Passing through the geriatric cottages on the way to Love. Here in cold glassed porches sit despondent oldsters, exiled from Tampa and Tucson for crankiness, misanthropy, malcontent, solitariness, destructiveness, misery— in short, the St. Petersburg Blues.
Each has two electrodes in his head, like a Martian with antennae. They’re being reconditioned, put in Skinner boxes, which are pleasant enough chambers furnished with that “recreational or avocational environment” which the patient shows highest aptitude for — pottery wheel, putting green, ceramic oven, square-dance therapist — and conditioned. Positively conditioned when he responds positively: spins wheel, hops to music — by a mild electric current flowing through electrode A inducing a pleasant sensation, an unlocated euphoria, hypothalamic joy. Negatively conditioned when he responds negatively: breaks wheel, kicks therapist, sits in corner — by a nasty shock through electrode B inducing a distinct but not overpowering malaise.
Those who respond? Back home to Senior Citizen compounds in Tampa and Tucson with other happy seniors.
Those who don’t respond? Off they’re packed to the Happy Isles of Georgia, the federal Good Time Garden where reconditioning is no longer attempted but rather the opposite: whenever they behave antisocially they’re shocked into bliss, soon learning to press the button themselves, off and dreaming so blissful that they pass up meals—
Here’s the hottest political issue of the day: euthanasia. Say the euthanasists not unreasonably: let’s be honest, why should people suffer and cause suffering to other people? It is the quality of life that counts, not longevity, etcetera. Every man is entitled to live his life with freedom and to end it with dignity, etcetera etcetera. It came down to one curious squabble (like the biggest theology fight coming down to whether to add the que to the filio): the button vs. the switch. Should a man have the right merely to self-stimulation, pressing the button that delivers bliss precisely until the blissful thumb relaxes and lets go the button? Or does he not also have the right to throw a switch that stays on, inducing a permanent joy — no meals, no sleep, and a happy death in a week or so? The button vs. the switch.
And if he has such a right and is judged legally incompetent to throw the switch, cannot a relative throw it for him?
The debate rages. The qualitarians, as the euthanasists call themselves, have won in Maryland and New York and Hawaii where legislatures have passed laws that allow sane oldsters to choose a “joyful exitus” as it is called in Maryland, or a kawaneeolaua as it is called in Hawaii, and throw the on-switch on. In the case of the insane, the consent of both physician and spouse is necessary.
Whup. Up ahead I spy my enemy, Dr. Buddy Brown, sailing his coattails, and duck into Love Clinic just in time.
I don’t want to talk to him about our coming shoot-out in The Pit. Am I afraid of him?
The small observation room in Love is not crowded. Moira is perched on a stool at the viewing mirror, steno pad open on her knees. My heart melts with love. Does not a faint color spread along her throat? She blushes! I nod merely — or do I blush? — and go on talking to Stryker. But her presence is like sunlight. No matter which way I turn I feel a ray of warmth, now on my cheek, now between my shoulder blades. There is a sextant in me that keeps her position.
Father Kev Kevin sits reading Commonweal at his console of vaginal indicators. Only the regular staff is present today — though there may be students in the amphitheater above — Dr. Kenneth Stryker, chief of staff of Love; Dr. Helga Heine, his assistant, a West German interpersonal gynecologist; Father Kev Kevin, an ex-priest now a Love counselor; and Moira Schaffner, my own true love.
Stryker and Moira are glad to see me. Father Kev Kevin and Helga are not, though they are civil enough. Helga thinks I don’t like Germans. I suspect, too, she believes I am Jewish because I was always with Gottlieb and I look somewhat Jewish, like my illustrious ancestor, Sir Thomas More.
Father Kev Kevin was a curate at Saint Michael’s, my old parish church. So he is skittish toward me, behaving now too brightly, now too sullenly. I think he fears I might call him Father. A handsome Irishman, he is not merely chaplain of the clinic but jack of all trades: counsels persons in Love who cannot love — love or die! he tells them — takes clinical notes, operates the vaginal console. Imagine a young genial anticlerical Pat O’Brien who reads Commonweal.
The behavior room beyond the viewing mirror is presently unoccupied. It has an examining table with stirrups, a hospital bed, a tray of instruments, a tube of K-Y jelly, and a rack for the sensor wires with leads to the recording devices in the observation room.
A subject comes in, a solitary lover. I gaze at her, feeling somewhat big-nosed.
I recognize her. She is Lillian, Stryker’s first subject. No doubt she will go down in history like Freud’s first patient, Anna O. For it is she, Lonesome Lil as the students called her, who exhibited in classic form the “cruciform rash” of love that won for Stryker the Nobel Prize.
Lillian wears a sensible gray suit and sturdy brown low-heeled shoes. Her outfit, with shoulder bag and matching hat, a kind of beret with up-arching hoop inside, puts me in mind of Lois Lane of the old Superman comics of my childhood. Lillian is a good deal sturdier, however. As she opens her shoulder bag and begins to remove small fitted devices of clear Lucite, lining them up neatly on the surgical tray, she is for all the world like a visiting nurse come to minister to a complex ailment.
But, unlike a visiting nurse, she undresses. As briskly as a housewife getting ready for her evening bath and paying no more attention to the viewing mirror than if it were her vanity, she sheds jacket, skirt, underwear — the lower article a kind of stretch step-in garment, the upper a brassiere with a bodice-like extension — and finally her up-arched beret, holding a bobby pin in her teeth and giving her short dark hair a shake as any woman would. Not fat, she is heavy-legged and heavy-breasted, her olive skin running to pigment. Though there is glass between us, there is the sense, almost palpable, of the broad, low, barefooted heft of her, of a clothed-in cottoned-off body heat and of the keratin-rasp of her bare feet on the cork floor.