All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [200]
It was June, and hot. Every night, except those nights when I went to sit in an air-conditioned movie, I went to my room after dinner and stripped buck-naked and lay on the bed, with an electric fan burring and burrowing away into my brain, and read a book until the time when I would become aware that the sound of the city had sunk off to almost nothing but the single hoot of a taxis far off or the single lost clang and grind of a streetcar, an owl car heading out. Then I would reach up and switch off the light and roll over and go to sleep with the fan still burring and burrowing.
I did see Adam a few times in June. He was more deeply involved than before in the work of the medical center, more grimly and icily driving himself. There was, of course, some letup in the work at the University with the end of term, but whatever relief was there, was more than made up for by an increase in his private practice and work at the clinic. He said he was glad to see me when I went to his apartment, and maybe he was, but he didn’t have much to say, and as I sat there he would seem to be drawing deeper and deeper into himself until I had the feeling that I was trying to talk to somebody down a well and had better holler if I wanted to be understood. The only time he perked up was one night when, after he had remarked on the fact that he was to perform an operation the next morning, I asked about the case.
It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.
“You mean he is a nut?” I asked
Adam grinned and allowed that that wasn’t too far wrong.
“I didn’t know you cut on folks for being nutty,” I said. “I thought you just humored and gave them cold baths and let them make raffia baskets and got them to tell you their dreams.”
“No,” he said, “you can cut on them.” Then he added, almost apologetically, “A prefrontal lobectomy.”
“What’s that?”
“You remove a piece of the frontal lobe of the brain on each side,” he said.
I asked would the fellow live. He said you never could tell for sure, but if he did live he would be different.
I asked how did he mean, different.
“Oh, a different personality,” he replied.
“Like after you get converted and baptized?”
“That doesn’t give you a different personality,” he said. “When you get converted you still have the same personality. You merely exercise it in terms of a different set of values.”
“But this fellow will have a different personality?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “The way he is now he simply sits on a chair or lies in his back on a bed and stares into space. His brow is creased and furrowed. Occasionally he utters a low moan or an exclamation. In some such cases we discover the presence of delusions of persecution. But always the patient seems to experience a numbing, grinding misery. But after we are through with him he will be different. He will be relaxed and cheerful and friendly. He will smooth his brow. He will sleep well and eat well and will love to hang over the back fence and compliment the neighbors on their nasturtiums and cabbages. He will be perfectly happy.”
“If you can guarantee results like that,” I said, “you ought to do a land-office business. As soon as the news gets around.”
“You can’t ever guarantee anything,” Adam said.
“What happens if it doesn’t come out according to Hoyle?”
“Well,” he said, “there have been cases–not mine, thank