Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [174]
“I guess not. You poor kid. What have you been doing, Ignatius? Just lying around in your room doping off?”
“Yes. For weeks. I’ve been immobilized by the neurotic apathy. Do you remember the fantasy letter about the arrest and the accident? I wrote that when my mother first met this debauched old man. It was then that my equilibrium started to fail. Since then, it’s been a continuously downward movement culminating in the schizophrenia of the Peace Party. Those signs outside were just one physical manifestation of my inward torment. My psychotic desire for peace was no doubt a wishful attempt to end the hostilities which have been existing in this little house. I can only be grateful that you were perceptive enough to analyze my fantasy life as embodied in my letters. Thank goodness they were distress signals written in a code which you could understand.”
“I can tell how inactive you’ve been from your weight.”
“I’ve gained pounds lying continuously in bed, seeking surcease and sublimation in food. Now we must run. I must leave this house. It has terrible associations.”
“I told you to get out of this place a long time ago. Come on, let’s get you packed.” Myrna’s monotonous voice was growing enthusiastic. “This is fantastic. I knew you’d have to break away sooner or later to preserve your mental health.”
“If only I had listened to you earlier, I wouldn’t have had to go through this horror.” Ignatius embraced Myrna and pressed her and her guitar flatly against the wall. He could see that she was beside herself with joy over finding a legitimate cause, a bona fide case history, a new movement. “There will be a place for you in heaven, my minx. Now we must dash.”
He tried to drag her out the front door, but she said, “Don’t you want to pack anything?”
“Oh, of course. There are all of my notes and jottings. We must never let them fall into the hands of my mother. She may make a fortune from them. It would be too ironic.” They went into his room. “By the way, you should know that my mother is enjoying the questionable attentions of a fascist.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes. Look at this. You can imagine how they’ve been torturing me.”
He handed Myrna one of the pamphlets that his mother had slipped under the door of his room, Is Your Neighbor Really an American? Myrna read a note written in the margin of the cover: “Read this Irene. It is good. There is some questions at the end you can ask your boy.”
“Oh, Ignatius!” Myrna moaned. “What has it been like?”
“Traumatic and dreadful. At the moment I think they’re out somewhere lashing some moderate whom my mother overheard speaking in favor of the United Nations in the grocery this morning. She’s been mumbling about the incident all day.” Ignatius belched. “I’ve been through weeks of terror.”
“It’s so strange to find your mother gone. She used to be around here all the time.” Myrna hung her guitar on a bedpost and stretched across the bed. “This room. We used to have a ball in here, exposing our minds and souls, composing anti-Talc manifestos. I guess that fraud is still hanging around that school.”
“I would imagine so,” Ignatius said absently. He wished that Myrna would get off the bed. Soon her mind would turn to exposing other things. Anyway, they had to get out of the house. He was in the closet, where he was looking for the overnight bag that his mother had bought for him for a disastrous one-day stay at a boys’ camp when he was eleven. He pawed through a pile of yellowed drawers like a dog digging for a bone, throwing the drawers up behind him in an arc. “Perhaps you’d better rouse yourself, my little lily. There are tablets to be collected, notes to be gathered. You might look under the bed.”
Myrna swung herself off the damp sheets, saying, “I’ve tried to describe you to my friends in the group therapy group, working away in this room, sealed off from society. This strange medieval mind in its cloister.”
“No doubt they were intrigued,” Ignatius murmured. Having found the bag, he was filling it with some socks he found lying on the floor. “Soon