Presently her hand comes down lightly on my thigh, stays there.

"Okay then," says Ellen.

"Yes, indeed."

"I-good."

"Sure."

"Soon-better."

"Right."

Ellen is still too stoned on sodium ions to talk right.

I am too drunk for too long to make love.

But it's all right. Soon she'll talk better and I won't have to drink.

Disney World is indeed splendid-though I could not stand more than one hour of it.

After one day of the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Mickey and Goofy, Spaceship Earth, the World of Motion, the Living Seas, I take to the woods.

The children love it. Ellen seems to like it in an odd, dreamy way. Tommy and Margaret are the only kids around-everybody else is in school. They're laid out, paralyzed by delight, when they shake hands with Mickey and Goofy (though they don't really know who Mickey Mouse is).

But it is splendid. The kids run free and safe, catch the tram, launch, monorail, quasi-paddle-wheeler in a quasi-river, go where they please.

Ellen makes friends with other ladies in Jack Rabbit Run, plays some bridge, not too well, no better than they.

We're there a week.

I am quite happy sitting in our private little copse in Fort Wilderness reading Stedmann's History of World War I. A little vista affords a view of the great sphere of spaceship earth and the top of the minaretlike tower of Cinderella's Castle.

It is easy to make friends. Sometimes I catch the Conestoga tram up to Trail Blaze Corral or down to the Ole Fishing Hole. Though we are hedged off from our neighbors by a brake of cypress, pine and palmetto, they are only a few feet away. A haze of perfumed briquet smoke, friendly talk, laughter enlists us in a community of back yards.

We meet on the tram or strolling about Jack Rabbit Run or Sunny Sage Way or Quail Trail.

Most of my neighbors are from Canada or Ohio. They are very pleasant fellows, mostly retirees who have done well and are cruising America in their Bluebirds and Winnebagos and Fleetwoods. The Ohioans are recognizable by their accents, not their license plates, which are mostly Florida, for they have settled down in places like Lakeland or Fort Myers or Deerfield Beach and have hopped over for a few days.

Native Floridians look down their noses at the Ohioans. The saying is: An Ohioan arrives with a shirt and a five-dollar bill and never changes either. But it isn't true. My Ohio neighbors in Jack Rabbit Run couldn't be nicer. It is quickly evident that I know nothing about motor homes and they spend a great deal of time demonstrating electrical and sewerage hookups and even the features of my own Bluebird, which they know better than I (they marvel at the modifications Leroy has made, especially the map locator).

The Canadians are as affable but standoffish-though not as shy as the English.

But both, Canadians and Ohioans, are amiable, gregarious, helpful-and at something of a loss. Here they are, to enjoy the rewards of a lifetime of work, to escape children and grandchildren, and they have. They stand about nodding and smiling, but looking somewhat zapped.

Ellen gets along splendidly with them too. She talks to the women by the hour, especially the Canadians, about the queen of England and Princess Di. Like many American women, she loves British royalty even more than the Brits.

Their expressions are fond and stunned.

The Ohioans looked zapped but keep busy.

The Canadians looked zapped but also wistful.

Every time I talk to a Canadian, either he will get around to asking me what I think of Canada or I will know that he wants to.

I realize that I do not have many thoughts about Canada. Reading Stedmann, who mentions the heroic role the Canadians played in World War I, I realize a curious fact about Canadians: When you hear the word Canada or Canadians, nothing much comes to mind-unlike hearing the words Frenchman or Englishman or Chinese or Spaniard-or Yankee. I realize this is an advantage. The Canadian is still free, has not yet been ossified by his word. (Why am I beginning to think like Father Smith?) I read Stedmann about the Battles of the Somme and Verdun for a while, then step out into my tiny plantation fragrant with hot palmetto palms-it is like summer here-walk over to Quail Trail, and have a Coke with my amiable, stunned neighbors.

Like my cellmates at Fort Pelham and unlike folks at home, they want to talk about current events, politics, Communism, Democrats, Negroes (their word), terrorists, and such.

I listen attentively and with interest.

After reading Stedmann in the Bluebird and stepping out into the fragrant Florida sunshine and discussing current events with my knowledgeable, up-to-date neighbors, who even with their knowledgeability-unlike me they're up to date-still look fond and stunned even as they speak, I experience the sensation that the world really ended in 1916 and that we've been living in a dream ever since. These good fellows have spent their entire lives working, raising families, fighting Nazis, worrying about Communism, yet they've really been zapped by something else. We haven't been zapped by the Nazis and the Communists. On the contrary. It is a pleasure to fight one, worry about the other, and talk about both.

We stand about in the Florida sunshine of Jack Rabbit Run, under the minaret of Cinderella's Castle, they fresh from the wonders of Tomorrowland-Tomorrowland!-We don't even know what Todayland is!-fond, talkative, informative, and stunned, knocked in the head, like dreamwalkers in a moonscape.

Ellen wants to stay on the road, head for Wyoming and Jenny Lake in Jackson Hole. But I have to get back to testify in the trial of John Van Dorn and company. We'll go later.

3. VAN DORN AND HIS STAFF were not convicted of child abuse, after all. The presence of heavy sodium in their bloodstreams (they'd been taking a cocktail now and then for one reason and another) compromised the case against them. In a plea-bargain agreement with the district attorney they were confined to the State Forensic Hospital in Jackson until their bizarre symptoms and behavior abated, whereupon they were paroled into the custody of Sheriff Vernon "Cooter" Sharp and sentenced to five years of community service. Sheriff Sharp, after consulting with me and Max, assigned them to St. Margaret's Hospice.

Meanwhile, Father Smith had come down from his fire tower and the hospice was reopened.

Mr. and Mrs. Brunette were assigned to the Alzheimer's patients, old addled folk who could not take care of themselves and in whom no one, not even the Brunettes, could take the slightest sexual interest. It was a hunch, mine and Father Smith's, and it paid off. The Brunettes went to work willingly and in good heart. Father Smith says they are a caring couple. What he actually said was: "Paroled murderers are the most trustworthy aides but sex offenders and child abusers are also excellent, once occasions of sin are removed."

Mrs. Cheney works as a nurse's aide in a ward of malformed infants, formerly candidates for pedeuthanasia. An excellent babysitter for twenty years-I so testified-she was and is never otherwise than her old motherly and solicitous self toward the children. And even though she persisted for some weeks in her odd rearward presenting behavior as the effects of the sodium ions wore off, there was no one to present to on the children's ward.

Coach also found his talents put to good use. He was assigned to the AIDS wing, which housed not only dying adult patients but also, in a separate cottage, a little colony of LAV-positive children, that is, children who harbored the virus but were not sick. Neither I nor any other physician considered them a threat, but since federal law requires quarantine, what to do with them? Coach did plenty. He is, after all, an excellent coach. His sexual preferences were no problem. The dying adults were too weak to bother him, and he was too terrified to bother them. In a word, he was good with them, didn't have to feign sympathy, was willing to talk and listen. He organized card games, skits, and sing-alongs. But the children were the challenge. He formed a soccer team which, since soccer is not a contact sport, was eligible for Little League competition. His Jolly Rogers (smiling death's-head insignia) are undefeated, have every prospect of winning the league and being invited to the Special Olympics in San Francisco.

Van Dorn, however, was a difficult case. He did not recover as rapidly as the others. Perhaps he ingested a more massive dose of sodium additive and suffered brain damage.

Anyhow, he had to be detained in the Forensic Hospital. When anyone approached, he would at first rattle the bars, roar, and thump his chest. Then, after this ruckus, he would knuckle over to the toilet and cower behind it. He became abject. What to do, legally or medically? No statute could be found to fit his case. Nothing in the Louisiana Civil Code seemed applicable. No medical or psychiatric diagnosis could be arrived at.

What to do with Van Dorn?

Months passed. Van Dorn gave up roaring and thumping, instead knuckled across his cell, crouched behind the toilet, and gave up eating.

I had an idea. It came to me by luck and happenstance-like most good scientific ideas.

It came to me one day while I was making my weekly visit to the Tulane Primate Center, where I earn a few needed dollars-my practice having gone to pot-by doing CORTscans on the primates housed therein. It is part of an FDA program to test for toxic side effects of new drugs on brain function.

The director, Dr. Rumsen "Rummy" Gordon, old friend and classmate, was showing me around the place, a pleasant compound of piney woods and oak groves which housed colonies of rhesus monkeys, chimps, orangutans, and a single gorilla.

The gorilla, a morose female named Eve, was a special case. She was the last of the so-called talking apes, the famous chimps and gorillas who were supposed to have learned sign language but had been given up on and so had lapsed from fame to obscurity. It was not clear whether they had learned sign language after all, or whether, if they had, they had grown weary of it, even abusive, and stopped talking, and their teachers weary of them. At any rate, in the end for lack of funding these world-famous apes were either packed off to zoos or to the wilds of Zaire, where, it was hoped, they might be accepted by their native cousins.

Only Eve remained, and only Rummy Gordon persisted in his conviction that apes could be taught sign language-not merely to signal simpleminded needs like Tickle Eve, Eve want banana, Eve want out, Rummy come play-but to learn to tell stories, crack jokes, teach language to their young, and so on.

But Eve, like the others, fell silent, no longer greeted Rummy with a happy hopping up and down and a flurry of signs, and took to her bower in the low crotch of a live oak.

"She won't sign, not even for bananas," sighs the disconsolate Rummy as we gaze up at Eve, supine and listless on her bed of bamboo leaves, one arm trailing down, one leg sticking straight up, for all the world like a catatonic patient on a closed ward. "In fact, she won't eat bananas, period."

"Rummy, I've got an idea."

He thinks I'm joking at first. "Cut it out, Tom," he says with a wan smile. "I'm serious."

"So am I. Look. This is a lovely spot and enclosed-you'd be taking no chances." It is a lovely spot, a half acre of live oaks and pines, and even a brooklet. If it were listed by any realtor in Feliciana, it would be called a ranchette and go for at least $300,000.

"You've got to be kidding-" But I see he's taking it seriously. "How do you know they would get along. She could kill him. Eve weighs in at about 250."

"I have a hunch, Rummy. A strong hunch. I think it would work. To be on the safe side, we'll watch them at first."

"My God." But he's thinking. "Let me look into the insurance." He's shaking his head. "No way."

In the end he's convinced by a single argument: It's his only chance to revive Eve's language. I know his weak spot. "Don't you see, Rummy? As Van Dorn recovers, they can communicate."

"How? He doesn't know sign language, let lone Ameslan." Ameslan is the special sign vocabulary apes are taught.

"That's the point," I say, watching him. I think I've got him.

"Oh. You mean-" He's got it! His eyes are alight. "She teaches him!"

He's got it: she teaches him!

"It hasn't been done before, not even ape teaching ape, has it? Isn't that the big breakthrough you've been trying for? Wouldn't it prove your detractors wrong once and for all?"

He's tapping his lips, casting ahead. I've got him. "Why not," he says finally. "We could put a metal hut in there in case he doesn't take to the bower. He might even get her into the hut," he muses.

Why not?

To make a long story short, he did it. They did it. Van Dorn joined Eve in her idyllic ranchette. After a good deal of wary knuckling and circling, baring of teeth, they made friends. For of course mountain gorillas, the species Gorilla gorilla, are gentle creatures despite the chest thumping and roaring, which are mainly for sexual display by males and for scaring off predators. And Van Dorn was no predator. Eve smacked her lips, a good sign. Presenting often follows. They, Eve and Van Dorn, spent the brisk fall days playing, romping about the compound, or taking long siestas in the live oak. She gave him a hand up to the crotch. On chilly nights she allowed herself to be led into the hut, which she converted to a proper bower by weaving bamboo shoots over it. They were observed signing to each other in Ameslan, the sign language of the deaf, Eve signing first, Van Dorn watching closely, then venturing a tentative sign in return.

It lasted two months-in a word, until Van Dorn recovered. Having recovered his humanity, become his old self, his charming, grandiose, slightly phony Confederate self, he summoned Rummy Gordon in ordinary Mississippi English and expressed his desire to rejoin his own kind, was released to Sheriff Sharp, examined, found competent to stand trial, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Angola for ten years.

As resilient as ever, however, he was soon running the prison library, giving bridge lessons, and writing a book. My Life and Love with Eve was an immediate and sensational best seller, serialized with photos in Penthouse and eventually made into a six-hour mini-series for stereo-V, the Playboy channel. It made such a hit with the Louisiana governor that he pardoned Van Dorn, who has since been busy on the talk-show circuit and making appearances on the Donahue show, often with Dr. Ruth.

Dr. Rumsen Gordon prospered as well. He wrote a landmark scientific paper, "The Interspecies Acquisition of Ameslan Small Talk by an Na-24 Intoxicated Homo sapiens sapiens from a Gorilla gorilla," which became celebrated in academic circles and led to his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at Yale at twice his former salary.

Eve did not fare as well. Having lapsed into silence upon Van Dorn's departure, she was returned to Zaire, where it was hoped she would be accepted by other mountain gorillas, who, however, were members of an endangered species on the verge of extinction. She was last seen squatting alone on a riverbank, shunned by man and gorilla alike.

4. BOB COMEAUX AND MAX AND I reached a gentleman's agreement. Instead of turning Bob over to the Justice Department for prosecution for defrauding the federal government, specifically in his misuse of both discretionary NIH funds and Ford Foundation grants, we suggested that it might be in his interest to stay long enough to dismantle the sodium shunt and to divert next year's funds to St. Margaret's Hospice-and then to leave town. Max, who knows everybody, made friendly telephone calls to the directors of both NIH and ACMUI and let drop not even a hint but only an intimation that even though they were not legally responsible for the Blue Boy pilot, it might be prudent-politics being politics, and we know about politicians, right, Doctors?-not only to dismantle the sodium shunt for environmental reasons but to terminate the local Qualitar?an Center at Fedville-for fiscal reasons.

The center was closed, quietly. Bob Comeaux left town even more quietly. I have not heard from him. There are rumors. Some say that he returned to Long Island City, resumed the family name Como-Huguenots being in short supply in Queens-and is running a Planned Parenthood clinic on Queens Boulevard.

He bears me no malice. In fact, the last time I saw him, in the A&P parking lot, where he'd had to park to get to the post office because his Mercedes was pulling a two-horse trailer, he greeted me in his old style, with knowing looks right and left as if he meant to share a secret. The secret was that he'd been invited to the People's Republic of China to serve as consultant to the minister for family planning, who wanted to enlist his expertise in the humane disposal of newborn second children-Chinese families being limited, as everyone knows, to one child.

"You want to know something, old buddy," says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.

"What?"

"You and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing."

"We were?"

"Sure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals."

"It was?"

"You always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship-for helping the individual-and you were right-especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers-for which I salute you."

"Thanks."

"But I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit."

"I must?"

"We were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other's defect."

"We did?"

"Sure." He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. "We've never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can't argue." His eyes almost come back to mine.

"About what?"

"Argue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family."

"I-"

"You want to know the truth," he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.

"Yes."

"You and I are more alike than most folks think."

"We are?"

"Sure-and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you're the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I'm the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don't know but what you and I know is that we're both after the same thing-such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here's the thing, old buddy"-he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow-"and you know it and I know it: You can't give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you're in good taste and I'm not. You have style and know how to act, and I don't. But you don't have one good reason-" He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. "You all right, Doc."

"I-" I begin, but he's gone.

5. TWO GREAT HAPPENINGS to Lucy Lipscomb within the month. Exxon brought in a gas well at Pantherburn and her ex-husband, Buddy Dupre, divorced his second wife and came home.

Acquitted of charges of grand theft and malfeasance in office by the Baton Rouge grand jury, mostly Cajuns, he returned to Feliciana exonerated and something of a hero. He is said to have political ambitions. Many friends, he reports, have urged him to seek higher office. What with his extended family-he's kin to half of south Louisiana-and Lucy's high-Protestant connections in Feliciana and his own advocacy of a "scientific creationism" law in the legislature-which helped him in Baptist north Louisiana-he has a political base broad enough to run for governor. And now Lucy has the money. Louisianians, moreover, have a fondness for politicians who beat a rap: "Didn't I tell you that ol' boy was too damn smart to catch up with?"

Lucy, to tell the truth, would not in the least mind being first lady of Louisiana and presiding over the great mansion in Baton Rouge. She is one of those women who can carry off being wife, doctoring, and running a plantation-doing it all well, albeit somewhat abstractedly.

It is just as well. I'd have gotten into trouble with Lucy for sure, lovely as she is in her bossy-nurturing, mothering-daughtering way, always going tch and fixing something on me, brushing off dandruff with quick rough brushes of her hand, spitting on her thumb to smooth my eyebrows. The one time she came to my bed, coming somewhat over and onto me in an odd, agreeable, early-morning incubus centering movement, I registered, along with the pleasant centered weight of her, the inkling that she was the sort who likes the upper hand.

It is just as well Ellen came home and Buddy came home. She, Lucy, gave signs of wanting to marry me, and how could I not have, lovely large splendid big-assed girl that she is, face as bruisy-ripe as a plum, with a splendid old house and Ellen having run off with Van Dorn? An unrelieved disaster it would have been, what with the uncle calling ducks night and day and what with Ellen coming home eventually. I'd have ended up for sure like our common ancestor, Lucy's and mine, with one wife too many in a great old house, sunk in English Tory melancholy, nourishing paranoid suspicions against his neighbors, fearful of crazy Yankee Americans coming down the river (Como and company) and depraved French coming up the river (Buddy Dupre and the Cajuns)-in the end seeing no way out but to tie a sugar kettle on his head and jump into the river.

What a relief all around.