The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  The Thanatos Syndrome

  Walker Percy

  To Robert Coles

  THE PLACE WHERE the strange events related in this book occur, Feliciana, is not imaginary. It was so named by the Spanish. It was and is part of Louisiana, a strip of pleasant pineland running from the Mississippi River to the Perdido, a curious region of a curious state. Never quite Creole or French or Anglo-Saxon or Catholic or Baptist like other parishes of Louisiana, it has served over the years as a refuge for all manner of malcontents. If America was settled by dissenters from various European propositions, Feliciana was settled by dissenters from the dissent, American Tories who had no use for the Revolution, disgruntled Huguenots and Cavaliers from the Carolinas, New Englanders fleeing from Puritanism, unionists who voted against secession, Confederate refugees from occupied New Orleans, deserters from the Confederate Army, smugglers from both sides, criminals holed up in the Honey Island Swamp.

  Welcomed in the beginning by the hospitable and indolent Spanish of a decrepit empire, some of these assorted malcontents united long enough to throw out the Spanish and form an independent republic, complete with its own Declaration of Independence, flag, army, navy, constitution, and capital in St. Francisville. The new republic had no inclination to join French Louisiana to the south or the United States to the north and would as soon have been let alone. It lasted seventy-four days. Jefferson had bought Louisiana and that was that.

  As pleasant a place as its name implies, it still harbors all manner of fractious folk, including Texans and recent refugees from unlikely places like Korea and Michigan, all of whom have learned to get along tolerably well, better than most in fact, who watch L.S.U. football and reruns of M*A*S*H, drink Dixie beer, and eat every sort of food imaginable, which is generally cooked in something called a roux.

  The downside of Feliciana is that its pine forests have been mostly cut down, its bayous befouled, Lake Pontchartrain polluted, the Mississippi River turned into a sewer. It has too many malls, banks, hospitals, chiropractors, politicians, lawyers, realtors, and condos with names like Château Charmant.

  Still and all, I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

  It is strange, but these Louisianians, for all their differences and contrariness, have an affection for one another. It is expressed by small signs and courtesies, even between strangers, as if they shared a secret.

  In what follows, the geography of the place has been somewhat scrambled. All of the people in Feliciana have been made up. The only real persons are the German and Austrian professors and physicians who were active in both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich—Drs. de Crinis, Villinger, Schneider, Nitsche, Heyde—and the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. C. G. Jung. For this information about the Nazi doctors and their academic precursors in the Weimar Republic, I am indebted to Dr. Frederic Wertham’s remarkable book, A Sign for Cain.

  WALKER PERCY

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  I

  1. FOR SOME TIME NOW I have noticed that something strange is occurring in our region. I have noticed it both in the patients I have treated and in ordinary encounters with people. At first there were only suspicions. But yesterday my suspicions were confirmed. I was called to the hospital for a consultation and there was an opportunity to make an examination.

  It began with little things, certain small clinical changes which I observed. Little things can be important. Even more important is the ability—call it knack, hunch, providence, good luck, whatever—to know what you are looking for and to put two and two together. A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

  For example, a physician I once knew—not a famous professor or even a very successful internist, but a natural diagnostician, one of those rare birds who sees things out of the corner of his eye, so to speak, and gets a hunch—was going about his practice in New Orleans. He noticed a couple of little things most of us would have missed. He had two patients in the same neighborhood with moderate fever, enlarged lymph nodes, especially in the inguinal region. One afternoon as he took his leave through the kitchen of a great house in the Garden District—in those days one still made house calls!—the black cook whom he knew muttered something like: “I sho wish he wouldn’t be putting out that poison where the chirren can get holt of it.” Now most physicians would not even listen or, if they did, would not be curious and would leave with a pleasantry to humor old what’s-her-name. But a good physician or a lucky physician might prick up his ears. There was something about that inguinal node—“Poison? Poison for what? Rats?” “I mean rats.” “You got rats?” “I mean. Look here.” There in the garbage can, sure enough, a very dead rat with a drop of blood hanging like a ruby from its nose. The physician went his way, musing. Something nagged at the back of his head. Halfway down St. Charles, click, a connection was made. He parked, went to a pay phone, called the patient’s father. “Did you put out rat poison in your house?” No, he had not. Is Anne okay? “She’ll be fine but get her to Touro for a test.” At the hospital he aspirated the suspicious inguinal node. Most doctors would have diagnosed mononucleosis, made jokes with the young lady about the kissing disease—So you’re just back from Ole Miss, what do you expect, ha ha. He took the specimen to the lab and told the technician to make a smear and stain with carbol-fuchsin. He took one look. There they were, sure enough, the little bipolar dumbbells of Pasteurella pestis. The plague does in fact turn up from time to time in New Orleans, the nation’s largest port. It’s no big deal nowadays, caught in time. A massive shot of antibiotic and Anne went home.

  This is not to suggest that I have stumbled onto another black plague. But if I am right, I have stumbled onto something. It is both a good deal more mysterious and perhaps even more ominous. The trouble is, unfortunately for us psychiatrists, that diagnoses in psychiatry are often more difficult—and less treatable. There is seldom a single cause, a little dumbbell bacillus one can point to, or a single magic bullet one can aim at the tiny villain. Believe it or not, psychiatrists still do not know the cause of the commonest of all human diseases, schizophrenia. They still argue about whether the genes are bad, the chemistry is bad, the psychology is bad, whether it’s in the mind or the brain. In fact, they’re still arguing about whether there is such a thing as the mind.

  It began with little things. The other day, for example, I was seeing a patient I hadn’t seen for two years. I’ve been away, but that’s another story. She had a certain mannerism, as do we all, which was as uniquely hers as her fingerprints. If she said something in her usual bantering way and I had the good luck to get behind it, make a stab in the same bantering tone and get it right, she had a way of ducking her head and touching the nape of her neck the way women used to do years ago to check hairpins in a bun and, as a slight color rose in her cheek, cut her eyes toward me under lowered lids almost flirtatiously, then nod ironically. “Uh huh,” she’d say with a smile. She monitored her eyes carefully. A look from her was never a casual thing.

  An analyst who sees a patient several times a week for two years and who has his eyes and ears open—especially that third ear Reik talks about which hears what is not said—comes to know her, his patient, in some ways better than her husband, who probably hasn’t taken a good look at her for years.

  But last week, when I saw her in the hospital, her mannerism was gone. Her eyes were no longer monitored. A curious business. I’d have noticed it even if I were seeing her for the first time. Women are generally careful of their eyes. She simply gazed at me, not boldly, but with a mild, unfocused gaze. She responded readily enough, but in monosyllables and shor
t phrases, and now and then gave a little start as if she had in some sense or other come to herself. Then she’d drift off again.

  To summarize her history in a word or two: She was a New Englander, a Bennington graduate, a shy but assured person who married a high-born, freewheeling Louisiana Creole whom she met at Amherst, a high-roller later in oil leases and real estate. So here she found herself, set down in this spanking new Sunbelt exurb, in a new “plantation-style” house, in a new country club, next to number-six fairway. All at once she became afraid. She was afraid of people, places, things, dogs, the car; afraid to go out of her house, afraid of nothing at all. There are names for her disorder, of course—agoraphobia, free-floating anxiety—but they don’t help much. What to do with herself? She did some painting, not very good, of swamps, cypresses, bayous, Spanish moss, egrets, and such. I thought of her as a housebound Emily Dickinson, but when I saw her on the couch in my office—she had made the supreme effort, gotten in her car, and driven to town—she looked more like Christina in Wyeth’s painting, facing the window, back turned to me, hip making an angle, thin arm raised in a gesture of longing, a yearning toward—toward what?

  In her case, the yearning was simple, deceptively simple. If only she could be back at her grandmother’s farm in Vermont, where as a young girl she had been happy.

  She had a recurring dream. Hardly a session went by without her mentioning it. It was worth working on. She was in the cellar of her grandmother’s farmhouse, where there was a certain smell which she associated with the “winter apples” stored there and a view through the high dusty windows of the green hills. Though she was always alone in the dream, there was the conviction that she was waiting for something. For what? A visitor. A visitor was coming and would tell her a secret. It was something to work with. What was she, her visitor-self, trying to tell her solitary cellar-bound self? What part of herself was the deep winter-apple-bound self? What part of herself was the deep winter-apple-smelling cellar? The green hills? She was not sure, but she felt better. She was able to leave the house, not to take up golf or bridge with the country-club ladies, but to go abroad to paint, to meadows and bayous. Her painting got better. Her egrets began to look less like Audubon’s elegant dead birds than like ghosts in the swamp.

  I contrived that it crossed her mind that her terror might not be altogether bad. What if it might be trying to tell her something, like the mysterious visitor in her dream? I seldom give anxious people drugs. If you do, they may feel better for a while, but they’ll never find out what the terror is trying to tell them. At any rate, it set her wondering and made her life more tolerable. She wasn’t afraid of being afraid. We were getting somewhere.

  Now here she is two years later, back in the hospital, again facing the window. But no yearning Christina she. More like a satisfied Duchess of Alba, full round arm lying along sumptuous curve of hip.

  “Mickey,” I said.

  She turned to face me with a fond, unsurprised gaze, eyes not quite focused, not quite converging.

  “Well well well,” said Mickey. “My old pal Doc.”

  Never, not in a state of terror or out of it, would she have called me that. She was one of the few patients who called me Tom.

  “You’re looking very well, Mickey.”

  I must have been leaning toward her, for my hand was propped on the edge of her bed. Her arm fell on my hand, the warm ventral flesh of her forearm imprisoning my fingers.

  “Well, yes.” She lay back, settling her body, giving the effect somehow of straddling a little under the covers.

  I remember registering disappointment. The flatness of her gaze gave the effect one senses in some women who have given up on the mystery of themselves and taken somebody else’s advice: Be bold, be assertive.

  “Old Doc.” Her chin settled into her full throat, luxuriating. “You really did it, didn’t you?”

  “Did what?”

  “Blew it.”

  “You mean—”

  “Do you think people don’t know where you’ve been for two years?”

  It is not necessary to reply. She has already drifted, eyes unconverged, gazing past me.

  “Mickey, did you want this consultation, or was it Dr. Comeaux’s idea?”

  “Old Doc.” My fingers are still imprisoned under her arm. “I was always on your side. I defended you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m just fine, Doc.”

  “You mean you didn’t send for me?”

  “Mickey’s glad to see you, Doc. Come by me.”

  “I’m by you.” Come by me. That’s Louisiana talk, not New England. “If you’re feeling fine, Mickey, what are you doing here?” I look at her chart. She’s not on medication.

  “I got it all, Doc. Did you know I was a rich bitch?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Did you know Durel and I own the biggest hunter-jumper ranch in the parish?”

  “Yes, I knew that. Then why—”

  “We got it made. You want to know the name?”

  “The name?”

  “Bar-in-Circle Ranch.” She released my hand and showed me the bar and circle with her fingers. She winked at me, like a schoolchild who’s just learned a dirty joke. “You like that?”

  “Sure.” I’m reading her chart. “Mickey, it doesn’t seem that things are so fine here. It seems there was an incident at the ranch with a groom, a fire, your prize stallion destroyed in the fire.”

  “He was coming on to me,” said Mickey idly.

  “According to this, he was a thirteen-year-old boy and the complaint by his parents was that it was you coming on to him.”

  She shrugged, but was not really interested enough to argue. Am I mistaken or is there not a sort of horsewoman’s swagger as she moves her legs under the covers? “That stallion was a killer, Doc. Now. How about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You know where the ranch is.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you got your troubles.”

  “So?”

  “So you come on out by me. Durel likes you too.”

  As I listen to her and flip through the chart, something pops into my head. For some reason—perhaps it is her disconnectedness—she reminds me of my daughter as a four-year-old. It is the age when children have caught on to language, do not stick to one subject, are open to any subject, would as soon be asked any question as long as one keeps playing the language game. A child does not need a context like you and me. Mickey LaFaye, like four-year-old Meg, is out of context.

  “Mickey, what is today?”

  “Monday,” she says, unsurprised. I am right. She gives me the day and the date willingly.

  Then it was that I had my wild idea, my piece of luck—perhaps it was part of my own nuttiness—which first put me on the track of this strange business.

  “Mickey,” I asked her, “what date will Easter fall on next year?”

  Again no surprise, no shifting of gears from one context to another. There is no context. What I do notice is that for a split second her eyes go up into her eyebrows, as if she were reading a printout.

  She gives me the date. I wouldn’t know, of course. Later I looked it up. She was right.

  She gives me other dates. They were right. I ask her where St. Louis is. She tells me where St. Louis is. Now everybody knows where St. Louis is, but people generally don’t answer the question Where is St. Louis?, asked out of the blue, without wanting to know why you ask, unless they are playing Trivial Pursuit.

  Then is she an idiot savant, one of those people who don’t have sense enough to come out of the rain but can tell you what is 4,891 times 23,547 by reading off some computer inside their head? I did not know at the time, but I knew later. No, she was not.

  I gaze down at her, my arms folded over the chart. What has happened to her? How can she be at once as innocent as a four-year-old and as blowsy as the Duchess of Alba? At the time I had no idea.

  “Mickey, what about t
he dream?”

  “Dream?”

  “The dream of Vermont, your grandmother’s cellar, the smell of winter apples, the visitor who was coming.”

  “The dream.” For a moment she seemed to become her old self, to go deep, search inward. She seemed to reach for something, almost find it. She frowned and shrugged. “Dream of Jeannie, Doc. That’s what Bobby calls me. Jean’s my real name. Jeannie with the light brown hair. You like?”

  “Yes. Bobby?”

  “Bob Comeaux. Doctor Comeaux, Doc.”

  “I know.” I turn to leave.

  “Doc.”

  “Yes?”

  “You call Bobby.”

  “I will.”

  “Bobby wants something.”

  “All right.”

  “And what Bobby wants—”

  “All right,” I say quickly, suddenly needing to leave. “So I ask Dr. Comeaux and he’ll tell me?”

  “Yes.” Her legs thrash enthusiastically.

  I leave, knowing very little, not even who called me for a consultation or why. I will ask Dr. Comeaux.

  2. A STRANGE CASE, yes, but nothing to write up for the JAMA. Indeed, I couldn’t make head or tail of it at the time, the bizarre business with the boy and the stallion, but mainly the change in Mickey LaFaye. But what physician has not had patients who don’t make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they’re our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

  Here’s another mini-case, not even a case but a fifteen-second encounter with an acquaintance even as I left Mickey’s room and started down the hall, musing over the change in Mickey. How much of the change, I was wondering, comes from my two years away and the change in me?

  Here’s old Frank Macon, polishing the terrazzo floor. I saw him a week ago, just after I returned. Frank Macon is a seventy-five-year-old black janitor. I have known him for forty years. He used to train bird dogs when there were still quail around here. Then as now he was polishing the terrazzo with a heavy rotary brush. From long practice he was using the machine well, holding back on one handle to give it a centripetal swing until it caromed off the concave angle of the wall to propel itself back by the torque of the brush. I broke his rhythm. He switched off the motor and eyed me. He clapped his hands softly and gave me one of his, a large meaty warm slab, callused but inert.