The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “Look who’s back!” he cried, casting a muddy eye around and past me. He throws up an arm. “Whoa!”

  “How you doing, Frank!”

  “Fine! But look at you now! You looking good! You looking good in the face and slim, not poorly like you used to.”

  “You’re looking good too, Frank.”

  “You must have been doing some yard work,” says Frank, good eye gleaming slyly.

  “Yes,” I say, smiling. He’s guying me. It’s an old joke between us.

  “I knowed they couldn’t keep you! People talking about trouble. I say no way. No way Doc going to be in trouble. Ain’t no police going to hold Doc for long. People got too much respect for Doc! I mean.” Again he smote his hands together, not quite a clap but a horny brushing past, signifying polite amazement. He turned half away, but one eye still gleamed at me.

  One would have to be a Southerner, white or black, to understand the complexities of this little exchange. Seemingly pleasant, it was not quite. Seemingly a friend in the old style, Frank was not quite. The glint of eye, seemingly a smile of greeting, was not. It was actually malignant. Frank was having a bit of fun with me, I knew, and he knew that I knew, using the old forms of civility to say what he pleased. What he was pleased to say was: So you got caught, didn’t you, and you got out sooner than I would have, didn’t you? Even his pronunciation of police as pó-lice was overdone and farcical, a parody of black speech, but a parody he calculated I would recognize. Actually he’s a deacon and uses a kind of churchy English: Doctor, what we’re gerng to do is soliciting contributions for a chicken-dinner benefit the ladies of the church gerng to have Sunday, and suchlike.

  I value his honesty—even his jeering. He knew this and we parted amiably. We understand each other. He reminds me of the Russian serfs Tolstoy wrote about, who spoke bluntly to their masters, using the very infirmity of their serfdom as a warrant to scold: Stepan Stepanovitch, you’re a sinful man! Mend your ways!

  “How Miss Ellen doing?” he asked, playing out the game of Southern good manners.

  “Just fine, and your family?” I said, watching him closely. Am I mistaken or is there not a glint of irony in his muddy eye at the mention of my wife’s name?

  That was my encounter with Frank Macon a week ago, a six-layered exchange beyond the compass of any known science of communication but plain as day to Frank and me.

  This is my encounter with Frank this morning, in the same hospital, the same corridor, the same Frank swinging the same brush. He simply stepped aside, not switching off the machine, neither servile nor sullen, not ironical, not sly, not farcical, not in any way complex, but purely and simply perfunctory.

  “How you doing, Frank?”

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “Still featherbedding—” I begin in our old chaffing style, but he cuts me off with, of all things, “Have a nice day, Doctor”— and back to his polishing without missing the swing of the machine. I could have been any doctor, anybody.

  Here again, a small thing. Nothing startling. He might simply have decided to dispose of me with standard U.S. politeness, which is indeed the easiest way to get rid of people. Have a nice day—

  Or he might have decided that the ultimate putdown is this same American civility. What better dismissal than to treat someone you’ve known for forty years like a drive-up customer at Big Mac’s?

  Or: Feeling bad, tired, old, out of it, he might have drawn a blank.

  Or: Something strange has happened to him.

  3. THEN ALONG CAME MY second case, which gave me my first clue that something queer might be going on hereabouts, that Mickey LaFaye was not just a solitary nut.

  Donna S—, a former patient, called to make an appointment.

  It was last Wednesday afternoon. Downtown was deserted. The banks were closed. The other doctors were playing golf. They’ve mostly moved out to the malls and the hospital parks, where they’ve built pleasant plantation-style offices with white columns and roofs of cypress shakes.

  Here I am, waiting for her, not exactly besieged by patients, sitting on the front porch of my office, my father’s old coroner’s building behind the courthouse, a pleasant little Cajun cottage of weathered board-and-batten and a rusty tin roof. It is October but it feels like late summer, the first hint of fall gentling the Louisiana heat, the gum leaves beginning to speckle. I am watching the sparrows who have taken over my father’s martin hotel. The cicadas start up in the high rooms of the live oaks, fuguing one upon the other.

  I am the only poor physician in town, the only one who doesn’t drive a Mercedes or a BMW. I still drive the Chevrolet Caprice I owned before I went away. It is a bad time for psychiatrists. Old-fashioned shrinks are out of style and generally out of work. We, who like our mentor Dr. Freud believe there is a psyche, that it is born to trouble as the sparks fly up, that one gets at it, the root of trouble, the soul’s own secret, by venturing into the heart of darkness, which is to say, by talking and listening, mostly listening, to another troubled human for months, years—we have been mostly superseded by brain engineers, neuropharmacologists, chemists of the synapses. And why not? If one can prescribe a chemical and overnight turn a haunted soul into a bustling little body, why take on such a quixotic quest as pursuing the secret of one’s very self?

  Anyhow, there I sat, waiting for Donna and making little paper P-51s and sailing them into the sparrows flocking at the martin house. I have had enough practice and gotten good enough with the control surfaces so that the little planes generally made a climbing turn, a chandelle, and came back.

  Here comes Donna, swinging along under the oaks. A stray shaft of yellow sunlight touches fire to her coppery hair.

  I watch her. She’s a big girl but not fat anymore. Not even stout or “heavy,” as one might say hereabouts. But certainly not fat in the sense that once it was the only word for her, even though physicians, who have an unerring knack for the wrong word, would describe her on her chart as a “young obese white female.”

  Then she was plain and simply fat. She was also, or so it seemed, jolly and funny, the sort described by her friends as nice as she could be. If she were put up for a sorority in college, she would be recommended as a “darling girl.” And if one of her sisters wanted to fix her up with a blind date, the word would be: She has a wonderful sense of humor. She was the sort of girl you’d have gotten stuck with at a dance and you’d have known it and she’d have known that you knew it and you’d have both felt rotten. Girls still have a rotten time of it, worse than boys, even fat boys.

  I used to see her alone at Big Mac’s: in midafternoon, I because I had forgotten to eat lunch, she because she had eaten lunch and was already hungry again; at four in the afternoon with a halfpounder, a large chocolate shake, and three paper boats of french fries lined up in front of her. Pigging out, as she called it.

  She was referred to me by more successful physicians who’d finally thrown up their hands—What do I want with her, they’d tell me, the only trouble with her is she eats too damn much, I’ve got people in real trouble, and so on—as a surgeon might refer a low-back pain to a chiropractor: He may be a quack but he can’t do you any harm. Maybe she’s got a psychiatric problem, Doc.

  Actually I helped her and ended up liking her and she me. Yes, she had always been “nice.” “Nice” in her case had a quite definite meaning. It meant always doing what one was supposed to do, what her mamma and papa wanted her to do, what her teacher wanted her to do, what her boss wanted her to do. Surely if you do what you’re supposed to do, things will turn out well for you, won’t they? Not necessarily. In her case they didn’t. She felt defrauded by the world, by God. So what did she do? She got fat.

  She started out being nice as pie with me. She listened intently, spoke intelligently, read books on the psychiatry of fatness, used more psychiatric words than I did. She was the perfect patient, mistress of the couch, dreamer of perfect dreams, confirmer of all theories. All the more reason why she was sta
rtled when I asked her why she was so angry. She was, of course, and of course it came out. She couldn’t stand her mother or father or herself or God—or me. For one thing, she had been sexually molested by her father, then blamed by her mother for doing the very thing her mother had told her to do: Be nice. So she couldn’t stand the double bind of it, being nice to Daddy, doing what Daddy wanted, and believing him and liking it, oh yes, did she ever (yes, that’s the worst of it, the part you don’t read about), and then being called bad by Mamma and believing her too. A no-win game, for sure. So what to do? Eat. Why eat? To cover up the bad beautiful little girl in layers of fat so Daddy wouldn’t want her? To make herself ugly for boys so nobody but Daddy would want her?

  I couldn’t say, nor could she, but I was getting somewhere with her. First, by giving her permission to give herself permission to turn loose her anger, not on them at first, but on me and here where she felt safe. She didn’t know she was angry. There is a great difference between being angry and knowing that you are angry. We made progress. One day she turned over on the couch and looked at me with an expression of pure malevolence. Her lips moved. “Eh?” I said. “I said you’re a son of a bitch too,” she said. “Is that right? Why is that?” I asked. “You look a lot like him.” “Is that so?” “That’s so. A seedy but kindly gentle wise Atticus Finch who messed with Scout. Wouldn’t Scout love that?” she asked me. “Would she?” I asked her. She told me.

  She lost her taste for french fries, lost weight, took up aerobic dancing, began to have dates. She discovered she was a romantic. At first she talked tough, in what she took to be a liberated style. “I know what you people think—it all comes down to getting laid, doesn’t it?—well, I’ve been laid like you wouldn’t dream of,” she said with, yes, a sneer. “You people?” I asked her mildly. “Who are you people?” “You shrinks,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you think and probably want.” “All right,” I said. But what she really believed in was nineteenth-century romantic love—perhaps even thirteenth-century. She believed in—what?—a knight? Yes. Or rather a certain someone she would meet by chance. It was her secret hope that in the ordinary round of life there would occur a meeting of eyes across a room, a touch of hands, then a word or two from him. “Look, Donna,” he would say, “it’s very simple. I have to see you again”—the rich commerce of looks and words. It would occur inevitably, yet by chance. The very music of her heart told her so. She believed in love. Isn’t it possible, she asked me, to meet someone like that—and I would know immediately by his eyes—who loved you and whom you loved? Well yes, I said. I agreed with her and suggested only that she might not leave it all to chance. In chance the arithmetic is bad. After all, there is no law against looking for a certain someone.

  After hating me, her surrogate seedy Atticus Finch, she loved me, of course. I was the one who understood her and gave her leave. Our eyes met in love. It was a good transference. She came to understand it as such. She did well. She was working on her guilt and terror, the terror of suspecting it was her fault that Daddy had laid hands on her and that they’d had such a good time. She got a good job at a doctor’s office—as a receptionist, did well—and got engaged.

  I didn’t share her faith in the inevitability of meeting a certain someone by chance, but I do have my beliefs about people. Otherwise I couldn’t stand the terrible trouble people get themselves into and the little I can do for them. My science I got from Dr. Freud, a genius and a champion of the psyche—Seele, he called it, yes, soul—even though he spent his life pretending there was no such thing. I am one of the few left, yes, a psyche-iatrist, an old-fashioned physician of the soul, one of the last survivors in a horde of Texas brain mechanics, M.I.T. neurone circuitrists.

  My psychiatric faith I got in the old days from Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps this country’s best psychiatrist, who, if not a genius, had a certain secret belief which he himself could not account for. Nor could it be scientifically proven. Yet he transmitted it to his residents. It seemed to him to be an article of faith, and to me it is as valuable as Freud’s genius. “Here’s the secret,” he used to tell us, his residents. “You take that last patient we saw. Offhand, what would you say about him? A loser, right? A loser by all counts. You know what you’re all thinking to yourself? You’re thinking, No wonder that guy is depressed. He’s entitled to be depressed. If I were he, I’d be depressed too. Right? Wrong. You’re thinking the most we can do for him is make him feel a little better, give him a pill or two, a little pat or two. Right? Wrong. Here’s the peculiar thing and I’ll never understand why this is so: Each patient this side of psychosis, and even some psychotics, has the means of obtaining what he needs, she needs, with a little help from you.”

  Now, I don’t know where he got this, from Ramakrishna, Dr. Jung, or Matthew 13:44. Or from his own sardonic Irish soul. But there it is. “Okay, that patient may look like a loser to you—incidentally, Doctors, how do we know you don’t look like losers to me, or I to you?” said Dr. Sullivan, a small ferret-faced man with many troubles. But there it was, to me the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, that is to say, the patient’s truest unique self which lies within his, the patient’s, power to reach and which we, as little as we do, can help him reach.

  Do you know that this is true? I don’t know why or how, but it is true. People can get better, can come to themselves, without chemicals and with a little help from you. I believed him. Amazing! I’m amazed every time it happens.

  Very well, I am an optimist. I was an optimist with Donna. I was willing to explore her romanticism with her. What I believed was not necessarily that her knight might show up—who knows? he could—but rather that talking and listening ventilates the dark cellars of romanticism. She needed to face the old twofaced Janus of sex: how could it be that she, one and the same person, could slip off of an afternoon with Daddy, her seedy Atticus Finch, do bad thrilling things with him, and at the same time long for one look from pure-hearted Galahad across a crowded room? Daddy had got to be put together with Galahad, because they belonged to the same forlorn species, the same sad sex. She was putting it together in me, who was like her daddy but had no designs on her and whom she trusted. She could speak the unspeakable to me. Sometimes I think that is the best thing we shrinks do, render the unspeakable speakable.

  So here she is two years later. I watch her curiously as she comes up the porch steps. She looks splendid, a big girl yes, but no fat girl she. She’s wearing a light summery skirt of wrinkled cotton in the new style, slashed up the thigh and flared a little. Her hair is pulled up and back, giving the effect of tightening and shortening her cheek. With her short cheek, flared skirt, and thick Achilles tendon, she reminded me of one of Degas’s ballet girls, who, if you’ve noticed, are strong working girls with big muscular legs.

  I try to catch her eye, but she brushes past me, swinging her old drawstring bag, and strides into my office. She ignores the couch. Seated, we face each other across the desk.

  Her gaze is pleasant. Her lips curve in a little smile, something new. Is she being ironic again?

  “Well?” I say at last.

  “Well what?” she replies equably.

  “How have you been?”

  “Oh, fine,” she says, and falls silent. “How about you?” Yes, she is being ironic.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I see”—and again falls silent, but equably and with no sense of being at a loss.

  “Do you wish to resume therapy?”

  She shakes her head but goes on smiling.

  “It was you who called me, Donna.”

  “I know.”

  I wait for her to start up. She doesn’t. I decide to wait her out.

  Finally she says, “I knew you were back.”

  “And you wanted to wish me well.”

  “I saw you in the store.”

  “I see.” Something stirs in the back of my head.

  “I often see your wife in the stor
e.”

  “Is that right?”

  “She’s your second wife, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is often with that famous scientist, or is he a bridge player, anyway a close friend, I’m sure.” Again the lively look. Again the stirring just above my hairline.

  “Donna, I’m sure you didn’t come here to tell me you saw my second wife at the store.” “No.” She opens her mouth and closes it.

  When patients get stuck, you usually get them off dead center by asking standard questions, as if you were seeing them for the first time.

  “Are you still working at the clinic?”

  “Yes”—neutrally. Again she falls silent, but without a trace of the old unease or hostility.

  “How does it go?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  As we gaze at each other, the stirring at the back of my head comes up front. I have the same nutty idea.

  “Where do you live now, Donna?”

  “In Cut Off, Louisiana.” Her reply is as prompt and triumphant as if I had at last hit on the right question.

  “I see. Where is Cut Off, Donna?”

  Her eyes move up a little as if she were consulting a map over my head. “Cut Off, Louisiana, is sixty-one miles southwest of New Orleans.” There is no map over my head.

  “Very good, Donna. Donna, where is Arkansas?”

  Again the eyes going up into her eyebrows. “Arkansas is bounded on the north by—”

  “That’s fine, Donna, I see that you know. Give me your hand, Donna.”

  She gives me her right hand across the desk. I had thought she was right-handed, but needed to be sure. I look at it, the broad thumb, the short nail. I remember dreaming of her once, making much in the dream of a certain stubbiness of hand and foot. Her foot does in fact have an exaggerated arch, like a dancer’s. A broad quick little hoofed mare of a girl she was in the dream.