The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “He can fix anything,” Lucy tells me when he’s gone. “I pay him a fortune, but he’s worth it. Do you know he’s going to finish up at L.S.U. next semester with two degrees in geology and chemical engineering? He worked on the rigs for years, made toolpusher at age twenty-three, at four thousand a month. He’s thirty-five now and is going to end up owning Texaco. He helps me as a favor. I take care of his father. How about it?”

  “How about what?”

  “Staying.”

  “I’ll stay tonight. As a matter of fact, I need your help.”

  “With your syndrome?”

  “It’s not mine. I think I’m on to something. But you’re going to have to tell me whether I’m as crazy as our ancestor. Furthermore, you’re an epidemiologist and this is up your alley. You saw what I found in Mickey LaFaye’s case.”

  “Yes,” says Lucy solemnly. “I don’t think you’re crazy. I saw Mrs. LaFaye. You’ve got something. Perhaps we could help each other. Did you bring a list of patients with their social security numbers?”

  “Yes. Why do you need them?”

  “You’ll see. I’ve got a little surprise for you. A couple, in fact.”

  Half the toddy is gone. She is drinking with me, drink for drink, and shows no sign of it, save perhaps a widening of the pupils in her dark gold-flecked eyes. But that could be because the sun is behind the levee and no longer in our eyes. The sweet strong bourbon seems to fork in my throat, branching up the back of my head and sending a warm probe into my heart.

  “Ahem,” I say.

  “Yes indeed,” says Lucy, smiling.

  “Tell me—ah—about the syndrome,” says Lucy, pulling up close.

  “Yes, certainly.” I do, at length, all I know, and with the pleasure of telling her and of her close listening, head cocked, tapping her lips with two fingers, brown gold-flecked eyes fixed on me above plum-bruised cheeks. It is a pleasure telling her, talking easily, she listening, smoking, and plucking tobacco grains from her tongue, we ducking our heads just enough to set the rockers rocking. I take an hour. She fixes us another toddy. She drinks like a man and shows no sign of it except in her eyes. Her eyes change like the sunlight, now lively A-plus smart-doctor’s eyes, now a woman’s eyes. Beyond peradventure a woman’s eyes. Above us the uncle is calling the ducks home for feeding and now and then gives a high-ball, a loud drake’s honk. We don’t mind.

  It is dusk dark. In the west a red light, probably atop the Grand Mer cooling tower, blinks in the mauve sky.

  When I finish, Lucy stops rocking and watches me for a long time, fingers on her lips. She puts her hand lightly on my arm.

  “I’ll tell you what. Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go have supper. I brought some Popeyes fried chicken and Carrie cooked us some of her own greens. Then I want to show you something upstairs. What do you say?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “By the way.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know what Blue Boy means?”

  “Blue Boy? No.”

  “I heard someone at the Fedville hospital talking to Van Dorn about Blue Boy. I wasn’t supposed to hear. He looked annoyed.”

  We finish our toddies and go inside. The old house is dim and cool. There is a smell in the hall as wrenching as memory, of last winter, a hundred winters, wet dogs, Octagon soap, scoured wood. The weak light in the crystal chandelier is lost in the darkness above. The uncle appears from nowhere, flanking us, slides back the twelve-foot-high doors. Light winks on the silver inset handles polished by two hundred years of use.

  “Is it true, Uncle,” I ask him, “that all the hardware of the doors, even the hinges, are silver?”

  “That’s true. The Yankees were too dumb to notice. They stole everything else, but missed the silver. You see those handles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a white hand touched those handles until the war.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so. All you had to do was walk to a door and it would open; go through and it would close.”

  “Is that right?”

  “The people around here were thick as fleas.”

  Lucy makes a sound in her throat.

  “You can’t hardly get one of them to do anything these days,” says the uncle.

  We eat at one end of the long table in the dark dining room, taking fried chicken from the Popeyes bags. There is a pitcher of buttermilk, cornbread, and a tub of unsalted butter. The greens are thick and tender and strong as meat. The one light bulb winks red and violet in the beveled crystal of the chandelier. Dark paintings the size of a barn door are propped against the walls. They seem to be landscapes and bonneted French ladies swinging in a formal garden. They’ve been propped there since the war, too heavy to hang from the weakened molding. They must have been too big for the Yankees to steal.

  I ask the uncle about different duck calls. Lucy makes a sound in her throat. He begins to tell me, but she interrupts him.

  “You can have Dupre’s room,” says Lucy. “I cleaned all his stuff out.”

  “Fine.”

  “He had his own room here his last year here,” she adds without looking at me.

  “I see.”

  “Do you know who slept in that room?” asks the uncle.

  “No.”

  “General Earl Van Dorn.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right. You knew he was from Mississippi—right up the river. One of our people. You know what he did, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “After those frogs in New Orleans and those coonasses in Baton Rouge gave up without a fight, the Yankees occupied this place. Beast Butler made his headquarters right here. Buck Van Dorn came in with the Second Cavalry from Texas and ran them off. He stayed here until they ordered him to Arkansas. He slept in that room. He was a fighting fool and the women were crazy about him. Miss Bett’s grandma, the one they called Aunt Bett, like to have run off with him.”

  “That’s a lot of foolishness,” says Lucy absently. “Come on upstairs, I have something to show you,” says Lucy, and leaves abruptly.

  But the uncle leans close and won’t let me go.

  “You know what they’re always saying about war being hell?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He leans closer. “That’s a lot of horseshit.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Let me tell you something. I never had a better time in my life than in World War Two. When I was at Fort Benning I lived for six months in a trailer with the sweetest little woman in south Georgia. She was an armful of heaven. When I was at Fort Sill, I had two women, one a full-blooded Indian, a real wildcat. She like to have clawed me to death. Do you know who were the finest soldiers in the history of warfare?”

  “No.”

  “The Roman legionnaire, the Confederate, and the German. I read up on it. The Germans were like us. They beat the shit out of us at Kasserine. Don’t tell me, I was there. We shouldn’t have been fighting them. Patton gave me a field commission. I made colonel by the time we got to Trier. When I was at Trier I lived with a German girl for three weeks. They were putting out for anything you’d give them, but she was crazy about me. A fine woman! But Patton was a fighting fool. We whipped the Germans in the end, but it was because they’d rather us than the Russians. Patton took seven hundred thousand prisoners. I was in the 3d Armored Division of the Third Army. He wanted to take Berlin and Prague and drive to the Oder—the Germans would have helped us—but Roosevelt wouldn’t turn us loose. That son of a bitch Patton was a fighting fool. We could have gone to the Volga.”

  “Tom!” Lucy calls angrily from the dim hall.

  “If Roosevelt hadn’t stopped us, we’d have gone to the Volga and wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We were fighting the wrong people.”

  “Tom!”

  Lucy takes me upstairs.

  “How much of that was true?” I ask her.

  “What? Oh, God, I don’t
know. Very little. I stopped listening ten years ago. He made himself a colonel last year. But if I have to listen to that damn duck call another day, and then about Rommel and Patton and Buck Van Dorn another night, I’m going to shoot him. I’m so glad you’re here! Do you know what he’s done in the fifty years since that war?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing. I mean nothing. But shoot birds and animals and blow that duck call. The only thing he’s learned in fifty years is how to do it with your fingers.”

  Upstairs in the hall Lucy hands me a pair of folded blue jeans, a light flannel L. L. Bean shirt, and pajamas. They’re new. The pajamas are still pinned.

  “I got these for Uncle Hugh, but they’re too big.” For some reason she blushes.

  “Thank you.”

  “Get out of that smelly suit,” she says brusquely, gives the lapel a yank. “I’m going to burn it.”

  There are four rooms upstairs and a wide hall, arranged exactly as below.

  “You stay in here. Did you bring anything?”

  “No.”

  “I thought so. Tch.” She seizes my coat again between thumb and forefinger, gives it a hard tweak, brushes it back like somebody’s mamma. “Look at you. You look like a jailbird. Thin as a rake. I’ll fatten you up.” She begins to close the door. “You knock on my door right there in exactly fifteen minutes. That’s my office.”

  “All right.”

  The door closes. The room is empty of everything but a bed and an armoire, which is empty. Buddy Dupre has been cleaned out, all right.

  I take a shower and put on my new jeans and Bean shirt. In exactly fifteen minutes I knock on her door. “Come in!” comes her cool hospital voice.

  I blink at the fluorescent light. The room could be an office in Fedville. There are desks, data processors, terminals, keyboards, screens, cables, shelves of medical texts and journals, cabinets of discs and cassettes, the whole as brilliantly lit as a laboratory.

  We sit side by side at a large particle-board table bare except for a keyboard, screen, black box, telephone.

  “How do you like it?”

  “It looks expensive.”

  “It is, but it’s mostly federal equipment. As their epidemiologist I rate a terminal.”

  “Does that mean you’re hooked up to—”

  “Everything. All networks. To CDC in Atlanta, NIH in D.C., Bureau of the Census, State Department of Health in Baton Rouge, AT & T, GM, Joe Blow, you name it.”

  “I see.”

  The fluorescent light is unsuitable. I wish we were having a drink on the gallery.

  “I think we have a lead.”

  “What’s that?”

  Lucy pushes a button. The room goes dusk dark.

  “Well,” I say.

  “We have to wait for our eyes. We have to read the screens.”

  “All right.”

  She has both hands on my arm. “You want to know something?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’re on to something.”

  “I see.”

  “And I think we have a lead.”

  “Good.”

  “Okay. Let’s boot up.”

  “Okay. What’s the lead?”

  “Correct me, but aren’t the symptoms you describe in your syndrome similar to the findings in your paper about the heavy-sodium accident at Tulane years ago?”

  “Somewhat. I’ve thought of that, but—”

  “Do you think your syndrome could be a form of heavy-sodium intoxication?”

  “It had occurred to me, but there’s been no accident, no yellow cloud—”

  “Did you know that thing over there”—she nods toward Grand Mer—“has a sodium reactor?”

  “Sure, but there’s been no accident.”

  “They call it an incident. Or an event. Or an unusual occurrence. An incident is worse than an event.”

  “But there’s been no event.”

  She smiles. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Would you like to find out?” We’re side by side on a piano bench. She settles herself, straightens her back, touches fingers to keys like a concert pianist getting to work.

  “Sure.” I am pleased she remembers my paper, my last scientific article written perhaps ten years ago.

  “Something occurs to me.” Now she’s settled back again, tapping fingernail to tooth. “Did you know that when Grand Mer was licensed, the EPA required as a condition of licensure the monitoring of blood levels of heavy sodium in both Feliciana Parish and Pointe Coupée across the river?”

  “How would they go about that?”

  She shrugs. “Whenever a routine blood workup was ordered in a hospital, heavy sodium and chloride levels were checked as routinely as blood sugar or NPN.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m wondering if they still do it.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t ordered much lab work lately.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “All right.”

  “Come over here by me now.”

  “I’m by you. Is that a terminal?”

  “Yes. Now then—” She consults a little book, punches keys on the keyboard, punches other keys on a small black box, humming a tune, musing and busy. She reminds me of a chatelaine, the ole miss of Pantherburn. Red lights begin to blink on the black box.

  The screen lights up with an arcane readout: LADPTPBH and a flashing question mark.

  “Do you know what that is?” she asks me.

  “Louisiana Department of Public Health?”

  “Right, I use ’em all the time. Now”—humming—“let me get the access and user codes.”

  “Aren’t they closed now?”

  “They don’t close, dummy. I’m not talking to people. I’m talking to their data bank.” She’s hitting more keys. The bank must be pleased, lights up with a merry flashing ACCESSED.

  “You’re in?”

  “We’re in. Now to ask the question. What’s the question?”

  “We want the mean plasma level of heavy sodium of hospital admissions in Feliciana Parish, say, for this year.”

  “Well expressed, well—” she muses, hitting keys.

  The computer utters a sour bleat, flashes SNERROR.

  “What does that mean? That is, doesn’t know or won’t tell?”

  “It means we asked a dumb question.”

  “I feel like I flunked a test.”

  “That particular bank has a personality.”

  “Like Hal.”

  “No no. It’s on our side. Hm. Tom, what did we do wrong?”

  “How did you write heavy sodium?”

  “As heavy sodium.”

  “Try Na-24.”

  “That’s the atomic weight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Smart.” She hits keys. The thing is pleased, flashes a smiling ACCESS ACCESS ACCESS, then, as if it were thinking things over, waits a second and reads out: 6 mmg., meaning 6 micrograms. The symbol is really 6 µ but I figure this was not practical typographically. We gaze at it blinking. “Jesus,” I say.

  Lucy looks at me. “What does that mean?”

  “Six micrograms. That is very little, but any is too much. I suppose it means the mean value of heavy-sodium levels in all hospital blood workups, including positives and negatives.”

  “Is it too high?”

  “Any number would be too high.”

  “But that’s very little, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but too much.” I feel a prickling under the collar of my new Bean shirt. I look at her musing. “What else can we ask?”

  “We can ask any terminal any question. It’s just a matter of framing the question.”

  “Well?” She looks at me, hands on keyboard. She’s shifted now, from chatelaine to girl-Friday secretary, Della Street waiting for Perry to make up his mind.

  “What we need is a control.”

  “Right.” She waits, smiling.

  “Let’s do yours and mine.
Have you had a complete physical lately?”

  “Sure. I had to get one to get this job.”

  “You got it at Fedville?”

  “Right. How about you?”

  “Me too.”

  “At Fedville?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was that?”

  “When I was arrested by the feds.”

  “Of course. I wanted to come see you.”

  “It was not a good time. Can you talk to Fedville now?”

  “Sure. I’m on intimate terms with their mainframe. Let’s see. Yours would be about two years ago, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Two years. What a waste.”

  “Waste of what?”

  “Give me your SS number.”

  I give it. “Can we get individual readings?”

  “We can get anything we ask for. I have Class One clearance.”

  More black book, more punching out the big keyboard, little box, more queries, accesses, OKS. The thing doesn’t even pause to think it over this time. Back come the answers. I have the feeling the thing is sitting pleased, waiting to be patted.

  LL NA24—O C137—O

  TM NA24—O C137—O

  We gaze and blink some more.

  “Does that mean what I think it means?” Lucy asks me.

  “It means you and I are negative, zero levels of heavy sodium and chloride.”

  “I don’t get it,” says Lucy at last. “We both live here.”

  I look at her. “Have you heard anything about an accident over there? Or an incident? Or event?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Would you hear if there had been one?”

  “I don’t know. But I live next to the damn thing. So if anybody got sick, it would be me, wouldn’t it?”

  “One would think so. If, that is, it—” I fall silent. “You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?”

  She cocks an eye. “Wouldn’t you have to test me to find out?”