The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  Texaco, which didn’t need it, gave the place to a private school, which had been founded to revive the traditional Southern academy founded on Greek ideals of virtue and to avoid the integration of the public schools.

  Van Dorn holds out a hand to each of us. “Old Br’er Possum Tom! Cud’n Lucy!” He gives her a kiss, pulls us close, holds us off. “Look at you two. I like. Splendid. Aren’t y’all kissin’ cousins too?” Van Dorn looks good, his gray-green eyes glittering, his heavy handsome pocked face not pale but slightly flushed as if he had just waked. He’s wearing old air force coveralls with knee pockets and loops for tools. He extracts a big Stillson wrench. “Pardon the mess but guess who’s the number-one handyman here. Have you tried to hire a plumber lately, Lucy? I’ve been up to my ass in cellar water. Come on in. Excuse me,” he says, bowing to Lucy. “Not Cud’n but Dr. Lipscomb, I believe. Nurse Cheney is expecting you.”

  “I’ve come to pick up the kids, Van,” I say, feeling better about him. “I called Mrs. Cheney.”

  “Sho now. Okay, come on in and I’ll have ’em rounded up from the dorm or more likely from the stables.”

  “Y’all go on in,” says Lucy. “I’ll just go on over there to the rec room. I know the way.” “Sho now. Tom—” He opens a hand to me and the house.

  Van Dorn doesn’t mind Lucy striking out on her own. Inside, he fixes his half-drunk drink and offers me one. I shake my head. We’re in a splendid room, what I remember as an old-style living room but now turned into a sort of gaming room with a large round mahogany-and-rosewood poker table with red-leather inlay and slots for the chips, a Bokhara rug, a severe Derby mantel on which, however, are scattered half a dozen teal and pintail decoys. The plantation desk, stomach-high, so the busy squire, on the run between hunts, could write checks standing, has become a dry bar, with crystal decanters of whiskey and toddy glasses.

  We are sitting at the poker table, Van Dorn gazing down at his bourbon, face grave. “I owe you an apology. I thought to be doing ya’ll a favor, keeping the kids.”

  “Yes?”

  “With Ellen headed for Fresno and you busy as a bird dog with your practice, I told her the kids were perfectly welcome to stay with us. She seemed quite worried. And she couldn’t locate you.”

  “Thanks. I understand. But I’ve got Chandra to help me look after them. Is something wrong with Ellen?”

  “I’m glad you asked, Tom.” Van Dorn, still gazing at his drink, pulls back his upper lip. “I’m really glad you asked. Frankly I’ve been concerned, Tom.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s the mood swings, Tom”—he looks up, fine eyes glittering even in the soft light of the room— “which I’m sure you’ve noticed and which you certainly know more about than I do. But I’ve got news for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “This trip is going to help her!”

  “Is that right?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell you how. She and Sheri are going to win the non-master pairs, she’s going to go over one hundred MPs, become a master in her own right, and come home feeling great!”

  “Oh, is Sheri going with her?” I feel better.

  “I insisted on it. Sheri’ll look after her. And Ellen will carry Sheri in the non-master pairs. Sheri’s competent enough, though no super-lady like Ellen. Hell, Ellen would win it even with you, ha ha!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Like I told you, Tom, remember? She somehow knows the cards.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Tom.” Van Dorn leans toward me, cradling his drink in both hands, elbows propped on the green baize. “I’ve tested her. After three rounds of play or two rounds of bidding, she knows the exact probability of distribution. I checked the math of it. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she knows.”

  “How do you think she knows, Van?” I watch him curiously. He’s exhilarated. He’s still grave, but there’s a fondness and a thrill in his gravity.

  “I—don’t—know, Tom! I’ve ruled out ESP. It’s nothing supernatural. What she’s doing is high-order math without knowing how she does it.”

  “Like an idiot savant.”

  Van Dorn gives me a single, steely look. “Don’t hand me that, old buddy. That lady is not only not an idiot, as you well know, but is a great lady in her own right.”

  “Right. Is she on heavy sodium, Van?” I ask in the same voice.

  He sets down his drink, eyes level, lips thin. “I’m glad you asked, Tom. Now that you’re part of the team. If she is, old buddy, she ain’t getting it here. You see that?” Picking up his drink, he holds it toward the French window. Beyond it, beyond the magnolias rises a silver bullet of a water tower. “You know where our water comes from? A ten-inch flow well, artesian water fifteen hundred feet straight down. More to the point, Doctor, where does yours come from?” He sits back, drinks his drink. “I knew you knew about Blue Boy. Seriously, where does your water come from?”

  “Same as yours. The town has an artesian well.”

  We look at each other. He smiles for the first time. “You’re a sly one. You didn’t suppose, did you, that I didn’t know that you knew about the boys’ little Hadacol juice in the water?”

  “I supposed that you knew. I talked to Bob Comeaux and he told me you were on the ACMUI team.”

  Van Dorn snorts and pushes back in his poker chair. “Me with those Rover boys? No way. No, I’m only a visiting fireman, consultant, no, those guys wanted some coolant—I’m the project engineer—I got the go-ahead from the guys at NRC. They had medical spread sheets from NIH, which looked promising to me. Hell, that’s down your alley, Tom. You’re the expert on the pharmacology of radioactive isotopes, especially sodium. You tell me.”

  “What do you think of that pilot, Van?” I ask, watching him.

  “Blue Boy? Shit.” He clucks, makes a face, pulls up close. “You really want to know what I think of those guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think they’re a bunch of Rover boys, eagle-scout mid-level bureaucrats, Humana airheads, Texas cowboys—hell, that’s where I made my money, Texas, remember? I know those types—who ride into town and shoot up the rustlers and have a ball doing it.”

  “You don’t approve of what they’re doing?”

  He gives a great open-hand Texas shrug. “Well, who’s going to argue about knocking back crime, suicide, AIDS, and improving your sex life—any more than you’d argue about knocking back dental caries by putting fluoride in the water. But that’s not the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is, you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You don’t treat human ills by creaming the human cortex. That’s a technologist for you. Give a technologist a new technique and he’ll run with it like a special-team scatback.”

  “Are you talking about Dr. Comeaux and Dr. Gottlieb and their colleagues?”

  Van Dorn makes a face. “Max Gottlieb is unhappy with them too. He’s a reluctant conspirator. But he’s locked in—by his position at Fedville. But the rest of those guys, you want to know what they are?”

  Not really. “What?”

  “Those guys are a bunch of ham-fisted social engineers, barnyard technicians, small-time Washington functionaries, long-distance reformers—you know who they remind me of? They remind me of the New England abolitionists, that bunch of guilt-ridden Puritan transcendentalist assholes who wanted to save their souls by freeing the slaves and castrating the planters. These guys—you know how they produce Olympic weight lifters in the U.S.S.R.? By steroids and testosterone—the same way they do football players and racehorses in Texas. These guys are running a barnyard. That’s no way to treat social ills or to treat people. Those damn cowboys are killing flies with sledgehammers. Do you know the latest they’re up to?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got a problem with teen pregnancy, children getting knocked up by the thousands
right here. Plus a mean, demoralized, criminal black underclass. A real problem, right? But you don’t cure it by knocking back all women in the pilot area into a pre-primate estrus cycle, do you? You don’t treat depression by lobotomizing the patient anymore, do you? You don’t treat homosexuals by dumping stuff in their water supply and turning them into zombies, do you?”

  “What do you do, Van?”

  But he doesn’t need an answer. He’s jumped up to fix another drink and is pacing up and down. He stops above me. “You don’t treat the ills of society by dumping stuff in the water supply, Tom.”

  “Then why did you participate in the project? It was you who gave them the sodium isotope.”

  “I’ll tell you why, Tom.” He’s brooding now, eyes as brilliant as agates. “Because it’s war. In time of war and in time of plague you have to be Draconian.”

  “Plague? War? What war?”

  “Tom, we have, as you damn well know, three social plagues which are going to wreck us just as surely as the bubonic plague wrecked fourteenth-century Europe. If you’d been in London in 1350, wouldn’t you have dumped penicillin in the water supply, even if it meant a lot of toxic reactions? Wouldn’t you have quarantined the infected?”

  “What three plagues are we talking about, Van?”

  He counts them off with big referee arm strokes. “One: crime. We can’t go out in our own streets, Tom. Murder, rape, armed robbery, up eighty percent. We don’t have to tolerate that. Two: teenage suicide and drug abuse, the number-one and -two killers of our youth. Number three: AIDS. Now we’re talking plague, Tom, five million infected, a quarter million dead.

  “So why are you complaining about this pilot project?”

  “Tom, I have no quarrel with their short-term goals. Every society has the right to protect itself—even if it means temporary loss of civil liberties. But those cowboys—hell, they like what they’re doing, and I think they want to keep on doing it. You want to know what their trouble is?” He leans over me. I can smell breathed bourbon.

  “What?”

  “Goals, Tom. They have no ultimate goals. They don’t know what in the hell they’re trying to accomplish. They’re treating everything in sight, curing symptoms and wiping out goals. It’s like treating a headache with a lobotomy. Tom, we have to leave the patient human enough to achieve the ultimate goals of being human.”

  “What are the ultimate goals of being human, Van?” I look at my watch. I’m already sorry I asked. Where is Lucy?

  Now Van is half-sitting on the poker table, swinging a leg, arms folded, at his ease, well-clad and graceful in his coveralls and—yes, exhilarated. He’s nodding, eyes gone fine and faraway.

  “I’ll answer that by telling you what I tell the boys and girls out there. Incidentally, it’s no accident, Tom, that since we took over this seg academy, we’ve got the highest SAT scores in the state and the most National Merit scholars. You know what the answer is, Tom, the only answer? Excellence? We give them the tough old European Gymnasium-Hochschule treatment. We work their little asses—”

  “Right. Look, Van. I have to find Lucy. We have an appointment—

  “Sure, sure.” He goes on but we’re moving toward the door.

  We’re walking in the magnolia alley toward the parking lot, Van taking measured steps, sauntering planter-style, hands in pockets, gazing down at the fine pea gravel. No sign of Lucy.

  “Tom, would you like to hear my own private theory of the nature of man?”

  The nature of man. I can’t stand theories about the nature of man. I’d rather listen to Robin Leach and watch Barnaby Jones.

  “Well, actually I think we’d better track down Lucy—”

  But he’s got going on his theory of the nature of man. It has something to do with science and sexuality, how the highest achievements of man, Mozart’s music, Einstein’s theory, derive from sexual energy, and so on. “Didn’t old Dr. Freud say it?” he says triumphantly, stopping me and swinging around to face me.

  “Well, not exactly—”

  There are times when you can’t listen to someone utter another sentence. This is one of them. Even shrinks run out of patience. Where is Lucy? I find myself looking attentive, either by frowning down at the pea gravel and presenting an ear or by maintaining a lively understanding eye contact meanwhile shifting around a bit so I can catch sight of Lucy, who, I calculate, should appear just beyond Van Dorn’s ear.

  Van Dorn is saying something about Don Giovanni, not the opera but the old Don himself being, in his opinion, a member of this company of sexual geniuses. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Actually—” I catch sight of Lucy behind the boxwood. She’s converging on the alley from the service drive. I do not at first see the children but then, just above the hedge, two heads bob. She’s in a hurry. She doesn’t see me.

  Van Dorn is talking but I’m not listening. I’m watching Lucy. There is something odd—She is perhaps two hundred yards away and could easily see us but she doesn’t look. Her eyes are straight ahead. She walks with a curious stiff rapid gait.

  “One thing,” I interrupt Van Dorn.

  “Yes?”

  “You didn’t know that Ellen had gotten a dose of heavy sodium?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  Van Dorn looks at me level-eyed. “If I had known it, would I have been so curious about her amazing talent for computing probabilities in bridge?”

  “Well—no.” He’s right.

  Van Dorn has seen Lucy. Her cheek is hard and high. I think she’s seen us.

  Van Dorn grabs me and pulls me playfully close—in men’s style of talking at the approach of women and before they come within earshot. “Just suppose, Tom, we could combine the high sexuality of the Don and Einstein without the frivolity of the Don or the repressed Jewish sexuality of Einstein—who needs heavy sodium?”

  “Right,” I say. “Where’s Claude Bon?”

  Van Dorn turns. We watch the three approach. Lucy, Tommy and Margaret, the children moseying along rapt, regardless, normal; Lucy stone-faced and stiff, headed straight for the truck without looking at us though we’re fifty feet away.

  “Oh. I forgot to tell you. Claude’s varsity now and they’re playing Baton Rouge High, the state champs, and I kid you not, B.R. is in for the surprise of the year.”

  We meet Lucy at the truck. Van Dorn opens the door for her.

  “Howdy, Miss Lucy.”

  She doesn’t answer, but Van Dorn calls to me over the cab of the truck. “You can pick up Claude later tonight. Or I’ll send him over. Let me know, folks.”

  I catch sight of Lucy’s face as she stoops to get in. It is welted, almost ugly. A rope of muscle twists her black eyebrows. Her cheek is pulled back, freckles dark plum against pale skin. She says only, “Get in,” to Tommy and Margaret, pushing them ahead of her, then backs up to let them in the middle, then gets in and slams the door. She’s driving.

  We leave. She looks straight ahead, face set. The pickup is old and big. There is room for the four of us on the broad front seat. In the rearview mirror I catch sight of Van Dorn. He has resumed his head-ducking, hands-in-pockets sauntering.

  12. WE DRIVE DOWN the River Road in silence. The Ranger four-door pickup passes, but the driver and passenger don’t seem to notice us.

  “Well,” I say at last.

  Lucy is still looking straight ahead. “Where are we going?” she says.

  “To Popeyes to get my car.”

  “Could we get some drumsticks?” asks Margaret.

  “I want a Happy Meal,” says Tommy. “You get a baby transformer in it.”

  “Okay. Well, Lucy?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I think you’d better tell me now.”

  “Why?”

  “I think we might be having company soon.” I am watching the Ranger pickup.

  “Yes, but—”

  “There is not much time,”

  “How
do you mean?”

  “Did you see that pickup that just passed?”

  “Sure. They were locals, a couple of good old boys, complete with gun rack.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Good old Louisiana boys don’t wear business suits like the driver or bib overalls like the passenger. And they wouldn’t be caught dead with an under-and-over in the gun rack.”

  “An under-and-over?”

  “That was a new .410 shotgun with a .22 on top. It’s a prop.”

  “You must have seen them before.”

  “I have. Locals might have a 12-gauge or a .30-.30 deer rifle, but not that.”

  “I see.” She’s gripping the wheel, frowning, knuckles white.

  “I think you’d better tell me now.”

  “I can’t in present company.” Lucy is relaxing a bit, but her face is still heavy and she has not looked at me.

  “I want a Coke-cola too,” says Tommy.

  “They don’t have Cokes at Popeyes, but you can get a diet Sprite,” says Margaret.

  “I don’t want a diet Sprite,” says Tommy.

  “You’re going to have to tell me. Tell me medically,” I say. “Did you examine some kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about this pair?”

  “No, but I think they’re all right.”

  “The others?”

  “Yes, the others.”

  “Lucy, how many children did you examine?” She wants me to ask questions. She seems to be having trouble concentrating.

  “Ah, about six. Yes, six.” Again she falls silent.

  “You shouldn’t drink regular Sprite because it has sugar,” says Margaret.

  “Lucy, tell me about the examinations,” I say patiently. “Tell me medically. Now. Do you hear me? Now.”

  “It was easy, since I had to do fecal smears for salmonella.”

  “I understand.”

  Silence.

  “Well,” I say.

  She is gripping the wheel tightly, sighting the road, chin up, like a novice driver. Her voice is not steady.

  “Well, it was in a sort of rec room that had a bathroom. I examined them in the bathroom. There was a Mrs. Cheney there, and a spooky couple named Brunette came in later. And somebody they called Coach, an oafish type with a whistle who looked as though he’d gone to summer camp for ten years and finally made counselor.”