The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  There’s time enough after dropping them off to stop at the driveup window of Popeyes to pick up five drumsticks, spicy not mild, and a large chocolate frosty before heading up the Angola road.

  V

  1. NO TROUBLE GETTING BACK to Angola in time. No trouble with Bob Comeaux.

  I simply retrace my steps, drive up the Angola road, chewing Popeyes drumsticks, park at old Tunica Landing, take jeep trail to levee, climb under fence, and stroll along hands in pockets like a Guatemalan ex-President returning from his exercise period. Two horse patrols pass me and pay no attention.

  Back before two o’clock! Stretched out on my cot as if I’ve been locked up all morning, when Bob Comeaux and Max Gottlieb show up. (What a pleasure to steal time, to do a thing or two while appearing to be idle, even incarcerated!) I report to Elmo Jenkins, thank him for allowing me my “exercise period.” He asks no questions, thanks me again for my long-ago treatment of his auntee. Though he does not say so, I think he is really thanking me for not flying the coop. He has already heard from Sheriff Sharp, I can tell from his voice. We’re all on the same side now, I, warden and sheriff. “Your visitors just walked in, Doc.” What if I hadn’t been there! “I’ll send them up.”

  One look at Bob Comeaux and I know that he knows. He’s still dressed in his white plantation tuxedo and he must have come straight from the wedding. But he gives me an odd, white-eyed look. Gone is his old Howard Keel assurance. For the first time he is at a loss. He doesn’t even seem to notice the hundreds of blacks picking cotton on the prison plantation, stooped over their long, collapsed sacks and singing mournful spirituals. What does he know? He knows about Belle Ame. How does he know? He could have called his office or Sheriff Sharp, been beeped, used the cellular phone in his Mercedes Duck.

  Max Gottlieb doesn’t know. He only knows something is up. He’s frowning, hot and bothered, shaking his head dolefully, even more dismayed than usual (what have you gone and done now?).

  I sit at my little student desk, they side by side on my cot, Bob Comeaux holding his wide-brimmed hat between his knees, tuxedo somewhat worse for wear, shirt ruffles wilted. Max is very neat in his new Oxford-gray vested suit, which his wife, Sophie, must have bought for him, but his shoes are the same dried-up Thom McAns he’s worn for twenty years. They are shoes no surgeon would be caught dead in.

  “Well?” I say after a while.

  Bob Comeaux jumps up and begins pacing back and forth as if it were he in prison. He explains he’d like to get back to the wedding reception. “Look, guys, let’s make this short. After all, this is only a routine hearing, for the book. Let’s spring our friend, the doctor here, sign the papers, vacate his parole status, and let’s all go about our business. I got to get back—” He looks at his gold wafer of a watch. “Jesus! Let’s get this show—So he’s had a couple of violations—but what’s a little kinkiness among shrinks, ha ha—right? Say, Tom—” He pulls up in front of me. “I was just wondering. Were the hell-raisin’ and hijinks at P&S as dumb in your day as they were in mine?”

  “Well, I remember we dropped water bombs on pedestrians.”

  “Hot damn! We did too!” He socks himself. “Can you believe it?” he asks Max, and instantly sobering: “Okay, guys, let’s get this show on the road”—and heads for the open door.

  But Max, worried as usual, likes to have everything squared away and kosher. “Yeah, right. Hold it. Let’s just hold it. I never had any use for this parole foolishness, anyway. But what’s this business about some incident this morning—‘disturbance of the peace’?—out at Belle Ame involving Dr. Van Dorn? And some arrested? What is all that about?” Max opens his hands, first to Bob Comeaux, then to me.

  Bob Comeaux waves him off, speaks quickly to both of us.

  In a word, Bob simply wants shut of me. He assures Max the ”incident” was not of my doing, is still willing to take me on at Fedville at consultant’s salary plus Ford grant money, is willing for me to do what I’m doing, or throw in with Max in Mandeville—whatever I want to do—but mainly move, move out from here, from him. Let’s go. He’s at the open door. “Come on, Tom, I’m signing you out, okay?”

  But Max is scratching his head, one eye screwed up, trying to make head or tail of it. “Well. He sure doesn’t belong here.” Sighing, he’s pushing himself up from the cot. He can’t quite get hold of it.

  Bob Comeaux, relieved, relaxes in the doorway and, gazing out at the prison plantation, shakes his head elegiacally. “God,” he says softly, “would you listen to those darkies!”

  We listen.

  Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Nobody knows but Jesus

  “Well, Tom?” He holds out hand-with-hat to me. Let’s go.

  I do not rise from my student desk.

  Max gives me his quizzical eye. “Well?”

  “There’re a couple of things,” I tell Max.

  “What’s that?” asks Bob quickly, as if, what with the singing, he couldn’t hear.

  “I think there’re a couple of things that need to be settled before we go any further.”

  “Right,” says Max, still feeling unsettled.

  “By all means,” says Bob, putting his hat on.

  “Well?” says Max, giving me his curious eye.

  “I think it would be a good idea to discontinue the Blue Boy pilot immediately, today.”

  “What’s that?” asks Bob Comeaux, cupping an ear.

  I repeat it.

  “What do you mean?” Bob asks me. “What does he mean?” he asks Max.

  “What do you mean, Tom?” Max asks me.

  “I mean turn off the sodium shunt at the Ratliff intake and dismantle it, today.”

  Max’s worries are back, worries now about me weighing him down. He sinks to the cot.

  “Tom,” he says, screwing up an eye, “I was aware you knew about the sodium pilot. We’ve never discussed it, for obvious reasons—since it was Grade Four classified. But since you do—to tell you the truth, I’ve never been too happy with it—I prefer individual therapy, as you well know—to this sort of mass shotgun prophylaxis. But how can you argue with success? I mean, the numbers from NIH are damned impressive, Tom. I mean, it may not do much for our egos if they can reduce street crime, drug abuse, suicides, and suchlike by a simple sodium ion—but what are you going to do? We weren’t too happy with lithium either. But zero recidivism at Angola. How do you argue with success? If it ain’t broke—” He trails off.

  “So I thought at first, but you don’t know, Max,” I tell him.

  “I don’t know what?” he says absently, distracted. He’s worried, I know, less about Blue Boy than about me.

  “Max, NIH doesn’t even know about Blue Boy, the heavy-sodium pilot program. They never heard of it. The FDA never heard of it. ACMUI never heard of it. Dr. Lipscomb even spoke to Jesse Land, the director whom she knows. He says it could only be what he calls an instance of ‘aberrant local initiative’— that is, some ambitious regional NIH people using their discretionary funding to run a pilot which might otherwise not be funded and then present them with a fait accompli which they can’t turn down. It’s been done before—and sometimes with good cause—to get around bureaucratic hassle—until the election next month.”

  “Wait.” Max has risen again, this time with both hands out, palms up. “Hold it. Are you telling me that Dr. Comeaux here and Dr. Van Dorn cooked up this sodium additive without even telling—”

  “Just as Dr. Fred McKay did with an equally simple ion, fluoridating water,” says Bob Comeaux from the doorway, facing us now, arms folded, eyes level and minatory. “If he’d waited for D.C. bureaucracy, children’s teeth would still be rotting out. And as both you doctors know, every kook and Kluxer in the country accused him of everything from mind control to Communist conspiracy.”

  Silence. Max sighs. “Well—” He is speaking to me.

  “Max, Blue Boy was not a pilot involving Angola. It covered the entire parish, in fact, all of Feliciana. Moreover, I’m afra
id what we’ve got here are some side effects which in fact you are aware of and which I can show are related to the additive—”

  “Such as? What do you mean, the whole parish?”

  “Such as regression of some subjects, especially children, to pre-linguistic pongid levels of behavior, regression of some women from menses to estrus, the sexual abuse of children—”

  Bob Comeaux has taken off his hat, placed his hand on his forehead, closed his eyes. “Dear God, do you hear?” He speaks softly. “Where have we heard this before? Do I hear echoes? Of men descended from apes? Who was accused of this? Of corrupting the youth of Athens? You know who was accused of that. But I will confess that tampering with the sexuality of women is a new one.” He’s shaking his head sorrowfully at me. “From the local yahoos I would have expected it. But from you? Et tu—” He turns to Max. “Well, I suppose it always happens in a scientific breakthrough—”

  “I wasn’t speaking of science, Bob. I was speaking of you and Dr. Van Dorn. It was you who made the decision to enlarge the pilot to the entire Ratliff water district—exempting Fedville. And it was your colleague Van Dorn who used the additive on the students at Belle Ame for purposes of the sexual gratification of himself and his senior staff—”

  “Hold it, Doctor!” Bob Comeaux now stands against the door, hands behind him on the knob. He has entirely recovered, not only himself and his old assurance, but his old anger. “Hear this, Doctor. In the first place, I put my money where my mouth was. I sanctioned a dosage of additive for my own son—and hear this: he is doing brilliantly. And finally, Doctor, you know damn well I’m not responsible for Van Dorn’s behavior. But apparently this is the way you want it.” From his pocket he takes a paper, slowly tears it once, and again, drops it into my student waste- basket. “That was your release. After what you pulled at Belle Ame this morning, what is going to happen is that we’re packing your ass right back to Alabama. I’m sorry, Doctor. I came up here to get you out of here. I had the door open. I did everything but pull you out bodily. Max,” he says.

  I look at Max.

  Max is standing over me, hands deep in his pockets, staring down at the curled-up toes of his Thorn McAns. “He can do it,” says Max softly. “Look, Tom. Here’s what’s let’s do. Why don’t you—and I’m sure Bob here would accept this—why don’t you and Ellen— Look, there’s no reason to, ah, go to Alabama—instead, why don’t you and Ellen do what I’ve been trying to get you to do, move down to Mandeville, into Beau Rivage with us—there’s a condo on 12 just below us available—and I need a partner—I’m tired of clinical work, want some time for writing. You know we always did well together, especially in group. I know you’ve had some problems, ah, at home, that is, adjusting. Tom, we could do well together, and economically too—” He breaks off suddenly, eyes widening.

  While Max is talking I’m spreading the Belle Ame photos on the floor, plus Lucy’s printouts and graphics from the NIH and Public Health mainframe in Baton Rouge and the local Fedvile data bank showing not only the distribution of Louisianians dosed up on Na-24—the starry galaxy over Feliciana—but the procurement order from Fedville, signed by Dr. Comeaux, exempting Fedville from the Ratliff water district and ordering a second intake upstream from Ratliff. The photographs, I can’t help but notice again, exhibit the same Victorian propriety, the decorous expressions, every hair in place, bobbed in the women, old-fashioned 1930s high haircuts in the men, a British sort of nakedness, white-as-white skins and vulnerable backs, unlike tan-all-over U.S. California nakedness, and the children above all: simpering, prudish, but, most of all, pleased. It is the proper pleased children—

  For a while both Max and Bob gaze, at first politely, heads aslant, as people will attend to other people’s photos. Max’s cheek is even propped reflectively on three fingers.

  In my clinical voice—doctor showing slides at a medical conference—I explain the exemption of Fedville from treated water, the sodium-additive arrangement, the presenting behavior of Mrs. Cheney, the anal lesions of this child, her curious linguistic regression, the extraordinary I.Q. of that child—not omitting Ricky’s perfect score in Concentration.

  “Ricky?” says Bob, not comprehending.

  “Ricky is all right, Bob. He’s at Lucy’s house.”

  “What?” says Bob. “Ricky?”

  “I understood you wanted to have him in the program, Bob.”

  “Yeah, but at first-level minimum dosage, to improve his—he was flunking math—Jesus, they didn’t—Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine. He’s not injured. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house. You can pick him up any time.”

  “Thank God,” says Bob. “Thanks, Tom.”

  “That’s okay, Bob. He’s with Claude at Lucy’s house.”

  “Jesus,” says Bob.

  Max seems not to be listening. His attention seems to be caught by one photograph, the one depicting Van Dorn supine, bearing the child aloft and impaled between his knees, the child’s expression, demure, as pleased as if she had just won the spelling bee, legs kicking up happily. The child is facing the camera and therefore appears to be looking at the viewer of the photograph.

  As Max examines the photographs he falls into an old habit, hissing a tune between tip of tongue and teeth, which I remember him doing as house physician standing with a patient’s chart in the nurses’ station—a sinister, amiable hissing, the attending intern casting about: How did I screw up this time?

  Max is also nodding in his old abstracted way. “So,” he says to no one.

  Bob Comeaux has come alongside, head medically-comradely aslant, like the attending physician co-inspecting an X-ray with the chief on grand rounds. He too is nodding, hands in pockets, upper lip folded against his teeth.

  “Bob,” he says in his old ominous-gentle, grand-rounds voice, head back, looking along his cheek. “Just what are we doing here?”

  Bob is clucking back-of-tongue-from-teeth tck tck tck meditatively, resident considering case: it’s amazing how everything you do, even late in life, you did in school.

  Silence, except for the spirituals.

  “What are we doing here?” Max asks again.

  “We are listening to the darkies singing,” I say.

  “All I can say is this,” says Bob Comeaux. He’s squinting into the afternoon sunlight, hat in his hands, head leaning back against the jamb. “I don’t know about those, whatever they are”—he nods toward, without quite looking at, the photographs—“but I will say this, you try the best you can to help folks. And what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get. You get the same thing Lister got, Galileo got, Pasteur got. Ridicule. Did that son of a bitch use Ricky?” he asks in a different voice.

  “Ricky’s okay, Bob.”

  Silence, except for the singing.

  I looked over Jordan and what did I see,

  Coming for to carry me home.

  A band of angels coming after me,

  Coming for to carry me home.

  “Don’t tell me that’s not beautiful,” says Bob absently.

  “Right, Bob,” I say. “Now here’s what we ought to do.” I exchange glances with Max—one of our “group” glances. We understand each other. We know something movies and TV don’t know. Here’s where movies and TV go wrong. You don’t shoot X for what he did to Y, even though he deserves shooting. You allow X a way out so he can help Y. X is going to have enough trouble as it is. Max already recognizes a tone in my voice, the clinical-helper voice of the “resource person” in group therapy. He and I have run many a group. It’s like two cops playing tough cop and softy cop.

  “What’s that, Doctor?” asks Max in his tough cop voice.

  “This is just an idea to kick around. I was thinking: Now that Blue Boy is closed down, wouldn’t it make sense to use the NIH discretionary funds and the Ford money to help Father Smith reactivate the hospice? The good Father is a nut, as we all know, but his place can be useful as a facility for your terminal cases—for one thing
, save you an awful lot of money. He’s going to need all the help we can give him. I’m thinking of giving him a couple of afternoons a week.” Group strategy: Don’t shoot Bob Comeaux, use him.

  We all appear to consider.

  “Well, I don’t know,” muses Max, who is just beginning to grasp what has happened, is astounded, and is not showing it.

  Bob Comeaux, still martyred, eyes still closed elegiacally, is actually attending closely. He almost nods.

  “I was thinking too,” I say, not to Bob, but to Max. “You know, we’ve not only got a lot of toxic-abused children, overdosed on sodium 24, thanks to Van Dorn’s hapless experiment”—blame Van Dorn for now—“who’ve been knocked back to a cortical deficit, a pre-linguistic level like a bunch of chimps and are going to need all the help Father Smith and the rest of us can give them. I think it would also be a good place to transfer the euthanasic candidates and quarantined patients from the Qualitarian Center.”

  Max rolls his eyes. Things are moving too fast. It’s all right for resource persons to fall out in group, stage mock warfare. But this! For Christ’s sake, Doctor, Max is saying, eyes rolled back, you’re pushing him too far.

  “I for one,” says Max, switching to his nice-cop-versus-mean cop voice, “don’t think Dr. Comeaux should take that to mean you’re suggesting the transfer of all infants who are candidates for pedeuthanasia for one reason or another—hopeless retardation, Down’s syndrome, AIDS infants, status epilepticus, gross irreparable malformations, and suchlike—who have no chance for a life of any sort of acceptable quality—you’re not suggesting that they too should be transferred from the center to the hospice?”

  “That’s what I meant. The hospice will take them all.”

  Bob Comeaux has recovered sufficient footing to lever himself away from the doorjamb and face us both.

  “You’re talking about violating the law of the land, gentlemen,” he says quietly. “Doe v. Dade, the landmark case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which decreed, with solid scientific evidence, that the human infant does not achieve personhood until eighteen months.”