Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

Somewhat abstracted, I forget to run the simplest test on them, a dominant-eye test or an out-of-context language test, like: Where is Ketchum, Idaho? (They’d know, because the Bhagwan had hung out there.) I have no doubt that either would have told me instantly and as merrily as a four-year-old, eyes rolled up to consult their interior brain maps. I’ll test them later.

Absently, I receive their hugs and thanking noises and watch from the windows as they depart in their old Econoline van with its flaming yin-yang logo centered between two dialoguing hearts.

2. WHAT TO MAKE OF these patients? What’s in common? Nothing? Something? Enough for a syndrome?

Here’s Mickey LaFaye, formerly anxious and agoraphobic, terrified of her own shadow, now a sleek, sleepy, horsewoman Duchess of Alba straddling under the sheets. Plus some peculiar business about a stallion and a stable boy. Plus Dr. Comeaux’s special interest in her.

Here’s Donna S—, formerly a fat girl, abused as a child, but a deep-down romantic, waiting for Galahad. Now she’s jolly, lithe, and forward, or rather backward, presenting rearward.

Here’s Enrique, once an enraged Salvadoran, now a happy golfer with no worries except his daughter making Gamma.

Here’s Ella Murdoch Smith, once failed and frightened, guilt-ridden, couldn’t cope, a solitary poet of the winter beach and spindrift. Now Rosy the Riveter, hardhat lady at Mitsy, with her boyfriend in a standard Louisiana pickup, getting beat up by a robot.

And Kev and Debbie, old friends, ex-Jesuit and ex-Maryknoller, a quarrelsome, political, ideological couple. Now content, happy as bugs in a rug; no, not happy so much as fat-witted and absorbed. Running some sort of encounter group out in the pines which sounds less like a couples’ retreat than a chimp colony.

Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day.

And Ellen.

What’s going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But — But what? They’re somehow — diminished. Diminished how?

Well, in language, for one thing. They sound like Gardner’s chimps in Oklahoma: Mickey like — Donna want — Touch me — Ask them anything out of context as you would ask chimp Washoe or chimp Lana: Where’s stick? and they’ll tell you, get it, point it out. Then: Tickle me, hug me. Okay, Doc?

Then there’s the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? the old ache of self? Ella doesn’t even bother to look at her own photograph, doesn’t care.

Bad or good?

For another thing, a certain curious disinterest. Example: Take the current news item: Soviets invited to occupy Baluchistan, their client state in southern Iran to restore order, reported advancing on Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. What to do? Let them have it? Confront them? Ultimatum? Two years ago people would be huddled around the tube listening to Rather and Brokaw. My patients? My acquaintances? No arguments, no fright, no rage, no cursing the Communists, no blaming the networks, no interest. Enrique doesn’t mention liberals anymore. Debbie does not revile Jerry Falwell anymore.

There’s a sameness here, a flatness of affect. There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.

Nothing like Alabama!

The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!

We inmates, or rather detainees — assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons — criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available. One of them, my old pal and exparish priest, Rinaldo, Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, sojourned next door to me on the Alabama Gulf Coast for a year to recover from his solitary drinking. (I must call him. Has he gone nuts again?)

At Fort Pelham we had discussion groups, seminars, screaming political arguments over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.

I witnessed such a fight between an anti-Communist Italian Republican dentist from Birmingham who had patented a new anesthetic and more or less inadvertently killed half a dozen patients and an anti-anti-Communist Jewish lawyer from New York, my cellmate Ben Solomon, recently removed to New Orleans, where he had been convicted of laundering Mafia-teamster money for a black mayoral candidate.

This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars , a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.

These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals. Now in the library I looked up from the Battle of the Somme and began to watch them. Both were gazing down at their magazines but neither was reading. Not a page was turned for twenty minutes. It was clear from his expression that Ben Solomon, the lawyer, was festering, nurturing some real or fancied slight, which was being rapidly magnified in his head to a mortal insult. I knew the signs. Perhaps he had lost the last argument and was thinking of what he might have said, a killing remark. But it was too late for talk. His fists clenched and unclenched on the table. The dentist, I perceived, was aware of the lawyer’s mounting rage. Then why didn’t they steer clear of each other? Why didn’t one just get up and leave? But no. They were bound, wedded, by hatred. They were like lovers. Finally the lawyer rose slowly and stood over the dentist, looking down at him, fists clenched at his sides. In a trembling voice he said, “Did you or did you not imply that as a supporter of Israel I was a secondclass and unpatriotic American?”

The dentist, surprised or not, did not look up from his Stars and Bars. “Only after that crack, addressed to others but intended for me, about rednecks, crackers, yahoos, and gritspitters. I only replied in kind.”

“You mentioned something about Yankee kikes.”

“Only after you used the expression ‘Southron fascist rednecks.’”

“Take it back,” said the lawyer, clenching and unclenching. Take it back! I am marveling. Like my five-year-old Tommy: Take it back. Well then, why not?

“Look, Doctor,” I said mildly, “if the word offends him—”