Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

The uncle of course knows everyone. We are received and booked amiably. Some mistake must have been made, we are assured. It will soon be straightened out. The deputy and jailer stand about swinging their arms. They kid the uncle: “Looks like they finally caught up with you, Hugh Bob,” etc. Vergil is acutely embarrassed. He sees nothing amusing about jail.

There prevails the tolerable boredom and gossip of all police stations, tolerable because of the gossip. Something always turns up, the latest outrage and the headshaking, not without pleasure, of the cops who thought they’d seen it all and now here’s the latest. The uncle, who has just got it from the deputy, passes it along to Vergil and me in the same low voice quickened by interest: a crime against nature, many crimes against nature, against children, by none other than this same couple, it is alleged, who run some sort of day camp, the very sort of childcare business these people get into to get at children, you know — alleged because this couple is being sprung for lack of evidence, but the deputy says we’ll get them sooner or later, they always repeat. But children! The couple’s name I remember as the very byword of somber, sober caring: Mr. and Mrs. Brunette.

“That’s one thing I wouldn’t put up with, messing with children,” says the uncle cheerfully. “I’d cut their nuts out.”

Bob Comeaux is all rueful smiles, chaffing and headshaking. “You old booger, you jumped the gun on us,” he says in a low voice, pressing me toward the door. “Another twenty-four hours and you’d have been aboard and on the team.”

His hand is touching my back as he escorts us out to his car, a mud-spattered, high-mounted, big-wheeled Mercedes Duck, a forty-thousand-dollar amphibian good for bird hunting in the pines or duck hunting in the swamp. Bob is dressed, if not for hunting, at least for a weekend at his lodge, safari tans and low-quarter boots, cashmere turtleneck. The uncle is impressed. Vergil is impassive. Our truck, I tell Bob, is parked on the Angola road. No problem, he says, and he’s genial as can be, but I notice that he drops off Vergil and the uncle at Pantherburn first, even though it’s out of the way.

We’re sailing through the pines, the morning sun warm on our backs. There is a pleasant sense of openness and of riding high and seeing all around, so unlike being sunk in my old spavined Caprice. The Mercedes smells like leather and oiled wood.

“Now, do you think you can get home without getting in any more trouble,” says Bob, smiling at the road, “and make it to our meeting tomorrow when we’re going to wind up this parole foolishness, spring you for good, and then make you an offer you can’t refuse?”

“I haven’t forgotten. I thank you for getting us out of jail, but frankly I’m a little confused.”

“What’s the problem, Doctor?” he asks, cocking an attentive ear, but I notice he’s frowning at the wood dashboard, wipes the grain with his handkerchief.

“I don’t understand what’s going on at Grand Mer and the Ratliff intake and what your part in it is.”

Bob Comeaux shakes his head fondly, socks the wheel. “Same old Tom! You always did lay it right out, didn’t you?” All smiles, he goes suddenly serious. “Good question, Tom!” he says crisply.

To emphasize the seriousness — this is too important to talk about while sailing along in his Duck — we pull off at an overlook, the loess hills dropping away to a panorama of Grand Mer, the cooling tower with its single pennant of cloud, the river beyond, and upriver the monolith of Fedville.

Bob swings around to face me, so solemnly his smiling crowfeet are ironed out white. Again he socks the steering wheel softly. The windows of the Duck go down, the sunroof slides back without a sound, letting in sunlight and the fragrance of pines warming. But there is still the smell of leather, oiled wood, and pipe tobacco.

“You old rascal.” He’s shaking his head again. “You jumped the gun on us. I told those guys! I told them!”

“Told them what?”

“Take a look.” From his suede jacket he takes a paper and hands it to me. It is stationery folded letter-size.

“So?”

“Take a look at the date!”

I take a look at the date. “So?”

“The date is the day before yesterday. It’s already in your mail. The original, that is.”

“Do you want me to read it?”

“At your leisure. It’s a job offer — a proposition you can’t refuse — employment to begin in”—he consults his wafer-thin Patek-Philippe—“exactly twenty-six hours, contingent only upon your clearing the formality of probation tomorrow. It’s official. We even have the brass down from Bethesda, a couple of wheels from NIH. They want you aboard too.”

“Job offer?”

“Tom,” says Bob, his eyes both solemn and fond, “we want you aboard as senior consultant for NRC’s ACMUI.”

“What’s that?”

He smites my knee. “You’re right. That goddamn bureaucratese. Okay, try this. You’re being offered a position as senior consultant on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee for the Medical Uses of Isotopes.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you know more about the brain pharmacology of isotopes than anyone else. You broke the ground. You’re our man. Starting tomorrow you’re on the team.”

“What team?” I notice a broken V of ibis lowering on Tunica Island.

“There.” He nods toward Fedville. “Your office is waiting for you. Your salary of $85,000—chickenshit, if you ask me, but it was the best I could do, so I went on the assumption that you’re like me and that the service counts for something — will be supplemented by local QLC funding, which is mostly foundation money — I’m in with those guys — so you’ll be making about $135,000—not up to a big-shot shrink, ha, but we figure it will free you up to do your own research, plus you’ll have all the facilities of the center rent-free, as they say.”

The wings of the ibis, not great flyers, are out of sync and flutter in the sunlight like confetti.

Bob pops in a cassette and soon the Mercedes is filled with Strauss waltzes coming from all directions.

“God, don’t you love that,” murmurs Bob, lilting along with “Artist’s Life.” “Doesn’t that take you back to P&S, where we’d catch the Philharmonic, then hoist a tad of bourbon and branch at the Ein und Zwanzig?”

“Actually I’d be more apt to catch the flicks at Loew’s State 175th Street and hoist a beer at Murray’s Bar and Grill.”

“Same old Tom,” says Bob absently, but adjusting the four speakers, ear cocked for the right balance, listening with a frown. Satisfied, he settles back.

I take a good look at him. He has aged well. In his safari jacket, he’s as handsome as Eric Sevareid, as mellow as Walter Cronkite. We two have come a long way, he as much as says, seen the follies of the world, and here we are. Like Eric and Walter he has grown both grave and amiable.

“Any questions, Tom?” asks Bob, moving his head in time with Strauss.

“What is that heavy-sodium shunt at Ratliff all about?”

Bob nods gravely, eyes going fine and gazing past me at the looming, lopped cone of Grand Mer.

“Good question. Very good question. And if you don’t mind, I’ll answer it in my own way with a couple of Socratic questions of my own, shrinkwise, you might say. Okay?”

“Okay.” The wings of the ibis flash like shook foil and drop into the willows.

Bob leans back, puts forefinger to lips. “I’m assuming, Tom,” he says, and pauses, as the strains of “Artist’s Life” die away, “that we live by the same lights, share certain basic assumptions and goals.”

“Yes?”

“Healing the sick, ministering to the suffering, improving the quality of life for the individual regardless of race, creed, or national origin. Right?”