Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

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.