Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“Yes. I’m going up now. You stick around in case I need you. I’m going to have to take him to the hospital. I’ll need your help to get him down.”

“I be right here, Doc, don’t you worry! You want me to help you with the trapdoor?”

“No thanks.” I could use some help but don’t want to fool with Milton.

Father Smith is sitting at the high table, temple propped on three fingers. He seems to be studying the azimuth. On a corner of the table, an old-fashioned kerosene lamp with a glass chimney casts a weak yellow light. Beside the lamp there is an open can of Campbell’s chicken soup and a melted bowl of Jell-O.

“Hello, Father.”

He seems to be looking at me, but his eye sockets are in deep shadow.

“Milton told me you were ill.”

He is looking at me, I am sure, under his brow.

I sit on the stool opposite him. We gaze at each other.

“Milton said you had some kind of attack yesterday.”

The priest says nothing. His head moves. Is it a nod? I try to make out whether his expression is ironic, but I can’t be sure. I move the lamp beside me so I can see his eyes better. I like to see patients’ eyes, unlike Freud, who looked at the back of their heads.

“He told me you had not eaten or slept.”

No answer, but he is attentive. His eyes follow me.

“You’ve been sitting in that chair since yesterday?”

No answer, but his gaze is equable.

“How do you get over there to the toilet? Does Milton help you?”

A deprecatory pursing of lips, almost a shrug: no big deal.

“Milton also said you had some sort of spell.”

Another near-shrug: You know Milton.

I set Lucy’s medical bag on the table. His eyes follow it.

“Do you mind if I have a look at you?”

He doesn’t mind.

“Give me your right hand. All right, squeeze. Your left. All right.”

Milton is right. When I move his arm, there is a waxiness in the motion, like a stiff doll. But when I let go of his hand, it doesn’t stay in the air like a catatonic but comes slowly back to the table.

“Can you stand?” He looks at me but doesn’t move. Am I mistaken or are his eyes slightly rounded, even risible? I give him my hands. He stands. “Right leg. Okay. Left leg. Okay.”

“I want to have a look.” I open Lucy’s bag, fish around, find her ophthalmoscope and reflex hammer. I look at his eyegrounds, tap a few tendons.

We sit in silence, the azimuth between us, like two diners at a lazy Susan.

I am beginning to get on to him. He knows it. He watches me with a lively expression, eyes rounded.

“I see that you are not moving around or talking or eating because you don’t choose to.”

He shrugs.

“I imagine that you feel depressed, that it doesn’t seem worthwhile to talk, eat, get up.”

A half-shrug, a downpull of lip.

“I’m half right? There’s more to it?”

A nod.

“You chose to do this for other reasons?”

A nod.

“All right. Examination over. You don’t need any help from me. I believe you are depressed. But if you have undertaken a fast for religious reasons, that is your affair. I don’t have to tell you about the medical consequences. I need help from you, however, a bit of advice. But if you wish me to leave, tell me or otherwise signify. I do not wish to disturb you. Milton called me.”

Long ago I discovered that the best way to get in touch with withdrawn patients is to ask their help. It is even better if you actually need their help. They can tell. They may be dumb but they are not stupid. Once, in trouble myself, I fell down in front of a catatonic patient who had not uttered a word for seven years. “You shouldn’t be down there,” he said in an ordinary voice. “Let me help you up.” He helped me up.

“All right, Tom,” says Father Smith in his ordinary voice.

“I’m not disturbing you?”

“No. What’s the trouble? Would you get rid of those?” He nods toward the soup and the Jell-O.

“Sure. How?”

“Open the trapdoor and set them on the top step.”

I do so.

I talk to him as if we were having an ordinary conversation, two fellows sitting at the lazy Susan in the Dinner Bell restaurant in Magnolia, as if there were nothing unusual about him perched on a stool like a wax doll atop a hundred-foot tower, not stirring for a day and a half. I tell him about my latest discoveries about Dr. Comeaux’s and Dr. Van Dorn’s Blue Boy project, about their offer of a job, about their threats if I don’t take it to send me back to Alabama for parole violation. I mention the incidents of sexual molestation at Belle Ame Academy, but also tell him of Bob Comeaux’s impressive evidence of social betterment through the action of the additive heavy sodium. “I’m not sure what I should do,” I tell him, frowning, troubled, but keeping an eye on him. As a matter of fact, I do not know what to do. So I am doing my best therapy, killing two birds with one stone, asking for help and helping by asking. He may be depressed, but I’m in a fix too.

The priest listens attentively, his temple propped on three fingers. At first I fear he has lapsed into silence again. Finally he says in a low voice, as if musing to himself, “Social betterment”; then to me, “What kind of social betterment?”

“Well, for example, the effect on the catastrophic problem of social decay in the inner city, in the black areas of Baton Rouge and the poor rural whites of St. Helena Parish.” I give him Bob Comeaux’s figures on the dramatic reduction of street crime, teen pregnancies, suicides, drug abuse. “You must admit there is something to be said for his results, even if he’s treating symptoms, not causes. And for his rationale.”

“His rationale,” repeats the priest.

I look at him steadily. “That every society has a right to protect itself against its enemies. That a society like an organism has a right to survive. Lucy agrees. So do I. My problem is—”

The priest is watching me with his peculiar, round-eyed, almost risible expression. “Society,” he murmurs, and then, as if to himself, something I don’t quite catch: “Volk—” Volk something. Volkswagen?

“What?” I lean forward, cock an ear.

With his free hand he is turning the azimuth slowly, inattentively, until the sights line up on me. He appears sunk in thought and I fear I’ve lost him again. But he looks up and says, “May I ask you a question?”

“Sure. You want to know what I think, right? Well, I must confess—”

But he is shaking his head. “No no,” he says. “Not that.” Wearily he rubs both eyes with the heels of his hands. “Could I ask you a professional question, a psychological question?”

“Sure sure,” I say, but I fear I showed my irritation. He sounds like priests often do when they talk to psychiatrists about ”psychological questions.”

“Something wrong, Tom?” the priest asks, eyeing me gravely.

I have risen. Suddenly I don’t want to talk or listen. I am worried about Belle Ame. “I’m sorry, but if there’s nothing more I can do for you, I’d better be going. You eat something and you’ll be all right. I have to pick up Claude Bon. Drs. Comeaux and Gottlieb are waiting for me.” Besides, I feel a rising irritation. Did I come all the way over here to have a conversation about a “psychological question”?

“I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t send for you.”

“That’s all right. What’s the question?”

“Something happened to me yesterday after you left.” He is turning the azimuth. “No doubt it is a psychological phenomenon with which you are familiar. I know that you work with dreams. What I want to ask you is this: Is there something which is not a dream or even a daydream but the memory of an experience which is a thousand times more vivid than a dream but which happens in broad daylight when you are wide awake?”