Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“Yes.” I am thinking of his “spell.” It could be a temporallobe epilepsy — which often is accompanied by extraordinary hallucinations.

“It was not a dream but a complete return of an experience which was real in every detail — as if I were experiencing it again.”

“Yes?”

“Is it possible for the brain to recapture a long-forgotten experience, an insignificant event which was not worth remembering but which is captured in every detail, sight, sound — even smell?”

“Yes, but I would question whether it was insignificant.”

“Yes, I expect you would. But it was absolutely insignificant.”

He speaks with some effort, in an odd, flat voice and in measured syllables, like a person awakened from a deep sleep. “Yes, I expect you would,” he says again, rubbing his eyes. Now he moves the kerosene lamp, tries to focus on me.

“Well?” I say after a pause, feeling irritation rise in my chest like a held breath.

“I was dreaming of Germany. Germany! Why Germany? No, not dreaming. It happened. I was wide awake. I was lying down after you left yesterday. It was getting dark but the sky was still bright against the dark pines. It reminded me of — what? the Schwarzwald with its dark firs? I’ve told you about it before. I don’t know. Anyhow, it was as if I were back in Tübingen, where I’d been as a boy. I was lying in bed in my cousin’s house. It was so vivid I could have been there. I stayed with them a year. I would wake every morning to the sound of church bells.”

He moves the kerosene lamp again, leans forward.

“Have I spoken to you about this?”

“About Germany? Yes.”

“But not about—” He stops, rubs his forehead with both hands. “Yes, the church bells. They had a special quality, completely different from our church bells, a high-pitched, silvery sound, almost like crystal struck against crystal. Even the air was different. It was thin and clear and silvery and high-pitched too, if you know what I mean. It had a different — smell. Or was it lack of smell? Anyhow, nothing like our old funky, fertile South. No, it was a smell, a high-pitched sweet smell, almost chemical, yet sweet too, something like the cutting room of a florist’s shop — like old geraniums? Of course it is impossible to describe a smell. But it came back! I would wake in the morning to that high silvery ringing and the chemical geranium smell. I slept in a narrow bed covered not by a blanket or a quilt but by a soft goose-down bolster, like a light mattress. It was like an old-fashioned Southern feather bed with the mattress upside down. There was also the vague but certain sense that something was about to happen.”

He stops. I say nothing. Now he’s back propping temple on his three fingers, looking at me sideways, almost slyly. “How is such a memory possible? Many things have happened to me, but in this case nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. A boy lying in bed.”

I look at him for a while. The kerosene lamp seems to drizzle, sending out sprays of weak yellow light.

Presently I ask him, “Was it about then that you had your— ah — spell?”

“What spell? I didn’t have a spell. Do you mean seizure? a fit? a convulsion? I didn’t have a convulsion. Why do you ask?”

“Milton said you had a — what he called a spasm.”

“No. It is true I have spells of dizziness, but what I had was this peculiar dream which was not a dream.”

“Was Milton up here at the time?”

“Well, yes. He brought me something to eat.”

“Was that before or after your—” I pause.

“My what? Go ahead and say it.”

“I was about to say hallucination, because as you describe it, it was that vivid.”

He’s still eyeing me sideways, but now through almost closed lids. “Hallucinations are generally abnormal, aren’t they? I mean, like a symptom of mental illness or something in the brain?”

“Sometimes.” I rise and repack Lucy’s bag. “I have to go now. I’m worried about the children, especially Claude Bon. I’d like you to come in for an ECG and a scan. I think you’d better come into the hospital for a general checkup. But if not, please call me or have Milton call me if you need anything.” I look at his hand, which is still on the azimuth. It is as withered as Don Quixote’s, yet, when he clasped mine, as strong as the Don’s too. “As your physician I am obliged to advise you to resume eating and drinking. You’re already dehydrated. Frankly, I cannot tell how much of your — ah — inactivity is due to depression and how much to a religious commitment. The latter is out of my territory. But you have my medical advice. Don’t hesitate to call on me, even though I’m not certain I will be here tomorrow. If I’m not available, call Dr. Gottlieb. He’s a good man.”

He watches me with the same expression as I snap the bag and move past him to the trapdoor.

As I pass, he seizes my arm. I wait, expecting an affectionate goodbye squeeze, perhaps by way of thanks. But he doesn’t squeeze and doesn’t let go.

“Yes?”

He tilts his head even more, to see me. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“Something happened to me in Germany. I have never told anyone.”

“I’m sure it’s interesting. But I have to go. I’m worried about Claude Bon. I’m going to pick—”

“I’m afraid this concerns you. I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m afraid I have to. There is something you need to know.”

Father Smith’s dry talon of a hand is still on my arm. Something stirs in the back of my head. For some reason I think of the time a priest came to get me out of a classroom to tell me my father was dead. There is in his voice and in the feel of his hand on my arm the same grave pressure, the same sweet urgency.

Then he gives a shudder, just exactly as one might for no reason at all, or as Negroes used to say, because a rabbit just ran over your grave. But then, to my alarm, the hand supporting his head falls away, pronates, the fingers bunching. It curls inward like a burning leaf. His head falls to one side. Fearing he might fall off the stool — his body slumps a little toward me, but not alarmingly — I catch him, ease him off and down to the floor. He makes no objection. I lay him out diagonally — the only way— prop his head on the bedroll. I sit beside him, watching him. No use to examine him. Mainly I’m casting about, wondering how best to get him down from the tower and to the hospital. Why didn’t I get him down when I could? What a place to have a stroke. I hope it is a seizure. The moonlight falls on his cheek and forehead, leaving his deep eye sockets in shadow. One eyelid, the right, twitches, I think. Best to call for Milton to give me a hand. I could let him down — I begin to rise, but the old man is saying something. I lean close. His voice is different. Right hand bunched, I’m thinking, the geranium smell. A petitmal seizure? Some seizures, especially in temporal-lobe epilepsy, are preceded by an aura, a strong resurgence of memory, of time, place, smell. But right eye twitch, speech altered? Left brain vascular accident, speech center affected?

But his speech is clear. His voice is thin and dry as dead leaves, but clear. He speaks in a rapid, dry monotone such as one might use in giving a legal deposition, not having much time.

“No no. Wait,” he says, almost whispering. “Wait.”

FATHER SMITH’S CONFESSION

In the 1930s I found myself visiting distant cousins in Germany. My father took me. They lived in the university town of Tübingen, where my cousin Dr. Hans Jäger was professor of psychiatry. He had two sons. One, Helmut, at eighteen, was older than I but became my friend. The other, Lothar, was a good deal older. I didn’t like him. He was some sort of minor civil servant, perhaps a postal clerk, and also a member of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the brownshirts. Not even his own family had much use for him. In fact, as best as I could tell, the entire SA had fallen into some sort of disfavor at the time. Sitting around in his sloppy uniform, he reminded me of a certain kind of American lodge member, perhaps a Good Fellow or Order of Moose dressed up for a lodge meeting. Helmut was something else. He had finished the Hitler Jugend and had just been admitted to the Junkerschule, the officer-training school for the Schutzstaffel, the SS. The one great thing he looked forward to was taking his oath at Marienberg, the ancient castle of the Teutonic knights. He already had his field cap with the death’s-head and his lightning-bolt shoulder patch. What he hoped to do was to become not a military policeman like many of the SS but a member of an SS division and incorporated into the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Dr. Jäger had nothing to do with the Nazis. He was a distinguished child psychiatrist — did I ever tell you that at one time I was considering going into your profession? — a music lover, and, I remember, a dog lover — he had two dachshunds, Sigmund and Sieglinde, whom he was extremely fond of. When I think of him, I think of him as the “good German” as portrayed in Hollywood, say by Maximilian Schell or earlier by Paul Lukas in Watch on the Rhine —you know, sensitive, lover of freedom, hater of tyranny, and so on, certainly the courageous foe of the Nazis. Dr. Jäger was a composite of the two, better than both, not only a brilliant child psychiatrist but a fine musician — he had just played the Bruch concerto with the university orchestra, the ultimate expression of romantic German feeling— Gefühl! Gefühl! Toward Lothar, the brownshirt, he displayed an open contempt. But he was silent about Helmut. I could never make out what he thought of Helmut.