Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“Like Atticus?”

“Yeah.” She nods but is not heeding.

She is engaging me, so to speak. To describe her backward embrace, I can only use the word primatologists use, presenting. She was presenting rearward. Enough of this. What probably saved me from the erotic power of her move was its suddenness and oddness.

She reaches back for me, clasping her hands at the back of my neck.

“You smell like—”

“Like your father?”

That did it. As suddenly as she started, she stops and goes stiff.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and turn her, not to face me, but to get her back to her chair with minimal embarrassment. She is not embarrassed. But her face is heavy and lengthened, mouth pulled down like a sulky child.

“It’s okay, Donna.”

“Okay.” She’s not badly put off.

I look at her for a while. Something crosses my mind.

“Donna, do you wish to come back next week?”

“Yes.” An ordinary, perfunctory yes.

“All right. You come back. Meet me at the hospital. Same time. I want to run a few tests on you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She’s up and off, swinging her bag, as carelessly as she came.

It is only after she’s left that I discover I’ve broken out in a sweat. There’s this business about seductive patients, known even to Hippocrates, and no credit to the physician — consider old funny-looking Hippocrates, who probably smelled stronger than I or Atticus Finch. But seductive is seductive, more or less, sometimes more than less. Ahem. What to do. One thing to do is open lower right desk drawer, remove fifth of Jack Daniel’s from where it’s been for two years, still half full and two years older, pour four fingers into a water glass, knock back. Ahem. That’s better.

4. IS THERE A COMMONALITY between these two cases? Have I been away so long and lived so strangely that everyone else seems strange? No, there’s something wrong with these women. And with Frank Macon. Two cases are too few even to suggest a syndrome, but I am struck by certain likenesses … In each there has occurred a sloughing away of the old terrors, worries, rages, a shedding of guilt like last year’s snakeskin, and in its place is a mild fond vacancy, a species of unfocused animal good spirits. Then are they, my patients, not better rather than worse? The answer is unclear. They’re not on medication. They are not hurting, they are not worrying the same old bone, but there is something missing, not merely the old terrors, but a sense in each of her — her what? her self? The main objective clue so far is language. Neither needs a context to talk or answer. They utter short two-word sentences. They remind me of the chimp Lana, who would happily answer any question any time with a sign or two to get her banana. Both women will answer a question like Where is Chicago? agreeably and instantly and by consulting, so to speak, their own built-in computer readouts. You wouldn’t. You’d want to know why I wanted to know. You’d want to relate the question to your — self.

I’m sitting on the porch again, not sailing airplanes but musing and keeping one eye on my watch — I have to meet Max and Bob, my “ parole officers,” at two — when suddenly I get a flash. Well, not quite a flash, but a notion. Could it be that—

Could it be that there has occurred in both Mickey and Donna some odd suppression of cortical function?

I am thinking of my sole contribution to medical science, a paper I wrote some years ago after an explosion in the physics lab at Tulane on the effect of a heavy-sodium fallout on the inhibitory function of the cerebral cortex on sexual behavior, which earned me a write-up in Time and some small local fame. I did in fact make a contribution toward the development of the present-day CORTscan, a scanning device for measuring localized cerebral functions. But there’s no reason to suspect a heavy-sodium factor in these cases. There’s been no explosion. It is true that the nuclear facility at Grand Mer has a sodium reactor, but there’s been no accident — or even an “occurrence,” as they call it.

But accident or not, are there not signs of a suppression of cortical function in Mickey and Donna? I’m thinking particularly of the posterior speech center, Wernicke’s area, Brodmann 39 and 40, in the left brain of right-handed people. It is not only the major speech center but, according to neurologists, the locus of self-consciousness, the “I,” the utterer, the “self”—whatever one chooses to call that peculiar trait of humans by which they utter sentences and which makes them curious about how they look in a mirror — when a chimp will look behind the mirror for another chimp.

Yes, I’ve been away, and yes, I’ve not been so well myself. But there’s an advantage in absence and return. One notices changes which other people don’t. Tommy has grown six inches, hadn’t you noticed? Betty looks ill. Mickey and Donna? Maybe they, my patients, are not crazy, but something’s going on here. What I need is objective evidence, more cases …

But first I must convince Max and Bob that I am not crazy myself, or at least no crazier than most doctors.

5. MEET BOB COMEAUX and Max in Bob’s splendid office in Fedville, the federal complex housing the qualitarian center, communicable diseases control, and the AIDS quarantine. He’s at the top now, director of something or other — Quality of Life Division, or something like — in the penthouse of the monolith with a splendid panoramic view of the river in its great sweep from the haze of Baton Rouge to the south to the wooded loess hills of St. Francisville to the north. Except for the cooling tower of Grand Mer looming directly opposite and flying its plume of steam like Mt. St. Helens, it could be the same quaint lordly river of Mark Twain, its foul waters all gold and rose in the sunset. There’s even a stern-wheeler, the new Robert E. Lee, huffing upstream, hauling tourists to the plantations.

Max and Bob are cordial and uneasy, having no stomach for this chore, riding herd on a colleague — what doctor would? Ordinarily we get along with standard medical jokes and doctors’ horsing around, but this business is official, legal, and awkward.

Accordingly, they go out of their way to be easy, yawn and stretch a lot, sit anywhere but in chairs. Bob is dressed for riding, in flared stretch pants, field boots, and suede jacket, as if he had dropped in from the stables. There’s a connection between us. We went to the same medical school in the East and so we talk about Murray’s Bar and Grill on upper Broadway and old Doc So-and-so at Columbia-Presbyterian, as if we were classmates. In fact, we didn’t even know each other. He was some years after me. He’s from Long Island, but is very much the Southern horseman now, as handsome as Blake Carrington, with his steel-gray eyes and steel-gray sideburns brushed straight back like the rest of his hair, and his easy way of half sitting on his desk, swinging one leg and leaning over, hands in pockets. There is not a single wrinkle on his smooth tanned face except for a fold of skin at the corner of each eye, which gives him a slightly Oriental look.

There is a manila file on the desk next to his thigh.

Max doesn’t do as good a job at acting casual. He’s dressed too carefully in suit and vest, like a local doctor summoned before a congressional committee. He’s concerned about me and seems at a loss — Max of all people — not knowing what to say except to express his concern. “You’re okay, Tom?” he asks softly, keeping hold of my hand after the handshake. “Sure.” “Are you sure?” he asks. “Sure.”

For some reason I become aware of my seedy suit. Ellen is not around much and I pay no attention to what I wear. I haven’t got around to buying clothes since my return. My cousin Lucy calls it my Bruno Hauptmann suit, a ten-year-old double-breasted broad-stripe seersucker, which I wasn’t even aware I was wearing until suddenly it feels dank and heavy.