Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

One look at Bob Comeaux and I know that he knows. He’s still dressed in his white plantation tuxedo and he must have come straight from the wedding. But he gives me an odd, white-eyed look. Gone is his old Howard Keel assurance. For the first time he is at a loss. He doesn’t even seem to notice the hundreds of blacks picking cotton on the prison plantation, stooped over their long, collapsed sacks and singing mournful spirituals. What does he know? He knows about Belle Ame. How does he know? He could have called his office or Sheriff Sharp, been beeped, used the cellular phone in his Mercedes Duck.

Max Gottlieb doesn’t know. He only knows something is up. He’s frowning, hot and bothered, shaking his head dolefully, even more dismayed than usual (what have you gone and done now?).

I sit at my little student desk, they side by side on my cot, Bob Comeaux holding his wide-brimmed hat between his knees, tuxedo somewhat worse for wear, shirt ruffles wilted. Max is very neat in his new Oxford-gray vested suit, which his wife, Sophie, must have bought for him, but his shoes are the same dried-up Thom McAns he’s worn for twenty years. They are shoes no surgeon would be caught dead in.

“Well?” I say after a while.

Bob Comeaux jumps up and begins pacing back and forth as if it were he in prison. He explains he’d like to get back to the wedding reception. “Look, guys, let’s make this short. After all, this is only a routine hearing, for the book. Let’s spring our friend, the doctor here, sign the papers, vacate his parole status, and let’s all go about our business. I got to get back—” He looks at his gold wafer of a watch. “Jesus! Let’s get this show — So he’s had a couple of violations — but what’s a little kinkiness among shrinks, ha ha — right? Say, Tom—” He pulls up in front of me. “I was just wondering. Were the hell-raisin’ and hijinks at P&S as dumb in your day as they were in mine?”

“Well, I remember we dropped water bombs on pedestrians.”

“Hot damn! We did too!” He socks himself. “Can you believe it?” he asks Max, and instantly sobering: “Okay, guys, let’s get this show on the road”—and heads for the open door.

But Max, worried as usual, likes to have everything squared away and kosher. “Yeah, right. Hold it. Let’s just hold it. I never had any use for this parole foolishness, anyway. But what’s this business about some incident this morning—‘disturbance of the peace’?—out at Belle Ame involving Dr. Van Dorn? And some arrested? What is all that about?” Max opens his hands, first to Bob Comeaux, then to me.

Bob Comeaux waves him off, speaks quickly to both of us.

In a word, Bob simply wants shut of me. He assures Max the ”incident” was not of my doing, is still willing to take me on at Fedville at consultant’s salary plus Ford grant money, is willing for me to do what I’m doing, or throw in with Max in Mandeville — whatever I want to do — but mainly move, move out from here, from him. Let’s go. He’s at the open door. “Come on, Tom, I’m signing you out, okay?”

But Max is scratching his head, one eye screwed up, trying to make head or tail of it. “Well. He sure doesn’t belong here.” Sighing, he’s pushing himself up from the cot. He can’t quite get hold of it.

Bob Comeaux, relieved, relaxes in the doorway and, gazing out at the prison plantation, shakes his head elegiacally. “God,” he says softly, “would you listen to those darkies!”

We listen.

Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Nobody knows but Jesus

“Well, Tom?” He holds out hand-with-hat to me. Let’s go.

I do not rise from my student desk.

Max gives me his quizzical eye. “Well?”

“There’re a couple of things,” I tell Max.

“What’s that?” asks Bob quickly, as if, what with the singing, he couldn’t hear.

“I think there’re a couple of things that need to be settled before we go any further.”

“Right,” says Max, still feeling unsettled.

“By all means,” says Bob, putting his hat on.

“Well?” says Max, giving me his curious eye.

“I think it would be a good idea to discontinue the Blue Boy pilot immediately, today.”

“What’s that?” asks Bob Comeaux, cupping an ear.

I repeat it.

“What do you mean?” Bob asks me. “What does he mean?” he asks Max.

“What do you mean, Tom?” Max asks me.

“I mean turn off the sodium shunt at the Ratliff intake and dismantle it, today.”

Max’s worries are back, worries now about me weighing him down. He sinks to the cot.

“Tom,” he says, screwing up an eye, “I was aware you knew about the sodium pilot. We’ve never discussed it, for obvious reasons — since it was Grade Four classified. But since you do — to tell you the truth, I’ve never been too happy with it — I prefer individual therapy, as you well know — to this sort of mass shotgun prophylaxis. But how can you argue with success? I mean, the numbers from NIH are damned impressive, Tom. I mean, it may not do much for our egos if they can reduce street crime, drug abuse, suicides, and suchlike by a simple sodium ion — but what are you going to do? We weren’t too happy with lithium either. But zero recidivism at Angola. How do you argue with success? If it ain’t broke—” He trails off.

“So I thought at first, but you don’t know, Max,” I tell him.

“I don’t know what?” he says absently, distracted. He’s worried, I know, less about Blue Boy than about me.

“Max, NIH doesn’t even know about Blue Boy, the heavy-sodium pilot program. They never heard of it. The FDA never heard of it. ACMUI never heard of it. Dr. Lipscomb even spoke to Jesse Land, the director whom she knows. He says it could only be what he calls an instance of ‘aberrant local initiative’— that is, some ambitious regional NIH people using their discretionary funding to run a pilot which might otherwise not be funded and then present them with a fait accompli which they can’t turn down. It’s been done before — and sometimes with good cause — to get around bureaucratic hassle — until the election next month.”

“Wait.” Max has risen again, this time with both hands out, palms up. “Hold it. Are you telling me that Dr. Comeaux here and Dr. Van Dorn cooked up this sodium additive without even telling—”

“Just as Dr. Fred McKay did with an equally simple ion, fluoridating water,” says Bob Comeaux from the doorway, facing us now, arms folded, eyes level and minatory. “If he’d waited for D.C. bureaucracy, children’s teeth would still be rotting out. And as both you doctors know, every kook and Kluxer in the country accused him of everything from mind control to Communist conspiracy.”

Silence. Max sighs. “Well—” He is speaking to me.

“Max, Blue Boy was not a pilot involving Angola. It covered the entire parish, in fact, all of Feliciana. Moreover, I’m afraid what we’ve got here are some side effects which in fact you are aware of and which I can show are related to the additive—”

“Such as? What do you mean, the whole parish?”

“Such as regression of some subjects, especially children, to pre-linguistic pongid levels of behavior, regression of some women from menses to estrus, the sexual abuse of children—”

Bob Comeaux has taken off his hat, placed his hand on his forehead, closed his eyes. “Dear God, do you hear?” He speaks softly. “Where have we heard this before? Do I hear echoes? Of men descended from apes? Who was accused of this? Of corrupting the youth of Athens? You know who was accused of that. But I will confess that tampering with the sexuality of women is a new one.” He’s shaking his head sorrowfully at me. “From the local yahoos I would have expected it. But from you? Et tu —” He turns to Max. “Well, I suppose it always happens in a scientific breakthrough—”