The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “What?” I would reply, though he had told me many times.

  “Cagney was a hoofer.”

  “What about his acting, his gangster roles?”

  “All right! But what he was was a hoofer, the best I ever saw.” The only movie of Cagney’s he had any use for was the one about George M. Cohan. “Did you see that, Doc?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see him dance ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see!”

  “You looking good, Doc,” says Leroy. “A little thin but good. All you need is a little red beans and rice. But you in good shape. You been playing golf?”

  “Not exactly. I’ve been taking care of a golf course, riding a tractor, cutting fairway and rough.”

  Leroy nods a quick acknowledgment of the courtesy of my oblique reply, which requires no comment from him and also relieves him of having to pretend I’ve not been away.

  “You going to a funeral, Doc?” asks James, his face like a stone.

  “Why no.”

  “You mighty dressed up for Saturday afternoon.”

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the reredos, whose silvering is as pocked as a moonscape. It’s true. I’m dressed up in my Bruno Hauptmann double-breasted seersucker. Why do I remind myself of an ungainly German executed fifty years ago?

  Leroy buys me a drink and pours himself one. I knock mine back. It feels even better, warmth overlaying warmth. His disappears in a twinkling, hand brushing nose.

  Leroy feels better too. He leans over and tells me about his safari. He owns a motor home, and he and his wife belong to a club of motor-home owners, ten other couples. They’ve just got back from Alaska. Last year, Disney World. Year before, Big Bend.

  “Tell you what you do, Doc. You need a vacation, you and the missus. Ya’ll take my Bluebird and head out west or to Disney World. Do you both a world of good. Take the kids. Here are the keys.”

  “Thank you, Leroy.” I’m touched. He means it. His Bluebird is a top-of-the-line motor home, the apple of his eye. It cost more than his home, which is the second floor of the Little Napoleon. “I might take you up.”

  I tell Ellen about the Bluebird. I know she’s listening because her head is turned, good ear clearing the pillow.

  “Why don’t we get in Leroy’s Bluebird and drive out to Jackson Hole? The aspens will be turning. Do you remember camping at Jenny Lake?”

  “I’m not going to Fresno alone.”

  I didn’t think she was going to Fresno.

  “We’ll drive to Fresno and then come back by Jenny Lake.”

  “Not time.”

  “Not time enough? Why not?”

  “Fresno is—twenty-one hundred miles.” I look at her. I can see the slight bulge of her cornea move up like a marble under the soft pouch of her eyelid. “Jackson Hole is nine hundred miles northeast of Fresno.”

  “I see.”

  “Fresno is almost exactly in the geographical center of California.”

  “I see.”

  I turn out the light.

  11. VAN DORN SHOWS UP bright and early Sunday morning, dressed in a Day-Glo jacket, a sun helmet in which he has stuck colorful flies. He’s wearing waders.

  “You won’t need that jacket.”

  “Right. The bream might mind?”

  “Yes. And you won’t need the waders.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you try to wade in one of these bayous, you’ll sink out of sight in the muck. I’ll get you some tennis shoes.”

  We spin down the bayou in my ancient Arkansas Traveler, a fourteen-foot, olive-drab aluminum skiff with square ends and a midship well. My twenty-year-old Evinrude kicks off first yank.

  A bass club is having a rodeo. Identical boats, of new grassgreen fiberglass, nose along the bank. Fishermen wearing identical red caps sit on high swivel seats in the bow.

  “You sure you want to fish for bream?” I ask Van Dorn.

  “I figured you might know places those guys don’t know. I’ve been with them. They’re mostly Baton Rouge lawyers.”

  Down the Bogue Falaya past country clubs, marinas, villages, bocages, beaux condeaux. I turn into the bushes, through a scarcely noticeable gap in the swamp cyrilla, and we’re in Pontchatolawa, a narrow meander of a bayou, unspoiled because there’s too much swamp for developers and it’s too narrow for yachts and water-skiers. It is not even known to the bass rodeo.

  I cut the motor. Pontchatolawa hasn’t changed since the Choctaws named it. The silence is sudden. There is only the ring of a kingfisher. The sun is just clearing the cypresses and striking shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Cicadas tune up. There is a dusting of gold on the water. The cypresses are so big their knees march halfway across the bayou. Their tender green is just beginning to go russet.

  “My Lord,” says Van Dorn, almost whispering. “We’re back in the Mesozoic. Look at the fucking ferns.”

  Van Dorn is busy with his tackle. I watch him. There is as usual in him the sense both of his delight and of his taking pleasure in rehearsing it.

  There is a huge swirl of water under his nose. He gives a visible unrehearsed start.

  “Good God, what was that, an alligator?”

  “Probably not, though they’re here. Probably a gar.”

  “Gators won’t bother you, will they?”

  “No, gators won’t bother you.”

  I try to place his speech. Despite its Southernness, the occasional drawled vowel, it is curiously unplaced. He sounds like Marlon Brando talking Southern.

  We are drifting. I keep a paddle in the water.

  “Can we try for bream?” Van asks.

  “All right, though it’s late. The best time is when they nest in April and July. But some of them will be hanging around. You see those cypress knees over there.”

  “Sho now.”

  “You see the two big ones?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just beyond is a bed. It’s been there for years. They use the same bed. My father showed me that one fifty years ago.”

  “Well, I be.”

  “You see that birch and cyrilla hanging out over it from the swamp?”

  “Those two limbs? Yeah.”

  “What you got to do is come in sideways with your line so you won’t get hung up.”

  “Sho. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to cut those limbs off? That’s pretty tight.”

  “Then all the sunfish would leave. You don’t mess with light and shade.”

  “No kidding.”

  Van Dorn has opened his triple-tiered tackle box. He takes out a little collapsed graphite rod and reel, presses a button, and out it springs, six or seven feet. He shows me the jeweled reel, which is spring-loaded to suck back line.

  “Very nice.”

  “You can keep this in your glove compartment. Once I was driving through Idaho, saw a nice little stream, pulled over. Six rainbows.”

  “What type of line you got there?”

  “It’s a tapered TP5S.”

  His equipment probably cost him five hundred dollars.

  “You not fishing, Tom?”

  “No. I’ll hold the boat off for you.”

  “You don’t want to fish!”

  “No.” What I want to do is watch him.

  He takes off his helmet and selects a fly. “I thought I’d try a dry yellowtail.”

  “Would you like something better?”

  “What’s better?”

  “Something that’s here and alive. Green grasshoppers, wasps. Catalpa worms are the best.”

  “Fine, but—”

  “Wait a minute. I remember something.”

  We drift silently past the bed and under a catalpa tree. The perfect heart-shaped leaves are like small elephant ears. A few black pods from last year hang down like beef jerky. This year’s pods look like oversized string beans. I stand up, cut a leaf carefully at the stem. “Hold out your hands.” I roll the leaf into a funnel, sh
ake down the worms, small white ones that immediately ball up like roly-polies. “Sunfish are fond of these.”

  “Well, I be. What now?”

  “Take off that fly and put on a bream hook.”

  “This little bitty job?”

  “Right. Even big sunfish have tiny mouths.”

  “How about just nigger-fishing with worms?”

  “Earthworms are all right, but these are better.” It is hard to tell whether he is trying to say “nigger-fishing” in a natural Southern way or in a complicated liberal way, as if he were Richard Pryor’s best friend.

  “Okay, you’re set,” I tell him. “You see the beds close to the bank, a dozen or so?” Bream beds are pale shallow craters in the muck made by the fish fanning the eggs.

  “I see.”

  Van Dorn is surprisingly good. He slings his hundred-dollar line under the cyrilla on second try. Even more surprising, he catches a fish. I thought they’d be gone. A big male pound-and-a-half sunfish feels like a marlin on a fly line.

  “Well, I be goddamned,” says Van Dorn, landing him, his pleasure now as simple as a boy’s. We gaze at the fish, fat, round as a plate, sinewy, fine-scaled, and silvered, the amazing color spot at his throat catching the sun like a topaz set in amethyst. The colors will fade in minutes, but for now the fish looks both perfectly alive yet metallic, handwrought in Byzantium and bejeweled beyond price, all the more amazing to have come perfect from the muck.

  But the beds are mostly empty. Van Dorn catches a couple more bream and a half dozen bass. “For y’all,” he says. Y’all? Hudeen will be pleased. Into the ice well go the fish, out comes the beer.

  It is getting on to noon and hot in the sun. We drink beer and watch the gnats swarm. The cicadas are fuguing away. I watch him.

  “That was sump’n, cud’n,” says Van Dorn.

  Cud’n?

  “You want to know something, Tom?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll make you a little confession. I think at long last I’m back where I belong. Among my own people. And a way of life.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you understand? What do you think?”

  “Yes.” What I’m thinking is that Louisiana fishermen would not dream of speaking of such things, of my own people, of a way of life. If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it.

  “Tom, I’m what you call a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I do all right, but I’m not really first-rate. I’ve been a pretty good physiologist, computer hacker, soccer bum, bridge bum, realtor, you name it. I went to Harvard and M.I.T. and did all right—I was a real hacker at M.I.T. and not bad at Harvard, but they were not for me, too many nerds at one, too many wimps at the other. So I cut out and headed for the territory like Huck. I chucked it all—except the kids.”

  “Don’t you run the computer division at Mitsy?”

  “Yeah, but it’s routine, checking out systems and trying to keep the local yokels from messing up—we don’t need another T.M.I. No, if I’d been first-rate I’d have gone from hacking to A.I.”

  “A.I.?”

  “Artificial intelligence, Tom. That’s where it’s at. As you well know—don’t think I don’t know your work on localizing cortical function.”

  “I’ve gotten away from that.”

  “Tom, you’ve no idea what’s around the corner. It’s a scientific revolution to end all revolutions. But I’m out of it now— quite content to be back where I started from.”

  “Where are you from originally, Van?”

  “Not a hundred miles from here. Port Gibson. Did you know the general was born there?”

  “What general?”

  “Earl Van Dorn.”

  “You related?”

  “How can there be two Van Dorns from Port Gibson without being kinfolks?”

  “I see.”

  I watch Van Dorn as he lounges at his ease, head cocked, eyes squinted up at the cypresses. He’s not as handsome as his picture in Dixie. His handsomeness is spoiled by the heaviness of his face and jaw, his pocked skin, the coldness of his blue eyes in the shadow of his sun helmet, humorless even when he is smiling. But he does remind me of an Afrika Corps officer, the heavy handsome face, helmeted, the steel-blue eyes, even the skin so heavily pocked on the cheeks that it looks like a saber scar.

  “Do you enjoy bridge?” I ask, watching him.

  “Let me put it this way, Tom. It was fun, I was good at it, and I made a living. Now I don’t have to. Do you play?”

  “No. A little in college. All I remember is the Blackwood convention. When you bid four no-trump you’re asking for aces.”

  He laughs. “Still do—with modifications.”

  “Tell me something, Van,” I say, watching him over my beer can. “What is mud?”

  “Mud?” He takes a long swig, holds the can against his forehead. “You mean as in drilling mud?”

  “No, a bridge term.”

  “Oh.” He laughs. “You mean mud as in M.U.D. You do know something. That means the middle of three cards in an unbid suit. It’s an opening lead and tells your partner something.”

  “I see. How about Schenken?”

  “Schenken? Oh, I get it. Ellen must be talking bridge. That’s an Italian bidding system.”

  “K.S.?”

  “Same thing.”

  “Roth-Steiner?”

  “Same, though it sounds German. Ellen goes for the Italian systems—and she’s good. Say, what—”

  “How about Azalea?”

  Van Dorn frowns. “Azalea?”

  “The Azalea convention.”

  “Oh.” He smiles as he shakes his head slowly, rolling his forehead against the beer can. “That’s a wild one. Not Azalea—you had me confused. Azazel. The Azazel convention. After the fallen angel.”

  “What is the Azazel convention?”

  “It means you’re in a hell of a mess. It is a way of minimizing loss.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It’s in the bidding. If you discover that you and your partner are bidding different suits and are at cross purposes and over your heads, you signal to her that it is better for her to go down in her suit. We’ll lose less that way. You do it by bidding your opponents’ suit for one round.”

  “You mean if your opponents are bidding hearts, and your partner is raising you in your suit, hoping for a slam, you wave her off by bidding hearts for one round, signaling to her: You go back to your suit and go down.”

  “You got it.”

  “I see.”

  “I think you’ve played more bridge than you’re letting on, Tom.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You know the jargon and you’re even on to their harmless little double entendres.”

  “Double entendres?”

  “You made one yourself—bidding hearts and going down.”

  “So I did.” Azazel. “So Azazel can be more than one kind of invitation.”

  “You got it, cud’n.”

  When we round our grand canal of a bayou and come in sight of The Quarters, Van Dorn makes a sign to me.

  I cup my ear to hear over the motor.

  “Cut the motor.”

  I cut the motor.

  “It’s about Ellen, Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something I want you to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to go to Fresno with Ellen, Tom.”

  “You’re not going?”

  “No way. I got these kids starting up school and soccer. First things first.”

  “She seemed disappointed.”

  “She’ll do fine! True, we’ve done well, won some tournaments, but what she doesn’t know is that I’m not indispensable. She’s the one. That’s why I wanted you to go.”

  “I couldn’t play tournament bridge.”

  “No. I mean to watch her.”

  “Watch her?”

  “Tom, you got to see
it to believe it. And I think you’d be interested even if it weren’t Ellen.” As the boat drifts, Van Dorn takes off his Wehrmacht helmet, leans forward, and gives me a keen blue-eyed look.

  “See what?”

  “I can only give you the facts. You’re the brain man, the psychologist. Maybe you’ve got an explanation.”

  “Of what?”

  “Tom, it’s not her bidding—which is okay, better than okay, somewhat shaky but highly proficient—after all, bidding is nothing more than a code for exchanging information. No, it’s in the play. Tom, she knows where all the cards are. Do you hear what I’m saying? She knows what cards her opponents are holding. Now, most of us can make an educated guess after a few rounds of play, but she knows!”

  “So?”

  “Tom, let me ask you a question.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you set any store in ESP, clairvoyance, and suchlike?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I. But how else do you explain it? She’s not cheating. So either she is reading the cards, which is clairvoyance, or she’s reading the minds of the players, which is telepathy, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think, Tom?”

  “You did mention A.I. earlier. Artificial intelligence.”

  “Yes.”

  “If, as you say, brain circuitry can be understood as a fifth-generation computer, maybe she’s able to use hers as such and after a few rounds of play calculate the exact probabilities of where the cards are.”

  Van Dorn gives me his keenest look. “And that would be even more amazing than ESP, wouldn’t it? You mean like an idiot savant. Don’t you think that hasn’t occurred to me? But Ellen is no idiot.”

  “No.”

  “Tom, look.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re a very intuitive therapist—on top of having made an early breakthrough in cortical function. But we’re not talking about brain circuitry. We’re talking about something else. We’re talking about someone who may be able to use her own brain circuitry. How about that? Think of the implications.”

  “All right.”

  “Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you should go to Fresno with Ellen.”

  “I see.”