The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  I think I helped her. I only saw her a few weeks. There was not enough time or money for a proper analysis. But we made some progress.

  The young Freud might have partly agreed with her—of course, it was the other way around, she was agreeing with Freud. Suppressed or unfulfilled sexual needs translate into anxiety, etc. Now I don’t know how it was with the middle-class Viennese Hausfrauen Freud saw as patients. Maybe he was right about them. But he was not right about Ella. As a matter of fact, she satisfied her needs and drives, as she called them, had an affair with one of her bosses, a chicken farmer—and became more frightened than ever. She actually wrung her hands and cried, her face going red as a child’s between her heavy iron-gray braids.

  I began to notice something about her. The only times she was not frightened were when she carried off some little performance, a gesture which seemed to her to be “right,” that is, sufficiently graceful, clever, savvy, warranted, that it pleased her and me. I never cease to be amazed at the number of patients who are at a loss or feel crazy because they don’t know what to do from one minute to the next, don’t think they do things right—I don’t mean right in the moral sense, but right in the way that people on TV or in books or movies always do things right. Even when such actor-people do wrong, go nuts, they do it in a proper, rounded-off way, like Jane Fonda having a breakdown on TV. “I can’t even have a successful nervous breakdown!” cried Ella, wringing her hands. She thought she had to go nuts in a poetic way, like Ophelia singing sad songs and jumping in the creek with flowers in her hair. How do I know what to do, Doctor? Why can’t you tell me? What I want to tell them is, this is not the Age of Enlightenment but the Age of Not Knowing What to Do.

  One day she carried off a charming little gesture and I noticed that it pleased her very much. She showed up with copies of Feliciana Farewell, the yearbook of our high school—yes, she had discovered that we had attended the same high school here and the same university in North Carolina. She opened the two books to show me her picture and mine—yes, we had both been editor of the yearbook. She gave me the yearbooks. It pleased her. She stopped trembling.

  We talked about failure. What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don’t show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded-off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits. Life doesn’t have to stop with failure. Not only do you not have to jump in the creek, you can even take pleasure in the general recklessness of life, as I do, a doctor without patients sailing paper P-51s at a martin house. I am a failed but not unhappy doctor.

  I took her hints of suicide—“I don’t have to play this hand,” etc.—seriously. We spoke of failure and she got better. I can’t claim a cure, but she got better. She showed some initiative, stopped wringing her hands, moved to Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, got a job teaching school, put her children in the excellent public school system of North Carolina, and even began writing poetry. She sent me a postcard showing the beach and the dunes of Kitty Hawk. It read: “Did you ever walk on a beach in December in a gale. The winter beach is lovely.” Later she sent me a poem she wrote called “Spindrift,” about the spindrift of the waves being like the spindrift of the heart, etc.

  Now, admittedly there is still some cause for alarm here: Ella setting too much store by walking on a winter beach and writing a poem about spindrift. There are at least a thousand women poets in America, mostly in California and New England, who walk on beaches and write poems about spindrift, spindrift of the waves, spindrift of the heart. Beware of women poets who write about spindrift. There is a certain peril in this enterprise. She could easily shoot herself down. The winter beach and the spindrift, relied on too much, could let you down. But at least I understood her and she me. We transmit on the same wavelength. She was functioning, living, not trembling, taking herself less seriously, had come to terms with failure. Her children were doing well in school, were happy, had not yet fallen prey to the miseries of adulthood.

  Cure? No. What’s a cure in this day and age? Maybe a cure is knowing there is no cure. But I helped her and she me. She gave me a gift which I liked. I still have her two volumes of Feliciana Farewell on my shelf.

  So here she is two years later.

  She had called earlier, saying she needed my testimony in an industrial liability case, that it meant big bucks.

  Big bucks? That didn’t sound like Ella.

  I am waiting on the porch when she shows up. She arrives in a Nissan pickup with gun racks in the rear window. She’s wearing an elbow cast. The driver stays in the truck, a fellow in a yellow hardhat. I ask her if he’s going to wait for her.

  She laughs. “Don’t worry about Mel. Let’s go inside.”

  I follow her in. The change in her is startling. Her hair is cut short, dyed pinkish-blond, as crimped and stiff as steel wool. She’s wearing long shorts, the kind that pull up over the stomach, and she’s got a stomach, but the bottoms are rolled up high on her thigh. Her clear plastic shoes have openwork over the toes. Jellies, I think they’re called. About two dollars a pair from K-Mart. She looks like a Westwego bingo player.

  It seems she has returned to Louisiana, gotten a job with Mitsy, the local nuclear utility at Grand Mer.

  Now I’ve got nothing against Westwego types—they can be, often are, canny, shrewd, generous women, good folks. But there’s something about the way she plays the part—yes, that’s it, she’s playing it and not too well, somewhat absentmindedly.

  But I’m fond of her. When she makes as if to give me a hug, I give her a hug. She’s bigger.

  “How you doing, Doc?”

  “I’m fine. I’m glad to see you.”

  “I hear you been having trouble.”

  “Yes. But I’m all right now. Do you have trouble?”

  “Old Doc. You always been my bud.”

  “Thanks, Ella.” It’s time she let go, but she hugs me tight, a jolly, nonsexual hug, like a good old Westwego girl.

  “Dear old Doc. Tell me something.”

  “All right.”

  “You getting much, Doc?”

  “What? Oh.” Well, so much for the spindrift of the heart. “What happened to your arm, Ella?” I ask, holding her off to take a look.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Doc.”

  Maybe I won’t, but it’s a relief to get her into a chair, aggrieved and telling me her troubles.

  I am wondering about Mel out in the truck.

  She goes into a long rigmarole about getting abused by her superior at Mitsy, a person named Fat Alice, who beat her up and broke her arm—and then getting fired. She wants to sue Mitsy for a million dollars and wants me to testify about her mental health.

  “The real boss, who is also her boss, says he knows you,” she concludes.

  “Who is that?”

  “Mr. Beck. Albert J. Beck.”

  “Bubba Beck? Yes, we went to high school together. Don’t you remember him? He was all-state quarterback.”

  “Will you call him?”

  “Yes. What is it you really want, Ella?”

  “I want my old job back and I want him to tell Fat Alice to leave me alone.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell him also that thanks to Fat Alice I was also exposed to radioactive sodium and have been rendered sterile.”

  “All right.”

  I reach Bubba at home. Although I haven’t spoken to him for twenty years he doesn’t seem surprised.

  “How you doing, Ace?” asks Bubba.

  “I’m fine. I have a patient here with a problem. You might be able to help.”

  “Let’s have it, Ace.”

  I summarize Ella’s complaint.

&nbs
p; Bubba speaks at some length.

  “Thanks, Bubba. I’ll get back to you.”

  I hang up and take a look at Ella. She’s got one leg crossed over the other, is frowning mightily at her thigh, squeezing it from the bottom to make the top, which is somewhat quilted, tight. She plucks something on her skin.

  “Ella,” I say.

  “Yes?” she says, looking up with mild interest.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Fat Alice is FA413-T, a rather low-grade robot which vacuums the floor and monitors the room air for particles?”

  “So what?” cries Ella. “She still got me cornered and broke my arm and subjected me to radiation poisoning.”

  “Ella, you were not even in the primary coolant unit. You worked in the secondary unit with non-radioactive sodium.”

  “She still pushed me!”

  “Ella, listen. You’ve got your job back if you want it. What is more, you’ve been promoted. You are now Fat Alice’s superior.” What Bubba told me was that Ella, whose job was hardly more demanding than Fat Alice’s—reading dials and noting molar concentrations of chemicals—could now periodically remove Alice’s software cassette and run it through the magnetic cleaner. “Do you want your job back?”

  Ella claps her hands. “Wow,” she says, and starts around the desk. “You were always my bud.”

  “Okay, hold it, Ella. I want to show you something.”

  An idea occurs to me just in time, and I get a book and hold the book between me and Ella. “I want you to look at something.”

  “Anything, Doc! Anything at all.”

  The book is Feliciana Farewell, her gift of three years ago, the yearbook and our year. I open it to the group picture of our class, only twenty or so boys and girls standing in a tight little trapezoid, each with the fixed, self-obsessed expression of high school seniors. The world lies ahead, the expression says, and who am I?

  It is by way of being a quick study, a little test, as crude and inconclusive as palpating an abdomen for liver cancer.

  I’ve used it before. Most people, I daresay nearly all “normal” people, will seek out themselves in the photograph, usually covertly, but I can watch their eye movements. As a matter of fact, there is a laser device which can track and print out the eye movements until the eye settles on its prey. Which is me? How do I look? People are generally self-conscious, either shy or vain, like General Jeb Stuart, whose last words were “How do I look in the face?”

  I wish I had my Mackworth head camera, which actually traces out eye movements. I need the records.

  The point of the test, of course, is that self-consciousness implies that there is a self.

  The book is open under my chin, facing her, her eyes on the book, my eyes on her eyes. They are looking at the picture, yes; focused? perhaps; interested? mildly. But there is no seeking herself out. A laser trace would show not a zigzag, cat chasing mouse of self, but a fond little moseying, cow-grazing. Maybe she’s looking for me.

  “Okay, Ella,” I say, closing the book and putting it on the shelf. “You’ve got your job back and been promoted. You come back here next week after work.” I don’t have to ask her. I want a tracing, medical evidence.

  “Oh boy.” She claps her hands. “Thanks, Doc. Wait till I tell Mel.”

  “All right.”

  CASE HISTORY #3

  Here come Kev Kevin and Debbie Boudreaux, old friends, patients now, married couple: Kev, an ex-Jesuit; Debbie, an ex-Maryknoll nun.

  They’ve had their troubles. I see them for marriage counseling. I don’t do much of that, but they are old friends.

  The trouble is that Debbie, who had taken over her father’s Oldsmobile agency in New Orleans, was quite competent and happy as the young woman executive, named Woman of the Year by the C. of C., in fact, as happy as she had been as Sister Thérèse teaching at the Ortega Institute in Managua. But Kev was unhappy as personnel director of Boudreaux Olds, even though there had been every reason to expect that his experience as counselor at the Love Clinic at Fedville should stand him in good stead in dealing with salesmen and servicemen.

  This dispute was acrimonious. They fought even more than non-ex-religious couples.

  Here is a sample:

  Debbie: The trouble with you is you’re still a closet Jesuit. Even though you’ve taken up transcendental meditation and teach it to the salespeople at your little ashram and play tapes of the Bhagwan and the Maharishi, supposedly to increase their selling potential, what you’re really running is a closet-Jesuit retreat. Next you’ll have them saying the rosary and making the stations of the cross. You don’t want to sell Oldsmobiles, you want to convert people. And the truth is, like the Bhagwan and most Orientals—and most Jesuits—you have contempt for women.

  Kev: The trouble with you is you’ve turned into the worst kind of man-eating bitchy feminist. You’re known as the Bella Abzug of the LADA (Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association). You pretend you’re the belle of the ball at the C. of C., but deep down you hate men. And if you want to know the truth, that’s the reason you and all the other nuns quit, not because of politics or the Church, but because you don’t know who in the hell you are and you copped out, and so you take it out on men from the pope on down. You still hate their guts and you still don’t know who in the hell you are or what you are doing.

  Debbie: Speak for yourself.

  Kev: Doc, you wouldn’t believe what she’s into now.

  “What?”

  “Wicca.”

  “Wicker?” I’m thinking, Good, she’s doing handcrafts.

  “Witchcraft.”

  Debbie: Don’t bad-mouth what you don’t understand. Wicca bears no relation to your stereotypical witchcraft, witches on brooms. It is extremely positive and loving, because it is the old nature religion, a nonsexist pre-Judeo-Christian belief. No guilt trips. It is nothing less than becoming one with nature and with yourself.

  Kev: Plus a little hex here and there.

  And so on.

  To tell the truth, at the time I didn’t have much use for either of them, though they were my friends and my patients. I confess certain sardonic feelings toward both of them. There was Kev’s faddish Hinduism, his new voice, which has suddenly become hushed and melodious like the Maharishi’s, his casual but mysterious allusions to his siddhi. What’s a siddhi? I asked. A spiritual gift. Like what? Like levitation, no big deal, he said. Yes, during meditation he was often six inches off the floor. And there was Debbie’s new lingo, her everlasting talk about dialoguing, creativity, community, intersubjectivity, centeredness (her favorite word, centeredness). And her new word, empowerment.

  What would happen, I wonder, if I asked them what they thought about God and sin?

  I thought they did better, looked better, felt better as Father Kev and Sister Thérèse in the old days, as priest and nun, than as siddha Kev in his new soft Maharishi voice and a NOW Wicca Debbie in her stretch pants. If you set out to be a priest and a nun, then be a priest and a nun, instead of a fake Hindu or a big-assed lady Olds dealer who is into Wicca—this from me, who had not had two thoughts about God for years, let alone sin. Sin?

  That meeting was before I went to prison. Prison works wonders for vanity in general and for the secret sardonic derisiveness of doctors in particular. All doctors should spend two years in prison. They’d treat their patients better, as fellow flawed humans. In a word, prison restored my humanity if not my faith. I still don’t know what to make of God, don’t give Him, Her, It a second thought, but I make a good deal of people, give them considerable thought. Not because I’m more virtuous, but because I’m more curious. I listen to them carefully, amazed at the trouble they get into and how few quit. People are braver than one might expect.

  This was three years ago.

  Anyhow, after listening to this marital warfare for a few weeks, I had an idea which might help them. I made a semiserious suggestion. Yes, I confess it, my suggestion had its origins both in a wish to help them and in a certain der
isiveness and a desire to be rid of them. Yet it worked! Why not, I asked them, why not put your talents to better use? After all, you’ve both had extensive experience in counseling. You both have superior—er—intersubjective and social skills (they used words like that, worse than shrinks). Why don’t you start your own counseling center, perhaps couples’ counseling. You could do it and you’d be helping yourselves while helping others. Was I being sarcastic? Not altogether. They’d been battling so long, they knew all the tactics of marital warfare. Ex-soldiers, after all, keep the peace better than politicians. Look at MacArthur in Japan, Eisenhower in Washington.

  We laughed. And they did! And they got so involved in other couples’ fights, they stopped fighting each other. They started something called Beta House out in the country. I talked Enrique Busch into letting them have a great barn with stables at the time Enrique was quitting polo and taking up golf. I did it by lying, that is, by not telling Enrique who Debbie was, that is, an ex-Maryknoller from El Salvador, or telling Debbie who Enrique was, a member of the famous fourteen families—they would have wanted to shoot each other on the spot—but by telling Enrique that Debbie’s father had founded the White Citizens’ Council in Feliciana, which he had, and by telling Debbie that Enrique had deep feelings for the people of El Salvador, which he did.

  So Beta House was founded in a barn, the stables converted to intimate bedrooms for estranged couples, the loft to an encounter room. Painted on the side of the barn was the logo they’d agreed upon, a yin-yang centered between two hearts, the yin-yang a concession to Kev’s Eastern leanings, the two hearts expressing Debbie’s notions about dialoguing and centeredness. Two hearts centered on a yin-yang.

  So here they are three years later:

  They’re pleased to see me and I them. There is no space of irony between us. I wish them well and they me. They’re as lovey now as they were fractious before. They sit side by side on my couch, holding hands and feeling each other up—which generally gives me a pain but doesn’t now because it’s an improvement over the mayhem.

  “How does it go?” I ask them.