The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

“Wow,” they say; both, I think. They look at each other and laugh. Then, putting on serious faces, they utter little noises of gratitude, not sentences, but exclamations: “Dear Doc,” “Our Doc,” “Oh boy, Almond Joy,” and suchlike. It seems I saved their marriage. It seems I get credit for the barn and Beta House, even though I only made a single, not quite serious suggestion, mainly to get rid of them. No more talk of Wicca.

  “Very good,” I say presently. “I’m glad things are going so well. You both look fine. But what can I do for you? I can’t imagine that you need anything further from me.”

  Secret looks between them, more laughter, again an instant sobering up, and they make their request.

  Do you know what they want from me? A prescription for Alanone, the new Smith, Kline & French polyvalent vaccine which confers some immunity against both the lymphadenopathy virus of LAV-III and the glycoprotein D of Herpes II.

  Without turning a hair and in the same smiling voice of our newfound friendship, I ask them why they need it. “I thought you were running a couples’ retreat.”

  “Couples’ community,” they both correct me. Kev makes certain noises of demurral, but Debbie says quickly and as if she were reading it, “It is also an open community. We do not discourage creative relationships across stereotypical bonding. We find that open relationships, entered into maturely, enrich rather than impoverish the traditional one-on-one bonding.”

  I do not say something derisive as I might have two years ago, but merely reflect a moment, sigh, and reach for my PDR, the physicians’ big red book—what do I know about creative relationships or pills and vaccines?—and write them a prescription for— How many do you want? “Three hundred,” says Kev; “Four hundred,” says Debbie. I make it four hundred. After all, better not to have than to have LAV-AIDS and Herpes II.

  Somewhat abstracted, I forget to run the simplest test on them, a dominant-eye test or an out-of-context language test, like: Where is Ketchum, Idaho? (They’d know, because the Bhagwan had hung out there.) I have no doubt that either would have told me instantly and as merrily as a four-year-old, eyes rolled up to consult their interior brain maps. I’ll test them later.

  Absently, I receive their hugs and thanking noises and watch from the windows as they depart in their old Econoline van with its flaming yin-yang logo centered between two dialoguing hearts.

  2. WHAT TO MAKE OF these patients? What’s in common? Nothing? Something? Enough for a syndrome?

  Here’s Mickey LaFaye, formerly anxious and agoraphobic, terrified of her own shadow, now a sleek, sleepy, horsewoman Duchess of Alba straddling under the sheets. Plus some peculiar business about a stallion and a stable boy. Plus Dr. Comeaux’s special interest in her.

  Here’s Donna S—, formerly a fat girl, abused as a child, but a deep-down romantic, waiting for Galahad. Now she’s jolly, lithe, and forward, or rather backward, presenting rearward.

  Here’s Enrique, once an enraged Salvadoran, now a happy golfer with no worries except his daughter making Gamma.

  Here’s Ella Murdoch Smith, once failed and frightened, guilt-ridden, couldn’t cope, a solitary poet of the winter beach and spindrift. Now Rosy the Riveter, hardhat lady at Mitsy, with her boyfriend in a standard Louisiana pickup, getting beat up by a robot.

  And Kev and Debbie, old friends, ex-Jesuit and ex-Maryknoller, a quarrelsome, political, ideological couple. Now content, happy as bugs in a rug; no, not happy so much as fat-witted and absorbed. Running some sort of encounter group out in the pines which sounds less like a couples’ retreat than a chimp colony.

  Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day.

  And Ellen.

  What’s going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But—But what? They’re somehow—diminished. Diminished how?

  Well, in language, for one thing. They sound like Gardner’s chimps in Oklahoma: Mickey like—Donna want—Touch me—Ask them anything out of context as you would ask chimp Washoe or chimp Lana: Where’s stick? and they’ll tell you, get it, point it out. Then: Tickle me, hug me. Okay, Doc?

  Then there’s the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? the old ache of self? Ella doesn’t even bother to look at her own photograph, doesn’t care.

  Bad or good?

  For another thing, a certain curious disinterest. Example: Take the current news item: Soviets invited to occupy Baluchistan, their client state in southern Iran to restore order, reported advancing on Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. What to do? Let them have it? Confront them? Ultimatum? Two years ago people would be huddled around the tube listening to Rather and Brokaw. My patients? My acquaintances? No arguments, no fright, no rage, no cursing the Communists, no blaming the networks, no interest. Enrique doesn’t mention liberals anymore. Debbie does not revile Jerry Falwell anymore.

  There’s a sameness here, a flatness of affect. There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.

  Nothing like Alabama!

  The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!

  We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons—criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available. One of them, my old pal and exparish priest, Rinaldo, Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, sojourned next door to me on the Alabama Gulf Coast for a year to recover from his solitary drinking. (I must call him. Has he gone nuts again?)

  At Fort Pelham we had discussion groups, seminars, screaming political arguments over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.

  I witnessed such a fight between an anti-Communist Italian Republican dentist from Birmingham who had patented a new anesthetic and more or less inadvertently killed half a dozen patients and an anti-anti-Communist Jewish lawyer from New York, my cellmate Ben Solomon, recently removed to New Orleans, where he had been convicted of laundering Mafia-teamster money for a black mayoral candidate.

  This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars, a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.

  These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals. Now in the library I looked up from the Battle of the Somme and began to watch them. Both were gazing down at their magazines but neither was reading. Not a page was turned for twenty minutes. It was clear from his expression that Ben Solomon, the lawyer, was festering, nurturing some real or fancied slight, wh
ich was being rapidly magnified in his head to a mortal insult. I knew the signs. Perhaps he had lost the last argument and was thinking of what he might have said, a killing remark. But it was too late for talk. His fists clenched and unclenched on the table. The dentist, I perceived, was aware of the lawyer’s mounting rage. Then why didn’t they steer clear of each other? Why didn’t one just get up and leave? But no. They were bound, wedded, by hatred. They were like lovers. Finally the lawyer rose slowly and stood over the dentist, looking down at him, fists clenched at his sides. In a trembling voice he said, “Did you or did you not imply that as a supporter of Israel I was a secondclass and unpatriotic American?”

  The dentist, surprised or not, did not look up from his Stars and Bars. “Only after that crack, addressed to others but intended for me, about rednecks, crackers, yahoos, and gritspitters. I only replied in kind.”

  “You mentioned something about Yankee kikes.”

  “Only after you used the expression ‘Southron fascist rednecks.’”

  “Take it back,” said the lawyer, clenching and unclenching. Take it back! I am marveling. Like my five-year-old Tommy: Take it back. Well then, why not?

  “Look, Doctor,” I said mildly, “if the word offends him—”

  Both ignore me.

  “You take it back,” said the dentist, rising.

  “Look, Ben,” I say, rising, “why not take—”

  “Who in the fuck asked you?” says Ben, not taking his eyes from the dentist.

  Neither would take anything back. I am rising from the Battle of the Somme to say something like “Hold it, fellows.” Actually I’m fond of both of them.

  “Tell him to take back ‘redneck,’” says the Italian (redneck!) dentist to me, without taking his eyes from the lawyer.

  “Take back ‘redneck,’” I tell Ben. “Then he’ll—”

  “Tell him to take back ‘Yankee kike.’”

  “Okay. Take back—” I begin, relaying messages two feet. But before I can utter another word, they have actually hurled themselves at each other, and now they are actually rolling on the floor, grappling and punching, two middle-aged gents grunting and straining, their bald scalps turning scarlet. Neither can hurt the other, but they’re apt to have a stroke.

  I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.

  “Cut it out, goddamn it!” I yell at them, straddling both. “You’re going to have a stroke!”

  I did get in between and did stop the fight, easily, because both wanted an excuse to quit with their Jewish and Confederate honor intact. For my pains I got punched and elbowed, my glasses knocked across the room. “Somebody hit Doc!” one of them cries.

  They both set about taking care of me, the lawyer fetching my glasses, the dentist staunching my bleeding lip. I go limp to give them something to do, carry me to the infirmary.

  A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.

  What, then, to make of my patients?

  Time was when I’d have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there’s more to it than neurones. There’s such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, as I’ve said, a doctor of the soul, an old-style Freudian analyst, plus a dose of Adler and Jung. I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?

  Then I became somewhat simpleminded. I developed a private classification of people, a not exactly scientific taxonomy which I find useful in working with people. It fits or fitted nearly all the people I knew, patients, neurotic people, so-called normal people.

  According to my private classification, people are either bluebirds or jaybirds. Most women, it turns out, are bluebirds. Most men, by no means all, are jaybirds.

  Mickey LaFaye, for example, is, or was, clearly a bluebird. She dreamed of being happy as a child in Vermont, of waiting for a visitor, a certain someone, of finding the bluebird of happiness.

  Enrique Busch was a jaybird if ever I saw one. He wanted to shoot everybody in El Salvador except the generals and the fourteen families.

  It is a question of being or doing. Most of the women patients I saw were unhappy and wanted to be happy. They never doubted there was such a creature as the bluebird of happiness. Most men wanted to do this or that, take this or that, beat So-and-so out of a promotion, seduce Miss Smith, beat the Steelers, meet their quota, win the trip to Oahu, win an argument—just like a noisy jaybird. The trouble is, once you’ve set out to be a jaybird, there’s nothing more pitiful than an unsuccessful jaybird. In my experience, that is, with patients who are not actually crazy (and even with some who are), people generally make themselves miserable for one of two reasons: They have either failed to find the bluebird of happiness or they’re failed jaybirds.

  It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy—though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed—or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who set their hearts on either usually end up seeing me or somebody like me, or having heart attacks, or climbing into a bottle.

  Take a woman—and some men—who think thus: If only I could be with that person, or away from this person, or be in another job, or be free, or be in the South of France or on the Outer Banks, or be an artist or God knows what—then I’ll be happy. Such a person is a bluebird in my book.

  Or consider this person: What am I going to do with my nogood son, who is driving me crazy—what I want to do is knock him in the head. Or, what is the best way to take on that son of a bitch who is my boss or to get even with that other son of a bitch who slighted me? Wasn’t it President Kennedy who said, Don’t get mad, get even?—now, there was a royal jaybird for you. Or, I’ve got to have that woman—how do I get her without getting caught? Or, I think I can make a hundred thousand almost legally, and so on. Jaybirds all. B. F. Skinner, the jaybird of psychologists, put it this way: The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested. Not exactly the noblest sentiment expressed in two thousand years of Western civilization, but it has a certain elementary validity. True jaybird wisdom.

  But what has happened to all the bluebirds and jaybirds I knew so well?

  They’ve all turned into chickens.

  Here I am out of the clink and back in the normal law-abiding world, the Russians are coming, the war, if there’s a war, is going to make the Somme look like Agincourt, and here are all these people tranquillized, stoned out on something, grinning and patting one another, presenting rearward. What happened to the bluebird of happiness or the jaybird ruckus? These folks act more like Rhode Island Reds scratching in the barnyard or those sparrows befouling the martin house.

  Are they better or worse?

  I think it’s a syndrome, but I am not sure. I aim to find out.

  First call Cousin Lucy. She’s an M.D., Vassar smart and Southern shrewd, a sane person, perhaps the only one around. And she knows me.

  Maybe she can tell me who’s crazy and who’s not.

  She calls me between Ella Murdoch Smith and Kev ’n’ Debbie.

  She’s at the hospital, in the doctors’ lounge, taking a break. Can she see me?

  Sure, I’ll be there around twelve, to see Mickey LaFaye.

  Good. She’s got an impaction in the same room. An intern screwed up and she’s got to do it. Do I have a few minutes now? she asks.

  Sure. Kev ’n’ Debbie haven’t arrived. They wouldn’t mind waiting anyhow. But what’s this all about?

  Can’t tell me now. Later.

  Well then, I have so
mething to tell her. Okay? Okay. I can hear the crinkle of the plastic of the chair in the doctors’ lounge as she settles back. There’s a click and a long, hissing exhalation. She’s still smoking.

  We’re in luck. She doesn’t get called for twenty minutes. There’s time to tell her about my “syndrome.” I don’t get into case histories but summarize the symptoms and signs, the odd language behavior and sexual behavior. There are some things you don’t forget, like riding a bicycle or teaching interns. I don’t mention Ellen.

  It takes fifteen minutes.

  When I finish, there’s a long silence.

  “Well?” I say at last.

  She clears her throat and makes a small spitting noise. I can see her touch the tip of her tongue for a grain of tobacco, spit it out.

  “What I need to know,” I tell her, “is whether the two years away have warped my perspective, whether it is me, not they, who has become strange—in a word, whether I’m seeing things.”

  “Yes,” she says in a changed voice.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, you’ve changed. Yes, the cases are real. You’re not seeing things.”

  “What do you think?”

  “About you or them?”

  “Them.”

  “I might have an idea. And about you too.”

  “I’ll look for you at the hospital around noon,” I tell her. Kev and Debbie are at the door. “Don’t worry. I’ll find you.”

  3. SECOND CONSULTATION WITH Mickey LaFaye.

  There is a slight unpleasantness about doing a psychiatric consultation in a small general hospital. Here a psychiatrist is ranked somewhere between a clergyman and an undertaker. One is tolerated. One sees the patient only if the patient has nothing else to do.

  In your office you are in control. You control where you sit, where the patient sits or lies, who speaks, what is said. You even control the silences. Here it is the patient who controls while you stand about on one foot, then the other; here it is Mickey lying at her ease among the pastel Kleenexes and Whitman Sampiers, chin at rest in her full, sumptuous throat, her tawny eyes watching me incuriously while I stand just clear of her bed as wary as a preacher.