The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “Test you for what?”

  “Presenting rearward. Think about that.”

  “That’s true,” I say, thinking about that.

  “Okay,” she says, not smiling, but eyes round and risible. “How many patients in your series?”

  “Maybe twenty or so.”

  “How many were hospitalized or had blood work?”

  “Maybe half a dozen.”

  “Do you know who and where?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s try a couple.”

  “Okay. How about Mickey LaFaye? Here’s her SS number. But her workup was done at the local hospital.”

  “No problem. They have a terminal and I’ve got their number. Now, she’s the one who—”

  “New England lady, married Durel LaFaye—you know him—high roller—ended up as a starveling Christina with free-floating anxiety, panic, unnamed longing—”

  “Me too.”

  “What? You don’t look much like Christina.”

  “Aren’t you glad?”

  “—now a complete turnaround: a voluptuous Duchess of Alba pigging out on Whitman’s Sampler, goes berserk, shoots half her thoroughbreds, perhaps fooling around with groom—”

  “I got it!” She takes my arm in both hands, eyes bright. “Let’s run her! No, wait. Oh shoot. Their little terminal would be down. No, wait. They would have to report to Baton Rouge, wouldn’t they? Let’s try the mainframe again.”

  “Just ask for sodium. It’s the active ion.”

  Long colloquy, nixes, queries, Sn errors; then: okay, access; then: Na-24—18mmg.

  “What do you know.” I am gazing at the screen. Again there’s a tingle under my Bean collar. There’s more. There’s the heavy, secret, lidded, almost sexual excitement of the scientific hit—like the chemist Kekule looking for the benzene ring and dreaming of six snakes eating one another’s tails—like: I’ve got you, benzene, I’m closing in on you.

  Lucy feels the same excitement. She pulls up close, round-eyed. Her exultation gives her leave. She can say things, ask things she couldn’t ordinarily.

  “We’ve got something big, Tom,” she says, pulling close.

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry about Ellen,” she says, still holding my arm, flushed with six emotions, happy enough to afford sorrow.

  “Thanks.”

  “What are you going to do about—” She stops, eyes searching my face.

  “About what?”

  “About Ellen and—? About Ellen and—your life.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Another searching look, hands still on my arm, then a squeeze and a brisk yank at my sleeve, a brushing off. She lights up a cigarette, plucks a tobacco grain from her tongue.

  “Let’s do another one, Tom.”

  “All right. Donna S—. That’s Donna Stubbs. Fat girl.Molested by father. A romantic at heart, expected a certain someone—”

  “Me too.”

  “—did well in therapy, took up aerobic dancing, lost weight, dated, but when I saw her last week, she exhibited an unusual erotic response.”

  “Unusual?” asks Lucy, hands on the keyboard. “How?”

  “I told you about her. Presenting rearward—like estrus behavior in a pongid.”

  “How would you know?”

  “She also had the peculiar language response I told you about. Mention a place name, like her hometown Cut Off, and they seem to consult a map in their heads, a graphic like your computer here. They seem to look over my head as if they were following a cursor on a map.”

  “Did you say Cut Off?”

  “She’s gone back to Cut Off. I know she saw a doctor there and went to a hospital with symptoms of hypertension.”

  “Hm,” I give her Donna’s number. “No hospital in Cut Off.”

  “Try Golden Meadow.”

  She found Donna in Golden Meadow: Na-24—12.

  “Wow,” says Lucy.

  “Right.”

  “Give me another one.”

  “Let’s try Frank Macon. You know him. Janitor at Highland Park, should be on employees’ health records. Old friend, ambivalent black, love-hate, we understood each other, very funny and wise about hunting dogs. Now talks like Bryant Gumbel: Have a nice day.”

  “Number? Okay, easy. Got him.”

  Frank: Na-24—7.

  “Jesus.”

  “Right.”

  “Give me another one.”

  “Let’s try Enrique Busch. Ex-Salvadoran. Married into one of the fourteen families. Probably involved in the death squads. Ferociously anti-Communist and anti-clerical. Now has only two interests: golf and getting his daughter into Gamma sorority.”

  “I’ll take the death squads.”

  “You can probably find him at East Feliciana Proctology Clinic. He has intractable large bowel complaints.”

  “No wonder.”

  She gets him.

  Enrique: negative! Nominal! Normal!

  Lucy looks at me. “What does that mean?” She’s more excited than I am.

  I shrug. “Presumably that it’s normal, not a toxic reaction, for a rich Hispanic removed to this country to progress from death squads to golf and sororities.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Lucy, that we’ve got an epidemiological element here and that it’s up your alley and that I want to find it.”

  “I know! I know!” Excited, she grabs me, with both hands again, then grabs Hal the computer. “We have to find a pattern. A vector. Another one?”

  “Well, here’s Ella Murdoch Smith’s number. Classmate at East Feliciana High, diehard segregationist in the old days, yet intelligent, Ayn Rand type, left town when schools were integrated so her children wouldn’t be ruined, went to Outer Banks of Carolina, lived in a shack, taught school, educated her children, wrote poetry about spindrift and the winter beach. Returned last year, rages and Ayn Rand ideology gone, got menial cleaning job right here at Mitsy, came to me complaining of plots of fellow employees against her, particularly one Fat Alice. My impression: paranoia, until I talked to her supervisor and found out Fat Alice was a robot. My impression: though Fat Alice was programmed to ‘speak,’ Ella couldn’t tell that she was not human. She was responding to Fat Alice’s speech like another robot. No more poems about spindrift.”

  Ella rolls out like a rug on the screen: Na-24—21, C-137—121.

  “Are you writing these down?” I ask her.

  “Honey, I’m doing better than that. I got them taped right here. If we get enough, we can run them through and see if we can come up with a vector, a commonality.”

  “How many do we need?”

  “The more the better. I’ll tell you what.” She grabs me and gives me a jerk.

  “What?”

  “Give me a few more, then I’ve got an idea. Tom, we’re missing something. It’s under our noses and we’re missing it!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s see.” I’m looking at my list. “Well, there’s Kev and Debbie. Father Kev Kevin, ex-Jesuit, and Sister Thérèse, ex-Maryknoller, now Debbie Boudreaux. Both radicalized, joined Guatemalan guerrillas, Debbie radical feminist, used to talk about dialoguing, then began to talk tough, about having balls, cojones—now both retired to a sort of commune retreat house in pine trees, marital problems: Kev accusing Debbie of being into Wicca and having out-of-body experiences with a local guru which are not exactly out of body, Debbie accusing Kev of becoming overly active as participant therapist in a gay encounter group—”

  “That’s enough. How do we get a handle on them?”

  “Try American Society of Psychotherapists.”

  “Got you. Give me the numbers. Okay. Okay. Got them.”

  Kev: zero. Normal!

  Debbie: zero. Normal!

  Lucy: “I’m confused. Talk about flakes. What do you make of them?”

  “One of three things. One, they’re acting like normal married couples. Two, they’re pathological, but the
pathogen is not heavy sodium.”

  “Three?”

  “Father Smith would say the pathogen is demonic.”

  “Demonic. I see. What do you say?”

  “I say let’s run some more.”

  We run a dozen more. We’ve got three negatives, the rest positive.

  Lucy turns off all machines. Lights stop blinking. There are no sounds but the hum of lights. A screech owl’s whimpers. It is three o’clock.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say. “Let’s sleep on it.”

  “Wait wait wait.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know where these people live?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. I’m going to give you a graphic, a map. Let’s see how many we can locate. Maybe we can get a pattern.”

  “Let’s do it tomorrow.”

  “It’ll only take a second. Watch this.”

  She pops in a cassette and there’s old Louisiana herself, a satellite view, color-coded, with blue lakes and bayous, silver towns and cities, rust-red for plowed fields, greens for trees—and the great coiling snake of the Mississippi.

  “Now watch this.”

  The satellite zooms down. Here’s Feliciana, from the Mississippi to the Pearl, from the thirty-first parallel to the Crayola blue of Lake Pontchartrain. I can even see the Bogue Falaya and Bayou Pontchatolawa, where I fished yesterday—was it yesterday?—with John Van Dorn.

  “Here’s your wand. Locate as many patients as you can.”

  Like Tinker Bell, I can touch the screen and make a star. I make a constellation. We gaze at it. It has no shape. It is a skimpy, ill-formed star cluster.

  “How many questions will this thing answer?” I ask finally, hoping to stump it so I can go to bed.

  “Almost any. It is a matter of framing the question.”

  “I can frame the question.”

  “Well?”

  “It is a preposterous question.”

  “Ask it.”

  “There is no way it can be answered.”

  “Ask Hal. He’s good.”

  “I want the computer to locate on this graphic every person in Feliciana Parish and adjoining parishes who has an elevated plasma level of heavy sodium—which is to say, any level of heavy sodium.”

  “Good Lord,” says Lucy. She gazes at me. I seem to hear her own circuits firing away like Hal thinking things over. She taps her teeth with a pencil. She tugs absently at my Bean collar, brushes me off. She slaps the desk. “Well, why the hell not? It’s a challenge. There are data banks which have the information. It’s just a matter of latching on to it, right?”

  “Right,” I say wearily. Why did I ask?

  “As a matter of fact,” she muses, plucking a grain of tobacco from her tongue and taking my arm again, “there just might be a chance.”

  “There might be?”

  “Sure. We got a five-thousand-baud system here.”

  “That ought to do it. What is a baud?”

  “Never mind. There just might be a chance.”

  “Good.”

  “You know why?” She pulls close.

  “Why?”

  “Because. I seem to recall that when the Grand Mer unit was finished, it was after T.M.I. Then after Chernobyl NIH called for an EIS to placate the anti-nukes.”

  “What’s an EIS?”

  “Environmental Impact Study.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning a parish-wide sampling was done for radioactivity.”

  “You mean people were tested?”

  “Sure. Urinalyses almost certainly. And it’s just possible that they could have—” She jerks me. “Sodium would show up in the urine, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “It is just possible—” She searches my right eye, then my left. “Tell you what?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s hit the mainframe in Baton Rouge and ask it to do the work. By God, there is just a chance.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  She gazes, taps her teeth, plucks at her tongue. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll do some networking. We’ll use State Public Health and if necessary the Census Bureau and if necessary NIH in D.C. And we’ll ask the mainframe in Baton Rouge to do the asking. I’ve got the authority.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now understand this. It won’t be entirely accurate, because if there’s a John Hebert who’s positive, the census will give us half a dozen John Heberts right here in Feliciana. You understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “But we’ll get some sort of distribution.”

  “Great.”

  Another half hour of phone work, little-black-box work, page flipping, key hitting, user names, user codes, access codes, logging in, PIVs, Hal’s initial outrage, user authorization denied, SNERROR, QUERY QUERY QUERY, NIX—Hal relenting, until finally there is a single meek little green-for-go o?.

  “Okay what?” I ask.

  “Cross your fingers.”

  “Okay.”

  She takes a breath. “Here we go.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m afraid to hit the key,” says Lucy, grabbing me, eyes round.

  “Show me the key and I’ll hit it.”

  She shows me the key, turns her face. I hit the key. Something is wrong.

  It looks like a weather map. It looks like what happens when the TV weatherman switches to his satellite map of Louisiana streaked with cold fronts, upper level clouds, clear black sunshine.

  “I don’t get it, Lucy. What are we looking at?”

  Lucy is laughing, eyes rounded, triumphant. She grabs me. “You don’t get it. Okay, let’s zoom in. What do you see now?”

  “It looks like a weather front right on top of Feliciana. But there is no front.

  “Look again.” Zooming closer.

  There is Feliciana as before and there are the clouds, closer, grainier. Now I see it. But surely not. It can’t be. The clouds are particulate, galactic clouds of tiny twinkling stars, as if the screen had been hit by a handful of Christmas glitter. Part of Baton Rouge is a regular snowfield.

  “Do you mean to tell me—” I begin, hardly believing what I see.

  “I mean to tell you,” says Lucy, face close, big-eyed, holding on to me like a ten-year-old.

  “—that each dot is—”

  “—a case of heavy sodium. I only asked for sodium. Every dot on that graphic is a person. You’re looking at the actual geographical distribution of your syndrome.”

  There is nothing to do but gaze. “That’s beautiful,” I say finally. “You’re beautiful.”

  “I know! I know!” She hugs me. “Oh, I’m so sorry about— but I’m also so glad about—”

  I say nothing, gaze at the screen.

  “Zoom back.”

  “Okay.”

  A single rack of clouds hangs over Feliciana like a warm front backed up from the Gulf. Strange: the lakefront is mostly clear, even though it’s high-density population. Baton Rouge? Northwest quadrant of the city cloudy, central and south lightly speckled, a scattering of star clusters over Feliciana.

  “What’s the factor?” I ask Lucy. “You’re the epidemiologist.”

  “I know, I know. It’s under our noses. We’re looking right at it and can’t see it.”

  “Look harder.”

  “Look at that.” She points to Baton Rouge. “It’s a starry yin embracing a clear yang. It’s telling us. It’s practically shouting.”

  “You listen.” I get up. The toddies and the time have caught up with me.

  “You okay?” she asks, pulling me down, staring into one eye, then the other.

  “I’m tired. Let’s sleep on it.”

  “Don’t leave.” She takes my arm.

  “I’m not going anywhere. See you in the morning. We’ll talk about this stuff. Interesting.”

  “One thing,” she says. We’re standing in the dim hall
.

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to take these.” She puts something in my hand. Two capsules.

  “What are these?”

  “Alanone.”

  “Why should I take them?”

  “Tom,” she says. “Do you trust me?”

  “Sure.” I try to see her face, but the dim light of the chandelier is behind her.

  “Would you trust me now and take those without asking whys and wherefores?”

  “No.”

  “Oh dear.” She sighs. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “I think you’d better tell what this is about.”

  “Oh my. Very well. I guess I have to.” She was touching me but now she’s moved away a little. Her face, in the light now, is tender and grave.

  Another déjà vu. The tragic tingle of bad news, the sweet sorrow to come. Her hand is on my arm. It is like the touch of a friend at a funeral.

  “It’s this.” It must have been in her pocket. She hands it to me, a slip of paper. Her eyes are in shadow. “You’ll hate my guts but I had no choice.”

  “What’s this?”

  I hold it up to the slit of light from her office. “A lab slip?”

  She’s silent.

  I read aloud. “A Schoen-Beck test? On who?”

  She’s silent.

  “On Ely Culbertson? Come on. What’s this? A joke?”

  “Schoen-Beck is for Herpes IV antibodies.” She could be talking to the lab. “That’s the new one. Genito-urinary and neural.”

  “I know, I know. So what?”

  “The name is Ellie Culbertson, Tom.”

  “He’s dead.’

  “Ellie, Tom. Not Ely.”

  “I see. So what?”

  “That’s what Van Dorn calls Ellen, isn’t it, as a compliment to her bridge playing. You’ve told me yourself. She’s his Ellie Culbertson.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Dear,” she says, taking my arm. “People don’t use their real names for this test.”

  “True, but you still don’t know who this is.”

  “Honey, George Cutrer told me.” Her voice is sorrowful.

  “Who in the fuck is he to know?”

  “Honey, he’s chief of ob-gyn. And he has to tell me. I’m the epidemiologist, remember?”

  “Who else did he tell?”

  “No one. I swear.”

  “Let’s see the date. Where’s the date?” I can’t seem to read the date.