The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

She’s beside me, reading past my shoulder in the slit of light.

  “The date was six weeks ago.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t me?”

  She has another slip. She’s the good intern. “Here. Six months ago she was negative. Six months ago you were in prison in Alabama. Six weeks ago she’s positive. Six weeks ago you were still in prison in Alabama. Now, unless they allow conjugal visits in federal prisons—”

  “That was uncalled for.”

  “You’re right. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  “Good night.”

  She plucks my sleeve.

  “Do you hold it against me?”

  “No.” I don’t.

  “I feel rotten. But you see that I had to tell you. I’m sorry. I know you feel rotten too.”

  “I don’t.” I don’t. I don’t feel anything. “Good night.”

  “If there is anything at all you need. Anything.”

  “Thanks. I think I’ll have a drink and go to bed.”

  “I’ll get you one. You go on upstairs. I’ll bring you one.”

  I remember where it’s always been kept. In the sideboard in the dining room.

  “Thanks.”

  She folds my hand on the capsules. “I’ll get you a drink to chase them.”

  I don’t move.

  “Tom—”

  “Yes?”

  “You see, I had no way of knowing whether you and Ellen— that is, since you got back—and I don’t intend to ask.”

  “Good.”

  “I think I’ll go on up. You remember where—”

  “Yes, in the sideboard. I remember.”

  “One more thing, Tom.” She’s half turned away.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve taken two too.”

  “Two too,” I repeat.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, Tom. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say, not understanding.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So I’ll say good night.”

  “All right.”

  She gives me a kiss on the mouth, eyes open, searching mine.

  3. I HAVE A FEW drinks standing at the sideboard in the dim dark of the dining room. There is a single gleam from the hall chandelier on the polished table. It’s been twenty years since I stood here. Yet I remember exactly where the decanter is, an expensive silver-and-crystal affair, and the child’s silver cup Uncle Rylan used for a jigger, and that he filled it, the decanter, with a cheap bourbon named Two Natural. It’s the same bourbon and twenty years haven’t helped it. Several times I fill the cup, keeping a thumb at the rim to feel the cup fill. I stand in the dark.

  Uncle Rylan would stand at the sideboard making a toddy for Miss Bett, first stirring sugar into three fingers of water. The silver spoon made a tinkling sound against the crystal. The stirring went on much longer than was required to dissolve the sugar. There was always talk of politics during the stirring.

  Even here with the freshly polished furniture there is the old smell of the house, of scoured wood and bird dogs.

  It is not bad standing in the dark drinking.

  There is this to be said for drinking. It frees one from the necessities of time, like: now it is time to sit down, stand up. One would as soon do one thing as another.

  Time passes, but one need not tell oneself: take heed, time is passing.

  Lucy finds me either standing at the sideboard or sitting at the table.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  She is wearing a heavy belted terry-cloth robe as short as a car coat. Her hair is wet.

  She turns on the light and looks up at me. I’m not sitting. I’m still standing at the sideboard.

  “You are all right, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  “Sure.”

  She looks at the decanter but she does not ask me: did you drink all that?

  “Well?” she asks after a moment.

  “Well what?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to go to bed?”

  “Sure.”

  I take another drink from Uncle Rylan’s child’s cup. It was the sugar of the toddy which made this lousy bourbon tolerable.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she says, looking down at me. I’m sitting.

  “What?”

  “I’ll help you up.”

  “All right.”

  I used to come here as a child for Christmas parties and blackberry hunts and later for the dove shoots at the opening of the season every November. It was a famous dove hunt.

  The tinkle of spoon against glass was the occasion of a certain kind of talk. The talk was of bad news, even of approaching disaster—what Roosevelt was doing at Yalta, what Truman was doing at Potsdam, what Kennedy was doing at Oxford (Mississippi)—but there was a conviviality and a certain pleasure to be taken in the doom talk. As a child I associated the pleasure of doom with the tinkle of silver against crystal.

  “I know how you feel,” says Lucy. “Did you ever know how I always felt about you?”

  “No.”

  She’s wrong. I don’t feel anything but the bird-dog reek of memory.

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Lucy.

  “What?”

  “Put your arm around my shoulders.” She puts my arm around her shoulders. “Put your weight on me. I’m a strong girl.”

  “All right.” She is a strong girl.

  “God, you’re heavy.”

  “Then I’ll not put my weight on you,” I say, not putting my weight on her.

  She laughs. “Come on. Up the stairs.”

  They, the English Lipscombs, must have spoken exactly the same way, with the same doomed conviviality and the same steady tinkle of silver against crystal, when the Americans came down the river two hundred years ago in 1796 and up the river with Silver Spoons Butler in 1862.

  In the bedroom Lucy says, “Do you need any help?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You are, aren’t you?” She smiles, absently spits on her thumb, smooths my eyebrows. “But I’ll help you anyhow.”

  “All right.”

  “What’s the matter?” asks Lucy.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look uncomfortable.”

  “It’s this collar. No doubt it’s the newness.”

  We had to take pins out of the pajamas. “Maybe another pin.”

  “Tch. My word. It’s the stupid price tag. Hold still.”

  “All right.”

  The mattress is new and hard but not uncomfortable. It used to be a feather bed. The bottom sheet is fitted and snapped on tight as a drum. The top sheet harbors trapped cold air. But the patchwork quilt is old and warm. The pillow slip is new, but the pillow is old and goose down.

  The silence and darkness and smell of the house is like a presence.

  “You’re okay,” says Lucy.

  “Yes.”

  “You seem all right but somewhat—distant.”

  “I’m not distant.”

  “You’re not even drunk.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You’re shivering.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I think I’ll stay here for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “All right.”

  In Freiburg they have feather beds too. But instead of a quilt comforter, they have something like a bolster, a long narrow pillow to cover the gap on top. I wake early in the morning to the sound of church bells, not like the solemn tolling of our church bells, but a high-pitched crystalline sound, eine Klingel, yes, almost a tinkling.

  We were hiking out of Waldkirch in the Schwarzwald. Though we had just met, we were both from the South, she from Montgomery, far from home and lonely, a girl named Alice Pratt. This was before young Americans bummed around Europe free and easy, sleeping in tents and hostels. We both wanted the same thing, to touch, laugh, be easy with each other, kiss perhaps—who knows!—even love! Yet we were shy and didn’t know what to do. W
hat to do? What to say? We made conversation. We thought of things to say. We spoke of mutual friends at Agnes Scott and Tulane. We were caught, trapped between the happy, safe, Wiener-waltz musical security of the Grand Tour of the 1870s and the shacked-up, stoned-out ease of the 1970s. What if we could not think of something to say?

  “I’ll cover you up,” says Lucy.

  “All right.”

  “Better still, I’ll warm you up.”

  “All right.”

  What if I touched Alice Pratt? But how? We’re hiking along, brows furrowed, casting about for topics of conversation, when all of a sudden and dead ahead, rounding the bend of the narrow blacktop road not two hundred yards away, appears a Tiger tank leading a column of tanks, a Wehrmacht officer standing in the open forward hatch. Maneuvers! I don’t think we’re supposed to be here. I grab Alice Pratt and yank her into the dark fir forest. We lie on a soft bed of needles and watch an entire panzer division pass. I am Robert Jordan lying on the pine needles. I hold her. She wants me to. When the panzers are gone, we look at each other and laugh. We have been given leave by the German Army and Robert Jordan.

  Her mouth is on mine. She, Alabama-German-Lucy-Alice, is under the comforter and I under her, she a sweet heavy incubus but not quite centered. Her hair is still damp. She needs centering.

  Miss Bett reads from her grandmother’s journal:

  Later we worked on a silken quilt comforter. Mr. Siegel, our new German tutor, went riding with us. We can’t stop giggling at him. Everyone was in stitches when he thanked us for our “horsepitality.”

  For Christmas Daddy gave a little darky to all seven brothers, each to become a body servant. Rylan took his to Virginia.

  We are kissing. Her short heavy hair tickles my cheek, first on one side then the other, as she turns to and fro in her kissing. She needs centering.

  I move her a bit to center her. There is no not centering her.

  Now.

  “Now,” Lucy says.

  The sweet heaviness and centeredness of her, I think, is no more or less than it should be.

  Now.

  Rylan Lipscomb, b. 1840, volunteered 1861 for the Crescent Rifles, Company B, Seventh Louisiana Regiment. Killed in Cross Keys, Virginia, 1862.

  At Fort Pelham, Harry Epps, in for counterfeiting credit cards, knows how to beat the pay phone with a phony charge card. He knows a dial-a-girl number in Pensacola and how to get not a recording but a woman. “Now, why don’t we both relax and tell each other what we like. I have all the time in the world,” says a woman’s voice in a soft Alabama accent, softer and farther south than Birmingham, but not countrified like a waitress at an I-10 truck stop.

  I recognize the Picayune taste.

  “I remember this feather bed,” I tell her.

  She pushes herself up to see me by straightening her elbows. “This is not a feather bed.”

  “It used to be a feather bed.”

  “It’s not now and I’m glad. It’s just fine.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re just fine too. Go to sleep.”

  “All right, but not right now.”

  “All right.”

  The feather bed flows up and around me, but something is missing. The bolster? A cold bluish dark fills the room. It must be early morning. Colly is laying a fire in the grate. I can smell the fat pine kindling. His starched white coat creaks. The match scratches on the slate hearth. He starts a blaze of pine first. The pine is so fat it can be lit by a match. As he sets the coals from the scuttle one by one, he holds his breath, lets it out in a hiss after each coal is placed. His hand passes unhurriedly through the blue-yellow flame. Colly is said to be the great-grandson of the faithful slave and body servant of Rylan Lipscomb.

  The uncle is walking up and down the gallery outside, blowing duck calls. It’s a high-ball, a bugling hoanh hoanh to get the attention of high-flying mallards so they’ll cock a green head and come circling down for a look. “That’s a lot of crap about war being hell,” he says. “I never had a better time in my life.”

  Miss Bett reads from her grandmother’s journal:

  I never saw men so happy as Rylan and his brothers when they marched off with the Crescent Rifles.

  Finished Rob Roy. What a delight after Horace Greeley!

  A couple is in for marriage counseling, facing me across the desk.

  He to her: I like the explicit VCR in the bedroom, in 3-D and living color. We both get excited. You have to admit you do too. Doc, you ought to hear her.

  She to him: Yes, but you’re really screwing her not me.

  He to both of us: It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?

  I: (silent, flummoxed).

  There is a honking on the gallery. The French doors are open. The uncle walks in. He has the flaps of his hunting cap down over his ears. “And I’ll tell you something else they’re wrong about. A little pussy never hurt anybody.”

  “What?”

  “Get up!”

  It is Lucy for sure, shaking me.

  “What?”

  Alarmed, I’m up, having jumped clean out of bed.

  “Are you all right?” asks Lucy, taking hold of me. She’s still wearing her terry-cloth car coat. The ceiling light is on. There is the disagreeable oh-no feel of a duck-hunting morning, dawn-dark, lights on, and leaving the warmth of a feather bed.

  Lucy is eyeing me curiously, lip tucked. I am wearing pajama bottoms.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure are.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six.”

  “Six.”

  “Six. Get up. It’s important.” She’s excited.

  “All right. Do you mind if I dress?”

  “No.” She turns, pauses. “What?”

  “What?”

  “You were about to say something, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “I’ve never been in Germany.”

  “Is that so. Well, it’s been a strange night all around. Wonderful, in fact. Please hurry. This is important.”

  “All right.”

  “I want to tell you something else too.”

  “All right.”

  “About you and me.”

  “All right.”

  I have never been to Germany.

  There is no coal fire in the grate.

  Colly has been dead for forty years.

  Miss Bett has been dead for fifty years, Aunt Bett for a hundred years.

  The uncle did not come in my room. The French windows are locked. But now he is walking up and down the gallery calling ducks.

  There is a Picayune taste in my mouth.

  4. WE SIT SIDE-BY-SIDE at her terminal, she still terry-clothed and bare-kneed. She’s been here awhile. The seat is warm from her. We are gazing at Feliciana on the screen twinkling away like a nebula crowded with stars.

  Do you see what I see?”

  “No.”

  She pulls me close, her eye next to my eye, as if I could see better.

  “I’ve been looking at it for two hours and all of a sudden it hit me. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “Water.”

  “Water,” I repeat.

  “It’s the water supply, dummy. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  She spells it out. “Where does the water people drink come from now?”

  I am silent for a long time. Water?

  “Where does the water come from?” I say. “Well, now that the water table has fallen out of sight and the aquifer is low, it comes from deep wells and the river.”

  “Right. And where in the river does it come from?”

  “Well, there’s an intake around here. Between here and Baton Rouge.”

  “Right here.” She puts a pencil point on a westerly loop of the river. “This is the Ratliff intake installe
d five years ago to be above the chemicals—you know, it’s the Ruhr Valley from here to New Orleans. It supplies most of western Feliciana and the northeast sector of Baton Rouge. Now watch closely, I’m going to show you something.”

  “I’m watching.”

  “Okay. Now what we’re looking at is the distribution of all known positives for heavy sodium or chloride, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Take a good look and remember the distribution—for example, here in northeast Baton Rouge, running across here in most of the smaller towns and countryside back of the lake. With clear areas here, here, and along the lake. Okay?

  “Okay. Now I’m going to show you another graphic. Another brainstorm!” She rubs her hands together, pleased with herself, “I got this from the S and WB.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The state Sewerage and Water Board. All I had to do was ask them for a graphic showing the areas supplied by Ratliff number one, that’s what they call it. Now watch this.”

  She hits a key. A pretty map rolls out, a Miró watercolor of red swatches, bands, and blocks. “You got it? You oriented?”

  “I think.”

  “Now watch.” She hits keys, back and forth from twinkling star-clustered Feliciana to Miró-red Feliciana. “What do you see?”

  “They’re roughly the same.”

  “Roughly, my foot. They’re almost exactly the same. Look. Same clear areas. Lakefront, small enclaves here, here, a town here and here. I don’t know why.”

  I say slowly, “The lakefront condos and high-rises use treated lake water. These clear areas are large new developments with their own deep wells. Towns like these, Covington, Kentwood, Abita Springs, have their own deep wells.” I look at her curiously. “What do you drink here?”

  “Would you believe cistern water?”

  “Cistern? I knew this place had an old cistern, but—”

  “Carrie and Vergil swear by it. Carrie says it’s softer and Vergil says it’s healthier. No metal ions. He had it analyzed. What about you?”

  I recollect. “Ellen is a nut on bottled water. Abita Springs water for ordinary use and Perrier for parties. Wait a minute.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re saying that stuff got into the main water supply.”

  “Got into it or was put into it.”

  “Put into it.” We look at each other.

  “I think I’ll fix us some coffee,” says Lucy.