The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  Clinton has a new jail, or rather a carefully restored old jail done up in columns and shutters to match the colonial courthouse and the neat little shotgun cottage-offices of lawyers’ row. The jail is strangely silent, with only a black vagrant and a white couple in the squad room who are being released even as we are booked. Unlikely inmates they are, the couple, a solemn, respectable-looking man and wife who could be a Baptist deacon and deaconess, almost formally dressed, he in a somber but stylish charcoal-colored suit and tie, she too in suit and tie, she with handsome unplucked black eyebrows and black hair whirled up like an old-fashioned Gibson girl. He wears oversize horn-rimmed specs, which give him an incongruous impish Harold Lloyd look.

  The uncle of course knows everyone. We are received and booked amiably. Some mistake must have been made, we are assured. It will soon be straightened out. The deputy and jailer stand about swinging their arms. They kid the uncle: “Looks like they finally caught up with you, Hugh Bob,” etc. Vergil is acutely embarrassed. He sees nothing amusing about jail.

  There prevails the tolerable boredom and gossip of all police stations, tolerable because of the gossip. Something always turns up, the latest outrage and the headshaking, not without pleasure, of the cops who thought they’d seen it all and now here’s the latest. The uncle, who has just got it from the deputy, passes it along to Vergil and me in the same low voice quickened by interest: a crime against nature, many crimes against nature, against children, by none other than this same couple, it is alleged, who run some sort of day camp, the very sort of childcare business these people get into to get at children, you know—alleged because this couple is being sprung for lack of evidence, but the deputy says we’ll get them sooner or later, they always repeat. But children! The couple’s name I remember as the very byword of somber, sober caring: Mr. and Mrs. Brunette.

  “That’s one thing I wouldn’t put up with, messing with children,” says the uncle cheerfully. “I’d cut their nuts out.”

  Bob Comeaux is all rueful smiles, chaffing and headshaking. “You old booger, you jumped the gun on us,” he says in a low voice, pressing me toward the door. “Another twenty-four hours and you’d have been aboard and on the team.”

  His hand is touching my back as he escorts us out to his car, a mud-spattered, high-mounted, big-wheeled Mercedes Duck, a forty-thousand-dollar amphibian good for bird hunting in the pines or duck hunting in the swamp. Bob is dressed, if not for hunting, at least for a weekend at his lodge, safari tans and low-quarter boots, cashmere turtleneck. The uncle is impressed. Vergil is impassive. Our truck, I tell Bob, is parked on the Angola road. No problem, he says, and he’s genial as can be, but I notice that he drops off Vergil and the uncle at Pantherburn first, even though it’s out of the way.

  We’re sailing through the pines, the morning sun warm on our backs. There is a pleasant sense of openness and of riding high and seeing all around, so unlike being sunk in my old spavined Caprice. The Mercedes smells like leather and oiled wood.

  “Now, do you think you can get home without getting in any more trouble,” says Bob, smiling at the road, “and make it to our meeting tomorrow when we’re going to wind up this parole foolishness, spring you for good, and then make you an offer you can’t refuse?”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I thank you for getting us out of jail, but frankly I’m a little confused.”

  “What’s the problem, Doctor?” he asks, cocking an attentive ear, but I notice he’s frowning at the wood dashboard, wipes the grain with his handkerchief.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on at Grand Mer and the Ratliff intake and what your part in it is.”

  Bob Comeaux shakes his head fondly, socks the wheel. “Same old Tom! You always did lay it right out, didn’t you?” All smiles, he goes suddenly serious. “Good question, Tom!” he says crisply.

  To emphasize the seriousness—this is too important to talk about while sailing along in his Duck—we pull off at an overlook, the loess hills dropping away to a panorama of Grand Mer, the cooling tower with its single pennant of cloud, the river beyond, and upriver the monolith of Fedville.

  Bob swings around to face me, so solemnly his smiling crowfeet are ironed out white. Again he socks the steering wheel softly. The windows of the Duck go down, the sunroof slides back without a sound, letting in sunlight and the fragrance of pines warming. But there is still the smell of leather, oiled wood, and pipe tobacco.

  “You old rascal.” He’s shaking his head again. “You jumped the gun on us. I told those guys! I told them!”

  “Told them what?”

  “Take a look.” From his suede jacket he takes a paper and hands it to me. It is stationery folded letter-size.

  “So?”

  “Take a look at the date!”

  I take a look at the date. “So?”

  “The date is the day before yesterday. It’s already in your mail. The original, that is.”

  “Do you want me to read it?”

  “At your leisure. It’s a job offer—a proposition you can’t refuse—employment to begin in”—he consults his wafer-thin Patek-Philippe—“exactly twenty-six hours, contingent only upon your clearing the formality of probation tomorrow. It’s official. We even have the brass down from Bethesda, a couple of wheels from NIH. They want you aboard too.”

  “Job offer?”

  “Tom,” says Bob, his eyes both solemn and fond, “we want you aboard as senior consultant for NRC’s ACMUI.”

  “What’s that?”

  He smites my knee. “You’re right. That goddamn bureaucratese. Okay, try this. You’re being offered a position as senior consultant on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee for the Medical Uses of Isotopes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because you know more about the brain pharmacology of isotopes than anyone else. You broke the ground. You’re our man. Starting tomorrow you’re on the team.”

  “What team?” I notice a broken V of ibis lowering on Tunica Island.

  “There.” He nods toward Fedville. “Your office is waiting for you. Your salary of $85,000—chickenshit, if you ask me, but it was the best I could do, so I went on the assumption that you’re like me and that the service counts for something—will be supplemented by local QLC funding, which is mostly foundation money—I’m in with those guys—so you’ll be making about $135,000—not up to a big-shot shrink, ha, but we figure it will free you up to do your own research, plus you’ll have all the facilities of the center rent-free, as they say.”

  The wings of the ibis, not great flyers, are out of sync and flutter in the sunlight like confetti.

  Bob pops in a cassette and soon the Mercedes is filled with Strauss waltzes coming from all directions.

  “God, don’t you love that,” murmurs Bob, lilting along with “Artist’s Life.” “Doesn’t that take you back to P&S, where we’d catch the Philharmonic, then hoist a tad of bourbon and branch at the Ein und Zwanzig?”

  “Actually I’d be more apt to catch the flicks at Loew’s State 175th Street and hoist a beer at Murray’s Bar and Grill.”

  “Same old Tom,” says Bob absently, but adjusting the four speakers, ear cocked for the right balance, listening with a frown. Satisfied, he settles back.

  I take a good look at him. He has aged well. In his safari jacket, he’s as handsome as Eric Sevareid, as mellow as Walter Cronkite. We two have come a long way, he as much as says, seen the follies of the world, and here we are. Like Eric and Walter he has grown both grave and amiable.

  “Any questions, Tom?” asks Bob, moving his head in time with Strauss.

  “What is that heavy-sodium shunt at Ratliff all about?”

  Bob nods gravely, eyes going fine and gazing past me at the looming, lopped cone of Grand Mer.

  “Good question. Very good question. And if you don’t mind, I’ll answer it in my own way with a couple of Socratic questions of my own, shrinkwise, you might say. Okay?”

  “Okay.” The wings of the
ibis flash like shook foil and drop into the willows.

  Bob leans back, puts forefinger to lips. “I’m assuming, Tom,” he says, and pauses, as the strains of “Artist’s Life” die away, “that we live by the same lights, share certain basic assumptions and goals.”

  “Yes?”

  “Healing the sick, ministering to the suffering, improving the quality of life for the individual regardless of race, creed, or national origin. Right?”

  “Right. But what does that have to do with heavy sodium in the water supply?”

  “What does that have to do with heavy sodium in the water supply,” he repeats gravely. “Good question, Tom. One might have asked a similar question fifty years ago: What does it have to do with fluoride in the water supply? And if we’d asked it, we’d have gotten the same sort of flak from the Kluxers and knotheads—as you of all people know. Hence our little cloak-and-dagger secrecy. Frankly, I saw no need of it.”

  “So?”

  “What would you say, Tom—” Bob, who has been lilting along with Strauss, leans forward and, turning down the music, fixes me with a smiling, keen-eyed look. “What would you say if I gave you a magic wand you could wave over there”—he nods over his shoulder toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans —“and overnight you could reduce crime in the streets by eighty-five percent?”

  I wait, knowing there is more.

  “Child abuse by eighty-seven percent?”

  “You mean you’ve done it by—”

  He waves me off. “We’ve done it—the numbers will be out next month—but let me finish. Teenage suicide by ninety-five percent. Ninety-five percent, Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “Wife battering by seventy-three percent.”

  “Yes?”

  “Teenage pregnancy by eighty-five percent.”

  “Yes?”

  “And here’s some bad news for us shrinks.” He winks at me. “Hospital admissions for depression, chemical dependence, anxiety reduced by seventy-nine percent.”

  “Yes?”

  “And get this.” He leans close. “AIDS by seventy-six percent.”

  “You’ve reduced AIDS by a heavy-sodium additive?”

  “Not directly, but the numbers are there.”

  “How, if not directly?”

  He sinks back, eyes me speculatively, turns up “Wiener Blut.” “I’ll give you the easy answer first.”

  “All right.”

  “By reducing anal intercourse and drug use, shooting up with needles. That’s how the LAV-HTLV-III virus is mainly transmitted, right?”

  “Right. But—”

  “Here comes the interesting part. Why we need you. Tom, hear this. We don’t have stats for obvious reasons, but in the sodium treatment areas we’ve mentioned, the incidence of homosexuality has declined dramatically.”

  “How could you know such a thing?”

  Bob shrugs. “Clinical impressions. How many homosexuals have you treated lately? And a couple of interesting items. The Gay and Lesbian Club at L.S.U. has disbanded. Voluntarily. Tom, every gay bar and bathhouse in Baton Rouge is out of business, and not from police pressure. And a tiny but telling little item: the sale of gay and S.M. video cassettes is down almost to zero. Not from censorship, Tom! From lack of interest.”

  “How does that come to pass, Bob?”

  He appraises me. “I think you might have an idea, Tom, but I’m asking the questions, remember?”

  “Then ask.”

  “Tom, how much do you know about chimpanzees?”

  “Not much. Some. I did some work with them.”

  I know. Tom, how many homosexual chimpanzees did you run across?”

  “Then are you saying that you’re zapping homosexuals with heavy sodium and regressing them to lower primates?”

  He shakes his head, wags a finger. “You know better, Doctor. That’s why we want you. For one thing, these same subjects have an average twenty percent increase in I.Q.—plus an almost total memory recall which makes you and me look like dummies. We ain’t talking chimps, Tom.”

  “I know,” I say absently. “They can tell you where St. Louis and Cut Off are.”

  “What?” he says sharply. “Oh, map and graphic recall. Yes, sir, they’ve got it. We’re not zapping them. No zombies here. Far from it.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  He turns down “Wiener Blut.” “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I have an idea you might know more than we.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so, but I’ll tell you how much we do know.”

  “All right.”

  “We know that the heavy ion inhibits dopamine production in the prefrontal cortex—which as you know is probably the chemical basis of schizophrenia. We know it increases endorphin production, which as you know gives you a drug-free natural high. We know it suppresses the cortical response to bombardment from the limbic system, which again you know is the main source of anxiety. Tom, we can see it! In a PETscanner! We can see the glucose metabolism of the limbic system raising all kinds of hell and getting turned off like a switch by the cortex. We can see the locus ceruleus and the hypothalamus kicking in, libido increasing—healthy heterosexual libido—and depression decreasing—we can see it! And here’s the damnedest thing, Tom!—here’s where we need your help—we need your help because of your expertise with the CORTscan, your baby—we know and you know that there are certain inhibitory functions in the cortex—you call it superego, Freudian forgetting—which wipe out most memory recall from the temporal lobe. Tom—!” He’s as exhilarated now as “Wiener Blut.” “Those suckers can remember everything. We can see it both on PET and SPECT. Ask them a question: What did you do on your fifth birthday? and, Tom, I’m telling you, it’s like watching the mainframe at NIH scanning its data bank. They retrieve it! If it’s in the neurones, they get it! What do you think?”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Then be the devil’s advocate. Attack us from your own expertise. Name one thing wrong we’re doing.” Both Bob and “Wiener Blut” wind up with a triumphant chord.

  “Well, there’s the technicality of civil rights. You’re assaulting the cortex of an individual without the knowledge or consent of the assaultee.”

  “Assault!” He leans forward again, eyes blazing. “Let me tell you about assault and who’s assaulted!”

  “All right.”

  He points north, past Grand Mer. “Do you know what’s up the river fifteen miles or so?”

  “Sure. Angola.”

  “Right. Angola. The Louisiana State Prison Farm. Ten thousand murderers, rapists, armed robbers, society’s assholes, who would as soon kill you as spit on you. That’s where the assault comes from.”

  “So?”

  “So, two little numbers, Tom. One: The admissions to Angola for violent crime from the treatment area have declined seventy-two percent since Blue Boy began.”

  “Blue Boy?”

  “The name of our little pilot program.”

  “I see.”

  “Two: The incidence of murder, knifings, and homosexual rape in Angola, which is of course in the treatment area, has—declined—to—zero.” He pauses. “Zero,” he whispers.

  “So why do you need me? It sounds like your pilot has succeeded.”

  “I’ll tell you why we need you.” He turns over the cassette. Here comes “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” “First, you know as much about the action of radioactive isotopes on neurones as anyone—you’re the pioneer. But I need you for something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tom, as you intimated a moment ago, we’ve got an interesting philosophical question here. Both my colleagues and I need some dialoguing on the subject and we think you could contribute a very creative input.”

  The Strauss is very lovely. The Feliciana woods here, bathed as they are in the gold autumn sunlight, are surely as lovely as the Vienna woods. “What creative input do you have in mind, Bob?”

/>   “Okay, try this for size. What we have here is a philosophical question. Yes, you’re right, though your language was pejorative. Yes, we’re treating cortical neurones by a water-soluble additive, just as we treated dental enamel by fluoride in the water fifty years ago—without the permission or knowledge of the treated. The courts upheld us then, probably will again. But that’s not the question. The real, the fascinating, question is this. What do you think of this hypothesis, which is gaining ground among psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists, to mention a few disciplines—as well as among academics and in liberal-arts circles—even among our best novelists!—Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book setting forth this very thesis.” He eyes me. “You already know, don’t you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “The hypothesis, Tom,” says Bob, speaking slowly, “is that at least a segment of the human neocortex and of consciousness itself is not only an aberration of evolution but is also the scourge and curse of life on this earth, the source of wars, insanities, perversions—in short, those very pathologies which are peculiar to Homo sapiens. As Vonnegut put it”—his arm is on the back of the seat; I feel his pointy, jokey finger sticking into my shoulder —“the only trouble with Homo sapiens is that parts of our brains are too fucking big. What do you say to that?”

  I don’t say anything. He has gone elegaic. We’re in the golden woods of old Vienna.

  “Homo sapiens sapiens” he murmurs, lilting. “Or Homo sap sap.” Reviving, he pokes me again. “We’re not zapping the big brain, Tom. To put it in your terms, what we’re doing is cooling the superego which, as you of all people know, can make you pretty miserable, and strengthening the ego by increasing endorphin production. No drugs, Tom—except our own—we’re talking natural highs. Energies are freed up instead of being inhibited!” Here comes another poke. “News item: L.S.U. has not lost a football game in three years, has not had a point scored against them, and get this, old Tom, has not given up a single first down this season. As you well know, nobody talks in Louisiana about anything else.” A final poke. “News item, Tom—not as well known but quite as significant: L.S.U. engineering students no longer use calculators. They’re as obsolete as slide rules. They’ve got their own built-in calculators.”