The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  We sit in silence, the azimuth between us, like two diners at a lazy Susan.

  I am beginning to get on to him. He knows it. He watches me with a lively expression, eyes rounded.

  “I see that you are not moving around or talking or eating because you don’t choose to.”

  He shrugs.

  “I imagine that you feel depressed, that it doesn’t seem worthwhile to talk, eat, get up.”

  A half-shrug, a downpull of lip.

  “I’m half right? There’s more to it?”

  A nod.

  “You chose to do this for other reasons?”

  A nod.

  “All right. Examination over. You don’t need any help from me. I believe you are depressed. But if you have undertaken a fast for religious reasons, that is your affair. I don’t have to tell you about the medical consequences. I need help from you, however, a bit of advice. But if you wish me to leave, tell me or otherwise signify. I do not wish to disturb you. Milton called me.”

  Long ago I discovered that the best way to get in touch with withdrawn patients is to ask their help. It is even better if you actually need their help. They can tell. They may be dumb but they are not stupid. Once, in trouble myself, I fell down in front of a catatonic patient who had not uttered a word for seven years. “You shouldn’t be down there,” he said in an ordinary voice. “Let me help you up.” He helped me up.

  “All right, Tom,” says Father Smith in his ordinary voice.

  “I’m not disturbing you?”

  “No. What’s the trouble? Would you get rid of those?” He nods toward the soup and the Jell-O.

  “Sure. How?”

  “Open the trapdoor and set them on the top step.”

  I do so.

  I talk to him as if we were having an ordinary conversation, two fellows sitting at the lazy Susan in the Dinner Bell restaurant in Magnolia, as if there were nothing unusual about him perched on a stool like a wax doll atop a hundred-foot tower, not stirring for a day and a half. I tell him about my latest discoveries about Dr. Comeaux’s and Dr. Van Dorn’s Blue Boy project, about their offer of a job, about their threats if I don’t take it to send me back to Alabama for parole violation. I mention the incidents of sexual molestation at Belle Ame Academy, but also tell him of Bob Comeaux’s impressive evidence of social betterment through the action of the additive heavy sodium. “I’m not sure what I should do,” I tell him, frowning, troubled, but keeping an eye on him. As a matter of fact, I do not know what to do. So I am doing my best therapy, killing two birds with one stone, asking for help and helping by asking. He may be depressed, but I’m in a fix too.

  The priest listens attentively, his temple propped on three fingers. At first I fear he has lapsed into silence again. Finally he says in a low voice, as if musing to himself, “Social betterment”; then to me, “What kind of social betterment?”

  “Well, for example, the effect on the catastrophic problem of social decay in the inner city, in the black areas of Baton Rouge and the poor rural whites of St. Helena Parish.” I give him Bob Comeaux’s figures on the dramatic reduction of street crime, teen pregnancies, suicides, drug abuse. “You must admit there is something to be said for his results, even if he’s treating symptoms, not causes. And for his rationale.”

  “His rationale,” repeats the priest.

  I look at him steadily. “That every society has a right to protect itself against its enemies. That a society like an organism has a right to survive. Lucy agrees. So do I. My problem is—”

  The priest is watching me with his peculiar, round-eyed, almost risible expression. “Society,” he murmurs, and then, as if to himself, something I don’t quite catch: “Volk—” Volk something. Volkswagen?

  “What?” I lean forward, cock an ear.

  With his free hand he is turning the azimuth slowly, inattentively, until the sights line up on me. He appears sunk in thought and I fear I’ve lost him again. But he looks up and says, “May I ask you a question?”

  “Sure. You want to know what I think, right? Well, I must confess—”

  But he is shaking his head. “No no,” he says. “Not that.” Wearily he rubs both eyes with the heels of his hands. “Could I ask you a professional question, a psychological question?”

  “Sure sure,” I say, but I fear I showed my irritation. He sounds like priests often do when they talk to psychiatrists about ”psychological questions.”

  “Something wrong, Tom?” the priest asks, eyeing me gravely.

  I have risen. Suddenly I don’t want to talk or listen. I am worried about Belle Ame. “I’m sorry, but if there’s nothing more I can do for you, I’d better be going. You eat something and you’ll be all right. I have to pick up Claude Bon. Drs. Comeaux and Gottlieb are waiting for me.” Besides, I feel a rising irritation. Did I come all the way over here to have a conversation about a “psychological question”?

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t send for you.”

  “That’s all right. What’s the question?”

  “Something happened to me yesterday after you left.” He is turning the azimuth. “No doubt it is a psychological phenomenon with which you are familiar. I know that you work with dreams. What I want to ask you is this: Is there something which is not a dream or even a daydream but the memory of an experience which is a thousand times more vivid than a dream but which happens in broad daylight when you are wide awake?”

  “Yes.” I am thinking of his “spell.” It could be a temporallobe epilepsy—which often is accompanied by extraordinary hallucinations.

  “It was not a dream but a complete return of an experience which was real in every detail—as if I were experiencing it again.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it possible for the brain to recapture a long-forgotten experience, an insignificant event which was not worth remembering but which is captured in every detail, sight, sound—even smell?”

  “Yes, but I would question whether it was insignificant.”

  “Yes, I expect you would. But it was absolutely insignificant.”

  He speaks with some effort, in an odd, flat voice and in measured syllables, like a person awakened from a deep sleep. “Yes, I expect you would,” he says again, rubbing his eyes. Now he moves the kerosene lamp, tries to focus on me.

  “Well?” I say after a pause, feeling irritation rise in my chest like a held breath.

  “I was dreaming of Germany. Germany! Why Germany? No, not dreaming. It happened. I was wide awake. I was lying down after you left yesterday. It was getting dark but the sky was still bright against the dark pines. It reminded me of—what? the Schwarzwald with its dark firs? I’ve told you about it before. I don’t know. Anyhow, it was as if I were back in Tübingen, where I’d been as a boy. I was lying in bed in my cousin’s house. It was so vivid I could have been there. I stayed with them a year. I would wake every morning to the sound of church bells.”

  He moves the kerosene lamp again, leans forward.

  “Have I spoken to you about this?”

  “About Germany? Yes.”

  “But not about—” He stops, rubs his forehead with both hands. “Yes, the church bells. They had a special quality, completely different from our church bells, a high-pitched, silvery sound, almost like crystal struck against crystal. Even the air was different. It was thin and clear and silvery and high-pitched too, if you know what I mean. It had a different—smell. Or was it lack of smell? Anyhow, nothing like our old funky, fertile South. No, it was a smell, a high-pitched sweet smell, almost chemical, yet sweet too, something like the cutting room of a florist’s shop—like old geraniums? Of course it is impossible to describe a smell. But it came back! I would wake in the morning to that high silvery ringing and the chemical geranium smell. I slept in a narrow bed covered not by a blanket or a quilt but by a soft goose-down bolster, like a light mattress. It was like an old-fashioned Southern feather bed with the mattress upside down. There was also the vague but certain sense that something was a
bout to happen.”

  He stops. I say nothing. Now he’s back propping temple on his three fingers, looking at me sideways, almost slyly. “How is such a memory possible? Many things have happened to me, but in this case nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. A boy lying in bed.”

  I look at him for a while. The kerosene lamp seems to drizzle, sending out sprays of weak yellow light.

  Presently I ask him, “Was it about then that you had your— ah—spell?”

  “What spell? I didn’t have a spell. Do you mean seizure? a fit? a convulsion? I didn’t have a convulsion. Why do you ask?”

  “Milton said you had a—what he called a spasm.”

  “No. It is true I have spells of dizziness, but what I had was this peculiar dream which was not a dream.”

  “Was Milton up here at the time?”

  “Well, yes. He brought me something to eat.”

  “Was that before or after your—” I pause.

  “My what? Go ahead and say it.”

  “I was about to say hallucination, because as you describe it, it was that vivid.”

  He’s still eyeing me sideways, but now through almost closed lids. “Hallucinations are generally abnormal, aren’t they? I mean, like a symptom of mental illness or something in the brain?”

  “Sometimes.” I rise and repack Lucy’s bag. “I have to go now. I’m worried about the children, especially Claude Bon. I’d like you to come in for an ECG and a scan. I think you’d better come into the hospital for a general checkup. But if not, please call me or have Milton call me if you need anything.” I look at his hand, which is still on the azimuth. It is as withered as Don Quixote’s, yet, when he clasped mine, as strong as the Don’s too. “As your physician I am obliged to advise you to resume eating and drinking. You’re already dehydrated. Frankly, I cannot tell how much of your—ah—inactivity is due to depression and how much to a religious commitment. The latter is out of my territory. But you have my medical advice. Don’t hesitate to call on me, even though I’m not certain I will be here tomorrow. If I’m not available, call Dr. Gottlieb. He’s a good man.”

  He watches me with the same expression as I snap the bag and move past him to the trapdoor.

  As I pass, he seizes my arm. I wait, expecting an affectionate goodbye squeeze, perhaps by way of thanks. But he doesn’t squeeze and doesn’t let go.

  “Yes?”

  He tilts his head even more, to see me. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Something happened to me in Germany. I have never told anyone.”

  “I’m sure it’s interesting. But I have to go. I’m worried about Claude Bon. I’m going to pick—”

  “I’m afraid this concerns you. I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m afraid I have to. There is something you need to know.”

  Father Smith’s dry talon of a hand is still on my arm. Something stirs in the back of my head. For some reason I think of the time a priest came to get me out of a classroom to tell me my father was dead. There is in his voice and in the feel of his hand on my arm the same grave pressure, the same sweet urgency.

  Then he gives a shudder, just exactly as one might for no reason at all, or as Negroes used to say, because a rabbit just ran over your grave. But then, to my alarm, the hand supporting his head falls away, pronates, the fingers bunching. It curls inward like a burning leaf. His head falls to one side. Fearing he might fall off the stool—his body slumps a little toward me, but not alarmingly—I catch him, ease him off and down to the floor. He makes no objection. I lay him out diagonally—the only way— prop his head on the bedroll. I sit beside him, watching him. No use to examine him. Mainly I’m casting about, wondering how best to get him down from the tower and to the hospital. Why didn’t I get him down when I could? What a place to have a stroke. I hope it is a seizure. The moonlight falls on his cheek and forehead, leaving his deep eye sockets in shadow. One eyelid, the right, twitches, I think. Best to call for Milton to give me a hand. I could let him down—I begin to rise, but the old man is saying something. I lean close. His voice is different. Right hand bunched, I’m thinking, the geranium smell. A petitmal seizure? Some seizures, especially in temporal-lobe epilepsy, are preceded by an aura, a strong resurgence of memory, of time, place, smell. But right eye twitch, speech altered? Left brain vascular accident, speech center affected?

  But his speech is clear. His voice is thin and dry as dead leaves, but clear. He speaks in a rapid, dry monotone such as one might use in giving a legal deposition, not having much time.

  “No no. Wait,” he says, almost whispering. “Wait.”

  FATHER SMITH’S CONFESSION

  In the 1930s I found myself visiting distant cousins in Germany. My father took me. They lived in the university town of Tübingen, where my cousin Dr. Hans Jäger was professor of psychiatry. He had two sons. One, Helmut, at eighteen, was older than I but became my friend. The other, Lothar, was a good deal older. I didn’t like him. He was some sort of minor civil servant, perhaps a postal clerk, and also a member of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the brownshirts. Not even his own family had much use for him. In fact, as best as I could tell, the entire SA had fallen into some sort of disfavor at the time. Sitting around in his sloppy uniform, he reminded me of a certain kind of American lodge member, perhaps a Good Fellow or Order of Moose dressed up for a lodge meeting. Helmut was something else. He had finished the Hitler Jugend and had just been admitted to the Junkerschule, the officer-training school for the Schutzstaffel, the SS. The one great thing he looked forward to was taking his oath at Marienberg, the ancient castle of the Teutonic knights. He already had his field cap with the death’s-head and his lightning-bolt shoulder patch. What he hoped to do was to become not a military policeman like many of the SS but a member of an SS division and incorporated into the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Dr. Jäger had nothing to do with the Nazis. He was a distinguished child psychiatrist—did I ever tell you that at one time I was considering going into your profession?—a music lover, and, I remember, a dog lover—he had two dachshunds, Sigmund and Sieglinde, whom he was extremely fond of. When I think of him, I think of him as the “good German” as portrayed in Hollywood, say by Maximilian Schell or earlier by Paul Lukas in Watch on the Rhine—you know, sensitive, lover of freedom, hater of tyranny, and so on, certainly the courageous foe of the Nazis. Dr. Jäger was a composite of the two, better than both, not only a brilliant child psychiatrist but a fine musician—he had just played the Bruch concerto with the university orchestra, the ultimate expression of romantic German feeling—Gefühl! Gefühl! Toward Lothar, the brownshirt, he displayed an open contempt. But he was silent about Helmut. I could never make out what he thought of Helmut.

  What were we, my father and I, doing there? I had just finished high school. My mother had died the year before and my sister had got married. My father decided it would be good for both of us if we went abroad. He had never been abroad. But he liked to say that we were both entitled to a Wanderjahr, as he called it. He was a romantic and a lover of music. In fact, he taught piano at the music school at Nicholls State Junior College. If you want to know the truth, he was second-rate, not really first-class at playing, not really first-class at teaching, not really a scholar. He was a certain type, quite common in the South, a lover of culture, books, the lofty things in life. Music of a certain sort moved him to the point of tears. In short, he was a romantic. His great ambition for years had been to make the grand tour of Europe, to see the cathedrals, above all to go to Bayreuth. It was natural that we should visit our cousins. The Rhine, the Lorelei, the cathedral at Cologne—they were as much a part of his dream of Europe as Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel and Florence. I think he thought of Tübingen and Heidelberg as a sort of backdrop for The Student Prince. Do you recall that being a student at Heidelberg was as much a part of the Southern tradition as reading Sir Walter Scott?

  It is important to understand that in the 1930s most Americans d
idn’t have two thoughts about the Third Reich and Hitler. We were still in the grip of the Depression. Mussolini, in fact, was the object of more curiosity than Hitler. I remember my mother presenting a paper at her literary club entitled something like “Mussolini, the New Caesar.” Mussolini, the strong man who made Italy work. Fascism was then thought of as a bundle of sticks, fasces, stronger than one stick and not necessarily a bad thing. Hitler seemed to be a German version of the same, another strong man whom the Germans had in fact elected, a matter of some, though not much, interest.

  There was certainly no reason not to go to Germany then, if one was going to Chartres and Florence.

  I must tell you how I felt about my father and mother, though it does me little credit. My father was, as I say, a type familiar in the South, not successful in life but an upholder of culture, lofty ideals, and the higher things. He was a practitioner of the arts, by turns a painter and a musician. And an author: he wrote occasional articles for the New Orleans newspaper about old Creole days, perhaps a humorous anecdote about Père Antoine or a historical sketch about a romantic encounter between a plantation belle and a handsome Yankee captain. As a young man he wrote poetry and was named poet laureate of Thibodaux by the mayor’s proclamation. But he settled on music and gave piano recitals at places like Knights of Columbus halls or the Jewish Community Center. Later he became assistant professor of music at Tulane, not the university proper, but in the university college, which was a sort of night school for adults. As I’ve said, not first-rate.

  We come from old Alsatian German stock who two hundred years ago were lured here by the thousands by a real-estate swindler named John Law who promised an idyllic life in a Louisiana paradise. So they landed in the swamps next to the west bank of the river, which is still known as the Côte des Allemands, the German coast, where they were engulfed by mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, and the French. My father’s family, the Schmidts, became Smith. My mother’s family, the Zweigs, became Labranche.