The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  Max’s eyes are in his eyebrows. If his junior resource person insists on screwing up, he’s on his own.

  “Not only that,” I go on in the same sociable tone, non compos but not hostile either, “we want all the so-called pre-personhood infants at St. Margaret’s by next week, plus all the terminal cases of any age, including adult AIDS patients who’ve been quarantined—plus your nursing staff until we can get organized.”

  Why am I saying all this? Father Smith is a loony and can’t even take care of himself.

  “Shit, Max!” Bob Comeaux, now altogether himself, collected in his anger, has squared off with Max. “He’s talking about shooting down the entire Qualitarian program in this area. No way.”

  Max now, dropping group voice: this is serious. “Tom, we don’t want to get into a legal hassle. It is, after all, the law of the land.”

  “Max, the law of the land does not require gereuthanasia of the old or pedeuthanasia of pre-personhood infants. It only permits it under certain circumstances.

  “I know, but—” says Max.

  Group falls silent.

  “No way,” says Bob Comeaux softly.

  “Very well,” I say, picking up the photos and Lucy’s printouts from NIH’s mainframe. “I’ll be going.”

  “What you got there?” asks Bob Comeaux quickly, eyes tracking the printouts like a Macintosh mouse.

  “You know what these are, Bob.”

  “What you going to do with them?”

  “Return them to Dr. Lipscomb. They’re her property. She in turn will be obliged to notify NIH, ACMUI, and the Justice Department.”

  “But we haven’t signed you out!” exclaims Bob Comeaux, actually pointing to the torn paper in my student wastebasket.

  “In that case I’ll just hand them to Warden Elmo Jenkins, who is familiar with the case and will pass them along to Lucy.”

  “Ah me,” muses Max.

  I’m halfway to the door. “Hold it, old son,” says Bob Comeaux, uttering, in a sense, a laugh, and clapping a hand on my shoulder. “As L.B.J. and Isaiah used to say, Let us reason together.” And, to tell the truth, he looks a bit like L.B.J. back at the ranch, in his Texas hat, smiling, big-nosed, pressing the flesh.

  2. ELLEN LOST OUT in Fresno. Cut off from Van Dorn and heavy sodium, she got eliminated in Mixed Doubles and came limping home.

  We were all glad to see her. She wouldn’t talk to anybody but Hudeen. They exchanged a few murmured syllables which no one else could understand.

  The children, out of school, stood around either picking at each other or moony and cross as children are when something is wrong. But Chandra is good with them, playing six-hour games of Monopoly. Between times they’re on the floor in front of the stereo-V, as motionless as battlefield casualties, eyes glazed: back to six hours of Scooby Doo and He-Man.

  My practice is almost nil. People are either not depressed, anxious, or guilty, or if they are, they’re not seeing me.

  I begin dropping by the Little Napoleon and having a friendly shooter of Early Times with Leroy Ledbetter.

  Ellen is puzzled, distant, and mostly silent. At night we lie in our convent beds watching Carson without laughing and reruns of M*A*S*H and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  What to do?

  Leroy makes his usual suggestion, after one of his all-but-invisible knockings-back of a shot glass as part of the motion of wiping the bar and leaning over to tell me.

  “Why don’t y’all take my Bluebird and go down to Disney World? Y’all will like it. There is something for all ages.”

  I thank him as usual, hardly listening, since Disney World is the last place on earth I would choose to go.

  But as I look at the moony, fretful children and puzzled silent Ellen lying in the silvery glare of the tube watching cockney Robin Leach and Carson and Hawkeye between her toes with exactly the same dreamy, unfocused expression, the thought occurs to me: Why not?

  As it turns out, it is a splendid idea, and Leroy is right: Disney World is for all ages.

  We find ourselves in the Bluebird parked in Fort Wilderness Resort next to the Magic Kingdom. Fort Wilderness is a pleasant wooded campground with hookups for motor homes. Our campsite is on Jack Rabbit Run.

  The Bluebird is a marvel. It cost Leroy over a hundred thousand dollars secondhand, and he’s spent another ten on it. He lives in a room over the Little Napoleon. It is like giving me his house.

  We go spinning along the Gulf Coast in the fine October light as easily as driving a Corvette, but sitting high and silent as astronauts. The children are enchanted. They spend days exploring the shiplike craft, opening bunks, taking showers, folding out tables and dinettes, working the sound system and control panel and the map locator, which shows us as a bright dot creeping along I-75.

  The four-speaker stereo picks up the Pastoral symphony. We’re a boat humming along Beethoven’s brook. I would be happy, but Ellen, in the co-pilot seat, is still abstracted, brows knitted in puzzlement. I take a nip of Early Times both in celebration and for worry.

  Ellen gets better the second night out in a KOA campground in the pine barrens.

  While I’m hooking up, figuring out where the plugs go, Ellen disappears.

  Oh, my God. But the kids are not worried. They’ve already found the playground. Neighbors come ambling over, offering a beer, inspecting the Bluebird. They think Meg and Tom are my grandchildren. They show me pictures of theirs. The American road is designed for children and grandparents. Oh, my God, where is Ellen? Have a drink. I have a drink, three drinks. Nobody else is worried. Neighbors assure me she has gone to the commissary.

  She has. She’s back with groceries. No more Big Macs and Popeyes chicken.

  Now in the violet October light after sunset, the air fragrant with briquet and mesquite smoke perfumed by lighter fluid, there is Ellen at the tiny galley cooking red beans and rice, not my favorite boudin sausage but Jimmy Dean sausage and—humming!

  I do not dare signify to her that anything is different, let alone approach her from the rear, as I used to. Instead, in celebration and gratitude I step outside in the violet dusk and take three nips like a country man.

  We sleep aft in a kind of observation bedroom—Meg has discovered how to slide back the roof, making a bubble under the stars—the kids amidships in complex fold-out astronaut pods. The bed is king-size, bigger than Sears Best. I am having bouts of nervousness and so take a nip for each bout. To keep the key low—no grand epiphanies, thank you—I turn on the tube. Leroy’s stereo-V is a pull-down screen big as a movie. There’s Hawkeye and Trapper John back in Korea. I never did like those guys. They fancied themselves super-decent and supertolerant, but actually had no use for anyone who was not exactly like them. What they were was super-pleased with themselves. In truth, they were the real bigots, and phony at that. I always preferred Frank Burns, the stuffy, unpopular doc, a sincere bigot.

  But if Ellen likes them—

  But Ellen turns them off.

  There we lie in the Florida barrens in a bubble of a spaceship as close to the stars as Voyager V, I not quite drunk but laid out straight as an arrow, feet sticking up, hands at my side, eyes on Orion.

  She too.

  Presently her hand comes down lightly on my thigh, stays there.

  “Okay then,” says Ellen.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “I—good.”

  “Sure.”

  “Soon—better.”

  “Right.”

  Ellen is still too stoned on sodium ions to talk right.

  I am too drunk for too long to make love.

  But it’s all right. Soon she’ll talk better and I won’t have to drink.

  Disney World is indeed splendid—though I could not stand more than one hour of it.

  After one day of the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Mickey and Goofy, Spaceship Earth, the World of Motion, the Living Seas, I take to the woods.

  The children love it. Ellen seems to like it in an o
dd, dreamy way. Tommy and Margaret are the only kids around—everybody else is in school. They’re laid out, paralyzed by delight, when they shake hands with Mickey and Goofy (though they don’t really know who Mickey Mouse is).

  But it is splendid. The kids run free and safe, catch the tram, launch, monorail, quasi-paddle-wheeler in a quasi-river, go where they please.

  Ellen makes friends with other ladies in Jack Rabbit Run, plays some bridge, not too well, no better than they.

  We’re there a week.

  I am quite happy sitting in our private little copse in Fort Wilderness reading Stedmann’s History of World War I. A little vista affords a view of the great sphere of spaceship earth and the top of the minaretlike tower of Cinderella’s Castle.

  It is easy to make friends. Sometimes I catch the Conestoga tram up to Trail Blaze Corral or down to the Ole Fishing Hole. Though we are hedged off from our neighbors by a brake of cypress, pine and palmetto, they are only a few feet away. A haze of perfumed briquet smoke, friendly talk, laughter enlists us in a community of back yards.

  We meet on the tram or strolling about Jack Rabbit Run or Sunny Sage Way or Quail Trail.

  Most of my neighbors are from Canada or Ohio. They are very pleasant fellows, mostly retirees who have done well and are cruising America in their Bluebirds and Winnebagos and Fleetwoods. The Ohioans are recognizable by their accents, not their license plates, which are mostly Florida, for they have settled down in places like Lakeland or Fort Myers or Deerfield Beach and have hopped over for a few days.

  Native Floridians look down their noses at the Ohioans. The saying is: An Ohioan arrives with a shirt and a five-dollar bill and never changes either. But it isn’t true. My Ohio neighbors in Jack Rabbit Run couldn’t be nicer. It is quickly evident that I know nothing about motor homes and they spend a great deal of time demonstrating electrical and sewerage hookups and even the features of my own Bluebird, which they know better than I (they marvel at the modifications Leroy has made, especially the map locator).

  The Canadians are as affable but standoffish—though not as shy as the English.

  But both, Canadians and Ohioans, are amiable, gregarious, helpful—and at something of a loss. Here they are, to enjoy the rewards of a lifetime of work, to escape children and grandchildren, and they have. They stand about nodding and smiling, but looking somewhat zapped.

  Ellen gets along splendidly with them too. She talks to the women by the hour, especially the Canadians, about the queen of England and Princess Di. Like many American women, she loves British royalty even more than the Brits.

  Their expressions are fond and stunned.

  The Ohioans looked zapped but keep busy.

  The Canadians looked zapped but also wistful.

  Every time I talk to a Canadian, either he will get around to asking me what I think of Canada or I will know that he wants to.

  I realize that I do not have many thoughts about Canada. Reading Stedmann, who mentions the heroic role the Canadians played in World War I, I realize a curious fact about Canadians: When you hear the word Canada or Canadians, nothing much comes to mind—unlike hearing the words Frenchman or Englishman or Chinese or Spaniard—or Yankee. I realize this is an advantage. The Canadian is still free, has not yet been ossified by his word. (Why am I beginning to think like Father Smith?)

  I read Stedmann about the Battles of the Somme and Verdun for a while, then step out into my tiny plantation fragrant with hot palmetto palms—it is like summer here—walk over to Quail Trail, and have a Coke with my amiable, stunned neighbors.

  Like my cellmates at Fort Pelham and unlike folks at home, they want to talk about current events, politics, Communism, Democrats, Negroes (their word), terrorists, and such.

  I listen attentively and with interest.

  After reading Stedmann in the Bluebird and stepping out into the fragrant Florida sunshine and discussing current events with my knowledgeable, up-to-date neighbors, who even with their knowledgeability—unlike me they’re up to date—still look fond and stunned even as they speak, I experience the sensation that the world really ended in 1916 and that we’ve been living in a dream ever since. These good fellows have spent their entire lives working, raising families, fighting Nazis, worrying about Communism, yet they’ve really been zapped by something else. We haven’t been zapped by the Nazis and the Communists. On the contrary. It is a pleasure to fight one, worry about the other, and talk about both.

  We stand about in the Florida sunshine of Jack Rabbit Run, under the minaret of Cinderella’s Castle, they fresh from the wonders of Tomorrowland—Tomorrowland!—We don’t even know what Todayland is!—fond, talkative, informative, and stunned, knocked in the head, like dreamwalkers in a moonscape.

  Ellen wants to stay on the road, head for Wyoming and Jenny Lake in Jackson Hole. But I have to get back to testify in the trial of John Van Dorn and company. We’ll go later.

  3. VAN DORN AND HIS STAFF were not convicted of child abuse, after all. The presence of heavy sodium in their bloodstreams (they’d been taking a cocktail now and then for one reason and another) compromised the case against them. In a plea-bargain agreement with the district attorney they were confined to the State Forensic Hospital in Jackson until their bizarre symptoms and behavior abated, whereupon they were paroled into the custody of Sheriff Vernon “Cooter” Sharp and sentenced to five years of community service. Sheriff Sharp, after consulting with me and Max, assigned them to St. Margaret’s Hospice.

  Meanwhile, Father Smith had come down from his fire tower and the hospice was reopened.

  Mr. and Mrs. Brunette were assigned to the Alzheimer’s patients, old addled folk who could not take care of themselves and in whom no one, not even the Brunettes, could take the slightest sexual interest. It was a hunch, mine and Father Smith’s, and it paid off. The Brunettes went to work willingly and in good heart. Father Smith says they are a caring couple. What he actually said was: “Paroled murderers are the most trustworthy aides but sex offenders and child abusers are also excellent, once occasions of sin are removed.”

  Mrs. Cheney works as a nurse’s aide in a ward of malformed infants, formerly candidates for pedeuthanasia. An excellent babysitter for twenty years—I so testified—she was and is never otherwise than her old motherly and solicitous self toward the children. And even though she persisted for some weeks in her odd rearward presenting behavior as the effects of the sodium ions wore off, there was no one to present to on the children’s ward.

  Coach also found his talents put to good use. He was assigned to the AIDS wing, which housed not only dying adult patients but also, in a separate cottage, a little colony of LAV-positive children, that is, children who harbored the virus but were not sick. Neither I nor any other physician considered them a threat, but since federal law requires quarantine, what to do with them? Coach did plenty. He is, after all, an excellent coach. His sexual preferences were no problem. The dying adults were too weak to bother him, and he was too terrified to bother them. In a word, he was good with them, didn’t have to feign sympathy, was willing to talk and listen. He organized card games, skits, and sing-alongs. But the children were the challenge. He formed a soccer team which, since soccer is not a contact sport, was eligible for Little League competition. His Jolly Rogers (smiling death’s-head insignia) are undefeated, have every prospect of winning the league and being invited to the Special Olympics in San Francisco.

  Van Dorn, however, was a difficult case. He did not recover as rapidly as the others. Perhaps he ingested a more massive dose of sodium additive and suffered brain damage.

  Anyhow, he had to be detained in the Forensic Hospital. When anyone approached, he would at first rattle the bars, roar, and thump his chest. Then, after this ruckus, he would knuckle over to the toilet and cower behind it. He became abject. What to do, legally or medically? No statute could be found to fit his case. Nothing in the Louisiana Civil Code seemed applicable. No medical or psychiatric diagnosis could be arrived at.
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br />   What to do with Van Dorn?

  Months passed. Van Dorn gave up roaring and thumping, instead knuckled across his cell, crouched behind the toilet, and gave up eating.

  I had an idea. It came to me by luck and happenstance—like most good scientific ideas.

  It came to me one day while I was making my weekly visit to the Tulane Primate Center, where I earn a few needed dollars—my practice having gone to pot—by doing CORTscans on the primates housed therein. It is part of an FDA program to test for toxic side effects of new drugs on brain function.

  The director, Dr. Rumsen “Rummy” Gordon, old friend and classmate, was showing me around the place, a pleasant compound of piney woods and oak groves which housed colonies of rhesus monkeys, chimps, orangutans, and a single gorilla.

  The gorilla, a morose female named Eve, was a special case. She was the last of the so-called talking apes, the famous chimps and gorillas who were supposed to have learned sign language but had been given up on and so had lapsed from fame to obscurity. It was not clear whether they had learned sign language after all, or whether, if they had, they had grown weary of it, even abusive, and stopped talking, and their teachers weary of them. At any rate, in the end for lack of funding these world-famous apes were either packed off to zoos or to the wilds of Zaire, where, it was hoped, they might be accepted by their native cousins.

  Only Eve remained, and only Rummy Gordon persisted in his conviction that apes could be taught sign language—not merely to signal simpleminded needs like Tickle Eve, Eve want banana, Eve want out, Rummy come play—but to learn to tell stories, crack jokes, teach language to their young, and so on.

  But Eve, like the others, fell silent, no longer greeted Rummy with a happy hopping up and down and a flurry of signs, and took to her bower in the low crotch of a live oak.

  “She won’t sign, not even for bananas,” sighs the disconsolate Rummy as we gaze up at Eve, supine and listless on her bed of bamboo leaves, one arm trailing down, one leg sticking straight up, for all the world like a catatonic patient on a closed ward. “In fact, she won’t eat bananas, period.”