The Thanatos Syndrome

about Yugo—about the ah predictions. Very interesting. Well, Father, I really must be—”
    â€œSo don’t worry about it,” says the priest. He has let me go and is absently doing a few calf isometrics, balancing on the ball of one foot, then the other.
    â€œAnd to be specific in your case, Tom.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œDo what you are doing. You are on the right track. Continue with the analysis and treatment of your patients.”
    â€œAll right,” I reply, somewhat ironically, I fear. “But I don’t have many patients.”
    â€œYou will. You are on the right track. I have watched you. Carry on. Keep a good heart.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œI will tell you a secret. You may have a thing or two to add to Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung, as great as they were.”
    â€œThank you.” Did he wink at me?
    We shake hands. He gives me his old firm Ricardo Montalban handshake, turns, throws a punch or two and is gone.

14. SITTING ON THE FRONT PORCH of my office sailing paper P-51s at the martin house.
    A fine warm Louisiana winter day, my best time: the morning sun booming in over the live oak, the air yellow and clear as light, oak leaves glossy, bottle-glass green. Pollen gone. My nose clear as a bell. The white-throated sparrows are back, kicking leaves under the bushes like chickens.
    In the next few minutes I must make a decision and phone Max.
    I must tell him either/or.
    Either take him up on his offer, join him in Mandeville, do group work and divorce facilitation with his aging yuppies, crisis intervention with their stoned-out teenage children. It’s good work and I need the money, but I’d rather do my old-fashioned one-on-one therapy with depressed and terrified people.
    Or take the directorship at the hospice. Low-paying but steady. No one else wants the job. Father Smith had had to be let go after all. In fact, he became a patient. He wanted to go back to the fire tower for good. Max diagnosed Alzheimer’s, pointing out his strange harangues, his memory loss and disconnected speech—more and more now he is given to short gnomic utterances which grow ever more gnomic and disconnected, as if he cannot remember what he said five seconds ago. I disagreed, pointing out that his CORTscans showed no loss of cerebral tissue and his PETscans no loss of cerebral function, and other tests were negative. And he is too old. Alzheimer’s dementia usually sets in in the fifties or sixties. But there was no denying his strange behavior. Perhaps it is presenile dementia. I agreed to co-sign his commitment—on one condition: that he be allowed to stay in the tower as long as he wanted. For he remains quite agile and can scramble up like an old mountain goat. He watches the horizon, mainly in the east, like a hawk, and at the first sign of a smudge he’ll line up his azimuth, call another tower, crisscross his fishing-line coordinates, report the fire as precisely as you please, talk at length and in the peculiar ham lingo to Emmy in the Waldheim tower. He did not object to being committed, seemed quite happy in fact. Max is pleased. Our treatment of Father Smith accorded well with new ideas in geriatrics—which boil down to making the elderly feel useful.
    Only occasionally does he seem confused. Then it is not clear whether he is speaking of locating brushfires or God by signs and coordinates. Milton Guidry looks after him, assists at Mass. But Milton’s emphysema is worse. When he can’t make it up the tower, Father Smith calls me and I substitute—when I can.
    I must make up my mind about the future. We’re in debt. Tuition at the Pentecostal school is high and Ellen has given away all her money to the Baton Rouge evangelist.
    A doctor needs patients to make a living. What happened to the sort of patients I used to see, the lonely-hearts, the solitary aching consciousnesses—they were my kind of people—the fears, the phobias, the depressions? Have these symptoms been knocked out for good by the heavy sodium? Or are they being treated by GPs prescribing pills? Or by pharmacists? In any case, who needs me?
    One good sign. Ellen is back as my secretary-nurse-receptionist.
    She’ll be here any minute. Better go inside. Wouldn’t do to be caught out here sailing P-51s.
    She’s canny, cheerful, businesslike. It’s like the old days, having her back, hearing her nimble voice in the outer office,