The Thanatos Syndrome

her. Not hearing her chair scrape, I am startled when at the very moment I turn around, I run into her. She has come around my desk, barefoot and silent. She backs into me.
    â€œOh, sorry,” I say automatically, moving sideways to my chair, but she has already reached behind her, seized my hands, brought them around her clasped in hers and against her. She presses the figurine in my hand against her body.
    â€œWhat’s this about, Donna?”
    By way of answer, she cranes her head back into my neck and begins turning to and fro. I begin to free my hands. She tightens her grip. “You know.”
    â€œKnow what?”
    â€œDonna needs you.”
    â€œNo, Donna doesn’t. We’ve been through all that, remember? First the hatred, then the love, neither of which had anything to do with me. We got past it, remember?”
    She’s turning to and fro. “I always liked to smell you. You in your seersuckers, not young not old, but like—?”
    â€œLike Atticus?”
    â€œYeah.” She nods but is not heeding.
    She is engaging me, so to speak. To describe her backward embrace, I can only use the word primatologists use, presenting. She was presenting rearward. Enough of this. What probably saved me from the erotic power of her move was its suddenness and oddness.
    She reaches back for me, clasping her hands at the back of my neck.
    â€œYou smell like—”
    â€œLike your father?”
    That did it. As suddenly as she started, she stops and goes stiff.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I tell her, and turn her, not to face me, but to get her back to her chair with minimal embarrassment. She is not embarrassed. But her face is heavy and lengthened, mouth pulled down like a sulky child.
    â€œIt’s okay, Donna.”
    â€œOkay.” She’s not badly put off.
    I look at her for a while. Something crosses my mind.
    â€œDonna, do you wish to come back next week?”
    â€œYes.” An ordinary, perfunctory yes.
    â€œAll right. You come back. Meet me at the hospital. Same time. I want to run a few tests on you. Okay?”
    â€œOkay.”
    She’s up and off, swinging her bag, as carelessly as she came.
    It is only after she’s left that I discover I’ve broken out in a sweat. There’s this business about seductive patients, known even to Hippocrates, and no credit to the physician—consider old funny-looking Hippocrates, who probably smelled stronger than I or Atticus Finch. But seductive is seductive, more or less, sometimes more than less. Ahem. What to do. One thing to do is open lower right desk drawer, remove fifth of Jack Daniel’s from where it’s been for two years, still half full and two years older, pour four fingers into a water glass, knock back. Ahem. That’s better.

4. IS THERE A COMMONALITY between these two cases? Have I been away so long and lived so strangely that everyone else seems strange? No, there’s something wrong with these women. And with Frank Macon. Two cases are too few even to suggest a syndrome, but I am struck by certain likenesses … In each there has occurred a sloughing away of the old terrors, worries, rages, a shedding of guilt like last year’s snakeskin, and in its place is a mild fond vacancy, a species of unfocused animal good spirits. Then are they, my patients, not better rather than worse? The answer is unclear. They’re not on medication. They are not hurting, they are not worrying the same old bone, but there is something missing, not merely the old terrors, but a sense in each of her—her what? her self? The main objective clue so far is language. Neither needs a context to talk or answer. They utter short two-word sentences. They remind me of the chimp Lana, who would happily answer any question any time with a sign or two to get her banana. Both women will answer a question like Where is Chicago? agreeably and instantly and by consulting, so to speak, their own built-in computer readouts. You wouldn’t. You’d want to know why I wanted to know. You’d want to relate the question to your—self.
    I’m sitting on the porch again, not sailing airplanes but musing and keeping one eye on my watch—I have to meet Max and Bob, my “ parole officers,” at two—when suddenly I get a flash. Well, not quite a flash, but a notion. Could it be that—
    Could it be that there has occurred in both Mickey and Donna some odd