The Thanatos Syndrome

wrecked fourteenth-century Europe. If you’d been in London in 1350, wouldn’t you have dumped penicillin in the water supply, even if it meant a lot of toxic reactions? Wouldn’t you have quarantined the infected?”
    â€œWhat three plagues are we talking about, Van?”
    He counts them off with big referee arm strokes. “One: crime. We can’t go out in our own streets, Tom. Murder, rape, armed robbery, up eighty percent. We don’t have to tolerate that. Two: teenage suicide and drug abuse, the number-one and -two killers of our youth. Number three: AIDS. Now we’re talking plague, Tom, five million infected, a quarter million dead.
    â€œSo why are you complaining about this pilot project?”
    â€œTom, I have no quarrel with their short-term goals. Every society has the right to protect itself—even if it means temporary loss of civil liberties. But those cowboys—hell, they like what they’re doing, and I think they want to keep on doing it. You want to know what their trouble is?” He leans over me. I can smell breathed bourbon.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGoals, Tom. They have no ultimate goals. They don’t know what in the hell they’re trying to accomplish. They’re treating everything in sight, curing symptoms and wiping out goals. It’s like treating a headache with a lobotomy. Tom, we have to leave the patient human enough to achieve the ultimate goals of being human.”
    â€œWhat are the ultimate goals of being human, Van?” I look at my watch. I’m already sorry I asked. Where is Lucy?
    Now Van is half-sitting on the poker table, swinging a leg, arms folded, at his ease, well-clad and graceful in his coveralls and—yes, exhilarated. He’s nodding, eyes gone fine and faraway.
    â€œI’ll answer that by telling you what I tell the boys and girls out there. Incidentally, it’s no accident, Tom, that since we took over this seg academy, we’ve got the highest SAT scores in the state and the most National Merit scholars. You know what the answer is, Tom, the only answer? Excellence? We give them the tough old European Gymnasium-Hochschule treatment. We work their little asses—”
    â€œRight. Look, Van. I have to find Lucy. We have an appointment—
    â€œSure, sure.” He goes on but we’re moving toward the door.
    We’re walking in the magnolia alley toward the parking lot, Van taking measured steps, sauntering planter-style, hands in pockets, gazing down at the fine pea gravel. No sign of Lucy.
    â€œTom, would you like to hear my own private theory of the nature of man?”
    The nature of man. I can’t stand theories about the nature of man. I’d rather listen to Robin Leach and watch Barnaby Jones.
    â€œWell, actually I think we’d better track down Lucy—”
    But he’s got going on his theory of the nature of man. It has something to do with science and sexuality, how the highest achievements of man, Mozart’s music, Einstein’s theory, derive from sexual energy, and so on. “Didn’t old Dr. Freud say it?” he says triumphantly, stopping me and swinging around to face me.
    â€œWell, not exactly—”
    There are times when you can’t listen to someone utter another sentence. This is one of them. Even shrinks run out of patience. Where is Lucy? I find myself looking attentive, either by frowning down at the pea gravel and presenting an ear or by maintaining a lively understanding eye contact meanwhile shifting around a bit so I can catch sight of Lucy, who, I calculate, should appear just beyond Van Dorn’s ear.
    Van Dorn is saying something about Don Giovanni, not the opera but the old Don himself being, in his opinion, a member of this company of sexual geniuses. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
    â€œActually—” I catch sight of Lucy behind the boxwood. She’s converging on the alley from the service drive. I do not at first see the children but then, just above the hedge, two heads bob. She’s in a hurry. She doesn’t see me.
    Van Dorn is talking but I’m not listening. I’m watching Lucy. There is something odd—She is perhaps two hundred yards away and could easily see us but she doesn’t look. Her eyes are straight ahead. She walks with a curious stiff rapid gait.
    â€œOne thing,” I interrupt Van Dorn.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œYou didn’t know that Ellen had