The Thanatos Syndrome

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.
    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.
    â€œShe 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.”
    â€œRummy, I’ve got an idea.”
    He thinks I’m joking at first. “Cut it out, Tom,” he says with a wan smile. “I’m serious.”
    â€œSo am I. Look. This is a lovely spot and enclosed—you’d be taking no chances.” It is a lovely spot, a half acre of live oaks and pines, and even a brooklet. If it were listed by any realtor in Feliciana, it would be called a ranchette and go for at least $300,000.
    â€œYou’ve got to be kidding—” But I see he’s taking it seriously. “How do you know they would get along. She could kill him. Eve weighs in at about 250.”
    â€œI have a hunch, Rummy. A strong hunch. I think it would work. To be on the safe side, we’ll watch them at first.”
    â€œMy God.” But he’s thinking. “Let me look into the insurance.” He’s shaking his head. “No way.”
    In the end he’s convinced by a single argument: It’s his only chance to revive Eve’s language. I know his weak spot. “Don’t you see, Rummy? As Van Dorn recovers, they can communicate.”
    â€œHow? He doesn’t