The Thanatos Syndrome

know sign language, let lone Ameslan.” Ameslan is the special sign vocabulary apes are taught.
    â€œThat’s the point,” I say, watching him. I think I’ve got him.
    â€œOh. You mean—” He’s got it! His eyes are alight. “She teaches him!”
    He’s got it: she teaches him!
    â€œIt hasn’t been done before, not even ape teaching ape, has it? Isn’t that the big breakthrough you’ve been trying for? Wouldn’t it prove your detractors wrong once and for all?”
    He’s tapping his lips, casting ahead. I’ve got him. “Why not,” he says finally. “We could put a metal hut in there in case he doesn’t take to the bower. He might even get her into the hut,” he muses.
    Why not?
    To make a long story short, he did it. They did it. Van Dorn joined Eve in her idyllic ranchette. After a good deal of wary knuckling and circling, baring of teeth, they made friends. For of course mountain gorillas, the species Gorilla gorilla, are gentle creatures despite the chest thumping and roaring, which are mainly for sexual display by males and for scaring off predators. And Van Dorn was no predator. Eve smacked her lips, a good sign. Presenting often follows. They, Eve and Van Dorn, spent the brisk fall days playing, romping about the compound, or taking long siestas in the live oak. She gave him a hand up to the crotch. On chilly nights she allowed herself to be led into the hut, which she converted to a proper bower by weaving bamboo shoots over it. They were observed signing to each other in Ameslan, the sign language of the deaf, Eve signing first, Van Dorn watching closely, then venturing a tentative sign in return.
    It lasted two months—in a word, until Van Dorn recovered. Having recovered his humanity, become his old self, his charming, grandiose, slightly phony Confederate self, he summoned Rummy Gordon in ordinary Mississippi English and expressed his desire to rejoin his own kind, was released to Sheriff Sharp, examined, found competent to stand trial, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to Angola for ten years.
    As resilient as ever, however, he was soon running the prison library, giving bridge lessons, and writing a book. My Life and Love with Eve was an immediate and sensational best seller, serialized with photos in Penthouse and eventually made into a six-hour mini-series for stereo-V, the Playboy channel. It made such a hit with the Louisiana governor that he pardoned Van Dorn, who has since been busy on the talk-show circuit and making appearances on the Donahue show, often with Dr. Ruth.
    Dr. Rumsen Gordon prospered as well. He wrote a landmark scientific paper, “The Interspecies Acquisition of Ameslan Small Talk by an Na-24 Intoxicated Homo sapiens sapiens from a Gorilla gorilla,” which became celebrated in academic circles and led to his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at Yale at twice his former salary.
    Eve did not fare as well. Having lapsed into silence upon Van Dorn’s departure, she was returned to Zaire, where it was hoped she would be accepted by other mountain gorillas, who, however, were members of an endangered species on the verge of extinction. She was last seen squatting alone on a riverbank, shunned by man and gorilla alike.

4. BOB COMEAUX AND MAX AND I reached a gentleman’s agreement. Instead of turning Bob over to the Justice Department for prosecution for defrauding the federal government, specifically in his misuse of both discretionary NIH funds and Ford Foundation grants, we suggested that it might be in his interest to stay long enough to dismantle the sodium shunt and to divert next year’s funds to St. Margaret’s Hospice—and then to leave town. Max, who knows everybody, made friendly telephone calls to the directors of both NIH and ACMUI and let drop not even a hint but only an intimation that even though they were not legally responsible for the Blue Boy pilot, it might be prudent—politics being politics, and we know about politicians, right, Doctors?—not only to dismantle the sodium shunt for environmental reasons but to terminate the local Qualitar?an Center at Fedville—for fiscal reasons.
    The center was closed, quietly. Bob Comeaux left town even more quietly. I have not heard from him. There are rumors. Some say that he returned to Long Island City, resumed the family name Como—Huguenots being in short supply in