The Thanatos Syndrome

Queens—and is running a Planned Parenthood clinic on Queens Boulevard.
    He bears me no malice. In fact, the last time I saw him, in the A&P parking lot, where he’d had to park to get to the post office because his Mercedes was pulling a two-horse trailer, he greeted me in his old style, with knowing looks right and left as if he meant to share a secret. The secret was that he’d been invited to the People’s Republic of China to serve as consultant to the minister for family planning, who wanted to enlist his expertise in the humane disposal of newborn second children—Chinese families being limited, as everyone knows, to one child.
    â€œYou want to know something, old buddy,” says Bob Comeaux, hitching up his pants, hiking one foot on the bumper of the horse trailer just below the long gray tails of two splendid Arabians. He hawks and spits, adjusts his crotch, casting an eye about, Louisiana style.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou and I may have had our little disagreements, like Churchill and Roosevelt, but we were always after the same thing.”
    â€œWe were?”
    â€œSure. Helping folks. Our disagreement was in tactics, not goals.”
    â€œIt was?”
    â€œYou always did have a genius for the one-on-one doctor-patient relationship—for helping the individual—and you were right—especially about Van Dorn and that gang of fags and child abusers—for which I salute you.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œBut I was right about the long haul, the ultimate goal, as you must admit.”
    â€œI must?”
    â€œWe were after the same thing, the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number. We were not a bad team, Tom. Between us we had it all. We each supplied the other’s defect.”
    â€œWe did?”
    â€œSure.” He pats the round rump of an Arabian, and his eyes go fond and unfocused. “We’ve never argued about the one great medical goal we shared. And you still can’t argue.” His eyes almost come back to mine.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œArgue with the proposition that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”
    â€œI—”
    â€œYou want to know the truth,” he says suddenly, giving me a sly sideways look.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou and I are more alike than most folks think.”
    â€œWe are?”
    â€œSure—and you damn well know it. The only difference between us is that you’re the proper Southern gent who knows how to act and I’m the low-class Yankee who does all these bad things like killing innocent babies and messing with your Southern Way of Life by putting secret stuff in the water, right? What people don’t know but what you and I know is that we’re both after the same thing—such as reducing the suffering in the world and making criminals behave themselves. And here’s the thing, old buddy”—he is smiling, coming close, but his eyes are narrow—“and you know it and I know it: You can’t give me one good reason why what I am doing is wrong. The only difference between us is that you’re in good taste and I’m not. You have style and know how to act, and I don’t. But you don’t have one good reason—” He breaks off, hawks, eyes going away in his new-found Southern style. He smiles. “You all right, Doc.”
    â€œI—” I begin, but he’s gone.

5. TWO GREAT HAPPENINGS to Lucy Lipscomb within the month. Exxon brought in a gas well at Pantherburn and her ex-husband, Buddy Dupre, divorced his second wife and came home.
    Acquitted of charges of grand theft and malfeasance in office by the Baton Rouge grand jury, mostly Cajuns, he returned to Feliciana exonerated and something of a hero. He is said to have political ambitions. Many friends, he reports, have urged him to seek higher office. What with his extended family—he’s kin to half of south Louisiana—and Lucy’s high-Protestant connections in Feliciana and his own advocacy of a “scientific creationism” law in the legislature—which helped him in Baptist north Louisiana—he has a political base broad enough to run for governor. And now Lucy has the money. Louisianians, moreover, have a fondness for politicians who beat