The Thanatos Syndrome

here with a problem. You might be able to help.”
    â€œLet’s have it, Ace.”
    I summarize Ella’s complaint.
    Bubba speaks at some length.
    â€œThanks, Bubba. I’ll get back to you.”
    I hang up and take a look at Ella. She’s got one leg crossed over the other, is frowning mightily at her thigh, squeezing it from the bottom to make the top, which is somewhat quilted, tight. She plucks something on her skin.
    â€œElla,” I say.
    â€œYes?” she says, looking up with mild interest.
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me that Fat Alice is FA413-T, a rather low-grade robot which vacuums the floor and monitors the room air for particles?”
    â€œSo what?” cries Ella. “She still got me cornered and broke my arm and subjected me to radiation poisoning.”
    â€œElla, you were not even in the primary coolant unit. You worked in the secondary unit with non-radioactive sodium.”
    â€œShe still pushed me!”
    â€œElla, listen. You’ve got your job back if you want it. What is more, you’ve been promoted. You are now Fat Alice’s superior.” What Bubba told me was that Ella, whose job was hardly more demanding than Fat Alice’s—reading dials and noting molar concentrations of chemicals—could now periodically remove Alice’s software cassette and run it through the magnetic cleaner. “Do you want your job back?”
    Ella claps her hands. “Wow,” she says, and starts around the desk. “You were always my bud.”
    â€œOkay, hold it, Ella. I want to show you something.”
    An idea occurs to me just in time, and I get a book and hold the book between me and Ella. “I want you to look at something.”
    â€œAnything, Doc! Anything at all.”
    The book is Feliciana Farewell , her gift of three years ago, the yearbook and our year. I open it to the group picture of our class, only twenty or so boys and girls standing in a tight little trapezoid, each with the fixed, self-obsessed expression of high school seniors. The world lies ahead, the expression says, and who am I?
    It is by way of being a quick study, a little test, as crude and inconclusive as palpating an abdomen for liver cancer.
    I’ve used it before. Most people, I daresay nearly all “normal” people, will seek out themselves in the photograph, usually covertly, but I can watch their eye movements. As a matter of fact, there is a laser device which can track and print out the eye movements until the eye settles on its prey. Which is me? How do I look? People are generally self-conscious, either shy or vain, like General Jeb Stuart, whose last words were “How do I look in the face?”
    I wish I had my Mackworth head camera, which actually traces out eye movements. I need the records.
    The point of the test, of course, is that self-consciousness implies that there is a self.
    The book is open under my chin, facing her, her eyes on the book, my eyes on her eyes. They are looking at the picture, yes; focused? perhaps; interested? mildly. But there is no seeking herself out. A laser trace would show not a zigzag, cat chasing mouse of self, but a fond little moseying, cow-grazing. Maybe she’s looking for me.
    â€œOkay, Ella,” I say, closing the book and putting it on the shelf. “You’ve got your job back and been promoted. You come back here next week after work.” I don’t have to ask her. I want a tracing, medical evidence.
    â€œOh boy.” She claps her hands. “Thanks, Doc. Wait till I tell Mel.”
    â€œAll right.”
    C ASE H ISTORY #3
    Here come Kev Kevin and Debbie Boudreaux, old friends, patients now, married couple: Kev, an ex-Jesuit; Debbie, an ex-Maryknoll nun.
    They’ve had their troubles. I see them for marriage counseling. I don’t do much of that, but they are old friends.
    The trouble is that Debbie, who had taken over her father’s Oldsmobile agency in New Orleans, was quite competent and happy as the young woman executive, named Woman of the Year by the C. of C., in fact, as happy as she had been as Sister Thérèse teaching at the Ortega Institute in Managua. But Kev was unhappy as personnel director of Boudreaux Olds, even though there had been every reason to expect that his experience as counselor at the Love Clinic at Fedville should stand him in good stead in dealing with salesmen and servicemen.
    This dispute was acrimonious. They fought