The Thanatos Syndrome

and an O, then a series of X’s with an occasional O.
    â€œThat’s fine, Mickey. Now I want you to come along with me and we’ll—”
    Before I get any further, she has obediently folded back the covers and swung her legs out without, I notice, taking the universal woman’s precaution of minding her gown, which rides up her not thin thighs.
    â€œJust a moment, Mickey. I’ll get you a wheelchair.”
    I become aware of a silence behind me, a silence, I realize, which has gone on for some time.
    I turn. Lucy Lipscomb has come out of her curtained-off bed-room. I thought at first it was to give me a hand.
    â€œHello, Tom.” She smiles, then hesitates, mouth open, as if she wanted to tell me something.
    â€œLucy.”
    â€œCould I have a word with you?” She is not smiling. “Wait a minute.” She peels off her gloves and goes into the bathroom.
    I haven’t seen her for a year or so. She’s better-looking. Perhaps it’s the gleaming white coat, so starched that it rustles with every movement, against her dark skin. Perhaps she’s lost weight. Perhaps it’s the way her haircut doesn’t look butch anymore. She used to cut it herself, I thought. It was as rough-cut as a farmer’s—she is a farmer as well as a doctor. But instead of looking like a Buster Brown, it looks French, straight dark bangs come down her forehead at angles. No butch she. There is a reflex hammer and an ophthalmoscope in her breast pocket.
    â€œSorry about the ward conditions, Tom.”
    â€œIt didn’t matter.”
    â€œI noticed that. It seems you have an audience, or rather an onlooker.” She speaks in an easy but guarded voice, looking over my shoulder.
    â€œWho? Oh.” I turn around. Across the tiny quadrangle, still holding the steel chart in both hands, Bob Comeaux is looking straight at me.
    â€œYeah. He’s waiting to see me when I finish.”
    â€œHm. So it seems. Could I also?”
    â€œAlso what?”
    â€œHave a word with you.”
    â€œSure.”
    Mickey is thrashing impatiently. Lucy is spoiling her game.
    I’m out the door and down the hall, looking for a wheelchair for Mickey.
    â€œDoctor!” A sharp peremptory un-Southern man’s voice. “Just hold it right there.”
    It’s Bob Comeaux, with Sue Brown holding a chart. He’s angry, I see at once, so angry that he’s past prudence, to the point of showing his anger toward another doctor in the presence of a nurse—which for a doctor is angry indeed. He’s lost his temper. His nostrils flare and have actually whitened where they join the lip. Sue Brown gives me a frightened smile.
    Bob Comeaux is not smiling. His eyes are up in his eyebrows, mouth tight like a chief of surgery on grand rounds.
    â€œDoctor, would you mind stepping over here?” We walk back, past the open door of the room, presumably to get a little away from Sue Brown. We don’t want a nurse to see doctors fight. But Sue Brown has vanished into thin air. For a split second I am aware of Lucy through the doorway, standing still, her brown eyes rounded.
    Bob Comeaux and I find ourselves standing side by side, backed against the wall, hands in pockets, looking down at our toes in a studious exercise of control, of not facing each other, not confronting, not yelling, not fistfighting. We could be a couple of horsy docs discussing the hunter-jumper show. I notice that his field boots are muddy. He’s wearing short spurs. I remember wondering at that very moment if his coming to the hospital in riding clothes is simply a matter of convenience or whether it is more than that.
    â€œDoctor, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” asks Bob Comeaux pleasantly, smiling—white around the mouth with rage—down at his boots.
    â€œI was doing the consultation on Mickey you asked for.”
    â€œI saw what you were doing.”
    â€œYou did?”
    â€œYou ran a Tauber test, then some Luria X’s and O’s. I saw you.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œWhat the fuck for?”
    â€œI—”
    â€œAnd you were about to wheel her out.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhere were you taking her?”
    â€œDown to get a PETscan. That’s the best I can do in this hospital. You must have seen the order on the chart.”
    â€œI sure as hell did. But to what end, for Christ’s sake?”—smiling, taking a deep