The Thanatos Syndrome

the siege of Poitiers was lifted? How do you think Lucca was saved from the Black Plague in the fourteenth century?”
    Hm. Poitiers? Lucca? Nobody knows how they were saved. The Desert Fathers. The other ladies are floored. But not for long. “I still say—” tolls Ernestine, her voice a soft little bell.
    Father Placide is back. “Sorry, Doc. Another dharma bum. Trying to get out to California. Looking for a handout. One more thing, Doc—”
    â€œLook, Father,” I say, lowering my voice, “I think those ladies are waiting for you to run the meeting. Hadn’t you better—”
    Father Placide laughs. “You kidding, cher ?” For once he does lean close and almost whisper. “Me run that gang? I don’t tell them. They tell me.”
    â€œWell—” I stand up. “I have to see Father Smith.”
    â€œGood luck, ma fren ,” says Father Placide, shaking hands, hollow-eyed but merry. “Tell Simon to phone home.” He laughs. Tired as he is, he doesn’t seem to bear a grudge.
    â€œI will.”
    Dan—yes, that’s his name—looks up from his index cards as I pass and addresses not me, it seems, but there’s no one else in the hall.
    â€œWhy make it complicated?” he says, not quite to me and not quite as a question. “It’s just a cop-out. There is such a thing. He quit, period. Who wouldn’t like to quit and take to the woods? But somebody has to do the scut work. Some people—” he says vaguely, and goes back to spinning his Rolodex.
    â€œRight,” I say as vaguely as I close the door.

6. THE FIRE-TOWER ROAD winds through a longleaf-pine forest to a gentle knoll perhaps fifty feet above the surrounding countryside. Beyond, fronting a meadow, stretches a spacious low building with a small central steeple, which looks stuck on, and far-flung brick wings. The building looks deserted. The meadow is overgrown. Half a dozen Holstein cows graze, all facing away from the bright afternoon sun.
    There is a single metal utility shed straddled by the legs of the tower, fitted with two aluminum windows. A chimney pipe of bluish metal sticks through the roof.
    Not a soul is in sight. I roll down the Caprice window and listen. There is no sound, not even cicadas. No breeze stirs the pines, which glitter in the sunlight like steel knitting needles.
    Getting out, I walk backward, the better to see the tower. It is an old but sturdy structure of braced steel, perhaps a hundred feet tall. The cubicle perched on top looks like a dollhouse. One window is propped open. Shading my eyes against the sun, I yell. My voice is muffled. The air is dense and yellow as butter.
    A bare hand and arm appear at the window. It is not a clear gesture. It could be a greeting or summons or nothing. I will take it that he is waving me up. I climb a dozen steep flights of green wooden steps smelling of paint. Presently the crowns of the longleafs are beside me, then below me. The heavy shook sheaves of needles, each clasping a secret yellow stamen, seem to secrete a dense vapor in which the sunlight refracts.
    Thumbtacked to a post at the foot of the tower are three cards, two ordinary business cards and an old-fashioned holy picture of the Sacred Heart, each with the scribbled note: “Thanks for favors granted.” On the metal upright of the tower I notice several penciled crosses, like the plus signs a child would make.
    The stairs run smack into the floor of the tiny house. The trapdoor is open. Father Smith gives me a hand.
    I haven’t seen him in months. We were both in Alabama, he almost next door on the Gulf Coast at a place named Hope Haven for impaired priests, mostly drunks. I used to attend his Mass, not for religious reasons, but to get away from Fort Pelham, the golf course, the tin-roofed rec hall, the political arguments, and the eternal stereo-V.
    He has aged. He still looks like an old Ricardo Montalban with a handsome seamed face as tanned as cordovan leather, hair like Brillo, and the same hairy futbol wrists. His chest is a barrel suspended by tendons in his neck. Emphysema. As he pulls me up past him, his breath has an old-man’s-nose smell. But he is freshly shaven and wears a clean polo shirt, unpressed chinos, and old-fashioned sneakers.
    He is different. It comes to me that the difference is that he is unsmiling and puzzled. He inclines his head to the tiny room. The gesture is not