The Thanatos Syndrome

have to listen to that damn duck call another day, and then about Rommel and Patton and Buck Van Dorn another night, I’m going to shoot him. I’m so glad you’re here! Do you know what he’s done in the fifty years since that war?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNothing. I mean nothing. But shoot birds and animals and blow that duck call. The only thing he’s learned in fifty years is how to do it with your fingers.”
    Upstairs in the hall Lucy hands me a pair of folded blue jeans, a light flannel L. L. Bean shirt, and pajamas. They’re new. The pajamas are still pinned.
    â€œI got these for Uncle Hugh, but they’re too big.” For some reason she blushes.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œGet out of that smelly suit,” she says brusquely, gives the lapel a yank. “I’m going to burn it.”
    There are four rooms upstairs and a wide hall, arranged exactly as below.
    â€œYou stay in here. Did you bring anything?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI thought so. Tch.” She seizes my coat again between thumb and forefinger, gives it a hard tweak, brushes it back like somebody’s mamma. “Look at you. You look like a jailbird. Thin as a rake. I’ll fatten you up.” She begins to close the door. “You knock on my door right there in exactly fifteen minutes. That’s my office.”
    â€œAll right.”
    The door closes. The room is empty of everything but a bed and an armoire, which is empty. Buddy Dupre has been cleaned out, all right.
    I take a shower and put on my new jeans and Bean shirt. In exactly fifteen minutes I knock on her door. “Come in!” comes her cool hospital voice.
    I blink at the fluorescent light. The room could be an office in Fedville. There are desks, data processors, terminals, keyboards, screens, cables, shelves of medical texts and journals, cabinets of discs and cassettes, the whole as brilliantly lit as a laboratory.
    We sit side by side at a large particle-board table bare except for a keyboard, screen, black box, telephone.
    â€œHow do you like it?”
    â€œIt looks expensive.”
    â€œIt is, but it’s mostly federal equipment. As their epidemiologist I rate a terminal.”
    â€œDoes that mean you’re hooked up to—”
    â€œEverything. All networks. To CDC in Atlanta, NIH in D.C., Bureau of the Census, State Department of Health in Baton Rouge, AT & T, GM, Joe Blow, you name it.”
    â€œI see.”
    The fluorescent light is unsuitable. I wish we were having a drink on the gallery.
    â€œI think we have a lead.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    Lucy pushes a button. The room goes dusk dark.
    â€œWell,” I say.
    â€œWe have to wait for our eyes. We have to read the screens.”
    â€œAll right.”
    She has both hands on my arm. “You want to know something?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI think you’re on to something.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œAnd I think we have a lead.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œOkay. Let’s boot up.”
    â€œOkay. What’s the lead?”
    â€œCorrect me, but aren’t the symptoms you describe in your syndrome similar to the findings in your paper about the heavy-sodium accident at Tulane years ago?”
    â€œSomewhat. I’ve thought of that, but—”
    â€œDo you think your syndrome could be a form of heavy-sodium intoxication?”
    â€œIt had occurred to me, but there’s been no accident, no yellow cloud—”
    â€œDid you know that thing over there”—she nods toward Grand Mer—“has a sodium reactor?”
    â€œSure, but there’s been no accident.”
    â€œThey call it an incident. Or an event. Or an unusual occurrence. An incident is worse than an event.”
    â€œBut there’s been no event.”
    She smiles. “How do you know?”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œWould you like to find out?” We’re side by side on a piano bench. She settles herself, straightens her back, touches fingers to keys like a concert pianist getting to work.
    â€œSure.” I am pleased she remembers my paper, my last scientific article written perhaps ten years ago.
    â€œSomething occurs to me.” Now she’s settled back again, tapping fingernail to tooth. “Did you know that when Grand Mer was licensed, the EPA required as a condition of licensure the monitoring of blood levels of heavy sodium in both Feliciana Parish and