The Thanatos Syndrome

a map.”
    â€œDid you say Cut Off?”
    â€œShe’s gone back to Cut Off. I know she saw a doctor there and went to a hospital with symptoms of hypertension.”
    â€œHm,” I give her Donna’s number. “No hospital in Cut Off.”
    â€œTry Golden Meadow.”
    She found Donna in Golden Meadow: Na-24—12.
    â€œWow,” says Lucy.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œGive me another one.”
    â€œLet’s try Frank Macon. You know him. Janitor at Highland Park, should be on employees’ health records. Old friend, ambivalent black, love-hate, we understood each other, very funny and wise about hunting dogs. Now talks like Bryant Gumbel: Have a nice day.”
    â€œNumber? Okay, easy. Got him.”
    Frank: Na-24—7.
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œGive me another one.”
    â€œLet’s try Enrique Busch. Ex-Salvadoran. Married into one of the fourteen families. Probably involved in the death squads. Ferociously anti-Communist and anti-clerical. Now has only two interests: golf and getting his daughter into Gamma sorority.”
    â€œI’ll take the death squads.”
    â€œYou can probably find him at East Feliciana Proctology Clinic. He has intractable large bowel complaints.”
    â€œNo wonder.”
    She gets him.
    Enrique: negative! Nominal! Normal!
    Lucy looks at me. “What does that mean?” She’s more excited than I am.
    I shrug. “Presumably that it’s normal, not a toxic reaction, for a rich Hispanic removed to this country to progress from death squads to golf and sororities.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt means, Lucy, that we’ve got an epidemiological element here and that it’s up your alley and that I want to find it.”
    â€œI know! I know!” Excited, she grabs me, with both hands again, then grabs Hal the computer. “We have to find a pattern. A vector. Another one?”
    â€œWell, here’s Ella Murdoch Smith’s number. Classmate at East Feliciana High, diehard segregationist in the old days, yet intelligent, Ayn Rand type, left town when schools were integrated so her children wouldn’t be ruined, went to Outer Banks of Carolina, lived in a shack, taught school, educated her children, wrote poetry about spindrift and the winter beach. Returned last year, rages and Ayn Rand ideology gone, got menial cleaning job right here at Mitsy, came to me complaining of plots of fellow employees against her, particularly one Fat Alice. My impression: paranoia, until I talked to her supervisor and found out Fat Alice was a robot. My impression: though Fat Alice was programmed to ‘speak,’ Ella couldn’t tell that she was not human. She was responding to Fat Alice’s speech like another robot. No more poems about spindrift.”
    Ella rolls out like a rug on the screen: Na-24—21, C-137—121.
    â€œAre you writing these down?” I ask her.
    â€œHoney, I’m doing better than that. I got them taped right here. If we get enough, we can run them through and see if we can come up with a vector, a commonality.”
    â€œHow many do we need?”
    â€œThe more the better. I’ll tell you what.” She grabs me and gives me a jerk.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGive me a few more, then I’ve got an idea. Tom, we’re missing something. It’s under our noses and we’re missing it!”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWell, let’s see.” I’m looking at my list. “Well, there’s Kev and Debbie. Father Kev Kevin, ex-Jesuit, and Sister Thérèse, ex-Maryknoller, now Debbie Boudreaux. Both radicalized, joined Guatemalan guerrillas, Debbie radical feminist, used to talk about dialoguing, then began to talk tough, about having balls, cojones—now both retired to a sort of commune retreat house in pine trees, marital problems: Kev accusing Debbie of being into Wicca and having out-of-body experiences with a local guru which are not exactly out of body, Debbie accusing Kev of becoming overly active as participant therapist in a gay encounter group—”
    â€œThat’s enough. How do we get a handle on them?”
    â€œTry American Society of Psychotherapists.”
    â€œGot you. Give me the numbers. Okay. Okay. Got them.”
    Kev: zero. Normal!
    Debbie: zero. Normal!
    Lucy: “I’m confused. Talk about flakes. What do you make of them?”
    â€œOne of three things. One,