The Thanatos Syndrome

tolling of our church bells, but a high-pitched crystalline sound, eine Klingel, yes, almost a tinkling.
    We were hiking out of Waldkirch in the Schwarzwald. Though we had just met, we were both from the South, she from Montgomery, far from home and lonely, a girl named Alice Pratt. This was before young Americans bummed around Europe free and easy, sleeping in tents and hostels. We both wanted the same thing, to touch, laugh, be easy with each other, kiss perhaps—who knows!—even love! Yet we were shy and didn’t know what to do. What to do? What to say? We made conversation. We thought of things to say. We spoke of mutual friends at Agnes Scott and Tulane. We were caught, trapped between the happy, safe, Wiener-waltz musical security of the Grand Tour of the 1870s and the shacked-up, stoned-out ease of the 1970s. What if we could not think of something to say?
    â€œI’ll cover you up,” says Lucy.
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œBetter still, I’ll warm you up.”
    â€œAll right.”
    What if I touched Alice Pratt? But how? We’re hiking along, brows furrowed, casting about for topics of conversation, when all of a sudden and dead ahead, rounding the bend of the narrow blacktop road not two hundred yards away, appears a Tiger tank leading a column of tanks, a Wehrmacht officer standing in the open forward hatch. Maneuvers! I don’t think we’re supposed to be here. I grab Alice Pratt and yank her into the dark fir forest. We lie on a soft bed of needles and watch an entire panzer division pass. I am Robert Jordan lying on the pine needles. I hold her. She wants me to. When the panzers are gone, we look at each other and laugh. We have been given leave by the German Army and Robert Jordan.
    Her mouth is on mine. She, Alabama-German-Lucy-Alice, is under the comforter and I under her, she a sweet heavy incubus but not quite centered. Her hair is still damp. She needs centering.
    Miss Bett reads from her grandmother’s journal:
    Later we worked on a silken quilt comforter. Mr. Siegel, our new German tutor, went riding with us. We can’t stop giggling at him. Everyone was in stitches when he thanked us for our “horsepitality.”
    For Christmas Daddy gave a little darky to all seven brothers, each to become a body servant. Rylan took his to Virginia.
    We are kissing. Her short heavy hair tickles my cheek, first on one side then the other, as she turns to and fro in her kissing. She needs centering.
    I move her a bit to center her. There is no not centering her.
    Now.
    â€œNow,” Lucy says.
    The sweet heaviness and centeredness of her, I think, is no more or less than it should be.
    Now.
    Rylan Lipscomb, b. 1840, volunteered 1861 for the Crescent Rifles, Company B, Seventh Louisiana Regiment. Killed in Cross Keys, Virginia, 1862.
    At Fort Pelham, Harry Epps, in for counterfeiting credit cards, knows how to beat the pay phone with a phony charge card. He knows a dial-a-girl number in Pensacola and how to get not a recording but a woman. “Now, why don’t we both relax and tell each other what we like. I have all the time in the world,” says a woman’s voice in a soft Alabama accent, softer and farther south than Birmingham, but not countrified like a waitress at an I-10 truck stop.
    I recognize the Picayune taste.
    â€œI remember this feather bed,” I tell her.
    She pushes herself up to see me by straightening her elbows. “This is not a feather bed.”
    â€œIt used to be a feather bed.”
    â€œIt’s not now and I’m glad. It’s just fine.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œYou’re just fine too. Go to sleep.”
    â€œAll right, but not right now.”
    â€œAll right.”
    The feather bed flows up and around me, but something is missing. The bolster? A cold bluish dark fills the room. It must be early morning. Colly is laying a fire in the grate. I can smell the fat pine kindling. His starched white coat creaks. The match scratches on the slate hearth. He starts a blaze of pine first. The pine is so fat it can be lit by a match. As he sets the coals from the scuttle one by one, he holds his breath, lets it out in a hiss after each coal is placed. His hand passes unhurriedly through the blue-yellow flame. Colly is said to be the great-grandson of the faithful slave and body servant of Rylan Lipscomb.
    The uncle is walking up and down the gallery outside, blowing duck calls. It’s a high-ball, a