Pharmakon (15 page)

Dr. Friedrich tilted his head to catch Casper’s eye. “We’re going to keep what happened today between ourselves. But under one condition: We’re going to meet right here next week, same time, same place, on this bench in front of Sterling, and you’re going to promise me that until then you will not do anything to hurt yourself.” Friedrich held out his hand.

“A-a-agreed.” Casper and the psychologist shook on it.

Friedrich wasn’t finished with him; he held onto Casper’s hand. “And if you think you’re not going to be able to keep that promise, you’re going to call me. No matter what time it is. Middle of the night, first thing in the morning, dinnertime, doesn’t matter. You’re gonna call me first.” Friedrich was gripping his hand hard.

Casper nodded yes. Friedrich let go and wrote down his home and office phone numbers. Casper said thanks, and they shook again.

Friedrich was halfway to the trolley stop when Casper called out, “When do I get the drug?”

“Did my wife tell you?”

“I-I-I saw the notice on the bulletin board.”

Over the course of three days in mid-May 1952, Friedrich and Winton handed out small brown glass bottles, each containing seven sugar cubes, some laced with GKD, some not, to forty individuals between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine. They were instructed to take one each morning after breakfast and to store the rest in a cool dark place.

Though Friedrich and Winton had interviewed the prospective subjects independently, at the start of the study, when the first week’s worth of sugar cubes were handed out in brown pill bottles, both doctors were present. All the volunteers were assured their participation would remain confidential, as would any and all details about their personal lives revealed during the interview process and during their weekly sessions with the doctors over the subsequent four months.

Friedrich and Winton agreed it would have been ideal if they both could have been present for each participant’s weekly session. But both had to teach summer school; they’d be hard-pressed to schedule twenty additional private sessions into their workweeks. Recognizing that test subjects might be more forthcoming in answering questions concerning perceived behavioral change for members of their own sex, they decided that Friedrich would handle the follow-ups on the Yale undergrads and Winton would monitor the nurses and the junior college coeds they’d recruited plus Betty, the cleaning woman who was tired of cleaning up other people’s shit.

Doctors Winton and Friedrich requested that all subjects refrain from discussing their participation in the drug study with their family and/or friends. They were wary; a change in treatment by the outside world would color their experiences under the influence of The Way Home. It was Winton’s idea not to schedule back-to-back meetings with the participants. She wanted them to do everything in their power to make sure participants had no contact with or knowledge of the others who were taking GKD. Neither one of them wanted their test results skewed by subjects comparing their reactions to the drug. They wanted the feelings reported to be the participants’ own.

Casper was the only subject who hadn’t gotten his medication. Winton had asked him to wait outside the lab.

Winton lowered her voice. “Look, I know I said yes to Gedsic, but I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want him in the study. I think we’re asking for trouble having a student who’s attempted suicide.”

“He didn’t attempt it, he thought about it.” Friedrich had already lit one of her cigarettes before he remembered he’d quit.

“He did more than think about it. You told me he brought his dissection kit.”

“But he didn’t use it.” Curiously, Friedrich had never mentioned the fact that Casper was the kid who’d designed an A-bomb for a high school science fair.

“What if, God forbid, he ended up in the group that’s getting the drug and he made another attempt?” Winton lit one for herself. Her therapist had suggested that she stop sharing smokes with Friedrich.

“What if we don’t give him GKD and he kills himself?”

“We’re running a double-blind placebo. There’ll be a fifty percent chance he’ll be getting nothing but pure glucose. Why endanger the study when you don’t even know . . .”

“I checked the logbook. This one’s the real thing.” Friedrich held up the bottle of sugar cubes and gave it a rattle.

“That’s cheating.”

“This kid can make a difference in the world. If we can make a difference in him . . .”

“No.”

“Didn’t you tell me your lieutenant had tried to kill himself before you gave it to him?”

A moment later Friedrich called Casper into the room, and Winton handed the boy his first week’s worth of GKD. Casper waited until his cube was half-dissolved in his mouth to ask, “W-w-what’s it derived from?” The volunteers had all been told the medication in the sugar cubes was an organic compound.

Friedrich smiled at him. “It’s a plant, Casper.”

“What s-s-species of plant?”

“I’m afraid we can’t tell you that, Casper.”

“W-w-why?”

“Because it’s one of the rules of our study.” Winton gave Friedrich a glance.

“Why?” Casper was starting to sound like Jack.

“Because you would go to the library and look it up, and you might read something about it that might influence your reaction to it.” Friedrich had helped Casper get a summer job at the library.

Winton waited until Casper had left the room to say, “He’s going to be a problem.”

“Wouldn’t you want to know what you’re taking?”

“I wouldn’t want me in my study, either.”

Casper came back through the door without knocking. “I-I-In the journal you want me to keep, how long do you want my daily entries to be?”

“A line or two will be fine.” Winton forced a smile.

“S-s-sometimes f-f-feelings are more c-c-complicated than that.”

“It’s not a test, Casper.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yes, you’re right, it is a drug test. What I meant is, it’s about your feelings; just write whatever you feel; it can be as long or as short as you like; there’s no right or wrong.”

“Of course there is, Dr. Friedrich.”

Casper wanted to feel different. He waited all day and into the night to feel a chemical hand pull him away from the edge. He had come down off the Giant, but he refused to live with the pain. The waiting and the hope that was tied to it rubbed salt in the hurt and exhausted him.

His first entry in the diary of feelings he was keeping for Dr. Friedrich read, “May 17th, 1:30 PM. No Change. Hopelessness
²
= pointlessness
³
. Being alive feels like a punishment.” When he crossed the last “t” he turned out the light and crawled under the covers, longing for dreamless sleep.

A dog barked, a siren raced to another crime in progress, and the thought of Nina lying next to him, touching him with her nakedness, her metal braces chucked on the floor next to the rest of her clothes simultaneously gave him an erection and made him cry.

Casper tried to distract himself by looking out the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye. He thought about the question of missing mass, not as a personal problem but as a riddle to take his mind off the sadness that pulled at him.

There was a physicist at Princeton who was calling it “dark matter.” The words made him think of whole stars and the worlds that orbited them being sucked farther and farther into invisible and inescapable darkness. Then he began to imagine there was dark matter in him, pulling him ever inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, until his existence could only be measured by loss.

Casper turned on a light, picked up his pen, and added these words to his first entry: “Bad thoughts.” The next day his entry read, “no improvement.” The same two words synopsized the sugar cube’s failure to sweeten life over the course of the next seventy-two hours.

By day five Casper so dreaded the depression that had collapsed in on him with consciousness that, as soon as his eyes winked open, he jumped out of bed and ran as if chased by the darkness out of his room to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He stood under the shower a good ten minutes before he realized he was singing along to a song he’d never heard before: Dry those tear drops, don’t be so sad . . . Some brand-new baby can be had . . .” The music wafted down from the radio, balanced on the windowsill of the triple on the floor above him.

How miserable could he be if he was singing in the shower, much less a song called “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere”? He thought of Nina, saw the photo of the crash inside his head, and thought of how different things could have turned out if he had let her car be stolen. Or perhaps just had the courage to talk, to speak to the girl who had captured his heart. It was still sad. And if he kept thinking about it, he would undoubtedly begin to weep. But . . . why?

Something had shifted inside him overnight. It was no longer so personal. It had happened to him, but the drug moved him just far enough away from his feelings so that it was more like watching a natural disaster on a newsreel than the main feature, something that had happened to him.

Casper dried himself carefully, brushed his teeth gingerly. He didn’t want whatever had moved inside his head to shift back into its old position and darken the day. Back in his room, Casper wrote in his diary, “No reason to feel better, but do.” The feeling that he was safe, i.e., that it was safe to think about Nina without feeling responsible, hatched and mated and multiplied in him like sea monkeys as the day progressed.

His job at the library had started the day before. As he pushed his trolley of books through the stacks, returning volume after volume to their proper places in the Dewey decimal scheme of things, Casper found himself able to painlessly reorder sentiments and thoughts and feelings that just the day before had made his mind flinch—it was as if Casper had stepped into the skin of someone just like him, only different.

At lunch, when he ate his egg sandwich, it tasted different, crunchy and salty, so much better than yesterday’s egg on rye. When the librarian told him he’d gotten the wrong sandwich and he discovered he’d just eaten bacon, he didn’t gag or feel queasy. No, the thought that an animal had been slaughtered to satisfy his appetite only made him muse,
What else have I been missing?

That afternoon he dallied reading the first sentence of books he’d thought beneath him, never bothered with, never heard of: Melville’s
Typee,
Proust’s
Cities of the Plain,
Llewellyn’s
How
Green Was My Valley,
Grahame’s
Wind in the Willows.
The vastness of what was unknown ceased to make his universe feel like an empty room. Over a solitary dinner of cheddar cheese, saltines, and an apple, Casper shocked himself by writing in his diary, “Feel surprisingly okay . . . happy?” Casper was just learning what that word meant to others.

The next morning he reached for his sugar cube before he got out of bed. He could taste it on his tongue as he stepped into the shower. It tasted like the wrapper on a stick of licorice. When the radio didn’t come on, he sang the Yale fight song as if he were getting ready to take the field.

Casper only had one worry—the possibility that the darkness would come back. That was the worm in this otherwise delicious apple. Was he really safe, or was he just kidding himself? Casper, still being someone not unlike Casper, devised a test.