Pharmakon (12 page)

That very morning, halfway through shaving his upper lip, he had so given in to the dream he found himself fantasizing about who they would get to play him if they made a movie about his contribution to the betterment of mankind. It wasn’t so farfetched. They made a movie about the guy who cured syphilis,
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet,
starring Edward G. Robinson. Friedrich considered the possibilities as he scraped off the night’s whiskers. Jimmy Stewart? Gary Cooper? He cut himself as his mind auditioned Gregory Peck for the role Friedrich hoped to live.

“Without impressive test results, we won’t get that far. Look, we’re both after the same thing.” More or less, that was true. “My money can make it happen faster. For all we know, someone else could be doing the same research with kwina that we are now.”

“I can guarantee you that they’re not.”

How could Friedrich be so sure? He had grown more confident, determined. She wondered if the dose of
gai kau dong
she’d given him had anything to do with the change. It had been three days since she had dosed them both with The Way Home. Friedrich was still in the dark about that, but she still felt the tingle of empowerment.

“I don’t care about the money. But if you’re too proud to accept it, we can put it in writing. All monies I invest in research will come out of first profits.” It was the first either had mentioned that there might be money in this. “I’ll keep receipts, I’ll charge you interest. You can even dictate the agreement. Happy?” She pulled a pen out of her purse and took a sheet of blue carbon paper from the drawer to make them both a copy.

Will cleared his throat. “Doctors Friedrich and Winton agree that they are equal partners in all research concerning the medicinal applications of kwina leaves and the indigenous fermented beverage g
aikau dong.
Any and all scientific publications regarding this search will bear both their names, and any profits stemming from their research will be split fifty-fifty after Dr. Winton has been repaid one thousand six hundred dollars.”

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I trust human nature.” Friedrich pocketed his copy in his wallet. Winton put hers in her purse.

That afternoon their advertisement for test subjects appeared on the bulletin boards of Yale, thumbtacked next to offers of summer jobs, tutoring French in Nantucket, math on the Cape, and employment as counselors and waterskiing instructors at lakeside sleepaway camps in the Adirondacks. In the hopes of recruiting twenty female guinea pigs, Dr. Winton posted the same offer in the nurses’ locker room at New Haven Hospital and the student lounge of a nearby girl’s junior college.

Friedrich had stayed up all night grading quizzes so that he and Winton could get an early start in the lab the next morning. She was late. He was struggling to drain the fermenting vessel by himself. Full, it weighed over two hundred pounds. One hand gripping its ironwood penis, the other clutching its nail-tipped breast, Friedrich was embracing the dark figures that decorated its facade as if in a ménage-à-trois when Winton finally slammed through the door. “You’re late. Give me a hand before I drop this goddamn thing.”

“Drop it . . . Our lab privileges have been revoked. We can’t do the test. I found this in my mailbox this morning.” She shoved a tersely worded handwritten note from Winton’s no longer kindly old mentor, Dr. Petersen, in Friedrich’s face as he muscled the fermenting vessel back onto the countertop.

It read as follows: “Dr. Winton, you have betrayed my trust. This is not the research project you outlined when you obtained my permission to use the facilities of this school. I want you and Friedrich in my office at ten o’clock to discuss disciplinary action.”

Friedrich felt like he was being flushed. His endorphins swirled him downward. “Disciplinary action.” In an instant the future he had built on the promise of The Way Home crashed down on him. The drug worked. He didn’t yet have the statistics to prove it, but he was sure of it. More important, he felt it. He could not, would not, let a fucking old Freudian fossil like Petersen flush not just his idea, but his new, improved idea of himself. Friedrich closed his eyes and imagined taking Petersen’s head in his hands and pounding it against the wall. When the fantasy had drawn imaginary blood, Friedrich blinked and shook the image from his head as if it were an insect crawling into his ear. Winton was saying something but he didn’t hear her.

“
Disciplinary action.” No tenure, no full professorship at Yale, no movie.

He wondered how he would break the news to Nora as he put on his jacket and straightened his tie. “What’s the bastard’s problem? We proceeded exactly as we told him we were going to.”

Winton waited until they were halfway up the cool, dark staircase to Petersen’s floor to ask, “There wasn’t anything that could be construed as unethical or illegal in the way you obtained the kwina and the fermenting vessel, was there?”

Friedrich stopped climbing the stairs. “The answer is no, but it might be construed as unethical or professionally irresponsible that you didn’t ask that question before you got involved.”

“Rest assured I’ll be more careful about my conduct in the future.”

To get to Dr. Petersen’s office they had to walk down a long, dimly lit corridor lined on both sides with metal shelves that sagged under the weight of more than a hundred gallon-sized glass jars, each containing a human brain floating in a formaldehyde bath. Each brain was carefully labeled in a spidery hand: Carmen Silva, poetess Queen of Rumania; John McCormick, inventor (steel plow); Ephraim Rosenbaum, pyromaniac; Thomas Mangan, alcoholic; Donnata De la Rosa, opera singer; Jim J. Jefferson, Negro tanner; Reginald Chapelle, homosexual; Ian Wainwright, murderer (poisoned twelve women); John J. Seward, Secretary of State; and on and on and on.

Some brains were as dark as coal, others as pink and delectable as a baby’s bottom. The one belonging to Dr. Herbert K. Glenway, the nineteenth-century phrenologist who had begged, borrowed, and stolen the collection his whole life and willed it to Yale, looked like it had been used as a football. Because it had.

Dr. Petersen barked, “Enter,” before they even knocked. The white-haired shrink who had made a career out of one lunch with Freud didn’t bother to stand or shake hands or invite them to sit down. He was combing his beard with a fine-tooth silver comb, a nervous display that accompanied anger. His face was pink, wizened, and ticked with age spots. He looked like a skull inside an udder. “How could you ever think I would allow this?” He crumpled the notice they had posted on the bulletin board and tossed it into a wastepaper basket that bore the college seal.

“The psychology department didn’t have a problem with—”

Dr. Petersen cut him off. “Shame on them, shame on you. Have you two been taking this stuff yourselves?”

“Dr. Petersen, I won’t dignify that with an answer. But I think it’s fair for you to know that if you cancel our lab privileges, I will appeal your decision directly to the board of trustees.” Bunny’s uncle was on the Board.

Friedrich was stupefied. He had had no idea the study was that important to her.

“I think the board of trustees would share my rather old-fashioned belief that the law means something.” Winton looked at Friedrich.

“What law are you under the misperception we have broken?” Friedrich chose his words carefully to offend.

“It is you that is misperceiving the gravity of this situation.” The udder shook at his impudence. “You have embarrassed the university and disregarded the welfare of the student body. You may think I am senile, but I am not. And since you insist on making matters worse for yourselves by feigning innocence, I will spell it out: The students you plan to recruit for this test are under twenty-one, are they not?”

“Some of them.”

“Fermenting produces alcohol, and it’s against the law for individuals under the age of twenty-one to consume alcoholic beverages. It’s also against the law for an adult to supply underage individuals with alcohol.” Friedrich smiled. “I fail to see the humor in this situation, Dr. Friedrich.”

“We evaporated off the alcohol. Sir.”

“What?” Petersen looked around the room as if he had woken up from his recurring nightmare and found himself lecturing naked.

The old man didn’t know how to back down from his rage. Friedrich helped him. “I apologize, Dr. Petersen, for not making that clear to you.”

“Apology accepted.” He wanted to forget this had ever happened.

But Winton wasn’t finished. “Just in case anyone else has a problem with our research, could you perhaps just give us a short note indicating you have an awareness of what we’re doing, and that we have adhered to your guidelines?” Friedrich waited as she got their asses covered in writing.

As they walked down the corridor of bottled brains, Doctors Winton and Friedrich began to giggle like schoolchildren who had gotten away with putting a frog in the teacher’s desk.

They worked together until the end of the day. Friedrich went home, Winton was five minutes late to the psychologist she saw twice a week. As usual, she spent most of her remaining fifty minutes ruminating about all the little things she didn’t like about Dr. Will Friedrich. What she liked about him was harder to put into words. Her therapist theorized that what attracted her to Friedrich was that she didn’t know much about him. Familiarity breeds contempt wasn’t how it was put, but that was the idea.

“Do fish have feelings?” Lucy was worried about the hook. The Friedrichs were going fishing that Sunday, if Dr. Friedrich ever came out of the psych building.

“Not like people do.” Nora had been sitting in the White Whale with her four children waiting for her husband to come down for thirty—no, thirty-three—minutes; every time she looked at her watch she felt more trapped by time and motherhood and . . .

Fiona looked up from Nancy Drew. She felt a different kind of trapped—the hot car, the annoying sweetness of her little sister, and Willy picking his nose and wiping his boogers on the pant leg that brushed against her knee as he struggled to assemble the fishing rod her mother had already told him twice not to play with. “That’s because fish are cold-blooded,” Fiona announced. Reminding her siblings she was the smartest made Fiona feel like she was less trapped. Nora wondered what might have the same effect on herself and still make her feel needed. That was her hook.

“So are some people we know.” When her husband and Winton had first advertised for test subjects, they were worried that they wouldn’t find forty people willing to volunteer their sadness for a study (so far they had fifty-seven prospective guinea pigs). He and Winton had worked late on Friday and all day Saturday interviewing subjects. Will had promised her that he only had four students to talk to on Sunday morning. He had sworn to her as he ran out of the house that morning to Bunny Winton in her Cadillac that he would be outside waiting for the Whale at 11:30. It was after twelve now. She knew all about The Way Home and how goddamn important it was, and what it was going to mean to them (which, of course, meant him). And even though the rat experiment didn’t prove anything to her, she believed him when he told her, “This is going to change our world.” But thirty minutes is a hell of a long time for someone who’s tired of feeling taken for granted to wait.

Dr. Friedrich had no idea his wife had purchased an open steamship ticket to France on the Holland America line when she was seven months pregnant with Fiona. It was a one-way ticket, passage for one, good for any crossing, bought with the two hundred dollars Nora had never told Friedrich her great and maiden aunt Minnie had given her the morning of their wedding. “Just so you can always change your mind,” was what Minnie had said. Nora Elizabeth Friedrich, née Hughes, knew how to keep things hidden. The ticket lay buried in her underwear drawer beneath a negligee her mother had given her for her wedding night, and that she had been too impatient to put on.

Jack lay sprawled across the front seat, head on her lap, sleeping. The fountain pen she hadn’t noticed him take out of her purse was clutched in his hand, cap off. She knew the blue ink that had leaked out onto the white of her Mexican skirt wouldn’t come out. Will had given her that dress when they were still in college. It had red flowers embroidered around the hem. It made her feel like someone else, someone exotic, someone like that Mexican painter she’d read about in the paper with the one eyebrow. It took her a moment to remember the name. But she wasn’t a Mexican painter, she was a mother, and mothers have to learn to leave some things in the drawer. Willy was poking her in the back of the head with the fishing rod she was getting tired of reminding him not to play with. “Willy, stop that.” She forgot about the bleeding pen.