Pharmakon (57 page)

Z drifted slowly up through the floors of the house that used to be a barn like a plume of smoke from a fire that had been left smoldering for a long time. His parents’ bedroom/office was untouched by time. He had never noticed their massive desk was exactly the same size as their bed. Work and sex, life’s tasks. He had not had sex for—five? six?—months. He felt like he had slept alone for years. His parents’ intimacy had always been enviable and suspicious. He imagined them working at their desk, naked.

His mother’s old manual Underwood typewriter with its extra-wide carriage to accommodate a computer printout sat squarely in the middle of her side of the desk. The vowels of her keyboard were worn faint and ghostly with use. Drafts, rough and polished, were stacked like bricks and secured with rubber bands and identified with Post-its. Correspondence waited to be answered in folders filed in an antique wooden dish dryer, bought while attending a symposium in Oslo.

Halfway across the desk, just past the wall of framed photographs of her children, there was an irregular battle line, demarcating where her organizational skills gave way to chaos and his father’s penchant for multitasked thought.

Her side of the desk and his father’s were as different and clearly defined as halves of the same brain. Ideas for books and articles and research projects scrawled out late at night in red pen on yellow legal pads were shuffled in with the pages of texts—the half-done, the finished, and the forgotten. A note to himself written on the back of an envelope that contained his American Express bill read:

1. Change snow tires.

2. Buy potting soil.

3. Get Foundation to establish Prize for first scientist to replicate photosynthesis in lab—solves all problems, food, energy, environment.

Z wondered if his old man suffered from ADD as he pushed open the door to his father’s closet. Minus the round window, it was the same as it had been on Harrison Street. It still smelled of cedar and shoe polish and dust. The stone ax heads and flint arrow points his father had collected with his father still lived in a wooden crate that bore the seal of Château d’Yquem. The split bamboo fly rods too fine to fish with were stacked in the corner. The mahogany chest of drawers no longer seemed so massive.

Still unable to resist the pull of the forbidden, Z opened the top drawer and looked for the loaded Smith & Wesson revolver nestled on a stack of clean handkerchiefs. It wasn’t there—he wondered where it had gone. He guessed his father finally felt safe from ambush.

Wishing he could still say the same for himself, Z recalled the morning he had considered waking his father from that Sock Moment with the missing pistol. Remembering all that was secret and forbidden in their home, Z got down on his knees, pulled aside the suits and sport coats that hung neatly on hangers, and reached into the darkness for the old steamer trunk that had been such a mystery to him. He could still hear his father growl, “There’s nothing in there that pertains to you.” But it, like the revolver, had vanished. What else was not as he remembered it?

Back out in the hall, a narrow set of rough-hewn steps, bowed with wear from farmers’ hobnailed boots, climbed steep as a ladder to a long, narrow loft that lay under the barn’s slate roof. There was a skylight in the middle. Climbing the steps, Z followed the memory of an afternoon when he and Sunshine had lain naked on their backs, sharing a joint as thunder cracked lightning overhead.

The loft was just storage space now. Boxes stacked on boxes. His mother had written the contents on the side of each, but an old leak had rendered her neat script illegible, save for the word “fragile
.”
A pane of glass had fallen out of the square window that wasn’t designed to be opened at the far end. A swallow darted from shadow to light, alarmed at his intrusion. A rattrap, cocked but missing its cheese, lay unsprung by his old headboard. Mice had eaten holes in his mattress.

He picked up the grown-up briefcase his mother had bought him to bring order to his life. He opened it. Nothing, except for a single piece of bubblegum. He put it in his mouth and began to chew. Dust and mold and bat droppings made the mystery of the past palpable.

In the corner, squirrels had clawed a nest out of a cardboard box full of snapshots he presumed to be of his mother’s side of the family. He recognized a five-by-seven of Great-aunt Minnie standing next to his mother at her high school graduation. When he tried to pick up the box, the bottom fell out.

There, amid the squirrel’s nest of snapshots of the dead, he found an envelope, thick and long, with his mother’s name typed out above their address in Hamden. The words “Deliver by hand” were written on the outside and underlined twice. Inside was a one-way unused steamship ticket to France on the Holland-America line. Z studied the ticket. His mother had purchased it with cash when she was pregnant with Fiona. She had paid for a single berth. She had intended to travel alone.

Z slipped his mother’s unused ticket into his back pocket. Squatting down, collecting the snapshots of relatives he could not name but felt should be saved, Z caught sight of that old trunk his father had told him he could not open because he’d lost the key. It was hidden behind a thicket of broken furniture and cardboard boxes. The treasure chest of his youth had been moved, but it was still there.

Because he had been told it did not pertain to him, he knew it must. Was it his mother’s trunk? Was she packed and ready to sail off from all of them on the Holland-America line? Was there another man? His father was not there to pull him back by the feet from the secret this time.

Cardboard boxes ripped and packing tape snapped as he pulled and pushed aside cartons stuffed with snowsuits he had hated and toys he had forgotten getting for Christmas. A broken chair he recognized from photographs of Hamden lost a second leg as he tossed it over his shoulder and clawed his way into the past.

The heat rose. In spite of the broken window, the attic was hot. He was sweaty and breathless from pulling away the domestic debris his family could not part with. Z picked up a screwdriver someone had used to stir a can of green paint.
Fuck the
key,
Z thought,
I’m going to pry it open.

As Z slipped the screwdriver under the latch, it popped free on its own. It had never been locked. Z opened the trunk slowly. The adrenaline rush of taboo denied accompanied the lifting of the lid. He did not know what he expected to find, but when he pulled the open trunk out into the light and saw its contents, he was disappointed. The mystery was nothing but old papers. Four stacks of the Friedrich Psychiatric Rating Scale, evaluations of patients made in 1952, all neatly tied up with butcher’s twine.

When he was eight or nine, his father had tried to explain how his scale worked. He hadn’t understood it then any more than he understood it now. But he could see that this diagnostic tool that his father had devised reduced happiness to a number. Was an 8.3 good or bad?

The people his father had tried to help back in ’52 were faded initials: MV, RS, BT, their sex a circled M or W. Age was a blank filled in with a number 2 pencil. The youngest was eighteen, the oldest fifty-seven. His father’s judgment was always clinical.

Stacked up and tied tight as a month of old newspapers waiting to be recycled, they were heavier than they looked. If that was all there was, he would have closed the lid of the trunk and left it there. But beneath the rating scale that had kick-started his father’s career were forty marbleized-black-and-white composition books.

The initials became human as Z read the words used to describe the feelings his father had treated them to over those twelve weeks. SV was a nurse who wrote in loopy script on the twenty-first of May: “Woke up. Took sugar cube with black coffee. Was hungry, but didn’t eat. Surprised everybody at cafeteria by passing up dessert. After putting kids to bed, let my husband fool with me, even though I was having my monthly. Which isn’t like me.” Four weeks later she had written, “Lost 17 pounds!!! Hooray for me!!!”

The diary that got to Z the most began with an entry printed neatly in block letters with a black fountain pen: “May 13th, 1:30 PM. No Change. Hopelessness2 = pointlessness3. Being alive feels like an embarrassment.” Z knew the feeling. He flipped to the last page. The final entry read:

Dear Dr. Friedrich,
   I hope that someday I will be in a position to repay you for what you have given me. I am still me, but because of you, that no longer feels like such a bad thing to be.
   Yours respectfully,
   Casper Gedsic

Wrapped in a moth-eaten army blanket, he found the two-faced ironwood demon with bone and coral eyes. He did not know it was a fermenting vessel, but he wanted to know more. Untying the knots in the butcher’s twine, he shuffled through the tests like a loser looking for the marked cards that had tricked him. He found the psychiatric rating scale initialed CG. The first evaluation was administered on the twelfth of May, the second and last in the second week of September ’52.

Even though Z had failed his own introduction to psychology class his freshman year at Yale, he could see that Casper had the lowest score at the start and the highest score by two points at the finish. Born two years to the day after Jack and Winton had died, Z knew that just ten days after scoring off the charts and thanking Dr. Friedrich for changing his life, Casper had repaid him with one and possibly two murders.

What had happened? What had gone wrong? If he was mad, why didn’t he kill the whole family when they were planting tulips?

Z put the notebook in his book bag and returned the rest of the disaster to its box. He was just closing the lid when he saw the manila envelope stuffed inside the sleeve built into the interior of the trunk. It contained tape recordings, spooled on six-inch reels. The only two he cared about were labeled CG sessions. They pertained to him.

Hurrying now, knowing he was running out of time, Z pushed the trunk back into the dark corner where he had found it and carefully reburied it beneath the rubble and discarded furnishings of their lives. Z was not the only one who had some explaining to do. The questions were obvious. Z was not yet sure whether he wanted his father to know how many answers he already had before he asked them.

Z was back downstairs in his parents’ den staring at his father’s old reel-to-reel tape deck, wondering if he had time to play the tapes back, when a dog barked. Looking out the window, he saw that Fred was a Rhodesian Ridgeback. His parents had taken him for a walk in a four-wheel-drive golf cart Lucy had bought them for Christmas. They were getting out of the cart now, and Fred was pissing on the chrysanthemums.

Z was stuffing the tapes back into his old briefcase when the dog bounded through the front door, snapping and barking. The dog circled him. Z turned his back to the door and kicked at Fred. Friedrich shielded his wife with his body and raised an umbrella as if it were a club. “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s me. I should have called, but—”

“Heel, Fred!” The dog obeyed.

Nora disarmed her husband of the umbrella. “What are you doing here, Zach?”

“There are some things we need to talk about.”

His father didn’t look at him. His eyes were on the clutter of the dining room table.

“Such as?”

“How about let’s start with ‘Glad to see you’?”

“What’s so important that gives you the right to barge into our home?” His mother spoke for his father.

“The door was open. This is my home. This is where I grew up.”

“Zach, you always were good at avoiding answering questions you don’t want to answer. But we’re old, and I’m sorry you’re a drug addict, but it’s not our fault. I want an explanation—what do you think we have to talk about?”

His father had put on his glasses and was sorting through the books and stacks of mail on the table. It was then Z noticed the winged bronze brain Zuza had given him so long ago.

“We can start with this.” Zach handed her the steamship ticket.

“What did he give you?” Lucy had told him his father’s eyesight was failing.

“Nothing.” Nora folded the ticket neatly and slipped it into the waistband of her skirt.

“Is there anything else?”

Z winced and cocked his head like a dog that doesn’t know why it’s just been kicked by its master. Before he could retaliate, his father pointed his finger at the table. “There was three hundred dollars for the gardener on that table when we left.”

Z reeled back. His mother wiped away a tear. “How can you do this to us?”

“You think I came here to steal from you?”

“Besides the fact that writing someone a bad check is a form of thievery, I think you’re a drug addict who won’t get treatment.”

Z pointed to his father’s feet. “Open your eyes.” Three one hundred dollar bills were on the floor. “You owe me more than an apology.”

Friedrich stepped back as Z reached for the table. Son and father were frightened of one another. Z picked up the bronze. “What are you doing?” For an instant Friedrich thought the boy was going to strike him.

“Taking what’s mine.”

Z was out the door when his mother called after him, “Are you coming to the party?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”