Pharmakon (10 page)

“Drive carefully.”

Friedrich paused at the far end of the pool, reached into water, and grabbed hold of the last two rats by the fur on the back of their necks, then walked out the door. As he gently set them down into the grass and watched them disappear into the garden, he felt like he was dreaming.

Even though he told himself he had done nothing wrong, Friedrich could not shake that
what have I just done to my life
feeling as he drove home that morning. The test was an unqualified success. There was no question the rats had survived because they had been given The Way Home. But did that mean they were happier? Certainly, the happiness Friedrich thought these results would bring him was not forthcoming.

He was angry at Winton for dosing herself with the drug without telling him. By not giving him the chance to be the first guinea pig, she had deprived him the opportunity to join that heroic tradition of doctors who dared greatness by testing their miracle cures on themselves.

Hartford dentist Horace Wells became the father of anaesthesiology, proving in 1844 the pain-killing capabilities of nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, by inhaling a large quantity of the same, and ordering a fellow dentist to pull out a perfectly good tooth from his jaw, reporting he “didn’t feel as much as the prick of a pin.” Wells ended up a chloroform addict who committed suicide in jail. More disturbing to Friedrich was remembering something about Wells’s partner and former apprentice ending up rich and famous off of Wells’s discovery.

Friedrich searched his mind for a medical first with a happier ending and thought of Dr. Werner Forssmann, who proved it was safe to catheterize the human heart by slicing open his arm and feeding a catheter into the right atrium of his own heart. Johns Hopkins had fired him for the stunt, but Forssmann was a shooin for the Nobel Prize one of these years. Friedrich knew Madame Curie’s husband had done a first to himself, but at that moment was too infuriated to recall it.

Winton could blame her sexual overture, whether she was conscious of it or not, on the drug, dismiss it as a side effect. But he had no easy excuse, no chemical scapegoat, for the jumble of primitive impulses he felt as he ran from the drowning pool.

Should he tell Nora what had happened? Confess everything and thereby convince himself, if not her, that it was nothing? His work with Winton was just beginning. They would be alone together for hours on end in the months to come. Years to come, if they were truly successful. If Nora got jealous this early in the game, life would be hell. If he told her the truth, i.e., that he ran away with an erection, it’d be almost as bad as if he’d stayed there and . . .

Driving slowly, letting others pass, he wondered,
If I’ve done
nothing, why do I feel guilty?
He knew the answer to that when he began wondering if he would have been more successful sooner if he had married someone as rich and powerful, and as accomplished, as Bunny. And if Nora knew he had such thoughts, what was to keep his wife from thinking likewise? She could cheat on him in her imagination and he would never know. She could be cheating on him right now. Friedrich shook the thought from his mind and decided to say nothing.

By the time he’d gotten to Hamden, Friedrich’s paranoia, his doubts about himself, his motives, and his questions about the path he was on had evaporated. He deserved to be a success. Friedrich was lost in the warmth of his newfound entitlement and self-appreciation. His needs, his predicament, were unique. They had to be protected. It was clear to him: Without him as himself the world would be a dimmer place.

Friedrich stepped on the gas and made it to Hamelin Road in record time. He was neither embarrassed nor chagrined when he turned the key and the White Whale backfired and refused to stop rumbling. The brown spots on his lawn and the peeling paint on his front porch didn’t depress him. He picked up his daughters’ bicycles and Will’s skates with a smile on his face.

The three oldest were in school, Jack was napping, he heard Nora in the shower. He stepped in with her without bothering to take off his clothes.

“Have you lost your mind?” Nora laughed, as she pushed her hair out of her face and looked up at him.

“On the contrary, I have finally found it.” His hands were on her, he was pleased to find her breasts were rounder and fuller than those of Dr. Winton.

“Come on, Will, what’s going on?”

“I’m happy.”

“So I see.”

He kissed her on the mouth. “I need you.”

He turned her around to face the wall. They had never done it that way before.

After they were done, they went into the bedroom, closed their eyes, and began to whisper. In the past, whenever she had asked him to touch her in a certain way, tried to instruct him in the likes and dislikes and curiosities of her body, Friedrich would balk, freeze up, and take her suggestions as criticism. But for the next hour her husband listened to her, took in what she wanted to share with him as he had never done before, or in fact, would ever be able to again for the rest of their marriage.

Afterward, they lay in bed and he told her, “This is going to change everything.”

Friedrich had no idea that the reason his coffee had tasted so bitter that morning was due to the fact that Dr. Winton had sweetened it with The Way Home without telling him.

As planned, Dr. Friedrich and Dr. Winton met in the lab at four to type up their notes. They were clinically courteous with one another. After they had finished collating their observations re: the effects of The Way Home on the rats, Friedrich broached its effect on Dr. Winton.

“I don’t mean to cause you any embarrassment, Dr. Winton, but I think it would be of value to discuss some of what you said when you were under the influence of GKD.”

“I quite agree.” She watched him as she sipped her tea. She wondered if it was her imagination, or did he in fact seem bolder, more aggressive, since she had given him the drug in his coffee. She had intended to tell Dr. Friedrich the truth the night before, but his reaction had been so emotional, she did not want to risk upsetting him. Winton had already decided it would be more informative to watch for any lingering effect on him without his knowing that he was a subject in her private study.

“Do you think GKD’s a sexual stimulant?”

“If you mean, did it arouse me or heighten the sense of arousal I felt at that moment, I would have to say ‘no.’ But it did make me feel on a conscious level that I would like to feel that way. And I felt none of the shame or inhibition that would have, under normal circumstances, prevented me from revealing that to a man. I felt free to be myself, and to make the most of myself.” Dr. Friedrich made note of what she was saying in a black composition book. “You don’t think that’s a good thing, Dr. Friedrich?”

“I don’t see it as good or bad. It’s just anecdotal evidence worth noting.”

“There’s one other thing that might be worth noting.” Winton was washing her teacup now. “I didn’t worry in the least about what I had said to you, or have the slightest concern about having put you in what was so obviously an uncomfortable position, until a few hours ago.”

Casper hitchhiked north that Saturday morning, passing the time between rides calculating perfect numbers, those whose proper positive divisors (excluding itself ) add up to the number: 1 + 2 + 3 = 6; 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28; 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 31 + 62 + 124 + 248 = 496; 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 127, 254, 508, 1016, 2032, 4064 = 8128 . . . While he begged a lift with his right thumb, he held his left hand aloft, and with his bony, nailbitten forefinger, traced and erased an endless stream of invisible numbers across the ether as if the whole universe were his blackboard.

They had taught Casper that all the perfect numbers that had ever been calculated were even, but Casper pushed on, sure there was an odd one waiting for him out there somewhere. Numbers bubbled up within him with the carbonated fizz of a shaken-up bottle of pop, igniting inside his head with a silent flash, like fireworks exploding underwater as he worked the progression over and over again as effortlessly as anyone else would hum a tune.

Casper didn’t just have a feel for numbers, he
felt
them. As such, each digit had a separate personality: 1 was a bright light; 5 was loud, like a clap of thunder; 6 was the most modest of integers; 9 the grandest. They were friends he had known since the crib, played with since before he could speak.

He was juggling the divisors of 2
⁸⁸
(2
⁹⁰
-1) when the driver of a Mayflower moving van coming out of the Esso station across the road pulled over and gave him a ride all the way up Route 1 to Providence. When he got out there, Casper was thirty-seven digits further down the road to nowhere, his numerical joyride was interrupted by a lift from a Presbyterian minister and his wife on their way to see a ballgame at Fenway Park. The wife gave him a cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper, which he ate even though the bread was stale and he wasn’t hungry.

When the minister asked him if he thought God was a Red Sox or a Yankees fan, Casper stopped chasing the perfect number long enough to stutter, “G-G-G-God loves the g-g-game more than those who play it.” And though Casper didn’t mean it the way the minister thought, after moments of silence, the reverend announced he was going to use the line in his next sermon, and went two and a half miles out of his way to drop Casper off at Harvard Square.

From the bounce in his step, the way he paused to smell the just opened blossoms of a cherry tree, you would have thought Casper had just found an odd perfect number. In a way, he had done something almost as incredible: He had hitchhiked to Boston to see a girl. Only he didn’t think of it that way; to Casper, this outing into the larger world was an experiment with/on himself.

As he walked across the square in the direction of the Radcliffe dormitory where she resided, he could still not quite believe he had set out on this journey, and even more amazing, that he hadn’t turned back on this wildly optimistic, decidedly un-Casper-like adventure. Not only was this the first time he had ever hitchhiked, it was the first time he had ever dared to go see any girl anywhere, ever. Most reckless of all, the girl had no idea he was coming or that he even existed. He didn’t want his past to contaminate the chemical reaction he hoped to experience within himself.

The girl he had come to see was the sister of the same Whitney who had sent him to report on the parrots, roommate of Whitney’s girlfriend, Alice Wilkerson, the girl with salamander eyes who had described Nina Bouchard as “insanely smart, but dumb about dumb stuff.” And most important of all, Alice Wilkerson had said out loud, “You’d like each other.” And since the parrots had turned out to be real rather than the practical joke he had suspected, and the Friedrichs had not just been polite but actually seemed to like him, i.e., had invited him to dinner, and Mrs. Friedrich, who was smart and a looker (not that she made a big thing about it) had told him to call her Nora and come back and see them soon and kissed him on he cheek instead of just shaking hands good-bye . . . it seemed not unreasonable in the calculus of Casper’s mind that perhaps someone “insanely smart” might be crazy enough to, if not like him, at least not dismiss him as pond slime.

As he pedaled back from Friedrich and the parrots that night, Casper had recalculated the trajectory of his life, and after two weeks of figuring in every unknown variable into the unknown equation of his life, had come to the conclusion that the long shot that he might know what it was like to be kissed by a female other than his mother and a professor’s wife who felt sorry for him was worth the probability of humiliation.