Pharmakon (27 page)

In August of that summer the Pep Boys rolled in a trolley loaded with old books and magazines, library cast-offs carefully screened not to include reading material that would titillate or inspire antisocial behavior: a Hardy Boys adventure titled
The
Missing Chums, A Life of Howard Taft, The Story of Plymouth
Rock,
old copies of
National Geographic
(minus the pages that featured native titties and bare-assed tribesmen). Casper made no requests, even though the sight of books brought a smile to his face. The Pep Boy named Jack thought he was being funny when he said, “This is a good one for you, Casper,” and handed him an impressive volume titled
Lawn Care Made Easy.

It took all of Casper’s energy just to lift the cover, not because it was heavy, rather because he sensed he was no longer interested in knowing what was inside. By chance. he opened to a chapter titled “Weeds.” Slowly, struggling with each word, he read aloud inside his head: “As every gardener knows, weeds are the enemy . . .” Why? It was a question that hadn’t occurred to him to ask in a very long time.

Dandelions, finger grass, fonio, umbrella grass, Arizona cottontop, silky umbrella grass, pigeon grass, and the crabgrasses: Queensland blue couch, pangola grass, slender crabgrass, longleaf crabgrass, Jamaican crabgrass, Indian crabgrass, Madagascar crabgrass, twospike crabgrass, dwarf crabgrass, velvet crabgrass, shaggy crabgrass, violet crabgrass, naked crabgrass . . . the names were just words; the photographs of undesirable shoots of life did not mean anything to Casper.

He was ready to close the book. He turned the page out of habit. In bold-faced letters he saw the words “jimson weed.” The photograph was black and white. He saw it in color, its forking purple stems erect, its irregular-teethed leaves the color of maple, its flowers trumpet-shaped, purple and white, opening and closing at irregular intervals during the night, hence the nickname, “moon flower.”

He had seen it before, not in his old world that he couldn’t remember, but in this one. It grew in the wasteland he now inhabited. The book of lawn care told him it also had another name: locoweed. It was then that his mind told him it was time to wake up.

The next day, as his fellow inmates shuffled about outside in a caged square of macadam known as the exercise yard, Casper found
Datura stramonium
growing up through the cracks in the blacktop along the edge of the chain-link fence. A sentinel of stalks the grounds crew had missed grew almost two feet tall, their egg-shaped fruit spined and large and as heavy as walnuts. He did not know if the seeds had been sown by the wind or excreted from one of the starlings that perched on the top of his chain-link cage.

The Pep Boys were arguing about the pennant race. Socrates was picking his nose, the air was being kicked out of a basketball. No one saw Casper reach down and harvest the leaves with the swipe of his hand and put them in his mouth. It didn’t seem like it, but Casper was thinking clearly now.

Ten minutes after ingesting the handful of foul-tasting locoweed leaves, Casper’s pupils ratcheted down to pencil points. His mouth was dry, his tongue a desert. His body told him to vomit, his mind overruled the command. His intelligence had been dormant, silent for so long, that now that it was back in force it seemed like a separate entity. It felt like a reunion with a much-missed old friend. Only . . . Casper corrected himself. He didn’t have any friends. The embrace was more intimate than that, more like a long-lost lover. Casper didn’t have any lovers either. (Socrates did not count.)

Having taken enough locoweed to make a twelve-hundred-pound steer hallucinate, he could imagine all sorts of things. In that afternoon’s session with Dr. Shanley, as he watched the shrink reach into a bowl piled high with sugar cubes and drop one into his coffee, the other cubes sprouted arms and legs and crawled out of the bowl and began to dance across the desk in a conga line that brought back memories of a sweeter time.

When his fifty minutes with Dr. Shanley were up, Casper stood up and tried to walk. His arms and legs seemed to belong to someone else. His gait was jerky, exaggerated. He moved down the hall like a marionette. Only Casper was pulling his own strings now.

Dr. Shanley’s notes on that day’s session concluded with “choreoathetosis not observed previously: watch.” By the time Casper sat down to dinner that evening he had to grip the seat of his chair with both hands to keep from falling off the roller-coaster ride he was on. The Pep Boys and his fellow inmates morphed into what they were, primates. Socrates appeared as a baboon. The Pep Boys were gorillas. And he was finally himself.

His breathing grew shallow, his heart raced, his face felt flushed. And yet, his body felt chilled. Sweat trickled down the sides of his face. Casper knew the dosage of jimson weed he had in his system was poisonous. But it was too late to worry about that. Besides, it wasn’t the first time he had been prescribed poison.

The first seizure hit him just as he was remembering that the early American settlers in Jamestown had used a salad of moon flowers to defeat a garrison of British soldiers who had infringed on their liberties: Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676. Casper, a new hybrid of rebellious American, felt vaguely patriotic as his arms and legs jerked spasmodically and his head fell forward into his tin plate of pork and beans. Casper wondered if the Pep Boys were smart enough to keep him from swallowing his tongue.

He woke up the next morning in the infirmary. Aside from a jackhammer headache and a sore throat, he felt better than he had in years. The headache was a chemical hangover. His throat hurt because a tube had been inserted down his esophagus when they pumped his stomach. Spinach having been on the menu the previous day, the half-digested tangle of jimson leaves did not raise any suspicions.

The onset of choreoathetosis, noted in the afternoon session, followed by his collapse at dinner—shallow breathing, rapid heartbeat, the seizures—were all classic symptoms of a toxic reaction to medication. Casper had been doing so well on Thorazine, his sudden allergic reaction caught Dr. Shanley off guard. It was unusual, but not unheard of. His body temperature had reached a hundred and four—at a hundred and five, brain damage begins.

Shanley was greatly relieved when Casper pulled through. Besides the paperwork involved in losing a patient to untoward side effects, there was something about Casper that Shanley liked. Dr. Shanley’s response to the entire incident was prudent and appropriate. He immediately took Casper off the Thorazine and substituted a comparatively light dosage of the recently synthesized experimental indole alkaloid, reserpine.

Thorazine had been a chemical hammer. Reserpine was a gentler weapon in the psychiatric arsenal. Derived from Indian snakeroot and long chewed in its country of origin by the likes of Gandhi to enhance philosophical detachment during meditation, it was a serendipitous choice of antipsychotic for Casper. Reserpine left him feeling light-headed and often faint, but his brain had been abused for so long, it had developed an ability to take a punch. Casper’s mind was still on a leash, but it was just long enough for his thoughts to roam in a new direction.

Casper didn’t know if the whole plan had been in him from the start. But now that he was reunited with not all but at least part of himself, he knew what he had to do next. Reserpine did not make it easy to think, but with a mind as agile as Casper’s, even at half speed, he was leaps and bounds ahead of Shanley.

In his first therapy session after Casper was on his new meds, Shanley began by asking, “How are you feeling, Casper?”

“I’m much better.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, after the way you saved my life, I think I owe you the truth. I’ve got to trust somebody.”

“I’m your doctor, Casper, you can trust me.”

“I want . . . I need to talk about what happened in Hamden; it’s time I faced up to why I’m here.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“Dr. Winton’s dead.”

“That’s true.”

“I know who’s responsible. I can’t hide from that anymore. I’d be sick to do that, and I don’t want to be sick.”

“In your mind, who’s responsible?”

“Not just in my mind, it’s fact, truth, undeniable. Punishment fits the crime. If a person won’t accept blame, they’re crazy. I don’t want to be crazy anymore.”

“Crazy’s not a word I use, but you could say they’re in denial.”

“Right.”

“Who is responsible for what happened, for your being here?”

Casper thought of Dr. Friedrich, saw him upside down, the way he looked through the viewfinder of the press camera that first day, parrots squawking in his mulberry tree, wife and children beside him happy and smiling and free. Dr. Shanley thought he was making real headway when he leaned forward in his chair and urged Casper down the path of enlightenment by softly repeating the key question: “And who is responsible, Casper?”

Casper began to cry. “Me, of course.” Casper wept not out of remorse, but at the beauty of his plan.

I was fourteen years old when I finally discovered I was born two years to the day after that Sunday of tulip planting and death. My father, being a psychologist, was careful to protect me from the tragedy my birth commemorated. My mother’s intelligence kept her grief at bay most of the year. She willed it away, kept it hidden with that unused steamship ticket in her underwear drawer. Her disappointment only leaked out enough so I noticed it on my birthday. Nothing was ever said. I guess there was a kindness to their silence. But when you have to connect the dots yourself, you’re bound to make mistakes.

My father worked hard to make sure my birthdays were so full of pin the tail on the donkey and sack races and piñata-bashing that he would be too distracted to think about Jack or Winton or any of the rest of Casper’s dark matter that bound us as a family. Ice cream cakes and a hired clown who was really a doctoral student who couldn’t finish his thesis, and presents my father never could have afforded back in the days when he was living on an assistant professor’s salary at Yale, only succeeded in making my siblings envious and reminded my parents just how powerless they were to escape the shadow of our secret history.

My mother always cried as I blew out my candles—then apologized to no one and everyone. As she’d help me cut the cake, her fingers entwined with mine on the handle of a silver cake knife, she’d act like it was over—wait until I’d opened the last of my gifts before excusing herself to bed. They slept in separate rooms when I was a small child. She said my father snored. But on my birthday, when she went to her bed, my mother didn’t get in it. She just lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling, afraid to close her eyes for fear the roof would fall in.

Whereas my mother couldn’t make it through my birthday without tears, my father never stopped smiling. The rest of the year his mood was unpredictable. But on my birthdays his good cheer was relentless. His grin was relaxed, but the effort to keep it on his face made him sweat. Even when we had my party outside, the perspiration beaded on his forehead. When he took his jacket off his shirt was soaked through. I remember Lazlo’s looking at my father and announcing, “Now I know why I like being miserable—happiness is too much like hard work.” Unlike my father, when Lazlo said sad things, he smiled to let you know he didn’t begrudge you your joy.

Even though my father’s friend Lazlo, who referred to himself as a “bounced Czech,” told me on numerous occasions, “The only thing I hate more than children is tulips,” he never missed my birthday. He was the only friend my father kept from New Haven. Much engaged, but never married, the little man from Prague who Rolfed syntax and inflection had gotten rich selling scrap. “I am garbage man to the world,” was how he put it.

It didn’t matter where Lazlo was in the world, Tokyo, Texas, Tehran, he’d show up on October 7 with outlandish presents: a BB gun with a telescopic sight for my fifth birthday; a set of razor-sharp ninja throwing knives for turning six. Before I had mastered a two-wheeler, Lazlo had given me a minibike with a 6-horsepower Briggs & Stratton gas engine, all taken away by my parents before I could hurt myself.

Greedier than most children, I loved Lazlo for the presents. But what I liked about him was that it was easier to feel you were normal with someone as peculiar as Lazlo around. He always came early to help my father hang the crepe paper and stayed late to keep my father company after my mother had retired to her bed with her tears.

Lazlo would walk beside us as my father carried me up to bed. And when he tucked me in with Lazlo watching, my father would say, “Good night, my friend.” Not “Zach” or “my son,” but always “my friend.” Which I guess is what he tried to be to me. And Lazlo could be counted on to make the same joke, which never failed to make my father laugh. “As your Jewish godfather, I must caution you about associating with friends like your father.”