The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  Happy without complication.

  This was visceral joy, that elation that must begin at the chromosome. Elemental...rudimentary...fundamental joy.

  "How are you doing?" she asked.

  "Fine," I said, my voice no more than a whisper.

  "Good."

  I turned toward her and saw she'd curled one of her legs up beneath her. Her orange shoes against her black pants made me think of Halloween, and that made me think of those marvelous, wondrous nights when I'd come home with whole shopping bags of Mars bars and M&M's, Milky Ways and Mike & Ikes, fireballs and Tootsie Rolls and UNICEF cartons of coins. The litany of costumes passed before my mind's eye: Lion, skeleton, jack-in-the-box. Vampire. Shortstop. Batman, sheik, bum.

  And, always, cans and cans of shaving cream. Never used. But always there. Just in case.

  "Still with us?" Carissa. Carissa's voice.

  "I guess."

  Nights that were numinous, more magic than fire. The costume--earthy, commercial, it didn't matter--always transcended the Barbasol and the curfew and the cold.

  "Good."

  Another masquerade: warlock. With Elizabeth as a witch--an incredibly beautiful, slinky witch. And a little girl we called Demon Baby, sometimes in her arms and sometimes in mine: Abby, fast approaching eighteen months. Black mascara rings around her eyes, and rub-on tattoos on her cheeks. We went trick-or-treating at the homes of the elderly in town, and Abby let us show her off to almost a dozen of our older neighbors before deciding this ritual was for the birds and melting down.

  But it had been a luminous forty-five minutes.

  "How are you feeling?"

  I blinked, and Carissa came back into focus. "Great," I said.

  "I'm glad."

  Yet great did not do the feeling justice. This was more. This was more than serenity or well-being or confidence. This was different.

  I sighed, aware that I was smiling. This isn't just contentment, I thought, this isn't just any old joy. This is Elizabeth-back-with-me-in-a-green-silk-chemise sort of bliss.

  "When can I see you again?" I asked.

  For the first time since I'd taken the cure, I was aware she was watching me. I knew instantly what she was going to say--not the exact words, but certainly the sentiment. You mean professionally, of course. That was what she was going to say. Something like that. But it didn't bother me, it didn't matter at all. It wasn't rejection. It was that doctor-patient thing. And once I was better--Jesus, God in heaven, I think I'm better now!--that would change.

  "Let's see. Today's the fourth. Why don't we plan on a follow-up between Christmas and New Year's?"

  "Should we schedule it right now?"

  "Would you like that?"

  "Very much."

  I felt the last of the pellets disappearing, and I took a deep breath when they were completely gone.

  "Will I need more?" I asked.

  "You sound like you want more."

  "I'm a junkie. I have a homey-jones, Carissa."

  She grinned. "You might. We'll talk about that at your follow-up."

  "I won't need any more tonight? Or tomorrow? It won't be like a prescription?"

  She shook her head. "Sorry."

  "I wish I'd come to you sooner," I said. "Is it like this for everyone?"

  "I can only guess what you're feeling, but--"

  "I'm feeling unbelievable, Carissa! Fantastic! Absolutely, unbelievably fantastic!"

  "No. It's not like that for everyone. Not even for everyone who receives your remedy."

  "And that is?"

  "You're just dying to know, aren't you?"

  "I am."

  "Fine, I give up." She held up the vial in her hands, and while the type was too small to read from where I was sitting, I had a pretty good idea what it said. And I could feel myself starting to smile inside. Here the notion had given me so much anxiety in the middle of the night only the week before; it had terrified, angered, and appalled me at once. And now it made all the sense in the world. Like cures like. The Law of Similars.

  "Think you know?" Carissa asked.

  "I do."

  "Want to venture a guess?"

  "It won't be a guess."

  She spread wide her arms, the vial disappearing behind her fingers in the palm of her hand. "Go for it."

  "Arsenic."

  "Bingo."

  "It's not just a homey-jones, Carissa. I got me an arsenic-jones."

  *

  PART II

  Chapter 8.

  Number 117

  What we call idiosyncracies belong to the last category.

  We mean that particular physical disposition, in otherwise healthy persons, to become more or less sick from certain things that do not appear to make any impression or alteration at all on many other people.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  .

  No two witnesses will recall an event in exactly the same way. This is true even when the witnesses are wholly well-intentioned and interested solely in what they perceive to be truth. No two memories are ever exactly alike.

  Moreover, memories change over time. In rare cases they grow more accurate, the details more vivid and real, but most of the time those details turn hazy or become transformed: Colors of cars change. Men grow beards. A woman, suddenly, is wearing slacks instead of a skirt.

  Sometimes a witness knows he is changing his story. Sometimes not.

  Most prosecutors want the police or state troopers to get statements from witnesses as soon as possible, simply because memories tend to age so badly.

  Jennifer Emmons came to my office the day after Christmas. Her recollections there of what had occurred in her home on Christmas Eve differed little--if at all--from the taped statement she'd given a state trooper and his detective sergeant on Christmas Day.

  Have some of those details changed for her now? I suppose. The simple act of telling the story to me--that lawyer who, in her mind, went from ally to enemy--must have affected what she remembered. Stories, after all, are merely memories given a certain tangibility with words, and it only takes a few words to subsume a memory completely.

  Still, I will always be respectful of Jennifer's memory, and the way, desiring justice, she had pulled from her mind the fresh details of her horror. What she told me in my office would match, more or less, with what I'd hear later from the first responders--the term we use in Vermont for the EMS volunteers scattered throughout our rural communities, including East Bartlett, who will invariably arrive at an accident scene before an ambulance.

  Like most first responders in Vermont, they knew the victim. Their patient. They knew Richard Emmons.

  All of them, like me, must now have a vision of what preceded the emergency call. Unlike me, however, they probably do not have the advantage of having heard the story directly from Jennifer, and building that vision from her words: Richard sitting up in bed, wheezing. Jennifer opening her eyes in the dark and telling him to use his inhaler. Maybe it comes out like a command. Maybe, by that point, like a plea.

  "Fine," he says, and it sounds as if he barely can speak. Which is exactly the case. He is getting so little air by this point, he really is having trouble talking.

  But then she hears him using his inhaler, and she assumes he will be somewhat better in a moment. Much better soon after that. And so she is relieved.

  But then he surprises her: He climbs out of bed without turning the light on, and he starts for the door. She hears him head down the stairs.

  Maybe he's getting something to drink, she thinks. She hopes. At least, even those days just before Christmas, he had been good about fluids.

  And maybe--just maybe--he is going to check the presents under the tree. Timmy, after all, will be up in three or four hours. No later than seven o'clock, that's for sure.

  But Jennifer told me in my office that she had known in her heart this wasn't his reason for going downstairs, she had known even then this wasn't why he was leav
ing their bed.

  He is getting up because he can't breathe.

  How long has he been off his drugs, she wonders, how many days has it been? Five? Six? She calculates in her mind the last time he used his inhaler before tonight, or the last time he took a pill, and as far as she can recall, it was Monday. Monday morning.

  Tomorrow will mark a full week. That's how long it has been.

  It has in fact been so long that bronchospasms are no longer the problem. Inflammation is. His airways have become irritated, swollen, and congested with mucus. His windpipe, normally the width of his thumb, has been reduced almost to a drinking straw: Imagine a half-inch pipe that is choked with debris. Consequently, his reliever medication for bronchospasms, his albuterol inhaler, has become all but irrelevant. It has no effect on the cascade of thick fluid that has built up inside him.

  And so now it is the night before Christmas and he is unable to breathe, his inhaler has failed, and he has gone downstairs to try something else. Take a prednisone, perhaps. Take one of the pills he's been given to help prevent exactly this sort of emergency.

  She pushes the quilt off her shoulders and gets out of bed, too, surprised by how cold the floor has become. She always seems to forget. She grabs her bathrobe off the chair and then tiptoes into the hallway. She doesn't want to wake Timmy or Kate; she doesn't want them to worry because they can hear their parents wandering around the house in the dead of night.

  She listens for a moment outside Timmy's door, but it is completely silent inside. Then she starts down the hallway, irritated by thoughts of that idiot homeopath.

  Had she really thought of Carissa that moment? Or was her annoyance a new addition a day and a half later, a fabrication of which she was completely unaware? Was it an invention to give her anger a channel through which to pass while talking to me the day after Christmas?

  Honestly? I believe that she did think of Carissa. Given the way Richard had grown excited over the cure--given my own experience the days immediately after I swallowed my arsenic--I am sure homeopathy was a subject of frequent conversation in the Emmons household in December. Jennifer, I am convinced, had wondered often that month exactly what that homeopath had given her husband.

  After all, soon after taking his remedy, his skin had cleared up completely, and the aches in his joints had diminished. Within a week of receiving his cure, Richard had decided to give up the inhalers and pills he took for his asthma.

  Even on Christmas Eve, I can imagine Jennifer wondering if that had been the homeopath's idea, too: It had to be. It just had to be.

  And so at the top of the stairs, she has a thought. Not quite a vision, certainly not a premonition. Clearly she has no idea what is before her. But she thinks to herself at the top of the stairs, I am going to end up driving Richard to the emergency room Christmas morning because some irresponsible homeopath has told him to go off his inhalers and his theophylline. Astonishing. Simply astonishing.

  That's what she thinks.

  It is as she is wrapping her hand around the knob to the kitchen door that she hears the thud on the other side. Instantly she knows what it is: a body falling to the floor. Richard. She whips the door open and sees first the refrigerator swinging shut in slow motion, and then her husband collapsed on the tile before it.

  She told me she heard herself shrieking his name, then her daughter's name, and she disliked the sound of the howl that was in fact her voice.

  "Kate! Get down here!" she screams as loud as she can as she crouches on the floor by her husband.

  He is on his back, his eyes open. But he is no longer able to breathe, so now he can't speak. On some level, she is aware that he has something in his hands, but she is unable to focus upon it. All she can see is the way the muscles along the sides of his neck are billowing like sails as he struggles to breathe, and the desperate panic in his eyes--something like fear and fight at once.

  "Kate!" she shrieks again. She wants her daughter to go to the bedroom and get the inhaler--though a part of her understands her husband has already tried this and it hasn't worked.

  But...but...what else can she do?

  She stumbles over Richard to get to the telephone, and when she has the receiver in her hands, she swears--"Goddamn it! Goddamn it!"--because their part of Vermont does not yet have 911 emergency service.

  Had she therefore actually had to look up the number for the local rescue squad in the phone book? No, she recalled with me, it hadn't come to that: She'd remembered that the number of their first-responder neighbor was stuck to a label inside the receiver of the phone.

  She punches in the seven digits, and she recognizes her friend David's voice instantly.

  "Richard can't breathe," she says. "Get over here, please!"

  "Jennifer? Is that you?"

  "Yes! Help us!"

  "I'm on my way," he says, and she hears him hang up just as Kate appears in the kitchen, and then Timmy behind her.

  "Daddy!" her daughter screams, and she falls back against the doorway, her hands on her mouth.

  "Get his inhaler!" Jennifer says, and for the first time since she has seen her husband collapsed on the kitchen floor, she hears more determination than panic in her voice: The rescue squad is coming. Kate is getting the inhaler. This will, in the end, be okay.

  She kneels beside Richard, wishing to God she knew CPR, when he slams the back of his hand onto the floor so hard it sounds to her like a rifle shot. She sees his eyes roll back in his head, and then his lids fall shut.

  "What's happening?" Timmy whimpers.

  Already his lips have begun to swell, and the first hives have begun to form on his neck.

  Though she doesn't know the details of CPR, she figures she understands the basics: You hold the nose and blow air into the mouth. And so she curls her body over Richard's and pinches his nose, and then takes a deep breath. Before she can exhale into his mouth, however, she feels his body spasm and--her face almost touching his--she smells the vomit a split second before she sees it, before his body throws up whatever remains of his Christmas Eve supper.

  She remembered, she said, looking away, trying not to vomit herself, as Kate had returned with her father's inhaler.

  But then she turns back and reaches into Richard's mouth with her fingers to make sure his throat is clear. When she sees that it is, she squeezes his inhaler inside his lips. Nothing happens, and she does it again. Still nothing. And so she starts trying to breathe for him once more, the smell of all that he's retched more apparent when she sits up and breathes in herself than when she exhales into his mouth. I can do this, she thinks. I haven't a choice...so I can do this.

  She isn't sure how many times she has tried breathing her husband back to life--it might have been five times, it might have been ten--when she hears David pounding at their front door.

  "Let him in," she tells Kate, but her daughter has already started for the door.

  She sits back on her legs, catching her own breath. For a split second her eyes skip over the tile floor, and her mind finally registers what her husband was holding when he collapsed. Instantly she recognizes what it is, what is inside. It is a clear bag with a label, the kind that are sometimes closed with a twist-tie. The kind of thing she would get at the health-food store. But she can't believe what she sees inside it; it doesn't make any sense. Cashews.

  Richard is allergic to cashews.

  David--a huge man, she realizes, especially when you're kneeling on your kitchen floor--pounds over to her in his boots, and she scoots a step back so he can get to her husband.

  "He can't breathe," she hears herself saying, but clearly he has figured this out. From his satchel he pulls a clear plastic mask and a bag linked by a tube, and places the mask over Richard's mouth. "Give me the phone," he says as he starts squeezing the bag.

  Behind her she hears a car in the driveway, and then the front door opening once more. Someone else is arriving, another volunteer.