by Tim Richards
Sam told her that the money had improved markedly in the ten years he’d been full-time. Almost enough to buy his two bedroom flat outright. She wanted a figure, and he was reluctant to give one, because people never understand the risks involved. It’s like being a test pilot or a racing driver. You get paid for what might happen. That, and your ability to maintain calm under pressure. Panic is a problem. You mustn’t contaminate a study with panic, though panic, if you experience it, is something worth reporting in your journal. Pragmatism came into it. Any fool knew that if you reported panic, and panic wasn’t a known side-effect of the research, you wouldn’t be asked to participate in further studies. Finally, Sam gave the marketing girl a figure.
‘You’re kidding! They pay you a thousand dollars a week to sit around and watch the Olympics?’
‘Only when the Olympics are on,’ Sam told her. ‘Otherwise you make your own entertainment.’
He wasn’t surprised when the woman expressed her desire to leave telemarketing. The job sucked. The pay was shit. She’d make a fortune as an experimental subject. She didn’t want to hear Sam explain that experimental subjects have no career path, it’s just something you fall into. You couldn’t count on being so lucky as he had been.
Researchers divide into Coats, Jackets and Suits. They always explain who they are and what their role is within the Institute, but remembering that only gives you something else to forget. Memory is almost always the key thing. It’s not often that you’re in danger of finding purple blisters on your chest, or drowning in mucus. Mostly, the studies are about fiddling with the circuits upstairs. It’s hardly in their interests to let you know what they’re really doing, so there’s no point in taking their spiels to heart, or getting thingy about white lies. Almost everything said or asked is part of a strategy to discover something peripheral.
Had Sam experienced discomfort in his feet? Whether he had or hadn’t, their area of concern probably wasn’t his feet, or what the medication was doing to his circulation; they want to plant a seed of fear, something that will make you pay attention to your feet. Researchers love to work their subjects over in this way.
Sam has a favourite Jacket, a pretty brunette he thinks of as Laura, having failed to catch her name the one time she mentioned it. Laura presents as sex on a stick, always asking about erections, fantasies, dreams, whether you now experience more intense orgasms when you masturbate, pain when you ejaculate, or any noticeable loss of libido.
Sam’s knowledge of research strategies inclines him to believe that Laura’s study is about obesity, or anxiety-depression, since most sexual enquiries are just a blind, but sometimes it’s nice to imagine that an attractive woman could be genuinely interested in your sexual being. Should he record this in the journal? No. No one pays you a bonus for being more honest than you need to be.
Feeling good can be a problem. A prelude to feeling bad. Sam’s more inclined to ask if he might be feeling too good than whether a new ache or pain could be the first sign of something nasty. Toss a coin. Sam’s coin-toss comes down seven to three in favour of placebo. ‘You’re feeling fine because you are fine. Mr Placebo strikes again!’
The amount of money you receive just might reflect the amount of risk you’re running. Sam doesn’t know if he’s more or less imaginative than the average person, but he does know that scientists wishing to test the limits of the human imagination would probably conduct a well-paid study where participants were left uninformed about the true nature of the investigation, and told only that their involvement left them open to the possibility of serious side-effects, even death. Though it’s unlikely that someone would give you a drug that causes your dick to burst, probabilities never hold much sway when you’re a participant who’s worried that his dick’s turned explosive.
Keeping order in your family requires a certain amount of deception.
Sam did enough worrying on his relatives’ behalf without giving them cause for concern. He told them that he’d been playing the investment market, or acting as a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry.
There was one occasion in Sam’s past when he told a young woman he fancied that he made his living as an experimental subject. Not long after, when speaking to a mutual friend, this woman described Sam as ‘a fucking guinea pig’.
What was her name? Sam could see her face clearly. Her eyes, the line of her cheeks, but just then, her name slipped his memory. Something beginning with A, or R.
Forgetting is the most disturbing thing that can happen to a participant. Forgetting always means something. If they’ve given you a substance that makes you forget, you’ll never know how much you’ve already forgotten. You could walk past friends as if they were invisible.
So it’s best not to load loved ones with the burden of these possibilities, not even when they express pride that you’re doing so well. Better than they ever imagined you would. You make a very good living.
Arriving for his Thursday appointment, Sam found a group of concerned hardhats pointing to the spot on the sixth floor of the R.K. Howarth Building where a slab of sandstone had fallen from its moorings to shatter the concrete below. There would be scaffolding on his next visit. A beautiful building under scaffold is sadder than a wild animal that’s lost a limb or an eye.
One of the traps for beginners is getting too Hamletty. You can get addicted to the chemicals fear lets loose in your brain, and lose weeks thinking about what the Authors might be up to and what your participation means to them. Are you proving a theory, or disproving it?
Your participation might consolidate a researcher’s career.
Years from now, some old Suit will sit across the table from friends at a dinner party and go moist when he recalls the experimental subject who supplied his major breakthrough.
Equally, your responses might so threaten someone that they will be tempted to contaminate a study before the results destroy their reputation.
How could any participant ever know where they were situated on an objective paranoia scale? You can’t. Sam chose to believe that his own paranoia was of a low order. Otherwise, he’d be of no use to researchers, not even as part of the placebo group. If you are going to make a living as an experimental subject, you need to think of yourself as the author of your own destiny. Your heart’s only palpitating because that’s how you’ve chosen to order things. If you really wanted the flutters, jabs and appetites to stop, you’d make them stop. This decisive shift in perspective allows you to twist anxieties into thoughts that favour your own interests. Everyone at the Institute is at your service, not vice versa. An experienced subject kowtows to no one.
Laura handed Sam a stack of photographs. She was more inclined to use visual stimuli than other Jackets he’d dealt with. Did Sam find the pictures arousing? In the first, a young brunette rather like Laura was fellating a particularly thick penis. Yes, the image was arousing.
When he was aroused by an image of this kind, was Sam imagining what it was like to be this man squeezing his big penis into the woman’s mouth, imagining his own penis inside that woman’s mouth, was he imagining his own penis inside the mouth of a woman this woman reminded him of, or was he imagining what it might feel like to take a huge erection into his own mouth? Could Sam describe the nature of his empathetic interaction with this image?
She was so skilled as an interviewer that Sam could forget Laura’s true purpose was probably to measure a sense of loss, or some revived capacity. Her researches almost certainly had nothing to do with sexuality, fellatio, or physical response.
Most research strategies were about obscuring the true purpose of the study. Participants were less likely to arrive at pertinent suspicions or guesses when sexually aroused or consternated.
‘Now I’d like you to look at this next picture.’
The community of people who make their living from participating in research studies is small. Over a period of time, Sam became acquainted with several of the subjects he’d met in waiting rooms
at the Institute. Very occasionally, he might meet one of them outside the confines of the R.K. Howarth Building.
He’d first met Warren during a study three years earlier, and they sometimes chanced upon each other in cinema foyers. Professional etiquette requires that you never discuss the precise nature of your experiences, or speculate on the possible significance of your participation. Still, there were obvious subtexts and meanings that couldn’t be ignored.
Bumping into Warren as he pushed a trolley down the frozenfood aisle of the supermarket, Sam told him that it was good to see him looking so well. Warren said the same. Sam looked well.
What purpose would be served by telling a man he looked wretched? Warren must have known about the stoop, and the tics, and the incessant blinking. He knew the risks. So Sam lied, and then thanked God that he had the good fortune to be Mr Placebo.
Of course, the question arose whether Sam should mention meeting Warren in his journal. Some silences are too loaded. No researchers would want their subjects to be indiscreet, let alone conspiratorial. Frankness can cost you. But Warren had to be noted, since not all meetings are as accidental as they seem. You need to consider the possibility that Warren was there to test your candour as a journalist. Sam was careful to document their meeting truthfully.
‘Warren looks like shit.’
If you must let your imagination off the leash, best to fantasise about your part in making the world a better place.
Whenever Sam saw disabled people in the street, he felt as if he was touching them. He wanted to reassure them that he was giving it everything he had. ‘Be patient … Soon.’
Did Sam want their gratitude? Maybe. In that respect, there was no difference between him and the Coats and Jackets. We all like to feel appreciated.
It’s unwise to spend too much time re-reading your journal. Re-reading leads to double-guessing and the fear that you might be disclosing more than you need to disclose. Re-reading his diary, Sam was shocked to find mention of masturbatory activity associated with lurid fantasies about the Jacket he knew as Laura.
Sam knew that no professional would be disconcerted by sexual responses, least of all one who utilised Laura’s style of interview. His double-guessing related to a concern that an experienced participant shouldn’t be seen to be naïve – so wilfully naïve – about the masking techniques employed in high-risk studies. It’s one thing to believe that a Jacket like Laura might flirt with her experimental subjects, it’s another to want to believe it.
Altering journal entries was risky. Sam had made one or two deletions in the past, but he wouldn’t say that he’d got away with it. You’d never know how such an action might impact on a researcher’s understanding of a participant. He chose to believe that the erasures had a nil-effect because he had no choice. The alternative was getting lost up your own arsehole.
Troubled by the sight of two men on a scaffold outside the window, Sam requested a break in the interview.
When Laura left the room, Sam imagined that she would ask the men to move for the duration of the session, but she returned in the company of a Suit carrying a file thick as a gorilla’s upper arm.
The Suit told Sam that early results from the current study were unpromising. Worse, they pointed to a coming tragedy. Short of prayer, there was little the Suit or Laura could do. Not unless Sam consented to trebling the dose of AR 2006.
This treble dose would merit an increased payment of $350 per week, as compensation for the raised stakes.
In reality, the subject had no choice, and Sam heard their proposal with unaffected calm. He knew that Suits hit you with this Prepare to die, we’re hoping for a miracle stuff from time to time. Someone less conversant with the nature of the business would crumble and beg them to up the dose.
But once you’ve chosen to be Mr Placebo, never loosen your grip on that confidence. It’s always in the researchers’ interest to slop black paint on the darkness at the end of the tunnel. Inclined to believe that Suit and Jacket were fudging, Sam was now convinced that Laura’s study related to morbid anxiety. Her conspicuous interest in masturbation frequency and the intensity of his ejaculations was a ploy. But Sam wouldn’t mention these suspicions in the journal. After signing a permission to treble his AR 2006, he walked home and waited with some impatience for nothing to happen.
Something did happen.
Sam received a letter purporting to be from an investigator acting for a legal company. These lawyers were currently engaged in a class action. Could Sam confirm that he had participated in voluntary psychological experiments while a student at university?
Was he aware that the professor who authorised those experiments had acted illegally? This man, McGibbon, was subsequently found to be engaged in research for a US intelligence agency. It’s probable that his student volunteers would have experienced difficulties as a result of these experiments.
In the most commonly reported side-effect, participants imagine themselves as the subject of a long sequence of scientific studies. Sam’s name had come to the legal firm’s attention when they found it on a computer listing of current Australian employees of the intelligence agency.
Knowledge is as much a matter of personal belief as it is about choosing between competing arguments.
Some experimental subjects would find it exciting to imagine a brainwashed, stolen life, to feel that their misery derived from one huge fuck-up, and that an antidote for their unhappiness might now be found. If you bought any of these Big Victim scenarios, you might as well kiss your career goodbye. Ninety-five per cent of research activity relating to a subject’s life masks its true purpose.
Once you accept that it’s all a complex game of ruse and masquerade, you can begin to take responsibility for shaping your own understanding.
The letter went into the bin, and would pass un-noted in Sam’s journal. This conspicuous absence should serve to remind the researchers that they needed Mr Placebo much more than he needed them.
All of us have the experience of thoughts slipping our minds before we have the chance to articulate them. We think little of this phenomenon, though we expect it to occur with greater frequency as we grow older.
Experimental subjects can’t be so relaxed about these losses. On Pandora’s Box you’ll find the one-word label ‘Forgetting’. To even consider what it might mean to open that box can send imaginative participants loopy.
The fear that he was forgetting something, or might have already forgotten things he needed to recall, spooked Sam. Fear, forgetting, and fear of forgetting were synonymous in Sam’s mind. Forgetting was the one side-effect that couldn’t be countenanced. Experience tells you to resist all thought of forgetting, to avoid the temptation to dwell on thoughts of the memories that might be essential to your personal integrity, or thoughts about whether the things you actually recall might be the least essential. If you ever let yourself accept that you were forgetting something crucial, you were finished.
Though Sam’s warm feelings towards the R.K. Howarth Building were partly derived from his pleasure at receiving regular cheques from the Institute, he still believed the building had a maternal personality. He was frustrated by the idea that he might once have known the name of the building’s architect, that his sense of a female architect stemmed from factual knowledge he could no longer access. The female Sam had in mind was a friendly old woman, a woman rather like the smiling Coat at the Payments desk.
While hand-drafting Sam’s pay-cheque, the clerk noted the increase in Sam’s authorisation, and remarked how well he looked. He told her that he’d never felt better.
Discretion prevented him from saying that the Suits and Jackets were doing everything they could to convince him that he wasn’t Mr Placebo. No chance.
Once you’ve chosen to believe that you’re on the other side of the study, you have to stick firm. You’re going to be Mr Placebo every time because no one does it better. Be sure to let nothing or no one undermine this confidence. Otherwise, yo
ur imagination runs crazy.
DOG’S LIFE
Email from: Astrid Mirch, Marginal Films
To: Dr Magnus Verde, CEO, Axcel International
I’m puzzled by your decision to deny availability to Axcel’s film and photographic archive. Since the technologies being investigated are now, effectively, public domain, you should expect that public to be cynical about appeals to commercial confidentiality.
Though it’s our wish to remain open-minded with regard to the efficacy and conduct of your researches, obstructive behaviour will, inevitably, have implications when forming a narrative viewpoint. While you stress that your organisation has nothing to hide, your actions could hardly be more hostile to the notion of full disclosure.
Marielle Hunsbrugger in your Sydney office has threatened legal action if we reproduce private/‘unauthorised’ images of Axcel’s experimental subjects. I can only repeat my previous view that such measures will be counter-productive re. public confidence in your operations, and I implore you to follow the (more sensible) path of candour.
Yours,
Astrid Mirch
Dana: We became a wealthy nation because we got smart. That meant learning to do things ahead of the pack and selling that knowledge. Knowledge economies have to take risks … Staying alive means taking risks.
Ed: The Axcel reps impressed us with their honesty. Their people said, These are the dangers, these are the benefits to Australia, and here are the likely benefits to yourselves. Weigh it up.
Dana: They were totally frank. This was cutting-edge technology. When you have people dashing about near sharp blades, you’ll have mishaps.