The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

  FOR SUSAN, JOEY AND BETH

  Thank you for purchasing this Touchstone eBook.

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Dangerous Voyage of Mike Shedloski Begins

  Chapter 2: In The Castle of The Enemy

  Chapter 3: Mike Gets the Urge for Going

  Chapter 4: Teacher

  Chapter 5: Yslan Hicks

  Chapter 6: Decker Takes a Job, or Two or Three

  Chapter 7: Yslan at the NSA

  Chapter 8: Orlando, Florida

  Chapter 9: The Further Voyage of Michael Shedloski

  Chapter 10: Pittsburgh

  Chapter 11: Cleveland, Ohio

  Chapter 12: Mac

  Chapter 13: Mike At Decker’s House

  Chapter 14: Henry-Clay’s Decision

  Chapter 15: Nightmares

  Chapter 16: Crazy Eddie

  Chapter 17: The Day After a Fire

  Chapter 18: Arson

  Chapter 19: The End of a Long Day

  Chapter 20: Henry-Clay

  Chapter 21: A Visit to Leavenworth

  Chapter 22: A Noose Tightens

  Chapter 23: Stanstead

  Chapter 24: Charles Cleareyes

  Chapter 25: Return to Manhattan

  Chapter 26: Josh

  Chapter 27: A Little Acting

  Chapter 28: Garden State

  Chapter 29: Mac and Henry-Clay

  Chapter 30: B

  Chapter 31: Decker and Yslan

  Chapter 32: Seth

  Chapter 33: Henry-Clay

  Chapter 34: What’s a Lie

  Chapter 35: Has Anyone Seen Mike?

  Chapter 36: Movements Toward New Jersey

  Chapter 37: Insurance

  Chapter 38: Escape

  Chapter 39: Hiding—A Column of Smoke Within a Fog

  Chapter 40: Yslan In Motion

  Chapter 41: A Cold Day in New York

  Chapter 42: Emerson Remi

  Chapter 43: Semblant Order

  Chapter 44: On the Bus

  Chapter 45: A Cold Night in Toronto

  Chapter 46: Cincinnati, Ohio

  Chapter 47: Cincinnati, Ohio, Two

  Chapter 48: Give Dreadful Note of Preparation

  Chapter 49: Fight in a Synagogue

  Chapter 50: After

  Chapter 51: Home?

  Chapter 52: Crazy Eddie

  Chapter 53: The Rothko Chapel

  Chapter 54: Dream Healing

  Chapter 55: The Junction—End, Full Stop.

  About the Author

  The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.

  MACBETH, ACT 1, SCENE 3

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank Alison Clarke and Kevin Hanson at Simon & Schuster Canada for their support and valuable input as this manuscript took shape. As well I owe a debt of thanks to Michael Levine, my agent and friend, who has been in my corner for many years now. In addition I’d like to acknowledge the talents of the teachers who work with me at Pro Actors Lab: Bruce, Rae Ellen, John, Marvin, Melee and Glen. Last, and most important, I want to thank the many gifted actors who have submitted to what were at one time my experiments and are now common practices in the profession. This book could not have happened without their talents.

  PROLOGUE

  You can’t understand how a man lives his life until you understand what he thinks is going to happen to him after he dies.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD, FORMER SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS

  DECKER FELT HIMSELF SLIPPING. HE TRIED TO PULL HIMSELF back—to make it stop. But he felt the cold, and knew there would be blood on his right hand if he looked.

  “We do what we do to find our place in the universe,” someone said.

  Decker knew where he was. It was 1988; he was twenty-two years old.

  He was on the obligatory European promenade between second and third year at university and on a whim had hitchhiked one night down from Paris to Chartres. At dawn he found himself on the steps of the ancient cathedral beside many other backpacked vagabonds. He watched as the day’s first light brought the twelve figures above the massive front doors to life. Each figure’s fine facial features slowly awakening and accepting their job of both welcoming and warning the faithful.

  “It never fails to thrill me,” the same high-class male British voice said.

  Decker turned and was surprised to find the voice belonged to a tall, gaunt, middle-aged man wearing a threadbare suit—and not sixteen inches from his left ear.

  “Do you know them? Can’t understand the message unless you know each statue’s story. The left side of the central door has five figures. From outer to inner they follow a chronological order. Outermost is Melchizedek, then Abraham (holding Isaac, whom he is about to sacrifice—note the trapped ram on the pedestal), then Moses holding a tablet and pointing to a brazen serpent, fourth is Samuel sacrificing a lamb, and finally King David carrying a crown of thorns. In some way they all prefigure Christ’s sacrifice and passion. You see,” he pointed expansively to the figures, “all the Old Testament prophets lead to the arrival of the King Himself.”

  Decker was going to counter that the Old Testament had been rearranged by the newly formed Christians so that it appeared that the prophets and the line of David led directly to the arrival of Christ, but the original order of the Old Testament did nothing of the sort. But before he could speak, the man put out his hand. “Brother Malcolm. I lecture at ten and one and four every day except Sunday, naturally.” Then he said the oddest thing. “Yes, the testaments have been rearranged. But sometimes the truth—His truth—needs to be bolstered by a bit of trickery. The falseness does not make the truth any less valid.”

  Decker spotted Brother Malcolm again just before ten that morning. He joined the small crowd around the man and listened intently for the hour plus of the man’s lecture about the flooring of the east transept and its door leading to what used to be called the Rue des Juifs. At the end of the lecture Brother Malcolm cupped his hands in front of his chest and announced, “I am a mendicant. I live on the generosity of others.” The thirty-odd people who had taken in the lecture put coins and notes into his hands.

  At one o’clock that afternoon Decker listened for almost two hours as Brother Malcolm explained in great detail the workings of a cathedral’s flying buttress system.

  Then at four o’clock he heard Brother Malcolm, brilliantly and in remarkable depth, shed light on the carvings, drawings and paintings at the first three stations of the cross. Surprisingly, at least to Decker, Brother Malcolm passed right by a newly bricked-in doorway. Beside the door was a small covered opening just large enough for food to be passed through. Decker was about to ask about it when Brother Malcolm shook his head, as if he knew the question before Decker asked it, and he wasn’t going to answer.

  Decker didn’t remember where he slept that night or the next or the next. But he did remember in vivid detail Brother Malcolm’s next nine lectures. At the end of the ninth—on the steps of the west transept entrance—he went to put some coins in Brother Malcolm’s cupped hands when the man said to him, “Stand beside me with your hands out as mine are.”

  Decker never forgot the feeling of the first coin landing in his palm or the feeling of a burden laid down. Later that night, Decker found himself on the front steps of the cathedral again. And as he slept on his backpack he heard Brother Malcolm ask him, “
So, have you decided to stay? I’ve waited a long time. I’m getting old and someone has to take over my ministry when I’m gone. I’ll teach you what I know and this great place of faith will be your home.” Then he added with a knowing look, “It is another path, a way to avoid the room with no windows—and the hanging man.”

  In his dream that night Decker closed his eyes—deeper darkness within the darkness of sleep—and watched his retina screen. Two identical cubes entered from the left side and slid majestically into the centre—perfect geometric shapes. Brother Malcolm was telling the truth.

  Decker felt the cold envelop him and the slime of blood between his fingers. He opened his eyes within the dream and begged the dream to end.

  Decker left Chartres before daybreak—but he never left it very far behind.

  1

  THE DANGEROUS VOYAGE OF MIKE SHEDLOSKI BEGINS

  ON THE SIDEWALK, ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE MASSIVE headquarters of Yolles Pharmaceuticals, a six-foot stack of bottles of all sizes and shapes were miraculously balanced, one upon the next, creating the most unlikely tree under the heavens.

  Mike Shedloski, a pear-shaped man wearing a dirty Michelin Man coat and frayed bell-bottoms, stood, fat fists pressed against his nonexistent waist, admiring his handiwork. A few feet away, another miracle of balance, this time made from random stones and twice the size of the tree, was clearly a representation of an office tower of some sort.

  Mike picked up a hand-painted sign that, in angry red letters, asked “What’s Your Ratio!” then began to shout across the road, “Tell the Enemy I worked here. I worked here, I worked here, tell the Enemy that!”

  Two security guards, one big the other bigger, raced across the street, nightsticks at the ready.

  Mike repeated his claim—“I worked here!”—as the bigger of the security guards grabbed him.

  “I worked here.”

  “Sure you did,” the security guard said as the other one knocked down the office tower statue with one simple push. When it fell it revealed another hand-painted sign: “Who’s Jumping Now?”

  “Move it along and don’t come back. This is a public sidewalk, not your damned toilet.”

  “The Enemy knows that I worked here,” Mike whimpered.

  The big guard grabbed Mike by the fleshy part of his upper arm.

  “Hey, that hurts.”

  “Yeah, it does. Now move along and take your damned signs with you.”

  Mike took his “What’s Your Ratio!” sign but left the “Who’s Jumping Now?” sign against the retaining wall.

  The guards watched Mike Shedloski amble away, then one of them kicked at the balancing bottle structure. The thing momentarily resisted and then crashed to the ground, clearly no adhesive of any sort had been used, just balance—incredible balance.

  2

  IN THE CASTLE OF THE ENEMY

  HENRY-CLAY YOLLES, CEO OF YOLLES PHARMACEUTICALS, stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his office with his hands clasped behind his back, watching as his guards dealt with the freak. Then his attention was drawn to the “Who’s Jumping Now?” sign, which led him to stare at the Treloar Building on the other side of the Ohio River. Why didn’t he just buy it? He had the money. Yes, but there was something else—something hidden from him—stopping him from just plunking down the cash for the damned stack of steel, glass and stone.

  He pulled his eyes away from the building and looked back at his newly refurbished, massive office. The place made him smile because it had all come about from what he first thought of as a stupid fucking mistake on his part. From the idiotic impulse to be helpful. To think like a doctor, a damned healer—not like a businessman.

  He had been approached at an ushy-cushy charity banquet by a Mrs. Francis Xavier—who could forget a woman named after a male saint? Her daughter was suffering from an extremely rare disease that afflicts fewer than sixty people in North America. And the pesky thing principally attacks preteens. The only treatment available—as unreliable as it was—required that the children endure painful and lengthy procedures in the hospital three times every week of their young lives. Mrs. Xavier had begged him to devote some research time to developing a treatment that would save her daughter from “this torture.”

  In a moment of weakness he had publicly committed his company to finding a better way to treat the disease. The research had proved to be incredibly expensive—vastly more than he had budgeted—and his stockholders were furious. What kind of return could be made with so few people having the disease? Finally, after applying tremendous pressure and truckloads of cash, his scientists had come up with a simple injection that could be administered once every six weeks.

  His marketing department wanted to make a splash, figuring at least on some great press for the company.

  He found two doctors who had been dealing with the victims of the disease and got them to agree, on compassionate grounds, to test the new treatment—it wasn’t hard to convince them, since the doctors were deeply troubled by their young patients’ pain. The only proviso was that the doctors were to forward all records of side effects directly back to him, rather than publishing them in medical journals like The Lancet. Positive results he would pass on; negative ones he would send back for a second opinion. It seemed only fair to him, since his company had gone to such expense and there was no way to make money with the treatment.

  One of the two doctors found the drug to be “efficacious and with only minimal and acceptable side effects and a great advance over the old procedure.” The other doctor, using a sample of only five patients, found one had a potentially dangerous reaction to the drug, and rather than reporting that back to Yolles Pharmaceuticals, she went to a reporter who just happened to be her lover, and the headlines rolled out: PHARMA COMPANY BUYS RESULTS! RIGGED DRUG TESTS! NEED FOR ARM’S LENGTH BETWEEN DRUG COMPANIES AND RESEARCHERS! GOVERNMENTS NEED TO ADDRESS PHARMA MALFEASANCE! Never once did the newspapers or television reports mention that the new treatment worked in 92 percent of the cases—nor did they bother to write about the incredibly painful procedure that the new drug allowed the children to avoid. Or, by the by, the only 64 percent effectiveness of the old treatment. No. Just headlines about how venal his company was. It had cost him a 38 percent drop in the stock price. Scientists deserted the company, and his balance sheet became a daily source of terror.

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  Two days after the shit hit the fan, Henry-Clay retreated to his Puerto Rico condo on the beach at Isla Verde, fully intending a three-day drunk. He hadn’t needed this kind of escape in years, but he wanted to get away from the board members and stockholders who were furious that his investment in the new treatment had darn near drowned the entire company.

  God, if they got this bent out of shape over this, what would they do when they found out about the problems he was having with his new antidepressant. And when they heard about the money he’d already spent…

  The company’s new antidepressant drug was making its way through the ludicrously long FDA approvals process at record speed—a bit of grease from his wallet had helped the process. But the drug was still too expensive to bring to market—almost twice its competitor’s price point. And no matter how hard he pushed his scientists he couldn’t get that price point down. The actual R & D had been expensive but manageable. The problem was the raw materials themselves needed for the drug. They were extremely hard to find in nature, and the process to produce them synthetically used viciously expensive chemicals. No matter what combination they tried, the price was too high to market.

  He awoke late in the afternoon of his second day in Puerto Rico with the post-rain sun streaming in the window. An empty rum bottle was on the floor, a second half-empty bottle tilted off the side of a copy of Maxim on the coffee table refracting a tiny spectrum of colour toward his fifty-two inch plasma TV tuned to a documentary on the Discovery Channel.

  What he saw made him sit up and question just how drunk he was. On the screen was a
Cincinnati street scene that he recognized, and in front of an impossibly balanced pile of junk stood a pudgy middle-aged guy. A voice off the screen asked, “And there’s no glue or nails holding this together?”

  “Why would there be? There’s no need for adhesives. Balance is just a matter of ratio. Up to down; left to right; forward to back. Everything has a ratio.”

  The interviewer asked, “Everything, Mike? Everything has a ratio?”

  “Absolutely,” this Mike person said. “Light to dark. Smart to stupid. Honest to dishonest.” He smiled mischievously. “Pens to pencils, Macs to PC’s, rainy days to sunny days, truth to lies, things that work to things that don’t.” He giggled and added, “Fat to muscle.” Then he placed what seemed to be four random pieces atop the balancing act.

  The interviewer asked, “And you know where to place the next piece by what you call its ratio?”

  “Yep,” Mike said as he added two more pieces to his balancing miracle.

  “But how do you know the ratio?”

  Mike looked at the camera and smiled, his face suddenly luminous, almost handsome. “I just know—I just know.”

  I bet you do, I just bet you do, Henry-Clay thought. And aren’t you just a big ol’ lonely dog, yeah, a lonely dog—that’s what you are, aren’t you, Mikey, a big ol’ lonely dog who needs a juicy bone, a pat on your fat belly, and a fluffy bed to call your own.

  “I just know,” Mike repeated.

  Now it was Henry-Clay who was smiling his version of a luminous smile. He hit mute on the remote then picked up his phone. He hit number 3 on his speed dial. The first two were escort services.

  Kreger, the scientist who headed Yolles Pharmaceuticals’ research, answered before the second ring. “Hey boss, where are you?”

  “Away. Don’t ask where away, just away.”

  “Okay. So how’s away?”

  “More interesting than I thought. How’re the trials going on the new antidepression medication?”

  “Good. Yeah, good. It’s passing all its trials with incredible speed. It’s been five years, but I think we’re close to FDA approval.”