The Placebo Effect

by David Rotenberg

  Mac pressed, “He knows, Mr. Yolles—and unlike Ratio-Man he’s not a nut, so people might take what he has to say seriously.”

  Henry-Clay nodded in his darkened office but didn’t reply.

  “He knows too much to live, Mr. Yolles.”

  Henry-Clay let out a long breath. Killing Ratio-Man was more like putting a dog down, but killing Decker Roberts would be crossing a new frontier for the owner of Yolles Pharmaceuticals.

  “Is it really necessary, Mr. MacMillan?”

  “It’s prudent, Mr. Yolles. Prudent.”

  “And there’s no other way?”

  “To be sure that this Roberts guy doesn’t talk? Not that I know. Just his bad luck, Mr. Yolles, just Mr. Roberts’ bad luck.”

  Henry-Clay thought about that, tried to weigh the risks against each other—killing versus his bottom line—and made up his mind. He felt better—Decisions R Us. “Your report on the Junction says there’s been a lot of fires, Mr. MacMillan.”

  “Seems there’s a firebug in those parts.”

  “Good, that’ll cover our tracks. Burn him down, Mr. MacMillan—he lives in an old house, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, old houses have fire problems, don’t they?”

  “They do indeed. When?”

  “Can it be done tonight?”

  “For the right amount of money, anything can be done. Tonight or any night.”

  “Tonight. Decker Roberts does not see the dawn—got it, Mr. MacMillan?”

  Henry-Clay slammed down the phone, stood and made himself think it all through carefully one more time. Mac would take care of Decker up there, then come down here and take care of Ratio-Man, but there was a loose end. How the hell had Ratio-Man found out that he was scouting Decker? Henry-Clay allowed his mind to retrace his steps from seeing Mikey on the Discovery Channel while drunk in Puerto Rico to tracking him down—to setting up the fake job interview.

  It had taken Henry-Clay less than twenty minutes to get Ratio-Man to address the issue of placebo ratios—in fact, the guy was happy if anyone listened to him. And oh, yes, Henry-Clay Yolles was listening closely.

  “Well, there has to be a ratio. Everything in nature has a ratio.”

  “Placebos as well?”

  “Surely.”

  “And would you be able to establish that exact ratio, Mr. Shedloski?”

  “Sure. It’d be fun.”

  Henry-Clay had offered him a job then and there. Mike had beamed—he’d found a friend.

  And within a few weeks of examining Yolles Pharma’s research and Henry-Clay’s MA thesis on “The Use of Placebos in Pharmaceutical Pricing,” Michael Shedloski had entered Henry-Clay Yolles’ office and pronounced an astonishing figure—a ratio of placebo pills to real pills well in excess of four times the accepted, although never used, figure. It posed a potential savings of almost 40 percent on every package of pills—risk free to the client, and more important without costing Yolles Pharma almost anything.

  “And you’re sure of this?” Henry-Clay had demanded. “Sure as your life—you’re sure of this ratio?”

  “Absolutely. People like me know this sort of thing.”

  Henry-Clay remembered pausing for a moment and rolling around the idea of “people like me” and asked as calmly as he could manage, “And there are more people like you out there?”

  Mike stuck out his chest and proudly announced, “I meet them every day on the website I set up for us, in the chat rooms.” He almost giggled, then added, “And, I installed a program that saves the e-mail and IP addresses of everyone who’s ever accessed the site. I’m not supposed to, but I did and I have them—everyone, broken down by time of day and frequency. Why shouldn’t I? After all, it’s our website, for people like me.” Then Ratio-Man had put his hand to his mouth just like he was a kid who’d just sworn in front of his parents.

  “I didn’t know you were a computer genius too.”

  Henry-Clay saw the man retreat. “I’m not. I don’t know anything about computers. Oh, my goodness, I shouldn’t have told you that. Promise me you’ll keep it a secret. Promise me, please.” The poor man seemed ready to pee his pleated corduroys.

  And Henry-Clay had given Ratio-Man the five-hundred-dollar bonus he’d promised for the ratio and told him what a fine fellow he was and metaphorically scratched his scruffy tummy, then said, “Here are the keys to my condo. Why not spend the night there—as a present from me. A way of saying thanks.”

  Mike took the keys and stuttered something to the effect that “it’s really, very, you know, nice of you…”

  But before Ratio-Man could finish whatever it was he was trying to say, Henry-Clay added, “And there’ll be a present there—just waiting for you to unwrap.”

  Mikey loved presents—really loved them. So with more attempts at thanks and twice almost forgetting the keys to the condo, he finally got to the office door and said, “But you won’t tell about that website thing, will you?”

  Henry-Clay made a lip-zipping mime and a throwing-away-the-key gesture—and Mike smiled and left the office.

  Without a pause Henry-Clay dialed the nastiest hooker he’d ever met and asked her if she’d like to make an easy $1,500.

  “Nothin’s easy with you, darlin’.”

  “I’m not the client. I’m the bank account but not the client.”

  “So who’s the client?”

  He told her, then informed her that he wanted her to wear an ocular implant and a mini camera attached to her choker.

  “That’s kinky even for you.”

  “Yeah—so?”

  “Sure. Where and when?”

  When Michael Shedloski opened the door to Henry-Clay’s condo the first thing he saw was a partially clad Nasty Natasha—née, Linda Lee Feldman. Henry-Clay had sat back in his big chair and watched the view from a hooker’s vantage point. He found it instructive—and exciting. But it was the cochlear microphone that allowed him to feed the hooker lines; that really thrilled him.

  When Ratio-Man’s pants were down around his knees and his none-too-clean jockeys bulging appropriately he whispered to Natasha, “Tell him if he touches himself you’re leaving.”

  She did and he whimpered that he wouldn’t touch himself.

  “Good,” Henry-Clay said, and Natasha repeated that.

  “Ask him if he’d like you to touch him.”

  She did—and he certainly did.

  “Fine. Now tell him that he has something that you want. And until you get it you won’t touch him now or ever.”

  Henry-Clay was enjoying this. He told himself that he was accessing his feminine side—then laughed at the very idea that he had a feminine side.

  “What? What do I have that you want?” Ratio-Man pleaded.

  “The access codes to the synaesthetes website and his master password,” Henry-Clay said.

  Mike resisted for a few moments, but Linda Lee Feldman was hard to resist, and Henry-Clay carefully jotted down the complex algorithmic codes that allowed him to take control of the website—and allowed Mike a sexual experience that was going to have to last him for quite some time.

  The first thing Henry-Clay did on the website was use the algorithm to change the master passwords so Ratio-Man couldn’t access the site.

  Once in control of the website Henry-Clay explored for other people like Mike. First in the chat rooms—then in the captured e-mail and IP addresses. And he’d found some weird-assed wackos but no one of any value—until he followed a hunch. There was a frequent user from Canada who never entered the chat rooms but spent a lot of time on the site. Where was he on the site? Lurking, sure, but lurking that long? He accessed the map of the site and noticed a surprisingly blank area. He waited for the next time the Canadian signed in and followed him—tracked him—to a blocked side room on the website’s empty space. There he found his Canadian user—Decker Roberts.

  Henry-Clay approached his office window. Across the river the Treloar Building was bathed in
floodlights. He pulled his eyes away from the building and returned to the problem at hand.

  Somehow Ratio-Man had found that he had made contact with Roberts. How? Was it possible that wimp hadn’t given Nasty Nat the only access codes to the site? No, he’d have given his left nut—maybe did. So it had to be something else.

  He thought about the first time he saw Ratio-Man on TV, standing beside his incredible balancing statues. Totally symmetrical, he thought—and just like that he had it. Of course: Ratio-Man was also Balance-Man, and he wouldn’t create a website without another in perfect balance with it—a mirror site!

  Sure, Ratio-Man would have an equal and opposite site. A balance. Fuck. That’s how he must have found out about Henry-Clay’s plan for one Decker Roberts.

  Henry-Clay quickly went up online and in less than five minutes found the mirror site. He cursed his foolishness and was tempted to throw the computer through the plate glass window.

  But no. Decker dies in the fire tonight. Then fat Mike ends his days and the threat is over. Henry-Clay put his right hand up to the cold windowpane then drew it away. As he lifted his palm, the frosted imprint of his hand remained, then slid mistlike into oblivion, another place—no, the other place. Now it was only a fleeting memory of a hand on a glass pane. A flicker of life gone forever.

  A death, Henry-Clay thought. Then he corrected himself. Two deaths.

  It was getting cold out there—in more ways than one.

  Back in the Junction, Mac flipped open his Zippo and lit his stump of a cigar, which was still in the side of his mouth. He watched the end of the cigar accept the flame then breathed out a dense fragrant fog of smoke against the frosted windshield as he told himself, Tonight’s a fine night for a wee conflagration.

  15

  NIGHTMARES

  DECKER KNEW HE WAS DREAMING, DREAMING OF SHANGHAI in the early 1990s before many Chinese spoke English—before they entered the capitalist race to oblivion. He knew what the dream was, but he couldn’t make it stop.

  A Caucasian face loomed up, filling the entirety of his dream-scape screen. “Don’t take anything but ten U.S. dollars. No wallet. No wristwatch. No jewelry.”

  Decker felt the cold, then something in his hand and looked down—blood. He knew it was part of the price for his gift. Then there was an address on Nanjing Lu.

  He watched helplessly as he left his wedding ring, watch, and wallet in his room, waited for the dark to take the great city, then stuffed a single American ten-dollar bill in a front pocket of his jeans and headed toward the Bund.

  Suddenly he felt something smooth between his lips and tasted the divine mix of opium tar and human saliva. He breathed the smoke in deeply. Time began to slip—and elongate—and he knew he was dreaming in his dream—and he felt the presence of the other.

  Then he was out on the street. The damp Shanghai night air knifed through his clothing. He stumbled to the curb and hailed a taxi from the waiting line of vehicles. The lead cab pulled up to him and the window slid down. He reached into his pocket for the card given to him by the theatre to explain where he lived—but it wasn’t there. His wallet wasn’t there either. He remembered! He’d left the wallet with the card and all his money back in his room. He stepped away from the taxi. The driver screamed something at him. He turned and ran. His feet flying along the cracked pavement, then suddenly he was at the river—at the river? How had he gotten to the Huangpu River? He turned to his left and headed in the other direction.

  The tile-roofed buildings of the old city seemed to loom forward, crowding the street. He felt hundreds of eyes, angry eyes, watching him. A man held his daughter’s hand as she lifted her skirts and peed on the sidewalk. Then he shouted. Had he been staring? Where the hell was he? He headed back uptown—made a sharp left and there was the river again! The river?

  How late was it? He looked to his wrist. No watch of course. Lost—utterly lost in Shanghai, in the middle of the night, without money, without identification, without even knowing what the time was—adrift in a vast foreign sea and the opium snake still alive and now very, very angry in his veins.

  A sharp female voice stopped him. He turned. The tiny peasant woman dressed in filthy rags stepped out of the blackness of the alley as she always did. She held a baby so dirty that it looked like it was made of mud. Her left hand was outstretched toward him, clearly begging for money. He stepped back, his heel hit the curb, and he found himself on the ground.

  Then the mud baby was on his chest.

  He looked up and the woman was speaking, and despite his extremely limited Mandarin he understood every word. “This child is you. Has always been you. And will always be waiting here for you. You will return to the filth that you came from. If you refuse to do what must be done, you will be abandoned by your friends and family—lost in a dark room that has no windows and no doors. And you will search—endlessly—for a way out. But you will never find the way out. Everything you fear will happen to you—as it has happened to this child.”

  He suddenly realized that he was seeing the woman from an odd angle. This was fucking new! With a cold shock he knew that he was seeing the peasant from the baby’s eyes. Then those eyes turned, and there he was—crazed, banging his head over and over and over against a wall. Tears staining his cheeks—a scream in his throat. Then an older voice—his older voice—pleaded, “I couldn’t do it! But please don’t forget me, please don’t forget me here.” And he held up his left hand and there was blood—and he shivered from the cold.

  And he knew it was a dream, and he knew the dream was part of the burden of his gift, and he knew that one night he would dream the dream and never awaken from the nightmare.

  Then he smelled the smoke. There was no smoke in his dream, but he smelled smoke. Then he felt intense heat rising through the floor of his second-story bedroom floor.

  Decker threw aside his bedcovers. The tendrils of smoke coming through the bedroom walls immediately shocked him into the present.

  He flipped the light switch—nothing. But in the orange glow of the growing fire on his balcony he could see billows of smoke swirling into his bedroom from under the door. When he stood the floor was warm—fuck, it was hot. He reached for the door handle to the balcony and it burnt his hand. He stepped back as the glass shattered and the window frame burst into flame.

  He grabbed his shoulder bag, pulled on his shirt and pants and made himself take a slow shallow breath and think. The balcony was of no use to him; flames were everywhere out there. The smoke from under the door to his bedroom was increasing by the second, and the floor was so hot that it scalded his feet. “Heat rises, heat rises,” he repeated to himself. So the way out is down. If he couldn’t get out the front door, he’d try to get to the basement and escape through the steam tunnel that used to connect the older houses of the Junction to the generating plant up by the now-abandoned train station. He knew he’d have to open the bedroom door and that he might be engulfed by smoke when he did. If the fire had started down there, it could be working its way up the stairway—but the stairway was the only way down.

  He threw open the door—instantly smoke filled his lungs and blurred his vision. He fell to the floor and crawled to the bathroom, hoping the window there would allow him a way out. But the wall with the window was consumed in fire, and the molded plastic bathtub and shower were beginning to melt. He grabbed two towels and shoved them into the sink and was genuinely grateful when the water came on. He soaked the towels and then turned the faucet toward his jeans and shirt. With one wet towel over his mouth and head and the other over his shoulders he raced to the flaming stairway. Some of the steps were on fire, others smoldering, but the carved hardwood banister was still in place. He reached for it and it accepted his weight as he half walked, half slid down. Six steps from the bottom a spindle broke and he crashed to the floor below. To his right the front of the house was a wall of fire. Behind him the kitchen and back room were ablaze. He scrambled to his feet and threw open the door to t
he basement. He took one step and crashed through the stairway to the cement floor some seven feet below. He’d have broken a leg for sure, but he glanced off his exercise ball, slightly cushioning his fall.

  He looked to the basement exit but it had already cracked under the assault of the fire. Above him flames licked their way along the joists. He scrambled into the laundry room and yanked against the drier with all his strength. It slowly ground forward, revealing the hole to the Junction’s steam tunnels that he’d found when he first bought the house.

  He literally fell into the tunnel and then pulled himself along until he got to the main shaft. He sat back, sweat and the smell of burnt hair—his burnt hair—momentarily overwhelming him.

  He pulled his shoulder bag to him and tried to catch his breath. As he did he heard approaching sirens, then the heart-wrenching grinding and twisting and tearing of his house as it was eaten by the great fire monster.

  “I can barely hear you, Mr. MacMillan.”

  “It’s the fire trucks and the police.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talk to me,” Henry-Clay demanded.

  “He’s toast,” Mac replied. There was not a hint of a smile in his voice.

  “Are you sure? How can you be sure, Mr. MacMillan?”

  “I have eyeballs on the back of his house and no one’s come out that way and I’m watching the front and not a soul made it out that way either.”

  “And the thing’s on fire?”

  “It’s a fireball. Completely consumed. Crossbeams should be coming down any moment now.”

  “And he’s in there. You sure he was in there?”

  “Saw him sleeping myself before I set the devices. He’s toast—as I said.”

  Henry-Clay felt the sweat from his armpits dripping down his torso, but his breathing was stabilizing. He realized he’d dodged a bullet—a big fucking bullet. “I want you home now, Mr. MacMillan.”

  “To finish Ratio-Man?”

  “Yes, it’s definitely time to tie up that loose end. Come home, now.”