by WD Clarke
—You’re in Emerg, old buddy.
—A dashing young man in an army uniform brought you here, added Nurse Turkington.
—Said you needed your head examined, said Dr. Pete. But I suppose he meant your face.
—He said you fainted and fell face-first onto the floor, said Nurse Turkington.
—He hit me, said Dr. Ed, still unable to move his head and struggling to try to get his 2 interlocutors peripherally into focus.
—In any event, said Dr. Pete, it appears as though your nose may be broken, Ed. It’s already fairly swollen, and it will most likely swell up a fair bit more over the next few hours. Try to keep some ice on it, we won’t be able to say for sure if there’s a fracture until the swelling subsides.
—How long will … ? said Dr. Ed, gingerly mapping the tumescent nasal region with his fingers.
—Give’r 4 days at least, said Dr. Pete. No more than a week. We’ll be better able to determine if you’ll require a splint at that time.
—Dr. Ed nodded sheepishly as he levered himself up into a semi-reclining position, then swung himself painfully around in an arc of 90 degrees, so that his legs now dangled over the right side of the gurney. He held his painkiller-addled head in one hand while the other supported him from behind. Christ, this took him back to Grade 5, when class bullies Billie ‘Nasty’ Roach and Danny Fautz had lifted Eddy and his soon-to-be best friend Andy O’Gallivan onto the horns of a rather nasty little version of the ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’: either fight each other after school out by the baseball backstop, until only one of them was left standing, or they both ‘might’ suffer a much more thoroughly brutal thrashing at the hands (and boots) of Roach, Fautz and assorted, otherwise-timid Grade 6 hangers-on—and if only one of them showed up while the other bawk-bawk-bawked his way back to the chicken coop, well, then watch out!
The short-lived ‘fight’ was over with one blow, as Andy had succeeded, with a deft right hook, both in knocking young Eddy off his feet and in breaking his jaw. After much caterwauling and threatening to sue Andy’s dad for all he was worth, precocious Eddy then suddenly realized that the incident had somehow made he and Andy blood-brothers: in the end it had been a mortified Andy who had ran home and retrieved his mother, who in turn had driven Eddy to the hospital, where his feet had dangled in mid-air from a gurney much as they did now, swinging back-and-forth in an embarrassed, nervous rhythm all their own.
When Nurse Turkington had finished applying a sturdy gauze-and-tape bandage to the offended region, Pete Laframboise came back and kindly (if somewhat inappropriately) wrote Dr. Ed a prescription for a week’s worth of Tylenol 4 with codeine phosphate.
One tablet every 4 hrs.
Not to exceed 6 tablets total in 24hrs.
Not to be taken with alcohol or sedatives.
Consult your doctor if you are taking anti-depressant medication.
—This should do you for a while, he said. Mind you, after the first 48, the pain shouldn’t be quite so bad.
Dr. Ed swallowed 2 tablets on his way out of the doors of the hospital pharmacy, 2 more in the cab on the way home, and a 5th and 6th after rummaging through his wife’s nightmarishly messy bedside table for clues to he didn’t consciously know what, unearthing only an empty bottle of lorazapam, a nearly empty bottle of Nocturne, a half-empty bottle of herbal BeCalm, and an unopened package of Slendereyes topical cream.
—Holy Fuck, he said to himself for no empirically verifiable or falsifiable reason. Though he was flying now, approaching escape velocity, he was still semi-capable of appreciating the gravity of a situation which was, his normally quietist gut-level instincts told him, becoming somehow, somewhat desperate. His gut-level then informed him of something else, something of an altogether more immediate, metabolic urgency: as he passed wind, and passed as quickly as he could into his wife’s private bathroom, undoing his belt buckle and zipper as he dove past her bidet and towards her toilet, one comforting ‘thought’ branched across his panicking neural synapses: whatever else may transpire, come what come may, the nitrogenous alkaloids of these codeine tablets [from the Greek kōedeia, for poppy head] would manage to do for him what laughable quantities of over-the-counter preparations of oil of bismuth had failed to provide: they would put paid to these compunctious visitings of nature; they would block and stop up all access to the passage of a certain varietal of remorse.
As yet another taxi cab sped him on his way back downtown Dr. Ed repeatedly added 2&2 together, his deductions arriving 9 times out of 10 (on admittedly speculative premises) to within +/-4% of the same obsession-inducing answer. And 2&2&2 codeine tablets, plus 2 more, made 8, and Dr. Ed made a heroic attempt to ‘think’: yes, Buddy and Missy Plumtree had both been placed on above-median dosages of Alba, and both (now that he laboriously turned it over&over&over in his ‘mind’) appeared to have been suffering from acute hypomania—to say the least. He had no real proof that his wife had managed to get her hands on any, but he was intending just now to do a sweep of Nurse Sloggett’s station and desk, for a little voice told him that she, too (for G-d knows what reason) may have been availing herself of the little white-and-off-white caplets.
Admittedly, he had no real evidence for any of this. Nevertheless, he ‘felt’ a compulsion to know, a compulsion to get to the bottom of at least something, a compulsion, funnily enough, that ventured (if only slightly) beyond the anxiety he ‘felt’ over the future of his own career, over his personal role as the director of this particular (heretofore uncontroversial) clinical trial. He glanced at his watch. It was 16:00.
16:00? That rang a bell, though he couldn’t say why. He was generally finished with patients for the day by 15:00 or 15:30, so it couldn’t be that. Oh, there were the ward rounds with the interns, and they were always at differing times of day, but no, they were always on Mon., Wed., Fri., never Thu. What, then?
—You a doctor? the cabby said, knocking Dr. Ed out of his increasingly eccentric personal orbit.
—That I am, said Dr. Ed. How did you know?
—I dunno. Just thought so I guess.
Something about the driver—obviously not his manner of speaking—communicated to Dr. Ed that this young man was highly educated. The name on his municipal licence, which was laminated and hanging from the rear-view mirror on a string, was Shboom, Daniel.
—Why do you ask? Are you a medical student yourself? asked Dr. Ed.
—Nah. Just curious if you knew anything ’bout that body.
—What body? Dr. Ed’s ‘switch’ was suddenly ‘overridden’ by the ‘tripping’ of a ‘breaker’.
—The one they found at the crematorium. They still haven’t identified it yet, but now they’re saying it was a probable overdose. She’s pretty average, otherwise, apparently.
—Average? How? Dr. Ed was somewhat more than mildly curious. The newspaper article that had previously induced the disgorgement of his tuna-on-white had provided no physical details whatsoever, and he’d forgotten all about it.
—Well, the cabby said, turning partly around to look at his passenger, Caucasian female, unspecified age, brown eyes & hair, 5-foot-5. None of this is official mind you, but bits & pieces have leaked out to the press. Didn’t you hear? It’s been on the radio all day.
Dr. Ed was speechless.
—You alright, mister? Getting no answer, the cabby turned back, turned his tape player on, turned the volume up to an audible level, and then increased the volume on his 2-way radio as well, so that he would not miss out on any calls from Dispatch.
—1-2-1 Base CanEx, the dispatcher then said. 1-4-4 Oomen’s Auctions, 0-8-1 MilCol.
—All perfect squares, the cabby said. What you think’d be the odds of that? Well, here we are.
The cab pulled up into the covered semi-circular hospital entrance.
—You know I love the Lord of Hosts, went the voice on the tape player. The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. Through the darkness They will guide me. In my time of trouble He will hide me.
—That’ll be … said Dan Shboom the cabbie. Dr. Ed handed him a 20.
—I dig the black girls, went the tape player.
—0-0-9 the Forum, the dispatcher said.
—Keep the meter running, said Dr. Ed, handing Dan Shboom another 10 as he leapt out of the car.
—We’re not on a metered system, actually, said Dan Shboom, but Dr. Ed had already started toward the hospital’s automatic doors.
22
The Iceberg
Randy Van Der Griff, former Team Canada rugby fullback and now Eumeta’s Project Manager for its ‘flagship’ anti-psychotic drug Differanz as well as for its ‘legacy’ tricyclic anti-depressant, Paradigm, stood waiting near the empty nurse’s station with a generic-looking piece of whitebread in a cheap-looking royal blue windbreaker, which bore the gold-embroidered logo of the well-known advertising firm of Happer, Baitman,Pancras & Kiln.
—What the hell happened to you? was the first thing to come out of Randy Van der Griff's mouth.
—Crazy patient’s crazy husband, said Dr. Ed with a shrug.
—Jesus, Ed, that’s nuts, said Randy. Dr. Ed shrugged. I was beginning to worry, Randy continued, that you’d left us standing at the altar. He now held his handshaking hand manfully out. When Dr. Ed took it but did not reply, Randy said: you know Stu Baitman, of course.
—Of course, Dr. Ed lied. He had had a hard enough time getting Randy, whom he had known for years, into focus—such were the kinetics of the 480 mg’s worth of narcotic that he had swallowed.
—Well this is Stu’s son, Stu II.
—Nice to meet you, said Stu II. Just call me Stu for short.
—Uh, how are you keeping Stu, said Dr. Ed, summoning each&every last dram of his willpower in an attempt to affect as conventional a demeanor as his chemically circumscribed circumstances would allow.
—Can’t complain, Ed, can’t complain, said familiar, friendly Stu.
—Good to know, said Dr. Ed.
—My old man has landed the Eumeta worldwide account, and he’s promised me Alba when the flight deck’s all-clear and the usual tedious hoops’ve been given the old in&out (and here Stu II made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and a rude gesture with the index finger of his left). Randy here’s pipelined for it as well, seeing how Paradigm is flatlining and Randy’s the obvious Best Man at the Wedding.
—Great, said Dr. Ed.
—Alba will be a compkiller, Ed, said Stu.
—No kidding, said Dr. Ed.
—How far out are we, you figure? said Randy.
—That’s a bit tough to gauge at the moment, said Dr. Ed, trying to be as unevasively evasive as possible. Ummm….
—Our appointment, as you’ll no doubt recall, Ed, Randy said, a vulpine rapacity in his eyes belying the mock-seriousness in his voice, was initially to discuss the possibility of your authorship of an in-service pamphlet for the prophylactic application of Differanz, timelined for distribution from our booth at February’s Cap-Pharma2 shindig.
—Where was that again? asked Stu.
—Virgin Islands, said Randy.
—British?
—American.
—Stupid fucks, said Stu. Um, pardon my French.
—Tell me about it. Anyway Ed, as regards the pamphlet, can we conference call that? I’d really like to give Stu II here a peekaboo at how Alba’s shaping up. Our man in dc is really pulling out all the stops with his man at the FDA, and he’s ballparking a March/April ’95 greenlight, providing there’s no 2-minute-warning fuckover from Baptist U.
—Who’s in charge of that trial? asked Stu.
—Brian Johns, interjected Dr. Ed, recovering, in his own ‘mind’ at least, a decent sense of professional decorum. I don’t ‘think’ he’ll be digging up any skeletons at this stage of the game, he added.
Randy laughed. —No, not Brian, he said. He gave Stu a sideways eyeball.
—So how about it, Ed, said Stu, could we have ourselves a little sneak preview?
—Of the Math? Oh, um, our Biostats man hasn’t crunched anything yet.
—Fuck the numbers, Ed, said Randy. Lessee the anecdotals.
—You see, Ed, said Stu, what Randy is alluding to, albeit somewhat, er, opaquely, is that we, as you probably already know, but here I go anyway, that we….
—Stu II loves this subject, Ed, let him roll with it….
—What we are talking about here, Ed, is nothing less than a revolution, we’re talking….
—Postmodern psychopharmacology, said Randy.
—I’ve heard of it, said Dr. Ed. It’s big at Berkeley.
—Correct, said Stu. Then there’s the work of 2 colleagues of yours, I’m sure you’ve heard of them, at the University of the Americas, Cadmon & Fallas.
—Of course.
—No doubt. They’ve co-authored a truly seminal paper that’s to be published in BodyMind next quarter.
—Stu I’s telling us at Eumeta to bet the farm on it, Ed, said Randy, with a smiling nod in Stu II’s direction.
—And Randy here’s getting his marketing cabal in bed with the r&d types on his end, said Stu.
—Without the Trads catching wind of it, said Randy.
—‘Till it’s a done deal, anyhow, said Stu.
—Trads? asked Dr. Ed.
—You know, Ed, said Randy, the dead wood. Prepostmodernists, if you will. Yesterday’s men.
—Uhhh….
—The paper’s called, said Randy, ‘The Linguistic Re-Turn: Dialogic Neuro-pharmacology and Social Reconstruction’.
—And given your pristine track record, Ed, said Stu.
—We knew you’d be keen to be groundfloored on this, said Randy.
—As Cadmon & Fallas see it, DSM-vi3 will require a near-gutting….
—A total re-think….
—Of next year’s DSM-iv. If I can run the abstract of what they say by you, we’re beginning to see ‘personality’ as a kind of neuro-chemical dialogue, one which shapes….
—And in turn can be shaped by….
—The narrative pathways of the so-called ‘self’….
—The interanimation of past experiences, said Randy, of present hopes and fears—and of course, of future possibilities. All of which is umbrellaed ….
—Or interpellated by, rather, the social meta-narrative, said Stu.
—Which in this case is, as Fukuyama’s work on Hegel and Kojeve leave absolutely no room for doubt.
—The liberal democratic state.
—Of which America, being both progenitor and progeny….
—Shall place its imprimatur, said Stu, on the ‘End of History’—uh, at any rate, in the Macro-sense of that phrase.
—While on the micro-level, the revolution continues….
—In an evolutionary kind of way….
—As all of the above perpetually co-determines the emergent Subject.
—Which nevertheless has a role to play.
—In an economic sense.
—In seeing itself as a consciously utility-maximising individual.
—In ‘making choices’.
—‘Rationally informed decisions’.
—‘Choosing’ which of the neuro-chemical modifiers.
—Supplied by us, of course.
—Will suit his or her currently perceived goals and values.
—So the conventional, subjective experience of ‘freedom’.
—By which Cadmon & Fallas mean the perceived freedom of the ‘Will’.
—Shall be supplemented by, not supplanted by.
—Shall be strengthened even.
—By all of this.
—Which, in turn (Randy’s increasing tendentiousness now reaching its climax), shall serve to bind the subject ever closer to the bosom, er, to the meta-narrative of the post-national state.
—That is, to the transnational neo-liberal meta-narrative.
—And by that Stu means the emerging, nascent, permanent ‘New Economy’.
—Don�
��t confuse this with ‘globalization’.
—That’s a pre-postmodernist, mechanistic, dinosaurist paradigm.
—Yeah. ‘Globalization’ is so 1848.
—This marks a complete break with all that, said Randy.
—Yeah, a complete break.
—But, as I said, an incremental break.
—Incremental, almost imperceptible steps.
—Baby steps, this hardly being some Soviet or Maoist, Randy said, chuckling, utopian enterprise.
—Hardly, said Stu.
—But the next step is already underway.
—Stateside, the FDA and the FCC have co-authored a White Paper which the Clinton administration is, in its timid way, by dribs & drabs, implementing.
—‘Consumer Rights & Pharmaco-Marketing’, said Randy.
—They’re way ahead of us, said Stu.
—They’re ratcheting up while we’re caught in a circle-jerk.
—A circle-jerk of hand-wringing.
—More & more, and whether the few remaining antediluvian interventionists at Health Canada like it or not, said Randy, prescription drugs will be pitched to end-users, not to doctors.
—The gate-keeping role of pharmacists and doctors, said Stu, will increasingly be seen as a trade barrier, no offence intended.
—Anyhow, the market will mushroom, said Randy.
—A total paradigm shift.
—And Alba will be, no, is, the … tip….
—Of the iceberg, Ed.
—And you’re standing on it.
—And we know you’d want a piece of it.
—Cos’ Stu II here is gonna tow it to the Persian Gulf if he has to.
—And sell it to the Saudis.
—So to speak.
The dynamic duo here paused, caught their breath, and the three men triangulated one another for a second-and-a-half or so.
—So, Ed, where do we stand on this? asked Stu, finally.
—Oh, Ed’s your man alright, said Randy. Aren’t you, Ed?
—I am, said Dr. Ed, with chemically-induced ingenuousness, what I am.
—Heh, said Stu.