by T. C. Boyle
And Herr H., pushing himself up to a sitting position now, smiled for the first time since they’d left the lab. The color was seeping back into his face, as if the crisis had passed—or was passing. He was silent a moment, his eyes sweeping over the room until finally coming to rest on the doctor’s. “Lysergic acid diethylamide,” he said. “Synthesis”—a brief stumble over the syllables—“synthesis number twenty-five.”
The doctor left, weaving off into the declining sun on his bicycle, but not before taking her aside and admonishing her to keep a close watch on the patient and call him right away if he should take a turn for the worse. “You never can tell with cases of poisoning,” he said, looking her full in the face, “especially if there’s no known antidote. And how could there be since the agent itself is all but unknown, isn’t that right?”
She could only nod.
He looked at her sharply and she thought he was about to deliver a lecture on the dangers of ingesting foreign substances, but finally, his voice shot through with scorn, all he said was, “Don’t you people have animals for this sort of thing?”
Frau Rüdiger, wringing her hands in the doorway—and she had a story to tell, oh yes indeed—said she hoped everything was going to be fine but that she had her own family to attend to, if that was quite all right. Snatching a quick look at Herr H., where he lay stretched out on the couch, staring at the ceiling and moving his lips as if conversing with someone who wasn’t there, she said she’d look in later when Frau Hofmann returned, and added, oddly, “Do you understand?”
Frankly, Susi didn’t understand, but no matter the awkwardness of the situation—alone now in the house with her boss—she was determined to see it out. She thought of her mother then. Her mother would be worried and she really should telephone her, but then she couldn’t get past the further awkwardness of asking permission—and whom was she going to ask? The wife wasn’t home yet—the wife was on the train from Lucerne, half-mad with worry, no doubt—and Herr Hofmann was in no condition to respond. In fact, for the next hour he just lay there on the sofa without moving except to blink open his eyes now and again and exclaim, “The light! The light!”
She was sitting in the chair across from him, trying to read a book she’d slipped from the shelf—Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, which she found heavy going, especially with the way her mind was wandering—when she heard a quick tattoo of footsteps on the porch and the click of a key in the lock. In the next moment Frau Hofmann burst into the room, her face burnished and eyes wild, shrugging out of her coat and dropping her purse to the floor in a single motion, and then she was on her knees in front of the sofa, clutching her husband to her and repeating his name over and over as if in prayer.
Susi didn’t know what to do. She started to get up, then thought better of it. She wanted to explain, officially, to give Frau Hofmann an account of all that had happened, what the doctor had said, Frau Rüdiger, the milk, the bicycle ride, everything, but it was as if she’d been bound in place like Werner Forssmann’s nurse. Everything was so odd. She was here in this house she’d pictured endlessly in her imagination, here among all the things it contained, the family pictures, the ancestral china, the carpet he walked on in his slippered feet, but this wasn’t where she belonged and it was dark beyond the windows, and her boss, the most proper man in the world, the man she esteemed more than any other, was responding to his wife’s embrace with mounting passion, his arms clutched to her shoulders and his mouth pressed tight to hers in a deep erotic kiss . . .
“Albert, Albert,” the wife murmured, coming up for air, “what have you done to yourself? What were you thinking?”
He didn’t say a word, just tightened his grip on her and tried to kiss her again, but she pulled away and for the first time seemed aware that they weren’t alone in the room, throwing a quizzical glance in Susi’s direction before turning back to him—to his kiss. “You gave us such a fright,” she whispered, and then she was repeating his name again, over and over, as if to take possession of it.
“The children—?” he began, but couldn’t finish the question.
“I left them with Mother because I didn’t know . . . I thought—Oh, Albert, I was frantic, frantic. Don’t you ever do anything like this again, hear me?”
For answer, he pulled her back down to him.
The room went deep then, enclosed, narrowing, a submarine plunging into the depths where only the two of them could go, and Susi, without a word, laid the book aside, pushed herself up from the chair and tiptoed out of the room.
She found her bike propped against the tree where she’d left it. It was chilly out now, but the crickets sang their night song and the frogs, awakened after a long winter’s sleep, joined in. She was out in the country, on her own, and it must have been past ten at night. Her mother would be furious. She swung a leg over the crossbar of her bike, pushed off and began pedaling down the dark driveway to the darker road, and there was no moon in the sky to guide her, only the pale distant luminescence of the stars God had put in the heavens to mark His boundaries.
She was late for work the next morning. Her mother had awakened her at the usual hour but she’d fallen back asleep, never more exhausted in her life. She’d got home very late and her mother had greeted her at the door with a stony face, but she explained herself patiently till gradually her mother seemed to relent and heated a pan of barley soup over the stove for her, all the while complaining You couldn’t have telephoned even? and she reiterating how desperate the situation had been—and she didn’t have to exaggerate, that was for certain. When finally she did get to bed, she couldn’t sleep, her mind replaying the day’s events in a continuous loop, coming around again and again to the way he’d cried out her name—Help me, Susi, help me!—and then the image of him holding fast to his wife, of their lips, their tongues, the way he moved against her and she against him as if there were no constraints, as if she herself wasn’t sitting right there in the corner of the room. And she wasn’t in that room as an interloper either, she was there as a Good Samaritan, a friend, a savior—and what did that get her? A lonely ride home in the dark and not a word of thanks.
The first thing she saw on opening the closet—his jacket, hanging on its hook like the most ordinary thing in the world—flooded her with relief. He was there. He was all right. He hadn’t died in the night or lost his mind or succumbed to delirium. She fought down the flickering memory of his vacant eyes, his reddened face, his mussed hair that stood straight up on his head like the hackles of an animal and the way he’d shouted at her when she asked, in all innocence, if she should call the doctor, then she hung her scarf and jacket on the hook beside his, slipped on her lab coat and stepped into the laboratory.
At the moment she caught sight of him in the far corner (not at his desk but at the window, his back to her), she was struck by the aroma of fresh coffee, a rarity in these days of rationing and hardship, and something else too, a lighter fragrance, a whiff of nature in this place where the natural invariably gave way to process, synthesis, titration and extraction. That was when she saw the flowers, the daffodils, a whole bouquet of them, arranged in a beaker on her desk. She was struck dumb. No one ever gave her presents, except for her parents and her brothers, and only then on her birthday and at Christmas, and before she could even think to call out a Guten Morgen to him she was pressing her face to the soft cool petals and breathing in the scent of the outdoors.
“Oh, I see you’ve found the flowers, Fräulein.” He’d turned round now, grinning at her, his hair swept back, the spectacles pinching his nose, his lab coat spotless and his tie perfectly aligned, everything right again, everything the way it should be. “I wanted to do something more for you, to thank you, that is, for yesterday . . . roses, I thought of roses, but the shops weren’t open yet and, well, I picked these for you along Bottmingenstrasse on my way in this morning. I hope you like them.”
Her first emotion was guilt over the resentment she’d fallen prey to on her way i
n on the tram, but now, as if a switch had been thrown, she felt nothing but warmth for him—he was his old self, and his old self was gentle and giving, and he did care for her, he did. And then, as he crossed the lab to her to take both her hands in his own, she gave way to relief and a kind of amazement at how well he looked, fresher than ever, in fact—if she hadn’t known better she would have thought he’d just returned from a week at a spa, at Montreux or Baden-Baden, his whole body aglow as if he’d been rebuilt, cell by cell, overnight.
“I do,” she said. “I love them. But you didn’t have to—”
He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s have a cup of coffee—you do enjoy coffee, don’t you, Fräulein?—and sit down a minute to discuss what’s happened here. I have so much to tell you.”
So they sat—at his desk, on company time—and sipped their coffee, with sugar and cream, no less, and he told her everything, from the minute the drug had come on to its gradual dissipation late in the night. “I experienced things, Fräulein, I’d never thought possible—saw things, saw whether my eyes were open or shut, a whole kaleidoscope of swirling images and colors, and that was only the beginning. It was the most”—he hesitated, then laughed—“eye-opening experience I’ve ever had. Susi, I saw the world as it truly is,” he said, his voice so rich and resonant he might have been singing, “—the immaterial world, the spiritual world, Kant’s Ding an sich in every object.”
She didn’t know what to say. She barely knew who Kant was.
“Table legs. The antimacassar on the chair. The end table, the telephone, my shoes! Everything has a life of its own totally independent of us and I never knew it, never even imagined it, because I’ve had my head down my entire life, my nose in books, in beakers, peering through microscopes at a busy universe no one before van Leeuwenhoek had even guessed at! Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying?”
He was his normal self, that was what she’d been thinking a moment ago, but now she wasn’t so certain—could he still be under the influence of the drug? Was he delirious? What was he talking about? She raised the cup to her lips, blew briefly across the surface to cool it, and looked into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I think so. It does have psychoactive properties, just as you predicted, is that what you’re saying?”
His eyes were strange—not dilated now, not black, and back to their normal color—but infused with something like, like . . . mania. Or no, enthusiasm, extreme enthusiasm for this new product and what its possibilities were for the company, for the world, because it was his creation, his alone, and he couldn’t contain the excitement of it. “I won’t say it was all bliss and I don’t know what I said or did”—a long look for her now, deep into her eyes, so deep she had to turn away—“and forgive me for any . . . indiscretions, but if I saw the devil, if I thought I was losing my mind when in fact I was only prying loose the grip of my ego, I saw God too, shining until His face engulfed the sun and a second sun and all the suns beyond it and I was left with a peace I’ve never felt in all my days—or even dreamed of.”
He straightened up in the chair, threw back his head and drained his cup. “This is a revolution, Susi, and make no mistake about it. We have something here more powerful than any bomb, any reagent, any synthesis anyone has ever come across—I’m sure of it, as sure as I’ve ever been about anything, but of course we need more experimentation, more human subjects, and my experience alone is woefully insufficient, I know that . . . but I feel it in my bones, in my heart, my brain, in the neurons, Susi, the neurons.”
Of course, no one would believe him, at least not at first. Three days after his self-experiment, she typed up his report on the experience and at his direction sent copies to Professor Stoll, his immediate superior at Sandoz, and to Professor Rothlin, director of the Pharmacological Department. It didn’t take long to get a reaction—within the hour Professor Rothlin was tapping at the door. At the moment, Herr Hofmann was in the middle of producing another iteration of the chemical for further trials—he’d been doing almost nothing but for the past three days—and he called impatiently over his shoulder to her to please see who that was and what they wanted, and if he was impatient, edgy, really, she excused it because the synthesis was so complex and tedious and the resulting product so unstable even light would rapidly degrade it, and of course, all this meant so much to him. This was his discovery, his child, and he would settle for nothing less than the purest synthesis it was humanly possible to produce.
“Yes,” she said, “of course,” and went to the door expecting one of the other young chemists or perhaps a secretary from the main office with some form or other, so it took her a moment to collect herself when she saw who it was standing there before her.
The director barely gave her a glance, just strode into the room, huffing and puffing and waving the report in one hand. “Albert, Albert, what in God’s name is this?”
Fortunately, Herr H. was in the second stage of the process, which involved cooling the isomerized synthesis prior to mixing it with an acid and a base and evaporating it to produce the active substance, so he was able to step away from the hood, strip off his gloves and nonchalantly shake the director’s hand. “What do you mean?” he said, breaking into a grin. “My report?”
“Exactly, yes. Because obviously you’ve made some error in calculating the dosage—”
“Not at all—and my lab assistant, Fräulein Ramstein, who was at my side throughout the entire process, can back me up here, isn’t that right, Fräulein?”
And here was a role she knew how to inhabit: modest, pretty, bowing her head in accord as the sun sent a slant of light through the window to illuminate her where she stood, and it was almost as if they were in a scene from a film, the heroine stepping forward to exonerate the hero when he most needed it. “Oh, yes,” she said, “we were very precise about that. Two hundred fifty micrograms.”
“Ridiculous,” the director said, and he’d begun to pace up and down the room now, a delicate-looking man of her father’s age, wearing whiskers. “Do you really expect me to believe that the merest trace of this substance—two hundred fifty millionths of a gram—can have any effect whatever? Especially for a man of your size—what do you weigh, Albert? Seventy kilograms?”
“Seventy-two.”
“There, you see? A man of seventy-two kilos affected by a barely measurable dose?” He’d reached the windows and come back again, twice, and now he swiveled round on his feet and pointed a finger at Herr Hofmann—and at her, her too, because she was indivisible from this. “There’s something very wrong here. Either that or you’ve discovered the alchemist’s elixir.”
Herr Hofmann tried to interject, but the director waved him off. “No, no, Albert, I’m sorry, but this is just too fantastic to be credible. I’m going to need to see all your laboratory notes, everything you’ve done with these lysergic acid amides, and I want to be personally involved in any further trials—animal or human—so that I can judge for myself.” He paused, the hint of a smile hovering over his lips. “You’re a solid man, Albert, one of the best we have, and I know as well as anyone here that you’re not given to miscalculation, exaggeration—or what, fantasy?” The director let out a little laugh. “You’re not a fantasist now, Albert, are you?”
Whether he was or not—and, of course, the director was just having a little joke—the compound Herr H. had discovered was simply too intriguing to resist, and within the week the director himself, and Professor Stoll too, had come to him for a trial dose, and so they became the second and third human guinea pigs to experiment with the drug. They remained incredulous regarding the dosage right up to the moment of ingestion, but Herr Hofmann, insisting that the quantity he himself had taken was an overdose, gave his colleagues less than a third of that, 60 micrograms only, and yet both reported the most astonishing effects, seeing lights, colors, experiencing synesthesia and visual distortions, though neither suffered the terrifying visions Herr H. had summoned, nor the glorious ones either. Which Her
r H. attributed to the reduced dosage. Still, the effects were beyond what anyone could have expected, and both men encouraged him to continue trials, which he did succeed in doing on separate occasions with two other volunteers from the Chemistry Department.
All this was very gratifying. She began to feel an attachment to the work she’d never experienced before because she’d been there from the very beginning, at his side, his helpmeet, and in a sense the compound was as much her child as his. Work, which had seemed so dull and repetitive, was suddenly absorbing, radiant even, so much so that she began to think she’d like to go back to school and become a chemist herself. Of course, she kept all this hidden from her mother, because her mother wouldn’t have approved and because LSD-25, as they were calling it in shorthand, was the secret sweet chemical bond between her and Herr H., and she valued that more than anything in the world.
Spring gave way to summer, the days collecting beyond the windows like so many invitations to another realm, each one softer and lovelier than the one before, and she and Herr H. worked at synthesizing, purifying and crystallizing the product until it was as close to perfection as they could make it, and sometimes, when the mood was right, they took their lunch hour together on the patch of lawn out back of the building. It was during the second week of June—June the twelfth, actually, and she would never forget the date—that she approached him about something she’d been revolving in her mind for the longest time.
They were sitting side by side in the grass on the blanket he’d spread, casually chewing their sandwiches, books open before them, as relaxed with each other as—well, she didn’t want to push the simile because he was married and always would be married and she’d never be married to him, but it wasn’t like brother- and sisterhood either, and no one, least of all her mother, could ever know what she was feeling. At any rate, she took the last bite of her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and screwed up her courage, sure he would deny her, say no, claim that she was a girl still and not a woman—not a woman at all, but a girl under her mother’s aegis—and the words were out before she could stop herself. “I want to be a guinea pig,” she said.