“It’s okay.”
“No, no it’s not.” Friedrich watched as Casper fell to his knees and began picking the tiny shards of glass from the earth. “One of the ch-ch-children could step here and cut themselves.”
“Don’t worry about it, Casper.” Friedrich pulled the awkward boy to his feet.
It was unusual for Casper to be touched. It felt almost like a hug. “Thank you for sharing your family with me. Really, Professor Friedrich, it’s been a privilege.”
“It was our pleasure, son.” Friedrich had already forgotten Gedsic’s first name.
“Come on, children, time to say good night to Casper.” Nora held Jack in her arms.
“If you’d like, I can make you prints of the photographs.” Still trying to remember why Casper seemed so familiar, Friedrich didn’t respond. “Don’t worry, it wouldn’t cost you anything,” Casper added nervously.
Friedrich let go of the boy’s hand. The idea that this kid thought he couldn’t afford to pay for pictures of his wife and children, that somebody called Gedsic felt sorry for him, made Friedrich’s mood plummet. The residue of the day’s earlier humiliations were still in him: the white whale of a DeSoto he couldn’t afford to fix; the bicycle he ran over but didn’t have the money to replace; the drug he hadn’t discovered. Friedrich’s cheeks flushed, his heart rate rose. He was studying himself now. Shocked by the visceral jolt of the same mix of anxiety and depression that one of Jens’s lab rats registered when they pressed on the food bar and got a hot shot of electricity instead of the kibble of dog food they’d been expecting, Friedrich snapped, “I can pay for my own photographs.”
Casper heard the edge in the doctor’s voice. “I . . . I . . . I d-d-d-didn’t mean it that way.” The stutter was back. His fingers worried circles on the side of his head like he was trying to scratch a hole in his temple.
Nora didn’t hear what had been said but sensed the joy suddenly bleeding out of the end of what had been a wonderful day. Friedrich’s jacket was off, his shirttails were out. She slid her free hand up his back. The warmth of her hand, the touch of her fingertips reminded Friedrich of all the good that had happened and the promise that there would be more of it tomorrow. He felt his heartbeat slow down. His anxiety dipped and his mood elevated. If only he could prescribe Nora’s touch, the gentle pressure of a hand on one’s back, life would be different for the Caspers of this world.
“What I mean to say, Casper, is ‘thank you.’ I’d appreciate that. Sorry if I sounded gruff. I get that way when I’m hungry.”
Nora had removed her hand, but the warmth lingered. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
“I d-d-don’t want to cause you any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. I’m afraid it’s just going to be bacon and eggs.”
“I can’t have bacon. I’m a vegetarian.”
Nora volunteered, “We’ll have potatoes and string beans.”
The children were asleep and the Friedrichs were in bed. They’d made love twice, something they hadn’t done since before the Korean War. Nora was just drifting off when Friedrich suddenly sat up. “He’s the A-bomb kid.”
“What?”
“I heard some guys in the physics department talking about him. I thought they were kidding, but . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“They said there was this sad-sack kid in the freshman class who had submitted a design for an atomic bomb in a high school science contest.”
“How do you know it’s Casper?”
“They said he was from New Jersey.”
“It’s a wonder he didn’t get arrested.” The Friedrichs would later find out that the FBI had interviewed both Casper and his mother when the judges of the Edison National Science Contest informed them that one of their contestants had submitted a model for a thermonuclear device that as far as they could tell would work. National security prevented Casper from being declared the official winner, but it got him into Yale.
Will scratched the back of his head. “It’s almost as if he lacks joy receptors.”
“Where are they located in the brain?”
“I don’t know; I just made them up.”
“Geniuses are always lonely.” Nora turned off the light.
“I don’t know if he’s a genius.” Friedrich was jealous. “Anyway, why do you say that?”
“Because I live with one.” He knew it wasn’t true, but he liked hearing it.
Friedrich’s black-and-white photo of the Bagadong fermenting vessel did not do justice to the presence of the object among the Bunsen burners and test-tube racks of the old chem lab in the basement of Sterling Hall. Fashioned from the trunk of a belian ironwood tree, nearly three feet tall, weighing nearly two hundred pounds, it held just shy of four gallons. Cut with stone axes and hollowed out with hot coals, it was carved to look like a squatting man on one side, a woman on the other. The male figure had a phallus, as long and stout as a billy club. The head of the penis was sheathed in beaten brass that had been cannibalized from an artillery shell. The female figure featured breasts nippled with iron nails stolen from a missionary, and a vagina fashioned from the jawbones of a primate (Dr. Winton, after much debate, had decided that its teeth had once belonged to an orangutan). Friedrich was more interested in the ethnopsychological implications of the fact that the male and the female shared the same head—which was also the lid of the fermenting vessel.
Perched on the slate countertop next to the lab sink, the periodic table bannered behind it, the figure seemed to cast a shadow on them, even when it didn’t. Hands, sweat, use had smoothed its surface and given the wood a darkly damp patina, as if it were perspiring. The eyes of the shared face were wide open; the whites were inlays of bone, with huge dilated pupils of red coral. The mouth was lipped in cowry shells, the man/woman was neither smiling nor angry; the expression was one of superior calm.
As Friedrich had hoped, the residue of dried gaikau dong in the bottom of the vessel provided the yeast culture necessary to ferment the kwina leaves into a crude beer. By day seven they had 3.78 liters of The Way Home as it would have been prescribed by the Bagadong shaman to ameliorate the grief and fears and depressions of a bereaved widow, an orphaned child, a spurned lover, or a warrior who had lost his hand, or his courage. To make administering this drug easier and more scientific re: dosage, as well as to ascertain in what form, if any, kwina was psychoactive, Friedrich and Winton distilled off the alcohol, then dried the remaining liquid in a vacuum.
By day ten The Way Home was reduced to a saltshaker’s worth of faintly chartreuse crystals. Gai kau dong was referred to by its initials, GKD. Doctors Friedrich and Winton had not quite become friends but were relaxed enough in one another’s company to borrow cigarettes from each other’s packs without feeling the need to ask.
It was day eleven. The crystals had been diluted in sterile water at a ratio of a hundred to one. Colorless and odorless, The Way Home now resided in 1,000 milliliter glass-stoppered Erlenmeyer flasks. Friedrich and Winton sat on stools, admiring the purified fruits of their labor. Will’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, tie loosened; he wore a black rubber apron tied around his waist. She wore a freshly laundered lab coat and sensible shoes cobbled out of alligator. “What do you think we should call it?”
“Nothing, until we find out if it works.” Will wasn’t a pessimist. It was just that he had learned the hard way that you won’t be disappointed if you expect the worst. They both reached for the pack of cigarettes on the counter at the same time. There was only one Lucky left. “You can have it.” Will handed her the smoke.
“We’ll share. We’re partners, after all, Dr. Friedrich.” They never used first names. Winton lit it off the Bunsen burner, took a drag, and passed it to Friedrich. He had sworn to his wife he hadn’t started smoking again. When she smelled the stink of cigarettes on his clothes, he blamed it on Winton. He didn’t feel guilty about the lie until he tasted Bunny’s pink lipstick on the end of that shared
cigarette.
“When this is all over . . .” Winton took back her cigarette, “. . . I think I’m going to turn Jack and Jill into a planter.” They were her nicknames for the figures on the vessel.
“Please correct me if I’m wrong, but did I ever tell you or imply that you could have the fermenting vessel?”
“No . . .” Bunny stubbed out the shared cigarette. “I apologize for being presumptuous.”
“I already promised it to my wife.” He hadn’t, but Winton’s sense of entitlement annoyed him a little more each day.
“Is Nora fond of primitive art?”
“Why do you think she likes me?”
“That is not a question I’ve ever thought about.” She picked a bit of tobacco off the tip of her tongue and jotted down something in her notebook.
Friedrich wondered why he’d brought Nora into the conversation, and changed the subject. “We’re gonna need thirty-six rats for our initial tests.”
“I should think one or two would be enough to determine if it’s toxic. The only way we’ll know the psychological effects of GKD is to test it on humans.” Winton had put a tea kettle on the Bunsen burner.
“I’m not comfortable letting anyone take this until I’ve seen hard evidence it has a beneficial effect.”
“You’re implying I imagined its effect on Lieutenant Higgins?”
“I just don’t think you were objective.”
“On what grounds?” She looked at him like a dog who’d growled at her.
“Because I think you were in love with your patient and probably had slept with him. All of which I understand and am in no way judging you for. But . . .”
“Point taken.” The kettle was whistling. “Well, Doctor, how do you propose to determine whether GKD makes a rat less depressed? Or more to the point, how do you intend to depress the rats that are taking part in your tests? Give them unhappy childhoods? Dead-end jobs?”
“I’ll have the rats in a controlled situation that provokes a general sense of hopelessness.” He said it like he was ordering a burger at a lunch stand.
“Such as?”
Friedrich winced as his mind tried to chase down a thought that had just poked its head into his consciousness. “You could think of depression as a way of pretending you’re dead, like an animal showing its throat. And if we think about this like one of the cannibals who thought this stuff up, to be a good cannibal, you can’t be defensive. What makes them function well in their society is the same thing that makes us function well—focused aggression in the face of chronic, inescapable adversity. So we depress the rats by putting them in a situation all their instincts tell them they can never escape from.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“Drowning . . . in a pool with no exit, and you can’t touch bottom. Put them up against a hopelessness they can feel and taste, and see how long it takes them to give up and stop swimming. That would approximate the emotions that bring on depression in modern-day life.”
“Clever, simple, and bleak.” Winton looked at Friedrich as if she felt sorry for him.
“That’s me.” Friedrich scratched his head and looked wistfully out a basement window that offered a view of feet hurrying to places he’d never been.
“What’s wrong?” Winton enquired with uncharacteristic softness as she sipped her tea.
“I was just thinking what sort of tank we’ll need to build to test all the rats at once.”
“I’ve already got one.”
Will didn’t really begin to understand who Dr. Winton was until they began testing. The effect of GKD on rats was ascertained in an indoor swimming pool housed in a redbrick Georgian folly on the grounds of her uncle’s estate overlooking the Connecticut River. The pool was Olympian in more than length. The roof above it was a giant stained-glass skylight designed by Tiffany to transform overcast afternoons into blue-sky days. There were headless Roman statues, potted palms that touched the ceiling, and a steam heating system that rendered the temperature equatorial.
Friedrich and Winton worked in eight-hour shifts. A butler delivered a hamper of sandwiches and a fresh thermos of coffee twice a day. The groundskeeper had lowered the water level in the pool and removed the ladder, so the drowning rats couldn’t claw their way out. They tested male and female pairs and marked them with nickel-sized dots of Easter egg dye on the tops of their heads for easy identification. The rats with the red dot on their head had been fed twenty grams of raw kwina leaves mixed with peanut butter; Friedrich suspected that if the psychoactive properties of the kwina leaves were absorbable in their raw state, the Bagadong shaman would have had his patients chew the leaves or brew them in hot water, like tea, instead of going through the effort of fermentation.
The two rats with blue Easter egg dye on their heads had been fed a hundred milliliters of the alcohol that had been distilled off the fermented gaikau dong. (Friedrich thought it unlikely that the psychoactive properties were distilled off into the alcohol, but he was taking no chances with his big chance.)
The pair of rats with the green dot on their head had been fed one ounce of the same form of fermented gaikau dong that had had such a healing effect on Dr. Winton’s lieutenant.
The rats crowned with purple were the ones Friedrich and Winton were placing their bets on. They had consumed two ounces of the dissolved crystals. Friedrich had pointed out that this would have been the equivalent of a human being imbibing a gallon of The Way Home. Winton had argued that since they were interested in seeing a clear demonstration of its effects, they should not be too concerned with the fate of the rats. The pair she had fed three ounces of crystals went into convulsions and stopped breathing before they got around to deciding whether to dot them with pink or black.
The control group, those that had had nothing but kibble for breakfast, were marked with a spot of yellow.
Friedrich had worked with rats before—they bit. Their incisors vibrated, cut you to the bone. Under the fluorescent lights of a psych lab, it was easy to be detached while watching a rat drown or shock himself to death. And if they had just bitten you, it was acceptable, even natural, to take some adolescent pleasure in having a hand in their demise. But Friedrich found the idea of watching the rats struggle, panic, give up, and sink to the bottom of a pool decorated with a mosaic likeness of a robber baron wearing a toga and holding a trident both ironic and depressing. He was flushed with enough adrenaline that the thought that he identified with the rat made him smile as he lorded over the drowning pool.
The realization that he had partnered up with a woman connected by blood to the kind of money and power that built indoor pools that weren’t used because the owner preferred to spend the spring tarpon fishing in the Gulf of Mexico not only awed Will Friedrich, but made him feel at the very bottom of the primal cortex of his brain that he had stepped into a trap of his own making, that something was now being tested on him.
Some of the rats treaded water, face to the wall of the pool, until their noses bled. Others swam back and forth across the pool at odd angles, hour after hour, in the hopes that a different trajectory would lead them out of the exitless hell their rat lives had become.
Just after lunch on day three, the rats began to die. The first pair to go were the two that had been fed the alcohol. Friedrich was not surprised. Of course, a hundred milliliters of alcohol in an eight-ounce animal was the equivalent of a human drinking a dozen martinis and swimming the English Channel. Five hours and eleven minutes later, the first of the two rats who had ingested the kwina leaves turned on his back and drowned. The female gave up eleven minutes later. A few minutes before ten o’clock, the control pair began to show signs of giving in to the madness of their plight.
Friedrich was getting tired of waiting for rats to drown. His efforts to turn off the heat in the pool house had been unsuccessful. He had taken off his trousers and was sitting in his boxer shorts when Dr. Winton showed up early for her 12:00 to 8:00 A.M. shift. The temperature was nearly a hun
dred. Friedrich was too hot and tired to be embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t expect you for another half hour . . .”
“I understand completely. Sensible. I should have worn shorts myself.” She watched him as he pulled on his trousers and reached for his shirt. She was as neat and clean as a printed page. She stayed in a guest room up at her uncle’s big house; it was easy for her to stay fresh. As always, her hair was braided into a serpentine bun. For an instant it looked like the male of the control pair was going to give in to the inevitable. But at the last second, he followed the female as she headed yet again for the opposite side of the pool.
Friedrich’s mouth tasted like an ashtray. He was looking forward to a shower and a few hours’ sleep next to his wife. Winton had a sticky bun in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Her eyes were fixed on the pair of rats marked with purple dye. They had decided that if those two, the ones that had been given The Way Home, survived eight hours longer than any of the other rats, they would know they were onto something. “You know, there’s no real need for you to drive back in the morning. I’ll call you and let you know how it turns out.”
“I think I’ll stay through the night and see for myself.”
“Does that mean that you don’t trust me to take accurate notes?”
“It means I’m curious.” The butler knocked. Instead of the usual hamper, he wheeled in a tea cart.
Winton explained, “I thought you deserved a decent meal.” There were lamb chops with paper socks on the end of the bone and asparagus and scalloped potatoes under a silver chafing dish.
Friedrich hoped food would wake him up. He waited for her to join him. “Please, don’t stand on ceremony. Start without me.” She was peering down at the control rats now. “Hey, you, Butch.” She was talking to the male control rat. “That’s cheating.” Winton’s nicknames and one-sided conversations with lab animals was getting on Friedrich’s nerves. He looked over just in time to see the male rat climb up on the female’s back. “The brute’s drowning her to stay alive.”
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