In fact, to Casper, the whole courtship ritual, putting your best foot forward, being polite, courteous, etc., was at best deceptive and ultimately dishonest. He had seen the way Yalies who delighted in being able to belch the longest and loudest took pride in mustering up farts that smelled like a dead animal left in an unplugged icebox, deceived the girls, blind dates, and sweethearts they squired about on weekends. Noses were not picked, farts were not released, belches were swallowed, and guys who would rather have a root canal than take a class on art history jumped at the suggestion of spending the afternoon at the museum. And even though the guys said they did it to make it to first base or get a hand job, when Casper analyzed their fun rather than envied it, the scientist in him saw that the real reason they pretended to be someone else was that if they didn’t, they would be alone.
Casper had always felt superior in his loneliness. Yet the events of the previous few weeks had made him wonder how the push and pull he observed other bodies exerting on one another might affect his own gravity.
As he stood before Nina’s dormitory on the Radcliffe quad, it was hard for him to imagine the women of the Seven Sisters schools in their saddle shoes, cashmere sweaters, and camel-hair coats burping and farting and picking their noses, but logic told him that they were both as desperately phony and lonely as guys were.
The rub that paralyzed Casper was that if everybody who walked on their hind legs was lonely, why didn’t they just accept the feeling as a fact of life? Why the compulsion to pretend to always feel different than how you really feel? And though he did not want to be part of the deception, he felt himself being pulled by a force as real as gravity into a strange place in search of a girl he had never met who did not know he was coming.
The first floor of Nina’s dorm was a lounge: sofas and armchairs upholstered in couples and threesomes, warming themselves around a fireplace that was not lit and did not work. There was a girl with red-rimmed eyeglasses that made her look like a surprised insect seated at the reception desk. Casper felt himself disassociate as he watched the Casper reflected by the mirror behind the desk approach the insect girl.
“Can I help you?” Casper had never felt so humiliated to be a human being.
“Is A-Alice Wilkerson here?” Casper was sure she was counting the blackheads on his nose.
“You know Alice?” The insect girl squinted up her face in disbelief.
“Y-y-yes. Yes. In a way.” Casper was not going to stoop to a lie.
“Well, you’re out of luck. She’s visiting her boyfriend at Yale.”
“Well, a-a-actually, I’ve come to see her roommate.”
“I get it.” The girl at the desk smiled at him like she actually thought he might be okay. “Nina just left for the library. If you hurry, you can catch her.” She came out from behind the reception desk. “She drives a two-tone Buick, red and black, can’t miss it.”
“Students are allowed to have cars?”
“Nina’s father fixed it.” A father that fixes things, special privileges, the “insanely smart” Nina was suddenly sounding like an “insanely spoiled” rich girl. He told himself the journey was an enlightening disappointment, a mistake he would never make again.
He left the dormitory, ready to hitchhike home. Then he saw Nina opening the door to a Buick that matched the description. Her eyes were wide set, her mouth generous and bowed, her hair was the golden brown of a wild silk moth. She was beautiful—too beautiful.
He was ready to call off the experiment. It would never work out with someone this lovely. Then he saw she had two canes and her legs were encased in steel braces. Casper was transfixed as he watched her struggle to open the car door. She reached down to release the lock in her braces at the knee, and slid gracefully behind the wheel. Whereas Nina’s being crippled by polio would not have been a plus to 99.99 percent of Yale freshmen, to Casper Gedsic it meant that he had a chance.
Casper was so overwhelmed by the way in which the improbable had morphed into the possible before his eyes that he did not think to call out her name until the Buick had pulled away.
Casper began to run. It was difficult to keep up the pace and ask directions to the library at the same time. Getting lost twice, nearly hit by a laundry truck once, an hour later he was still two blocks from the library. Bent over double to catch his breath, he saw the rear end of Nina’s two-tone Buick halfway up a one-way street.
A man in a leather jacket and jackboots was leaning up against the driver’s window. His hair was duck-assed over his collar and his cheeks were cratered with acne. Leather Jacket looked up and down the street and opened Nina’s car door. When a police car passed, he closed it, stepped away from the car, and lit a cigarette. Casper was disappointed that Nina would have a friend like this. It was a heartbeat or two before he realized that this juvenile delinquent was about to steal Nina’s car.
Casper was on the passenger side of the Buick now. He saw the custom hand controls mounted on her steering wheel for the brakes and gas. More important, he saw the keys dangling in the ignition.
The face on the duck’s ass swiveled in his direction. “Get lost.”
“J-j-j-just give me a minute t-t-t-to . . .” Casper smiled as he opened the passenger door. He had been beaten up enough in his life to know that a grin confuses a bully before it enrages him. Casper was hoping that would give him enough time to . . .
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I f-f-forgot my keys.” Casper had them in hand now. He pushed the driver’s side door lock down before Leather Jacket could open the door and throw him out of the car.
“Why didn’t you say it was your car?”
Casper locked the door now. “I didn’t know you were trying to steal it.”
Leather Jacket laughed. No question, the trajectory of Casper’s life had changed.
He found Nina between HA and HL in the library’s card catalog room. He passed her slowly, goggle-eyed, like a fish in a neighboring aquarium. It was too good to be true. She was writing down the Dewey decimal numbers of the works of Heidegger. She had just jotted down the title of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Her nostrils flared and she tickled her cheek with a tendril of her hair as she flipped through the card catalog. All wasn’t just right in the world; it was perfect. He had pushed his luck enough for one day.
Wanting to savor the possibilities of the future, not wanting to risk a setback, he borrowed an envelope from an assistant librarian, and on the outside wrote Nina’s name and the following: “For the time being, being and time does not permit more than this thank you for giving me the opportunity to prevent your car from being stolen. Do you think Heidegger was really a Nazi? Yours respectfully, Casper G.”
Putting the keys inside, he licked the envelope and handed it to the assistant librarian. “Could you give this to the girl with the cane over by the card catalog?”
As she read the note, Casper admitted, “It’s d-d-d-difficult to be funny about Heidegger.” When the assistant librarian laughed out loud, Casper shushed her and headed home to replan the rest of his life.
WANTED
VOLUNTEERS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
Dr. Winton and Dr. Friedrich are interested in individuals who have experienced loss, grief, disappointment, and/or depression and would like to see an improvement in the quality of their lives. Participants must be available to meet on campus one hour every week from May 15th to September 15th and keep a brief journal of their reactions to the medication they will be taking. Those selected will receive five dollars per week for their participation, payable at the conclusion of the study.
CONTACT
Dr. William T. Friedrich, rm 307, Psych Building
Dr. B. Winton, rm 211, Inst. Human Relations.
Winton had typed up the above while Casper was on his way home from Radcliffe. It was Monday now. Friedrich was in the lab fermenting the second batch of GKD. They were equally impatient to get started. Though the doctors would have said they had nothing in comm
on save for a scientific interest in the chemistry of unhappiness, both had the same chip on their shoulders. Doctors Winton and Friedrich felt equally gypped by life. Curiously, each felt that the other had an unfair advantage. Winton made no secret of the fact that she believed that if she had been born a man, not only would the world have been her oyster, but she would already have devoured it.
Likewise, as he watched her brew her tea over his Bunsen burner, Friedrich was not above stewing. If I had one tenth your fucking money and connections, I’d . . . But if things were fair, neither of them would have been blessed with an IQ that put them in the ninety-ninth percentile.
Their plan was to have forty people take part in the test: twenty men, twenty women. Half would be given a placebo, the others a daily dose of The Way Home eyedroppered onto a sugar cube— roughly a quarter of what had saved the life of the two test rats that Friedrich had liberated into the garden. All human participants would be led to believe they were given something that would make them feel different, i.e., better. Friedrich and Winton would have liked to have a larger test sample and a longer test period, but they barely had enough kwina leaves for four months.
Friedrich read what Winton had typed up. “When did you decide we should pay our test subjects?”
“If we pay them at the end, they’ll be less likely to drop out of the study. It’s summer. The volunteers we’re looking for are unhappy, and unhappy people are unreliable people.”
“Where are we going to get the money?” At five dollars a week, Friedrich’s half would be sixteen hundred dollars. He only made sixty-eight hundred dollars a year. “I don’t want to wait around for a grant, and besides, we’ll be in a much stronger position to get real funding for this if we have data.”
“I wasn’t thinking of a grant.”
“Really?” He pronounced the word as Bunny did, like a slow slap in the face.
She took it and answered back in kind, “I’ll contribute the funds.”
“I’m not comfortable with that.”
“I’ll loan you your share. You can pay me back. The important thing is maintaining our momentum and not having them quit on us.”
“It puts me in an awkward position.”
“Okay, let’s not test it on civilians. It’ll be easier if we test it on long-term mental patients. I guarantee you you’ll get more dramatic results.” It was what she had wanted from the start.
“I’m interested in seeing if GKD can keep people out of mental hospitals, help them function while they’re still functional.” In his daydreams Friedrich imagined a world five years from now where a synthesized substitute for GKD would be prescribed like penicillin. He knew the survival of a few rats was no guarantee of the fame or fortune he longed for. But it was possible the drug and other drugs it could lead them to might just be able to alter the chemical reactions within the brain so that depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive behavior, and all the rest of what ails our brains might be treatable with a prescription, filled at your corner drugstore.
That very morning, halfway through shaving his upper lip, he had so given in to the dream he found himself fantasizing about who they would get to play him if they made a movie about his contribution to the betterment of mankind. It wasn’t so farfetched. They made a movie about the guy who cured syphilis, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, starring Edward G. Robinson. Friedrich considered the possibilities as he scraped off the night’s whiskers. Jimmy Stewart? Gary Cooper? He cut himself as his mind auditioned Gregory Peck for the role Friedrich hoped to live.
“Without impressive test results, we won’t get that far. Look, we’re both after the same thing.” More or less, that was true. “My money can make it happen faster. For all we know, someone else could be doing the same research with kwina that we are now.”
“I can guarantee you that they’re not.”
How could Friedrich be so sure? He had grown more confident, determined. She wondered if the dose of gai kau dong she’d given him had anything to do with the change. It had been three days since she had dosed them both with The Way Home. Friedrich was still in the dark about that, but she still felt the tingle of empowerment.
“I don’t care about the money. But if you’re too proud to accept it, we can put it in writing. All monies I invest in research will come out of first profits.” It was the first either had mentioned that there might be money in this. “I’ll keep receipts, I’ll charge you interest. You can even dictate the agreement. Happy?” She pulled a pen out of her purse and took a sheet of blue carbon paper from the drawer to make them both a copy.
Will cleared his throat. “Doctors Friedrich and Winton agree that they are equal partners in all research concerning the medicinal applications of kwina leaves and the indigenous fermented beverage gaikau dong. Any and all scientific publications regarding this search will bear both their names, and any profits stemming from their research will be split fifty-fifty after Dr. Winton has been repaid one thousand six hundred dollars.”
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
“I trust human nature.” Friedrich pocketed his copy in his wallet. Winton put hers in her purse.
That afternoon their advertisement for test subjects appeared on the bulletin boards of Yale, thumbtacked next to offers of summer jobs, tutoring French in Nantucket, math on the Cape, and employment as counselors and waterskiing instructors at lakeside sleepaway camps in the Adirondacks. In the hopes of recruiting twenty female guinea pigs, Dr. Winton posted the same offer in the nurses’ locker room at New Haven Hospital and the student lounge of a nearby girl’s junior college.
Friedrich had stayed up all night grading quizzes so that he and Winton could get an early start in the lab the next morning. She was late. He was struggling to drain the fermenting vessel by himself. Full, it weighed over two hundred pounds. One hand gripping its ironwood penis, the other clutching its nail-tipped breast, Friedrich was embracing the dark figures that decorated its facade as if in a ménage-à-trois when Winton finally slammed through the door. “You’re late. Give me a hand before I drop this goddamn thing.”
“Drop it . . . Our lab privileges have been revoked. We can’t do the test. I found this in my mailbox this morning.” She shoved a tersely worded handwritten note from Winton’s no longer kindly old mentor, Dr. Petersen, in Friedrich’s face as he muscled the fermenting vessel back onto the countertop.
It read as follows: “Dr. Winton, you have betrayed my trust. This is not the research project you outlined when you obtained my permission to use the facilities of this school. I want you and Friedrich in my office at ten o’clock to discuss disciplinary action.”
Friedrich felt like he was being flushed. His endorphins swirled him downward. “Disciplinary action.” In an instant the future he had built on the promise of The Way Home crashed down on him. The drug worked. He didn’t yet have the statistics to prove it, but he was sure of it. More important, he felt it. He could not, would not, let a fucking old Freudian fossil like Petersen flush not just his idea, but his new, improved idea of himself. Friedrich closed his eyes and imagined taking Petersen’s head in his hands and pounding it against the wall. When the fantasy had drawn imaginary blood, Friedrich blinked and shook the image from his head as if it were an insect crawling into his ear. Winton was saying something but he didn’t hear her.
“Disciplinary action.” No tenure, no full professorship at Yale, no movie.
He wondered how he would break the news to Nora as he put on his jacket and straightened his tie. “What’s the bastard’s problem? We proceeded exactly as we told him we were going to.”
Winton waited until they were halfway up the cool, dark staircase to Petersen’s floor to ask, “There wasn’t anything that could be construed as unethical or illegal in the way you obtained the kwina and the fermenting vessel, was there?”
Friedrich stopped climbing the stairs. “The answer is no, but it might be construed as unethical or professionally irresponsible that you didn’t ask
that question before you got involved.”
“Rest assured I’ll be more careful about my conduct in the future.”
To get to Dr. Petersen’s office they had to walk down a long, dimly lit corridor lined on both sides with metal shelves that sagged under the weight of more than a hundred gallon-sized glass jars, each containing a human brain floating in a formaldehyde bath. Each brain was carefully labeled in a spidery hand: Carmen Silva, poetess Queen of Rumania; John McCormick, inventor (steel plow); Ephraim Rosenbaum, pyromaniac; Thomas Mangan, alcoholic; Donnata De la Rosa, opera singer; Jim J. Jefferson, Negro tanner; Reginald Chapelle, homosexual; Ian Wainwright, murderer (poisoned twelve women); John J. Seward, Secretary of State; and on and on and on.
Some brains were as dark as coal, others as pink and delectable as a baby’s bottom. The one belonging to Dr. Herbert K. Glenway, the nineteenth-century phrenologist who had begged, borrowed, and stolen the collection his whole life and willed it to Yale, looked like it had been used as a football. Because it had.
Dr. Petersen barked, “Enter,” before they even knocked. The white-haired shrink who had made a career out of one lunch with Freud didn’t bother to stand or shake hands or invite them to sit down. He was combing his beard with a fine-tooth silver comb, a nervous display that accompanied anger. His face was pink, wizened, and ticked with age spots. He looked like a skull inside an udder. “How could you ever think I would allow this?” He crumpled the notice they had posted on the bulletin board and tossed it into a wastepaper basket that bore the college seal.
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