“I checked the logbook. This one’s the real thing.” Friedrich held up the bottle of sugar cubes and gave it a rattle.
“That’s cheating.”
“This kid can make a difference in the world. If we can make a difference in him . . .”
“No.”
“Didn’t you tell me your lieutenant had tried to kill himself before you gave it to him?”
A moment later Friedrich called Casper into the room, and Winton handed the boy his first week’s worth of GKD. Casper waited until his cube was half-dissolved in his mouth to ask, “W-w-what’s it derived from?” The volunteers had all been told the medication in the sugar cubes was an organic compound.
Friedrich smiled at him. “It’s a plant, Casper.”
“What s-s-species of plant?”
“I’m afraid we can’t tell you that, Casper.”
“W-w-why?”
“Because it’s one of the rules of our study.” Winton gave Friedrich a glance.
“Why?” Casper was starting to sound like Jack.
“Because you would go to the library and look it up, and you might read something about it that might influence your reaction to it.” Friedrich had helped Casper get a summer job at the library.
Winton waited until Casper had left the room to say, “He’s going to be a problem.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know what you’re taking?”
“I wouldn’t want me in my study, either.”
Casper came back through the door without knocking. “I-I-In the journal you want me to keep, how long do you want my daily entries to be?”
“A line or two will be fine.” Winton forced a smile.
“S-s-sometimes f-f-feelings are more c-c-complicated than that.”
“It’s not a test, Casper.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Yes, you’re right, it is a drug test. What I meant is, it’s about your feelings; just write whatever you feel; it can be as long or as short as you like; there’s no right or wrong.”
“Of course there is, Dr. Friedrich.”
Casper wanted to feel different. He waited all day and into the night to feel a chemical hand pull him away from the edge. He had come down off the Giant, but he refused to live with the pain. The waiting and the hope that was tied to it rubbed salt in the hurt and exhausted him.
His first entry in the diary of feelings he was keeping for Dr. Friedrich read, “May 17th, 1:30 PM. No Change. Hopelessness2 = pointlessness3. Being alive feels like a punishment.” When he crossed the last “t” he turned out the light and crawled under the covers, longing for dreamless sleep.
A dog barked, a siren raced to another crime in progress, and the thought of Nina lying next to him, touching him with her nakedness, her metal braces chucked on the floor next to the rest of her clothes simultaneously gave him an erection and made him cry.
Casper tried to distract himself by looking out the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye. He thought about the question of missing mass, not as a personal problem but as a riddle to take his mind off the sadness that pulled at him.
There was a physicist at Princeton who was calling it “dark matter.” The words made him think of whole stars and the worlds that orbited them being sucked farther and farther into invisible and inescapable darkness. Then he began to imagine there was dark matter in him, pulling him ever inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, until his existence could only be measured by loss.
Casper turned on a light, picked up his pen, and added these words to his first entry: “Bad thoughts.” The next day his entry read, “no improvement.” The same two words synopsized the sugar cube’s failure to sweeten life over the course of the next seventy-two hours.
By day five Casper so dreaded the depression that had collapsed in on him with consciousness that, as soon as his eyes winked open, he jumped out of bed and ran as if chased by the darkness out of his room to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He stood under the shower a good ten minutes before he realized he was singing along to a song he’d never heard before: Dry those tear drops, don’t be so sad . . . Some brand-new baby can be had . . .” The music wafted down from the radio, balanced on the windowsill of the triple on the floor above him.
How miserable could he be if he was singing in the shower, much less a song called “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere”? He thought of Nina, saw the photo of the crash inside his head, and thought of how different things could have turned out if he had let her car be stolen. Or perhaps just had the courage to talk, to speak to the girl who had captured his heart. It was still sad. And if he kept thinking about it, he would undoubtedly begin to weep. But . . . why?
Something had shifted inside him overnight. It was no longer so personal. It had happened to him, but the drug moved him just far enough away from his feelings so that it was more like watching a natural disaster on a newsreel than the main feature, something that had happened to him.
Casper dried himself carefully, brushed his teeth gingerly. He didn’t want whatever had moved inside his head to shift back into its old position and darken the day. Back in his room, Casper wrote in his diary, “No reason to feel better, but do.” The feeling that he was safe, i.e., that it was safe to think about Nina without feeling responsible, hatched and mated and multiplied in him like sea monkeys as the day progressed.
His job at the library had started the day before. As he pushed his trolley of books through the stacks, returning volume after volume to their proper places in the Dewey decimal scheme of things, Casper found himself able to painlessly reorder sentiments and thoughts and feelings that just the day before had made his mind flinch—it was as if Casper had stepped into the skin of someone just like him, only different.
At lunch, when he ate his egg sandwich, it tasted different, crunchy and salty, so much better than yesterday’s egg on rye. When the librarian told him he’d gotten the wrong sandwich and he discovered he’d just eaten bacon, he didn’t gag or feel queasy. No, the thought that an animal had been slaughtered to satisfy his appetite only made him muse, What else have I been missing?
That afternoon he dallied reading the first sentence of books he’d thought beneath him, never bothered with, never heard of: Melville’s Typee, Proust’s Cities of the Plain, Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. The vastness of what was unknown ceased to make his universe feel like an empty room. Over a solitary dinner of cheddar cheese, saltines, and an apple, Casper shocked himself by writing in his diary, “Feel surprisingly okay . . . happy?” Casper was just learning what that word meant to others.
The next morning he reached for his sugar cube before he got out of bed. He could taste it on his tongue as he stepped into the shower. It tasted like the wrapper on a stick of licorice. When the radio didn’t come on, he sang the Yale fight song as if he were getting ready to take the field.
Casper only had one worry—the possibility that the darkness would come back. That was the worm in this otherwise delicious apple. Was he really safe, or was he just kidding himself? Casper, still being someone not unlike Casper, devised a test.
He waited until it was dark before he climbed aboard his rusted bicycle and began to pedal. It was a hot and windless night. The telephone wires sizzled. As the katydids sang, moths orbited the street lamps on velvet wings.
The Egyptian gates to Grove Street cemetery were locked. Casper hid his bicycle in some bushes on High Street and jumped the wall. What better place to test his emotional state, his ability to resist the pull of the gravity within him, than the grave of his loss? If he could face what could not be fixed, perhaps he had a chance.
A back copy of the New Haven Chronicle told him a graveside service for the Bouchard family had been conducted two days earlier. The cemetery was larger than he had expected, long rows of headstones in gray-and-pink granite, chiseled dates of birth and death, sometimes followed by beloved wife, husband, daughter, son. There were old-fashioned names lik
e Jebediah and Lieselotte, and thirteen Townsends planted tight as tulips, families closer in death than in life.
Casper had already begun to weep when he saw the marbled angel on a plinth that bore no name, just “Son,” and under it “Born January 21st 1823, died the same.”
He wandered the stately marble orchard for more than an hour before he found Nina Bouchard. Her headstone was carved in the shape of an open book. Her epitaph was from Byron: “Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most/must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,/The Tree of Knowledge is not that of life.”
Casper started to read it aloud but could not finish. Braced for the worst, he waited for the realization that he had missed his one chance for happiness to sweep him back into his depression. But instead of the tidal wave of recrimination and self-loathing he expected, Casper was flooded with a comforting melancholia that bordered on ennui: It’s tragic she died, but everyone here has died. What about the kid that only lived a day? Everybody dies; it’s a fact of life; it’s out of your hands, my hands.
What now made Casper sad and worried as he brushed away his tears at Nina Bouchard’s graveside was how close he had come to dying for her, dying for a girl he’d never said a word to. In the darkness of that graveyard Casper could now see clearly that she wasn’t the only girl in the world who read Heidegger. There were other “crazy smart people” in this world besides her and himself, and Casper’s only responsibility at that moment was to worry about himself. He’d never thought of life as a job, like putting books on library shelves, but that’s what it was. He began to think what Dr. Friedrich referred to as “healthy thoughts”—to stay alive, to make the most of things, to take advantage of good fortune when it befalls you, to change what you can and forget what you can’t. Like Dr. Friedrich said, “The past doesn’t exist.”
When Casper found himself wondering whether they buried Nina with or without her braces on, he felt a hiccup of guilt, which he quickly soothed by deciding that the next time he came to visit, he would bring her a bouquet of flowers. Ready to return to the world, Casper was looking for the shortest way out when he heard a match being struck behind him.
Whitney Bouchard had a cigarette in one hand and a pint of Old Crow in the other. He had on the same suit he’d worn to her funeral two days ago.
“Nina was the best, wasn’t she?” Whitney staggered slightly but did not slur his words.
The truth, as Casper had so recently realized, was that Nina was a complete stranger. The correct response to Whitney’s statement would have been “I didn’t know her.” But Casper had come to realize that it’s the living who are important. Casper nodded yes.
“Sorry I didn’t invite you to her funeral.”
“I didn’t expect it.” Casper was no longer stuttering.
“Should have invited you.” He took a pull off the Old Crow before he confessed, “She read me the note you gave her the night before. . . .” He spilled some bourbon on his lapel as he wiped a tear from his eye. “It meant a lot to her. Hell of a lot.”
“It did?”
“Stuff like that means the world to a girl. Especially a girl like Nina.”
“I’m glad.” He was.
“You’re the first guy who ever tried to pick her up. Braces, polio . . . most guys, shits like me, couldn’t see past that.”
“She was beautiful.” Casper smiled at the thought of her looking over her shoulder as she got into her Buick.
“You’re lucky, you’re smart enough to see what really matters, what’s inside.” Whitney took another pull of Old Crow and offered it to Casper. Casper shook his head no. He already felt intoxicated by the strangeness of their intimacy.
Casper only then noticed tears were streaming down Whitney’s face.
“God, I’m ashamed.” The sight of Whitney Bouchard, football hero, faux Hemingway editor of the paper, undergraduate Batman, weeping as helplessly as Casper had, elicited a joyous empathy in Casper. Though it was dark, Casper could see he wasn’t so different after all.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Whitney dropped his head on Casper’s shoulder. His breath smelled of vomit and sour mash. “I was embarrassed of her being a cripple, didn’t want her near me; I always made up excuses to leave her behind. She was alone so much.”
“She had Heidegger.”
“That’s something.”
“That’s a lot.”
“You’re okay, Casper.” He didn’t call him “Getsick.”
They walked back through the graveyard in silence, then helped each other up over the wall. Whitney insisted on giving him a ride back to the dorm as he got behind the wheel of his Packard. The bottle of Old Crow shattered on the pavement just before he slurred, “Maybe you’d better take the wheel.” Whitney passed out before Casper could tell him he had never driven a car . . . Of course, he’d seen people do it.
Key in the ignition, clutch, gas, brake . . . like so many things in life, it wasn’t as complicated as Casper thought. As the clutch popped and the car lurched down High Street, Casper caught his reflection smiling back at him in the rearview mirror. Incredible, but true—he was okay, Whitney was his friend, and he was driving a Packard into a parallel universe.
Friedrich had a different kind of journey ahead of him that evening, but it, too, was a kind of test. Dr. Winton had listened to her shrink and decided to begin demystifying her attraction for her collaborator by inviting Friedrich and his wife to a party she was giving that night. The invitation was for seven. It was five ’til. The babysitter they had never used before was late, and Nora was not only not ready to go out the door, she hadn’t even come out of the bathroom.
Freshly ironed shirt, new tie, blue suit just back from the cleaners, Friedrich loitered at the foot of the stairs, glaring at his watch and bellowing, “Nora, for crissake, we’re gonna be late.”
No answer.
It had already occurred to him that she was paying him back for making her wait in the faculty parking lot in the White Whale with the kids and a fishing pole the Sunday before, and then sending her off to Sleeping Giant on her own.
It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Wintons’. Though he had never physically crossed the threshold of this or any of the other big houses (at Winton’s uncle’s, he had only been privy to the pool house), in his mind Friedrich had been inside. He had imagined what it would be like to have a spare four or five thousand square feet, a half dozen working fireplaces to sit by while you looked out leaded windows and watched your children play on two acres of lawn mowed by somebody else.
At that moment his own freshly bathed and pajama’d kinder were in the kitchen eating wieners and ignoring their broccoli. He didn’t need to go to a party at Bunny’s to know her house wouldn’t stink of boiled tube steaks and a bunch of dandelions rotting in the jelly jar Lucy had placed on the windowsill a week earlier. There’d be fresh-cut flowers in crystal (if not cloisonné) vases at Winton’s house; the jumble of life would be ordered in closets, cupboards, and drawers, not strewn across the living room rug.
In fairness to Nora’s admittedly lackluster housekeeping skills, the Friedrichs’ house at that moment was comparatively neat. It wasn’t the bouquet of weeds in the jelly jar that reeked; it was the two-day-old dirty diaper Jack had hidden under the couch that was ripe. And yes, the typewriter on the card table didn’t make for an elegant living room. But it was set up there so he could close the door on them and work into the night. Those were his papers and dirty coffee cups and unemptied ashtrays. And, in fact, he had been the one who’d forgotten to put away the Little Red Hen and the bowl of popcorn and the chalk that he had just stepped on. But Dr. Friedrich didn’t see it that way. It was their mess, not his, that was drowning him.
Blindly dumping the coffee cups, the popcorn bowl, the jelly jar, and the Little Red Hen into the kitchen sink, then cursing as he pulled his children’s favorite book from the dishwater, he began opening cabinets looking for a dustbin. The garbage was not i
n the liquor cabinet, but once it was opened he was confronted by more mess. Why save an empty bourbon bottle? And the gin had fruit flies floating in it. He didn’t even drink gin. And yet he was infuriated. It was the waste that galled him.
The knock on the kitchen door was the babysitter. He shouted, “Come in.” She was fifteen years old, and wore a poodle skirt and a look of horror. Standing there with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a fifth of gin in the other, he could just imagine what she’d tell her parents.
In Hamden or anywhere else in 1952 America, babysitters were the suburban equivalent of the KGB. They were the secret police, reporting the slightest variations of the norm to the neighborhood, using their youth, tickle rubs, and the promise of candy to elicit innocent confessions from children about their parents. At least, that’s how Friedrich saw it.
One of the liquor bottles broke as he dropped it into the trash. The kitchen was hot. He was sweating through his shirt. Apologizing for the heat, he opened the window. “I don’t know how it got so warm in here.”
The babysitter pointed to the stove, the burners were on full blast. “God, I’m losing my mind.”
Lucy piped in, “When he’s hot, my dad takes his pants off.” The babysitter backed toward the door.
“She’s joking.”
“No, she’s not.” That was Fiona. “You like to get naked.” Fiona and Lucy squealed with delight. There was much talk of nakedness in the Friedrich household. Fiona added, her cheeks flushed, “Especially at night.” The babysitter looked out the window nervously. The sun was about to set.
Friedrich began to back out of the kitchen. “I’m just going to check and see what’s holding up my wife.”
“Do you have a television?”
“No . . . ah, shit!” Will had just gotten ketchup on his clean suit.
“Daddy said ‘shit.’ ”
“And he deeply regrets it.” Wiping the ketchup off the sleeve of his no longer clean suit, Friedrich turned to the babysitter in the hopes of sympathy. “You know how it is sometimes.”
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