After a brief pause, whoops and hurrahs breathed life back into the dead space of the lecture hall. The students who didn’t applaud pounded on their desktops. Friedrich felt like a goddamn Mr. Chips.
Thirty minutes later the double doors in the back of the hall swung open. It was the head of the department’s secretary, five feet tall and seventy pounds overweight. She didn’t leave her chair, much less the psych building, except to get lunch or deliver bad news. Nora? The kids? The dean couldn’t have found out about the extra-credit project unless that freckle-faced ROTC kid who’d raised his hand to go to the bathroom had . . .
The secretary was breathing hard by the time she reached the lectern. Friedrich lowered his voice, “What’s wrong?”
“Will you kindly tell your patients not to leave messages for you at the psychology office? We’re not an answering service.”
“What patient?”
“He wouldn’t give his name, but he said it was an emergency and that you’d know who he was and to tell you he needs help. He insisted you’d know where to find him.”
“How did he sound?”
“I didn’t take the call myself; I was at lunch. But the TA who took the call said he was crying.”
“When did he call?”
“Lunchtime. I didn’t see the note on my desk ’til just now.” It was almost five o’clock.
Friedrich leaped from the stage, feeling like an assassin. As he ran to the exit he shouted, “Read chapters one and two tonight. Gentlemen, there will be a quiz.”
It was a half mile to the bench in the courtyard of Sterling. Friedrich hadn’t run that far that fast since railroad bulls wielding ax handles had chased him across a freight yard in Salt Lake. He had escaped their wrath by hiding in the bottom of a boxcar crowded with veal calves on their way to slaughter.
The bench where they’d met the last two weeks was empty. It had been more than three hours since Casper had made his call for help. Had he gone back to the Giant? Taken the scalpel from his dissection kit? Bent over, hands on his knees, Friedrich tried to catch his breath and think. There was a pay phone in the basement of the library. He’d call the police from there, have them send a car to Sleeping Giant. Friedrich took a knee to tie his shoe. A robin was pulling a worm from the ground, Casper’s note was written in chalk on the slate walk:
Dr. Friedrich, waited as long as I could. You can find me hanging in my room, 303 Vanderbilt Hall.—CG.
Friedrich ran, even though the race was lost. He took the dormitory stairs three at a time, fell, scrambled to his feet, and pressed on. Casper’s floor was deserted. His door was ajar. Friedrich silently pushed it open. His shades were drawn and the lights were off. Casper’s body lay motionless on the bed. Faceup, eyes closed, his left arm dangled off the bed. Darkness pooled on the floor beneath his fingertips. Friedrich saw the dissection kit on the desk next to the bottle that had held his sugar cubes. The study was over. The selfishness of the thought made Friedrich feel like something dirty stuck to the bottom of a shoe, but he couldn’t resist. Friedrich hadn’t just failed; he had had a hand in this sad boy’s demise.
He fought the urge to run for help. He made himself take it all in: the Spartan neatness of the desk; a photograph of Friedrich and his family and the parrots thumbtacked to the wall, below an overexposed snapshot of Casper’s mother that made her face look like a solar flare; underpants washed in the sink, hung to dry; the black composition book that held the diary Friedrich had asked him to keep. Friedrich reached for the light switch. He had to see it all. It was the least he could do.
“What’s wrong, Dr. Friedrich?”
Casper sat up. Friedrich’s head spun around. He felt like God had just yanked his chain. It took him a moment to shift emotional gears. Relief was followed by an ebb tide of profound annoyance. He tried not to let it show.
“How are you doing, Casper?”
“Good.” His voice was drifty.
“Then why did you call me?”
“I need help.”
“The person who took your message said you were crying.”
“I was excited.” Casper didn’t want to worry Friedrich any more than he already had.
“Why are you lying in the dark?”
“I don’t like to waste energy. We could turn on the light, if you’d like.”
“That’s okay. So, were you thinking of hurting yourself again?”
“No.”
“Well, then, why did you write that I could find you hanging in your room? Given your history, you know I’d be concerned.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.” Casper laughed. “It’s an expression I heard from Whitney Bouchard, Nina’s brother, hang, as in ‘hanging out.’ It’s slang.”
“Whitney Bouchard?” Newspaper editor, football star who broke his leg keeping Princeton from crossing the goal line, handsome, blond, rich, golden: He wasn’t a god, but in the pantheon of Yale undergraduates, he was as close to Achilles as you could get.
“He’s my new friend.”
Friedrich took note of the fact that Casper had turned an acquaintance into a friendship. “Is there something about this friendship that bothers you?”
“No, he’s a great guy. My problem is I got another job.”
“I already got you a job at the library.”
“But this is a better position for me.”
“What sort of job?”
“Bartending at the Wainscot Yacht Club.” Friedrich had never been to the Wainscot Yacht Cub, but he had heard Winton and Thayer belonged. Even snobs thought it was a snobby place. Friedrich found it hard to believe that the Bouchards or the club would extend themselves to Casper. “Whitney got me the job. He wants me to spend the summer with him.”
“He told you that?”
Casper nodded yes.
Friedrich considered the possibility that Casper had misinterpreted an offhand remark of Whitney’s, was taking the rich boy literally when he was merely to trying to be polite—things like that had happened to Friedrich when he first came to Yale. “What else did Whitney have to say?”
“He thinks he’s a shit, but I see what really matters.” Casper smiled proudly.
“He used the word ‘shit’?”
“Yes.”
Friedrich wondered if it was a side effect of GKD. Not an irreversible setback for the study. He’d talk to Winton about lowering Casper’s dosage. “How did this friendship with Whitney and the job offer and the invitation to spend the summer all come to pass?”
Friedrich sat in the dark and listened to Casper’s excited recap of his trip to the graveyard, Whitney’s guilt about how he had treated his crippled sister, the bottle of Old Crow, Whitney passing out, driving Whitney home, staying up all night with Whitney’s mother talking about Nina.
Casper took a deep breath, then added, “Mrs. Bouchard told me I was a gift from God.” The improbable was turning into the delusional.
The only question for Friedrich was, did Casper’s relaxed grip on reality merit calling Winton and having her put the boy into a psychiatric hospital for observation? Friedrich didn’t want to do it. He genuinely wanted to do what was good for Casper, not what was going to make GKD look good. But he was also not unaware that even if Casper survived the next suicide attempt, the fact that he was on the drug when he tried it would kill their drug. The only way to protect The Way Home and Casper was to play it safe.
Friedrich was trying to think of a way to lure Casper someplace where there was a phone—maybe he was being overcautious, but he couldn’t shake the idea that it wasn’t safe to leave the boy alone like this. He’d call Winton. He’d rather hear “I told you so” than make a mistake. She’d probably want to pull some strings and get him into a private mental hospital. He wasn’t crazy about that idea, but . . . remembering that Casper had developed a taste for flesh, Friedrich was about to suggest a burger at a diner called Louie’s that made the preposterous claim that it had invented the hamburger, when a voice echoed up from the
quad below, “Hey, Casper, you need help with your suitcase?”
Friedrich snapped open the shade. Either it was Whitney or Friedrich was delusional, too. Casper jumped off the bed, opened the window, stuck his head out, and shouted, “We’ll be down in a few minutes, Whit.”
Friedrich turned on the light to get a better look at his patient. More unbelievable and far more disconcerting to Friedrich than Casper’s Dickensian graveyard fantasy and subsequent embrace by the Bouchards was the fact that Casper was changing into a navy blue blazer with a Wainscot Yacht Club crest.
Casper saw Friedrich staring at his costume. “Whitney loaned them to me. After he vomited on my clothes.” Casper didn’t have to reveal that Whitney had also offered him a bathroom equipped with fresh toothbrush, scented soap, dental floss, shampoo, grooming aids that were completely foreign but not at all unpleasant. Yes, Casper looked different. “Whit said I could keep them. It’s what you have to wear when you bartend at the club.”
Casper opened his suitcase and put a patent-leather-brimmed captain’s hat on his head. There was something about the way he smiled and the rakish tilt of the cap that was so un-Casper-like— feline, almost predatory—that made Friedrich think of Marlene Dietrich. The oddness of this association distracted Friedrich from the anger that roiled up in him at the thought that after all he’d done for Casper, the costumed ingrate was going to screw up his research.
Friedrich picked up the empty bottle from the desk. “Casper, you’ve made a commitment to the research.”
“I wouldn’t give that up, Dr. Friedrich. You just have to look at me to know it works.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not sure, but it doesn’t worry me that I’m not sure. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you look happy, then?”
“I don’t like going out of my way to get jobs for people who quit them the next day. And how the hell are you going to meet me once a week if you’re living at the Wainscot Yacht Club?”
“You’re mad at me.”
“No.” He was, but it didn’t seem to bother Casper.
“I won’t be living there. Whit asked me to bunk in the guesthouse with him behind their cottage. Why do they call a thirty-eight-room house a cottage?”
“It’s not my area of expertise.”
“Gotcha. Anyway, I checked the schedule. I could take the train in Mondays, my day off. I was hoping we could switch my appointment. That’s why I called. The job starts tomorrow. We’re driving down tonight. I was also hoping you could give me next week’s medication now. Because of you, because of it, I have an opportunity I never even thought about wanting. But now that it’s there, I want to make the most of it.”
“What do you see this as an opportunity for making the most of?”
“Being me.”
Whitney drove Friedrich and Casper to the psych building and waited in the car while Friedrich took him upstairs to give him another week’s course of GKD. Casper assured him he would not tell Whitney he was participating in the drug test and would remember to take his sugar cubes every morning.
The fermenting vessel was in the corner. When Casper asked what it was, Friedrich said, “Nothing.”
“Who wants ice cream?” Friedrich called out of the window of the Whale as he pulled into the driveway. Nora was lying on the grass, reading a first edition volume of T. S. Eliot that Thayer Winton had given her at the party. The kids were playing on the swings she had guilted Friedrich into constructing out of two-by-fours in the side yard.
Strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, he had splurged and bought a quart of each on the way home from work. His children, leaping off the swings he had built with his own hands, his wife throwing aside T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and running toward him with the kids, all at once on a summer’s evening sweetened with honeysuckle and hand-packed ice cream—the moment was as good as it gets until Friedrich saw the arc of the empty swing seat Fiona had just leaped off of peaking ten feet in the air and then coming back down toward earth with a cruel twist of its chains toward the back of Jack’s head.
No time to shout a warning, all he could do was watch and exhale as Jack suddenly stooped to pick a dandelion and the swing seat sailed harmlessly past. Frozen to the spot, visions of his youngest being lobotomized by a homemade swing flashing before him, he didn’t move his right hand from the door frame of the car as Willy grabbed the ice cream bag and slammed the car door closed.
Friedrich’s legs buckled. He felt the bones in at least two fingers snap and his palm tear open. Strangely, opening the car door with his fingers in it hurt even more. He was proud of himself for not blaming Willy. The ice cream was eaten in the Whale as Nora drove to the hospital.
Two fingers in a splint, his right hand swollen as tight and purple as an unripe plum, it was two months before he could write or take notes. Winton insisted they trade offices; the Aalto-designed desk she had in her private office had a tape recorder and hidden microphone built in. It was activated by a foot pedal under the rug. He had twenty subjects a week to interview and report on. If he met them there, she argued, he could dictate his notes after each session onto the tape recorder.
Friedrich said no. What he really felt was that he didn’t want to be any more in debt to his collaborator than he already was. He already owed her the money they were paying the subjects. On Saturday Winton had treated Nora to a trip to New York and taken her to an art gallery to see a show by some guy called Pollock. From the way Nora described the show, it sounded to Friedrich like a cross between a Rorschach test and a cocktail party. Nora had paid for her own train ticket, but still . . . what he really wasn’t comfortable with was his wife’s newfound friendship with Winton—Nora called her “Bunny.”
Realizing that holding a pen or pencil in his broken hand was even more uncomfortable than being further in Winton’s debt, Friedrich grudgingly accepted the offer of her penthouse office. And so, on that next Monday and every Monday thereafter that summer, instead of meeting Casper on the hard bench of Sterling courtyard, Friedrich and the atomic-kid-turned-bartender met in Winton’s office to discuss how GKD and the Wainscot Yacht Club had been treating him over the previous week.
The temptation of the tape recorder had been too great; Friedrich decided to record the interviews as well as his notes after Casper and the other subjects left. He did not mention the fact that a hidden tape recorder was running—the boy was doing so well, why make Casper self-conscious?
A graduate student transcribed the tapes in duplicate. The transcription of that first session in Winton’s office was twenty-seven pages long, plus three quarters of a page of single-spaced notes. Friedrich circled the following passage in red pen:
F: So, how do you like being a bartender?
C: At first, I was nervous. I mean, I don’t drink and I’d never even been to a bar. I read a mixologist’s handbook, but that’s not the same. Anyway, so when I felt myself getting anxious, I thought of you, how you know how to make people like you, trust you, open up. It’s part of your job.
F: How do I do that?
C: Like you’re doing now, you smile and lean toward them, but you’re careful not to get too close. Oh yeah, and very important, you keep still so they maintain eye contact. You make people feel like they’re the only person in the world. Did you learn that from your father?
F: Maybe subconsciously; he knew how to tell a story people liked to hear.
C: It’s funny, talking to the people out there, how you can get them to overlook your name’s Gedsic, your mother picks cranberries, that you don’t belong. People’s lack of intelligence, their limitations, are like gravity. It’s a force you have to reckon with if you want to make forward progress.
F: What’s progress?
C: To be accepted, make them like you.
F: How do you make people do that?
C: It’s like racing dragons.
F: What?
C: They
’re a class of sailboat they race out there. Whitney’s going to the Olympics. He teaches sailing.
F: How’s making people like you like a sailboat race?
C: Sometimes you see them sail a mile in the wrong direction to catch a breeze that will put them across the finish line first.
F: I’m not sure I understand what you’re . . .
C: Well, if you’re honest . . . no, straightforward’s a better word, and tell someone, “I don’t know anybody here and I’d like to be your friend,” you’re a jerk, a desperate creep. But if I start out by saying, “It’s amazing how much Wainscot’s changed.”
F: Have you ever been to Wainscot before, Casper?
C: No, but it was obvious from the old photographs that are hanging around the place that it’s changed. And everyone at the club is always going on about how it’s not what it used to be and how many new members there are and, so, I let us have a shared point of view.
F: Anything else you do to make people like you?
C: I don’t correct them when they’re wrong, and flattery will get you everywhere.
F: How can you be sure these people you think like you aren’t just pretending to like you?
C: Because they invite me over to their houses for dinner even when they know Whitney’s out on a date with Alice and can’t come. Her family lives in the cottage next door.
After the session was over, Friedrich dictated his notes on Casper Gedsic, which began as follows:
CG now makes more direct eye contact and has improved personal appearance, better posture, complexion has cleared, improvement in overall hygiene. No longer stuttering, seems distinctly calmer and less anxious. When I shook his hand, it was dry. Check medical records to see if in fact CG was diagnosed as having hyperhidrosis. Subject is tan and appears to be more physically fit.
Two sessions later Friedrich circled the following portion of the transcript, this time in blue ink:
F: So, how’s it going, Casper?
C: I met a girl.
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