Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  “It’s our present too, Mommy,” Lucy protested.

  Casper wrapped his arm around the gift and dragged it across the lawn like there was a body inside.

  “Will, help him.” Friedrich took one end of it. It was more awkward than heavy; even he was curious to see what was in it.

  “Can we open it? Can we open it? Can we, please, please?” Lucy, Willy, and Jack shouted and jumped up and down as Friedrich and Casper carried it up onto the front porch. Fiona, feeling too old to do the same, felt left out and pretended she wasn’t excited.

  “It looks more impressive than it is,” Casper told them apologetically.

  Alice volunteered, “We saw it yesterday in the window of an antique shop on the way up to my grandfather’s.” (It would be thirty minutes before Dr. and Mrs. Friedrich would be able to put together that Alice’s grandfather was a former governor of Connecticut.) Lucy, Will, and Jack ripped away the brown paper, revealing a towering Victorian birdcage big enough to imprison a man.

  “It’s beautiful, Casper.” Nora liked it so much, she kissed him on the cheek.

  “I saw it and thought of you, Dr. Friedrich.” The remark puzzled Friedrich, but the cage was indeed beautiful. Its bars were woven out of brass and zinc wire hammered and trompe-l’oeiled to look like bamboo entwined with vines.

  Casper and Alice stayed for tea. Nora and Lucy baked cookies after all. Alice helped in the kitchen, insisted on washing the dishes, and relaxed enough to confide, “I’ve never met anyone like Casper.”

  “Yes, he’s unusual.”

  “We’ve been talking about marriage.”

  Nora said, “That’s wonderful.” But at that moment, that wasn’t how she felt.

  Over tea Fiona showed off her vocabulary, telling Willy he was “simian,” and Lucy sang “Petit Poisson,” only to burst into tears when she couldn’t remember the final verse.

  Friedrich said she was overtired; Casper said the same thing had happened to him once, only he made it worse by wetting his pants. Everyone laughed.

  As Casper drove off with Alice into the sunset, Friedrich put his arm around his wife. “He seems to be doing okay.”

  “He seems like a whole different person. I saw him last month. He seemed more relaxed and confident, but nothing like this.”

  “You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

  “Yes, I did. I told you I ran into him downtown. We had a very funny conversation.”

  “What about?”

  “The Waste Land.”

  “I would have remembered that.” His eyes narrowed as he imagined his wife bobbing for apples with Casper. In his head he’d already seen her do it with Thayer. He was just beginning to make himself miserable.

  “He loaned me a nickel to call you.” Nora pushed her hair behind her ear. “It’s funny, I kind of miss the old Casper.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that your drug works.”

  “How do you know he’s on the drug?”

  “He is, though, isn’t he?”

  “It’s a double-blind placebo test. I don’t even know.”

  “But you’d tell me if you did know, right?”

  “That would be unethical.”

  At 6:15 A.M. the next morning Friedrich was awakened from a dead sleep by a child’s scream, sharp as a knife cutting glass. It was Lucy. Before he was awake he was running toward the sound, his brain caffeinated with parent paranoia. It was coming from downstairs. Was there a fire? Had she fallen, cut herself? Was an intruder dragging her out of the house?

  He found her on the front porch. She was pointing at the parrot cage, Casper’s gift. Friedrich did not know if they had come over one by one or migrated into captivity all at once. But every single parrot had left the mulberry tree and crammed themselves into the cage except for the gray.

  “Daddy, you’ve got to set them free.”

  Friedrich was sure he had closed the door to the cage the night before. “How the hell . . . ?” Grey sat on the railing and ruffled his wings. His eyes twinkled manically as he threw his head back and mimicked a laugh.

  Will opened the cage door with his good hand and tried to shoo out the birds. The cockatoo bit him on the thumb and wailed, “Donde está Marjeta?” Friedrich left the cage door open all that day and through the night. But the parrots didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t budge. The idea that the birds preferred Casper’s cage to the freedom of the mulberry tree in his front yard depressed and annoyed Friedrich more than he’d admit. The next day he tried to lure them out with special treats, pumpkin seeds and corncobs. All the parrots stayed behind bars except for Gray, who feasted.

  Friedrich gave them five days to fly free. He didn’t want to believe they had come to him in the hopes of finding a cage. In the end he had to call the ASPCA. The man who took them away promised they’d be well cared for.

  They kept Gray. Lucy continued to believe he was an African prince. But Friedrich’s feelings toward Gray changed. Looking into the glare of Gray’s eye, past his own reflection into the heart of the family beast who would not be tricked by the cage, Friedrich could not help but think that Gray had been the culprit who had lured his brothers and sisters into the cage and then locked the door with his beak. Of course, none of it would have happened if Casper hadn’t come to take the damn picture.

  Friedrich had what turned out to be his last session with Casper on a Monday in late September. Casper had called and asked to meet Friedrich on the bench at Sterling. “Let’s finish where we started, for old time’s sake.” When Friedrich had first heard his voice, he thought it was Thayer. More than Casper’s appearance had changed. His high-pitched, nasal, South Jersey accent had been refined over the course of his summer behind the zinctopped mahogany bar at the Wainscot Yacht Club into a substantial and intoxicating tenor, fruity with a touch of sweetness, like a well-mixed Manhattan.

  Friedrich arrived at their old meeting place early. There’d be follow-ups with Casper and the other test subjects over the next few months. Since Dr. Winton had reported seeing no withdrawal or addiction problems either in her lieutenant or among the Bagadong, they saw no need to taper off the drug.

  The sky was a pale shade of blue that made Friedrich think of a blank check. The campus was crowded with freshmen. Friedrich watched as loafered lost boys in tweed jackets unknowingly made decisions that would add up to the man they would be stuck with when they graduated. He had a strange urge to warn them. But of what?

  Friedrich’s hand was finally out of the cast. The study was done, the summer of sugar cubes over. After this last meeting Friedrich would go back to his office and evaluate Casper using the same rating scale he and Winton had employed to evaluate Casper and his thirty-nine fellow test subjects every week since the start of the study, the Friedrich Psychiatric Rating Scale.

  Friedrich’s Rating Scale was nine pages long, seventy-two different areas of behavior, qualities of personality and behavior to be observed and judged. It contained questions to be rated 0 (no pathology) through 3 (extreme pathology):

  Question 27:

  Makes no attempt to influence or control others.

  Attempts to influence others indirectly, e.g., by comments, allusions, flattery, etc.

  Attempts to control others by direct comments or requests.

  Insists on controlling others by any means at his/her disposal.

  Question 46:

  Does not try to attract the sexual interest of others.

  Dresses, behaves, or speaks in a manner that may attract the sexual interest of others.

  Dress, behavior, or speech is explicitly provocative or exhibitionistic.

  Makes direct and unmistakable physical approaches of a sexual nature.

  Question 62:

  Shows no unusual inclination to smile or laugh.

  Smiles or laughs readily.

  Smiles or laughs at things that are not humorous or amusing for most people.

  Smiles or laughs at things that are decidedly un
pleasant for most people.

  Grouped in symptom clusters, tabulated, and scored via factor analysis, it measured change. People and their lives and the feelings they felt and the thoughts in their heads were broken down into a series of numbers that when tallied would determine whether or not GKD altered behavior in ways that were desirable, and ultimately marketable, to both the scientific community and the world at large.

  Friedrich and Winton knew it worked. Over the course of the last four months, one of Winton’s nurses had gone back to college. Another reported being less irritable, i.e., she’d stopped giving the toddler the back of her hand. Another had lost twenty-six pounds. The cleaning woman had become the first female deacon in the history of the Christ Is Lord Baptist Church. One of Friedrich’s boys, who suffered from a mild case of acrophobia, had not only climbed into the cockpit of a plane, he’d gotten his pilot’s license. Self-improvement equals self-fulfillment. Friedrich believed that. But did the symptom clusters factor out to happiness?

  Of the twenty subjects who weren’t on placebo, only two reported no improvement in the quality of their lives. One complained of intestinal side effects, but since he had a previous history of chronic colitis, it was inconclusive whether or not diarrhea was an occasional side effect of GKD. Of course, no one’s improvement was as meteoric as Casper’s. But as Friedrich had told Winton from the start, “Casper’s special.”

  Friedrich had brought a yellow legal pad and pen to take notes, but he already knew how he would have to answer the questions posed by the Friedrich Rating Scale. The trouble was, the Friedrich Rating Scale did not cover all the changes he had observed in Casper Gedsic. Friedrich’s test would reduce Casper to a number that would make him a victory. But that was not an accurate way to describe how he felt about Casper. The purloined accent, the borrowed clothes, the stolen girlfriend—all could be considered “self-improvement” in a sense. Casper had made real progress. But there was something phony about it, something that Friedrich didn’t trust.

  The success of his rating scale depended on his objective observations, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Casper had given him the cage knowing that it would lure the parrots back inside.

  Casper arrived in a pinstripe suit, his shirt was French-cuffed, and the links at his wrists were amethysts set in gold. He had taken his last sugar cube that morning. “Sorry I’m late, Professor Friedrich.” Friedrich noticed but did not note that Casper had ceased to call him “Doctor.” “I got held up having lunch with Alice’s father.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Did you know he was given a seat on the New York City Stock Exchange for his twenty-first birthday?”

  “You don’t say. What did you and Alice’s father talk about?”

  “Gold. Specifically, how you can predict fluctuation in its price based on market history, current events, threat of war. I came up with a mathematical formula. It’s pretty simple, but it seems to work.”

  “You’ve been buying and selling gold?”

  “It began as a joke. Well, a challenge. Made over the bar at the yacht club. He and I both started out with a hundred thousand dollars in imaginary capital and speculated, bought futures, sold, short, that sort of thing. When Labor Day came and I’d doubled my money, he got interested how I did it, and . . . here, I’ll show you.” Casper took out an alligator agenda with a silver pencil attached and neatly began to write out a series of cosines.

  Friedrich focused on the smile on Casper’s face as the elegant young man handed him the formula written out on gilt-edged paper with a silver pencil. “Try it out, see for yourself. We’ve made over forty-seven K in the last two weeks.”

  “You made forty-seven thousand dollars?” Friedrich struggled to keep his jaw from dropping.

  “No, not me personally. Alice’s dad did. He gave me ten percent. Which was very fair of him, considering he was the one who risked the capital. It’s based on an extrapolation of the work of the philosopher Laplace. You know, Laplace’s demon—know everything about the past and you can predict the future.”

  “The future’s not firm ground, Casper. Say, just supposing, what if someone discovered a huge deposit of gold? The price would drop.”

  “It’s possible. But . . . basic human nature, self-interest, would seem to suggest, if not guarantee, that your discoverer would keep his discovery a secret so as not to flood the market and lower the price of gold and devalue what he had worked so hard to dig up.”

  “What if someone discovered how to manufacture gold synthetically?”

  “Alchemists have been trying to do that for a long time. Besides, if it happened, someone would pay the fellow who discovered it enough to forgo being famous in return for being rich. He’d destroy the formula.”

  Friedrich stared at him. “You’re not taking notes, Professor Friedrich. Something wrong?”

  “No.” There was, of course. “I’m taking it all in.”

  “I’m not giving up physics, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not worried if you’re not, and you seem to be doing well.”

  “I’m happy. It’s not quite the right word for how I feel. But whatever it is, I like it, and it’s thanks to you.” Casper adjusted his French cuffs and admired his amethyst links.

  “You’re the one who changed your life, not me.”

  “I wish I could say Whitney was happy. Alice and I talked to Whitney’s mother about the drinking.”

  “How’d Whitney feel about that?”

  “Drinks more than ever, blames everything on me; he says terrible things about me. He has this idea he can get me kicked out of Yale. He’ll probably call you.”

  “To say terrible things about you?”

  “That, and his mother’s ordered him to see a psychologist. I recommended you.”

  When the hour was up, Casper shook Dr. Friedrich’s hand. The ten-bell carillon of Harkness Tower was ringing out the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

  “Now can you tell me the name of the organic substance I’ve been taking?” Casper hadn’t let go of Friedrich’s hand yet.

  “No.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” Casper let go, turned, and started to walk away, then looked back with a smile. “Will you ever tell me?”

  “When we publish the results of the study you can read about it. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  “Maybe we can get together before that.” Casper called out.

  “Maybe.” Friedrich wanted to be done with his day, and with Casper Gedsic. Packing up his briefcase, he decided to put off filling in the blanks on Casper until tomorrow, and headed home early.

  Friedrich drove home slowly, but not carefully. He drifted through yellow lights, crossed the line, and strayed over into the wrong side of the road without realizing it. A cigarette waited in his mouth for ten minutes before he remembered to light it. Reaching into his pocket for a match, he pulled out Casper’s formula for gold. He balled it into garbage. The window was already down. He was about to throw it away, then stopped . . . what if it worked? The math was beyond him.

  Was he simply envious of Casper’s brain? Or the way he was using it? Friedrich was ambitious, he wanted more: a house on the hill, private school for his children, an alligator agenda. Was it simply that Casper was getting more faster, that the student was better than the teacher? Or was it that Casper showed no shame or guilt, was unconflicted about his reinvention? Quaint as it seems, social climbing was bad manners in 1952.

  When he got home Friedrich’s brain downshifted to the here and now. There was a silver Jaguar sedan parked at the curb. Foreign cars were a rarity in Hamden back then. Thayer drove a black Cadillac; he thought he remembered Whitney driving a Packard. Casper had said Whitney was going to call. It’d be like a rich, spoiled, aspiring alcoholic to come to his home unannounced. Casper said he had a motorcycle now. Maybe he’d bought a Jag to go with it. Anything was possible.

  Friedrich had told Nora he was going to work
late. She wasn’t expecting him for several hours, and he wasn’t expecting to get out of the Whale and hear his wife’s laughter bubbling down from their bedroom window, carefree and girlish as a daisy chain. She laughed like that after she had an orgasm.

  What if . . . who knows . . . anything? Silence now. Where were the children? What was she doing up there? The image of his wife bobbing for a stranger’s apple flashed inside his head.

  Friedrich entered his home as silently as a thief. It was a game. He didn’t really believe Nora was up there with . . . but if he didn’t believe it, why was he walking on tiptoes? He climbed the stairs, careful to avoid the squeaky step. The bedroom door was ajar. Nora didn’t see him. She stood in front of the mirror, wearing a pink slip he had never seen before. In the bathroom, the water was running. He heard a man’s voice.

  He pushed the door open slowly. It was more sordid than the fantasy in his head. A man was sitting on the toilet in his underwear. There was a long moment of rage before he realized it was the Czech he had met at Winton’s. It took Friedrich a moment to even remember his name, to focus on the fact that—Lazlo, that was his name—was holding a copy of Little Red Hen, and that the laughter was coming from his boys who were at that moment splashing in the tub. Why is this stranger sitting in my bathroom in his underwear reading to my naked sons in the bathtub?

  “Your fish were getting me wet and there wasn’t room for me in the tub.” His suit was hung from a coat hanger on the bathroom door.

  Normally, Friedrich’s mind would have gone straight to “pervert.” But he was so relieved not to have walked in on his wife having sex, he greeted Lazlo like a long-lost friend: “Great to see you, Lazlo.” Then, in spite of his relief, added, “What are you doing here?” He tried not to sound suspicious. All psychologists know they’re crazy. They just try not to advertise it.

  “The butcher that I used to work for when I first came here had to have his thumb amputated. Osteomyelitis. Pinkie, the cheap bastard, he deserves to lose, but without this . . .”—he held up his thumb like he was hitchhiking—“. . . we would have lost our grip when we tried to climb down from the trees. I visited him in the hospital.”