Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  “I’m sorry. I mean, I’m glad to see you, but . . .” He was still suspicious.

  Nora appeared in the doorway and kissed him. She was wearing a dress now. “I missed you.”

  Willy announced, “Jack spilled chocolate sauce on Mom’s dress.”

  “I was changing. I didn’t hear you come in.” Nora wrapped her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him twice more.

  Friedrich was still trying to get his bearings. “Your Jaguar, Lazlo?”

  The Czech nodded. “You know what they call them in England? Jews’ Bentley.” Lazlo laughed.

  Nora glared at him as she dried off the boys. “That’s a horrible thing to say, Lazlo.”

  “To me, what is horrible is the Little Red Hen. Not sharing the bread. Capitalist propaganda. And very un-Christian. If a Jew had written this book, the hen would at least have had the decency to offer to sell the pig some bread.”

  “Why do you talk like an anti-Semite?” Nora didn’t find it funny.

  “I’m anti-everything.” Lazlo thought that was very funny.

  Friedrich laughed, too. “Where are the girls?”

  “At Jenses’.”

  “Lazlo gave us a ride in his new car.” That was Willy.

  Lazlo put his pants on in front of them. Lazlo made anything seem natural. “New suit, too. Very expensive. Silk mohair. Had to get, because of the Jag. Also, had to get new hi-fi, new apartment. Jaguar is a very expensive car.”

  “Things seem to be going well.”

  Lazlo shrugged. “My fiancée’s mother’s brother is in scrap steel. You are looking at the new vice president.”

  “Only in America.” Friedrich suddenly felt like everybody had found a shortcut to the good life but him.

  “This is how the whole world runs. Here you just pretend you do it like the Little Red Hen.”

  As they headed downstairs, Lazlo announced, “I needed an excuse to visit you, so I bought you a present.” In fact, he was curious; Friedrich looked all-American, but he seemed as displaced as Lazlo. Lazlo wanted a family, but he knew he could never make one.

  They followed him outside and he opened the trunk of the Jaguar. There were three large burlap sacks filled with tulip bulbs.

  “Lazlo, you shouldn’t have.”

  “All right, I’ll sell them to you.”

  Friedrich wasn’t sure why he thought that was funny. Perhaps he just needed to laugh.

  “My florist gave them to me. I buy a lot of flowers for my girlfriends.”

  “I thought you had a fiancée.”

  “Do you eat the same dinner every night? Roast beef, roast beef, roast beef. Even if it’s filet mignon, boring, not to mention unhealthy.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “No, is kind . . . if I have a girlfriend, I am nicer to my fiancée when I am with her. If I have two girlfriends, I am twice as nice. It would be cruel to her and to them to be faithful.”

  “Makes sense to me.” Friedrich was suddenly having a good time.

  “It better not.” Even Nora thought it was funny.

  “So do you want me to give them to you or do you want to pay me for them?” Lazlo was carrying one of the bags of tulip bulbs up to the house.

  “Don’t you want some tulips for yourself, Lazlo?” Friedrich picked up the other bag.

  “I hate tulips. Filthy flowers, especially the bulbs, disgust me.”

  “How could anyone hate tulips?”

  “Try eating them for a year.”

  The next two nights Friedrich was woken by the same dream: Nora was bobbing for apples inside his head. The imaginary room where this betrayal was taking place was dark. He could not see who she was fellating. Each time he woke up before he could say or do anything. The third night he had the same apple-bobbing nightmare, only this time he stayed asleep long enough to pick up a fire tool and put a dent in the forehead of his wife’s phantom lover. There was blood everywhere. When Nora turned on the light in his dream to clean up the mess he’d made, Friedrich saw the face of the man she had betrayed him for—Friedrich woke up with a gasp when he realized he had just murdered himself.

  Dr. Friedrich had told his patients on more than one occasion, “When you dream, you are talking to yourself.” For the rest of that night he lay awake, listening to Nora breathe, analyzing what he was trying to tell himself. Scared to close his eyes, frightened of his dreams, he wanted to feel different but didn’t know how. For the first time since he had heard about The Way Home, he was tempted to take it himself.

  Winton was between classes. She was in her broom closet of an office, feet up on her desk, halfway through what she vowed would be her last cigarette for the rest of her life, trying to decide the best way to approach getting the molecular structure of GKD analyzed. Going through official university department channels would mean putting in a request to the psychiatry department, and in turn having them put in a request to the chemistry department, who would in turn have to . . . what with politics and protocol, it might be six months or a year before Yale’s mass spectrometer gave them GKD’s chemical composition, which then they’d have to begin work on synthesizing.

  Winton was onto her second last cigarette she would ever smoke for the rest of her life when someone knocked loudly on her door.

  “Come on in.” She wasn’t expecting Friedrich. He looked tired and had cut himself shaving, and had stopped it with a bit of toilet paper.

  “You’re done already?”

  “No, it’s actually going slower than I’d like.”

  “There’s no rush. Well, there is, but . . . you’re still bleeding.”

  A drop of blood trickled down his neck. She handed him a Kleenex.

  “Thanks.” He dabbed it just before it reached his collar.

  “So what brought you all the way over here?”

  Friedrich closed the door behind him. “Do you have time for a new patient?”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.”

  “Has he been to a psychiatrist before?”

  “No.”

  “Is he a close friend?”

  “Friend is the wrong word. I have mixed feelings about him. He’s paranoid, delusions of grandeur, insecure narcissist.”

  “Sure. What’s his name?” She opened her calendar.

  “Friedrich.”

  She jerked her head back as if Friedrich had just swung a bat at her. “You want to talk to me in a professional capacity?”

  “Yes.” Friedrich was as amazed as she was. He’d never been on the other side of the couch.

  “You’re not concerned our professional relationship, as well as our friendship, might . . .”—she hadn’t thought of him as a friend, not truly, until this moment—“. . . might interfere with the process?”

  “You’re the only psychiatrist I trust.”

  “I am flattered, but . . .” It was unprofessional of her to even consider. “Is there something specific?” Friedrich was standing; but she was already talking to him like a patient.

  “Yeah . . . I’m making myself miserable.” He fought the urge to tell her about his dream. Sharing it would make it less of a fantasy.

  “How does Monday at five o’clock sound?”

  “Fine.” Friedrich opened the door.

  “I know it wasn’t easy for you to ask for help.”

  “I say that to my patients, too.”

  “I’ll waive my fee.”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t. Paying’s part of the process.”

  “Just for the record, you know we’re doing something wrong here.”

  “I’ve known that for a long time, Dr. Winton.”

  As he drove back across campus, Friedrich looked at himself in the rearview mirror: “It’s official now, you’re crazy.” Strange but true, just making the appointment, admitting he had a problem, made him feel better. Wondering if that was all he needed, he was debating whether or not to cancel his appointment with her this afternoon, or just wait until . . . that thought was b
lindsided by a blur in the corner of his eye. His cerebrum rocketed a message to his right foot. Suddenly, he was standing on the brakes, wheels locked, tires screeching; all Friedrich’s brain was thinking about was stopping the Whale before it flattened the motorcycle that had stalled in the midst of pulling out into traffic a few feet before him.

  It was Whitney, just out of the liquor store, a case of Old Crow strapped to the back of his motorcycle. Friedrich could tell by the difficulty Whitney had restarting the motorcycle he’d already had a few. An open bottle of beer fell from his jacket pocket as the Triumph sputtered to life, and Whitney wobbled at high speed down the street.

  Clearly, Casper wasn’t exaggerating about Whitney’s turning into a drunk. And if he wasn’t exaggerating about that . . . Friedrich tried to remember what he’d done with the formula for gold.

  The Friedrich family was planting tulips. It was Sunday morning, October was a week old, and Indian summer had kept the leaves from showing their colors. The bulbs Lazlo had given them had such wonderful names: Queen of Marvels, Red Sun, Sweet Love, Flaming Springgreen, Kingsblood, Mon Amour, and Friedrich’s favorite, Marjolein, “large, tapered petals of rich, salmon scarlet touched with yellow and the edges of the blossoms shaded salmon pink.”

  The descriptions wired to the bags inspired Friedrich to dig whole new flower beds for them. He drew them out on a paper napkin over breakfast. It was Jack’s idea to make one of them in the shape of a full moon. “Tulip moon” was how the three-year-old verbalized it. The older children didn’t think it fair that Jack had a tulip bed of his very own.

  “You always do what Jack wants.” Fiona voiced the consensus.

  “Daddy, why do you like Jack more than us?” Willy, like his father, felt shortchanged at birth.

  “I love all my children equally.” Friedrich knew that wasn’t true.

  “Then why don’t you treat us the same?” Lucy didn’t care about tulip bulbs, but she planted great stock in love.

  “That’s because each of you is different. I treat you as individuals.”

  “Tulip moon for me!” Jack shouted out triumphantly. Friedrich wondered what it was that made him love his youngest the most. Did he see too much of himself in the faces of his others? Jack looked like Nora. He hoped it was that simple.

  When they started digging, the sky was overcast. But a cool breeze, courtesy of an arctic air mass circling the Great Lakes, blew the grayness out to sea. The sky dilated into blue with great, long swirls of cloud high overhead that Friedrich told the children were called mare’s tails when he was a boy.

  Friedrich turned the earth over with a rusty spade. Nora worked next to him with a hoe, breaking up the clumps of earth, then leavening in handfuls of lime and manure. The children helped—that is, they got in the way, but in a charming way. Growing up on a farm, Friedrich had watched his own parents work like that, shoulder to shoulder. As the first blister of the day rose in his palm, he remembered how his father would tell stories to make it seem less like hard labor.

  Stories of neighbors and childhood friends who had fallen out of love and run off with railroad brakemen and got girls in the choir pregnant or had been born with webbed toes or harelips or clubfeet; those who had died of influenza and tetanus and heartbreak—stories Friedrich’s mother, Ida, would interrupt with, “The way you gossip, you’d think you’d been born a woman.”

  To which his father would always reply, “I’m not gossiping; I’m contemplating the human condition.” What Friedrich liked to remember best were those moments when his father would drop his shovel, hoe, scythe, whatever, reach down, and pull a flint arrowhead or stone tomahawk out of the ground, spit on it, rub it clean on his shirttail before handing it over to him. “Things only stay buried so long.”

  Friedrich also remembered the day after his ninth birthday when he and Homer were on a train platform waving good-bye to his father as he left for Chicago to talk to a man about opening up a John Deere tractor dealership in the county seat. Ida didn’t like the farm.

  Two weeks later he and Homer were feeding the chickens. His mother came outside with a letter in her hand. She told them, “Your father died in a hotel fire with a woman.”

  He recalled after a long cry hugging his mother. She smelled of tuberoses. What he liked remembering least was when he finally came up with a thought that would make them all feel better, and said, “At least Daddy wasn’t alone.” His mother slapped him. After she said she was sorry and didn’t mean it, she asked him and Homer nicely to go kill the rooster for Sunday dinner.

  The tulip moon was ten feet across, concentric circles of Red Suns and mauve Sweet Loves and Kingsblood followed by Mon Amour planted in holes twelve inches deep with broken oyster shells in the bottoms to keep the voles and moles from dining on the bulbs over the winter.

  “Did your dad teach you to put oyster shells in the bottom of holes?” That was Willy. He would have different memories of his father than Friedrich had of his.

  “No, we couldn’t afford tulips.” Friedrich had thought about his father enough for one day.

  “Why do you know how to do it?”

  “I read it in a book.”

  “Is that how you learned everything you know?” Fiona smiled.

  “Mostly. But not everything.”

  “Will you teach me something you didn’t learn from a book?” Reading wasn’t coming easily for Lucy. Dyslexia?

  “Something I didn’t learn in a book . . .” Friedrich repeated the question slowly, baffled by the fact that at that moment he couldn’t think of one goddamn thing that he hadn’t learned from a book. “A snake can bite you after you cut off its head.” Friedrich lifted his sleeve, and showed Willy a scar on his wrist where a blacksnake had bitten him.

  “Wow.” Willy was impressed. “Why’d it bite you?”

  “I put my hand where it didn’t belong.”

  “Jack’s planting the tulips upside down.” That was Fiona.

  “Maybe they’ll bloom in China.”

  “Don’t be silly, Daddy.” Lucy laughed.

  “It’s good for Daddy to be silly.” That was Nora. It had been Nora’s idea to roll out the old concrete birdbath that the previous owners of their house had left in the garage and place it in the very center of Jack’s tulip moon. Friedrich filled its heavy scallop-shaped cement bowl with a hose and a blue jay promptly flew in for a bath.

  Friedrich’s spade was now turning up a new flowerbed along the path in front of the house that made a sloppy S between the driveway and the front door. He was sweating, blisters had risen and popped, and his hands hurt. Nora offered him her gloves, but he resisted. “Getting soft, time to toughen up” was what he said to her.

  The first time the phone rang, Nora ran, but she missed it. A few minutes later, it rang again. Friedrich sprinted. He was out of breath when he picked it up. “Yeah?”

  “Professor Friedrich?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “It’s Whitney Bouchard. Is this a bad time?”

  Friedrich lied. “No . . . what’s on your mind, Whitney?” Casper had told Friedrich Whitney was going to call.

  “I’m not calling about me, sir.” He slurred the “sir.”

  “Whitney, have you been drinking?”

  “Casper’s the one you should be worrying about.”

  “Right now, I’m worried about you.”

  “For your information, he’s made a list.”

  “Daddy, come back.” Jack banged on the glass of the kitchen door.

  “A what?” As Jack’s fists pounded on the window panes, he imagined the glass shattering, shards slashing his wrists.

  “A list.”

  “What sort of list?” Nora pulled Jack away from the window and her husband’s fantasies of doom.

  “People he blames.” He could hear the ice rattling in Whitney’s glass. He remembered Casper’s saying Whitney was going to say terrible things about him, how he wanted to get him kicked out of Yale.

  “Whitn
ey, you’re drunk.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact you’re on his list. I didn’t make the cut.”

  “Does that bother you? Do you think he should blame you, Whitney?” Without thinking about it, Friedrich had shifted into the doctor-patient mode.

  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “But he did something to you.”

  “He turned into a jerk. You should see the way he brown-nosed everybody at the club. Did he honestly think people weren’t going to see him for what he is?”

  “What is he?”

  “The worst kind of social climber, Doc. The kind who thinks he’s superior to the people he’s sucking up to.” Friedrich felt the small hairs on the back of his neck rise. It was as if Whitney were talking about him, not Casper.

  “Who else is on Casper’s list?”

  “Alfred Griswold.”

  “You called the president of Yale?” If Whitney talked to Griswold, Casper would be kicked out of Yale. Maybe even if it wasn’t true.

  “No, you think I should?”

  “Not unless you want the president of Yale to expel you for being a drunk. Whitney, if you need to talk to me, call me during office hours.”

  “Casper is the one that needs talking to. He stole my girl, stole my clothes, God knows what else. He rummaged through all my drawers.”

  “As I recall, you loaned him the clothes, Whitney. And you stole his girl first.”

  “What girl?”

  “The bird-watcher.”

  “Well, if I loaned him the clothes, he should have given them back. And none of that makes it alright that he stole my motorcycle.”

  “Did you see him steal it?”

  “Well, the keys are gone, he’s gone, and it’s not where I parked it last night.”

  “Maybe you were too drunk to remember where you left it. Be careful of what you accuse people of, Whitney.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Doc.”

  Friedrich hung up the phone, thought of calling Whitney’s mother, but decided he’d better talk to Casper first. He dialed the pay phone in Casper’s dorm. The line was busy.