Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  He woke up the next morning in the infirmary. Aside from a jackhammer headache and a sore throat, he felt better than he had in years. The headache was a chemical hangover. His throat hurt because a tube had been inserted down his esophagus when they pumped his stomach. Spinach having been on the menu the previous day, the half-digested tangle of jimson leaves did not raise any suspicions.

  The onset of choreoathetosis, noted in the afternoon session, followed by his collapse at dinner—shallow breathing, rapid heartbeat, the seizures—were all classic symptoms of a toxic reaction to medication. Casper had been doing so well on Thorazine, his sudden allergic reaction caught Dr. Shanley off guard. It was unusual, but not unheard of. His body temperature had reached a hundred and four—at a hundred and five, brain damage begins.

  Shanley was greatly relieved when Casper pulled through. Besides the paperwork involved in losing a patient to untoward side effects, there was something about Casper that Shanley liked. Dr. Shanley’s response to the entire incident was prudent and appropriate. He immediately took Casper off the Thorazine and substituted a comparatively light dosage of the recently synthesized experimental indole alkaloid, reserpine.

  Thorazine had been a chemical hammer. Reserpine was a gentler weapon in the psychiatric arsenal. Derived from Indian snakeroot and long chewed in its country of origin by the likes of Gandhi to enhance philosophical detachment during meditation, it was a serendipitous choice of antipsychotic for Casper. Reserpine left him feeling light-headed and often faint, but his brain had been abused for so long, it had developed an ability to take a punch. Casper’s mind was still on a leash, but it was just long enough for his thoughts to roam in a new direction.

  Casper didn’t know if the whole plan had been in him from the start. But now that he was reunited with not all but at least part of himself, he knew what he had to do next. Reserpine did not make it easy to think, but with a mind as agile as Casper’s, even at half speed, he was leaps and bounds ahead of Shanley.

  In his first therapy session after Casper was on his new meds, Shanley began by asking, “How are you feeling, Casper?”

  “I’m much better.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, after the way you saved my life, I think I owe you the truth. I’ve got to trust somebody.”

  “I’m your doctor, Casper, you can trust me.”

  “I want . . . I need to talk about what happened in Hamden; it’s time I faced up to why I’m here.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “Dr. Winton’s dead.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I know who’s responsible. I can’t hide from that anymore. I’d be sick to do that, and I don’t want to be sick.”

  “In your mind, who’s responsible?”

  “Not just in my mind, it’s fact, truth, undeniable. Punishment fits the crime. If a person won’t accept blame, they’re crazy. I don’t want to be crazy anymore.”

  “Crazy’s not a word I use, but you could say they’re in denial.”

  “Right.”

  “Who is responsible for what happened, for your being here?”

  Casper thought of Dr. Friedrich, saw him upside down, the way he looked through the viewfinder of the press camera that first day, parrots squawking in his mulberry tree, wife and children beside him happy and smiling and free. Dr. Shanley thought he was making real headway when he leaned forward in his chair and urged Casper down the path of enlightenment by softly repeating the key question: “And who is responsible, Casper?”

  Casper began to cry. “Me, of course.” Casper wept not out of remorse, but at the beauty of his plan.

  I was fourteen years old when I finally discovered I was born two years to the day after that Sunday of tulip planting and death. My father, being a psychologist, was careful to protect me from the tragedy my birth commemorated. My mother’s intelligence kept her grief at bay most of the year. She willed it away, kept it hidden with that unused steamship ticket in her underwear drawer. Her disappointment only leaked out enough so I noticed it on my birthday. Nothing was ever said. I guess there was a kindness to their silence. But when you have to connect the dots yourself, you’re bound to make mistakes.

  My father worked hard to make sure my birthdays were so full of pin the tail on the donkey and sack races and piñata-bashing that he would be too distracted to think about Jack or Winton or any of the rest of Casper’s dark matter that bound us as a family. Ice cream cakes and a hired clown who was really a doctoral student who couldn’t finish his thesis, and presents my father never could have afforded back in the days when he was living on an assistant professor’s salary at Yale, only succeeded in making my siblings envious and reminded my parents just how powerless they were to escape the shadow of our secret history.

  My mother always cried as I blew out my candles—then apologized to no one and everyone. As she’d help me cut the cake, her fingers entwined with mine on the handle of a silver cake knife, she’d act like it was over—wait until I’d opened the last of my gifts before excusing herself to bed. They slept in separate rooms when I was a small child. She said my father snored. But on my birthday, when she went to her bed, my mother didn’t get in it. She just lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling, afraid to close her eyes for fear the roof would fall in.

  Whereas my mother couldn’t make it through my birthday without tears, my father never stopped smiling. The rest of the year his mood was unpredictable. But on my birthdays his good cheer was relentless. His grin was relaxed, but the effort to keep it on his face made him sweat. Even when we had my party outside, the perspiration beaded on his forehead. When he took his jacket off his shirt was soaked through. I remember Lazlo’s looking at my father and announcing, “Now I know why I like being miserable—happiness is too much like hard work.” Unlike my father, when Lazlo said sad things, he smiled to let you know he didn’t begrudge you your joy.

  Even though my father’s friend Lazlo, who referred to himself as a “bounced Czech,” told me on numerous occasions, “The only thing I hate more than children is tulips,” he never missed my birthday. He was the only friend my father kept from New Haven. Much engaged, but never married, the little man from Prague who Rolfed syntax and inflection had gotten rich selling scrap. “I am garbage man to the world,” was how he put it.

  It didn’t matter where Lazlo was in the world, Tokyo, Texas, Tehran, he’d show up on October 7 with outlandish presents: a BB gun with a telescopic sight for my fifth birthday; a set of razor-sharp ninja throwing knives for turning six. Before I had mastered a two-wheeler, Lazlo had given me a minibike with a 6-horsepower Briggs & Stratton gas engine, all taken away by my parents before I could hurt myself.

  Greedier than most children, I loved Lazlo for the presents. But what I liked about him was that it was easier to feel you were normal with someone as peculiar as Lazlo around. He always came early to help my father hang the crepe paper and stayed late to keep my father company after my mother had retired to her bed with her tears.

  Lazlo would walk beside us as my father carried me up to bed. And when he tucked me in with Lazlo watching, my father would say, “Good night, my friend.” Not “Zach” or “my son,” but always “my friend.” Which I guess is what he tried to be to me. And Lazlo could be counted on to make the same joke, which never failed to make my father laugh. “As your Jewish godfather, I must caution you about associating with friends like your father.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because your father is not a Christian.”

  “What are you, Dad?” I asked.

  “My friend, I’ll let you know when I figure that out.”

  Casper Gedsic remained at large for two full days after the murder of Dr. Winton. The killing and subsequent manhunt drove the Korean War off the headlines of the New England papers for more than a week. The fact that Casper was a Yale student dating the granddaughter of a governor, and that Winton was Social Register rich, and that there was
lots of blood made it fodder for the New York tabloids as well. When Casper was finally apprehended, he was found sleeping in the forward cabin of a fifty-foot schooner that was in dry dock at the Wainscot Yacht Club.

  Perhaps he thought he was at sea and had made good his escape. The death list with my father’s name on it was found folded neatly in his wallet.

  The evidence against him was incontrovertible. The stepdaughter gave an eyewitness account of seeing Casper standing over her stepmother’s body with a pistol in his hand. His fingerprints were on a .22 caliber eight-shot Harrington & Richardson revolver found next to a rosebush a quarter mile away; the ballistics matched. My father was not called to testify and did not volunteer. A jury was never assembled to pass judgment.

  A trio of eminent psychiatrists examined Casper. Two pronounced him a paranoid schizophrenic; the third judged him a sociopath with schizoid tendencies. Casper’s state-appointed attorney pleaded insanity. Casper remained mute. The judge sentenced him to life in the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. According to newspaper accounts, Casper refused to give any explanation for his actions other than to say, “They made me.”

  Among psychologists and psychiatrists in the academic community, the case was well-known but little discussed. They categorized Dr. Winton’s death the way my father dealt with Jack’s—a tragic accident. But then, isn’t that what all murders are?

  A crazed, delusional patient kills the brilliant young physician trying to help him—it was an occupational hazard, remote, but real. Dr. Winton wasn’t the first mental hygienist who suffered at the hands of a paranoid. My father’s research on gaikau dong, his study of its effect on depression, its uncanny ability to produce that subtle electrochemical state commonly called happiness, was never completed, much less published.

  My father and Dr. Winton had kept their research to themselves. Desperate to be the first, they ended up, well, CRAZED YALIE KILLS LADY SHRINK was not the headline they’d hoped to garner. Their adviser on the study, Dr. Petersen, was the only person at Yale privy to their preliminary test results. They were in the bottom drawer of his desk when a blood clot formed in his carotid artery and turned out the lights in the left hemisphere of his brain. Stroke, coma, he died the day after Casper’s capture. Perhaps he would have added something to the inquest.

  In spite of the fact that Yale became the first Ivy League college to expel a student for murder, there was no scandal. The Yale community was more isolated then, a fortress of greatness more than an ivory tower, immune to any and every thing but success. Alfred W. Griswold, the president of Yale, was number three on Casper’s list. Winton was number two. My father was number one. My father had his theories as to why Casper, the Angel of Death, had passed him over that Sunday and gone straight to Winton’s. But he never shared them.

  By the time the tulips had flowered the following spring, Winton’s husband was out of the hospital. All Thayer remembered was the doorbell ringing. The bullet Casper fired into his face damaged his tear duct. His right eye wept constantly. No one was sure whether it was the way Thayer fell against the stone floor in the hall or the beating Casper inflicted with the help of a field hockey stick that fractured his spinal column at the T8 vertebra. When not in his wheelchair, he walked with canes. There was a picture of him in the paper the following summer at the helm of his sailboat, winning the regatta. He stayed in Hamden and endowed a scholarship in his wife’s name.

  My father left Yale at the end of that academic year. Yale wanted him to stay. He had promise, he was on the right track. He could do a standard deviational analysis in his head, he was alive. The head of the department took Dad out to lunch and tried to talk him out of leaving. My father always said he left because they didn’t make him a full professor. It was more complicated than that.

  In June of ’53, he traded in the White Whale for a brand-new robin’s-egg blue Plymouth station wagon with automatic transmission and a V-8 engine, and drove what was left of himself and his family south.

  Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey in New Brunswick, not only made my father a full professor at double the salary, he only had to teach one semester per annum of doctoral candidates in the final year of their PhD program—the rest of the time, he was free to do research.

  Rutgers wasn’t Yale. Except for the old Queens College, a handful of dark brown nineteenth-century stone buildings, and an impressive iron gate, the campus was a dreary, sprawling hodgepodge of clapboard and stucco. Happy homes for the skilled laborers who used to work in the factories that lined the banks of the Raritan, fouling its waters blue green with chemicals, had been hastily coopted by the university as its ambitions grew and the factories closed and the workers moved on to places not yet poisoned.

  We lived across the river in Greenwood in a pre–World War I housing development that had seen better days. Now that my father could afford it, there was no High Lane Club to join, no polite private school to send his children to, i.e., nothing to offer proof positive that all he had compromised he had compromised for them.

  Our house in Greenwood was three stories of gingerbread bric-a-brac with a curving porch curtained by a tangle of un-pruned rhododendrons and old maple trees that provided too much shade for grass to grow green. It was clear from photographs that our house was twice as big as the box they had lived in back in Hamden. But I never once heard my father say something nice about our home in Greenwood. My mother would occasionally well up the energy to talk about fixing it up, tearing down walls to enlarge rooms, adding a terrace, a fireplace, bigger windows in the hopes of making it more cozy and less claustrophobic. But my father would always say, “What’s the point? It’ll never be right.”

  Other more renowned and scenic universities courted my father. He had offers to go to Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. His rating scale and tests were being used all across the country. He knew the questions to ask, the statistical formulas to tell America just how crazy it was getting.

  New Jersey was a strategic retreat. My father picked Rutgers because New Jersey, the Garden State, was where the drug companies were. Hoffmann–La Roche, Merck, Sandoz, Johnson & Johnson, Ciba all lay between the Delaware to the west and the Passaic to the east, the Tigris and Euphrates of prescribed modernity. The sixty-mile crescent that lay between those rivers was the cornucopia of pharmacology.

  I was not yet one year old when Miltown hit our local pharmacy: C9H18N2O4. It was named after a town in New Jersey. A pink pill that put your blues to sleep, it made everything feel okay, even when you knew it wasn’t. Newspapers called it the “happy pill.” Wildly addictive and incredibly popular with middle-class housewives, it was sometimes referred to as “mother’s little helper.” Family doctors all around the world gave it to brides-to-be nervous about their wedding nights, and to wives diagnosed frigid by their husbands. By the time I was three, one in twenty Americans was on Miltown.

  For a few years, it swept anxiety, what the ladies’ magazines called “emotional problems,” under the carpet. By that time people had begun to notice that if you upped your dosage, you felt a buzz. If you took a little more, side effects included stomach upset, blurred vision, headache, impaired coordination, nausea, vomiting. Try to stop? Convulsive seizures. Take too many, your body forgets how to breathe. By then a prescription for Miltown was being written out every second of every day.

  No longer just a psychologist, Dad was now a neuropsychopharmacologist. He didn’t come up with the drugs that made the world feel better about itself; he just picked the ones that had promise, designed the tests, came up with the numbers that brought them to market. Dad stayed out of the lab after Hamden.

  Officially he was a consultant to the drug companies. Over the years he worked for almost all of them. He wrote books and articles with titles I still don’t understand. He worked hard and lived frugally. He still lived the dream of the magic bullet. Ambition and salvation were one and the same to Dr. Friedrich.

  Bunny Winton’s name had
never been mentioned in our house, not once. Fiona was eight when Dr. Winton was murdered. Lucy was seven. They remembered the day the tulips were buried. They met Sergeant Neutch at our house in Hamden. They heard my mother wail, “No!” They saw Jack facedown in the birdbath.

  My parents hid the newspapers in the days after the killing. Fiona was a precocious reader. Her friend showed the headlines to her. Lucy remembered. They filled Willy in on it. They had met Casper, they knew the bogeyman was real.

  It must have been hard for them to resist telling the secret to me when I was little. But to their credit, they did. Dad had told them there was only one thing they could do that would be more unforgivable than telling me about the shadow in the pricker bushes: playing with the big, blue-black revolver my father kept loaded in his bedside table.

  Our neighbors in Greenwood weren’t academics; they were professional people, small-business owners, midlevel management. A sales executive named Lutz who worked for a paint company lived directly across the street from us with his wife, June, and their five children. Over the hedge to the east were the Murphys. The father was a plant manager for Squibb. They had three boys.

  Behind us was a pediatrician, Dr. Goodman, who had daughters the same age as Fiona and Lucy and a cherry tree that hung low over our back fence, pink with blossoms in the spring, heavy with fruit in the summer. I was sixteen months away from being born when we moved to Greenwood. But I imagine our neighbors were pleased when they heard a youngish professor with a wife, two girls, and a boy had bought the old Conklin house on the corner. They looked forward to meeting us, had every reason to believe we’d fit right in. And when they looked out their window in the summer of ’53, and they saw us arrive with the moving van, they must have liked what they saw. My family looked neat, clean, reasonably attractive, white, had a brand-new Plymouth station wagon, and all their fingers and toes. They couldn’t see what was missing from our family. Not at first, at least.