Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

“There are some things we need to talk about.”

  His father didn’t look at him. His eyes were on the clutter of the dining room table.

  “Such as?”

  “How about let’s start with ‘Glad to see you’?”

  “What’s so important that gives you the right to barge into our home?” His mother spoke for his father.

  “The door was open. This is my home. This is where I grew up.”

  “Zach, you always were good at avoiding answering questions you don’t want to answer. But we’re old, and I’m sorry you’re a drug addict, but it’s not our fault. I want an explanation—what do you think we have to talk about?”

  His father had put on his glasses and was sorting through the books and stacks of mail on the table. It was then Z noticed the winged bronze brain Zuza had given him so long ago.

  “We can start with this.” Zach handed her the steamship ticket.

  “What did he give you?” Lucy had told him his father’s eyesight was failing.

  “Nothing.” Nora folded the ticket neatly and slipped it into the waistband of her skirt.

  “Is there anything else?”

  Z winced and cocked his head like a dog that doesn’t know why it’s just been kicked by its master. Before he could retaliate, his father pointed his finger at the table. “There was three hundred dollars for the gardener on that table when we left.”

  Z reeled back. His mother wiped away a tear. “How can you do this to us?”

  “You think I came here to steal from you?”

  “Besides the fact that writing someone a bad check is a form of thievery, I think you’re a drug addict who won’t get treatment.”

  Z pointed to his father’s feet. “Open your eyes.” Three one hundred dollar bills were on the floor. “You owe me more than an apology.”

  Friedrich stepped back as Z reached for the table. Son and father were frightened of one another. Z picked up the bronze. “What are you doing?” For an instant Friedrich thought the boy was going to strike him.

  “Taking what’s mine.”

  Z was out the door when his mother called after him, “Are you coming to the party?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Z called Lucy from the train station down in the village. He apologized for borrowing Leila’s bike without permission and told her where he had parked it. His sister had been worried, coming home from school, finding him gone. “You haven’t had a slip, have you?”

  “Not the kind you mean. I went to see Mom and Dad. It felt good, actually. Angry, but good.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “As well as could be expected.”

  “That bad?”

  “Let’s just say it was a mixed message.” He leafed through Casper’s diary as he talked to her from the phone booth.

  “You sound sad.”

  “Thoughtful.” He knew what he had to do, but had no idea how he could do it.

  “What are you doing, Z?”

  “I’m not sure, but it feels right.” The New York train was pulling into the station. “I’ve gotta go.”

  Lazlo had an office. He had several, in fact. New York, London, L.A., Tokyo. But over the last few years, since he’d turned sixty, he saw less and less reason to go to them; like the Friedrichs, he preferred the desk in the bedroom. He was there now, 4:07 in the afternoon, and still in his Sulka pajamas. He had just put on an overcoat over his robe. The sun was shining, but he felt cold.

  Computer screens glowed on his desktop. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for the day. It was already tomorrow in Japan, but the markets weren’t open yet. Lazlo’s success was due to the fact that he was uniquely comfortable assuming financial positions of great risk. Gambling was his antidote to the anxiety of success. Lazlo never worried except when things went well, for he knew that could not last.

  He still lived in the house on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. When he began his ascent, his life had been sex first, work a distant second. Over the years, more work and less sex. He still had girlfriends, but now instead of breaking it off when he began to fall in love and blaming the impossibly young women he courted for fulfilling his addiction to disappointment, he thanked them and said good-bye by sending them to college or graduate school, or giving them money to fly home and marry their high school sweethearts.

  Lazlo still liked to gamble, but he had so much (or so little, depending on how you looked at it) that it was hard to tell if he was winning or losing. Lazlo lit a fresh cigarette off the one in his lips, called Chicago, and bought some futures.

  Remembering it was Monday, he thought of Monday Night Football, hung up in the middle of the trade, and called his bookie. “Who is playing who?” His accent, like his stomach, had gotten larger over the years.

  “Eagles, at home against the Giants.” Lazlo never bothered to learn the rules of the game. It was more fun to watch that way.

  “Give me two dimes on the Giants at plus seven and a nickel on the over.”

  “That’s it?”

  Lazlo wanted more action. “I want a dime on the coin toss. I say ‘heads.’ ”

  “We only take bets on the coin toss in the Super Bowl.”

  “Fuck you, let’s bet.”

  “Against the rules, Lazlo.” His bookie was just a phone number and a voice. They had never met.

  “What rules? You’re a bookie. Are the bookie police going to come and arrest you? Take my money on coin toss.” Lazlo didn’t like rules.

  When the bookie answered, “Fuck you, too,” and hung up, Lazlo was left unsure what he had wagered. Lazlo liked having somebody to root for.

  The doorbell rang. The maid was out. He looked over at the small screen of his security system and saw Zach Friedrich standing on his doorstep. The fish-eye lens distorted his godson’s face into a goblin’s. He had not seen Z in over a year.

  Lazlo pushed “speak” and laughed. “You look like shit.” When he had had dinner with the Friedrichs two weeks ago, no mention had been made of Z.

  “Thanks, Lazlo.”

  “I’ll be right down.” Lazlo put on a suit and tie. He did not want the world to know he was in the habit of loitering the day away in his jammies.

  The door opened. Lazlo greeted Z with the hug he had hoped to get from his father. But their reunion wasn’t out of a storybook. Lazlo broke the embrace quickly and let Z know where he stood. “I quit, you know.”

  The aging captain of industry had been a major blow fiend for years. He had diluted it and put it in the Dristan bottles he was always spraying up his nose. The last time he and Z had seen each other, they had snorted a few dry grams of blow while watching the ladies’ finals of the U.S. Open on TV.

  “Me, too.” Lazlo smiled and gestured for him to come in. It was both a relief and a burden for Z to be taken at his word. Except for a couple of museum-quality paintings Willy had helped Lazlo buy at auction, the decor was still Playboy After Dark. The early Hugh Hefner look now seemed quaint rather than titillating.

  Z put down his briefcase and perched nervously on a stool at the Lucite bar. The bottles still appeared to float in thin air, but he no longer felt the urge to spin himself around on the bar stool. He already felt dizzy.

  Lazlo opened a glass door and took out a bottle of Montrachet Ramonet, chilled to thirteen degrees Celsius. “Drink?”

  Z shook his head no, wondering if Lazlo was testing him.

  Lazlo poured himself a glass. “So tell me, do you miss cocaine?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good . . . I do. People seem more interesting, likable, when you’re high. The fucking is better now. I could never get it up, could you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “But the talk afterward is not so good.” Lazlo stamped out his cigarette and rummaged through a drawer for a fresh pack. “Cigarettes taste better, too, when you’re high.”

  Z came to the point. “I need help.”

  Lazlo’s smile hid his disappointment. Money
. If people didn’t want to borrow it, they wanted to talk about it. “Cash or check?”

  Lazlo pulled out his wallet. Friedrich had told him more than once, “If he comes to you, don’t help him. He’s got to touch bottom.” Having spent a lifetime there, Lazlo did not agree.

  Z shook his head no.

  “Name something and it’s yours.”

  Z reached into the briefcase of his youth and pulled out Casper’s diary and the tapes. “I want you to tell me about Casper Gedsic.”

  “How much do you know?”

  It had never occurred to Z that Lazlo might not tell him the truth.

  Lazlo chain-smoked as he read the diary. When he got to the last page, he snorted like he’d just done a line of bad blow. “It would appear Casper, like your father, thought the drug worked.”

  “What was it?”

  “Never told me. Probably thought I’d take it.”

  “Did you ever meet Casper?”

  “No. Your father is, was, very discreet, very professional. He never said a word about it until the killings. Then we talked.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He blamed himself.”

  “Was it the drug?”

  Lazlo shrugged. “Casper was fucking crazy before he took it. Worst kind of crazy: smart crazy. Your mother still can’t forgive herself for stopping him from jumping off that cliff.”

  There was no mention of that in the diaries. Lazlo filled him in on what had happened at Sleeping Giant, and then added, waving his cigarette in the air like a wand, “Crazy before he took the drug, crazy again after he stopped. Look what he did to you.”

  “All Casper did to me was teach me how to swim.”

  “If the bastard just shot Winton, I could say maybe, perhaps. He’s a victim. He didn’t like what the drug did to him so he killed one of the doctors that gave it to him. But killing the baby . . . for that the motherfucker does not deserve to live.”

  “I don’t think he killed Jack.”

  “How come?”

  “If he wanted to murder the children, he would have shot everybody on the front lawn before he went to the Wintons. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You know, the war, the Nazis, taught me one thing. Trying to make sense out of what crazy, sick motherfuckers do only makes you crazy.”

  Lazlo still had the old reel-to-reel tape deck that used to come on automatically and play Sinatra when he dimmed the lights. They ate Chinese takeout as they listened to the tape recordings of his father’s weekly meetings with Casper.

  As they played back those afternoons from the summer of ’52, his father and Casper’s disembodied voices came alive. Z closed his eyes and listened. It was as if Casper and Friedrich were in the room with them. His father sounded young, Casper even younger. Z was surprised how much his father knew about Casper, how much Casper felt comfortable revealing to him. Z was jealous.

  It was after midnight when they heard the last of the tapes. He felt like he knew everything and nothing about the doctor-patient relationship that had spawned him. And yet, Casper and his father were more human than ever.

  They sat in silence as the end of the tape clicked around the spool. Lazlo spoke first. “Is strange, one minute your father seems to like the son of a bitch, and the next minute—”

  “That’s the way it is with Dad.”

  “That’s the way it is with all fathers.”

  Christmas came early for the Friedrichs. He was out walking Fred when the news came. It had snowed the night before, crystalline flakes that thawed and froze again.

  Friedrich’s wife was taking advantage of this rare moment of solitude to bring some order to her husband’s side of the desk. The private chaos of his methodology was spilling over onto the floor, encroaching on the order she struggled to maintain in her half of the life they coinhabited. She had to be careful, tidy up in ways he wouldn’t notice, or he’d blame her for what he could not find.

  She smiled at the memory of all the times she’d heard him bellow, “Nora, for the love of God: Why can’t you just leave things as I’ve left them?”

  When the phone rang, she was looking for page twenty-seven of the appendix of the new version of his old book on depression. She was going to let it ring through to the answering machine when she heard, “Will, Stan Bender here. I’ve got a proposition for you, and I’m not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. We need you for this.”

  They’d known Stan for years. He’d been a graduate student of Friedrich’s. Not the best student, but a go-getter. More important, he was vice president in charge of research and development at one of the pharmaceutical giants. “Stan, we were just thinking about you the other day.” What she had been thinking was that it had been five years since they had needed her husband.

  Stan didn’t go into specifics. “I’ll explain everything over lunch.” Stan suggested the Four Seasons on the twentieth and volunteered to send a car. No question, they needed her husband. Nora checked the calendar and said yes for Friedrich, and asked after Stan’s wife.

  She greeted Friedrich at the door with a hug and a kiss and told him the good news. Friedrich took it with a grumpy shrug. “I wonder whose mess they want me to clean up.”

  Nora was impatient with him. “For God’s sake, cheer up. How many men your age do you know who still get calls like that? The Four Seasons, a limousine?”

  “It’ll be a Town Car.” Friedrich feigned indifference, but she could tell his batteries were recharged by the idea that he was still the only man for the job. “Let’s knock off an hour or two of work before lunch.”

  Throwing Fred his plastic bone, Friedrich took her by the hand and they climbed the stairs together. She was just about to sit down at the typewriter when she felt his arms close around her and the fingers of his right hand on her breast.

  “I thought we had work to do.”

  “We do.” His eyesight was getting worse. He had trouble unsnapping her brassiere. They made them differently now. As she helped them undress, she looked into the clouded gray of his eyes and wondered how he saw her. It had been a long time since they had been like this. It still felt good to be alive.

  “I told you so.” Friedrich peered out the window on the morning of the twentieth. It was, in fact, a Town Car. “Come with me.” He’d been trying to talk her into joining him for lunch since breakfast. “I’ll take you Christmas shopping after lunch.”

  “I’ve done all my shopping.” She had bought presents for everyone but Z. She neither knew what he needed, nor how to give it to him.

  “We’ll buy a present for you.”

  “It won’t be a surprise, then.” She was helping him on with his overcoat.

  “Come on, Stan will be disappointed not to see you.”

  “Go on. They want the Lone Ranger, not Tonto.” She pushed him gently out the door. The bells on their wreath tinkled.

  The ride was uneventful. He read the newspaper with one eye closed. The doctor had diagnosed his problem as glaucoma. He had known the darkness was closing in for some time.

  The right half of the Four Seasons was a blur. His narrowing vision detracted from the pleasure of being shown to a power table. Stan was waiting.

  They started with littlenecks and small talk. “Did you hear they’re doing a book on Dr. Petersen?”

  Friedrich had not thought of the dead Freudian for years. Now that he did, he realized Petersen was seventy-two when a stroke pulled the plug on him. Friedrich was wondering how long he had left when he responded, “What an incredibly good idea for a boring book.” Friedrich didn’t care if they wrote a book about him when he was dead. He wanted it while he was alive.

  Stan laughed. “One can always count on you for the milk of human kindness.” Stan was squeezing the lemon now. “I agree about the book, but the graduate student who’s writing it is my nephew, so I had to pretend I was interested.”

  A quiet rage rose up in Friedrich. Nora must have gotten it wrong. All he needs me for is a goddamn quote for
his nephew’s book on Petersen. Friedrich watched as the waiter took his fish off the bone. “I don’t think I have much to contribute to your nephew’s tome on Dr. Petersen.”

  “The book’s not important. What I want to talk to you about is the study of yours he found going through Petersen’s papers.” Friedrich’s appetite was replaced by a swell of nausea. He had no memory of turning in their results to Petersen. His write-up wasn’t finished. He remembered handing Winton a rough draft. She was wearing gloves, and she had put it into a red leather briefcase that had an alligator snout for a clasp.

  As his field of vision closed in on the past, he barely heard what the drug exec was saying. “I was stunned by the results.”

  “So was I.”

  “This degree of improvement in seventeen out of twenty subjects who were actually receiving the drug?” Stan had pulled out a copy of the study. “Granted, it was small study, but gai kau dong obviously has potential as an antidepressant.”

  “What?”

  “We’re interested in working with you on GKD.”

  Friedrich shook his head no. “The study doesn’t give an accurate picture.”

  Stan sat back in his chair. “Are you trying to tell me the data isn’t accurate? That’s the reason you never published?”

  Friedrich knew he should say yes, swear the results were falsified, blame it on Winton. After all this time, he was still caught between pride and shame. He could not betray that part of himself. “No, the results were as recorded.” Stan was happy again. “But the study doesn’t give you the whole story.”

  Stan was cutting into his steak. “It never does. But with you onboard, we can pick up where you left off . . . this could be incredibly beneficial to . . .”

  Friedrich held up his hand as if fending off a blow. “Ten days after his last dose of GKD, one of the subjects suffered violent, paranoid delusions, which prompted him to attack Dr. Winton and her husband. She was killed; he lost the use of his legs.”

  Stan nodded as he chewed the undercooked meat. “I know about Casper Gedsic.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Of course, what I mean is, I appreciate how you must have been shocked by the tragedy. I can understand why you decided to put it aside. But you’re being too hard on yourself. According to your notes, Gedsic was a borderline to begin with.”