Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  “We didn’t call them that then, but I would not have categorized him as such now. More important, he had no history of violence.”

  “He attempted suicide.” Stan had done his homework. “If I recall correctly, you always told us that suicide is an act of aggression.”

  “It wasn’t in his case.”

  “There are always treatment-resistant individuals with any antidepressant.”

  “There were other side effects not reflected in the study.”

  “Such as?”

  “Diminished awareness of the feelings of others, narcissism, loss of empathy, delusions of grandeur, social aggression . . .” As Friedrich sounded his warning, he thought of the day Casper spoke pridefully of how he had mastered the applied physics of dishonesty involved in making people at the Wainscot Yacht Club like him, of the circumstances under which he had stolen his best friend’s girl who happened to be the ex-governor’s granddaughter, of the way he had looked in that tailored suit the day he had given Friedrich his formula for gold.

  The smile was still on Stan’s face. The man didn’t hear what Friedrich was saying. “One of the subjects exhibited half of the characteristics the DSM uses to define a sociopath.”

  “The same could be said about every guy that graduates from Harvard Business School.” Stan’s smile was now tempered with pity for an old man who doesn’t understand that the world has changed. “I think perhaps some of the side effects that may have seemed antisocial to you in 1952 are no longer considered negative qualities.”

  “The world hasn’t changed that much.”

  “Your data indicates GKD helped make people feel better about themselves, it helped them make the most of their potential. The nurse loses weight and enjoys sex, what’s-his-name, the one who was scared of heights, learns how to fly an airplane.”

  “His name was Bill Taylor, and the next year he was shot down in the Korean War.”

  “That’s hardly the drug’s fault. You came up with something that helps people self-realize, focus themselves, forget what they were and how they feel about it and think about what they can be, feel what they want to feel. I’m telling you, Will, this is a drug for the times we live in. It’s not just an antidepressant, it’s a prescription for achievement.”

  “You don’t understand. There’s a reason it was created by cannibals.”

  “Let’s just explore it.”

  “I don’t want it developed.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Stan pushed his plate away from him. He’d only eaten the choicest parts of the steak. “I was looking forward to us doing great things together. But, and I wish there was a gentler way to put this, if you really felt that way, you should have patented it.”

  Stan shook Friedrich’s hand on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant and wished him luck. Friedrich did not do the same. The chauffeur opened the car door for him. He got in wondering where he was going.

  Holiday traffic blocked the cross streets to the Lincoln Tunnel. When the driver turned down Fifth to make his way to the Holland, Friedrich asked, “Is there time for me to stop?”

  The driver double-parked on Horatio Street. Lazlo had told him Z was staying with him. Friedrich rang the bell. When he got no response, he pounded on the door so hard his knuckle split. Tilting his head back, he called, “Zach, open up, it’s me.”

  No one answered his call for help. Friedrich got back in the car, blood dripping from the knuckles of his right hand. The drug he took for his heart had made his blood too thin to clot. Friedrich stared out the car window past his own reflection. The world was a blur. A shadow carrying a Christmas tree floated by him on the pavement. He did not see that it was Z.

  BOOK IV

  MARCH 1994

  Friedrich survived the birthday party. In the end, there was even dancing. He was now four weeks from turning seventy-six, and there’d be another party he didn’t want. Glaucoma continued to lower the curtain on his right eye. He still hadn’t gone in for laser surgery. He’d read the literature. They said it was effective 98 percent of the time. As he told Nora, “I damn well guarantee you the 2 percent who wake up blind wish they still had glaucoma.”

  He was alone at his side of the big double desk in their hayloft bedroom/office. Nora was out running errands. He’d just gotten off the phone with a psychiatrist out at Washington University medical school in St. Louis. They’d spent thirty minutes talking about teenage suicides and Prozac. They discussed risk factors and statistical anomalies the way he imagined weathermen debated whether or not a circling air mass mandated a hurricane warning.

  Though he had retired professor emeritus from the university, he still consulted for drug companies. As an elder statesman of pharmacology, a genuine trailblazer turned hired gun in the pioneer days of psychoactive drugs, Dr. Friedrich’s seal of approval was invaluable. And even if he didn’t approve, just having paid for his dissenting opinion made it appear as though due diligence had been done.

  Friedrich looked out the window and waited for their new Volvo with Nora in it to round the bend of the road that curved out of town and snaked its way up their hill. The village had grown suburban. A new development of three-acre McMansions crowded his view. The tunnel vision of his glaucoma was a blessing in that regard. If he fixed his squint due west on the church steeple that peaked just over the pale green of the spring hillside where their river plunged into a gorge, he could pretend that his universe was all as it had been twenty-seven years ago when they first moved into the barn they called home.

  But then he connected the steeple to the church beneath it, and he’d remember Fiona’s marriage to the chickenshit, and Lucy flying in pregnant and beautiful, which he still regretted failing to tell her. There was much he regretted not telling Nigel as well.

  Then he began to think of Zach. Yes, he should have told him more about Casper. He should have told them all. But once you weave the lie into the fabric of your life, how do you remove its tangle and still have anything to hold onto?

  And then, lastly, he’d think about Willy, who he’d always felt he’d ignored, which in turn would lead Friedrich to ponder, Perhaps that’s why he’s happiest of the bunch.

  Finally, on this spring morning, as was always the case when he looked out from his barn at the narrowing horizon and followed the chain of events that had led him to this point in time in regret, Friedrich cursed himself aloud. “Christ, Friedrich, you’re thinking like an old man.”

  In fact, except for his eyes, Friedrich was in remarkable shape for a man who’d endured the planet over seventy years. Sunblock had kept his face free of age spots. His hair was silver and combed straight back, and he prided himself on still being able to wear suits that he’d bought thirty years ago, and never went anywhere without a tie. He looked polished rather than old.

  The barbells and Royal Canadian Air Force exercises had kept his body lean enough to have a BMI of twenty-four. He could still bench-press 150 pounds. He checked his blood pressure twice daily with his own pressure cuff, breakfasted on a milkshake of brewer’s yeast, seaweed, megavitamins, and powdered skim milk, and had not eaten ice cream in over a decade.

  As long as he continued to thin his blood with rat poison (10 mg of Coumadin) daily and kept his heart rate regular with 5 mg of Lanoxin every morning, he could feel reasonably confident he wouldn’t go brain dead from a stroke or heart attack for another ten years. Death did not frighten him half as much as stupidity.

  Whenever a new intelligence test came out, he took it. Nora laughed at her husband for this, but it cheered him up that he still scored in the ninety-ninth percentile. He wasn’t quite as quick with the answers, especially the math, as he once had been. But when Friedrich wasn’t distracted he could still do a standard deviational analysis in his head.

  Sometimes when he was feeling low, on days like this when Nora took longer than she’d said to come back from shopping, he’d work the numbers through his brain just to make sure it hadn’t frozen up on him while
he wasn’t looking.

  Though his hairline had retreated to the back of his skull, he still had his prostate. He could still perform. He still had work to do, and the possibility that his best work was yet to come filled him with a restless dissatisfaction that he still mistook for hope.

  The pharmaceutical industry had boomed. His stockbroker, a young woman named Shirley, called him regularly to ask his opinion about new products that were in the pipeline, drugs that showed the promise of profit. He enjoyed talking to her because she had a Midwestern accent and a flat nasal voice that reminded him of the girl who’d sat next to him in fourth grade and died of spinal meningitis over Christmas vacation. He had a few million dollars worth of Sandoz and Merck and Hoffmann–La Roche and the like in his portfolio now. Back in the days when he was driving the White Whale through the streets of Hamden, he would have called himself rich.

  But Friedrich did not feel rich this day. It didn’t seem like he had much to show, not given the compromises and sacrifices and hours they had spent shackled to the desk whose veneer he was now picking at with a letter opener. And as he noted the need for getting it fixed, and all the trouble and time it would take to remove a lifetime of work from its drawers and file cabinets, the thought occurred to Friedrich that they had indeed been shackled, prisoners all these years, serving life sentences imposed on themselves, by themselves, with no chance of appeal or hope of pardon. It was then that Dr. Friedrich remembered that their new Volvo had a car phone, and that he could call his wife on it.

  Unlike most of his generation, those that had come of age in the Great Depression, Friedrich was comfortable and adept with computers. He had worked with them since the fifties. His grandchildren came to him when programs malfunctioned, screens froze, and homework was eaten by hard drives. But mobile phones did not compute, and dated him.

  He dialed Nora and got a recording. “Your service provider is not available in this area.” He dialed again. Busy. The same hill that protected his view made it impossible to reach Nora when he needed to talk to her. He’d say he wanted to remind her to pick up a bottle of vermouth and a spare cartridge for the printer. But mostly he just needed to hear her voice to know he was not alone in the prison of the fortress they had constructed.

  He was about to punch redial, another bit of nineties technology he’d forgotten he had, but then thought better of it as he fantasized Nora reaching for the car phone’s ring while going round a corner and taking her eyes off the road to speak to him, cradling the receiver to the cheek he’d just kissed an hour ago, drifting lanes as she answered with “Yes, dear, I remembered the vermouth, and the toner,” just before she ran head-on into a semi or a deer or a dump truck.

  Friedrich mocked himself for clinging to the childish fantasy that imagining the worst would decrease the statistical probability of it actually happening. Life had taught him the world didn’t work that way.

  Friedrich was just checking his pillbox to make sure he had remembered to take his Coumadin and Dig that morning, as opposed to thinking he had remembered to take them, when he heard Nora’s voice calling to him, “Will . . . Will.”

  He walked out onto the balcony and called out to her grumpily “What took you so long?”

  Gray looked up at him. “Will?” The parrot mimicked Nora’s voice perfectly. It was not the first time the aging African gray had tricked him that way.

  The bird had seen it all. Except for the talons of his right foot being eaten by a fan, Gray looked just as he had when Friedrich had mistaken him for a hallucination perched in his mulberry tree. Then and now, Gray was an uncooperative witness. The thought that a bird would outlive him used to amuse Friedrich. Now it just pissed him off.

  Friedrich slammed the balcony door as the parrot laughed at him. Friedrich opened the stereo and removed the CD titled Learn to Dance at Home. The numbered steps of a foxtrot were rolled out on a mat on the floor. After nearly a half century of marriage, Friedrich was finally so bored he was willing to learn how to dance.

  He replaced the instruction CD with Billie Holiday. He preferred vinyl, missed the scratches on his old records. He tried not to think more old man thoughts, but it was impossible. Closing the door on Gray and turning up the volume of a stereo remix of Billie’s sadness made it seem fresher than it had when he’d first heard her back in ’39. But that didn’t change the fact that in less than a month he’d be seventy-six years old.

  He told his wife and children he did not, under any circumstances, want another party. He said he saw no reason to celebrate old age. He’d said the same thing last year, but they wouldn’t listen . . . they never did.

  Friedrich tried to change his perspective on this day by sitting in his wife’s chair. But looking across the big desk they had shared, gazing on his empty seat, just made him think of the day when he’d vacate his place on the planet permanently.

  He knew he was feeling sorry for himself. If Nora weren’t dawdling on the way home from the office supply store, or hadn’t turned back to get the vermouth, or worse, stopped in at Lucy’s down the road to talk about my goddamn birthday, she would have been there to pull him out of his spiraling funk, to say “Enough dillydallying, we’ve got work to do, a speech to write, a chapter to compose.”

  “Wiiiiiill?” He heard her calling now, stretching out his name into a shriek; he knew it sounded too much like her to be anything but the parrot he should have gotten rid of years ago. Friedrich reached for the remote and turned up Billie Holiday’s call for emotional rescue.

  The clutter of his desk was pinned down with a dozen paperweights, giant pills in Lucite, miracle drugs cast in Plexiglas to commemorate the millionth prescription, sales figures that made stocks split and dividends double. These trophies to his alchemy were lined up like chess pieces in a game played to a draw. Perhaps they had done some good, distanced a few hundred thousand unhappy souls far enough from their feelings to avoid getting fired from their jobs, or walking out on their children, or jumping into the paths of oncoming trains, and cars, and lives unlived. Yes, maybe he’d helped them feign a memory of happiness, kept them from being devoured by their guilt and shame. But then again, what were people to feel when they did things they should feel guilty or ashamed of? Synthetic joy?

  There had been no miracle cures. Wonder drugs for the mind came and went out of style like the hemlines of ladies’ skirts and the width of men’s ties. Ultimately, they were remembered as ill advised as last year’s fashions. Friedrich still read the latest literature; his advice and support were sought out and courted by young men and women with new pharmaceutical axes to take to market. Friedrich was tuned in, but had dropped out years ago.

  MRIs, CAT scans, dye injections of radioactive tracers into the brain that showed thought mass and move across the mind like an advancing army were all promising. But sitting at his desk that morning, waiting for Nora to come home, listening to the parrot who had witnessed his fall from grace, calling out in the voice of his flesh and blood addiction, his ball and chain, his partner in crime, his wife, “Will . . . Will . . . ,” Dr. Friedrich knew he and his kind were forty years away from having the hardware to understand how to rechannel thought to that uncharted beach in the brain called happiness.

  If he were twenty-one in 2021, he would make a difference, he’d have a chance to be great then. Everything he touched and loved would have been better off if he just had more time. Friedrich knew these were old man thoughts, but he could not help himself. He was an old man.

  The sun was behind a cloud now. He could see its shadow rolling up the hillside toward him. Rain was on its way. If the weather had been different, if Gray hadn’t been calling up to him from the past, he would have gotten up, brought out the barbells, gone for a walk. This was not a Sock Moment, this was age-related depression. He knew how to fight it, raise the blood sugar, get the body moving, reach out to another human being. Instead, he stared straight ahead at the photos Nora kept on her side of the desk and made himself feel worse.


  There was an eight by ten framed in malachite of Lucy surrounded by her five adopted children. No two were the same color. Black, brown, the color of unfired clay, the white of phosphorous—he called them Lucy’s Rainbow Coalition. Friedrich wished Lucy had had children of her own, in part because he was soothed by the thought of his own DNA twirling into the future. But also for its therapeutic value.

  Lucy had been in the eighth month of her pregnancy when she and Nigel went to surf the break in Rincón, Puerto Rico. The car they had rented at the airport was supposed to have a rack for his surfboard. It didn’t. Nigel sat in the backseat and held the surfboard steady while she drove, nose end out one window of the car, fin end out the other. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault. She was driving carefully. A minibus passed her on the right, just clipping the nose of the board. The rental car plowed into a ditch. Nigel was basically decapitated by his surfboard at the third cervical vertebra, and the baby was stillborn while Lucy was trapped in the front seat.

  Friedrich realized Nigel wasn’t the bastard he had thought when his will was read and she had inherited all that money. That Lucy had chosen not to tell him Nigel was rich, that she had let him think the father of her dead child was a worthless surf bum bastard right through the funeral was, in Dr. Friedrich’s mind, cruel and unusual and deserved punishment. Yes, Nora was probably having coffee with Lucy right now, talking about the party he didn’t deserve.

  Billie was singing Stormy Weather now, and Friedrich was holding a small, tarnished silver frame with a photo of Homer and his mother back when they lived on Harrison Street. They died within three weeks of each other, in the summer of ’84. Heart disease.

  Softly touching Homer’s cheek with his forefinger, Friedrich made a mental note to polish the frame. A glance at Nora’s desktop pic of Fiona and Michael and the twins, a boy and a girl. Just as Ida had predicted, one was dark, one was fair, and both were born fat. The boy had red hair Ida would have envied, the girl had recently developed an eating disorder. The picture had been taken at last year’s Emmy Awards.