Pharmakon (14 page)

Nora was standing behind him now. Yesterday’s newspaper was folded in his lap. Nora didn’t recognize the photo of the college girl. But she could read the headline: C
AR
C
RASH
K
ILLS
C
OED
. It was Nina Bouchard.

Nora looked down at the picture of the two-toned Buick speared by a telephone pole. The hand accelerator on the steering wheel had gotten stuck.

The wind rustled the pages of the paper. She could see an ant crawling up the back of Casper’s neck. He did not bother to brush it away. “Was she a friend?”

“S-s-s-she would have been.”

“You didn’t know her?” Casper shook his head no. “Then why are you . . . ?”

“It’s my f-f-fault.” Casper had calculated his culpability. If he had stayed home, if he had let the crater-faced hood steal the car, if he hadn’t longed to be her hero, if he had had enough heroism to ask her out on a date, they would have kissed, instead of the Buick and the telephone pole. Casper looked up. He could tell Mrs. Friedrich didn’t have a clue. “You’d have to be me to understand.”

“Casper, please come back down with me. You’re not responsible.”

“W-w-we’re all responsible. M-m-most of us just don’t like to t-t-think about it.”

“What I mean is, you’re not God.”

“W-w-w-we’re all God.”

“You need to talk to my husband.”

“He can’t change how I f-f-f-feel.”

“He can, I promise.” She reached out her hand. She knew she was making a promise her husband couldn’t keep. Like Casper said, we’re all responsible.

Casper didn’t say a word as Nora walked him down off the Giant. Nora told him to put his bike in the back of the Whale. Jens and his wife agreed to bring the children home with them. As she explained to the kids, “Casper doesn’t feel well . . . I know he doesn’t look sick, but he is.”

Casper soothed himself, calculating the number of leaves on the branch of the elm tree that swayed overhead, then the number of limbs on the tree, the number of trees in the woods, in the county, in the state, in the country, in the hemisphere . . .

Nora pulled over at the first phone booth she saw. She hadn’t considered the possibility that Will might not be in his office until she started to dial his number. Should she take him to Student Health? To the hospital? Call his mother? She couldn’t leave him alone. But she had her own children to look after. And Jack was crying as she drove off.

Casper wasn’t her problem, Casper wasn’t even her husband’s problem. As she listened to the phone go unanswered in her husband’s office, she remembered how her aunt Minnie used to say “There’s only so much a body can do.”

Friedrich was down the hall, about to descend the stairs. He figured the ringing phone was Nora; no one else would call him at the office on a Sunday. He was still seething about the way she had invaded his domain. He ran back down the hall, fumbled with his keys, reached for the receiver, intent on letting his wife know just how pissed off he was—
Does she think I like working
on weekends? Enjoy disappointing my children? If she could just
stop thinking of herself, stop being the victim,
he
could be the
goddamn victim for a change.

“Thank God you’re there.”

As soon as he heard the panic in her voice, his anger distilled into worry. “Are you all right?”

“Yes . . . no.” She gave him the broad strokes—Casper, cliff, suicide. “No, he didn’t jump, but he was about to.”

“Bring him here.”

It was what she wanted him to say. “I love you . . . I’m sorry about barging in.”

“It’s all right, I love you, too.” Will started to put down the phone, worst-case scenarios began to bubble up inside his head, like Casper’s numbers. “Wait, Nora, hold on: Does he seem agitated?”

She looked out the glass of the phone booth. Casper was worrying thin air with his forefinger. “No . . . I mean, I’m not sure.”

“Have him lie down in the back while you drive him in.”

“Why?”

“He might try to do it again while you’re driving.”

“What do you mean?’

“You know, jump out of the car, grab the steering wheel, hurt you while trying to hurt himself. Look, I’m probably just being paranoid, but just in case.”

“Right, I get it.”

Nora approached the Whale cautiously. “Casper, I want you to lie down in the back.”

“W-w-w-why?”

“My husband says it will make you feel better.”

Casper did as he was told. The Whale, having been an ambulance before Friedrich resurrected it into a station wagon, provided plenty of room for the boy to stretch out. “C-c-convenient of D-D-D-Dr. Friedrich and you having an ambulance.”

Will was sitting on the steps of the Psych building waiting when she pulled up. His tie flapped in the wind as he stood up; he stretched and yawned and pushed his cowlick out of his eyes. When things were good, her husband unraveled. But when there was a problem, he was unnaturally calm, eerily at ease. There was a warmth to his detachment.

“You made it.” Friedrich opened the back of the Whale and helped Casper out. “I’ll call you after Casper and I finish dinner.” He held up a grease-stained paper bag.

As Casper pulled his bike out of the back, he stuttered, “I’m a v-v-v-vegetarian.”

“And that’s why I got you an egg sandwich.” Will had his hand on Casper’s shoulder as he quietly guided the boy across the lawn. “It’s such a gentle evening, I thought it’d be nice to talk outside.”

Nora marveled at the lightness of her husband’s touch, infinitely kinder to a stranger suffering than he was to himself, or to his wife. He let her know she should leave with a wave of his hand.

They sat on a bench in the courtyard of Sterling Library, fifteen stories of Gothic Revival. Millions of books separated them from the outside world. The lights were on but the library was deserted. Friedrich assessed the potential danger Casper posed to himself by studying the way the boy ate his egg sandwich. He took small, methodical bites, one after another, back and forth across the bread, as if he were eating corn or typing.

Compulsive, but hungry. Though Dr. Friedrich had no data to support it, in his experience, patients who are about to attempt suicide are uninterested in food. After Casper wolfed the egg on rye, Friedrich split a Hershey bar with him. Blood sugar up, doctor and patient began.

“Was today the first time you climbed up on the Giant?”

Casper looked at his feet and nodded yes.

“Any special reason?”

“D-d-didn’t your wife tell you?” Before Friedrich could say “I’d rather hear it in your own words,” Casper added casually, “I was going to k-kill myself.”

“Is that something you think about often?”

“There wasn’t a need before.” Friedrich had a way of leaning into someone in a conversation that made them feel as if they’d asked a question, even if they hadn’t. “I did the math,” Casper explained. His eyes followed the vapor trail left by a lonely jet fighter skirting the lower depths of the stratosphere.

“What kind of math?”

“Algorithms. Are you familiar with Claude Shannon’s information theory?”

Friedrich nodded. “Vaguely.” He had no idea what Casper was talking about.

“He’s at MIT.” The boy hugged himself and rocked back and forth the way Homer did when he was trying to make himself understood. Each limited by the way their brains worked. Was that the link that connected him to this strange boy? “He developed an equation to calculate coincidence, chance, predicting the unpredictable.”

When Friedrich was talking to a patient who claimed to have had lunch with Napoleon or the president of the United States or Satan, he could be reasonably confident the individual had lost touch with reality. But with Casper’s brain, he had no idea whether the boy was talking sense or nonsense.

“He’s the father of cybernetics.” Friedrich, like most people, had not yet heard the word “cybernetics.”

“How’s all this tie in to the girl, Casper?”

“You haven’t read Shannon’s work, have you?”

“I told you, I’m familiar with it.”

“Well, there’s this guy named Kelly who took Shannon’s equations and put them to use to make bets.”

“Bets on what?”

“On anything in life where chance is involved.” Casper wrote the following on the egg bag:

“You take the probabilities in whatever game or wager you’re making, plus the insider information, and you have the best strategy for winning. It’s derived from information theory, where you have probabilities which are introduced by noise in the system, the information you’re trying to convey. You follow me?”

Friedrich nodded dumbly.

“
H
is your edge, insider information, known, random factoids. Me. I stutter when I get ner vous or excited.” He wasn’t stuttering now. “I forget to brush my teeth. I suffer from hyperhidrosis. The only girl I’ve ever been able to imagine being with who might want to be with me was a cripple, and she’s dead.
K
_t
is the outcome of the bets you make, the chances of winning after so many encounters. Getting the girl, the other human element.”

“So what does this equation tell you?”

“Put it this way, Dr. Friedrich: I-I-I-I’d have a better chance of playing s-s-shortstop for the Yankees than I do of m-m-meeting another girl like N-Nina.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Well, mathematically, there’s a certain probability of ultimate ruin.”

“I’m not talking about the math. I mean you.”

“If l-losing someone I never m-met, s-s-someone who is just an idea, hurts this much, what w-would it be like to lose someone I’d actually touched? What p-p-power would the p-p-pain be raised to then? I thought it’d be b-better to start fresh.”

“As what?”

“Oxygen, carbon, hydogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iodine, iron, chromium, cobalt, copper, fluorine, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, tin, vanadium, and zinc.”

“So why didn’t you take the leap back to the periodic table?”

“I w-w-wasn’t going to jump.”

“But I thought . . .”

Casper popped open his dissection kit. Friedrich looked at the scalpel, startled. He’d never considered that Casper was carrying a weapon; he should never have let his wife drive him into town.

“Do you hurt now, Casper?”

“N-no.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“Your wife t-told me you could c-cure me.” Will knew Nora hadn’t used those words.

“Of what?”

“Of being me.” It was at that moment Friedrich realized it was not Homer he related to when he looked at Casper, it was himself. His empathy was genuine, but his interest was selfish.

As the sun set mauve and the stars unfurled on the night, Friedrich and Casper talked about what it meant to be Casper. Dr. Friedrich had listened to many lonely and disturbed souls describing their unhappiness with the human condition over the years, and he had spent many lonely nights himself reading case histories and scientific accounts of every kind of soul sickness, but Casper was the first subject he’d ever encountered who compared his feelings of alienation to the paradoxical observations a physicist by the name of Dr. Fritz Zwicky had made about the gravitational pull of cluster galaxies.

“When you m-m-measure their g-g-gravity, they should be ten times larger than they are. There’s a m-m-missing mass. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there, ’cause you can m-m-measure its pull. Your light’s trapped before it reaches another human’s eye.” Casper licked the tip of the lead of his pencil and began to write more equations on the paper bag.

It was after nine. They’d talked for almost three hours. Friedrich was relieved he didn’t feel professionally obliged to check Casper into a psychiatric ward. If he had to write a diagnosis for Casper at that moment, he would have called him a highly functional obsessive compulsive with marginal schizophrenic tendencies. But there were times in his life when he would have diagnosed himself similarly.

If Yale found out a student had attempted suicide, he’d be suspended. And if Yale forced Casper to go back to his mother the cranberry picker (who Casper hadn’t mentioned once), he’d be even more depressed about the light that struggled to escape his missing mass, and hence more likely to climb back up the cliff face of Sleeping Giant and “start fresh.” Friedrich found himself rooting for Casper’s mind.