Pharmakon (19 page)

Casper saw Friedrich staring at his costume. “Whitney loaned them to me. After he vomited on my clothes.” Casper didn’t have to reveal that Whitney had also offered him a bathroom equipped with fresh toothbrush, scented soap, dental floss, shampoo, grooming aids that were completely foreign but not at all unpleasant. Yes, Casper looked different. “Whit said I could keep them. It’s what you have to wear when you bartend at the club.”

Casper opened his suitcase and put a patent-leather-brimmed captain’s hat on his head. There was something about the way he smiled and the rakish tilt of the cap that was so un-Casper-like— feline, almost predatory—that made Friedrich think of Marlene Dietrich. The oddness of this association distracted Friedrich from the anger that roiled up in him at the thought that after all he’d done for Casper, the costumed ingrate was going to screw up his research.

Friedrich picked up the empty bottle from the desk. “Casper, you’ve made a commitment to the research.”

“I wouldn’t give that up, Dr. Friedrich. You just have to look at me to know it works.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure, but it doesn’t worry me that I’m not sure. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you look happy, then?”

“I don’t like going out of my way to get jobs for people who quit them the next day. And how the hell are you going to meet me once a week if you’re living at the Wainscot Yacht Club?”

“You’re mad at me.”

“No.” He was, but it didn’t seem to bother Casper.

“I won’t be living there. Whit asked me to bunk in the guesthouse with him behind their cottage. Why do they call a thirty-eight-room house a cottage?”

“It’s not my area of expertise.”

“Gotcha. Anyway, I checked the schedule. I could take the train in Mondays, my day off. I was hoping we could switch my appointment. That’s why I called. The job starts tomorrow. We’re driving down tonight. I was also hoping you could give me next week’s medication now. Because of you, because of it, I have an opportunity I never even thought about wanting. But now that it’s there, I want to make the most of it.”

“What do you see this as an opportunity for making the most of?”

“Being me.”

Whitney drove Friedrich and Casper to the psych building and waited in the car while Friedrich took him upstairs to give him another week’s course of GKD. Casper assured him he would not tell Whitney he was participating in the drug test and would remember to take his sugar cubes every morning.

The fermenting vessel was in the corner. When Casper asked what it was, Friedrich said, “Nothing.”

“Who wants ice cream?”
Friedrich called out of the window of the Whale as he pulled into the driveway. Nora was lying on the grass, reading a first edition volume of T. S. Eliot that Thayer Winton had given her at the party. The kids were playing on the swings she had guilted Friedrich into constructing out of two-by-fours in the side yard.

Strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, he had splurged and bought a quart of each on the way home from work. His children, leaping off the swings he had built with his own hands, his wife throwing aside T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
and running toward him with the kids, all at once on a summer’s evening sweetened with honeysuckle and hand-packed ice cream—the moment was as good as it gets until Friedrich saw the arc of the empty swing seat Fiona had just leaped off of peaking ten feet in the air and then coming back down toward earth with a cruel twist of its chains toward the back of Jack’s head.

No time to shout a warning, all he could do was watch and exhale as Jack suddenly stooped to pick a dandelion and the swing seat sailed harmlessly past. Frozen to the spot, visions of his youngest being lobotomized by a homemade swing flashing before him, he didn’t move his right hand from the door frame of the car as Willy grabbed the ice cream bag and slammed the car door closed.

Friedrich’s legs buckled. He felt the bones in at least two fingers snap and his palm tear open. Strangely, opening the car door with his fingers in it hurt even more. He was proud of himself for not blaming Willy. The ice cream was eaten in the Whale as Nora drove to the hospital.

Two fingers in a splint, his right hand swollen as tight and purple as an unripe plum, it was two months before he could write or take notes. Winton insisted they trade offices; the Aalto-designed desk she had in her private office had a tape recorder and hidden microphone built in. It was activated by a foot pedal under the rug. He had twenty subjects a week to interview and report on. If he met them there, she argued, he could dictate his notes after each session onto the tape recorder.

Friedrich said no. What he really felt was that he didn’t want to be any more in debt to his collaborator than he already was. He already owed her the money they were paying the subjects. On Saturday Winton had treated Nora to a trip to New York and taken her to an art gallery to see a show by some guy called Pollock. From the way Nora described the show, it sounded to Friedrich like a cross between a Rorschach test and a cocktail party. Nora had paid for her own train ticket, but still . . . what he really wasn’t comfortable with was his wife’s newfound friendship with Winton—Nora called her “Bunny.”

Realizing that holding a pen or pencil in his broken hand was even more uncomfortable than being further in Winton’s debt, Friedrich grudgingly accepted the offer of her penthouse office. And so, on that next Monday and every Monday thereafter that summer, instead of meeting Casper on the hard bench of Sterling courtyard, Friedrich and the atomic-kid-turned-bartender met in Winton’s office to discuss how GKD and the Wainscot Yacht Club had been treating him over the previous week.

The temptation of the tape recorder had been too great; Friedrich decided to record the interviews as well as his notes after Casper and the other subjects left. He did not mention the fact that a hidden tape recorder was running—the boy was doing so well, why make Casper self-conscious?

A graduate student transcribed the tapes in duplicate. The transcription of that first session in Winton’s office was twenty-seven pages long, plus three quarters of a page of single-spaced notes. Friedrich circled the following passage in red pen:

F: So, how do you like being a bartender?

C: At first, I was nervous. I mean, I don’t drink and I’d never even been to a bar. I read a mixologist’s handbook, but that’s not the same. Anyway, so when I felt myself getting anxious, I thought of you, how you know how to make people like you, trust you, open up. It’s part of your job.

F: How do I do that?

C: Like you’re doing now, you smile and lean toward them, but you’re careful not to get too close. Oh yeah, and very important, you keep still so they maintain eye contact. You make people feel like they’re the only person in the world. Did you learn that from your father?

F: Maybe subconsciously; he knew how to tell a story people liked to hear.

C: It’s funny, talking to the people out there, how you can get them to overlook your name’s Gedsic, your mother picks cranberries, that you don’t belong. People’s lack of intelligence, their limitations, are like gravity. It’s a force you have to reckon with if you want to make forward progress.

F: What’s progress?

C: To be accepted, make them like you.

F: How do you make people do that?

C: It’s like racing dragons.

F: What?

C: They’re a class of sailboat they race out there. Whitney’s going to the Olympics. He teaches sailing.

F: How’s making people like you like a sailboat race?

C: Sometimes you see them sail a mile in the wrong direction to catch a breeze that will put them across the finish line first.

F: I’m not sure I understand what you’re . . .

C: Well, if you’re honest . . . no, straightforward’s a better word, and tell someone, “I don’t know anybody here and I’d like to be your friend,” you’re a jerk, a desperate creep. But if I start out by saying, “It’s amazing how much Wainscot’s changed.”

F: Have you ever been to Wainscot before, Casper?

C: No, but it was obvious from the old photographs that are hanging around the place that it’s changed. And everyone at the club is always going on about how it’s not what it used to be and how many new members there are and, so, I let us have a shared point of view.

F: Anything else you do to make people like you?

C: I don’t correct them when they’re wrong, and flattery will get you everywhere.

F: How can you be sure these people you think like you aren’t just pretending to like you?

C: Because they invite me over to their houses for dinner even when they know Whitney’s out on a date with Alice and can’t come. Her family lives in the cottage next door.

After the session was over, Friedrich dictated his notes on Casper Gedsic, which began as follows:

CG now makes more direct eye contact and has improved personal appearance, better posture, complexion has cleared, improvement in overall hygiene. No longer stuttering, seems distinctly calmer and less anxious. When I shook his hand, it was dry. Check medical records to see if in fact CG was diagnosed as having hyperhidrosis. Subject is tan and appears to be more physically fit.

Two sessions later Friedrich circled the following portion of the transcript, this time in blue ink:

F: So, how’s it going, Casper?

C: I met a girl.

F: Great.

C: No, what’s great is, she likes me. Her name’s Eloise. She’s a birder.

F: What?

C: A birdwatcher. She’s interested in ornithology.

Three pages later, also circled:

F: So what do you and Eloise do besides watch the ospreys?

C: There’s an awful lot of swimming. At night after work, the gang gets together on the beach.

F: You don’t sound too excited about that.

C: I don’t know how to swim.

F: How do you go swimming, then?

C: I wade out until water’s up to my chin, and pretend.

F: Why don’t you learn how to swim?

C: I’ve tried, believe me. I just can’t get the hang of it. I understand the buoyancy of saltwater, the physics of the flutter kick and the crawl. I mean, intellectually, I know I’m going to float. But . . .

F: But what?

C: I just can’t shake the feeling, if I can’t touch bottom, I’ll be sucked under by the water.

F: Don’t you think it’s kind of dangerous to go swimming when you can’t swim, especially at night?

C: I guess I figure, if I put myself in deep enough, eventually I’ll learn.

The following Monday Friedrich’s hand had healed enough for him to scrawl the word “interesting” in number two pencil across the first page of that afternoon’s transcript: