Pharmakon (2 page)

When Friedrich first arrived, he, like everybody else in the building, had believed that if he kept his brain to the grindstone, his brilliance would outshine the brilliance of the guy in the office next door. But it was more complicated than that. With so many sharp minds being honed and wielded in such close quarters, you had to be guarded without seeming to be on your guard. What made the Yale psych department different, and in fact far more competitive, than your average above-average workplace was that everyone who worked there knew that they were being observed by people who had made a career out of judging who and what was and wasn’t normal.

All were qualified for greatness, but only one, maybe two, per decade would extract something from their minds so novel and wondrous and inarguable that even their competitors would have to acknowledge the superiority of another’s brain. If that happened, you became a full professor. Otherwise you had to wait until the senior colleague in your area of expertise either retired, died, or had a nervous breakdown.

By the time Friedrich had reached the stairway at the end of the hall, he’d put the Flexible Flyer back into the garage. He could smell the animal behaviorists in the basement lording over classrooms filled with mice. His friend Jens claimed to have taught rats to share. Will was just thinking about how much he liked the idea when a scream shocked out of a chimpanzee named Molly echoed up from below.

As he climbed up the stairwell he returned the nod of an elderly renowned therapist who never trimmed his nose hairs, deliberately wore two different colored socks, and encouraged the rumor that he had had an affair with Garbo while treating her for a mild case of agoraphobia. The right eccentricities were valued at Yale.

The third floor housed the head of the department and his favorites. He ran a program called “Communication and Persuasion.” They’d all been in the same army unit during World War II, working on ways to tap into the collective subconscious to influence public opinion. Since then they’d formed a chamber music group that played on weekends.

Friedrich’s office was on the fourth floor, with the other psychologists who had separated themselves from the pack by mastering the shadowy art of statistics. He and the other young psychometricians were hired guns, not just for the psychology department, but for the psychiatrists over at the med school as well. The ability to reduce the human condition to a set of numbers made them indispensable. They made up the rules and kept the score of the games that were being played among the headshrinkers. Will wanted to be more than a thought accountant.

Some of Friedrich’s colleagues specialized in measuring IQ, memory, or senility. Yale had recruited Friedrich for a rating scale he had thought up at an Army Air Corps base in Illinois that was used to measure whether a mental patient was getting saner or crazier, happier or sadder, improving or deteriorating. Even those in the department who thought him brash, lacking in gentility, and possessing a farm boy’s chip on his shoulder recognized that the Friedrich Psychiatric Rating Scale could give them the proof needed to convince the department they were on the right track.

On the day of its publication Friedrich felt a sense of pride he had not experienced since the age of twelve, when he’d earned enough money selling eggs from a roadside stand to buy back the family pony that his mother had insisted on selling to a neighbor in that first lean year of the Depression. He and Nora had gone out for chop suey to celebrate. There was just one problem. In the previous five years Friedrich’s rating scale had proved only one thing: Ninety-five percent of the people psychologists and psychiatrists treated never got any better. In fact, most of them got worse after seeing a professional. Of course, Will Friedrich didn’t talk about that in the psych building.

Last summer a neurologist had asked him to go down to Columbia and help him come up with the data that would prove lobotomies were both brutal and bad medicine. Friedrich administered his tests to patients before and after they received what was then called a “precision lobotomy.” To get a clearer picture of the damage that was being done, Friedrich augmented the tests by asking patients who were under local anesthesia a series of simple, mathematical questions while the scalpel was cutting into their frontal lobe.

“What’s one plus one? Two plus three? Count backward from a hundred.” He could still see the face of the teenage girl with curly black hair who had been sentenced to neurosurgery by her parents. When Mom and Dad found out she had contracted syphilis at Wellesley, they had sent her to a state mental health facility. Shortly after her arrival, she had attempted suicide.

“Eighty-eight, 87, 86, 8 . . .” Will could still hear that girl counting down the last seconds she had to be herself, then gasping a sigh and mumbling, “What comes next?”

Friedrich’s findings did not make him popular among those PhDs and MDs at Yale who were on the lobotomy bandwagon. Will knew it was just a matter of time before the numbers he and others came up with put the lobotomists out of business. But that didn’t make him feel any less guilty for having interrogated a teenager on simple math while someone broke into her brain and stole her soul. Friedrich hadn’t performed the operation, or ordered it, or put her in a loony bin. He hadn’t cut into her head—it would have happened even if he hadn’t been there. But he had watched it happen and done nothing to stop it. And that bothered him.

Throwing off his overcoat and kicking off his galoshes, Will slumped into his desk chair. There were a half dozen different research projects he could have started. He had toyed with the idea of doing studies on foster children, senility, and a half dozen other dark corners of health care that could have benefited from the spotlight of his mind, but Friedrich’s ego couldn’t shake the vain notion that somewhere in him was a big idea that could make the world a saner place.

As he reached for a yellow pad to make notes, a pencil fell off his desk. It was an early Christmas gift from the head of the department. Embossed on the pencil were the words “Publish or Perish.” Friedrich snapped it in two, pulled on a leaky boot, and reached for his overcoat.

Will ran toward the exit. As he headed out the front door the janitor called out, “Where are you off to in such a hurry, Dr. Friedrich?”

“Christmas shopping for my kids.”

“I’m glad somebody in here has some sense.”

Feeling like an escapee from an institution, Friedrich whistled along to the Salvation Army band on Main Street and spun himself through the revolving doors of the first department store he came to. He had no trouble finding the children’s department, and the robotic reindeer that pranced across the rooftops of a gingerbread palace worthy of the “Mad” King Ludwig was impressive. But the toys depressed him.

Gifts he could afford were either made of plastic or looked like they’d been sewn together by a sweatshop worker wearing mittens. There were big-ticket items he didn’t have the money for but would have loved to find under his Christmas tree, even if he were a girl, like a chemistry set claiming to contain “everything needed to perform real scientific experiments at home”: a crystal-radio kit, complete with its own soldering iron. But when he opened the box all he found was an assortment of chemicals available under your average kitchen sink, a nickel’s worth of wire, some pegboard, and a soldering iron guaranteed to set off an electrical fire.

A saleswoman tapped him on the shoulder. “You opened the box.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to see what was inside.”

“It says what’s inside right on the plastic wrapper.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to see for myself.”

“Well, you have, and that will be $8.54.”

Will Friedrich was in the bar of the faculty club now, self-medicating with a beer, trying to think what his mother called “pleasant thoughts,” i.e., trying to cheer himself up before he boarded the streetcar home. He felt contagious. Self-absorbed but not selfish, he did not want to infect his family with his mood.

If he couldn’t buy what he wanted for his children, he would make them something they would never forget, create something that would give them memories he wished he had. He would go to the lumberyard, get wood, finishing nails, and little brass hinges and glue and construct a dollhouse. It would be for the girls, mostly, but his sons, ages three and almost two, were too young to think it so gender-specific that they would feel overlooked or emasculated. Yes, a wonderful dollhouse, three stories high, with windows big enough for little hands to reach inside, and floors that could be raised and lowered so that his progeny could get a sense of the three-dimensionality of the world and develop their spatial thinking.

But before the dollhouse was half built in his head, Friedrich began to pull it down. Imagining the girls fighting over it Christmas morning, Jack choking to death on one of the little plastic shrubs he was going to plant outside. Jack put everything in his mouth; last week he was nearly murdered by a cat’s-eye marble.

Still thinking about the box he was in, Friedrich’s mind moved out of the dollhouse and attempted to distract itself from his melancholy by constructing a whole new future for himself. He could leave Yale. Why not take his doctorate in psychology to where the money was: advertising.

For a brief, giddy moment on that bar stool he imagined himself working in a Madison Avenue ad agency. Living in a penthouse on Park Avenue, applying his insights to the frailties of the human mind, to creating subliminal ad campaigns, questionnaires that tricked the consumer into revealing what really made them willing to pay more for toilet paper.

Why not just pack it in and go for the gold . . . why not? I’m
thirty-three, I have a wife, children, I’m too old to start a new
career, and even if I wasn’t, I’d have to begin at the bottom. I
wouldn’t even be able to afford to live in Manhattan.
Besides, Friedrich didn’t want to be an ad man any more than he wanted to sell his skill set to one of the foundations that funneled CIA money to clever young men at Yale.

Dr. Friedrich tried to remember why he had become a psychologist. If he’d had two more beers, or an audience, Will Friedrich would have answered that question with a glib and not entirely untrue “because it was the Depression and I didn’t have the money to go to med school and become a real doctor.”

Instead he thought of his mother and his older brother, Homer, and that other institution she packed her first-born off to the day after Will had left for his freshman year of college. He didn’t discover what she’d done with Homer until he came home for Thanksgiving and found his mother holding a séance in Homer’s bedroom. That was the fall she’d become a devotee of Madame Blavatsky and theosophy. It had taken him five days to hitchhike east to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton. He found Homer playing his harmonica in a caged room, while nearby a naked woman he could now diagnose as a classic schizophrenic fingerpainted with her feces.

Homer didn’t seem any worse for wear until he turned his head. The left side of his jaw was caved in. It looked like someone had taken a trowel to the inside of his mouth. Dr. Cotton, the director of Trenton, had pulled out a half-dozen of Homer’s teeth based on his well-respected and much publicized theory that bacteria from tooth decay and the small bowel were the causes of dementia praecox.

Homer and his bowel had been scheduled to go under the doctor’s knife the next day. Getting his big brother released before surgery cost Will the rest of his college money. He still didn’t know why Homer couldn’t always spell his own name and thought nothing of rocking for three or four hours at a time repeating the same phrase over and over again: “If it’s not raining, you don’t need an umbrella” was the one that was playing in Friedrich’s head now. Will Friedrich wasn’t sure if he’d become a psychologist to cure Homer or forgive his mother; all he knew was he hadn’t succeeded at either.