Pharmakon (5 page)

Well-intentioned was Will Friedrich. Even though he knew he had risked his job by reassuring the boy that he wasn’t sick, Will did not think of it as going out on a limb—he did not see himself as a beacon of enlightenment, just as a man doing his job. That afternoon he was as close to happy as a man who devotes his life to the study of unhappiness can be. Less than a mile into his journey home that day, Friedrich looked in the rearview mirror and saw a fine film of sweat collecting on his face. Suddenly, his throat tickled and his eyeballs felt like they needed to be scratched. Sneezing twice, rolling up the window, Will muttered to himself, “Christ, I’m getting a cold.”

It was too beautiful a day for him or anyone else to be sick. The sky was the same shade of blue as a set of sheets he had liberated from an Army Air Corps hospital outside Chicago where he had worked during the war, when he and his wife were first married and the clouds on his horizon were as invitingly white as freshly fluffed pillows.

But when traffic stopped and he looked over at the big plate-glass window of a department store over on the avenue, the promise of the day flew out the window, even though it was rolled up. It was a store he couldn’t afford to shop in. Usually, the sight of the expensively dressed mannequins in its window would prompt superior thoughts such as,
ideas are important, not
things.
Or,
shopping’s the opiate of the people, not religion.
But that day, due to the clouds and the angle of the sunlight on the glass, the windows became a gigantic mirror, and all Dr. Friedrich could see was himself smiling inanely behind the wheel of a vehicle that belonged in the junkyard and he should have been embarrassed to drive. What did he have to be smiling about? He’d gone to college for eight years, and as his wife had reminded him that morning, their checking account was overdrawn . . . again.

Traffic began to move, but the reflection of himself stayed in his head. He turned on the radio, forgetting the tuner was broken and that the only station he could receive was the AM colored station out of New York. Usually the dark rhythms were all static, but today he heard them as clear as the bell that seemed to be going off inside his head.
Ain’t no doctor in all the lan’ can
cure the fever of a convict man.
Leadbelly’s wail didn’t make Dr. Friedrich feel any better. But he did wonder why he identified with a Negro field hand who’d been sent to prison for murder. Though he’d given up on psychoanalysis—time and manpower prevented it from ever helping more than a handful of people— Friedrich never tired of psychoanalyzing himself.

Gunning the White Whale up the steep incline of the short driveway, Friedrich swerved just in time to avoid running over his six-year-old daughter Lucy’s hand-me-down scooter. By the time he hit the brakes he’d flattened the new Schwinn bicycle he had just given Fiona for turning eight, the one he’d told her to put in the garage that morning.

“Why do I bother talking? No one ever listens to me,” Friedrich muttered to himself. Of course, it was unrealistic to expect an eight-year-old, even his eight-year-old, to have the retentive abilities to comprehend the repercussions of her irresponsibility. If he’d had the money to buy her a new bicycle, he could have turned it into an object lesson by refusing to replace the bike she should have put away. But because he was unable to afford to replace the bike, his predicament was exacerbated by shame. Friedrich was well aware that he’d feel even more foolish for blaming his child and his wife, but knew he’d probably do both. He was embarrassed by his embarrassment.

Will Friedrich slammed the flat of his hand against his frontal lobe and was about to ask himself “What the fuck is happening to me?” when he looked up and saw a flock of hungry parrots dining al fresco in his mulberry tree.

If Dr. Friedrich had been a psychologist practicing on the citizens of Caracas, or Manila, or even Miami, the sight of eleven noisy parrots shrieking red, blue, green, turquoise, and tropical gold in his fruit tree would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Dr. Friedrich’s mulberry tree being full of parrots in the front yard of a little two-story ersatz Cape Cod cottage in a housing development just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, this was an incident of greater magnitude. He was a thousand miles too far north to believe his eyes.

Having labored that morning in a poorly ventilated, jury-rigged chem lab taking the first of a series of tedious steps necessary to isolate the psychoactive ingredients of a drab little shrub native to the island of New Guinea, Friedrich’s mind jumped to the logical conclusion: “I’m hallucinating.” He said it out loud, like a miner who’s just struck gold.

He climbed out of the White Whale without bothering to turn off the engine or close the car door. Hat on the back of his head, necktie blowing in the wind, he’d left the world of a broken bicycle behind. A spiderweb, woven between a climbing rose and a leafless apple tree that had died over the winter, broke across his face.

With the calm eye of a clinician, he reviewed the circumstances of the morning’s fermentation in the basement lab over at the med school. He’d been there by himself, and was wearing rubber gloves. He was certain he’d not been so foolhardy as to touch his fingers to his lips. The active ingredient must have been absorbed into his bloodstream through his nasal passages. He put his finger to his nose. Yes, it was running. He tasted it. Slightly bitter, but not at all unpleasant.

Pulling a small black notebook and pencil out of his pocket, he checked his watch, jotted down the time, and made his initial observations. The first hallucinations he was aware of appeared around 5:00. Or was that reflection he saw in the store window a hallucination? Had that tailback really been arrested for sodomy in Greenwich Village? He’d call him up, see how he was doing, just to make sure.

Friedrich walked toward the shrieking, feathered apparitions with a smile on his face. In fact, he was grinning from ear to ear. This is why, at seventeen, after reluctantly leaving his brother in the care of a blind great-uncle who used Homer as a Seeing Eye dog, Will had climbed on top of a boxcar and headed west with $1.17 in his pocket. He had ridden the rails with bums, hobos, and men driven mad by lack of employment, and counted himself lucky that he ended up in California picking fruit for twelve hours a day, two bucks a week, and had told himself he had it good when he found a job in a cannery, all to save up enough money to go back to college.

This is why he had become a psychologist and taken a job at Yale at a salary that forced him to put off going to the dentist. Yes, this moment made even the indignity of having to teach Ivy League freshmen snobs statistics seem like time well spent. He, William T. Friedrich, had discovered something. Willy Friedrich, the farm boy from southern Illinois, had just stepped off the beaten track of what was on the pages of other men’s textbooks into the untouched wilderness of the unknown.

Hofmann had accidentally discovered LSD in 1943. April 16, to be exact. Will noted that his hallucinations weren’t like the distortions Hofmann had experienced. These parrots in his mulberry tree were goddamned perfect. There was a pair of macaws, one blue, one red, both with yellow eyes; a green-cheeked Amazonian; gold-headed parakeets with green wings and a tail feathered in turquoise; cockatoos that shouted obscenities and asked questions in Spanish and English; a threesome of lovebirds, and a drab but loquacious African gray. Friedrich recorded that he felt no confusion or disorientation in crisp penmanship; his handwriting was neater than usual.

His mind never felt sharper. It had been more than a year since he had read Hofmann’s extract. And yet now, as he stood beneath these imaginary parrots, watching them bicker and squawk and flirt and fluff their feathers—Christ! Two of them were copulating—he could recall Hofmann’s words verbatim: “I was seized by a peculiar sensation of vertigo and restlessness. Objects, as well as the shapes of my associates in the laboratory, appeared to undergo optical changes. I was unable to concentrate on my work.”

Friedrich penciled, “No sense of vertigo—no fear.” Friedrich stood on one foot, closed one eye, and slowly touched his forefinger to his nose, and then added, “No loss of motor skills.”

Connecting the dots from the laboratory to what was happening in his mind, he wondered aloud, “Why parrots?” Was it because he had been bitten by one at age eleven at the Illinois State Fair in Urbana? Could it have something to do with the fact that parrots talk without understanding a word of what they are saying? Or was it simply that when his henna-haired mother reversed the charges on her late-night long-distance phone calls, warning him of train wrecks, car crashes, and fires that had not yet occurred, her voice had the same shrill, slightly hysterical shriek as that macaw who kept calling out, “Here they come, here they come.”

There was no question Friedrich had stumbled onto something wondrous—until the African gray shit on the shoulder of his one good suit. Any hopes he had that the nausea of disappointment that gripped him might be a hallucination of humiliation stemming from his manifest self-doubt vanished when his wife, Nora, stepped out of their front door with their toddler, Jack, on one hip, and little Willy clinging to her leg like a limpet, bird book in hand.

“We’ve been watching them all afternoon.” Will stared at his wife, then at the birds. That he hadn’t even been the first to see the damned parrots iced his humiliation. The only positive emotion in his body was relief that he hadn’t run inside and made an even bigger fool of himself by calling Bunny Winton. When he didn’t respond, his wife called out, “Well, what do you think?”

The question was posed with a casual and cautious amusement. Nora was guarded with her opinions. Not because she didn’t have them, but because she experienced them so strongly she felt betrayed and slightly carsick when they weren’t shared by those she loved.

Looking up at the parrots, trying to think of something to say that would hide how ridiculous he felt, Dr. Friedrich didn’t see the gravity with which her full-lipped smile dropped from her face when he turned away. Dr. Friedrich misdiagnosed his wife’s wariness as fear of failure; he too wanted to see his own feelings reflected on those he loved.

They had met over the Bunsen burner in organic chemistry class. There was still heat, but after nine years of marriage it didn’t warm him the way it used to. Her ability to laugh at life, once so seductive, had now begun to make him feel small. She thought it was amusing buying secondhand dresses at Nearly New, especially when the dean’s wife recognized the flowered frock Nora had worn to the faculty tea as a dress she had donated. Friedrich was terrified by her ability to brag aloud at these same teas about saving twenty-five cents a week on shampoo by washing the family’s hair in an emulsion of dishwashing detergent and lemon juice mixed in an Erlenmeyer flask. He loved her when she waylaid others with her intelligence, correcting a French professor on an irregular verb, or beating a physicist to the atomic weight of iodine when they did crosswords during the period breaks at the Harvard-Yale hockey game they had attended to please the dean, who placed great weight on school spirit. Friedrich was proud of her mind. Except, of course, when it ensnared him.

Nora was still waiting for her husband to reveal his feelings about the parrots. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” Lipstick being her one vanity and extravagance, Nora smiled a shade of Helena Rubenstein called Desire. Her cheeks were dimpled, her hand was on his shoulder, but all the time he knew she was thinking,
Hell’s bells, if coming home to find parrots waiting for you
doesn’t make you happy, what in God’s name will?

The door slammed. His daughters were now dancing around him, laying claim to his attention and the parrots overhead. Fiona, the eldest, ebony-haired like her mother, stood on tiptoes to cast a bigger shadow. “The red macaw’s mine. He’s indigenous to South America. Did you know that, Daddy?” Fiona had an impressive vocabulary for an eight-year-old.

“It’s not fair.” Lucy—blond like Nora’s aunt Minnie, had a predilection for troubling theological questions: If people go to heaven, why not dogs? And insects? And vegetables?—protested, “You just want that macaw because I called him first.”

“I have to make pee-pee.” That was Willy.

Friedrich wished his son didn’t bear such a striking resemblance to his own older brother. It wasn’t that Homer was unattractive or that Friedrich didn’t like his sibling (Homer was handsome, in fact, and Friedrich loved him), it was just that Homer, now thirty-six, would have been hard-pressed to outscore Lucy on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test. “The word is ‘urinate,’ Willy.”

“He’s barely three, Will.”

“It’s less confusing if you teach a child the correct word first.” Since Willy had already wet his pants, the point was moot. Will picked up his son and gave him a hug and a kiss to make up for Homer.

Nora was about to go inside for dry pants when Fiona began to shriek. “My bike!” Friedrich had forgotten about that.

“I warned you not to leave it in the driveway.” He hadn’t wanted to say that, but . . .

“We can fix it.” Nora put Jack down on the lawn and extracted the twisted Schwinn from beneath the DeSoto.

“It’s my fault. We’ll buy you a new one tomorrow.”

“Can I have a new bike, too?” Lucy, like most middle children, felt lost in the shuffle.

“We can’t afford it,” Nora protested.

“I can and I will.” It was the mantra he lived by. Wiping the parrot shit from his shoulder, he handed Willy to his wife and tried to regain his dignity with a joke. “I think the gray one’s depressed.”