Pharmakon (59 page)

“I thought we had work to do.”

“We do.” His eyesight was getting worse. He had trouble unsnapping her brassiere. They made them differently now. As she helped them undress, she looked into the clouded gray of his eyes and wondered how he saw her. It had been a long time since they had been like this. It still felt good to be alive.

“I told you so.” Friedrich peered out the window on the morning of the twentieth. It was, in fact, a Town Car. “Come with me.” He’d been trying to talk her into joining him for lunch since breakfast. “I’ll take you Christmas shopping after lunch.”

“I’ve done all my shopping.” She had bought presents for everyone but Z. She neither knew what he needed, nor how to give it to him.

“We’ll buy a present for you.”

“It won’t be a surprise, then.” She was helping him on with his overcoat.

“Come on, Stan will be disappointed not to see you.”

“Go on. They want the Lone Ranger, not Tonto.” She pushed him gently out the door. The bells on their wreath tinkled.

The ride was uneventful. He read the newspaper with one eye closed. The doctor had diagnosed his problem as glaucoma. He had known the darkness was closing in for some time.

The right half of the Four Seasons was a blur. His narrowing vision detracted from the pleasure of being shown to a power table. Stan was waiting.

They started with littlenecks and small talk. “Did you hear they’re doing a book on Dr. Petersen?”

Friedrich had not thought of the dead Freudian for years. Now that he did, he realized Petersen was seventy-two when a stroke pulled the plug on him. Friedrich was wondering how long he had left when he responded, “What an incredibly good idea for a boring book.” Friedrich didn’t care if they wrote a book about him when he was dead. He wanted it while he was alive.

Stan laughed. “One can always count on you for the milk of human kindness.” Stan was squeezing the lemon now. “I agree about the book, but the graduate student who’s writing it is my nephew, so I had to pretend I was interested.”

A quiet rage rose up in Friedrich. Nora must have gotten it wrong. All he needs me for is a goddamn quote for his nephew’s book on Petersen. Friedrich watched as the waiter took his fish off the bone. “I don’t think I have much to contribute to your nephew’s tome on Dr. Petersen.”

“The book’s not important. What I want to talk to you about is the study of yours he found going through Petersen’s papers.” Friedrich’s appetite was replaced by a swell of nausea. He had no memory of turning in their results to Petersen. His write-up wasn’t finished. He remembered handing Winton a rough draft. She was wearing gloves, and she had put it into a red leather briefcase that had an alligator snout for a clasp.

As his field of vision closed in on the past, he barely heard what the drug exec was saying. “I was stunned by the results.”

“So was I.”

“This degree of improvement in seventeen out of twenty subjects who were actually receiving the drug?” Stan had pulled out a copy of the study. “Granted, it was small study, but
gai kau
dong
obviously has potential as an antidepressant.”

“What?”

“We’re interested in working with you on GKD.”

Friedrich shook his head no. “The study doesn’t give an accurate picture.”

Stan sat back in his chair. “Are you trying to tell me the data isn’t accurate? That’s the reason you never published?”

Friedrich knew he should say yes, swear the results were falsified, blame it on Winton. After all this time, he was still caught between pride and shame. He could not betray that part of himself. “No, the results were as recorded.” Stan was happy again. “But the study doesn’t give you the whole story.”

Stan was cutting into his steak. “It never does. But with you onboard, we can pick up where you left off . . . this could be incredibly beneficial to . . .”

Friedrich held up his hand as if fending off a blow. “Ten days after his last dose of GKD, one of the subjects suffered violent, paranoid delusions, which prompted him to attack Dr. Winton and her husband. She was killed; he lost the use of his legs.”

Stan nodded as he chewed the undercooked meat. “I know about Casper Gedsic.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Of course, what I mean is, I appreciate how you must have been shocked by the tragedy. I can understand why you decided to put it aside. But you’re being too hard on yourself. According to your notes, Gedsic was a borderline to begin with.”

“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

F
riedrich 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.