Pharmakon (60 page)

Sometimes when he was feeling low, on days like this when Nora took longer than she’d said to come back from shopping, he’d work the numbers through his brain just to make sure it hadn’t frozen up on him while he wasn’t looking.

Though his hairline had retreated to the back of his skull, he still had his prostate. He could still perform. He still had work to do, and the possibility that his best work was yet to come filled him with a restless dissatisfaction that he still mistook for hope.

The pharmaceutical industry had boomed. His stockbroker, a young woman named Shirley, called him regularly to ask his opinion about new products that were in the pipeline, drugs that showed the promise of profit. He enjoyed talking to her because she had a Midwestern accent and a flat nasal voice that reminded him of the girl who’d sat next to him in fourth grade and died of spinal meningitis over Christmas vacation. He had a few million dollars worth of Sandoz and Merck and Hoffmann–La Roche and the like in his portfolio now. Back in the days when he was driving the White Whale through the streets of Hamden, he would have called himself rich.

But Friedrich did not feel rich this day. It didn’t seem like he had much to show, not given the compromises and sacrifices and hours they had spent shackled to the desk whose veneer he was now picking at with a letter opener. And as he noted the need for getting it fixed, and all the trouble and time it would take to remove a lifetime of work from its drawers and file cabinets, the thought occurred to Friedrich that they had indeed been shackled, prisoners all these years, serving life sentences imposed on themselves, by themselves, with no chance of appeal or hope of pardon. It was then that Dr. Friedrich remembered that their new Volvo had a car phone, and that he could call his wife on it.

Unlike most of his generation, those that had come of age in the Great Depression, Friedrich was comfortable and adept with computers. He had worked with them since the fifties. His grandchildren came to him when programs malfunctioned, screens froze, and homework was eaten by hard drives. But mobile phones did not compute, and dated him.

He dialed Nora and got a recording. “Your service provider is not available in this area.” He dialed again. Busy. The same hill that protected his view made it impossible to reach Nora when he needed to talk to her. He’d say he wanted to remind her to pick up a bottle of vermouth and a spare cartridge for the printer. But mostly he just needed to hear her voice to know he was not alone in the prison of the fortress they had constructed.

He was about to punch redial, another bit of nineties technology he’d forgotten he had, but then thought better of it as he fantasized Nora reaching for the car phone’s ring while going round a corner and taking her eyes off the road to speak to him, cradling the receiver to the cheek he’d just kissed an hour ago, drifting lanes as she answered with “Yes, dear, I remembered the vermouth, and the toner,” just before she ran head-on into a semi or a deer or a dump truck.

Friedrich mocked himself for clinging to the childish fantasy that imagining the worst would decrease the statistical probability of it actually happening. Life had taught him the world didn’t work that way.

Friedrich was just checking his pillbox to make sure he had remembered to take his Coumadin and Dig that morning, as opposed to thinking he had remembered to take them, when he heard Nora’s voice calling to him, “Will . . . Will.”

He walked out onto the balcony and called out to her grumpily “What took you so long?”

Gray looked up at him. “Will?” The parrot mimicked Nora’s voice perfectly. It was not the first time the aging African gray had tricked him that way.

The bird had seen it all. Except for the talons of his right foot being eaten by a fan, Gray looked just as he had when Friedrich had mistaken him for a hallucination perched in his mulberry tree. Then and now, Gray was an uncooperative witness. The thought that a bird would outlive him used to amuse Friedrich. Now it just pissed him off.

Friedrich slammed the balcony door as the parrot laughed at him. Friedrich opened the stereo and removed the CD titled
Learn
to Dance at Home.
The numbered steps of a foxtrot were rolled out on a mat on the floor. After nearly a half century of marriage, Friedrich was finally so bored he was willing to learn how to dance.

He replaced the instruction CD with Billie Holiday. He preferred vinyl, missed the scratches on his old records. He tried not to think more old man thoughts, but it was impossible. Closing the door on Gray and turning up the volume of a stereo remix of Billie’s sadness made it seem fresher than it had when he’d first heard her back in ’39. But that didn’t change the fact that in less than a month he’d be seventy-six years old.

He told his wife and children he did not, under any circumstances, want another party. He said he saw no reason to celebrate old age. He’d said the same thing last year, but they wouldn’t listen . . . they never did.

Friedrich tried to change his perspective on this day by sitting in his wife’s chair. But looking across the big desk they had shared, gazing on his empty seat, just made him think of the day when he’d vacate his place on the planet permanently.

He knew he was feeling sorry for himself. If Nora weren’t dawdling on the way home from the office supply store, or hadn’t turned back to get the vermouth, or worse, stopped in at Lucy’s down the road to talk about
my goddamn birthday,
she would have been there to pull him out of his spiraling funk, to say “Enough dillydallying, we’ve got work to do, a speech to write, a chapter to compose.”

“Wiiiiiill?” He heard her calling now, stretching out his name into a shriek; he knew it sounded too much like her to be anything but the parrot he should have gotten rid of years ago. Friedrich reached for the remote and turned up Billie Holiday’s call for emotional rescue.

The clutter of his desk was pinned down with a dozen paperweights, giant pills in Lucite, miracle drugs cast in Plexiglas to commemorate the millionth prescription, sales figures that made stocks split and dividends double. These trophies to his alchemy were lined up like chess pieces in a game played to a draw. Perhaps they had done some good, distanced a few hundred thousand unhappy souls far enough from their feelings to avoid getting fired from their jobs, or walking out on their children, or jumping into the paths of oncoming trains, and cars, and lives unlived. Yes, maybe he’d helped them feign a memory of happiness, kept them from being devoured by their guilt and shame. But then again, what were people to feel when they did things they should feel guilty or ashamed of? Synthetic joy?

There had been no miracle cures. Wonder drugs for the mind came and went out of style like the hemlines of ladies’ skirts and the width of men’s ties. Ultimately, they were remembered as ill advised as last year’s fashions. Friedrich still read the latest literature; his advice and support were sought out and courted by young men and women with new pharmaceutical axes to take to market. Friedrich was tuned in, but had dropped out years ago.

MRIs, CAT scans, dye injections of radioactive tracers into the brain that showed thought mass and move across the mind like an advancing army were all promising. But sitting at his desk that morning, waiting for Nora to come home, listening to the parrot who had witnessed his fall from grace, calling out in the voice of his flesh and blood addiction, his ball and chain, his partner in crime, his wife, “Will . . . Will . . . ,” Dr. Friedrich knew he and his kind were forty years away from having the hardware to understand how to rechannel thought to that uncharted beach in the brain called happiness.

If he were twenty-one in 2021, he would make a difference, he’d have a chance to be great then. Everything he touched and loved would have been better off if he just had more time. Friedrich knew these were old man thoughts, but he could not help himself. He
was
an old man.

The sun was behind a cloud now. He could see its shadow rolling up the hillside toward him. Rain was on its way. If the weather had been different, if Gray hadn’t been calling up to him from the past, he would have gotten up, brought out the barbells, gone for a walk. This was not a Sock Moment, this was age-related depression. He knew how to fight it, raise the blood sugar, get the body moving, reach out to another human being. Instead, he stared straight ahead at the photos Nora kept on her side of the desk and made himself feel worse.

There was an eight by ten framed in malachite of Lucy surrounded by her five adopted children. No two were the same color. Black, brown, the color of unfired clay, the white of phosphorous—he called them Lucy’s Rainbow Coalition. Friedrich wished Lucy had had children of her own, in part because he was soothed by the thought of his own DNA twirling into the future. But also for its therapeutic value.

Lucy had been in the eighth month of her pregnancy when she and Nigel went to surf the break in Rincón, Puerto Rico. The car they had rented at the airport was supposed to have a rack for his surfboard. It didn’t. Nigel sat in the backseat and held the surfboard steady while she drove, nose end out one window of the car, fin end out the other. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault. She was driving carefully. A minibus passed her on the right, just clipping the nose of the board. The rental car plowed into a ditch. Nigel was basically decapitated by his surfboard at the third cervical vertebra, and the baby was stillborn while Lucy was trapped in the front seat.

Friedrich realized Nigel wasn’t the bastard he had thought when his will was read and she had inherited all that money. That Lucy had chosen not to tell him Nigel was rich, that she had let him think the father of her dead child was a worthless surf bum bastard right through the funeral was, in Dr. Friedrich’s mind, cruel and unusual and deserved punishment. Yes, Nora was probably having coffee with Lucy right now, talking about the party he didn’t deserve.

Billie was singing
Stormy Weather
now, and Friedrich was holding a small, tarnished silver frame with a photo of Homer and his mother back when they lived on Harrison Street. They died within three weeks of each other, in the summer of ’84. Heart disease.

Softly touching Homer’s cheek with his forefinger, Friedrich made a mental note to polish the frame. A glance at Nora’s desktop pic of Fiona and Michael and the twins, a boy and a girl. Just as Ida had predicted, one was dark, one was fair, and both were born fat. The boy had red hair Ida would have envied, the girl had recently developed an eating disorder. The picture had been taken at last year’s Emmy Awards.

The chickenshit lawyer was a big-shot producer now. His un-watchable TV show had won its third Emmy. It was a good photograph. The children were handsome, Fiona looked glamorous, and Michael held the Emmy with the disparaging grin of a man who thinks he deserves an Oscar. Just behind him and Fiona was the gap-toothed smile of Ben the Bottom.

Lucy had not forgiven her father for being wrong, and Fiona could not forgive him for being right. Friedrich did not feel like a man who was batting five hundred. His daughters invited him to his grandchildren’s birthday parties, and school plays, and Christmas pageants, and soccer games. When he went, they treated him like a trespasser. And when he stayed away and let Nora carry the flag, they complained that he didn’t care.

Friedrich cared. He loved them all, adopted and blood, but not alike, for he did not believe any two loves were the same. Yet when he looked at his grandchildren smiling back at him from the photographs on Nora’s side of the desk, his own neurotransmitters did not send him the warm, fuzzy feelings he knew grandparents were supposed to be prone to.

Try as he might to well up pride or sentimental tears, the glaucoma of his clinical eye would only permit him to see side effects. Of his seven grandchildren, five were on Ritalin. His daughters said it helped them do well at school. One of them snorted it. Fiona’s boy, who was diagnosed ADD, was on Ativan. And Lulu, sixteen now, who had the best brain of the bunch and had gotten a perfect score on her math PSAT and beat him in chess when she was ten, was on Haldol and had gained twenty pounds. Lucy had said puberty was “particularly hard” on her. Friedrich told himself they were strangers to him because they were strangers to themselves.

Friedrich muttered aloud to himself. “Christ,
life’s
hard.”

Friedrich wondered how his wife could bear to look at the snapshots of life gone wrong day after day. He wanted to sweep them off the desk, throw them in the garbage. But each was true. And as hard as they were to face, he could not look away.

After the disappointment his daughters reflected back at him, the photograph of Willy was a relief. It was taken last year. Willy’s hair was almost as gray as his own. He’s sitting somewhere— hotel? apartment? café?—pointing something out in the newspaper to his friend Henry. It makes them both smile, not so much because it’s funny but because they see it the same way. Henry is a neurologist. Friedrich likes him, and would have liked him even if he were not his son’s lover, but likes him more because of it.

Friedrich opened the drawer on his wife’s side of the desk and took out her phone book. He would call Henry at the hospital. Willy was traveling. Talking to Henry was always a tonic. He was doing research on the temporal lobe, on that part of the brain where religious fanaticism and violence lived side by side. Fifteen minutes of listening to Henry’s cerebral baritone complain about the bullshit of drumming up funds for research would pull him out of his malaise.

As he dialed Henry’s number, it occurred to Friedrich that he used people to alter his mood, and he was turning the idea of people as drugs over in his brain, tilting it in the sunshine of his mind, looking for flaws and possibilities, the way a marooned sailor might examine a useful piece of driftwood washed up on the shore of his deserted island. But the recorded message he received did not provide the fix Friedrich was after. Friedrich, for all his years synthesizing emotion, had a profound misunderstanding of and a deep appreciation for the human factor. The recording told him that Henry was with Willy. He wished he were with them.