Pharmakon (7 page)

He had biked out to Hamden to photograph Dr. Friedrich and his parrots for a five-hundred-word human interest piece. It was his first assignment. Being a freshman, he wasn’t even officially on the staff of Yale’s venerable rag, the
Yale Daily News.
Being the kind of freshman he was—bearded with pimples and peach fuzz, too shy to look a person in the eye unless it was through the viewfinder of a camera, and, most un-Yale-like of all, saddled with the name Casper Gedsic, which everybody who wasn’t of Russian/Lithuanian extraction mispronounced as Getsick, even if they weren’t trying to make fun of him—Casper knew he was never going to be tapped for the masthead of his college paper. He knew it with the same unnerving intelligence that enabled him to give you the name and due date of the first comet to appear in the heavens of New Haven in the twenty-third century. No matter how many pots of coffee or cigarette runs he made for the upperclassmen, no matter how many hours he spent developing others’ photographs of touchdowns scored and baskets missed, no matter how many misplaced modifiers he corrected rewriting lesser minds’ copy, his gifts would remain untapped in this universe.

He did not think it any more unfair or fair than the fact he would not be alive to see the polar ice caps melt. It would happen, but not for him. Perhaps if he had gone to Choate or Hotchkiss, or grown up in Darien, or if there had been a brand of cough drops named Gedsic’s, his lack of social skills, vegetarianism, even his old girl’s bicycle might have been written off as eccentricities. But Casper was the only child of a widow from Vilnius who had survived the Nazis and the Russians and made it to the land of opportunity, only to end up picking cranberries in the bogs of southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.

Tests with right or wrong answers, essays that asked him to compare and contrast, problems that involved numbers, unknowns that didn’t breathe, that weren’t flesh, were easy for Casper. People were difficult. So difficult that he had started doing grunt work for the school paper quite by accident. That first day of school, he had been looking for the astronomy club when he knocked on the door of the
Daily News.
Asked if he knew how to set up a darkroom, it was easier to say “yes” than to explain how he’d come to be lost.

As it turned out, Casper enjoyed standing in the corner of the paneled newsroom in a haze of cigarette smoke, as wannabe Edward R. Murrows and bogus Hemingways with butts parked in the corners of their mouths shouted orders and barked wisecracks, watching with wonderment and disdain at the ease with which other human beings could shoot the shit.

Casper was aware of the fact that he was the last choice for the parrot article. It was the Friday before the spring dance, already after four, when Whitney Bouchard, the features editor who had blown out his knee six months earlier in the Princeton game, heard about the parrots out in Hamden. He was rich, athletic, and as darkly handsome as Bruce Wayne, aka Batman. Whereas undergraduates who longed to be Whitney envied him, Casper regarded him as an exotic species of wasp and was content not to be stung. And since Whitney and everybody else at the paper (except for Casper) had dates coming in from Vassar and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr, coeds in camel-hair coats and saddle shoes to meet at the train station, corsages to pick up, and rubbers to slip into the backs of their wallets, Casper got his break.

Only Casper didn’t think about it like that. He did what was asked at the paper under the not unreasonable assumption that if he kept his nose clean and to the grindstone, by the time he graduated, he would have enough strangers to introduce to his mother by their first names to give her the impression that he had made friends.

As Casper pedaled north through the campus that afternoon, light turning the spray from a garden hose into a rainbow made him think of the year 1666, the year Newton had reduced sunshine to wavelengths. Which made him think of gravity, which reminded him that a meteor shower would be visible an hour and half before the next dawn. Which in turn prompted him to consider the probability of Ted Williams’s batting average. Thoughts ricocheted across the calm surface of his mind like a flat stone skipped across the water. Such was the random brilliance and potential of Casper Gedsic’s brain, which would have continued its elliptical orbit of thought if it hadn’t been for a sharp whistle.

Casper looked over his shoulder and saw a girl with the two fingers of her left hand making an instrument out of her smile. He had never seen a girl whistle like that. Blond, matching periwinkle-blue sweater set, she was waving now. Accepting of the fact that he didn’t know girls like that and never would know them, he pedaled on, aware but indifferent.

“Hey you, on the bike.”

Casper put on the brakes. “M-m-me?”

She was walking toward him. “Who else am I talking to?”

“R-R-Right . . . of course.” Looking her in the eyes just long enough to see that they were a shade bluer than green, like the spots on the tail of a salamander, Casper turned his gaze downward to the pearls around her neck.

“I saw the press camera and thought you might be able to help me.” The girl tilted her head to make eye contact. He worried that she thought he was looking at her breasts, which he was, and focused his eyes on the travel stickers that polka-dotted her suitcase: Lake Placid, Palm Beach, Val d’Isère.

While she talked to the top of his head, he briefly considered and dismissed the idea of volunteering the fact that Val d’Isère was where Hannibal was deserted by his Saracen mercenaries. “How?”

She was already looking over his shoulder for someone less obscure to help her. “I mean, when I saw the camera, I thought you might be on the staff of the paper.”

“I’m a freshman.” It wasn’t a non sequitur to Casper.

“Are you a foreigner?”

“F-f-f-freshmen aren’t tapped for the paper unt-t-til the end of their sophomore year.”

“So you do work at the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Whit Bouchard?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you know where he is?” He could hear the impatience in her voice.

“No.”

“Are we playing twenty questions?” It was her laughter that made him look up.

“No . . . I mean, I could look for him.”

“That’s sweet, but you don’t have to do that.” She lit a cigarette. “I told his sister, Nina—she’s my roommate—to call Whit and tell him I’d be taking the earlier train. But you know Nina: in one ear and out the other.”

“I d-d-don’t know Nina.”

“You’d like each other. She’s insanely smart, but dumb when it comes to dumb stuff. I’m Alice Wilkerson, by the way.”

Casper was sure he hadn’t heard her right. “I’m Casper.”

They shook hands. He was glad she was wearing gloves. His hands sweat even when he wasn’t nervous; he suffered from hyperhidrosis, abnormal and chronic perspiration. His body sweat even when he wasn’t exerting himself. His mother told him it was because he thought too much.

“Hey, stop trying to steal my girl and get out there and interview those parrots.” He was relieved Whit didn’t call him Getsick. He watched Alice turn and run toward Whit with open arms. Just before she kissed him, she looked over her shoulder. “See you at the dance, Casper.”

Casper got back on his bike knowing he wouldn’t be seeing her at the dance. He didn’t have a tux, much less a date. Having never gone out on a date his whole life, dating, like melting of the polar ice caps, wasn’t an experience he worried about missing. But there was something about the way she said it—“see you at the dance”—that shifted the idea into the realm of possibility. And as the afternoon sunlight mottled the path beneath his wheels with shadow, he felt a sensation that fate and nature had insulated him from—hope.

What if his photograph and five hundred words were so dazzling, so rich with metaphor and insight, that Whit was impressed? What if Whit liked them so much that when he got to the last line, he lit a smoke and announced to everybody in the newsroom, “This dog’ll hunt.” Which is what Whit would always say when he really liked something. And following the progression of impossibility as if he were calculating pi, Casper was bold enough to imagine Whitney’s calling up his sister Nina, “I’ve got this buddy named Casper. He’s got a funny last name, but you’d really like him. And . . .”

For the first mile after Alice, he played variations of his pipe dreams. He imagined Whit’s sister was first a brunette, then a redhead. Blue eyes, brown eyes, green, he worked her up in his imagination until she burned with the incandescence of white phosphorous. Hot as Rita Hayworth, but with the wit of Katharine Hepburn. And the intellectual rigor of Shelley’s wife—
Frankenstein
was Casper’s favorite novel.

But daydreaming was one of the few disciplines that didn’t come naturally to Casper. “What if ” was a game he didn’t know how to play. Hope was so new to him that it almost felt toxic. And though the sun was still shining and the air was scented with lilacs, a cloud passed over him as he pedaled down the streets of New Haven. Five hundred words and a snapshot of a shrink and his parrots weren’t going to impress Whitney, much less prompt him to introduce his sister, especially if she had the body of Rita Hayworth and the brain of Marie Curie.

By mile two of his journey the bicycle seat was just beginning to raise a blister on his buttocks. What had seemed like an opportunity to change the trajectory of his life now felt more and more like a cruel joke.
The bastard gave me the assignment because
he thinks I am a joke.
Suddenly, the thoughts he was throwing across the still waters of his mind were weighted with an anger and resentment Casper hadn’t felt since eighth-grade graduation, when he’d become so lost in his recitation of “Hiawatha” that he’d wet his pants on stage.

Fuck you, Whitney. I didn’t get into Yale because of my last
name. I won the Edison National Science Prize. I had to take a
test to get into this hellhole. I got a hundred percent correct—
perfect.

Casper was riding down a street that wasn’t familiar. Horns blared. Someone shouted, “Watch where you’re going, buddy.” But Casper didn’t hear them. For by now it had occurred to him that his journey felt like a joke because it was a joke. There weren’t any parrots. No shrink. They’d made it all up to see if he was gullible enough to do it. He’d seen them play jokes like that on other maggots. That’s what frosh were called. And worse, he could see Whitney and that blond bitch Alice shacked up at the Taft Hotel, laughing.

Paranoia flamed his anger into a state of mind that melted logic. And even now, as he pedaled up to Friedrich’s and saw the parrots, he was still outraged. And though no one noticed his arrival, his mind was shouting,
What are you looking at?

Dropping his bike, not bothering to put down the kickstand, Casper opened his mouth to scream
Stop it!
And would have if the strap that held the camera to his neck had not caught on the handle of the bike. He fell, chin first. His jaw hit the sidewalk. His glasses fell onto the lawn. The impact of real pain, the salty taste of blood in his mouth, the sight of it dripping onto his hands, brought him relief, soothed him so quickly and completely that Casper felt like he’d woken up from someone else’s nightmare. What was he so angry about? Why did he ever think Whitney was going to introduce him to his sister?

“Are you all right?” Fiona Friedrich handed him his glasses.

“I-I-I-I’m not sure.”

A drop of blood dripped from his chin onto Fiona’s white Mary Janes. “You better put iodine on it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to die.”

“Dogs pee on the sidewalk where you cut your chin. It could get infected. You could get . . . I forget what they call it, but my daddy says if you catch it, you can’t open your mouth. Not to eat or to drink and you die.”

“Lockjaw. I’ve had a tetanus shot.” Casper was surprised how much easier it was talking to children. Not that he could remember talking to any since he was a child. He told himself he should do it more often.

Nora Friedrich was there now. “Let’s get you inside and wash that off.” Fiona took his hand and led him toward the house.

Nora carried his camera. “You must be from the paper.”

“How did you know?”

“Your friend Whitney called from the paper to say you’d be coming. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” She was pointing at the parrots. Casper was thinking of something else.

Chin bandaged and orange with Mercurochrome, Casper posed Friedrich with his arms raised beneath the mulberry tree as though Friedrich had conjured the parrots out of thin air. After pointing out the different species, the pair he’d seen mating, the one that called out for Marjeta, Friedrich introduced Casper to now slightly tipsy instructors and assistant professors who glibly volunteered theories about the parrots’ unexpected arrival in Hamden. These ran from UFOs to weather changes brought on by nuclear testing.

Friedrich gave Casper more than enough for his five hundred words. But there was something about this freshman that made Friedrich want to give him more than that. Perhaps it was simply that Friedrich had had two beers, and the way the big press camera hung around Casper’s neck reminded him of the time his mother had tied a dead hen around the throat of Homer’s dog, Lilly, to teach the poor hound not to chase chickens. It took two weeks for Lilly to paw the rotting hen carcass from around her neck. She never chased chickens again, but it didn’t make her overly fond of humans—she bit anyone who tried to pet her, except Homer.