Thought Crimes (11 page)

One of the traps for beginners is getting too Hamletty. You can get addicted to the chemicals fear lets loose in your brain, and lose weeks thinking about what the Authors might be up to and what your participation means to them. Are you proving a theory, or disproving it?

Your participation might consolidate a researcher's career.

Years from now, some old Suit will sit across the table from friends at a dinner party and go moist when he recalls the experimental subject who supplied his major breakthrough.

Equally, your responses might so threaten someone that they will be tempted to contaminate a study before the results destroy their reputation.

How could any participant ever know where they were situated on an objective paranoia scale? You can't. Sam chose to believe that his own paranoia was of a low order. Otherwise, he'd be of no use to researchers, not even as part of the placebo group. If you are going to make a living as an experimental subject, you need to think of yourself as the author of your own destiny. Your heart's only palpitating because that's how you've chosen to order things. If you really wanted the flutters, jabs and appetites to stop, you'd make them stop. This decisive shift in perspective allows you to twist anxieties into thoughts that favour your own interests. Everyone at the Institute is at your service, not
vice versa.
An experienced subject kowtows to no one.

Laura handed Sam a stack of photographs. She was more inclined to use visual stimuli than other Jackets he'd dealt with. Did Sam find the pictures arousing? In the first, a young brunette rather like Laura was fellating a particularly thick penis. Yes, the image was arousing.

When he was aroused by an image of this kind, was Sam imagining what it was like to be this man squeezing his big penis into the woman's mouth, imagining his own penis inside that woman's mouth, was he imagining his own penis inside the mouth of a woman this woman reminded him of, or was he imagining what it might feel like to take a huge erection into his own mouth? Could Sam describe the nature of his empathetic interaction with this image?

She was so skilled as an interviewer that Sam could forget Laura's true purpose was probably to measure a sense of loss, or some revived capacity. Her researches almost certainly had nothing to do with sexuality, fellatio, or physical response.

Most research strategies were about obscuring the true purpose of the study. Participants were less likely to arrive at pertinent suspicions or guesses when sexually aroused or consternated.

‘Now I'd like you to look at this next picture.'

The community of people who make their living from participating in research studies is small. Over a period of time, Sam became acquainted with several of the subjects he'd met in waiting rooms at the Institute. Very occasionally, he might meet one of them outside the confines of the R.K. Howarth Building.

He'd first met Warren during a study three years earlier, and they sometimes chanced upon each other in cinema foyers. Professional etiquette requires that you never discuss the precise nature of your experiences, or speculate on the possible significance of your participation. Still, there were obvious subtexts and meanings that couldn't be ignored.

Bumping into Warren as he pushed a trolley down the frozenfood aisle of the supermarket, Sam told him that it was good to see him looking so well. Warren said the same. Sam looked well.

What purpose would be served by telling a man he looked wretched? Warren must have known about the stoop, and the tics, and the incessant blinking. He knew the risks. So Sam lied, and then thanked God that he had the good fortune to be Mr Placebo.

Of course, the question arose whether Sam should mention meeting Warren in his journal. Some silences are too loaded. No researchers would want their subjects to be indiscreet, let alone conspiratorial. Frankness can cost you. But Warren had to be noted, since not all meetings are as accidental as they seem. You need to consider the possibility that Warren was there to test your candour as a journalist. Sam was careful to document their meeting truthfully.

‘Warren looks like shit.'

If you must let your imagination off the leash, best to fantasise about your part in making the world a better place.

Whenever Sam saw disabled people in the street, he felt as if he was touching them. He wanted to reassure them that he was giving it everything he had. ‘Be patient …
Soon
.'

Did Sam want their gratitude? Maybe. In that respect, there was no difference between him and the Coats and Jackets. We all like to feel appreciated.

It's unwise to spend too much time re-reading your journal. Re-reading leads to double-guessing and the fear that you might be disclosing more than you need to disclose. Re-reading his diary, Sam was shocked to find mention of masturbatory activity associated with lurid fantasies about the Jacket he knew as Laura.

Sam knew that no professional would be disconcerted by sexual responses, least of all one who utilised Laura's style of interview. His double-guessing related to a concern that an experienced participant shouldn't be seen to be naïve – so wilfully naïve – about the masking techniques employed in high-risk studies. It's one thing to believe that a Jacket like Laura might flirt with her experimental subjects, it's another to want to believe it.

Altering journal entries was risky. Sam had made one or two deletions in the past, but he wouldn't say that he'd got away with it. You'd never know how such an action might impact on a researcher's understanding of a participant. He chose to believe that the erasures had a nil-effect because he had no choice. The alternative was getting lost up your own arsehole.

Troubled by the sight of two men on a scaffold outside the window, Sam requested a break in the interview.

When Laura left the room, Sam imagined that she would ask the men to move for the duration of the session, but she returned in the company of a Suit carrying a file thick as a gorilla's upper arm.

The Suit told Sam that early results from the current study were unpromising. Worse, they pointed to a coming tragedy. Short of prayer, there was little the Suit or Laura could do. Not unless Sam consented to trebling the dose of AR 2006.

This treble dose would merit an increased payment of $350 per week, as compensation for the raised stakes.

In reality, the subject had no choice, and Sam heard their proposal with unaffected calm. He knew that Suits hit you with this
Prepare to die, we're hoping for a miracle
stuff from time to time. Someone less conversant with the nature of the business would crumble and beg them to up the dose.

But once you've chosen to be Mr Placebo, never loosen your grip on that confidence. It's always in the researchers' interest to slop black paint on the darkness at the end of the tunnel. Inclined to believe that Suit and Jacket were fudging, Sam was now convinced that Laura's study related to morbid anxiety. Her conspicuous interest in masturbation frequency and the intensity of his ejaculations was a ploy. But Sam wouldn't mention these suspicions in the journal. After signing a permission to treble his AR 2006, he walked home and waited with some impatience for nothing to happen.