The Placebo Effect Read online

  “How close?”

  “Really close. But there’s a problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “You know the problem. You’ve known it from the beginning. Price!”

  “But the science is okay?”

  “The science is terrific. Terrific.”

  “So how expensive is it?”

  “It comes to almost forty dollars a pill. So, just to amortize the R & D, you’d have to sell them for at least seventy dollars a pill.”

  Henry-Clay whistled through his teeth—but he was smiling.

  “What’s the whistle mean, boss?”

  “It means—unless.”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we know the ratio, Dr. Kreger—unless we know the ratio.”

  “The ratio of what to what?”

  Of placebo to real, Henry-Clay thought; of placebo to real. “Patch me through to Evelyn.”

  His secretary’s sultry voice came on instantly. “Sir?”

  “I need someone to find someone for me. Do we have someone who can do that?”

  “Sure. Who’re you trying to find?”

  Henry-Clay told her. He already thought of Mike Shedloski as Ratio-Man.

  Henry-Clay moved to his condo balcony. A parasurfer was taking off from the beach, the ratio of uplift to gravity clearly in uplift’s favour, so he soared, as did Henry-Clay’s hopes for the future.

  And within six weeks of hiring Michael Shedloski, aka Ratio-Man, and treating him like a prized St. Bernard—clumsy but beautiful—he had the knowledge that allowed him to float a few strategically placed rumours about his new—and now not so expensive—antidepressant drug that sent his stock roaring back to new highs. He and his business were in flight, aiming for the stars.

  Ratio-Man had, for a few belly scratches and a dozen Aren’t you a fine doggy, aren’t you’s not only stocked Yolles Pharmaceuticals’ coffers with gold but supplied something even more valuable: a way for Henry-Clay to find other freaks like Mike—one of whom claimed he could tell when people were telling the truth.

  Then of course he’d fired the fat moron. Mac had suggested a more permanent solution, but Henry-Clay was not a murderer—he was a businessman jettisoning a used-up asset.

  Easy to do now that he had a new asset on the horizon. One whose gift I’ll have to test, Henry-Clay thought as he poured himself a drink. We’ll see the reach and breadth of this new freak’s gift. You never know when such a skill could be of great value to Yolles Pharmaceuticals—and, of course, to me.

  He raised the crystal glass and saluted the Treloar Building across the Ohio River. Then he downed two fingers of the most expensive scotch whiskey that money could buy—and wished that he could tell the difference between it and five-dollar hooch.

  Then he looked down and across the street. Mike Shedloski, aka Ratio-Man, was gone.

  3

  MIKE GETS THE URGE FOR GOING

  MIKE WAS HIDING BEHIND THE RETAINING WALL ACROSS from Yolles Pharma, trying to watch the Enemy standing way up there in his castle window. All around him was the detritus of the statues he’d so painstakingly balanced from nothing into things of beauty. He started to rebuild the stone building, but the voices in his head were confusing him—teetering him dangerously out of balance. And the store didn’t have dill pickle chips and that had upset him so he’d thrown over the whole rack—what kind of store doesn’t have dill pickle chips? And the store owner had gotten angry and called the police so he’d run, and the voices in his head were confusing him. So many voices. He thought about taking his meds, but they just made it worse—made the voices soft and silky, female, but still there. And even if he couldn’t hear them accurately, he knew they made fun of his small penis—and besides, he wasn’t sure if the meds came from friend or foe. General Tso’s chicken worked better than meds. But where could he find an open Chinese restaurant in Cincinnati at this hour of the night? And he needed to stop the voices, ’cause they were screaming at him now: “You’re just a fat idiot. An obese cluck. A tiny-dicked moron in bell-bottoms!”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! Natasha didn’t think that—didn’t!”

  He knew he was screaming, and that the teenagers across the street were watching—smiling—ready to jump him. And suddenly he found himself in front of the weird building on Plum Street. The synagogue that looked like a mosque—covering a portal—a danger—he was out of balance—out of balance—out of balance! He really needed dill pickle chips. Right now—or General Tso’s chicken—or both—yeah, both at once—the chips crushed on top of the chicken. He began to move along Plum Street, to get away from the teenagers, to get away from the yawning portal, from that weird building, from the voices. The voices that kept on shouting, “Give it up. Give it up. This is too big for a fat boy like you. Give it up!” But he couldn’t give it up, couldn’t give up. He owed it to himself and the others like himself that he had betrayed to the Enemy. He’d pretended to be nice, given Mike a job, put him in charge of a lab. And Mike had betrayed his own kind. Been used by the Enemy who he thought was going to be his friend, a real friend who understood how special he was—and now that friend was the Enemy and was going to try and use Decker. He had to warn him. He had to get to the place called the Junction and warn Decker, warn him that the Enemy was getting ready to test then use him—him and his gift—just like he had used Mike.

  “You can’t do this, fatso!” The voice screamed.

  “I can,” he said under his breath. Then over and over, “I can, I can, I can.”

  Then he wondered where the airport was. He’d never been on an airplane. He wondered how much it would cost to take an airplane to the Junction—where Decker lived.

  4

  TEACHER

  DECKER LOOKED AT THE FORTY OR SO ACTORS ASSEMBLED in his studio and decided where to begin. “Evolution is blindly cruel,” he said. “It remorselessly removes the unuseful. Yet it has not done away with actors. Your profession is the second most consumed of all the arts—pop music being number one.

  “And the iconography of your art form has never changed. Those who have voyaged have earned the right to be up in the light. Those who have yet to voyage sit in the dark.”

  An older actor raised his hand.

  Decker nodded. “Voyaging?”

  “Yeah, go over that again.”

  “Sure. The first actor was no doubt some extraordinary woman who stood up by the campfire, and because she had gone to the valley, found something there and brought it back—voyaged—she had the right to speak, to act while the others stayed in the dark and listened. Without voyaging you have no right to stand in the light. You have to chance the danger of going to the valley, then you have to find something there (the fleece is the mythic expression of this), understand what you have found, then bring back your newfound knowledge to the fire. Only then you can stand in the light.”

  Decker thought of his twelve years in New York City, his two Broadway shows—and the ALS death of his wife—as going to the valley and his teaching as standing up by the fire.

  “What if you’ve never traveled?” Tawtiawna, an incredibly talented light-skinned black actress, asked.

  “Emily Dickinson never went anywhere, but she voyaged. The Brontë sisters never met anyone like Rochester in their lives, but they voyaged, they explored their world both real and imagined, or they couldn’t have found him and brought him back to the fire.”

  Decker smiled then turned to the blond actress in the front row. “Hold out your hand, palm down.” She did as Decker asked, then Decker put his hand out, palm down, six inches from hers and turned to the class. “So two people go to a bar and they flop their hands on the table—about six inches apart—like our two hands. And over the evening they magically join.” Decker moved his hand forward and interlaced his fingers with hers. Her hand was remarkably soft, the fit perfect with his fingers—biology saying yes. For an instant he caught the actress’s eyes looking up into his, as his wife had done so long ago
as she demanded, “Do you know what you are doing, Decker? Do you know?” Decker pushed aside the memory, held the actress’s interlocked fingers aloft, and announced to the actors watching, “Two kids, a mortgage, and a car.” Then he dropped the actress’s hand and said, “And they don’t know how it happened.” Decker smiled and added, “How it happened is what they learn from actors.” He turned back to the actress. “Put out your hand again.”

  “You going to marry me a second time, Decker?”

  Decker paused, then said, “No. Just put out your hand.”

  She did.

  He turned to the class and said, “The six inches between our hands is actor territory. No writer, no director, no cinematographer can guide you across those six inches. That territory belongs to you. It’s the reason that evolution hasn’t removed you and your kind.”

  Without segue Decker turned back to Tawtiawna. “Did you have a private name for yourself when you were a little girl?”

  The actress looked around—wary—as if Decker had seen into a secret place. Finally she said, “Yes.”

  “I’m not asking you to tell me her name. But she’s your artist, and she wants to voyage, but you protect her because you think she’s frail. She’s not—she voyages all the time and is waiting to take you along with her.”

  After a few more questions Decker put the first of the evening’s twelve scenes (the Venice sequence from Pinter’s Betrayal) on its feet—completely unaware that he was being watched, every move noted, every word recorded then transcribed.

  Class ended just short of midnight. The actors packed up and headed for cheap beer at Squirly’s up on Queen Street. Decker stored the cameras in his office beneath his sixth-grade report card, which he’d tacked to the wall. Long ago he had circled his teacher’s comment: “Does not play well with others.” Beside it was his son Seth’s sixth-grade report card. The comment circled there—“Does not fully participate in group activities”—was more politically correct but meant the same thing. He looked at the two reports, thought about taking them down, then decided, as he usually did, to leave them where they were.

  Back in the studio he picked up Tawtiawna’s diary—she always left her diary. Decker had been tempted to leaf through it the first time he’d found it but quickly realized it was Tawtiawna’s effort to reach out to him. It was tempting, but Decker wasn’t ready—perhaps would never be ready to risk hurting those he cared about again.

  He had caused enough pain.

  He put Tawtiawna’s diary on the monitor cart, locked up the studio and headed down the block to his “office,” an upscale bar called Politica.

  Sitting at the bar he ordered bourbon with water on the side—a holdover from his time directing in regional theatres in the American South.

  The waitress knew him and didn’t hurry him. But when he gave over his Visa card he was surprised that the bank rejected the plastic.

  He apologized, made a mental note to check on this, paid in cash and headed home to the Junction—never suspecting that his personal voyage was about to take him to places of which even he had never dreamt.

  5

  YSLAN HICKS

  YSLAN HICKS HATED WASHINGTON. THE CENTRE OF HER HATRED was Congress. And the very epicentre of that hatred was the congressional oversight committee before which she now sat, waiting for the last plump rump to squattle down into its assigned chair for the morning session. She hoped that both the early hour and the esoteric name of her NSA file would scare away reporters, few of whom were really thinkers. Most weren’t really even newshounds anymore; now they all seemed like wannabe infomercial guys—“For the next twenty minutes we’ll double the offer. All you pay is the extra shipping and handling. Call right now. Don’t wait. I can’t do this all day—and by the way, the synaesthetes oversight committee met today, and the oversighters… oversighted.”

  Then she saw Emerson Remi enter the room and she felt herself shrink. Emerson Remi was—as his name implied—old Princeton all the way to his argyle socks and red suspenders. And more important, he was a smart guy reporter for the Times with a nose for a story and enough intelligence to find his way through the murk of this committee—and, at one time, into Yslan’s heart.

  Yslan forced herself not to look in Emerson’s direction and glanced down at her notes—unnecessary as they were, but appearing without notes before a congressional committee implied a kind of arrogance that a woman couldn’t afford to show these old guys. Yslan even thought of the two women on the committee as old guys.

  The head of the oversight committee, a congressman from Texas—in his parlance, “the Great State of Texas”—banged his gavel, the doors were closed and, after he finished his self-congratulatory opening remarks, turned to her. “Ms. Hicks, we’d like to thank you for making an appearance this fine morning before the committee.”

  “It’s not a problem, Congressman. I’m prepared to answer any questions you might have.”

  “Good. Very good. To begin with, could you pronounce your first name for those in the room who don’t come from the South.”

  “Certainly. It’s spelled Y-S-L-A-N, but pronounced like the word ‘island,’ as in ‘island of Manhattan’—but without the ‘d.’”

  “It’s a fine southern name for those of you who are curious. You are welcome here, Ms. Hicks.”

  “Thank you, Congressman.”

  So much for the niceties.

  “We’ll start with questions from Louisiana congressman Villianne. Pass him over the microphone there.” A fresh-faced congressional page did as the congressman requested and moved the old-fashioned thing on its heavy stand to the far end of the raised table.

  Yslan followed the movement of the microphone along the table to Congressman Villianne. Trim and tanned, the man was handsome in a foxish kind of way. There’d been rumours about a connection between him and the infamous Darryl Marmalukes, but they were unsubstantiated. Yslan reminded herself that this man was no Louisiana back-bayou yokel.

  “Ms. Hicks, let me repeat my colleagues’ thanks for making the time to appear before the committee.”

  Yslan nodded and moved the microphone on the table in front of her closer to her face. The old mic made Yslan feel like she was Pacino in The Godfather, demanding an apology.

  “Now we on this committee are charged with making sure that the taxpayers’ money is not unwisely spent.”

  “I understand that, Congressman.”

  “Good. I hope you do. So let’s all be sure that we all understand what we are talking about here. Your file at the NSA, which costs the taxpayers well in excess of five million dollars annually, concerns what some people would call freaks but you call synaesthetes, is that correct?”

  Yslan did her best not to flinch. “It is.”

  “And could you—just so we’re all on the same page here—describe exactly what a synaesthete is?”

  “Well, Congressman, there is not really an accepted medical definition of the term.”

  “I am aware of that.” His voice had taken on an edge that said, I am no fool.

  “Yes, Congressman, I assume you are. I meant no disrespect.”

  “Good, it would be unwise to be disrespectful to a congressional oversight committee.”

  For a moment, Yslan was thrown by the tenor of the conversation, then she asked, “Would you like me to give you the working definition of synaesthesia?”

  “Yes, I think that would be helpful.”

  “Fine. The term comes from the Greek. For a comparison, amnesia refers to someone who has lost brain function. Amn—lost. Esia—brain. Whereas synaesthesia is from synaesth, having to do with mixing, and esia, having to do with the brain. Synaesthesia is when the brain mixes two or more functions.”

  “Functions or senses, Ms. Hicks?”

  Yslan paused for a moment. Did he know what we’re really up to at the NSA? “Senses, Congressman.”

  “And how does this mixing of the senses happen?”

  “Well, that too is a subject o
f debate. Some researchers believe that we are all synaesthetes for the first six to sixteen months of our lives until the brain sorts out the distinctions between the senses and then divides their recognition function into distinct sections of the brain. Much like a computer’s hard drive can be partitioned into distinct zones—often one for storage files and another for operating systems.”

  “Yes. Well, thanks for the analogy, but how do these ‘distinct sections of the brain’ as you call them suddenly stop being distinct and leak into one another, if I can put it that way?”

  She hesitated, trying to hear if there was real knowledge behind his question.

  “Ms. Hicks, would you like me to repeat the question?”

  “Often by an injury to the head,” she said softly.

  “Speak up, Ms. Hicks.”

  Yslan leaned in closer to the table microphone and said clearly, “Often from an injury to the head.”

  “Ah. I see. So the government is supplying large sums of money for you to oversee people who have been hit on the head?”

  “It’s not the way I would put it but—”

  “I’m sure you’d prefer to put your work in a better light. But let’s be honest here. Your work concerns people who have been hit on the head and as a result of that trauma the walls between the sections of the brain have come down and they can’t help mixing up things from one section with things from another section.”

  She warned herself to be careful—to find the right balance to defend her work without giving away exactly what her work was. “Synaesthetes are able to do some remarkable things by what you call mixing up.”

  “Like knowing the smell of colours?”

  Yslan took another deep breath to calm herself. “Yes, some synaesthetes have that odd crossing of the senses.”

  “Now the NSA is concerned with national security, isn’t it? After all NSA is short for National Security Agency, isn’t it?”