The Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

"I think he was eating these," she says to David. Her words, in her mind, sound more perplexed than urgent. Cashews? What was he thinking?

  Then she hands him the clear little bag of nuts.

  "He allergic to them?" David asks.

  "Yes."

  "He know that?"

  She nods, thinking: Good God, of course he did!

  Her daughter brings David the cordless phone, and he rests it on his shoulder after dialing. Someone at the other end answers instantly, and she hears words and expressions that she doesn't understand. Anaphylaxis. Agonal breathing. Epinephrine. Then she hears one that she does: cardiac arrest. It will happen any second now.

  "I'm giving him epi, one to one thousand, sub-q," David says on the phone before putting the receiver down, rolling up the sleeve of Richard's pajamas, and giving her husband a shot.

  She leans back against a cabinet. Within moments, it seems, her husband is surrounded by men and women in the khakis and the jeans they'd thrown on half-asleep. There is Stephen and Ruthie and Doug. They open a little suitcase with a machine inside and start pressing patches with wires to Richard's chest. The wires lead back into the box.

  "I.V. Ringer's," David says to one of the other volunteers, then murmurs, apparently speaking now to her husband, "Hang in there. The ambulance is coming."

  "How long?" she asks, referring to the ambulance. How long till it gets here?

  "It usually takes at least seven or eight minutes before the damage is irreversible," Ruthie answers, and Jennifer realizes that Ruthie thinks she has meant something else.

  Her children lean against her, Timmy practically burrowing into her nightgown. She wraps one of her arms around each of them, and watches her family's friends work on her husband. One of the volunteers--it happened so fast, she wasn't able to tell if it was Ruthie or Doug--had batted the bag of cashews across the floor when it got in the way. David, at some point, must have put it down.

  Stephen picks it up, evidently deciding it must be important.

  "Why was he eating them?" he asks her, standing.

  "I don't know."

  "But he knew he was allergic to them?"

  "Yes! He has asthma, and he's allergic to them! He knows that!"

  "Shit," she hears David hiss. "No pulse. Shit. Hit press-to-analyze."

  "Hands off," Ruthie says. "Clear."

  The EMTs sit back on their heels, and the room becomes quiet. Jennifer expects an electrical charge will rip through her husband any second now, and his body will bounce off the floor--they all expect it--but then a metallic voice from the little machine informs them, "No shock indicated."

  "What does that mean?" Jennifer says. "What?" But none of them answer. Suddenly even Stephen is back on the floor with the volunteer rescue workers, helping Ruthie to insert a plastic tube into Richard's mouth, while David is back on the phone with...someone.

  "He went bradycardic, and now he's gone flat-line! There's just no heartbeat!" David is saying, his voice loud with the desperation that often precedes defeat. Then: "We're working the airway, that's just what we're doing! But we're not moving any air!"

  She watches them press on his chest with two hands at a time. They tilt his head back, they battle his ever-swelling tongue. They try tightening the seal on the mask on his face. Finally David drops the phone, nodding at no one, and shoots more epinephrine into Richard's system.

  Outside, the night sky over their driveway is filled with the flashing red strobes atop two of the rescuers' parked cars. Jennifer can see the lights through the kitchen window.

  She feels her daughter pressing her forehead against her chest, and Timmy's little fingers squeezing her side. Cashews, she cries in her mind even then, cashews! What in the name of God was he thinking?

  What indeed?

  No one will ever know for sure. But there is, in my opinion, a good deal we can assume.

  We can assume, for instance, that he was frightened when he awoke in the night and couldn't breathe, because he finally broke down and tried his inhaler. Six days away from his usual pharmacopoeia--almost, as a matter of fact, seven--and he had at last succumbed to his body's dependence upon it.

  Unfortunately, it was already too late for that. He was already too far gone for albuterol, the drug in his reliever inhaler. He was probably, by then, too far gone for even his prednisone to have been of any use.

  No, by then Richard was in need of emergency medical help; by then he was in need of a hospital.

  Did he know this? Did he understand what he had done to himself? Maybe. And so, perhaps, he was desperate and panicked and scared. He could barely breathe, and he was thinking with that peculiar lack of judgment that seems to mark the middle of the night.

  It is at night, after all, when without fail the strangest crimes in this world occur, and some of the biggest mistakes are made. I know. For years, I have helped clean up the mess that is left in their wake.

  Whether Richard did what he did because of Carissa--because she, too, had made a mistake, evidenced a peculiar lack of judgment herself--is still debated with gravity and ardor in some circles in Vermont.

  What was he thinking? Jennifer had told me she'd wondered. What?

  I did not try and answer her question then; there had not been a need. After all, she had not expected an answer--and if she had, I most certainly would have lied. I can't imagine, Jennifer. I just can't imagine.

  But if I had responded, and if for some inexplicable reason I'd told her what I honestly believed, I suppose I would have told her this: He was thinking in some fashion about the Law of Similars. Look at what an infinitesimal trace did for me, his frenzied, oxygen-starved mind had concluded, look at what it did for my skin. Maybe all I need now is a little bit more: one nut. That's really not very much, is it? It's not very much at all.

  It can't be enough to hurt me. Isn't that what Carissa had said at the health-food store?

  He'd been clamoring for more medicine for almost two weeks, calling Carissa practically every other day. And consistently she had refused to give him another dose.

  Well, now he had more. Right there in his hands. Same stuff, essentially, as his cure. Right?

  Right?

  And so he had put that one cashew into his mouth, and then he had bit into it.

  And then his wife had found him on their kitchen floor.

  I could feel Margaret and Phil watching me. Waiting for me to crack. To rise in my chair before Margaret's desk, walk past Phil--leaning in the doorway like one of the rubber trees near the receptionist's desk that were always fighting like hell to get to the sun--and stroll with seeming casualness to the coffee machine. But I really didn't feel like a cup. I just didn't want one.

  "Procuring another person to commit a felony is five years," I said to them. "Have you read the computer transcripts? They were serious, completely serious."

  "They both pleaded innocent," Margaret said. "She looked it. He didn't."

  I disagreed. In my mind, they'd both looked like war criminals at the arraignment: defensive, indignant, and angry at once. And guilty as hell. The pair were married, though not to each other. That was the problem. They were having an affair, and at some point had concocted an absolutely lunatic scheme to have the woman's husband kidnapped and beaten, in order to convince him to grant her a divorce in which she would get most of the couple's worldly possessions--including their cottage not far from Lake Champlain. Kidnappers, of course, don't advertise in the yellow pages, and so they had gone on-line to a variety of chat rooms on the Internet to try and find one.

  "Frankly, five years is too good for that pair," I said. "I'm sorry, but there are some things you just don't do in this world. Like asking somebody on the Internet to kidnap someone and threaten him with a wood-splitting maul."

  "They did that?" Phil asked. "A maul, really?"

  "Sure did. And the two of them were on-line at the same time. Same chat room."

  "It's in the information?"

  "You bet."

 
Phil glanced at his watch and shook his head. "What about those thugs who beat up that little guy with the saxophone the other day? The street musician? Where are we with them?"

  "Probably we'll settle on a misdemeanor: simple assault," Margaret said.

  "Not aggravated?" Phil asked, disappointed.

  She shook her head. "No. They were actually pretty banged up, too. He may not be able to play the saxophone very well, but he sure can swing it. And they were all in an alley by the parking garage, so we don't have any witnesses to the start of the fight. Just the end, when the officers arrived and broke it up."

  Outside Margaret's window, massive waves of clouds the color of burned charcoal briquettes were rolling in from the north. Ashy gray. Layered like scallops on a curtain that stretched all the way into Canada. Beautiful, I thought. Just beautiful.

  "Any idea why they were putting the hurt on the fellow?" I asked.

  "He was butchering 'Love for Sale.'"

  "He butchers everything," I said. "That's part of his charm."

  "There really is no motive," Margaret insisted. "Just a little random street rage."

  "I have a meeting, so I have to go," Phil said. "But please see if we can do better than a misdemeanor. I don't like living in a city where little street musicians get clobbered because they can't play the saxophone. Okay?"

  Margaret and I nodded as one.

  "Want me to get you a cup of coffee before I go?" Phil asked me, a vaguely malevolent smirk on his face. "I'm already up."

  "No, I'm okay."

  "Good. I'm glad to hear it. Surprised. But glad."

  When Phil was gone, I stretched my legs toward Margaret's table of toys and murmured, "Unbelievable, isn't it? Can you imagine beating someone up because he can't handle Cole Porter?"

  "Or using the Web to find a kidnapper?"

  "Ah, the things we do for love."

  "Think we'll find any other witnesses?" she asked.

  "For the assault? No, I wouldn't get my hopes up."

  I couldn't actually see the cold front moving, but I noticed when I looked away from the window and then glanced back that the shape of the mass would be different, and there'd be somewhat less blue in the sky. What a magnificent night it would be for a fire in the woodstove. Perfect, I thought. Just perfect.

  "Leland?"

  "Yes?"

  "Are you okay?"

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. You sound almost...I don't know, serene."

  "I'm fine."

  "You're not on Prozac or something, are you?"

  "Nope." I shrugged. "It's just a beautiful day in the neighborhood."

  There was a time when the locals threw rocks at Samuel Hahnemann's windows. The homeopath had just left Leipzig for Kothen, a much smaller city with a less educated populace, and the people there decided he was some kind of evil wizard. A sorcerer the local physicians and apothecaries neither trusted nor liked.

  That was in 1821. He was in his mid-sixties by then, and most of his provings were behind him, as well as a great deal of his writing. Not The Chronic Diseases, of course. He would write the first edition right there in Kothen. But if one of those rocks had crashed through the window of his study where he'd been scribbling and hit him squarely on the head, if somehow one of those stones had killed him, he would still have left behind early editions of his Organon, a Materia Medica, and a library of notebooks and test results. He would still have left behind a foundation for modern homeopathy. He would still have been the first real homeopath.

  The first, too, ironically, to have slept with a patient. He and his second wife, Melanie, were the precedent for that also.

  After all, Melanie had come to see him in Kothen as a patient. She'd been troubled by stomach pains, and left Paris--traveling across Europe dressed as a man--for a consultation with the much older physician.

  He was seventy-nine when they met in 1834. She was somewhere in her mid-thirties. Unmarried.

  Hahnemann had proposed to Melanie three days after they met. When you're seventy-nine, you don't dilly-dally. And Melanie had said yes almost as quickly: "No other man will ever lay a profane hand on me, no mouth other than yours will kiss my mouth." When Carissa showed me her books with Melanie's poems and letters, she told me that was her single favorite line. She said the Hahnemanns would have nine glorious years together, and Melanie would go on to become a groundbreaking homeopath herself.

  It was due in part to Melanie that Carissa chose, in the end, not to have the tip of Hahnemann's tomb among those with small cameos in the lower corners of the view from Pere-Lachaise. Melanie is buried along with Samuel in le cimetiere now, but the massive vault is a homage solely to Samuel, and the great sepulcher exudes his arrogance. An obelisk towers above a bust of the man, surrounded by--astonishingly--one wall listing his books and another one listing his maxims.

  Similia similibus curentur, for example. Let likes be treated by likes. The Law of Similars.

  Or Maladies Chroniques. The Chronic Diseases--the monster opus he first published in 1828 and would update throughout the next decade.

  Balzac and Proust and Richard Wright are buried nearby, and even they don't have the names of their books on their crypts.

  And yet despite the fact that the remains of his wife exist as well under all that granite and stone, you won't find Melanie mentioned anywhere on the monument.

  Not a word. Not even her name.

  Chapter 9.

  Arsenicum Album

  WHITE ARSENIC

  When the All-merciful one created iron, He granted to mankind, indeed, to fashion from it either the murderous dagger or the mild ploughshare, and either to kill or to nourish their brethren therewith. How much happier, however, would they be, did they employ His gifts only to benefit one another!

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  The Chronic Diseases, 1839

  .

  Five days after taking my homeopathic arsenic, the taste was still a wonderful memory on my tongue: a flavor somewhere in the world of sugar cubes and mint chocolate pie.

  It was a Saturday, and Abby and I wandered into the woods behind our house with a bow saw, and there Abby picked a dense, lush cat spruce that was just about the right size for the bay window. It was perhaps seven feet tall, and almost a perfect cone.

  I dragged it back to our house through the three inches of snow that had fallen on Friday, a good half-mile--though it didn't feel that great a distance to me--and left it on our front porch to settle overnight. We planned to trim it after church the next day, though Abby did insist that we get down the ornaments from the attic right away so she could begin removing the sheets of tissue and newspaper that protected them.

  Then I called Carissa for the second time that day. The first had been to invite her to come with us to choose a tree. She'd declined, but I was sure she was glad I had phoned. Especially when I told her how great I felt. How unbelievably great I felt. In the five days since I'd seen her, I hadn't sneezed or coughed or endured a single headache. And while my throat had indeed burned a bit that Monday night, the burning had been gone Tuesday morning.

  And then Wednesday--a day when I would have to spend four-plus hours in court--I'd discovered to my horror that I'd forgotten a handkerchief when I was opening the door to Courtroom 3A...only to find I hadn't needed one. Didn't blow my nose a single time.

  Just to see if I could do it, I'd then purposely sat in the swivel chair in the courtroom that didn't have my own special cinnamon bun stain. And it hadn't mattered. I'd asked for an in-patient evaluation of a psycho real-estate agent--he'd stopped a teenager with a Trans Am he insisted was always speeding past his house like a madman, tied the kid up, and brought him at gunpoint to the police station claiming citizen's arrest--and I had gotten it.

  I'd also realized that I was no longer woozy. Ever. And Thursday morning when I was awakened by my alarm, I was shocked--pleased, of course, too, but first and foremost shocked--by the revelation that I'd slept through the night. Hadn't wo
ken up once. The same thing had happened Friday morning. I realized I had slept soundly through the night.

  "I probably shouldn't be telling you all this," I'd said on the phone the first time I called Carissa that Saturday.

  "Why not? I'm thrilled to hear it."

  "Because you'll think I don't need a booster."

  "You are a junkie."

  "I think my throat's getting sore," I said, pretending the pain was unbearable.

  "Never lie to your homeopath, Leland."

  "Bad karma?"

  "Bad cure."