Law of Similars

by Chris Bohjalian

  But I had never cared for the bears, even when I was a boy. I didn’t like the way the arms had joints at the shoulders, and the way the paws had claws made of a rubber that felt like a pencil’s eraser. I’d just never found the bears very cuddly.

  Yet my sister and I owned one or two of almost every single grizzly ever made. Abby must have had a dozen of the things in her room, and at least a dozen more in a sealed moving box in the attic.

  With Carissa, I’d gone into the childhood embarrassments that were an inevitable part of what my parents would refer to eventually as their weird midlife hippie phase. There was my father standing beside the tiny bleachers at the Little League field in Burlington in the summer of 1971, his hair in a ponytail. There was my mother picking me up from the school nurse’s office one morning in second grade when I had a fever that reached triple digits. My mother was wearing an Indian sari, and what I believe were called “granny glasses,” with deep purple lenses.

  “We were meditating,” she’d explained to the nurse when the other woman had actually had the audacity to ask.

  And I’d told Carissa what it had been like to witness my mother die slowly from lung cancer—although it was the treatment, I thought, that had made it so painful to watch. Especially the radiation. The esophageal radiation. My mother couldn’t eat because she couldn’t swallow, and sometimes after struggling through one of those tiny cans of high-protein shake, the pain in her throat would become too much, and she’d end up vomiting all she’d consumed.

  Finally, I had recalled—whether for Carissa or for myself, I hadn’t a clue—a few predictably painful teen memories, including the afternoons I would rifle through my older sister’s underwear drawer to find bras I could practice unsnapping. And that April morning when I was seventeen, and Laurel Palmore’s septic tank had overflowed, and all of the condoms Laurel and I had used our last year of high school had floated onto the stone terrace in the Palmores’ backyard. (“I guess I should have carried them home with me,” I’d said when she called me, sobbing, the night her mother found them. I knew it would cost me my girlfriend.)

  “You really do have a healthy libido,” Carissa had said, and while I hoped it was meant as a compliment, I was pretty sure that the homeopath was just trying to be gracious. She must have seen I was on the verge of tears.

  That night as I was starting to drift off to sleep, I realized my throat was growing sore. Burning, once more. I tried not to swallow, afraid swallowing would cause pain and that pain would cause me to wake up. But it took an effort not to swallow, and that effort pulled me back from the brink. I opened my eyes, I stretched my neck. I was awake.

  Carissa, I decided, was going to prescribe arsenic. And it was going to kill me. I was sure of it. The little book I’d skimmed at dinner had said something about arsenic being a good remedy for people whose symptoms included restlessness. Anxiety. Fear.

  A sore throat.

  Well, that’s me, I thought. I’m going to get arsenic, and I’m going to tank.

  In the morning, I knew, arsenic would stop scaring me. After all, there really wasn’t any arsenic at all in the remedy. Just like there was no tarantula in tarantula. Or gold in gold. Or belladonna in belladonna. That was the beauty of homeopathy. (Or, I thought, why it was such incredible quackery. I wondered if instead of seeing this woman for help, I should be prosecuting her for fraud.) Unlike conventional medicine or naturopathic medicine or even that seemingly wholesome New Age standby herbalism, homeopathic medicine was completely safe. It might not do a bloody thing to heal me…but it sure as heck couldn’t hurt me.

  The book had even said the whole essence of a homeopathic remedy was dilution. You took a substance and kept diluting it and shaking it, diluting and shaking, until there was virtually nothing left of the original ingredient. The dilution might go from one part arsenic and ninety-nine parts water to one part arsenic and a million parts water. Maybe the ratio would become one to one hundred million.

  Homeopaths believed, of course, that even at that infinitesimal a level, the remedy retained a memory of the original substance—just enough to set the body on its path to recovery.

  But from a chemist’s perspective, it was certainly harmless. And most likely quackery.

  No, it was the other way around: Certainly quackery. Most likely harmless.

  It couldn’t possibly be absolutely, positively—certainly—harmless. After all, who the hell knew how that stuff was made? The fact is, the remedy began with arsenic. Arsenic! Poison! And just as it was possible that there could be a bad batch of a prescription drug—Amoxil or Claritin or Seldane gone wrong—it was certainly conceivable that there could be a bad batch of arsenic.

  I imagined a homeopathic chemist—a barefoot blonde in a white lab coat, Carissa Lake in a lab filled with ferns—and saw her holding a pair of beakers, wondering, Let’s see, which one is one to one hundred and which one is one to one thousand?

  Carissa had said the remedy was usually diluted beyond something called Avogadro’s number—beyond a detectable trace. Well, it seemed to me that was fine if this Avogadro fellow was a NASA scientist with a NASA scientist’s toys, the tools for a proper, twenty-first-century chemical analysis. But what if Avogadro were some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century alchemist? A guy in a hood who lacked even the tools to weigh himself properly? I decided I’d have to ask Carissa about Avogadro the next time I spoke with her, or look him up on the Web in the morning.

  I reached into my nightstand drawer, hoping to find a tube of cough drops. No luck. I’d have to go downstairs for a spray of Chloraseptic. Elizabeth and I had always talked about putting a bathroom on the second floor of the old farmhouse we’d bought, but we had never gotten around to it. And so the only bathroom in the whole place—on the first floor, on the far side of the kitchen—seemed about an acre away in the middle of the night, especially on cold nights in January and February.

  For a moment I watched it snow from my bedroom window, the larger flakes rafting in the occasional gusts like leaves in a stream, before settling finally in the grass. I’d suspected the snow had resumed when I’d turned out the light, because the world had seemed so quiet.

  Downstairs I passed through the kitchen. There were my dishes in the sink, and there on the counter was the little book Carissa had lent me. And there on the cover was the picture of that old bald guy with a beard. Hahnemann. Samuel Hahnemann. Mr. Homeopath. Dr. Like-Cures-Like.

  Carissa had said that Hahnemann had begun his “provings” in the late 1700s and continued them into the nineteenth century.

  Provings, of course, sounded scientific, at least in a vaguely mad-doctor-with-a-monocle sort of way. But Hahnemann was also a bark eater. His exploration of what would become homeopathy had begun when he’d started eating Peruvian bark in 1790 in order to try and replicate the symptoms of malaria.

  That, in turn, probably meant that Avogadro had lived in the nineteenth century, too. Perhaps even earlier.

  Shit. Carissa, I realized, was going to give me arsenic. And I was going to get sicker for sure.

  Number 74

  Among chronic diseases we must unfortunately include all those widespread illnesses artificially created by allopathic treatments, by the prolonged use of violent, heroic drugs in strong, increasing doses.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  Jennifer realized her husband was serious about homeopathy while she was watching him shave one morning late in November. It wasn’t long after their race to the emergency room in the middle of the night, and he may still have been taking prednisone.

  She remembered sitting on a small bar stool in the corner of the bathroom off their bedroom, watching his reflection in the mirror as the razor cleared the white foam from his face like a snowplow.

  “And you could get a cat,” Richard was saying, his eyes on his chin.

  “Is that what all this is about?” she’d asked. “You want me to have a cat?”

  �
�You love cats. And the kids could have a dog.”

  “Timmy talks a good game, but I don’t think he really cares one way or the other.”

  “What about Kate?” he had asked, referring to their daughter. “She brought it up again just the other night.”

  “She starts high school in a year. Ten months. Trust me, pretty soon boys will matter to her a whole lot more than a dog. She won’t even remember she’d wanted a dog.”

  “Ah, but you’ll still want a cat.”

  “I’m fine, sweetheart. I really am. I see more than my share of cats and dogs at the animal hospital. I get my fix twice a week. Don’t feel you need to do this because your family wants pets.”

  She’d watched him start on his neck, tilting his head back as far as he could, and she’d wondered how men managed to shave there. It didn’t just look like it hurt: It looked downright deadly.

  “There are other reasons.”

  She thought she had probably smiled. She knew exactly what he was going to say next. “Such as?”

  “No inhalers. I have this great fantasy that someday I won’t have an inhaler with me wherever I go. I won’t see one every time I open my desk drawer at work. There won’t be one taking up space in my attaché case. I won’t have to sleep with one next to our bed.”

  “It’s not like you’re an invalid,” she had said. Because, after all, he wasn’t. Not at all.

  “And I’d love to go off theophylline. You have to wonder what I’m doing to my body long-term with that stuff. Every time I look at the warning about side effects, my stomach gets a little queasy.”

  “You’d be much worse without it.”

  “Right now I would be.” He’d rinsed the razor, and the Eucerin ointment on the back of his hand glistened like vegetable shortening. The eczema had flared up the other day with the asthma, and even through the skin cream she could see the scabs and patches of red flaky skin.

  “But you know what scares me the most?” he’d said. “The prednisone, that’s what. I hate the whole idea of pumping my body full of steroids.”

  “I don’t think you’ve been on prednisone more than six or seven weeks in all the years we’ve been married.”

  “Well, it’s been more often than that. And two weeks in the last year alone, counting last Tuesday’s little debacle.”

  “It wasn’t a debacle.”

  “A three A.M. race to the emergency room? Waking up Kate in the middle of the night so she knows we’re gone in case the house catches on fire?” He’d shaken his head before rolling the razor over a thin strip of white at the edge of his neck nearest his ear. “I don’t like being in the hospital, and I don’t like being unable to breathe. Trust me: It was a debacle. A complete and utter debacle.”

  “Have you talked to your allergist about this?”

  “About seeing a homeopath? No way. Dawson would never approve. He’d feel much too threatened.”

  “So you’re doing it anyway?”

  “Dawson’s a drug dealer, for God’s sake. The man’s a pusher. You know what his response was to Tuesday’s attack? New drugs. More drugs. Accolate. Zyflo. Things called pathway interrupters. Well, I don’t want new drugs. I want no drugs.”

  She’d sighed. “Have you checked this woman’s credentials?”

  “She comes highly recommended.”

  “Oh, does she now?”

  “You betcha. She saw Christine through menopause—”

  “Go on! Christine’s been through menopause?”

  He’d shrugged. “She’s forty-eight, forty-nine years old.”

  “I knew she was older than us. But not six or seven years older than us.”

  “Yup—”

  “She told you she was in menopause?”

  “She was having hot flashes in meetings.” He’d said it so matter-of-factly that she’d thought to herself, My body would have to be in the midst of a jet-engine flame-out before I’d announce in a meeting, Yikes! Hot flash!

  “And she helped Dan go a whole winter without a cold,” he’d continued.

  Downstairs she heard a replicated explosion—a car crash, perhaps—from one of Timmy’s video games. He knew he wasn’t supposed to play on the computer before school.

  “Maybe you should start by seeing if she has anything for the dermatitis,” she’d suggested. After all, it often seemed that the skin thing bothered him more than the asthma. On days when his ad agency had a new business presentation, he’d be miserable. Absolutely miserable. He’d find himself beginning the pitch by apologizing for refusing to shake people’s hands.

  It had been so bad lately that they hadn’t made love since before his attack, because he couldn’t bring himself to touch her.

  “The dermatitis goes with the asthma,” he’d said.

  “Well, does she at least have a license or something?”

  He’d paused, then put the cap on the shaving cream and the can in the small cabinet by the sink. “Do you think homeopaths need licenses?”

  “Oh, God, I hope so.”

  “Who’d license them? The State Medical Board?”

  “I have no idea. But I’d look into it before I put my trust in some holistic hippie.”

  He’d splashed cold water on his face and then dried himself with the hand towel by the sink. “I’ll look into it,” he’d said, and his words had made her feel better. He’d sounded so serious.

  “Good. After all, most of the time your asthma’s completely under control. But this homeopathy thing? Who knows what that could do.”

  Anyone who’s lived in Vermont for any time at all knows the old joke about Burlington: It’s a great place to live because it’s so close to Vermont.

  I had heard the joke all my life. My family had moved to Burlington from a Connecticut suburb of Manhattan when I was a toddler, and it was very soon after settling there that my father founded Green Mountain Grizzlies. My parents, like so many other flatlanders who migrated north to the city on the lake, fell in love with Burlington exactly because they could say that they lived in Vermont without having to endure rural poverty, roads that smelled of manure, and the isolation that was a natural by-product of the mountains of snow and rivers of mud that arrived between November and May.

  Burlington sits on a hill that slopes gently into Lake Champlain. At the top of the hill are the rows of stately Victorian homes and Gothic Revival cottages built by lumber and potash barons throughout the nineteenth century, as well as the greens and quadrangles dotting the campus of the state’s two-century-old university. The downtown itself has evolved into a lakefront of boathouses and bike paths, with perhaps a half-dozen blocks, all told, of expensive specialty shops, coffee bars, and small office buildings—none taller than seven stories.

  The place is constantly cited by magazines and newspapers as one of America’s most livable cities, which was probably why Elizabeth and I bought a farmhouse in the mountains twenty miles to the south as soon as we could. The neighborhoods in the city where we were likely to live were just getting too damn mannered.

  And while our jobs might demand that we work in the town, we sure as hell didn’t have to join the throngs who were drawn there from around the country by the high-tech giants that were employing literally thousands of aspirational Vermonters by the end of the 1980s. After all, if we had stayed in the city long enough, we might have wound up joining a Kiwanis Club, like fully two-thirds of the bankers in Elizabeth’s department. Worse, we might have ended up volunteering for the Chamber of Commerce, like Philip Hood.

  Hood, the State’s Attorney for Chittenden County, had the sole corner office, and the only one that faced Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. That was, in my mind, a perfectly reasonable perk, given the fact that Phil actually spent more time at his desk and less time in court than any of the other lawyers.

  As Phil’s chief deputy, I knew I had the best office of the dozen other state prosecutors in Burlington—the best view of the city, the most light, the shortest walk to the copier and the print
er and the coffee machine—but it was Margaret Turnbull who had the best toys. That made sense, of course, because she handled easily eighty percent of the child-abuse cases that came our way. And so whenever she wanted to discuss whether a case should go to trial or what sort of sentence to offer the accused—that human litany of fathers and uncles and new boyfriends of Mom, that group of men who were despicable, unrepentant, and (in Margaret’s and my minds) patently guilty, even if the evidence wasn’t there—I’d go to her office. I liked beaching the plastic whales beside the glass snow globes (one of which was filled with a real starfish and actual sand), and walking her Barbies and Kens around the edge of the desk. I liked the small cubes and puzzles and blocks.

  Sometimes the toys would remind me of Abby, and in the back of my mind I’d be thinking of new games I could invent to entertain my daughter. Other days, however, I’d see the dolls and lose complete sight of the fact that I was a father: I’d view them instead as profoundly erotic little models of people—men with washboards for stomachs, and women with fetish-thin waists—and I’d forget the fact that these were the very same sorts of dolls around which my four-year-old crafted whole worlds.

  I remember I met with Margaret in her office the morning after my very first consultation with Carissa. The clouds that had dusted the ground with snow were well to the east, and the sky was the neon blue that comes only in winter. It was freezing out, but with the sky that crisp, I lost all fear that the homeopath would make me down arsenic. She’d give me something that sounded vaguely magic, like belladonna. Or Gelsemium. Or Ignatia.

  Ignatia, I decided, that’s what I’d like. Sounds just like a saint.

  There were three cases Margaret wanted to discuss: an at-tempted sexual assault, an “L and L” with a minor—a lewd and lascivious act—and a possible murder.

  “Let’s start with the murder,” I suggested, sitting archaeologist Barbie on the arm of the chair I’d taken opposite her desk, and resting the chocolate doughnut I’d bought in my lap. I’d never seen this Barbie before; she was new. Dark, dark hair. A wide-brimmed hat to protect her plastic shell from that searing hot desert sun, a fossil hunter’s fatigues. A colorful map in one hand, a tiny magnifying glass in the other. I made a note in my mind to be sure this particular doll would be among Abby’s new Christmas Barbies.