by Jake Wolff
When Sammy arrived home, he found a visitor waiting for him in the living room: Andres. The old man was sitting in the corner of the sofa, one arm up on the armrest. The bottom of his thick beard rested against his chest, and he was wearing dark jeans and a sweater the color of tennis balls. Seeing him this way, reclining casually outside the library, was a bit like seeing Don in his undershirt. The chairman rose stiffly as Sammy entered the room, but Andres had no nervous energy around him, none of the unctuousness that clung to so many of the people in the hospital, people unsure how to act around a boy who had tried to kill himself.
“I heard you won’t be joining us anymore,” Andres said as he shook Sammy’s hand. “Your father said it would be all right if I came to say goodbye.”
Leena was standing in the doorway, and Sammy thought he saw her mouth tighten. The living room was one of the lighter rooms in the house, with cream-colored walls and a ten-bulb crystal chandelier, but compared to the luminescent whiteness of the hospital, it seemed dark.
Sammy was prepared to endure a long, awkward conversation with Andres, but instead the old man gave a brief, satisfied nod and said, “Well, goodbye.”
“Oh. Bye,” Sammy said.
Andres took the long way around the couch, and Sammy and Leena followed him to the front door, where Sammy recognized the man’s heavy coat hanging in the foyer. He put this coat on slowly, grunting, as Leena’s impatience filled the room like gas.
“Thanks for stopping by,” she said before he had it on fully, then she opened the door and held it for him. If Don were there, he would have said, “Don’t let the heat escape,” but he was upstairs in his office, bothering neither to entertain their guest nor welcome home his son. So Leena held the door, the cold air hitting them hard, until the chairman was all zipped up.
As he left, he handed Sammy a small, rectangular present, wrapped in gray tissue paper. “A little get-well gift.”
“Thanks,” Sammy said, and it was the last time he would ever see the man.
Once Andres was gone, Leena charged upstairs to scold Don for letting the old man inside. Adults loved to talk about young people being influenced by things: violent movies, violent video games, and, yes, in this case, an elderly group of coin collectors. But Sammy knew he could watch the most gruesome movies, play the bloodiest games, every minute of every day, and he would never be anything other than what he was. How he chose to fill the hours was no more meaningful, really, than when Leena chose the crystal chandelier over the wide Roman bronze.
It was good she was angry: the front door was only just latching shut and she’d already forgotten about the gift. He trailed her upstairs and closed his bedroom door behind him. A small card was attached to the tissue paper with Scotch tape. Sammy lifted the flap. The note, which was unsigned, read, Speak of things public to the public, but of things lofty and secret only to the loftiest and most private of your friends. The quote was from Trithemius.
Sammy unwrapped the gift. It was a book, a small book—neither old nor expensive nor rare. The sticker on the back, which the chairman had neglected to remove, said it cost him $18. Sammy opened the front cover and flipped through the pages. He’d seen something like this, he thought, in one of the rarely used drawers in the kitchen.
It was a recipe book.
* * *
Sammy rode the subway to the hospital, and it was dark in the train car, or—no, he was wearing sunglasses. He was sixteen years old, and he was wearing sunglasses to hide the color of his eyes. That morning, in the mirror, they were so red from sleeplessness he thought instantly of the day he saw a family of deer dead on the side of a parkway—three of them together, a mother and two fawns, and the eyes of the smallest one had burst.
The previous night, he couldn’t sleep because he was hungry. He was hungry because he hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t eaten because Dr. Huang told him not to. So, too, did the informational pamphlet she gave him.
Q: What should I do to prepare for my electroconvulsive treatment?
A: First, do not eat the night before.…
Electrotherapy. Shock treatment. In the spirit of Ken Kesey, Sammy had taken to calling it “brain burn”—“a free trip to the moon”—but this upset Dr. Huang. “That’s a terrible way to think of it,” she said. “No one is going to burn you.”
He shifted in his seat. The subway car rattled, the muffled beat of dance music came through the oversize headphones of the boy sitting next to him. The air smelled of exhaust and baked bread. He was dressed in a red hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans one size too big.
Q: What should I wear?
A: You will be placed in a hospital gown upon arrival. You will be tired when you wake up from treatment, so we recommend clothes that are easy to get back into, like loose-fitting sweatshirts or jeans.
This was his first brain burn, and he was not scared, exactly, though somewhere within the deep space of his mind was a kind of trembling—a psychic arrhythmia. As a boy, he would wonder, What’s wrong with me? As a teenager, he pictured that boy and said to him, Your life is going to be impossible.
Then he thought of the Mercury Formula that had got him into all this trouble:
HgS + O2 → Hg + SO2
Andres had known, somehow, the very first day they met, that Sammy would respond to an idea presented this way: as a formula, as a puzzle to be solved. After the overdose, he’d used the recipe book as Andres clearly intended, to refine his search for an elixir, to keep track of the recipes as he consumed them. The overdose had been a bad mistake: for a year or two after, he had no independence, little unsupervised time with which to experiment. He was more careful now. At NYU, where he was a freshman chem major, he tested his recipes rigorously and took them only in the smallest doses. He heeded Andres’s inscription and spoke of his work to no one. He told Dr. Huang he was finished with the elixir, kept his books and his materials hidden. His actual antidepressants he deposited, one tablet per day, into the toilet.
What he hadn’t anticipated was Don cheating on Leena with a Peruvian hypnotherapist he’d met at a conference. Sammy had a small apartment in the East Village, funded by his parents, walking distance from NYU’s shared instrumentation facility. When Don confessed the affair to Leena, she’d grabbed the spare key to this apartment, which they kept for emergencies, packed an overnight bag, and let herself in while Sammy was at class. When he came home, he found her in tears, and he still wasn’t sure which was the primary cause: Don’s cheating, or that she’d found, in Sammy’s bathroom, close to a gallon of quicksilver.
Thus: the brain burn. Either he agreed to this or he gave up school, his freedom, everything. Even Dr. Huang seemed hurt by the news. “I really thought we were making progress,” she said, “but has it occurred to you that your self-experiments are the reason we haven’t made more?” It was the closest he’d ever come to feeling guilty.
Q: How will I feel when I wake up?
A: Hopefully, you’ll feel better.…
By the time he reached the hospital he was ravenous. Even the nauseating smell of apple juice and pudding, which was so heavy there it stuck to the walls, made his stomach growl. Through his sunglasses, Sammy watched old, sick people push their IVs like a reluctant friend down the hallways. In his room, he put on the papery gown and lay flat on the bed. The nurse zip-tied his clothes into a plastic bag, which she hung by a cord around the bedpost. “Relax,” she said, but there it was, so close to his head: the ECT machine. It looked like a microwave or a video game console. But he could see the little pads that would go on his head, the little dials that controlled the strength and duration of the shock. One button said BEGIN, another said STOP, and why was this worse than ON/OFF? He wasn’t sure, but it was.
He lay that way for what seemed like a long time until he felt a hand on his shoulder, and it was Dr. Huang, smiling down at him. She had a slightly oval face, a smile that was almost a frown. She squeezed his shoulder and told him she would be there the whole time, would be there when he w
oke up.
“Will I be here?” he asked.
“I promise you will be,” she answered.
The nurse hooked up his IV.
“Count backward from ten,” said the anesthesiologist.
“Ten…,” Sammy said, and he was sleeping.
Dr. Huang connected the oxygen mask and inserted a mouthguard to prevent Sammy from chewing off his tongue. She placed electrodes at each temple. When everyone was ready, Dr. Huang pressed BEGIN, and the electrical stimuli surged through the electrodes. A muscle relaxant administered with the anesthesia prevented Sammy’s body from thrashing against the restraints. In the 1940s, some brain burn patients would shake so bad their femurs would snap and their shoulders would pop out of their sockets. But Dr. Huang could see only a flutter in the eyelids, a trembling in the feet. Goose bumps emerged on Sammy’s arms and neck.
When he woke up twenty minutes later, he told the nurse, “I have to go to bed.”
She adjusted his pillows. “Mission accomplished.”
He fell asleep for another minute and woke to see Dr. Huang standing over him. She had a slightly oval face, a smile that was almost a frown. He began to remember where he was and why.
“You had a really good seizure,” she said. “Are you going to throw up?”
He blinked at her. “Maybe.” But then he yawned and the feeling passed. The darkness lifted. His thoughts ping-ponged between happiness and the remembrance of becoming happy. He’d gone to the hospital. Three flavors of pudding.
Count backward from ten.
Ten. Ten. Ten.
Everything was light and right in the world.
* * *
Four years later, Sammy was a graduate student, still at NYU, in organic and inorganic chemistry. He wasn’t the standout he used to be. His undergraduate career had been underwhelming, and he’d only been accepted to the graduate school off the wait list. Every year since he was sixteen he’d required “maintenance” brain burns—like rotating the tires of a car—and whenever he was in the middle of a regimen, his memory just wasn’t the same.
That day, he was staying late in the lab, which had so much equipment, and so little desk space, that a casual observer might wonder where the work was done. There was the matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization unit, which looked like an air conditioner, and the elemental analyzer, which looked as if it would talk if you pressed the right buttons, and the infrared spectrometer, which had an arcadelike joystick. There were no windows, and the air smelled of ethanol and coffee. He was proofreading the manuscript of an article on the structures of carboxylic acid reductase, which was part of his adviser’s research—nothing that especially interested Sammy, but it paid the tuition, and eventually some offshoot of the project would grow into his own dissertation.
His obsession with the elixir wasn’t gone, per se, but the ECT had shocked it into some deeper part of his limbic system, where he only sometimes felt it, like an ancestral pain. On “happy” days—in the immediate aftermath of a brain burn—he would say he’d lost his obsession because the ECT had fixed him. But then it would wear off, and the darkness would come, along with his memories. For most people, memory loss after a brain burn was slight, brief, and occasional. “I won’t claim to understand why it’s worse for you,” Dr. Huang had said. “We’ll figure it out.” But he knew the answer, even if she didn’t: everything was worse for him; that was his condition in life. What’s wrong with me?
Sammy was pondering this question when a young woman entered the laboratory with a Styrofoam cooler and said, “Hey, I could use your help.” She was small, maybe five feet three, and her hair was dirty blond and cut short. She was wearing a tank top with the logo of a potato chip company, jet-black jeans, and a worn leather messenger bag, the strap of which cut diagonally across her body and accentuated the shape of her breasts.
He was too startled by her forwardness to say anything but “Okay.”
She dropped the cooler on the table and began to remove the electrical tape that held the top shut. Her dissertation, she said as she picked at the tape with her fingernail, involved the traditional medicines of pre-Columbian tribes in Central America, and she said this, Sammy noted, as though she was only reminding him, as though he should already know. She had recently smuggled home a tribal medicine made from Zamia nesophila, a beach-loving cycad she’d first seen on the southern coast of Panama. There, she noticed the locals stripping the skinlike bark from the fern’s narrow trunk and grinding the leaves into paste. She tracked down a Ngäbe-Buglé healer, who told her that they used the tree to create an elixir of eternal life.
Her use of this phrase excited Sammy, and his excitement was sexual.
She wanted to know exactly what was in it. She pulled the last strip of tape off the Styrofoam, lifted the lid, and removed a ⅝-dram vial, clear glass, filled with a thick green liquid. Sammy studied her as she held the vial up to the artificial light of the laboratory and examined the contents from below. He did not make a habit of comparing women to cars, but she reminded him—the thought was there, he couldn’t unthink it—of the Ferrari Testarossa.
His ability to feel this attraction, he knew, was the result of the brain burns. They did help. If nothing else, the ECT eliminated a doubt he’d had in his mind since his jump out of his window—that is, he’d often doubted his father’s cold reassurances that his disorder was chemical and not an indictment of his character. The real torture of mental illness is this lingering sensation that normalcy is a thought away, that if only you were strong enough, you could think your way out of it. But if that were true, something so visceral as the brain burn wouldn’t help at all. A paradox emerged from the convulsions: the ECT left him both happier and weaker. Imagine that. It turned out strength had nothing to do with it.
“I’m not a phytochemist,” he told the woman. “I don’t think I can do anything.”
She snorted. “You know how to use the equipment and you’re here on a Friday evening. You obviously have nothing better to do.” She handed him the vial.
“Actually, I am interested in the elixir of life.” It was the first time he’d said this out loud since he was sixteen.
She gave him a funny look. “Right,” she said, but something was different. Her confidence had faded. She was the one who’d barged in here and started making demands, and yet somehow, as always, he was the one who said the wrong thing. “Well, anything you can tell me would be helpful.”
“Sure.”
She lingered near the table. “So…” There was a long pause, as though he was supposed to say something. “I’ll see you tonight?”
Sammy cocked his head, nose scrunched. “Do I know you?”
The woman licked her lips. “I can’t tell if you’re being funny or mean.”
* * *
Her name was Catherine, she was a graduate student in anthropology, and what the fuck? Why was Sam pretending not to remember her? She’d met him a week ago, in this very lab, and he was so different then: brighter, more attentive. When she told him what she was studying, he told her to sit, and she watched him find a stool for himself, and then he sat very close to her. He asked so many questions, about her dissertation, about her time in Panama, that by the time he asked a different kind of question—Would you maybe want to have dinner with me?—it seemed like a natural, inevitable extension of that interest. It was not like with the other guys she’d met at NYU, whose compliments were too horny to be sincere.
Long before they’d met, she’d seen him around campus—Christ, had she seen him. Those eyes! Up close, he looked like a feminine Kurt Cobain—like a gay Kurt Cobain, to be honest, but she knew gay men, she’d even kissed a few, and none stared at her with such intensity. He wanted her.
Or he used to. Now he was staring at her like an entrée he didn’t order and was about to send back. He was playing some sort of game, and because the human heart is absolutely useless, this made him all the more alluring. She was aware of the pickup strategy men called neg
ging—“You’d look so much hotter with long hair,” she once had two men tell her, in the same night, at the same bar—but this was something different. There was too much confusion in his coldness. He was lost in it, like a little boy.
“I can’t tell if you’re being funny or mean,” she had said, but watching him, she thought it was something else.
He brushed the hair away from his eyes and looked down at the floor, his cheeks red. He was a beautiful blusher, and she actually entertained the quick, breathless fantasy of interrupting the awkwardness of this encounter by tackling him to the cool, chemical-smelling floor and fucking him until he remembered her.
“We had a date tonight,” he said slowly, with a hint of a question mark.
“I guess I’m not that memorable.”
“Catherine?”
“That’s me.” She was twenty-three and had never trusted men. Sure, she’d slept with them in a mechanical way—it was something to do on the weekends, she couldn’t afford cable—but she’d never come close to a relationship. So what was she to do about this strange, beautiful man? This man she’d been thinking about since she’d met him and who had now forgotten and remembered her in the space of a minute?
“I hope I haven’t blown it, but I should tell you something about myself, and you can decide.” He pulled a stool out for her, as he did the first time they’d met. His wrists were thin like a woman’s. “So, have you ever read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”
* * *
Over the next few months, Sammy saw Catherine almost every day. After their embarrassing meeting in the lab, he’d gone home to check his journal, and sure enough, there it was:
