by Jake Wolff
He wouldn’t like me much, that man. He believes mental illnesses are a myth, a metaphor. They are not “real diseases” but simply “problems in living.” The words don’t interest me. I do know that people who have searched for the elixir of life have often suffered from “real diseases”: cancers, malaria, what we now call Alzheimer’s—stuff that shows up on an MRI or autopsy. Their search for the elixir is a response to an alarm sounding in their bodies.
But that’s the problem. Their dying bodies pollute the data and place too short a timer on the search. No one has ever searched for the elixir in response to a mental illness. What’s wrong with me? I’ve never found the word for it, but that same indefinability makes it the ideal condition on which to experiment. What’s wrong with me doesn’t clear up on its own, as malaria sometimes does; it doesn’t kill you, like cancer.
Who knows what’s possible? Any question about possibility is just a sanity test in disguise. That’s what Dr. Huang was really asking this morning: “Are you crazy or are you sane?”
I believe I’m uniquely qualified to search for the elixir of life. Whatever that makes me, that’s what I am.
Good night.
* * *
It was one in the morning, and I lay stretched out in bed, the tips of my fingers sandpaper dry. On the floor, I had the stuff we’d taken from the storage unit. The box contained at least some of the materials described in Sammy’s elixir, and though it was slow going, the journals were helping me make sense of them. I read as much as I could each day, in every spare, private moment. I’d reached his grad school years, and it wasn’t until I read his first entries about Catherine, for example, that I understood the CATHERINE vial we found in the storage facility to be what Sammy called the “tribal medicine” in his recipe book.
CATHERINE. It was appropriate that I’d first seen her name that way—all caps, thick ink. Her name had reverberated in my mind since reading Sammy’s account of their courtship. He’d been with a woman. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a dead man’s ex, but I couldn’t help searching his entries for signs of insincerity, for hints that he was only faking with Catherine. It’s not uncommon for closeted gay men to date women, even to marry them—just look at Congress. But nothing in his journals suggested reluctance, displeasure, bared teeth. It didn’t read like playacting.
I set the journal aside and moved from the bed to the floor, where I had a half gallon of quicksilver sitting in a carton as if it were leftovers raided from the fridge. I turned the plastic container upside down, watched the quicksilver travel from one side to the other. I was trying to see it as Sammy did—as the centerpiece to an elixir that could save my father. Instead, the more I looked at the stuff, the more my bedroom felt poisonous.
The mercury reminded me of a day in spring, Sammy’s second semester at LHS. That was baseball season, the Littlefield Yellow Jackets. My position was right field, where no one ever hit the ball, and if they did, I was too surprised to chase it. Back in the dugout, our coach would pat me on the back as if he were about to console me, but he hated to lose, so in the heat of the game all he could manage was “At least no one’s here.”
That day, though, I’d invited a special guest: Mr. Tampari.
“Do you have a game this afternoon?” he’d asked me, after the bell rang and I said goodbye to him. We were in his classroom. Our relationship had been, if not always professional, at least strictly platonic, and I allowed my affection for him to grow only because I considered him unattainable.
“Yeah. We’re playing Saco. You should come watch us.”
Sammy pretended to consider this. “Are you going to hit a touchdown?”
“You know that’s not what it’s called.”
“Are you going to hit the ol’ four-bagger?”
“Stop.”
“The grand salami?”
“I will if you come.”
He closed his grade book. “Are you serious? Because if I sit in the sun with strangers watching sports, and you don’t do anything impressive, you will fail this class.”
I refused to crack a smile; I was serious about wanting him there. “Okay, I promise.”
He sighed in a long, dramatic way. “Fine,” he said, stretching the word out. “I’ll go.”
But these were not promises either of us could keep. As I walked back to the dugout after another strikeout, I searched the stands for any sign of Sammy. Nothing. I found only the bored, stiff smiles of overtired parents, the dirty, sun-kissed faces of little brothers and sisters. By the time I missed another ball in the outfield, I was despondent.
The next morning, I searched for Sammy in the hallway. When I found him, walking in the opposite direction from his classroom, something felt wrong. He was too sweaty for seven in the morning, and his blond hair looked almost leaden in the bad light of the hallway.
“You missed my game.”
“Oh.” He had no idea what I was talking about.
“I hit the winning home run, and my team carried me off the field on their shoulders.”
“Awesome. Really good.” Then, when it was clear I wanted more: “Something came up.”
“Big plans last night?”
“Sort of.” He tried to move past me.
“It’s just that you said you’d come.”
Sammy fixed me with his cloudy eyes. “I know you think you want to know everything,” he said, his voice gravelly and cruel, “but trust me that you don’t.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“I’m your teacher. Not your cheerleader.” He walked away.
I ignored him for the rest of the day. I even skipped our third-period independent study. I spent that hour in the bathroom, imagining him alone in the lab, wondering where I was. What an idiot! I was so in love with him, and whether he liked it or not, I believed that affection made him responsible for me. Someday, I decided, I’d have a young protégé who wanted to fuck me, and I’d be nice to him. I’d show him how barium chloride, sodium silicate, and varying concentrations of carbon dioxide could be used to create microscopic crystal flowers, a whole garden of color, right there on the slide, visible only to us. The flowers would serve as a metaphor for the bond we shared—a special intimacy, but not a boundless one. An intimacy that followed the rules of the experiment, and the first rule of the nanocrystal flowers, I’d tell him, is this: don’t touch them, or they’ll break.
After school, I went to the lab and watched Sammy through the window of the door. I don’t know why I expected otherwise, but he looked the same as that morning. He was hunched over his desk. He had the colored chalk from his blackboard and was pounding it into powder with his fist. It puffed into the air around him. He removed a container from his bag and poured something slow and serous onto the chalk—it was mercury, though I didn’t know that then. His desk was covered in a sticky gypsum goo, and he rolled his hands over this mixture as if he were making the dough for bread. He picked up the dough, rainbow colored from his assortment of chalk, and bit off the end of it as if he were biting the head off a snake. He swallowed. I watched him struggle to keep it down, which he barely did, and then I ran away.
I never asked Sammy about that day. It was strange enough that I could pretend I’d misunderstood, and the next day at school he was back to normal. He called on me more than once to answer a question, even when other hands were raised. After class, he asked me to stay behind for a “quick chat” but was interrupted by a boy, whose name I can’t remember, who had just failed the midterm exam. He didn’t understand why.
“Well, look at your diagram in number four,” Sammy said. “What’s missing?”
The boy scrunched up his face but couldn’t find the answer. To help him, Sammy mimed taking deep breaths.
“Ah, dude,” the boy said. “I forgot oxygen. Can I get another try?”
“No can do.”
“Dude, please.”
Sammy shook his head. “In the words of Eminem, you only get one shot.”
“Dude. Dude.”
“The sooner you stop begging me for something I can’t give you, the sooner you can start studying for the final.”
The boy stood quiet, possibly trying to make himself cry. But no tears came, and he zipped up his bag and left.
The moment the door closed, Sammy burst into laughter. “Thanks for staying after, dude.” Sammy’s eyes were wet from laughing. “I have a question for you.”
“Dude, hit me with it.”
He blotted his eyes with his sleeve and asked if I had any interest in a field trip the next day during our independent study. He wanted to take a tour of a local company that manufactured, of all things, organic deodorant and toothpaste. Of course I agreed.
“All right, dude,” he said. “It’s a date.” Only after reading his journals did this moment, and the way he smiled, come back to me. It was a wild, reckless smile—a smile that, in hindsight, marked the start of our affair as much as our first time in bed. All of the things that had once been barriers between us burned up in the light of that smile like fog being cleared by the sun. The rules of the experiment had changed. Now, we could touch the flowers.
* * *
I’d been keeping these two sides of Sammy separate: my lover, and the eccentric who wrote the recipe book. But as mercury began to seep through my memories of Sammy, I had to face the reality of its influence. We had not grown close, as I’d thought, in the halls of the high school, in the chemical-rich air of the lab, in the cramped confines of his studio apartment. No, we made love in the cave of gloom.
In his journal from the day after my baseball game, he wrote:
Scary couple of days. Yesterday’s entry contains several paragraphs of illegible words. I don’t remember writing them.
I do remember waking from a nap, in the early afternoon, to the sound of the Widow sending a telefax in the garage. I also remember deciding, awake and angry, to drive to the storage unit. I can only speculate on what happened next. When I finally came to, back in my apartment after a school day that I apparently did attend (!), I woke up with a mouthful of blackboard chalk. I waited for a phone call telling me that I’m fired, but none came.
When I first recovered, I found something new on my desk: a postcard from S, from the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (!). He wrote to say Hello, I Miss You. How he even found me here I don’t know. But now it all makes sense: I was woken by the Widow, checked the mail, found the postcard, went crazy. Is that an oxymoron, to say going crazy makes sense?
Good night.
PS: Where does the word “dude” come from? The OED attributes it to the late nineteenth century but does not know its origins. The Boston Journal, on June 2, 1885, refers to the “intense dudeness of Lord Beaconsfield.”
* * *
Although the box from the storage unit contained none of this so-called Appetizer, the Dor, it did contain the Entrée: quicksilver, tribal medicine, B. rossica, rapamycin, and P. cupana. The problem was quantity. I had everything I needed of the quicksilver, but the tribal medicine, the CATHERINE vial, was nearly empty—if it were a jar of peanut butter, I would have thrown it away. The B. rossica had been wrapped in computer paper secured with tape, but I didn’t even need to unwrap it to know I had much less than the three ounces required in Sammy’s recipe. The same was true of the rapamycin; I needed fifteen milligrams and had, based on the dosages listed on the bottle, less than five.
Why had Sammy left me with so little to work with? There were two possibilities, as I saw them:
1. Someone had broken into Sammy’s storage unit and stolen the bulk of the ingredients.
2. The same Sammy I saw eating blackboard chalk and punching holes into the wall was responsible for the destruction—was likely mad with mercury poisoning—and I couldn’t trust anything he said.
* * *
It was early in our summer vacation when he’d attacked the wall, the third week of June. It was the same day our rats arrived: Number 5, Number 7, Number 37, Number 42, and Number 50. Those were the numbers they came with, and Sammy advised me not to name them.
“Don’t fall in love,” he told me. “There’s no place for love in the lab.”
That first day, Sammy spent a good eight hours teaching me how to care for them. He showed me how to hold the rats in one hand with their belly up, firmly but gently, and he showed me where the needle would go to inject the P. cupana: in those bellies, just below the liver. I was too hesitant at first, too afraid of hurting them, and the rats fought me for it, squeaking and snapping. Eventually, I learned.
I did love them—their tired eyes, their wiggling noses, the way they slept on top of one another and sometimes, most adorably, in their little hammocks. They didn’t look traumatized. Their coats were white and full, their appetites normal. Even though Sammy preached the value of scientific distance, the rats’ arrival had obviously excited him. He showed me how to set up the water maze, humming as he did it. We cleared out the supply closet to make space for the maze, and so we were surrounded by shelves and boxes and file cabinets, all pushed to the far edge of the wall.
I watched Sammy work, and now and then I would have mental flashes of his naked body, just small pieces: a bead of sweat on his lower back, a round belly button, a bare knee. If I pictured his body all at once, I would lose the ability to think. The school was completely empty, but we would never, ever touch each other outside his apartment. That was something we’d agreed upon without needing to say it.
The water maze looked like a kiddie pool but with a hard acrylic shell. It was five feet in diameter and one foot deep. We filled the maze using a rubber hose connected to a tap and stirred tempera paint into the water, watched it darken in a slightly sinister way. A water maze isn’t a “maze” the way we usually think of one; there is no way out of it. Instead, it has a hidden platform—obscured by the dark paint—where the rat can stand and rest. Once you place the rat in the water maze, you time how long it takes him to find the hidden platform. If the rat is healthy, he’ll get better and better at it over time—he’ll remember where it is.
“We used to use milk powder instead of paint,” Sammy said. We were crouched in front of the maze, and I could see our reflections slowly disappear as the paint spread. “You haven’t smelled anything until you’ve smelled sour milk mixed with rat shit.”
I wrinkled my nose and watched the hidden platform become hidden, vanishing under the dark water. “Did you ever do a science fair?”
He shook his head. “Never. Are they actually fun?”
I told him they were. My favorite part was talking to the judges, being judged by them, but not the way my high school classmates and even some of my teachers judged me. These judges were my people. A few of them actually wore dark-plastic pocket protectors, the kind you usually only see in “nerd” Halloween costumes. Once, in the middle of my explanation of hepatic stellate cells, one of the judges closed his eyes and said, “Mm, I love learning,” as if he were biting into a piece of chocolate cake.
“Huh,” Sammy said. “I’ve never really fit in anywhere.”
I looked at him, delighted that he was opening up to me, but also somewhat disbelieving. He was so beautiful. I couldn’t imagine him ever feeling alone. Sometimes I did feel bad for the popular girls, the really pretty ones, who seemed to be drowning in attention. I thought of Jody Girardi, a senior, and how every time she opened her locker, a thousand eyes fell upon her perfectly round backside, muscles straining as she went tippy-toes to reach her history textbook. I had always thought she didn’t notice—she seemed to operate in a cloud of beauty-induced carelessness. But one day I was leaning against the wall near her locker as she searched through her bag for soda money. Behind her, Shaun Bowa punched his friend on the shoulder, gestured to Jody’s ass, and mimed biting into it like a hamburger. They were perfectly silent, even in laughter, but I watched as Jody’s face turned red, her eyes shut tight in exhaustion. She knew everything and always had.
Sammy clapped his han
ds together. “Let’s get our test subjects and see what’s been done to them.”
I opened the cage and lifted Number 50 out of his bed. Number 50 was the smallest rat, but his tail was a full centimeter longer than that of the others, and this gave him a toylike appearance—it was easy to imagine him being dangled in front of a cat. He was also our primary test subject: Number 50 would be receiving the highest dose of P. cupana.
I scratched his ears through the rubbery fabric of my gloves and carried him to the water maze. Sammy held the stopwatch, and when he nodded for me to proceed, I lowered Number 50 into the water. He began to swim a lap around the perimeter of the circular pool.
“Why is he hugging the walls like that?” Sammy asked, and this was not a sincere question—it was a quiz.
“Thigmotaxis,” I said, drawing upon a textbook he’d given me on behavioral neuroscience. “His impulses tell him to remain in contact with the vertical surface.”
Sammy said nothing, which meant I was right. Number 50 was looking for a way out of the maze, but there was no such exit. He swam quickly, propelled by doggy paddles around the perimeter. Eventually, his survival instincts pushed him away from the wall and toward the center of the pool. In Sammy’s hand, the stopwatch ticked the seconds. We were timing Number 50’s escape latency; that is, the time it took for him to reach a full stop on the platform.
When a minute had passed, I grabbed him by the tail and pulled him to the platform, held him there, allowed him to see where it was.
“Even if you put him back in the water right now,” Sammy said, “he wouldn’t be able to find the platform again.”
“Okay.” I began to lift Number 50 out of the water maze.
Sammy grabbed my wrist. “Wait. Never just take my word for it. You have to see for yourself.”
