He read the reports from France and England. He watched as research confirmed, at its own careful pace, Dr. Holmes’s speculations about a final victory over infection. Phenol acted by killing the microscopic cellular agents responsible for corruption. How much misery might be averted by bringing civilization’s struggle to these smallest gauges! Surgery, released from the threat of infection, could free the body from those ills that kept it forever battered down to its lowest level.
Holmes further awakened in Benjamin an interest in what the doctor christened “anaesthetic.” Morton had demonstrated ether’s deadening godsend during surgery at Massachusetts General, down and across the Charles from Benjamin’s laboratory. The war now served as this miracle’s great proving ground. The deliverance of the race was indeed close at hand.
Ben stood as on a hill, above Jordan’s banks, looking out upon mankind’s constant campaign against contamination and pain. Since the beginning, that fight had remained deadlocked. Now the scales had shifted; life might win. Possibility exploded in Ben’s imagination. Clean at least, and released from pain, humanity could rise and expand to fill the day. No deeds would be denied the race. From such a dock, man might undertake the furthest voyage.
By God’s grace, Morton lost exclusive patent rights to ether. Priority disputes with two other researchers left the dentist without enforceable claim. The way cleared, various companies, the naval Dr. Squibb’s among them, raced to perfect industrial processes for redeeming humanity at an affordable price.
Liebig’s pioneering discoveries opened competing paths to Lethe. Wells’s laughing gas, Guthrie’s chloroform: anaesthetic erupted in a single breath. The meager government subsidy of the soap business paled before these stakes. For the nation had no greater interest than the conquest of pain.
Benjamin set his sights on this final prize. He commenced the search for further answers to suffering, better solutions than chloric ether or nitrous oxide. Superior compounds surely existed: more robust, more expedient, safer soporifics that exacted lighter tolls upon the taker.
Ben’s search sketched a formal beauty beyond his power to describe. Alcohol and ether shared a common heritage. Each roughly resembled the other, with only the fruit of their functional groups substituted. Other substances perchance existed that could extend this series of benefice and lift the body past all obstacles. Somewhere down that series lay salvation’s aqua vitae.
The thrill of the chase kept Benjamin working through long nights. He waxed inexhaustible with the sweet prospect. He tested in arduous cycles. For want of adequate assays, he held his derivatives up to his nose or tasted them with a volunteer finger. He noted the effects of his chemical trials on his own body, the only research subject that returned reliable data.
Benjamin entered the most intense period of work in his life, beyond college, beyond the sea, beyond the harshest shifts of industry. The effort exhausted him. Yet never had he been so awake, so certain of his physical stamina. When his compounds disoriented him, he rebounded quickly from their noxious impact. When other tests produced in him lost memories or unimaginable euphorias, he jotted down their effects in his notes and pressed on. Hazard to his own body was a trifling price to pay for freeing the human race from its bodily ransom.
He needed more studies. Studies to ascertain proper doses. Studies to determine levels of purity and mixture. He circled back assiduously to the most promising substances and their derivatives. For some months, he kept meticulous notes of the scrutinized compounds, their precise synthesis, the frequency and quantity of ingested doses, and rigorous descriptions of their physiological effects.
After a time, these notes became more perfunctory. His hand grew more hurried, harder to comprehend upon review. Finally, Ben’s notes stopped altogether.
It fell to Samuel to find his brother. Worried by a long lapse in communication excessive even for Benjamin, Samuel made the trip out to Cambridge, to his brother’s combined residence and experimental laboratory. At the door, meeting no response to his entreaties, he broke in.
In the shock of entry, Samuel thought some denizen of the underclass had murdered Benjamin for the warmth of this decaying shelter. But the lethargic, speech-impaired man with the red-veined eyes cowering from invisible sprites in the air was his youngest brother.
Samuel searched Benjamin’s notebooks for an account. But science’s records came to a halt, silent and complicit, long before tendering any explanation. Even as they descended to illegible burlesque, the notebooks stuck to their one investigation: what might the species become, once sprung from its waking nightmare of infection and pain? Here was the twitching shape of that freedom, sunk into a crepuscular night known only to itself.
The family spared no expense in Benjamin’s rehabilitation. At the height of wartime, they hired a private nurse to attend, feed, and restrain him at all hours. They laid in stocks of ruinously expensive blood purifiers and nerve tonics. What accident had induced, application might yet remedy.
But Benjamin refused to be cured. The man whom his family sought to bring back had vanished. Twice, for periods of two weeks, he recovered a decorum whose sole aim was relapse. Twice he repeated the willful humiliation of his family. Health now was only a trick he employed in their deceit, a parody of cleanliness that let him sneak past their benevolent guard and return to his sickness.
Samuel and Julia pleaded and reasoned with Benjamin. But Ben had landed well beyond reason. For reason was itself but a latecomer, an upstart Tudor needing all the propaganda of a Shakespeare to legitimate its autocracy. Deep inside the human lay an animal, a brute nostalgia that wanted only to take the bit in its teeth and be free to run.
There was something in the human that wanted, above all things, to be a plant. To return to its vegetable origin. And once the body tasted that return, no earthly kindness could deflect its further hunger.
Samuel removed Benjamin from all association with the company. He repurchased Ben’s shares in the firm, at a price that only someone indifferent to and desperate for cash would have agreed upon. And for the good of Benjamin’s immortal soul, Samuel deprived his erstwhile brother of all other fluid assets.
The company saved what could be salvaged from the notebooks. The best of Benjamin’s chemistry laid out efficiencies that might redeem his otherwise senseless sacrifice. Bankrolled by federal subsidy and backed by the research of an addict, Clare eventually entered the growing market for disinfectants and anaesthetics.
The sole remaining problem in applied chemistry now facing Benjamin took on a different shading. His means and will evaporated more or less in tandem. He lived only to lose lucidity, for, lucid, he had lost the point of living.
In those hours when he was not beyond power of thought, he thought only of how to commit a discreet suicide, one that didn’t seem self-murder. He wished only to avoid further hurting the firm’s reputation, which he had already damaged. He stood outside in high places during electrical storms. He waded into the Fens, seeking cholera or the bite of a rabid rat.
He had died once already. He had taken the scent of scentlessness into his nostrils, out on the pack ice at earth’s end. He had already worn perfect white, that bleach past all manufacture. He could die a second time, almost without giving it a second thought.
The tune of his chemical reverie was a shape-note tune. He hummed that bit of sacred harp hymnody to himself at all hours, long after he could hear himself humming. No chilling winds or poisonous breath could reach that shore. Sickness, sorrow, pain, and death would rule no more.
His family reclaimed Benjamin’s corpse from where it settled, in an immigrants’ alley off the North End. They interred it at Mount Auburn, next to his older brother Resolve, in a private ceremony in early April 1865, three evenings before President Lincoln ordered the White House band to strike up that fine and lively tune “Dixie.”
“Hey, lady,” a voice calls out as Laura enters the chemo room for the third Chinese drip torture.
Ruthie
Tapelewsky, staked out in her old corner, waves Laura over as if the two of them have just met for a lunch date. “This here’s one happening place, hey? Where the elite meet.”
“Like I never left,” Laura says, dazed. “Like the month between treatments just fell out of my pocket and vanished into the sofa cushions.”
“I hear you,” Ruthie says. “Wanna form a Fifteenth of the Month Club?”
“Tell you what,” Laura tells her. “When it’s over? When it’s all over? We’ll have a Sweet Sixteenth. Every goddamn month, if you want to.”
Ruthie chuckles hard. “You’re on, doll. Hey! You’re halfway, this time, aren’t you?”
The woman remembers. Keeps track of a stranger’s numbers. Laura hasn’t been able to keep track of the days of the week.
“Well, I’ll be halfway a month from now. When I’m done with this one. How about you, Ruthie? I’m sorry, I can’t remember how many you have left.”
“Me? Oh, I got a couple left.”
The big woman grins at her. Couple. A couple.
“Waiter’s coming,” Ruthie says, pointing across the room at Alan, the approaching chemo nurse. “Make sure to ask for a clean straw.”
Alan straps Laura in and gets her started. All the while, Ruthie keeps up a running monologue. “Don’t let him fondle your catheter, doll. Ask him to give you the good stuff.”
Laura has forgotten the distraction of talk. Forgotten that another person might even be a pleasure. “Nice scarf, Ruthie,” she says, settling in for the long haul.
“Thanks, honey. You too. But you know: I think you ought to go wild. You’d look real good in one of them bloodred wigs. Something in black and purple, maybe.”
“I’ve tried all sorts of creative hats. My daughter won’t let me wear them out of the house. I’m thinking about just going around bald. Save a lot of energy.”
“You should! You should, Laur. Whose business is it but yours? Most people just want to sweep us under the rug. Hey. I made a funny.” She laughs like a blancmange on an airplane cart. “Not that the rugs they sweep us under fool anybody. I think the third word my youngest one learned how to say was ‘wig.’ ”
Laura lies back and takes the venom into her. Ruthie entertains her with tales of the Tapelewsky offspring. They tumble in and out of her account like bands of roving pickpockets and street buskers. Her eldest, a tenth grader, candy-stripes at the nursing home, where she has been named as major beneficiary in the wills of half a dozen eighty-year-old men.
“She kind of developed early,” Ruthie apologizes. “They all do, these days. I think it’s the stuff they put in the breakfast cereal.”
Her second child was just fingered in some kind of scheme to distribute tens of thousands of dollars of application software to Pakistan and China over the Internet.
“God,” Laura says. “Don’t let him meet my boy.”
“I mean, where do they learn these things? My little Elliot, the international software pirate. Come to find out, he didn’t see anything wrong with the operation. Even after the FBI came by and gave us that little wake-up visit at three in the morning. He didn’t see the harm in making an extra twenty bucks a week while helping these Third World countries develop.”
That gets Laura laughing, too, which sets off her IV alarm. The alarm summons Alan. “Now, will you two ladies behave, or am I going to have to dope you?”
But Ruthie is already well into the saga of the terrible twins, who have worked every angle of identity-kiting that their interchangeability allows. And finally—for now, anyway—there’s the one-year-old, the one who gets on her case for wearing a wig.
Laura has seen this woman somewhere before. Something about her feels incredibly familiar. Reassuring, too. Like nobody’s going to come to any lasting harm while Ruthie is around to keep them entertained. Ruthie, against whose snort and chortle the latest in organized madness slinks away embarrassed.
It nags at Laura: Where has she met this person? How does she know her? Then the penny drops: a childhood friend, an ancient comfort. The old woman who lived in a shoe.
“How’s that hopeless husband of yours?” Ruthie asks. “You teach him when to use which diapers yet?”
“No, Ruthie,” Laura squeezes out, between giggles. “That’s your husband.”
“Oh. Come to think of it, you’re right. I get your husband and my husband confused.”
Laura would wet herself, if this weren’t a hospital. “He’s not my husband, Ruthie.”
“Don’t I wish,” Ruthie says.
They watch afternoon TV, Laura in a growing fog of nausea, Ruthie sassing back at the angst-ridden soap actresses and the airhead talk show hosts.
“Problem Shoppers. Now there’s a support group whose fax number I need. Teens Who Kill for Clothing. What do you say we skip this one?” To the various sales pitches whose stories interrupt these stories, Ruthie blows assorted raspberries. “Yeah. Right. Like I’ve got time for a lifestyle.” Or: “It’s just a damn car, lady. Stop jerking off on the fender.”
Ruthie winds up her treatment just as Laura’s own chemo starts to slam her. “Ride it out, kiddo. Don’t let them catch you dragging.”
“Don’t leave me yet, Ruthie. I need you.”
“Oh, honey. I’ll be back soon enough,” the woman groans. Somewhere along the line, the groan becomes another quaking blancmange without Laura seeing it change.
And she’s left alone. With each go-round, her body’s revolt starts sooner, digs in deeper, and departs with more elaborated viciousness. The biohazards are building up in her bloodstream. Or maybe she’s just getting conditioned to puke whenever she sees a plastic tube.
But it can’t all be conditioning. Because the bad stuff gets worse while the good stuff gets weaker. She can’t understand why the Benadryl hardly works at all this time, even though she knows exactly what she was waiting for.
Dr. Archer makes his rounds as she is nearing the end of the taxol. “Thank God for the home team, huh?” he asks her.
She pushes herself through the cork wall to answer him. “Home . . . ?”
“The home team! Our local gravy train.” He clinks the inverted bottle with his fingernail: municipal champagne. No sooner does he tap the empty jar than Alan comes by to change it for the next wash. Dr. Archer gazes at the laboring nurse, but says nothing.
“What do you mean?” Laura asks. She looks at Alan for help. Alan keeps working. “What gravy train? Where?”
“Tell me life’s not strange,” the semiretired oncologist says, by way of explanation. “Stuff’s brought to you by the same folks who took the fat out of deep-fat frying.”
“Clare makes this?”
“No. That would be Bristol-Myers Squibb. NoDoz, Ban, and a few cancer and AIDS gold mines. But Clare sells them cheap materials.”
“I thought the stuff was made with tree bark.” She looks at Alan. “You told me it was tree bark.” Alan just shrugs.
“It used to be,” Archer says. “Now they use artificial tree bark. Used to take six mature hundred-year-old Pacific yews to treat you. Pretty expensive, when you figure yew trees can only be harvested by clear-cutting. The problem was, cutting the trees was triggering some local extinction event.”
“An owl,” Alan inserts.
“Right. Some kind of spotty owl. Now me, call me irresponsible, but I’m one of those Humans First folk. I say, if somebody needs the trees to get well, to hell with the owl.”
“What about the trees?” Alan asks. “No offense, Mrs. B.”
She waves him off. “Of course not.”
“What do you mean?” Dr. Archer spits.
“I mean, a lot of people might have said to hell with the yews, a year before they discovered taxol in the bark. And besides: six hundred years of tree for every sixty years of human being? As the song says, something’s gotta give.”
“Well, young man, that’s exactly where science comes in. One of our home-team chemists has figured out how to make, in a test tube, what used
to cost an arm and a leg and half a dozen yew trunks. The molecule that does all the good work is so complex that synthesizing an imitation was supposed to have taken years. But so many people were willing to pay so much for it that science has produced a substitute in record time.”
Alan waves his hand. “Whatever you say, Doctor.”
“If you just get out of people’s way, they’ll figure out how to make what people need.” The oncologist strolls on down the gauntlet of patients, still shaking his head at the simplicity of the lesson that humanity stubbornly refuses to see.
“Ask him about the pill form of your anti-nausea drip,” Alan tells Laura. “A weekend dose would run you a couple hundred dollars. Managed care won’t let the doctors prescribe it unless the patient is ready to croak.”
“You mean they have a better thing than they’re giving me? Something that works?”
“Well, the one that works is always too expensive to use.”
“I need that one,” Laura says.
“I can imagine, Mrs. B.”
But he can’t. Can’t begin to imagine. If he could imagine, he’d say something useful.
She starts planning in her head. An all-out bake sale. How many Kahlúa Nut Bars would she have to sell, to make enough to pay the difference, to buy herself deliverance from this month’s agony?
“Yeah,” Alan is saying. “A lot of people out there, figuring out how to make what we need. They say Philip Morris has thousands of acres in North Carolina, just ready to go to pot the minute the FDA blesses it as a chemo palliative. Pretty ironic, given what the fields grow now.”
“Marijuana, you mean? Weed makes you . . . ?”
“Well . . . sure. It works for some people. Does that . . . ? Is that interesting?”
“No, no,” Laura says, wildly interested. Anything. Anything that might keep her from heaving again.
“Tell him you’re dying,” he suggests. “Say you won’t be able to make it through the week, otherwise. Tell him you’ll throw up on his alligator shoes if he doesn’t get you some decent pills.”
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