The Normals

by David Gilbert

  3

  THROUGH A CONFUSED series of trains, Billy transfers himself below Manhattan, jumping in and out of sliding doors and sprinting through stations and slipping from downtown express to uptown local to crosstown shuttle until he's positive—or fairly positive—all traces of Ragnar, even if illusory, have been lost. Wall Street. Morningside Heights. City Hall. Astor Place. Hunter College. On platforms, as the third rail snaps and headlights prick the tunnel, the gore on the track takes on a creepy quality—a sock, a pacifier, mysterious green puddles—and once inside trains, under the commercial strip of molding, where Dr. Z promises to eliminate your acne, and Ramon and Dolores learn the hard cartoon truth about AIDS, and Tide calls attention to the bacteria on the pole you're gripping, Billy can hardly believe that anyone is healthy, let alone himself.

  But he's FDA approved.

  On paper at least.

  Then again he's always tested well.

  Two weeks ago, while seated in the waiting room of the HAM recruitment office, Billy completed the medical history form without incident. No to allergies, drug or otherwise, though he's never been stung by a bee, so who knows. No to current medications. No to hospital admissions. No to operations. Not even a tonsillectomy or an appendectomy in his past. No to fractures. Nary a sprain or dislocation, a tear or rupture. On headaches and shortness of breath, chest pain, fainting, Billy hesitated before deciding he's free of these afflictions unless he's been exercising inadvertently. He pitied those who checked Yes on tarry stool, the same with incontinence and hemorrhoids and bowel irregularity. No, thank you. Along the margin of sexual dysfunction he almost wrote Define. Asthma brought back memories of friends with those wonderful inhalers and his lame imitation with a Pez dispenser. Measles and mumps, diphtheria and rubella, were all but rumors growing up, some poor kid down the block taking the brunt of those infections, the class absentee with lice and impetigo and conjunctivitis. Chicken pox? No, not even after his mother forced him into the company of his next-door neighbor—a lovely girl with chicken pox—for help in corrupting the flesh. But the virus was never consummated. "Sooner would be so much better," his mother informed him. "Because later will be so much worse." Nervousness and moodiness and depression were rounded down to No with a rationalization on the human condition. Besides, a Yes was followed by a Please explain and an explanation would sound so pathetic. Sometimes I get sadfor no reason. There was a brief debate on memory loss and his early years, the amnesia between zero and five, the long blackouts between six and ten, the various gaps since then. Childhood seems to him like a series of small head traumas. Perhaps one day he'll recover a vital chunk, and the false screen will lift, and molestation or abuse or an awful accident will be revealed, some smoking gun that murdered hope and replaced it with puppet scorn. But after all these years, nothing has surfaced, and Billy is left with hollow blame. But he assumed this question addressed recent memory loss so he replied accordingly and moved on. Polio and scarlet fever and tuberculosis caught him by surprise—oldies but goodies—and he was curious whether smallpox or bubonic plague or leprosy would follow, but medical history ended with Other.

  Billy marked his only Yes.

  He thought he might have Other.

  Other was a distinct possibility.

  The next section of the form—Habits—he fared just as well.

  Smoking? No, never smoked. But he wishes he smoked, chain-smoked, had brand loyalty, a collection of ashtrays, could unwrap the cellophane and pinch away the nicotine heat shield and tweeze away the first victim, could light a match with style, better yet, a Zippo, could blow smoke rings, could bum butts and dispense butts in the warm karma of cigarettes, could bitch about no smoking in the office, could escape outside and join the instant brethren on the streets, could tamp, flick, stomp filters, could quit and fail and quit again.

  Too bad Billy always coughs and tears up and becomes terribly dizzy.

  Drinking? Occasionally, but he drinks mostly beer and wine, a few glasses a week with a sporadic bender thrown in every month. But he's expected more from his drinking self, whiskeys and martinis ordered wet and dry, shots, doubles, straight up and clean, the knowledge of the perfect Bloody Mary, maybe even a problem drinker, a nasty drunk, an alcoholic pouring all his promise down a glass, hitting rock bottom, needing help, recovering with Betty Ford, telling stories about his boozy self, the memoir of mash, cataloging the liters of this, the pints of that, and the quarts in between, harking back onto old times as he orders a soft drink with rue and maybe a twist of gin-soaked lime.

  Too bad Billy hates hard liquor and hangovers can crush him for a week.

  Controlled substances? Long ago, experimented in college, marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, but never near an addiction, and upon graduation forgot those things like he forgot so many a required course (LSD on par with Chaucer: enjoyable, perhaps even important, but once was enough). Still, he's fascinated by the downfall of drugs, the obsessive cutting of lines on a mirror, the ravings in a nightclub, the dealers and various seedy characters in your circle, the scoring of a bag, the jones, the raising of stakes, speedballs and scag, the argot of junkies, holing up and cooking spoons and withering away until friends stage an intervention and enroll you in a treatment program where you withdraw with your demons and are reborn, and invariably a few months later you OD and are found in your apartment with a syringe exclaiming the end of your sorry life.

  Too bad whenever the rare joint is passed his way Billy is reminded—Ah, shit—the second after inhaling why he should stay away from the stuff.

  The next section—Family History—consisted of matching the disease with the appropriate blood relative. Billy has no siblings. He is an only child (in his youth misheard as lonely). Grandparents on either side are total mysteries, never met, never even seen in photographs, rarely discussed except as traditional blocking characters against his parents' true love. Statistically speaking, they're probably dead, either from heart disease or cancer, the exact cause as obscure as the whereabouts of their graves. Uncles, aunts, cousins are also unknowns, part of the New York life Abe and Doris fled, a landscape they hang in a musee imaginaire of high romantic art.

  All Billy has are his parents.

  He checked Mental Illness for the both of them.

  Then he signed on the dotted line confirming the above information was true.

  The form completed, the interview followed. "Right off the bat," the HAM recruiter asked him, "how'd you learn about our clinical pharmacological unit? Or CPU, as we say in the trade." The woman leaned into the letters with the instinctive semaphore of a cheerleader. She would've been the cornerstone of the pyramid, Billy thought, the catapult for the more delicate girls. Her name was Florence Baker-Blau and she frightened him.

  "On the radio," he answered.

  Which was true. He had been lazing in bed, on his third snooze bar and second Ragnar regret, when a voice screamed in his ear: "Hargrove Anderson Medical is looking for volunteers to participate in a Phase I drug study. No disease or disorder necessary. No previous experience required. No skills needed. No labor involved. Room and board is free, and you will be paid a generous stipend. If you're interested, please call 1—800 HAM STUDY. You must be over eighteen years of age and in good physical health. That's 1-800 HAM STUDY. Earn money while benefiting medical research. Our quest is to bring people better treatments and greater options. Join us. That's 1-800 HAM STUDY. A job you can be proud of. 1-800 HAM STUDY. Call now for more information." For the rest of the day the advertisement looped in Billy's head like an infectious chorus. HAM STUDY. HAM STUDY. HAM STUDY. By late afternoon he weakened and called and made an appointment with a secretary. "No food or coffee after midnight, just water," she told him. And here he was, tired and hungry, hoping he might resemble a decent male specimen.

  Florence, Ms. Baker-Blau (Billy uncertain of their social standing) beamed. "The radio, that's great," she said. "Really great. Super. Which station?"

  "Uhm, ninety-two point three,
I think, FM."

  "Oh, K-ROCK."

  Billy had hoped to avoid those embarrassing call letters.

  "Well, that makes my day and it's only nine o'clock." She wrote a note on her clipboard, her cursive like soap bubbles blown from a pen. "Hargrove Anderson usually focuses their recruiting dollars in the classifieds of alternative weeklies and college newspapers and neighborhood giveaways. It's cheaper, of course, but I pushed hard for moving into the radio market, in particular, the contemporary rock, hip-hop, speed metal, alternative types of format. Young people are really suited for this line of work. The twenty-somethings"—she raised her hands in surrender—"guilty as charged. So I'm pleased."

  Her office was small and windowless. Billy thought he recognized the faint odor of toner and the soul-crushing spirit of a former copier room where ambition is murdered by a thousand cuts of light. As Ms. Baker-Blau talked, Billy tried to look interested, nodding and smiling, flexing his face into nonverbal interjections, but his chair, this fucking chair, a high-tech Swedish contraption designed to enforce comfort, reacted to his every gesture with either a swivel or a recline. It was like a bronco trained in dressage. Just breathing threatened his balance. And there was Florence, Ms. Baker-Blau, this Amazon well within accidental footsy range. A sneeze could be grounds for sexual harassment. Propped on her desk was a photo of Mr. Baker or Mr. Blau (who got top billing?) glaring at Billy as if ready for a fumble. And her computer screen saver, the dream life of software, had exotic fish swimming around an aquarium, the sound effects reminding him he had passed on his morning piss, knowing a urine sample was required and hoping he might wow them with his bladder command. Christ, Billy needed to go, which made him fidget, which spurred the chair, which threatened his professional relationship with the Baker-Blaus, which collectively provoked his sweat glands and slowly turned his shirt into a Rorschach of what could only be interpreted as a disturbed young man.

  "I love K-ROCK," Billy said.

  "Yeah, K-ROCK's great," Ms. Baker-Blau agreed. She was not unattractive, not unattractive at all. The teased blond hair and gold jewelry and athletic build were set against a wide nose and large hands and a lip-heavy smile. She was two turns from pretty, three turns from homely, a combination that cultivated excessive personality and enthusiastic fellatio. She had the mien of a Norse debutante who could swing a bludgeon with devastating pep. Leif Eriksson's trophy wife.

  "So William—do you go by 'William'?" she asked

  "Mostly 'Billy,' " he answered with his usual defeat: After college he had attempted the adult permutations—Bill and Will—but those versions of himself seemed tough and sturdy and entirely unbelievable. A Bill is comfortable in a foxhole; a Will is dependable and steadfast. Bill and Will are buddies. Bill would pounce on a grenade to save Will, and Will would give the most beautiful eulogy about brave, brave Bill. So how about William instead? No chance there. William personifies a massive checking account and a well-dressed manner and charitable donations in the thousands. William is a trustee; William earns respect. Now Liam is a pleasant graft, a nice word in the mouth, full of soul and depth and human appetite, but try implanting Liam onto Schine with a straight face. He might as well be Moisha McGahern or Shamus Glickstein, Paddy Hebe the limey shegetz from County Kibbutz. Multiplying his mother's Irish Catholic side by his father's German Jewish side is like multiplying by zero. In the end, Billy is the product of nothing. But at least he isn't a Willy.

  "It means helmet," he told Florence Baker-Blau for no reason.

  "Really."

  "And yours means flowery. Florence. It's Latin for 'flowery.'"

  "And I thought it was just a city in Italy."

  "Well, that too."

  "Flowery, I like that." She smiled, the desired effect. "Names are so fascinating. I mean, to name a child, what a responsibility." Her eyebrows were like well-plucked diacritical marks emphasizing the warmth and compassion of her baby blues, pupils spying the future of swollen bellies.

  "What a thing to do."

  Billy agreed. Wholeheartedly. His bobbing head, if cleaved, would reveal a name-your-baby book cuddled in his parents' bookshelf, the pages marked with checks by Robert, Tess, Emma, Charles, the paper holding possible traces of Doris's fingers as she tested the names aloud while Abe checked the meanings for an appropriate message. Would Gideon have given Billy a different life? But there was William, circled extra thick. What prenatal enthusiasm in that pen. "I've always hated my name," he told the recruiter.

  "I think most of us hate our names," she said.

  "Oh." Even you, Florence?

  "Your application says you went to Harvard."

  "Yep."

  "That's impressive."

  "Not really. I majored in sociology and minored in classics. I had what you could call a passive-aggressive education." This was his stock response to Harvard, an old line he handed over as spontaneous wit, and though the joke was often well received, Billy could smell the staleness of the material.

  She asked if he was an artist.

  "Me? No. Not at all."

  Ms. Baker-Blau appeared disappointed. "Because a lot of our more educated volunteers tend to be artistic types. You can earn good money and support your, well, your craft, I guess. People will sketch or write or do whatever they do while they're engaged in a study. A few have had success since. We also get graduate students who are doing their research while we're doing our research, which I think is a hoot."

  Billy had no idea how to respond. Should he claim an ulterior motive, a dream he was financing, a project in the works instead of the unglamorous truth of temporary escape? He wanted to give her the right answer, but his right answers were always lies, so he just sat there and grinned.

  "You're twenty-eight?" Ms. Baker-Blau asked.

  "Yes, but recently," he said.

  "And you're currently a temp worker?"

  "Yes. Full time."

  "Right right right." Ms. Baker-Blau shifted in her chair to signify the official beginning of the interview. "Billy, this is a prescreening interview, more informative than anything else. We'll go over your application and answer any questions you might have before your physical."

  Billy shifted—more like jerked—to signify he was ready.

  "Have you ever done anything like this before?"

  "No. Never."

  "Well, we do love our educated volunteers. They're always civil and mature and considerate. It's also much easier on the explanation process. A lot of difficult words are thrown around, technical words. For example, 'pharmacokinetics.' Hello! Pharmacokinetics anyone? You say 'pharma-cokinetics,' 'pharmacodynamics,' 'pharmacogenetics,' and you see eyes glaze over and you know you've lost them."

  Billy expressed, Those ignorant fools, nonverbally.

  "You see, Phase I testing focuses primarily on the absorption, distribution, elimination, and metabolism of the substance in question. ADEM for short and easy. ADEM is our main concern in these first-in-man trials. It's all about safety t Efficacy comes later, in the Phase II, Phase III, Phase IV testing when we start using people actually afflicted by the disease or disorder under study, but during this early stage, we just want the ADEM on normal healthy individuals like yourself. Plus a detailed record of any adverse events."

  "Adverse events?"

  "Yes. Or AEs."

  Adverse events. Those two words pulsed in Billy's head, a siren accompanied by a flashing crimson light. Adverse event. It seemed more suited to a meteor hurling toward earth. A tidal wave. A pestilence. A thousand natural disasters beyond one's control. An adverse event was a promotion into big-time catastrophe while Ragnar & Sons offered a smaller, more everyday phenomenon.

  Ms. Baker-Blau assumed his pause carried a qualm. "Be confident," she told him. "We take extreme precautions."

  "Oh, I'm sure you do."

  "We have rigorous guidelines. Super rigorous. Before a NiCE—that's a New Chemical Entity—is given to our normal, healthy volunteers, it's gone through a slew of range-finding studi
es. We use nonhuman lab domesticators who receive doses much higher than the doses you'll receive. I mean, much higher. To-the-moon higher. So we already know the LD-fifty."

  "LD-fifty?"

  "Well, technically, that's the lethal dose in half of the NoHoLDs."

  "Oh."

  "Which sounds more dangerous than the truth of the matter."

  "Doesn't sound unreasonable to me," Billy assured her.

  But Ms. Baker-Blau kept on explaining. "You have to understand, Billy, these are absurd doses. HAH-hahs we call them. Hugely abnormal hits.But when we enter Phase I, we already know the gist of the drug, all the expected hazards, and the FDA has approved the protocol, and a local institutional review board has been convened to monitor the prudence. I can say without hesitation, without any hesitation whatsoever, none at all, your safety is our main consideration. You should know nobody has ever died as a direct result of Phase I testing. Never ever ever. Never directly." Ms. Baker-Blau, Florence, Flo, rested her buoyant head on her shoulder as if mourning even the possibility. "But are there risks involved?" The rhetorical question lingered before landing on the God's honest truth."Yes. There are. No ands, ifs, or buts. Risk is part of the job. But without risk, without that entrepreneurial spirit, where would this country be?" Patriotism lifted her head. "These are experimental products, Billy, perhaps important discoveries with a real benefit to society. HAM invests hundreds of millions of dollars in developing these new products, and from the lab to your corner pharmacy, a product will go through years of investigation, years of trials, years of FDA bureaucracy, and after all those years, Billy, all those grueling years, the product more often than not will never get to market. The chances are so slim. Still, no matter the expense and the effort, you press on because you never know, you just never know. Pick a disease, a disorder, a defect, from cancer to the common cold, and HAM is there."

  Billy told her to sign him up.

  "On the molecular level. Biotech compounds. Genetic engineering."