The Normals

by David Gilbert

  "I'm in," he said.

  But the woman was on a roll. "So are AEs worth the risk-to-benefit ratio? Absolutely. Otherwise we wouldn't continue with their development. Are they super dangerous? Not likely. Not if you're one hundred percent honest with us." She waved his medical history form like a pompom. "And you might think AEs must mean intensive care. No no no.They're generally small discomforts." Ms. Baker-Blau began listing them as though they were the sickly reindeer on Santa's sleigh. "There's asthenia, a fancy word for weakness, there's diarrhea, xerostomia, nausea, there's pyrexia, meaning fever, dyspepsia, i.e., upset tummy, urticaria, tachycardia, insomnolence and somnolence, hypopraxia, pharyngitis, diaphoresis, which just means excessive perspiration."

  Billy squeegeed his brow. "I might already be a guinea pig."

  Florence frowned the way a beauty queen protests world hunger.

  "I mean because I'm sweating so much," he explained.

  Ms. Baker-Blau lowered her eyes. "Billy, this is important, so listen. We consider our normals an essential part of the HAM team, and we treat them as such. A guinea pig, a human guinea pig, conveys the wrong message. Way too, quite frankly, Mengele."

  "Mengele?" Billy said. The Angel of Death sounded like a cocktail party faux pas.

  She nodded. "It does have that connotation." From her desk she pushed forward a brochure with the deference of an illuminated manuscript. "I want you to see this. We just got these in. Same people who do the Canyon Ranch Spa."

  On the cover was a photograph of a large building with wings embracing a courtyard, the architectural style institutional pragmaticism, part dorm, part corporate headquarters. A sans serif U. There were no curves, no pitch to the roof, no roof really, only a maximum usage of space.The camera's exposure must have been minutes, for the sky had a tidal sheen and the building seemed smeared in medicinal jelly.

  "This is the Animal Human Research Center," Florence told him.

  "What we call the AHRC." This woman certainly loved her acronyms.

  "Very nice," Billy said.

  She—"No!"—quickly corrected him. "It's the nicest. It's located in upstate New York, near Albany, right on the Hudson. We provide a shuttle service to and from the center, absolutely free, which is rare in our business. Usually transportation is out of your own pocket. The shame is the picture doesn't do justice to the place. Imagine all around you acres of woods and shoreline, bird life galore, the most amazing light. The land was once owned by a Rockefeller."

  "Oh."

  "And HAM has created a state-of-the-art facility."

  The brochure cleverly matched the building, designed like a glossy triptych with front panels opening upon the dollhouse interior of the AHRC. Inside was the typical room, with three beds and a color television and a semiprivate bathroom; the common room with board games and a big-screen TV and a video library; the cafeteria-style dining room; the kitchen with fruits and snacks, a steaming plate of spaghetti Bolognese, the chef a graduate from the nearby Culinary Institute of America; the lab with rows of microscopes; the technicians, the researchers, the nurses, care their middle name; the healthy normal volunteers watching a brilliant sunrise or sunset from a window; the inventory of famous drugs developed by Hargrove Anderson Medical.

  Ms. Baker-Blau proudly told him that this center put other CPUs to shame. "Maybe other companies would consider you a guinea pig." Her fingers gave the term evil bunny-ear quotes. "Some of them have been known to use homeless drunks under the guise of charity. Disgusting. But Hargrove Anderson has respect for the work you do. We value our normals. We want our normals to have a good experience. We want return business. That's why we pay so well."

  Billy asked about the stipend.

  "Depends on the study. Anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a day."

  "The longer the better," he told her. "And the sooner the better."

  "That's good to know because we have a two-week in-patient study we're still trying to fill. Back-to-school season kills us. It's a parallel design. One hundred seventy-five dollars a day."

  "Sounds perfect," Billy said.

  "You should know that the pay can bump up nicely if there's any minor unanticipated duress. MUDs they're called. Maybe an extra fifty dollars a day. Sometimes higher. And you should also know that there's a clause about improper behavior, controlled substances, drinking, smoking, being aggressive with the nurses or other volunteers, if that's the case, we'll send you packing without pay. Fines are served for lateness. And if you're having a particularly bad reaction to the drug, just you alone, we'll pull you from the study and figure in the difference. But we're very fair. Often we'll give you full value."

  "How quickly would I get paid?"

  "A check upon completion. But this isn't easy work. No no no." Florence shook her blond grindstone of a head. "This is tougher than it seems. You're up early. You're poked and prodded. Endurance is involved, maybe a different kind of endurance, but endurance nonetheless. All those particulars will be spelled out"—the phone rang and she finished her sentence on a lesser note—"further along in the process. Excuse me for a few."

  Ms. Baker-Blau huddled for privacy. Billy was feeling better, though he regretted the whole guinea pig comment and cringed over flowery, and did he really say "Nice office" when he first walked in here? Sadly enough he was trying for a compliment, but his lips gave the sentence a sarcastic spin. Still, he was feeling better. The Swedish stallion of a chair had been broken. His bladder had passed the bursting point and like a marathoner had settled into the long haul. The fish in the screen saver aquarium seemed downright adorable, bumping noses with affection. Even Mr. Baker or Mr. Blau softened, his glare becoming soulful around the edges, as if he feared someday his wife would leave him and he was already begging her to stay.

  Ms. Baker-Blau hung up the phone.

  "Is that your husband?" Billy asked of the photo.

  "Yeah. His first-year wedding anniversary present to me—you know, paper. I gave him Knicks playoff tickets, so expensive, you can't believe. Fourth row."

  Billy said, "That's nice," with just the right tone, he thought.

  "The frame's not even silver. Anyway." Ms. Baker-Blau clapped her hands and clicked her teeth. "Unless you have any more questions, we're all set for your physical."

  "I'm good to go."

  She led him down the hall, into examination room #2. The table inside was covered in what seemed to be butcher paper prepared for the choicest Billy Schine cuts. "Undress to your underwear," Ms. Baker-Blau said, her head tilting to the left, as if this request had kicked free a buttress."Someone will be in shortly." With that, she said good-bye, Billy smiling and nodding until the door closed.

  And that was the last he saw of her.

  But today, the day of AHRC induction, the subway seems packed with Baker-Blau types who wear effort-filled outfits neither stylish nor hip, who read books bought in paperback carousels, who fold the newspaper to the sports or gossip section, people you might discount because maybe you've read better books or seen better movies, as you spot the person across the aisle thumbing the New Yorker, or better yet, the New York Review of Books, or who's halfway finished with a certain kind of novel, you wishing he or she would glance up so you could wink without winking and convey / am with you, we are alike, trust me, while the Baker-Blaus around you are those you simply humor, smiling and nodding, the mass populace who, once pitted against your own shallow sense of worth, become a nagging reminder of what you've become.

  Billy finally surfaces in Grand Central. A recent restoration has rediscovered the stars in the vaulted ceiling, the aquamarine sky once again alive with constellations. The zodiac shines down on the polished brass and marble, on the upgraded stores and restaurants, on the oh-so-forties feel. Shoes tattoo their reflections as if soled in metal, and voices recirculate the air into a general hullabaloo. Evening rush hour starts early on an August Friday. Hundreds of commuters speed through the main terminal toward their summer porta
ls where the sun has some meaning beyond sweat. Billy wonders how many have an undiagnosed disease, a genetic time bomb, a fast-spreading malignancy, a nearly blocked artery, a death certificate on the verge of being served? How many are feeling as good as they'll ever feel again? There are indisputable percentages and nasty statistics to consider, cold actuary tables sluiced for blood. (Billy once temped for an insurance firm.)

  But Billy himself is 100 percent healthy. The team of HAM doctors and nurses weighed and measured him, adducted and abducted him, ausculated and palpated him, percussed and probed him, squeezed and fingered him, electrocardiographed him, blood and urine sampled him, and two days later he was notified of his peak physical condition. They offered him a fourteen-day in-patient Phase I study for an experimental atypical antipsychotic. It paid twenty-five hundred dollars and started in a week.

  Interested?

  Billy hits the street and heads west.

  4

  TIME TURNS into debt on the Avenue of the Americas.

  It happens in lights, the wattage by no means impressive when compared with the candy-colored neon and the billboards of models, actors, athletes, musicians, celebrities. The buildings around Times Square could've been decorated by teenagers in desperate need of Ritalin. Me, me, me, they scream. But this sign is more of a whisper, a.psst from a dark alley. Hey you. And peering down like the loan shark version of Big Ben is the national debt clock. Its dun races in the five trillions, its vig compounding more than ten grand a second, while another dun—Your Family Share—ticks in the forty thousand dollar range. The precise number is as fleeting as the precise nth on Billy's wristwatch (now being checked) but either way, in twenty-two minutes and God knows how many more millions, he'll be vamoosed. Billy gauges the worth of his upward stare. Maybe he does this self-consciously, pursing his lips and wiping his chin, performing worry, but the image seems made for him and carries the same sort of weight as love songs for the recently split or beer ads for the barely sober: brief morbid flashes where time and space converge on your sad story.

  Hands down, he thinks, this would be the ideal locale for his death.

  Billy searches faces for Ragnar.

  Everybody is a potential assassin.

  Ragnar?

  All these pedestrians would become bystanders, the final player in the trinity of murder. "I was there! I saw it happen!" they'd tell reporters while behind them kids would wave and jump in the pinata burst of the live feed.

  Billy tilts his chin back, offers up his throat for a switchblade.

  But cell phones are the only weapons drawn. The electronic ring of famous symphonies, Beethoven in pockets and purses, in theaters and restaurants, drives Billy—no, drives everybody, even people with cell phones—nuts. It's like a telecommunicative form of self-loathing. And the denial, the cell phone denial, like cell phones are the bane of your on-the-move existence, like you have no choice, like your shit-eating grin is somehow sheepish. As fears of radiation and brain tumors creep in and more and more people use headsets, the lunatics are getting harder to spot. Someone yelling "motherfucker" could be talking to his broker.

  Ragnar?

  Unsatisfied, Billy checks back with the national debt.

  All this thinking has cost the country another quarter million.

  He should go while he's still early.

  But the trip north requires some brainless reading material.

  He stops in a cavelike kiosk where magazines peer from racks. The people on the covers are mostly beautiful unless politicians or murderers or unfortunates caught up in the day's events. Their faces mark the weeks and months, like a Gregorian calendar with a publicist, all the issues postdated as if milk has been mixed with ink. Change only happens to these people here, Billy thinks, while the rest of us just have the weather. And how often does his own calendar depend on Sally's subscriptions for a sense of where he is in the week: Monday, the New Yorker; Tuesday, Newsweek; Wednesday, the Village Voice, etc. Monthly glossies remind him he's another Vogue older. All these magazines are the visible version of the ever-sloughing layers of skin, dust mingling with insert slips.

  Browsing the racks, Billy thinks he sees somebody he knows—yes, near the financial section, with Fortune in hand, Winston Feller, his first-year roommate from Harvard. Ever the teaser, small and quick, a champion high school wrestler, Winston, then known as Winnie, taunted football players until they chased him around the cafeteria or quad. Seven years later he seems uncomfortably wedged within his featherweight body, like a child athlete who has pumped muscle over hormones. He could be a late-blooming dwarf.

  Billy glances away. Did Winnie spot him? Did Winnie have the same rush of recognition? Billy figures if Winnie says hi, then he'll say hi; otherwise, he'll pretend ignorance. Winnie lives in Westchester, with Charlotte, his gorgeous wife, pregnant and due in late December, near the big day, their own millennium bug—Ha ha!—in the oven. Billy knows this because Billy is a compulsive reader of class notes. With every issue of Harvard Magazine, he ticks up the century, from 1923 to 1999, and instinctively mocks those fools who bother writing in with their latest update, as if anybody cares about their new job or most recent accomplishment. In particular Billy eats up the crap of 1993, most of the people unfamiliar yet all of them successful, like Winnie here. What an asshole. Billy can picture him in his upscale suburban yard fooling his Labrador retriever with false tennis ball throws then coming inside and shadowboxing his wife's punching bag stomach.

  Winnie must've recognized Billy. I mean Billy has hardly changed since college. Maybe it's the hat and dark glasses, which Billy now removes. Winnie steps up to the cashier. Billy edges toward the newspapers nearby. Funny how you'll humor an old acquaintance despite your low opinion, how you'll tap him or her on the shoulder with a hey, remember me, please. Winnie, now leaving, passes Billy as he holds the New York Post, the headline all but screaming CLASSMATE BUMPED INTO, PLEASANT IF INNOCUOUS WORDS EXCHANGED. But Winnie says nothing. He's gone.

  Billy feels slighted, then—oh, fuck him and his kind—reconsiders.

  Back outside, the national debt clock is given another glance, once again, overly dramatic, the way Billy tilts his head and grimaces, like his face is being projected, but how often do you find a symbol written across the sky. Here he is, on the vanguard of ruin, the point man for when this clock will stop and the billing period will end and everyone will have to pay an unforgiving sum. The great seal will break. Mass liquidation will flood the land. God will no longer favor our undertakings. Billy could turn this corner into a pulpit and sermonize on the conversion of flesh: "We are all collateral, all compounded by interest, all pursued by a higher lender.Remit now!"

  But who will listen? Nobody needs saving nowadays. Things are going well. Manifest destiny has gone virtual. Somewhere in the decade, Generation X discovered six other letters: NASDAQ. Besides, most of the people milling around Times Square are tourists more worried about pickpockets and exchange rates. Billy does spot a boy, six or seven or eight, who seems transfixed by this unholy arithmetic. Or maybe it's the flashing numbers. The boy sways on his mother's arm while she scans a map, she a tree to his monkey. Billy watches them, downright stares behind the safety of sunglasses. Such easy affection, he thinks, such natural love, and neither notices the trade.

  In general, children spook Billy. Dogs too. Every time he considers a possible life with a child or a dog, he sees the child tucked in a tiny coffin, the dog mashed up by the side of a road. When children or dogs pass him on the street, their eyes seem to stick onto him as if they're glimpsing his hidden soul. They're his judge and jury and his case is never strong. Pigeons know better, he thinks, avoiding both children and dogs alike, the avatars of W. C. Fields. But the unfortunate undeniable truth is that Billy wants every child and dog to love him, often resorting to silly faces and goofy prattle. The mother closes the guidebook on her thumb and with son in hand walks toward Billy. "Excuse me," she says. "I'm lost." Her accent is German but her English is im
peccable.

  "Where do you need to go?" asks Billy.

  "Times Square."

  "You're basically there." He points west. "A block in that direction and you'll be in the thick of it."

  "Thank you."

  "Right in the heart of the action."

  "Thanks again."

  "No problem, ma'am." Ma'am? Where did that come from? He's far from Southern. Weird how giving directions can make you feel like a minor superhero—Mapman—like all those nothing good deeds where you lend a hand or give up a seat or tell a blind person the light has changed, these things proving yourself—what?—vaguely human. Weird and sad how the slightest drop of your own kindness can fill you up.

  Mother and son move on their way, the son skipping while the mother tries reigning in his exuberance. For them, this is a small moment not worth remembering. New York, August 1999, will certainly land in the scrapbook, the sights captured on film, but this jaunt down Forty-third Street, mother tugging son closer, son twirling under her arm, the two of them now dancing, will quickly be forgotten.

  Billy watches them, a face captured in the background of a family snapshot.

  3:27 P.M. Millions of dollars have been lost.

  Now he really has to go.

  Times Square will have other clocks, clocks counting down until the New Year. Maybe for the first time in history, time itself is overexposed, the millennium profiled on all the networks, in all the papers and magazines, and this is only August. Y2K (the year formerly known as 2000) has sold out. In no time Dick Clark will be emceeing from high atop the festivities, his face, like this country, a miracle of wealth and surgery. Greenwich mean means diddly and screw those islands in the middle of the Pacific, this is the place to be, this is the crossroads of the world, this is where the ball will drop and the blast wave will begin.

  Eastern standard rules.

  With all the fears of computer malfunction and civil chaos and a possible apocalypse from those doing complicated biblical math, the real dread will be the day after, the week after, the month after, when a new batch of beauties grace the newsstand racks and checkbooks are dated double zero with barely a second thought, when what seems to have been a period is just a fleck of dust brushed away.