by S. G. Browne
“Hey Frank, have you considered anger-management classes?” Randy says. “Or maybe meditation?”
“Have you considered kissing my ass?” Frank says.
“There’s a lot of it to kiss lately,” Vic says. “Can you narrow it down to a longitude and latitude?”
The waiter approaches our table. “Are you gentlemen ready to order?”
Everyone looks at Frank, who stares at the menu like it’s written in Hatfield and he’s a McCoy. “Goddamn it!”
The rest of us place our orders while Frank tries to make up his mind. He finally decides on the smoked-whitefish sandwich with a bowl of vegetarian chili, but isn’t happy about it. When the waiter leaves, I figure this is my chance to bring up my newly discovered ability to make people fall asleep, but Charlie starts asking questions about his upcoming clinical trial for an experimental drug to combat seizures and the conversation inevitably turns to business.
“What are some of the side effects?” Blaine asks.
Charlie reads off the list of more serious ones, which include mood and behavior changes, depression, thoughts of suicide, muscle pain, weakness, tenderness, easy bruising or bleeding, swelling in the hands or feet, and rapid weight gain.
“Hey Frank,” Vic says. “Did you take this medication?”
Isaac lets out a snort and Frank silences him with a glare.
We spend the next fifteen minutes talking about other upcoming clinical trials and sharing information about which ones to volunteer for and which ones to avoid; then our food arrives and we all dig in. Even Frank, though he complains the whole time about how he was in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger.
While we’re eating lunch, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt who weighs at least two-eighty walks past us and sits down at a table with his buddy, who’s wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and playing Laurel to the other one’s Hardy. The skinny one lets out a yawn that I catch, which prompts Frank to ask if I’m still having trouble sleeping.
“Not lately,” I say. “But I think I’ve figured out what was causing it.”
“Sorry to eat and run.” Blaine tosses his napkin on his plate and a twenty on the table. “I’ve got a two o’clock in the Bronx.”
“Is that the trial for the West Nile virus vaccine?” Charlie asks.
“Irritable bowel syndrome,” Blaine says.
“Well, I’m done.” Frank pushes the last of his vegetarian chili away.
I pick up Blaine’s twenty. “How much change you want?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Blaine flashes a smile and dual peace signs like Richard Nixon before he leaves, walking past the table where the obese guy in a Hawaiian shirt is ordering half the menu while his skinny companion sits slouched so far down in his chair it looks like he’s taking a nap.
And I decide that’s my cue.
“Anybody have anything weird happen to them lately?” I say.
“Weird?” Isaac asks. “What k-kind of weird?”
“The kind of weird that makes you wonder if there’s something going on that you don’t know about,” I say.
“I get that all the time,” Charlie says. “It’s called women.”
Randy claps Charlie on the shoulder. “I can help you with that.”
“When you say weird,” Vic says, “are you talking about with you or with other people?”
“A little of both,” I say.
“Does it have anything to do with body spasms or convulsions?” Charlie asks, running a hand through his disheveled red hair.
“No,” I say. “Why? Did something like that happen to you?”
Charlie looks around the table like he just farted and doesn’t want to own up to it. “Maybe.”
“Did you report it?” Frank asks.
Charlie shakes his head and Frank launches into lecture mode about personal responsibility and the Guinea Pig Code, which we’re all pretty sure is something Frank made up.
Isaac stares at me and cocks his head, as if waiting for me to continue.
Outside the restaurant, a homeless man starts shouting something about being impregnated by aliens and pounds on the window a couple of times before he runs off down the street.
Never a dull moment in Manhattan.
“Can we get back to Lloyd’s question about things being weird?” Vic says.
“Yeah.” Randy scratches at his chest, which is something he’s been doing a lot lately. “What do you mean by weird?”
I look around at everyone, then lower my voice and fess up, telling them everything about the girl on the Staten Island Ferry and the kid on the skateboard in Central Park.
“And they both passed out right after your lips went numb?” Vic asks. “At the same moment you yawned?”
I nod.
“Are you s-s-sure it wasn’t just a c-coincidence?” Isaac asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. Then I tell them about the others I’ve made fall asleep over the past few days.
“That is weird,” Randy says.
Everyone looks around the table, but it seems like we’re all trying to avoid eye contact. Like we’re hiding something.
“Any of you feel nauseous?” Vic asks. “Not right now, but I mean in general?”
“No,” I say.
“Only when I’m forced to eat vegetarian food,” Frank says. “Or contemplate Blaine’s IBS study.”
Charlie and Isaac both shake their heads.
“I haven’t been feeling nauseous,” Randy says, scratching the back of his head. “But I have been getting these rashes.”
Frank, who is sitting next to Randy, scoots farther away.
The thought occurs to me that Randy might have had something to do with what happened to that punk on the subway a few weeks ago. I’m about to ask him when Vic leans forward so only we can hear him and says:
“I think I’m making other people throw up.”
INTERLUDE #1
PORCELAIN GODS WORSHIPPED HERE
Vic stands in line at the Deluxe Food Market, waiting to pay for three boxes of pork dumplings and a couple of steamed buns. As usual, the market is crowded with a mixture of young and old, Asian and Caucasian—with the Asians in the majority. Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking voices dominate the conversation, a cacophony of shees and tongs and aiyas, people shouting or talking loud, and everyone sounds angry. As far as Vic is concerned, Chinese people are always pissed off. They could be making dinner plans or discussing classical music and still sound like they’re about to beat the shit out of each other.
But in the Deluxe Food Market, getting angry is easy to understand.
Everywhere up and down the narrow aisles people elbow and shove their way between each other and cut in line, violating everyone else’s personal space with complete disregard. About every thirty seconds, one of the Chinese workers shouts out Hello! at anyone who isn’t paying attention, usually some white person who is so overwhelmed that they don’t know whether to laugh or run out the door screaming. Inevitably some douche bag tries to navigate his way down the aisles with one of those folding shopping carts, running into people’s knees or up the backs of everyone’s legs.
It’s barely controlled chaos, a banana republic teetering on the verge of anarchy, hot and humid and thick with the smell of greasy food and human perspiration. To quote Charlton Heston, it’s a madhouse. And to Vic, the place doesn’t smell a whole lot different than a holding cell for unwashed carcasses. But the prices are cheap and the food is worth fighting for, so long as you stay away from the deep-fried stuff.
The checkout line is running long (typical) and Vic’s patience is running short (also typical). He lets out an exasperated sigh, looks around, and considers giving up, except he’s been craving the steamed buns all day long, almost since the moment he woke up. But now, standing in line, surrounded by crowds of shouting, shoving, unapologetic douche bags, he wonders if it’s worth the trouble.
Actually, that’s been the running question for Vic lately: Is it worth the trouble? Not ju
st for the steamed buns, but for his life in general.
As far as Vic can tell, his life has no purpose anymore. It used to be the opposite. In spite of the occasional politics and bullshit and pain-in-the-ass students or, more often, pain-in-the-ass administrators, Vic loved to teach. He felt like he was doing something that mattered, offering guidance and knowledge and tools that his students could use to help them become better humans and find success in life.
But then in a single moment of bad judgment and lack of self-discipline, he screwed up and has been paying the price ever since.
Now, instead of being filled with self-confidence because he’s doing something worthwhile, Vic is filled with self-loathing over the wasted opportunity of his life. Sometimes it feels like the self-loathing is something he’s eaten, this constant weight sitting in his stomach, waiting to be digested, and he wishes he could find a way to get it out of his system.
“Hello!” the man shouts from behind the meat counter. “Hello! Next!”
An elderly Chinese woman with a small box in her hands approaches Vic, elbows him in the ribs without so much as a glance or a gesture of acknowledgment, and pushes her way past him to get to a display of uncooked noodles. Once she gets what she wants, she stays where she is, right in front of him, looking straight ahead like she hasn’t done anything wrong and he was holding her place. Vic considers poking her in the shoulder and asking her to go to the back of the line, but he doesn’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese and even if he did, she would probably just ignore him or else yell at him in a language he doesn’t understand.
Instead he stands there holding his boxes of pork dumplings and steamed buns, now one customer farther away from the cashier than he was just a few moments ago, staring at the back of the old woman’s head—which doesn’t appear to have seen a bottle of shampoo in at least a week. Vic swears he can smell her—the odor of her unwashed hair mixed with a concoction of late-afternoon sweat, greasy fried duck, and barbecued pork. It’s like a cloud of stink, a fog of pungent, sweaty, greasy funk swirling around him, permeating his skin and seeping into his pores.
The queasiness starts in his stomach and works its way up to his diaphragm, spreading out across his entire lower torso, accompanied by a cold sweat and a slight bout of light-headedness. He hopes it’s just a temporary reaction to the crowd and the odors, but he’s never felt this sick this suddenly before. So he blinks his eyes and takes a deep breath, which he realizes too late was a bad idea.
The stench of the place—it has now moved from odor to stench and could never in any possible way be described as a scent—flows into his nostrils and down the back of his throat, nearly causing him to gag. He tastes the barbecued pork getting spooned into a takeaway box mixed with the cooked alligator tail hanging on display and the raw chicken getting chopped up on the meat counter, along with the oniony breath of the twenty-something hipster in line behind him and the ripe funk of sweat rolling off the middle-aged bearded guy who just walked past.
Vic looks at the back of the head of the old Chinese woman who cut in front of him, her scalp at the perfect height for him to notice the strands of black woven in with the predominance of gray, all held together and matted into a uniform clump. He can smell the buildup of dirt on her scalp and can almost feel the greasy fibers of her hair brushing against his lips.
Before Vic can help himself, he gags and thinks he’s going to throw up, but instead he burps. Fortunately it’s not accompanied by any surprise juice. He makes a face just the same as he lets out a single explosion of rancid breath.
And just like that, Vic feels better. More than that, he feels clean, as if he’s purged himself of something that needed to get out. A bug or a virus or a parasite. It’s as if he just spent three days on some kind of cleanse to purify his body.
Vic has never meditated before. He always thought that was something monks or hippies did to keep from having to do a good day’s work. But standing in line at the Deluxe Food Market, he experiences something similar to enlightenment, as if he’s floating and grounded at the same time. He’s not even bothered by the crowd or the noise or the smells anymore.
The old woman in front of him drops her dried noodles and her box of what Vic presumes are either dumplings or sponge cake. In spite of the rudeness she exhibited by cutting in line, Vic is in a forgiving mood and decides to help the old woman pick up her groceries. Then she bends over and throws up.
At first there’s just a series of several coughs and wheezes accompanied by a short, controlled expulsion of vomit that reminds Vic of a cat coughing up a hairball. She even convulses like a cat. When she’s done, the old woman takes a deep breath, her hands on her knees, and for a moment it seems like that’s it. She just needed to get something out and now she’s done. Then she lets out a loud groan and somewhere inside of her a valve opens and the vomit starts pouring out of her as if someone turned on a faucet.
The people near her move away faster than you can say jook, which is apparently what the old woman had for lunch. Nobody offers to help her or to see if she’s okay. Instead, everyone gets out of the splatter zone before they can get contaminated.
The aroma of fresh vomit mingles with the bouquet of cooked meats and the smell of human sweat. Some of the customers cover their mouths and noses with their hands as others look away and gag. Cries of disgust mix with shouts of Aiya! while some of the Deluxe Food staff let loose with a steady stream of color commentary and emphatic hand gestures. Vic doesn’t need to speak Chinese to know that they’re not happy about someone throwing up in their store.
In less than a minute the old woman is done, a pool of vomit spreading out across the floor like a Rorschach test. But rather than stick around to clean up her mess or get a psychological interpretation of her regurgitated lunch, she elbows her way through the customers, who get out of her way like she’s Patient Zero, and escapes onto Mott Street, with the shouts of more than one employee following her out the door.
Vic stays put for a few moments, trying to make sense of what just happened; then he steps over the discarded contents of the old woman’s stomach and stands in line to pay for his pork dumplings and steamed buns.
Thinking I’d caused other people to fall asleep was one thing. Now I find out Vic made an old woman throw up and Randy apparently makes people break out in rashes.
“That’s called herpes,” Vic says, sitting on Randy’s couch with a beer in his hand. “You might want to get yourself checked out.”
While there are certain medications that may lead to an outbreak of genital hives or blisters, you’re not going to get herpes from any of them. Still, there are hundreds of prescription drugs that can cause rashes. Antibiotics and diuretics and laxatives. Medications for diabetes and seizures and high blood pressure. Drugs that people are prescribed on a daily basis.
“It’s not herpes,” Randy says, scratching the back of his head. “But sometimes my nuts itch.”
Frank, Charlie, Randy, Vic, Isaac, and I are at Randy’s studio apartment in the Bowery, which comes with an around-the-clock homeless person on the front doorstep and a view of someone’s hanging laundry. If you want a twenty-four-hour doorman and a view of Central Park, you’re in the wrong neighborhood.
“Is that what happened with the punks on the subway a few weeks ago?” I ask Randy.
Randy nods. “I think that’s when I popped my cherry.”
“What punks?” Vic asks.
Randy and I fill the others in on our close encounter on the way back from Queens.
“I read something about that,” Vic says. “They thought it might have been some kind of viral contagion that had been released in the subway.”
Leave it to the news to make everything sound like a possible terrorist attack.
“What’s happening to us?” Charlie asks, his face filled with concern. Even his freckles look worried.
Charlie confessed to having moments where he gets the chills and right after they go away, someone around him suddenly d
rops to the ground and starts going into convulsions.
“I have a theory,” I say.
Vic puts his feet up on Randy’s coffee table. “Let’s hear it.”
I look around the room and wonder if this will sound as rational out loud as it does in my head. “I think that, through the course of volunteering for clinical trials and taking all of these pharmaceutical drugs over the past five years or so, we’ve developed some kind of mutated side effects that we’re able to project onto other people.”
No one says anything. If I were a stand-up comic, someone would start heckling me. Then Vic says, “Makes sense.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Frank says.
“What is?” Randy asks.
“All of it.” Frank gestures around the room. “Everything you’re suggesting.”
“What’s so ridiculous about it?” I ask. “We’ve all been volunteering for clinical trials for what? Five years? Six years? And how many of those trials have involved some experimental drug that caused a bunch of side effects like vomiting or rashes or drowsiness?”
“Or seizures,” Charlie says.
“Yeah, and what about that study we all took part in last month?” Randy says. “The one where we were given multiple drugs to see how they interacted with one another? Maybe that triggered something.”
I hadn’t thought about that, but considering we all started to experience these side effects not long after that study ended, it might have been a factor. After all, when you take multiple medications at the same time, you never know what can happen.
“I give p-people erections,” Isaac says, as if making a confession, his face turning red. “Not w-w-women, but, you know, men. I cause them to get b-boners.”
“Seriously?” Vic asks.
Isaac nods.
“That’s awesome,” Randy says.
In addition to the popular medications taken to help manage erectile dysfunction, priapism is a possible side effect of numerous drugs, including antidepressants, anticoagulants, and medications to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
