by T. C. Boyle
She’d drawn her hand back when he’d begun waving his arm, and she wasn’t so much thinking that this was the first time they’d ever actually touched, aside from brushing past each other in the performance of their daily routines, but of what he’d written in the notebook. Ataxia, anxiety. Would he need an emetic? A tranquillizer? Should she call a doctor?
As if reading her thoughts, he turned his face to her again—black eyed, his features slack and distorted—and murmured, “It’s all right, Susi, I’m fine, everything’s fine, it’s just that—well, let’s see, let’s give it a . . . bit more time.” He glanced at the clock, let out another laugh. “It’s only five. We wouldn’t want to . . . to cheat . . . the, the company out of our last hour’s work of the day, would . . . we?”
Everything stopped right there, right in that instant: he’d called her Susi. Never before, never once, had he let slip the formal bonds of their relationship, under which, rigorously, unfailingly, she was Fräulein Ramstein and he Herr Hofmann. As upset as she was, as frightened, she was rocked by it: he’d called her by her first name, almost as if they were on an equal footing—almost as if they were friends, very close friends, male and female, as if she really was more to him than a starched lab coat and a pair of willing hands. She didn’t know what to say. Cheat the company? No, was the proper response, but then he clearly wasn’t in his right mind and to expect him to continue work—or her to—was absurd.
He abruptly turned back round in his chair, the four legs grating on the floor so that the sudden noise startled her, and he began paging through his notes as if he were riffling a deck of cards. The pages hissed under the pressure of his fingertips, a noise that struck her as frivolous, and beyond that, wrong: this was the official record, not a plaything. He released the pages, took them up, riffled them again. Then again. “Please, Susi, dear Susi, give me, give us,” he said, and here came the laugh, “give us a few minutes . . . and we’ll . . . we’ll see, because when you examine it, really examine it, time has no meaning, whether it’s company time or free time or the, the . . . time . . . they clock at the Greenwich Observatory. Nicht wahr?”
She was still floating on that Susi, dear Susi, when things became complicated (or more complicated, that is, considering that her boss was self-poisoned and acting as if he were a slurring drunkard in the back room of a whiskey bar). Suddenly he jumped up from the desk as if he’d been stung, as if the desk itself had come to life and attacked him, and when he swung round on her she saw that all the color had drained from his face. He wasn’t laughing now. Now he looked ill, seriously ill, the knowledge of what he’d done to himself rising up to infest the swollen black pupils of his eyes. He looked to the ceiling, looked to the walls. “The light,” he said. “The light.”
“You want me to turn off the light?” She crossed the room to the switch on the wall and shut down the overhead lighting, though the lab was still flooded with sunlight so that you could hardly tell the difference.
“That’s not it,” he insisted. “That’s not it, that’s not . . . it at all.” He was standing in the middle of the room, swaying on his feet. “Home,” he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling at the buttons of his lab coat. “Take me home. I need to . . . Help me, Susi, help me.”
If she was frightened—and she was—she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She’d never been to his house, but she knew he lived in Bottmingen, out in the suburbs, some ten kilometers away, and the immediate problem, a problem that could have life and death consequences for all she knew, was to get him home where he could be properly cared for. She helped him out of his lab coat, her own fingers trembling, and then she was handing him his jacket, which he merely stared at as if he’d never seen it before, and she helped him with that too. And his cap—he couldn’t very well bicycle all the way home without his cap. It took him a moment, turning the cap over in his hands as if trying to reference it, and then he reached up and pulled it down firmly over the crown of his head.
She made a quick survey of the lab to be sure everything was in order and led him out the door. Never once did she think of going to his colleagues for help—just the opposite: she went out of her way to avoid them. She looked in both directions up and down the hall and then hurried him to the back stairway, where there was no one to see him but Axel Yoder, eternally plying his mop. She did this reflexively, to protect him. He was more than merely respectable—he was a cornerstone of the research department at Sandoz—and it would be devastating if anyone were to see him in this condition because they would assume the worst, that he was drunk, drunk on the job. That would never do.
Her next worry was how to get him home. He bicycled to work every day, rain or shine, winter and summer, but was he in any condition to bicycle now? She would have called a car, but it was wartime and there were no cars available, except maybe for the mayor or the president of one of the big chemical companies, so she really had no choice in the matter. “I’m taking you home,” she said to him firmly, reassuringly, no arguments, and suddenly their roles were reversed—she wasn’t addressing her boss and superior but a child, like Liliane and her sister Juliette, the little girls she’d instructed and chastised and watched over day and night when she worked as an au pair. “You think you can bicycle?”
They were standing out on the sidewalk now, the mild evening sifting down around them, sunlight draping banners across the street all the way to the end of the block and the air charged with the scent of flowers and the cooking smells from the cafés. It was a beautiful evening, the sort of evening she would have reveled in under other circumstances, but all that mattered to her now was that it wasn’t raining and wasn’t going to. There were pigeons at their feet, ubiquitous pigeons, parting and regrouping as she wheeled both bicycles up and held his out to him by the handlebars. He hadn’t uttered a sound since they’d left the building, just let himself be led by her like a schoolboy, but now he began giggling uncontrollably, and a couple, passing close by, arm in arm, gave him a look.
“Can I bicycle?” he repeated in an odd tone, taking hold of the handlebars and swinging one leg over the crossbar, his movements syrupy and slow, which lulled her for just the instant it took for him to push off and begin pedaling furiously up the street. “Just you watch!” he cried, glancing back at her with a triumphant look, and in his distraction he very nearly ran down an old man with a stiff leg limping across the street. But panic and more panic: before she could even mount her own bike he was already at the end of the block, slashing left at the corner directly in front of a tram that somehow managed to miss dragging him under its wheels, and the chase was on.
There were people everywhere, on bicycles, in carts, on foot, men carrying satchels home from work, women with groceries, children darting out after hoops or balls till the street was like an obstacle course—and dogs too, dogs popping up to chase along, disappear and pop up all over again. The tram. An automobile. A wagon laden with beer kegs. Herr H. was wearing the loden jacket she’d helped him on with not five minutes before and she struggled to keep sight of it, weaving in and out of the traffic. She was pedaling with everything she had but she didn’t seem to be gaining on him, and were they racing now, was that it? But wait, there he went, darting down a side street and into a scrum of bicyclists who were all but dressed identically to him, so that for one frantic minute she lost sight of him and wound up homing in on someone else altogether until she saw her mistake, her legs churning, her heart thumping in her chest, and where was Herr H.? Where was he? She pedaled on, frantically scanning the road ahead, until a figure separated itself from the scrum—loden jacket, pale cap, the hard-muscled V of his back—and she shot after him.
It wasn’t until they were on Bottmingenstrasse, with its long vistas and thinning crowds, that she finally caught up with him. He hadn’t slackened his pace, not for a minute, and it was only fear and adrenaline that kept her going, because what if he had an accident, what if he ran off the road into a ditch and broke a leg—or worse? She was res
ponsible. She was the one he’d cried out to for help and no one else. Of all the people extant—his colleagues, his intimates, his wife—she was the only one on this earth who knew he wasn’t in his right mind, that he was poisoned and in danger, mortal danger. As she drew even with him, fighting for breath, she called out, “Herr Hofmann, slow down, will you, please?”
The wheels whirred. The breeze fanned her sweat. He didn’t turn his head—just kept pumping and pumping as if she weren’t even there. “Herr Hofmann!” And then, her lungs burning and her legs like rubber, she lost all control and began shouting at him—or no, shrieking, actually shrieking. “Stop it, will you? Albert! Albert!”
That was when he turned his head. “Fräulein?” he gasped, slowing now and giving her a puzzled look. “What on earth are you doing here?”
She was curious about his house—and his wife, Anita, a pretty, dark-haired woman of thirty or so she’d met only once in passing—but of course lab assistants didn’t get invited to Sunday dinner or to socialize or sit around dipping croutons into the fondue in the bosom of the family, and in any case, Bottmingen wasn’t exactly in the heart of town. The odd thing was that she hardly noticed the place when they finally arrived—it was a house and he lived there and that was all that mattered. She was sweating, exhausted, her heart about to burst through her chest, but she followed his lead, making a sharp right turn and pedaling up the gravel drive to the front of the house, where he just dropped his bicycle on the lawn and bolted inside, leaving the door wide open behind him, the keys dangling in the lock. Even as she propped her own bike against the tree in the front yard, wondering if she should follow him in and explain the situation to his wife as best she could, she heard him shouting within. “Anita! Anita, where are you?” There was a clatter, as of something metallic crashing to the floor, then a silence. A beat. Two beats. And then a long drawn-out moan of despair: “Anita!”
Tentatively, she made her way up the steps and into the front hall. The sun was out still but it was shadowy inside, none of the lamps lit and the light from the yard held trembling in the windows. “Herr Hofmann?” she called, afraid to enter uninvited.
His voice cracked as he cried out his wife’s name one more time, and then it dropped almost to a whisper: “I’m here,” he said. “In here.”
She found him in the sitting room—sofa, chairs, end table, lamps, everything in perfect order—staring wildly about him. “She’s . . . she’s gone,” he said, and all the breath went out of him.
“Gone? What do you mean?” It was nearly six in the evening—any wife, let alone the wife of such a man, would have been at home, cooking the meal, looking after the children, there to greet her husband at the end of a long day.
“Gone,” he repeated. He pressed his hands to his temples, as if the internal pressure were too much to bear. “And I’m left here dying, I tell you, dying. I’m poisoned, can’t you see—?”
That froze her inside—could it be true? Was it fatal? Had he miscalculated the dose? None of the dogs had died, had they? But then who knew what effect an experimental drug might have, a new drug, one nobody had ever tested before on a human subject?
“No, no, you’re not dying, not at all,” she said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “You’ll be fine, you will—you just need to, to sit a minute,” and she helped him to the armchair, where he dropped down like a stone. In the next moment she was making a frantic circuit of the house, shouting herself now—“Frau Hofmann! Frau Hofmann! Are you home?”—but there was no answer. The wife did seem to be gone, and the children too. She couldn’t help feeling a flare of anger—if she were the wife of a man like Herr Hofmann, like Albert, she would be there for him every minute of every day and night.
Sixty seconds later she was back in the sitting room, repeating what he already knew: “She’s not here.”
He said one thing only: “I can’t stop it.”
“Milk,” she said, “what about milk—to absorb the poison? Do you have any milk?”
He didn’t answer, so she went to the kitchen herself, feeling like an alien in this house where he lived, where he spent his nights, where he climbed into bed with his wife who wasn’t even here when he needed her most . . . She flung open the door of the icebox, but there was no milk. A bottle of beer, yes, cheese, a plate of sliced beef, rösti and haricots verts laid on the shelf as if set aside for his dinner, but no milk.
When she came back to him, very nearly in tears now, to say that there was no milk in the house and what did he want her to do—the doctor, should she call the doctor?—he flinched as if he didn’t recognize her, as if she’d come to do him harm rather than rescue him. His face was in shadow. He held a hand over his eyes. “The doctor,” she repeated. “Should I call the doctor?”
Suddenly he lurched up in the chair, his face flushed and his eyes snapping at her. “What the hell do you think? God help me, yes—call the doctor! And, and . . . the neighbor, Frau Rüdiger, go next door and ask her for milk, as much as she can spare . . .”
She was in motion again and glad of it, glad to be doing something, anything, bolting out the still-open door and across the yard to the neighbor’s house, where she pounded on the door until it was answered by a bewildered-looking woman with fleshy pouches for cheeks and drawn-down little specks of blue for eyes. “Help us, please, it’s an emergency, we need milk and we don’t have any,” she said in a breathless rush, “and the doctor, call the doctor, please—”
“The doctor?” the woman repeated. “But who are you?”
The explanation took all of ten seconds and then the woman had the milk in her hand, two full liter bottles, and they were hurrying across the yard to the open door of the Hofmanns’ house and the woman was saying, “Poisoned? How?” But then the woman stole a glance at her—the sweat at her temples, her hair come undone, the frantic look in her eyes—and said no more.
The doctor, who was local to Bottmingen, was there within half an hour, wheeling up the drive on his own bicycle, his bag strapped on behind. When he came into the sitting room, Herr H. was stretched out on the sofa, a comforter pulled up to his throat and both bottles of milk standing empty on the end table at his side. Herr H., who’d been forcing his eyelids shut with the pressure of his fingertips, dropped his hands and flashed open his eyes as the doctor entered the room, and he looked more startled than relieved. After his outburst he’d sunk back into lethargy, muttering to himself, moaning, exclaiming, the whole time acting as if she weren’t there in the room with him, as if he couldn’t see her or trust the evidence of his senses. Now he tried to say something—a name, the name of the doctor, or no, the drug, the poison—but it was garbled and confused and though it really wasn’t her place she couldn’t help speaking up. “It was an experiment,” she said, feeling ridiculous, feeling guilty, as if she were the one responsible or at the very least a coconspirator.
The doctor was an old man, dressed in a shapeless blue suit and a collar that didn’t seem to fit him. His hair was white, his face red, and he lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement, as if he didn’t know whether to question her or the patient or even to step back a moment and make introductions, because who was she established here in his patient’s sitting room and where was the patient’s wife?
“It was a new compound we—Herr Hofmann, that is—synthesized in the lab, lysergic acid diethylamide, and Herr Hofmann had a hunch, and he . . .” She had to break off—she was afraid she was going to start sobbing. “He, he—it was the minutest dose, just two hundred fifty micrograms . . .”
“When was this?” The doctor gave her a sharp look, his voice harsh and accusatory. “And who are you, exactly, Fräulein?”
Very slowly, in bits and pieces, the explanation came out, and Frau Rüdiger was there to back her up on the details of what had occurred since she’d brought Herr H. home, how they’d given him milk, how he’d cried out that a devil had taken possession of his soul, how he’d had trouble standing, how Frau Hofmann, today of all days, was
absent, having gone to Lucerne with the children to visit her parents, and how Frau Rüdiger had telephoned her so that she was rushing home even now. All the while, Herr Hofmann just lay there on the sofa, staring at nothing.
“All right, then,” the doctor said, turning to him. “How are you feeling, Albert? Can you speak?”
Herr Hofmann—black eyes, fingertips alive at his temples—only nodded.
“This young woman—your assistant, is that right? This young woman claims that you’ve ingested a very small dose of this substance, two hundred fifty micrograms, yes? Nod if that’s true.”
Herr Hofmann nodded, and then he was trying to say something. The doctor leaned in, cupping a hand to one ear. “Yes,” Herr H. said, his voice so soft it was barely audible. “Yes—micrograms.”
The doctor didn’t reply, just pursed his lips and reached behind him for his black bag. He took the patient’s temperature, which was slightly elevated, applied his stethoscope and finally pressed a finger to Herr H.’s wrist to count his pulse. A long moment crept by, Frau Rüdiger looking as startled as if she’d stumbled upon some satanic rite in the sitting room of her next-door neighbor who’d always seemed so unassuming and substantial but was now revealed as a deviate, while the doctor’s eyebrows rode up and down like pale markers in the gathering gloom as the evening deepened and Susi took it upon herself to go around the room and switch on the lamps as if this were her own house and her own privilege.
“Everything appears normal, Albert,” the doctor said finally, turning aside to replace his instruments in his bag. “You’ll be fine—just let it pass. And it was wise”—he looked back to the patient now—“to consume the milk, which I’m sure is acting as an antidote to whatever you’ve managed to poison yourself with . . . what did you say it was?”
