Long Short Story
1
For a thousand easy bucks, I could lie all right. I had the gift all great liars had: the uncanny ability to figure out exactly what Herr Other wanted to hear, and if in this case he had a medical degree and a Ph.D. in Psychiatry and ran his own clinic, all the greater the satisfaction would be when I duped him right there on his home turf. I listened carefully to Dr. Berman and proceeded to spew forth fallacies with the reckless abandon of a seasoned mendax.
“No, I can honestly say I’ve never had any kind of what people call mental problems. It actually bugs my friends that I am so impervious to anxiety. They say stuff like I just don’t seem to have any nerves: I’m the rock. When my friends have problems, they all call me, and invariably at some point they tell me they need to see me because I’m so stoically stable that I always make them feel grounded. They use me as a reference point for psychological balance. Some of them even think I’m so stable that my very stability probably amounts to some sort of mental aberration.
“But the truth is that my family life and upbringing were almost comically supportive. My parents loved me and always reinforced my positive self-image by praising all of my accomplishments. They came to all my athletic tournaments and always cheered me on. I guess you could say they spoiled me, but if they did, they seemed to spoil me to the perfect degree.
“The University of Michigan scouted me right out of high school in Richland, Washington, with an absurdly generous scholarship package. I did my B.A. in English there in three years and graduated Summa Cum Laude. For graduate studies, I chose the University of Toronto ahead of Berkeley and University of Virginia—which also accepted me—and then Toronto fast-tracked me into their doctoral program in English.
“And here I am!
“My classmates see me as a sort of academic machine. My typing speed—a hundred and eighteen words per minute—is exactly double the speed Northrop Frye achieved when he won his speed-typing prize, though in fairness I should say that it is easier to type quickly on a computer than it was on a typewriter. As far as my feelings about myself go, I would say I am generally suffused with an overwhelming sense of my own power and capabilities. Every assignment I turn in, I know in advance will pull an A+. And it always does. My marks for the first two years of doctoral work amounted to a straight A+ average. I guess that’s why—in a variety of social contexts—I’m just so comfortable with myself that I almost unnerve people. Anxious and paranoid people don’t like me because of my dispropensity to psychic vacillation. I went into and aced my Comprehensive Doctoral Exams in a state of total peaceful relaxation. The guy who sat next to me (who had brought fifteen back-up pens) said I absolutely had to be a Buddhist.
“But it’s not confidence or arrogance that enables me to achieve stuff so easily. It’s just some sort of genetic calm. I have to say that, among the doctoral candidates, there is a certain amount of resentment towards me because I seem to have an almost superhuman ability to perform well under stressful conditions. I don’t know what it is, exactly. It’s just something I’ve learned to accept about myself. I don’t do yoga. I don’t meditate. I’m not religious, and I don’t even adhere to any of the less systematic belief systems to which unstable people so often subscribe. I just have this healthy, accepting view of myself, and beyond that I’m not preoccupied at all with myself or even with the self as such. My stability is obviously just a constitutional thing. I must get it from my parents. I’ve never seen either of them express themselves in anger. I had no siblings to compete with, never had a financial worry, and I always had healthy, sound, stable relationships, first with girls, then with women. I’m set to polish off this doctorate in three years—that’ll be the fastest it’s ever been done. The most common criticism I’ve heard about myself is that I’m so stable, so focused, so achievement-oriented, so accomplished (I’m only twenty-one!) that my peers find me kind of dull, and I guess that’s probably true: from the outside I may well appear to be quite boring.”
Berman nodded his head and turned a page of the questionnaire.
“Well, Steve, you certainly seem like the right material for the experiment.”
“The right genetic material?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. I wouldn’t venture to make any assessment of that, although you’re obviously a very healthy young man. Your blood test came back and it’s fine.”
“That’s great. I wouldn’t have applied to become part of the study if I didn’t think it was right for me. I knew when I read the preliminary description of the experiment that this kind of thing wasn’t right for everyone. I mean, some of my friends...”
“Yes, Steve, you’re right about that, which is why we are so scrupulous about the initial screening and why I prefer to meet with the candidates myself before giving the go ahead. As you may know, the clinic leads the nation in panic research, and we take great care to preserve our reputation. One way I have—we have—done that is by subjecting all our specim, er, our subjects, to very careful scrutiny before we proceed.”
“Well, I just want to let you know, Dr. Berman, that I feel very comfortable in this kind of a context. I’m certainly perfectly fine with deferring to your professional judgment on my fitness for the trials. I don’t even need the money, so my girlfriend thinks it’s sort of strange that I would even want to participate in an experiment like this, because— between my generous fellowship and my teaching assistantship and my savings from tutoring undergraduates—I’m well set up financially, all the way to the end of the doctorate. I must admit, though, that when I read the preliminary literature that was given to us after the first screening, my curiosity was piqued.”
“Hm. Yes. I see your doctoral research relates to the psychopathology of the first-person narrator in Twentieth-Century American fiction. I suppose your interest in this experiment would probably grow naturally out of your literary studies.”
“Exactly. I think this experience could help me to understand—at least a little—some of the extreme mental states I see represented in the fictional works I study.”
“Well, perhaps it will. It would be particularly gratifying to us if your experience here could redound to your benefit beyond the parameters of the experiment. Aside from the honorarium, of course, which is quite generous...”
“Well, I do want to make clear that I am not here for the money, Dr. Berman. I mean, I won’t be handing the check back to the clinic after the experiment is over, but really the money would just be extra on top of everything else. I’m thinking of taking my girlfriend to Montreal for her birthday. It’ll be a little holiday thing—on top of all the other holidays we already take, that is.”
“Well, I think you are going to be fine, Steve. In a way, you are exactly what we’re looking for. Especially when we’re drawing off a pool comprised predominantly of student applicants—as I’m sure you already know—we’re often dealing with young people who are already under a considerable degree of academic stress. We need to be careful. We wouldn’t ever want to push anyone over the ledge, the, er, edge, so to speak. Steve, I’m going to leave you alone with some literature to read. These are first-person accounts of past participants in the study that relate to their experiences here in the panic lab. You may find some of the testimonials a bit raw, but we like to prepare people for what they are getting into. I just want to emphasize that, while the conditions for the experiment are extremely carefully controlled, what the testimonials describe are purely the subjective internal experiences of the subjects. If you give your consent after perusing the testimonials, I’m going to give my go ahead as head of the clinic, and we can set you up for a session next Tuesday. I’ll just leave you with this, and I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Some people do back out after reading the testimonials, so this is necessarily a standard procedure for us here at the clinic.”
Dr. Berman handed me the folder of photocopied testimonials and left the room. I sank back into the comfortable chair and read the accounts.
2
Raoul, Student, 20 Years Old
Even though I was strapped to the gurney, I felt comfortable and relaxed when the experiment started. When the assistant inserted the IV, it didn’t hurt at all. I just lay there for a while and thought I was going to drift off to sleep. I remember feeling a little bit guilty, wondering if I would ruin the experiment by dozing off. I definitely felt sleepy. Then, pretty quickly, I began to worry that it wasn’t sleep I was drifting off into. It was death! I was going to just quietly slip away and die right there in the room, with the medical assistants watching me. So, I started to fight the sleepiness. It seemed very urgent that I stay awake. I thought if I could just not fall asleep, I wouldn’t die. I started to jerk my left arm up in the restraints. If I could just jam the IV needle way up into my arm and then break it in half—I thought—that would keep me awake. But I couldn’t move my arm enough. I tried to reach the headrail of the gurney. I thought if I could bash my head into that metal railing, I could wake myself up. But I couldn’t move my head that far, due to the restraints. My legs, though, had a bit more wiggle room, and—since it seemed like a matter of life and death at this point— I tried to work my right leg loose. The assistants, with their calm voices, kept advising me to try and keep still. But by this time, I already thought they were trying to kill me, so I kept jerking that leg and finally managed to bust one of the restraints. Once I got my leg free, I immediately tried to break some glass. The sound, I figured, would stop me from falling asleep, from going into a coma and dying. I worked my leg around before the assistants could stop me and got some leverage off the wall. In this way, I managed to push the gurney across the room. Then I was able to kick all the beakers and syringes off a trolley. I kicked the whole thing over. It fell with a huge crash. Then the door opened and Dr. Berman came in and quickly gave me the antidote injection. I calmed down quickly. Afterwards, I was very apologetic, and the staff were very nice about things. I guess I sort of ruined the experiment, but I did my best.
Heather, Student, 19 Years Old
By the time the medication had been dripping into my blood stream for about fifteen minutes, I was beginning to be surprised I had let myself do this. I was thinking this was a really bad idea, but I told myself it would be over in a few hours and tried not to pay attention to anything. It’s hard to relax, however, when you have medications circulating in your bloodstream that are specifically designed to induce panic. For a while this was all I could think about. It seemed to me that I was this huge contradiction tied to a bed, trying to be calm during an avalanche of unease. But soon all my rationalizations about the experiment and where I was were replaced by an extremely uneasy feeling in my chest. It wasn’t long before I realized my heart was seizing up. It was like I could feel it shutting down ventricle by ventricle and getting harder and stiffer. At the same time, I could feel my heart swelling up with thick black blood. I could feel the organ getting larger. It felt like I had a huge brick in my chest that was getting bigger. I realized this would continue until my heart burst out of my chest and exploded. I originally thought I started screaming to stop it exploding, but now I realize that I was just screaming from fear. But also, because I was expending so much energy in screaming, I was also getting terrifyingly short of breath. I was gasping for air between screams. For a long time, I felt I was merely seconds away from death. Meanwhile, the seizure in my chest was spreading to my stomach and my neck. It seemed incredible to me that I kept not dying. I had never in my entire life felt anything remotely like that fear or that pain. I couldn’t believe my chest, my body, would be able to hold it all in, to contain all that inner expansion and torment. My body was exploding, but my mind was imploding. I just wanted it all to end so that I could die, so that my suffering would stop once and for all. That became my only desire. I had been screaming for Dr. Berman to come into the room and kill me. Apparently, Dr. Berman came into the room and administered the antidote. I say apparently, because I had passed out by then. Dr. Berman told me I was unconscious for a while. When I came to, he told me I had been screaming so much I had suffered from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the brain. I was exhausted and I noticed I had bandages on my palms, where I had been trying, apparently—in a last desperate effort—to drive my nails far enough into my clenched fists to sever an artery.
Andrew, Construction Worker, 25 Years Old
I accidentally cut into my left thigh with a chainsaw once, when I was cutting firewood in Muskoka, so I thought I knew a lot about pain. Another time, I riveted my left arm to a crossbeam with a rivet gun and was unable to work my arm free for an hour, so that also convinced me that I knew what pain was. This is why I thought this experiment would be a cinch. Easy money during a slow spring in the housing market. All my experiences seemed to have prepared me too well, however. When they put the IV in and the drugs started to enter my bloodstream, all I felt was a weird calmness. I was so relaxed. I had read the accounts of what other people had gone through, and I thought it would be scary, even for me, but actually, I soon realized that there was no way this panic drug could scare me, after all the fights I’d been in and after all the reconstructive surgeries I’d had after Sonny Gerber bashed me in the face three times with a metre-long piece of two-by-four. I lay there, waiting for all the panic and fear to hit me, but it never happened. I was proud of myself because I had seen the one guy coming out of the room when I came to the clinic for the first screening, and he had looked like a horror film makeup crew had spent an entire day trying to make him look as dead as they could. And here I was, lying on the gurney without a care in the world. This sure is easy money, I thought. I got more rest lying in that hospital room than I usually get in a full night’s sleep. I was looking forward to telling all my buddies how I had kicked the panic drug’s ass, how it hadn’t been strong enough to scare me. Then Dr. Berman came in and told me I had been given a placebo and therefore I wouldn’t need him to give me the antidote.
Carrie, Librarian, 29 Years Old
Words can’t even begin to describe what I went through in that room. I barely had time to settle into place after the IV was attached. Almost immediately, I thought to myself: That was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life, right there! But almost as soon as I’d thought this, I realized it was an even bigger mistake than I thought—that what was happening here in this oh so carefully controlled room was the biggest mistake in the history of the human race. It didn’t take me long to realize it wasn’t a mistake at all: it was evil—pure evil! Evil in purely secular terms. Evil on a level that all the other evils in history seemed like small errors in judgment by comparison. I couldn’t say how, exactly, things came to seem this way to a normally rational person like me, but it happened, and what transpired was beyond language—I figured that out pretty quickly. I was at the epicenter of evil. I realized that the human beings around me weren’t merely inhuman or subhuman, but that there had never been anything even remotely human about them in the first place, and that I had been brought to this place to learn this lesson, not by some malevolent demon or goblin—it was way, way worse than that—but by some overwhelming force of cosmic animosity. But it was even worse than that sounds, because that is just language, whereas what I was starting to realize while strapped to that gurney was something that I apprehended in a way far beyond the capacity of language to approximate. I remember thinking I would give everything I had just for the luxury of being in the dimmest, most barbaric medieval torture chamber. But no—I wasn’t that lucky. I knew that, and it was no use to scream or shout or cry or sob because all of my thinking collapsed inward into a catatonic stupor under the crushing weight of the realization about how many times worse than I had ever imagined in my wildest, most apocalyptic nightmares my situation was, although it wasn’t just this realization that was so shattering—it was the situation, not just of me and others, but everything all together, rolled into one giant black steamroller, a juggernaut of pain crushing everything, mountains and seas and planets and stars and galaxies, into a fine powder of futility, and I lay there, frozen by an absolute zero of horrifically paralyzing realization. Words, these words, are unable to describe what I went through before Dr. Berman gave me the antidote. I felt I was a human subatomic particle being smashed into other particles and splintering into more fundamental subatomic particles, a microscopic field of fallout that was somehow condemned to be able to think.
3
“I can tell by reading these,” I said to Dr. Berman when he came back into the room and asked me what I thought, “that I have—perhaps to a greater degree than some of the past participants—what it takes to go through this experiment and keep everything in perspective.”
“Well, that’s good, Steve. You know, some of our prospective participants read those testimonials and find them somewhat disturbing. This reading material is a sort of final preliminary test we give people, a chance to think clearly about what, for many—let’s be frank about this—could become a disquieting, albeit localized, experience.”
“Well, I can honestly say that what people wrote was pretty much what I expected. You’re the expert, obviously, a leading scholar in this field, but in my own modest way I’ve read quite widely in psychiatric literature—I had to—as background research for my dissertation project. It was interesting to read these personal accounts because I’m used to reading more literary accounts of psychic disturbance, and some of the patients—as difficult as it must have been—did a pretty good job of putting their reactions into words.”
“Okay, then. Let me just tell you a little bit about the physical side of the experiment, and then I’ll put you in a slot for next Tuesday. The test itself takes four hours, but you probably won’t be able to get much work done for a day or two afterwards. Your, er, system will be a little bit fatigued. Just be sure to eat well and get lots of rest in the few days before and after the session.”
“No problem.”
“Okay. The experiment is quite simple. This is what will happen. You’ll be strapped to a gurney—just as a precaution, to prevent you doing any harm either to yourself or the staff while you are under the influence of the medication. One of my assistants will attach an IV that will administer the panic attack medication. We use an IV because it is the best way to get the medication into your system and quickly achieve the requisite levels of metabolization. Essentially, what we do is this: we give you a medication that will induce a severe panic attack, and then, as the, erm, attack takes it course, we study the results and the symptoms. But what this is really all about, Steve, is the antidote. This is a new pharmaceutical product—I actually designed it myself—that is intended to block the action of the neurotransmitters responsible for initiating the attack in the first place. You see, the only way that we can develop a medication that will help people suffering from these devastating attacks is to create the attacks themselves under controlled conditions and then use the antidote and study the effects of the antidote during the time when the attacks are happening. This study is designed to find a fast-acting medication that can be given to panic attack victims and relieve their symptoms. By participating in the study, you will be doing your own small part in bringing relief to millions of suffering people.”
“Hm. So I’d be like a Christ figure?”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Right. More of a guinea pig?”
“Erm, I wouldn’t say that, either. Let’s just say that you will be contributing to the progress of science. In a small way, of course. This research is actually very important to pharmaceutical companies, which are anxious to market a drug that can bring an end to the psychological phenomenon of spontaneous catastrophic panic attacks. That’s one reason we can afford to pay you such a generous honorarium.”
“That makes sense, although like I said before, it isn’t the money that I’m doing this for—my curiosity has got the better of me here. I simply want to know what it’s like.”
“Yes, I see that. Well, I want to reassure you that there will be a physician and medical staff in the room at all times, just in case, erm, something ah...”
“Goes wrong?”
“No, no no. Nothing should go wrong. This is a precaution we take in case there is any adverse reaction on the part of participants—I mean adverse beyond the expected parameters associated with an induced panic attack, that is. We do what we can—with the blood test and medical history checks—to ensure that everything goes, not smoothly exactly, but in accordance with reasonable expectations. Frankly speaking, however, the precise effects of the medication we use to induce the panic attacks tend to be subject-specific, as you no doubt noticed in your reading of the testimonials.”
“Yes, I did notice that.”
“And we like to have medical staff there in the room in case you, erm, manage to work yourself free of the restraints or—and this would be an absolute worst-case scenario, one we do not expect to happen—if you somehow manage to harm yourself.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t imagine that happens very often.”
“Very infrequently, very infrequently. I should tell you, however, Steve, that we did have one, erm, unfortunate incident in a past trial.”
“Well, Dr. Berman, I’m sure these things happen. I’m sure the clinical staff are quite capable of keeping things under control.”
“Yes, in the overwhelming majority of cases, we are, but it is, erm, my, ah, professional obligation, my ethical and legal obligation, to inform you—with full disclosure—that, unfortunately, one of our subjects did manage to, erm, harm himself.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, it was most unfortunate. To be honest, he would probably have harmed himself sooner or later anyway, but this particular subject did manage to trick the staff into believing that the antidote had already taken effect before it really had. Again, the action of the antidote—like that of the medication that induces the attack—is quite subject-specific. It works more quickly with some subjects than others. Sometimes, (though rarely), a second dose of the antidote is necessary. And so, erm, as soon as the subject was unstrapped and had all his restraints removed, he rushed over to the window and put his, put his erm, head through it.”
“Was the window open?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Jeezus!”
“Yes, it was a deeply disturbing episode.”
“He didn’t er...he didn’t...”
“No no no no no! He didn’t die. But he told us later that he was trying to decapitate himself by running his neck along the jagged edge of the broken glass. However, I’m happy to report that the clinic was able to get a top plastic surgeon—one of the best in the country—to help rehabilitate the subject in terms of his self-inflicted wounds. And I will say also that, if you saw this person today, you would have to look at his neck very closely indeed in order to discover that anything amiss had ever happened.”
“Well, I’m very glad to hear that. I’m sure that must have been a quite anomalous development in the big picture of the study. I’m sure it probably won’t happen again.”
“We do everything in our power and bring all our expertise to bear on ensuring that it does not happen again, Steve. And I’m very glad to say that—aside from a few other relatively minor incidents—it never has, at least not in such a dramatic way.”
“Hm. Well, as I said, I’m sure I won’t be one of those people who have a bad reaction like that. I have such confidence in my own unshakeable stability that I am sure something of this kind will not happen to me. I appreciate your frank and honest disclosure, Dr. Berman. It has only reinforced my trust and faith in the professionalism of your staff and of your medical ethics in general.”
“I appreciate that, Steve. I can assure you that, in terms of ethics, the clinic and the staff, including myself, of course, adhere to the very strictest code of medical ethics in this entire field of research. I just wanted to be frank in letting you know that there is a very slight potential for unforeseen complications as a result of the experiment. This is why it is extremely important for you to be forthcoming about any underlying psychological problems you may have had in the past. I know the temptation is there with students—because of the large honorarium—to perhaps fib a little, but I just want to stress that being honest on the questionnaire and in your discussions with me is of the utmost importance—both for you yourself and, of course, the, uh, clinic. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, some people think that they can somehow trick the experiment, but the truth is that they only end up by tricking themselves.”
“No problem there, Dr. Berman. I wouldn’t recommend this experiment for everyone, I can tell you that! And I wouldn’t even think of doing it myself if I didn’t have the greatest confidence in my ability to keep things under control and to avoid the pitfalls of being dishonest with you or with myself.”
Dr. Berman penciled me into his timetable and showed me out of the office to the reception area, where he had me sign—in ink—a legal consent form and several complicated medical waivers. I tucked the appointment card into my wallet and left.
4
My girlfriend confronted me three days later. We had just finished breakfast, and she was getting ready to head out to class.
“Steve, have you been stressed out about anything lately?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, you’ve been screaming in your sleep.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Like, blood-curdling screams. I can’t believe you don’t remember. I have to practically pick you up and slam you down onto the bed to snap you out of it. Then you just sob yourself back to sleep. Three days now it’s happened.”
“Do I say anything?”
“All kinds of weird shit. Last night you were going on about HIV or something. I don’t hear it all, because by the time you wake me up you’ve already been at it for a while. First, it gets into my dreams. Last night I dreamed I was on that pod thing at the top of the CN Tower? I was reaching down to grab your hand to prevent you from falling. Christ, you were yelling! It was horrible, but before you fell off the tower I woke up, and there you were next to me, screaming bloody murder. When I tried to wake you up, you freaked out even more. Look at this...”
She rolled up a sleeve and showed me a bruise.
“Jeezus!”
“Yah. It’s like wrestling an octopus just to get you to wake up. It’s as if you think I’m going to kill you or something. On the one hand, you’re screaming for help; on the other, you’re terrified of being woken up.”
“Whoa, Jeezus! I’m sorry! I had no idea!”
“Three nights it’s been now. When it starts giving me nightmares of my own, that’s where I draw the line. Are you sure everything is okay with you?”
“Yeah, totally. I’m doing great in my program. The diss is coming along nicely. I’ll have my fourth chapter in by the end of the month. I’m in the zone. No money worries, nothing.”
“There’s nothing in your life that’s stressing you out that I don’t know about?”
“Nope. Nothing at all.”
“I was beginning to think you might be getting those panic attacks again, the ones you got after you failed your comprehensive exams the third time...”
“No no no: that’s way behind me now.”
“Then there was that paranoid episode you had at System Soundbar.”
“I think that was just because it was too crowded in the club.”
“Well, we can’t go back there, that’s for sure. Rick said you freaked out the bouncers.”
“Hm. I guess so, but Sweetie—nothing is wrong! I’m not stressed out about anything!”
“You aren’t involved in anything I don’t know about, right? Look—don’t be angry—you haven’t been going to Niagara and gambling again, have you?”
“No no no—of course not. God, I haven’t been down there for ages. What could be giving me nightmares? Well, I guess it could be some of the twisted narrators I’ve been reading. I mean, Rojack and Tarden—those guys are pretty twisted up.”
“Hm. I guess so. They didn’t seem to give you nightmares in the past, but maybe it’s the repeated readings. You don’t have any more money worries, right?”
“No. None. Nada.”
“You haven’t spent the thousand I gave you for our Montreal trip, have you?”
“Of course not! It’s sitting right there in the bank.”
“Only two weeks to go! I’m looking forward to that—I need a break!”
“For sure you do. Come to think of it, maybe that’s where my nightmares are coming from. You’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. Your schedule has been tough this term. You’ve been stressed out a lot. Maybe I pick it up from you subliminally? Some kind of sympathetic response? I absorb it, repress it, and then it comes out in my sleep!”
“Wait. I’m stressed out, so you end up screaming in your sleep? It sounds like a scene in a Woody Allen movie.”
“Hm. Well, it’s some sort of anomaly, that’s for sure. Maybe something I’ve been eating has been giving me the nightmares? Like those spicy Korean instant noodles?”
“They are spicy, but I’ve been eating them, and I’ve not been having nightmares.”
“But you said you’d been having nightmares of your own.”
“Yeah, but they’re nightmares that come from your nightmares.”
“You can say that, but it’s probably not that simple.”
“Right! I can see this coming—I’ve got it back-to-front: I think your nightmares are giving me nightmares, but it’s really my nightmares that are creating yours!”
“It could happen that way... .”
“Right, Steve! Turn this whole thing on its head! You’re pretty good at that!”
“Oh, gimme a break! This is all probably happening because you’re going through a stressful stretch with your studies and your workload. Maybe, in some subterranean way, it transfers into my subconscious from your subconscious, without you ever intending anything like that to happen.”
“Ja, ja. Okay. Whatever. I just thought I’d ask. I’ve been worried about you.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. I think all of this stuff will disappear once you have finished your exams.”
“Well, that’s part of the problem, Steve. I can’t have you screaming through the night until the end of term, just because I’m so stressed out that I stress you out enough that you turn right around and stress me out all over again. That sounds like a slippery reflexive slope to me. Maybe an infinite regression. But at the end of the day, I need my sleep, all of it, if I’m gonna get through all the assignments I’ve gotta complete before we go to Montreal.”
“Okay. Tell you what. While you’re out, I’ll try to figure out what’s going on with me, in case there’s anything I missed or whatever. I’ll look inside myself and let you know what I discover when you come home. I’m sure it’s just those noodles.”
Off she went to class and that was the end of that.
I managed to talk myself into sleeping peacefully for the following two nights, and this little problem didn’t come up again, but then—with my appointment just two days away—I woke up ranting and raving again. Mel got up and turned on all the lights.
“Look, Steve! Something’s going on, okay?! I’ve never seen you like this. You act like you’ve gone to bed in fear of your life or something. Am I really stressing you out that much? I thought I was doing a good job of keeping stuff under control.”
“You are, Mel, you are! Jeez! I dunno. Maybe it’s all those murder shows I watch on A&E. They’re pretty grizzly.”
“I don’t think so. You’ve been watching those things ever since I’ve known you. Four years Mister Insatiable Appetite for Death and Destruction here’s been glued to the screen for that stuff. Why would you suddenly start having nightmares about it now?”
“Maybe it’s a cumulative thing!”
“Oh, come on, Steve! Something’s going on with you! I swear! What is it that’s stressing you out so much? You’re not seeing anyone else, are you?”
“No no no! Of course not!”
“I can’t help thinking these outbursts must have something to do with something you’re not telling me about. That weirdo hasn’t been bothering you, has he?”
“What? Gary? No, I haven’t seen him for ages. There’s a restraining order on him. He comes within thirty yards of me, he goes to the clink. Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make an appointment to see Dr. Llewellyn next Tuesday. Next Wednesday, I mean. I’ll see if I can find out something by chatting with him. I saw the guy three times a week for two years. He knows everything about me and my disturbed past. He’ll figure out what my nightmares are about. It’s probably just some residual stuff left over from my 2CB addiction in Ann Arbor.”
“What Ann Arbor 2CB addiction? You told me you only tried that stuff once!”
“Once, a couple of times. I dunno. That stuff was pretty potent anyway. Maybe my nightmares are some sort of somnolent flashback.”
“Jeezus, Steve! I know you’re bullshitting me when you start throwing all this bogus jargon at me. Maybe you should stop telling your students about the iceberg effect in Hemingway and start applying it to yourself! Man, oh Man! Sometimes I wonder how much of yourself is lumbering along in shadowy silence.”
“Nice conflation, Mel! Thanks for the Thomas Hardy allusion!”
“Who’s doing the conflating here? Sometimes my boyfriend’s just Steve Jenks, and other times it’s like I’m living with the Steve Jenks Muppett Show, you know?”
“Come on, Mel! Don’t gimme that Muppet shit! What’s next, Mickey Sabbath?”
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry! I don’t have any room for extra stress right now. I’m like two thousand pages behind in my Proust readings, okay? Then I’ve got four other graduate courses, Steve. Four! I can’t spend every night waking up in the middle of an Edgar Allan Poe story!”
“What is this, Mel? Argumentum ad Nortoniensis Anthologium?”
“No, No—I’m just worried about you, that’s all. And at the same time, I haven’t got any room for any more worries than the worries that are already worrying me to death.”
“Okay, okay, Mel. Just don’t worry about me, okay? I’m gonna be fine. I am fine! It’s just a couple of stupid bad dreams. I don’t know what it is. The noodles! Those Nong Sam Noodles! I’m sure of it!”
“Okay. Okay. It’s just kind of spooky, you know. I’m starting to feel fatigued from all these nights of interrupted sleep.”
“I’m sorry! It’s all my fault, even though it’s obviously not my fault! Look. I’ll go see Dr. Llewellyn next week, for sure. I’m sure he’ll make the nightmares go away. Just talking to him about them will probably make them stop.”
“You’ve talked to me about them, and it hasn’t made a scrap of difference. If I’m not mistaken, they’re getting worse...”
“Yeah, but you’re not a licensed shrink.”
“No, but I’ll need a licensed shrink if my boyfriend doesn’t stop screaming his way through every single night. I’m beginning to dread going to sleep myself. I’m gonna end up like Proust—needing a cork-lined room just so I can get some rest.”
I managed to make it through the next night without screaming, and then I had just one more night to go before the big day when all my financial problems would be solved. I decided I’d better keep myself up the day before the experiment. This made a lot of sense because it would mean I would be really fatigued when I went in for the session. The panic medication would have less effect on me because I’d be so sleep-deprived. In addition to this, I knew I wouldn’t wake up screaming during the night if I never went to sleep in the first place. At that point, I had not yet developed a problem with involuntary screaming while I was awake.
5
Steve Jenks, Graduate Student, 21 Years Old
Partly because of my own complete immunity to paranoia, I was surprised to find myself somewhat anxious about the fact that the assistant had to try seven times to successfully insert the IV into my arm. I had had peaceful nights of sleep since my final screening interview with Dr. Berman. I feel it is important to emphasize the circumambient calmness of my life as I entered the testing room. (My girlfriend had twice remarked on my apparent freedom from stress and anxiety, in spite of the fact that a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, “Reliably Unreliable: Narrating the Psychotic Self in Post-War American Fiction,” was due for delivery to my doctoral supervisor at the end of the month.)
The only reason I mention this is to give as accurate an account as I can to the researchers for this study so that the disparity of my mental state going into the experiment and the state effected by the panic-inducing medication can be discerned with the utmost clarity. Not to pat myself on the head or back, but in the cause of science itself, I mention the basic fact that I am a person who is seen as practically supernaturally stable, and frankly speaking—to the future participants in these trials as well as to those who supervise them—I had a distinct suspicion that my personality was so coherent and my mind so steady that the medication, in however high a dosage it was administered, would not really have enough potency to induce panic is a subject as stable and grounded as myself.
I thus reclined in my bonds in what seemed to me at the time a state of almost preternatural calm. The bruises on my left arm from the assistant’s failed attempts to insert the IV did not bother me at all. If anything, they reminded me solely of the little bruises that can sometimes be seen on pickled miniature potatoes. I knew I had some time before the medication acted, so I busied myself with indulging in what I told myself were humorously picayune fears. Did I leave a big enough tip when I got a coffee and a chocolate orange muffin Dessert Sensations on Beverley Street? Had I mentioned the laundry room washer that didn’t work to my girlfriend so she wouldn’t waste money using it? Had I missed the date on which I would turn 7500 days old? Was a letter a month enough to send to my parents? Should I have stopped and chatted with the old lady in the hall of my building when I was on my way to the clinic, asking about her son’s visit and his career as a lawyer in Manhattan? Should I make a small donation to charity, seeing that I had so much money in the bank?
I continued in this vein for some time, entertaining myself with the genuine scope of my fears. I was so relaxed that I began to chat with the assistants and Dr. Riesling, who was in the room. However, the staff advised me that it was not appropriate for me to chat during the trial. I needed to simply lie on the gurney. If I needed to shout or ask urgent questions, that was fine, but I should make no effort to engage the staff in ongoing conversations.
I was just lying there calmly meditating—counting my blessings, you could almost say—when suddenly the trolley onto which I was strapped lurched forward violently. For a second, I thought a bus or some other huge vehicle had crashed into the clinic, jolting the gurney away from the wall. I broke the talking rule and asked Dr. Riesling what exactly had just happened—clearly it was not part of the experiment. Dr. Riesling honored me, if reluctantly, with a reply.
“Nothing is happening in this room, Steve. Just try to let the medication take its course. It’s much better if you don’t try to talk to us. We’re really only here to observe.”
I was somewhat taken aback by how blasé Dr. Riesling had been about a matter that was so obviously extrinsic to the experiment, but I held my tongue, determined to be a model subject. Soon I heard a rattling sound coming from the cart full of instruments over by the window, so I looked over at them. I could see the cart trembling violently, the instruments tapping insistently against their containers, whether of metal or of glass. The trays and the stand itself were shaking to a considerable degree. I looked at Dr. Riesling and the assistants and discovered, strangely enough, that they, too, were swaying from side to side noticeably, though there was no sign in their expressions suggesting any recognition or awareness of this.
It was clear to me by this point that an earthquake was shaking the region. I found it astonishing that the medical staff responded by smiling when I warned them of the obvious danger that so considerable an earthquake represented. Clearly, I thought, they are happy to die here in this room with smiles on their faces and white coats around their shoulders. I realized I would get nowhere with them. They would be pulled from the rubble of the collapsed institute and would bark the results of their precious research at their bewildered rescuers, while my body was still strapped to this gurney and I slowly asphyxiated due to escaped gas fumes in the pile of rubble, my chest crushed by a concrete pillar or a collapsed ceiling.
At this point, I started to swear at the staff and curse them with expressions I never knew. I projectile vomited verbal filth and abuse all over them, accusing them of callousness. I told them I didn’t care if they didn’t care about their lives but that I did care if they didn’t care about mine, which they were revealing minute by minute they didn’t give a damn about. I cursed their profession, their families, their ancestors, their ancestral homelands. I cursed the pink little fingers of their precious children’s hands.
Then I remembered my girlfriend. I struggled to get free of the gurney, which I soon realized wasn’t a gurney at all but a Medieval torture rack. I could feel the supports and braces slowly pulling my limbs apart. I could feel the pain as the cartilage in my joints started to tear. It was horrifyingly painful. I begged the staff to free me and cursed them all over again when they didn’t, this time for all the horrible things they had done in their miserable lives as horrible people, things only I knew about and could discern from the lines in their faces and the blank opacity of their inhuman unfeeling eyes.
But they were impermeable to insult.
I begged them for my girlfriend’s sake. The building she was in would not be able to resist the force of so substantial an earthquake. If they could just free me from the gurney, I could run over there and rescue her, or I could at least arrive on the scene in time to help the rescue workers by digging in the rubble with my hands until my fingers bled, my hands broke, my arms fell off.
After a particularly virulent torrent of abuse, as I tried to capture my breath, I noticed a crack in the floor of the room, then another, then another. Either something was coming up through the floor or the floor itself was sinking.
Then a huge robotic arm reached up out of the linoleum.
I yelled and yelled for the staff to free me.
But to no avail.
I had forgotten all about the earthquake and my girlfriend now. A huge Meccano creature burst through the hole in the floor and looked at me with evil red laser beam eyes.
I closed my eyes in terror and found myself floating in a world of nightmarish chaos. But I knew that if I kept my eyes closed for any longer, my brain itself would be vaporized.
Opening my eyes again, I now saw there were four of the Meccano giants in the room, monsters whose sole duty was to tear me limb from limb and to drag my bloodied limbs off to some underworld, some laboratory of some kind. Three of the creatures had the remains of white lab coats hanging over their metal frames. I was both horrified and fascinated by how their joints worked, especially since my own joints, during all of this, were still being slowly torn apart by the torturous apparatus of the bed.
The room was shaking violently now. Wall cabinets were crashing to the floor. Windows exploded out of their frames, spraying tiny pellets of glass over the ruined floor of the room.
The four creatures continued to gnash their metal jaws at me.
They were making huge primal noises as they watched me.
Tied fast to the trolley, all I could do was endure their insidious gaze.
But then I became aware of something else. A column of soldier ants started walking up my arm and feeding on the bruises left by the failed attempts to attach the IV. The wounds, I saw to my horror, were now festering and rotting and writhing with maggots. The column of soldier ants began systematically to eat the maggots in my wounds and then to eat the flesh around the wounds.
One of the Meccano creatures whirred and hummed and clanked over to my bed and started yanking on my leg. I felt the bone socket become detached at the hip joint. Then, with a pop and a sickening sound of tearing flesh and rattling bone and gristle, the creature tore my leg off at the hip and lifted the bloody stump up to his mechanized mouth.
I wanted to close my eyes, but I found that—no matter how hard I tried—I could not do this. I watched the creature gnash my severed leg. He moved his metal jaws from side to side, rather than up and down.
Suddenly, I saw steam rising from his feet and the creature dropped the remains of my leg, which fell to the floor with a sizzling noise. Now the creature roared in pain. Some kind of acid was bubbling up through the floor and melting the metal monsters. Having already melted their feet off, the acid was working its way steadily up their limbs.
The monsters screamed with horrifyingly inhuman anguish.
Then I heard maniacal laughter and realized it was my own.
I must have passed out briefly at some point, because when I came to, there was nobody else in the room with me and there were no signs of the Meccano demons. The soldier ants were still eating my suppurating arm. For a second I was glad that the rising tide of acid would annihilate the maggots and the ants, but then I realized it would also burn off my own flesh.
I struggled to hold up my head. Soon the gurney was level with the surface of the sizzling viscous liquid, which started to flay my buttocks and my back. Through all the intense pain, I managed to wriggle my head up a bit higher.
I must have passed out again, for when I came to, I looked down at my body on the gurney, and all I could see were bones.
I had become a skeleton, yet somehow I could see.
I screamed. I yelled. I prayed. I cursed. I wept.
I had become this anguished cry, these screams.
It is hard for me to convey how surreal my state was. It was not me that was screaming—it was me qua scream: screaming in pain was my quiddity.
I was just this head, these eyeless sockets, this lipless tongueless mouth.
I remained this way for what seemed like measureless eternities.
Then there was nothing but darkness, an inky blackness of all.
And then suddenly Dr. Berman was dabbing my arm with a cotton swab and giving me an injection and telling me that things had gone very well, and I just needed to wait twenty or thirty minutes, to ensure the antidote was having the desired effect. Once the effects of the panic-inducing medication could be determined with a high level of certainty to have been reversed, Dr. Berman assured me, I would be free to get dressed, sign a few forms, and go home.
6
Melanie comes in singing one of her impromptu arias about A pluses and waves her Proust paper at me for a second before she stops short.
“Jeezus Christ, Steve! What happened to you?”
“Oh, I had a bit of a rough day, that’s all.”
“What happened?”
“Got in a fight with some guy down at Union Station.”
“Another fight? How did this happen?”
“Some dude asked me for a smoke. I told him the one I was smoking was my last one and he started screaming at me that I was a liar. Sonofabitch.”
“Jeezus!”
“Yeah. I lost it. I went over and started yelling back at him. But when I called him a loser, he went ballistic and pushed me into a wall.”
“Are you okay? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
She comes over to check for bruises.
“Nope. I took care of him alright.”
“Shit! What did you do? How did all this end?”
“I knocked him about a bit. Neutralized him. Then he took off running. Got the hell out of there. I’m just a bit frazzled, that’s all.”
“Uh, yeah! Was the guy okay?”
“Yeah, he took off. He wasn’t badly injured or anything. Nobody reported it. A few people saw it from a distance, but there weren’t many people around. Anyway, the main thing is—I got these today!”
I pull the ViaRail tickets to Montreal out of my pocket and hand them to her.
“Wuhoo! Montreal, here we come! Time to get tha hell outta Dodge!”
“Yup! Yes Sirree! I also made reservations at our Sheraton, the one on Rene Levesque? We’ll be there for the entire Mutek Festival, by the way.”
“Nice! But wait a minute—are you sure you didn’t get injured in this fight?”
“Nope. I’m fine. It was just one of those things.”
“You told me you wouldn’t get in any more fights!”
“Look, Mel. The guy attacked me. I just defended myself, okay?”
“Fair enough. As long as the guy and his buddies don’t come looking for you!”
“No worries. The only thing we need to worry about is whether we party at Metropolis or Stereo on Friday and whether we party at Sona or Aria on Saturday.”
“We can figure that out on the way up there! We’re on the night train?”
“Yup!”
“I hope you’re not gonna freak other passengers out with your screaming nightmares, ha ha!”
“No, no. I think maybe this fight thing cured me of those. Sort of an outlet of pent-up emotions, I guess.”
Mel is leery of believing this, but after ten days of me sleeping like a rock for twelve hours, her fears have subsided and we’re walking through the underground PATH system with our backpacks, on our way from the subway to the train station. We’re chattering about the DJ lineups, the necessity of taking an occasional break from school. We practice our Joual, rave about the virtues of Montreal.
As we scurry beneath the vaulted ceiling of Union Station, we are joking about what we’d be willing to do to have another go at experiencing the night life in Quebec. It isn’t hard coming up with hyperboles.
No price is too high to pay for a week of partying in Montreal.