At 1:46 he was still awake.
By 2:11 his mind was a flywheel. If there was a God, he thought, he or she didn’t have a sleep problem. The cable box clock. As a light source it wasn’t intrusive, but he knew that every time he opened his eyes there was the countdown in glowing red—and as long as the digits were visible, he’d be tempted to gauge the passage of time.
Shit!
He got up and covered the cable box.
An hour later, he headed down to the kitchen for another warm glass of milk. He thought about reading a dull book or maybe catching some mindless movie on TV. But that would only stimulate his brain all the more. So he sat at the kitchen table and sipped warm milk out of a blue glass under the garish fluorescence of the circular tube on the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his head on his elbow, thinking about warm milk coating his stomach and magically transmitting rock-a-bye-baby signals to his brain. But that didn’t work.
Jack opened one eye. It fell on the cellar door.
The cellar.
Don’t think about it, he told himself. Then another voice cut in: Yeah, sure. Like don’t think “elephant” and suddenly there’s Dumbo flapping his ears at you.
His eye dropped to the hexagonal glass knob.
Turn me.
Click.
Pull.
He closed his eye and sipped more milk.
Come on, guy. Peek-a-boo.
His eye slitted open.
Thata boy, I see you …
The door, and just behind it a black shaft and twelve little steps down, light switch at the top. He closed his eyes again.
He got up, scraping the chair noisily against the floor, and downed the rest of the milk and rinsed out the glass. Then he turned and leaned against the sink, staring at the door. So, what’s it going to be, Jacko? Stay out of the cellar for good until your laundry rots in the machine—been five days now, still sitting in a damp twist at the bottom, never did make the dryer. Going to have to send them through again for the mildew.
He crossed the kitchen and opened the door.
So what’s the big deal?
Well, you see, the last time I did this, there was this poltergeist thing that took me over.
What are you afraid to find? Just a lot of boxes of old stuff. Maybe glug up the throat on nostalgia, but that’s an old friend by now.
He flicked on the light.
Empty stairs, no goggle-eyed zombies gaping up at him, and no ooga-booga vibes registering. Plus, a few low-sleep cobwebs aside, your head feels clear for once.
He took the steps one by one, holding on to the rail. Someplace in the front hall he had left his cane, which would have been comforting to grip at the moment. But he decided not to bother going back up.
At the bottom he turned slowly until he faced the rear wall and the armoire. Nothing.
He moved across the floor to the washing machine and put his hand on the lid, thinking that this is where the thing with the KKK hood jumps out and crushes your skull. Nothing but his clothes in a fused ring around the base of the agitator. They were still damp but they didn’t smell mildewy, so he put them into the dryer.
He limped across the old carpet and stopped in his tracks. Along the metal shelves were boxes. He didn’t know why he stopped, but as if following some radar beam his eyes fell on a single carton. He had been through all the boxes—all but this one, which still had tape across the flaps. On the side in small black letters it said “Jack’s Stuff.”
As if by remote control he went over to the shelves, his mind funneling all attention onto that parcel, that plain brown cardboard box with no commercial lettering. It was maybe eighteen inches on a side, but surprisingly light. He placed it on a table and opened the top.
Old newspapers were balled up as packing. He unfolded one double page that was discolored from long repose in the box—October 1979. He felt around under the upper layers until he hit the source of the weight. Smooth shape—soft, cloth, pliable. His fingers began to hum as they sent up crude premonitional images to his brain like a sonogram. He pulled it out.
A large tan stuffed mouse with round sausagey limbs, floppy round pink ears, a red knobbed nose, big startled cartoon eyes in white and black, a thick brown tail. Instantly every inner sensor focused on that stuffed mouse.
“Mookie.”
63
“IT’S A DAMN JOKE. KLANDER AND COMPANY gave them just what they wanted to hear: It’s the dementia, stupid.”
René had not seen Nick so upset. His face was red, as if too full of blood. The Klander Clinical Research Group report sat in a black folder on Nick’s desk.
“They hired a bunch of fancy-sounding neuro people and threw a ton of money at them and got the validation they were looking for.”
“But we gave them reams of data and documentation of the problems.”
“Yeah, and they concluded that the events were not Memorine-related but the results of the brain’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. And they bolstered the claim that since the flashbacks are treatable with standard antipsychotic meds, the phenomenon equals demented delusions. QED.” He pushed a copy toward her. “You can read it yourself.”
René took the report and thumbed through it. There were pages of data from outside literature documenting hallucinatory behavior of AD patients. “But the evidence is overwhelming.”
“Not when the conclusion is predetermined. So instead of burying the evidence, they hire so-called neutral specialists to say the problems aren’t drug-related. Pretty clever, huh?”
“But can’t the FDA see through that?”
“No, because the FDA wants this to go to market. So does the president. He sees it as a sixty-billion-dollar savings of taxpayers’ money. So, it’s fait accompli.”
“What about the investigators at some of the other sites? I thought we had some support on this.”
“We do. Paul Nadeau wants an extension. So does Brian Rich. In fact, Nadeau reports he’s got a patient who keeps having flashbacks of finding his father hanging in the closet when he was eight years old. And Dr. Rich says one of his keeps reliving her days as a child at Dachau. And the only treatment is to dope them into a stupor.”
“God, the cure is worse than the disease.”
“Exactly, but GEM’s going to deny that.”
“So we treat the flashbacks with the usual stuff.”
Nick nodded. “And if people recede into the past, let them stay there. If they get out of hand, sedate them, and to hell with the burdens on the families.”
“I don’t believe this.” And in René’s mind she saw Louis Martinetti blanching with horror as he was suddenly transported to the Red Tent where he was forced to watch his captors do unspeakable things to his buddy, pleading for them to stop in some kind of pidgin Korean speak.
“Believe it. What we have is a fifty-billion-dollar piggy that’s going to market, no matter what—ethics and good business practice be damned. It’s the same sealed mind-set you saw with Enron and Tyco. Nobody wants to hear bad news. And if you have any or you raise ethical questions, you’re not part of the team—and don’t get the rewards.”
“But this didn’t happen on its own. Somewhere along the line somebody made a decision to compromise the truth.”
Nick nodded. “There’s an old Greek expression: ‘The fish rots from the head first.’”