On Sunday, after the morning feed and bleed, there's an optional ecumenical service in the dose room, which Billy skips in favor of a nap followed by some wandering around the third floor. Routine is already plowing a path under every footstep. Mundane prescience hangs over time. Everybody knows what comes next: lunch. Passing rooms, Billy sees bodies stretched on beds, their eyes staring toward the television's event horizon. They could be adrift on rafts, the floor filled with atypical antipsychotic sharks ready for the slightest slip of ankle. In the spaces between these doorways hang framed posters, not from museum exhibitions or world-famous destinations. No, they are HAM inspired, advertisements blown up and proudly displayed like family photographs if the family in question celebrated medical adversities rather than graduations or weddings. The people pictured are good average folk, their faces occupying the middle beauty bracket, their features rubbed from the Rosetta stone of physiognomy. Cut and paste and you could collage anyone. Billy browses them, the Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham of erectile dysfunction and vaginal dryness, the Richie and Joanie of attention deficit disorder and social anxiety, the Fonzie of acid reflux. But these are very special episodes in otherwise happy days.
Maybe it's sunburn, but no, it's winter.
Maybe it's skin irritation, but you're rarely this red.
Maybe it's an allergy, but usually you just stuff up.
Maybe it's acne, but you're forty-six years old.
Maybe it's rosacea, an unsightly epidermal condition that affects over 13 million Americans. Talk to your dermatologist today about a topical therapy that can really make a difference.
These are the kind of ads plastered in subway stations and bus stops, in places where literate boredom resides, where you read without intention, you the sucker always deciphering, always linking letters into words. If only you could pause comprehension, Billy thinks, push your temples and become illiterate and revisit that time when billboards carried the mystery of John Donne. What's that mean? But it's incurable, this viral comprehension, and it starts with cereal boxes and the fun facts of milk. All this information jammed in front of your face and you're the cornered prey. No matter what, the words have you nailed.
Now men who despair over the frequent nightmare of nighttime urination can sleep snug like a baby. No more endless trips to the bathroom. No more worries of an embarrassing accident. No more time taken away from your important rest. Because benign prostatic hyperplasia, a common noncancerous enlargement of the prostate gland, shouldn't be something to lose sleep over.
The afflictions are photographed in gauzy near-death light, in the magic hour when pollen is alive, when liver spots glow like honeydew, when you're no longer as young as you think and you're older than you realize. That ache, that throb, that funny feeling, it's telling you something. Forgetful? Irritable? Uh-oh. Billy absorbs these images as if they are old master canvases painted with patented morbid affection. Of course those afflicted are just actors impersonating discomfort, the fourth estate of performers who inhabit the pits of print advertising. They pretend to search for answers. All they want is a cure.
"Billy?"
He turns and sees Gretchen in the doorway of her room.
"What're you up to?" she asks.
"Just taking in the artwork," he tells her.
"Uplifting, isn't it?"
"Yes." He invests his answer with the sight of her in a silk peach bathrobe. A pair of glasses, nerdy chic, hedges her eyes like a collaboration between warring instincts. "I didn't know you wore glasses," he says.
"Yep."
"Not that I know you well enough to know anything."
"Well, glasses can be the first surprise."
Billy smiles, the verb hardly doing justice to the thrill in his lips, the vestibule, the commencement of what might follow, of what is already churning in his lungs.
"I love this one," Gretchen says gamely. She goes over to a glossy young woman laughing among a group of female friends.
A birth control pill proven to better your skin. A fantasy drug, right? Too good to be true? But it is true. Introducing a birth control pill that can help reduce mild to moderate acne and prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Nearly nine out of ten women saw a significant change in their complexion while being 99% certain of contraception when taken correctly. Now a perfect choice for women who have reached menstruation, are seeking contraception, have no known contraindications to birth control pills, and are unresponsive to topical acne medication. Now you can be confident inside and out. So clear your mind as well as your skin. See, miracles can happen.
"You know what Madison Avenue calls this woman," Billy says of the clear-skinned, ovum-independent woman. "She's a Merry Andrews. All these people are Merry Andrews and they populate the piggy spots, which is industry code for the pain-is-good approach. Nice, huh? And fake doctors in lab coats are grinders, and product is kickapoo, and Middle American appeal is called P&G, after Procter & Gamble. Pretty perfect for this country, huh? The puritan and the speculator."
"Thanks, professor," Gretchen says.
"I've done some temp work in the advertising field."
"Lucky you."
Together, if not hand in hand then perhaps with sensibilities entwined, Billy and Gretchen peruse this rogue's gallery of remedy. The drugs themselves come in a variety of forms (creams, sprays, solutions, lotions, inhalers, suppositories, liquids, patches) but by far the preferred method is oral (tablets, capsules, pills), illustrated ten times actual size as if a jewel worthy of Elizabeth Taylor. Shapes and colors compose a digestible geometry: blue triangles, orange circles, pink rectangles, green diamonds. They could have been manufactured in a confectionery lab, consumed in a bowl of milk. Billy and Gretchen struggle in pronouncing their generic names: tretinoin emollient, omeprazole, sumatriptan succinate, azithro-mycin, trimethodenzamide hydrochloride, doxazosin mesylate, loratadine, raloxifene, pravastatin sodium, finasteride, norgestimate ethinyl estradiol. They sound ethnic in their morphology, immigrants fresh off the boat. But like movie stars—"like Norma Jean Mortenson," Gretchen says; "like Roy Scherer and Issur Danielovitch," Billy says—these drugs have brand names with the sizzle of Marilyn Monroe, the brawn of Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas. Vigorous exclamation points seem sculpted in their meter, like weight-bearing spears. There's Suprax and Tigan, Orudis and Calan, Ultram and Hyzaar, Procardia and Orap, Rufen and Sansert, Videx and Ziac, Tonocard and Pen-Vee, Cozaar and Imdur, Voltaren and Lasax. Billy hears sacred undertones in the names, pharmaceutical spin-offs from the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Vedas, the Pali Canon, the I Ching. An equal-opportunity apothecary. And always there's the HAM corporate logo: the sun either setting or rising on the promised land of choice.
"Hargrove Anderson Medical," Billy intones.
"Tomorrow's Company Today," Gretchen finishes.
Billy turns toward her, her pale hexagon of a face pictured in the lower-left-hand corner of his own unfocused malaise. She's in that tricky age, he thinks, often bemoaned by actresses, when their lives fold into no-great-roles-for-women-except-dutiful-wife-or-mother. There is, in the clothesline sag of her mouth, a worn sadness.
"How are you feeling?" she asks.
Billy almost mistakes this question for something else. "All right, I suppose."
"Any side effects or anything?"
"No, not yet."
"Me neither."
"I actually feel good," he says, Gretchen dissolving into his bloodstream. From down the hall a man appears, first in voice—"Gretchen"—then in body, slim and nebbish, though the neb has been honed to a studied point of tousled intellect, like a nib spewing love letters disguised as letters to the editor. "It's starting now," he says, fast approaching.
"Oh yeah, already?"
"Absolutely." The man stops in front of them. Fingers tap against thumb in a continuous four-part beat.
"Billy," Gretchen says. "Do you know Stan Shackler?"
"No.".
"Hey," Stan says, his hand far too busy for a handshake.
"Stan here has a Ph.D.," Gretchen informs Billy.
"Not yet," Stan says. "Soon though. Now we really should go."
"Whatever you do don't ask about his dissertation," Gretchen says.
"That fascinating, huh?" Billy says.
Stan Shackler puffs himself up, as if loosening a French cuff. "Actually, it is quite fascinating, and it's already getting attention within certain circles. I just don't want to talk about it. I think about it too much to want to spend a second of my time talking about it, talking about it with people who will have no idea what I'm talking about. I'd be the only person who understands the conversation."
"How long have you been working on it?" Billy asks.
Stan Shackler practically groans. "I really don't want to talk about it."
"Sorry."
"But I should be done soon. I have to be done soon or else I'll forever hate my career. But I really really don't want to talk about it. No offense."
"None taken," Billy says, viewing Stan Shackler along the lines of a cat who wears a bell that warns potential prey, this shrill alert excusing the thousand leaps and swipes, the constant springing forward, the frankness of attack.
"I'm sure it's brilliant," Gretchen says.
"It's not, it's shit, okay. Now we have to go because it starts soon."
"What's starting soon?" asks Billy.
Stan fidgets. "Can we please just go?"
"Fitzcarraldo," Gretchen says.
"It's a film by Werner Herzog," Stan informs Billy.
"I know," Billy says, then he asks, "Is it the movie or the making of?" though he's seen neither, though he knows both plots.
"Not Burden of Dreams," Stan snips. "Fitzcarraldo."
"The only Herzog I've seen is Even Dwarfs Started Small," Gretchen says.
"The fact that you've seen that film is amazing," Stan tells her, captivated.
"He did Nosferatu, right?" Billy says.
Stan nods with critical indifference. "His most commercial film. I, for one, prefer Murnau." Stan pauses, sort of simulates a burp as if digestion is a personal quirk. "It's not cinematics, if that's what you're thinking."
"Thinking what?" Billy asks.
"About my dissertation."
"Oh."
"And it's certainly not economics. Now Gretchen, let's go. Kinski awaits."
"We're watching it in my room," she tells Billy.
"My roommates are only interested in Tom and Jerry," Stan explains.
"Join us," Gretchen says.
Billy shakes his head. "That's all right." And off they go, Stan shuffling along, Gretchen falling in behind, Stan glancing back as if Gretchen is a scribbled note he fears has slipped his pocket. Billy watches them disappear into her room, Billy alone in the hallway, the self-styled outsider, surrounded by images of anxiety and relief, by the man who holds his throbbing elbow instead of a golf club, by the woman who takes a deep liberating breath on a mountaintop—Welcome home©.