Do gone, Lannigan leaves soon after. "I thought this would be a casual two-week gig," he tells Billy as he packs up. "Get out of the city during the height of the summer and do my thing and get paid decently. I didn't sign up for blinding." Lannigan shudders, balls his hands into blunted fists. No more Voltimand, now he's Lady Macbeth with eyes red-rimmed. "Shaving my entire body was my own stupid idea, but poking a guy's eyes out, that I never intended. What was he thinking?" Billy shrugs no idea. "I mean that must've killed. I could feel his eyeballs kind of roll against my—fucking awful. And my goddamn fingernails. Why was I growing them long?" Lannigan zips up his bag like quick stitching on a scar. "I don't need this in my life right now, the sight of that, that memory, that sensation. He must've been nuts. Did you see him when he was laid out on the ground?" Billy nods. "He almost looked content. I never thought my body would become an instrument for something like that. I can still feel it on my fingers, you know. Christ, he was strong. I couldn't pull away. I tried." Lannigan's bag thuds from bed to floor. "I'm gone." He gives Billy a wave instead of a handshake. His face seems shuttered and newly mournful, as if the marquee of Brad Lannigan, the show, is no longer running, Billy's, "So long," one more spray of graffiti on the stage door. "I hope he's all right," Lannigan says before leaving. "I mean I hope he can still see. Do you think so? I'm doubting it after what I, yeah, awful. Not my fault. Drug must've been doing something crazy in his head. I just hope he's all right. I wonder where they've put him."
This is the question Billy poses to Dr. Honeysack after Honeysack calls him into his office for a little talk.
"Who?" asks Honeysack, frazzled.
"John Rami."
"Oh, him. Terrible what happened. Certainly unexpected. We sent him to the hospital and they're keeping him under observation. The eye is a fairly resilient organ. He'll probably recover his sight, or some of it, at least. But we paid him in full and we'll pick up his hospital bill and maybe cover any other counseling that might be required. But whatever happened to him happened on his own accord, that psychotic break or whatever, that was his own thing. Now on to—"
"How can you say that?" Billy interrupts. "Of course your drug was responsible. In fact, I thought you guys would've called off the whole study after an incident like that."
"Not my drug, not my study. I want to be clear about that."
"But your company's."
Dr. Honeysack levels his eyes on the real world lingering just to the right of Billy's shoulder. "He was on placebo, okay. Once a volunteer washes, we access their file and check their dose just in case, so we can anticipate other possible reactions within the test group. John Rami was on placebo. He was taking sugar pills."
"Placebo?"
"So we're in the clear," Honeysack says.
"You know what 'placebo' means in Latin?"
"No. And I don't care."
" 'I shall please,'" Billy says. "It's vespers for the dead."
"Oh," Honeysack says without interest.
"Why the fuck would you people use that word for a sugar pill?"
"Don't be mad at me. You think I came up with the word?"
"Placebo isn't nothing," Billy says.
"Hey, but suggestion can only go so far," Honeysack claims. "Our hands are clean in this matter, legally. John Rami had a preexisting condition, a mental crack that after nineteen years finally broke. Maybe we were a catalyst, but you can't prosecute a catalyst."
"Yes you can," Billy tells him. "A shove is a catalyst."
"The behavior was his own."
" 'Placere,' to please. He was under the influence of—"
"Nothing," Honeysack says. "He was under the influence of influence. I also accessed your file so I could sleuth your status, and you're on placebo as well." Billy is disappointed but not surprised; all of his side effects seem so trivial, like an overactive imagination. "Brad Lannigan," Honeysack continues. "Also on placebo. Never would you find three roommates on placebo. It simply wouldn't happen. So I'll tell you what I think, and I'll tell you because I want you to trust me. What's going on here is something called a calibration study. A calbrat. Roughly every five years we have one and they help determine the effect of environment on the normal population. It's like weighing the container before putting in the contents. Calbrats give us a sense of the adverse effects of just living here for a few weeks. We get a baseline of stress and its manifestations, usually constipation, lethargy, coldlike symptoms, sore throat, sniffles, the stuff that always shows up regardless of the drug. But sometimes in these calbrats we study suggestion. Personally, I'm not a fan, not a fan of any kind of calbrats. They're a waste of time and resources. At the end of the day a regular study can divine real side effects from imagined side effects by simply crunching the placebos. Anyway, nevertheless, Hargrove Anderson takes great pride in their calbrats. It's a marketing gimmick. They load maybe ten, fifteen percent of the study group with actors and these actors perform the expected adverse events to gauge the effect of proximity on placebo. Quantifiable, I'm not sure. Sexy promotional tool, perhaps. But they claim to get a reliable percentage of unreliability in an average study, placebo or nonplacebo."
"Actors?" Billy says.
"Not always the greatest actors either. I've witnessed some horrible side effects."
"Was Lannigan one of these actors?"
"I have no idea. For the sake of double-blindness, I'm out of the loop. I should say, this is just a guess, but it's an educated guess."
"So nobody's on anything?" Billy asks.
"In my opinion."
"So whatever we've been feeling these two weeks has been phony."
"Not phony," Honeysack says. "Just free-floating."
Billy shakes his head, half-pleased, half-depressed. "So we're the assholes who get high on oregano, drunk on grape juice. We can't even suffer legitimately."
"But the conclusions are as important as any real study. Or at least some people think so." Honeysack leans forward, as if the air is clearer below this innocuous conversational smoke. "But that's not why I want to talk to you. I want to talk about something else."
"What's that?"
"We have a window."
"A window?"
"A window of opportunity. A very small window but a window nonetheless."
"What kind of window?"
"For us to do something."
"Us?"
"If you're game."
"Is this for your deep-freeze study thing?"
Honeysack frowns. "That's not what we're calling it."
"Do you have a name yet?"
"Not yet. But we have an opening—"
"A window."
"—to test our work."
"To preemptively kill someone before they die."
"In a matter of speaking."
"Manner," Billy says.
"Manner?"
"Yeah. In a manner of speaking, as a matter of fact."
Honeysack grimaces.
"So what are you proposing?" Billy asks.
"What an idiot, of course manner"
"Do you want me to get into a bad car accident or something?"
"The trauma itself isn't necessary."
"Oh."
"We'd like to prove our thesis before they drop our research and take the write-off. 'It's a good idea impossible to execute' is what they've told us. Trauma care will always insist on the best possible treatments before our experimental procedure can be attempted, and as a matter of last resort, our work will fail more often than not. It needs to get in early and take hold in order to slip the patient into this hypothermic chrysalis."
"To buy some time."
"Exactly, then the ER can determine with a bit more leisure the best course of action. Problem is, we've come up with a breakthrough that can't be tested properly. We can't use it because we need the proof and we can't get the proof because we can't use it. The danger in field-testing this thing without informed consent is that if it doesn't work, then hospitals will get sued. We can show eighty percent success in animal studies but animals don't have lawyers. But we have a window," Honeysack tells Billy again. "And we have discretionary R&D money left over, and we have access to the proper equipment, and we have a moment where nobody's looking, and hopefully, we have you."
Billy smiles. "So you want to use me."
Honeysack glances down like his lap is vibrating. "Yeah."
A skid of unease in his stomach, thoughts locking up on slippery desire, if all this talk should be acted upon for what? the dubious hope of self-transubstantiation, his own flesh becoming his own flesh? or if he should turn away and apologize to Honeysack for words once again said without meaning, Billy, unsure, asks, "What would you do to me?"
"I promise you won't feel anything. We'll knock you out. It'll be like having your wisdom teeth removed. Then we'll flush your aortic artery with something we've developed called Sal-Gid, a solution we chill to forty degrees Fahrenheit. Then we'll wait. Your body will start to shut down all unnecessary function and just service the essential trunk. Vitals will slow down to almost nothing, an in-between state, a stasis. We'll keep you this way for thirty minutes, and then we'll start bringing you back, gradually, by degrees, until you're like all the happy dogs we've seen who are none the worse for wear."
"So you kill me."
"No, not at all. Or if so, just barely. It's like we're pushing the Pause button. The things we've done to dogs and chimps, inflicting massive trauma on them, breaking them up pretty bad and then flushing them with Sal-Gid and putting their demise into a sort of superslow motion while we move twenty-four frames a second, it's like that but without the trauma."
"Do you know Frank Gershin?" Billy asks of the man and his canvas of scars.
Honeysack nods. "Unbelievable, huh? See, Sal-Gid would be a perfect application for military use, for hospitals in the field, for people just like Frank Gershin coming in all shot up, of course in his case by friendly fire, but that's beside the point."
"Frank Gershin?"
"Yeah, he got those wounds in Desert Storm."
"He was in Desert Storm?"
"Yeah."
"I thought it was something else," Billy says, curious where the truth lies, Kuwait or Queens, if the truth even matters. "So when would you do it?" Billy asks.
"Our window is Friday afternoon, the day of your discharge."
"That soon?"
"It's that or nothing."
September 3, Billy thinks, the day before his parents' scheduled death. He could beat them to the punch and be spared the news, spared the survival, spared the rod of their spoiled life. Funny how stars can line up, how circumstance can scream. If he lives, he lives, and maybe in recovery, whatever recovery that might be, he'll know what they felt, heart stopped, heart restarted, and he'll feel in that banal but awe-worthy repetition, beat upon beat, a sense of who they were. "What would I get paid?" Billy asks.
"We might be flexible on this but we've come up with thirty thousand dollars."
A thousand dollars a minute for thirty minutes of death, Billy calculates.
"We think it's a good offer. There's a chance something could go wrong."
More than sixteen dollars a second.
"There's a chance you might die, not a big chance in our opinion, but a chance."
In the other direction, sixty grand an hour.
"And death would be a big problem for us, for you, of course, but for us as well."
$1,440,000 a day.
"Particularly in terms of explaining your death."
$10,080,000 a week.
"We might be able to chalk it up to a coronary occlusion or thrombosis or something. That's a thought. You just dropped dead, sudden death syndrome, something congenital. We could do the autopsy ourselves and nobody's the wiser."
$40,320,000 a month.
"But we want to cover all the bases."
$483,840,000 a year.
"So what we were thinking, me and my colleague, is that on top of all the release forms we're going to want you to sign, if maybe you could"—Honeysack grins as if the words about to be spoken must be summoned from his bowels—"well, if you could write us a suicide note. Just in case. That way, worst-case scenario, we could chalk this whole thing up to a depressed man. That's what we were thinking. A classic overdose, which we could pull off no problem. Nobody's suspicious of a dead body in a hospital. We would simply bypass the normal operating procedure. Keep it internal. My colleague would do the death certificate, and we'd notify next of kin and give over the suicide note and there, done, finished. Because at the end of the day, a doctor is as good as a cop."
$174,182,400 in federal taxes.
"But you're not suicidal, right?"
$58,060,800 in state and city taxes.
"Because that's very important, that you're of sound mind and body.
Otherwise it'd be unconscionable for us to let you do a test of this severity." The small office is ripe with Honeysack, a bitter, soaked-in smell, the brown rings on white Oxford armpits like a half-drunk cup of coffee forgotten on a radiator. "You're not suicidal, right?" he asks.
"No," Billy answers. "I'm sane."
Honeysack smiles unnaturally. "That's what I thought. You're as sane as they come. You're just playing the percentages and you understand the odds are in your favor, hugely in your favor. You're perfect for our test. Smart, educated, sensitive to the need for extreme secrecy. Because we have a window where we can actually do this, a small window that's about to close for good."
"Friday afternoon?" Billy asks.
"Yep, from three to six. Three hours but we'll only need one."
"What happens afterward, if everything goes well?"
"Worst-case scenario, and I mean that in the best case, you'll go to my colleague's house for observation. He has a nice guest room. Best best case you'll be groggy and sore and probably still spend the night in his guest room, just in case."
"Okay then," Billy says.
"You'll do it?"
"Yes."
"This is great." Honeysack rah-rahs his fists.
Billy wonders if he should bow. Honeysack has never been so animated, not necessarily a positive development. His face is more suited for a courtroom sketch. And what has Billy done by saying yes to this suddenly giddy doctor? The chances of death churn like the reels in a slot machine, the payout tray ready for 120,000 quarters. Yes, the money would be nice, and the odds are more than decent. Absolutely, the money is the thing, Billy thinks. Pay away a large chunk of Ragnar and gain peace of mind. But in the spinning cherries, oranges, lemons, bars, and bells, there is another symbol, a metaphor, a cheesy image of almost dying, of being reborn. Should he endorse such hackneyed crap? Should he allow himself such self-indulgence? There must be a special level in hell for those who die for the sake of their own gesture, perhaps the eighth level, among the fraudulent. No, the money's the thing, Billy assures himself, good old-fashioned greed. But in that deep breath, as the coin slips in and the lever is pulled and the three wheels blur blue-red-yellow-orange-blue, there's the other thing, the thing that speeds between loss and gain.
Billy gets up from his seat. "So Friday."
"Friday it is."
As Billy leaves, Honeysack stops him. "Billy?"
"Yes, doctor?"
"Don't forget that suicide note."