Outside Looking In Read online

  Dedication

  Ariane Fasquelle,

  in memory

  Epigraph

  Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream

  It is not dying, it is not dying

  —John Lennon–Paul McCartney, “Tomorrow Never Knows”

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  —William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Part I: Cambridge, 1962

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II: Zihuatanejo/Millbrook, 1962–1963

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part III: Millbrook, 1964

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prelude

  Basel, 1943

  Was it poison? Was it out of bounds? An unacceptable risk? She couldn’t have said, but she was in a state all day, though she kept telling herself she was being foolish—if anybody in the entire building knew what he was doing, it was her boss. Since she’d come to work for him just over a year ago, she’d never seen him falter—he was precise, cautious, solid, and he didn’t take chances with his own safety or his assistants’ either. Which you couldn’t say for all the chemists who worked here. Some of them—she’d heard the gossip—got sloppy as the day wore on, not bothering with their safety goggles, crossing the floor with pipettes of nitric acid or sodium hydroxide as if they were on their way home with a bag of groceries, even in one case (though this was only rumor), drinking on the job. And who was left to clean up the mess, to accept blame and cover for them if need be—to lie right to the face of the supervisor? Their lab assistants, of course. Who else?

  Herr Hofmann wasn’t like that. He followed safety procedures to the letter, always, whether it was eight in the morning or five in the afternoon, whether they were preparing the chemicals for the first process of the day or the last. She admired his efficiency, his attention to detail, his professionalism, but there was so much more to him than that. For one thing, he’d had no qualms about taking on a female assistant, the only one in the whole company, and for another he was no cold fish, but a man with red blood in his veins. He was unfailingly pleasant, even on the off days, always with a sympathetic look or a smile for her, and under his lab coat you could see the effects of his bodybuilding and the hours he spent training with the boxing club. His hair might have been thinning and he wore spectacles in the lab, but he swept his hair back like Adolphe Menjou so you hardly noticed, and the spectacles only made him look distinguished. Maybe she was in love with him, maybe that was it, which of course she would never have admitted to anyone on this earth, not even her best friend, Dorothea Meier, and certainly not her mother, who if she had even an inkling that her daughter had a romantic fixation on an older man—a married man, no less, with children—would have marched right up the steps of the building and dragged her home by the scruff of her neck.

  It was April. The day was bright beyond the windows, spring in the air, the whole world singing, and she was in a state. So what if there was a long and honored tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves—August Bier opening a hole in his own spine to discover if injecting cocaine directly into the cerebrospinal fluid would prove an effective anesthetic; Werner Forssmann running a catheter from an incision in his forearm up a vein to his heart to see if it could be done; Jesse Lazear purposely allowing an infected mosquito to bite him in order to prove the insect was the vector of yellow fever—there were as many failures as there were successes. Lazear had his proof, but died seventeen days later, so what good did it do him? Or his wife, if he had one? But that wasn’t going to happen to her boss, she told herself—nothing was going to happen to him. He was taking so small a dose of the compound, a mere 250 micrograms, it couldn’t possibly have any adverse effect, and if it did, she would be there at his side to see him through it.

  She’d come to work that morning in high spirits, never suspecting what he had in mind or that this day would be any different from any other. Because the weather was so fine she’d bicycled to work rather than take the tram, and the fresh air and sunshine had made her feel as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Good morning to you, Fräulein Ramstein,” Herr H. had called out cheerily when she came through the door after hanging her jacket in the closet and slipping into her lab coat. He was at his desk, peering up from his notebook, grinning at her. “Did you see the way the daffodils are pushing up everywhere? I thought somebody’d smeared the whole landscape with butter while we were asleep.”

  “Yes,” she murmured, “yes, it’s all so beautiful—summer will be here before we know it,” and if it was a banal exchange, so much the better, because everything was ordinary, business as usual, and nothing was going to happen to her or her boss, not now, not ever.

  But then, grinning still, he gave her a long look and said, “Didn’t you find it unusual when I went home early Friday afternoon?”

  She had, but she hadn’t said anything then and didn’t say anything now either—she just stood there at the doorway, waiting.

  “Of course, you know it’s not like me—I don’t think I’ve missed more than maybe two days in all the”—he paused, counting up the years—“fourteen years I’ve been at the company, but I felt so strange, or disoriented, I guess, I was sure I had a touch of the flu or a fever or something.” He paused, held her with his eyes. “But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all. You know what it was?”

  She didn’t have a clue, but it was then, at that precise moment, that the anxiety began ticking away inside her like one of the time bombs the partisans were using against the occupiers in Vichy and the Netherlands.

  “The chemical, the synthesis. You know how careful I am, how rigorous—especially with toxic compounds—but nobody can be perfect a hundred percent of the time and I realized the next morning I must have got a trace of the solution somewhere on my skin during recrystallization, on my wrist or forearm, I suppose—or even my fingertips when I pulled the gloves off. A trace. That’s all. And I tell you, I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was as if I were intoxicated—drunk suddenly, right here in the laboratory, in the middle of the day. But more than that, and stranger, when I got home all sorts of fantastic shapes and images kept spinning in front of my eyes, even with my eyelids closed.”

  She said the first thing that came into her head: “You were poisoned.”

  “Yes,” he said, rising from the chair and crossing the room till he was standing right there before her, peering into her eyes as if looking for something he’d misplaced. “But how? And what does it mean?”

  She couldn’t think. He was too close to her, so close she could smell the lozenge on his breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “That you’re lucky?”

  He laughed aloud. “Lucky, that’s exactly it. We’ve got something here, I feel it, I really do.”

  “No,” she said, taking a step back, all the precautions, all the rules, everything she’d learned in her apprenticeship and her time here as a full-fledged employee, a
ll the horror stories about inadvertent poisonings, splashes and caustic burns flapping through her brain like flocks of black-winged birds—Never pour water into acid, All volatile materials to be handled in a hood with the exhaust fan on, Always cover up and always wear gloves. “What I mean is you’re lucky it wasn’t worse. Lucky”—she paused and felt something float up in her, some amalgam of fear and loss and love—“lucky you’re alive.”

  The chemical was one of the ergot compounds Herr H. first synthesized in 1938, when she was just sixteen and working as an au pair in Neuchâtel and he an ambitious young chemist hoping to synthesize an analog to Coramine, a cardiovascular stimulant produced by Ciba, one of the company’s biggest rivals. The structure of Coramine—nicotinic acid diethylamide—was strikingly similar to that of lysergic acid, the basic constituent of the ergot alkaloids his mentor, Arthur Stoll, had isolated eighteen years earlier, and so Herr Hofmann reasoned that it would have similar properties and uses. He spent three years on his investigations, which yielded one useful product—ergobasine, marketed by the company for obstetrical use, as it promoted dilation of the uterus and stanched bleeding after birth—and a series of lysergic acid derivatives that unfortunately didn’t show much promise, including the twenty-fifth iteration, lysergic acid diethylamide. The pharmacological unit found it 30 percent less effective than ergobasine, though it did seem to have a mild stimulatory effect in animal trials, producing a degree of restlessness in rats, rabbits and dogs. But Sandoz was not in the business of marketing stimulants for the lower animals, and the compound was shelved, along with its twenty-four predecessors.

  The thing was—and he’d tried to explain this to her the previous week—he just couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was paid to experiment, to be creative, to unlock the chemical secrets of natural substances (like ergot, a parasitic fungus of grains that had been used in preparation by midwives from time immemorial) in order to produce new medicines for the company so that the company could market them and make a profit for its investors, and, by extension, its employees. That was his job, his fulfillment, his pleasure in the work—the natural world presented a mystery and it was the object of science to chip away at that mystery and see what lay beneath it. He had a hunch about this synthesis, that was what he’d told her (“Ich habe ein Vorgefühl”), this one above all the others, and though it was unusual to continue experimenting on a drug once Pharmacology had passed judgment on it, he couldn’t help feeling there was something here they were all missing. And so, on Friday she’d assisted him in preparing a new synthesis for further trials. And on Friday he’d inadvertently poisoned himself and had to go home early. Now it was Monday, the first day of the workweek, and he was proposing to poison himself all over again, intentionally this time.

  He was right there, as close as he’d ever been to her, and her heart was pounding in her chest. Strangely, his eyes didn’t seem to blink—he was fixated, not on her but on something beyond her, through her, an idea—and for the longest moment he didn’t say a thing. When he told her what he was proposing, she let out a little cry—she couldn’t help herself; she was that shocked. “But wouldn’t it be better to test it on animals first—in the event, I mean, in case there are adverse effects, or you, you—?”

  She had to look away from him. It wasn’t her place to question him—he’d gone to university, he was an educated man, he was her boss, and she was a girl still, just twenty-one. She hadn’t even gone to high school. None of the girls she knew had—in her place and time women were expected to marry and raise a family. Period. Oh, maybe they’d work for a year or two as au pairs or apprentices in a shop, as typists or assistants in a chemistry lab, but marriage was their prospect and their destiny and that made a high school education strictly de trop.

  “Ha!” he said, spinning away from her like a dancer, as excited as she’d ever seen him. “We’ve already been down that road, as I told you—all that would happen is that the stiffs over in Pharmacology would dose a couple of dogs and the dogs’ pupils would dilate and their body temperature rise and they’d pace back and forth in their cages, but dogs can’t talk, dogs can’t tell us about the kind of psychoactive properties this compound might have, does have, I’m sure of it.”

  “You’re no guinea pig,” she said, because she wouldn’t give it up. Ergot was dangerous. She’d looked it up in the library because she wanted to be informed, wanted to learn, and what she learned frightened her all the more. It poisoned whole villages in the olden days when people consumed it in their bread, the fungus ground up into flour along with the grain it infested, and no one suspecting the truth of the matter. It caused convulsions, diarrhea, paresthesia, and worse, mania, psychosis, dry gangrene that made your nose, ears, fingers and toes shrivel and drop off.

  “But I am,” he insisted. “I am. And you’re going to be my witness.”

  The noon hour came and went. She didn’t go home for lunch, but instead sat outside in the sun and nibbled at the sandwich her mother had made her that morning. Everything around her was buzzing with activity, people from the shops and offices picnicking on park benches or spreading blankets on strips of grass, bees at the flowers, birds in the trees, pigeons rising up and fluttering down again like windborne leaves. She wasn’t hungry but she forced herself to eat, trying not to think about what lay ahead—which was nothing really, she kept telling herself, because ergot was only toxic in much higher and repeated doses, so that the photo she’d seen of the gnarled decaying feet of a peasant afflicted with ergotism was the end result of continued ingestion—bread, daily bread. She took a bite of her sandwich, then turned it over in her hand and examined it, the neat semicircle her teeth had made, crumbs, the pink of the ham, the yellow of the cheese. The sun warmed her face. Her mind drifted. She chewed. Swallowed. Watched a cloud in the shape of a scythe slice across the face of the sun and melt away.

  Herr Hofmann, always mindful of the company’s time, put off the experiment till late in the day. She kept herself busy cleaning the lab equipment, washing and drying beakers, funnels, stirring rods, wiping down the counters she’d already wiped down twice, but all the while she was keeping an eye on him where he sat at his desk making notations in his laboratory journal. The afternoon wore on. She was in the midst of rechecking the inventory for lack of anything better to do, when all at once he pushed back his chair, stood up and swung round on her. “Well,” he said, “are you ready, Fräulein?”

  It was four-twenty in the afternoon—he made a note of it for the record and so did she—when he diluted 0.5 cc of ½ promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate with 10 cc of water, gave her a “here-goes” grin, raised the glass as if he were toasting her and drank it down in a single swallow. “Utterly tasteless,” he pronounced, looking past her to the window and the glaze of sunlight on the panes. “If I didn’t know better I’d think I was just taking a sip of water.” Again he flashed the grin. “For the purpose of moistening the throat. Always advisable to keep the throat moist, right?”

  Her response was so muted she could barely hear herself. “Yes, I think so,” she murmured, but she was watching him closely, feasting on the sight of him actually, this shining man, this genius, and why couldn’t he have chosen somebody else for the trial, somebody who didn’t have so much to lose? He could have called for volunteers, paid someone—Axel Yoder, the halfwit who pushed a mop up and down the hallways all day long as if it were attached to him. Or the squint-eyed woman in the butcher’s shop down the street. He could have paid her, couldn’t he? What would she know? Or a monkey—what was wrong with trying it on a monkey?

  Twenty minutes later, nothing had happened. They’d both gone back to their work, the sun held steady, a telephone rang somewhere down the hallway. She could barely breathe. She was aching to ask him if he was feeling anything yet—any effects, anything whatever—but she felt shy suddenly, as if it would be an imposition, as if somehow the experiment would be in jeopardy if she were the first to speak. The toxin was in him, thi
s was his body, his trial, and what could be more private than that? She thought of Werner Forssmann then and how he’d had to physically restrain his nurse so she wouldn’t interfere with him when he worked that catheter all the way up his antecubital vein to his heart, and then she was wishing she’d taken the compound with him. Or instead of him.

  Every minute fell like a sledgehammer. She wanted to get up, wanted to go to him, if only to press a hand to his shoulder to assure him she was there still, but she fought the impulse and fought it again. And then, just as the church bells tolled the hour, he suddenly shifted around in his chair, glanced over his shoulder at her and began to laugh. Laugh! And not just a titter or a cackle, but a booming full-chested roar of a laugh that just kept coming and coming till he had tears in his eyes and she was on her feet and flying to him, crying out, “What? What is it?” And absurdly, “Are you feeling it?”

  He tried to get up, then sat heavily. The laughter caught in his throat. “I feel, I feel”—he was struggling to get the words out—“light . . . headed . . . dizzy, maybe. And”—here he laughed again, sharply, more a bark than a laugh—“gay, gay, Fräulein, and why would I feel gay?”

  She was standing over him now, barely able to breathe herself, and she did the only thing she could think to do: she touched him, ever so lightly, on the forearm. He rotated his head to stare up at her, his question still hanging in the air, and she saw that his pupils were dilated like the pupils of the dogs in the laboratory trials he’d told her about, so wide open they drove all the color out of his eyes. Normally, his eyes were the color of caramel; now they were black, shining and black, and she made a mental note of that so she could write it down later, and why did she have such an ache in the pit of her stomach and why was she thinking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

  “I must . . .” he began, then laughed again, waving an arm in front of his face as if he were conducting an orchestra only he could hear, “must . . . record . . .” In the next moment he took up his pen and very slowly and meticulously wrote a single line in his notebook: 17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of ataxia, desire to laugh.