The Law of Similars

  Sometimes the toys would remind me of Abby, and in the back of my mind I'd be thinking of new games I could invent to entertain my daughter. Other days, however, I'd see the dolls and lose complete sight of the fact that I was a father: I'd view them instead as profoundly erotic little models of people--men with washboards for stomachs, and women with fetish-thin waists--and I'd forget the fact that these were the very same sorts of dolls around which my four-year-old crafted whole worlds.

  I remember I met with Margaret in her office the morning after my very first consultation with Carissa. The clouds that had dusted the ground with snow were well to the east, and the sky was the neon blue that comes only in winter. It was freezing out, but with the sky that crisp, I lost all fear that the homeopath would make me down arsenic. She'd give me something that sounded vaguely magic, like belladonna. Or Gelsemium. Or Ignatia.

  Ignatia, I decided, that's what I'd like. Sounds just like a saint.

  There were three cases Margaret wanted to discuss: an at-tempted sexual assault, an "L and L" with a minor--a lewd and lascivious act--and a possible murder.

  "Let's start with the murder," I suggested, sitting archaeologist Barbie on the arm of the chair I'd taken opposite her desk, and resting the chocolate doughnut I'd bought in my lap. I'd never seen this Barbie before; she was new. Dark, dark hair. A wide-brimmed hat to protect her plastic shell from that searing hot desert sun, a fossil hunter's fatigues. A colorful map in one hand, a tiny magnifying glass in the other. I made a note in my mind to be sure this particular doll would be among Abby's new Christmas Barbies.

  Margaret dove right in. "Remember that guy in Underhill who died in a hunting accident on Sunday? When he shot a deer, his gun blew up in his face?"

  "I do." How could anyone forget? The poor son of a bitch had ended up bleeding to death in the woods, but his younger brother--a guy in his twenties--was one hell of a hero nevertheless. He'd carried his older sibling on his back close to three miles in the bitter cold that comes after Thanksgiving.

  "The gunsmith who repaired the gun might have rigged it to burst."

  "What makes you think so?" I wondered what a homeopath would do for a guy who'd had most of his face blown away by a defective gun. It began in my mind as a snide little inquiry but then grew merely curious: Maybe Ferrum phosphoricum stopped bleeding. For all I knew, nux vomica--now, there was a remedy that needed public relations help--was a coagulant.

  "The victim was sleeping with his wife."

  "Oh, that's clever," I said, "using one buck to bring down another," but I knew Margaret wouldn't smile. Margaret was profoundly earnest about her work, perhaps because she was still, technically, a newlywed. I imagined she was so happy with her older, wiser psychologist husband--Margaret was twenty-eight, but Dr. Strangelove was somewhere in his late forties or early fifties--that she was all business in the office. In the ten months she'd been married, she'd arrived promptly at eight every morning and left like clockwork at five. Even those weeks when she was in the midst of a trial, she'd managed the seemingly impossible feat of going home almost the moment court recessed for the day.

  "But the gunsmith's record is clean," Margaret said, ignoring me. "Not even a parking ticket."

  "And the widow's?"

  "We haven't checked."

  "Do it. Any kids?"

  "Nope. Thank God."

  I placed archaeologist Barbie on Margaret's desk, and started my doughnut. "Does the gunsmith know he's under investigation?"

  "Yup. Already has counsel. Oren Candon."

  "He's a very successful gunsmith."

  "Guess so."

  "Where's the gun?"

  "What's left of it? At the crime lab. It's a muzzle-loader."

  The regular deer season when rifles were allowed had been over for almost a week, and so the victim had been one of the small group of Vermonters who took to the woods with "primitive weapons"--antiques or replicas of antiques--like muzzle-loaders.

  "Since he has a lawyer, he's probably not doing much talking himself," I said. "So make sure the detectives are talking to his friends. Maybe he said something."

  "Customers, too?"

  "Customers, too. And see if there's a history of these guns blowing up. I think we'll both be very interested in what the ballistics report says."

  I knew it sounded like busywork to Margaret; I could see she wanted to start laying the groundwork for a charge of first-degree murder. But first we had to rule out other causes. Then we might see if we could show deliberateness.

  "And see if gunsmiths are regulated," I added.

  Margaret's hair was black as licorice, and for some reason I thought she looked a bit like the doll on the desk. It might have been the nose. Margaret's nose was tiny, too. When she looked down at the notepad on the blotter, as she did that moment, it disappeared completely behind a curtain of bangs.

  "Okay, we will," she said. "Can we do the sexual assault next?"

  "Sure." I saw that beside her notes was the little Ziploc bag of dates she munched through the morning.

  "Attempted, actually. Burlington firefighter, thirty-four years old--"

  "A firefighter? I never expect untoward behavior from fire-fighters."

  "And he's a father. Three kids. But his wife and children were in Boston visiting family, and Dad hired an exotic dancer to come to their house on North Winooski. 'Adult dancing,' it said he was getting on the MasterCard slip."

  "Married father of three was putting it on a credit card?"

  "I'm sure the monthly statement would be discreet."

  "Nevertheless, talk about leaving a paper trail..." I looked down at the napkin in my lap and was astonished to see I'd already managed to scarf down my entire doughnut. And still I was hungry. Worse, I wanted a cup of coffee. Desperately.

  But Carissa had said the coffee bean sometimes interfered with a remedy. That little book on homeopathy had said the same thing. Consequently, I'd made the spontaneous decision that morning not to purchase a cup on my way into work, so that when Carissa called I could say, Look at me: crisp and clean and no caffeine. Make me well, you sexy healer, you.

  Well, I wouldn't say that second thing. But that crisp-and-clean line wasn't an abomination.

  "The firefighter had agreed to a hundred-and-sixty-dollar dance. Apparently that's about five minutes of stripping to lingerie, five minutes in lingerie, and five minutes in the buff."

  "He got a little overexcited?"

  "So it would seem. He asked her to--as the French say--clean his pipe. And she said no."

  "That's what I like: a stripper with morals."

  "He said he'd pay her whatever she wanted, and still she said no. So then he asked how much it would cost if she just climbed on top of him on the couch for a minute--no penetration."

  "And she said no."

  "No, she said yes."

  "Oh, Lord."

  "She says the minute she straddled him, he grabbed her and started trying to slip inside her. And so she slapped him hard on the face."

  "Good for her."

  "Based on the mug shot, it was a really good whack. Then she says she jumped off the couch and grabbed her things. And though she did call her driver, it's clear she wasn't all that frightened: She also took the time to call her boss to get approval for an extra three hundred dollars in charges."

  "And there went the grocery money for the month," I said.

  "You haven't heard the best part. When the driver arrived, the guy flashed some firefighter badge and said he was a cop! He said they could either tear up the credit-card slips or he'd arrest them. For a minute the driver believed him, but then the dancer asked to see more I.D."

  "And it got nasty?"

  "Yup. He took a swing at the driver, missed, and then grabbed the girl. Who knows what he had in mind. The driver--who, I hear, is one very large animal--pulled the firefighter's arms apart and extricated the dancer. Then, as they were leaving the house, a police cruiser pulled up."

  "Who called the cop
s? A neighbor?"

  "Nope. Dancer's boss. He didn't like how she sounded on the phone, and he got worried."

  I wondered, suddenly, if there were homeopathic aphrodisiacs. Or anti-aphrodisiacs. Something to suggest to that firefighter, maybe, the next time his wife was away. After all, there were certainly a great many conventional drugs that diminished a person's sex drive.

  "When's the arraignment?"

  "Three-thirty."

  "See if you can get some conditions. No alcohol. A curfew. No contact with the victim."

  "You don't approve of this firefighter."

  "I don't. In fact, let's not be content with attempted sexual assault. Let's also get him for assaulting the bodyguard. And impersonating a police officer."

  I looked at my watch and saw I was due in court in ten minutes, and we still had to address the lewd and lascivious.

  And somehow I absolutely had to find a moment to grab a quick cup of coffee or pop an Advil. If I didn't, I was going to have one doozie of a caffeine-withdrawal headache.

  From the package insert that comes with the Ventolin brand of albuterol, one of the prescription drugs Richard Emmons would breathe into his lungs by means of an inhaler: "Ventolin Inhalation Aerosol can produce paradoxical bronchospasms that can be life-threatening."

  Then: "Fatalities have been reported in association with excessive use of inhaled sympathomimetic drugs. The exact cause of death is unknown...."

  And this, under the bold subhead, "Carcinogenesis, Mutagenesis, Impairment of Fertility: Albuterol sulfate caused a significant dose-related increase in the incidence of benign leiomyomas of the mesovarium in a two-year study in the rat...."

  Most of the Ventolin insert is written like this: The language is incomprehensible, vague, and relentlessly ominous. The words are scary and long.

  The language on the insert that comes with the Aerobid Inhaler System is better. The downsides of its active ingredient, flunisolide, are spelled out in prose that is precise. In clinical trials with flunisolide, there was a:

  20 percent incidence of sore throats;

  10 percent incidence of diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting;

  3 to 9 percent incidence of heart palpitations, abdominal pain, edema, fever, and decreased appetite;

  1 to 3 percent incidence of capillary fragility, enlarged lymph nodes, hypertension, tachycardia, and good old-fashioned constipation.

  Meanwhile, beclomethasone dipropionate, known commonly by asthmatics as Vanceril, is warning its users that patients have died as a result of "adrenal insufficiency" while transitioning to it from systemic corticosteroids. Fluticasone propionate can cause rhinitis, dermatitis, and pains in the joints. Theophylline--that pharmacological workhorse in the battle against asthma--can lead to "caffeine-like adverse effects," "cardiac arrhythmias," and "intractable seizures which can be lethal."

  And almost every anti-asthma drug insert admits somewhere that "the long-term effects on human subjects are not completely known."

  Or--I can imagine Richard Emmons surmising--at all.

  Chapter 5.

  Number 94

  While taking a case of chronic disease one should carefully examine and weigh the particular conditions of the patient's day-to-day activities, living habits, diet, domestic situation, and so on.

  Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,

  Organon of Medicine, 1842

  .

  While I was discussing with Margaret how best to go after a married firefighter with an inordinate interest in strippers, Carissa was at her kitchen table, contemplating possible remedies for her anxiety-rich new patient.

  I know now that Carissa did much of her thinking at home over breakfast, before leaving for her office in the Octagon.

  And so I have a vision in my mind of Carissa at work at that moment: She has her Materia Medica open before her, with a mug of herbal tea to her side. She is still in her nightgown, and she has wool socks on her feet because the hardwood that is her kitchen floor is so cold in the winter.

  She has to lift Sepia, her cat, off the book, because without fail the cat will try and plant herself exactly upon whatever magazine or book Carissa is reading. Anything to get her attention.

  Gently she places the animal onto the floor and then sips her tea. She bookmarks the page and writes down a note on one of the charts she has made about me or my constitution. Perhaps it has to do with the way she believes I have suppressed my grief. Or the fact that I tend to awake in the night and grow anxious. My fear of spiders. And cancer. And death.

  Then, maybe, she returns to the notes she took during our session and rereads what I said about food and sleep and sex. She looks at the medical history I offered and then reviews the chart she has made that lists my symptoms by intensity and depth. My sore throats and my sneezing. My wooziness. My headaches. My ongoing unease.

  Sometimes, I'm told, the cure is clear-cut, but sometimes it demands a great deal of thought and exploration. Sometimes you get the cure right the very first time, and sometimes you don't.

  Perhaps what will help her finally decide my remedy will be one of my memories of Elizabeth. How some of the smallest ways we would manifest our love were my favorites: the hours we would spend chatting in a bath together before Abby was born, or the summer evenings we would spend in our vegetable garden, happily pulling weeds from the beets and the carrots and the corn until nine or nine-thirty at night. Then there were those long walks we would take together after Abby arrived. We'd put our little daughter in the stroller on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon and follow the road to the top of the hill to see Mount Abraham and Mount Ellen, or we'd wander without purpose through the old and the new cemeteries in East Bartlett.

  Elizabeth and I imagined that someday we would be buried there, but it hadn't seriously crossed either of our minds that in one of our cases that day would come soon.

  Eventually, Carissa has to shower and get dressed. Her first patient that day is due at nine-thirty. And so I see her inspecting her notes and her charts one last time, and then writing down the name of a remedy in my file. She will think about it some more, but not for very long. After all, her deliberative choice matches her instinctive one.

  I am, she will tease me later, the sort who wears his disease on his sleeve.

  I realized while driving home from work that night just how badly I wanted to see Carissa. I'd thought of her often that day. I'd thought of her whenever I'd sniffed or sneezed, whenever I'd walked past the coffeepot without pouring myself a cup. I'd thought of her whenever I'd seen a woman in eyeglasses, and the two times I'd seen one who'd taken her shoes off: One was in a booth at the restaurant where I was grabbing a take-out sandwich for lunch, and the other--clearly a law student--was in the front row of the courtroom when I was arguing a motion mid-afternoon.

  I'd even been reminded of Carissa that morning when Margaret had chomped into a date--slicing the wrinkled, rust-red roach into halves, one chunk in her mouth and one in her hand--because from now on dates would remind me of confession, and confession would remind me of Carissa Lake.

  But I knew I couldn't see her and I knew I shouldn't call her. I had to wait for her to call me. And so I decided if I couldn't see Carissa, I'd do the next best thing: I'd try and bump into a relative. I'd try and bump into her niece. I had time; it was barely ten after six. Mildred and Abby wouldn't expect me for at least another ten minutes.

  As I pulled into the parking lot, I could see Whitney at the lone front register, weighing organic tomatoes for a customer before dropping them gently into a brown paper bag. I wasn't sure whether I'd figure out a way to bring up her aunt, but I also wasn't sure that it mattered. The genetic proximity alone was comforting.

  The only part of the store I knew at all was the section with herbal tinctures, but Whitney gave me a wave and a smile as I walked in the door, and I felt sufficiently emboldened to explore other aisles. I took off my overcoat as if I actually meant to stay awhile, and wandered toward the alcove with the rice and the beans.

/>   Rice and beans, I knew, were a whole lot better for me than bear claws and doughnuts. And a whole lot less appetizing. In all fairness, of course, I wasn't going to have a bear claw for dinner. I'd probably have another calzone--like the night before--though this time I'd have one with my daughter.