The Placebo Effect (2 page)

“Move it along and don't come back. This is a public sidewalk, not your damned toilet.”

“The Enemy knows that I worked here,” Mike whimpered.

The big guard grabbed Mike by the fleshy part of his upper arm.

“Hey, that hurts.”

“Yeah, it does. Now move along and take your damned signs with you.”

Mike took his “What's Your Ratio!” sign but left the “Who's Jumping Now?” sign against the retaining wall.

The guards watched Mike Shedloski amble away, then one of them kicked at the balancing bottle structure. The thing momentarily resisted and then crashed to the ground, clearly no adhesive of any sort had been used, just balance—incredible balance.

HENRY-CLAY YOLLES, CEO OF YOLLES PHARMACEUTICALS
, stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his office with his hands clasped behind his back, watching as his guards dealt with the freak. Then his attention was drawn to the “Who's Jumping Now?” sign, which led him to stare at the Treloar Building on the other side of the Ohio River. Why didn't he just buy it? He had the money. Yes, but there was something else—something hidden from him—stopping him from just plunking down the cash for the damned stack of steel, glass and stone.

He pulled his eyes away from the building and looked back at his newly refurbished, massive office. The place made him smile because it had all come about from what he first thought of as a stupid fucking mistake on his part. From the idiotic impulse to be helpful. To think like a doctor, a damned healer—not like a businessman.

He had been approached at an ushy-cushy charity banquet by a Mrs. Francis Xavier—who could forget a woman named after a male saint? Her daughter was suffering from an extremely rare disease that afflicts fewer than sixty people in North America. And the pesky thing principally attacks preteens. The only treatment available—as unreliable as it was—required that the children endure painful and lengthy procedures in the hospital three times every week of their young lives. Mrs. Xavier had begged him to devote some research time to developing a treatment that would save her daughter from “this torture.”

In a moment of weakness he had publicly committed his
company to finding a better way to treat the disease. The research had proved to be incredibly expensive—vastly more than he had budgeted—and his stockholders were furious. What kind of return could be made with so few people having the disease? Finally, after applying tremendous pressure and truckloads of cash, his scientists had come up with a simple injection that could be administered once every six weeks.

His marketing department wanted to make a splash, figuring at least on some great press for the company.

He found two doctors who had been dealing with the victims of the disease and got them to agree, on compassionate grounds, to test the new treatment—it wasn't hard to convince them, since the doctors were deeply troubled by their young patients' pain. The only proviso was that the doctors were to forward all records of side effects directly back to him, rather than publishing them in medical journals like
The Lancet.
Positive results he would pass on; negative ones he would send back for a second opinion. It seemed only fair to him, since his company had gone to such expense and there was no way to make money with the treatment.

One of the two doctors found the drug to be “efficacious and with only minimal and acceptable side effects and a great advance over the old procedure.” The other doctor, using a sample of only five patients, found one had a potentially dangerous reaction to the drug, and rather than reporting that back to Yolles Pharmaceuticals, she went to a reporter who just happened to be her lover, and the headlines rolled out:
PHARMA COMPANY BUYS RESULTS! RIGGED DRUG TESTS! NEED FOR ARM'S LENGTH BETWEEN DRUG COMPANIES AND RESEARCHERS! GOVERNMENTS NEED TO ADDRESS PHARMA MALFEASANCE!
Never once did the newspapers or television reports mention that the new treatment worked in 92 percent of the cases—nor did they bother to write about the incredibly painful procedure that the new drug allowed the children to avoid. Or, by the by, the only 64 percent effectiveness of the old treatment. No. Just headlines about how venal his company was. It had cost him a 38
percent drop in the stock price. Scientists deserted the company, and his balance sheet became a daily source of terror.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Two days after the shit hit the fan, Henry-Clay retreated to his Puerto Rico condo on the beach at Isla Verde, fully intending a three-day drunk. He hadn't needed this kind of escape in years, but he wanted to get away from the board members and stockholders who were furious that his investment in the new treatment had darn near drowned the entire company.

God, if they got this bent out of shape over this, what would they do when they found out about the problems he was having with his new antidepressant. And when they heard about the money he'd already spent…

The company's new antidepressant drug was making its way through the ludicrously long FDA approvals process at record speed—a bit of grease from his wallet had helped the process. But the drug was still too expensive to bring to market—almost twice its competitor's price point. And no matter how hard he pushed his scientists he couldn't get that price point down. The actual R & D had been expensive but manageable. The problem was the raw materials themselves needed for the drug. They were extremely hard to find in nature, and the process to produce them synthetically used viciously expensive chemicals. No matter what combination they tried, the price was too high to market.

He awoke late in the afternoon of his second day in Puerto Rico with the post-rain sun streaming in the window. An empty rum bottle was on the floor, a second half-empty bottle tilted off the side of a copy of
Maxim
on the coffee table refracting a tiny spectrum of colour toward his fifty-two inch plasma TV tuned to a documentary on the Discovery Channel.

What he saw made him sit up and question just how drunk he was. On the screen was a Cincinnati street scene that he recognized, and in front of an impossibly balanced pile of junk stood a pudgy middle-aged guy. A voice off the screen asked, “And there's no glue or nails holding this together?”

“Why would there be? There's no need for adhesives. Balance is just a matter of ratio. Up to down; left to right; forward to back. Everything has a ratio.”

The interviewer asked, “Everything, Mike? Everything has a ratio?”

“Absolutely,” this Mike person said. “Light to dark. Smart to stupid. Honest to dishonest.” He smiled mischievously. “Pens to pencils, Macs to PC's, rainy days to sunny days, truth to lies, things that work to things that don't.” He giggled and added, “Fat to muscle.” Then he placed what seemed to be four random pieces atop the balancing act.

The interviewer asked, “And you know where to place the next piece by what you call its ratio?”

“Yep,” Mike said as he added two more pieces to his balancing miracle.

“But how do you know the ratio?”

Mike looked at the camera and smiled, his face suddenly luminous, almost handsome. “I just know—I just know.”

I bet you do, I just bet you do
, Henry-Clay thought.
And aren't you just a big ol' lonely dog, yeah, a lonely dog—that's what you are, aren't you, Mikey, a big ol' lonely dog who needs a juicy bone, a pat on your fat belly, and a fluffy bed to call your own.

“I just know,” Mike repeated.

Now it was Henry-Clay who was smiling his version of a luminous smile. He hit mute on the remote then picked up his phone. He hit number 3 on his speed dial. The first two were escort services.

Kreger, the scientist who headed Yolles Pharmaceuticals' research, answered before the second ring. “Hey boss, where are you?”

“Away. Don't ask where away, just away.”

“Okay. So how's away?”

“More interesting than I thought. How're the trials going on the new antidepression medication?”

“Good. Yeah, good. It's passing all its trials with incredible
speed. It's been five years, but I think we're close to FDA approval.”

“How close?”

“Really close. But there's a problem.”

“Which is?”

“You know the problem. You've known it from the beginning. Price!”

“But the science is okay?”

“The science is terrific. Terrific.”

“So how expensive is it?”

“It comes to almost forty dollars a pill. So, just to amortize the R & D, you'd have to sell them for at least seventy dollars a pill.”

Henry-Clay whistled through his teeth—but he was smiling.

“What's the whistle mean, boss?”

“It means—unless.”

“Unless what?”

“Unless we know the ratio, Dr. Kreger—unless we know the ratio.”

“The ratio of what to what?”

Of placebo to real
, Henry-Clay thought;
of placebo to real.
“Patch me through to Evelyn.”

His secretary's sultry voice came on instantly. “Sir?”

“I need someone to find someone for me. Do we have someone who can do that?”

“Sure. Who're you trying to find?”

Henry-Clay told her. He already thought of Mike Shedloski as Ratio-Man.

Henry-Clay moved to his condo balcony. A parasurfer was taking off from the beach, the ratio of uplift to gravity clearly in uplift's favour, so he soared, as did Henry-Clay's hopes for the future.

And within six weeks of hiring Michael Shedloski, aka Ratio-Man, and treating him like a prized St. Bernard—clumsy but beautiful—he had the knowledge that allowed him to float a few strategically placed rumours about his new—and now not so
expensive—antidepressant drug that sent his stock roaring back to new highs. He and his business were in flight, aiming for the stars.

Ratio-Man had, for a few belly scratches and a dozen
Aren't you a fine doggy, aren't you
's not only stocked Yolles Pharmaceuticals' coffers with gold but supplied something even more valuable: a way for Henry-Clay to find other freaks like Mike—one of whom claimed he could tell when people were telling the truth.

Then of course he'd fired the fat moron. Mac had suggested a more permanent solution, but Henry-Clay was not a murderer—he was a businessman jettisoning a used-up asset.

Easy to do now that he had a new asset on the horizon.
One whose gift I'll have to test
, Henry-Clay thought as he poured himself a drink.
We'll see the reach and breadth of this new freak's gift. You never know when such a skill could be of great value to Yolles Pharmaceuticals—and, of course, to me.

He raised the crystal glass and saluted the Treloar Building across the Ohio River. Then he downed two fingers of the most expensive scotch whiskey that money could buy—and wished that he could tell the difference between it and five-dollar hooch.

Then he looked down and across the street. Mike Shedloski, aka Ratio-Man, was gone.

MIKE WAS HIDING BEHIND THE RETAINING WALL ACROSS
from Yolles Pharma, trying to watch the Enemy standing way up there in his castle window. All around him was the detritus of the statues he'd so painstakingly balanced from nothing into things of beauty. He started to rebuild the stone building, but the voices in his head were confusing him—teetering him dangerously out of balance. And the store didn't have dill pickle chips and that had upset him so he'd thrown over the whole rack—what kind of store doesn't have dill pickle chips? And the store owner had gotten angry and called the police so he'd run, and the voices in his head were confusing him. So many voices. He thought about taking his meds, but they just made it worse—made the voices soft and silky, female, but still there. And even if he couldn't hear them accurately, he knew they made fun of his small penis—and besides, he wasn't sure if the meds came from friend or foe. General Tso's chicken worked better than meds. But where could he find an open Chinese restaurant in Cincinnati at this hour of the night? And he needed to stop the voices, 'cause they were screaming at him now: “You're just a fat idiot. An obese cluck. A tiny-dicked moron in bell-bottoms!”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! Natasha didn't think that—didn't!”

He knew he was screaming, and that the teenagers across the street were watching—smiling—ready to jump him. And suddenly he found himself in front of the weird building on Plum Street. The synagogue that looked like a mosque—covering a portal—a
danger—he was out of balance—out of balance—out of balance! He really needed dill pickle chips. Right now—or General Tso's chicken—or both—yeah, both at once—the chips crushed on top of the chicken. He began to move along Plum Street, to get away from the teenagers, to get away from the yawning portal, from that weird building, from the voices. The voices that kept on shouting, “Give it up. Give it up. This is too big for a fat boy like you. Give it up!” But he couldn't give it up, couldn't give up. He owed it to himself and the others like himself that he had betrayed to the Enemy. He'd pretended to be nice, given Mike a job, put him in charge of a lab. And Mike had betrayed his own kind. Been used by the Enemy who he thought was going to be his friend, a real friend who understood how special he was—and now that friend was the Enemy and was going to try and use Decker. He had to warn him. He had to get to the place called the Junction and warn Decker, warn him that the Enemy was getting ready to test then use him—him and his gift—just like he had used Mike.

“You can't do this, fatso!” The voice screamed.

“I can,” he said under his breath. Then over and over, “I can, I can, I can.”