The black woman didn’t get sick. The guy next to her didn’t get sick, either. And then the guy next to him seemed okay, although I hadn’t been watching the time, so I didn’t know how long it had been. Time was going so slow.
Then that next guy said, “Oh, man, I feel it.”
It was like that story in the Bible, where the Israelites want to leave Egypt and they smear blood on their doors and God sends the angel of death to slay all the firstborn but passes over the houses marked with lamb’s blood. Except we didn’t know who had been marked and who had been saved.
A doctor showed up in about half an hour, but by that time they had called EMTs. Six people had gotten the drug and four were placebos, and we placebos were all standing around not looking at each other or looking at the sick guys. They loaded the sick ones into ambulances. The nurse was standing there in the hallway, holding her fist to her mouth like she was trying not to cry. I wanted to ask her if anything had ever happened like this before, but it was pretty clear no one had a clue.
I drove home.
I stopped on the way home and got a hamburger, but it seemed strange to eat it. I felt like I should be so upset I couldn’t eat. Like that ever happened. When I got home I thought to check my cell phone—I had turned it off when I got to the medical trial because at Cleveland Clinic we weren’t supposed to have our cell phones on inside the building. There was a message from a representative of the company that was doing the study, asking me to call. I called my friend Mel instead and told her what had happened, and she said she’d come over as soon as she got off work.
The phone rang as soon as I hung up, and it was NewsChannel5. I told them I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk, but when they asked me if I could confirm that six people had gotten sick, I said that was true. Then the newspaper called. My cell kept ringing and ringing, until finally I shut it off and turned on the TV.
Mel got there just about the time that it came on the news, so I almost missed the first part. Not that it was very exciting. This news woman with really stiff, unmoving newscaster hair said that six people went to the hospital in a drug trial that had gone horribly wrong. The six men were hospitalized in critical condition with multiple organ failures. Then they showed the outside of a hospital—not Cleveland Clinic, maybe University Hospital?
“Fuck,” Mel said, “that’s so stupid.”
I didn’t know what she meant.
“Showing the outside of the hospital. It’s just a building.”
I said, “It’s where they are.”
“So?” she said. “What does showing you the hospital tell you? It’s like when they are talking about a car accident and they show you this perfectly normal stretch of road with cars whizzing by.”
Mel was really mad. It seemed a weird thing to be mad about.
“It’s wrong,” she said. When she lifted her hands, her bangles jingled. “It makes everything seem normal.”
“They have to show something,” I said, although that sounded lame.
“No they don’t,” she said. “We could go back to Miss My-Hair-Wouldn’t-Move-in-a-Hurricane.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing happened to me.”
“I don’t know why it pisses me off so much,” she said. “It’s just the news.”
The next day they had an interview with the girlfriend of one of the guys who got sick. She said that her boyfriend was in a coma and his head had swelled up to three times its normal size and he looked like the Elephant Man. I didn’t think she should have said that. She should have given him his dignity. All day at work I told people what had happened. People wanted to know if I was going to sue. For what? They had told us that there was a risk. They’ve got to test drugs, or people would still be dying of plague and polio. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just something that happened. I explained it over and over again. But people kept saying to me, “Are you going to sue?”
On Saturday I was so tired of the whole thing, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
I wished I could find out what happened to the construction guy, the guy in the flannel shirt. Four of the guys were out of ICU in a couple of days, and I hoped he was one of them. I hoped he wasn’t the guy whose girlfriend had said his head swelled up.
Then the news stopped talking about it.
It was almost like it had never happened. I got a check from the company that did the drug trial, and I put it in my bank account. It was weird because in some ways it was a bigger deal when Chris and I got our marriage annulled. People talked about that for a long time, and not just in Lancaster. But even Mel didn’t talk to me about the drug trial thing unless I brought it up.
It didn’t bother me, not really. I think about it sometimes. I’m not doing any more medical trials. I figure I gave my all for science already. But other than that, it’s just something that happened.
We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico, I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-Mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida.
Still, it was incredibly fun. You walk out of the hotel and down to the road, and this bus comes along. There’s no schedule, because they just take you from the zona hotelera to the downtown. It costs fifty cents. We partied a lot because even if we got trashed it didn’t matter.
There was this one club that sold drinks that were two feet tall. We’d been to Coco Bongo the night before, which was great but too crowded to dance, so we just picked this place at random because it had a dance floor. They had these long skinny glasses, red and blue plastic. I was sick of margaritas, but all you could get were margaritas and daiquiris, so I was on my third daiquiri. Usually I could drink pretty much. I started to feel kind of sick—Cancun catching up to me, I figured. I found the bathroom. I rinsed my face off, careful to keep my mouth tightly closed. I didn’t want to get Montezuma’s revenge.
I overheard these two girls talking. They were thin and blond, and it was clear they had never worked in McDonald’s in their lives. The one was saying to the other, “I don’t know if I want to come back here anymore.”
The other one asked where she wanted to go instead, and they talked about Hawaii or Miami something.
I hated them. I don’t know why; they were probably nice enough. But I just hated them. I thought, I almost died to get here. I still felt a little sick and dizzy, and I went in one of the stalls and sat on the edge of the toilet. Usually I don’t want to touch anything in a public bathroom.
Maybe it just hit me, I don’t know.
I had heard that all the guys lived, although I suspected none of them was exactly ready to come to Cancun. I had specks dancing in front of my eyes. I put my head down on my knees and took deep breaths, and I tried not to think about my head swelling up so that I couldn’t open my eyes.
I’m okay, I thought. I’m okay.
Someone called, “Are you all right?” It was Mel, jingling with bracelets.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sick?”
I was actually feeling better. I stood up and flushed the toilet and came out. “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ve just been drinking too fast.”
The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like to be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection.