The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [151]
Dec. 14: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 600 mg.
Back to earth, moodwise. Also, no noticeable return of side effects. Stay on this dose a few days, then lower again.
The notion that he was carrying on significant scientific work entered Leonard’s head so smoothly that he didn’t recognize its arrival. It was just suddenly there. He was following in the daring tradition of scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, who’d put himself into a decompression chamber to study the effects of deep-sea diving (and perforated his eardrum), or Stubbins Ffirth, who’d poured vomit from a yellow fever patient onto his own cuts to try to prove that the disease wasn’t infectious. Leonard’s high school hero, Stephen Jay Gould, had been diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma just the year before, given eight months to live. Rumors around were that Gould had devised his own experimental treatment and was doing well.
Leonard planned to confess to Dr. Perlmann what he’d been doing as soon as he’d compiled enough data to prove his point. Meanwhile, he had to pretend he was following orders. This involved feigning side effects that had already disappeared. He also had to calculate when his medications would run out naturally, in order to refill them often enough to avoid suspicion. All of this was easy to do now that he could think clearly again.
The problem with being Superman was that everybody else was so slow. Even at a place like Pilgrim Lake, where everyone had high IQs, the pauses in people’s speech were long enough for Leonard to drop off his laundry and return before they finished their sentences. So he finished their sentences for them. To save everyone time. If you paid attention, it was amazingly easy to predict the predicate of a sentence from its subject. Only a few conversational gambits seemed to occur to most people. They didn’t like it when you finished their sentences, however. Or: they liked it at first. At first, they thought it indicated a mutual understanding between the two of you. But if you did it repeatedly, they became annoyed. Which was fine, since it meant you didn’t have to waste time talking to them anymore.
This was harder on the person you lived with. Madeleine had been complaining about how “impatient” Leonard was. His tremor may have been gone but he was always tapping his foot. Finally, just that afternoon, while helping Madeleine study for the GRE, Leonard, unhappy with the pace at which Madeleine was diagramming a logic problem, had grabbed the pen out of her hand. “This isn’t art class,” he said. “You’ll run out of time if you do it so slow. Come on.” He drew the diagram in about five seconds, before sitting back and folding his hands over his chest with a satisfied air.
“Give me my pen,” Madeleine said, snatching it back.
“I’m just showing you how to do it.”
“Will you please get out of here?” Madeleine cried. “You’re being so annoying!”
And so it was that Leonard found himself, a few minutes later, vacating the unit in order to let Madeleine study. He decided to walk into Provincetown and lose more weight. Despite the cold, he wore only a sweater, gloves, and his new winter hat, a fur hunting cap with earflaps that tied together. The winter sky was blue as he made his way out of the laboratory grounds and along Shore Road. Pilgrim Lake, not yet frozen, was full of freshwater reeds. The surrounding dunes looked comparatively tall, speckled with clumps of dune grass except for stretches of white sand near the top where the wind kept anything from growing.
Being alone increased the volume of information bombarding him. There was no one around to distract him from it. As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested