Snowflake, AZ Read online

  And off she went again like her head might fall off.

  ‘Well, why would it do that?’ Mary asked, so Mona said that the book said that say you was a toxoplasma bacterium and you infected a male rat. Now that male rat is gonna take more risks, maybe not stay away from the cat that’s been snooping about. So the rat gets eaten and you’ve managed to pass yourself into a new host. And then, say you infect a female rat and you make it have more babies, and you can infect them too, then you’ve found yourself a crew of new hosts.

  ‘Pretty cool, huh?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s real rare, ain’t it? That bacteria,’ I said. ‘Toxo-what-have-you? That must be real rare.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Mona, ‘only about one in four people have it.’

  ‘One in four?’ I said, like I was dumb, which was dumb because here was a number I could understand.

  ‘Unless you’re a woman who lives in Paris, France,’ Mona added. ‘In Paris, France, four out of every five women have it.’

  Four out of every five.

  Then Mona told us about an experiment in Berlin, Germany, where they proved that women are most attracted to men who have the greatest difference in bacteria in their gut from what they got. They did this using identical T-shirts that ten guys had slept in. And when they got ten girls to rank the T-shirts (just the T-shirts, mind) in order of how attractive the owner must be, they found out that it was the bacteria being different that made ’em attractive.

  ‘Well, why would the bacteria do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Make you diversify your colonies of bacteria, I guess,’ Mona said. ‘I always told you diversity was good. Right? Right!’

  And I thought about that. Did you only take a shine to someone because of the bugs in their gut? Not because they had nice square shoulders, or an old faded red T-shirt that does something special for ’em?

  Or was that T-shirt only attractive because of freaking bacteria?

  ‘Not so smart now, are we?’ Mona said, and started giggling again. ‘Bacteria have been around for longer’n we have. And maybe they’re controlling a bunch of what we do and think. There are far more of ’em than us, and when we’ve wiped ourselves out and all the fancy tigers and lemurs and what-have-you too, you know who’ll be left? Right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but these bacteria. The ones living in us. They’re not all bad, right?’

  I said that partially to reassure myself, because whenever Mona started talking about bacteria, I started feeling all itchy and scratchy and would want to go have a shower and not come out. Mona had already told us that some bacteria were good for us, in fact, how we actually need some bacteria, like the ones in our gut, to help us digest food and so on.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mona, ‘but here’s the rub. There are good bacteria and bad ones. And we take antibiotics to kill the bad ones, like when we get some infection or other. Trouble is, these antibiotics, they kill the good ones too. The book says that if you take this thing called metronidazole, it’s real bad news.’

  ‘Metro-what?’ I said, and Mona said, yeah, don’t they give drugs weird names.

  She told us that the book said it was proven fact that the use of antibiotics was being linked to all sorts of woes and illnesses and syndromes. Obvious things like irritable bowel syndrome and celiac disease. And then things that were less obvious, like autism and ADHD. And then things that were just way out there. Like obesity, like depression.

  So then I remembered that even Bly had talked about that—about how you needed the good bacteria in your gut to help you make serotonin or you’d get depressed and then I remembered that Bly wasn’t here anymore and I felt real depressed myself.

  I wondered where he was and if he was a police officer yet, and I wondered how smart he’d look in his uniform and how he’d have women falling at his feet and some of the men too, no doubt. Then I felt sick, and I don’t mean with MCS, I mean something turned over inside of me and it hurt and I wanted him to come home. To Snowflake.

  And the point was, shouldn’t they have to prove these things are safe first, before they get used all across the planet? Before millions of people have used ’em and swallowed ’em and before they have ended up in our rivers and waterways?

  Something occurred to me and so I said it. ‘These drugs. They sound like gods in a third-rate role-playing game,’ I said, so then Mona looked at me like ‘whut?’ and I said, ‘Metronidazole.’

  I said they must’ve been made up by a bunch of jerks sitting in a boardroom with a set of Czechoslovakian Scrabble tiles and a bottle of whiskey.

  Mary laughed and said uh-huh, or gods from ancient Sparta, and Mona put her head in her hands and said they weren’t the gods of Sparta, they were the gods of Pharma. Big Pharma.

  So then Mary and me, we played our last guessing game of the evening.

  ‘There are fifty thousand chemicals in use in the Western world,’ Mona said. ‘Guess how many of ’em have been shown to be safe.’

  And we both guessed, but we was both wrong. The actual answer, by the way, is about three hundred. Three hundred out of fifty freaking thousand.

  ‘That’s…’ I said, but I couldn’t think what it was.

  ‘Dumb?’ said Mona. ‘Irritating? Outrageous? And you know why it is, don’t you? You know why they’re used before we know they’re safe?’

  And yes, I did by now, for I had spent long enough with Mona. I knew she was setting me up for the answer, just like she used to do with Bly. And I told her.

  ‘Money,’ I said. ‘That’s why. People wanna make money first, and maybe wonder how after. Maybe.’

  Mona did her fingers into guns thing at me.

  ‘Gotcha. People think Big Pharma is there to make ’em better, but it ain’t. It ain’t. It’s there to make money, and if they get away without killing anyone in the process, well, that’s a neat little bonus.’

  Mona nodded, and I knew I had become Bly. I had stolen his bed and I had stolen his life and I had stolen his answers to Mona. I had even stolen his sickness. But he’d stolen something of mine in return when he went wandering off back down to flatland. And that, in case you didn’t know, was my heart.

  And maybe it was just the bacteria that made me feel that way. And maybe it was just the bacteria that made Bly do what he’d gone and done too. But that didn’t matter none, it all hurt just the same.

  N

  Nocebo

  ‘So that’s what your face looks like,’ Mary said to Mona one day and cracked one of her tiny smiles. It was somewheres in November, and it was coming on cold. The nights were a little below freezing, and the days didn’t show much on the thermometer that was stuck by the back door. The days were warm still, long as you was in the sun. That was one of the things about being up at five, well, heck, six thousand feet. It’s warmer. I mean, actually it’s colder, but it feels warmer if you’re in the sunshine. Not because you’re closer to the fiery orb, but because the air is so darn thin. There ain’t so much air to stop the sun’s rays, and that warms you up.

  Mary had called around again with a file of letters and documents to go over, and Mona had finally read everything there was to read about bacteria. Now that her face was no longer hid by a book, we simple folk could try to speak to her about something other than how bacteria are gonna rule the world, if they ain’t already, and that was surely open to discussion, at least as far as Mona saw it. Mona seemed a little weird for a few days after the bacteria thing. Like she was seeing everything different, and I guess, maybe I was too, because while what she had to say about bacteria was mightily tiresome, it was also, if I tell it right, quite a thing. It sorta did change your mind about things. About what we’re all so fussed about, when the bacteria have been here for four billion years and we’ve only been here for twenty minutes. And will be real damn lucky, as now we know, to get to twenty-five.

  Anyway, at last Mary got her chance to show us what was eating at her.

  She pulled out a bunch of letters from her he
alth insurer, and then a bunch of letters she’d been getting from some lawyer she’d found. Then the three of us stood with our hands on our hips and Mary said, well, whaddya think? And Mona and me thought for a bit and then at the same time we both said about what?

  ‘That!’ said Mary, and she jabbed a finger at one of the letters from her lawyer.

  Now, the thing is, it had taken Mary about a hundred years to find a lawyer who took her seriously about EI and who’d agreed to help her in her case with the insurance company. She’d told me one time how three folks had laughed down the phone at her. How one guy had just said ‘fruitcake’ and hung up. And about how finally she’d found this guy in Flagstaff who’d listened for a real long time and then how he’d agreed to do it.

  Even then, Mary said, it had not been easy, because he didn’t understand things.

  So Mary had had to educate her lawyer about environmental illness and she was finally happy that they was good to go up against the insurance company, and then he sent through a letter of agreement between them about a week ago and on that was written a list of terms.

  ‘So?’ said Mona, and Mary said, ‘Look at item 26.’

  So we did.

  Item 26: client to confirm if tinfoil hats are to be worn in court.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mona.

  ‘Gee,’ I said.

  ‘Yuh,’ said Mary. ‘I spent two months getting this guy to the point where he’s ready to defend me, and now he’s yanking my chain.’

  It sure did seem that way. Like this guy thought it was funny to ask if they all had to wear little tinfoil hats like those crazies who think the government is fooling with their brainwaves. The government or aliens. You take your pick. Because everyone knows those guys are crazy, though I guess, thinking about it for a moment, I guess they don’t think they’re crazy. I guess they think they have darn good reasons for wearing tinfoil hats and I also guess they think their thinking is logical.

  ‘So whaddya gonna do?’ asked Mona.

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m asking you,’ said Mary. She looked real worried, more’n I had ever seen. ‘Do I tell this guy to get lost?’

  And I thought, yeah, tell him to get lost, but Mary’s point was she’d spent so long getting this far, and she’d already paid some time already and that money would be in the trash if she started off again with someone else. Even if she could find a someone else.

  ‘Well,’ said Mona, ‘I guess he has a sense of humor,’ and that could not be denied, but my point was a) yeah, but what kind of sense of humor and b) do you really want a clown representing you in court anyways?

  And Mary did not know what to do.

  A few days later I was hanging out with Finch. Mona had started up on deliveries again since Bly had left, and she made me come with her, just to get me out of the house. I was still tired all the time, and I had the headaches come and go, and I couldn’t walk more’n fifty yards without falling over, near enough. So we had been buzzing this way and that in her little Japanese car, and sometimes I’d go to every drop, and sometimes she’d leave me to talk a while with someone or other and pick me up on the way home.

  Finch was still camping outside his house. He’d made some progress on stripping out things that didn’t oughta be in there, but there was still more to do and it was getting colder every day.

  I told him about Mary and the lawyer and the tinfoil hats and what did he think she should do?

  He shook his head and he looked mad. Angry for Mary, because she needed help with her case and she’d been sleeping in the back of a pickup truck for seven years and wasn’t that bad enough? He was lucky, he said.

  ‘Screwit,’ he said. ‘Insurance companies. You pay them for years and the second you need something back they do everything they can to avoid paying out. They think it’s all in our heads.’

  And he was mad, like I said.

  So then I was thinking about Dr. B and what she’d said to me.

  It’s all in your head. It’s all in your mind. You ain’t truly sick. It’s all in your mind.

  So I said to Finch, ‘What do they mean by that anyway?’

  And he said ‘what?’ so I said, ‘I mean, do they think we’re imagining it? Or do they think we’re pretending it? Or what?’

  Finch huffed around his porch for a bit and it was always funny to see him mad, because he was, 99 percent of the time, so calm, so calm, always so calm like he was a Zen master and had medals to prove it. And then every once in a little while something would rile him and he’d say ‘screwit.’

  When he’d finished making coffee, he’d calmed down.

  He said, ‘Yeah, I guess some folks think we’re pretending.’ And he told me about how he’d had to go before some kind of committee that the insurance company set on him, to prove he was ill, or else he wouldn’t have been getting his payout. And he said there was one guy on the panel who tried to rile him, who told him to his face that he was just putting it all on.

  ‘There are folks like that. I don’t think Dr. B is one of those guys. Most doctors, they mean something a little different. When they say it’s all in our heads, they’re talking about something else. They believe that we believe we’re sick, and they also believe that we really are sick, but that the sickness is a product of the mind, not the body.’

  So what I said was ‘huh?’

  So then Finch took a deep breath.

  And then he said, ‘You heard of the placebo effect, right?’ and I nodded because everyone knows about the placebo effect. You go to the doctor and take some pill and it makes you better and all the while your doctor is chuckling away to his- or herself because actually the pill was made of nothing but baking soda and/or sugar. And Big Pharma is chuckling away twice as hard because they just charged somebody a small fortune for a tiny little dollop of baking soda and/or sugar. And baking soda and/or sugar don’t make you better. Least, they shouldn’t, but they can.

  So Finch said, ‘Yeah, that’s about right, but there’s more to it than that.’ And then he told me about some of the really weird things about the placebo effect.

  Like, thing number one, you can be told that the pill you’re taking is only a placebo pill, and it can still work anyhow.

  Or thing number two, that the more expensive you think a placebo pill is, the better it works.

  And then there’s thing number three, the placebo effect is so powerful that it gives real drugs a run for their money. Finch told me how the drug companies have a mighty hard time proving that the shiny new drug they just made is better than the placebo effect, which is to say, better than nothing but the human mind telling itself everything’s gonna be fine.

  Then I thought about someone I knew, and something that someone was taking. Had been taking.

  ‘Yeah, but something like Prozac, that works for real, doesn’t it?’

  Finch told me how the results for fluoxetine, for instance, were debatable. How maybe it shouldn’t be sold, because according to some tests, it ain’t no better than the placebo. So then I was thinking about Bly, and the pills he’d been taking, the pills he didn’t take with him when he left, and how they could mess with your head so much they made your depression worse. And now here was Finch telling me maybe they weren’t even better than taking baking soda and/or sugar pills. That they was just the placebo, with side effects.

  Then Finch told me what I thought was the weirdest thing of all: that how well you responded to a placebo wasn’t random. It was down to your genes. You inherited it from your ma and pa. And 25 percent of people respond real well to it. And 25 percent of people don’t really respond to it that much at all. And then there’s the 50 percent of people in the middle. Finch said it was down to one little gene with a real long fancy science name that I didn’t catch. Depending on which version of this guy you ended up with, well, that was how much you’d get outta them fake pills. That and how much you thought they cost.

  Now, just as I was thinking, yeah, but what does all this have to do with us sick
folks, Finch says, ‘So that’s the placebo. But the thing is, where there’s light, there’s always dark too, right?’

  And Finch told me all about this thing called nocebo. And nocebo does the exact opposite of placebo. By which I mean that if placebo can make you better when you’re sick, then nocebo can make you sick when you’re well.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said to Finch. ‘You can’t think yourself sick. Can you?’

  So Finch gave me a good old Snowflake shrug and said, ‘If I told you that chair you’re sat in was covered in maggots this morning and I had to scrape ’em all off before you got here, what would you think?’

  And I said, ‘What? This chair was covered in maggots?’ and Finch said, no, it wasn’t but he reckoned that even telling me that might make me start feeling itchy and then two seconds later I was telling Finch about how I felt whenever Mona started talking about bacteria. There you go, that’s the power of the human mind. That’s nocebo, Finch said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Finch said, ‘maybe you know those stories you hear about an old couple, and they’ve been living with each other for decades and then one of ’em dies. And then the other dies a few days later?’

  And I said ‘kinda, yeah’ and Finch said that the statistics showed that was more than chance. You really can die of a broken heart. So one guess gets you the name of who I was thinking about then. And Finch was talking on and it sounded like it might be real interesting but I wasn’t listening no more. I was thinking about cold nights and my shed that had been Bly’s shed and a few other matters like that. Things like faded red T-shirts. But finally I noticed that Finch was asking me something and what it was was this.

  ‘So, do you think your MCS is all in your head?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. Right off. ‘No. Least…’

  ‘Least what?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that durned doctor put the thought in my mind.’