Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

It was there, while snatching a tray still moist and warm from the wash, that I saw her again. Betty Lynne Elliot Webb. I had forgotten her face. It had faded from my memory, leaving only a dull, familiar ache in its place. But when I saw her again, sitting there with two friends at a table in the middle of the room, I felt that same sharp carnal impulse that had come over me in the bookstore. I wanted to clear the room and have her on the table right then and there, amidst the clutter of salt and pepper shakers and sticky condiment bottles. So I left my tray behind and walked directly to her, a little too stiffly perhaps, as if carrying a jug of water on top of my head, but with great purpose, too.

“Pardon,” I said. “So sorry. Don’t mean to interrupt.”

Her friends whispered; Betty looked up at me and asked, “Can I help you?” I smiled to keep from showing that I was cursing myself inside. I had lived in Wargrave, on the western outskirts of London, until the age of twelve; only then did my father move us to the other side of the Atlantic, saying I had better learn to be an American before it was too late. It had taken a year in front of the television for me to lose my English accent, but now it was back, like some streaker set loose on the set of Benny Hill. Pardon. So sorry. Wouldn’t happen to have seen my pruning shears around here, would you? Seem to’ve lost the silly little buggers somehow. And I couldn’t deviate from it now. She’d think I was mad — British one minute, American the next — and she was too beautiful for that, with her sculpted blonde hair curling up over the shoulders of her blue dress in a way that brought to mind a young Jacqueline Onassis, and breasts — breasts as pointed and firm as the fantasies of my youth. I’d fake it. In a moment I knew I’d fake my accent forever if only I could unhook her brassiere and fall asleep with the feel of her warm flesh cupped in my hand. So I let my silence linger until it had turned from an expression of timidity into a bald and pulsing statement of fact. Then I spoke. “I wanted to find you,” I said. “That day in the bookstore.”

Her friends shared another whisper, but Betty held my attention, looking at me with blushing cheeks and skin so clear and eyes so white.

“Whilst standing in line,” I said, “I opened my dictionary, and the word that I saw,” and here she lifted her chin ever so slightly, her lips parting to release the soft hiss of a warm breath, “that word was ‘fate.’”

The moment stretched between us like taffy being pulled apart at the county fair, then she bit into her lower lip and glanced away, restraining the coyest of smiles. It was all the encouragement I needed to sit down beside her — and if she had said nothing more in the next five months that we dated, it would have been all the encouragement I needed to drop down to one knee and say, “Betty, I love you. Will you be mine?”

* Licorice, I’ve learned, has been linked to lower testosterone levels. I won’t say this was the cause of my loneliness in college, but I do think it interesting that I was such an avid fan of the candy at this loveless time in my life.

IF GIVEN THE CHOICE, I would have lived a life of quiet domesticity, benumbed by the banality of my daily routine. I never wanted to go poking at my past as the cook pokes at the cut of grilled meat to see if it’s done; I wanted to have kids and a buy a barbecue and follow an American football team with the same passion I’d once given The Tractor Boys of Ipswich Town. And yet here I am banging away at the keys of my old IBM Selectric as if I were a failed ex-president with a deadline for a bloated memoir.

What happened? you say.

One thing: Sweetness #9.

It was my task at Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark to conduct a chronic toxicity test of this artificial sweetener prior to our submitting it to the FDA for approval. For this, I bred eight pairs of Sprague-Dawley rats, those red-eyed albino creatures that are so commonly used in toxicology studies because of their calm demeanor and excellent reproductive performance. Within days, vaginal swabs in each of the females in estrus showed the presence of sperm, a reliable indicator of conception, and the males were eliminated from the colony. Gestation cycles ran between twenty-one and twenty-three days and resulted in the birth of seventy-four pups across eight litters. When the males were once again eliminated, there remained thirty-nine test subjects, one of which was cannibalized by its stressed mother before it could open its eyes at two weeks.

The rats were housed independently in plastic tubs on one of two wheeled storage shelves that occupied the back wall of the rodent room. Each tub was secured from above by a metal grate and equipped with an overhanging water bottle; the rats were fed standard rodent chow ad libitum and given one of four doses of Sweetness #9. The control group was given no amount of The Nine, as we had taken to calling the sweetener. One-third of the remaining population was given the equivalent of 75 mg/kg BW/day (more than fifteen times the estimated daily human intake of the sweetener), while another third received 1,600 mg/kg BW/day, and the final third enjoyed a dose of 8,000 mg/kg BW/day. To offer perspective, if the group receiving the least amount of Sweetness #9 was ingesting the equivalent of a sweetened bullet every twenty-four hours, the middle third could be said to be absorbing one of the conventional bombs dropped on Dresden, while those receiving 8,000 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day were taking in something approaching the combined power of Fat Man and Little Boy.

For the first four weeks of my planned twelve-month study, I administered the sweetener by feeding tube. After my rats were weaned from their mothers, I added The Nine to their rodent chow and mixed it in with their water, leaving me to calculate the amount of the test substance assimilated each day.

I would be remiss if I did not mention here the existence of one last test group, however unofficial and poorly tracked it was. This group consisted of two people: me and my wife. That this went against protocol goes without saying. I just couldn’t help leaving the lab with a little vial of sweetener stashed away inside my coat pocket every third or fourth day. I felt proud to be wearing my lab coat and performing this work, which would help bring about a future in which diabetics and the calorie-conscious could enjoy a sweetened drink or snack without fear or guilt. And besides, this wasn’t a drug study whose results were in question from the start. Previous short-term tests had already determined the maximum dosage I was to deliver, beyond which a large mortality rate could be expected. So when I took home that first vial of The Nine and sweetened my wife’s coffee one Saturday morning, I didn’t think to discuss its dangers. I only lifted my cup to hers and toasted to progress and new ideas.

Betty giggled as if we were teenagers sneaking alcohol. “It certainly is sweet,” she said, after taking a wide-eyed sip.

“One hundred and eighty times sweeter than sugar,” I told her, “and at a fraction of the cost.”

“Progress and new ideas,” she echoed, clinking her cup against mine once more.

While I consumed the sweetener twice per day (first with my morning coffee, then in the evening with a cup of Earl Grey), Betty ingested the substance at a somewhat higher rate, as she had inherited a taste for sweet tea from her Virginia-born father and drank no fewer than four or five cups of the stuff each day. So.

If gaining access to Sweetness #9 years before the public would was a perk of my new career, the excitement this afforded me soon wore off. In fact, by the end of my first month, the novelty of my newfound professionalism had disappeared entirely, and I was looking at my job as a factory worker might. It was the same thing day after day. Each morning I’d pull the rats out of their tubs by the base of the tail and check for anomalies in appearance or behavior. Illness can overtake a rodent quickly and without warning; for this reason it is important to know your test subjects intimately, right down to the consistency of their stool samples. I would touch each specimen’s nose and stare deep into its red eyes, looking for any sign of nasal or ocular discharge; then, after rubbing its tail between my fingers to determine if it was running a temperature, I’d set the rat down upon the wire roof of its tub and apply a stethoscope to its chest, listening for the tell-tale signs of congestion or wheezing. Once this task was completed, I’d palpate the rat’s lumbar spine and pelvic region to assess its Body Condition Score, a five-point scale that runs from “emaciated” to “obese” and helps identify an animal’s general health status. Finally, I’d set the test subject down in the communal glass tank with anywhere from one to three other members of its cohort, and observe its sociability and response to external stimuli, being sure to record all of my findings in the marbled notebook that I stored in the top drawer of my desk.