Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

Laughter came from the elevators, where a young couple stood waiting for the doors to open, their bodies intertwined. I looked down at the table in front of the love seat, seeing again the porcelain holder with all of the sweetener on one side. Had I grabbed a packet myself? And then blacked out? I’d never done so before, but I’d had more than enough to drink. I told myself that must be it. And so when I stepped into the elevator a few moments later and pushed the button for the ninth floor, I was smiling as I watched the numbers light up over the door. Everything was fine; there was nothing to fear. It had only been my anxiety talking, and knowing that — that the threat was self-made — was as calming and therapeutic as any drug.

The doors opened with a ding, and then I reached into my pocket for my key card and moved out into the hall, already thinking nothing of this, just as I would continue to do until November, when I’d receive a second packet of Sweetness #9 and all of my thinking would change.

* My account of my mentor's story is deeply indebted to How Great Thou Taste: A Corporate History of FlavAmerica, which I discovered while cleaning out Ernst Eberhardt's house following his death. The manuscript was then unknown to me, but its clean prose and lack of idiosyncrasies (Ernst was always capitalizing words he shouldn’t have, a carry-over from his native tongue) told me it had been ghostwritten. As to the authorship of the book, I can only hazard a guess: an editor at Food Product News who never turned down an invitation to the beer garden that Ernst and I once frequented. Sadly, these suspicions can neither be confirmed nor denied, because the editor was murdered in 1989 after being discovered in bed with his lover. The account of this crime that ran in Food Product News suggests there wasn't a struggle between the two men so much as there was a struggle to escape. While the husband went to the dresser for his pistol, the editor pleaded for his life and fled out the window, wearing only a watch and a bedsheet. He was shot while racing down the steps of the fire escape, and fell to the sidewalk below as the wind caught the bedsheet and pulled it away. By the time the police arrived, the suspect was sitting on the curb in front of the body, wearing the dead man’s watch. All of which is to say, How Great Thou Taste was left incomplete — and for good reason, you might be allowed to think, if you were to say, as I so often do, that my mentor’s story is most logically completed by my own.

* Ernst later informed me that he entered Hitler’s bunker much sooner than this, but I have allowed the date to stand uncorrected here as a record of what he included in his memoirs.

IT WAS WAITING FOR ME on my desk when I turned in to my office from the flavor development studio. A plain white envelope. No stamp or postmark, no return or mailing address.

I sat down in my chair and pulled at the beaded brass chain of my shaded green desk lamp, then held the envelope up to the light. The silhouette of a small rectangular object appeared. I tore the envelope in half and dumped its contents onto my desk.

Just as I suspected: a single packet of Sweetness #9.

It shouldn’t have had the power to shock. I’d seen these packets in restaurants and alongside the free coffee in the lobby of every hotel — even in my own kitchen cupboards. Still, I looked down at it as if I were a young boy again, attempting telekinesis for the first time.

The packet gave off a warm pink glow from inside, meaning it had either been harbored in these United States for at least four long years or been sent to me from Mexico, where the granules of The Nine were still bathed in a bright pink dye during production.

I sprang from my chair and popped my head out of my office.

“Where’d this come from?” I said. “This envelope you left for me?”

Eliza sat at the front desk, working on the computer. She offered me a cool reptilian stare over the rims of her bifocals, then said she’d found it beneath the mail slot when she’d come in.

“I wasn’t about to touch it, either,” she said. “I worked for the Post Office when the Unabomber was still doing his thing. Did you open it already?”

I nodded.

“Then consider it a good day. You live.”

As she returned to her typing, I went back to my desk, closing the door behind me. It was as if an accelerant had been released into my bloodstream, quickening my thoughts. Had the Albanians found me, perhaps because Priscilla had ordered the report using her name? Or were Mexicans to blame? Why else the pink granules? I blew into the mouth of the torn envelope, first the one half, then the other, thinking there must be a note inside, something making threats against my person or demands upon my bank account, maybe a map describing where and when to meet. But no, empty, so I turned in my chair to face the window, remembering now that night of the Society meeting. Hickey! Why after all these years had I seen Hickey — and then awoken a short time later with a packet of sweetener in my pocket?

I pulled open my pencil drawer; the orange bottle of lorazepam rolled toward me. I grabbed it and closed the drawer, then slid it open it again and felt around until I’d found something else: the trial pack of anti-anxiety medication.

Dr. White had said it would make me feel more anxious the first seven days I used it, and that, along with the belief that I didn’t have a problem requiring daily medication, had been enough to keep me away from it until now. But (and if every unhappy person is different, their story of obsession is somehow the same) I didn’t want to feel like this anymore. I was always pushing down at the top of my skull or pawing at the side of my neck, conscious of the beating of my carotid artery. Some mornings I stood over the toilet studying the shape, consistency, and color of my stool as if it were a work of modern art; other days, I’d have Betty take Polaroids of all my most suspicious moles so we could compare them with those she’d taken three, five, or ten years ago. I saw death, disease, and degeneration in everything that I faced, and I thought so much about what I should’ve done and couldn’t do that the immediacy of the present all but disappeared.

Dr. White was right. We all could use a little help every now and then. So I pushed the first pill through its foil backing and laid it on my tongue, telling myself not to think of the anxiety that might swell and surge over the coming seven days. It was like being in a burning building. You had to throw yourself through a wall of fire to escape. And besides, I thought, as that pill dissolved like a Communion wafer on my tongue, what better time to do this than now? In seven days, at the end of my most anxious period, I’d sit down to a plump Thanksgiving turkey, thankful for my new, worry-free life.

I had gained no new responsibilities as a result of my promotion, but I had been given a new title (Chief Creative Flavorist, Director of Flavor Development, and Chief Financial Officer) and a few additional perks, the foremost of which was an increased ownership stake in the company. I suspect Beekley and Tennessee wouldn’t have agreed on which of these was the least deserved, but one thing is certain: they had responded to the transfer of power about as well as the Romanovs had responded to the transition to Communism.

Tennessee was more reserved in my company these days, though also more voluble in the men’s room. I learned this one morning while he was chatting away at the urinals and didn’t realize I was behind the door of the second stall. Beekley, on the other hand, never said a word against me in public, preferring to wage a more covert form of warfare.