Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

Because Ernest had not started using verbs by the end of winter break, Betty and I decided together to add Ritalin to the mix, and remarkably this did work. Our son started speaking in complete sentences again, and though we didn’t always like what we heard—​slamming doors and whining, saying he could do something by himself—​we were glad he was able to retake his test and transfer back into his regular classroom.

Like most high schools in northern New Jersey, the one my son attended wasn’t without its fair share of connections to the horrors of 9/11. To honor those who died, an assembly was held out on the playground, and many somber speeches were delivered against a backdrop of fluttering flags and soaring patriotic songs. I didn’t attend, but I was one of the parents called after a group of children fell in the heat and dropped into convulsions on the blacktop. Maybe you read the story that went out over the AP wire. The convulsions had been triggered by an overdose of pharmaceuticals. The children, including Jeremiah and my son, had hoarded them and started taking them in higher and higher doses.

Jeremiah’s inclusion in this group led to greater scrutiny of his foster mother, who, it was discovered, had in her care only children with ADD — though most of these kids hadn’t been so diagnosed before they’d gotten to her. Suspecting she’d started them on the pills because it meant up to two hundred dollars more of monthly support for each affected child, the state removed all of her children from her custody, including my son’s good friend, who stopped drooling once he was off the Ritalin — and then disappeared from our lives entirely.

Betty took some pleasure in knowing “The Saint” wasn’t as saintly as she’d imagined, but even so, the ordeal proved too much for her. We didn’t renew Ernest’s prescription after this, and though he didn’t retreat to verblessness as a consequence, he didn’t speak much in our presence either. Betty never forgave herself. She wouldn’t listen to me when I told her he’d probably been getting pills from Jeremiah even before we’d ever gotten him a prescription ourselves; she’d only blame herself, saying she was the one who’d suggested we put him on the medication in the first place. “It’s just another bad mother storyline,” she’d say, again and again.

A few weeks after 9/11, while bombs were falling in Afghanistan and leaked bin Laden videos were still being played in full on the news, Betty left and didn’t come back. Ernest was in school when it happened; I was at work. He came home first, but I was the one to find the note on her pillow. I didn’t have the heart to read it through to the end. I brought it down to my son’s bedroom and gave it to him. He stared at it for the longest time, and then he took in a deep breath and began.

You should know I love you all very dearly, her note began. But I’m 197 pounds, heavier than I’ve ever been, and if I’m going to be any good to myself or you I need to be alone for at least one year to put Neal’s secret to the test. I can tell you this much: I’ve left for Ukraine. Please know that I will be thinking of you every day. With much love, Betty.

He stood there not moving after he’d finished, as if waiting for me to excuse him. I wouldn’t, though. Not yet.

“Why’d you do it?” I said. “Lose the verbs. Make us think something was wrong with you. We took you to how many doctors, pricked you with a needle how many times? Why’d you do it?” I said. “Was it the drugs?”

For a moment he just looked at me as if full of rage, as if wondering how I could be so stupid as to ask. Then he said, he said to me, “Do you really want to know?” and if there was one question that could have made me want to avoid the truth, that was it.

The following month, I sold my mentor’s row house and the condominium he’d bought for Eliza, and I contacted the CEO of Better Health and Flavorings and asked if he was still interested in meeting for lunch. We didn’t have to push numbers back and forth across the table. I was satisfied with the first figure that I saw.

I was sad to leave my co-workers, but I knew they would prosper and that we had been diminished for some time anyway. Tennessee had taken early retirement not long after Ernst Eberhardt had died. Meanwhile, Koba found secure employment with a flavor house in Paterson and has since become a fully certified member of the Society of Flavor Chemists. He lives in South Battle Station Township, I’m told, and recently became the father of twin girls.

Beekley would have been kept on by Better Health and Flavorings, but his heart was no longer in the work. The supermarket attacks had convinced him there was no future in it, and when Y2K failed to reinvent our lives as he’d once imagined it would, he became as lost as I had been after the fall of Communism. All that changed on 9/11. Like so many young men about to run down to the military recruiter, he stood before the TV, saying he had to do something. A few days later he showed up at work with a U.S. flag pin on the lapel of his lab coat. “I just wanted to say good-bye,” he said. “I won’t be coming back. I’m gonna do my part to keep this country safe.”

“You joined the army?” I said.

“Not exactly.”

“The marines? Don’t tell me you joined the marines.”

“I won’t be fighting with a gun, David. Where I’m going, I’ll have something a little more powerful than that.”

He told me he couldn’t say anything more, that he’d already said too much, but my desire to know must have weighed on him, or if not that, his need to tell me must have been great, because a couple of months later he called from a pay phone and risked losing his security clearance.

He sounded drunk and clearly exhilarated, speaking of an elite team of flavor chemists that had been recruited by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and brought together at a secret lab in the mountains of northern New Jersey. It was like the Manhattan Project, he said. “We’re working on a weaponized odor, the mother of all stink bombs.” Osama bin Laden was believed to be in the mountains of Tora Bora. “And it’s gonna get him. They’ll deliver it on a bomb that’ll pierce down through all that rock and drive him out into the open. I wish you could smell it, David. Even with all the gear I have to wear, the goggles and the Hazmat suit, I still have to burn my underwear when I get home each evening. It smells so bad it makes you proud to be an American. Can you imagine it, David? Can you imagine the smell?”

I didn’t hear from him again after that, but I recently learned via email from an old flavor friend that he died under mysterious circumstances in a brothel in Algeria, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Fare thee well, Frederick Archibald Beekley. Fare thee well, young man. You will be missed.

Betty sent us her first postcard in December of 2001. It didn’t include a return address, only a postmark from Kiev, Ukraine, to which she said she’d traveled to celebrate the holidays. She didn’t offer much else, and in the coming months her infrequent communications were no more enlightening. In them she spoke of the hardships of her new life (she had been robbed one morning while jogging, her foreignness revealed by the bright tracksuit she’d worn) and begged for our patience while she “learn[ed] how to live life again.”

On the first day of the new year, I went through the house, collecting everything that included Sweetness #9 and Red Dye No. 40 and telling Ernest that this time we were staying on the diet for good. For several months we barely spoke about anything other than a military school in Virginia, which I assured him had a cafeteria offering a wider range of food than he could expect in our house. He stayed, however reluctantly, and our life in South Battle Station Township was as silent and as empty as ever.