Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

As soon as I got out of my car, I spotted Hickey in his backyard, wearing madras shorts and spraying lighter fluid onto the coals of a black Weber barbecue. I didn’t think anything of this until I had stepped up onto the sidewalk and realized he was alone. I’d still be puzzling over this a few hours later, but already it slowed and then stalled my steps. We owed so much to the discovery of fire. It brought our early human ancestors together, first for the hunt, then the chore of cooking. You had to skin the game and soften its meat by pounding on it with a stone, then you’d pierce its flesh with a stick and set it out over the open flame. Conversation developed as a result of these chores, our very first communities; you couldn’t do everything by yourself, after all, and if you worked closely with others, your grunts and groans would naturally develop into a shared tongue. Fire is what made us human. Because smoked meats last longer than those that are raw, fire provided us with our first free time, allowing us to forget about our survival for a minute and dream up the first of those niceties — a wheel! — that have made our civilization so civilized. But Hickey, Hickey — the thought pierced me like a spear to the gut: he was barbecuing alone.

I looked back to my car, but then he spotted me, and I returned his tentative wave and moved forward smiling until we were shaking hands beside the Weber.

“Well.” I turned to face his home, as if I were on a tour of architectural marvels. A black flag hung from the window of the door to the kitchen. It showed a crestfallen soldier in silhouette, standing before a watchtower and a couple of strands of barbed wire. POW*MIA, it read. YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN. “Hope you don’t mind my dropping by.”

“No, not at all.” He ran a handkerchief across his forehead, mopping up the sweat that had gathered there. “You hungry?”

It was a strange time for a meal, somewhere in that grey zone of hours between noon and five o’clock, when so many bachelors, realizing they’ve forgotten to have lunch, spoil the prospects of a proper dinner by consuming a large meal.

“Famished,” I said.

He didn’t have any more ground beef thawed out, but he did have some cold lunch meat and a couple of slices of white bread that were surprisingly fresh, considering he didn’t know how long they’d been languishing on his kitchen counter. After I’d slathered on the mustard and mayo, I followed Hickey back out into the yard and sat with him beneath a sun umbrella, drinking cans of Budweiser he fished from an ice chest near his feet.

“I apologize for coming over unannounced like this,” I said at last. “Betty and I have been…” I shook my head, then bit into my sandwich. “We’re going through a difficult time.”

He reached into the cooler—“Incoming!”—and set a can down before me.

“I’m not even done with my first one yet,” I said.

“Then you had better catch up.”

I don’t know if it was the drinking that did it, or if perhaps he was on the pills I’d seen in his desk drawer, but he spoke as he never had before in my presence. It was as if he’d been hiding his words in his backyard all this time, and now that I had come upon his stash, he had no choice but to show them to me. He spoke of an absent father and an overbearing mother, then went on — and on — about his miserable time in high school. (He was the uncoordinated kid whose flop sweat was the subject of universal ridicule.)

“When I signed up for the army,” he said, “I thought I’d finally be able to start over.” But he was neither brave nor daring, and the fellowship of man was no more automatic in the swamps of Vietnam than it had been in the corridors of his old high school. “My fellow soldiers refused to learn my name because they were certain I’d get sent home in a box or on a gurney before I’d made the effort worth their while. And they were right, too.” Hickey rapped his knuckles into the side of his artificial leg. “Happened on Day Four. I walked away from the others to piss, so shy about pulling myself out in front of them that I forgot about the dangers of a land mine.” He lifted his beer can to toast. “Live and learn, right?”

I sat there silently, nodding as if I were a priest receiving confession.

“I’m not a happy man,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been happy.”

I laughed nervously; then joked that maybe he was just coming down with a bad case of Sweetness #9 poisoning.

He crushed his empty can in one hand, then tossed it over his shoulder into the wilds of his lawn. His pinched expression said it all: What do you mean?

So I shared my suspicions, telling him what I’d observed that afternoon and in the preceding days and weeks, too. “I think it’s safe to say they’re all affected.” I counted the symptoms off on one hand. “I’ve noticed anxiety, lethargy, unexplained anger, reduced intellectual acuity.”

Hickey leaned back in his chair, sighing. “Oh, Leveraux, don’t tell me you’re one of these goofy types.”

“But Louie’s the worst.”

Hickey crossed to the Weber and closed its lid. “How many times do I have to tell you? Use numbers, not names. Otherwise you’ll swing the results.”

“You should see him,” I said. “It’s plain as day. He’s come down with what I can only describe as a generalized dissatisfaction with life.”

“Then put down that he’s suffering from the American Condition and be done with it.”

“I mean it, Hickey.” I’d had only one beer for every three that he had consumed, but still that was one or two more than I usually had. I took a sip and continued: “I’m worried about him.”

“And I’m worried about you. Do you know what you’re doing?”

I didn’t, but the element of menace in his voice made it perfectly clear: a lot was at stake. Millions had been invested in The Nine, but billions more were forecast on the other end. Just the soda pop and table-top markets alone were expected to generate a fortune greater than that of any remaining European king or queen, and it was all there for the taking, if only cancer didn’t halt its advance into America’s supermarkets, restaurants, and homes. The disease had already placed the future of saccharin in doubt. In 1960, lab tests had linked the popular product to bladder cancer in rats — a clear violation of the newly enacted Delaney Clause of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which prohibited the use of any food additive known to cause cancer in man or animal. The only reason saccharin hadn’t immediately been pulled from the shelves was that it couldn’t be replaced. It was the only artificial sweetener then on the market, something we at Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark knew full well and were racing to undo.

Hickey reached for another beer and popped it open. “Have you put any of your rats under the microscope?”

I nodded.

“And what does it say?”

I shrugged.

“Then stop your worrying.”

“But Hickey.”

“What?”

It would have been blasphemous for me to think this only a few weeks earlier, but now I wanted to speak to him about the dangers of a lifetime of exposure to food additives, a chemical residue that builds up like silt in a stream. I kept thinking back to something I’d learned as a graduate student. At the start of the century, when the unscrupulous were fortifying your flour with sawdust and using embalming fluid as an anti-curdling agent in your milk, Dr. Harvey Wiley, chief of the FDA’s forerunner, the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, tested a variety of potentially harmful substances then in the U.S. diet, including borax, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde. His methods would be impossible now, for he added these substances to home-cooked meals that he served to young civil servants who had volunteered their time. “Dr. Wiley’s Poison Squad,” as the press came to call this group, was supposed to have stayed together for five years. But before the experiment could continue as long as that, the volunteers began complaining of nausea and vomiting, of various mental afflictions and a perhaps not too surprising loss of appetite. For some, these problems started only after chronic exposure; for others, one meal was more than enough.