The Normals Read online

  Praise for The Normals

  "The Normals is relentlessly intelligent and fully aware of the scope and contradictions of contemporary culture. It's also a very good read, and an experience you'll want to stretch out as long as you can."—Douglas Coupland, author of Hey Nostradamus!

  "Here it is at last, the perfect allegory for the times—our Catch-22, our Generation X—a masterpiece of cultural riffing so ingenious, so hilarious and enthralling, you will dog-ear every page and quote aloud to friends. Surely the first great comic novel of the century."—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

  "A sly side-splitter of a novel...The Normals is comic writing in a ferociously somber vein, cackling all the way to the gallows."—Newsday

  "[A] must-buy...[an] intelligent and funny dissection of our ADD-addled culture."—Maxim (four stars)

  "T. C. Boyle meets Alice Sebold with a bit of Paul Theroux."

  —Rocky Mountain News

  "Wild and woolly.. .A trenchant study of human suggestibility, tricked out with a wry subplot about the media hoopla surrounding a brain-tumor victim whose latest MRI bears a striking resemblance to the Shroud of Turin.. ."—Seattle Times

  "Witty.. .fast-paced and winningly insouciant.. .a fine debut that uses humor to tackle some very serious issues, including questions of medical ethics, the search for grace and the meaning of love."—Publishers Weekly

  "Gilbert does comic absurdist riffs in his sleep...his novel offers considerable pleasures."—Boston Globe

  "David Gilbert masterfully depicts the casualties of our pill-popping, TV-numbed age: an unforgettable group of men (and one woman) whose lives are the side effects of the drugs others take to make them happier and healthier. Written with a rare combination of gusto and precision, The Normals is a daring and wildly funny first novel."—Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father

  "Witty and edgy."—Booklist

  "David Gilbert's The Normals attacks its subject, our essential aloneness amidst the swirl of contemporary culture, with a surgical wit and daring imagination. A savage and funny first novel."—Jane Mendelsohn, author of I Was Amelia Earhart and Innocence

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Remote Feed: Stories

  t h e n o r m a l s

  a novel

  David Gilbert

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 2004 by David Gilbert

  Excerpt from "The Naming of the Cats" from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats © 1939 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. For Canada, permission to reprint granted by Faber & Faber, Ltd.

  "You'll Never Walk Alone" by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, © 1945 by Williamson Music. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  "Summer Nights" from Grease. Lyrics and Music by Warren Casey and Jim Jacobs. © 1972 Warren >Casey and Jim Jacobs, © Renewed 2000 by Jim Jacobs and the Estate of Warren Casey. All Rights Administered by Edwin H. Morris & Company, a Division of MPL Music Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Excerpt from "The Bridge" from Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well -managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Gilbert, David, 1967-

  The normals : a novel / David Gilbert.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-58234-609-0

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Human experimentation in medicine—Fiction. 3. Collecting of accounts—Fiction. 4. Antipsychotic drugs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I3383N66 2004

  813'.54—dc22

  2004002499

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004

  This paperback edition published in 2005

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 42

  Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  For Susan Leness Gilbert

  His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

  Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

  His ineffable effable

  Effanineffable

  Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

  —T. S. Eliot

  1

  THE THIN sentiment never changes. Sally . . . I'm leaving. . . Billy. No real surprise. No drama. No heartbreak. After all, Sally is leaving next week, for Cambridge no less, business school and the annoyingly acronymed HBS. Billy is simply sneaking away, well, sooner. She'll likely forgive the lack of ceremony and forwarding address and only bemoan the loss of his packing ability. So good-bye. But his handwriting is driving him nuts, wavering between print and cursive, drooling across the page and compressing near the bottom as if penmanship has suffered a grand mal seizure. Billy wants calligraphy, not this remedial scrawl. Out comes a new sheet of paper. Then another. Dear seems wrong, too loopy, too formal. Sorry looks askew. He switches pens. Felt. Ballpoint. Maybe a pencil. But nothing helps. If only he had a fountain pen. Defeated, the various attempts are surrendered in a neat little pile flagged by a Post-it—I'm so pitiful—which is rewritten twice.

  Ridiculous, Billy thinks.

  But done.

  A glance around the kitchen-living room—dining room—library-guest room-media center, four hundred square feet of hyphenated space and wasted time. Most of his belongings have already been bagged and tagged and mailed yesterday to his parents in Ohio. The entire shipment stood seven boxes tall, Frankenstein's monster as fashioned from cardboard. No doubt it will be a surprise delivery. Years without visiting and suddenly the beast comes crawling home in laundry form. Hi Dad, how's Mom? Seven boxes, no note. The essential Billy Schine. The rest of the apartment, furniture, d
ishes, TV, and stereo, belong to his girlfriend, Sally Hu, a securities analyst from Brooklyn. Billy has known her since college, their relationship evolving from casual acquaintances during junior year not abroad, to decent pals upon graduation, to neighbors in New York, to pretty good friends following a painful breakup (hers), to roommates after a rent hike, to what-should-we-do-for-dinner companions, to bored back-rub buddies, to one-night stand-ins, to habitual offenders, to a couple by romantic default. They've been fucking dutch for almost a year. In Sally's parlance, pleasure is a body-fluid exchange, intercourse a corporal merger, orgasms a pooled mutual fund. Head is always split fifty-fifty, sixty-nine the preferred delivery system. Assisted masturbation is the minimum investment. Kinky deviations, silly fantasies, supplementary devices are hedges against sexual inflation when love and marriage and children turn such commerce into safe thirty-year bonds. "It's like we're insider trading," she once told him, all too obsessed with her banking jargon.

  "Please," Billy replied from between her legs.

  "Like we're outsourcing sex."

  "Okay, enough."

  "Price-fixing penetration."

  "I'm trying to eat pussy here, not rally the Asian markets."

  "You pig."

  This is how they often talked.

  Or was.

  Billy heads toward the window, checks the street for trench coats despite the heat. But the minglers below are just the normal Lower East Side crowd. Ragnar is nowhere to be seen. Truth be told, Billy has never actually seen Ragnar, though he has an idea of the man, if, perhaps, a tad cliched: Ragnar the relentless pursuer, Billy the offender on the run, Javert and Jean Valjean without the catchy tunes. Billy enjoys this image and squints his eyes dramatically as if the window is a movie still. Glimpsing him from the street, you might wonder if he's an actor. He's attractive enough, as tall as most diminutive stars, and has a smile that could roil foreign lands into anti-American protest. But there's something about his complexion—no scars, no pockmarks, no moles, no pores, you'd swear—that resembles a forensic facial reconstruction where clay is molded around a skull in hopes of a re-creating a long-missing person. Under fluorescence he can appear frighteningly anonymous. Years of uncertainty have sculpted a deep rumple in his brow, lending him an expression often mistaken for sarcastic scorn, and when spied in conjunction with that already mentioned smile, can be suspected as profound bafflement. Without uttering a word, his lips can launch a thousand fists. Socially, he fights against this first impression—Ym better than this, nicer, smarter, really —and winces through introductions as if cramping. In flip moments of weakness, he'll blame astrology. Or the typecasting of astrology. Billy is a Cancer, a crab, a sign that insinuates not only a horrific disease but also a public louse. His birth seems to fall on the high and low of human suffering. No wonder Cancers are notoriously oversensitive. Maybe that's why Billy habitually stays home under the guise of sickness, treating sniffles as the flu, headaches as migraines. Some might consider this hypochondria, but far more philo is involved. Billy loves being sick, relishes the notion of rest and rehabilitation. Imagine a car accident and broken bones and months of recuperation, and if for a moment you're intrigued by the care and attention, the character arc of recovery, then you share something with Billy and chances are you've never been seriously injured or ill. Oh, but you could be brave. Yes, a survivor. Victims interviewed on television always seem thankful for their misery, telling misty-eyed reporters they have no regrets. None. This is who I am, Barbara, Stone, Diane. A higher purpose is often mentioned in the next artificially respired breath. Yes, a blessing. Billy envies their inspiration.

  Awful, he knows.

  He should be thankful for his health.

  After all, health is all he has.

  And health might save his life.

  The phone rings its typical cardiac of fear and trepidation. Caller ID has no clue. Not Ragnar. Not Sally. Not the temp agency asking where the hell is he. So Billy answers, uneasily, expecting bad news, maybe from a pay phone in a hospital, his father stuttering on the other end.

  "Hello."

  "May-I-please-speak-to"—pause—"William A. Schine?"

  The voice unfamiliar, Billy relaxes his grip. "Who's calling please?"

  "Hargrove Anderson Medical."

  "This is William Schine."

  "Mr. Schine, I'm calling to remind you that your shuttle for the research center leaves today from the Port Authority at three-thirty."

  "I know. I have all the information."

  "Three-thirty sharp."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "You have no idea how many of our volunteers forget."

  "Well I'll be there."

  "Three-thirty. Port Authority."

  "Got it."

  "Just making sure."

  "Thank you."

  Billy hangs up. He has five hours to shower and pack, plenty of time.

  He uses Sally's soaps and shampoos for the last time. As usual, voices mutter in the ruin between nozzle and drain, of his mother, his father calling for him—Billy! —or worse, the sound of an intruder jamming open the lock, of Ragnar kicking in the door. Billy has highly suggestible ears. Electric razors, airplane engines, air conditioners, all carry a ghostly charge. Twice he shuts off the water and pokes his head through the plastic shower curtain (a tacky ocean scene smelling of a first condom) and listens.

  Nothing. Of course nothing. And the voices begin again.

  He gets dressed. On goes the recently purchased disguise: acid-washed blue jeans; Cats T-shirt (feline eyes glowing from the nipple region, NOW AND FOREVER written on the back); baseball cap; cheap mirrored sunglasses. Billy inspects himself through streaks of rubbed-away steam. Not bad. He could be a Times Square tourist composing postcards in his head. An old familiar fantasy, that he's a spy, bubbles up from the wellspring of memory when as a child he would sneak around his house and search for evidence, nothing specific, just random traces of something in the sleepless night, once planting a tape recorder under his parents' bed so he could catch their whispers after goodnight. (Doris: "Is he asleep yet?" Abe: "I don't know." Doris: "I think he's awake." Abe: "I really don't know.") Plots soothed the boy. And as an adult he can still fall under this spell, especially when his shoes make a certain patter on the pavement and strangers offer him their glance for an extra beat—Billy will start feeling as if he's on a mission even if the mission is buying a loaf of bread. It's almost meditative, his version of yoga where he stretches into the person he wishes he were, all slick and sly. But the balance is tricky. The smallest miscue—pushing instead of pulling on doors, hailing an already taken taxi, pressing and pressing the elevator Close button—can throw him on his back.

  With care, Billy makes the bed. Sally's numerous lace pillows are arranged in a conciliatory gesture, and then rearranged, as if bedding has a language in which an apology might be spelled. He folds his towel the way she likes and tissue-wipes the toilet rim clean. He relinquishes his disposable razors as well as his really good hairbrush, hoping they might be considered a gift instead of a few forgotten things.

  11:16 A.M. Little more than four hours left. Still loads of time.

  Out from under the bed comes the hard-shell suitcase, bright red. Billy clicks open its satisfying, semiprofessional latches and puts in the remainder of his clothes: boxers not briefs, khakis and blue jeans, pocket tees and button-front shirts in any color but black, a sartorial existence that has stayed the same since college despite his near-constant lament for a new style. All he needs now is a book. He scans the shelves for the right book, the perfect book, the book he would want if he were stranded on a desert island. But which book is the right book? Which book represents him? Which author? Which cover should ride the front of his nose, the standard bearer to the taste of William A. Schine? Stanley Elkin? Robert Musil? Nathaneal West? Kafka? Virgil in the original? Horace? Too pretentious? Too hip? Too obscure? Too sensitive? Thick or thin, Magic Mountain or Death in Venice! Just one book, that's hi
s decree. Billy, being a big reader—wait, that's not true. Billy loves books more than he loves reading, loves the physicality of books, the effort contained within books, all that potential trapped inside. The collected Philip Larkin or the selected Emily Dickinson? Maybe Nabokov? He buys cheap secondhand paperbacks almost every day, knowing full well they'll remain forever in progress, receipt slips marking the page where attention wandered toward the television or a magazine or a nap. (Moby-Dick is by far his favorite unfinished book, Don Quixote a close second.) He's the master of the first line, the first paragraph, maybe the first chapter, then focus fades and the book migrates from couch to bed to couch again to under the coffee table to the corner of the room and the tower of other unread books capped every few days by another book, the tower growing higher and higher, leaning, until finally this Babel is disassembled and stuffed into the already overstuffed bookshelf, a mosaic of fraudulent desire.

  Sally once asked him why he bought more books when so many went unread.

  "But I want to read them," he told her.

  "Then read," she said.

  "I will, at some point," he said, more to himself than her.

  "You already have enough books to last a lifetime," she said.

  "Point taken, okay." And for the rest of the day Billy sulked, a conversation about clutter turning into an unintended death sentence.

  On the third shelf he spots and pulls down The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, fourth paperback edition. Nice and hefty, the book hasn't been touched since college days, when its genius on demand was used to pad many a paper (Byron in the epigraph, Shelley in the epilogue, bullshit in between). A handy key word index allows instant recall of the world's greatest words, a best of language, from Abelard to Zola. This is the soul of literature, Billy thinks, figuring whatever he needs will be in this book—as Keats said, "Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know." Billy smiles. He really should read more Keats. He tosses the dictionary into the suitcase, the book resting up high on a mound of clothes, too high for the latches to snap without the groaning pressure of an ass.