The Ketamine Deviations

Tail-end of spring semester, freshman year of college. I'm living in a room of whitewashed cinderblock with a Korean roommate who's supposed to be studying engineering but sleeps through his classes with Tupac on the stereo. I'm writing essays with titles like "Creative Intertextuality." I find myself with an offer for the desirable position of editorial assistant at a small publishing house. The prospect of editing Puerto Rican cookbooks, nonfiction social analyses and whatever new novels they want to throw at me appeals; I have no money.

I see one of those ads in the back of the Press where patron saints are thanked, strange items exchanged, suspect offers extended to the suspecting. If you're a smack addict, a professional and not a dabbler, board-certified angels in white want to get you off the horse, and they'll pay you $2000 cash to detox you on their terms in their hospital. I however, am not addicted to anything, so I find the only ad interested in the healthy and call.

They want to scan my brain, the girl tells me. Why don't I come in? The study consists of neurological imaging, as I find out during my free physical and consultation, where I am also given a drug test, and pending its negative result, am submitted as a healthy control subject for a study of the effects of ketamine on the brain. Ketamine is a horse tranquilizer, and, apparently, it renders humans unable to play computer games. This is what I glean from the physician's presentation, whose emphasis, of this I am sure, is a certain six-page form in which I absolve the NY State Psychiatric Hospital of wrongdoing in the event of injury or demise. The doctor assures me that the total amount of radiation my body will absorb is below the legal limit set by the FDA. Relatively few risks, relatively few risks, he repeats.

A week later the same girl calls to tell me I have passed the drug test, and asks if I would like to go a little further. I sign the liability forms and schedule the first of three scans. The night before I practice going into the tunnel by wrapping myself in a blanket. Not claustrophobic but comfortable. Feeling my own breath on my face is not unsettling, and I fall asleep. Before I do, I remind myself to use the fact of this comfort to reassure myself later, in case the ontological dimensions change and I freak out.

The first scan takes place in a PET machine which is not as claustrophobic because only my head is encased, but before I get in the nurse wraps my head in a warm substance that solidifies as a molded helmet, shutting out noise and the most basic interaction with her and the technicians. I hear the word preliminary and nod, pretending to understand what this nurse, who of all people should know I can't hear, is saying. Before I saddled up I had looked through one of the windows to an unobstructed view of the Hudson, and this shimmering image stays with me for the hour of my internment. After 15 minutes of taking this river image apart, pixel by pixel, and venturing into the void of the pixel from which, I assume, no one returns, I shamelessly fall asleep. The nurse had told me that falling asleep is the best thing I could do.

The first scan being relatively successful, I am invited back for part two of the brain imaging study that doesn't yet materialize. I know the security guards by now and the way the elevator drops a bit below ground floor because of the intensity of acceleration. The second scan is postponed, but I get paid anyway for coming. On the way out I see familiar faces in the waiting room joking with the scrubs, looking through magazines like decks of flashcards. Regulars.

Ketamine rots the brain. All those k-holes create real gaps in brain tissue, says the doctor before the second scan. Like Swiss cheese, he laughs, but won't give me anything for my nerves, which are shot from academic pedantry, bacchanalia, aggravations real and imaginary. I've already accepted the editorial assistant position, but I still need the cash. That getting into this MRI machine is something I must do strikes me as grotesque and artificial, unnecessary but necessary. I'm getting inside a contradiction. Getting inside an inconsequential absurdity or nothing at all, because you can't operate with a contradiction, as some Viennese philosopher said.

All I'm thinking about is the arterial line in my wrist, which is sticking out at an awkward angle, discomforting and distracting me from any calming thoughts. An arterial line, as a head doctor explained in the examination room before the scan, hooks up to your artery, not your vein as an intravenous does. For this study an arterial line is absolutely necessary because large samples of my blood must be taken at carefully synchronized intervals rather than the usual continuous trickle. Both doctors and the nurse are looking at me expectantly as I understand that this is the decisive moment of my participation in this study, the crucial threshold. I have to swallow the bait. The doctor assures me that while this is a dangerous procedure only a few known cases exist in which malfunction of the arterial device resulted in disability. And, she smilingly assures me, the emergency room is down the hall if anything should go wrong. I recall the clause above my signature in which I resigned my right to seek damages for any injury sustained as a result of a procedure involved with this study. I've done this many times the doctor smilingly affirms. The nurse holds out another form reiterating the clause and asks me to sign with my free hand, which I do without taking my eyes off the plastic worm boring into my wrist.

The next two hours don't pass so much as congeal from blood, nerves and hallucinations. This tunnel that doesn't go anywhere reminds me of deprivation experiments, of Altered States, and Troma films: a lidded freezer in the basement of some university, professional incompetence, the ambivalent vanguard of science. Deprivation or isolation releases indulgence from every obstruction so that nothing is out of the question. Every sinister detail rejected by reason is reconstructed, indulged and explored to its conclusion. The conclusion is that I am not the standard from which deviations will be measured, not a guest star, but the main attraction. My blood will run out, Elton John will come out of the speakers in the ceiling and crawl in here with me. They'll take his blood and transfuse it into my body, shake me around so that it adapts, and suck it out again at carefully synchronized intervals. They'll leave me in here with Elton John's rattling piano teeth and I won't be able to breathe. A citywide power failure will send the technicians running and trap me in here to survive by gnawing on a British corpse. These ideas manifest and reverberate, recede, return. I inform the nurse that I need to urinate. To my relief I enjoy the appropriateness of using this word in context. She sends in a male nurse with a bedpan, and I can barely relax my bladder enough to fill it. In another half hour they take me out, remove the arterial line, thank me for my participation, tell me I'll be called in soon for a third scan (which never happens) and may be asked to play computer games for $75 per one hour session.

I get on the downtown 9 wearing a pair of scrubs too large for me (the male nurse was incompetent on both counts), the drawstring wound around the back instead of the front, and holding over my shoulder a black trash bag containing my jeans and a photo image of my perfectly healthy brain lit up in yellow, red and blue. I emerge from below and go straight to my next class, flower-print scrubs and all.