Read Online The Law of Similars by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online

from lung cancer--although it was the treatment, I thought, that had made it so painful to watch. Especially the radiation. The esophageal radiation. My mother couldn't eat because she couldn't swallow, and sometimes after struggling through one of those tiny cans of high-protein shake, the pain in her throat would become too much, and she'd end up vomiting all she'd consumed.
    Finally, I had recalled--whether for Carissa or for myself, I hadn't a clue--a few predictably painful teen memories, including the afternoons I would rifle through my older sister's underwear drawer to find bras I could practice unsnapping. And that April morning when I was seventeen, and Laurel Palmore's septic tank had overflowed, and all of the condoms Laurel and I had used our last year of high school had floated onto the stone terrace in the Palmores' backyard. ("I guess I should have carried them home with me," I'd said when she called me, sobbing, the night her mother found them. I knew it would cost me my girlfriend.)
    "You really do have a healthy libido," Carissa had said, and while I hoped it was meant as a compliment, I was pretty sure that the homeopath was just trying to be gracious. She must have seen I was on the verge of tears.
    That night as I was starting to drift off to sleep, I realized my throat was growing sore. Burning, once more. I tried not to swallow, afraid swallowing would cause pain and that pain would cause me to wake up. But it took an effort not to swallow, and that effort pulled me back from the brink. I opened my eyes, I stretched my neck. I was awake.
    Carissa, I decided, was going to prescribe arsenic. And it was going to kill me. I was sure of it. The little book I'd skimmed at dinner had said something about arsenic being a good remedy for people whose symptoms included restlessness. Anxiety. Fear.
    A sore throat.
    Well, that's me, I thought. I'm going to get arsenic, and I'm going to tank.
    In the morning, I knew, arsenic would stop scaring me. After all, there really wasn't any arsenic at all in the remedy. Just like there was no tarantula in tarantula. Or gold in gold. Or belladonna in belladonna. That was the beauty of homeopathy. (Or, I thought, why it was such incredible quackery. I wondered if instead of seeing this woman for help, I should be prosecuting her for fraud.) Unlike conventional medicine or naturopathic medicine or even that seemingly wholesome New Age standby herbalism, homeopathic medicine was completely safe. It might not do a bloody thing to heal me...but it sure as heck couldn't hurt me.
    The book had even said the whole essence of a homeopathic remedy was dilution. You took a substance and kept diluting it and shaking it, diluting and shaking, until there was virtually nothing left of the original ingredient. The dilution might go from one part arsenic and ninety-nine parts water to one part arsenic and a million parts water. Maybe the ratio would become one to one hundred million.
    Homeopaths believed, of course, that even at that infinitesimal a level, the remedy retained a memory of the original substance--just enough to set the body on its path to recovery.
    But from a chemist's perspective, it was certainly harmless. And most likely quackery.
    No, it was the other way around: Certainly quackery. Most likely harmless.
    It couldn't possibly be absolutely, positively--certainly--harmless. After all, who the hell knew how that stuff was made? The fact is, the remedy began with arsenic. Arsenic! Poison! And just as it was possible that there could be a bad batch of a prescription drug--Amoxil or Claritin or Seldane gone wrong--it was certainly conceivable that there could be a bad batch of arsenic.
    I imagined a homeopathic chemist--a barefoot blonde in a white lab coat, Carissa Lake in a lab filled with ferns--and saw her holding a pair of beakers, wondering, Let's see, which one is one to one hundred and which one is one to one thousand?
    Carissa had said the remedy was usually diluted