Angel of Light by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Brothers and sisters, Suicide victims, Revenge
Publisher: New York : Dutton
Published: 1981-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

RESEARCH t 215

An abortive attempt to record a telephone conversation with one of the old Commission men in Washington—an alleged friend of Mau-rie's. Each time Mr. Carlyle was about to come on the phone Owen pressed the on button; but another secretary spoke; or another assistant. It was Owen's strategy not always to identify himself ... he knew word would spread in his mother's and Nick's circle quickly enough ... yet his false names elicited no respect. And when he did get through to Carlyle at home the conversation came to nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zero.

Owen, I'm afraid I can't help you, I've told my version so many times, you must understand, it's all in the public record, I haven't falsified anything or held anything back, I'm still sick about Maurie and I understand your concern, I understand what yoa're doing, but I can't help you, there simply isn't anything further I know. . . . Owen?

Fucker, Owen whispers. And hangs up.

Tossed in the research bag: a New York Times article on a thirty-three-year-old chemical researcher at West Virginia University in Mor-gantown. West Virginia, who had dealt himself an anticoagulant named warfarin because he thought it would prolong his life—allow him to live for two hundred years. (He had also taken BTH, a chemical used in food packaging to retard spoilage.) Owen had difficulty reading the article all the way through because the ending was sad but he skimmed it several times and felt a powerful sympathy for the young researcher who had evidently miscalculated the potency of his drug and was found in bed in his apartment, blood on his clothes, soaking the mattress, and on the kitchen and bathroom floors. The young man had called warfarin the Fountain of Youth. It must have been an agonizing death, the assistant state medical examiner said.

And a lengthy article in the student paper, the consequence of undergraduate investigative reporting, about C.I.A.-funded research at the university between the years 1950 and 1973. This is the real thing, Owen thinks, they've got the bastards now, they've got them by the balls. A $25 million project of "secret mind control" research. Code-names MK-ULTRA, Project Bluebird, and Project Artichoke. Two private institutions underwrote the C.I.A. program: the Geschikter Foundation for Medical Research and the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. In New York City brothels "unsuspecting subjects" were given mind-control drugs and their behavior was observed in two-way mirrors. Prisoners at the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey were subjects of experiments, as were "sexual psychopaths" at the Winona State Hospital in Michigan. Five professors at the university were paid consultants—and paid quite well—and the president of the university stated that it was "not a university matter at all." Ah hah,

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