I run my tongue along my teeth, feel the film that’s stuck there. “Your semester only ended a month ago. Maybe you should take a break for a while. Come back to your work once you’ve had a chance to recharge. We could pack things up together. We could—”
“A break?” He spits out the word as if it’s poison. “You know who’s not taking a break? Brennan Llewellyn. I’m sure you’ve seen his new book—The Desolation of Fear.” He says the title with a mocking high-pitched tone.
“It’s complete garbage, of course. I was reading it when you pulled in. Five hundred pages of mind-numbing research and case studies that make the same argument as all his other books. But the critics don’t care. Nor the consumers. It debuted at number nine.” He scoffs. “Everyone’s a brain-dead lemming.”
I lean my head against the window, watch the oak trees whiz by. I’m too weary for one of Ted’s rants about Brennan Llewellyn, his old grad school classmate who went on to enjoy the success that Ted always wanted. Bestselling books. Spots on morning talk shows. The reverence of the entire psychology community. Brennan is Ted’s “friemesis,” a term Ted uses without irony. Whenever Brennan’s in town, the two of them have a meal together, laugh about whichever former classmate is currently embroiled in some university scandal, raise a glass to old professors who’ve recently passed away. But even as they clink their drinks, as they chuckle about the public humiliations of people they used to know, Ted’s teeth are always clenched.
Brennan didn’t start as Ted’s friemesis. In grad school, they were close, bonded by their shared specialization in fear. Ted says they used to have the same bold ideas, the same impulsive methods (which he swears is not an oxymoron). For a couple years, they thought of each other as research partners, both on a mission to break the field of psychology out of its rigid traditions, shake up the whole community. One night, Brennan got an idea for an experiment in which they would follow women home from the campus library. He showed Ted how to make his body hunched and menacing, and then, together, they crept along sidewalks, matching their pace with that of their subjects. It was only once the women began to run that they caught up to them, laughing, and tried to interview them about the experience.
But then Brennan betrayed him, Ted claims, by selling out. Brennan’s adviser encouraged him to submit a paper he’d written for class to scientific journals, even though it was virtually unheard of for a student so early in his graduate studies to be published. But when a prestigious journal actually accepted his paper, Brennan became intoxicated by his morsel of success. Abandoning his work with Ted, he dedicated himself to more generically academic methods—case studies, meta-analyses, experiments with controls—and Ted said that, from then on, the fear research Brennan conducted wouldn’t scare a baby.
After graduating, Brennan landed a position at Stanford, but none of the Ivy League schools would have Ted. His work wasn’t sterile enough—his words, not theirs. They couldn’t afford to be associated with such wild-card research—their words, not his—and they wanted someone like Brennan Llewellyn instead. Someone whose methods were rigorous but inoffensive. They wanted research like Corn Flakes, Ted said.
So he got stuck at Wicker, a school he deemed to be second-rate, and there, he published papers with the frequency required to keep his job. But the papers, by necessity, were always on topics that bored him—anxiety disorders, run-of-the-mill phobias, the startle reflex—because even second-rate schools, he claims, insist on playing it safe.
When it came to the real work, the real research, he had to do it on his own time.
The real work, of course, was his Experiments. But nobody would fund them. No journals accepted the articles he wrote about them. Nobody saw them as anything legitimate. “These ‘experiments’ you do,” Eric once said to Ted, “you know they’re not real science, right? They’re really just… pranks.”
The comment made me wince, but Ted actually laughed.
“Not real science?” he echoed. “Maybe they’re not the kind of science you’re accustomed to, Dr. Eric. After all, it’s not like you can smear the human mind onto a slide and discover its secrets under a microscope. Psychological studies are much more of an art.” Eric rolled his eyes, but Ted kept going. “Brennan pretends to disagree, and that’s why his work remains embarrassingly unimaginative. He took our subject and neutered it—to the point where no one can comprehend the brilliance of what I’m doing. But someday—soon, I suspect—the world will finally see Brennan for the fair-weather, suit-and-tie fraud he is.”
But Ted’s “embarrassingly unimaginative” is the psychology community’s “scientific.” In Brennan’s first book, The Legacy of Fear (a required text for my social work degree), he included countless case studies of people who had witnessed something traumatic as children—domestic abuse, familial murder/suicide—and studied the impact those experiences had in different facets of their life: academic performance, mental health, success in romantic relationships. To replicate the effects of fear in a safe, controlled environment, he performed the now-famous Exam Experiment, in which undergraduates volunteered to take a written test. In one group, students completed the test with no interruptions. In another, a student who had been planted in the front row let out a choreographed scream, ran up the stairs of the lecture hall, and burst out the door in the back of the room. The startled students were then told not to worry and to continue on with the test, the results of which were compared against months of identically run experiments.
To Ted, the Exam Experiment is the funniest joke he’s ever heard. There’s a world of difference, he says, between witnessing a murder and hearing a scream. And what a waste of time—a yearslong project with hardly anything to show for it: “Just research as thin as the paper it was printed on. Just jump scares, Fern! Jump scares. For God’s sake, he used to have ideas; he used to stalk people on the streets!”
Now, Ted turns the car sharply onto Main Street, and I put my hand against the door to brace myself. A stretch of buildings comes into view—the old Victorian repurposed as a post office; the two-room brick library, with an “Under Reconstruction” sign that’s been posted out front since I was seventeen; The Diner, which serves the best corned beef sandwiches; and, finally, Rusty’s Got Everything.
Ted whips into a space in front of the store, parallel parking with a confidence I can’t imagine having. When he taps the bumper of the car in front of him, he huffs “Serves ’em right” before reversing a couple inches and cutting the engine. He runs a hand through his wispy gray hair, messing it up rather than smoothing it out. Ted loves to look frazzled and unkempt, as if you’ve interrupted him during the middle of a work binge.
When I step out of the car, I’m blasted with a heat so potent it feels like a sauna. I didn’t register how hot it was when I first got to Ted’s; I probably thought the sweat that sprang to my forehead was from the woods, the vomit, the flashes of Astrid. Inside the store, it isn’t much better. Rusty’s got five giant fans going, one at the end of each aisle, but the air feels like bathwater. All these years and he’s never invested in AC. Nothing in Cedar ever changes.