The Maniac in the Balance

By Roger Rosenblatt

Something about the bottle, about the bright red cap snappy as a frontier bonnet, and the white cotton cloud showing through the translucent plastic, and the label, wide and snug, and the staunch lettering of EXTRA-STRENGTH, the whole shape of the thing comforting, like an old-fashioned milk bottle or a VW Beetle: it looks especially good in rows. Something about the rows, all the neat chunky boxes, one after the other, facing forward like a drill team on the shelf. Something about the shelf, third from the top, aisle B, toward the rear of the store, about which there is also something, as there is about the street and the hour of the day, any day, and the headache or the sniffles.

The ruminations get to you. No, the Tylenol case is not quite like the Son of Sam killings or the Mad Bomber or the Atlanta murders, and not only because these latest deaths are more random. There is something about the will involved, the you involved, plucking the particular little pill box that your hand has settled on, then standing politely in a row, ready to pay for your medicine. The trouble with poison is that you take it yourself, even when the murderer has spiked the gum on the envelope or when a Borgia has switched the wine. It is the victim who does the actual killing. That is why moviemakers focus so carefully on the glass of smoky milk jiggling on the silver tray as it progresses up the winding staircase toward the invalid wife. They know that we will want to follow the death instrument in the slowest motion, to see it grasped eagerly or laconically, at last to shudder. So one shudders picturing Stanley and Theresa Janus in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, stunned over the death of Stanley's brother Adam a few hours earlier, the couple sitting in despair at the kitchen table, about to reach for the Tylenol.

Such gestures constitute normality. In the millions and woven together, they combine to construct what we shyly call civilization, as does the work of the company that makes the pill, the one that packs and distributes it, the Government agency that examines and sanctions it, the store that stocks and sells it, and so forth, all tied together by nettings in which life hangs, as they say, in the balance. Fascinating, how easily that balance can be threatened. Fascinating too how it protects and sustains itself.

At first hearing the story is outrageous, confounding. Do you actually mean to say that some maniac has been filling Tylenol capsules with cyanide? Not that the wretched inventiveness of modern terrorism and science fiction have placed such acts entirely beyond the imagination. But we are not talking here about a bombing in a Bologna railroad station or of the Day of the Triffids. This is American everydaydom, the casual course of events. Alarmed, the mind skates hurriedly to the ifs: If Tylenol, why not aspirin? If drugs, why not food? October is the month for Halloween, after all. The razor blade in the apple? The lamb chops, the soap, the Pepsis? We already had an eyedrop scare. Hasn't the water tasted funny lately?

If such fancies took hold of our lives, rather than merely titillating our parlor conversations, the ensuing panic would be something to see. Either we would head for the streets bearing clubs and torches, like the villagers in the Frankenstein movies, or we would bolt the doors like Howard Hughes, letting our fingernails grow toward heaven in prayers for a germproof sterility. That we do neither is as remarkable in its way as the Tylenol poisoning itself. The poisoning is, to put it mildly, an aspect of extreme behavior. One might think that its antidote would also consist of extreme behavior. But instead, all the public does in response to this hitherto unseen monster is to rely on several old, familiar investigative mechanisms: the testimony of experts, the advice of the Food and Drug Administration, the news reports and, of course, its own capacity to make sense of these things.

All of which comes to fairly tame conduct when one considers that after ten days of the scare, the motives, the scope and the murderer(s) remained unknown. Yet there is an astonishing amount of pure wide-eyed trust that people give their social structures, no matter how fragile they are shown to be. What the public has done in the face of this particular emergency is simply to shift its faith temporarily from the pillmakers and sellers to several other social institutions: the Government, the police, the media. These institutions are hardly those that the public always believes in, but in this case the shift seems understandable, since there is nowhere else to turn if one wishes to avoid the extremes of chaos and catatonia.

Yet there is more to these acts of trust than plain necessity. The poisoning of the Tylenol capsules proves how treacherous and uncertain is the world.

Nobody needs such proof. Everyone is too well aware of the shakiness of existence without the evidence of yet another maniac. Still, we are perfectly able to live with such uncertainties. Indeed, there seems a near infinite capacity to do so, to go doggedly about our business in the presence of unknowns, including the unexpected menace and the undiscovered killer, just as long as civilization remains intact. In a sense, the certainty of our uncertainty creates our most durable bonds.

Exactly how tight these bonds may be stretched is severely tested by something like the Tylenol incident, and would be tested a lot more severely by, say, a poisoning of the air or, for that matter, a nuclear war; by anything for which there are no protective mechanisms in place. At that high level of danger it would most likely be every man for himself. One of the undercurrent impulses of the antinuclear movement, in fact, may be the collective acknowledgment that the world does not work very well with every man for himself. It is precisely that feeling which creates the links among the pillmakers, sellers, testers and users in the first place, a sense that life only progresses and avoids hysteria through various mutual dependencies, no matter how delicately wrought.

Hysteria is not the only extreme that societies avoid by these dependencies, however; they avoid or at least reduce a general heartlessness and egocentricity as well. Conventional wisdom has it that modern times have grown so savage, no one cares about human life any more. But the social structures by which one attempts to forestall death and panic would not be set up and maintained if human life had no real importance, not just your life but every life, all the lives standing in a row. The value of the maniac in our midst is that he makes this clear, makes clear the reliances, the selflessness, the health--he who in his private hell seeks to poison the world. --By Roger Rosenblatt

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