She studies the soft curve of the pill’s surface. An ovum, pregnant with possibility. She is Schrodinger’s woman; both potentially well and unwell at the moment of the pill’s ingestion.
Ingestion, conception, deception, indigestion.
She is a slow metabolizer, has a sensitive constitution; weak liver from swallowing too many bottles of Tylenol as a teenager in an effort to permanently end her depression. Pills have never agreed with her.
If she is the cat and the pill is the box, she wonders, does the act of swallowing constitute opening the box? Zeus had given Pandora a box; told her not to open it. When she did most everything bad had escaped. Only hope had remained. If the box (pill) is then hope, or at least the symbol of hope, does opening it—metaphorically or symbolically at least—signify the abandonment of hope; the active act of hope; or is it some other third thing still? A sort of post-hope state? She feels like maybe it’s the latter, but she can’t be sure. Not really.
What if she becomes more unwell instead of less unwell after swallowing the pill? Would she then be deemed to have a paucity of wellness or a surplus of unwellness? And what of placebo? What if the effects she experienced were only imaginary? A delusion of wellness. Would deluding herself that she had been made well, when she was, in fact, no more or less well than she had been before taking the medication, mean she was more or less crazy?
She rolls the smooth pill between her fingers, thinks about placing it on her tongue and swallowing, just to see what happens. She wonders: does becoming the subject of an experiment—because that’s what ingesting pills with variable effects and side effects is, in essence, an experiment—change her animal status form cat to guinea pig?
Animal, vegetable, mineral.
All can be ingested; consumed. Should she then consume the pill? Begin the experiment? Just to see what happens? And, at the end of the experiment, would she, the cat (or is it now guinea pig?) then be considered to be alive or dead?
She is schizo, polarized, and she needs to be depolarized. She thinks about how the root of schizophrenia, “schiz” means to spilt, like splitting atoms or splitting infinitives; to [let the mind] boldly go. And that “phren” refers to the seat of intellect, emotion, and thought, which the Greeks and Chinese believed resided not in the head, but in the heart. Depolarization, she thinks, is a scientific term. A shift in charge from negative to positive. Her mind is always shifting from positive to negative.
She likes to think she has a scientific mind. Likes the idea of being not just open to possibilities, but pregnant with them. Unfortunately, she has done this experiment a dozen times before and pregnancy has always resulted in stillbirth. And anyway, hadn’t she heard people say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome was the definition of insanity? A quote she knows to be misattributed to Einstein, and also knows not to be empirically true, but one that she appreciates as having some real wisdom, nonetheless. Einstein was a scientist, but he was not above philosophy. He was an admirer of Spinoza’s view that God and nature were one, claimed that Hume had influenced his theory of relativity. Schrödinger, in fact, had devised his famous experiment during a discussion with Einstein in an attempt to illustrate the problems with the existing philosophical views on quantum mechanics. Einstein also had a schizophrenic son. She thinks he would have seen the value in the sentiment. That one could not hope to cure insanity by engaging in further acts of it.
She’d like to believe she is open to existing in a post-hope state, but she’s not prepared to split infinitives, not ready to more than double her suffering. She puts the pill back in the little orange pill container and snaps the lid shut. Better to keep the cat in the box.