I had to agree not to get pregnant. I told Vick Clover, the recruiter, that I didn’t intend to have sex with anyone any time soon, but that didn’t matter. As “a woman of childbearing potential,” I had to produce a negative hGG serum test to participate in a Phase 1 drug trial. Then, I had to sign my name, Whitney Trager, to a special set of e-documents, which confirmed that I had “no birth plan” and would start taking hormonal birth control. I could choose to subject myself to an experimental treatment, but a fetus could not.

After a comprehensive screening, I was given a NuvaRing for free, which I inserted two days before traveling to the study site. I’d promised to keep it in for the duration of the trial and for seventy-five days after it concluded. The device didn’t feel like anything. At the time, I was perfectly stoical about healthcare. Three years earlier, when I was twenty-seven, my boyfriend and I had been involved in a car accident. An ambulance arrived, and eventually a fire truck. I had to be cut out of the wreck. Three of my ribs were broken, and my right leg was deeply lacerated. I lost a lot of blood. At the hospital, while I was unconscious, I received a cross-matched transfusion that saved my life.

Within a year, I’d made a full physical recovery. But I hadn’t been the same since the collision. I dropped out of my PhD program in Jewish studies and moved back in with my parents. I’d been waiting tables at a farm-to-table restaurant, where I worked as many hours as I could, though I had few expenses: I usually ate shift meals, and my parents refused to accept any rent. At home, exhausted, I doomscrolled on Reddit and TikTok, obsessing about forever chemicals and clean beauty.

The other front-of-house workers at the restaurant were all a decade younger than me. That’s how I met Marcus, the college student who recruited me for the trial. Or he referred me to Clover, the official recruiter. But I assumed that Marcus got a kickback.

Clover explained the protocol over Zoom. He was employed by a research organization, Vigilant, which had a contract with one of the pharmaceutical giants. They were studying a new medication that would potentially be used to treat unspecified “autoimmune disorders.” At this early stage, the substance did not yet have a trademark, or even a generic name, just a series of letters and numbers: AGC-5746. Before they could test the drug’s efficacy, they first needed to investigate its safety and pharmacokinetics in humans. That’s why Vigilant was seeking “medically healthy people” for a ten-day inpatient trial. They would administer AGC-5746 twice a day to each participant via IV infusion. It was an open-label study, which meant that I’d know exactly what I was receiving, and the dosage. There was no chance I’d be given a placebo. There were possible side effects, some of them severe.

If I followed the rules and made it through the ten days, I’d be paid up to $14,500. But that’s not why I enrolled. I wasn’t desperate for money. I could stay with my parents indefinitely; they were aging and would soon need my help around the house. Nor do I believe that my motives were altruistic. Clover described the research in philanthropic terms: as “volunteers,” we’d be contributing to medical knowledge, aiding the sick. I can’t say that these words had no effect on me, but I wasn’t stupid enough to see myself as a hero or mensch. Clover was obviously greedy, unscrupulous, a man without a conscience. What he said about helping others—that was all scripted spin.

No, I think I signed up because I wanted to cede control. To let things be done to me and live on someone else’s schedule. To be swabbed down with disinfectant alcohol and make a dutiful fist for the phlebotomist. In this modern world, none of us are pure. There are surfactants in the bottled orange juice, polymer filaments coating our bowels. I’d been trying so hard to resist the pollution; why not acquiesce? The scientists would flush me with their chemicals, and it would feel like putting down a burden.

And maybe it also had something to do with the accident. When I learned about the transfusion, I asked who the blood had come from. The doctor couldn’t tell me. “Patient privacy.” She said it was a donor.

+

The study site was a decommissioned resort in the Catskills, in what was once the Borscht Belt. It was large but rundown, with several dining rooms and lounges, most of them off-limits. There was a vaudeville theater with café tables, and an empty indoor swimming pool. The door to the pool was locked, but you could see in from the corridor, through floor-to-ceiling windows. To the left of the door was a trompe-l’oeil mural. It was supposed to look as if a stone wall had been partially demolished. Through a painted hole in the painted masonry, a landscape with ruins was visible.

I was assigned to a private room with two queen-size beds. The quilts and valences were visually disquieting, crimson and gold. The curtains were velvet. Wi-fi was provided, and I could visit any website, which surprised me. The staff directed everything else—how much we ate, the timing of our exams, when we went to bed and woke up. They collected urine and blood samples, and we had to inform them when we defecated. We couldn’t leave the building, as if we were serving on a sequestered jury. But it wasn’t that kind of trial. Vigilant needed our bodies; what we did with our minds was irrelevant.

The infusions themselves were non-events. I’d get a reminder text and walk down to the exam room, a modified office near reception. A nurse would insert the cannula and tape it down, and I’d wait fifteen minutes for the medication to drain into my bloodstream. At first, I noticed no effects. But a few hours after the second dose, I started to feel tired and dizzy. And my left wrist hurt, as if the infusion had triggered some latent arthritis.

The dining room where we ate had once aspired to look luxurious. The carpet was printed with stylized lilies, and the tables were lit by gaudy bronze chandeliers. The meals, however, were incongruously humble: cold pita sandwiches, salty chicken fingers, and frozen vegetables. We had to eat everything, so that we’d all be ingesting the same number of calories and the same nutrients. The other volunteers seemed downtrodden and embarrassed. We’d greet each other, then keep to ourselves, playing on our phones and chewing quickly.

In my room and in the hallways, I heard muffled gunshots and yelling: everyone else had brought gaming consoles. Once, by the elevators, I made out a distinct line of dialogue: My other safe house. It’s more of an armory. I wondered if the game was about witness protection.

After each infusion, we were required to fast for two hours. This didn’t bother me in the mornings, but in the evenings, I’d get hungry before dinner. On Day 3, my thoughts became fixated on food. I kept picturing myself at an extraordinary staff meal, seated with my coworkers at the longest table in the restaurant. It was heaped with short-rib ragu and three-cheese polenta, stuffed acorn squashes and sweet-potato pies. I was turning into Ichabod Crane. I decided to leave my room.

At six-thirty, I made my way downstairs, to a lounge with a large flat-screen television. There was a man there, Isaac Rollo, who I’d met in the dining hall. He was about my age, an older millennial. Old enough to have failed at something, or several things, but not too old to challenge his body. Mentally undaunted, maybe indomitable. Maybe a little stupid.

I sat with him on a leather sectional. The TV was playing The Masked Singer. A pink dragon in a bridal dress was about to perform. After a bombastic introduction, the dragon began to sing in a baritone voice. The judges and the audience pretended to be shocked.

Rollo wasn’t really watching. He wanted to tell me about his life. He said that he was a “professional subject:” he’d done over a dozen of these trials, up and down the east coast and as far west as Colorado. They were his only source of income. He saw the whole thing as gambling, a life hack, free money. He wasn’t laughing, but his voice was excessively gleeful, uncontrolled.

After a while, he asked me, “Isn’t this hotel weird?”

“Yeah, the décor’s pretty dated.”

“It was a couples’ resort. From the seventies.” He was looking to see how I’d react.

I pretended not to understand. “Like people would come here on their honeymoons?” He seemed like the founder of a dubious start-up, an app for ordering in-home massages.

“That’s how they’d advertise it. But it was for couples. For swingers. Like an open marriage. They slept with each other’s wives.”

“I bet the husbands slept together too.”

He looked away from me, disappointed. “Yeah, yeah. I’m sure there was some of that.”

My wrist ached. The dragon sang chemical, physical. I felt an obligation to be polite.

“That’s an interesting theory. How did you figure it out? Or are you speculating?”

“There are literally brochures. In the bedside tables.” He handed me a trifold.

The cover said HEARTLAND, in a retro typeface with lots of ligatures and swatches. Beneath the logo, there was a photo of a man and a woman at the resort, in the indoor pool, which was full. The man was lifting the woman as she threw back her head. She’d just broken through the surface tension of the water, which cascaded from her hair and the backs of her legs. She appeared to be topless, but she was facing the man, not the camera, so her nipples weren’t in view. Behind them stretched the Mezzogiorno countryside.

“I guess that’s conclusive,” I acknowledged. “This wasn’t a family destination.”

“It’s weird. They usually have us at, like, an old Holiday Inn.”

I was still examining the photo. “There’s probably a man across the pool. The second man is going to catch her. They’re throwing her back and forth.”

I watched my finger drawing an arc, from the woman’s waist toward Isaac Rollo’s thigh.

+

By Day 5, the side effects were barely tolerable. I lost my appetite and became delirious. I lay in bed, too nauseous to sit up. I dreamed that I’d swallowed an entire rack of lamb; now my blood was flowing backwards. Then abruptly, on the following day, the study was called off. There’d been an adverse event. A rumor spread: one of the participants had gone into a coma. We were each issued checks for $9,400 and sent home. And the drug was abandoned.

+++

Melissa Tuckman’s writing has appeared in several publications, including Necessary Fiction, Litro, The Rialto, and Rust & Moth, and is forthcoming in Image Journal. Her essay “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” was nominated for Best of the Net. She teaches at Rowan University.