Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.—EMERSON, “Experience” Myla Goldberg opens her short “Author's Note” to Wickett's Remedy (2005) with a historical reference to the overwhelming influenza pandemic of 1918, the cause of which remains debatable, she says, although its devastating effect is a matter of record. Basing her observations on five years of writing and research for her novel, she states that the pestilence “killed more Americans in ten months than died in all twentieth-century wars combined, and killed well over 20 million people worldwide.”1 If the epidemic began in the United States, and American troops carried it into Europe when they sailed there to fight in the last battles of World War I, as Goldberg says is generally thought to have happened, then many of those soldiers, following their patriotic dream of destroying the German army, saw it transform into a nightmare that brought death and destruction to themselves instead before they ever reached the battlefields. Goldberg illustrates the havoc indirectly through letters and reports as well as shocking snatches of conversation aboard a military transport ship in which large numbers of infected troops are dying as they sail to war.These are but a few of the many assorted fragments, announcements, newspaper articles, tributes, advertisements, and letters that she has incorporated in the construction of her surrealistic second novel, Wickett's Remedy. Michael Kilkenny, for example, mails two such letters home to South Boston from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he is sent on being drafted, having rushed to register as soon as President Wilson declared war against Germany. In the first he describes his initial week's experience of army life at Fort Devens. In his second letter a week later he tells his family that “a nasty flu [is] going around” (105), and in the next communication received from the fort they learn that Michael already has died of it. Thinking back on him, and recalling his son as heroic and patriotic as he excitedly came home waving his draft notice “like it was a winning lottery ticket” (95), his father is proud of him for having signed up for the draft, but the fun-loving young man, recently married, has died before he can fight the despised enemy, before he can even board a troopship for Europe. Michael's family is deeply grieved, of course, especially his sister Lydia, younger than her brother by a year and already a widow, having lost her husband, Henry Wickett, to the flu after a short marriage.Henry, like Lydia's brother Michael, also attempts to join the army: “As a soldier I will be able to write about everything that is going on over there. By the time I return, I'll be a first-class journalist” (52), he writes in a letter to her before leaving. The letter, she recalls, however, is short, and after his death, Henry from beyond the grave remembers his actual and much longer letter, as cited in the sidebar of Goldberg's page, where the dead speak indirectly to each other and to whomever and whatever may be able to overhear them.2 While still alive, he had said that, writing as an army journalist, “I will … fulfill what I have always suspected to be my true calling” (52). But unlike Michael, Henry is rejected because of his basic frailty. Sensitive and talented as a writer, he is unrealistic, a dreamer somewhat like Lydia herself, but unlike her he cannot realize his impractical dreams. When he meets Lydia and begins to court her, she is a saleslady in a large department store in Boston where she has worked since graduating from grammar school eight years earlier in order to escape the old neighborhood at least during the days. He, in sharp contrast, is a medical student, an unhappy one as she learns to her dismay soon after their marriage when he informs her then that he no longer aspires to become a doctor and has consequently left medical school. Instead he plans to “realize [his] destiny” (34) by selling a universal “remedy” chiefly for mental distress, a remedy to be accompanied by a therapeutic letter he will write to each ailing buyer individually and follow up as long as the recipient replies regardless whether more remedy is purchased. Lydia dubiously shakes her head but finally agrees to create the “remedy,” which she does by basing the recipe for it on advice she receives in a dream from the grandmother she has never seen, and she designs a label as well. But it is Henry himself who unexpectedly draws the lovely cherubic face to grace the label, according to Lydia, one that evidently represents the child the couple has longed unsuccessfully to conceive, and he places an advertisement in the daily newspaper to attract buyers.Drawn by the ad, young Quentin Driscoll comes to see Henry and offers to assist him by persuading pharmacists to stock and sell the remedy. Having nothing to lose, Henry agrees; and after deferring initially, Lydia concurs, so an informal partnership is arranged, but Henry succumbs to the flu before Driscoll can put his idea into effect. Driscoll then approaches Lydia, suggests maintaining the arrangement, and again she agrees. A crucial turning point occurs at this point when Driscoll suggests that customers will return to the pharmacies from which they purchased the remedy when they “develop a taste for it” (91). Quickly responsive, Lydia muses over people's buying it only for the taste and proposes that it be carbonated and sold as soda rather than as a medication. Driscoll attends her suggestion with no expression of interest in her idea; they shake hands, and he thanks her cordially for maintaining their business relation. Lydia is pleased: “She suspected that if Henry could see them at that moment, he too would be smiling” (92). But according to one of the dead sidebar speakers, “Alas, Henry was unaware of this meeting until Lydia joined Us. Our knowledge is confined to Our collective memory, the conflux of Our whisperings” (92). For a few months after the renewal of their agreement, Driscoll sends Lydia a little change with “friendly notes detailing modest sales” (92).From here on, however, he deceptively cheats her out of her rightful 50 percent of the profits from their informal partnership; furthermore, he tells people that he, not Lydia, acquired his recipe for the concoction in a dream and that selling it as a tasty soda drink rather than a remedy was his own idea. As a result he becomes the developer and owner of the huge QD Soda manufactory, which he names after his own initials, but he never fully acknowledges his surreptitiously squeezing Lydia out of the operation and all the wealth it brings in. Because of this unethical action, though legal because Lydia's claim cannot be substantiated without documentation, the fabulously wealthy Driscoll has a lifelong struggle with his conscience, and she dies still relatively young after years of suffering and poverty.Driscoll's career from adolescence to death is textually interrelated with Lydia's only briefly, in approximately the first third of the novel, which deals with him as a young man. Apart from his few early meetings with her before and after Henry's death, he and virtually everything related to QD Soda are highlighted separately in short sections of most chapters, preceded by incidents in the continuing grim narrative of her unfortunate life. Those sections pertaining to QD Soda that follow the narrative in which Lydia is central, chapter by chapter, are altogether different in manner and tone from the text that features her as both the central character and central narrative consciousness.Like many other isolated passages and sections in the novel, those dealing specifically with the QD Soda company differ markedly in style from the parts of the narrative that portray Lydia and her family as they struggle to overcome the oppressive dangers of the influenza epidemic. Of course, the partnership with Driscoll commences shortly before the epidemic takes hold, and the expansion of QD Soda necessarily occurs some years afterward, so the grim scenes of Boston's struggle with the scourge in 1918 and the lack of reference to any effects of influenza in the diverse reports on QD's successful marketing are explained by the lack of simultaneity. Therefore the plot in which Lydia is central and the diverse commentaries and exhibits related to QD Soda cannot be presented clearly in parallel texts because they relate to different time periods.Nonetheless, the QD Soda segments do provide valuable comic relief by satirizing the company's efforts to celebrate and thus further publicize its already widely known and distributed product. For example, at the third stop on “The QD Soda Walking Tour: Scollay Square,” tourists learn that among the many theaters and other “entertainments” that operated on the Square in the 1920s was the QD Follies. The tour guide explains that “QD Soda became a national sensation thanks, in large part, to the first ‘QD Cutie,’ Sara Lampe, who also became the first Mrs. Quentin Driscoll and whose beautiful voice turned ‘I'm Just a QD Cutie’ into a national hit. In 1926, with Sara pregnant, Quentin picked for his next ‘Cutie’ a young singer from Newton named—Cara Blaine. It is often forgotten that one of our most beloved Hollywood stars got her start as the spokesmodel for one of our most beloved soft drinks!” (62). The guide then explains that five years later Sara and their young son were killed in a “tragic accident.”Similarly, the most highly exaggerated of such sections follow a sharply contrasting reprinted newspaper article that describes the marriage of an apparently terminally ill soldier in a hospital bed and his bride, with all in the wedding party, including the bride and groom, wearing gas masks. The immediate shift in tone from this melancholy vision to the following is gross and ridiculous to say the least: “Congratulations! Not everyone has what it takes to be a QD Tour Guide (QDTG), but those who do will find it a memorable and rewarding experience. QDTGs are very important members of our extended QD Soda family” (179). The next six pages are devoted to the scripts and rituals to be followed as Guides, including a song celebrating QD Soda, “‘I wanna drink QD’ (sung to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’)” (184). This entire episode is so outlandish that it rivals the theater of the absurd and further justifies associating Wickett's Remedy with surrealism for its “fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.”3 Although Goldberg's descriptions in the context of exposing the company's manner of gaining such commercial success are exaggerated, they are effective as a means of comparing Lydia's somber life with Driscoll's exciting if unethical achievement.In direct contrast to his role, Lydia's share of the novel, even from before Henry's death, is persistently dark because of her constant suffering under the heavy shadow of the epidemic. Eventually, she realizes that Driscoll has been cheating her out of her just share of his huge soda empire and all the profit he has acquired from it; time and again, she writes to him pleading with him to do her justice, but he never directly responds. The author makes us aware of his suffering conscience by printing letters he writes to his dead wife (to “My Beautiful Darling—” from “Your Loving Husband”) and son (to “My Dear Boy”—from “Your Loving Father”), both of whom are killed in a boating accident over half a century before he dies. Yet his letter writing continues. Driscoll for decades is in effect psychologically warped to the extent that he has no true emotional engagement with any living person after the death of his wife and son.As he ages, he develops a quasi-emotional attachment to Ralph Finnister, a young man in the company to whom he gives special attention more as a surrogate son in place of his dead child, also named Ralph, than an ordinary well-qualified employee. Finnister thus becomes affiliated with QD Soda to an extent as Driscoll himself did, by ingratiating himself as a youth with the owner of a soda counter (78), albeit a much larger enterprise, and eventually he replaces Driscoll at the top. As for Driscoll himself, he has retired and moved to the luxurious Lawnview Senior Complex, where most or all of his expenses are covered by QD Soda. By August 1993, however, he is mentally unstable in his nineties, and his throbbing conscience has driven him to confess publicly that an obscure widow should be considered the true owner of QD rather than himself. By this time, however, it is much too late to acknowledge his secret guilt, much less to help Lydia. Seeking to honor him at a street-naming ceremony in 1993, Finnister explains in a letter Driscoll's bizarre statements in a recent public address: “As of late, his golden years have not rested lightly on his shoulders. He has become troubled by the false notion that his professional life was not the exemplary model the rest of us know it to be….” (240). Knowing nothing whatever about Lydia or Henry Wickett, both of whom are long dead by the time he publicly acknowledges his unethical acquisition of QD, Finnister believes the aging former head of the company is delusive or otherwise non compos mentis. A month later Driscoll is transferred from Lawnview to a much less desirable home for the aged, a state institution, when Finnister no longer responds to the Lawnview manager's request for payment despite the availability of more than sufficient funds through the company.Whereas Driscoll's initial immoral action to acquire wealth gradually leads to his miserable turn of mind, consequent incomprehensible behavior late in his life, and eventual institutional confinement, the death of neither Michael Kilkenny nor Henry Wickett can fairly be attributed to any fault of their own. Although Michael dies on his way to become a war hero, and Henry's scatterbrain dreams do no more than give him hope as he quietly breathes his last in bed under Lydia's loving care, both succumb to the prevailing influenza pandemic. Lydia alone of the three consciously places herself in danger of infection, time and again, entirely for the sake of others, although she too has a sense of destiny at work as she feels a call to be of assistance as a nurse and seems to give little thought to the danger into which she is stepping.Like her brother and later her husband, she too has dreams, and as an adolescent she sets out to fulfill them by finding a job in a more upscale part of Boston, accepting the marriage proposal of a medical student from a local Brahmin clan, trying to start a family after her marriage, and living on a higher plane in a basically new, almost foreign environment. She is, after all, a girl from Southie (South Boston) in a tightly knit Irish-Catholic environment altogether different from that of Washington Street (“where there was not a clothesline in sight, not a single vegetable or fish man” [4]) and Gilchrist's department store where she is employed.From the beginning of the novel, she dreams of changing her life. She lives with her parents and siblings—all brothers, with Michael the eldest—in a brownstone amid many others like it with extended family members and cordial neighbors in surrounding flats in a relatively low-class neighborhood from which year by year she longs to escape. Goldberg describes the environment as realistically in the opening paragraph as Howells might have depicted it in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) or A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)—that is, apart from the talking dead in the sidebar: On D Street there was no need for alarm clocks: the drays, ever punctual, were an army storming the gates of sleep. The wooden wagons were heavy and low-riding with loud rattling wheels, their broad planks too battered and begrimed to recall distant origins as trees. Each dray was pulled by horses—two, four, or sometimes six per wagon—pounding down nearby Third Street. Windows rattled and floors shook…. In winter the drays came when the sky was still dark, their pounding hooves sharp reports against the frozen cobblestones….With visions of a better life to be gained in Boston proper, she crosses the bridge to the elite stores and takes a position as a stock girl at Gilchrist's that she holds for four years before advancing to the men's shirt counter when an opening occurs. There she works well because she is attractive, perceptive, and bright enough to be an effective saleslady. This entire chapter is devoted to Lydia's developing awareness of a new and altogether unfamiliar lifestyle that had been beyond her. Once she sees it, she is determined to become a part of it, which she does by watching, working, and learning. When Henry Wickett steps into her life, she adjusts easily to the changes he inadvertently initiates. Goldberg's descriptions of their behavior together under varying circumstances convey not only the incidents and occasional embarrassments of a developing romance but portray both Lydia and Henry as floundering toward their engagement and eventual marriage as if it were a magical voyage for both.Indeed, the charming letters he sends to her at work prove that he is more than a competent writer; he is a poet in prose, and his “letters imbued even the banal particulars of Lydia's day with magic” (16). From childhood on, she tends to romanticize and glorify aspects of experience that most people reared in her milieu would simply overlook. Her father delivers large blocks of ice around the neighborhood in summer, so on spotting an ice truck while playing ball in the street, she and Michael would chase after it until “the iceman would toss out an extra block, the surplus ice arcing toward the street in a dream of captured light before exploding into frozen bliss on the cobbles” (3).4 As the author injects magic into the web of common experience, so does she transform embarrassing situations into comedy, as when a glass of water is spilled while Lydia and Henry are having lunch at a local café. Many instances of such romanticizing transformations occur early in the novel, making it a comedy of errors for a short time, but after the first chapter ends so does the comedy—and the honeymoon. The door has then been opened to the nightmare that soon darkens and gains much control over their lives. Goldberg has penned several comical scenes in Wickett's Remedy, but she has surely written no comedy, having left that aspect of her art behind in Bee Season (2000), at least for the present.With Henry's death and Lydia's consequent return home to D Street, Wickett's Remedy takes a decidedly darker twist, and it never turns back. She finds a new job behind a counter at Gorin's, another department store, where illness has kept many employees away; soon after she is hired, the store closes temporarily because of the epidemic. Michael's death and Henry's more recent one foreshadow the dreadful conflicts she has yet to face, the most awful of which, of course, is the rapidly spreading influenza, but the struggle that proves most fateful for her is with Quentin Driscoll and his QD Soda empire. The influenza does not defeat her, but the incomprehensible Driscoll does.The epidemic reaches Lydia's family with dreadful results. As its members fall ill, their mother isolates them in a single room, and when it ravages little Brian, her sick cousin Alice's youngest child next door, to the extent that he must be hospitalized or die from his racking cough and high fever, Lydia picks him up and runs ten blocks with him in her arms to Carney, the nearest hospital, where tents have been set up in the yard to handle the overflow of patients. After leaving him in charge of an overworked nurse, she walks home to D Street and learns that his mother has died wretchedly during her absence. When she returns to Carney the next day to see Brian, a nurse tells her that he “passed” during the night.Two nights later she dreams that she is dancing with Michael; when she whispers to him that she knew he was not dead, he replies, “Oh I'm dead all right, Liddie,” and she awakens frightfully to see a dark figure in her doorway—one of her brothers has come to tell her that a sibling is feverish. An anonymous remark in the sidebar by one of the dead silently reveals uncertainty over the cause of her nightmare: “Michael may or may not have contributed to his sister's nightmare. We are powerless over all aspects of Our whisperings save their ceaseless production” (148). Lydia's father enters the room and prays before weeping. This somber incident is immediately followed by dialogues aboard a troopship expressing some of the soldiers' fear, anger, and apparent dementia as well as their refusal to obey orders to service the sick bays because of the mortal illness spreading aboard that endangers them all, and these passages are directly followed by an undated nostalgic letter from Driscoll to his dear dead son complaining over his treatment in the care center. The rapid-fire juxtaposition of such dissimilar texts emphasizes the surreal nature of Goldberg's complex narrative.After leaving home for work and seeing that Gorin's is closed for the week because of the epidemic, Lydia walks to Carney and offers help; she is gratefully received in the overcrowded hospital despite her lack of credentials. Her assistance there all day becomes an intense learning experience and “her memories of other places the products of dreams” (161); otherwise she remains “unscathed” as she walks back to D Street through strangely silent thoroughfares. Scanning her father's newspaper at home, she reads a notice inviting “experienced nurses” to participate in a government program “concerning the flu” on Gallups Island and falls asleep holding it in her hand. Before the chapter ends, two brief linked dialogues occur between a doctor and a nurse or aid over victims of the flu brought into the hospital, the first already dead, and the second a dying woman experiencing the forced ejection of a stillborn fetus. Immediately afterward a lengthy memoir by Ralph Finnister in the “QDispatch” exposes his ersatz filial association with Driscoll, the latter's unsuccessful attempt to acknowledge his unethical acquisition of QD Soda from the widow of his former partner, Driscoll's forthcoming retirement at seventy-two, and his implicit passing on of the presidency of the company to Finnister himself. Stylistically, the memoir is steeped in false humility.The next morning, with mixed emotions because she lacks credentials and experience, Lydia goes to the Public Health office and inquires about the announced opening for experienced nurses on Gallups Island, at the outer edge of Boston Harbor. Despite her misgivings and professional limitations, she tells the agent: “I want to be—I am meant to be a nurse. I am as sure of this as I have ever been about anything” (174). Her single self-sacrificial day at Carney helping the sick and dying, patient by patient, becomes an epiphany for this suffering servant and a dream to be realized. The agent hires Lydia immediately and tells her to report the following Sunday to the tender that will take her to the island. Enraged and distressed when they learn what she has agreed to do, and fearing they will lose another child to the scourge, her parents believe she is mad. Nevertheless she is aboard the tender and on her way to Gallups the following Sunday as ordered.Once on the island, she learns that she and the arrogant head nurse are to work with other medical personnel attempting to discover a way to control the fatal spread of influenza by experimenting on thirty naval prisoners who have volunteered to participate in the effort all under the supervision and control of the distinguished Dr. Joseph Gold. Basically, the doctors will attempt to infect the volunteers, whom they consider patients rather than prisoners, with an influenza strain brought from the mainland; or if one of the volunteers or doctors should already be infected, mucus or blood from that person would be injected into or smeared on the other volunteers. The men are assured that if they become ill, they will be given outstanding care, so their chances of recovery would be excellent. Although everyone including the doctors understands that the experiment may be fatal to whoever is infected, they do not dwell on such a possibility; instead the volunteers expect to be released from their imprisonment when the experiments end after a month has passed. Initially ignorant of all the implications of the experiment, Lydia is appalled on learning that some of the men under her care as an assistant nurse may die after absorbing an intentional shot or smear of infected matter, but she is mollified on being reminded that such a result is highly unlikely. Besides, the volunteers understood the danger from the start and accepted it.During the course of her stay on Gallups, Lydia—called “Liddie” and even “Nursie” by the volunteers—becomes friendly with the prisoners and more personally acquainted with one than the others. Early in the novel Frank Bentley is introduced as a young naval recruit who drinks so heavily with his friends that he passes out and cannot return to his ship on time. Consequently imprisoned, he volunteers for the experiment and meets Lydia on the island; personable and good natured, he subtly courts her until an intense relationship develops between them, and when they leave Gallups after the experiment ends, they marry.The only fatality attributable to the experiment is that of Dr. Percival Cole, the widely admired assistant of Dr. Gold; it is a result for which Dr. Gold cannot forgive himself because Percy Cole is a brilliant and highly devoted colleague. His kindness and high standards also endear him to Lydia, in whom he perceives the angelic benignity she virtually reflects. Shortly before his death she gives him special attention and care, which leads him to request that she be invited to attend his autopsy. When the time comes for him to be dissected and examined, she is invited to observe, and against the advice of a kindly doctor who cautions her gently and accurately that she is making a mistake, she accepts, and a voice in the sidebar says that “Percy Cole is pleased to have eventually learned, among Us, of Lydia's acceptance of his invitation” (300). In contrast, another of the anonymous deceased speakers in the sidebar says that Cecil Worth, also one of the younger medical personnel, “was quite unhappy to see Lydia in attendance: he had wagered a modest sum that she would lack the nerve to come” (301). That is the last sidebar comment in the section of the book detailing the autopsy.Goldberg has created a surreal scene in depicting the dissection and examination of Percy Cole's remains. Presiding over the necropsy is Dr. Gold; he “resemble[s] an Old Testament Abraham who had heeded too late God's call to spare his son” (301). The image evoked of the great Hebrew patriarch implicitly portrays Joseph Gold as a notable Jewish doctor, not unexpectedly in this novel published in the shadow of Goldberg's Bee Season. The author highlights the sounds as well as the sights to which the observers are subjected, including Lydia herself, who finds it increasingly difficult to stand and not only watch but hear the cutting of flesh and striking of bone, difficult because she cannot think of her admirable friend as a corpse on a slab when he still lives in her memory as a kindly, gentle human being. She has prepared to watch the proceedings because “after weeks of foundering, she would leave Gallups with a bit of real medical knowledge, something concrete and incontrovertibly true” (300).But the instruments to used when the necropsy starts are frightening in themselves. After the cutting begins, “the room took on the faint butchery smell she associated with the meat market on Dorchester, a smell previously linked to Sunday dinner” (303). She is struck cold by assorted clinks and crunches. “Then it came again. Another clink of metal, then a pause, and then the scalpel hit the floor with a purely musical sound, like a triangle being struck from an orchestra's back row. Several people gasped. Somewhere to her left, a low voice beside her murmured, ‘My God’” (303).Dr. Gold cuts into the chest and removes a lung, which he holds up, saying, “That can't be…. Seven hundred grams. It's all fluid” (304). Although she knows that the corpse has not moved, “in her mind's eye,” it seems to Lydia that “Percy was now standing, his chest dangling open, a dark space where his left lung had been” (304). Then she glimpses “Percy's dangling hand. In place of fingers she now saw five test tubes filled with red fluid, one of which was encircled by a silver ring” (304). She can take no more and forces herself to walk stiffly from the room, past a medical student on the floor who has passed out, and continues advancing until she leaves the building and flees to the beach, where she vomits “silently and repeatedly onto the sand” (305).This striking episode is followed by a series of disconnected short segments. First is a dialogue between Dr. Gold and the snobbish head nurse, Cynthia Foley, who shows no sympathy or consideration for Lydia until enough time has passed for her to recognize that the volunteers and several of the medical staff have more affection and respect for her assistant than for herself. She is attempting to placate Gold, who castigates himself for failing to find a vaccine to counter influenza. He sees himself as the famous Dr. Joseph Gold, “who can't transmit flu to a single goddamn Navy deserter but kills off his best assistant surgeon” (305). She pleads with him to come to bed, but he drives her from the room. Next is a reprinted newspaper article, “Fails to Find Influenza Cure,” that provides a short report on the vaccines that fail. Following that are bri