The Stacked Deck

Cold open 0:20

a desk fan, steady · a playing card flicked into the blades · another

TRACY (V.O.)Four arms. Two clinics. One list.

And six months of me feeding a deck of cards to a desk fan, one at a time, trying to work out what was wrong with it.

— music sting —

ANNOUNCERAdverse Events. From the case files of Dr. Tracy Grant, who writes the protocol, and Connie Chase, who makes it happen.

ANNOUNCERThe story you are about to hear is fiction. Any resemblance to your last study is purely coincidental and entirely predictable.

ANNOUNCERThe Case of the Stacked Deck.

The drama 10:00 · five scenes · ~1,210 spoken words

SCENE ONE — THE OFFICE

the fan, slower · a door · a clipboard signed

CONNIECourier came. Sealed, signed for, initialed twice. From a Mr. Miser.

TRACYRandy.

CONNIERandy Miser. (a beat) Somebody in that family had a sense of humor.

TRACY (V.O.)Randy Miser. Two states over. A man I have never met and would not know if he sat down on me.

Which is the whole point of him. A stranger deals, and we just play the hand we've been dealt.

Allocation concealment. Cheapest rigor in the business, and it costs a stamp.

CONNIEWhere do you want it?

TRACYDrawer.

CONNIEThe drawer that locks, or the drawer that's got a lock on it?

a beat

TRACYThe one that locks.

a drawer, pushed shut

TRACY (V.O.)I'd asked Randy for blocks of four. Four arms, four cards to a block, so the groups stay even at every interim look.

He said fine. Randy says fine to everything, which at the time I mistook for agreement.

CONNIEOh — the specialty clinic's sending four more Thursday. Then nothing till the twentieth.

TRACYOf course they are.

CONNIEThey come in bunches, that place. Always have.

TRACY (V.O.)Which I complained about at the time, to anybody who'd hold still.

— music bridge, four bars, then under —

SCENE TWO — THE INTERIM LOOK

no fan · rain at a window · a cup set down

CONNIEFinally getting crisp out there. Don't you love the fall?

CONNIEBrought you a hot — well. A coffee. From the machine on four.

TRACYYou went to four? On purpose?

CONNIEHey, at least it's consistent. Predictably cold, right from the spout.

the door

TRACY (V.O.)Six months in, you take an interim look. Not curiosity. Protocol. Somebody has to make sure we're not hurting anybody.

pages, set down one at a time

Table one. Four columns, A through D. Forty-odd apiece. Age, even. Gender, even. Every column telling the same story.

Severity. Five point nine. Six point oh. Six point seven. Six point one.

a page turned back

Six point seven.

Same as the look before. And the one before that.

Now, randomization is the one thing in this business you are never supposed to have to think about. It's a coin. A coin does not develop opinions.

I read that table four times, on the theory that a fifth might fix it.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE THREE — THE INVESTIGATION

the fan back on · a filing cabinet · a telephone

TRACY (V.O.)You start with the machinery, because the machinery hasn't got feelings and can't be insulted.

Was the deck truly shuffled? Or was it the shuffling they do at a wedding. Feet going every which way, yet nobody's moved one square foot in twenty minutes.

Except my nephew Donald, who can't seem to stay with one partner long enough to say hello…

a beat · then a handset lifted · dialing · a machine picking up · the beep

TRACYRandy. Tracy Grant, QUARTET. I need somebody to tell me that sequence is clean. Humor me.

handset down

TRACY (V.O.)He'd called back before I got in the next morning, which tells you everything you need to know about Randy Miser.

an answering machine clicking on

RECORDED VOICETracy. Ran it again. Sequence is clean, dated the third of March, and I still have the code. (beat) It ain't the list.

the machine clicking off

TRACY (V.O.)Scratch one.

Second suspect: the tape measure. Maybe severity itself was walking on me. Different rater out at the specialty clinic, different afternoon, different private notion of what a six looks like on a bad day.

a filing drawer · folders going down on a desk

So I pulled the ratings and set them against each other. Concordant. Boringly, beautifully concordant. The measurements were on the level and they had alibis.

Which meant the imbalance was real. And a real imbalance in a randomized trial is a thing with no business existing. Like a draft in a sealed room. Like hot coffee from the machine on four.

rain · the fan

Which left a third suspect. And I sat there a good long while before I'd let myself walk all the way up to it.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE FOUR — THE DECK

the fan · a deck squared on a desk · one card flicked into the blades

TRACY (V.O.)There's a deck in my second drawer. Been there since the Halloran fiasco. I flick them into the fan when I'm stuck, which my mother would call a waste and I call thinking.

another card · and another

Somewhere around the fourth one, it stopped being a fidget.

the fan switched off · cards dealt out one at a time, four to a round

Four hands. Four arms. Four cards to a block.

Clubs. Diamonds. Hearts.

a pause · nothing but the room

And I'm holding the fourth one before I've turned it over, because there is exactly one thing left that it can be.

That's not a trick. That's arithmetic.

Nobody out at that clinic is dealing the cards. But they can see every card that gets dealt. Three down, and the fourth's got nowhere left in the world to go.

So somebody out there could look at the patient sitting in front of her, and know exactly what was coming next, and hold it back a day.

Nobody would have to lie. Nobody would even have to decide anything, exactly.

a card set down flat, not flicked

There's a woman at that clinic. I've met her twice. She has been enrolling people into studies since I was writing my first aims page in a library carrel.

And at eleven o'clock at night, with a fan going, I was building a case against her out of a deck of cards.

I would like to tell you I felt bad about that. I did feel bad about that.

I kept going.

the drawer · an envelope lifted, and set back · the drawer closing

And here's what I could not do. I could not find out whether anybody ever had.

Six months. A drawer I picked out because it locked, and a key nobody ever turned. Me included. An office with four desks and a door that stands open because it has always stood open.

There's no record of who opened that drawer. There was never going to be one. Nobody writes down the thing nobody thought to watch.

HOLD — three full seconds · rain

An innocent explanation and a guilty one leave the same mark on the world. Which is none.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE FIVE — THE RE-DEAL

traffic through a window · the fan, off

CONNIEYou slept here.

TRACYI did not sleep here.

CONNIEYour coat's on the chair and there's a jack of spades under the radiator.

cards being gathered up

TRACY (V.O.)She wasn't wrong about the cards.

But somewhere in the small hours I'd quit asking who, and started asking where.

pages · a pencil

I took that table apart and dealt it again. Not by arm. By clinic.

Two clinics. One list.

And the specialty place — the one that sends the sicker folks, four in a week and then nobody till the twentieth —

Every one of those bunches walked into a block of four and came out cut in half. Never down the middle.

That's the whole of it. Nobody stacked that deck. We dealt one deck across two different tables and never once stopped to think about it.

I'd asked Randy for blocks of four and he'd said fine. I never asked him what he made of two clinics.

He'd have told me. That's the part that stings. He'd have told me in a sentence.

TRACYConnie. It was never a person.

CONNIEIs that the good news or the bad news?

TRACYIt's arithmetic.

CONNIESo's that machine on four. Nobody's fixed that either.

a chair · papers squared

TRACY (V.O.)Two things changed after that, and there is nothing clever in either of them.

The next list gets stratified by site. Which is a long way of saying each clinic deals from its own deck, so a run of hard cases at one of them can't bend the other.

And the deck stays right where it is. Turns out a lock only tells you nobody's supposed to look. It doesn't tell you whether anybody did.

So there's a book beside it now. You open that drawer, you sign for the privilege. Name, date, why.

a drawer sliding shut · a key turning

— music —

People think you seal the deck because you don't trust your people.

You don't seal it for that. You seal it so that six months on, when the numbers come out crooked and it's eleven at night and there's nobody in the building but you — you can quit asking who, and go find out what actually happened.

ANNOUNCERThis has been The Case of the Stacked Deck.

Guest cameo slot. Scene three — Randy's message on the answering machine. Twenty-two words, read flat, which is why a non-actor can't get it wrong:

"Tracy. Ran it again. Sequence is clean, dated the third of March, and I still have the code. (beat) It ain't the list."

The beat is the whole performance. He has taken this call from PIs a dozen times and it has never once been the list. The pause is a man deciding whether to say the obvious thing and then saying it anyway. "Ain't" is his alone — the only bent grammar in the episode outside Connie's mouth — and it tells you he is very good at his job and entirely unbothered by yours.

Credited in the outro as the Voice of Randy Miser. The name is a spoken pun — "Randy Miser" at conversational speed is randomizer, so it must be read at pace and never leaned on. Connie's "somebody in that family had a sense of humor" in scene one is the only nod it ever gets. As in The Perfect Delivery, this is a recording rather than a live call, so it doesn't break the rule that phone voices are never cast.

The word "predictably" is planted, not incidental. Connie says it in scene two about a coffee machine, as praise. It is the exact property that makes a fixed block dangerous in scene four, where Tracy names a card before turning it over. Nothing marks the connection and nothing should — but don't trim the coffee line for being a coffee line.

Four is the episode's number, over a dozen times. Four arms, blocks of four, four cards to a block, four more Thursday, the machine on four, four columns, read that table four times, four hands, four desks, four in a week. None of it is announced and none of it should be varied for freshness; the saturation is what makes the block of four feel inevitable by the time she deals one.

Connie holds the room up. Radio cannot show you autumn, an emptying building or an hour, so nothing here is set by stage direction — it arrives in her mouth. The fall, the rain, the cold coffee, the specialty clinic's four-then-nothing rhythm, and the fact that Tracy slept at her desk. She also plants the case without knowing it: her throwaway line about bunches in scene one is the answer to the whole episode, delivered six minutes before anybody needs it.

The deck and the fan. A woman flicking cards into a desk fan is a real thing people do while stuck, and it buys three things at once: a sound the audience can place, a physical action at the turn, and a deck already on the desk when the arithmetic arrives. Note the fan goes off the moment she starts dealing for real — the fidget becomes work, and the room goes quiet for the discovery.

She never breaks concealment. The prediction is worked with her own playing cards and from assignments already made — visible to everyone, because you can't blind a behavioral trial to itself. The envelope is opened in an sfx line and stays sealed. The moment she looks, she is a different character and the episode is about her instead of about the drawer.

What closes and what doesn't. She solves the imbalance — one deck across two tables, fixed by stratifying — and it costs her a night and a pot of cold coffee. What she never gets is a way to stop suspecting a colleague, because there is no record of who opened that drawer and there never was going to be. That is the hole the platform fills, and the episode should let the audience find it without naming it.

Nobody is a villain. The woman at the clinic never does anything, is never accused, and never learns she was suspected — and the injury is precisely that. Scene five's last beat is played completely straight. No slang after the re-deal.

Jargon in the investigation, plain speech in the hurt. Scene three carries the load — truly shuffled, on the level, they had alibis, scratch one — over real method vocabulary: allocation concealment, interim look, baseline severity, concordance, stratified by site. All of it drops away in scene five.

Sign-off 0:30

— music up —

ANNOUNCERDr. —— appeared as the Voice of Randy Miser.

ANNOUNCERAdverse Events is brought to you by Software for Research. For those who love discovery more than data entry.

ANNOUNCERAnd even though the biostatistician points out that our sample size is one whenever they hear us: this is Adverse Events.

— music out —