The Case of the Invisible Line

COLD OPEN

CONNIE (V.O.)Sixty people put their hand up. Nine of them made it through the door.

I was the one who was supposed to notice the difference.

— music sting —

ANNOUNCERWelcome to Adverse Events. Transcribed stories from the case files of Dr. Tracy Grant, who writes the protocol, and Connie Chase, who makes it all 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 Invisible Line.

SCENE ONE — A CORRIDOR, THEN THE STREET

a photocopier running · tape torn off a roll · footsteps on hard floor

CONNIE (V.O.)The ASCEND trial. Nobody could ever tell you what it stood for, including the three of us who made it up.

Sixty participants in eleven weeks. That part of the job I'm good at.

The flyer took nine weeks and three offices to approve. Legal wanted a disclaimer. Somebody in communications wanted the logo bigger. The IRB wanted to discuss it for another month.

I spent a good part of those nine weeks on hold.

a handset lifted · a number dialed

RECORDED VOICEThank you for calling the Institutional Review Board. Your call is important to us. Current response time for expedited review is six to eight weeks.

handset down

CONNIE (V.O.)We ended up with five tear-off tabs and a QR code smaller than a postage stamp.

tape · a flyer smoothed flat against a wall

I put it up anyway. Grocery store, two clinics, the laundromat on Ash.

And it worked. That's the part nobody warns you about. Sometimes the thing works.

Sixty submissions in three weeks. Sixty people who read eleven paragraphs about their own sleep and thought: sure. I'll give you twelve weeks of my life for a twenty-five dollar gift card and the tax paperwork it generates.

a desk phone rings · handset lifted

CONNIERecruitment, this is Connie.

a voice on the line — warm, indistinct, never words

CONNIEYou did, yes. You're number thirty-one. No, that's not a ranking. That's just the order they came in.

the voice again, longer

CONNIESomebody will be in touch. I promise.

handset down

CONNIE (V.O.)She had a good question. She wanted to know whether it would still be any use to us if she had to miss a week.

Most people ask about the money. She asked about the science.

— music bridge, four bars, then under —

SCENE TWO — THE OFFICE

no copier · fluorescent hum · a wall clock, audible now that nothing else is

CONNIE (V.O.)Eleven weeks later I sat down to draw the flow diagram.

If you've never had the pleasure — it's a column of boxes running down a page, and every single person who ever touched your study has to end up inside one of them. Assessed. Excluded. Consented. Analyzed.

It's the most honest document in research. Nobody gets rounded off.

Sixty assessed.

Nine consented.

Which put fifty-one people in a box marked Excluded.

the clock · nothing else

Holy mackerel. Fifty-one? In a sixty-person study?

I counted it twice. It came out fifty-one both times.

And under that box there's a line where you write the reason.

I sat there with a pen for a while, like the line was going to fill itself in if I stared at it long enough.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE THREE — THE SAME ROOM, LATER

the same hum, the same clock · a filing drawer

CONNIE (V.O.)Fifty-one people don't just get up and sneak away. Somebody let them walk.

Three suspects immediately appeared.

Time to line them up and make a positive identification.

First up: the flyer.

Wrong neighborhoods? Wrong wording? A QR code nobody on this earth could scan?

Great questions, and all the wrong answers.

Sixty witnesses, and every one of them swore that flyer did its job.

a drawer rolls open · folders pushed aside

Next up: eligibility. Maybe we'd built a study nobody alive could get into. It's been done before.

So I pulled the screening records.

Let's see here... Four ineligible. Two medications. One birthday. And a gentleman who lived in Nevada.

Four reasons I could write on the line. And forty-seven I couldn't.

Which left yours truly. Did I turn left at some point when I shoulda turned right?

I keep a call log. People laugh at that log right up until it's the only thing standing between them and a very long meeting.

Eleven Thursdays, ninety-four calls, every one written down. I went through it twice looking for the place I dropped the ball.

Came up clean.

Which is the worst news you can get. If it wasn't me, there's somebody out there still walking around.

a door

TRACYYou're still here.

CONNIESo are you.

TRACYI'm leaving.

CONNIEYou said that at six.

TRACYI meant it at six.

a chair dragged over

CONNIEFifty-one of them are logged the same way. Not rejected. Not withdrawn.

TRACYThen what.

CONNIENo response.

TRACYThat's not a category. That's a shrug.

CONNIEIt's the only shrug I've got.

papers squared against the desk

CONNIE (V.O.)"No response" hands you a shovel and paints an X on the ground.

I dug there till nine. Good plan, good shovel.

Wrong X.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE FOUR — THE TURN

CONNIE (V.O.)It was the memory of a phone call that did it. The one from March — number thirty-one, and her question about missing a week.

I went to find her file, to see what we'd told her.

a folder opened · a single sheet drawn out

We had never told her anything. Not once. In four months.

So I did the only thing left. I took the list apart.

sixty sheets of paper set down one at a time

Sixty names, and ninety-four calls in the log. So I laid the log out beside the list and went looking for who I'd been spending my Thursdays on.

And there it was, in a shape you could see from the other side of the room.

CONNIENinety-four calls. Nine people.

TRACYNine.

CONNIENine.

TRACYConnie, there are sixty names on that list.

CONNIEThat's the part I've been sitting with since six.

hold — the hum, the clock

CONNIEThe woman who filled in a card in March isn't a no-show. No-shows have appointments.

TRACYSo she's a dropout.

CONNIEHow can you drop out before you've been dropped in?

TRACYGood point. So what do we call her?

CONNIEThat's the trouble. Nothing in this building has a word for her.

I'm going back to my desk to find the impossible. See you tomorrow.

— music bridge, two bars —

SCENE FIVE — THE CALL

traffic through a window · a kettle somewhere

footsteps · a knock at an open door

CONNIEThere's a man in the parking lot been sitting in his car since I got here.

TRACYDoing what?

CONNIEHe's staking out the building. Apparently a result got loose last week.

TRACYNo, really. What's he doing.

CONNIEPizza delivery, I think. You ordered a pizza for us, right?

TRACYNice try. What can I do for you.

CONNIEI took the list apart last night. Sixty sheets of paper, one name apiece, and I laid the call log next to it.

TRACYAnd?

CONNIEForty-seven of them have never heard a word from us.

So here's what I know to do. First half hour of every Thursday goes to whoever's been waiting longest.

TRACYThat sounds right.

CONNIEIt is right. I just can't do it.

a chair creaks

TRACYWhy not.

CONNIEBecause nothing in this building can tell me who that is. Next Thursday it'll be a different sixty sheets. And the Thursday after that.

That report you built after DRIFT. The one that says who's gone quiet.

TRACYWhat about it.

CONNIEIt only watches the people who started. I need the same thing pointed at the ones who haven't — and it has to say for how long.

a pause

TRACYHow long has the longest one been waiting?

CONNIESixteen weeks.

a chair pushed back

TRACYYou're kidding, right?

You're not kidding. Show me. I'll get us some coffee.

— music, under —

CONNIE (V.O.)We sat with it till seven.

The diagram took the last hour of that. Forty-seven lines, two words apiece.

Not contacted.

— music out · pages

CONNIE (V.O.)Forty-seven names, longest wait at the top. I got a pot going and started at eight.

Two of them I was too late for. One took a job with evening hours in May, and our visits are evenings. She was decent about it, which was worse.

a page turned

CONNIEWell, would you look at that. Next up is number thirty-one.

I remember her.

a number dialed · ring, and a pickup

CONNIEMrs. Dunphy? It's Connie, from the sleep study at the university. You put in a card back in March.

the voice — surprised

CONNIEYou are. You're still on it. That's why I'm calling.

the voice — longer

CONNIEI'll say this plain, because I'd rather you hear it from me. Half the people in this study get the program and half get the usual care, and it's a coin toss which one you are. Nobody will know until the end whether the thing works at all. It might not.

the voice — short

CONNIEI'm sorry, say that again?

the voice — longer now, unhurried

CONNIE (V.O.)She'd had her cataracts done in the spring. Both eyes. Reads the paper again, drives in the daytime.

And somewhere in there a nurse had told her the lens in her eye was an experiment once, and somebody signed up for it not knowing whether it would work.

CONNIENo, ma'am. I hadn't thought about it that way.

the voice — brief

CONNIEThursday at ten. I'll be the one at the front desk.

the handset down

CONNIE (V.O.)Sixteen weeks she waited on a card nobody read, and she still wanted in, on a thing that might turn out to be nothing at all, for somebody she is never going to meet.

This job gets frustrating at times. But people like Mrs. Dunphy are why I still love what I do.

Forty-six to go.

— music up —

SIGN-OFF

ANNOUNCERThis has been The Case of the Invisible Line.

Dr. —— appeared as the Voice of the Institutional Review Board.

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

And even though Reviewer 2 recommends rejection without review whenever they hear us say it: this is Adverse Events.

— music out —