Nine days and $1,500. That was all I was thinking when I signed up for the summer flu study last year, a quick and easy way to finance a summer of study and unpaid internships in Charlottesville after my more lucrative prospects didn't pan out. Even today, eight months after I signed over my body to nurses with bottles of disease and insatiable blood sample test tubes, people are amazed by that short-lived "job" of mine. My peers can't believe I made so much money; X-Files-influenced university community outsiders (most notably my mother) can't believe that I would put my health so completely in the hands of strangers. Some, however, would say that the real point of life is to do things that give you a good story to tell, and that's really the best thing I can say about those nine days. Except of course for the big pile of cash.

All this happened in the Holiday Inn that houses Damon's ("the place to go for ribs!") out on Route 29. I had come expecting peace and quiet, and once I saw that my window gave me a quasi-pastoral view of the forest out back instead of traffic, I was certain that my stay would be an artistic retreat of sorts. I came supplied with some assigned reading for ENGL 383 and my laptop so I could read and maybe write some great novels in the spare time. The first day "on the job" further reinforced my naive misconception of the week's potential, because all we had to do was eat the two room-service meals exactly when they told us to (my time slot was seven minutes after the hour, right during "Seinfeld"), listen to an introductory lecture (during which we all checked each other out and in some cases flirted), and give a little blood. After the scheduling was done I settled in with my computer and enjoyed what was to be my last night of intellectual normalcy.

What you don't think about when you sign up for a flu study is the malaise that sets in because of your unchanging environment. My room didn't even have variety in the tacky art, as all I got were two identical watercolors of the Rotunda that even the Bookstore would have been ashamed to sell. The pictures could have been a metaphor for my human interaction, too, because I saw the same six people every day: two nurses who rotated on blood-taking and dinner-delivering duty, a man in O.R. scrubs whose specialty was finding veins, a young lady next door from Delaware, a cute JMU graduate diagonal from me who already had a boyfriend, and the girl across the hall whose initials spelled "RAT." All natural human contact in my life had pretty much ceased, and it only took two days or so for my imagination to achieve a state of atrophy. You don't realize how important the little things in life, like filling your gas tank or watching strangers trip on stairs, are until they're taken away from you. My personality quickly took on the bland, unoriginal nature of my room's wallpaper, and once that happened James Joyce and my laptop didn't get touched.

photos by Justin Dodd

This happened even though I was lucky enough to fail the drug test and therefore get more visitors than anyone else in the study group. After scoring a positive for amphetamines I was showered with attention, offers for free counseling, and stares that ranged from the cold to the compassionate. It took a few days and some extra urine samples before they believed my excuse (I assume they've heard the poppyseed bagel story several times before), but they never entirely shook their suspicion that I was an opium fiend. I think this because every time I went out on my balcony for a breath of fresh air, I was approached by suspicious nurses checking to see if I was sneaking a smoke.

Then there was the time I forgot that they don't want you to have any privacy (sort of like a suicide watch) and closed the door to my room before I hopped into the shower. This is pretty much the way everybody I know operates, so I think I could have been forgiven for my mistake. On this particular occasion I was creating my own personal sauna with the unlimited hot water (I was both stiff and bored that afternoon) and didn't hear the frantic pounding on my locked door. My buddy Jynne down the hall listened in on the resulting panic, though, and told me later that the nurses were shouting stuff like "What's happening?! Why's his door locked?! Where is he?!" She said it sounded like I'd escaped via knotted-together bedsheets or had killed myself. They weren't jumping to conclusions, either, because I, and probably everybody else in the study who didn't have a video game system, had considered both options during the last few days.

If only I'd been more serious. Great literature and mind-expanding activities, like I said earlier, had more or less fallen by the wayside as I got sucked into the NBA Championship and free HBO. I'm still embarrassed at my pathetic TV choices. Men in Black twice. "Bassmasters" on Sunday morning ESPN. About the only interesting thing I watched all week was the documentary Pimps Up, Hos Down, from which I learned that pimps don't actually get jobs for their prostitutes or even protect them, and are sometimes referred to as "gentlemen of leisure." For the first time in my life, I felt like I had something in common with inner city culture, although "leisure" is probably too kind a word to describe my state of lethargy.

It's hard to say if I recommend this line of work. Even the easy money factor isn't perfect, as I just found out last weekend that I have to pay $216 of self-employment taxes to everyone's favorite compulsory charity, Social Security. But I did get a free thermometer that came in handy a few weeks ago, as well as a chance to try the legendary Damon's ribs. And since I haven't mentioned the whole illness thing in the last thousand words or so, it's probably worth pointing out that none of us actually got sick. Unless you count self-loathing and sloth as a medical condition, in which case I was bedridden.

Laurie Ripper

I knew I was going to participate in a cold study before I even got to the university. It is the epitome of monetary desperation and the youthful optimism that causes people like me to say things like, "How bad could it possibly be?" Besides, these were my options for the reading holiday: 1) sit around all day and get paid 400 dollars, or 2) sit around all day. My body held up splendidly through the whole ordeal, but my brain felt the pain of isolation and under-stimulation. It kept playing tricks on me, so I would play tricks on it in revenge, and things got a little messy, and now my brain and I are barely on speaking terms.

During the first day of confinement my mother called, audibly flustered. She informed me that my father had "almost had a heart attack." (Apparently surprise and fear have replaced high cholesterol and hypertension as the main causes of heart attack.) It seems I had bungled the phone number for the hotel, so when they attempted to call me they were greeted not by the friendly staff at Holiday Inn, but by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. My father presumably pictured me and countless other well-meaning, God-fearing teens lying prostrate on the pews of some psycho-sanctuary subjecting ourselves to a spiritual cleansing process involving large doses of Kool-Aid laced with a potion that would bring us closer to God in a matter of minutes. After tending to my father's hyperventilation, my mother managed to get the correct number so she could call and berate me for "scaring us like that." "For the love of God!" I told my father, "Do you think I'm crazy? I'm in it for the money, dad." He was, of course, relieved

My father asked me 12 more times what kind of drugs they were putting me on. My mother reminded me once again to practice my immune system-stimulating yoga postures and to keep drinking my orange juice, despite the fact that my grotesquely increased consumption of citrus beverages (in an attempt to boost my vitamin C intake and my resistance to illness) in the week prior to the cold study had nearly eaten away the tender flesh on the inside of my mouth. I seriously considered doing sun salutations in the morning, but soon realized that it was more fun to perform gravity-defying gymnastic feats using the king-size bed as my safety mat and to stand on my head until I could no longer feel my feet.

My room was on the top floor, the second one to the right of the glowing Holiday Inn sign. I still wave at it every time I go by. (I'll share with you a potentially embarrassing typo, which was undetected by spell check -- I originally wrote "I wave a tit every time I go by.") I would pretend that it was my penthouse apartment, that I was disgustingly rich, and that I owned this town. Granted, Route 29 is not the hottest property on the market, but I sure got a kick out of imagining all the little people in the cars they bought from my dealership, driving to work at my death-trap factories and my oppressive super corporations, drinking coffee they bought at my outrageously overpriced bakery, and dropping off "their" kids (whom I genetically engineered) at my re-education center. Hey, imagination is the only savior of an under-stimulated mind.

photos by Justin Dodd

On day three, I began to lose that measly mind of mine. I don't think that watching the disturbing psycho-thriller Devil's Advocate repeatedly was the actual cause of my insanity, but I'm sure it didn't help suppress my tendencies. I became certain of only one thing: circumstances were not as they seemed. I began to seriously question how and why on earth they were paying me and many others 400 freakin' dollars to lounge around in order to do research on something as innocuous as the common cold

Here was my answer: the "cold study" was obviously a façade to mask their true intentions -- the real study was designed to determine how people deal with solitary confinement. But the study's purpose had to be kept from the participants (or the "unknowing victims," as I liked to refer to us) and the used-tissue collecting and daily nasal washes were merely an attempt to convince us that all they were interested in was our snot.

You've seen the movies -- some fool agrees to be studied behind a two-way mirror, to lead his little life in a virtual reality while his every move is recorded by creepy scientists in long white lab coats with clip boards. That fool, I realized with growing horror, is me! But how were they spying on me? Of course! I thought the mirror had been put on the wall so conspicuously in front of the bed to titillate hotel room love-makers, but now I saw its true purpose -- to scrutinize my every move! Tricky of them to aim it where I admittedly spent two-thirds of my time, sleeping and staring mindlessly at the well-chanelled television. There was another mirror on the wall above the dresser that, just for safety's sake, I took off the wall and tucked away face down under the bed. But what to do about the two-way mirror that was attached to the wall? The logical answer was to cover it with scraps of paper with menacing messages like "Now I'm watching you!" facing toward the ever-present monitors. That'll teach 'em. Sometimes you gotta let them know that you know

Later that night I discovered an even darker aspect of their evil plot. As I was lying down to go to sleep, the thought came to me "If this isn't really a cold study, what's the medication for?" They weren't planning to just watch my everyday life -- they wanted to chemically alter my brain first! Recognizing this, I was quite aware when I began to lose my grasp of that hallmark of human intelligence -- language. The loss was gradual -- at first my vocabulary started to diminish, but I could still form simple sentences such as "Holy shit! I'm losing my god-forsaken mind!" Even-tually all my language abilities disappeared and I had only a sense of abstract dread. Of course, without language, there is no thought, so I cannot report back to you what happened after that. All I know is that when I awoke the next morning, I had made a complete recovery.

There are some that might claim this experience was simply a "dream," citing the fact that I was sleeping at the time of its occurrence. To them I offer this crushing retort: Go away and leave me to my conspiracy theory -- it's all I've got now that my mind has left me.