At first glance, the museum doesn’t look like much. Tucked in a residential Westside neighborhood among Spanish revival homes and pastel dingbats, the building is a nondescript whitewashed stucco. A barber shop was once housed at this site perhaps, or a bail bond office. There is no sign out front to let guests know they’ve arrived.
Atherton Pollard waits for me at the curb. Pear-shaped and six-foot-five, Pollard looms no matter where he’s standing. He unlocks the front door to his museum and lets me inside, turning on the lights. Tasseled lamps halo jacquard armchairs and curio cabinets in soft light. Bell jars and photo albums rest on every flat surface, and a taxidermy jackalope surveys the room with glassy eyes. On the wall, posters advertise exhibits about the bloodsucking marmot of the Andes, lucid dreaming, and eighteenth-century hair clips carved out of cats’ teeth.
The effect of the room is so overwhelming that the receptionist desk almost blends into the background. But a young, dark-haired woman welcomes me to the museum and asks if I would like a commemorative sticker.
“No stickers today, Tina,” Pollard says. “This is the reporter I told you about. From the Palms Reader.”
Before Tina can say she has never heard of the Reader (we lack the subscriber base of Los Angeles and LA Weekly), Pollard leads me past her desk and through a short, black door.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, but once they do, I see a medical examining table at the center of the room. To the left, on a stainless steel instrument stand, sits Pollard’s claim to fame: a fine mesh mask connected to a huge monitor. This newly patented device can ostensibly identify whether the wearer’s happiest moment has already happened.
“Most people don’t know this,” Pollard says, “but neurotransmitters are like fossil fuels—nonrenewable resources. Once, maybe twice in a person’s life, their neurons produce a flood of dopamine so great it depletes their reserves. If we know when this satisfaction peak will occur—or indeed when it has occurred—then we can help that individual portion out their remaining dopamine.”
Pollard himself is no stranger to ennui. He recalls the birth of his daughter nineteen years ago as a moment of pure elation, rivaled only by his PhD dissertation defense and dancing with his wife at their wedding. Everything about the new baby, from her red, delicate eyelids to the whorls of skin on the soles of her feet, made him want to burst into song. But of course, the feeling didn’t last.
He can’t pinpoint the exact moment when he realized his happiness levels had stagnated, but gradually, the colors of the world dimmed. His morning cup of coffee no longer tasted quite so smooth, and his wife’s snoring annoyed him more than it charmed him. Even research could not hold his interest. In graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he spent whole weekends sifting through spreadsheets of unfiltered data, subsisting on Goldfish crackers and chocolate-covered coffee beans because his next discovery was only ever one regression away. Seven years had passed since his daughter was born, five since he founded his museum, and he procrastinated on everything. His wakeup call came when he missed the deadline for an important grant, one that would have funded the museum for five whole years. He needed to get out of this slump, and being a man of science, why not turn to experimentation for the answers?
“One thing led to another, and there you go,” Pollard says. “That was how I discovered the satisfaction peak.”
When it comes to the exact process of discovery, Pollard remains cagey.
“It was quite tedious,” he insists. “Your readers wouldn’t be interested. I thought I had something promising, so I tested it on myself, using the device you see here. And do you know what I found when I tested my own satisfaction levels?”
He looks at me with anticipation, waiting for me to guess. When I don’t, he tells me anyway.
“They hadn’t peaked after all! The happiest moment of my life was yet to come. So I thought, ‘If I could help other people going through the same thing, why, there’s no better reason to be a scientist.’”
Those other people helped by Pollard’s research remain mostly speculative. A preliminary trial successfully yielded satisfaction reports for thirty test subjects, but the results have yet to be published. A little publicity, Pollard hopes, will speed up the process. He asks me how I feel about my own life. I seem like a man with an open mind, a fellow with a healthy respect for innovation.
“On a scale of one to ten,” he asks, pushing up his glasses. “How fulfilled would you say you feel? On a daily basis?”
When I received the email tip about Pollard’s research, I did not intend to become a guinea pig for a yet-to-be-approved device that measures dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain. I consider my life reasonably happy. My parents are both alive and still married, and growing up, they were attentive without being smothering. Saturday mornings, Dad took me surfing in Del Mar, even though I was never good; Monday nights, Mom ordered pizza and played Scrabble with us. My sister and I don’t often call each other, but every Christmas she bakes my favorite grasshopper pie. I went to Northwestern on a scholarship for journalism, and then after moving back to Southern California, I landed a staff gig writing for the Palms Reader (although, if I’m honest, I always pictured myself as the next Hunter S. Thompson). Writing puff pieces about the latest low-carb cupcakery in Manhattan Beach has its perks. I get most holidays off, and I’ve never had to work a graveyard shift, unlike my old college buddy who ended up a cable news producer. I’ve never had much luck with the ladies, but I do have a cat who purrs in my lap when we watch ER together.
“I’d give it a six, I guess,” I tell Pollard. “Actually, a seven, why not.”
“And what is the happiest you have ever been?”
This question is even harder to answer. What is the happiest I have ever been? College graduation? Moving into my studio in Mar Vista? College graduation involved an hour of sweating through a button-down shirt and trying not to fall asleep while some feckless politician droned on about responsibility and accomplishment. The first night in my studio I smoked a bowl and watched reality TV on a bare mattress in the middle of the floor.
Or what about the first time I did a cutback without wiping out? Now that was exhilarating—carving down the face of the bomb, blood in my ears the whole way.
“Surfing. I’d give it a nine.” Tens, I imagine, are reserved for life’s crowning achievements. It feels like a waste—or at the very least, a miscalculation—to give surfing a perfect score.
“Would you like to know for sure?”
He motions for me to lie down on the examining table. I follow his instructions, wondering if I might get electrocuted, if flashing lights might cause me to seize on this table in a tiny room in an unmarked museum. He slides what looks like a blood pressure cuff onto my arm and then straps the mesh mask onto my face.
“Be still,” he says. “This will only take a minute.”
I close my eyes and try to breathe normally. I’m more nervous than I thought I would be. The device hums slightly, and a red light flashes through my closed eyelids.
“You can relax,” Pollard says.
I open my eyes and sit up. He stares at a computer screen, examining what looks like a series of waves. No big ones, though, just mush.
“Interesting,” he mutters.
When I ask him what’s so interesting, he looks up disoriented, as if pulled from deep water. He rubs his hand across the stubble on his chin.
“Your results are not what I would expect from someone so young—you’re what, twenty-three, twenty-four?”
I tell him I’m twenty-six, but the distinction doesn’t seem to matter.
“Like I said, so young.” He shakes his head.
I ask a follow-up question, something like why my age would matter or what results he was expecting. My notes get a little jumbled here, the panic mucking up my handwriting.
Pollard stands up, offering me his chair. When I take it, he leans over with his arm on my upper back, a weirdly paternal stance. The first third or so of the graph consists of thick, dark lines, but the waves that follow are traced more lightly—that’s where the model stops detecting past satisfaction and starts projecting the future. With a pencil eraser, Pollard maps out the ebb and flow of my satisfaction curve, the parts I’d call the barrel, the lip, and the base. But I was never good at the STEM-y stuff, and I can’t make heads or tails of what it all means.
Pollard takes his hand off my shoulder and makes sure he’s looking at me for this next part. “The height of your curve here indicates you have already hit your satisfaction peak.”
Somewhere in the room, there’s a buzzing sound. At first, I can’t move. Then, I lean in for a better look. I sketch the wave patterns in my notebook, tracing the humps over and over. They’re shallow and rolling, nothing worth surfing. And definitely not the curve of someone who has already maxed out their happiness levels. I ask Pollard how he can be sure. By his own admission, he’s only tested the device on a couple dozen people.
“The calculations are sound.” He switches off the monitor before I can ask any further follow-ups. “Preliminary trials indicate that the device is accurate. I’ve estimated the margin of error as less than two percent. The findings are being peer reviewed as we speak.”
“How do you know happiness can be quantified?” I ask.
“Why do you assume it can’t?”
Another question waits on the tip of my tongue, but Pollard stands and leads me back into the room where we’d met. He has another appointment he needs to prepare for, he tells me, but there is a garden on the rooftop should I wish to sit and get my notes in order. He pauses at the reception desk and asks Tina to put the kettle on for me. Then he folds himself to squeeze back through the little black door.
It is unclear if the garden was here before Pollard founded the museum, or if he designed it himself. Green tendrils cascade down the sides of the building, and a fountain bubbles in the center of the rooftop enclave. Mourning doves coo, and I sip the tea Tina prepared, leafing through my notes at a tile-topped coffee table. One of the doves lands on the concrete ground next to me. When I make eye contact, it bobs its head, anticipating breadcrumbs. I ignore the bird and flip to the page where I traced my own satisfaction wave. If I look closer, there are smaller, shallower waves in the wake of the highest one, small ripples in the timeline of my life. Overall, though, the pattern is one of tapering off.
I had thought my happiest moment was that day surfing, but the graph’s apex comes too close to the present. I close my eyes, trying to remember, but nothing comes to mind. I open my eyes. The mourning dove struts along the table’s tile surface. There has been a mistake. That must be it. If I can’t remember my own alleged satisfaction peak, Pollard’s machine must be wrong. Maybe I’m in the two percent of errors. Maybe Pollard’s a quack. Either way, I need further expertise. I stand up, leaving the rest of my tea to the mourning doves.
Five days later, I tear open a manila envelope from Pollard. Since Pollard does not use email, he has faxed the documents I requested: my satisfaction report, his own, and a new one belonging to Tina. I fan the documents across my desk and compare the three different graphs. I thought the printouts might include a key to the graphs or a footnote or some kind of annotation, but there is only the graphs themselves.
The patterns of the other two reports differ radically from my own. Pollard’s, like he said, includes a sharp spike at some point in the relatively near future, while Tina’s report contains only a few modest waves until close to the edge of her x-axis. Both of them have the best days of their lives ahead. Me, I lived my happiest moment and didn’t even realize. Unless, of course, Pollard is wrong.
Scientists remain divided over the validity of Pollard’s findings. Dulce Moreno Sosa, professor of neuroscience at University of California, Los Angeles, flatly dismisses Pollard’s claims.
“Is this a prank?” she asks, looking behind me as if to check for a hidden camera crew. “Am I on Punk’d right now?”
There is no evidence to support the notion of a lifetime “cap” on the production of any neurotransmitter, including dopamine, Sosa explains. “If that were true,” she tells me, “we would wake up one day completely unable to feel happiness ever again. All seventy-year-olds would be miserable. There would be a suicide pandemic. Scientists would be tripping over themselves to find a solution.”
Sosa echoes the majority of scientists. But Ochoa, Burnett, and Liu’s 2002 study “Shiny Happy People: Measuring lifetime satisfaction levels after milestone events” found sixty percent of participants reported greater feelings of depression and hopelessness in the five-year period after a major milestone. I pore over more studies, and for each paper that disproves Pollard’s hypothesis, another renders it plausible. In 1999, a team of neurobiologists at Delhi University discovered most individuals consistently change what they consider their happiest moment. Before that, in 1976, psychologists at Cambridge University found evidence of diminishing life satisfaction as we age.
I interview four more experts, but they remain as split as the studies. Saul Benjamin of Loyola Marymount University calls Pollard’s mission “a fool’s errand,” but Judith Li at Pepperdine University says she sees “no reason why it wouldn’t work.” Orla Finch at Santa Monica College sniffs disdainfully and tells me Pollard is “running the same scam as those TV fortune tellers.” On the other hand, University of Southern California’s Arjun Desai is excited by the possibilities and insists Pollard may be responsible for “the next great breakthrough in neuroscience.”
Interview with Desai over, I wander through the rose garden at Exposition Park. Not a single flower blooms among the neat rows of green. I sift through memories of my own college days, prospecting for a single moment shinier than the rest. My first kiss, with a girl whose name I don’t remember? We’d been drinking Natty Light at a Halloween party and went outside to talk. The tip of her nose was flushed pink with cold, but we were too entrenched in our conversation to go back inside. We started to make out, sloppy, drunk, but there were no sparks, and I never spoke to her again.
What about when I broke the story of our dining hall underpaying international student workers? The thrill of stitching together evidence, of staying up all night to type it out? No. I thought the story might make a splash on campus, but hardly anyone seemed to read it. For all I know, the article changed nothing.
Or maybe it was the first time I saw snow? A gray November day my freshman year, that first semester in Chicago. I watched the flakes pile up outside my dorm room and marveled at the stillness, the way everything sparkled, so unlike the winter rainstorms back in San Diego. But it was also a Sunday, and I was too hungover from the night before to do anything other than shut the blinds and go back to sleep.
At a street vendor’s cart outside the rose-less rose garden, I order a hotdog wrapped in bacon and topped with grilled onions. I eat on a bench, watching passersby and trying to imagine what their happiest moments might be. I unfold the copy of the report Pollard faxed me, running my fingers over the waves. Looking at the pattern now, it’s clear my life’s pinnacle came several years after the day of surfing I mentioned in Pollard’s museum, even after college graduation. It looks to have occurred sometime in my early twenties.
I crumple the hotdog’s foil wrapper into a ball. This exercise of identifying the moment feels futile. Knowing when it was, what it was, will not change the decades of flatlining ahead of me, will not make them pass any faster or more tolerably. Nor will it make a better story for the Reader. My job is not to navel-gaze; it’s to show our audience something interesting. When I send this draft to my editor, she will probably tell me to cut these paragraphs. Hunter S. Thompson wouldn’t dwell so much on his own misery. He once told the Paris Review, “Wanting to and having are two different things.” Journalism (even fluffy magazine writing) is about reality, the having, not about the wanting.
* * *
In three years, the museum hasn’t changed. Outside the dim light of the museum’s foyer though, the world is radically different. The country has plunged into recession and elected its first Black president. Prop 8 has banned same-sex marriage in the state of California. And Pollard’s research into happiness has been published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Tina smiles at me from behind the receptionist desk. She now wears glasses with thick, black frames and has added a blue streak to her hair, but her work for Pollard has remained the same. I ask her if she has ever thought about leaving.
“It’s a decent job,” she says. “He’s nice to me, and there’s lots of downtime. Why would I leave?”
I open my mouth to tell her surely, someone in her mid-twenties, with all the world ahead of her, would want more than faxing documents for a man who still, in the year 2010, refuses to adopt email. But I think better of it. Who am I to tell Tina what will make her happy?
Pollard emerges from the back room. He wears a fitted blazer and slim-cut jeans, an upgrade from the cargo shorts and T-shirt he wore when I saw him last. He shakes my hand with confidence. “Corey, my man! Long time no see.”
I agree that yes, it has been a long time. Pollard continues the small talk, brimming with an energy I can’t match.
“How’s that magazine of yours? Your editor finally come to her senses and send you back to get the scoop?”
I tell him the Reader shuttered in 2009, another victim of print media’s slow asphyxiation. I write for a blog now, I say. It’s mostly true. I have a blog, although I make most of my money bagging groceries part time. After my editor at the Reader told me the Pollard profile didn’t have legs, I kept my notes. Now, with Pollard’s recent publication, seemed like the perfect time to bring this story back from the dead.
“How does it feel to finally have your research validated?” I ask.
Pollard leans against the reception desk and waves dismissively. “Took them long enough, but I knew they’d recognize a breakthrough when they saw one.”
I wonder what Sosa, Finch, and Benjamin would say to that. But I’m not here to fan the flames of professional infighting. Since the publication of Pollard’s findings two months ago, daily visitors to his museum have increased from five to twenty-five. Pollard’s patented satisfaction detector has been moved to an open side room. Dozens of testimonials plaster the walls, waiting to be perused, to inspire visitors who, like those who wrote them, have all but given up on feeling content with their lives. Pollard walks me through them all, showing off the new-and-improved device, which now connects to a stunningly iMac-like display. I read about a woman who lost her son to childhood cancer, whose satisfaction report showed a very rare instance of twin prominences—another day in her future just as happy as the birth of her lost boy. There was a middle-aged teacher, recently divorced, who learned the wedding to his ex-wife would pale in comparison to his true satisfaction peak. Pollard recounts each story like a proud father. I ask him if they’re all true.
“Every last word,” he swears.
When I met with him before, he said the margin of error for the detector was less than two percent. Is that still the case, now that so many visitors have tested the device?
For a second, Pollard looks annoyed. “It’s more like three percent, turns out,” he admits. “But still. Three percent, for a device of this complexity? Those are results you can be proud of. Only one visitor has complained. Her report cut off too soon, showed she was experiencing severe anhedonia when she’d just gotten divorced and hadn’t been happier in months.”
Pollard was able to placate the visitor by offering her a second satisfaction report. As expected, the do-over showed her satisfaction peak occurring just after leaving her ex-husband. I ask Pollard about his own report.
“I think I’ve finally hit it,” he says. “The satisfaction peak, I mean. Don’t you see? All along, I was meant to bring this discovery to the world.”
So, what’s next?
“My serotonin and dopamine levels will begin to plateau over the next few months and gradually start to dip. But I’m ready. I don’t need any more highs.”
Of course, that kind of assertion is easy now, while Pollard is at the top of his career. I wonder if he’ll have a different outlook on life if I ask him in another three years. Then he surprises me.
“And you’re still hanging in there! Tell me, how have the past three years treated you? Did my little machine get it right?”
It’s a question I have been asking myself every day for the past three years. The day I sent my editor my draft about Pollard, she killed the story. He was clearly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and we couldn’t in good consciousness allow our readers to spend their hard-earned cash visiting him. I knew she had a point, but I’d spent the better part of two weeks working on the story and had nothing else to turn in by my deadline. I left the office in a funk and drove east on Culver to my favorite dive. It was still happy hour, and I ordered a Manhattan, wondering if the rest of my life would be just a series of compounding disappointments.
That night, there was a girl. Drinking a dirty Shirley and wearing red lipstick. Skinny jeans and a sparkly shirt. We got drunk at the bar, made out a little, and then she came back to my place. I woke up next to her, the moles on her back like constellations in the morning light. For a heartbeat I felt Pollard’s report was wrong, would have bet money on it. Then she turned over, and her eyes fluttered open and she smiled at me and she was beautiful, but I remembered the killed story, and we were in my shitty studio in Mar Vista, and then that little ray of sunlight was gone. Like watching the paint on the walls go from yellow to gray. I kissed her, and then I said I had to work. She got up, got dressed, and left me lying on my back in the dark.
Later, she texted me, and because she was beautiful and I was alone, I texted her back. We kept going out. After a year, I thought about buying a ring. She always listened to my work problems and made me laugh. But the gray never left. There was never a rush or a spark or any kind of bright shining light when I looked at her, when we kissed. I didn’t buy the ring, and she got sick of waiting around. Then the stock market crashed, and then the Palms Reader went under and I felt like a fucking sucker for getting a journalism degree.
“Yeah, you got it right,” I tell Pollard. “More or less.”
He looks like he wants to celebrate, but I must not look too thrilled. He licks his lips and puts his arm around my shoulder. “If you’d like to be extra sure, we could replicate the experiment. What do you think?”
I agree because, at this point, I don’t have anything left to lose. Again, I lay on an examining table and lie still while the device performs its scan. Again, I watch as the computer generates a graph of gentle, rolling waves. Pollard scrunches himself into the computer chair, scrutinizing my report with pursed lips.
“Well,” he says at last, “I don’t see much change.”
I join him at the computer. Sure enough, the graph looks the same as it did three years ago. The scientific process has spoken.
“If you don’t mind me asking, would you complete our follow-up survey?” Pollard asks. “It helps us track participants’ outcomes over the years.”
I tell him sure. What else am I supposed to say? He says Tina will send over the survey by the end of today. I thank Pollard and exit the museum.
It’s raining. I zip up my windbreaker and hurry up the block to where I parked. A large puddle pools between the curb and my tires, no way to keep my feet dry. I start the engine and rub my hands together. Through the rearview mirror, I glimpse the dirty white edifice of the museum, still unmarked. If I still wrote for the Reader, my editor would say this is all bloat. The audience doesn’t need to know about the weather or about me warming my hands in my beat-up Ford Taurus. But The Palms Reader doesn’t exist anymore, and I do, so I get to choose what I linger over in these last lines.
I used to end magazine profiles with a quote. Something snappy from the subject of the piece, something heartwarming from their mother or their best friend. For the initial Pollard profile, I had something all picked out, something that felt like solid gold when he said it.
“Without identifying when our satisfaction will peak,” Pollard asked me back then, “how can we ever be truly fulfilled?”
Eventually, I did pinpoint the alleged zenith of my life. I remembered it about a year ago, while my then-girlfriend and I waited outside a new sushi place in the marina. The water refracted the sun, sending light shivering all along the boats bobbing at the dock, and it reminded me of a moment I had completely forgotten.
My old college roommate was in town—the one who works in cable news. He wanted to go to the beach, not a specific one, just any old beach. But it was March and too cold for swimming, and, being from a landlocked state, he couldn’t surf. Instead, we rented bikes and rode along The Strand, all the way to El Porto.
When we stopped, sweat trickled down my back. Sunlight shivered on the waves. A boombox somewhere played a Justin Timberlake song I’d heard a million times, but the sun and the blue sky and the company made the usually grating falsetto tolerable. My roommate called Timberlake a bleach-blond douchebag, and I laughed.
We turned and rode back, and on the way, I’d never felt lighter.