Glow (6 page)

He hesitates. ‘I was really, really, really hoping I would,’ he says.

‘Yeah?’

Raf feels as if their adrenaline is still here with them in the room but it’s started to expand, thin out, condense on the window like the steam from the electric kettle. She’s clasping her mug with both hands and he can see the veins that wind their pale green up between her knuckles and then drain it into skin a few shades more melanous than his own. He has never before had in his flat, he reminds himself, a girl whose life he might just have saved. He leans forward to kiss her.

Her tongue is warm from the tea, and then so are her fingers on the back of his neck. In this position they have to lean awkwardly into each other, as if the kiss is something heavy they’re hoisting through a broken window, so he pulls his chair closer to hers in two little hops. She pivots her left leg up to rest across his knees, and when he touches the bare ankle of her dangling foot her whole body shrugs. Normally the radio by the sink is tinny, but now the bass has crawled after them into this vault they’ve built with their lips and eyelids, and in the limitless darkness there it seems to find room to swell until Raf feels as if he could be back at the laundrette right next to a subwoofer. Their hands squirrel up under each other’s T-shirts, his fingers counting the bumps of her spine, and without thinking he starts to unhook her bra. She pulls away. ‘Hey . . .’ she says, not angrily.

Raf clears his throat. ‘Sorry.’

Cherish is breathing fast and there’s a flame in her eyes as if she’s just metabolised about a double shot of rocket fuel. A single hair from her head has found its way down into the corner of her mouth. She bites her lip and looks away, weighing something up – and then at last she looks back at him, smiles, and reaches down to peel off her T-shirt. For the second time his fingers find the catch of her plain black bra, and as she shrugs off the straps he kisses her from her neck down to her nipples. ‘Do you have a bed?’ she murmurs.

‘Yeah.’ He gets up and takes her by the hand, seeing that across her upper back she has a tattoo of three songbirds: red, orange, and yellow, with black heads. Their mugs of tea are only about a quarter drunk, and he realises they can’t have exchanged more than a few hundred words in total; but in a club that would never trouble him, it’s only the damp daylight that’s making it strange. Isaac once went home with a girl he met on a bus on a Sunday afternoon, although admittedly they were both still out from the night before.

When they get to his bedroom Cherish stops dead, and at first he’s worried that it’s too messy or something. ‘Whoa, listen,’ she says. ‘I’m not that into . . .’

Raf doesn’t understand. ‘What?’

She is looking down at his eyemask and earmuffs. ‘Isn’t that, like, S&M stuff?’

He laughs. ‘No. That’s to help me sleep. I have a disorder.’

‘And what’s that thing on the pillow?’

‘That’s for white noise.’

‘Oh! I thought maybe it was for electric shocks.’

3.50 p.m.

When Cherish climbed off Raf for the second time, he just knotted the condom and left it on the floor by the bed, which was a serious error. They’re still lying there side by side when Rose scurries into the bedroom, and before Raf can stop her she has found the condom, gulped it down with an actual audible gulp, and escaped triumphantly into the hall.

‘Oh my god, that is so fucking gross!’ says Cherish.

‘She loves used condoms. A lot of dogs do. I don’t know why.’

‘And you let her eat them? Like, as a treat?’

‘No!’ Normally he remembers to put them out of her reach.

‘Is she going to be OK?’

‘It’ll go through her in about a day.’

‘That is really fucking gross.’

‘Yeah.’ His penis feels, pleasantly, like a railway bridge that’s been struck by a vehicle. He shifts his head on the pillow so that his eyes are only an inch from her bare shoulder, almost too close to focus, and in that position he could swear there’s a phosphorescence in her skin, as if he could shut the blackout curtains and still see the shape of her. And he knows that this is probably a combination of at least three things: first of all, the light from the bedroom window skipping off her sweat; second, the persuasive impression of what she told him an hour ago about the auras you see when you swallow the right drugs; and third, the joy he now feels, as dim as this illusory light he’s trying to explain, but still real joy, like he hasn’t felt since his girlfriend left.

Then he remembers an article he once read about an experiment they did in Japan, where volunteers sat for three hours in a dark room, motionless and naked and very clean, as if for some purgative temple rite, and they were photographed by a camera chilled to 120 degrees below zero. Over the course of that long, long exposure, enough light trickled from the chemical reactions in their cells to make a portrait. In other words, humans really do glow, although a million times less brightly than even a baby firefly. And the researchers found that the glow has a diurnal cycle, like the sky. If you could make a film with that camera and speed it up and boost the contrast, humans would strobe. (Raf, of course, would strobe at a different rate.) He also knows that sex, like drugs, dilates your pupils. Could your pupils ever gape so wide that a naked body would disclose its light to your naked eye? Maybe if the sex was good enough.

‘Do you have any vodka?’ says Cherish.

‘Yeah, in the kitchen. Why?’

In a typical instance, when Raf lies back to watch a girl climb out of his rumpled bed and pad across the room, it’s with such unconcealed pride that you might have thought he’d assembled her himself, but this time he’s still too surprised by the whole episode to feel like that. He hears the toilet flush. After a minute Cherish comes back with his half-empty bottle of supermarket vodka, sits down on the bed, and takes a swig. ‘Bleh!’ She wipes her mouth and looks down at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not getting the shakes or anything. It’s for the oxytocin.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I came a couple of times, so my brain’s all full of oxytocin – plus you wouldn’t leave my nipples alone, which was, you know, nice, but that means even more oxytocin – and that’ll make me want to pair-bond with you and then, like, cry when you don’t call. But alcohol messes with hormone release from the hypothalamus and the pituitary. So if I drink something neurotoxic right after we fuck, I don’t bond with you so much. It’s folk medicine, I guess, but I kind of trust it.’

‘Why don’t you want to bond with me?’ says Raf; not forlorn, just curious.

She puts a hand on his lopsided butterfly of chest hair. ‘I’m not saying I don’t like you. But I don’t want to like you any more than I would if you hadn’t squeezed some hormones out of me with your dick. Nothing personal. It’s policy.’

‘Should I drink some?’

‘You’re a man, so you mostly just get dopamine and some prolactin, not oxytocin. Unless you’re a real pussy, I guess.’

It’s oxytocin, Raf recalls, that makes your pupils dilate when you’re aroused, and that helps MDMA work as a truth drug. Isaac once ordered three bottles of a product called Liquid Trust, which described itself on the website as ‘The world’s first and only product to attract women by getting them to trust you’. It was just synthetic oxytocin diluted in alcohol, and you were supposed to spray it on your clothes every morning like a cologne and keep it in the fridge between uses. Isaac was going to use it in a club, a subliminal broadcast on a secret frequency. But then Raf pointed out that unless you were wearing a gas mask you’d inhale the majority of the Liquid Trust yourself, which would be like trying to date-rape someone by putting one temazepam in their drink and five in your own. So instead, Isaac sprayed some up his own nose and then spent an hour on YouTube watching conspiracy videos about the July 7th bombings to see if the oxytocin would make him more gullible, but the results were inconclusive.

The two of them have been running their continuous amateur neurochemistry seminar ever since Raf first got diagnosed with his syndrome and Isaac first took amphetamines (which happened around the same time) but it’s still odd to hear words like ‘hypothalamus’ and ‘pituitary’ in conversation with a stranger. And odd, too, that she seems determined to treat her own amygdala like some lawless vertex of the Golden Triangle, purging her oxytocin with alcohol like a drug agent spraying a poppy field with glyphosate, although maybe that means she’s just more advanced than Isaac or Raf. His own internal serotonin labs are up and running right now after six long weeks of downtime and he really hopes they don’t get busted again. ‘How long have you been into . . . brain stuff?’ he says.

‘There were girls at my high school in LA who’d been taking Zoloft since they were three years old and they didn’t even know how it worked. If you don’t educate yourself about this shit you’re an idiot.’ She scratches her knee. ‘Do you have anything we can eat?’

He decides against a joke about the other condom. ‘Not really.’

‘How about a curry? I know a place near here.’

Raf sometimes thinks there is nothing in the whole world that makes him happier than spicy food soon after sex. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Wow, yes.’

4.31 p.m.

Raf was considering a prawn madras, but Cherish makes him turn to the end of the laminated menu, where there’s a page that says ‘burmese specialities’: tea-leaf salad, catfish soup, peanut curry, tamarind lamb, royal noodles.

‘Why do they have all this stuff?’

‘It’s a Burmese restaurant.’

‘I always thought it was Indian.’

But in fact there were clues that it wasn’t: in Raf’s experience, Indian restaurants in London, even the cheap ones, usually feel a bit like funeral homes with their tinted windows and dark carpets and low lighting, whereas this place just has linoleum floors and vinyl tablecloths and a few creased posters of Buddha on the walls. On the ledge by the door are two of those battery-powered Maneki Neko cats, the white one bigger than the gold one, so their metronomic paws move in and out of phase.

‘They cook Indian food here because people don’t know what Burmese is. But the staff are all Burmese.’

The waiter, a short guy with a goatee, brings over their beers and takes out his notebook. Earlier, Cherish greeted him as if they knew each other.

‘I don’t know what to have,’ says Raf.

‘You want a curry?’ says Cherish.

‘Yeah.’

She turns to the waiter and says something in what is presumably Burmese. He nods and goes back into the kitchen.

‘So that’s what you are too?’

‘Burmese? Kind of. At higher resolutions I’m half Danu, half American.’

‘Where did you grow up?’

‘In a mining town about halfway between Mandalay and the border into Yunnan.’

Cherish’s earliest memory, she tells Raf as they wait for their food, is the night her Uncle Chai came back to Gandayaw after six months away in the Concession and she burst into tears because he looked so much like a monster: eyes buried alive in the gloom of their own sockets, cheeks like slack grey tarpaulins, mouth turned down in a paresis of pure despair. But he promised her he was still her Uncle Chai and he was just very tired. Years later, she would find out why. At the Lacebark mine, you got two hours a day to eat and wash and pray and play cards, and the rest of the time you were either sleeping or working. But you didn’t work for fourteen hours and then sleep for eight, or even work for sixteen hours and then sleep for six. Instead, you worked for three and a quarter hours at a time, then unrolled your foam mattress wherever you stood and slept for forty-five minutes. That was the cycle. In total, you slept for only about four hours a day. When she was older, Cherish would learn that this was called polyphasic sleep, and it was used all over the world: the purpose was to maximise the productive hours of the workforce at the mine by teaching their bodies to skip straight to essential REM sleep, while also eliminating the inherent inefficiencies of the three-shift system. It was an agronomic approach to the brain, like some new method of crop rotation. And Uncle Chai had admitted that after a full month of sleeping only four continuous hours a night, he would have been passing out on his feet like a drunk, and yet even after six months of polyphasic sleep, he was still able to work. But polyphasic sleep gave you a tiredness of a different kind, a soggy tumour of exhaustion that grew heavier and heavier every sunrise, so that you could always feel it squeezed against your skull even if it hadn’t yet made you sick. After Uncle Chai returned that first time, he lay down inside the house and couldn’t be woken for more than a day, even to eat the welcome-back feast that Cherish’s mother had been planning for weeks.

When her mother was young, Gandayaw had still been a village of only a few dozen families, so isolated that many of the locals had never seen a pair of shoes, but in 1989 the Burmese government leased a vast area of copper and ruby deposits, half a million hectares of the Shan forest at the base of the hills, to an American company.  Lacebark Mining built an office on the western edge of the Concession, and Gandayaw puffed up into a boom town out of the Wild West: from China and Thailand and India and other parts of Burma came traders, pedlars, fixers, translators, builders, electricians, plumbers, doctors, drivers, hoteliers, cooks, missionaries, musicians, hairdressers, tattooists, bodyguards, extortionists, confidence tricksters, drug dealers, bootleggers, pimps, prostitutes, beggars, and government agents. Helicopters landed three times a week. A discotheque was built, with a karaoke lounge, a jacuzzi, and a sign in the foyer warning people not to bring in hand grenades or durian fruit. Uncle Chai once told Cherish that the change had come so fast that it was as if the village itself had been abducted in its sleep and then woken up somewhere entirely new.