Placebo Junkies (11 page)

Big Brother is watching.
Don't I know it.

The maggots wriggle and squirm in my brain, and I flash-glance at the grinning faces of the jock posse in the booth. They're elbowing each other, pointing and laughing. I turn my head and see the pinched straight line that is the waitress's mouth as she walks over, probably to ask me to shut up or leave. Then I turn back and look at the pen sitting abandoned next to the Professor's blank page.

Book club for freaks is over.

“You know what? I don't have time for this bullshit.” I push away from the table, spin toward the door as more phrases from the book flare up in the corners of my thoughts.

“Shove it up your memory hole!” I yell as I walk out the door, covering my ears so that I can't hear anyone else's voice saying anything at all.

“I feel great. Really, I'm doing so much better.”

I smile as I lie to the doctor. I imagine his skin peeling off his face. I imagine machine guns loaded with hypodermic needles.

rat-a-tat-tat, how d'ya like that?

He smiles as he lies back to me. Bullshit is the new black.

“Audie, the terms of your stay here have changed,” he's saying. “There's a question of consent, and the legal department is concerned. Without a signature from a legal guardian…” He trails off, waits for me to fill in the blank.

I'm too busy trying to keep the smile floating on my face. It's not easy, keeping this skin mask on. It takes all of my concentration not to let it slide right off.

He sighs. Tries another approach. “There is one other option. My department is starting a new clinical study. It combines a new medication with a…procedure that I think could really help you. It is experimental, but you'd be under my care, so I would be your medical guardian for the purposes of the study. That would eliminate the consent problem.”

Consent problem.
That's one way to describe it. It's also one way to describe
me.

I could reach him. My thoughts are turbocharged calculations of force and distance and trajectory. I could reach that sharp, sharp pen in his pocket. Stupid, careless man, sitting there so foolishly close to me with his Proud Doctor Pen winking in the light. It's silver, topped with two tiny snakes coiling around a tiny winged staff. The caduceus—a symbol of poisoners and torturers and thieves.

How do I know that? Where did that word come from? Words like that don't float around in defective junkie heads like mine.

Then I understand.

They
whispered it to me. The snakes. They're moving, teeny, tiny little metal snakes the width of a string, and I can hear them hissing words at me. I can feel their scales as they circle around my ankles and squeeze.

As I watch, one snake stretches its jaws wide and then devours the other. It slowly, smoothly eats its twin, and then it loops back and begins to feast again, this time beginning with its own tail. The snake's hunger is greater than its will to live, and it slowly begins to turn against its own flesh.

The snake hisses my name in greeting. The pain of being consumed and the burden of flesh in its mouth make it difficult for it to speak, but I understand. Even covered as it is with blood and gristle, the snake is beautiful in its wholeness. Life and death, hunger and pain, beginning and end. It is infinite perfection.

It is truly everything.

“Audie?” The doctor's voice breaks my concentration. “Audrea?”

I hate that fucking name, and I wish the snake would eat the man speaking it.

“Do you understand what I'm saying here? I think it's our best option.”

I stare at his face for too long—I keep forgetting to blink. The snake in his pocket doesn't blink, either. I nod.

PANCAKE MOMENTS
™
: A FAMILY AFFAIR!
Directed by: Yours truly

Fade in. Soft-focus, wide shot of brown-eyed,shaggy-haired father figure (handsome, not too) making a delightful (!) mess in sun-kissed kitchen with small, brown-eyed progeny (three or fewerto avoid negative socioeconomic overtone).[Props: bowl, spoon, spatula]

Cue montage: 1) Slow-motion spill followed by wide-eyed pantomimes of guilt (child) and forgiveness (father). 2) Touching moment involving dab of flour either brushed off or dabbed onto (better) adorable (!) button nose. 3) Playful mishap involving syrup.

Pan camera to bathrobe-clad mother figure entering kitchen, shaking her head (tousled, but not suggestively so) in mock consternation. Cut to flour-nosed child proudly serving plate of pancakes. Smiles and hugs all around, music swells, that's a wrap!

**Postproduction note: Rough edits of discordant images/sounds already completed, per client request. Pls confirm deletion throughout of: Mommy's scrunchyhangover face. Daddy's sleep-gruff voice calling out for his
goddamn cigarettes.
The sound of foster brothers rattling lockless bathroom doorknobs. Sponsor confirms lack of brand compatibility: these are not Pancake Moments
™
.

I wake from a night of vivid dreams feeling so much better.

I finally feel like myself again.

My anger has evaporated. It was obviously only a temporary side effect, and I have my head on straight now. I do.

I'm apologizing with pancakes. I found a package of powdered mix in the back of a cupboard, which makes me laugh a little, because it's just one of those things that would never even occur to me to buy.

Things got a bit weird for a little while, but not too long, right? It will all be fine. Because, pancakes! The Disneyland of breakfast entrees. The Hallmark of griddle fare.

I've never made pancakes before, but they're turning out perfect. Pancakes: the fresh start of breakfasts. I crank up the stereo and dance while I flip.

I think about calling Dylan to invite him over, but then decide against it. I have this very strong feeling that he'll come on his own. He always shows up when I need him the most. We joke about it sometimes, about how it's like we're on some private mental Wi-Fi network.

I'm sure he has a good explanation for not showing up last night.

I'm sure there's no reason to worry.

When the clock hits 11:00, the larvae in my head start to wake up, but I rinse them away with orange juice and make extra noise as I wash dishes and rattle the utensil drawer. At 11:20 I turn the music up to a semi-obnoxious volume. At 11:25 I pound on Charlotte's door, then Jameson's. No answer at either.

I have enough pancakes for an army, but I'm the only one home.

At 11:31 the key rattles in the front door and Jameson drags himself in, bleary-eyed and stubble-cheeked. His clothes are usually starched and pressed to the point of squareness—he's the rare kind of guy who might actually look natural in a bow tie—but now he's wearing a stained hoodie that makes him look like one of his druggie customers. He looks like shit.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asks as he punches off the stereo, not even acknowledging the leaning tower of pancakes resting in front of him on the counter. “I've been calling you for hours.”

Crap.
I picture the last place I remember seeing my cell phone: on the table in the diner last night. “Why? What's wrong?” I can't even think of a single time that Jameson has called me—I mean, we
live
together, so it's not like I'm hard to track down—so I can't figure out why he'd care now. I step closer to the pancakes, waiting for him to notice my peace offering.

He rubs his hands over his face, hard, like he's trying to squeegee away a bad dream. “It's Charlotte. She— I don't even know how to describe what happened. She completely lost it last night not long after you took off. I've never seen anything like it. We were trying to get her under control, but then she just…collapsed, I guess. I didn't want you to hear about it from someone else.”

Sad but true: this statement alone triggers no warning bells. Among the guinea pig crowd, people collapse/black out/pass out/faint/fall fairly often. Side effects and substance abuse both tend to leave you with a wonky equilibrium and bruises on your ass. I make a
so what?
face at Jameson.

“Audie, she—” He stops talking, and just sort of deflates in front of me. Everything about him wilts, and his voice sounds airless when he finally continues. “We didn't think it was a big deal at first, either. I mean, you know how it is around here.”

I nod, not breathing, starting to understand what's coming next.

“So by the time we called for help, she was too far gone. I didn't— I mean,
none of us
realized how serious it was. We all thought, hey, this is Charlotte we're dealing with here. She'll snap out of it, she always does….” Jameson rakes his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in greasy spikes. “Except this time she didn't. Jesus, I can't even wrap my head around it. She's fucking gone, Audie.” He doesn't look at me when he says this. He says it to the floor. To his feet.

We become statues.

I'm just standing there, the goddamn spatula still in my hand. Even my brain has frozen midthought. All I can think about, for a long, stupid minute, is my pancakes. Like, if Charlotte's dead, who's going to eat all these pancakes?

But then I unfreeze, and what he said punches me in the stomach.

Hard.

“Fuck” is what I finally say.

You always think you'll be eloquent, or at least admirably stoic at times like this, but that's not how it goes. Not for me, anyway. “Fuck,” I say again, slow and drawn out. It's the only word I have that captures the moment.
Sorry, Charlotte. No disrespect intended.

“I don't understand. What happened?”

Jameson shakes his head. “Nobody knows. She was on a lot of stuff, Audie. Way too much stuff. But I don't know exactly what did it—the docs wouldn't tell me jack since I'm not family.” His face is blotchy, like he's been crying.

My throat closes. Something wet and vicious is strangling me from the inside. I grab the edge of the counter, because there's nothing else to hold on to. “Are they going to stop the studies she was doing? Do an autopsy? Anything?”

Jameson looks at me hard when I ask this, and I feel my face go red, since it must be pretty obvious that I'm not just asking out of curiosity. I admit that it's pretty shitty to be worrying about myself at a time like this, but in the back of my mind I'm thinking that Charlotte and I were in quite a few of the same studies recently.

Asshole,
I call myself, and force my thoughts back to Charlotte. “Does she have…do they know who to call? Her next of kin, or something? What will they do with her…?” I leave the question unfinished. I can't bring myself to say
her body
.

Jameson shrugs, then scratches at the shadow growing across his cheeks, so hard his nails leave red lines. He's still staring at the ground. “I don't know. All this time I've known her, and I never once heard her talking about her family. I don't even know where she's from.”

“Detroit. She grew up in Detroit. That's all I know.” I don't say it, but it's pretty obvious that when someone never talks about her family, ever, they're probably either dead or scumbags. That's kind of the deal for people like us, isn't it? We're not the kind of people who have anyone to call.

We're the people with empty chairs at our funerals.

Jameson and I just stand there, on opposite sides of the kitchen counter, and the silence between us turns awkward. Like we're supposed to be saying more, but we both forgot our lines. “We should do something for her,” I finally say, mostly because one of us has to say
something.

“Yeah. We should do something.” Jameson answers like he's in a trance. Finally, after a few more seconds of silent weirdness, he looks up at me, but it's more like he's looking through me. “I need to take a shower. Maybe grab a few hours of sleep.”

I just nod. I wait until I hear his door close and then I dump the pancakes in the trash. I'm not crying, exactly, but my chest hurts and my eyes burn and the vicious wetness is starting to win. I can't seem to move or even think very fast, either. I try to wash the pancake plate no one ate from, but I have this weird, clumsy sensation like my hands just don't belong to me anymore, and it occurs to me that the dishes are,
were,
all Charlotte's, so it seems especially important not to break anything. I set the plate down in the sink as gently as I can and slide down onto the floor. I sit there for a very long time not
not
crying.

At first I'm thinking how much it sucks that the last time I saw her we were fighting. I've only known her for what, about a year? But I haven't lived many places for a whole year at a time, so it's almost like I've known her forever. And the thing is, I
liked
Charlotte. I really did. It may not be saying much, but she was the closest friend I've had in a long time. Maybe ever.

So then, sitting there in that suspended tears, not-crying way that actually feels way worse than crying, I start trying to figure out why, exactly, we were fighting anyway, and I realize that the fighting bits in my memory are sort of blurry. And it's not just one of those
don't speak ill of the dead
things, either. It's more like all of a sudden I'm not so sure she
actually
said or did the things that made me upset. Maybe I just thought she was thinking those things. Like, did she really take a dig at Dylan when we were at the party last night, calling him my “boyfriend” with those little air-quote fingers, or did I edit those in myself?

I do that sometimes. I project bad stuff where it doesn't necessarily exist. I put words in people's mouths, fill in gaps with my own worst thoughts. And I was definitely feeling insecure about Dylan last night.

The more I think about it, the more I'm sure: Charlotte and I weren't fighting at all. Okay, so I did call her a bitch at the party. But it was loud, and she didn't even turn around—I'm totally positive about that part—so that means she probably didn't even hear me say it. Which means that my last words to her, at least the last words she heard, weren't nasty after all. And it's not like I was ever actually mad at her. Not Charlotte. She was a good egg.

She was my friend.

I feel a little better when I realize this. My hands start to feel like they belong to me again, like they've been reconnected to the rest of my body, and I push myself up off the floor because now I'm motivated. Charlotte was my best friend, and now I need to do something for her.

I feel good about this. And the better I feel, the more angry I feel; the more angry I feel, the better I feel. Does that sound weird? There's such a thing as good angry. Good and angry. Good. And angry.

Yes.