Placebo Junkies (19 page)

When Lab Coat opens the tank, I have to shield my eyes from the light. He eases the hatch open slowly and gives me a few minutes to adjust to the glare of the real world before saying anything. He seems to realize that it's a difficult transition to make.

Or maybe he heard my agonized howls in the tank and now he's afraid of me.

Either way, I appreciate it. When I finally emerge from my dark steel cocoon, I feel shrunken and dehydrated, and my throat is scraped raw from the crying. I know I look like an animal being pulled from a cage, so I'm glad that he doesn't even ask if I'm okay, since it's pretty obvious that I'm not.

It's amazing what you notice when the noise gets stripped away.

Lab Coat guy, for instance. I see things about him I didn't before. Now I see the way he turns his face away respectfully as he hands me a towel, then a robe. When my eyes finally adjust to the light, I notice that he has nice teeth. I can tell that he's probably a decent person by the way he hands me an alcohol wipe to remove the residue from the electrode adhesive before I even have to ask, and then gently wishes me well. When he turns his head just so, his profile reminds me, just slightly, of someone I know and love.

Let's not say his name just now. It's all confusing enough as it is.

Now that everything has been stripped away, I can see that this is how it happens. This is how so many faces and bodies and names become Dylan to me.

Is it really such a bad thing to be able to recognize people's best parts? To find something to love in everyone I meet?

Because I'm aware of myself now, aware of the tricks my mind plays on me, I also notice when things start to go blurry around the edges. I force myself to read the name stitched on Lab Coat's breast pocket in navy thread.
Jacob.
I force myself to say it out loud. “Jacob.”
Not
Dylan.

Because this is how it happens. This is how I fall in love.

If you squint hard enough and hold your hand up just so, you can block out anything you don't want to see—the past, the present, the future, or the changing color of your boyfriend's eyes.

Don't judge me. Just because Dylan doesn't exist doesn't make our breakup any easier.

It's worse, really. Because he's perfect.
Was
perfect. Whatever. Do you know how much it hurts to lose perfection? People toss out the phrase
soul mate
so much it's become a cliché. But Dylan was the real deal. Because he came from inside of me.

He
was
my soul.

Just try ripping your soul out of your body. That's how much it hurts.

Or if that's too melodramatic, then at least grant me this more pragmatic explanation: my breakup with Dylan is really a breakup with
AidenEricEvanLukeConnorDougieJonathan
OrionPaul. It's a dozen breakups, rolled into one. It's one breakup splintered into multiples.

It's pain multiplied by each new face.

The doctor gives you a sugar pill, and your headache is gone by dinner. The pill may be a sham, but the cure still counts, doesn't it? The relief is as real to you as the pain was.

So don't tell me it doesn't hurt. It was real in all the ways that count. Dylan: my perfect placebo boyfriend.

Lab Coat—does his name even matter?—walks me to the door, where Pinch Face hands me my money. They stand shoulder to shoulder like two bouncers holding back a crowd until I walk away. Bruised and mute, I stumble home. I must fade out a bit, my feet on autopilot, because no time at all seems to pass before I arrive at my door.

I remember too late that I've lost my keys, but Jameson appears out of the fog behind me almost immediately, bearing his own key. “Hey, Audie. You look like hell.” He unlocks the door, holds it open for me, but does not come inside.

“Aren't you coming in?” I ask him from the doorway, and he gives me a funny look, then starts to walk away.

His clothes are clean again. So starched and pressed it almost looks like he's wearing a uniform.

He stops abruptly, looks left and right like he's making sure no one is watching, then comes back. “Hey,” he says in a low voice. “Were you really serious about needing extra cash so bad? There's a study going on tomorrow. I'll be honest—it's a nasty one. Bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. But it pays well.”

He's acting squirrelly, talking out of the corner of his mouth and keeping his body angled away from where I stand in the doorway. “But you have to swear you won't dime me out to Dr. O'Brien. He's already breathing down my neck, and I don't want to lose my job over this.”

A dagger of pain and confusion twists in my head, and it's all I can do to stay on my feet. “Who
are
you?” is all I can manage to say.

Jameson tilts his head and studies me. “Audie? Are you slipping on me again, girl? Because you know I'm the last one on earth who wants to get O'Brien involved, but I will if I have to. I'm not going to be a part of you going down this road again.”

I'm not so confused that I've lost my survival instincts. I force my mouth into the shape of a grin, reminding my eyes to play along. “No, I'm fine. I'm just messing with you.”

He frowns at me. Scans me again with narrowed eyes.
Judging, judging.
“Okay, if you say so,” he finally says. “I'm off tomorrow, so meet me in the back parking lot at 10:30. Think you can behave long enough not to lose day-pass privileges before then?”

I give him my best annoyed-teenager eye roll, which seems to convince him I'm normal enough to leave unattended.

“Okay. Just don't let anyone see you get in my car. I'll get shit-canned for sure if anyone sees me with a patient on a day I'm not even scheduled to work.”

His words are like little electric currents cauterizing parts of my brain, obliterating whatever used to make sense. I just nod, too unsure of what's going on to speak.

May I tell you a story?

It won't take long, I promise. Mostly because the details keep shifting. Little earthquakes keep rattling my thoughts and shaking the words around.

Have a seat. Yes, right here. Right next to me on this twin-sized bed. The one with the institutional linens and rounded edges and complete absence of exposed screws. It's a remarkably
safe
bed, don't you think?

Did you know there are companies that specialize in making furniture specifically for crazy people? I mean, think about it: they can't just build a plain old chair that looks and functions like a chair, and then call it a day. No, they have to consider some very un-chairlike things when they design their furniture.

Things like the effects of bodily fluids and psychotic rages and creative suicidal tendencies. Things that tend to be tough on furniture. Also, potential lethal uses of screws and hinges and knobs. It's amazing just how many things can be dangerous in the wrong person's hands.

Yes, that is very interesting. It's also a good segue into the story. Shall I begin?

Okay.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who was batshit crazy. She was stupid, too. Very, very stupid.

She might have been pretty, were it not for the scars.

She might have been smart, were it not for the pills.

Anyway, our stupid, ugly girl was very lonely, as stupid and ugly people often are, so one day she set out in search of companionship. Having little to lose, she decided that she would do anything, anything at all, to find her one true love.

She would go to the end of the world, if need be.

She was unsuccessful, of course—that much goes without saying. How many crazy, stupid, ugly people do you know in happy relationships?

But she wanted this one thing so very, very much that the crazy part of her mind took over, and she managed to fool herself into believing that she
had
succeeded in finding happiness and love. She tossed in some friends and lots of money, too, because, why not? If it's all imaginary, you might as well go all out.

Just think of it as a form of mental alchemy: where you or I might see shit, she saw gold.

For quite some time she was a very happy crazy girl, since, in her mind at least, she had everything she had ever wanted. She even started to look prettier, or at least less ugly, on account of that special glow that true love brings.

Perhaps she wasn't so crazy after all.

But, alas. Crazy or not, her happiness was not meant to be.

One day, an evil wizard came along and decided to test the strength of his magic against the strength of the girl's crazy. He spent a long time studying her crazy lies and her stupid mind tricks, and he spent many nights stroking his pointy white beard, pondering. Pondering and stroking. Stroking and pondering. Finally, after all this time studying and stroking and pondering, he developed a potion that he was certain would defeat the demons in her mind, and he used his powers of enchantment to make her drink it.

Wait—where do you think you're going?

I don't care if you don't like fairy tales. Sit your ass down, shut the fuck up, and listen.

Besides, the door is locked from the outside.

Did you happen to notice these subtle little slots on the side of the bedframe? They're designed to accommodate restraints. Isn't that clever? Sometimes a bed isn't just a bed. Now, where was I?

Oh yes.

The potion was very powerful, and the wizard watched proudly as it did its work—as everything in the poor girl that was crazy and happy vanished in a puff of smoke.

In no time at all, our newly lucid girl was once again alone and miserable, once again surrounded by shit instead of gold. Worse still, she was now fully aware that true love did not, in fact, exist. The wizard declared her cured; his experiment, he decided, was a smashing success.

But.

Of course there's a but. What kind of story would this be without one?

But, unbeknownst to the wizard, there was still a tiny little glimmer of crazy deep within our girl. It was on account of her stupidity, actually. She was so stupid that while she was taking the potion, she became distracted and accidentally spilled a few drops. Embarrassed by her clumsiness, she mopped up the spilled liquid with a handkerchief and hid the evidence under her mattress so that no one would be the wiser. And since the wizard had given her only just enough to do the job—he hadn't wanted to kill her by mistake—that last, hidden ember of crazy remained aglow.

And because she now
really
had nothing left to lose, the girl decided to use that last tiny spark to do something
truly
crazy. So in her darkest hour, in the depths of mourning for a life that never was, she began to transform herself into something altogether different. In one final hurrah of insanity, she turned herself into a giant snake.

If she couldn't be happy, then perhaps she could be fearsome.

If she had to be lonely, then at least she could be strong.

The wizard, of course, was terribly disappointed. In a fit of rage he sealed her into her chambers, bricking over the door and windows so that his failure would never be known to the outside world.

Locked away from any source of comfort, the girl who was now a snake quickly began to starve. And because she was crazy, and because she was hungry, our stupid girl who was now a snake decided to nibble on her own tail, just to see if it might satisfy her, even for a moment.

Surprisingly, it did.

So because she was crazy and stupid and hungry, she bit down again and again, barely even noticing that she was destroying herself in the process. That's how great her hunger was. How empty she felt.

Her snake body coiled into a giant, infinite loop, her head consuming her tail, and her tail nourishing her head, until finally, she was happy once again. And perhaps not quite so stupid after all, because she no longer felt alone, though, technically of course, she was.

She had found the solution, don't you see? She had to consume herself in order to survive. It was all within her; it was all within her control: love, power, sustenance,
will
.

Because she was both the source and the outcome.

The cause and the cure.

Don't bother with that button on the wall. It hasn't worked for ages. A vicious cycle? Really? That's how you interpret the ending of the story?

Not me. No, definitely not. I mean, can you even think of a more literal act of self-sufficiency than that? I think she was her own hero. She saved herself, don't you see? She took control of her life and her death.

And every story needs a hero.

All those
I woke up in someone else's body
stories I've read or watched over the years, and not one of them does fuck-all to help me now.

I don't care if it's Kafka or yet another
Freaky Friday
remake—they all use pretty much the same basic formula, amiright? Person wakes up, checks their shit out in the mirror, and is all
ohmygawd, holy shit, wtf
for a while. Then, later on, they get used to their new body and play around and have fun with it for a while, like,
look at me, I'm a big hairy cockroach climbing up the walls, wheee!
Little girls check out their new grown-up boobs, little boys have fun learning to shave their overnight-adult faces, whatever.

You can practically hear the fledgling screenwriters pitching their film agents on their latest version, their spin on a spin on a spin that's been done a hundred times:
Who hasn't occasionally wanted to wake up as someone else?

I've certainly wanted to wake up as someone else. Of course I have. But the whole goddamn
point
of that fantasy is to wake up in someone else's body, with someone else's life. Instead, I wake up with the same shitty life, the same scar-blasted, toxic waste dump of a body, and someone else's memories layered on top of mine. I'm me, but not me. I'm doubled down—all of my problems and hang-ups and deficiencies multiplied by Fact and by Fiction. I'm someone's sick-joke version of “cured”; I'm me to the power of fucked.

I'm not seeing the potential for slapstick antics here.

I think the film rights to this one will remain safely mine.

Sunlight filtering in through safety glass and the sound of a lunatic gargling somewhere down the hall jolt me out of the stupor that has replaced sleep, but I don't get up just yet. There are too many cobwebs and fissures still crisscrossing my thoughts to be able to face the day. So I lie in my bed, which isn't really my bed, and untwist the snarled braid I seem to have woven from the details of my life.

Fact: my name. Several people confirmed it last night, including one of the many nurses who fade in and out of my field of vision like pill-pushing ghosts, and Jameson, whose clothing I now realize matches the uniforms worn by several other key-ring-wielding men I've seen wandering around—men who fall below the nurses in the pecking order, but above the cleaning staff. Orderlies, maybe, though do they still use that word? It sounds too old-timey, so I'm sure it's been replaced by something stiff and modern and ridiculous: Psychiatric Sanitation Engineer, or Certified Cranial Technician.

The nurses are familiar, too; I've seen them all before. But back on the flip side of this little breakdown, this total mental meltdown of mine, they were lab administrators and research assistants.

Here on this side they don't ask for my consent. Here, I'm supposed to hand over my veins and swallow their pills for free. Here, they think
they're
in charge.

And yet, here's another fact: there
is
money under my mattress. (Un)grand tally: two hundred and thirty-one dollars. Hardly enough for the trip of a lifetime. Does Castillo Finisterre even exist? Add that one to the mountain of questions already towering over me.

Also under the mattress: hundreds of other pieces of paper, all folded with maniacal precision into rectangles the size of dollar bills. Sad, crazy counterfeits that make my today-face burn with shame. The pathetic currency of my delusional mind. But this discovery is almost comical considering what's
also
under the mattress: a shitload of pills. They're faded and crusty, like they were held in someone's mouth just long enough to start to dissolve.

Someone's
mouth. How delightfully passive of me, no? Just thinking about it, I can feel the sensation of a smoothly coated capsule rolling under my tongue. I taste the memory of that first bitter release of what's inside, and I reflexively start to push the taste out of my mouth.
My
mouth.

If there was ever a time not to be passive, it's now. So…Fact: those are clearly
my
pills, which I clearly spit out of
my
mouth. I have no conscious memory of doing so, just the muscle memories of ingrained habits. I don't know why I refused this hidden cache of medicines, but there must have been a good reason. Which brings up yet another question, this one with some urgency: Who can I trust? Doctors and nurses proffering questionable cures, or my (less than reliable) self?

Neither option holds much appeal.

I shove my hand under the mattress and pull out a handful of the folded pages, flicking away two crusty capsules that stick to my sleeve like burrs. My Madwoman's Monopoly Money mostly consists of tissues, random flyers, and articles torn from magazines. My fortune is a practical joke, played
on
me,
by
me. Perhaps there's comedic value to my story yet.

Nope.
Not funny, Audie. Not funny at all.

Fortunately, among the useless trash are dozens of identical brochures bearing glossy and copyedited answers.

Because if it's in writing, it must be true. (And if you believe that, then have I got some great drugs to sell you!)

I unfold one of the pamphlets with shaking hands and read.

Facts, as spelled out in tactfully euphemistic jargon: “The Cedar Hill Center for Transitional Living provides residential psychiatric care for adults and adolescents with persistent mental illness. Various levels of intensity are offered in our apartment-style community, which is conveniently located on the grounds of a top-ranked, university-based hospital system, thereby ensuring that residents have access to state-of-the-art treatments and facilities.”

Whoever designed the brochure chose a mint-green tree motif for the cover, which makes zero sense at all, since what the hell do trees have to do with crazy people? Personally, I would've gone for an ice-pick design. “Cedar Hill Psych Ward: Not just for lobotomies anymore.”

Fact: I am crazy. Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy. Insane in the membrane. Out to lunch. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, wack job, nutso, loony tunes. Fucked in the head.

Sick.

Or so they say.

It takes a very long time before I can convince myself to get out of bed.

When I finally do, I'm relieved to find that my home today is much the same as it was yesterday. Yesterday, back when I was still…on the reality-is-optional channel, shall we say? Not that I'm not anymore, just, I don't know. Something has cracked. Something I took, something I stopped taking, something Dougie said, something I did, I don't know what, just
something
has changed and now I'm seeing certain things I didn't before. And not seeing certain other things that I used to see.

Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Audie's mind catches up slow.

The truth has now achieved critical mass in my mind, and it's forcing out all the beautiful, happy stories. My fantasy world is a smoldering wasteland.

Fiction: Dylan, whispering (
lies
) in my ear. Arms around me, holding me, keeping me centered, his (
stranger's
) flesh on my flesh, keeping me (
in
)sane. His whispered (
lies
) promises,
we'll get through this together, baby.

Liar, liar, brain's on fire.

I can't deal with this particular crack in my brain right now, so I seal it shut. It's a temporary fix at best, but it allows me to get up and stumble around my half-familiar world.

The apartment is almost the same as yesterday—same curtains, same toaster, same couch. It's just smaller than before; a twee miniaturization of a real apartment. Kitchen(ette). (Mini) fridge. A faux home—a dollhouse for the institutionalized set.

I think back to that day I woke up in the alley, the way everything looked huge for a few hours. Lilliputian effect, they called it. Today I'm experiencing the opposite. Today, my world has shrunk.

Reality: a most unwelcome side effect.

Different versions of events continue to unfold like origami. The Professor walked me home that day.

Zzzzzzzap.

No, Dr. O'Brien walked me home that day.

crazy stupid crazy stupid crazy stupid

second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder, a little bit worse

I stare at the door to Charlotte's room. She was real, I'm almost certain. My thoughts about her have more heft, somehow. But…is it possible that I imagined her death? Maybe it's just a part of this whole fucked-up, delusional whatever it is that's going on in my head. A fight between friends that my smoke-and-mirror brain morphed into a tragedy? For a second my heart races with hope that one thing, just this one thing, might actually turn out in my favor, and that Charlotte may actually be alive. But then I open the door. It's a vacant room, the mirror image of mine—utterly anonymous with its institutional, bolted-down furniture and paste-colored walls. Anyone could have lived here. No one could have lived here.

I close the door to the empty room and try to find solace in the fact that at least now I know what I don't know.

I fail to find solace in this fact.

It turns out that ignorance is
not,
in fact, bliss. Ignorance is a hole in the head and a knife through the heart. Ignorance is a terrifying void too quickly filled with Styrofoam facts and junk-food hopes.

Outside my apartment, which is not, of course, actually my apartment, the
same but different
trend continues. I explore the alternate universe of my shrunken world, walking through hallways that just yesterday were city-blocks long, down a stairway that used to be an alley, and across a small, grassy quad that used to be the neighborhood park. I keep my head down in order to avoid conversation with any of the quasi-familiar faces that drift by.

I'm not ready for any more reality at the moment. I'm already at a toxic saturation level; I'm
this
close to overdosing on the truth.

But I change my mind when I see Scratch sitting on a bench. He's revolting as ever, but he's also someone I know and remember—for some reason he seems to straddle the gap between my delusions and my reality. Plus, he might be able to help me sort out the whole Charlotte business, which is as confusing as ever.

Scratch. Good old Scratch.

Except it turns out that today's version of Scratch is not quite the same as the version in my recent memories.

How did I not see it before? Was I so fixated on his rashes and boils that I never even noticed his eyes—the way they're focused so intently on something just out of range of everyone else's vision? How did I miss the tics and twitches?

“Hey, Audie,” he says as I sit down next to him. “How's Dylan?” His voice is sharp and mocking.

I jump up from the bench and stare at him. The scabby little fucker is grinning at me. A teasing, toying grin. So this is how it is? I'm a joke around here, laughed at even by the likes of this pus-pocked fool? I wonder if I'm at the bottom of some unwritten psychiatric pecking order: a crazy person who doesn't know she's crazy.

Zzzzzzzap.

Make that: a crazy person who
didn't
know. I walk away from Scratch as fast as I can without calling attention to myself, not feeling the least bit elevated by my newfound knowledge.