Placebo Junkies (22 page)

“
Still
crazy?” I call out after his car. The braying sound of my laughter surprises me—it's not because anything is funny, but because my brain is spinning with the ticklish, kaleidoscope feeling of déjà vu. “Oh no, my friend. I'm just getting started!” It doesn't even make sense, really, but I don't care. It feels good to say it, like a satisfying line straight out of the end of some cheesy action movie.

It sounds like something that you say just before you take back control. It sounds like a decision.

I say it again, louder, grinning at the way it makes a group of women walking back to their car stare at me like I'm insane. Because that's kind of the whole fucking point, right?

Dr. O'Brien does not like it when I challenge him. Oh no sirree. He does not like it one little bit. Nor does he approve of my extracurricular activities.

“Audie, when it comes down to it, you are a minor, and you've been placed under my medical guardianship. So when I discover that you haven't been complying with treatment, then I have an obligation to take certain steps that are in your best interest. I'm just sorry we've come to this point again. You were doing so well.”

He sounds so sure of himself when he talks like this. He thinks he's safe, hiding behind his medical-legal jargon and his mountain range of a desk, with all those snowy paperwork peaks.

But I know his secrets.

The snakes are talking to me again, telling me things I can use against him. Even now they're twisting and shining atop his fancy silver pen, only he's too fucking blind to see it. Is it one snake with two heads? Or is it two snakes conjoined? It doesn't matter. One is clearly stronger than the other. I smile as it begins to eat its twin—I do so admire a strong survival instinct.

You get hungry enough, eventually you're willing to do whatever it takes to save yourself.

I turn my snake-charmer smile on the doctor.

“And do you also have an
obligation
to take money for force-feeding me all those pills? Are you also
obligated
to keep the bonus you get for hooking me up to your machines?”

His hand freezes in his beard, midstroke.

He doesn't take many notes anymore. Hasn't for days and days. Instead, he just taps his pen on my stagnant file.

tap tap tap tap

The silver caduceus atop the pen catches the light. It's such an appropriate symbol for doctors, don't you think? It's from Greek mythology—from the staff carried by Hermes. Hermes, the god of thieves and commerce.

Oh yes, I've done my homework. This is one test I'm determined to pass.

tap tap tap tap

“I've been perfectly clear all along that you're part of an experimental protocol, Audie. Yes, my study is being funded, in part, by grants from the pharmaceutical industry, but in no way does that influence my clinical judgment.”

He flinches when I hiss at him.

I've grown much stronger lately. I'm getting stronger every day.

“Your tan is fading,” I tell him. “Remind me—where was this year's conference? Hawaii? How nice that they paid your way. And a little bird told me you were even the keynote speaker. How much do they pay keynote speakers at medical conferences in luxury hotels in Hawaii these days?”

I wink at the dominant snake atop Dr. O'Brien's pen. You could almost forget the weaker twin was ever there in the first place.

Dr. O'Brien sighs and closes my file, sets the pen on top of it. He's conceding his defeat: he has nothing left to write. “Audie,” he says after a long silence. “Your mind is tricking you right now, offering you false solutions. Is there any part of you that can understand that?”

“I promise you that my solution is a hell of a lot better than what you're peddling, doc.” I say it gently, since I've obviously already won the battle. No sense being a poor sport.

He just nods slowly and sort of wilts into his chair. Even his beard looks limp and defeated.

It's survival of the fittest.
I
am the dominant snake in the room now. I am consuming him, consuming his research, consuming his career.

I
control the cycle.

He is so cowed that he doesn't even notice when I slide his pen into my pocket as I stand up and walk out of the office. Outside, in the hallway, I celebrate my victory with my hand wrapped around my prize, glorying in the heavy silver sharpness now in my palm. It's beautiful and dangerous, and I very much want to keep it.

I toss it into a trash bin as I leave the building, just to prove to myself that I can.

I'm catching up on some reading when Jameson comes in a few hours later full of bullshit excuses. “I forgot my lucky sweatshirt,” I hear him say to the nurses in the little office where they congregate, isolating themselves from the “residents” (ha) in their care [avoidant personality disorder, diagnostic code 301.82]. “It's a game night, so I have to have it. You know how it is.”

They accept his ridiculous explanation [ritualized behavior indicative of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, diagnostic code 301.4] without comment. He's just an orderly (excuse me, a psychiatric technician) here—almost as invisible to them as I am.

I'm sitting in the common area, a sad little lounge where crazy people can blend into ugly upholstery as they ignore one another. It's the same place where I remember a party happening. The guinea pig blowout where I last saw Charlotte.

The strong stench of urine bridges both versions of the room.

The befores and afters are clicking into place, though sometimes they hop around and switch positions on me mid-thought. Often the facts and the faces are exactly the same. The only thing that changes is my interpretation.

Before: Party!

Now: Purgatory. A place where the already dead wait for whatever comes next.

Ain't reality grand?

Jameson walks up behind me and drops down to one knee, sneaky casual, acting like he's just stopping to tie his shoe. I don't turn around, not even when he does his little throat-clearing thing extra loud [persistent vocal tic disorder, diagnostic code 307.22]. “I'm sorry I freaked out on you, Audie. I think of you as a friend, and sometimes I forget that you're…”

I fill in some possible words for him. I hold up the heavy diagnostic manual I've been reading, show him that he's not the only one who can swipe things from doctors' offices.

It's actually sort of fun to flip through the pages and pick out labels for people. If you get to know someone well enough, I guarantee you can find a diagnosis or ten for them in here. Everyone's got at least a little crazy going on just below the surface.

“No.” He shakes his head. “I was just going to say that sometimes I forget how sick you are. I shouldn't have brought you today. It was unprofessional.”

He hangs his head, puts on his best shame-faced expression. He knows what it looked like over there, he says. But it's really not that much different from what the doctors are doing here. “It's just the way the system works.” He shrugs and makes his eyes go round and blameless.

He doesn't want to leave me with the wrong impression, he says. He has big plans. He's going to open up his own CRO, do things the right way. “You don't have to have a degree or anything. Only a doctor's name somewhere on the letterhead, someone willing to act as a silent partner. It's just a matter of running a good business,” he says. He's going to run studies the right way, he says. Maybe I can work for him (awkward pause, foot shuffle). When I get out.

Now look who's delusional [diagnostic code 297.1].

As if this were only some sort of temporary psychosis [diagnostic code 298.8].

What's that old saying we were talking about earlier? Sometimes paranoia [former diagnostic code 295.30; current manual no longer distinguishes a paranoid subtype of schizophrenia] is just having all the facts.

“Funny thing,” I tell him. “There's no diagnostic code for a compulsive liar. Why do you think that is, Jameson?”

He doesn't answer. Shocker.

“Maybe because you'd all have to diagnose each other. Every single person working here who's making a living putting poison in my veins.”

His skin flushes pink, and he stands up and stops pretending to tie his shoe. “You've gone off your meds again, Audie. Haven't you?” He shakes his head, tries on a few different expressions, and settles on sad. “I hate that it has to be this way,” he says, and then turns and walks away.

I start to laugh. “Oh, don't be like that. I'm just messing with you, Jameson. Come back.”

He doesn't.

The nurse brings a paper cup of pills to my room as I'm getting ready for bed. I thank her automatically, like she just delivered late-night pizza, double-pepperoni mushroom, instead of a cup full of poison.

Because, what was Jameson
really
doing here?

Lucky sweatshirt, my ass.

I can't take the chance that his off-schedule visit, his casual swing through the nurses' station, was a coincidence. I can close my eyes and picture it: him floating past the nurses who ignore him anyway, leaning in to spike my nightly dose with something a little stronger. Something a little more deadly, perhaps.

I've seen him with the books. I know about his special interest in certain controversial pharmaceuticals. I know about his secret stash.

I know quite a few things about him, really. Things he probably wishes I didn't know.

I stare at the pills, poke through them with my index finger. How many
should
there be? In which sizes and colors? My memories aren't clear enough to answer these questions.

I have no way of knowing whether these pills are the cause or the cure.

Taking them would be an act of faith.

Not taking them would be a very different act of faith.

Who to believe? Who to choose?

The longer I stare at the pills, the more the lines between everything blur together. I'm afraid to blink, afraid everything around me will blend together into a gooey mess, the way my memories do. I swat away the buzzing sound in and around my thoughts to give myself a second to figure this one out. I've been down this road before; I've raced this same track a time or two. Surely I've learned from my mistakes.

Through it all, the buzzing and the blurring, only one thing remains clear: how very, very alone I am in all of this. Without Dylan, without the people I thought of as my friends, my life is a permanent experiment on the long-term effects of total isolation. I might as well be still locked in the sensory deprivation tank.

Or maybe I'm not quite as alone as I think, because when I close my eyes I can hear Charlotte's voice singing.
Oh, which came first, the crazy or the pill…

I stand up. I've made a decision.

I race out of my room. This is no time to be selfish. As I run, my progress down the long hallway is marked in units of Plexiglas-framed motivational posters bearing aggressively capitalized advice:

It's a long fucking hallway. It's a lot of fucking advice.

Here's my advice—capitalize it however you'd like: Don't mistake consent for surrender.

I burst through closed doors into other rooms at random, slapping pill cups out of hands, sticking my fingers in people's mouths if I have to, ignoring their protests as I fish out the toxins. Because how would Jameson have known which medicine cup was mine?

If he wanted to be sure, he would have spiked them all with his poison.

That's what I would've done.

I'm on a roll. I run down the hall, screaming my warnings. I feel powerful and unafraid, because now I finally understand: I am the hero of this story. I can save us all—myself and all these other poor, gullible bastards locked in here with invisible keys. I smash and I grab at anything dangerous. Even if Jameson didn't do anything to our medicine, the pills are killing us just the same, with their broken promises and profit margins and bogus hopes. They're false idols in capsule form; they're sugar mixed with cyanide. They've turned us all into addicts and zombies—we're broken-down junkies, drooling and shuffling our way through the years, waiting for something outside of us to change what's wrong inside.

But not anymore.

I am finally in control.

I ignore the footsteps and shouts behind me; I ignore everything until I hear the sound of Dr. O'Brien barking out commands, and then I know it's too late to save myself, so I go even further. I
will
be the hero of this story, even if it kills me. I shove the pills I've collected into my mouth and swallow until I choke. My pills, everyone else's pills, the nurses' pills, tucked discreetly away into purses and taken when no one is looking. The pills under my bed, the pills in Jameson's secret stockpile in the back of the supply closet. I swallow them all, and by the time anyone catches up to me, before they can restrain me, hook me up to their machines, plunge their needles into my veins, it's too late for them to change what I've done.

I am the Ouroboros, choosing my own fate. This may look like an act of self-destruction, but it's not. It's an act of salvation. Of self-preservation. No one else will ever nourish themselves from my body again.

I stop as the blur of white coats descends—a feathered flock closing ranks, wings flapping around me until I am overcome. I feel a prick, and then the sting of snake oil coursing through my veins, and the words of one last motivational poster start to dance and blur overhead:
I
T
I
S
N
EVER
T
OO
L
ATE TO
B
E
W
HAT
Y
OU
M
IGHT
H
AVE
B
EEN.

I am the warning label. I am the list of side effects. I am the guinea pig; I am the safety net.

I am the probable outcome. I am the cure.

I
am in control.

I close my eyes against the bright lights and the faces, and soon enough the hissing of the snake becomes the gentle shush of icy ocean waves as I drift off to sleep dreaming about a castle at the end of the world.