Placebo Junkies Read online

This is how it works for people like us. No reading of the will. No last testament, except what you have crumpled in your pockets. Leave enough behind and you can at least rest in peace knowing the scavengers are singing your praises. Peace be with you and your up-for-grabs stash. Otherwise, it’s like you never even existed.

  Jameson’s skewed division aside, there’s no shame in taking what we need from Charlotte. It’s the universal code of the slightly less unlucky, like a Civil War soldier taking the boots off a gutshot comrade. An unbegrudged matter of practicality. I fully expect the vultures to descend when I die. Let ’em pick my bones clean—less of me to rot in the ground.

  Jameson stands up and wipes his hands on his pants, like the whole process has made him feel dirty. He’s avoiding eye contact. “I’m gonna go get some beer and pizza. Dinner’s on me tonight.”

  I nod, still not sure whether I have a right to be pissed or whether I should feel grateful, and he takes off fast, his pockets heavy with thousands of dollars of our dead friend’s money.

  Once Jameson’s gone, I go into Charlotte’s room, glad for the chance to be alone there. It’s a lot like mine, meaning there’s nothing in there but dirty clothes, more tampons, and a wheezing hair dryer that probably won’t survive the month. A handful of change. A lighter and a cheap alarm clock, mismatched earrings all missing the backings. A crusty tube of mascara and four black eyeliner pencils. This is all that’s left of her. A bunch of useless junk that could belong to anybody. It’s depressing as hell, really.

  But even with so small a presence in the room, this is still all I have left of Charlotte, so I take my time. I touch all the surfaces. I breathe in the air. This was my friend. This is my goodbye.

  There are no pictures on the walls. No mementos. There’s fuck all for tchotchkes or knickknacks. Something about the guinea pig life, all that gambling with your mortality, makes a person unsentimental, I think. Like it’s hard to appreciate the value of any object, anything, if you’ve already started selling off your own flesh to the highest bidder. Because what’s more valuable than that?

  We are not yearbook people. We have no trophies or stuffed animals held on to from childhood. We don’t display our pasts in frames.

  I crawl under the covers of her bed and then open up her wallet. No pictures there, either. Not a single credit card. Damn. Just her driver’s license and a punch card from the falafel place down the street. One more stamp and the next combo meal’s free. A real golden fucking ticket.

  “Thanks a lot,” I say out loud. But I have a smile on my face. The girl did love a good falafel. How’s that for an epitaph?

  It’s when I crack open the appointment book that the cash starts to make more sense. I let out a whistle, and the sense of relief I feel takes me by surprise.

  Charlotte didn’t need to rob me. She was a busy, busy girl. A genuine test-tube entrepreneur. She’d been double-booked, triple-booked in studies every single day for months. How did I not know she was testing so much? And why did she wait so long to bring me in on her plan?

  I’m going through the last week—the week before she died—line by line when I notice the extra appointments. In addition to the studies we did together, there are several entries I don’t recognize. I assume they were follow-ups for long-term studies she started before we partnered up, but I can’t be positive, because she tended to use a bizarre kind of shorthand, with scrawled words paired with doodles and codes, only some of which I can figure out. The only thing I can be sure of is that she was far busier than I’d realized.

  Why so much? Testing like this is just asking to die. Anyone could see it, even someone like Charlotte, who was convinced she’d live forever.

  “What were you doing, Charlotte?” I ask her room.

  I understand need. I understand hunger. I totally get the desire to make enough money to go a little wild, and then enough on top of that to feel safe, and maybe even a little more on top of that just because. But the pace Charlotte had been keeping for what I now realize was months was completely insane. Dumping all those chemicals into your body takes a toll. And then there’s the blood—so many vials drained from her in the name of somebody else’s science.

  Why would she let herself get sucked dry like this?

  I shiver a little under her quilt. Chemicals in, blood out. Poison in, life force out. Day after day. Over and over. I feel like I’m looking at a scheduled suicide. Death by testing.

  “Why?” I ask her room again, but I don’t expect any answers. We’re an unsentimental bunch, remember? When we pack up and leave a place, we’re gone for good. What little she left behind won’t tell any tales.

  I know there’s nothing worth keeping, but I crawl out of Charlotte’s bed and poke through her dresser just to be sure. Sweaters and jeans in the bottom drawer. A few shirts in the middle. One top drawer full of socks and underwear, and the other full of drugs. It’s a pill graveyard, filled to the brim with dozens and dozens of different medications—Jameson must not have known about them, or else he wouldn’t have been so quick to leave me the contents of the room. Half the bottles are uncapped, and tablets and capsules rattle around loose as I yank hard, then harder, to get the stiff drawer to open further. I yank too hard and the entire drawer comes flying out in my hand, spilling pills all over the carpet.

  Damn it. I get down on my hands and knees to clean up the mess.

  It’s doing this, picking up what I’d spilled, that gives me the idea. Crouched down on the floor like that, my hands full of the half-empty bottles and random, mismatched pills, any one of which could have been the thing that killed her, I feel like Charlotte is sending me a message. Giving me a gift.

  I know I’m being morbid and ridiculous as hell, but it’s just the way I feel. Charlotte was my friend, and this idea, this plan, is coming from her. It sounds like demented, poltergeist-y bullshit, but I know what I know. This is Charlotte giving me rent. This is Charlotte giving me a chance at the castle at the end of the world. This is Charlotte finally approving of Dylan.

  Jameson may have snagged Charlotte’s cash, but I can earn that and a whole lot more if I’m smart about it.

  I walk over to her bed and pick up her driver’s license. It worked once before, and it’ll work again. I open the appointment book to today’s date. It’s too late now, but starting tomorrow I will be a very busy girl. A test-tube entrepreneur.

  I’m doubling down on my doubling down. I’ll go to my appointments and hers. If they catch me and kick me out, so be it. There’ll always be another opening in a study down the hall.

  I feel good about this. Happy and hope-y. It’ll be a cinch stepping into Charlotte’s place. Tomorrow, after I’m done being me, I will be her.

  Except, not dead.

  InterThen

  They keep bringing it. More medicine, in impossible quantities. They pour and inject; they load it into me by spoonful and pitchfork and truck.

  I am diluted.

  Audie in a bottle, one part per million.

  Shake well to avoid separation. Shake well before serving. I can feel the good bits, the me bits, dissolving in the bad blood.

  shakemeup shakemeup shakemeup

  Keep it together. Keep me together.

  They add even more medicine. I had no idea I was so empty, that I had so much space that needed filling. They crack me open and pour it in, day after day after day. I’m being reconstituted. Regenerated. New and improved.

  A whole new me.

  Chapter 27

  Being Charlotte gets easier over time.

  I panicked the first couple times I had to sign her name. Was she right-handed or left-handed? I felt guilty for not knowing this, so I signed using large, gratuitous swoops, the opposite of my compact scrawl, just to give Charlotte’s name more space on the paper. No one questioned a thing.

  In her name I give samples. On her behalf I swallow pills. As Char
lotte I spread myself wide open and say aah. Nothing to it. It’s just like being me, except busier.

  It’s also more fun. I’m more fun. It’s hard to explain, but when I walk into an office and tell them I’m Charlotte, it’s like I become her. Like I’m channeling her. It feels good to be someone else for a little while.

  Charlotte had energy. Charlotte had stories. Charlotte was sarcastic and funny and bouncy and flaky, and she had this way of ice-skating over the shitty parts of life. Charlotte made liberal use of her middle finger. Charlotte put hot sauce, the hotter the better, on everything she ate. Charlotte lit up a room.

  And now I do, too.

  It’s not as creepy as it sounds—this isn’t some beyond-the-grave Single White Female thing. I’m not actually trying to be her. I’m just taking her best parts and … borrowing them.

  So Charlotte pisses cheerfully, a happy, tinkling stream of gold. Charlotte holds out her arm with enthusiasm, never wincing as the needle plunges in. Charlotte lies on tables in peaceful repose. Her sacrum is sacred. Her ventricles are venerable. Her medulla oblongata is an open book.

  I am out of body, out of mind. My follicles and my spleen and my metatarsal bones and my bronchial tubes all pay tribute to my friend, and the money comes rolling in, and in, and in.

  I’m Charlotte Incorporated, businesswoman extraordinaire. My complexion is glowing, my bikini line is hair-free. I have a newfound appreciation for laser technology.

  I even need less sleep than I used to. Charlotte was always complaining about insomnia—maybe it’s contagious on some subconscious level? Or maybe I’m just highly suggestible.

  In any event, I am she and she is me. Together, Charlotte and I are profitable. We are in the black. We shampoo and chew and scrape with great efficiency, and the castle at the end of the world shimmers brightly in the back of my mind.

  Dylan’s birthday gift is a bright and shiny maybe. A quickly growing nearly.

  But between appointments, between procedures, behind the glowing possibility of Castillo Finisterre, something festers when I let it. A dark and rotten clump of questions I do my best to ignore.

  why did she die what happened what will they do with her body

  But mostly, as Charlotte, I feel fine. I feel good. There are uppers and downers and wires and isotopes, but everything seems remarkably survivable.

  so why did she die

  It’s a question I ask a lot, actually. I know I can’t just reap the rewards, collect all this good fortune, without repaying Charlotte in some form. And so the more money I make, the closer and closer I get to the cost of round-trip airfare for two and six—no, seven!—nights of eco-luxe heaven, the harder I look at faces and procedures and ingredients alike. Which one of you killed her? I silently inquire.

  So far, I’ve found no clues.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Dylan says when I visit him between appointments. I come as often as I can, although we both prefer visits when no one else is around. Not that we’ve ever discussed it explicitly, but we don’t have to. It’s obvious that neither one of us likes to share our time together with anyone else. If I show up and anyone else is in his room, I tiptoe away and come back later.

  “Of course I am. You’re getting out tomorrow.” As my plan solidifies, the secret is becoming harder to keep. I’m going to tell him soon. The time is almost right.

  “Right. Tomorrow.” Dylan is grinning—he has his own secret plan. “That’s what my mom thinks, anyway. Hmmmm … my bad. It’s actually today.” He checks his watch. “Within a matter of hours, as a matter of fact.”

  “You sneaky, amazing bastard,” I say, and flop down next to him in his bed.

  “Oof, easy there, sparky. All is not yet operating at one-hundred-percent capacity.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Does this mean you’re coming over? For the whole night?”

  He nods. “My mom always comes by after work. They’ll discharge me as soon as she leaves and then I’m all yours.”

  Butterflies and experimental double-action antacids flutter in my stomach as I lean over to kiss him. “Do I even want to know how you pulled this off?”

  “Sexual favors for the nurses.” He kisses me back, but he’s moving stiffly and protecting his abdomen. “I feel cheap and used. And chafed. You wouldn’t believe what a bunch of deviants they are.”

  We lose it as one of the nurses, who looks about eighty-five years old and has a face like a deflated balloon, walks by his room and gives us a disapproving look.

  “Seriously, Audie.” He takes my hand. “This has been amazing. You’ve been amazing. Your visits have been the only things keeping me going in here.”

  I mock-punch his shoulder, light as a feather since I know he’s still in pain, to try to lighten the mood. “You’ve done the same for me,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “No I haven’t. Not even close.”

  I kiss him to shut him up. The big dope doesn’t even realize how much he does for me, how just being around him makes all the other crap in the universe disappear into the background.

  I try not to worry that he’s favoring one arm. It can’t be a good sign that the pain seems to be spreading to new parts of his body every week.

  His kissing, on the other hand, gets better and better every day. It doesn’t matter what crappy thing happened that morning, or how lousy I might be feeling. As soon as his lips touch mine, the slate is wiped clean.

  Just yesterday, for example, I actually managed to have a polite conversation with Scratch. It was only a hi, how are you kind of thing as we passed in the hall, but still. Without Dylan I’d still be holding a grudge, carrying around all sorts of unnecessary anger.

  I have one more study today, but this time when I leave I know it’s only for a few hours, so I don’t have those itching, crawling worries I usually when I walk away from Dylan. “See you tonight,” I tell him. I like saying that. I like not having a question mark at the end of our goodbye.

  “Promise me you’ll be gentle,” he yells at me down the hallway, loud enough for the nurse to hear and glare anew. “Remember, the chafing!”

  Charlotte’s appointment book says “Memories, 2:00–4:00, Rm. 1321,” with a little smiley face with stars for eyes drawn next to it. She does that … did that a lot. Used weird little doodles as shorthand. I haven’t seen this particular version of a smiley face before, but it can only mean good things.

  Room 1321 is on the psych floor. That’s Jameson’s territory. Candy Land. Overthinkers Anonymous. Shrinkydink Central. The Nut Farm. Wonderland. There are a lot of nicknames for this particular corridor—it’s a love-it or hate-it kind of place. Jameson won’t do any other kind of study; he gets off on twisted mental stuff, likes to feel smarter than the tests. I was under the impression that Charlotte avoided psych studies—she always called them mind fuckers—but I’m starting to learn how little I actually knew about her, so I’m not that surprised she had an appointment here.

  I’ve been here a few times. The experiences were okay, I guess. I’m pretty sure I got a placebo the last time I was here because the meds didn’t do anything at all, but then I had to spend hours answering inane questions about my freaking “emotional experience” and the pay was only meh, so I haven’t been back since. It just isn’t worth the grief.

  But now’s not the time to be choosy, so I walk into the reception area, rattle off Charlotte’s study ID number, and hand over her driver’s license. The receptionist photocopies it without even glancing at the picture, then hands me the consent forms.

  I laugh when I read the study description: the effects of psilocybin on long-term memory recall. Leave it to Charlotte to find a way to get paid for taking a ride on the Magic Mushroom Express. The starry-eyed smiley face makes perfect sense now. You crazy little stoner bitch, I whisper affectionately.

  All around me people are filling out their paperwork far mo
re eagerly and cheerfully than you usually see in a study waiting room. One of them, a leathery older guy missing a bottom tooth, looks up at me and winks like we’re sharing a joke. Which, I guess we kind of are.

  “You done this before?” he asks.

  I shake my head and he cackles. “Hoo boy. You’re in for a treat. Just relax and enjoy it, girlie. Let go ‘a the reins on your brains, know what I mean?” He cackles again, a wet, lecherous sound, and I’m glad when a nurse pokes her head in the room to call him back.

  I pick up a magazine to help me avoid eye contact with the other person in the room, but after a minute it’s obvious I don’t need to bother. She’s middle-aged, frizzy and unfocused, smiling at a spot on the wall. Every few seconds the smile changes, a reaction to a joke only she can hear, and her face lifts and droops and pinches accordingly. Big smile, little smile, silent laugh, repeat. It’s like watching a mime watch a sitcom.

  By the time the nurse comes back into the room and calls Charlotte’s name, I’m almost spooked enough to bolt. Something just feels wrong here. Take the drugs, then take the money, I tell myself. Calm the fuck down.

  I stand up and follow the lady.

  Chapter 28

  I know exactly where I am—nothing about the room has changed since the nurse led me in and made me open wide to prove I hadn’t cheeked my pill. (Silly me, expecting an actual mushroom.) But somehow things have shifted, and I’m both here and not here at the same time. No, it’s worse than that. It’s more like a feeling of being simultaneously dead and alive, like a furless version of Schrödinger’s cat.

  I obviously didn’t draw the placebo card this time.

  In the distance of the not-here, a carnival tent splits open. It’s the lone splash of color against an otherwise never-ending stretch of murky grayness.

  From inside the tent a low-pitched, slurring voice starts to gather tempo and volume. It sounds like the Professor’s voice, with the curious addition of a carny twang. He’s like a drunken ringmaster, and as he speaks, the fog begins to lift and images from not-here superimpose themselves on the previously blank walls of here. Slowly the familiar pages of a magazine come to life around me, and somewhere, a curtain lifts.