Placebo Junkies Page 14

  Ahem.

  Welcome.

  Welcome, and don’t be shy! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs. See before you a motley crew—fine and fearless individuals transformed, transfigured, and bound by neither flesh nor physics. Feast your eyes on tongues split in two … wait, make that three! Watch the clever pink tentacles flitting nimbly from pierced, bedazzled lips—the tongue is surprisingly dexterous when freed from its dreary, unforked form, don’t you think? And look at those teeth, neatly filed to points. Someone’s dentist had better be on his best behavior. Hahaha!

  Step to your left to enjoy the next display. A dazzling array of decorative scarification and newly unsplinted elvish ears. So pointy and droll! (Let’s not get into the mechanics just now, sir—there are children present.) And don’t be concerned by the startling number of missing digits and other appendages, kind audience. All amputations are performed on a strictly voluntary basis.

  Now look, look over there. See those horns? No, no, save your gasps. The fine gentleman sporting them is neither devil nor billy goat. He’s merely modeling the finest in decorative titanium implants. Because why should your epidermis have all the fun?

  Let’s move on—there’s not a moment to waste. The grand spectacular is about to begin!

  Shhhh. Hush now. The surgeon needs to concentrate. Oh, no, madam—he’s not an actual surgeon, at least not in the conventional sense. But observe the confidence with which he plunges the hooks through his victim’s flesh—I guarantee you’ve never felt sturdier hands upon your bones. If you won’t take my word for it, you need only look at the bliss upon said gentlewoman’s face as she’s hoisted by—let’s count together, are there six?—metal hooks through tender flesh. Watch as she dangles, suspended in midair like a chrysalis in wait. Watch her breath deeply, and begin to sway as she grows comfortable with her newly stretched flesh wings. She’s dancing now, do you see? Flying, really. Behold, and envy her freedom! Envy her beauty! She’s conquering her mortal coil, transcending the limits of her very flesh! So graceful, so brave …

  Something is wrong.

  This isn’t my memory.

  The instructions were clear: focus on an early memory. Happiness. Yes. My earliest happy memory.

  I need to think about this. I need to focus while they take snapshots inside my brain. Click click click click. I need to ignore the wet darkness that is filling the room around me and think about pony rides or sitting on Santa’s lap or Grandma’s special just-for-me cookies. These are the examples they gave, and somehow I didn’t get the chance to tell them before they strapped me here that I only have a hole where those memories should be.

  I am a drain. I am a whirlpool. I am suction and vacuum.

  Now something is wrong and my mind has sprung a leak.

  Liquefied thoughts pour from my ears, puddling around me on the metal table then overflowing into a drain on the floor.

  Somewhere, out of sight, Charlotte begins to sing:

  Ashes to splashes, we all fall down.

  I scream to block out the sound.

  A tinny voice comes from a speaker. “Charlotte, try to stay calm. Remember, we need you to hold still while we complete the scan. Try to focus on the topic.”

  I am strapped to a table, stuffed into a machine that clicks and thunks as it eats my memories.

  I start to scream again, but everything I need to say melts into a pale gray puddle and oozes from my pores before any sound comes out. The vibrations from the machine splatter and scatter the liquid.

  The topic. Focus on the topic.

  What is the topic?

  Memories. Yes. They must exist in here, somewhere.

  The mechanical noises fade away, and I go limp. A cool breeze sweeps through the room, and I release. Let go ‘a the reins to your brains.

  But the liquid soon returns, first in speckles and in drops, and then in great, arcing arterial sprays. I vaguely register that it’s now red.

  Through the mist, the electronic voice chirps out. “Hang in there, Charlotte. Not much longer; we’re getting some great prefrontal-cortex images.”

  I go stiff because I know, I just know, that something terrible is coming, and before I can cry out for help, the swirling redness fills my mouth and my ears and my eyes, and the pictures I see, all those memories that don’t even belong to me, are tinted with the angry color of spilled blood.

  The machine roars back to life, this time in reverse direction, and now I can hear the sound of its mechanical claws kneading past and present into a sticky ball of muddled time, then rolling it out flat. The machine twists and braids the dreamdough and I can’t tell where all the red is coming from or why my skin feels like it’s on fire even while I’m drowning. …

  I’m relieved when the darkness finally returns; I breath it in with great, grateful gulps.

  “Charlotte? Charlotte, are you okay? Can you hear me?” The tinny voice breaks through my thoughts. “We’re finishing up now. I’ll get you out of there in just a minute.”

  “I’m okay.” My voice is a croak.

  I am okay. Somehow I know the worst is over—that I’ve come through it intact. But part of me is still anxious. Did they get the direction right at the end? Is time moving forward again? I have this terrible feeling that something has gone wrong, and time is moving forward and backward at the same time, weaving and looping around itself in a never-ending figure eight.

  I want to ask, make them check their machines, but the speaker stays silent, and before anyone comes into the room, I slide gently back into the grayness and the empty place where memories should be and then it’s too late anyway. What’s done is done.

  Chapter 29

  All the way home the lights play tricks on my mind.

  I’m well enough to walk, but my balance is off and I keep veering to the right even when I mean to go straight. I swat away the buzzing gnats of the hallway fluorescents overhead, and I spit at the stabbing, jabbing floodlights that line the sidewalk outside. I weave through the parking lot and slam my fist down on the trunk of a car whose turn signal is mocking me with it’s pointless on-off, on-off sounds (FUCKyouFUCKyouFUCKyou). The white-haired driver looks at me with startled round eyes and slaps quickly at the door lock as I walk by.

  One-block, two-blocks, one-block. The distance contracts and expands as I walk home, and the streetlights follow me, stretching their necks to hand me off, relay-style, to the next glowing guard. There’ll be no shadows for me to hide in, no sirree. The spotlight shines on my back, making the skin on my neck tingle and crawl as I stop and lean against the wall to vomit.

  It’s fortunate for me now, as it has been before, that guinea pigs don’t drive to work. Too many blurry, side-effected nights like this one to survive the commute.

  Halfway home my brain unwinds itself enough that at least I can tell the difference between fact and symptom—I can recognize, I can articulate to myself that this thing or feeling or apparition is just the drug gripping my mind, and, most likely, so is that. These things, these creeping, whispering bugaboos peering out at me, are not real, they are figments of my test-addled mind. Knowing this does not stop me from seeing them, but it does stop me from believing in them. Someone who has never had this experience, this breakthrough, might not recognize the significance, but it is profound.

  Fuck me. Chalk up yet another recreational drug my junkie genetics won’t let me enjoy. My mind feels tinkered with, toyed with, in a most unpleasant way.

  Apparently, I prefer a good close rein on my brain.

  When I finally squint and stumble my way back to my apartment building, it takes me panicked minutes—two? five? time is too stretched out to tell—to find my keys, since even the act of sticking my hands into my pockets assaults my overwrought nerve endings with unpleasant sensations. Glass-sharp lint and razor-blade crumbs wedge themselves under my fingernails when I r
each into my jacket, and the fabric feels like barbed wire wrapping around my wrist.

  I must have found the key, somewhere in the middle of a stretch of time that my brain has absorbed and discarded, because all of a sudden I’m in the apartment, where a different sense assaults me. The apartment is messy, messier than it’s ever been, and beneath the clutter, wafting in swamp-colored tendrils through the air, is the unmistakable stink of decaying flesh. My regular brain notes the overflowing wastebasket in the kitchen, deduces it’s the smell of chicken tossed two days ago and begging to be taken out, but that doesn’t stop the part of my brain that’s still dancing in circles from whispering terrible things in my ear. It’s Charlotte. She’s here. This is how she smells now. Dead and rotten, just like you.

  I slap the thought away from my ear and walk into the stench.

  Jameson is sitting at the table, staring into space. “Hey, Audie,” he mumbles, but barely. He’s wearing the same clothes from yesterday, and I can smell the vinegary stink of his sock-clad feet even over the smell of decay.

  I open my mouth to ask him if he’s okay, maybe make a joke about the messy apartment, but someone knocks on the door behind me before I can say anything.

  I open the door and the fog in my head lifts a little as soon as I see Dylan standing there. I press against him and kiss him, I mean really kiss him, and Jameson makes a disgusted snort behind me.

  “Come on.” I grab Dylan’s hand and pull him past Jameson, who just sits there and shakes his head at me like he’s a fucking school principal debating whether to send me to detention.

  I almost lead Dylan into Charlotte’s bedroom by mistake, since I’ve been sleeping in there for the last couple of nights, but I catch myself just in time and we go into mine, where I shut the door against the smells of the apartment.

  “That dude hates me,” Dylan says as I’m pulling his shirt over his head.

  “He’s having a rough week.”

  I pretend not to notice how much weight Dylan has lost—how he seems to be shrinking before my eyes. His jutting ribs look like gills, and the new peaks of his face catch the light in ways they never did before. He’s fine, I remind myself. Nobody eats the hospital food.

  I turn off the light so that I can fill him. Rebuild him. Fortunately, he’s familiar in the dark.

  Once he’s been asleep for what feels like long enough, I sneak out of bed and pull his wallet from the pocket of the jeans crumpled on the floor.

  I have enough money saved up now to buy our plane tickets. I know I won’t be able to keep everything a surprise, but I’m trying to wait as long as possible, to take care of as many details as possible, before I tell Dylan that we’re going to Patagonia. I want the big reveal to be fun—I’m thinking about filling out a passport application with all of his information, then handing it to him to sign. See how long it takes him to figure it out. I already have most of the blanks filled in.

  I freeze as he stirs, then rolls over in the bed. I wait until he settles back into his slow sleep-breathing before I pry his ID out of the wallet in order to fill in one last gap on the form, his middle name.

  Alexander. How did I not know that? It makes me feel bad, like the world’s shittiest girlfriend, for not even knowing my own boyfriend’s middle name.

  But at least now I know: Alexander.

  It suits him. I imagine his parents quarreling about names, wanting, needing to come up with just the right one. A family name, I bet. A gift from an earlier generation. The kind of name you get from parents who care, from a family with roots that grip the earth and don’t let go. A name shared and bestowed.

  Not like my name, which looks like a drunk person’s typo. Audrea is bad enough. Pair it with my middle name, Makayna—Hawaiian, a random thought from parents who’ve never come closer to any tropical location than a Malibu Rum hangover. I have a dollar-store, grab-bag name. They might as well have called me Final Discount. Little Miss Odds and Ends.

  Whatever.

  I’m smiling, feeling victorious as I slide the ID back in the wallet, when the numbers on the card start to fidget and scatter. Dylan’s birth date rearranges itself before my eyes, and as I watch, next month becomes three months past.

  No. No.

  It’s not right. It’s the drugs. They’re still in my system.

  I remind myself of this over and over until my heart slows down and my gut unclenches. It’s not real. Of course I didn’t miss his birthday. It’s an optical illusion. My eyes playing tricks on me.

  I toss the ID and the wallet onto the floor without looking at it again—no sense letting it pull its nasty stunt on me again—and curl up against Dylan, my forehead pressed to his back and my eyes squeezed shut.

  When I wake up, everything is clear again, and the numbers and letters and facts and shadows have all returned to their correct places. Keep the reins on your brains, Audie, I tell myself. You’ll get through this.

  JustUntil

  He waits until the end of the hour to tell me he wants to increase my dose and also start me on a new medication. “I’m very pleased with your progress, Audie. You’re becoming one of my success stories.”

  “Progress according to what?” the girl using my mouth asks. She sits on my fingers to keep me from scratching.

  The doctor’s eyes pinch a little, the way they always do when one of us challenges him. “Well, we’ve certainly made significant progress at least as far as your cognitive functioning and the delusions go. But at the same time, on some fronts it does feel like we’re slipping a bit. I haven’t seen you smile in weeks, for example, and several of the nurses have commented on your flat affect. You seem to have lost some of your fight, which I suppose is both good and bad. Anyway, I’d like to start you on an antidepressant, see if we can hold off another slide into major depression.”

  I wrestle control of my mouth back long enough to say something, even though I know it will cost me. “I’ve never been depressed in my life.”

  He raises a doubting eyebrow, then looks down to flip through the pages in my chart. It takes him a long time to scan through the alphabet soup of my various diagnoses.

  Finally, he frowns his confirmation that I’m right. “Well, Audie, nonetheless I’m seeing some unmistakable signs of depression. Insomnia. Lethargy. Decreased appetite. Do you really disagree?”

  “I’m not depressed. I’m unhappy. It’s different.” The itching is almost unbearable. It’s her fault—she wants me to stop talking.

  The doctor leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers, the way he always does when we only have a short time left. He thinks the pose disguises his wandering attention. His eyes are welded to the clock on the wall behind me. “How so?”

  It takes the last of my energy, but I say it anyway. “Depression is irrational. I’m unhappy because my life sucks. That’s rational.”

  I can tell that the clock has finally reached the hour, because the little tension lines around his eyes relax. “You know, Audie, sometimes I forget that you’re still a teenager.” He smiles. Gives the shallow little rumble that is meant to be his laugh. He is the only person I’ve ever met who actually chortles. “Okay. We can hold off for now if you feel strongly about it, but I’d like to revisit this again next week.”

  I do feel strongly about it, but I can’t say so because I’ve lost control of my mouth again. As payment, the girl who isn’t me lets me snake my hand out for one quick scratch, deep along my thigh. I dig in my nails, make it count. “No, it’s fine,” she says in my voice. “If you think changing my meds will help.” She tilts my head one way and then the other. Blinks away the fading edges. “You’re the doctor.”

  Chapter 30

  After a long day in the pill mines, I go to a movie with Dylan. It’s something action-y and futuristic, but I can’t concentrate on the plot because I’m too focused on the actor’s hairpiece and how it slips around from scen
e to scene. Our aging but still-muscular hero has found love on a distant planet, but all I can think about is the fact that his hairline was noticeably higher back on Earth. Has NASA ever studied gravitational effects on follicles?

  It’s the drugs, of course. Charlotte must have self-reported a severe case when she filled out the enrollment paperwork for the ADHD study, so I’m on the maximum dose possible. For three days I’ve been hyperfocused on one thing at a time.

  One.

  Thing.

  At.

  A.

  Time.

  So you know how you usually have a few things floating around your brain at once? Like, yeah, this movie is awesome, and oh shit I forgot to charge my cell phone, and damn my boyfriend’s hot? Not me. Not anymore, anyway—the usual matrix of competing thoughts has shrunk into a single laser-beam point of concentration. I process the world in staccato, single-task bursts.

  It turns out that this completely ruins the act of making out, which is fundamentally supposed to be a holistic experience. Dylan tried kissing me as soon as the lights went out in the theater, but it was kind of pathetic since I couldn’t help getting fixated on stupid details. Like, I’d never noticed the way he makes this weird clicking sound with his tongue right before our lips meet, or the way he traces little circles into my thigh with his thumb while we’re kissing. Suddenly it was all I could think about and it absolutely annoyed the crap out of me. Which kind of defeated the whole purpose of making out.

  I miss my free-form brain ballet. There’s something to be said for random. There’s something healthy about distraction.

  Nobody’s perfect if you stare long enough.

  Now please excuse me while I focus.

  The actor stands on the planet’s windswept surface, marveling at his newfound ability to breath alien air, but his hair barely flutters in the Martian breeze. And: his part is a quarter inch closer to his left ear than when he first emerged from the transport pod. He moves off camera and I hold my breath until he reappears. Hey-ho, cut scene, and his phony cowlick has shifted portside again!