Placebo Junkies Page 16

  Five years ago I was twelve years old, spending my time angling for sleepovers at friends’ houses and making up excuses for erratic school attendance. Five years does feel like forever. And I had no idea Charlotte had been working the labs for that long. She must have started doing the pediatric stuff. You see that occasionally, scared parents dragging scared kids in for tests.

  “You’ve been here longer than five years,” I say. “And you’re still breathing.”

  He kind of half smiles. “What can I say? I’m a lifer. If I can somehow manage to hang on for twenty more years, I’ll get a gold watch and a pension.”

  I snort, and my anger dissolves a little. “Yeah, right. Wouldn’t that be nice. A guinea pig retirement plan.”

  He looks at his feet. Doesn’t laugh.

  Now I feel bad. It’s no joke. He really is a lifer, and here I am rubbing his nose in it. What’s he going to do after all these years farming out his brain cells? Fold shirts at the Gap for just above minimum wage? Clock in and out, ask his twenty-year-old boss for permission every time he needs to take a piss break? He wouldn’t last a week. None of us would. Once you get the chance to control your own fate, set your own schedule, it’s too hard to give it back.

  I look at him sitting there, morose and greasy-haired, and I soften up. Jameson isn’t the enemy here. I know that. “I know you mean well, and I appreciate it. I don’t plan to do this forever, I promise. Okay? But I really do need to make some money. Can’t you please help me out?”

  He nods vaguely, mutters something about making some calls, but he won’t look at me. Instead, he slumps even further in his chair and stares down at his hands, and I can already tell the fingernails on the left are going to be chewed to the quick by nightfall.

  “Thanks, Jameson,” I say. And, “I miss her, too.” I hold my breath as I give him a small peck on the top of his head and then get out before his funky smell and funkier mood wear off on me.

  Chapter 34

  I head back to the labs and check the boards. I need cash. I can’t afford to be picky.

  While I’m standing there, Dougie walks up. “Looking for some action?” He waggles his eyebrows to let me know I can take that question any of several ways.

  “Jesus, lighten up, Audie,” he says when I don’t answer.

  I can’t deal with his oily energy, so I start to walk off.

  “Too bad,” he calls after me in a taunting voice. “I was gonna let you in on a little secret, tell you how you can make a fast five bills.”

  I grit my teeth and turn around slowly. Try not to look as hateful as I feel. I can’t afford to be picky, I remind myself.

  “Attagirl,” he says with a smirk on his face. “Why do you hate me so much, anyway? I’ve never been anything but nice to you.”

  “I have good instincts,” I say. Then, “I’m pretty sure you screwed me over in a past life.”

  He laughs. “Well, you won’t hate me so much after this.”

  It’s not posted on the bulletin board, he says. Word of mouth only. “I’ll walk you over myself,” he says, holding out his arm, which I don’t take.

  “Suit yourself.” He shrugs. “Follow me.” But he insists on walking too close, our shoulders brushing, as we head over to a different building. His route cuts through the alley where I woke up with the black eye, and I can’t help looking around for bodies. None today.

  It’s all about family history, Dougie tells me as we walk. He takes hold of my elbow, steers me through a set of double doors. Cancer stuff, blood stuff, all the usual crap. Check yes for this, no for that. He rattles off symptoms and conditions. They’ll catch me eventually, once the blood test results come in, but somebody screwed up when they wrote the forms and they have to pay you five hundred bucks even if you get kicked out.

  He’s proud of himself for knowing this.

  “We’re all signing up before they figure it out and shut things down. Today might be your last chance.”

  He leaves me at the lab door with a slow, blatant scan of my body and a hard squeeze of my upper arm.

  “Thanks,” I say automatically, then bite my tongue hard as punishment. I don’t want to encourage him.

  I sign in at the front desk and sit down to fill out the forms, eager fucking beaver, already feeling the weight of that cash in my hand. I start to get excited. With five hundred dollars, I’ll have enough. As soon as the cash is in my hand, I’ll tell Dylan. Finally.

  I space out for a few minutes like that, thinking about how he’s going to react, and I’m sure I have a giant stupid grin on my face. But after a few minutes I snap out of it and look around and I realize that certain things seem … off. Different from other studies.

  It’s the other people. They’re different.

  All around me, sitting in those ugly waiting-room chairs, everyone looks gray and boneless, like it’s too much work to sit upright, so instead they’re drooping and puddling over the edges of their seats.

  They move differently, too. They shuffle like old people. They lean on things. They hunch when they stand. Guinea pigs almost always look hungry—it has as much to do with personality as it does malnourishment. These people, though, they look starved.

  It takes me a minute to figure it out. This is what is different about the people in this waiting room: these people are Sick.

  There are a lot of different ways to be sick. I know this now.

  There’s sick as in mildly ill. Oh man. That cafeteria meat loaf made me sick to my stomach.

  There’s sick as in disgusting or disturbed. Did you see Dougie kick that dog? He’s one sick bastard.

  There’s even sick as a compliment. Gavin is so hot—he has sick abs. Actual sick people, I suspect, do not use the word this way.

  Here is what I realize now, sitting here surrounded by these melting, shuffling people: guinea pigs are, indeed, sick.

  sick in the head sick as fuck sick puppies sick of waiting sickly sick humor sick and tired sick at heart sick of this shit make me sick

  What we are not, however, is Sick. As in, deserving of treatment. As in, in need of care. As in, desperately, hopelessly ill, the way the people in the chairs around me clearly are.

  I put my paperwork down and just look at the other people in the room. I force myself to look at Sick, really look, for the first time, and compare it to what else I know. What else I’ve seen.

  Dylan, in his hospital bed. Watching even the nurses avoid eye contact with him.

  Charlotte’s empty room.

  Here is what I realize: Real Sick doesn’t talk about itself.

  Real Sick whimpers and turns its back to the door. Real Sick is quieter than the noises in the room. Real Sick whispers underneath the sound of the monitors and the pumps and the optimistic voices of well-intentioned visitors.

  Real Sick sits patiently in the waiting room for as long as it takes. Real Sick does not ask the receptionist for the second time how late the doctor is running. Real Sick knows the value of time.

  Real Sick savors the taste, the essence of minutes.

  I sit in the waiting room, my lie-spattered paperwork resting in my lap, and I understand what’s going on. I’m competing with these slow-moving people, these Sick people, for a golden ticket—a slot in an experimental treatment for people with a family history of dying in a really terrible way. I’m bullshitting my way through the forms so that I can take a chance away from someone who really needs it.

  You probably want me to tell you that I stand up immediately and storm out, don’t you? Took A Stand. Did The Right Thing.

  Sorry to fuck up your after-school special. This is not what I do.

  It’s five hundred dollars.

  i’m sick too

  I don’t walk out.

  I finish filling out the paperwork, drafting page after page of fiction. I answer the questions exactly the
way Dougie told me to.

  sick in the head sick at heart

  How do you like me now?

  But there’s this one lady sitting in the corner. Same as everybody else in the room—middle-aged and ancient all at the same time. A used-up sponge. Unlike everyone else, though, this lady has a kid with her. A boy. About nine years old, maybe? That age when most kids are kind of ugly, with teeth too big for their heads and awkward haircuts. He’s ugly like that. And this homely, big-toothed kid keeps glancing over at his mom with this look on his face that just about punches me in the gut. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like this cesspool of hope and fear and resignation and horror, all spun together in a fucking nine-year-old’s eyes. It’s like he can’t even look at his mom without imagining her dying, right there in front of him. He just looks so goddamn helpless and hopeful and so fucking sad.

  I stand there with the finished paperwork in my hand, watching this kid watching his mom. And all I can think about is what if I get into the study, and that kid’s mom doesn’t? For all I know, it’s a first-come, first-served system, and the lady’s hand is shaking so much it’s taking her forever to fill out the paperwork. I’m standing there in the middle of the room like an idiot, willing her to just hurry the fuck up, get her paperwork turned in before I do. I even start getting mad at her for taking so long. Lady, you gotta want this more, I want to yell at her. You need to act less starved and more hungry.

  No kid should have that kind of look on his face. No kid should have to feel like that.

  So, finally, I leave.

  Reluctantly.

  Slowly.

  Subtracting money from my pocket with every step until I reach the door with nothing at all.

  How d’you like me now?

  PerpetuNever

  The doctor frowns at the piece of paper while I hold my breath. He sits back and steeples his fingers in silence, making me wait for what I can already tell is going to be a no.

  “I’m only asking for a day pass,” I say. I keep my voice soft. Nonconfrontational, with no jagged edges. “Just to get out and walk around a bit. Visit some friends.”

  control my mind control my feet control my voice

  “But what do you hope to accomplish with that, Audie? Especially considering what happened last time. We’ve seen several times now that outside influences too early in your recovery process tend to set you back. I’m inclined to advise against it for now, but we can revisit the issue during your next appointment if you really feel like you’re ready.”

  “Okay.”

  He pauses. Waits for anger and argument and fists and shouts. When none appear he smiles, makes a small note in his file. “Don’t feel discouraged, Audie. I think we’re close. Very close.”

  I nod and tether my stare to the edge of his desk.

  “The new medication seems to be working well. How about the blackouts? Have you had any recently?”

  “No.”

  I feel his disappointment with my one-word answer. He wants cartwheels and gratitude for his work. He wants me to worship at the same altar of pills he does. I try to generate a more enthusiastic response, but my voice is slow to cooperate lately and nothing comes out.

  “No blackouts at all since our last appointment?” He sounds skeptical.

  “No, none,” I say. Technically it’s true. True-ish. I no longer have grave-sized hunks cored out of my weeks. Hours and days no longer wander off, never to be seen or heard from again.

  But.

  Of course there’s a but.

  But the order of things is … off. Things that can’t possibly have happened appear in my mind as memories. Ancient history recurs on a random Tuesday.

  The sequence of my life is all wrong lately. Dead people show up at birthday parties. I wake up in houses that burned down years ago. I find myself in the middle of tasks I never would have agreed to.

  It’s no longer so much a matter of blacking out as it is a problem of blocking out, though. As in, I’m no longer able to block out those parts of life I’d rather not experience.

  I don’t even try to explain this to the doctor. It must be the pills he’s giving me—his oh-so-carefully crafted treatment plan—but I don’t want him to know this. I hate to disappoint people.

  Starting today I’ll cut back. Maybe spit out every other dose when the nurse isn’t looking. No reason for anyone else to know.

  See? I’m already starting to feel better, just thinking about it.

  Chapter 35

  I’ve lost my keys, and Jameson’s not home to let me in.

  This is what I get for trying to do the right thing: empty pockets.

  I close my eyes, do that trick where you try to visualize the last place you saw something, but all I get is a headache. I paw through my pockets, but for the life of me I can’t remember where the keys should be, much less where they are. I can’t even conjure up the muscle memory for the way they should feel if I had them, for the heft of the key ring in my hand, can’t even remember how many keys there should be. Were they on a key ring? They must have been, so why can’t I picture it?

  When I was eight, the spare house key was in a rusty Altoids tin, behind a cobwebby planter full of long-dead ferns. I always held my breath as I reached into the dark, spidery space to fish it out.

  When I was thirteen, my foster father du jour made a big deal of giving me a key on a ring with a little silver teddy bear on it. “Giving you this key to my house proves I trust you, Audie. Do you trust me?” I can still feel his humid whisper in my ear, extra quiet so no one else would hear.

  I can remember a half dozen other key-ring configurations, other secret hiding places—magnetic boxes, fake rocks with clever, key-sized hollows in the center. So why can’t I picture the keys I need to open my apartment now?

  The black holes in my mind are growing again. The headaches are getting worse.

  I’m too freaked out to try any more of the studies Charlotte has in her appointment book today, so I sit on the ground and pull out my phone. My hands are shaking, so it takes me a minute to shuffle through my list of contacts to find Dylan’s latest phone number. How many times can one guy lose a cell phone, anyway? I have each version saved: Dylan(a), Dylan(b), Dylan(c). I dial Dylan(d), hoping it’s the right one. The latest one.

  When he answers, it makes the blackness recede a bit. “Hey!” he says. He sounds good—better than he has in a long time. I can feel his health, his energy, coursing through the phone line. I feel better immediately.

  “Hey back. What’re you doing right now?”

  “Not much. Thinking about you, of course.” He says it in that teasing, suggestive way that always makes me laugh. It’s amazing what just hearing his voice does for me. It’s infinitely better than any fucking pill.

  “I’m at my place right now, but I’m locked out. Are you anywhere near the hospital? I can be there in five minutes, meet you for coffee or something.”

  “A date in the hospital cafeteria, huh? I always knew you were an incurable romantic. I’m on my way—can’t wait.”

  I flinch a little when he says incurable. I can’t help it. I hate that so many words are off-limits, tainted by association. It makes me wish I could order up the mental equivalent of a colon cleanse. Just purge the bad thoughts—let them spill out your ears in filthy torrents, like the messy aftermath of an old-fashioned enema. An emotional laxative. Prozaxative.

  There’d be a huge market for a drug like that. I’m surprised no one else has thought of it.

  I push myself up off the ground and balance against the door for a minute until the wavy lines clear from my vision. One of the pills I’m taking is doing a number on my equilibrium lately.

  I totter the short walk to the hospital wishing I had sunglasses, since the bright sunlight is laser-beaming even more pain into my skull. I’m sure I’m quite a sight, with my drun
ken-sailor walk and my face scrunched up against the daylight. Not to mention my jeans, which are hanging off my body like they belong to someone twice my size. When did I start shrinking again?

  I’m so focused on cursing the midday sunlight that I don’t think about the fact that, duh, Audie, it’s so fucking bright because it’s the middle of the day, and the middle of the day is when Dylan is supposed to be in school.

  I forget normal things like that a lot. I don’t have a lot of normal in my life, so it feels strange when I know someone who does. Like the other day, Dylan was talking about going to the mall with his mom to buy new shoes, and the whole idea of that just blew me away. I mean, he might as well have said they were about to board a rocket ship for a family vacation to Mars, that’s just how crazy his normal life stuff feels to me.

  So I’m thinking about how weirdly normal Dylan is, realizing too late that he shouldn’t be meeting me here in the middle of the day, when I push my way through the glass doors of the cafeteria. He’s nowhere to be seen.

  Of course he isn’t. It’s the middle of the day.

  I just stand there, and the black holes in my memory start joining forces with the headache that’s tearing up my vision, and I start feeling more and more confused. Wait, was it just now that I called Dylan? I start wondering. Or am I remembering a call from a different day?

  I’m standing there, half freaked out and half-laughing at myself for being such a space cadet, when Dougie comes up to me from behind and grabs my elbow, spinning me around so that I face him.