Placebo Junkies Page 20

  fact: a thing that is indisputably true.

  indisputable: impossible to question or doubt.

  It’s a problematic definition, if you stop to think about it. I mean, how many things in life are truly impossible to question?

  Your health? Your wealth? Your relationships? Your safety?

  Your hairline, your waistline, your paycheck, your plans? I’ll shut up about it now—you get the picture. The list is endless.

  I, for one, am capable of questioning anything and everything.

  Here is how I know I am not yet “well,” by any stretch of the imagination: The whole time I’m walking around the hospital, I’m looking for Dylan. I can’t help it—it’s like a reflex. A habit. I’m a goddamn placebo junkie, addicted to the fake-out cure of my factless, delusional world.

  Just close your eyes and click your heels together three times …

  And now on top of all the rest of it, I’m also questioning everything I thought I knew about Charlotte. Is she dead, my bright-light, hot-sauce, scheming-twirling-singing friend, or is she just locked away in the hospital equivalent of an attic somewhere?

  But I entertain these questions without any real sense of hope. If she’s locked away, there’s a high likelihood that she’s functionally, if not factually, dead. Charlotte would never consent to life in a cage.

  But then again, nothing is truly indisputable.

  It makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Or maybe my head was already hurting. Things are still a bit jumbled in the wasteland north of my shoulders.

  I make my way to the back parking lot, still surprised not to be stopped or even questioned. Jameson is already there, waiting in his car—something shitty and dented and red. I use it as a test. Have I ever ridden in this car with Jameson? I ask the newly awakened part of my brain. No, says the less crazy part. It sounds reasonably confident.

  “Have I ever driven anywhere with you?” I ask Jameson when I slide into the passenger seat.

  “No,” he says. “Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure.”

  Score one for a correct answer. I need to learn which sectors of my memories I can rely on, particularly before I start asking him the important questions. I need to be able to judge whether he’s lying to me.

  Jameson looks me over, head to toe, before he starts to drive. He nods, satisfied, like he knows exactly what he’s looking at. “Mm-hmm, I thought so. You’re pulling out of it again. Good for you.”

  “How can you tell?” I ask him.

  He grins. “Audie, I know you better than just about anyone. Definitely better than fucking Dr. O’Brien, that quack, knows you. Who do you think watches out for you when you’re deep in it?”

  “Deep in what exactly?” I’m hoping he has a word for it—something to call what I’m going through. Something to call what I am. I need an anchor.

  He shakes his head. “Nuh-uh. You’re not going to get me with that. Every new doc who comes through this place has a different diagnosis for you. Conveniently enough, it usually coincides with whatever drug their pharmaceutical sponsor of choice is hawking. But you’re a bit of a moving target. There’s no one obvious thing, like there is for most of the people here. But, hey, that’s what makes you interesting, right?” He winks at me.

  “What’s wrong with Scratch?”

  Jameson honks at someone who cuts him off, swearing softly. “Oh, he’s a kick, isn’t he? Morgellons. Delusional parasitosis. He thinks he’s infested with alien fibers. Like, fully convinced of it. You wouldn’t believe what that poor guy has done to try to get the imaginary critters out of his skin—the dude’ll use anything he can get his hands on to pick, or scrape, or worse. Have you seen the scars on his back? He tried to burn the fibers out with acid. That particular stunt is what finally earned him his entrance ticket here.”

  “He did all that to himself?” My stomach turns just thinking of the peeling skin, the oozing sores, the pockmarks. The fact that it’s self-mutilation just makes it all so much worse.

  But then my mind zip-lines back to the magazine I found in Dr. O’Brien’s briefcase—the piercing and stitching and impaling I saw in the photo spreads, and how much it upset me to be compared to the people who chose to do those things to their bodies—and all of a sudden I see it differently.

  Now I see poor, altered souls in search of just the right adjustment. A prescription, a doctrine, a nose ring, a diploma, a plane ticket. We’re all always a step or two away from being a finished product.

  “Sure did. But his new meds are working pretty well, so he may get out soon. Hey …” Jameson turns and looks sharply at me. “Now that you’re lucid again, or whatever you want to call it, you know you can’t tell anyone that I talk to you about the other patients, right? I’m one more write-up away from a suspension as it is.”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I say. Who would believe me, anyway? I sure as hell wouldn’t. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “We have a few stops to make before we get to the testing center.”

  It’s a nonanswer, but I don’t push for more. I don’t really care where we’re going, or how long it takes to get there—it’s not as if I have anywhere better to be. I lean my seat back and stare at a star-shaped chip in the windshield. But then I sit up straight again, only to be practically garroted by the seat belt. My muscles twitch, fighting involuntarily against the familiar feeling of restraint.

  “Wait a minute—you said the testing center. Are you telling me that testing is real? That’s really how I make money? I mean, it’s actually a thing, getting paid to take meds?” I had convinced myself that this was another Dylan. A distortion of reality designed to make my shitty life more palatable.

  Jameson sighs. “I’m just going to write this down for you one of these days. Save me from the trouble of having to explain it every time.”

  “Tell me again. Please.”

  So he explains. Again.

  The guinea pig thing, bills for pills, is real. Sort of. It’s another one of those facts-braided-with-lies things. Sometimes I get paid to take medicine. Sometimes I just think I do.

  He laughs when he describes it. “Girl, you know I love you, but you can be a real pain in the ass sometimes when you don’t want to take your meds. And just try to drag your ass into a treatment room when you don’t want to go—you’ve given me more than one black eye.” He turns and winks at me. “So, you can’t really blame me if sometimes I let you believe you’re getting paid for it. I mean, I don’t out-and-out lie to you about it. You do all that yourself. But maybe I do encourage you a little more than I should. Like your fake blog thing. I like reading it, though. And you are a good writer.”

  I feel myself shrinking in the seat. “But sometimes I do get paid. Right? At least something?”

  “Oh, sure. You all do it—I think the whole system would implode if you didn’t, since the university would be shit out of luck for getting human subjects for their research. And no research results would mean no more corporate funding. No more corporate funding, no fancy university hospital. So it doesn’t really matter if O’Brien doesn’t like it,” Jameson says. “The hospital makes the rules, not him, and they sure as hell don’t want to lose their handy-dandy stable of in-house volunteers. Plus, he can’t really stop you unless he restricts you to the ward.”

  He honks as another car cuts him off, and then his voice turns catty. “And if he restricts you to the ward, your file automatically comes up before the quarterly review panel. He definitely doesn’t want that. You want to talk about some seriously shady experimental methods …” He winks at me again, like I’m in on the joke. Which, of course, I’m not. “Since you’re already right there on the hospital grounds, then it’s easy enough for you to sign up for studies. And lord knows, they’re not picky about who they get. Case in point … “He puts the car in park and points at the line of people snaking around a buil
ding.

  It’s a thready, undisciplined queue—the type of line formed by people who have to wait, not by people who want to wait. There are four men to every woman, most of them hiding underneath pulled-up hoods or pulled-down hats. I’m not surprised in the least when I finally spot the sign and see that we’re parked outside a methadone clinic.

  “Here, help me out, would you? You start at the back of the line, I’ll start from the front, and we’ll meet in the middle.” He shoves a handful of flyers at me. “Just make sure they understand they need to hand in this paper when they get to the testing center. Look, it’s coded, see? Otherwise, we don’t get our referral fee.” He points to a tiny string of numbers printed at the bottom of every page.

  On the flyers are short, simple words—an easy-reader message for the quasi-literate. More space is dedicated to the address and directions than the actual point of the flyers: New Drug Study Seeks Volunteers. “Cash Compensation” is advertised in bold colorful print—once at the top of the page, then again at the bottom.

  It takes several more stops until I fully appreciate the scope of our task: We’re passing out invitations to the world’s least exclusive party.

  Jameson’s route takes us to all the wrong parts of town. Homeless shelters. The city bus terminal. A shabby medical clinic. It’s a tour of the down-and-out; add in a mental institution and you’ll have a royal flush.

  Oh, wait …

  We’ll split things seventy-five/twenty-five, Jameson tells me. The more people we get to sign up, the more money we get.

  It’s a good deal for them, Jameson tells me. They get the meds they need, plus more cash than they’ve seen in a long time.

  We’re doing a good thing, he says.

  All the doctors do it, he says, even the ones don’t like to talk about it. “Just look at Dr. O’Brien. That smug bastard acts like he’s above all this, but he’s raking in the grant money left and right. Where do you think that comes from? Who do you think puts up the money for those big grants? You think his regular salary bought him that shiny new Lexus?”

  The pharmaceutical companies need to test their new medications on someone, he says. And this is a big one. A big study. It could do a lot of good for a lot of people someday. There’s only one way to know.

  It makes my veins tingle, just listening to him. A buzzing sound low in my brain hums along with his words.

  Our last stop, an underpass just outside city center, is the worst of the bunch. It’s the tail end of the tent city that meanders around the wrong side of the tracks—a post-apocalyptic stomping ground for people barely hanging on. We park next to a scrubby bush that’s been decorated Christmas-tree-style with empty plastic bags and used condoms.

  As we step out of the car, a bedraggled gray-haired woman shuffles up to us with a lopsided grin. The left side of her face droops uselessly as she greets Jameson.

  “Mary!” Jameson calls out, like he’s genuinely pleased to see her. “How’re you doing? Up for another round? Same pay, as long as you’ve waited the thirty days.” He winks at her when he says this—has he always been such a big winker?—and I get the impression that whatever rules govern this system are loose at best.

  She grabs one of the flyers with a clawed hand and walks away. “Oh god. Jameson, look.” My hand flies involuntarily up to my mouth. She’s wearing only a bathrobe, and she’s wearing it backward. It trails open behind her, revealing filthy bare skin and evidence that she’s soiled herself, probably more than once. Slept in it, too, it looks like. “Oh god,” I say again.

  “I have a few blankets in my trunk,” Jameson says to me, handing me the keys to his car. “I gave her some clothes last time, but what’re you going to do? We can’t force her in off the streets. She’s been in and out of the system for years—she’s a tough old bird. Talk about a survivor. “

  I run to his car, grab a stack of blankets, then hurry after Mary. She’s easy to catch—she doesn’t seem to move very quickly. Plus, she’s only wearing one shoe—a man’s boot. Her other foot is protected by a thick layering of dirty socks.

  “Just one, honey. Weather’s getting warmer. It’ll be hot as fire soon enough, you’ll see,” she says to me with her slanted grin as she pulls a single blanket off the pile I offer her. “Keep the rest for yourself. Least I got me some padding—you’re just skin and bones. Heat’s coming, but that don’t always stop the cold. I know you know what I mean.”

  She cackles softly, then spits, and when she turns and walks away from me I see the tattoos crawling up her back. Circles made from snakes, four of them, rising above the dried shit caking her skin. Four serpents destroying themselves atop her knobby, bruised spine.

  They’re the same tattoos I saw on Charlotte’s back just before she died.

  If, in fact, she died. Neither side of my brain feels certain about that yet.

  “Mary?” I want to ask her about the snakes, but she waves me off without even turning around. She’s muttering to herself about the weather, and she can’t be bothered with the likes of me. “Hot as fire,” she’s saying again as she walks away. “I know you know.”

  Chapter 43

  In Valediction

  Well, hello there, faithful readers.

  Or shall I address you simply as the voices in my head?

  No, no, you’re right. Let’s not drop the charade just yet. It’s a productive conversation, in any event, regardless of how you classify our relationship here.

  If a blogger shits on the Web and nobody clicks on it … ?

  Anyway. For today’s topic, let’s move outside ourselves for a moment. It’s so easy to get focused on our own bottom line, on the me, me, me of it all, that sometimes we forget to examine the motives of people around us. People whose behavior and decisions may be controlling our behavior and decisions.

  People who hold invisible keys.

  When you don’t even know you’re locked in a cage, you don’t realize how limited your options are. And then you just end up chasing your own tail.

  Ha ha—see what I did there? Oh, sorry. Inside joke. I’ll explain some other time.

  Moving on.

  Up until now we’ve been focused on the microeconomics of the testing world. Who will pay how much for which study. Oh, and how much each of those pills or procedures is going to hurt, of course. We’ve been distracted by all the talk about this scalpel, and that side effect. How am I going to feel today? Will I still have that rash tomorrow? Which of my friends will end up in a morgue, and which one will stick a knife in my back?

  The shitty nitty-gritty.

  Because that’s all you can see when you’re locked in a cage.

  But when you get out of that cage, escape even for a moment, all of a sudden you see the big picture. The macroeconomics, you could say.

  Do you remember anything from your econ class? If you even made it that far in school, obviously. Does GDP ring a bell? Gross domestic product? It’s the total value of all the crap a country produces in a year.

  Yeah, snoozefest. I know. But let’s talk about the guinea pig version, which I think is a little more interesting:

  Gross Domestic Pain (GDP): The total value of all the things you’ve ever taken. Pills and kicks and slaps. Insults you’ve sucked up, bullshit you’ve tolerated. Electrodes on your skull, a stranger’s hands on you, in you, holding you down, holding you back. An experimental cough syrup. A prison sentence. A needle in your spine. The endless grief of everyday life.

  Because, really, isn’t it all the same?

  Gross Domestic Pain: the value of everything you’ve ever absorbed.

  So what?

  What’s the fucking point?

  To be honest, chickadee(s), I’m not really sure. But I guess if I’ve learned anything, anything at all from this lab-rat life, it’s the importance of control. The importance of taking all the crap life has thrown at you a
ll these years, and turning it back on the crap flingers.

  So use your GDP, my silent, invisible friends. Add up all the pain you’ve accrued over the course of your lifetime. And once you’re sure there’s enough—that is, once you’re certain you’ve had enough—then cash out and spend it wisely.

  And never look back.

  Chapter 44

  Once our stack of flyers is exhausted, we drive in Jameson’s shitty, dented car to a shitty, dented strip mall in a shitty, dented part of town, where a testing center sits between two vacant storefronts. clinic says the sign masking-taped to the door.

  This is not a place for healing, says everything in sight.

  Jameson tucks his shirt into his pants before we walk in. Smoothes his hair. Stands a little taller.

  We go inside and he cuts through the crowded waiting room to an office door in the back. He knocks once, then opens the door without waiting for an answer.

  I know without being told that I’m to wait in the lobby, so I sit down in an empty chair in the back of the room. I can still hear him from here. He’s talking in a different voice than he uses with me, a little deeper and maybe a little louder, and he’s using words like clinical assessment and population and inclusion criteria. He doesn’t do his throat-clearing thing, not even once, and he doesn’t sound like an orderly anymore.

  Here, he sounds like a guy with a well-tucked-in shirt who’s read lots of medical journals. Here, he looks like a man who’s in control of his life.

  Naughty little schemer.

  I can’t see the person he’s speaking to inside the office, but I can hear a woman’s voice murmuring sounds of agreement and appreciation. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one who’s been tricked into believing in a fictional version of Jameson.

  He looks over his shoulder, then closes the door so I can’t hear what’s being said anymore. Denied, I focus instead on the people sitting around me in various states of quiet agitation. It’s depressing as hell, the view from here, and I wish I had waited in the car.