Placebo Junkies Read online

  “Let’s go get takeout somewhere and eat it in the park. I don’t even care what as long as it’s spicy. The spicier the better. I know—let’s do Thai. The newish place on the corner. No, never mind. Not Thai. Last time we ate there I itched for three days. I think I’m developing an allergy to lemongrass. Is that even possible? Whatever, let’s get Indian instead.”

  She starts singing a stupid song she makes up as she goes along, Vindaloo, for me and you, and doing this stupid little hula dance move as we walk. She’s gone from catatonic to manic in about ninety seconds flat, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t even realize that she shut down completely for a few minutes.

  “We can get whatever you want, as long as you’re paying,” I tell her. “Since you cost me twenty-five bucks back there.”

  She gives me a one-eyebrow-up look that could be interpreted as either puzzled or annoyed, but then throws her hands in the air and shrugs flamboyantly. “Whatever, cheapskate. I’ll pay, but I’m gonna tell them to make it so hot it’s gonna burn just as much coming out as it does going in.” She takes off skipping—seriously, skipping—down the block, and doesn’t look back. Holla, holla, tikka masala! I can hear her singing at the top of her lungs.

  “What. The. Fuck,” I whisper. Then, louder, “I’m not going to skip after you, Charlotte!” I curse myself under my breath as I speed up into a trot.

  By the time I catch up to her at the restaurant she’s already ordering. “Excuse me?” the man behind the cash register is saying. I’ve been here a few times with Charlotte, and I’ve never seen the guy be anything other than friendly, but he doesn’t look so friendly now.

  “I said, five-alarm ass-fire spicy,” Charlotte says in a voice too loud for the room. The other customers all look up from their food to stare.

  “Jesus, Charlotte,” I say behind her. “Can you chill out a little?”

  The restaurant guy’s face goes hard, and without saying another word he scrawls something on the order slip and then hands it back through the window into the kitchen, where I can see another man cooking in a small, crowded space. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he’d written instructions to put some choice ingredient other than spices in our food. I probably would’ve, anyway.

  I convince Charlotte to wait with me outside the restaurant. Make that: I wait, she paces. Once our food is ready, handed over in thin-lipped silence by the guy behind the counter, we commandeer one of the two benches in the tiny park across the street.

  “Holy fuck, this is spicy,” I say after a few bites. I can feel beads of sweat forming on my upper lip, and my tongue feels like it’s being attacked by fire ants. Charlotte doesn’t even seem to notice—she’s eating her way through one of the takeout containers like she hasn’t seen food in a month.

  I blow my nose into a napkin and wish I’d ordered something to drink—anything to quench the fire in my mouth. “Dylan loves spicy food, too; I should bring him here. But I think I’ll have to limit myself to two- or three-alarm ass-fire spicy. I can’t handle it this hot.” I say it as a joke—I’m just trying to fit into Charlotte’s manic, silly mood—but something dark flashes across her face and she tosses her half-full container of food in the general direction of a garbage can and misses by a mile.

  “Yeah, you do that,” she says, all the bounce gone from her voice as fast as it came. “You go right on ahead and bring Dylan here for your next little date.”

  I bite my lip and stop talking. I can’t keep up with her mood swings. But I also probably should’ve known better than to bring up Dylan. Charlotte’s always been a little weird about him. Like, she’ll be perfectly nice to his face most of the time, but then she’ll occasionally get all huffy and prickly when he stays the night, practically treating him like a home invader if she happens to run into him in the morning. “Geez, I hope no one ever gives that chick a real weapon,” I remember Dylan saying once after she threw a fork at him because she claimed he sneaked up on her. “Is she the morality police around here, or what?”

  And once at the hospital I saw her walk right by him in the hallway—she didn’t even acknowledge him, like he wasn’t even worth the effort of a freaking single-syllable greeting. She didn’t know I was walking right behind her, or she probably wouldn’t have been such a blatant bitch to him—fork-throwing aside, her snubs are usually a little more subtle than that. I never said anything to her about it, but it still bugs me. Dylan doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.

  I don’t know if it’s a jealousy thing, or what, the way she is about him. I’m not going to ask her about it right now, though. Not when she’s acting this weird about everything.

  I’m about to take off—I’m not going to sit there and listen to her start trashing Dylan—when she apologizes. “I’m sorry, Audie, don’t be mad. I’ve just got such a raging headache right now I can’t even think straight.”

  She moans a little and bends over at the waist, cupping her head in her hands. She lets out a few more groans, like she’s being tortured, and after a minute she peeks over at me to make sure I’m paying attention. When she sees that I see her checking, she grins like a Cheshire cat.

  “Okay, drama queen,” I say. “You can knock off the misery show. I forgive you.”

  She sits up and shakes her head from side to side a few times, the way you do when you have water in your ears. “No show; I really do feel weird.” She opens her eyes extra wide at me, bats her eyelashes a few times. “Audie, can you do me the hugest favor ever? Pretty please?”

  She wants me to take her two o’clock appointment. It’s the third in a series of four clinic visits, and she doesn’t want to get kicked out before she gets paid. “Please, Audie?” she whines. “I feel like hell. My head is seriously killing me right now.”

  She does look pale and shaky. And even if she’s 95 percent full of shit, I know she’d do it for me if I asked. That’s what friends are for, right? Not to mention the fact that we’re supposed to be business partners now, in a manner of speaking.

  “I’ll split the money with you fifty/fifty,” she says. “I’m pretty sure it’s just a blood draw at this visit. If you were a real friend, you’d do it for free.”

  “Make it seventy-five/twenty-five,” I say, and when she agrees immediately I know I could’ve bargained even harder. Still, money is money.

  “Just tell me where to go,” I sigh.

  Chapter 12

  I make it about ten paces before the obvious problem occurs to me and I turn back. “I can’t just walk in and say that I’m you—they already know what you look like.”

  Charlotte isn’t worried, though. “Don’t flatter yourself. You of all people should have figured out by now that we’re all interchangeable. Besides, it’s a bunch of interns and research fellows and third-world immigrant doctors who can’t land a real hospital job here. I’ve never seen the same person twice. They don’t know and they don’t care who shows up, as long as their paperwork’s in order.”

  But I’m still hesitant, so she rolls her eyes at me and then rummages around the scabby leather sack she uses for a purse. She pulls out her driver’s license and flings it at me. “Here. On the zero percent chance they even bother asking for ID, give them this.” She perks up as a new tactic occurs to her. “In fact, want to make a wager? Double or nothing says they don’t ask for identification. Come on, just for fun.”

  “No, I don’t want to bet on it.” I look at the license. “I don’t look even remotely like you in this picture.”

  Charlotte snorts. “I don’t look even remotely like me in that picture.”

  She has a point. The photo must have been taken a few hair color changes and a few piercings ago, because Charlotte looks almost wholesome in it, or at least a whole lot less bleach-y and spike-y and rage-y than she looks these days.

  I’m still wavering when my phone starts to ring, and I know it’s probably Dylan. I make it a point
not to even sneak a look, since Charlotte’s being so weird about him, but it doesn’t make a difference. “Go ahead, answer it,” she says in a quiet voice. “Wouldn’t want to miss a call from Mr. Perfect.”

  I shove her driver’s license in my pocket and walk away, partly because I don’t want to argue with her anymore, but mostly because she’s right—I don’t want to miss his call.

  At least I’m consistent.

  Chapter 13

  Math for Guinea Pigs.

  Or: Show Me the Money!

  I’m no math whiz. Ask me to divide by anything over ten and you’re gonna have to pass me a calculator. But these things are pretty straightforward once you accept that this whole “volunteer” gig is actually a business. A mutually beneficial, pain-based economy, if you will. Here are a few equations you should know:

  Supply = You

  You are the commodity. The guns and the butter. You are the sum of your fluids, your pressures, your lymphocyte counts, your cells. Your value lies in your blood, your waste, and your mitochondrial minutiae. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re part of a research team—you’re renting out your body the same way a back-alley hooker rents out her snatch. Really, the only difference is that you’re turning your tricks at the cellular level.

  Demand = (Profits)/(Volunteers)

  Hoo boy, but you can smell pharma-greed from a mile away. Want to know where the deep-pocket studies are? Look for the glossy recruitment ads and promises of free crap. (If I had a nickel for every ugly-ass canvas tote bag with a pharmaceutical logo on it … ) It’s simple: the more money the corporate man behind the curtain stands to make from a safe-enough pill, the more money you can make for being the first one dumb enough to swallow it.

  Reward = (Risk)x(Pain)

  Oh yeah, you’re a tough one, all right. A genuine badass. Bring on the needles, you say. Take your pound of flesh! Well, guess what, tough guy? Patience. Sometimes the real pain only comes knocking a whole lot later, and that’s a whole different set of equations altogether.

  Word Problem: How many X-rays and CT scans now equal one walnut-sized tumor a decade down the road?

  Word Problem: How many years until the doctors find out those pesky little green pills have been silently chip-chip-chipping away at your kidney function and you end up aboard the Dialysis Express?

  Word Problem: How long before that itsy-bitsy spider of a blood clot ambles out of its hidey-hole in the crook of your vein and creeps its way to your lungs or your brain?

  Aw, frowny face. Our fourth-grade teachers lied to us, boys and girls. Math isn’t always fun, is it?

  If X, then Y …

  No cutting in line! The order of things matters a great deal in the testing world, so queue up accordingly. The first tests are done on animals, of course—monkeys and rabbits and rats, oh my. If enough fuzzy-wuzzy bunnies make it through round one alive and kicking, the grim reapers of research move on, setting their sights on the junkies, the indigents, and the professional guinea pigs for round two. (Ahem. This is where we come in.) Next come the college students. Then come the ailing minimum-wagers—legit sick people whose crappy, barely-there health plans and stretched-to-broke budgets don’t have room for things like “proven” cures. Only then, at long, long last and hopefully not too many testing oopsies later, will anything ever be tried on the upstanding citizens from Planet Properly Insured. Everyone eventually gets their turn, as long as they’re not dying of impatience (see what I did there?).

  So, it may not be fun, but I told you math for guinea pigs was simple. And now, what better way than to conclude with a few lines from Kenny Rogers, the patron saint of gambling fools:

  Every gambler knows

  That the secret to survivin’

  Is knowin’ what to throw away

  And knowin’ what to keep

  ‘Cause every hand’s a winner

  And every hand’s a loser

  And the best that you can hope for

  Is to die in your sleep

  Gamble on, guinea pigs!

  Chapter 14

  The thing about testing is that you have to get used to overriding a lot of normal reactions.

  Imagine a burly guy coming at you, a large-bore needle in his hand. I’m not talking about one of those harmless little slivers they use when you get a tetanus booster, either. No, the thing in this guy’s hand looks like the goddamn Excalibur of syringes. Assuming you haven’t bolted from the room yet, maybe you also start to have a few concerns about the guy’s hygiene. Like, as he gets closer, maybe you see that he has orange Cheetos dust from lunch still staining his fingers. Maybe he’s got greasy spatters on his scrubs, and his breath smells like a dog’s ass. You take a close look at his face and maybe his eyes are a little bloodshot, and he’s obviously on autopilot, not even paying attention to what he’s doing with that needle in one hand as he kneads your limbs with the other, searching for a nice, meaty spot to violate. Maybe he’s not even looking as he presses that silver-sharp tip against your flesh, because he’s too busy bitching to his coworker on the other side of the room about how they’re cutting lab-tech hours again, and how’s he supposed to make his car payment without overtime?

  Normal reaction: run the other direction as fast as your goddamn feet’ll carry you. It’s a no-brainer, right?

  Or, let’s say some lady hands you a cream. She tells you it’s definitely going to sting, most likely going to burn, and quite possibly leave you badly scarred, maybe even disfigured for life. She hands you a clipboard with a ten-point scale on it, tells you to circle a number every five minutes to indicate how much pain you’re experiencing. Leave it on for as long as you can stand it, she tells you. She’ll just be working in the next room over. Don’t worry, she says, I’ll hear you if you scream.

  Normal reaction? Shit-can the stuff, tell the lady to go fuck herself.

  It’s survival instinct. Fight or flight, lizard-brain stuff. Fear is the gift that keeps on giving—an anniversary present from the slithering and slope-skulled creatures we evolved from. The willingness to say fuck this scene and run is what kept your Neanderthal ancestors off the sharp end of a woolly mammoth tusk.

  But guinea pigs have to turn it all off, ignore all those millions of years of hard-knock-life lessons. Hey, Great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- grandma, awesome job outrunning all those saber-toothed tigers, but I got this under control now. And that’s hard to do at first. You have to figure out ways to psych yourself up, to walk toward the tiger. It takes a while, sometimes, to be able to do that.

  And that’s how I met Jameson.

  I was in the hallway, leaning against a wall while I waited for the shaking to stop, and for my stomach to stop heaving and lurching like two sea monsters humping. I was trying, but not succeeding, to talk myself into going back into the room I’d just fled. I was not in a happy place.

  I may have been yelling something about sadistic bastards and torture chambers. It’s kind of a blur.

  To my left was a door. Behind the door was a doctor, a nurse, and a human skid mark of a lab administrator, all waiting for me to override my fear, my disgust, my pride, and my last vestiges of self-preservation, and walk back in to submit to the rest of their program.

  I was trying, I really was. Just maybe not hard enough. “You can tell Dr. Jekyll in there I’m not swallowing any more of his poison!” I may have yelled. “Fucking barbarians!” I wasn’t really in the right state of mind for this kind of thing yet.

  It’s that mind-body connection people are always yapping about. Your body won’t consent until your mind signs off on the plan.

  Anyway, Jameson, who I’d never even seen before, walked over, parked himself next to me and offered me a stick of gum, which I did not accept. Candy from strangers and all that. “You’re only making it harder on yourself,” he said. “They get paid either way. You, on the other hand, do not.”
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br />   “Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t go back in there for all the money in the world.” I remember spitting on the floor, just missing his feet. “Someone needs to tell Nurse Stalin in there to go back to her gulag.” I raised my voice and turned my head to yell at the closed door. “Go find some puppies to drown!”

  I was going through kind of a rough patch then—not exactly feeling friendly.

  But Jameson grinned. “Well, aren’t you feisty? Let me guess. You’re new around here.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” he said. “Do what you need to do, but I’ve been hanging around this place longer than pretty much anyone here, including the doctors. It may not seem like it, but you can actually make a pretty decent life for yourself here if you figure out how the system works. I can walk you around, show you the ropes a little, if you want.”

  Looking back, now I know that was just Jameson doing his den-mother, right-in-the-middle-of-everything thing. At the time, though, he made me nervous. I couldn’t figure out his game. “Why?” I asked him. “What do you want from me?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem interesting, I guess—you’ve got that whole feral, waifish thing working for you. And you curse like a champion. I always admire people who swear well.” He unwrapped a piece of gum and stuffed it in his mouth. “Besides, look around. This neighborhood is starting to go downhill. Like I said, I’m an old-timer here, so maybe I just have a vested interest in welcoming the right kind of people.”

  I followed his glance and looked around. He had my attention, if only because it had never even occurred to me that anyone did this sort of thing on a repeat basis, made a life out of it. Not that the idea appealed to me in the least, but it was interesting on a theoretical level. Completely batshit insane, obviously, but still interesting.