Placebo Junkies (10 page)

The first time I got high, it was the moon, full and round.

It was the warmth of the sun.

It was the tide, pulling and lulling in my veins.

It's no exaggeration to say that feeling, that pale, electric, shimmering sensation inside of me, was the light at the end of a tunnel. It was my first breath. It was my introduction to the world. It gave me my voice, that bliss-ed, bless-ed, drug-fueled moment—my first cry a chemical
hallelujah,
a filled-to-the-brim
amen.

Screw you.
Screw all of you who try to tell me it's not possible for me to remember it.

I remember it. I do.

I came out of the womb high as a kite. Every day since has been stained by the absence of that particular feeling, that singular, scene-setting cocktail of opioids and bulking agents (likely suspects, as per police reports thoughtfully included in my hospital discharge file: brick dust, crushed aspirin, sugar. Also, traces of rat feces).

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Audie. Haaaaaah-peeeee birthday to me.

But nothing will ever touch that feeling again. No drug in the world can give me
life
the way it did that first time, the day I was born, a yowling, yellow, smoosh-faced, too-early, too-small little tweaker baby, crying and shaking in my incubator with nurses tsk-tsking all around.

I remember it all, because every day since then has been an act of withdrawal.

The upside of being born an addict: nothing tempts me. That is to say, nothing satisfies. A twist in my junkie genetics has left me with all the cravings, the bone-deep needs, but none of the fix. I've already experienced the perfect high, and nothing else will ever come close. Not that I haven't tried—just that I've tried and failed. I have apathetic veins. Constipated opiate receptors. It's a shitty way to break a shitty cycle: I am stubbornly and hopelessly unaddicted.

It would be fair to say that my chemical indifference is rare among my fellow professional guinea pigs, however, and tonight a rousing game of Musical Pill Bottles is going on in the living room.
Par-tay!

A skinny blonde squints at the writing on the small container that ends up in her hands when the music stops. “What the fuck is this stuff going to do to me? I don't even
have
testicles!” She shrieks this loud enough for the whole room to hear, dry-swallows two of the pills, and then starts to laugh so hard she pisses herself, the stain spreading down both thighs, which only makes her laugh harder.

Things like this happen at a guinea pig party, which goes a long way toward explaining why you don't see many outsiders in attendance.

Because, incontinence. Also because, lesions.

See also: Vomiting. Flatulence. Drainage. Not exactly crowd-pleasers.

From my seat in the corner I spot at least four revelers carrying large bottles that look to be filled with apple juice, only it's not apple juice, of course. There's a big trial going on that requires participants to collect forty-eight hours of urine, and a party's no reason to slack on the job, so they rest their bottles full of piss-colored beer next to their bottles of beer-colored piss.

It ain't a pretty scene, but it sure is entertaining—something crazy
always
happens at guinea pig parties. There's just something liberating about handing your body over to science, jumping blindly into the pharmaceutical abyss. Plus, you've never seen anyone dance like a crowd of people all testing a government-sponsored substance designed to counteract the effects of hallucinogens.

I watch a tall, bald man on his hands and knees chasing his imaginary tail in the center of the room. Either he was in the control group, or someone might want to tell the researchers their taxpayer-sponsored psychedelic chastity belt isn't very effective at its current dosage. It's impressive, however, that the man is mere centimeters from actually achieving his goal and nipping himself on his own ass. All around him, the other guinea pigs cheer his efforts, and down the hall, Jameson is dominating a round of pharmaceutical logo bingo. “Pfizer,” the caller shouts out, and the other players groan as Jameson raises his hands in victory and scoops up his winnings.

Everyone is having a good time.

Everyone except me. Mostly, this is because my head feels like it's being pounded with a molten-hot sledgehammer—a burning, aching acheburn. Behind my eyes the pain claws to get out, releasing its venom into my blood.

Charlotte lurches by, also looking rough, and I wonder what she's on. The right half of her face is flushed and her pupils are the size of nickels, and whatever it is she's been taking, I'm pretty sure she shouldn't take any more of it. “Still waiting for your ‘boyfriend' to show up, Audie?” She makes little air quotes when she says it, then keeps walking. Staggering, more like it.

I'm quiet for a beat, but then something inside of me flares even brighter than the pain in my temple. I've been trying to be understanding, but everyone has a breaking point. “What's your problem, Charlotte?” I stand up and follow her down the hall. “Why do you have to be such a bitch when it comes to Dylan? I know you have issues, but you need to fuck off and let me be happy.”

She keeps walking like she doesn't hear me, which is completely impossible, since I might have sort of screamed it and I can feel everyone else in the room staring at me, but Charlotte just keeps going until she's out the door.

I stand there like an idiot. I have no idea what happened, why she's being so nasty. I thought we'd gotten past the Dylan argument during our little bathroom-counter chat, or at least agreed to disagree. But Charlotte obviously walked away from that conversation with a very different conclusion.

I try to shrug it off and go back to enjoying the party, but the fact is that I hadn't been enjoying the party in the first place, since Dylan has once again pulled a disappearing act.

I check my phone. Nothing. He promised he'd come tonight, but here I am, waiting, without receiving so much as a courtesy call to let me know he's running late.

Jameson comes up behind me and puts a drink in my hand. “What is this?” I ask, sniffing it.

“Drink up. It's exactly what you need right now, from the looks of things,” he says, leading me away from the door and out onto the cigarette-butt cemetery of a patio. “What's going on, Audie?” he asks.

All of a sudden—seriously, out of nowhere—I realize that I hate him. I know that sounds like a strong word, and I probably made it seem like I thought Jameson was such a great guy and all before, but I only really figure it out just now, standing on this shitty, butt-filled patio outside this shitty freakfest of a party, that I can't fucking stand him and the way he's always mooning around our apartment, like you can barely have your own space or a private conversation, because he's always inserting himself into whatever you're talking about, acting like he knows so much more about
everything
than everyone else.

I mean, a girl can change her mind, right?

“Just stay out of my life, Jameson!” I say, and stalk off to a lone, weather-beaten rattan chair on the opposite side of the patio—the perfect place for a good, solitary sulk. But before I do, I toss back the drink, whatever it is, and wince as the liquid burns its way down my throat. I may not be a druggie, but I'm also not opposed to a little high or a little low here and there.

Damn it, Dylan. Why aren't you here?

But deep down, I already know. He said he'd come, sure, but only after I practically begged him. It was obvious that he didn't want to, and I really can't blame him. The way Charlotte treats him is only part of it. He's too nice to say so, but I know the whole guinea pig life freaks him out, and our little talk about Why Audie Is a High School Dropout Loser probably didn't help, even if I didn't exactly tell him the whole story.

I feel the tingle of Jameson's mystery drink starting to kick in, and my suspicions begin to crystallize into a recognizable form. Suddenly it's obvious that I've been lying to myself all along. Dylan hasn't been pulling away from me, disappearing for hours or days at a time, taking longer and longer to return my calls because he's getting
sicker.
He's pulling away because he's getting
better.

He's not rejecting me because his cancer is back. He's just rejecting me.

Full stop.

How shitty a person am I that I'd prefer to think my boyfriend has a terminal illness rather than confront the fact he's just not that into me?

I hear a crash, and then loud hooting noises coming from the party, and my face flushes. The healthier Dylan gets, the weirder we all must seem.
Of course
he can't wait to be done with his treatments, to be in full-fledged remission, and never set foot on hospital grounds again.
Of course
he can't wait to leave all this behind. (Translation: leave
me
behind.)

Since my brain is now filling in the gaps I've been willfully ignoring, it occurs to me that Dylan almost never talks about his illness anymore. You can sit and talk to him for hours, and he'll never say the word
cancer
. Not once. He's done with it. Beat it. Over it. And next up on the discard list? Me.
I'm
part of his sick world. Why would he want to be around a constant reminder of the worst years of his life, once he's better?

I feel kind of woozy and off balance—that must've been one hell of a strong drink. (Or was it two? The details are going hazy.) But even through the shifting prism of intoxication, I know with a singular clarity that only one thing can fix this downward spiral.

Patagonia. The castle at the end of the world.

Dylan and I need to get away from here for a while, away from both of our pasts, so we can build something healthy. We need to start over in a different context. In a better place.

All of a sudden I can't get out of here fast enough.

I shove past Jameson and back into the apartment, then keep shoving, all the way through the crowd, until I'm out the front door.
Whose apartment is this, anyway?
I feel like I knew the answer to that at one point during the evening, but the answer eludes me now. Doesn't matter. Guinea pig apartments are all the same. Revolving roommates, minimal decor. Clean. We're compulsively clean people, which makes sense. The labs put the fear of contamination in you. We've all seen what happens when things aren't kept sterile: Fungal Jungle, maybe a visit from Mademoiselle MRSA or that most unwelcome houseguest, necrotizing fasciitis. Only us guinea pigs realize that the true zombie apocalypse is microscopic, that the zombies aren't outside the gates.
They're inside the house, people!
Or, more accurately, in your veins. The early signs of infection have been drilled into us so much that at one point Charlotte turned them into a nightmare of a nursery rhyme:

We're a hand-scrubbing, Lysol-spraying band of freaks, we are.

Once I'm outside, I scroll through the texts on my phone, hoping to find answers. Hoping to find proof of…what, exactly? Even I don't know.

Him:
Dinner with folks, then b right there.

Me:
c u soon!

Me:
Where r u?

Me:
Still coming?

Me:
I love u.

Me:
?

Him:
On my way.

The texts offer no proof of anything, except perhaps indifference. Two hours have come and gone since his last message, which I think officially makes him a liar. I pace outside the door and shove away the stinging realization, but I feel it coming on, like an infection.

Don't do it, Audie,
I tell myself.
Don't turn on him. I'm sure he has a good reason for not being here yet.

But anger, that most invasive of infections, has already found a way in and now it's slowly eating through my thoughts. If he didn't want to come, he should've just said so.

I'm talking to myself, stamping my feet, when the Professor walks up. He's about the last person on earth I want to see at the moment, but I do have to admire his nerve, the way he keeps showing up where he's not wanted. He must know people lie to him all the time, when they agree to talk to him. He has to know Charlotte's full of shit when she tells her wild stories. But he keeps showing up, keeps filling his notebooks full of lies.

You have to admire that sort of dedication, even if it is pointless.

“Are you okay, Audie?”

I don't say anything. But since people usually aren't shy about telling him to fuck off, get lost, he seems to take my silence as an invitation.

“You look a bit troubled. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Maybe go somewhere and chat?”

Fucking weirdo little gnome. Professor LikesToWatch. Guinea Pig Groupie.

But I do want to get out of here. I'm sick of the party. Sick of checking my phone for texts that never come. Why not? If nothing else, it's a chance to practice the fine art of telling a good lie.

“Fine,” I say. “Lead the fucking way.”

There's a diner close by, the kind of place that smells like a few decades' worth of grease and plumbing problems. Stepping inside, I feel a brief sputter of panic, since I have no recollection of walking (driving?) here. It's one more small black hole in my memory, which doesn't speak highly of either my sobriety or my short-term memory.

But here we are.

The hostess leads us over to a dingy booth, where she flicks a brown-edged piece of lettuce off the table with her fingernail and then slams a half-full carafe of coffee between us without even asking if we want it.

I wipe two different colors of lipstick off the rim of my coffee cup before I fill it myself. “This place is a shithole.”

The Professor scratches at a fist-sized patch of dried ketchup obscuring the words on his laminated menu and then gives up. “I'll just stick with the coffee,” he says when the waitress comes by. “But decaf, please.”

This is the type of restaurant where Charlotte would eat if she wanted to get into an
E. coli
study.

This morning she told me she never washes her hands after using the toilet anymore, and she's been eating eggs sunny-side up every day for weeks. “You wouldn't believe what they'll pay you to test new salmonella treatments,” she said. “The poultry industry is loaded.” She's never tried eating raw chicken before, but she will if she has to.

She may be a bitch sometimes, but you have to respect her work ethic.

“Here's your decaf.” The waitress sloshes coffee all over the table when she fills the Professor's cup, then walks away.

“Miss, can you bring me a towel?” he calls after her, but she ignores him.

He sighs and then asks me to hold his briefcase so it doesn't get wet while he sops up the mess with a fistful of paper napkins.

I take the case, then unzip it and start flipping through the contents. He raises an eyebrow while he watches me do this, but he doesn't tell me to stop.

“See anything interesting?”

I shrug. “I'll let you know.”

I'm being a brat, but it's only because I know exactly why I'm here. The Professor is famous for these little “interviews.” Almost everyone I know, except Jameson, who goes out of his way to avoid him, has sat down and answered the Professor's questions at least once.

Most people like talking about themselves.

Most people like to believe they're interesting.

It's sad, really—some asshole spends fifteen minutes asking you nosy, leading questions and you feel like a rock star for a day.

I start to feel pissed off at myself for even being here. “What exactly are you researching, anyway?”

His face twists as he takes his first sip of coffee. I could've told him it was lousy, but then that would be one more thing he learned vicariously through someone else's experiences. Better he figure it out on his own.

“Interesting question,” he says, even though it's not. See what I mean about how phony these conversations are?

“I study human behavior,” he says after another minute. He had to think about it first, like no one's ever cared enough to ask. Which probably doesn't bode well for his research. “Specifically, human behavior in extreme or unusual circumstances.”

I snort. “Which category do my circumstances fall into? Extreme or unusual?” Before he can answer, though, I pull something out of his briefcase and hold it up. “Jesus. I'm guessing this is what you mean by extreme?”

It's a magazine: the
Journal of Artistic Body Modification.
On the front is a picture of a man who barely looks human. Which, apparently, is the point; the cover model has painstakingly transformed himself into a human cat, complete with surgically clefted upper lip, sharpened teeth, and pointed ears. Tattooed whiskers traverse his acne-scarred cheeks.

I open the magazine to the middle and pick a random sentence to read out loud: “The decision to declare scleral tattooing illegal in the state of Oklahoma is a clear example of government overstepping.” I stop and look up at the Professor, who smiles grimly and points to his eyes.

“Whoa. Scleral, as in eyeball?” I say. “People tattoo their freaking eyeballs? Seriously?” I should put the magazine down, but it's too gruesome, too fascinating, to stop looking. I flip through the pages.

Holy fucking freak show.

Holey, wholly, holy fucking freak show.

The pictures in the magazine make my rashy, sutured, piss-toting brethren look like farm-fresh Mormon missionaries. From children's books. Heavily bleached children's books. These are the stumpy-est, bumpy-est, inky-est, holey-est people I've ever seen.

Flesh zippers. I did not know there was such a thing.

Branding: it's not just for cattle.

A four-page spread covers a recent performance by a troupe of dancers who perform while hanging from hooks piercing the flesh over their shoulder blades. The pictures look like crime-scene photos, except for the fact that the victims are smiling and posing with pointed toes and gracefully extended arms. It's all surprisingly bloodless, and one of the performers is quoted as saying that he finds the act of suspension “therapeutic.” His dance partner is his wife; one of the pictures shows them gently skewering one another.

They look like ballerina kebabs.

“This is real?” I ask the Professor. “
This
is what you study?”

He reaches over and takes the magazine out of my hands. “Not exactly. May I have my briefcase back?”

I wait a beat before I hand it to him.

“I'm studying a variety of populations. The unifying theme, at least as I would argue it, is a desire for control. Over oneself, first. And by extension, a feeling of control over one's circumstances. Sometimes people cause themselves harm just to prove to themselves, and perhaps to the rest of the world, that they can.”

“Or before someone else can hurt them first,” I say, without thinking.

“Or that,” he says.

I sit back and think about this. Then I grip the table and lean forward again. “Wait, you're comparing
us
to those freaks in the magazine? That's ridiculous. Totally fucking idiotic.”

“Is it really?” He's pulling on his beard, enjoying my reaction. He has his notebook out and his pen in hand. Sneaky, baiting bastard. “Why does the comparison upset you so much?”

It
does
upset me. But I'm having a hard time expressing myself. Some of the pills I've been taking lately slow down my thoughts and stretch out my words, especially at night, and I had to double up today because I'd forgotten to take them yesterday. They're combining forces with the pain meds, plus the one or two or three drinks I may have had this evening, and now the chemicals are all mixing and churning and burrowing like hungry maggots in my thoughts.

I hate it when I get like this. I'm not normally an angry person, I don't think, but certain combinations just set me off. The wrong people plus the wrong pills, and
bam,
it's like someone lit a fuse in me. I take slow breaths and remind myself that bad things happen when I let my temper take over.

“We're nothing like them. We're just making a living,” I finally say. “We get paid to do what we do.
Those
freaks pay other people to mutilate them. If that's not a good indicator of insanity, I don't know what is.”

The Professor is scribbling notes so fast he bumps his cup with his elbow. “Damn!” he says as coffee spills across the table for the second time. But his eyes are glittering and he keeps writing, ignoring the growing puddle. “So the difference lies in the exchange of money? Is that what you're arguing? That the decision to willingly allow another person to inflict pain upon you is a rational one, as long as you're being compensated?”

“No. And don't write that, either, because that's not what I said.” I can tell that he's trying to provoke me. Unfortunately, it's working. “
We
—guinea pigs, professional volunteers, whatever you want to call us—serve a purpose. We're part of a scientific process. What we do has a point. It isn't just…self-butchery.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. It's for science. So what you do is altruistic as well as lucrative. Which makes it all…” He mimics my own pause with a mocking smile. “Which makes it all perfectly sane.”

The smile fades from his face as he notices the fork gripped in my fist.
Stab him!
the maggots cheer me on.

His eyes go wide and he raises his hands in surrender. “Whoa, settle down. I apologize, Audie; I didn't mean to insult you. I just thought it would be a fun debate. Two intelligent minds turning over a juicy, complex topic. No disrespect intended. I may have taken our chat too far too fast.”

I relax my grip on the fork, but I run my thumb over the tines, checking for sharpness. Just in case.

I may enjoy the look of panic on his face slightly more than is healthy.

“How about this, Audie,” he says. His eyes have lost their glitter, and the taunting edge is gone from his voice. “Instead of me always asking questions, how about we talk about anything you'd like to. Anything at all.”

It actually makes me feel sorry for the guy, the way he says it. I mean, it's pretty pathetic—here's this grown man who doesn't even exist except as a shadow following other people's lives.

Whatever. He wants to chat? It's not like I have anything better to do right now.

It's not like Dylan has called or texted.

“So let's talk about books,” I say, only because it's the first remotely polite thing that comes to mind. Small talk, you know?

The Professor beams at me. “What have you read lately?”

“
1984.
You know, Big Brother, all that good stuff. George Orwell.” I fidget in my seat. The only reason I agreed to talk was to avoid thinking about Dylan. And yet, here we are. All topics lead to Dylan, it seems.

But the Professor lights up even more. “I actually reread that fairly recently; it's one of my favorites. The main character, Winston, says a number of things that echo my own work. For example, he says in the beginning of the book that ‘freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.' It's a powerful statement about the need to maintain control over one's own thoughts and beliefs and truths.”

I fidget around in my seat, making sure I look bored. Dylan never even bothered to tell me how he did on the paper I basically wrote for him.

The Professor doesn't notice; he's still rambling on. “It articulates a sentiment that I see in the various groups I study— a fundamental desire for autonomy, even if that self-control has to be gained or expressed via extreme behavior.”

He pauses, waiting for me to say something, but I take my time stirring more of the greasy artificial creamer into my cold coffee. In a booth on the other side of the restaurant, a quartet of overmuscled teenage boys loudly order french fries all around, and their normal boyish drunkenness, of course, makes me think even more about Dylan.

Which makes me upset again. It's like I can't escape him—he's everywhere. His
rejection
of me is everywhere.

Which makes the maggoty dark spots in my thoughts start to buzz and fidget.

Which makes me lash out against the Professor again, even though, up until this very moment, I had no strong feelings about either his research theories or his literary analysis, one way or the other.

“What a crock of shit,” I say. At this point I'd say that to anything that came out of his mouth. I've been called a contrarian little bitch on more than one occasion. Watch me earn the title.

“The right to say ‘two plus two equals four' isn't freedom. It's just spouting off a fucking formula somebody more convincing drilled into your head.”

The Professor is staring at me with a strange little smile on his face. He isn't taking notes.
Pick up your fucking pen!
the maggots chorus. My voice gets louder.

“Screw four,” I say, and the teenage jocks turn to stare at me. “Maybe that's somebody else's pathetic idea of freedom, but what if I want more than that? Maybe I want five. I want more than numbers, more than science. I want the magic beans, you know? And, hell yes, I want control. So, when everyone else says four is the answer—the “truth”—well, maybe I still want five. I want the power to make five happen.
That's
freedom.”

I don't even know where this is all coming from, or why I even care. But like I said, certain combinations just seem to set me off, and I guess this is one of them. Maybe I should stop taking those birth control pills. At the very least I'm going to report the mood swings.

But even though I'm annoyed with the Professor—and I'd never admit this to him in a million years—it actually feels kind of nice to sit here and talk about a book. About ideas. About something other than my family's medical history or my allergies and current prescription medications. About something other than Dylan.

It's kind of nice to remember there's still a brain lurking around inside of this price-tagged body of mine. I may be a slab of meat, but I'm a slab of meat with a head still attached.

But the shit-eating smile is back on the Professor's face and his pen is resting on the table, like nothing I have to say matters half as much as Charlotte's bullshit sexcapade stories. He's always in a hurry to capture every motherfucking word of those.

She's probably right about him. He probably is a little pervert. Maybe that's why he does what he does—it gives him a chance to hang out with other deviants without admitting his own sick and twisted tendencies.
I have a friend…I know this guy…I'm studying someone who…

While I'm thinking this, little bits and pieces of
1984
are running through my head. A word from the book flashes like neon in my mind:
doublethink.
Two contradictory beliefs, simultaneously accepted. Welcome to my life.