“It’s a good drug, Gene. You don’t have to feel…there isn’t anything shameful about taking it. It just restores the brain chemistry to whatever it was before the trauma.”
I scowled, and gestured for two more beers.
“All right.
I didn’t mean to…
There’s
been several generations of neural pharmaceuticals since then. And that’s why I’m talking to you.”
I sipped my second beer, and watched Bucky drain his.
“Three years ago we…there was a breakthrough in
neuropharm
research, really startling stuff, I won’t go into the…we started a whole new line of development. I was on the team.
Am.
On the team.”
I waited. Sudden raindrops, large and sparse, struck the dirty window.
“Since
Camineur
, we’ve narrowed down the effects of
neuropharms
spectacularly. I don’t know how much you know about this, but the big neurological discovery in the last five years is that repeated intense emotion doesn’t just alter the synaptic pathways in the brain. It actually changes your brain structure from the cellular level up. With any intense experience, new structures start to be built, and if the experience is repeated, they get reinforced. The phy
s
ical changes can make you, say, more open to risk-taking, or calmer in the face of stress. Or the physical structures that get built can make it hard or even impossible to fun
c
tion normally, even if you’re trying with all your will. In other words, your life literally makes you crazy.”
He smiled. I said nothing.
“What we’ve learned is how to affect only those pat
h
ways created by depression, only those created by fear, only those created by narcissistic rage…we don’t touch your memories. They’re there. You can see them, in your mind, like billboards. But now you drive past them, not through them.
In an emotional sense.”
Bucky peered at me. I said, not gently, “So what pills do
you
take to drive past your memories?”
He laughed. “I don’t.” I stayed impassive but he said hastily anyway, “Not that people who do are…it isn’t a sign of weakness to take
neuropharms
, Gene.
Or a sign of
strength not to.
I just…it isn’t…I was waiting, was all. I was waiting.”
“For what?
Your prince to come?”
I was still angry.
He said simply, “Yes.”
Slowly I lowered my beer. But Bucky returned to his background intelligence.
“This drug my team is working on now…the next step was to go beyond just closing down negative pathways. Take, as just one example, serotonin. Some researcher said…there’s one theory that serotonin, especially, is like cops.
Having enough of it in your cerebral chemistry keeps riots and looting and assault in the brain from getting out of control.
But just holding down crime doesn’t, all by
itself,
create prosperity or happiness. Or joy. For that, you need a new class of
neuropharms
that create positive pathways. Or at least strengthen those that are already there.”
“Cocaine,” I said.
“Speed.
Gin and tonic.”
“No, no. Not a rush of power. Not a temporary high. Not temporary at all, and not isolating. The neural pathways that make people feel…the ones that let you…” He leaned toward me, elbows on the table. “Weren’t there moments, Gene, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you
were
Ma
r
gie?”
I looked at the window. Raindrops slid slowly down the dirty glass, streaking it dirtier. In the alley, a homeless man prowled the garbage cans. “What’s this got to do with the elderly suicides? If you have a point to make, make it.”
“They weren’t suicides. They were murders.”
“Murders?
Some psycho knocking off old people?
What
makes you think so?”
“Not some psycho. And I don’t think so. I
know
.”
“How?”
“All eight elderlies were taking J-24. That’s the Kelvin code name for the
neuropharm
that ends situational isol
a
tion. It was a clinical trial.”
I studied Bucky, whose eyes burned with Bucky light: intense, pleading, determined, inept. And something else, something that hadn’t been there in the old days. “
Bucky, that
makes no sense. The NYPD isn’t perfect, God knows, but they can tell the difference between suicide and murder. And anyway, the suicide rate rises naturally among old people, they get depressed—” I stopped. He had to already know this.
“That’s just it!” Bucky cried, and an old Greek couple at a table halfway across the room turned to stare at him. He lowered his voice. “The elderly in the clinical trial
weren’t
depressed. They were very carefully screened for it. No psychological, chemical, or social markers for depression. These were the…when you see old people in travel ads, doing things, full of life and health, playing tennis and dancing by candlelight…the team psychologists looked for our clinical subjects very carefully.
None
of them was d
e
pressed!”
“So maybe your pill made them depressed.
Enough to kill themselves.”
“No! No! J-24 couldn’t…there wasn’t any…it didn’t make them depressed. I saw it.” He hesitated. “And b
e
sides…”
“Besides what?”
He looked out at the alley. A waiter pushed a trolley of dirty dishes past our table. When Bucky spoke again, his voice sounded odd.
“I gave five intense years to J-24 and the research that led to it, Gene. Days, evenings, weekends—eighty hours a week in the lab.
Every minute until I met Tommy, and maybe too much time even after that.
I know everything that the Kelvin team leaders know, everything that can be known about that drug’s projected interaction with existing neurotransmitters. J-24 was my life.”
As the Church had once been.
Bucky couldn’t do an
y
thing by halves. I wondered just what his position on “the team” had actually been.
He said, “We designed J-24 to combat the isolation that even normal, healthy people feel with age. You get old. Your friends die. Your mate dies. Your children live in another state, with lives of their own. All the connections you built up over decades are gone, and in healthy people, those connections created very thick, specific, strong ne
u
ral structures. Any new friends you make in a nursing home or retirement community—there just aren’t the years left to duplicate the strength of those neural pathways. Even when outgoing, undepressed, risk-taking elderlies try.”
I didn’t say anything.
“J-24 was specific to the neurochemistry of connection. You took it in the presence of someone else, and it opened the two of you up to each other, made it possible to gen
u
inely—
genuinely
, at the permanent chemical le
v
el—imprint on each other.”
“You created an
aphrodisiac for geezers
?”
“No,” he said, irritated. “Sex had nothing to do with it. Those impulses originate in the limbic system. This was…emotional bonding.
Of the most intense, long-term type.
Don’t tell me all you ever felt for Margie was sex!”
After a minute he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Finish your story.”
“It
is
finished. We gave the drug to four sets of volu
n
teers, all people who had long-term terminal diseases but weren’t depressed, people who were willing to take risks in order to enhance the quality of their own perceptions in the time left. I was there observing when they took it. They bonded like baby ducks imprinting on the first moving objects they see.
No, not like that.
More like…like…” He looked over my shoulder, at the wall, and his eyes filled with water. I glanced around to make sure nobody noticed.
“Giacomo
della
Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other.
In knowing each other.
Not each other’s memories, but each
other’s…
souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the ps
y
chological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost
were
each other.”
I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an i
l
lusion.”
“No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone,
share
something intense with them?”
I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself,
unstoppable.
“What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk-taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said,
greater
pleasure. And
all
of those r
e
sponses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just r
e
verses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the
rate
of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples…does it only work on men and women?”
A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained. I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you…have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him—to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer.
My liberal, tolerant daughter.
But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the te
r
ritory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.
Bucky didn’t look offended.
“All right.
But just ima
g
ine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our
whole tiny lives.…” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.
“And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a…what did you call it?
A
neuropharm
.
They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”
“No,” Bucky said.
I stared at him.
“It would have taken years.
Maybe decades.
It’s too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”
“You knew there was no approval.”
“Yes. But I thought…I never thought…” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those
unlogical
flashes, and I saw there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths d
e
pressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his hair, or hating himself.
Bucky, to whom guilt was the staff of life.
I’d seen him try to kill himself over leaving the Church. I’d watched him go through agonies of guilt over ignoring answering-machine messages from Father Healey. Hell, I’d watched him shake and cry because at ten years old we’d stolen three apples from a market on Columbus Avenue.
Yet there he sat, disturbed but coherent.
For Bucky, even serene.
Believing he’d contributed to murder.
I said, “What
neuropharms
do you take, Bucky?”
“I told you.
None.”
“None at all?”
“No.” His brown eyes were completely honest. “Gene, I want you to find out how these clinical subjects really died. You have access to NYPD records—”