The Merchant's War (25 page)

That was wrong. It was a lot worse than any basic training. Basic training at least usually starts with fairly healthy raw meat for its processing. There was nothing like that in sight among my compeers. They came in all shapes and sizes but good. There was one woman who had to weigh over three hundred pounds, and a couple of others, both sexes, who probably weighed less but made up for it by being a lot shorter, so that they billowed grossly over their belts. There were scarecrows skinnier than me and at least as frazzled. There were elderly men and women who looked not hopelessly inhuman except that they had tics they couldn’t control—hand to the mouth, hand to the mouth, over and over in endlessly repeated gestures of smoking, eating, drinking. But they had nothing in their hands. And, oh, yes, it was raining.

The joggers shoved and nagged us into a disorderly sort of clump in the middle of a wide cement quadrangle, surrounded by low barrackslike buildings. Over the door to the building we had just come out of was a sign:

Acute Addiction Facility

Detox Effort Division

One of the instructors blew a whistle close by my right ear. When the sound had stopped bouncing around inside my skull I saw that an Amazon in the same jogging suit as the others, but with a gold badge sewn to the jacket, was strutting toward us. She looked at us with revulsion. “God,” she observed to the lunatic with the whistle, “every month they get worse. All right, you!” she bawled, climbing on a box to see us better and emphasizing her orders with a blast on her own whistle that neatly severed the top of my head and sent it spinning off over the barracks. “Pay attention! See that sign? ‘Detox Effort Division.’ The crucial word is
effort.
We’ll make the
effort.
You’ll make the
effort,
too, I promise you that. But in spite of all of our best
efforts
we’re usually going to
fail.
The stats tell the story. Out of ten of you four will go out clean—and then readdict themselves within a month. Three will develop incapacitating physical or psychoneurotic symptoms and require extended treatment—extended has been known to mean the rest of your lives, which are often short. And two of you won’t make it through the course.” She grinned kindly—I guess she thought it was kindly. I was six hours behind my last pill and the Madonna wouldn’t have looked kind to me just then.

Another shattering blast on the whistle. She had paused for a moment, and she didn’t want us daydreaming. “Your treatment,” she said, “comes in two phases. The first phase is the unpleasant one. That’s when we cut you back to minimum dose, feed you up to build resistance, exercise you to develop muscle tone, teach you new behaviors to break up your body-movement patterns that reinforce your habit—and a few other things—and that starts right now. Down on your bellies, everybody, for fifty push-ups—and then it’s clothes off and into the showers!”

Fifty push-ups! We stared at each other incredulously in that dark, sultry dawn. I had never in my
life
done fifty push-ups, and I didn’t think it was possible … until I found out that there were no showers, no breakfast, no leaving the drill ground—above all, no pills— until they were done.

It became possible, even for the three-hundred-pounders.

The lady hadn’t lied. Phase One was unpleasant, all right. The only way I could force myself through every miserable hour was by thinking about the blessed green pill that would come at the end of the day. They didn’t take the pills away; they only made me earn them. And the horror was that the better I got at earning, the less the reward; by the third day they had begun to shave the end of the pills; by the sixth they were cutting them in half. Three of us had pill habits from Moke addiction. The others had every imaginable addiction. The fat lady, whose name turned out to be Marie, was junk-food; she wheezed like a calliope going over the obstacle course but she always went, because there was no other way to the mess hall. A dark little man named Jimmy Paleologue had been a Campbellian technician himself, borrowed from his Agency by the services to help teach the New Zealand Maoris civilized ways. He was far too sophisticated to be caught by Campbellian stimuli himself, but had inexplicably fallen for a free trial sample of Coffiest. “It was a lottery-ticket tie-in,” he explained sheepishly as we lay on the muddy ground, panting between knee-bends and rope-climbing. “First prize was a three-room apartment, and I was thinking of getting married …” Palsied and pitiful, barely dragging himself at the tail end of the three-mile runs, he wasn’t thinking of it any more.

The center was in one of the outer suburbs, a place called Rochester, and it had once been a college campus. The buildings still had the old lettering carved into the cement walls— Psychology Department, Economics Section, Applied Physics and so on. There was a sludgy body of liquid lapping at the foot of the campus, and as far as physical surroundings were concerned that was the worst part. They called it Lake Ontario. When the wind was from the north the stench would knock you down. Some of the old buildings were barracks, some therapy rooms, a mess hall, offices; but there were a couple at the edge of the campus that we were not allowed in. They weren’t empty. Now and then we would catch glimpses of creatures as miserable as ourselves being shepherded in and out, but whoever they were, we did not mix. “Tenny,” gasped Marie, leaning on me as we headed past them toward afternoon therapy, “what do you suppose they
do
in there?” A woman in a pink jogging suit—even their instructors were separate from ours—leaned out the door of one of the buildings to glare at us as she tossed something in the refuse bin. When she went back inside I tugged Marie over.

“Let’s take a look,” I said, glancing around to see that no blue suit was near. I didn’t
think
there would be any discarded green pills among the trash, and I’m sure Marie didn’t expect to dig up any extra morsels of food. Disappointingly, we were right. All we came up with was a couple of gold-colored booties and a cracked pseudoivory-handled toy gun. They meant nothing to me, but Marie let out a sudden squawk.

“Oh, my gosh, Tenny, they’re
collectibles!
My sister had these! Those are from the Miniature Authentic Replicas of Bronzed Baby Shoes of Twentieth Century Gangsters—that one’s Bugs Moran, I think—and I’m nearly sure the other is from the Lone Star Scrimshaw Handgun Collection. That’s aversion therapy they’re doing in there—where first they make you stop needing it, then they make you hate it! Could that be Phase Two?”

And then the instructor’s bellow from behind us: “All right, you two goof-offs, if you’ve got time to stand around and gossip you’ve got time for a few extra push-ups. Let’s have fifty, now! And make it quick, because you know what happens if you’re late for therapy!”

We knew.

When I wasn’t doing jumps and jerks or having my head rebent I was eating—every ten minutes, it seemed. Plain food, healthy food, like Bredd and ReelMeet and Tangy-Joose, and no argument. I cleaned off my plate every time, or it was, you guessed it, another fifty push-ups for dessert. Not that fifty extra push-ups made that much difference. I was doing four or five hundred a day, plus squats and sit-ups and bendings-and-touchings, and forty laps a day in the pool strip. There was only room for three of us to swim abreast, and they handicapped us so we three were pretty even in skill—guess what the loser got? Of course he did. The forty of us dropped to thirty-one, to twenty-five, to twenty-two … The one that hit me hardest was Marie. She’d actually lost forty pounds or so, and was beginning to be able to eat her “meals”—vitamins and protein bars, and not much of them— without whimpering, when on the twelfth day, scrambling up the nets, she gasped and choked and rolled to the ground. She was dead. She wasn’t permanently dead, because they wheeled out the heart shocker and whisked her off in a pneumatic three-wheel ambulance, but she was too dead to come back to our group.

And all the time my nerves were crawling inside my skin, and what I wanted to do more than anything else was to conk the medication nurse over the skull, take away his keys and get into the locked cabinet of long green pills.

But I didn’t.

The funny thing was that, after two weeks, down to one quarter-strength cap a day, I actually began to feel a little bit better. Not
good.
Just less bad, less strung out, less Jesus-I’d-
kill
-for-a-cap. “False well-being,” Paleologue panted wisely when I said as much to him, just out of the pool, waiting to start our two-mile run. “You’ll hit these temporary plateaus, but they don’t mean anything. I’ve seen you Campbellian-syndrome people before.”

And I laughed at him. I knew better; it was my own body, wasn’t it? I could even spare time for thinking about something beyond long green pills—even got as far as the line for the one public phone, once, with every intention of calling Mitzi. And would have, too, if one of those nausea fits hadn’t driven me to the communijohn, and then there wasn’t time to sweat the line again.

And two more weeks passed, and it was the end of Phase One. The unpleasant part.

Silly me. I hadn’t asked our instructor what the second part was going to be like. I had happily, hopefully, assumed that if Phase One was described as
unpleasant
then Phase Two would be described best as something like at least
okay.

That was before I encountered aversion therapy and final withdrawal, and found out that Phase Two certainly was not anything you would call
unpleasant.
It was way beyond unpleasant. The best term I can think of for it was just your ordinary plain hell.

I guess I don’t want to talk any more about Phase Two because, every time I do, I start to shake; but I got through it. As the poisons got out of my body they seemed to get out of my head, too. By the time the director shook my hand and put me on a rocket back to the world —conscious, this time—I felt—still not good— more sad than good—more angry than sad— but, for the first time maybe in my life,
rational.

You lose track of the seasons in Phase Two, because one is as bad as the next. When I got back to the city I was surprised to find that it was still summery, though the tree in Central Park had begun to turn. Sweat streamed down the back of my pedicab pusher. The ear-shattering traffic din of yells and squeals and crunches was underlaid with the pusher’s hacking, sooty cough. There was a smog alert, of course. Of course my pedaler wasn’t wearing a face-filter anyway, because you can’t get enough air through a filter to keep your speed up in heavy traffic. As we rounded the Circle into Broadway, a six-man armored bank van swerved right in front of us; dodging them, the pedaler slipped on the greasy fallout and for a moment I thought the whole rig was going over. She turned a scared face to me. ” ‘Scuse it, mister,” she panted. “Those damn trucks don’t give you a chance!”

“As a matter of fact,” I called, “it’s such a nice day that I’m thinking of walking the rest of the way anyway.” Of course she looked at me as though I were insane, especially when I ordered her to pace me empty in case I should change my mind about walking. When I paid her off with a big tip at the Haseldyne & Ku Building she was sure I was insane. She couldn’t wait to get away. But the sweat had dried on her back and she was hardly coughing at all.

I had never done anything like that before.

I waved absently at the colleagues I recognized as I entered the building. They were looking at me with varying degrees of astonishment, but I was busy being astonished at myself. Something had happened to me at the Detox Center. I had come back with more than the bruises from the jabs of vitamin spray and the distaste for long green pills. I had come back with some new accessories inside my head. What they were exactly I didn’t yet know, but one of them seemed to want to answer to the name “conscience.”

When I walked into my office Dixmeister was as pop-eyed as anyone. “Gosh, Mr. Tarb,” he marveled, “you look so
healthy!
That vacation sure must have done you a lot of good.”

I nodded. He was only telling me what the scales and the mirror had been telling me the last few mornings. I’d gained back twenty pounds. I didn’t shake. I didn’t even feel shaky; even the flashing commercials and glitter-bang posters hadn’t awakened any cravings on the way to the office. “Carry on,” I told him. “I’ve got to report to Mitzi Ku before I take over here.”

That was not easy. She wasn’t there the first time I tried. She wasn’t there the second, and when I caught her at last on the third round trip between her office and mine she was there all right, but just on the point of leaving. “Mr. Haseldyne’s waiting,” her sec
³
warned, but Mitzi tarried. She closed the door. We kissed. Then she stood back.

She looked at me. I looked at her. She said to me with wistful surprise, “Tenny, you are looking
fine. “

I said to her, “Mitzi, you are looking fine, too,” and added for truth’s sake, “to me.” For in fact Mitzi’s morning mirror would not have been as kind as mine. She was looking terribly worn, in fact, but the subjective fact behind those facts was that I didn’t care how she looked as long as she was there. With her complexion, the circles under her eyes were not emphatic. But they were there: she’d missed sleep, maybe even had missed some meals … and she still looked to me quite splendid. “Was it awful, Tenny?”