Placebo Junkies (14 page)

They keep bringing it. More medicine, in impossible quantities. They pour and inject; they load it into me by spoonful and pitchfork and truck.

I am diluted.

Audie in a bottle, one part per million.

Shake well to avoid separation. Shake well before serving. I can feel the good bits, the
me
bits, dissolving in the bad blood.

shakemeup shakemeup shakemeup

Keep it together. Keep me together.

They add even more medicine. I had no idea I was so empty, that I had so much space that needed filling. They crack me open and pour it in, day after day after day. I'm being reconstituted. Regenerated. New and improved.

A whole new, homeopathic me.

Being Charlotte gets easier with practice.

I panicked the first couple times I had to sign her name. Was she right-handed or left-handed? I felt guilty for not knowing this, so I signed using large, gratuitous swoops, the opposite of my compact scrawl, just to give Charlotte's name more space on the paper. No one questioned a thing.

In her name I give samples. On her behalf I swallow pills. As Charlotte I spread myself wide open and say aah. Nothing to it. It's just like being me, except busier.

It's also more fun.
I'm
more fun. It's hard to explain, but when I walk into an office and tell them I'm Charlotte, it's like I become her. Like I'm channeling her. It feels good to be someone else for a little while.

Charlotte had energy. Charlotte had stories. Charlotte was sarcastic and funny and bouncy and flaky, and she had this way of ice-skating over the shitty parts of life. Charlotte made liberal use of her middle finger. Charlotte put hot sauce, the hotter the better, on everything she ate. Charlotte lit up a room.

And now I do, too.

It's not as creepy as it sounds—this isn't some beyond-the-grave Single White Female thing. I'm not actually trying to be her. I'm just taking her best parts and…borrowing them.

So Charlotte pisses cheerfully, a happy, tinkling stream of gold. Charlotte holds out her arm with enthusiasm, never wincing as the needle plunges in. Charlotte lies on tables in peaceful repose. Her sacrum is sacred. Her ventricles are venerable. Her medulla oblongata is an open book.

I am out of body, out of mind. My follicles and my spleen and my metatarsal bones and my bronchial tubes all pay tribute to my friend, and the money comes rolling in, and in, and in.

I'm Charlotte Incorporated, businesswoman extraordinaire. My complexion is glowing, my bikini line is hair-free. I have a newfound appreciation for laser technology.

I even need less sleep than I used to. Charlotte was always complaining about insomnia—maybe it's contagious on some subconscious level? Or maybe I'm just highly suggestible.

In any event, I am she and she is me. Together, Charlotte and I are profitable. We are in the black. We shampoo and chew and scrape with great efficiency, and the castle at the end of the world shimmers brightly in the back of my mind.

Dylan's birthday gift is a bright and shiny
maybe.
A quickly growing
nearly.

But between appointments, between procedures, between the pages of my well-thumbed Castillo Finisterre brochure, something festers when I let it. A dark and rotten clump of questions I do my best to ignore.

why did she die what happened what will they do with her body

But mostly, as Charlotte, I feel fine. I feel good. There are uppers and downers and wires and isotopes, but everything seems remarkably survivable.

so why did she die

It's a question I ask a lot, actually. I know I can't just reap the rewards, collect all this good fortune, without repaying Charlotte in some form. And so the more money I make, the closer and closer I get to the cost of round-trip airfare for two and six—no, seven!—nights of eco-luxe heaven, the harder I look at faces and procedures and ingredients.
Which one of you killed her?
I silently inquire.

So far, I've found no clues.

“You're in a good mood,” Dylan says when I visit him between appointments. I come as often as I can, although we both prefer visits when no one else is around. Not that we've ever discussed it explicitly, but we don't have to. It's obvious that neither one of us likes to share our time together with anyone else. If I show up and someone else is in his room, I tiptoe away and come back later.

“Of course I am. You're getting out tomorrow.” As my plan solidifies, the secret is becoming even harder to keep. I'm going to tell him soon. The time is almost right.

“Right. Tomorrow.” Dylan is grinning—he has his own secret plan. “That's what my mom thinks, anyway. Hmmmm…my bad. It's actually today.” He checks his watch. “Within a matter of hours, as a matter of fact.”

“You sneaky, fantastic bastard,” I say, and flop down next to him in his bed.

“
Oof,
easy there, sparky. All is not yet operating at one-hundred-percent capacity.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Does this mean you're coming over? For the whole night?”

He nods. “My mom always comes by after work. They'll discharge me as soon as she leaves and then I'm all yours.”

Butterflies and experimental double-action antacids flutter in my stomach as I lean over to kiss him. “Do I even want to know how you pulled this off?”

“Sexual favors for the nurses.” He kisses me back, but he's moving stiffly and protecting his abdomen. “I feel cheap and used. And chafed. You wouldn't believe what a bunch of deviants they are.”

We lose it as one of the nurses, who looks about eighty-five years old and has a face like a deflated balloon, walks by his room and gives us a disapproving look.

“Seriously, Audie.” He takes my hand. “This has been amazing.
You've
been amazing. Your visits have been the only things keeping me going in here.”

I mock-punch his shoulder, light as a feather since I know he's still in pain, to try to lighten the mood. “You've done the same for me,” I say.

He shakes his head. “No, I haven't. Not even close.”

I kiss him to shut him up. The big dope doesn't even realize how much he does for me, how just being around him makes all the other crap in the universe disappear into the background.

I try not to worry that he's favoring one arm. It can't be a good sign that the pain seems to be spreading to new parts of his body every week.

His kissing, on the other hand, gets better and better every day. It doesn't matter what crappy thing happened that morning, or how lousy I might be feeling. As soon as his lips touch mine, the slate is wiped clean.

Just yesterday, for example, I actually managed to have a polite conversation with Scratch. It was only a
hi, how are you
kind of thing as we passed in the hall, but still. Without Dylan I'd still be holding a grudge, carrying around all sorts of unnecessary anger.

I have one more study today, but this time when I leave I know it's only for a few hours, so I don't have those itching, crawling worries I usually have when I walk away from Dylan. “See you tonight,” I tell him. I like saying that. I like not having a question mark at the end of our goodbye.

“Promise me you'll be gentle,” he yells at me down the hallway, loud enough for the nurse to hear and glare anew. “Remember, the chafing!”

Charlotte's appointment book says “Memories, 2:30, Rm. 1321,” with a little smiley face with stars for eyes drawn next to it. She does that—
did
that—a lot. Used weird little doodles as shorthand. I haven't seen this particular version of a smiley face before, but it can only mean good things.

Room 1321 is on the psych floor. That's Jameson's territory.
Candy Land. Overthinkers Anonymous. Shrinkydink Central. The Nut House. Wonderland.
There are a lot of nicknames for this particular corridor—it's a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. Jameson won't do any other kind of study; he gets off on twisted mental stuff, likes to feel smarter than the tests. I was under the impression that Charlotte avoided psych studies—she always called them mind fuckers—but that's just one more example of how little I actually knew about her.

I've been here a few times. The experiences were okay, I guess. I'm pretty sure I got a placebo the last time because the meds didn't do anything at all, but then I had to spend hours answering inane questions about my freaking “emotional experience” and the pay was only meh, so I haven't been back since. It just isn't worth the grief.

But now's not the time to be choosy, so I walk into the reception area, rattle off Charlotte's study ID number, and hand over her driver's license. The receptionist photocopies it without even glancing at the picture, then hands me the consent forms.

I laugh when I read the study description: the effects of psilocybin on long-term memory recall. Leave it to Charlotte to find a way to get paid for taking a ride on the Magic Mushroom Express. The starry-eyed smiley face makes perfect sense now.
You crazy little stoner bitch,
I whisper affectionately.

Two other people are already sitting in the waiting room. One of them, a leathery older guy missing a bottom tooth, looks up at me and winks like we're sharing a joke. Which, I guess, we kind of are.

“You done this before?” he asks.

I shake my head and he cackles. “Hoo boy. You're in for a treat. Just relax and enjoy it, girlie. Let go o' the reins on your brains, know what I mean?” He cackles again, a wet, lecherous sound, and I'm glad when a nurse pokes her head in the room to call him back.

I pick up a magazine to help me avoid eye contact with the other person in the room, but after a minute it's obvious I don't need to bother. She's middle-aged, frizzy and unfocused, smiling at a spot on the wall. There's something strangely chilling about her stillness, about the complete lack of recognition that I'm sitting just a few feet from her, almost like
one
of us doesn't exist.

By the time the nurse comes back into the room and calls Charlotte's name, I'm almost spooked enough to bolt. Something just feels wrong here.
Take the drugs, then take the money,
I tell myself.
Calm the fuck down.

I stand up and follow the lady.

I know exactly where I am—nothing about the room has changed since the nurse led me in and made me open wide to prove I hadn't cheeked my pill. (Silly me, expecting an actual mushroom.) But somehow things have shifted, and I'm both
here
and
not here
at the same time. No, it's worse than that. It's more like a feeling of being simultaneously dead and alive, like a furless version of Schrödinger's cat.

I obviously didn't draw the placebo card this time.

In the distance of the not-here I see when I close my eyes, a carnival tent splits open. It's the lone splash of color against an otherwise never-ending stretch of murky grayness.

From inside the tent a low-pitched, slurring voice starts to gather tempo and volume. It sounds like the Professor's voice, with the curious addition of a carny twang. He's like a drunken ringmaster, and as he speaks, the fog begins to lift and when I open my eyes, images from not-here superimpose themselves on the previously white walls of the room. Slowly the familiar pages of a magazine come to life around me, and somewhere, a curtain lifts.

Ahem.

Welcome.

Welcome, and don't be shy! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs. See before you a motley crew—fine and fearless individuals transformed, transfigured, and bound by neither flesh nor physics. Feast your eyes on tongues split in two…wait, make that three! Watch the clever pink tentacles flitting nimbly from pierced, bedazzled lips—the tongue is surprisingly dexterous when freed from its dreary, unforked form, don't you think? And look at those teeth, neatly filed to points. Someone's dentist had better be on his best behavior. Hahaha!

Step to your left to enjoy the next display. A dazzling array of decorative scarification and newly unsplinted elvish ears. So pointy and droll! (Let's not get into the mechanics just now, sir—there are children present.) And don't be concerned by the startling number of missing digits and other appendages, kind audience. All amputations are performed on a strictly voluntary basis.

Now look, look over there. See those horns? No, no, save your gasps. The fine gentleman sporting them is neither devil nor billy goat. He's merely modeling the finest in decorative titanium implants. Because why should your epidermis have all the fun?

Let's move on—there's not a moment to waste. The grand spectacular is about to begin!

Shhhh. Hush now. The surgeon needs to concentrate. Oh, no, madam—he's not an actual surgeon, at least not in the conventional sense. But observe the confidence with which he plunges the hooks through his victim's flesh—I guarantee you've never felt sturdier hands upon your bones. If you won't take my word for it, you need only look at the bliss upon said gentlewoman's face as she's hoisted by—let's count together, are there six?—metal hooks through tender flesh. Watch as she dangles, suspended in midair like a chrysalis in wait. Watch her breathe deeply, and begin to sway as she grows comfortable with her newly stretched flesh wings. She's dancing now, do you see? Flying, really. Behold, and envy her freedom! Envy her beauty! She's conquering her mortal coil, transcending the limits of her very flesh! So graceful, so brave…

Something is wrong.

This isn't my memory.

The instructions were clear: focus on an early memory. Happiness. Yes. My earliest happy memory.

I need to think about this. I need to focus while they take snapshots inside my brain.
Click click click click.
I need to ignore the wet darkness that is filling the room around me and think about pony rides or sitting on Santa's lap or Grandma's special just-for-me cookies. These are the examples they gave, and somehow I didn't get the chance to tell them before they strapped me here that I only have a hole where those memories should be.

I am a drain. I am a whirlpool. I am suction and vacuum.

Now something is wrong and my mind has sprung a leak.

Liquefied thoughts pour from my ears, puddling around me on the metal table, then overflowing into a drain on the floor.

Somewhere, out of sight, Charlotte begins to sing:

Ashes to splashes, we all fall down.

I scream to block out the sound.

A tinny voice comes from a speaker. “Charlotte, try to stay calm. Remember, we need you to hold still while we complete the scan. Try to focus on the topic.”

I am strapped to a table, stuffed into a machine that clicks and thunks as it eats my memories.

I start to scream again, but everything I need to say melts into a pale gray puddle and oozes from my pores before any sound comes out. The vibrations from the machine splatter and scatter the liquid.

The topic. Focus on the topic.

What is the topic?

Memories. Yes. They must exist in here, somewhere.

The mechanical noises fade away, and I go limp. A cool breeze sweeps through the room, and I release.
Let go o' the reins on your brains.

But the liquid soon returns, first in speckles and in drops, and then in great, arcing arterial sprays. I vaguely register that it's now red.

Through the mist, the electronic voice chirps out. “Hang in there, Charlotte. Not much longer; we're getting some great prefrontal-cortex images.”

I go stiff because I know that something terrible is coming, and before I can cry out for help, the swirling redness fills my mouth and my ears and my eyes, and the pictures I see, all those memories that don't even belong to me, are tinted with the angry color of spilled blood.

The machine roars back to life, this time in reverse direction, and now I can hear the sound of its mechanical claws kneading past and present into a sticky ball of muddled time, then rolling it out flat. The machine twists and braids the dreamdough, and I can't tell where all the red is coming from or why my skin feels like it's on fire even while I'm drowning….

I'm relieved when the darkness finally returns; I breathe it in with great, grateful gulps.

“Charlotte? Charlotte, are you okay? Can you hear me?” The tinny voice breaks through my thoughts. “We're finishing up now. I'll get you out of there in just a minute.”

“I'm okay.” My voice is a croak.

I am okay. Somehow I know the worst is over—that I've come through it intact. But part of me is still anxious. Did they get the direction right at the end? Is time moving forward again? I have this terrible feeling that something has gone wrong, and time is moving forward and backward at the same time, weaving and looping around itself in a never-ending figure eight.

I want to ask, make them check their machines, but the speaker stays silent, and before anyone comes into the room, I slide gently back into the grayness and the empty place where memories should be and then it's too late anyway. What's done is done.