Indecision (5 page)

• early exposure to drugs

• early exposure to other persons

• especially one’s parents

• divorce of those parents

• their marriage beforehand

• the whole Alice issue

• a little learning

• not near enough

• moderation

• immoderation

• lack of funds

and/or

• lack of Der Unternehmungsgrund der Individuums

and throughout this whole time I’d been unable to see all of these for the mere epiphenomena they only too obviously were! I felt like inside the pill I could see all these little magic grains of velleity adding up, maybe, to a
will.
I stood up and shouted. “Gimme a Combo!”

From his cubicle Sanch whimpered aloud in a sleep-blurred voice. “Dude . . . dude . . . shut fuck up . . .”

“So,” Dan whispered, “I take it you’re not at all curious how this shit works.”

“Right.” I sat back down. In my eagerness to make decisions I had forgotten my great love of knowledge.

“That, in your hand, is one of the
grails
of pharmacology. Turns out chronic indecision is a complaint for a huge number of ostensibly normal people. Of course the argument could be made that indecisiveness is precisely why they seem so normal. They’re tractable—they’re putty. But what these people are telling us, very consistently, is that chronic indecision is no picnic on the inside.”

“No.”

“Number of complaints is huge. Growing. At least among the sort of people who have doctors to complain to.” Dan paused, took a drag. “Not to mention the hard cases where you have to be institutionalized. Or should be. That’s who’s officially enrolled in the trials. These are people with serious pathologies on both the macro- and the micro—I mean, these are people who literally they can’t decide between paper or plastic. On the other hand these same people will go on dangling for years in front of
one major choice.
Often to do with employment or love object.”

“No.”
I was seriously aghast.

“In some cases the patient will have been
about to decide
whether to leave their job or spouse, literally right on the cusp, we’re talking the fucking teetering
verge,
every single free moment”—another drag, while I waited, appalled—“for like several decades.”

Naturally I thought of poor mom. Who used to come down the hall and sit on my bed asking how I thought I’d fit in at a new school if she left dad and we had to move. Finally it was me who went away to St. Jerome’s while she stayed put. And after twenty-seven years dad was the one who called a lawyer. The horror of any condition would seem somehow to implicate the method of its cure, and with an inner grimace I put the pill away.

“These are people,” Dan was saying, “who they couldn’t deal with TV
before
cable, before TiVo. Now they’re getting fucked from all sides. They can’t look at a menu, can’t even
en
ter a supermarket. These are like people who want to move to Communist Romania, but now that’s all gone. And don’t even try saying the word
internet
to them—millions of these people. And why?”

It seemed like you could start, if you wanted, with Eve’s teeth poised a little iffily on the apple’s unbroken skin. Eve who must have had very nice teeth . . . Or probably not, lacking orthodonture.

“Why? Mainly the problem’s in the medial forebrain bundle—the part of you where you experience so-called ‘pleasure.’ And what you’ve also got going on in the MFB is essentially protracted civil conflict. On the one hand you’ve got the nerves that go
from
the ventral tegmental area
to
the medial forebrain bundle and these carry excitatory neurotransmitters. You know, make you happy, make you want to do things.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“That’s the thing. Some people don’t know what to do. And if it’s difficult for them to decide that’s because in the medial forebrain you’ve also got the nucleus accumbens—that’s where the
inhibitory
neurons from the locus coeruleus feed in. So when you take cocaine or speed—”

“I don’t
take speed.
” I was scandalized. “Mr. Ecstasy. But wait—” Something almost incestuous had occurred to me. “It’s not Pfizer, is it? Who’s making this thing? I hope Pfizer helps me decide to quit Pfizer.”

“Sorry dude—Bristol-Myers Squibb. And what Bristol’s done is create a drug with a
mixed agonist-antagonist profile.
So Abulinix acts
antagonistically
toward the receptors which would make you feel speedy or confused. But there’s also a molecule bonding, as an
agonist,
to the specific receptor that has to do with decisiveness. Ironclad resolutions. And so forth.” Another drag, then he stubbed out the cigarette, totally resigned and blasé. “The idea is that the drug should foster feelings of capability in the face of conflict. Naturally I thought—Dwight Wilmerding.”

He pulled his knees to his chest. The lecture was over. At one time Dan had been a chem major and played bass in a bright droney band called Haiku d’État. But what had
he
decided to live for, for now? His heavy-lidded and darkly bright eyes struck me as not dissimilar from sunglasses. He was wearing the green pajamas, same color as hospital scrubs, that he usually wore at night. He was the most catlike person of my acquaintance—efficient, aloof, compact.

“So what’s your motive here?”

He smiled. “Humanitarian intervention.”

“Come on.”

“I think of you as humanity, Dwight. You’re one of about four people I think of that way. I include myself.” He just looked at me with zero expressiveness from those lacquered brown eyes.

“There must be risks. With abulia. I mean Abulinix. Side effects maybe? Or dangers?”

He shrugged. “Minimal so far. Some stomach upset. Some satyriasis.”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning excessive desire for fucking in the adult human male. Also it’s a potentiator with regard to alcohol. One drink will equal two. Two plus two will equal five.”

“I’ll save lots of money at bars.”

“Ignorance will be strength.”

“Except I don’t like bars—I don’t like standing up. It’s the same with rock shows and museums. Don’t you feel like that? I feel like we’d all be much more receptive to things if we had more contact with the ground.” Or maybe this was the Knittel talking.

Dan lit up another Marlboro Light, as I note because without smoking myself I know that smokers can perform characterological analyses of each other by means of brands, and frankly Dan sometimes mystified me. Ignorance will be strength? “I must warn you,” he was saying. “I do have one concern. So far no one has gone nuts—or more nuts than already. But I think the possibility must exist. What if the id—to use outmoded terminology—but what if the stalemate between id and superego in the medial forebrain is what’s preserving civilization. Decency. Homeland security.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Right . . .” I suffered a vision of myself charging up Madison Avenue in a rented gorilla suit, grabbing at the asses of wealthy female shoppers and looking for flower planters to overturn. “I would hate to run amok.” I saw myself driving through Nevada in a stolen red convertible with a rocket launcher in the trunk, occasionally stopping to take out a billboard. “I wouldn’t like to go berserk.”

“But I’ve thought about this. You’re a highly socialized person, Dwight, you’re very polite—”

“Thank you Dan.”

“Nice. Kind. Whatever. Even Mr. R thinks so.” Mr. Rorschach, or Dan’s dad, had on several occasions shaken his big gleaming head at me and pronounced me the genuine article. Somehow my not knowing what he meant seemed particularly to confirm him in this impression. “So I would hazard that you pose less of a risk than another more or less ‘normal’ person. At the same time Abulinix may affect you more powerfully than people whose abulia is more truly pathological. I’ve given you the lowest dose. Twenty migs. Should be interesting. You understand”—he stubbed out his second cigarette—“I’m committing a serious breach of medical ethics.”

“Thanks, man. It’s good of you.”

I borrowed Dan’s bathrobe and we crept out of the apartment, going down to the street to buy at the corner deli another pack of Combos and some Jiggy Juice (I refer to the popular if controversial caffeinated malt-liquor beverage) so as the better to solemnize my first swallowing of an Abulinix. “Someday are they really going to have a drug for everything?” I asked.

“For everything, yes. For everyone, no.”

He always was a riddler. Possibly he should have been called that: the Riddler. And then wistfully I thought of the Joker, as I did every so often in those days and late nights before I received Natasha’s email from Quito and then became far too excited to think of her at all.

“I’ll regret my intervention,” Dan was saying, “if you end up in Vermont.”

“That’s like the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. You’re not on Ecstasy now are you?” Dan had remained a big proponent of Ecstasy and a downplayer of its neurotoxicity even after we’d all taken it about nine months previous on the night of Ford’s birthday and the eve of a pretty seriously bad day.

“If I were on E my pupils would be dilated.”

“Are you depressed Dan? Because sometimes I’ve wondered.”

He was spared from answering by the appearance right in front of us of a jostling cohort of drunken prosperous young men in shirts of probably superhigh threadcount. A bar had just released them into the streets, and one dude was looking kind of askance at me in the bathrobe—which was thick as a carpet, maroon-colored, and classily monogrammed with Mr. R’s initials. Really I had nothing to be ashamed of.

“Happy bathing!” the guy shouted aggressively at us while another was like, “Happy Fourth of July!” These were the guys who basically owned the neighborhood on weekend nights.

“I wish those motherfuckers would die,” Dan said. “Not in a terrorist attack of course. Some other mass death.”

I too was offended. The regular alliance of happiness with idiocy has always been for me as a happy person one of the world’s more painful features.

Inside the deli I went searching for something besides Combos. There was something else that I wanted, now and always, and often I devoted several minutes to hunting out this phantasmal snack. Mr. Youn no longer asked me whether I needed help when he saw me retracing my steps through the aisles. “You a patient shopper,” he’d told me. “Not so hurry. Live long.”

At last I gave up and went to fetch Dan where he stood cradling two fat torpedoes of Jiggy Juice by the refrigerated beverage bank. “Tomorrow, man, I’m going to come in here and I’m going to make a beeline straight to—straight to whatever it is I’ll have decided I want. This is so exciting, Dan. When do you think I make my first Abulinix decision?”

Dan frowned. “I should have told you. No effect for five to ten days—or could be two weeks. There’s like a nine-day window there where you may not know if it’s affecting you yet. Sorry.” He smiled a nonsmile. “The look on your face Dwight . . .”

A minute before, all the commodities on the shelves had seemed to brim and gleam with imminent disclosures. Whereas now they were restored to being things that are only themselves. And with them still them, me still me, the world still the same world, except a minute older, everything looked really barren, and under the nervous rods of fluorescent light, just so nakedly so. “What will I
do
tomorrow?”

“What would you have done anyway?”

Sometimes Dan could laugh a pretty sinister laugh.

THREE

I woke up to the smell of frying eggs. Also to some hip-hop cranked on the stereo going
thug- a-thug-a-thug-guh— guh—guh— thug-a-thug-a-thug— guh—guh
and which I identified as “Electric Chair” off Quality of Life’s
Embarrassment of Bitches
CD. The album was in my view their most superlative outing yet, and now the cheerful obnoxiousness of the music melded so thoroughly with the yellowish eggy smell from the kitchen that each seemed an expression of the other.

There was still a ghost of heat and indentation to the other side of the bed. But when I got up yawning and stumbling to go check by the door, I saw that Vaneetha’s tall black boots were gone. I was also able to assess, via standing up, that I’d contracted a serious hangover from my forty of Jiggy Juice the night before, plus the half I’d drunk of Dan’s in my disappointment at the nine-day-window thing. Age sure takes its toll: back in the day at St. Jerome’s I’d been able to stay up late drinking shot after shot of cut-rate vodka before going off in the morning, feeling fresh as newly baked bread on a truck, to study French and later on practice baseball. Now a little caffeinated malt liquor and I felt like next time I’d wake up with a tag on my toe.

“Hello, Sanch,” I said to the broad back hunched over the range. But I’d lost out to
Bushy go to Yale / like me I go to jail / I think tha’s really fair / cause I think tha’s pretty funny / you be laughin in the chair / whi’ they rakin up they money.
I went to go tap him on the shoulder. Meek and giant, Sanch started. “Sorry about the music, man. I figured ten o’clock rule.”

“ ’S cool. As long as I get some mess.” There was pain in my head.

Sanch had gotten us to relieve him of regular cleaning duty by volunteering to cook on Sundays what we all called eggy mess. More and more this was looking like a good deal, for him anyway, since Ford was usually uptown on weekends, and Dan—I went to go check his cubicle. Nobody home.