Placebo Junkies (12 page)

Charlotte's still dead when there's a knock on the door. I'd been willing the news away, eyes closed, when the sound broke my concentration, and so she's still dead.

I ignore it at first, but then it crosses my mind that it could be Dylan. He must have done it again, picked up on my need for company from our pretend psychic network.

“Works every time,” I say as I swing the door open.

But no one's there.

On the ground is my cell phone and a brand-new hardcover copy of
1984
with a business card—the Professor's—marking a page with a single line underlined in red:

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

I understand immediately that it's the Professor's weird way of offering his condolences for Charlotte, and I appreciate it. Quite a lot, actually. Maybe the little garden gnome isn't such a bad guy after all. I see now that he means well.

There's a single message on my phone, from a number I don't recognize. I access my voice mail with shaking fingers. I don't know how, but somehow I just know it's going to be bad. It's just the way things have been going lately. Downhill, no brakes.

I hear a male voice I don't recognize. At first I think it's a wrong number or maybe a butt dial, because there's all kinds of noise in the background, and the voice is so muffled I have to listen twice to understand what the caller is saying. The second time around, though, I realize that the stranger's voice is actually Dylan's, and that there's a very good reason he doesn't sound like himself.

He's back in the hospital.

From beneath my squeezed-tight eyelids, real tears finally start to escape.

Of course Dylan had a good reason for not showing up.

I never doubted him. Not for a second.

I stop in the little store just off the lobby and spend money I should be saving on an arrangement of the ugliest helium balloons they have in the place, which says a lot, since have you seen the tacky shit they sell in hospital gift shops? The worst of the bunch has a picture of Eeyore with a thought bubble floating over his mopey, sad-fuck donkey face: “After all, one can't complain. I have my friends.”

It's so morose and awful I know it'll make Dylan smile.

I remind myself to keep my own smile in check. I wouldn't want him to think I'm glad he's sick, or anything. I was just so relieved to hear from him, period, that it's hard not to feel a little bit happy. Appropriately happy, I mean.

“Just coming to visit my sick boyfriend,” I tell the old-lady candy striper I ride up with in the elevator.

“I hope he gets better soon, dear,” she says back, and pats me on the shoulder. “I'm sure he'll be thrilled to see you. Visitors do our patients
so
much good.”

This visit is going to help me just as much as it helps Dylan. I need something to take my mind off of Charlotte before the grief paralyzes me. I need good news.

The news
is
good: he's not in the cancer ward. This time it's a secondary infection—the unfortunate result of a good treatment gone bad. It's one of those
the cure is worse than the disease
kinds of things, and they're pumping enough antibiotics into him to sterilize the Northern Hemisphere twice over. I recognize the name of the drug—I'm pretty sure I tested it once. It chewed my stomach to bits and made everything taste like copper for a month after I stopped taking it, if I remember correctly.

I'm sure that's why he only pokes at his odorless lunch while I sit on his hospital bed trying to entertain him. “Seriously, why doesn't it smell like anything at all? I mean, it's a grilled turkey and cheese sandwich. Shouldn't it smell like meat? Or cheese? I'd even settle for a faint whiff of toast. But there's nothing.”

There are so many topics of conversation that must be avoided. Like Charlotte, obviously. Dylan doesn't need to hear about that. They may not have been friends, but he would care because
I
care. It's better to stick to positive subjects. My current strategy: avoid anything from the past. Only the future is safe.

And food. Talking about food is safe.

Dylan grins, and you can hardly tell he's sick. Okay, so he's paler than usual, and maybe he's a little more subdued than normal, but nothing dramatic. His doctors are always overreacting—I can tell that he's going to be fine. “You can't have smelly food in a hospital,” he says. “It's insensitive. I mean, can you imagine if your death, your final swoon, your great swan dive into the sky, was accompanied by a bacon smell track? Or, like, Tater Tots? Those things smell for freaking miles. It would take away from the dignity of the moment.”

I shift as a nurse glides into the room to glance at Dylan's monitor. “Wait. Did you just say
smell
track?”

His eyes are twinkly. It could be the meds, but I don't think so. “Hell, yeah. If there can be such a thing as a sound track, why not a smell track?”

I steal a bite of his sandwich, since he's obviously not going to eat it. It tastes exactly like it smells. Like nothing. “Personally, I want my death to be accompanied by the smell of marshmallows toasting over a campfire,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow. “Interesting choice. A little more Girl Scout-y than I would've thought from someone like you.”

I take another bite and think it over while I chew. “You're right. Cancel that. I'd rather have something spicy. Something exotic. Something that smells like you're in the middle of an adventure. Paella, maybe? Nothing boring can possibly happen in a room that smells like paella.”

Dylan goes rigid for a second, and his face loses about two more shades of color. He breathes through whatever it is for a few seconds before saying anything. “I've never had paella” is all he gets out before closing his eyes and sinking back into his pillows. Apparently, his pain meds have kicked in. Lying like that, he looks slight, almost frail. He's definitely neither, but seeing someone you love semiconscious in a hospital bed can mess with you a bit—it can make even someone as tall and broad-shouldered as Dylan seem small and vulnerable.

It makes you want to do whatever it takes to protect that person, to crawl in bed and fight his battles right alongside him.

I shake him softly. “Wait, don't fall asleep yet! I want to tell you something.” It's a spur-of-the-moment decision. All of a sudden I feel an overwhelming need to tell him about my plan, about how close I am to making our trip to Castillo Finisterre happen, before he gives in to the twilight. I happen to know that when you're suffering the worst, just having something to look forward to can make all the difference.

Plus, now that his secret is out—he doesn't have to hide the fact that he's sick from me anymore—I want to tell him my secret, too. I don't want secrets between us anymore.

But he's too far gone. He mumbles something barely comprehensible about the party last night, probably an apology for not coming, and then he closes his eyes, smiles, and says “nice to meet you,” in the voice of a happily oblivious drunk. I'm about to tease him for sounding so loopy, but he's out cold, the traces of the smile lingering just enough to make it look like wherever he is right now, it's a decent place to be.

I curl up next to him while he sleeps, kissing him and whispering travel plans in his ear. At first it feels nice, and I can almost tune out the hospital noises and pretend it's just the two of us in a cozy little honeymoon suite. But after a few minutes his words come floating back, like they always do, and they start twisting around as they play on repeat in my head.

never had paella never had paella never had paella

I'm trying so hard not to dwell on anything negative, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to seem like the saddest fucking thing in the whole world, and it doesn't take long before I'm totally depressed.

I sit there, in a funk once again, looking at this amazing guy who could die without ever eating paella, and think about how even if I were to go out and find someone to cook him some goddamn paella, it would be one of those depressing-as-hell make-a-wish type things where it wouldn't even taste good, because you'd be sitting there picking at it, knowing this is, like, Death Takeout. And then the quicksand that is my brain sucks my thoughts over to death-row inmates and their last meals, and all of a sudden I'm wondering how many of them actually eat whatever their last meal is. I start picturing empty jail cells filled with uneaten food, murderers' pork chops and kidnappers' mashed potatoes, and then I'm just staring and staring at all the food left on Dylan's lunch plate and thinking about all those pancakes I made for Charlotte, who I still can't think of as being dead.

So not even five minutes after he goes to sleep, I'm sitting there next to my sick, sleeping boyfriend, ugly-crying with snot smearing my upper lip, all because of the goddamn smell of paella and a stack of uneaten pancakes.

Hold your shit together,
I tell myself.
Quit spiraling.
The solution is obvious.

The solution, as it has always been, is Castillo Finisterre.

I don't even know if they eat paella in Patagonia, but I don't fucking care. I'll have it flown in from Spain if I have to. It's all gotten wrapped together in my head and I don't care what I have to do, I'm going to put everything on fast-forward and make this trip happen. Soon.

We all raise a glass to Charlotte, cold and stiff.

Besides Scratch, no one cries, and even with him it's hard to tell whether he's actually crying or if it's just his usual allergy-induced dampness.

This is not a weeping crowd.

It
is
an angry, wall-punching crowd. There's something in the water. Outrage in the air.

“The people running this fucking place destroyed her. They're a bunch of fucking criminals.” I don't think the guy who says this even knew Charlotte. I've never seen him before in my life. A few other people in the room rumble their agreement that yeah,
someone
should pay, but it doesn't go anywhere. We're all guinea pigs here. We know that the hand that jabs us is the same hand that feeds us.

So the anger remains hazy and unfocused. It's a missile in search of a target.

To diffuse the tension Jameson shows us a video he took on his phone ages ago: Charlotte goofing around on a ukulele. She played badly, sang worse, but damn could she liven up a room. In the video she's tipsy, sitting crooked in her seat (has anyone, ever, played a ukulele sober?), and she's making up goofy lyrics to the tunes of kids' songs. She did that all the time—some of her lyrics got pretty raunchy. She had an X-rated version of “Old MacDonald” that nearly made me piss myself every time I heard it, it was that funny. This one, the one in Jameson's video, is relatively tame, set to the tune of “The Chicken or the Egg,” but she's singing it in this weird, really intense voice, instead of her usual jokey sort of way.

She starts rocking back and forth a little while she sings, and she's staring at—no, staring
down
—whoever is recording. She looks seriously pissed, like she
hates
the person behind the camera, like she's about to leap out of her chair and rip his head off. It's all pretty weird, honestly, since I assume that Jameson is the one who shot the video, but as far as I know they were pretty tight. I never knew Charlotte to act so hatefully toward him.

It starts feeling really awkward, and you can tell that other people are noticing, too, so no one protests when Jameson puts his phone away before the clip ends.

Dougie's holding ice on his knuckles, glowering through a matted curtain of his stupid wannabe dreadlocks, and I start feeling like I should go say something to him, no hard feelings, that sort of thing, to let him know that I'm not holding a grudge or anything. I mean, we're in my apartment after all, so I should probably at least try to act like a good host, even if Dougie is a fucking idiot.

My phone keeps ringing, but I don't answer it because I know it's not Dylan, and I've been getting a bunch of wrong-number calls lately. A few of them have been pretty nasty, and I'm starting to think that maybe somebody played a joke on me and wrote my name in a bathroom stall.
For a good time, call Audie,
that kind of thing.

Now that I think about it, it seems like something Dougie might do. In fact, I start feeling kind of annoyed that it took me this long to figure it out. Of course Dougie did it. I watch him sulking on the other side of the room, how he makes a big point of ignoring me even though it's my freaking apartment, and I'm sure of it.

I'm not going to confront him, though. Not tonight, anyway. Tonight's about Charlotte.

Besides, I don't feel so hot at the moment. Somebody raises yet another toast, and everyone in the room gets a little drunker and a little madder.

I pull out my phone and text the number on the Professor's business card.
Want to observe a guinea pig funeral ceremony? Come over.
I don't even know why I do it, why I invite him. For some reason I just want him to be here, doing the little note-taking thing he does. I want Charlotte's name written down somewhere. I want someone to have a record that she existed, and that she died doing this. I like the idea of having her name in a textbook somewhere. She'd get a huge kick out of that—generations of college students highlighting her name. Or even better—how cool would it be to have a multiple-choice question about you on a test?

Was Charlotte's death:

I know—I'm quite the life of the party, aren't I? But just thinking about Charlotte's death like that, like a question, makes me realize that not a single person in the room, myself included, has a fucking clue what happened to our friend. Okay, fine, like Jameson said, it's a reasonable assumption that she OD'd. We all know she was dumping a whole lot of a whole lot into her body, but was it a drop or a flood that killed her? I want to know exactly
which
pill,
which
vial, or
which
combination took my friend.

Am I the only person who wonders?

Maybe I shouldn't. It isn't that big a mystery; she's just one more test bunny who died a foreseeable, and therefore unremarkable, death. She's the warning label everyone ignores:
MAY RESULT IN DEATH
.
It doesn't apply to me,
people tell themselves.
Those things only happen to other people.

Except we, the scary, scarry people gathered in this room,
are
the other people.

I finish my beer and stand up to get another, even though I know it's a bad idea.

“Hey. Quiet. Can everyone shut up for a second? I want to have a moment of silence for Charlotte.” Even Jameson is sloppy tonight, and everyone ignores him. “She's in a better place. She really is…,” he trails off.

You can tell he doesn't believe it by the way he says it, though, like he's reading from a cheesy sympathy card. He's just saying it because that's the thing that people say when someone dies.

The Professor texts back to say he's on his way, and pretty soon Charlotte's wake begins to resemble every other guinea pig party. People are yelling, there's a guy running around in drooping tighty-whities, and the smoke detector goes off. I have another drink, because tonight's for Charlotte, and after a while the Professor shows up. I see him talking to people and taking notes, and I have another drink, and none of it fucking matters anyway.

As individuals, we're all statistically insignificant.

There's a swirling energy in all of the buffoonery that starts to lift me up a bit, though. It's obvious that all these ridiculous pillheads really do care, and that's no small thing. Eventually, all I can do is stand there and grin, because I feel like Charlotte would be laughing at all these lunatics right along with me, and even though she's dead, and even though her absence feels like a goddamn hole in my chest, I feel sort of happy right now, standing here thinking about my friend laughing, thinking about Dylan, and thinking about how I'm going to come up with the money for Patagonia even if it kills me.

Scratch wanders over and stands next to me. “Hey, Audie,” he sniffs.

Poor Scratch. I can't look at him. He's been trying to grow a mustache—it's a patchy, sad little thing crawling across his lip—and he has all these ingrown hairs that look like they're probably infected nestled in between the few pube-y tufts he's managed to grow. He's a nice enough guy, I guess, but he's just so exhaustingly revolting.

I do my best not to shudder as he scoots closer, then closer still, until he's almost leaning against me.

Oh shit.
He wants a hug.

I go stiff and try to give him one of those touch-minimizing, back-patting things, like the hug equivalent of an air kiss, but he's not having any of that. Once he has his opening, he dives right into full body contact, pulling me against him. He's a couple inches shorter than me, so he ends up kind of snuffling wetly into my neck. A little moan escapes me as I think of the mucus trail he's probably leaving on my shirt, and Scratch mistakes the sound for crying, which he takes as a cue to open up the floodgates. Soon he's weeping and snotting all over my shoulder.

“I can't believe she's gone,” he sobs.

I pull back as much as his damp embrace allows, but he's obviously taking Charlotte's death pretty hard, so I don't pull all the way away. To be honest, I'm getting a little weepy myself, just watching Scratch break down.

“I know, I miss her, too,” I say. Poor Scratch. Now I feel really bad. I mean, I know Charlotte threw the occasional pity fuck at him, but I didn't realize he had real feelings for her. I'm pretty sure the feelings weren't reciprocal, but obviously he doesn't know that. I give up on my shirt and on holding back the tears, and for a minute we sort of cling to each other and just have a good old cry. It feels good to mourn Charlotte together. Comforting. And phlegmy as he is, Scratch actually smells kind of nice. Clean. Like he made an effort.

“I know you guys were close,” I say when I finally extract myself from our wet embrace.

He shrugs, then starts fingering a nest of blackheads inside his ear. “Sort of. I mean, we hooked up a few times. But we weren't, like,
close
close.”

“No? I just assumed from the way you were…I mean, you seem to be taking it pretty hard. I thought maybe…?”

He lifts the bottom of his shirt up to towel off his face, giving me a flash of the silvery-pink eczema blooming out of his belly button. Volcanic pimples and puckered biopsy scars dot his chest like dozens of extra nipples.

Good Lord, Charlotte. How could you?

I bite the inside of my cheek and focus on a smudge on the wall behind him until he tucks his shirt back in. “Nah, it's not like that. It's just the timing, man. It sucks. I mean, I was
this
close to closing the deal on a little, uh, investment opportunity, and Charlotte was gonna help me out. Make the dream happen, you know?”

I tilt my head at him, work my jaw a little.

He misunderstands my confusion. “I was going to pay her back. With interest, obviously.”

“
That's
why you're wailing like a fucking banshee? Because you asked her for a fucking
loan
?”

He shrugs again, goes back to digging into those blackheads in his ear, really going for it this time. “What? I was counting on it, you know? I have
commitments
. And she supposedly had some sweet thing going on, tons of cash coming in.”

He finally looks at the expression on my face. Picks up on my rage. “Hey, don't get me wrong—it's not just the money. Do you think I'd be crying like a baby if I didn't care? I'm totally going to miss her. Totally. It's some sad shit, man. It's sad shit
and
bad timing, that's all I mean.”

I think back to one of my last conversations with Charlotte. Our Marry, Fuck, Sack Tap game.

I pick option C and leave Scratch mewling and sputtering on the floor in fetal position as I walk away. “Get bent, you nasty fucking pustule,” I say over my shoulder. “Shove your stupid investment opportunity up your crusty, leprous ass!”

I hate it when I'm so wrong about people. It makes me question my own judgment—like, who else am I misinterpreting?

I see the Professor trying to get my attention as I push my way out of the apartment, but I ignore him. I'm done wasting time with this crowd.

It's cold tonight, and raining pretty hard, but I don't care. I tuck my head down and head over to the hospital. It's way after visiting hours, but I know how to sneak past the nurses. Dylan's pretty much the only person I can count on these days, and since he can't come to me, I'll go to him.