Placebo Junkies (15 page)

All the way home the lights play tricks on my mind.

I'm well enough to walk, but my balance is off and I keep veering to the right even when I mean to go straight. I swat away the buzzing gnats of the hallway fluorescents overhead, and then I spit at the stabbing, jabbing floodlights that line the sidewalk outside. I weave through the parking lot and slam my fist down on the trunk of a car whose turn signal is mocking me with its pointless on-off, on-off sounds (
FUCKyouFUCKyouFUCKyou
). The white-haired driver looks at me with startled round eyes and slaps quickly at the door lock as I walk by.

One-block, two-blocks, one-block. The distance contracts and expands as I walk home, and the streetlights follow me, stretching their necks to hand me off, relay-style, to the next glowing guard. There'll be no shadows for me to hide in, no sirree. The spotlight shines on my back, making the skin on my neck tingle and crawl as I stop and lean against the wall to vomit.

It's fortunate for me now, as it has been before, that guinea pigs don't drive to work. Too many blurry, side-effected nights like this one to survive the commute.

Halfway home my brain unwinds itself enough that at least I can tell the difference between fact and symptom—I can recognize, I can articulate to myself, that
this
thing or feeling or apparition is just the drug gripping my mind, and, most likely, so is
that.
These things, these creeping, whispering bugaboos peering out at me, are not real—they are figments of my test-addled mind. Knowing this does not stop me from seeing them, but it does stop me from
believing
in them. Someone who has never had this experience, this breakthrough, might not recognize the significance, but it is profound.

Fuck me. Chalk up yet another recreational drug my junkie genetics won't let me enjoy. My mind feels tinkered with, toyed with, in a most unpleasant way.

Apparently, I prefer a good close rein on my brain.

When I finally squint and stumble my way into my apartment building, it takes me several panicked minutes—two? five? time is too stretched out to tell—to find my keys, since the act of sticking my hands into my pockets assaults my overwrought nerve endings with unpleasant sensations. Glass-sharp lint and razor-blade crumbs wedge themselves under my fingernails when I reach into my jacket, and even the fabric feels like woven barbed wire against my skin.

I guess that I find the key somewhere in the middle of a stretch of time that my brain absorbed and discarded, because then all of a sudden I'm in the apartment, where a different sense assaults me. The living room is messy, messier than it's ever been, and beneath the clutter, wafting in swamp-colored tendrils through the air, is the unmistakable stink of decaying flesh. Part of my brain notes the overflowing wastebasket in the kitchen, deduces it's the smell of chicken tossed two days ago and begging to be taken out, but that doesn't stop the other sector of my brain that's still dancing in circles from whispering terrible things in my ear.
It's Charlotte. She's here. This is how she smells now. Dead and rotten, just like you.

I slap the thought away from my ear and walk into the stench.

Jameson is sitting at the table, staring into space. “Hey, Audie,” he mumbles, but barely. He's wearing the same clothes from yesterday, and I can smell the vinegary stink of his sock-clad feet even over the smell of decay.

I open my mouth to ask him if he's okay, maybe make a joke about the messy apartment, but someone knocks on the door behind me before I can say anything.

I open the door and the fog in my head lifts a little as soon as I see Dylan standing there. I press against him and kiss him, I mean,
really
kiss him, and Jameson makes a disgusted snort behind me.

“Come on.” I grab Dylan's hand and pull him past Jameson, who just sits there and shakes his head at me like he's a fucking school principal debating whether to send me to detention.

I almost lead Dylan into Charlotte's bedroom by mistake, since I've been sleeping in there for the last couple of nights, but I catch myself just in time and we go into mine, where I shut the door against the smells of the apartment.

“That dude hates me,” Dylan says as I'm pulling his shirt over his head.

“He's having a rough week.”

I pretend not to notice how much weight Dylan has lost—how he seems to be shrinking before my eyes. His jutting ribs look like gills, and the new peaks of his face catch the light in ways they never did before.
He's fine,
I remind myself.
Nobody eats the hospital food.

I turn off the light so that I can fill him. Rebuild him. Fortunately, he's familiar in the dark. Wrapped together, skin pressed to skin, his changed appearance no longer matters.

Afterward, he falls asleep. Once he's been out for what feels like long enough, I sneak from the bed and pull his wallet from the pocket of the jeans crumpled on the floor.

I have enough money saved up now to buy our plane tickets, and I've finally decided how I'm going to surprise Dylan with the news that we're going to Patagonia. I want the big reveal to be fun—I'm going to fill out a passport application with all of his information, then hand it to him to sign. See how long it takes him to figure it out. I already have most of the blanks filled in, but I need to fill in the rest soon if there's any chance of getting the passport back in time for the trip. Even with expedited service, we're cutting it close.

I freeze as he stirs, then rolls over in the bed. I wait until he settles back into his slow sleep-breathing before I pry his ID out of the wallet in order to fill in one of the gaps remaining on the form—his middle name.

Alexander. How did I not know that? It makes me feel bad, like the world's shittiest girlfriend, for not even knowing my own boyfriend's middle name.

But at least now I know: Alexander.

It suits him. I imagine his parents quarreling about names, wanting, needing to come up with just the right one. A family name, I bet. A gift from an earlier generation. The kind of name you get from parents who care, from a family with roots that grip the earth and don't let go. A name shared and bestowed.

Not like my name, which looks like a drunk person's typo. Audrea is bad enough. Pair it with my middle name, Makayna—Hawaiian, a random thought from parents who've never come closer to any tropical location than a Malibu Rum hangover. I have a dollar-store, grab-bag name. They might as well have called me Final Discount. Little Miss Odds and Ends.

Whatever.

I'm smiling, feeling victorious as I slide the ID back in the wallet, when the numbers on the card start to fidget and scatter. Dylan's birth date rearranges itself before my eyes, and as I watch, next month becomes three months past.

No.
No.

It's not right. It's the drugs. They're still in my system.

I remind myself of this over and over until my heart slows down and my gut unclenches. It's not real. Of course I didn't miss his birthday. It's an optical illusion. My eyes still playing tricks on me.

I toss the wallet onto the floor—no sense letting the ID pull its nasty stunt on me again—and curl up against Dylan, my forehead pressed to his back and my eyes squeezed shut.

When I wake up, the room is flooded with sunlight, and everything is clear again—the numbers and letters and facts and shadows have all returned to their correct places.
Keep the reins on your brains, Audie,
I tell myself.
You'll get through this.

He waits until the end of the hour to tell me he wants to increase my dose and also start me on yet another new medication. “I'm very pleased with your progress, Audie. You're becoming one of my success stories.”

“Progress according to what?” the girl using my mouth asks. She sits on my fingers to keep me from scratching.

The doctor's eyes pinch a little at the challenge. “Well, we've certainly made significant progress as far as your cognitive functioning and the delusions go. But I will admit that, on some fronts, it does feel like we're slipping a bit. I haven't seen you smile in weeks, for example, and several of the nurses have commented on your flat affect. You seem to have lost some of your fight, which I suppose is both good and bad. Anyway, I'd like to start you on an antidepressant, see if we can hold off another slide into major depression.”

I wrestle control of my mouth back long enough to say something, even though I know it will cost me. “I've never been depressed in my life.”

He raises a doubting eyebrow, then looks down to flip through the pages in my chart. It takes him a long time to scan through the alphabet soup of my diagnoses.

Finally, he frowns his confirmation that I'm right. “Well, Audie, nonetheless I'm seeing some unmistakable signs of depression. Insomnia. Lethargy. Decreased appetite. Do you really disagree?”

“I'm not depressed. I'm unhappy. It's different.” The itching is almost unbearable. It's her fault—she wants me to stop talking.

The doctor leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers, the way he always does when we only have a short time left. He thinks the pose disguises his wandering attention. “How so?” His eyes are welded to the clock on the wall behind me.

It takes the last of my energy, but I say it anyway. “Depression is irrational. I'm unhappy because my life sucks. That's rational.”

I can tell that the clock has finally reached the hour, because the little tension lines around his eyes relax. “You know, Audie, sometimes I forget that you're still a teenager.” He smiles. Gives the shallow little rumble that is meant to be his laugh. He is the only person I've ever met who actually chortles. “Okay. We can hold off for now if you feel strongly about it, but I'd like to revisit this next week.”

I do feel strongly about it, but I can't say so because I've lost control of my mouth again. As payment, the girl who isn't me lets me snake my hand out for one quick scratch, deep along my thigh. I dig in my nails, make it count. “No, it's fine,” she says in my voice. “If you think changing my meds will help.” She tilts my head one way and then the other. Blinks away the fading edges. “You're the doctor.”

After a long day in the pill mines, I go to a movie with Dylan. It's something action-y and futuristic, but I can't concentrate on the plot because I'm too focused on the actor's hairpiece and how it slips around from scene to scene. Our aging but still-muscular hero has found love on a distant planet, but all I can think about is the fact that his hairline was noticeably higher back on Earth. Has NASA ever studied gravitational effects on follicles?

It's the drugs, of course. Charlotte must have self-reported a severe case when she filled out the enrollment paperwork for the ADHD study, so I'm on the maximum dose possible. For three days I've been hyperfocused on one thing at a time.

One.

Thing.

At.

A.

Time.

So you know how you usually have at least a few things floating around in your brain at once? Like, yeah, this movie is awesome, and oh shit I forgot to charge my cell phone, and damn my boyfriend's hot? Not me. Not anymore, anyway—the usual matrix of competing thoughts has shrunk into a single laser-beam point of concentration. I process the world in staccato, single-task bursts.

It turns out that this completely ruins the act of making out, which is fundamentally supposed to be a holistic experience. Dylan tried kissing me as soon as the lights went out in the theater, but it was kind of pathetic since I couldn't help getting fixated on stupid details. Like, I'd never noticed the way he makes this weird clicking sound with his tongue right before our lips meet, or the way he traces little circles into my thigh with his thumb while we're kissing. Suddenly it was all I could think about and it absolutely annoyed the crap out of me. Which kind of defeated the whole purpose of making out.

I miss my free-form brain ballet. There's something to be said for random. There's something healthy about distraction.

Nobody's perfect if you stare long enough.

Now please excuse me while I focus.

The actor stands on the planet's windswept surface, marveling at his newfound ability to breathe alien air, but his hair barely flutters in the Martian breeze. And: his part is a quarter inch closer to his left ear than when he first emerged from the transport pod. He moves off camera and I hold my breath until he reappears. Hey-ho, cut scene, and his phony cowlick has shifted portside again!

I turn to examine Dylan's hairline. Now that he's given up on getting any dark-theater action—apparently, I didn't disguise my lack of responsiveness very well—he's enjoying the movie and doesn't notice me staring. Wait. Has his hairline changed, too? I could have sworn he wore his hair parted on the other side. I replay various scenes in my mind, zeroing in on his hair.
Click click click,
I shuffle through memories, frowning at hairline discrepancies. Finally, a pattern emerges.

Oh.

Scrutiny is the enemy of perfection.

I stretch my arm over his shoulder, pretend-casual, and ruffle my fingers through his hair to confirm what I already know. He turns his head and gives me a brief distracted kiss, then returns his eyes to the screen. I pull my hands back into my lap, ashamed of myself for only now realizing how much his treatments have thinned his hair, which used to be thick and full.

At least he's put back some of the weight he lost.

My excessively attentive brain gloms on to any good news at all lately, since life as Charlotte has not gone as smoothly this week. Two studies busted me, shooing me out the door in disgrace. One, upon noticing discrepancies in my blood type. Charlotte: A-positive. Me: O-negative.

Make that
O
for oops. Definitely a big fat negative, as far as the lab was concerned.

The other study did the unthinkable: they actually looked closely at the ID I handed over. “This isn't you,” the study coordinator said after frowning at the driver's license for a long minute.

I wasn't going to argue with her. I reached for the card, prepared to walk out without a scene, but she snatched it away, holding it just out of my reach. “This isn't a game, you know,” she snapped. “You people think this is just an easy way to make a buck. Do you not understand that we're trying to do something important here? Do you even care that pulling stunts like this, lying on your forms and swapping participants, can completely invalidate our results? You're messing with real lives here.”

Like my life isn't real. Like Charlotte's wasn't real.

We stared each other down until I finally lunged across the desk to grab Charlotte's driver's license and then walked out of the office.

“I'm going to warn the other offices about you,” she called after me. “I'm sending an email to the whole department. Good luck pulling off your little switcheroo in the future.”

She's full of shit. The studies are staffed by a rotating cast of graduate students, visiting faculty, interns, and technicians who have their noses buried so far into the data that they can't be bothered with details about individual test subjects.

But still. It's a concern. Good thing I can't worry about it for long. I have hairlines to inspect.

The movie climaxes. At last, the hero's hair comes under control; it maintains its Astroturf-y stasis and the integrity of its side part through two galactic battles, several sexy alien romps, and an interplanetary award ceremony. Two-thirds of the way through the film and someone on the production set finally started paying attention to details. Perhaps the good makers of AttentiQuil DX (patent pending!) should commence their marketing efforts in Hollywood.

Dylan wants to get something to eat, but the meds have killed my appetite. “I'll split something with you,” I say, and he makes a face.

I recalibrate. “How about Mexican?” I say, trying to look hungry and enthusiastic.

I really hate disappointing him.