Placebo Junkies (3 page)

Back home I start telling Charlotte about what happened with the Beagle, but she stops me before I get very far. “Quit avoiding the subject, Audie,” she says, and throws a handful of popcorn at me. “You still haven't given me an answer for Leonardo DiCaprio. Before he got all jowly, obviously.”

I have no strong feelings whatsoever about Leonardo DiCaprio, pre- or post-jowls, but I make a stabbing motion just to mix things up. We're playing celebrity Marry, Fuck, Kill, but Charlotte never wants to kill anyone.

“I'm not a pacifist or anything,” she says when I point it out to her. “I just have commitment issues. Killing's too permanent—with my luck I'd off somebody then realize two minutes later they were actually the love of my life. I prefer to keep my options open.” She chews on a fingernail for a minute, until her face brightens with a solution. “There are plenty of guys I'd like to kick in the nuts.”

We change the game to Marry, Fuck, Sack Tap, and that evens out our ratio considerably.

“There's something I want to talk to you about,” Charlotte says once the popcorn bowl is empty. “A proposal.”

“You're in no condition to be making any proposals,” I say. “You just expressed your desire to marry the biggest douche bag in the history of reality television. Your judgment is obviously impaired.”

“Not
that
kind of a proposal, smart-ass. Though any man would be lucky to call me his wife.”

“That goes without saying.” I roll my eyes, then duck as she swats at me.

“Shut up and hear me out,” she says. “I'm being serious here. I think it's time for us to cash out. Or cash in. Whatever. I'm just sick of this place. I'm sick of being sick, you know? I can't take it anymore. I'm starting to feel like a prisoner.”

I start to say something sarcastic about how no one's stopping her from getting up and leaving right this second, but then I notice the look on her face. For once, Charlotte is being completely serious.

She sits up straight, something else unusual for her, and explains her plan.

It's simple enough: She's going to sign up for everything.
Everything.
She's willing to consent to anything—she'll do any study that'll take her, until her pockets are bursting with cash, and then she's going to hit the road and never look back. It's a guinea pig marathon. A game of endurance. “Come on, Audie. It'll work even better if we partner up. I have a system all figured out.”

Her system largely consists of binge-testing in staggered shifts. She'll drag me home from my shifts, I'll prop her upright during hers. We'll run distraction for each other if the lab administrators ask too many questions, vouch for one another's unerring compliance, that kind of thing. We'll be the guinea pig equivalent of sober sisters.

I wait until she's done talking and then I tell her it sounds like suicide by experiment. “You should've seen the old lady this morning, Charlotte. The Beagle. She seriously looked like she was about two minutes away from Game Over. No one ever talks about it, but bad stuff does happen here sometimes.”

Charlotte heaves a melodramatic sigh at me, and when she answers, it's in the slow voice she uses with people she thinks are stupid. “Duh, Audie. I'm not going to actually
take
all the shit they give me. I'm not an idiot. Don't tell me you actually swallow every pill they give you.”

It's not a question, the way she says it. Ethics do not weigh heavily on Charlotte's mind.

Charlotte prefers to focus on survival.

“Here's how you do it.” She starts telling me all the ways you can fake your way through studies. I've heard some of them, but she's turned the tricks people use around here into a science. I can't help but be impressed—Charlotte can be quite the little schemer when she wants to be.

Toss back a few caffeine pills and then chain-smoke three cigarettes just outside the doctor's office and your blood pressure goes sky-high, she says.

Fake a pregnancy with twenty bucks and a quick trip to the waiting room of the low-income clinic. There's always someone willing to sell you a nice warm cup of piss brimming with all the right hormones.

Scarf a triple brownie sundae three hours before your glucose test.

“Fast when they say eat, and eat when they say fast,” she says.

Load up on iron supplements and aspirin for five days before giving a stool sample. Mix metal shavings into Vaseline and rub it on your body before an MRI. “It'll fuck up their results enough they'll have to pay you to come back and do it all over again.”

Drink enough Visine and you'll slip into a coma.

Charlotte has done a lot of homework. She closes her eyes and shows me the way she gasped and snorted her way into a diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea just last week.

“What?” she asks when she opens her eyes and sees the way I'm looking at her. She knows people who've faked cancer. She knows someone serving a rough prison sentence who faked tuberculosis convincingly enough to ride out the rest of his time in a cozy isolation room. “Did you know you can order tapeworm larvae on the Internet?”

It's no big deal. Everybody does it, Charlotte says.

I happen to know she's right.

I remember the feel of a specimen cup shoved between my legs, my mother's voice hissing at me to
hurry up and tinkle, baby, you can do it, just hurry, goddamn it!
while the HR person waited outside. Back in the days when she occasionally held on to a job, dear old Mom could always come up with a reason for why I had to come into work with her on drug-testing days. My day care burned down, or maybe I'd just been sent home for lice—her lies rarely skimped on tragedy or humiliation.

So yeah, everybody does it, but that still doesn't make Charlotte's plan a good idea. Right now I do maybe two or three studies a week, on average. It doesn't sound like a lot, but once you factor in the paperwork, lab visits, hours and hours of observation time, and multiple appointments for each study, it's practically a full-time job.

And then you need to figure in the pain. The recovery time. The side effects. The blisters, the fevers, the days and days of knock-you-retching-to-the-ground nausea.

It's just not possible to keep up the kind of pace Charlotte's talking about. Besides, it's not so bad here. It really isn't. This is just one of Charlotte's funks talking.

And yet, I can see the appeal.

Her plan is completely unrealistic. It's crazy, really—stupid, dangerous crazy. But the money…the money would be nice.

I happen to have a great need for money at the moment. I haven't told Charlotte anything about it, but she's the kind of person who can sniff out that sort of thing. Charlotte's the kind of person who can smell weakness.

I don't mean that in a bad way. It's a useful skill in a place like this.

“I see that greedy little gleam in your eye,” she says. “I can tell you're thinking about it. Hey, maybe we can even take off together when we're done. We'll be like Thelma and Louise, or something. I don't even care where we go. Just…away.”

“You know what happened to Thelma and Louise, right? They died.” But I can feel myself considering what the money would mean.

She shrugs. Grins. “Who cares? That movie was so good. Ooh, speaking of—vintage Brad Pitt: Marry, Fuck, or Sack Tap?”

I don't say anything. It's a ridiculous idea, not even worth talking about.

“Hello? Earth to Audie?” Charlotte nudges me with her foot.

“I'll think about it,” I say.

I like to keep my options open, too.

Sometime during the night I wake up, just barely, and Dylan is pressed against me.

This is a love story, after all. Are you surprised by that?

I don't remember hearing him come in, but we're in my bed, spooning. After the fiasco of a morning, I talked my way into a quickie procedure study and got nicked by a catheter wielded by some shaky-handed little shit of an intern, so I don't feel like fooling around. Did I tell Dylan about that already? I don't remember telling him, but my thoughts are all blurry, so who knows. Or maybe he can just tell.

The lab supervisor gave me a couple of Vicodin by way of apology, so I'm woozy on top of sore—maybe that's why I didn't hear him come in—but Dylan is awesome about stuff like that. He's been there, too. Not literally, obviously, though I'm sure guys can get their own version of catheter injuries. I just mean he's been sick enough that even the thought of sex is like someone rubbing sandpaper over a sunburn. Just…
no.
He gets it.

He's not a tester, though. Well, he is, but he isn't. I just mean it's not a career for him.

Testing saved his life.

Dylan's kind of a celebrity around the labs. He's an outlier. An anomaly. A six-foot-one, amber-eyed discrepancy. Usually that's a bad thing around here, but in his case it means that unlike the other thirty-odd people in his sample group, he's alive. A particularly nasty cancer, fast and mean—I picture his tumors in stained wifebeater tanks, muttering with my dad's bourbon scrape of a voice—and a violent brute of a treatment to match. Dylan somehow survived both. He alone still stands.

Rather, Dylan still lies. Here in bed. With me. His breath is warm against my bare shoulder.

He's my very own improbable outcome, if you're statistically minded. My very own miracle, if you're not. Either way works for me; I'm not one to pick apart something this good.

“I hate seeing you hurt. You should quit, Audie. This stuff'll kill you.” He kisses my neck as he starts the conversation we've had a hundred times before. He doesn't push it, though. He just keeps kissing little feathery trails, letting the statement breathe on its own.

I love him.

I do—I love his mutant, scarred skin and his ninth-life mind. We fit together like two pieces of a waterlogged jigsaw puzzle, our damage swelling us tighter and closer. True, he doesn't like what I do, but that's because he still has one foot in Normal. High school, report cards, the whole bit, including a mom who gives him hell when she catches him sneaking out to stay with me. But he doesn't feel comfortable in his old life anymore, either. There, he's Cancer Boy. Here, he's a stud—a test-lab superhero. The Great Teenage Hope for a Cure. That, and I think it's pretty hard to give a shit about your senior prom after you've had nuclear waste injected into your gonads.

I met him in a waiting room, fooled around with him later that night, then again a few days later. I kept my low expectations, my no expectations, for a while.
Just hanging out. See ya when I see ya.
That's what people like us do, right? He's cute. He's tall. He makes me smile. It was plenty.

But it hit me
bam!
when he held the bucket. How long ago was that—two months? Six? It was a textbook's worth of side effects ago, and it's been obvious ever since: he loves me too. I knew it the moment he walked into the bathroom without knocking, sleeves already pushed up. “What can I do?” he asked, stepping in closer, undeterred by the foul liquid torrents pouring out of me, uncontrollably spraying out both ends at the same time—I was a two-sided fountain of sick. I couldn't say anything at all, I just heaved and retched, unbeautiful, untouchable, unwantable, and nearly savage with misery. But he stayed anyway, his eyes tactfully unfocused as he held my hair back for me, gently pulling it off my sweaty, vomit-crusted cheeks. It's a crystal-clear moment in a sea of muddy weeks, one I revisit often, whenever I can: I'm as sick as a freaking dog, pants around my ankles and oh my God the smell, and he walks in, keeps walking in even when he sees what's going on.
I'll hold the bucket,
he says in this gentle, deep voice, like it's nothing at all, and
yes,
I could see, I
can
see it through the tears, sense it through the stench, feel it through the cramps and the waves.

He loves me.

And since then, since that night, oh the fluids we've shared.

It's a special kind of intimacy, I think. All the usual puppy love and teenage sex, sure, but something stronger than that, too, something torn raw, then scarred over. I don't care if it grosses you out, I think it's romantic. He's seen me at my lowest, and he stayed. Stayed while I sprayed, puked, shat, dribbled, sobbed. And I've done the same for him. We've loved the worst of each other, so we get the best of each other.

“You're my blue moon,” I whisper into his skin.

“Is everything okay?” He's half-asleep, still curled around me, but I can feel the question mark as clearly as I can hear it. “You're kind of a mystery lately.”

I don't answer. We both know I'm keeping a secret from him—there's no use denying it.

It's getting harder, though. It's a big secret. The kind of secret that practically vibrates out of you, shimmering out of your pores—it's
that
good. I stuff it back down before I turn to kiss him good night, hoping he'll take the hint and go back to sleep. I'll tell him soon enough. In seven weeks, to be exact.

That's when Dylan, who should be dead, turns eighteen.

Dylan, who could still die—his is an IV tightrope walk of a survival—deserves to celebrate. But what do you buy someone for a birthday he was never supposed to see? A freaking sweater and some moo shu chicken from the takeout place down the street just isn't going to cut it.

I need to give him a gift worthy of the occasion.

A trip around the world was my first idea. I could do it, too. There's good money to be made on the testing circuit if you're smart about it. Picturing him in all those postcard places so foreign and far away they seem made up—the Eiffel Tower, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu—just about brings tears to my goddamn eyes I want it so bad.

But Dylan can't travel. Not capital-
T
Travel, months at a time like that, anyway. His remission is still too shaky to untether so completely from his meds and his tests and his scans.

So I had to pick just one place. One place out of all the places he's never been. I'd been sweating it for a while, thinking, fuck it, I guess I'll just trust the masses and pick somewhere popular—we'll go see the Glockenspiel, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa or something. I've never been out of the country either, so what do I know? I was about to do it, to make reservations for some chumpy bus tour of Euroschlock, because I thought if I waited any longer we'd end up stuck at some divey Motel Six in Des Moines, since that's all that would be left if I didn't hurry up and make plans to go
somewhere
. But then that night we were watching the Discovery Channel, not even because we wanted to, but because neither of us had the energy to change the channel, and a program about Patagonia came on. They were showing this eco-resort called Castillo Finisterre, which the show's ambiguously accented (New Zealand? South Africa? Native-Born Reality TV?) host translated as “the castle at the end of the world.” It's at the far tip of South America, perched on the edge of the continent, the very end of the inhabited world, with nothing else around except cliffs and glaciers and the occasional wandering puma. Some dude was paddling around icebergs in a kayak, and I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say it looked like something from a different planet.
Otherworldly
—that's the perfect word to describe it.

I was barely paying attention, to be honest—I'm not exactly a nature lover. I only happened to see the look on Dylan's face because I turned to ask him if he wanted to order pizza.

It gave me the chills, that look. Seriously, it just about broke my heart. He didn't say anything, but he didn't need to. I could tell exactly what he was thinking. Two thoughts at the same time, etched across his face like an acid splash:

There should be a word for it, that simultaneous stab of desire and defeat—the knowledge that something is generally possible but personally impossible. It's like getting a giant middle finger from the universe, a great big
fuck you
of a dream turned inside out. All I could think while I watched that look spread across his face was,
Okay, here's where it all starts to go to shit
. It was like watching bitterness and regret take root inside Dylan in real time.

So right then and there I knew I had to do whatever it took to make Patagonia happen. I mean, come on—the castle at the fucking end of the world. It puts every other half-assed tourist spot to shame.

A secret like this one tends to leak through the cracks, though. Especially during moments like these, pressed skin to skin, his breath on my shoulder. But I can't let it slip yet. Not until the whole trip is planned, paid, and promised. And that's going to take some serious, vein-popping overtime—the place costs a damn fortune. But I've got a lot of skin, and a lot of blood. I'm going to give Dylan his impossible.

That's the thing someone like Dylan doesn't necessarily get about volunteering. For someone like him, it's a last resort. For someone like me, it's a starting line—the castle at the end of the world, and everything in between.

Unlike his, my version of normal sucks. I did the whole fast-food-restaurant job, GED, homeless-teen-in-the-system thing when I first left home. Foster parents, social workers, suburban-wasteland taco-chain night shifts so fourth-meal-seeking stoner assholes can come and eat their chalupas, giving me a hard time, leaning in and waggling their eyebrows for their friends while they ask me to squirt extra sour cream on their burritos
but do it sexy this time.
Making minimum wage except what the shitbag manager docks from my check because I called said fourth-meal asshole exactly what he was and squirted the sour cream all over his ugly face. And from there, couch-surfing, flophouses, shelters, alleys—barely managing to survive month to month, in the system, under the system, in spite of the system…

Dylan's not the only one saved by the experiments they do around here. My whole
life
was a fucking tumor.

So yeah, the side effects can be rough. But the money's good, and the odds of survival are a hell of a lot better here than where I'm coming from. Think about it this way: the researchers and the drug companies have a vested interest in keeping you healthy. They
want
you to be okay. They'll let you know if your blood tests come back wonky, they'll patch up your sores, they feed you whenever you're in their labs more than an hour or two, tops—I'm talking organic stuff, feta cheese, that sort of thing. They don't want anyone dying on them—they need us healthy. They want us alive.

And that, my friends, is a whole lot better than anyone else has ever wanted for me. So sure, this life might kill me. But in my experience, real life kills you even faster.

I turn over and wrap myself even deeper into Dylan's arms, and I fall back to sleep knowing exactly what I'm going to say to Charlotte tomorrow.

I'm in.