The question is, do I have enough left to do it again?
It’s not long before I’m soaked to the bone. I think I should go home and change, before the thudding reality hits me that I now have no home. I’ve lost everything, clothes included, and for a moment I’m caught in a vortex of dizziness.
Once it’s passed I buy some clothes and a raincoat, stuffing my wet gear into the plastic bag offered, and then duck into a small coffee place on Runstraat. Once I’ve drained half the cup, the hot liquid only partly warming me up, I start to feel a little better, so I pull out the phone and make the call I’ve been putting off. But the electrician doesn’t answer. I leave a message asking him to call me urgently. Then I tackle my voicemail, of which there are plenty. The last is from someone called Theo Veldt. He’s the fire investigator assigned to the case and says he’ll be there at midday, if I’d like to meet him there. I’m not sure I can face it. I know that he’s going to find it was the electrics. I must have left something on and condemned Kush to his death.
I turn on to Keizersgracht, past all the fancy houses, and then turn right into Leidsestraat. It’s busier here, two tramlines and people on bikes streaming in both directions, spray spinning off their tyres in elegant arcs. A man in work boots, hard hat and an orange hi-vis steps out of McDonald’s taking large bites out of a burger, and knocks into me. Further down a shop window is full of TVs, a jumble of different-sized screens. They’re all tuned to the same channel, a news programme; there’s a talking blonde head, and in the corner of the screen a small rectangle with a scene I recognize. The rectangle zooms out till it takes up the full screen. It’s shaky mobile-phone footage of my boat burning in the dark. From the angle I can work out roughly where it was taken from, a house across the canal in the opposite direction to Rashid’s. I watch it for a bit, the flames being tickled by the jets of water before it ends and the talking head appears with the next news item. I’m starting to think the electrician’s not answering my calls because he’s seen this and skipped town. I walk on quickly, my heart punching my ribcage. All of a sudden I know what’s coming. I can feel it, a presence behind me, gathering strength, a sense of darkness sucking at my back, sucking at my feet, sucking all the air out of the world.
It hits when I’m crossing the next bridge. At first I think there’s an earthquake. But it’s not; it’s the anger, the black wolf. I stumble to the rail and grab it as the rage ignites inside. People cycle by, no one stops. I get my vape out, press the button. It’s taking too long, and I feel myself start to slide. My fingers fumble and the vape falls into the water below. Splash. A tram rumbles. The bell clangs once. Reality fragments into static scenes. Time loops. Traffic. Horns blaring. I stumble into someone. Heywatchout. Clouds. Spires. Circling birds. Voices coming in and out of focus. Hands in front of me. My hands? Opening a gate. Rain rain rain. Back of my neck. Coin on the ground. Black wolf’s eye. More horns speeding past and dropping in pitch and another one and another one and a … Wait here for a while, maybe it’ll pass. Walking now, feet distant; they look miles away. Better not look down. Time speeds up, blur of people, too fast. Black. Faces. Faces. Faces. Station Chief Smit, gun wound. Faces faces faces. Shoe in my hand. Throw. One. Two. Screams. A woman’s face. Fear on it. Move. Move now. Wet grass against my soles. Eyes. Eyes everywhere. Mouths muttering. Soft whispers building to a deafening roar. Hands clamped on ears. Heart thudding. A man taking something out of a bin. The eyes are looking at me. Sodden cigarette butts clustered round a lamp post. There’s something I … On the move again. Where am I? Where are we? What are we? Our head’s turning, a million freeze-frames one after the other. Metallic taste. Wet grass on my cheek. Something crawling in my ear. There’s something … Time stoooooooooooooooooooooooooooops.
What – do I …
The call had not gone well. Which was hardly a surprise. He’s driving home from the office, having told his PA he had a last-minute doctor’s appointment. Only the doctor is waiting for him at home, inside a bottle with a fancy label. The traffic lights up ahead turn red and he slows to a standstill. Another car pulls up alongside him and he feels jumpy all of a sudden. He glances over and sees a couple of young men, mid-twenties most likely. They have the windows down, music blaring, the driver smoking a cigarette, the passenger upending a bottle of something. They’re pumped up and he suddenly zooms back in time to twenty years earlier when it could have been him in the car. He finds himself wondering what happened. How did he end up where he is now? What would his younger self do if he’d known the route he was travelling down would land him here? The light changes and the car roars away, but he just sits there, unable to move, unable to press the accelerator until the next light cycle comes round.
It’s Not The World – It’s How You Look At It
‘Rykel.’
I look up to see Vermeer behind bars. For a moment or two I wonder what she’s done to deserve that, then realize it’s actually me behind them. But then I think that really it’s only a matter of perspective. She tries to slide them open but they’re locked.
‘Hey,’ she calls out to someone further down the corridor. ‘Hey, why’s this locked? You know who that is in there?’
A guard saunters into view, unhooking a large key chain from his belt. He takes an age deciding on the key. It’s got to be some kind of record. Finally he selects one, holds it up for a final inspection, then slips it into the lock.
He shrugs. ‘Just following orders.’
The key turns, the bars slide through each other like an optical illusion, and for a moment I feel on the verge of being catapulted back.
Vermeer steps into the cell. ‘C’mon, let’s get you out of here.’
They’d found me in Amsterdamse Bos, a call from a concerned citizen alerting them to my whereabouts. The panic was starting to subside as the two uniforms approached me, but I was still a long way from being coherent. That was hours ago, how many I’m not sure, but the dark undercurrent is still there, still pulling at me, sucking me down. I need cannabis, and quick. Or I risk going back.
Vermeer stands with me whilst the duty sergeant fetches the box and pulls out my keys and phone. No wallet. I query that. The man shrugs, hands me a bit of paper I don’t recall signing, relinquishing one set of keys. Nothing else. No vape. There’s a memory of it disappearing in water.
I turn to go.
‘Hey, what about your keys?’
I stare down at them, a single latch key and a Chubb, both shiny and worn from use.
‘The door they unlock no longer exists.’
He looks at me like I’m crazy. Which given my state when I was brought in is probably not surprising. I suddenly remember I had two sets, though, and Sabine’s aren’t here.
‘Where are the other ones?’
‘There are no other ones; these are the keys you had on you when you were brought in.’
‘No, that can’t be right. I had another set.’
I try to think back, remember what’s happened to them, but it’s hopeless, my memory a confusing jumble.
‘Why don’t you just take these?’ he says to me like I’m clearly unhinged and will regret it later.
I must’ve lost them. Fuck. I’m going to have to tell Sabine. I look at the keys to my houseboat. They’re vibrating, though no one else seems to see it.
‘No, really. Chuck ’em.’
It’s no longer raining when we step outside and I suddenly wonder just how long I was out. A few hours, longer? The darkness is still sucking at my back.
‘I need to go to a coffeeshop.’
‘Rykel, you were found sprawled on the grass in Amsterdamse Bos mumbling incoherently, jumping at shadows. You tried to fight off two of the officers and they had to restrain you, which is why you ended up in that cell. I really think you need to lay off.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘You’re right, I don’t.’
She’s a bit ahead of me now, something righteous in her bearing. I can hardly blame
her. I was the same once. Only what I’ve gone through has changed me. I’m no longer the same person I was even six months ago. And something I realized during that period when I started to finally get better is that, really, it’s not the world – it’s how you look at it. Only looking at it differently is not always so easy on its own. Sometimes you need help.
‘You’re not hearing me. I need it right now or it’ll happen again.’
‘What you need is to take a real hard look at yourself,’ she says, spinning round, her eyes flashing. ‘You’re standing in the street, with no shoes on, telling me you need a psychoactive drug.’
When I look down I discover she’s right. Okay. I get that it’s not ideal, but neither’s my life right now. And really, if she had a headache I’m sure she’d pop a pill. What’s the difference?
‘It won’t take long.’
In the end she actually waits outside Barney’s Lounge on Reguliersgracht whilst I have to deal with a bud-tender who harbours a bottomless pit of contempt for humanity before I’m finally hitting a dab rig. I don’t normally like dabs – highly concentrated cannabis extracts are not the same as vaporizing flower – but in this case I need the quickest way to get the stuff into my system. Afterwards, as the anxiety starts to melt, the sucking darkness finally receding, she takes me to a store and buys me a new pair of shoes. I catch her looking at me in a mirror as I lace them up.
I’m pretty sure the look is one of pity.
Everyone is on eggshells at the station. Creeping round me as if I’m going to blow up. Or they might catch something, as if bad luck’s an illness, a vector for infectious disease. I’m at a desk in the incident room, work going on behind me, my first footstep across the threshold killing the usual banter stone-cold dead. It’s been over an hour since Vermeer got me out of the drunk tank, and I’ve been feeling better, the dab I’d had really calming things down, though maybe it’s taken me a little too far in the opposite direction. Dabs can do that; they can blanket the pain, but sometimes that blanket’s too thick.
Now I’m in the canteen, the same table overlooking the intersection I’d sat at with Jansen three days and a lifetime ago, wondering just how it’s come to this so quickly. Homeless, jobless. Probably responsible for putting an innocent man in prison, definitely responsible for Kush’s death.
‘Fuck, man. I’m so sorry.’
I look up to see Jansen. He slaps me on the back, massages my shoulder.
‘Seriously, I only just heard. That’s so fucked up,’ he’s saying.
I look at him. For some reason I find the expression on his face, the personification of earnest concern, strange. Then I start to find it amusing. It must be the effects of the dab, I realize, a second wave swelling up inside me, blossoming in my head like some kind of weird jungle flower. I start to laugh. Hard. Tears stream out of my eyes, collect with a tickle under my chin. From there they drip down on to my still damp top. I’m finding it all hilarious.
He looks at me as if I’m mad.
‘Get me a coffee, will you?’ I ask when I’ve managed to stop laughing.
He returns with two cups, a stroopwafel balanced on the rim of each. He hands me mine, I can see the caramel centre is already starting to go sticky, and then sits down opposite.
‘You all right? You seem a little …’
I think he wants to say crazy, but doesn’t quite manage to get it out. I take a bite from my stroopwafel, I’m suddenly hungry as hell, and it disappears in no time. Jansen looks at me like I’ve turned into a monster, but then hands me his stroopwafel.
‘Listen, I’ve got to …’
‘Go for it,’ I tell him. ‘And thanks for this.’
He nods, then takes his coffee and starts to walk away before stopping and turning back. I demolish his stroopwafel just as fast.
‘By the way, that info you asked for on DH Biotech? You want it still?’
I think about what else I could be doing right now. Don’t seem to have a lot of options.
‘Yeah. Might as well take a look.’
In the incident room he hands me a massive stack of papers. It must be well over 200 pages of assorted papers and looks like it must’ve taken Jansen a significant chunk of time to pull together. Luckily the caffeine’s synergizing nicely with the dab and I feel motivated. I find a desk and settle in for the long haul.
The background to the company I already know; I’m more interested in the years when Muller and Kleine were both on the board, and I quickly narrow it down and focus my attention there. After a good hour of solid reading I’m beginning to get a picture, a company with financial difficulties which had pinned its hopes, and dwindling resources, on an experimental drug simply codenamed FAA673. I have to skip some of the more intense pharmacology. I realize that Joel would probably be able to help with that if needs be, but in essence FAA673 was a compound targeting a specific set of receptors in the brain implicated in appetite control, and it was hoped this could prove a preventative to obesity and therefore to all the other associated problems: diabetes, heart disease, cancer. Basically, reading between the lines, they were confident that this could become a first-line treatment, a drug that every doctor could prescribe to patients at risk. Which is probably just about everyone. I’m starting to see why they believed FAA673 could be so lucrative. One executive had noted in an email that FAA673 could be bigger than statins.
Joel had once told me about statins, a long rant demonstrating that not only were they not necessary, but they were actively screwing with you. I don’t remember the details, but he was pretty plausible. It was things like that which made him switch sides, as it were. Google gives me a rough global market value of over 30 billion dollars a year.
If FAA673 could come even close to that, then no wonder they were excited.
The animal trials had gone well, and they’d had approval from all the regulatory bodies to progress to a phase-one trial, which from what I read means the first trial on humans after it’s been tested on animals. But after that the information starts to become more sparse, and just over a year and a half later the company posts an enormous loss in their accounts.
I turn back, trying to find out what had changed. It takes a little while to piece it together, but it seems likely that the human trial had not delivered the results they’d been expecting. With their finances in such a perilous state the failure of FAA673 seems to have given a significant mauling to DH Biotech’s bottom line. But in the end I’m not sure what any of this means. I’m just about to give up when I notice a mention of legal action buried deep in the index of a board meeting several years ago. But when I flip to the relevant part of the minutes there’s no mention of it at all, at least that I can see. I flip back and check the page reference again; it is there in the index, but not in the document itself. I do what anyone does in this situation, turn to Google. I try ‘DH Biotech Legal Action’ and get no results. A little disclaimer at the bottom of the screen tells me that pursuant to some obscure EU regulation some results may have been removed due to privacy issues. Hmmm.
I go back to the stack of papers. The minutes were from the first meeting after the trial, so I try to delve into that. The trial itself had been scheduled to happen at the AMC in a private ward. There were to be twelve volunteers, and the trial was going to be double-blind, meaning half of them would be getting FAA673 and half a placebo, but crucially the staff administering the two wouldn’t know which was which either. The compound had a half-life of just six hours, so the patients would be monitored for twenty-four, then allowed to leave. But that’s where things end. Because I can’t find anything else on the trial. Surely there’d be notes on the results, something to say why the drug didn’t work? The company had its financial future pegged to the outcome, so I’d expect to at least see something.
They’re headquartered in Den Haag, but I don’t feel like the drive right now, so I pick up the phone. I start at the bottom, and after working my way up through increasing layers of bureaucracy, I’m onc
e again listening to a ringtone, waiting for someone to pick up.
‘Joost Beltmann.’
His voice is light, a tenor I’d guess, but confident. I explain what I’m after.
‘How did you get this number?’
‘It’s taken me quite a while, no one seemed able to help, and I’ve been passed around from –’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m afraid I’m unable to help either. Not sure why you got put through to me; it’s not my department at all.’
I feel like I’m going to crush the phone in my hand.
‘So who do I need to be talking to?’
‘Give me your number. I’ll get someone to call you back. Someone who can help.’
I give him my mobile and hang up. I’ll give it an hour. In the meantime I turn to plan B, dialling the AMC’s switchboard. It’s working hours so I know Nellie will have her mobile phone turned off. It takes me a few minutes but I’m finally connected to Dr Nellie de Vries’ line. She only started her clinic at the AMC after the trial took place, but at least she might be able to point me in the right direction.
I’m only expecting her answer machine, so it’s a surprise when her voice comes on the line. We spend a few minutes talking, though I neglect to tell her about my houseboat. It would take too long, and frankly I want to forget about it for a bit. Using work to avoid my personal troubles? Well, yeah. Me and the rest of the world. I explain what I’m after and she promises to look into it. She does mention that there’s unlikely to be much, as the trials are highly guarded. The pharmaceutical companies don’t want anyone to know what they’re up to, so it’s likely that any AMC staff involved didn’t know much, if anything. I hang up and turn back to the papers, trying to see if there’s anything I’ve missed and I’m caught up in it all until the thought of Kush burning to death hits me out of nowhere.
I burst into tears.
Ash lifts lazily into the air each time I put a foot down. I breathe in the residue of my incinerated life. Right now I could be inhaling part of the washing machine, the kitchen table, a CD of Bach’s ‘Magnificat’, hydrocarbons from any number of objects I’d owned or obscure parts of the boat’s construction seeping into my lungs, and from there travelling throughout my body until they cross the blood–brain barrier doing who knows what damage. Or Kush. Kush could now be there, inside my head. I feel a deep wave of nausea.
The Copycat Page 20