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by J. A. Henderson

  “All I’m saying is that routine is a shackle as soul destroying as any prison.” R.D. waved his unlit cigarette around. “So, I quit my job.”

  “You mean you got fired. Again.”

  “Let’s just say I’m at a crossroads in my life. I have some big decisions to make.”

  “You’re broke too.” Big Jim stared into his pint, wishing his friend would get to the point. “Bills want settling, even if you don’t.”

  Jim Lindsay was a French polisher. He liked big solid objects, big solid pay cheques and big solid women. Unless R.D. had a big solid problem that he could rectify by giving him a tenner or hitting someone, he didn’t think he’d be much help.

  “I know you, man” he grunted. “You kid on that you’re carefree, but it’s cause ye dinnae have a clue what you want. Look at you, you’ve got a degree in pharmacology…”

  “Psychology. And it’s a PhD.”

  “Eh? Sorry?” Big Jim glanced around the half empty pub. “Who was it you were trying to impress?”

  R.D. laughed. This was why he liked Jim Lindsay. The guy didn’t take shit and wouldn’t let R.D. dish it out.

  “So, you got a PhD.” Jim flicked open his Zippo and held it out, forcing his friend to actually light the cigarette. “You’ve had mair menial jobs than I’ve had birds.”

  “Shouldn’t that be ugly birds?”

  “And nowhere you ever worked paid more than six quid an hour.” Jim wasn’t put off. “That’s why I’m still paying for yer drinks.”

  R.D. sucked smoke into his lungs with a sigh. There was no point in beating about the bush with Big Jim, no matter how many birds were in it.

  “You know Anne-Louise?” he said, finally.

  “The posh yank.” Big Jim nodded. “You still going out wi her? That’s a record for you.”

  “She’s going back to America soon. Finished her studies at University.”

  “She’s pretty. Nice tits, excuse my French Polishing.” Big Jim slowly raised a furry eyebrow, a motion he managed to make look like weight lifting. “She’s got plenty money too.”

  “Her father’s chairman on the board of the Daler Corporation.” R.D. agreed. “That is pharmaceuticals.”

  “Aye. The daughter must be takin dad’s happy pills.” Big Jim lowered his eyebrow again and the other descended with it into a grimace. “You’re a good fifteen years older than her fur a start, and you still dinnae make any money.”

  “She thinks I’m a rough diamond.”

  “You’re a fake diamond. Maybe she cannae see the difference.”

  “I gave her an orgasm in Princes Street gardens once,” R.D. said pleasantly

  “That might do it.” Jim was unperturbed.

  “She’s pregnant. We’re getting married.”

  A spray of amber mist shot out of his friend’s mouth.

  “On your bike!” He looked truly impressed, an expression that was as rare on his face as any other extreme.

  “I’m going back to the USA with her.”

  Jim looked into his pint. Now he knew where the conversation was going.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Dinnae sound so offended. You’re no exactly the type to be tied down.” The polisher treated him to a rare smile. “Ye mebbe just love her cause she’s takin ye to America.”

  R.D. thought about that. The USA was the nation – no, the concept - that had welded him to the TV. screen as a child. For as long as he could remember he had been mesmerized by a million celluloid American dreams. The place where anyone could be somebody. Even a talented nobody.

  “I love her,” he repeated with as much certainty as he could muster.

  “Well… good luck tae ye, man.” Jim raised his glass. “You’ve nothin keepin ye here, except your other women. They’ll all be fat or married afore lang. And no to you either.”

  He clinked his pint against R.D.’s, despite the fact that his companion was still drinking.

  “Hey! You can visit.” R.D. looked down at the splash of amber liquid staining his t-shirt and tisked. “Once we get settled.”

  “Settled life after all, eh?” The smile was half hearted this time. “Well, I’ll no hold my breath.”

  “No excuses, now. You’d get to go on a real plane. That’s the big thing with wings that sometimes flies over the pub.”

  “You won’t keep in touch,” Jim snorted, though there was no animosity in his voice.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You think pals are interchangeable. Like women or jobs or countries.” He downed the rest of his pint. “By the time you realise you’re wrong, it’ll be too late.”

  “Where did that little speech come from?”

  “Just dinnae drink any of that American Bud shite.” His friend belched loudly. “Stick to stuff that’s in a brown or dark green bottle.”

  “What the hell for?”

  No reason.” Jim wiped froth from his moustache with a meaty hand.

  “It’ll just mean you remember me.”

  After the pub closed R.D. watched his only mate stumble down the Cowgate and out of his existence, clumsily circling little galaxies of vomit left by Saturday night revellers.

  He looked straight up, pretending there were skyscrapers all around him. Tried whistling a few bars of the theme from Starsky and Hutch. He liked the feeling.

  He was going somewhere. An Adventure was beginning.

  One way or another, he knew he’d never come back.

  -5-

  Austin, Texas 1990

  “How do you think I’m doing?” R.D. whispered in his new wife’s ear. Anne Louise’s parents were old-style southern gentility he was treating them with a mixture of abject terror and utter servility. Disturbed by this display of sycophancy, Anne-Louise’s mother had gone to supervise coffee and her father was taking a phone call on the veranda.

  “You’re doing fine,” Anne-Louise hissed back. “They like you.”

  “They think I’m an idiot.”

  “They’re not sure. Neither of them can understand your accent.”

  “Oh God.”

  “No. No. Mother thinks it’s hilarious. She keeps asking what you’ve said whenever you’re out of the room.”

  “Yeah, well how does someone supervise making coffee? It’s not exactly an art form.”

  “Don’t get defensive honey.” His wife gave a wide smirk. “Daddy must see something in you. I believe he wants to discuss a little proposition.”

  “He probably wants to hire me as his gardener. I bet he thinks all Scots are born up to their knees in barley.”

  Mr. Fischer entered, upright and rigid as a lamppost. He smiled thinly and put away his phone.

  “Now then… eh… son,” he said, affable as a mantis. “I want to talk to you about job prospects.”

  -6-

  R.D. sat on the porch of his new house with an unopened can of beer on his lap. On the glistening lawn, Anne-Louise’s rabbits, Otto and Llewellin, chased each other in awkward floppy circles. They had been a wedding present from R.D. to his wife. R.D. didn’t care for animals much but he assumed all women did. Rabbits, at least, he could put up with. They didn’t seem as needy as dogs or insolent as cats.

  Anne-Louise slid out of the back door, wearing nothing but a bathrobe, and sat beside him. Her bulge was unavoidable.

  “Don’t care for the view?”

  “I do now.”

  “It was pretty nice of dad to give us a house as a wedding gift. I was only expecting a set of Calfalon pots.”

  “It was.” R.D. opened the can with a fizz and the rabbits shot into the bushes. “A job and a house? My parents got us matching Swiss Army knives.”

  “You don’t like being in debt to dad.”

  “No.” R.D. sighed again. “But I bet he likes it just fine.”

  Being the senior director of Daler Pharmaceuticals, Anne Louise’s father had encountered little trouble securing R.D. a position in his company. No-one was sur
e exactly what the Scotsman was capable of, so he had been given the post of lab assistant to a promising young researcher named Justin Fenton Moore, who was heading clinical trials on a new strain of anti-depression drugs.

  Anne Louise leaned over and gave her husband a peck on the cheek.

  “Not happy with the house?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “And your job?”

  “It’s more money than I ever made in my life.”

  “What’s up then, huffy?”

  “I feel like a curiosity rather than a person.” R.D. took a swig of his beer. “Somebody asked if I’d ever hunted haggis yesterday.”

  “Stop making things up.” Anne Louise grinned. “Everybody knows they grow on trees.”

  “And everyone at Daler knows I’m married to you. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out how I got the job.” R.D. stroked his wife’s arm absently. The sun was sinking behind the garden’s wooden fence and amber light danced along the rim.

  “Some of them probably are brain surgeons,” he added grimly.

  “And I know you,” Anne-Louise said acerbically. “If you don’t think you can fit in, you won’t try.”

  “I resent having to suck the dick of polite Southern society,” her husband retorted moodily. “I might not want to be part of the cosy after dinner chat that’s your parent’s world.”

  “That didn’t make any sense,” she grinned. “Sounded good though. You do have a way with words.”

  R.D. stayed silent.

  “You still pissed off because I’m pregnant?”

  “I still think we’re awfully young.”

  “Well, I am, you old coot.”

  “Plus we’ve got rabbits to look after.”

  “Hell, you probably won’t ever change a diaper. We got a nanny for that. I’m not even asking you to stop smoking. Just do it outside.”

  R.D. gratefully pulled a cigarette from his packet and lit it.

  “Besides, you’re making buddies here. You get on pretty well with Justin Moore.”

  This was true. The two men had taken an instant liking to each other and their opposing personalities were a compliment to their blossoming friendship, rather than a hindrance. R.D. was grateful for Justin’s company and in awe of his brilliance as a scientist. The researcher, on the other hand, referred to himself genially as a ‘hick from Muleshoe’ and envied R.D.’s eclectic background and ease around women. He found the droll Scotsman colourful company and R.D. was only too happy to be his centre of attention.

  “You’ll make a fine father,” Anne-Louise said confidently. “Somewhere inside you have a good heart, even if you don’t know how to use it properly.”

  -7-

  Justin and R.D. sat on the well-watered grass of the Daler grounds, a complex of glass and steel towers on the outskirts of Austin. Justin drank Cherry Coke while his companion smoked a cigarette.

  “Know why I brought you out here, Scotty?”

  “You need to borrow money and don’t want to be turned down in public?”

  “Actually, money does come into it.” The researcher put down his drink and lay back on the spongy green carpet. “I’m making significant breakthroughs with our anti-depressant programme. My funding’s getting bigger and bigger, but so are my responsibilities. I don’t wanna get bogged down in admin and PR when I oughta be in the labs.”

  “I can see the sense in that.”

  “Good. Then you can take over that shit. You may as well do the funding paperwork while you’re at it.”

  “Are you nuts?” the psychologist gasped. “I’m the world’s oldest junior lab assistant. Everyone in your team is more qualified than me. We’ve got lab mice that know more about your research than I do.”

  “C’mon. You’re Scottish. You’re bound to be good with cash.” Justin gave a smug grin. “As for PR? You can talk your way out of a greasy barrel.”

  “Shouldn’t I actually know what I’m talking about?”

  “Only in a general way, Scotty. Another god durned expert chipping in with his two bits worth is exactly what I don’t need.” Justin’s breathless Panhandle drawl remained unruffled. “It’ll be easy, huh? You take notes, agree with everything I say and get your salary tripled.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Absolutely.” The researcher’s honesty was as refreshing as ever. “What I really need is a yes man.”

  “If you put it like that. Yes.”

  “Then get yourself a black suit. The more expensive the better, huh?”

  “What? It’s 34 degrees in the shade! I’ll boil to death.”

  “Clothes maketh the man, Scotty. You’ll look like you got some authority, an that’s half the battle.”

  Justin was working on a process to combat clinical depression and associated mental disorders. He had pumped lab mice full of calcium based catalytic drugs threaded with a retroviral package. These drugs ‘switched on’ junk DNA – discarded genomes that had lain dormant in all species of animal life for millennia. After thousands of experiments trying different combinations, the researcher believed his assistants had found the key to stimulating and localizing dendritic growth in the brain.

  This was a quantum leap from the normal process of enhancing synaptic passages to combat depression. The new dendrites, in theory, should be able to actually circumvent the areas of the brain most associated with acute melancholy or psychosis.

  The process had been carried out on animals in the Daler labs for several years but it was only in the last two – under Justin’s leadership – that real progress had been made. They were now proving so successful that the scientist had applied to test the drug on human volunteers.

  Permission had been granted.

  In La Zona Rosa, on Saturday night, Zydeco music ululated between the sweat slippered bodies of gyrating patrons. It was time to introduce Daler’s innovations to the wider scientific community and R.D. and Justin sat at an outside table, trying to compose an introduction to their research paper that didn’t sound like Mary Shelly had written it. R.D. stirred a Lynchburg Lemonade with his pen, notebook open in front of him. Justin ended his scribbling in an identical jotter with a literary flourish.

  “All right, mister. You read your masterpiece an I’ll read mine,” he hee-hawed. “Whoever sounds most like Raw-bee Burns buys the next round.”

  R.D. waited until Justin had calmed down, then began to read.

  “It took ten thousand years to get from wheel to airplane. One hundred years later, we can name the moment the universe began. The evolution of the human psyche is accelerating too, and the mind of each individual is a microcosm of that collective progression. And we must assume it is progression, not simply the acquisition of knowledge. We at Daler believe in human evolution on both a small and large scale. We are optimists in every sense of the word. We have discovered that individual brains can be encouraged to repair and reroute – to bypass damage or despair – in the same way cultural changes and scientific advancements can defeat famine or overthrow tyrants. We are confident we have found a way to make the individual mind permanently impervious to oppression. This is a giant leap for the race as well as for each member of it.”

  He put down his notes dramatically.

  “The rest is up to you.”

  “Eh… I aint really sure what it means,” Justin said awkwardly.

  “That’s the whole point,” R.D. countered blithely. “Only you would admit it’s pure waffle. Everyone else will get a severe case of Emperor’s New Clothes.”

  “Still lost.”

  “Trust me.” The psychologist sipped his drink, thoughtfully. “We’ll call the process ‘Moore’s Cocktail’. That’ll grab the public right by their curliest pubes. You read yours now.”

  Justin stared at him. He crumpled up his own bit of paper and dropped it in the ashtray.

  “All-righty, Mr. Shakespeare,” he sighed. “You win. What d’ya wanna drink?”

  Though R.D. provided an occasion
al insight into the work Justin was pioneering, it was obvious his real contribution to the project was his ability to sell the researcher’s ideas to the sceptics. He descended like a black suited hawk on moral objectors and scientific detractors. He couldn’t argue the facts - he didn’t know enough about them - so he swept Justin’s critics away with a tidal wave of snappy rhetoric. His pithy articles in magazines, though gloriously short on scientific details, were written in a chattily disarming style. It allayed fear over the coming human trails which were to be the next step in his partner’s controversial work.

  R.D. had finally found his niche.

  Justin was already lining up prospective subjects and official forms had been circulated to the warders of various state homes, in the hope of recruiting likely candidates. The ideal applicant would be physically healthy, between 18 and 35, and suffer from severe bouts of depression or an associated personality disorder. They would also have to be considered competent to sign a waiver allowing ‘Moore’s Cocktail’ to be administered. In return, the lucky few would be transferred to the Daler labs for secure observation while the drug tests were conducted. If the results were a success, the subject stood a chance of early release, as well as a permanent cure for their disorder. It was a win-win situation.

  Justin’s first stop was the Northland State Home outside Waco. Daler had contacted the warden and he volunteered two potential inmates who were willing to take the Cocktail in exchange for a chance to lead normal lives.

  -8-

  Northland State Home, Waco, Texas 1991

  A single cloud, a strip of white flesh torn through a bright blue sky, flitted miles over the faraway girl in the unassuming white frock.

  Justin, R.D. and Anne-Louise sat in the well-watered grounds of the Northland State facility. Justin was fuming. It had taken three hours to drive from Austin and it had been a wasted trip. R.D. and his wife didn’t seem too bothered but they had just come along for the ride. Anne-Louise even brought a picnic and was spreading it out on the lawn a few yards away.