Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Sort of. Hypnotism works, but as far as bringing back memories goes, it’s controversial. Some psychologists think there’s no such thing as repressed memories. Even the ones who do believe in them know that it’s easy to implant false ones. I don’t think it will work.”

  “So why do it?”

  He looks away suddenly and riffles through his pockets, piling lint and crumpled receipts and half-smoked papers beside the remains of her communion. There seems to be no space between the sparkler fizz of intuition and the dip of her hand into her own pocket to pull out a pen. She marvels at the sight of it — a grubby Bic with a long crack in the side and ink congealed in a glossy mass by the uncapped tip. A typical Bird pen, because she loses them too quickly to keep anything else. Coffee’s hands shake when he takes it from her. Yet even his shaking fingers make that utilitarian instrument a blurred streak of beauty as it dances between them. She could watch him forever and be content; strange how she didn’t understand that until now. Why remember hard pasts, like the writing on the wall, when she could make a universe of this infinite present?

  “Do you trust me?” he asks her. She sees his voice as indigo stars, slow-burning embers flicked like spittle from his lips. She reaches to catch one in her left hand: trust flickers there, desperate and hopeful.

  “I like your trust,” she says, smiling at it.

  He sighs. “Bird.”

  “I never thought I did. I was so angry. You aren’t always very nice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shakes her head, deflecting that dejected stream of yellow. “I don’t like your sorry.”

  “I’m —” He cuts himself off and laughs.

  “I trust you,” she says.

  Coffee levers himself from the papasan chair and sits beside her. Just now, his heat is the most beautiful thing about him. He glows.

  “Then close your eyes, Bird. Let’s find out what you remember.”

  He glows even through her eyelids, but she won’t tell him that. Just like she won’t tell him how much she loves him, how long she has, how all those months she was terrified of a wall that turned out to be a trick of the light.

  Paper rustles and Coffee clears his throat. “I just want you to concentrate on my voice. I can’t hypnotize you unless you want me to. I need you to focus and relax. We’re going to remember what you did after Trevor Robinson’s party. And if you don’t remember, that’s fine too. There’s no —”

  “Coffee, wait, wait!”

  She falls forward on the couch, ungainly from the warmth of his body and the stringy relaxation of her muscles. She struggles to sit upright. “What about your ankle tracker?”

  Coffee snorts and she remembers to open her eyes. Even when she does, his features are fogged by the pulsing glow that fills the whole room.

  “Bao tested its wireless signal yesterday. It’s not sending enough data for audio. I’m just paranoid, like you said.”

  She hunts for his hand and squeezes it. “Roosevelt demands paranoia.”

  He sinks his fingers into her inch of hair. She sighs and leans back against him — happy, happy, happy, a girl with all fizz and no edge.

  “Relax,” he says with an awkward distance in his voice from reading off the papers. “Focus on that night. Tell me the last thing you remember.”

  “You.” Unequivocal.

  Coffee’s arms tense around her. “What about me?” Painfully neutral.

  “You running after the car. You can’t catch us and you’re sprinting anyway and then Paul turns and I smash my head and all I want to do is protect you.”

  She can see it all. Even feel that starry flash of pain and the sticky wet of her own blood on her hand. Then a new sensation: rough synthetic fabric over rounded, smooth metal. Coffee has put something in her hands.

  “Do you remember this?”

  Not by touch, but the smell, faint as it is after all these weeks, is unmistakable. “Peach schnapps. That shit fucked me up, but I didn’t care. I kind of wanted it.”

  More smells assault her, attached to the first like burrs on a stray dog: the humus of the earth in the woods behind Trevor’s house, cheap cigarettes, cheaper beer. And then laughter, explosive and muffled, the delight of kids getting away with the worst in their parents’ backyard. The briefest lingering afterburn of someone else’s pot.

  “You don’t want any more?” Paul asks her, rubbing her back.

  She takes another sip. It’s disgusting, but she doesn’t say so. You don’t get martinis hiding from the adults in the woods.

  “What do you remember?” Coffee, reminding her of the present.

  “How he drugged me in the woods.”

  “Good. Now focus on the car. Paul has pulled away from the house. What happens?”

  “He gets a call.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Unavailable. Roosevelt. But I don’t hear. I pass out.”

  “Do you dream?”

  “I …”

  “It’s okay. Don’t try to force it. Remember something else. What did you think the first time you met me?”

  “I liked your accent. Organic chemistry never sounded sexier.”

  “Wow.” He has momentarily forgotten the calculated dispassion of his hypnotist voice.

  “Are you sure about this hypnotizing thing?”

  “No. This script isn’t very helpful. Next I’m supposed to tell you that there’s someone else in the room who wants to ask you some questions.”

  She shifts against him, eyes closed, and a sudden snap reverberates through the room. The couch is gone, and so is all sensation of Coffee’s body but his warmth. She floats in a black void, but there are stars limning the distance. Does she have a body, or has she only imagined it all this time? She’s a brain, she’s a shooting star, she’s a trillion trillion atoms in the improbable, evanescent arrangement that will call itself Bird.

  “Do you hear the question?” ask the stars.

  “There are no more questions,” says a voice.

  Now another woman floats with her in the dark. She looks familiar — a bit like Mo, a bit like her mother, with an air of determined confidence that reminds her of Marella. She has a full-on Black power fro, a thing of such beauty she wants to ask her for hair tips. Her eyes are hard but edged with compassion; she’s sorry for what she has to do, and Bird makes herself face this implacable goddess with her every ounce of bootstrapped bravery. The stars shudder and sigh around her and she loves them, but she has traveled beyond their help.

  “Then what is there?” asks the thing called Bird.

  The goddess smiles. “A story.”

  “Bird?” say the stars.

  “Shh,” she says. “Listen.”

  * * *

  I remember the confusion of that drug. The sickness of it. The struggle to keep any thought in my head longer than a few minutes. It’s worse than not being able to think, not being able to remember what you were thinking.

  I remember the brassy smell of new leather recently wiped down with bleach. It tickled my nose and I sneezed. Someone said to get me a tissue, but no one did, so I just wiped my snot on my sleeve.

  I remember the sounds of men. Men cursing, shuffling, laughing at dirty jokes, smoking, drinking coffee, belching. Mostly asking and asking and asking, questions I could hardly keep in the shallow bowl of my memory. They spoke to one another a great deal and me more than enough. Tell me about your daddy, they asked. Tell me about that boy. Tell me what you know, girl.

  I remember the dry squeak of an alcohol swab packet tearing open, and the cool swipes drawing a barcode up my arm. Each time a needle would prick and burn, and I would lose the world for a few minutes before they dragged me back into it. Tell me about Synergy Labs, tell me about your mommy.

  I don’t know, I just found it in the trash.

  And what did your mommy think of that?

  I remember the man with the needle who smelled of cinnamon breath mints, sandalwood cologne, and sour armpit. He had a voice a
t once deep and thin, as though he took his breaths through a narrow tube obstructed with gravel. She could OD, he said before he pricked me again. We don’t have much experience with this formula. I hated him most of all.

  I remember the voice in my ear, the one from the party. He thought I was pathetic, and stroked my hand like he could just as easily rip it off. And that boy at the party, that diplomat’s kid. What did you tell him about your parents? What did he tell you?

  Nothing, you asshole, I thought. Leave him out of this, I said.

  The voice smiled. Too late.

  I remember getting the idea.

  I remember how my arm burned, twisted and bunched beneath me when I slumped on that couch. I told myself not to move. He propped up my head with a hand that smelled of soap and cigarettes. I drooled on it.

  Oh, great. Victor, get me a tissue. How much did you give her?

  You’ve always known how to pick ’em, a voice laughed and Roosevelt said, clear as a bell, Ugly Black chicks aren’t my type. That kid is welcome to her.

  (“He’s an asshole, Bird.”

  I know. This would have been so much worse if he were attracted to me.)

  * * *

  I don’t remember seeing anything but blues and oranges chasing the black behind my eyeballs. I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t remember how I got away.

  But I remember needing to remember. I have a space inside of me, and the shape of that space is something overheard accidentally, spoken by people who thought me mindless. It was important, what those men said over the body of the girl they had drugged into a stupor. My parents never told me a thing, but those men did. It would have been safer for me if they just kept their mouths shut. But I didn’t care. I remember being so happy that Roosevelt thought so little of me that he had given me something that would destroy him.

  I said to myself, Remember, Bird. No matter what you do, you must remember this.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t, not after what they dropped in my veins. They nearly killed me with it, just to make my memory a mile of rotted lace.

  (“You remember enough. You don’t have to —”

  I do. I always did.)

  All they left me are flashes. My hand with my father’s pen. The writing on the wall on a carefully smoothed out piece of paper.

  My face, smeared in my mother’s bathroom mirror. Someone crying.

  Your voice on the other end of the phone. Not the words, but the sound of it, the apology and the worry and the relief. The sound of you that cared enough to warn me at the party, caring enough to find me now at the other end of the line. I don’t know why I called. Maybe it was just to hear your voice.

  (“You told me to get away. You told me to think of your shop for you if you died.”

  I’m still here. It’s okay.

  “No, it isn’t. Not even a little.”)

  * * *

  My tights, covered in mud and soaked from the rain. I’m outside. I peel them off and stuff the paper inside, then wad the mess back in my pocket. I am more afraid than I have ever been. I swallow rainwater and salt and bile. Then I turn and face the monster behind me.

  I do not remember forgetting.

  The sweet potato pie tastes like the dying dream of a root vegetable, an ecstasy of light custard contrasted with crumbly, buttery crust and a piquant afterbite of nutmeg and lemon. Marella, Coffee, Aaron, and Bird shovel forkfuls in their mouths like squirrels storing acorns for winter.

  “I think it got better since Thanksgiving,” Marella says, her words only intelligible to her fellow pie-stuffers. “Is that possible?”

  “It matures in the fridge,” Bird says. “Leftovers are always superior.”

  “Matures?” Aaron giggles. “It’s got sweet potato puberty.”

  Coffee laughs so hard he starts to cough, momentarily removing his fork from the competition. Bird takes advantage, securing a sizable chunk of crust.

  “Good thing we’re eating it now,” Coffee says. “It might get PMS or something.” He and Aaron can’t speak for laughing. Marella and Bird raise their eyebrows in concert.

  “You’ve both got the sense of humor of a ten-year-old,” Bird says. “That’s not good news for one of you.”

  “If you’re going to make stale period jokes at our pie, then I think you can watch us ladies eat the rest of it.” Marella smiles sweetly at Aaron’s pout. “The PMS, you know. It makes us unreasonable.”

  “And hungry.” Bird takes a very large bite. Her stomach twists, because in point of fact she did get her period this morning, and she’s already gone through three ibuprofen attempting to beat back the cramps. This pie, Nicky’s all-star-parent idea for Aaron’s lunch today, couldn’t have been better timed.

  Coffee smiles at her and sucks on the end of his fork, which pushes out his bottom lip in a way she finds suddenly, complexly distracting. The three days since Thanksgiving have been a dollhouse of tiny joys. Each look or laugh or brush of hesitating fingers is a memory she polishes and arranges and rearranges because she knows that eventually this will be all she has left of him. One day either she will be gone or he will; she has no trust in the permanence of love or life — no one does, here at the end of days.

  Bird takes pity on him and feeds him the last forkful of pie. He keeps his eyes on hers the whole time, until she feels gooey and warm, fresh out of the oven. In her peripheral vision Aaron makes a gagging motion.

  “No kissing,” Aaron says.

  “Were we kissing?” Bird asks, looking away from Coffee.

  Marella laughs. “We know the warning signs.”

  The four of them are sitting in the stacks of the Bradley library again, where the normal rules against eating seem to have been waived in a general End Times exemption.

  “Aaron, don’t you have classes?”

  He groans. Coffee glances at his cell phone and stands up. “I’ve got a makeup appointment for my, ah, vitamin treatment,” he says. “You coming, Aaron?”

  “Makeup?” Marella asks.

  Bird rolls her eyes. “He opted out the first time around.”

  “Smart move.”

  Coffee shrugs. “Distrust authority, that’s my motto. I’ll see you after school, Bird.”

  She squeezes his hand in farewell and watches until he and Aaron clear the swinging doors by the abandoned circulation desk. She sighs.

  “So when I left, did you two just make out all night or did you try what you said you were going to?”

  Bird looks up at Marella, then down at the hole in her right sock. The rough and ashy skin on the bottom of her foot has snagged the unraveling weave. The sight surprises her, since she’s had regular pedicures since tenth grade. But then, in a universe where she’s made out ten times in three days with an ex-fugitive drug dealer, the president has declared martial law, and she has finally apprehended her mother as a creature of human faults and frailties, ashy feet are an unremarkable dislocation.

  “I did,” Bird says. “It sort of worked. I don’t remember much, but I know I need to get back into my house. My mom says the quarantine tape will be cleared by the end of this week, so I’ll see what I can find then.”

  It seemed so obvious, once she remembered. The writing on the wall meant the words she wrote herself years ago. She’d used it as an arrow pointing to the clue that only she could find: her father’s gold pen. She must have escaped Roosevelt, run back to her house, written down what she heard, warned Coffee, and then gotten caught again. This time, they didn’t let her go until they’d doped her enough to destroy most of her memories of that night. Most, but not all.

  “And this thing with Coffee …” Marella’s lips twist, like she’s trying to frown and smile at the same time. Bird pulls a book out at random from behind her elbow and runs her fingers down the edges of rough-cut papers. Her mother is back in the city; she doesn’t need any more disapproval.

  “Hey.” Marella puts her hand on Bird’s, blocking the blurry march of black type on yellow paper. “Bird, come on,
I’m happy for you. You’ve sure wanted this long enough.”

  “Haven’t I,” Bird says, her tone somewhere between a question and a revelation.

  “It’s just, has he told you how his case is going? He doesn’t have diplomatic immunity. He’s eighteen. He could go to prison.”

  Marella has tied her hair back in four braids and as she speaks, quiet and serious, she winds and unwinds one of these dark ropes around a finger. This is a friend, Bird thinks: scared and concerned enough to speak her mind, but not judgmental. Bird makes room in her dollhouse for this new treasure, an incalculable gratitude for having Marella in her life.

  But she says, with deliberate lightness, “I can wait. We can get matching tats and show them off at the five-year reunion, once he’s out on probation.”

  Marella snorts. “I’d go just to see Felice’s face. But seriously —”

  “He could die of the v-flu too. He hasn’t had the vaccine yet. It’d be like in English last semester, an Aristotelian tragedy.”

  Marella gives in. “Influenza isn’t much of a tragic flaw.”

  “Ah.” Bird tosses the book aside and sprawls across the aisle. The carpet smells of pie crumbs and book dust. Not a combination she’d have made herself, but she takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Anti-authoritarianism might be, though.”

  “I’ve always liked that about him.”

  “See? Perfect Aristotelian tragedy. Or we could just get hit by some rogue terrorist anthrax attack and get tossed in a mass grave. A regular, nonliterary tragedy.”

  “The inevitability of death, huh? Not exactly an original argument for bad decision making.”

  “Is that what this is? A bad decision?”

  “You’d really wait for him if he went to jail?”

  “I’ll just pretend he’s at a different college.”

  “Most people can’t swing that either.”

  Bird squeezes her hands together, remembering the warmth of his lips tracing the lines of her palms. “Most people don’t have Coffee.”

  After a moment, Marella lies down on the floor herself, one braid tickling Bird’s cheek. “So you love him.”