by Paul Briggs
For a moment, Isabel’s muscles tensed themselves and her eyes pivoted to the exit. Then she forced herself to relax. So. I’m naked in bed with a sweehead. That’s… okay, that’s bad, but it’s not necessarily an emergency. She’s just as naked as I am. And unarmed. And about half as strong. With no aptitude for physical violence.
Yeah, but I gotta sleep some time.
So does she.
“Yeah,” said Laurie, watching her reaction. “This is why I don’t go around telling everybody. See, here’s the thing about swee—it doesn’t change your basic desires. If you don’t want to commit rape or murder, if you don’t want to molest children, you won’t want to do it on swee.” Laurie turned her back on Isabel and leaned back into her. Isabel gave her a hug, partly for the physical pleasure of it and partly to make sure she had the other girl under control.
Laurie crossed her arms and brushed Isabel’s upper arms with her fingertips. “Now I remember why I stayed with you so long,” she said. “You’ve got that peasant-woman bod.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes, it is. Strong with just the right amount of softness. Perfect for cuddling.”
I should have known something was wrong when she ate the chicken. Back when we were dating, she really cared about that whole vegan thing. I should have asked myself why she stopped giving a shit, and what else she might have stopped caring about.
But you didn’t, because all you could think about was how this made you more comfortable. Now you’re cuddling a sweehead and you have no one to blame but yourself.
Speaking of pharmaceuticals, take a chill pill. She has a legitimate medical, psychological reason for taking swee.
Unless of course she’s lying. Which sweeheads are known to do.
She didn’t have to say she was on swee at all. It’s not like it fell out of her purse right in front of me. She volunteered that information.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Laurie.
“Shoot.”
“When was the last time you actually did something that was wrong? I mean, really, seriously wrong?”
Isabel was silent for a moment. There were times enough when she’d felt guilty over something she’d thought, or something she’d failed to do, but as for things she’d actually done…
“This is one of the things I learned in therapy,” Laurie said. “That thing inside you—that little voice that’s always finding fault with everything you do and think and feel—maybe for some people, that’s their conscience. But not with you. Your real conscience is built into your behavior. You hardly even know it’s there, because it never really says anything in words. You just sort of do the right thing naturally.
“And Suiamor has no effect on that. The only thing it affects is that little clot of… internalized negativity inside you that pretends to be your conscience. That you can do without.”
* * *
Isabel watched as Laurie’s little electric car pulled out from the curb.
One night. That was the deal. She’s just passing through. But it was going to be hard going back to being alone. Just let me finish the specs on Conowingo. Then maybe I can start dating. Now that Group 77 was gone, and its lawyers were running around screaming they hadn’t done anything illegal, Marshpower was back in business and the Conowingo Project was a go again—in fact, Alpert wanted construction to begin in February and be done by the end of August. That would take either a miracle or a whole lot of money.
One night. That’s all. And it’s not like I can even trust her. Not after that little gift she left me. A few individually wrapped doses which Laurie “didn’t plan on using.” Because it’s totally normal to go around with drugs in your purse that you don’t plan on using. Yeah. I’ll buy that for a Red Ron.
They were sitting in her bathroom medicine cabinet now, three little packets the size of postage stamps. Suiamor. The drug for people who thought discount Jellicoe treatments were too damn safe.
You need to throw it away. Right now. Today.
Do you have any idea how much that stuff costs? Even the generic version of the antiautechthic cost about two hundred dollars a dose. It seemed wrong to throw away such an expensive gift.
What are you going to do—sell it on the black market?
Actually, if I knew anybody on the black market that wouldn’t be a bad idea.
For the next hour or so, Isabel did some research online. She read the testimonials of people who’d gotten a new lease on life from it. And she read about other people whose lives had been ruined by it.
Suiamor was, basically, a painkiller. But it only blocked certain kinds of pain—fear, guilt, shame, and self-loathing. It was a blessing to people who had survived abuse or suffered from social anxiety. The trouble was that there was a technical term for people who didn’t feel fear, guilt, shame, or self-loathing. It was “sociopath.”
And those who took it without really needing it sometimes found that the things it blocked were themselves blocking other things—dark impulses, desires never meant to be acted on. Swee opened doors inside your head. Sometimes they turned out to be doors that should have been left shut and locked.
The effect lasted three to four days, and you weren’t supposed to take it more than once a week. If you took it all the time, your brain would respond by rewiring itself in an attempt to rebuild the blocked connections, and would probably do it wrong, resulting in some really spectacular neuroses.
It was no more habit-forming than anything else that produced a temporary pleasant sensation—which is to say, it was habit-forming. And if you did or said something really bad under the influence that you regretted when it wore off, of course you’d want to take it again as soon as possible… and possibly do something equally bad, leading to what they called a “swee spiral.” And since it didn’t affect the brain in the same way drugs like heroin or cocaine did, a Jellicoe treatment wouldn’t work. If Laurie’s trying to get me hooked so she can be my dealer, I’ll kick her perfect ass so hard she’ll shit through her ears.
What are you waiting for? Throw it away!
Suppose I throw it away. Will you thank me? Will you fill me with the warm glow of having done the right thing? Or will you just yell at me for having taken so long to do it?
You’re using yourself as a hostage. I don’t negotiate with terrorists.
You don’t negotiate, period. The swee stays. I’m not using it—not today—but it stays.
* * *
It was the morning after the midterm elections. If it had been the morning after a night of heavy drinking, the assembled men and women could not have looked worse. A lot of them had been up late last night, and had been rewarded for their diligence with very bad news.
For this occasion, Henry Pratt was acting in his capacity as leader of the Republican Party, not as President of the United States. His wife was sitting at the far end of the table, small and silent. Slender, goateed Vice President Quillen was at his right hand, and at his left was RNC chair Meredith Grimes, middle-aged and so colorless she almost vanished into the upholstery. The rest of the guests were, for the most part, Republican senators who hadn’t been up for reelection this year. All of them were sitting in front of plates of five-star-restaurant-quality eggs Benedict. None of them were doing more than pick at it.
Well, there was no point putting off this discussion. “Last night was one of the worst nights our party has had in a long time,” said Pratt. “Even considering the incumbent party often loses in the midterms, it was bad. We’re down six seats in the Senate, twenty-three seats in Congress and at least five governorships—possibly six. Graves would know the figures on state legislatures better than I. Does anyone have anything to add to this?”
“I do,” said Sen. Bryce Wilkinson (R-AL) a note of anger in his old-fashioned drawl.
Pratt gestured for him to speak. Wilkinson pushed himself to his feet with a mighty effort, scooting his chair backward to give his gut room to clear the rim of the table. His f
ace was red, and his jowls were ornamented with a white goatee in a failed attempt to not look like Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard in a navy-blue suit.
“Mr. President,” he said. “You say we’re down six seats, but in fact we lost eight seats. Eight seats! And seven of them should have been safe! One of them the Minority Whip! Six of those seats we never imagined losing in our worst nightmares, and we lost them! And the only reason we lost them was because of voters who were put there by FEMA!” The other senators were nodding and looking angry.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Wilkinson said. “Mr. President, you are the worst thing to happen to the Republican Party since… since the last Republican president! Or the one before that, even!”
“Before I accept the blame for this,” said Pratt, “I want the answer to one simple question. Why didn’t anybody in our party try going into the camps and campaigning for votes?”
“We thought we had a chance in court!” Flecks of spit leapt from Wilkinson’s lips and landed on the white tablecloth. “We honestly thought we could fix it so they wouldn’t be allowed to vote at all. And once you start down that road, you are committed. If you lose the court battle, you can’t just turn around and say, ‘I fought like hell to make sure you people would never get a vote that counted, but I lost, so please vote for me anyway.’ We’ve tried that in other places. It does. Not. Work.”
“Haven’t we gained a couple of senators? Illinois, Michigan? I know it’s not enough to make up our losses, but…”
“You’re right, it’s not. It still leaves us with only forty-three senators. Also, Patterson and Izenberg aren’t exactly Republicans as we understand them.”
“The same has been said of me.” There was an awkward silence. The same had in fact been said of him by people in this room.
“Well, yes,” said Wilkinson, “but between them and three Democrats—that I know of—Morgan’s got her own little bipartisan voting bloc in the Senate. Does that concern you, Mr. President?”
“As a matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me.”
Grimes spoke up for the first time. “Speaking of things that should scare the hell out of you, have you heard the latest from Oklahoma City?”
“Is the recount still going on?”
“Yes,” she said, “and it doesn’t look good for us, but that’s not the bad news. The bad news is, Diggins has already said he’s not going to concede. He says he doesn’t give a damn what the courts say—he’s not going to let Oklahoma get taken over by ‘foreign invaders.’ And Lofton is backing him up.”
“Does Lofton have any power?”
“Nope. He’s term-limited out.”
“So what are they going to do? Move to Texas and form a government in exile?”
“Something like that, actually. I don’t know the exact details of what they think they’re planning.”
“What’s Haralson saying?”
“He’s saying he’ll respect the will of the voters, that if the count comes out in his favor he’ll work for all the people of Oklahoma with lots of emphasis on ‘all’ and he ‘trusts Gov. Lofton and my opponent to honor the norms of a democratic society.’”
“Do they have to be so goddamned self-righteous?” muttered Sen. Turgeon. “‘Ooh, look at us, we’re the Democrats, we’re nice, we Honor the Norms, unlike those subhuman animals—”
Pratt coughed. “Time to get back on track,” he said. “As I see it, there are still some parts of our agenda that we’ll be able to move forward with next year.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President,” said Sen. Brearley, “what I think you mean is that there are still parts of your agenda you can move forward with. Our agenda, on the other hand”—he gestured around the table—“for at least the next two years, it’s deader than King Tut’s nuts.” That was a phrase he used a lot. It hadn’t caught on yet. But judging by their expressions, most of the people around the table at least agreed with the sentiment. The agenda Pratt had run on in the first place—more drug law reform, getting started on sentencing reform—was a lot more popular with Democrats than with his fellow Republicans.
“And don’t try blaming all this on the so-called ‘Monsoon,’” Brearley continued. “We could’ve had our tax cuts during the first hundred days if you’d been willing to fight for them. The weather was fine then. But you just had to do drug law reform and currency reform and everything to save taxpayer money except not taking their money!”
“And if we had cut taxes,” said Pratt, “where would we be now?”
For six or seven seconds by the clock, no one spoke. They just sat there glaring at him or each other and poking at their eggs in a desultory way. Maybe half the people around the table genuinely believed that if you cut taxes, the resulting economic growth would bring you more revenue than if you’d left them where they were. The other half knew this was nonsense, but regarded cutting government revenue as an end in itself. And by acting as though he’d somehow anticipated the disasters of the last two years, Pratt had just offended all of them.
“There is one good piece of news,” said Grimes in a tone of deliberate cheer.
“What is it?” said Wilkinson.
“We’re finally rid of Darling,” she said. “They voted him out. No more playing games with the ShameList, no more unsolicited opinions on Israel… I never thought I’d be glad to see the last of a Republican, but he’s a special case.” The other Republicans nodded in agreement.
* * *
Governor Alpert, in the infinite depths of his mercy, had decided to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to evacuate the last families from Smith Island. That Thanksgiving had been a hard one, with nine people sharing what might be their last meal together in a house that two of them had lived in for the better part of fifty years and six others had moved into this summer after having to leave their own home.
The day after Thanksgiving, the day they moved everyone and everything into a house in a new development in St. Mary’s County (and why there? Why not Somerset County? Only Alpert seemed to know)… that had been a worse day.
Today, however, broke all records. The authorities, having no record of the Bradshaws as part of the population of Smith Island, chose this rainy morning to evict every member of her family but her maternal grandparents from the housing development. The police herded them onto a shuttle bus and sent them… nobody seemed to know where.
Mr. Roberts took calls and texts from them all day, trying to keep track of where they were while also trying to get hold of the state agencies and find out what was happening and why. Isabel, meanwhile, drove around Maryland in the rain in her father’s old gas-guzzling, no-self-driving, not-even-any-GPS truck, having no plan other than to find her family, bring them back to her apartment for the night and find somewhere for them tomorrow.
Now she was seated in the office of a Mrs. Dew, whose exact title she was uncertain of. Mrs. Dew was small, black, wore heavy bifocals, and looked closer to seventy than sixty.
“First, I went to St. Mary’s City,” she said, glossing over a three-hour drive with a couple of rounds of heavy traffic. “I spent about an hour in town trying to find out where they were and getting the runaround. Finally Pop called and said they were headed for Annapolis. So, another hour and forty-five minutes to get to Annapolis and right when I’m right in the middle of town, I get a call from Mr. Roberts saying whoops, the place I want is actually in Lanham.” To avoid sounding whiny, Isabel decided not to go into detail about her adventures navigating downtown Annapolis, which would have been a time-consuming task even with GPS and was next to impossible without it. She’d heard it said that people in Annapolis live twenty to thirty minutes longer than the national average because the Grim Reaper keeps having to stop and ask directions. “So…” after another fucking hour on the road… “here I am. And here they apparently aren’t.”
“Well, no, they wouldn’t have been sent here,” said Mrs. Dew. “Let me see…” She consulted her computer.
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br /> “It looks as though your parents had a talk with DHR yesterday,” she said, “They were looking to see what kind of public assistance would be appropriate.”
“Only out of desperation,” said Isabel. “The last thing any of us want is to be asking for any kind of help. All Pop needs is a roof over his head at night within walking distance of a dock and he can start earning money again and we won’t be any more of a burden.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, Pop-pop still needs his medication, so there’s that.”
“It looks like they were turned down,” said Mrs. Dew. “I’m trying to find out—wait, your father has a boat?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
Mrs. Dew gave her a disapproving look over the tops of her bifocals.
“Sorry. But the boat is a business necessity. He’s a waterman. You need a boat for that. It’s not like it’s a yacht or something.”
“I understand that,” she said.
“Here’s the thing,” said Isabel, pulling a printout out of her purse. “The state already owes us money. They said so themselves. Pop is the legal owner of the Bradshaw property—the bank made that very clear. When the state took that property, they were supposed to compensate him. Instead, they sent us this IOU basically saying, ‘We’ll pay you the fair property value as soon as we can afford it.’”
“Plus interest.”
“Right. But you know what that means, right? They’re going to wait until coastal property values hit rock bottom, then pay us off with some loose change they found in the sofa. Plus interest.”
“Do you think the state would be doing that if we had a choice?” said Mrs. Dew. “You have any idea how many miles of coastline we’re talking about?”