And cunning it was, diabolically cunning (which Valentina knew only too well), the way it tricked you, toyed with you, lied to you, used your own thoughts and perceptions against you, twisting your interpretation of things to the point where you couldn’t even trust your own mind. They had to stay vigilant, the Variant-Positives, as the threat was always there, lurking, even at times when it seemed like it wasn’t, and especially at times when it seemed like it wasn’t. Which was also part of its insidious nature. Human Anti-Social Disease was not just cunning, it was also patient. It might lie there dormant inside you for years, and then, one day (you never saw it coming), out of nowhere, for no discernible reason, some seemingly insignificant event, a dream, or memory, or some associative connection, would start you thinking, questioning, doubting. Once that happened, you were pretty much lost. Before you knew it your head was swimming with all kinds of Anti-Social ideations.
According to the DSM XXXIII, these “Anti-Social ideations” took any number of invidious forms: resentment, blaming, shaming, enabling, coveting, other-directed thinking, emotional sabotage of self or others, toxic remorse, future tripping, excessive grieving, pride, self pity, projection of fears and/or weaknesses onto others, emotional distancing, hostile questioning, manipulative simulation of illnesses ... the list went on and on, and on. Everyone had them to some degree, these ideations (not all of them, of course, but several, at least, in some combination), some more active, others more latent. On top of which, newer forms of ideations were being discovered on a daily basis, and older forms were often amended or merged into other umbrella designations. Which meant that trying to stay abreast of all the myriad forms of ideations was virtually hopeless. So no one did. No, the best you could do was become aware of the ideations you, yourself, were prone to, acknowledge, accept, and admit them openly, and keep them in check as best you could. The Clears, of course, whose defective genes had been corrected in a petri dish, were immune to this threat and thus free from the burden of having to monitor their every thought, as were the A.S.P.s, like Taylor, who were born full-blown, and according to the experts didn’t even think they had the disease. But for Valentina, as for most of the Normals (and significantly more than for most of the Normals, in light of the history of disease in her family), the danger of slipping had always been there .
Valentina had done her best to deal with her latent Anti-Social ideations. She had diligently walked the Path(s) to Prosperity, and practiced its principles, for thirty-one years. She’d carefully adjusted her recommended dosage of each new version of Zanoflaxithorinal that came to market every two to three months, under the guidance of her doctors, of course. She had taken all the other pills they’d prescribed ... the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, the norepinephrine-dopamine disinhibitors, the sedatives, tranquilizers, the anti-psychotics, the anticonvulsants, the psychostimulants. She had joined an array of anonymous support groups, Latent Anti-Social Persons Anonymous, Children of Latent Parents Anonymous, Verbal Abuse Survivors Anonymous, among many others, and had worked their programs. She’d taken up yoga, transcendental meditation, running, weaving, said affirmations, stared at candles for days on end, read entire self-help libraries, adjusted her diet and the hours she slept, and attended countless retreats and seminars, and individualized life coaching sessions. In her desperation, she had even tried the scheduled substance known as LTC9, a powerful supposedly dangerous hallucinogen that some in the alternative medicine community believed could cleanse the neural pathways, erasing latent Anti-Social ideations and simulating direct union with the One. Alison, a temp in the Records Department, who dressed a bit oddly, but who was generally nice, had slipped her the pill the day she left. “You only have to take it once,” she whispered, “trust me, it’ll change your life.” Aside from giving her a three-hour migraine, and causing her to dream she was trapped inside an enormous hive of cancerous tissue housing an infinite number of other identical insect versions of herself, the LTC9 changed absolutely nothing.
So on they came, as they had forever, the negative thoughts, the doubts, the questions, the aural and visual hallucinations ... that very December morning, for example, the supposedly happiest day of her life. Valentina had been sitting in the kitchen, silently drowning in sunflower yellow, gazing out through the sliding glass doors into the silver predawn twilight, the poisonous sky alive with beacons, strobing, flashing, winking, twinkling ... the running lights of commercial airplanes, corporate choppers, and UAVs, pulsing, painting trails of light, webs of color, lines of flight, forming some faint, familiar pattern ... some half-remembered whorling maze. One of the Pewter Palisades gardeners, Joachim Maria-Torres Oakley, with whom Valentina was fairly friendly, was down by the pond behind the house, carefully trimming a hedge of Snail Seed. He was trying to trim the last few meters before the sun got all the way up. Sweat was cascading down his back, which Valentina was intently ogling. Joachim lived down in who knew where ... somewhere down in Center City, just outside the Quarantine Zone. He lived there with his wife and kids, his parents, her parents, and their other relatives. He and his wife (Kinshasha, was it?) and the older generations were Variant-Positives. The kids, two boys and a girl, were Clears. They lived in a three-bed, two-bath apartment in a low-rise complex on a big noisy street. They had a modern, if limited kitchen, a decent sized Viewer, wore clothes off the rack, paid their rent and bills on time, carried approximately a million in debt, and generally lived a relatively comfortable, paycheck-to-paycheck type of existence.
Valentina had no idea why she was thinking any of this.
Kyle was scanning his All-in-One, letting his morning decaf go cold. His mustard yellow Tucci tie was flipped up onto its face on his shoulder, the better to keep it from catching drips of the decaf coffee he wasn’t drinking.
“Hot one today,” he announced, clicking.
Valentina, elsewhere, eyeballed, out through the sliding glass doors of the kitchen, across the still surface of the artificial pond, down at the end of the hedge of Snail Seed, Joachim Maria-Torres Oakley’s lateral muscles flexing like wings. Right at that moment ... now ... now ... billions of trillions of Globodollars were being transferred from bank to bank, purchasing stocks, corporate paper, covered bonds, repackaged debt, hedges, futures, anything, everything ... forty gadzillion transactions per second. Some of those virtual Globodollars were hers and Kyle’s. None were Joachim’s. Each and every one of Joachim’s Globodollars were spent in advance. They were spent on rent, food, clothes, toys, Info-Entertainment Content, energy fees, water, taxes, medical bills, and interest on debt. She and Kyle were also in debt, but theirs was an altogether different equation ... an equation based on the price of money, interest rates, amortization, return on investment, inflation, and so on. They, and everyone else in their circle, were making money with other people’s money. Which was what made the world go around after all, virtual streams of numbers, figures, flowing freely through fiberoptic cables, in and out of virtual accounts, feeding investment, producing returns, generating compound interest. This was the magic of other people’s money, the Tree of Abundance, whose fruit was Wealth, the Wealth with which they would feed their family, pay for their schools, clothes, toys, Viewers, therapy, software, medicine, and personal growth-based corporate seminars ...
Valentina understood all this.
She understood the Path(s) to Prosperity. She understood that she and Kyle had chosen spiritual and material abundance, plenty, plenitude, affluence, assets ... it wasn’t that she didn’t understand all this. It was just that, gazing across the pond, sipping her ginger tea that morning, with all those trippy colored trails of light bleeding off the edges of everything, forming mandalas in the brightening sky, Valentina could not for the life of her shake the thought that those other people, those other people whose money it was that she and Kyle were making theirs with, were, basically, people just like Joachim. Not even like. They were Joachim ... who Pewter Palisades paid enough to house h
imself and his family, barely, feed everybody, and keep them distracted, buying products and servicing debt, the interest on which was paid to the banks, which owned the low-rise building he lived in, and her and Kyle’s house, and Pewter Palisades, and virtually everything else in existence ... well, OK, not quite everything else. Some of it was owned by other people, or other corporations, which were owned by these people, who also held a stake in these banks, or who held a stake in some other business which held a stake in some other bank upon which the banks in question depended, the failure of which (the banks in question), or even the unwarranted fear thereof, would trigger a massive financial crisis that would quickly spread around the globe precipitating widespread social unrest and bringing an end to life as she knew it ... which basically, the way Valentina saw it, looking at it through the funhouse lens of her Anti-Social ideations that morning, made Joachim a glorified slave ... all right, granted, a glorified slave with sixteen hundred channels of Content, health insurance, and air-conditioning, but nevertheless, essentially, a slave. Hanging in a physical drawer in Kyle’s study were various legal and official documents, the signed, original copies of which it was still, even in this paperless age, customary for people to retain. One of these documents happened to be the lease for their house on Marigold Lane. Valentina had read this lease. She had signed this lease. She’d had it scanned. This lease consisted of sheets of paper. Sixty-three, if memory served. Sixty-three sheets of A4 paper.
This was what made Joachim a slave.
“Val?”
Kyle was talking to her. How long had he been talking to her? She raised her mug and faked a smile.
“What is it, honey?”
“What time’s our appointment?”
OK. She was in the clear.
“Eleven.”
“Eleven? I thought it was later.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you think that?”
“What?”
“Why did you think it was later?”
“Uh ... I don’t know. Are you OK?”
He was looking at her like she wasn’t OK.
“Yes, Kyle, I’m OK.”
He went back to clicking through screens on his Viewer.
“Did you see this comment on Friedman’s Fleep?”
“What Fleep?”
“On the Kiki Brezinski piece.”
“Kiki Brezinski?”
“What’s her name’s agent.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kyle.”
“I’ll forward it to you.”
“I’m sitting right here.”
He forwarded it to her. His Viewer bleated. He checked it.
“Hold on, I need to read this. ”
Valentina closed her eyes and tried to change the channel in her head. Let go and detach, she told herself. Joachim is not a symbol of anything. Joachim is a gardener. He chose his life. No one is enslaving anyone. Everything is all a series of choices. Everything is happening for a reason. Joachim went to school ... a public school, which everyone knows are ... NO. Stop it. The Oneness of the infinite One. The Multiplicitous Oneness of the ... He could have gotten a scholarship somewhere. People do. Some people do. OK, not many. Practically no one. Still, theoretically, he could have. Or saved some money. Or not had kids. Or invested ... or, all right, not that much, but if he’d set aside a little monthly ... in forty or fifty years he could have ... NO ... or started a business. With what? Nothing. See? That’s how it works. The system ... NO ... the Oneness of the ... DETACH. Try to see the big picture. Someone has to do the gardening. Someone has to pick up the garbage. To pick up our garbage. Shine our shoes. NO. Please. PLEASE make it stop. PLEASE ... SHOW ME WHAT TO DO.
On the other side of the sliding glass doors out of which Valentina was staring again, the temperature was 42 Celsius and rising. Another suffocating day was breaking, which the Normals were all going to spend indoors. Across the pond, Joachim and one of the other gardeners were loading their gear into the back of a ten year-old hybrid work van, the side of which was prominently branded with the double “P” Pewter Palisades logo. The self-adjusting projectile-proof glass in the sliding glass doors in the sunflower kitchen where Kyle was now grunting and poking his Viewer was turning a soothing shade of green.
“I covered that in my memo, I believe.”
Valentina’s hand was shaking. Her heart was racing. Her teeth were clenched. She grabbed up an orange prescription bottle from among the collection that lived on the table, and took a pill, a Zypralexathol, an anti-convulsant, which sometimes helped. Please, she prayed ... please, make it stop. Help me, please, let go of these thoughts. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing.
“Val?”
Kyle was staring at her. Yes ... she could definitely feel him staring. How long had he been staring at her? How long had she been lost in her thoughts ?
“I’m OK ... give me a minute.”
“Thoughts?”
“Uhuh. Give me a minute.”
One of those endless silences followed.
“Anger?”
“Mostly guilt,” she whispered.
He took her hand, and squeezed it gently.
“Try to let it go,” he said.
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“I’m sorry ... I just ...”
A Fleep came in on his All-in-One. He glanced at it quickly. She could feel him do it. She pulled her hand back and opened her eyes.
“I think Graell ought to up your dosage.”
“I know, Kyle. I’m seeing him tomorrow. I took another one. Just give me a minute.”
“I wasn’t trying to pressure you, sweetheart.”
Another Fleep came in on his Viewer. She watched him resist the urge to read it. He gazed at her, radiating love and concern. She turned away and looked out the doors again. Joachim and the other gardeners were gone. Kyle got up, flipped his tie down, dropped his All-in-One in his pocket. He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.
“I love you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pressure.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I love you, muffin. I’ll see you there at eleven. OK?”
Valentina reached for his hand, found it, squeezed it, nodded, and smiled. He bent down and kissed her sweetly on the temple.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m OK.”
“You’re really OK?”
“I’m really OK.”
Valentina was not OK. Despite both her and Kyle’s attempts to wish it away, and pray it away, and talk it away, and gloss it over, the ever more undeniable truth was, Valentina, in spite of all her efforts to keep her latent disease in check, was “Non-responsive to Pharmatherapy.” This was becoming increasingly obvious, incontestably, embarrassingly obvious. The possibility had always been there, given her mother’s medical history, and now ... here it was ... it was actually happening. She and Kyle had discussed this at length, back when they were both in their twenties, when it had all seemed very remote and abstract. Her mother, Catherine, after all, had made it into her early sixties before she had finally gone full-blown. Kyle and Valentina figured, worst case scenario, she would make it that long, and maybe, just maybe, with the right combination of medications and spiritual programs, she would never go full-blown at all.
Then, one summer, six years earlier, she’d had the first of her little episodes. It didn’t seem that dramatic at the time, one random sarcastic remark in public, made to a server at Giggles, luckily, and not at work, or to one of Kyle’s colleagues, which certainly would have gotten her reported. A few weeks later, another remark, this time to a Content Assistant in the Literary Content department at Finkles, which Susan Foster had clearly overheard, and had had no choice but to mention to Kyle.
Then, a few days later, another.
During the six long years that followed, Doctor Graell and her other psychiatrists had diagnosed her with a cornucopia of latent Anti-Social “conditions” ... C
hronic Altered Reasoning Complex, Early-Onset Perceptual Disorder, Oppositional Logic Syndrome, Stage 3 Ideational Slippage, Werden’s Disease, among many others, which together led to one grim conclusion ... Valentina was “very possibly” Non-Responsive to Pharmatherapy.
In light of the rather catastrophic personal, professional, and social consequences flowing from such a diagnosis, “Non-Responsiveness to Pharmatherapy, was never confirmed by laboratory testing, which entailed a significant margin of error. Confirmation was entirely based on observation of the patient’s behavior, which, if the patient was Non-Responsive, exhibited certain hallmark symptoms, which once reported could not be ignored. Any type of violence was of course dispositive, but such behavior was extremely rare. Typically, much less dramatic eruptions (i.e., verbal abuse, aggressive gesturing, or disregard for private property) were enough to confirm the diagnosis and earn one an NRP designation. As long as a patient hadn’t crossed that line and forced some doctor to enter the dreaded “NRP” in the patient’s records, Non-Responsiveness to Pharmatherapy remained merely “possible” or “very possible,” which meant that the doctors could continue treating, writing prescriptions, and billing for same.
Valentina Briggs, at this point in our story, had not yet officially crossed that line, but clearly she was inching up to it. Clinically, she was “decompensating.” Her paranoid ideations were worsening. She wasn’t reading reality right. She was suffering fits of delusional thinking. For example, the one she’d suffered that morning, gazing out at the lateral muscles of Joachim Maria-Torres Oakley, that had caused her to think all those Communist thoughts as she spiraled down into the destructive feelings of guilt she so obviously didn’t deserve. Or the one that started, a few hours later, with her sudden outburst of inappropriate laughter in the consultation room at Paxton Wills ... and that continued now as she rode the elevator down from the 200th floor to the lobby. These fits were not full-blown psychotic episodes. They were simply extended delusions of reference, minor variations on a discordant theme, a twisted narrative her mind had created, which turned the real world upside down, not in terms of what it was, but, rather, in terms of how it worked ... for, whereas, now, and in all her fits, Valentina still perceived the world (i.e., the physical world) as you and I do (e.g., chairs were still chairs, cars were cars, toasters weren’t alien listening devices), her perception, or, rather, her interpretation, of societal and interpersonal relations was disturbingly, pathologically skewed. Everywhere she looked she saw (or thought she saw) some bit, piece, evidence of some secret scheme, some deeply diabolical complot, in which, her intuition told her, everyone was implicated ...
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