The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  My mouth opens to call out to someone, but my throat is on fire and a thick paste coats my tongue. I want water, but even though the words form, they won’t come out as anything but a hoarse whisper. Where’s the concern? Where’s the love? Above me, the lights seem brighter than before, brighter and whiter. They shine through my eyelids when I close them. A wave of nausea crawls from my stomach up into my throat and I gag. I try to crane my neck and wipe the bile on my skin onto my hospital gown, but I can’t, and the bile just hangs on my chin and grows cold.

  The beating of my heart is too fast. I feel it thumping against my ribs, sending out shock waves that travel to my fingers and toes and make my temples pulse. My cells ache. Each one. As if they’re reaching for something and can’t quite grasp it. My cells want. The shivering starts a few minutes later. Another wave of nausea comes.

  * * *

  There is indifference on Dr. Simon’s face as she wipes the slime from my chin with a paper towel rough as tree bark. Blue-gloved hands tilt my head, turn it right, turn it left, as her eyes squint at me. A penlight appears and she tells me to look right at it. I try but have to look away after a second. She tells me to try again.

  When Dr. Simon is finished with her exam, she takes her chair and opens her laptop on her knees.

  “Nausea,” Dr. Simon says, not looking up. “Zero to five?”

  I blink at her. She repeats the question.

  “Five,” I say.

  “Restlessness in limbs?”

  “Five,” I say.

  “Difficulty concentrating?”

  “Five,” I say. “What is this?”

  “Anxiety index, modified for pharmacology studies.” She types something, peers at the screen. “How about blurry vision? Ringing in the ears?”

  “What did you give me?”

  “I call it Theta Compound, but it’s not quite ready yet. There’s still more work you and I need to do.” Dr. Simon puts her laptop away, then stands and walks over to me. From here I can see every pore on her face, and the line below her chin where her makeup ends. “What is the therapeutic purpose of morphine, what’s its point?”

  “To get high.”

  “No. That’s a side effect. The therapeutic purpose of morphine is to relieve pain.” She rests her hand on my arm. “How was it, my Theta Compound? Just subjectively, I mean.”

  I nod, swallow. “Good.”

  “Come on,” she says, mouth breaking into a smile. “It was better than good. Better than amazing.”

  I look away.

  “Like love, right? Because it is love. Love and saline. But again, that’s just a side effect.” She places a finger on my chin, turns my head to her. “A philosophical question, Gwendolyn: What is love? On a basic level?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Love is want, Gwendolyn. You want what you love. And what you love, you’re loyal to. That, that, is the therapeutic purpose of Theta Compound. The political purpose.”

  I close my eyes in order not to see her. But the light comes through anyway, stinging the raw nerves of my retinas. I’ll just do what she asks. I’ll just comply. “What do you want from me?”

  “What we want—what I want—is for you to want us. For you to love us.”

  “Us?”

  Dr. Simon places her hands on her knees, presses down, breathes slowly, like she’s meditating. “You’re a citizen,” she says after a while. “The state, your government, it needs you. A body can’t live without, say, the pancreas. And you don’t see a pancreas walking around without a body, do you?”

  I blink at her. “I’m—I’m the pancreas.”

  “You are,” she says. “You are the pancreas.”

  My face stretches, and despite everything, I laugh. Dryly. Coughing out my laugh until I taste blood. I laugh at her metaphor, and her pancreas. I laugh at her suit, at her good leather briefcase from the mall, at her rubber laptop inside it. When I stop, when I make myself stop, there are tears cooling on my cheeks.

  * * *

  It gets worse, the wanting. By the time she leaves, my veins hurt like they’d been stretched and my brain itches so badly that if I could get my hands out of the restraints I’d pull my hair out to squelch it. Waves of fever and chill roll over me, and sometimes my head is freezing while my feet sweat, and sometimes it’s the opposite. The fluorescent lights are deafening.

  The door opens at some point, and the man with curly hair who wears scrubs the color of a perfect day’s sky comes in. The concern I’d seen on his face is something more now. Worry. His eyes are narrow and jaw is set as he takes my temperature and checks the restraints. He puts on blue gloves and produces a tube of some kind of balm, then smears it on the abrasions on my wrists and ankles. His touch is warm and gentle and hurts so bad I wince.

  “How’s the nausea?” he asks.

  The voice, I recognize it from somewhere, but it’s too much trouble to try to place it. I shake my head and say, “Bad.”

  He pats the pockets of his scrubs, then takes out a single tiny pill. “Zofran. I’ll put it under your tongue,” he says. “Don’t swallow it, just let it dissolve.”

  But as soon as the pill touches the saliva in my mouth, I’m dry heaving over the side of the bed. The man pulls a crescent-shaped steel dish from below and catches the strings of saliva, then wipes my mouth with a cloth.

  “You need an IV,” he says.

  He leaves and comes back wheeling a pole already carrying a flaccid bag of saline.

  “What’s your name?” I manage to ask.

  He looks at me from the side as he wipes my arm with a brown fluid that looks like oil. “I’ve missed our games lately,” he says quietly.

  Max. His name is Max. Now I recognize the shape of his hands even through the gloves, the stubby fingers that slaughtered me in chess. And his face, the corner of it I saw through the slot in the door, I recognize that, too. “Are you a doctor, Max? What’s wrong with me?” I say.

  “Nurse. Army medic before this,” he says, readying the needle. “Squeeze your hand into a fist. You’ll feel a poke.”

  It’s agony, the needle, but over in a second and already taped down by the time I open my eyes.

  “Krankenschwester,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nurse. In German.” I watch as he sticks a syringe into a plastic port on the line leading to my arm. “It means ‘sicksister.’”

  “Sicksister. I like that.”

  “What are you giving me?”

  “We’ll try the Zofran intravenously,” Max says, sticking a syringe into a plastic port on the line leading to my arm. “Nausea should be gone soon. But don’t tell her I gave you anything more than saline.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nausea is part of the withdrawal,” he says. “That’s—what this whole thing is about.”

  I study his gloved hands and try to remember what Dr. Simon had said. “Love is just a side effect.”

  Max’s Adam’s apple shifts up, then down, as he swallows. “I’m sorry about all this,” he says, voice low. “Really. You don’t deserve it.”

  “So cut the straps,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  He closes his eyes, peels off the gloves. “I’ll try to make you as comfortable as possible,” he says.

  * * *

  I’m mostly better by the next day, the IV having done what Max promised, relieving the nausea. Or maybe it was just time that did that, the drug, Dr. Simon’s magic love potion, her Theta Compound, having been sweated out through my pores. When Dr. Simon arrives, she checks the needle in my arm.

  “Aside from needing some hydration, you handled it well,” she says. “That crash when it’s over, though. A real bitch, isn’t it?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Come on, Gwendolyn. I want your opinion. Wasn’t it awful?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  A shrug, casual, like the question hadn’t occurred to her. “We just want you”—and now a smile, real, not even pretending—“to fe
el the love. To understand it. In here.” She taps her chest where her heart is.

  She takes a prefilled syringe from her pocket and attaches it to the port in the IV line, just as Max had done with the antinausea medication.

  No ceremony or buildup this time. She inserts the needle into the plastic junction in the IV line. The rush hits me stronger than it did the day before, like she’s upped my dose, pushing it as high as she dares to go.

  I’m bending backward, backward through the mattress, through the floor, my body bent in a C, my spine impossibly flexible, as I tumble through lavender light that licks my skin.

  Twenty-Nine

  Four or five times this happens, a quick visit, another injection, another glide through the universe on lavender light, kissing all I meet with loving-kindness, and getting loving-kindness back in return. Each dose becomes heavier and the trips longer and better. Each crash becomes harder and more violent. The injections of Zofran, delivered in secret by Max, seem to do less and less. So he changes the sheets and my scrubs soaked in sweat and bile and piss and tells me with grave concern and frustration bordering on naked fury that I should give her what she wants, give her what she wants and end this. But Max knows nothing about love.

  Each time she steps into the room and readies a fresh dose, my eyes gleam with a kind of love I’d never known.

  Turns out, I’d gotten the emotion all wrong. Admiration? Respect? Lust? The embodiment of all that’s good in the whole wide world? Bullshit. Those are poets’ definitions. Children’s definitions. Dr. Simon was right: Love is want. And what we want, we’re loyal to.

  All this she gives unconditionally. Other than a few simple questions from her anxiety index after each dose, there is no other interrogation from Dr. Simon. She gives me her love unconditionally.

  So that’s why, after that fourth or fifth trip, I suspect nothing as she detaches my IV and orders Rossi and LaBelle to haul me out of bed. Surely, Dr. Simon has benevolent reasons in mind, loving me as she does.

  Rossi’s strong arms hoist me by the right armpit, while LaBelle’s hoist me by the left. They walk slowly, accommodating my slow shuffle like the good sports they are, guiding me out of the room and down the hallway to another room, this one very near the end where the tunnel is unpainted and the doors are battered steel shot through with bolts.

  This cell they help me into is utterly bare and the floor is slicked with water a few degrees above freezing that glows brown under what little light there is. As Rossi and LaBelle let me go, I stagger forward, regaining my balance just in time to hear the door slam behind me. My arms beat on the door and I call out, but no one comes. No one comes, because that’s the point. Even a mind in my dull state can recognize that much.

  The pain, the terrible afterward, was just starting when they lifted me from the bed. I was a few minutes out of my high and still catching my breath. But the stretched veins and itchy mind are coming back now with fierce earnestness. Fever and nausea, too. I stumble to the far wall, wet like the floor, very nearly greasy, and press my body to it. It helps a little, cooling the noxious waves of heat shuddering through me. Then the wall moves, sliding this way, then that, but not really. It’s just the vertigo, the up-down-left-right gyroscope in my head still spinning wildly. I lose my balance and slide to the floor, the icy water slicing through the pink scrubs.

  I need a reference point, something for my mind to hold on to. My eyes bounce around the room for anything to pull me through the agony that’s just starting and will get worse until such time as it becomes unbearable. The walls and ceiling and floor are all identical in size, forming a perfect cube, broken only by a yellow lightbulb trapped in its cage like a sad, dim canary. Only the lightbulb. And no camera.

  Not just alone, but unseen. Uncared for. Outside God’s love. Outside the state’s embrace, as Dr. Simon had said. So here, Gwendolyn: Let me show you exactly how alone.

  I retch, stinging yellow slime coming up from my empty gut and forming a solid cord of bile between my throat and the fetid water on the floor. As I pull away, the cord snaps and bounces back into my mouth, tasting of iron and whatever else is down there. A wave of fever turns cold, and my whole body shakes violently, vibrating as if I’m being driven along a shitty, rutted road at a hundred miles an hour.

  * * *

  My arms are curled around my knees and I’m shuddering with cold when the door opens very suddenly, a deafening screech of metal being ripped in two and crying out in pain. Two figures enter and take me by the arms, trying to get me upright, but my legs are too shaky for my own weight. I manage only to raise my head and see a silhouette standing in the entrance.

  Dr. Simon gives a nod to the guards. They release my arms and I buckle, my knees striking the concrete. I catch myself with a hand then raise it to my chest, where my heart hammers away, as if trying to get out. I leave behind a shit-brown palm print.

  She takes a step forward, then crouches so her face is even with mine. There’s soft pity in her eyes, and sadness—this hurts her, too—and her lips are slightly parted, bare and dry, like we’re about to kiss.

  “Nausea,” she says evenly. “Zero to five?”

  My mouth flutters open and I struggle to say something, but as my breath touches her, she recoils.

  “Restlessness in limbs?”

  “I can’t even stand,” I manage.

  “So, five. And concentration?”

  “I’m dying.”

  She places her hands on either side of my head and tilts it up. “You are not, Gwendolyn. You are not dying. Not yet.”

  “Help me,” I whisper.

  Dr. Simon withdraws a hand from my face and digs for something in her pants pocket. When she pulls it out again, there’s a small capped syringe resting on her palm. “This what you want?”

  I look down, away from her. And nod once.

  She tilts my head up again with a finger under my chin. “The love you give is the love you get.”

  “What?”

  “The love you give. Is equal to the love you get,” she says.

  “Tell me how.”

  An easy shrug. “Think of something.” Then she stands, crosses her arms, and paces through the filthy water. Her shoes will hate her for this.

  A shudder comes through me, not fever or chill or nausea, but a sob, dry and soundless. How tiny my body is. How weak I am. Give him up. Give him up, and feel God’s love. Pathetic, but so what? It was always going to come to this. Tomorrow or a week from now or in a month. I would still be here, my body frail and desperate, and the water would still be cold, and the math would never change: your happiness for his life.

  “He has a doomsday device,” I whisper.

  Sudden footsteps to my side, then she’s crouching again. “Good, Gwendolyn. Good.”

  “His—testimony. He tells everything,” I say softly. “An account on a cloud service. The links, ready to send out. In the drafts folder.”

  “Send out to whom?”

  I look up at her; her face is so tender. “Media. CNN. New York Times. Everyone.”

  She snaps her fingers, and I hear one of the guards opening a notepad and clicking a pen.

  “Username and password, Gwendolyn.”

  I rattle them off slowly, deliberately, making sure she gets the spelling, the special characters, the nonsense phrases of the password just right. She double-checks, then shows me the actual paper.

  “That’s it,” I say.

  She hands me the syringe, and a moment later, they’re gone again and the door is shut.

  It won’t be enough, though. They’ll realize that account is just one of the many I’d set up. In the morning, they’ll be back for the others. I’ll string them along as best I can for as long as I can, until there’s nothing left. As to what I do after my information runs dry, I have no idea. But that’s a problem for then.

  I bite the cap off the needle, pull the filthy sleeve of the scrubs up, and stab myself in the shoulder.

  * * *


  Max checks my pulse and lets out an audible breath when he finds there is one. With the back of a gloveless hand he feels for a fever, then touches my cheek.

  “Try to sit up,” he says quietly.

  I do try but can’t, so he does it for me, circling an arm beneath my shoulders and heaving me into a seated position as if he were posing some enormous dead-eyed doll. There’s a blanket around my shoulders a moment later, and another one under my ass, folded thick enough so that it doesn’t get saturated.

  “Thanks,” I whisper.

  He squeezes both my hands in his, then massages my forearms, heat through friction. I’m wet and cold and he’s dry and warm and the effect is both painful and marvelous. In a moment, I’m coughing, and I feel blood coming back to my face. His hands move to my shoulders and squeeze hard, then he’s slapping my cheeks, alternating left, right, left, right, until I actually smile and try feebly to push his arm away.

  “Dr. Simon says no more IV, even saline,” Max whispers. “But I’ve got a patch I can put behind your ear. Or the Zofran pills again. We can try.”

  I manage to raise a finger at the mention of the Zofran, so he shakes a pill out of a bottle and tells me to open. I don’t vomit this time, and in less than a minute, it’s dissolved under my tongue.

  The shivering is starting to come back and I pull the blanket around me more tightly, barely able to hold on to it. Max checks his watch, then tells me to lean forward. Before I understand what’s happening, he’s sliding his body behind mine, pressing his chest to my back, and wrapping his arms around my torso. I can feel his breath on my neck. “You need to warm up,” he says. “Hypothermia.”

  I nod and continue to shiver, but each tremor of my body now is being absorbed by his, bouncing into warm flesh. “Are, are, y-you”—the stuttering is too much to control—“go-going to g-get in…”

  “In trouble?” Max says. “Yes. If you tell them.”

  “Ma-Max…”

  “Yes?”

  “Mm-Am I”—I swallow, trying to force the stutter away—“going t-to die?”