by Ben Marcus
“They don’t say that. That’s not a saying. Cook the books, game the system, queer the pitch. Anyway, are you that insecure about your work that you can’t tell me anything about it?”
He just blinked.
“Medical pathway? Part of brain targeted? Side effects? Give me some crumbs so I can at least make a goddamn biscuit.”
I knew his rules. I knew his life. It was pointless to ask. The secrecy was so bone deep here at Thompson that a false narrative of this bit of medical terrorism, him standing at my desk blowing powder over my head, had already been scripted. The dailies, when they came in, would reflect a different scenario entirely, one in which I had not been medically sneezed on by a hulking gray skeleton. Dr. Nelson looked like he didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep, and didn’t really breathe. So much abstention. What, really, was there left to erase except the idea of the man?
“How about you just tell me what you feel whenever you have a minute. Use the logger on the…” He pointed at my terminal. “I added an identity for you.”
He told me the name of the experiment. It had the word “bear” in it. It had a longish number, with some letters, too, and I instantly forgot it. He told me the name I’d be logging in with: Terry Corbin. For the purposes of the experiment I was a fifty-three-year-old woman, with no medical issues, and a family history of depression. Not so far from the truth. He told me that my fictional background was necessarily scattershot, because he didn’t have time to flesh out a real and believable past for me. Because why bother, and bleh, and gross?
“The system requires medical subjects to have a past, as such, but that level of information has no technical bearing.”
I blinked at him. When the scientists spoke that way I tended to turn to ash.
“The past isn’t interesting. It doesn’t matter. Sentimental value only, if that. Legacy software demands it and we comply, but we phone it in and that’s been approved all the way at the top. We’re not going to make a fetish out of stuff that has already happened. I sort of actually hate the past.”
Like, he hated the past on principle, or certain specific things that had happened in the past? And did he hate his own past, which would be understandable—I imagine he was a small, unnoticed figure in his childhood, perhaps frequently set upon by larger children who tried to drink from his body—or was it the past of the entire world that troubled him?
“Thanks for the sexless name,” I said. “And the age. Nice. I can practically smell my coffin.”
We did this sometimes. We took on guinea personas for Nelson and his crowd before we romanced the FDA with our product. How did we put it when we congratulated ourselves about the work we did? We inhabited nascent identities to spread the data to a broader population. Maybe this was deceitful but it felt scarcely more problematic than using a real person. Scarcely. Crowdsourcing worked really well when you could handpick your crowd and rename them at will. You know, like drafting a football team or casting extras in a gladiator scene. It also saved some pennies on testing and it gave all of us in data collection a chance to sample how people would be feeling in the future, if any of this ever, ever, was approved and came to market. Yeah, if. And if and if and if. It was the unspoken word before a good deal of the sentences we punted at each other. And it was usually the last word, too. Along with many of the words in between.
The burning eased off in my nose and I’d shaken the crumbs free. I still felt nothing from the dose. No rush, no sudden clarity, no blast of sorrow. I was not high and I was not sleepy and I had not been put on some teetering edge that could only be soothed with sex or violence or kindness, which was good, because I wasn’t sure what the likely outlets were. This chemical friend looked like a quiet actor. Maybe an out-of-work one. The subtler drugs were always harder to bear, ha ha, because they triggered a bottomless disappointment. In me, anyway. Which I was arguably on the verge of feeling anyway, and who wanted a spotlight on the real? Ever. At times like this I realized how much I wanted out of myself, how blitzed and bored I was by my own thoughts and feelings, my own little story. Terry Corbin could have licked me into some new, intriguing shape, but she was turning out to be a fucking dud with limited powers of rescue. I kind of hated her already.
The other option was a placebo. It could always be that. Maybe it always was. In which case I’d just been sneezed on by a creepy man for nothing.
Just then there was an intercom announcement. Possibly in French. I looked at my coworkers, who all groaned at once. People reached for their coats. A crowd started to gather at the window.
I had questions, even though my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t really anywhere.
“What’s the time frame on this, or whatever? What’s the onset and then how long will this shit last?”
Dr. Nelson looked at his watch. “Yeah, uh. Onset is, you know…now.” He looked at me and blinked. Still nothing on my end, although I hated evaluating my feelings. It was like looking into an empty room, trying to see if the walls were breathing. Sometimes when I scrubbed in as a monkey for these experiments I was already shaking with the blast of the initial dose by now, quivering under my desk, running for the toilet. For some reason, experimental medicine often led to a thunderous shit. Today was different. This drug might as well have been called Status Quo. Who was going to pay for more of the same?
“As far as duration, this one might be pretty long term. We’re working on something sustained, and, uh.”
“Sustained?”
“Pretty much. That’s how we refer to it. It’s one of the words we’re comfortable with. But I’m not going to get too involved with language right now. The language for this experience will come last.” For some reason Dr. Nelson gestured out the window, as if that was where the language would be coming from. I looked in that direction, right into the sun, and for a moment forgot myself, who I was, where I was, what I was doing. Jesus it felt good.
“So this will last a full day? Two?”
Nelson just stared at me. I was playing cat and mouse with a dead man. Both of us were dead, maybe. Which explained the lack of repartee.
“Or what, like, a week? I should have probably asked you that. I have things to do at home. Stuff I have to take care of.”
There was, really, nothing of the sort. There was simply a man named Richard at home, my betrothed, and then the two children we had fashioned out of wedlock, using techniques we’d long since forgotten. These days I bent over a chair to receive his anxiety, but this happened merely monthly, and was marked by a great fatigue. The children walked the rooms of our home collecting food. Sometimes they left for long periods of time and returned home, silent and unchanged. They still called it school but Jesus Christ. When the kids slept I thought of examining them, but for what? From time to time I grabbed them and held them and sometimes they grabbed me and held me. I felt very little when I did this, so I did it more, and the children grew quieter and more remote, hanging from my arms like ornaments on a tree. You could almost hear a bell go off when we hugged, as if we were all good little subjects in the great experiment that was our family. You didn’t need special glasses to see where it was all going. You could watch a movie in which people like us were burned alive. We had just slightly more agency than stuffed animals. I’m sure there was more to it, but I didn’t know what it was.
Dr. Nelson touched my face. “Lucy, sweetheart.” He was one of those men who talked this way, applying human touch that felt both deeply inappropriate and entirely welcome. I allowed it, however cold his hand felt, however much I shivered. Maybe he could undress me. Maybe he could cut into me with a knife and it would seem like chivalry. I think I am only half kidding. There was a funny way that human law seemed kind of arbitrary when it came to the doctors on our wing. Human law, in the end, would have a short half-life—human law could seem so overwhelmingly polite sometimes. He was always kind enough, but in an overcompensated way, as if he’d just c
ome from the killing floor somewhere up north, freshly showered, blood free for the first time in months. Whatever nice thing he did for you was out of guilt for something especially heinous he’d done literally seconds before. Sometimes in the break room we discussed the various doctors, and we had silent ways of singling out the creeps and corpses among them. The ones who were so recently dead that they twitched just enough to seem functional in the world, tripping and stumbling through rooms on their way to the burial pyre.
“It’s a moon shot,” Dr. Nelson said. “But we’re going really more sort of long term with this one. ‘Indefinitely’ is one of the words we might use. Maybe. We don’t know. I mean, we do know, but we also are not saying that we know.”
“So the dose of nonsense you just gave me, with mysterious effects that you won’t reveal, you’re hoping it will last, maybe, forever? That wasn’t worth mentioning, as a courtesy?”
Dr. Nelson smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said.
* * *
—
What we were doing that year in St. Louis—it sounds odd to call it that—was tagging the major feelings, sub-tagging the minor ones. This was the mandate at Thompson Lord, the company where we died a little bit every day. Even on the weekends, when we didn’t go to work. Because it taunted us on the horizon, brown and long and suspiciously moist. More of an animal reared up on its hind legs than an office building, even though up close it resolved into brick and glass and was just another future pile of rubble for the end-times.
We were giving order to the interior weather system, and whatnot. Telling a story about our moods. The thousand shades of disquiet, was what we called it in the pale halls of Thompson. A system of classification for all the ways to feel. But because the names of feelings are just so unpleasant, destroyed forever by poets and shameless emoters, we swapped in animal names. Bear and wolf and whatever. It was easier. A Noah’s ark of the possible tantrums, freak-outs, and moods. With such an approach, we wouldn’t box ourselves into some classification corner, or get lost in a subjective hell farm, and anyway it was better to be on the same page with Dr. Nelson and his team, and the middle geeks at the chem lab who had to conjure hormone equivalents of these feelings, using the ass glands of snakes and whatever.
It sounds a bit highbrow, but it was just an intellectual property land grab on the part of Thompson. They were boiling over with money, and as such were obliged to own what could be thought or felt, even if it could not yet be, well, done, by which I mean: sold. Because usually that was just a matter of time.
So, own the moods. Break all possible emotions down into chemical states, and simulate those states with drugs. Pretty simple. Then, curate the hell out of people’s days. Feed them their feelings second by second, like a DJ. The drugs would have names like Tuesday, Thanksgiving, First Day of School. We’d lose the animal branding and tag the chemical helpers with super-obvious monikers. Then we’d get into blends. Then we’d get into mods and hacks. The word “smoothie” would not be inappropriate. The horizon on all of this was pretty and it was filled with cake.
Except, of course, the tech sucked balls, and there was no agreement whatsoever in the so-called scientific community—“community” is the wrong word for what happened when these cretins got together in an auditorium—over what even constituted a particular emotional state. You wrote a protein poem for this shit, and you sidecarred a timeline of hormones, but the result too often wobbled when you squirted it into a live human body and eventually everything fell out of focus. People bled, they wept, they shat. Human ignorance turns out to be pretty durable, and it played a starring role in our work. The moods, in the end, were like ghosts. Not even. Less credibility.
And if 2014 really was the year of the sensor, as they kept saying on NPR, it had turned into a pretty long and terrible one, approaching one thousand days now. Maybe more. Who was counting? I was, along with lots of people I knew. Sensors in the trees, on the roads, slapped onto buildings, drinking from our necks, sucking up data on us. Sensors on our bodies, in our clothing. Sensors in our face cream. Sensors, yeah, in the water, finally, because water, really, has the broadest access in the world, inside our bodies and out, and how dopey we all were not to see it sooner. Water as the ultimate delivery system for that final frontier of surveillance—the inside of the human body. The data that came back was mountainous. It was crushing. Did the sensors work? Was the data sound, or even remotely reliable? Yeah, no. I mean, no one knew for sure. Or of course we did, and the answer wasn’t good.
It sounds pretty high tech, maybe, and it might have been, if it worked. These were the 2010s, after all, a time of hypotheticals and wish enterprises, when people still needed to eat, and the sun still behaved itself.
We fed this data, big and hairy as it was, to a crew over in a building we called the dorm, where beaver-faced children worked the curation. I mean worked the shit out of it. Maybe these wet beasts were of age, but just. And maybe they were human, but, well, also just. And that’s being generous. I don’t think they slept, and if they ate it must have been liquid food through a very thin straw, or the tiniest nibbles of mush, because their mouths were disturbingly small. Like, how did these kids really breathe out of such pinholes, at least without causing a balloon squeak? How did they stick a toothbrush in there to clean their teeth, let alone administer oral deliciousness to some hulking uncle who needed his emerson drained? Maybe the kids at the dorm were just, uh, small people, horrendously gifted with numbers, but there was something off in their appearance. Everyone kept reasonably quiet about the whole thing, though. Given the speech protocols at Thompson, not to mention elsewhere, you just didn’t really say what you were thinking. And if you could help it, you didn’t really think what you were thinking, either. I got good at that. My thoughts were going to die with me, whenever that day came. Or maybe my thoughts already had, preceding me to the grave. I wasn’t going to get caught out. I wasn’t going to get listened in on. I had a few tricks to protect myself.
* * *
—
The house was dark when I got home. Another cold St. Louis afternoon. There was going to be snow, supposedly, and there was going to be a lot of it. Maybe we’d all be buried alive. Everything would freeze and in hundreds of years they’d find us, chilled in position as we tended our homes or pursued our craven desires out on the street, and the story they would concoct—of who we were and what we were doing—would be so splendid. It would be majestic. Everything so small and remote in our lives—our handbags, our kitchen tongs—would be rescued from their current uses and gifted with tremendous, almost unbearable power, united to a meaning we could never even imagine. We’d be gods and we’d be animals, we’d be uncanny accidents in the larger trajectory of the universe, anomalies of light. It would almost be worth it, to die that way, and then to be understood through such a profound, new lens. To be upgraded and romanticized and lifted up. Weren’t we all just caught in a rehearsal for our fossilization? Stories would be written. Songs would be sung.
I called out into the house. Richard was usually back from work by now. He’d be up to something desperate in the kitchen. A cooking project from one of his books. Save your relationship with this brilliant stew. That sort of thing. The result was usually a cozy bowl of something to eat, and we’d sit together looking out the window at our favorite tree, trying not to argue. The children would be home as well, for sure. They’d be upstairs in their rooms, polishing their privacy until it glowed. You could sometimes see the light under the door. It stood for everything you’d never know about them. Everything you’d never understand.
But there was no one home. No one anywhere. Quiet in the streets and quiet abroad. Quiet inside the home. A pretty quiet world tonight overall maybe. I had the sense that if I turned on the TV it would not be able to penetrate such profound silence. It’d be no match for this hushed world. I’d just see the strange faces on the screen as if they were tr
apped under water, shouting silently behind the glass. For a moment I thought that if I cut myself open, there’d be no noise in there, either. Just the silent rush of blood, all perfectly muzzled, even as my body hurried about its business, working so tremendously hard, which you rarely got to see, just to keep me alive.
I slept forever. I slept and slept and slept. And I woke to a different world. The snow was piled high up on the windows. Plows rolled down the street pushing so much snow that the parked cars on each side were covered in it, perfect white mounds with nothing visible underneath. I went to wake the kids, but they’d come and gone already. Richard, too. They must not have wanted to disturb me. I was still in my clothes from yesterday. I needed to shower and eat and get the hell back to work.
The phone rang as I was making breakfast.
“How are you holding up?” the caller asked.
“Who’s calling?” I said.
“Is this Terry?”
“No.”
“Terry, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay. With the storm. If you need anything.”
I told them it was a wrong number, and they didn’t apologize, or say anything. They just held the line and listened. I said that I was hanging up, and they yelled that name again, Terry, just as I disconnected.
* * *
—
At work we were on lockdown, of sorts. Not everyone could make it in. I wasn’t going to let some weather stop me, plus Dr. Nelson would probably worry if I didn’t show up. He’d think I’d died. He’d send a team. They’d need to collect me, clean up, hide the traces. Whatever. None of that was relevant. The buses were running, and all I did was bundle up like crazy, with so many layers that you could have thrown me from a building and it wouldn’t have hurt when I landed. “Unbreakable” was the word I kept saying to myself. Unless a car got to me. Unless someone used fire. I pictured myself flung from a window and falling gently into the snow. I’d be fine. I’d stand up and walk it off. Maybe I’d even ask to do it again, just one more time, because you don’t get to feel that way very often. You rarely get to feel that you could fall forever, without harm, as the world rushes by you.