My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  All these things should have given me a thousand and one warnings and raised up all the red flags, but I was young. Hormones working overtime. For me, it was exciting and I’d always had something of the thrill-seeker in me. Spending time with this older man. A married older man. Possibly involved with government conspiracies. In my head, I was courting James Bond. I know—silly, right?

  Blake Highsmith was the one who began mapping out Atroxipine for us. Drawing up the dry-erase boards with his left hand until every spare inch of white board was filled. All of us discussing variants. I stood quiet and holding as much poise as I could manage as a newcomer, waiting for my chance to ask: what effect is this drug supposed to achieve?

  Atroxipine was designed to accomplish several goals: to reduce or even reverse the effects of aging; to excite and increase the frontal lobe activity; and lessen the symptoms similar to schizophrenia and other psychological disorders. What disease or affliction it was intended to treat was never revealed to us. Even Blake himself did not know.

  He consulted a herbalist, a homeopath, fringe doctors, a veritable medicine cabinet of wonders. Blake was a maverick in this way; prior scientists were not risky enough to satisfy him, he said, and thus their work fell short of satisfaction. He wanted real results. He took us out to rainforests in Puerto Rico. For a whole month, he plied me with orchids and pretended not to know where they came from, that a secret admirer must be sending them to me. During business, he hired, and insisted we work with, elders of indigenous tribes. Several of the technicians left in disgust; they felt working with prehistoric natives was akin to superstition rather than science, and that next we’d be sacrificing goats over sacred stones to achieve results. They’d had enough when he suggested that we could make a drug for that too, and they walked out of the lab, leaving only myself and him to engineer the entire thing.

  He moved the lab into his own kitchen. He owned a house big enough, and I didn’t know just how big it was without a wife there to occupy it. I expected to meet her at last and was stunned to find she was not there; no second car parked beside his in the driveway. Bills with her name piled by the door. The pointed absence of a certain feminine touch—no flowers in vases, and if there had been window treatments, they’d been traded out for blinds. No woman’s coat in the closet. The fridge had the usual earmarks of a bachelor’s residence rather than a married man—all condiments and leftovers from take-out joints.

  I didn’t ask. I was afraid it would take us to an inappropriate place, and even with my dangerous longings, I was beginning to understand there was a difference between the anticipation of the object of desire and attaining the actual object itself. Blake was a highly driven man. He never slept at first. That’s not an exaggeration. I spent nights in the house strictly as a professional function—sleeping on the pull-out couch. As far as I knew, he never made it upstairs to collapse on his own bed. He spent the night “cooking” strange batches of witches’ brew, searching for that perfect alchemical mix of ingredients for the drug that was supposed to cement his career, if only he could deliver it. While I worried about contamination in the unsecure, and hardly sterile, environment of his home, he laughed me off and told me to pretend it was a field office. “How do you think people made medicine a thousand years ago?” I said that maybe that’s why it took so long to come up with penicillin and he scoffed. Told me witches were wrapping wounds in moldy bread long before science put it into a pill.

  He opened my eyes to a different way of medicine and science—asked me to consider a world in which all of our conveniences and gadgets were no longer available. He prized innovation and experimentation over rigid protocol. When he wasn’t working in our makeshift lab over his expensive counters and stainless steel cookery, he was reading a dog-eared copy of The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis. If anyone had seen him doing that, he would have been laughed out of any institution, much less the pharmaceutical one.

  But there was another man who came and went and he did not laugh. And that man looked like you. His name was Jamie. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he had been killed. You’ll have to tell me what that was all about. So I tell all this to you with some reservation; but knowing you are the flesh of his flesh, surely, you will keep my confidence? I fear the consequences if those in positions of power discover I have spoken about things I am not allowed to speak about.

  It was Jamie and Blake, bent over the papers and the books, comparing notes and talking in whispers back and forth until I fell asleep and woke to their voices in alternate hours. Tested compounds they put before me, cleaned glass beakers in the massive stainless steel service sink. Another man would come, and they always called him the Inspector. He seemed as a shadow. Insubstantial. I was always leaving as he was arriving, catching glimpses of him as he blurred past. He never acknowledged me. At least Jamie was civil, but the Inspector deepened the coldness in the air by twenty degrees. Had his own gravitational pull like a magnetic planet. I was happiest when he was gone.

  Jamie looked haggard, in those days. As though a deadline were ticking away in the background. Blake told me that Jamie was bringing in “heavy” stuff—pscyhotropic drugs. Ayahusca, mescaline. Making batches of mushrooms and feeding them to a team of rats we housed in the garage. Jamie ordered us a new batch and cleared out the old ones and sat us down at the kitchen counter.

  We had a sit-rep, though no one called it so. It seemed to me more and more that Blake was keeping information in his head instead of writing it down. I discovered him in the hallways, or accidentally brushed past him to the bathroom, and found him, clenching his jaw as though he could turn his teeth to dust, muttering figures to himself to commit them to memory.

  The white boards were erased—and disappeared. Months of work vital to our production, vanished. Even the pens and the paper began to disappear. I spent hours digging through junk drawers to find something, anything to write with. I asked him how the hell I was supposed to record my findings and he put a finger to his lips and shook his head and would say no more. I can’t write anything down? I asked, and he only shook his head and that was the end of the discussion.

  If I hadn’t been so sleep deprived and focused on stretching the memory muscles in my brain to help me keep track of what experiments I’d done and what more I needed to do, I would have realized something was amiss. That we were being spied on. It’s a slippery slope to the tin foil hats once the paranoia starts in. It didn’t hit me until later that he didn’t want us writing anything down in case we had to answer for it later. Answer for it, the way some must answer for wrongdoings at a Nuremberg trial.

  You’d be surprised how far back into the land of memory you can travel. I know people would scoff, say that it’s not possible to conduct work in the manner that we did and call it valid. That there’s no way I could remember all that needed to be remembered.

  It was the Inspector who taught us.

  It was true that I never saw him for any length of time. I never studied with him directly; but there was a basement in the house. Blake followed the Inspector down there, sometimes with Jamie in tow—and I remember looking up to see Blake descending the stairs, back lit by bare bulbs in the engulfing darkness. He looked like a boy—a boy sinking into a quagmire of quicksand from which every desperate struggle only pushes him deeper in. They spent hours down there, in a frightening triumvirate of silence and secrecy.

  Blake resurfaced to sleep. He would stumble through the basement door and scare me half to death. Who knows how many tests I destroyed from jumping two feet out of my chair at the kitchen counter and upsetting serums and test tubes. He would stagger out as though someone had yanked his spinal cord from his body and go so far as the couch before stumbling into the cushions and passing out. Jamie and the Inspector, with his collar turned up to render him eerily invisible, would troop out and leave. Blake would sleep for a day straight.

  This happened over and over again across the course of a month. The three of them disappearing into t
he basement and reemerging in the midnight hours with the sun still transiting the other side of the world. My worry and concern for Blake’s ability to weather this intensity and to keep it sustained increased.

  I tried to wake him once, to take him up to his bedroom so he could be ensconced in some familiar territory. I even thought about finding his wife and reaching out to her for help, though I wasn’t so naive as to consider how badly that encounter might go. That’s how desperate I was over his worsening condition. His skin lost its healthy glow. His hair crept in gray at the edges and he was not what I would call an older man. Too young for that.

  I tried to lift him up from under the arms. He dragged me down into the couch with him, taking my mouth in his, and I didn’t stop him. I was as exhausted as he was. I smelled like an alchemist come from a graveyard, burned by the cauldron I slaved over. All my resistances and objections were null and void in that moment. It was the beginning of our relationship. I fell asleep beside him on the couch and we slept more deeply than we had since we began. When he woke up next, it was as though nothing had happened, as though Jamie and the Inspector had never been there.

  This turning point came with unexpected revelations; Blake became confessional with me in ways he was not before. More willing to discuss the nature of the work while we watched workmen open up the garage and set up massive structures for rat cages. This is how he taught me to remember. To explore the power of memory recall. To begin with the earliest memory and then doggedly track my way backward through my senses and my mind, bringing every event back to life as though it were happening before me. To take snapshots with my mind and imprint what was most important there, so I could come back later and retrieve it. To create structures and architecture on the dreaming inside of me. I had not realized how impoverished my mental space was until he taught me how limitless my imagination could be. Blake didn’t just change my view points on science—he demolished them.

  Meanwhile, hired help stacked cages in the garage. When they finished, Jamie arrived with coffee and take-out food and we gathered around the kitchen counter while Blake ate nothing at all but sipped at his coffee and ground aspirin between his teeth to kill the headache; Jamie explained what the next stage was.

  We are moving into trials, with rats, Blake told me.

  We’re going to infect those rats with a virus, Jamie explained over a box of lo mein that he picked at with his chopsticks. He eventually set them down to wipe his hands on a napkin and stare at both of us.

  Take note of what happens when you test, he explained, but if the rats bite you, and you become infected, we will have to kill you.

  Up until then, there’d been no commentary on all the erratic comings and goings of dark-suited people. No identification, or the complete lack of professional structure. The entire thing must not even be real, because how could it be; when there wasn’t even a paper trail to prove our work existed? I realized the house Blake and I had been living in was a bigger rat cage holding smaller rat cages. We’d built our own trap.

  The realization that Jamie would have us merely wiped out—all over the greasy armpit smell of Chinese food with this mild-mannered desk jockey eating with his chopsticks—struck me as surreal and part of a fever dream. I understood what he had said but could not absorb the import, its overriding implication. If I had my senses about me, I would have left at that instant and never come back, but instead I made my first priority not letting Jamie know how terrifying I found his statement, and covered my fear with a new question. As though, if he knew how afraid I was, he would cut me down.

  What is the virus? I asked.

  Virus X, he said, and he didn’t eat after that. It’s what you’ve been building the cure for. And all you need to know is this: Don’t. Get. Bit.

  We never did bring a single rat back to life during our endless testing of compounds and serums and tinctures. Blake and I moved deeper into our own relationship. In a way, the experiments fostered it. Gave us an environment so hectic and strenuous that we didn’t have time to destroy the romance before it began. There was no time to talk about the conventional things most couples talk about, like what the rules of the relationship should be, where we were going with it, how serious it would be.

  We were careful with the rats; though even after Jamie’s special crew of soldiers came to dispose of them, I never forgot Jamie’s casual, off-hand warning, as though murder was something he could tack on to a supply list for a Staples run. That was how little he thought of the act itself—and how little he thought of us.

  I thought once the rats were exterminated and disposed of, Blake and I would get the chance to talk about what the nature of our dalliance was. Before we could, the Inspector and Jamie were whisking Blake away into the basement again, and this time, for much longer stretches of time.

  I moved in. There were no more drugs to mix or experiment with, but Blake wanted me to stay. My only other option was returning to the cramped apartment with the unreliable roommates who liked to rifle through my purse and lift any extra cash I had. Blake’s place was the better deal, but the truth was, if I wasn’t intrigued and interested by the man himself, I would never have gone. I would have stayed in that shitty apartment.

  Can you fault a woman for loving the wrong type of man, Mr. Adamson? I suppose they have our work stowed away in a secret laboratory somewhere. I always wondered what the treatment was designed for, and when I would see the fruits of our labor.

  But now I think of my husband, and now I know what the fruits of our labor were. To destroy my love and sacrifice our marriage.

  Jamie was some kind of spook and you’re just another one of those, those things this government machine spits out. I guess it doesn’t matter now. I’m not getting out clean from this, am I? And if this is the way it has to be, if you’re gonna turn me in or bury me in a ditch… send me off to a black site. I don’t care. You’ve taken away everything that matters now. My love, my husband, my self-respect. But I don’t care what you try to take from me now, I’m not killing for you people anymore.

  Things got deeper. I stayed upstairs on the second floor but I was awake and listening for when the ghoulish figure of the Inspector would leave, often with Jamie. And that was when Blake began to tell me that there was an interesting side effect to Atroxipine.

  You’re not taking it, are you? I was aghast. It wasn’t as though Atroxipine was going through any committee I knew of. There were no approvals or safeguards in place.

  Blake didn’t answer. His silence, damning.

  You’re taking it, I said.

  Don’t be angry, he answered, rubbing away the lines in his forehead. Every night he fell asleep with a permanent scowl and the lines were etching into a V mark between his eyes. He was too young, I thought, to slowly destroy himself in this fashion.

  You don’t know what it’s going to do to you, it’s not designed—

  He slammed down the coffee cup on the kitchen counter and it broke into porcelain halves, one rolling off the edge to the floor and the other shattering into the sink.

  Don’t you understand! I’m too far in. They want me to do things. They want me to test, they want me to…

  He stopped and stared at the wall. The rings under his eyes formed a mottled horizon of purple and orange. A shell of the man I’d first met. Love has a way of warping your perception. You still see the man inside, even when the exterior is falling apart.

  What do they want you to do, Blake? I whispered.

  Remember the rats?

  Of course.

  They’re done with rats. They’ve done all they can do with rats. We failed with Atroxipine and they want something more, something better. They want… people. They want certain people to test on. And if I can’t do it, I’m done for. I’m finished.

  *

  I listened to Polly with the back of my hand pressed against my mouth. Elvedina was a crumpled outline in the dark and dim hallway, casting soft shadows on the Berber as though she had not fallen i
nto a carpet but drowned in a river of white.

  “Jamie looked so much like you, you know,” Polly whispered.

  I cleared my throat. My last mental image of Jamie was pointing the gun at his heart. The look on his face. He hadn’t even been angry. Kept his hands open as though if he could hug me to him and we’d be restored to little boys cowering in our father’s shadow. If we had ever stopped being them.

  I wanted another drink but I feared to sink myself into a liquor stupor and slow my faculties. A tremor in my fingertips.

  I wanted more Atroxipine.

  I took out the bottle and rattled it once before setting it on the coffee table between us. The high polished glass reflected a double of the orange bottle. The gun, warm against my rib cage reassured me, sistered up my exhausted heart.

  “Atroxipine,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a cure,” Polly sighed. “I still don’t know what was wrong with the rats. But they were dead. We could never get them to come back but… they functioned much better with Atroxipine. But Atroxipine wasn’t good enough. It was the Inspector who wanted to know what would happen if regular, healthy people took it.”

  “Side effects,” I whispered.

  She nodded, grim. “Most of all, all our hard work had been abandoned. They were exploring other ‘cures.’ That still left us with a useless drug that Sisemen Pharma, Inc. had sunk a lot of investment into. These investors were not going away until they had something to show for it.”