Placebo Junkies

by J. C. Carleson

  “Get off me, Skeevy McFuckerson.” I shove him away and practically run out of the office, not even caring when I look down and see a small bloom of blood soaking its way through my pants.

  I’m not surprised. I’ve never liked Dougie—he set off my creepdar from the first time I met him. But he’s the least of my worries, and I can’t get distracted. My biggest enemy right now is time. The final study follow-up isn’t for five weeks. Which means no cash until after Dylan’s birthday, so it might as well be forever. Just thinking about it makes me almost vibrate with anger. They already have my flesh, but I’m not getting a dime for five fucking weeks. Can they really do that—change the terms like that?

  I pull out my cell phone—it’s a crappy, prepaid, junkie’s phone—and call Dylan. I don’t care that it’s not time yet. I need to hear his voice. I need to hear that we’re worth this.

  Chapter 19

  The first time I got high, it was the moon, full and round.

  It was the warmth of the sun.

  It was the tide, pulling and lulling in my veins.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that feeling, that pale, electric, shimmering sensation inside of me, was the light at the end of a tunnel. It was my first breath. It was my introduction to the world. It gave me my voice, that bliss-ed, bless-ed, drug-fueled moment—my first cry a chemical hallelujah, a filled-to-the-brim amen.

  Screw you. Screw all of you who try to tell me it’s not possible for me to remember it.

  I remember it. I do.

  I came out of the womb high as a kite. Every day since has been stained by the absence of that particular feeling, that singular, scene-setting cocktail of opiods and bulking agents (likely suspects, as per police reports thoughtfully included in my hospital discharge file: brick dust, crushed aspirin, sugar. Also, traces of rat feces).

  Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Audie. Haaaaaah-peeeee birthday to me.

  But nothing will ever touch that feeling again. No drug in the world can give me life the way it did that first time, the day I was born, a yowling, yellow, smoosh-faced, too-early, too-small little tweaker baby, crying and shaking in my incubator with nurses tsk-tsking all around.

  I remember it all, because every day since then has been an act of withdrawal.

  The upside of being born an addict: nothing tempts me. That is to say, nothing satisfies. A twist in my junkie genetics have left me with all the cravings, the bone-deep needs, but none of the fix. I’ve already experienced the perfect high, and nothing else will ever come close. Not that I haven’t tried—just that I’ve tried and failed. I have apathetic veins. Constipated opiate receptors. It’s a shitty way to break a shitty cycle: I am stubbornly and hopelessly unaddicted.

  It would be fair to say that my chemical indifference is rare among my fellow professional guinea pigs, however, and tonight a rousing game of Musical Pill Bottles is going on in the living room. Par-tay!

  A skinny blonde squints at the writing on the small container that ends up in her hands when the music stops. “What the fuck is this stuff going to do to me? I don’t even have testicles!” She shrieks this loud enough for the whole room to hear, dry-swallows two of the pills, and then starts to laugh so hard she pisses herself, the stain spreading down both thighs, which only makes her laugh harder.

  Things like this happen at a guinea pig party, which goes a long way toward explaining why you don’t see many outsiders in attendance.

  Because, incontinence. Also because, lesions.

  See also: Vomiting. Flatulence. Drainage. Not exactly crowd-pleasers.

  From my seat in the corner I spot at least four revelers carrying large bottles that look to be filled with apple juice, only it’s not apple juice, of course. There’s a big trial going on that requires participants to collect forty-eight hours of urine, and a party’s no reason to slack on the job, so they rest their bottles full of piss-colored beer next to their bottles of beer-colored piss.

  It ain’t a pretty scene, but it sure is entertaining—something crazy always happens at guinea pig parties. There’s just something liberating about handing your body over to science, jumping blindly into the pharmaceutical abyss. Plus, you’ve never seen anyone dance like a crowd of people all testing a government-sponsored substance designed to counteract the effects of hallucinogens.

  I watch a tall, bald man on his hands and knees chasing his imaginary tail in the center of the room. Either he was in the control group, or someone might want to tell the researchers their taxpayer-sponsored psychedelic chastity belt isn’t very effective at its current dosage. It’s impressive, however, that the man is mere centimeters from actually achieving his goal and nipping himself on his own ass. All around him, the other guinea pigs cheer his efforts, and down the hall, Jameson is dominating a round of pharmaceutical logo bingo. “Pfizer,” the caller shouts out, and the other players groan as Jameson raises his hands in victory and scoops up his winnings.

  Everyone is having a good time.

  Everyone except me. Mostly, this is because my head feels like it’s being pounded with a molten-hot sledgehammer—a burning, aching acheburn. Behind my eyes the pain claws to get out, releasing its venom into my blood.

  Charlotte lurches by, also looking rough, and I wonder what she’s on. The right half of her face is flushed and her pupils are the size of nickels, and whatever it is she’s been taking, I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t take any more of it. “Still waiting for your ‘boyfriend’ to show up, Audie?” She makes little air quotes when she says it, then keeps walking. Staggering, more like it.

  I’m quiet for a beat, but then something inside of me flares even brighter than the pain in my temple. I’ve been trying to be understanding, but everyone has a breaking point. “What’s your problem, Charlotte?” I stand up and follow her down the hall. “Why do you have to be such a bitch when it comes to Dylan? I know you have issues, but you need to fuck off and let me be happy.”

  She keeps walking like she doesn’t hear me, which is completely impossible, since I might have sort of screamed it and I can feel everyone else in the room staring at me, but Charlotte just keeps going until she’s out the door.

  I just stand there like an idiot. I have no idea what happened, why she’s being so nasty. I thought we’d gotten past the Dylan argument during our little bathroom-counter chat, or at least agreed to disagree. But Charlotte obviously walked away from that conversation with a very different conclusion.

  I try to shrug it off and go back to enjoying the party, but the fact is that I hadn’t been enjoying the party in the first place, since Dylan has once again pulled a disappearing act.

  I check my phone. Nothing. He promised he’d come tonight, but here I am, defending him, without so much as a courtesy call to let me know he’s running late.

  Jameson comes up behind me and puts a drink in my hand. “What is this?” I ask, sniffing it.

  “Drink up. It’s exactly what you need right now, from the looks of things,” he says, leading me away from the door and out onto the cigarette-butt cemetery of a patio. “What’s going on, Audie?” he asks.

  All of a sudden—seriously, out of nowhere—I realize that I hate him. I know that sounds like a strong word, and I probably made it seem like I thought Jameson was such a great guy and all before, but I only really figure it out just now, standing on this shitty, butt-filled patio outside this shitty freakfest of a party, that I can’t fucking stand him and the way he’s always mooning around our apartment, like you can barely have your own space or a private conversation, because he’s always inserting himself into whatever you’re talking about, acting like he knows so much more about everything than everyone else.

  I mean, a girl can change her mind, right?

  “Just stay out of my life, Jameson!” I say, and stalk off to a lone, weather-beaten rattan chair on the opposite side of the patio—the
perfect place for a good, solitary sulk. But before I do, I toss back the drink, whatever it is, and wince as the liquid burns its way down my throat. I may not be a druggie, but I’m also not opposed to a little high or a little low here and there.

  Damn it, Dylan. Why aren’t you here?

  But deep down, I already know. He’d said he’d come, sure, but only after I practically begged him. It was obvious that he didn’t want to, and I really can’t blame him. They way Charlotte treats him is only part of it. He’s too nice to say so, but I know the whole guinea pig life freaks him out, and our little talk about Why Audie Is a High School Dropout probably didn’t help, even if I didn’t exactly tell him the whole story.

  I feel the tingle of Jameson’s mystery drink starting to kick in, and my suspicions begin to crystallize into a recognizable form. Suddenly it’s obvious that I’ve been lying to myself all along. Dylan hasn’t been pulling away from me, disappearing for hours or days at a time, taking longer and longer to return my calls because he’s getting sicker. He’s pulling away because he’s getting better.

  He’s not rejecting me because his cancer is back. He’s just rejecting me.

  Full stop.

  How shitty a person am I that I’d prefer to think my boyfriend has a terminal illness rather than confront the fact he’s just not that into me?

  I hear a crash, and then loud hooting noises coming from the party, and my face flushes. The healthier Dylan gets, the weirder we all must seem. Of course he can’t wait to be done with his treatments, to be in full-fledged remission, and never set foot on hospital grounds again. Of course he can’t wait to leave all this behind. (Translation: leave me behind.)

  Since my brain is now filling in the gaps I’ve been willfully ignoring, it occurs to me that Dylan almost never talks about his illness anymore. You can sit and talk to him for hours, and he’ll never say the word “cancer.” Not once. He’s done with it. Beat it. Over it. And next up on the discard list? Me. I’m part of his sick world. Why would he want to be around a constant reminder of the worst years of his life, once he’s better?

  I feel kind of woozy and off balance—that must’ve been one hell of a strong drink (Or was it two? Even that seems hazy). But even through the shifting prism of intoxication, I know with a singular clarity that only one thing can fix this downward spiral: Patagonia. The castle at the end of the world.

  Dylan and I need to get away from here for a while, away from both of our pasts, so we can build something healthy. We need to start over in a different context. In a better place.

  All of a sudden I can’t get out of here fast enough.

  I shove past Jameson and back into the apartment, then keep shoving, all the way through the crowd, until I’m out the front door. Whose apartment is this, anyway? I feel like I knew the answer to that at one point during the evening, but the answer eludes me now. Doesn’t matter. Guinea pig apartments are all the same. Revolving roommates, minimal decor. Clean. We’re compulsively clean people, which makes sense. The labs put the fear of contamination in you. We’ve all seen what happens when things aren’t kept sterile: Fungal Jungle, maybe a visit from Mademoiselle MRSA or that most unwelcome houseguest, necrotizing fasciitis. Only us guinea pigs realize that the true zombie apocalypse is microscopic, that the zombies aren’t outside the gates. They’re inside the house, people! Or, more accurately, in your veins. The early signs of infection have been drilled into us so much that at one point Charlotte turned them into a nightmare of a nursery rhyme:

  Hickory, dickory dead.

  You’re wound is swollen and red.

  Your glands are sore,

  There’s pus galore,

  Hickory, dickory dead!

  We’re a hand-scrubbing, Lysol-spraying band of freaks, we are.

  Once I’m outside, I scroll through the texts on my phone, hoping to find answers. Hoping to find proof of … what, exactly? Even I don’t know.

  Him: Dinner with folks, then b right there.

  Me: c u soon!

  Me: Where r u?

  Me: Still coming?

  Me: I love u.

  Me: ?

  Him: On my way.

  The texts offer no proof of anything, except perhaps indifference. Two hours have come and gone, and something, perhaps me, smells vaguely singed. I pace outside of the door and shove away the feeling, but I feel it coming on, like an infection.

  Don’t do it, Audie, I tell myself. Don’t turn on him. I’m sure he has a good reason for not being here yet.

  But anger, that most invasive of infections, has already found a way in and now it’s slowly eating through my thoughts. If he didn’t want to come, he should’ve just said so.

  I’m talking to myself, stamping my feet, when the Professor walks up. He’s about the last person on earth I want to see at the moment, but I do have to admire his nerve, the way he keeps showing up where he’s not wanted. He must know people lie to him all the time, when they agree to talk to him. He has to know Charlotte’s full of shit when she tells her wild stories. But he keeps showing up, keeps filling his notebooks full of lies.

  You have to admire that sort of dedication.

  “Are you okay, Audie?”

  I don’t say anything. But since people usually aren’t shy about telling him to fuck off, get lost, he seems to take my silence as an invitation.

  “You look a bit troubled. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Maybe go somewhere and chat?”

  Fucking weirdo little gnome. Professor LikesToWatch. Guinea Pig Groupie.

  But I do want to get out of here. I’m sick of the party. Sick of checking my phone for texts that never come. Why not? If nothing else, it’s a chance to practice the fine art of telling a good lie.

  “Fine,” I say. “Lead the fucking way.”

  Chapter 20

  There’s a diner close by, the kind of place that smells like a few decades’ worth of grease and plumbing problems. Stepping inside, I feel a brief sputter of panic, since I have no recollection of walking (driving?) here. It’s one more small black hole in my memory, which doesn’t speak highly of either my sobriety or my short-term memory.

  But here we are.

  The hostess leads us over to a dingy booth, where she flicks a brown-edged piece of lettuce off the table with her fingernail and then slams a half-full carafe of coffee between us without even asking if we want it.

  I wipe two different colors of lipstick off the rim of my coffee cup before I fill it myself. “This place is a shithole.”

  The Professor scratches at a fist-sized patch of dried ketchup obscuring the words on his laminated menu and then gives up. “I’ll just stick with the coffee,” he says when the waitress comes by. “But decaf, please.”

  This is the type of restaurant where Charlotte would eat if she wanted to get into an E. coli study.

  This morning she told me she never washes her hands after using the toilet anymore, and she’s been eating eggs sunny-side up every day for weeks. “You wouldn’t believe what they’ll pay you to test new salmonella treatments,” she said. She’s never tried eating raw chicken before, but she will if she has to.

  She may be a bitch sometimes, but you have to admire her work ethic.

  “Here’s your decaf.” The waitress sloshes coffee all over the table when she fills the Professor’s cup, then walks away.

  “Miss, can you bring me a towel?” he calls after her, but she ignores him.

  He sighs and then asks me to hold his briefcase so it doesn’t get wet while he sops up the mess with a fistful of paper napkins.

  I take the case, then unzip it and start flipping through the contents. He raises an eyebrow while he watches me do this, but he doesn’t tell me to stop.

  “See anything interesting?”

  I shrug. “I’ll let you know.”

  I’m being a brat, but it’s only bec
ause I know exactly why I’m here. The Professor is famous for these little “interviews.” Almost everyone I know, except Jameson, who goes out of his way to avoid the him, has sat down and answered the Professor’s questions at least once.

  Most people like talking about themselves.

  Most people like to believe they’re interesting.

  It’s sad, really—some asshole spends fifteen minutes asking you nosy, leading questions and you feel like a rock star for a day.

  I start to feel pissed off at myself for even being here. “What exactly are you researching, anyway?”

  His face twists as he takes his first sip of coffee. I could’ve told him it was lousy, but then that would be one more thing he learned vicariously through someone else’s experiences. Better he figure it out on his own.

  “Interesting question,” he says, even though it’s not. See what I mean about how phony these conversations are?

  “I study human behavior,” he says after another minute. He had to think about it first, like no one’s ever been interested enough to ask. Which probably doesn’t bode well for his research. “Specifically, human behavior in extreme or unusual circumstances.”

  I snort. “Which category do my circumstances fall into? Extreme or unusual?” Before he can answer, though, I pull something out of his briefcase and hold it up. “Jesus. I’m guessing this is what you mean by extreme?”

  It’s a magazine: the Journal of Artistic Body Modification. On the front is a picture of a man who barely looks human. Which, apparently, is the point; the cover model has painstakingly transformed himself into a human cat, complete with a surgically clefted upper lip, sharpened teeth, and pointed ears. Tattooed whiskers traverse his acne-scarred cheeks.

  I open the magazine to the middle and pick a random sentence to read out loud: “The decision to declare scleral tattooing illegal in the state of Oklahoma is a clear example of government overstepping.” I stop and look up at the Professor, who smiles grimly and points to his eyes.