Placebo Junkies

by J. C. Carleson

  “Audie, she—” He stops talking, and just sort of deflates in front of me. Everything about him wilts, and his voice sounds airless when he finally continues. “We didn’t think it was a big deal at first, either. I mean, you know how it is around here.”

  I nod, not breathing. Not wanting to hear what comes next.

  “So by the time we called for help, she was too far gone. I didn’t—I mean, none of us realized how serious it was. We all thought, hey, this is Charlotte we’re dealing with here. She’ll snap out of it, she always does. …” Jameson rakes his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in greasy spikes. “Except this time she didn’t. Jesus, I can’t even wrap my head around it. She’s fucking gone, Audie.” He doesn’t look at me when he says this. He says it to the floor. To his feet.

  We become statues.

  I’m just standing there, the goddamn spatula still in my hand. Even my brain has frozen midthought. All I can think about, for a long, stupid minute, is my pancakes. Like, if Charlotte’s dead, who’s going to eat all these pancakes?

  But then I unfreeze, and what he said punches me in the stomach.

  Hard.

  “Fuck” is what I finally say.

  You always think you’ll be eloquent, or at least admirably stoic at times like this, but that’s not how it happens. Not to me, anyway. “Fuck,” I say again, slow and drawn out. It’s the only word I have that captures the moment. Sorry, Charlotte. No disrespect intended.

  “I don’t understand. What happened?”

  Jameson shakes his head. “Nobody knows. She was on a lot of stuff, Audie. Way too much stuff. But I don’t know exactly what did it—the docs wouldn’t tell me jack since I’m not family.” His face is blotchy, like he’s been crying.

  My throat closes. Something wet and vicious is strangling me from the inside. I grab the edge of the counter, because there’s nothing else to hold on to. “Are they going to stop the studies she was doing? Do an autopsy? Anything?”

  Jameson looks at me hard when I ask this, and I feel my face go red, since it must be pretty obvious that I’m not just asking out of curiosity. I admit that it’s pretty shitty to be worrying about myself at a time like this, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking that Charlotte and I have been in quite a few of the same studies recently.

  Asshole, I call myself, and force my thoughts back to Charlotte. “Does she have … do they know who to call? Her next of kin, or something? What will they do with her … ?” I leave the question unfinished. I can’t bring myself to say her body.

  Jameson shrugs, then scratches at the shadow growing across his cheeks, so hard his nails leave red lines. He’s still staring at the ground. “I don’t know. All this time I’ve known her, and I never once heard her talking about her family. I don’t even know where she’s from.”

  “Detroit. She grew up in Detroit. That’s all I know.” I don’t say it, but it’s pretty obvious that when someone never talks about her family, ever, they’re probably either dead or scumbags. That’s kind of the deal for people like us, isn’t it? We’re not the kind of people who have anyone to call.

  We’re the people with empty chairs at our funerals.

  Jameson and I just stand there, on opposite sides of the kitchen counter, and the silence between us turns awkward. Like we’re supposed to be saying more, but we both forgot our lines. “We should do something for her,” I finally say, mostly because one of us has to say something.

  “Yeah. We should do something.” Jameson answers like he’s in a trance. Finally, after a few more seconds of silent weirdness, he looks up at me, but it’s more like he’s looking through me. “I need to take a shower. Maybe grab a few hours of sleep.”

  I just nod. I wait until I hear his door close and then I dump the pancakes in the trash. I’m not crying, exactly, but my chest hurts and my eyes burn and the vicious wetness is starting to win. I can’t seem to move or even think very fast, either. I try to wash the pancake plate no one ate from, but I have this weird, clumsy sensation like my hands just don’t belong to me anymore, and it occurs to me that the dishes are, were, all Charlotte’s, so it seems especially important not to break anything. I set the plate down in the sink as gently as I can and slide down onto the floor. I sit there for a very long time not not crying.

  At first I’m thinking how much it sucks that the last time I saw her we were fighting. I’ve only known her for what, about a year? But I haven’t lived many places for a whole year at a time, so it’s almost like I’ve known her forever. And the thing is I liked Charlotte. I really did. It may not be saying much, but she was the closest friend I’ve had in a long time. Maybe ever.

  So then, sitting there in that not-crying way that actually feels way worse than crying, I start trying to figure out why, exactly, we were fighting anyway, and I realize that the fighting bits in my memory are sort of blurry. And it’s not just one of those “don’t speak ill of the dead” things, either. It’s more like all of a sudden I’m not so sure she actually said or did the things that made me upset. Maybe I just thought she was thinking those things. Like, did she really take a dig at Dylan when we were at the party last night, calling him my “boyfriend” with those little air-quote fingers, or did I edit those in myself?

  I do that sometimes. I project bad stuff where it doesn’t necessarily exist. I put words in people’s mouths, fill in gaps with my own worst thoughts. And I was definitely feeling insecure about Dylan last night.

  The more I think about it, the more I’m sure: Charlotte and I weren’t fighting at all. Okay, so I did call her a bitch at the party. But it was loud, and she didn’t even turn around—I’m totally positive about that part—so that means she probably didn’t even hear me say it. Which means that my last words to her, at least the last words she heard, weren’t nasty after all. And it’s not like I was ever actually mad at her. Not Charlotte. She was a good egg.

  She was my friend.

  I feel a little better when I realize this. My hands start to feel like they belong to me again, like they’ve been reconnected to the rest of my body, and I push myself up off the floor because now I’m motivated. Charlotte was my best friend, and now I need to do something for her.

  I feel good about this. And the better I feel, the more angry I feel; the more angry I feel, the better I feel. Does that sound weird? There’s such a thing as good angry. Good and angry. Good. And angry.

  Yes.

  Chapter 22

  Charlotte’s still dead when there’s a knock on the door. I’d been willing the news away, eyes closed, when the sound broke my concentration, and so she’s still dead.

  I ignore it at first, but then it crosses my mind that it could be Dylan. He must have done it again, picked up on my need for company from our pretend psychic network.

  “Works every time,” I say as I swing the door open.

  But no one’s there.

  On the ground is my cell phone and a brand-new hardcover copy of 1984 with a business card—the Professor’s—marking a page with a single line underlined in red:

  We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

  I understand immediately that it’s the Professor’s weird way of offering his condolences for Charlotte, and I appreciate it. Quite a lot, actually. Maybe the little garden gnome isn’t such a bad guy after all. I see now that he means well.

  There’s a single message on my phone, from a number I don’t recognize. I access my voice mail with shaking fingers. I don’t know how, but somehow I just know it’s going to be bad. It’s just the way things are going lately. Downhill, no brakes.

  I hear a male voice I don’t recognize at first. At first I think it’s a wrong number or maybe a butt dial, because there’s all kinds of noise in the background, and the voice is so muffled I have to listen twice to understand what the caller is saying. The second time around, though, I realize that the s
tranger’s voice is actually Dylan, and that there’s a very good reason he doesn’t sound like himself.

  He’s back in the hospital.

  From beneath my squeezed-tight eyelids, real tears finally start to escape.

  Chapter 23

  Of course Dylan had a good reason for not showing up.

  I never doubted him. Not for a second.

  I stop in the little store just off the lobby and spend money I should be saving on an arrangement of the ugliest helium balloons they have in the place, which says a lot, since have you seen the tacky shit they sell in hospital gift shops? The worst of the bunch has a picture of Eeyore with a thought bubble floating over his mopey, sad-fuck donkey face: “After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends.”

  It’s so morose and awful I know it’ll make Dylan smile.

  I remind myself to keep my own smile in check. I wouldn’t want him to think I’m glad he’s sick, or anything. I was just so relieved to hear from him, period, that it’s hard not to feel a little bit happy. Appropriately happy, I mean.

  “Just coming to visit my sick boyfriend,” I tell the old-lady candy striper I ride up with in the elevator.

  “I hope he gets better soon, dear,” she says back, and pats me on the shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see you. Visitors do our patients so much good.”

  This visit is going to help me just as much as it helps Dylan. I need something to take my mind off of Charlotte before the grief paralyzes me. I need good news.

  The news is good: he’s not in the cancer ward. This time it’s a secondary infection—the unfortunate result of a good treatment gone bad. It’s one of those the cure is worse than the disease kinds of things, and they’re pumping enough antibiotics into him to sterilize the Northern Hemisphere twice over. I recognize the name of the drug—I’m pretty sure I tested it once. It chewed my stomach to bits and made everything taste like copper for a month after I stopped taking it, if I remember correctly.

  I’m sure that’s why he only pokes at his odorless lunch while I sit on his hospital bed trying to entertain him. “Seriously, why doesn’t it smell like anything at all? I mean, it’s a grilled turkey and cheese sandwich. Shouldn’t it smell like meat? Or cheese? I’d even settle for a faint whiff of toast. But there’s nothing.”

  There are so many topics of conversation that must be avoided. Like Charlotte, obviously. Dylan doesn’t need to hear about that. They may not have been friends, but he would care because I care. It’s better to stick to positive subjects. My current strategy: avoid anything from the past. Only the future is safe.

  And food. Talking about food is safe.

  Dylan grins, and you can hardly tell he’s sick. Okay, so he’s paler than usual, and maybe he’s a little more subdued than normal, but nothing dramatic. His doctors are always overreacting—I can tell that he’s going to be fine. “You can’t have smelly food in a hospital,” he says. “It’s insensitive. I mean, can you imagine if your death, your final swoon, your great swan dive into the sky, was accompanied by a bacon smell track? Or, like, Tater Tots? Those things smell for freaking miles. It would take away from the dignity of the moment.”

  I shift as a nurse glides into the room to glance at Dylan’s monitor. “Wait. Did you just say smell track?”

  His eyes are twinkly. It could be the meds, but I don’t think so. “Hell, yeah. If there can be such a thing as a sound track, why not a smell track?”

  I steal a bite of his sandwich, since he’s obviously not going to eat it. It tastes exactly like it smells. Like nothing. “Personally, I want my death to be accompanied by the smell of marshmallows toasting over a campfire,” I say.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Interesting choice. A little more Girl Scout-y than I would’ve thought from someone like you.”

  I take another bite and think it over while I chew. “You’re right. Cancel that. I’d rather have something spicy. Something exotic. Something that smells like you’re in the middle of adventure. Paella, maybe? Nothing boring can possibly happen in a room that smells like paella.”

  Dylan goes rigid for a second, and his face loses about two more shades of color. He breathes through whatever it is for a few seconds before saying anything. “I’ve never had paella” is all he says. He closes his eyes and sinks back into his pillows, and I can tell his pain meds have kicked in. Lying like that, he looks slight, almost frail. He’s definitely neither, but seeing someone you love semiconscious in a hospital bed can mess with you a bit—it can make even someone as tall and broad-shouldered as Dylan seem small and vulnerable.

  It makes you want to do whatever it takes to protect that person, to crawl in bed and fight his battles right alongside him.

  I shake him softly. “Wait, don’t fall asleep yet! I want to tell you something.” It’s a spur-of-the-moment decision. All of a sudden I feel an overwhelming need to tell him about my plan, about how close I am to making our trip to Castillo Finisterre happen, before he gives in to the twilight. I happen to know that when you’re suffering the worst, just having something to look forward to can make all the difference.

  Plus, now that his secret is out—he doesn’t have to hide the fact that he’s sick from me anymore—I want to tell him my secret, too. I don’t want secrets between us anymore.

  But he’s too far gone. He mumbles something barely comprehensible about the party last night, probably an apology for not coming, and then he closes his eyes, smiles, and says “nice to meet you,” in the voice of a happily oblivious drunk. I’m about to tease him for sounding so loopy, but he’s out cold, the traces of the smile lingering just enough to make it look like wherever he is right now, it’s a decent place to be.

  I curl up next to him while he sleeps, kissing him and whispering travel plans in his ear. At first it feels nice, and I can almost tune out the hospital noises and pretend it’s just the two of us in a cozy little honeymoon suite. But after a few minutes his words come floating back, like they always do, and they start twisting around as they play on repeat in my head.

  never had paella never had paella never had paella.

  I’m trying so hard not to dwell on anything negative, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to seem like the saddest fucking thing in the whole world, and it doesn’t take long before I’m totally depressed.

  I sit there, in a funk once again, looking at this amazing guy who could die without ever eating paella, and think about how even if I were to go out and find someone to cook him some goddamn paella, it would be one of those depressing-as-hell make-a-wish type things where it wouldn’t even taste good, because you’d be sitting there picking at it, knowing this is, like, Death Takeout. And then the quicksand that is my brain sucks my thoughts over to death-row inmates and their last meals, and all of a sudden I’m wondering how many of them actually eat whatever their last meal is. I start picturing empty jail cells filled with uneaten food, murderers’ pork chops and kidnappers’ mashed potatoes, and then I’m just staring and staring at all the food left on Dylan’s lunch plate and thinking about all those pancakes I made for Charlotte, who I still can’t think of as being dead.

  So not even five minutes after he goes to sleep I’m sitting there next to my sick, sleeping boyfriend, ugly-crying with snot smearing my upper lip and all because of the goddamn smell of paella and a stack of uneaten pancakes.

  Hold your shit together, I tell myself. Quit spiraling. The solution is obvious.

  The solution, as it has always been, is Castillo Finisterre.

  I don’t even know if they eat paella in Patagonia, but I don’t fucking care. I’ll have it flown in from Spain if I have to. It’s all gotten wrapped together in my head and I don’t care what I have to do, I’m going to put everything on fast-forward and make this trip happen. Soon.

  Chapter 24

  We all raise a glass to Charlotte, cold and stiff.

  Besi
des Scratch, no one cries, and even with him it’s hard to tell whether he’s actually crying or if it’s just his usual allergy-induced dampness.

  This is not a weeping crowd.

  It is an angry, wall-punching crowd. There’s something in the water. Outrage in the air.

  “The people running this fucking place destroyed her. They’re a bunch of fucking criminals.” I don’t think the guy who says this even knew Charlotte. I’ve never seen him before in my life. A few other people in the room rumble their agreement that yeah, someone should pay, but it doesn’t go anywhere. We’re all guinea pigs here. We know that the hand that jabs us is the same hand that feeds us.

  So the anger remains hazy and unfocused. It’s a missile in search of a target.

  To diffuse the tension Jameson shows us a video he took on his phone ages ago: Charlotte goofing around on a ukulele. She played badly, sang worse, but damn could she liven up a room. In the video she’s tipsy, sitting crooked in her seat (has anyone, ever, played a ukulele sober?), and she’s making up goofy lyrics to the tune of kids’ songs. She did that all the time—some of her lyrics got pretty raunchy. She had an X-rated version of “Old MacDonald” that nearly made me piss myself every time I heard it, it was that funny. This one, the one in Jameson’s video, is relatively tame, set to the tune of “The Chicken or the Egg,” but she’s singing it in this weird, really intense voice, instead of her usual jokey sort of way.

  Oh, which came first, the crazy or the pill?

  Which came first, the crazy or the pill?

  How could something so cruel and spiny

  Come from something so smooth and tiny?

  Which came first, the crazy or the pill?

  She starts rocking back and forth a little while she sings, and she’s staring at—no, staring down whoever is recording. She looks seriously pissed, like she hates the person behind the camera, like she’s about to leap out of her chair and rip his head off. It’s all pretty weird, honestly, since I assume that Jameson is the one who shot the video, but as far as I know they were pretty tight. I never knew Charlotte to act so hatefully toward him.