Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  I swabbed the vein, and the touch of the alcohol made my whole arm go cold. When I held the assembly up to the light, the silvery drug seemed to roll in the syringe like a glob of mercury. I squeezed out the bubble of gas and watched the first drop roll down the shaft of the needle.

  My arm was starting to go numb. I had to make up my mind. Setting my teeth, I put the needle into my arm.

  I eased the plunger back a fraction with my thumb and watched purple ribbons of blood swirl into the silvery liquid. The sight of it nearly made me sick, but I pushed the plunger in all the way, just the same.

  The city stretched out in front of me like a deserted movie set. Low white buildings, some with short towers and domes, spread across a broad plain and ran halfway up a nearby hill. Everything had an unfinished look, as if it had been built from sketches or rough cardboard models.

  I turned slowly around. Behind me a path led into a sparse forest and disappeared. To either side a broad, deserted highway ran unbroken to the horizon. I was standing at the head of a walled footbridge that crossed about 20 feet above the highway.

  I sniffed the air and tasted freshness, a clean smell like sun-dried clothes. I felt slightly high, but my head was clear, and I knew I was having some kind of dream experience. It just didn’t seem important at the time.

  Nothing else moved. The highway was unused, the sidewalks were empty, even the pale blue-white sky was completely clear. On second look, it was obvious that no one had ever lived in the city, not in its present condition, anyway. What had seemed to be doors and windows were only recesses in the solid walls and didn’t open into anything.

  I reached out and touched the wall that edged the overpass. It gave a little under my hand, like Styrofoam. I took a couple of tentative steps out onto the walkway, and it seemed to hold my weight well enough. On the other side, a narrow lane wandered down into the center of the city.

  As I walked slowly down the street, I noticed how comfortable everything was. The feeling was like déjà vu, but without any of the frightening overtones. I felt pretty sure I had dreamed something similar before, possibly even lived in a city like it when I was growing up. Whatever the reason, I seemed to know my way around already and knew what I was going to see around every corner. I stumbled once, falling against the side of a building. The light cotton clothes I wore weren’t even torn, but I did feel the impact in my shoulder. The vividness of it surprised me and I stopped and pinched myself, the way you’re supposed to do in dreams. It hurt, but nothing changed in the city around me. If the pain is real, I thought, maybe injury is real, too. Maybe that’s what Matheson meant by “too much.”

  It seemed to me that I walked for at least three or four hours. Even though there wasn’t anything to see, only the monotony of white buildings and narrow streets, I couldn’t seem to get bored with it. I didn’t get physically tired either, or hungry, or thirsty. My body seemed to run like a finely tuned machine.

  Then, suddenly, it ended. A wave of dizziness hit me and I leaned against a wall to steady myself. While I watched, my hand turned transparent and I looked down to see my legs fading away. A moment later I was in my bed, exhausted and disoriented, but awake.

  I lay there for a minute or two, eventually realizing that I was staring at my bedside clock. It took another little while for me to make sense of the hands and see that I’d only been across for an hour of objective time.

  I got up for a glass of water, and after a couple of minutes I could tell that I wasn’t about to go back to sleep. I took 30 milligrams of Dalmane, and after about half an hour I managed to drift off.

  “Fantastic,” I said to Matheson the next day. We were eating in the cafeteria, but I didn’t have much appetite. The Dalmane, with its long half-life, was keeping me relaxed, but I could still feel the excitement of the night before. “I mean, nothing really happened, but the sensations...just incredible.”

  Matheson’s smile twitched. “Sure,” he said. He was playing nervously with his silverware and his eyes were shot with red. “That’s because this city of yours is like, well, a model of your subconscious. If you could take the inside of your head and build it in 3D, that’s what it would look like. That’s why you’re so comfortable there.”

  “Where do you go? The same place?”

  “No. For me it’s something more...primitive. Somebody else could be on a beach or in a little town in Ohio. Somehow the stuff is tapping into your memories or dream centers or something like that.”

  ‘Where did you get it?”

  “You remember a guy named Davis, intern, just transferred down to St. Mary’s? He turned me on to it.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  Matheson smiled that nervous smile again. It was starting to make me uncomfortable. “I guess he wouldn’t mind my telling you. Davis introduced me to him down at the Pub one night. Calls himself Smith. Weird little guy, short and pudgy, lots of fat around his neck, kind of gray-brown skin. I don’t know where the hell he comes from.”

  “Does he cook it up himself?”

  “Who knows? He’s the ultimate source of all of it I’ve ever seen. Ask him about it yourself if you want to. He’s there two or three times a week.” Matheson’s eyes were darting back and forth again, and the same piece of food had been pinned on his fork for two minutes.

  “What about...” I struggled for the right word, “side effects?”

  “Blake, you worry too much.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “Okay, there’s a little risk. There’s a little risk in everything.”

  “What’s the risk in this? Specifically.”

  Matheson shrugged, said, “Dependency,” and looked at his food long enough to eat the bite on his fork. “But it’s not the kind of big deal you want to make it out to be. If you want to stop, you can stop.”

  Right, I thought. How many junkies do I know that tell me they’re not hooked?

  “I had some trouble getting to sleep last night,” I said. “You know, afterwards.”

  Matheson nodded. “Yeah, that happens. Just use some Valium or something. You’ll be all right.”

  I couldn’t place what it was about Matheson that was bothering me. But then I hadn’t had enough sleep, and there was an edginess under the fatigue that might have been the Dalmane wearing off. It could have just been me.

  The damp heat from the radiators gave the hospital an ancient, sour smell. One of the fluorescent tubes over the nurses’ station was flickering, so fast that the irritating effect was almost subliminal. When I got up to make my rounds that afternoon, the corridors seemed like narrow, dirty tunnels. Even the faces of the nurses were sliding into a dreary anonymity. I made it through the afternoon somehow and got Matheson to cover for me in case I was needed that night.

  Once I was back in the apartment the fatigue seemed to burn away. More sleep, I decided. If I took the drug earlier, I’d have more time to recover before going back to the hospital.

  I ate a little, almost by reflex, and took a shower. Then I went to bed and put another dose of Adonine in my vein.

  The city was coming to life.

  It hadn’t made it all the way yet, but the buildings had grown-real doors and windows, and I could sense movement behind them. The sky was a deeper blue, and for the first time I realized that there was no sun in it, just an unbroken dome of color.

  There was a coolness in the air that I could taste but couldn’t really feel, like springtime or early morning. Just outside the edge of my vision I could see blurs of motion, and I could hear the rippling of conversations without words.

  I walked downhill, toward the center of town. None of the shadow people got within fifty feet of me, and the ones in the distance had the fuzziness of pictures taken with an unsteady hand. I could see they were wearing the same sort of loose clothes that I had on, but that was the only detail I could make out.

  In the center of the valley the road split, one fork winding into the hills to my left and the othe
r continuing on. A small, barren park had grown up in the center of the Y since the night before, complete with benches and leafless trees. The ground had the color of infield dirt on a baseball diamond, but was hard-packed and dry.

  I sat down and closed my eyes, wondering what would happen if I fell asleep. A dream within a dream?

  Sleep didn’t come. So I experimented with controlling the dream itself. I tried to bring one of the people closer to me, just by concentrating, but it didn’t work. Nothing happened when I tried to will changes in the buildings or the trees, either. The shape of the city was either coming right out of the drug, or from some unconscious level of my own mind.

  My scientific curiosity didn’t last long. Like anything else associated with the waking world, it seemed irrelevant in the city. I got up and started walking again, aware just below conscious thought that I was looking for something. I followed the branch of the road that led through the valley, looking at the buildings. I didn’t pay much attention to the blur of people on the streets, even though there seemed to be more of them every minute.

  Individual houses out of the jumbled architecture looked familiar. The land on either side of the street rose as I got farther from the center of the city, and it was on one of these low hills that I saw a house I was sure I knew. It was two stories high, white as all the others, but with a square ledge between floors that ran all the way around the building. The slope leading up to it appeared rocky from a distance, but close up turned out to be made of the same hard, uniform substance as the ground in the park.

  I sat down and waited without being sure why. After what seemed like half an hour a single figure detached itself from the crowd and climbed the long stairway up to the house.

  It was a woman, and she was more nearly in focus than anyone I’d seen thus far. I’d never laid eyes on her before but she was as familiar as my own reflection. Her hair and eyes were a dusty tan, the color of the slope behind her. Her body was wide in the shoulders and hips, but her waist was narrow and her breasts were small.

  She turned at the top of the steps and looked at me just long enough to let me know she’d seen me. Then she turned and went into the building.

  I waited for her outside. Without drifting clouds or a moving sun I had no idea of how much time passed. When she came out again I followed.

  She had the same elusive, flowing walk as the others in the city, and it was hard for me to keep up with her. More and more people were appearing on the sidewalk in ones and twos, and they were no longer staying out of my way. I had to weave around them, nearly breaking into a run to keep the woman in sight. Still she kept putting distance between us and finally disappeared when two people stepped out of a doorway as she passed.

  She was gone without a trace, without an alley or a storefront to have ducked into. I circled the block twice, and when I was sure she was gone, I wandered back toward the park.

  The sight of her had aroused something in me, something sexual, but also a deeper sort of longing that I couldn’t really pin down. I sat on the bench, and before long things seemed to heel over sideways and I came back across.

  Again the experience had only lasted an hour, even though the subjective time had been even longer than the night before. My body was limp with fatigue, and when I got up to take some Valium, the room did a slow roll.

  I swallowed two 5-mg tablets and went back to bed, but an hour later I was still awake. Things seemed fuzzy and distant, and I felt cranky as an exhausted child. I took 500 mg of Placidyl and left the problem of waking up for the next morning.

  Snow had been falling all night and the roads were buried in slush. Putting the chains on my tires turned into a contest of wills that I almost lost. I kept the heater of the little Volkswagen turned up all the way while I drove to the hospital, and I still couldn’t get warm.

  All through morning report I kept glancing over at Matheson. He was in bad shape, bleary-eyed and jittery, as if he’d been shooting amphetamine for a week. The chief of staff was presenting a case of tricyclic antidepressant overdose, and I was bored right through my exhaustion. My eyes kept wandering to Matheson, then to the yellowing walls, the scarred gray tile, and the peeling veneer of the conference table.

  It was late afternoon before I found Matheson alone, and even then he was so distracted that I had to struggle to keep his attention. His behavior was irritating, but the residual Valium kept it from bothering me too badly. I finally got him to agree to slip away to the Pub for a few minutes. We got our coats, and both of us had them on and buttoned before the elevator stopped at the ground floor. I caught him looking at me.

  “Hypothermia?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I’m always running a fever when I come out of it. The next day I might get as low as 95.”

  The bar was on the other side of the street from the hospital and we crossed in the middle of the block. Dark gray mounds of snow were clotted on the edges of the sidewalks.

  “How long have you been taking it?” I asked him.

  “Week and a half.”

  “Every night?”

  He looked at me strangely, then glanced away. He nodded.

  The Pub was already crowded. Everybody from premeds at the university to senior residents hung out there, and the tables were packed tighter than boats full of refugees. I stood with Matheson at the bar and tried to shut out the throbbing voices and burning cigarette smoke. I was feeling nauseated, but ordered a beer anyway. Matheson didn’t want anything.

  I stared into the foaming yellow fluid for a minute, then blurted out, “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I suppose I’m a little edgy, I guess. Yeah, edgy, why?”

  “You look lousy, man. I think that drug is tearing you up.”

  “Hey, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. There’s some rebound excitability, that’s all.”

  He looked down at the bar, at his hands pounding out some strange rhythm, as if they didn’t even belong to him. “Besides,” he said. “It’s worth it.”

  Suddenly he turned and stared at something across the room. “That’s him,” he said quietly. “Smith.”

  I followed Matheson’s eyes and saw him in one of the booths. There was no mistaking him. He was too dark for a Mediterranean, but he had a green-gray cast to his skin that I’d never seen in an African. His head was bullet-shaped, totally hairless, and his neck looked like an uneven stack of pancakes. His small, pudgy eyes seemed to roll back and forth between the people he was talking to, and there was something about him that I didn’t like at all.

  I turned back to Matheson. The noise and the damp smell of crowded humanity was getting to me. “I don’t like this,” I told him. “I’m getting out.”

  Matheson shrugged. “Do what you want.”

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I’d stayed at the hospital past midnight, determined to exhaust myself so I could sleep without using Adonine. One good night’s sleep, I was sure, would take care of the physical problems I’d been having and would prove that I could do without the drug.

  I choked down half a sandwich and went to bed, but it was no good. I took 50 mg of Seconal, and another 50 half an hour later. My spine was humming like a power line, and I had to pull extra blankets down from the closet in order to get warm. The small noises of the apartment—creaking floors, whistling in the water pipes—made me jump uncontrollably.

  I’d been constipated for two days, but that night my bowels turned to water.

  I was a walking textbook of withdrawal symptoms. After only two days on the drug. “Rebound excitability,” Matheson had said. My ass.

  The Seconal was making my stomach flutter, and the sheets felt like they were made out of sandpaper. I started telling myself all the things that people tell themselves in that kind of situation. Like how I was going to get myself some real help, that I was going to talk to Matheson and get off the stuff for good. First thing in the morning.

  That was when I got the hypo kit out and loaded up another dose.

&nb
sp; Cars had come to the city. They were red and blue and bright green, and from where I stood on the footbridge they looked like the toy cars I’d had as a kid.

  For the longest time I just stood there, watching the cars slowly slipping under me, unable to see anyone inside them. For the first time that day my body temperature felt normal, my bowels didn’t hurt, and my hands were lying still.

  It was an acute physical pleasure just to be alive. On this side of the drug, anyway. I wondered how sick and screwed up I would have to get on the other side before it started leaking through.

  Eventually I walked downtown to the park. The trees had grown uniform light-green leaves, and a carpet of yellowish grass had spread over the ground. I sat on the same bench, searching each passing group of people for the woman but not finding her.

  Everyone had faces this time, regular features that didn’t belong to anyone I knew in the waking world. I felt I knew something about each of them just from the way they looked, a sense of how they would react if I spoke to them. Occasionally their eyes would flicker in my direction, then pass on.

  Two men sat on a bench across from me and started playing some sort of card game. Instead of a standard four-suit deck, they were using cards with stylized paintings on the faces-chickens, rabbits, bears. I couldn’t make any sense of the game, even to the point of knowing who would play next.

  For the first time I felt a loss of control, a sense that something was going on that I didn’t understand. It suddenly became clear to me that the city was reality for the people who lived in it. They were self-conscious entities, not just Disney robots there to put on a show for me.

  The thought made me distinctly uncomfortable.

  I got up and walked past the card players. One of them glanced up at me quickly, then went back to the game. He turned up a card with a dog on its face, and the animal seemed to have a sinister significance.