HARJ
“Ah. Such a bittersweet story, Diana.”
“Thanks, Harj.”
Everyone was mellow. The fire was down to embers, and a general tone of drowsiness prevented us from stoking it. Serge was frantically scribbling; Zack asked what he was writing.
Serge said, “You people are saying the most amazing things without even realizing it.”
Zack made a strange face and Sam asked him what was behind it. He said, “When I was growing up, whenever a teacher wanted to get me out of their classes, they’d always tell my parents how ‘amazing’ or ‘gifted’ I was, and that I ought to be in a different, better, more challenging school. So whenever I hear myself described in such a way, my antenna goes up. Serge, what is it about these stories of ours that’s so amazing?”
Serge looked a little bit as though he’d been caught with his pants down. After a few ums and ahs, he said, “In some ways, you’re telling the same story in different manners. And in some ways, you’re all telling a larger story without knowing it.”
Sam asked, “What story is that?”
“You’ll find out if you keep going.”
I said, “I think it is now my turn to tell a story—perhaps the last story of the evening. But before I do so, someone must place another log on the fire. I am still not used to the sensation of cold. As you all seem equally lethargic, I advise you to use rock paper scissors to select the stoker.”
Diana lost. She went to fetch a log and the others rearranged their blankets. Once everybody was again comfortable, I said, “I am also a good private investigator. You see, this afternoon, I was online and digging about, and this investigation led to my next story.”
The Liar
by Harj Vetharanayan
There was once a young scientist, and he must have been very smart indeed, because he worked for a large pharmaceutical company in a gracious and magical kingdom called Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, a place where style and intelligence lived side by side with great amounts of flair. When this young scientist first arrived, he was young and full of wonder, and he was assigned to work on a drug belonging to a new family of drugs—and new families of drugs don’t just pop up when you want them, so this was a big deal for the young scientist. What did these new drugs do, you ask? These drugs were designed to alter a person’s sense of time. The thinking was that there would be no immediate effect after swallowing a pill, but over a long period of time one would have the sensation that time was moving more quickly. If you were lonely or in prison or working in a call centre or working an assembly-line job, the drug would be a blessing—a boon to both commerce and a grossly overloaded penal system.
However, as though blessed by a wizard’s spell, the drug turned out to have unexpected properties. It gave its users a sense of calm individualism almost identical to that achieved while reading a novel. This news was exciting, indeed—science had created an antidote to the daily barrage of electronic information so common to the era! And as an extra magic bonus, the drug tended to keep people locked in the present tense. It removed from its users the burden of overthinking the future, which is, of course, a well-known cause of anxiety. Most magically of all, the drug’s users stopped feeling lonely. So many of life’s problems fixed with one pill! The young scientist felt like a pig in clover—and not only this, the scientist and his company were poised to become profoundly rich.
However . . .
. . . The drug was incredibly difficult to make in large quantities. But over the years, the scientist and his friends began making relatively significant leaps in the amount of drug they could produce in a day. And the more of it they made, the faster honeybees near the facility began to vanish.
As the drug finally became cost-effective to make in bulk and began to spread and enter the world at large, bee populations continued their quick decline. And it wasn’t just bees that were affected—other insects, too, after extended exposure, disappeared. Of course, the scientist and his co-workers eventually figured out that it was their highly profitable drug that was causing the bee trouble—but because it had required a decade of work and massive capitalization to put it into full production, they kept this secret from the world. They must have felt truly guilty for what they had done to the planet, yet they also wanted to get their costs back, and, being human, they weren’t happy merely to get their costs back—they instead chose to earn staggering profits. Bees were surely a small price to pay for a drug such as this one.
By the time the drug was in full production, bees were almost extinct; by the time the drug reached the global market, bees were gone, and the scientist and his co-workers had become crazy-rich. Insanely rich. More-money-than-the-gods rich.
One of the drug’s side effects was that its users became quickly addicted. They felt like they needed no other people in their lives—they left their spouses and families and the places where they lived. They stopped dating and voting and seeking religion. Even if they wanted to quit the drug, they couldn’t: quitting was impossible, physically and emotionally. The drug scarred users’ brains, rendering them permanently in need of more—a terrific thing for the drug’s makers, as it guaranteed perpetual sales. The scientist and all of his co-workers were as addicted to the drug as any of their customers. So while things were terrific, they were not so terrific at the same time. The gods are pranksters, indeed.
Then the young scientist—now not quite so young—heard of a young farmer in the middle of nowhere who had been stung by a bee in a highly visible manner that seemed entirely calculated to ensure that the world knew bees were still around. And then a young woman on the other side of the planet was stung in a similar highly visible manner. And then three more people were stung, one of whom later had a shock reaction to the scientist’s magical drug simply from opening a box containing it. It was the first time a person had experienced a shock reaction to the drug. It spurred the scientist and his colleagues to do all they could possibly do to figure out what was happening with these five bee people—they could be real trouble. Their systems likely contained something that resisted the new drug—antibodies so powerful that those few rogue bees that remained alive were drawn to sting these people in order to give humans hope and encouragement.
The scientist wondered if he could use these people to create an antidote to the drug, something that might lead to a cure for the addiction. That way drug-makers could have it both ways: money from getting people hooked; money from getting people unhooked. A bonanza. A gravy train.
So the scientist, who now essentially ran the company, used an almost unlimited amount of money and many of his firm’s connections to gather and isolate each person who’d been stung, telling them that he was looking for a way to bring back the bees.
The scientist placed his subjects in controlled environments for several weeks, where he and his team were able to extract body fluids at will. These fluids were checked for all sorts of minor proteins created by the subject’s mood and state of mind.
He then craftily persuaded the five bee-stung people to join him on a remote island, giving them the illusion of sanctuary. On that same island, he also began conducting an undercover study on the effects of his drug on a tightly knit tribe of non-users who had lived on that island for thousands of years.
The stung people trusted the scientist completely, and were they to find out what he’d been up to, they’d be shocked. The gods were certainly shocked! And the gods certainly had no idea what would happen to our scientist when the five test subjects learned the truth about their captivity.
Fortunately, one of the stung people was a lighthearted character who most people assumed was harmless and clueless. In fact, he was a good observer—good at locating patterns and assembling odd facts to reveal a larger picture. This subject was happy to be with a new family, but like the gods, he was unsure of what would happen next.
ZACK
We all turned to stare at Serge, who said, “It’s not what you think.”
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br /> “What isn’t what we think?” I replied.
“What you just heard. Harj’s story.”
“As far as we know, it’s just a story. Why are you being defensive?”
“I am not being defensive, but I need you to know I’d never do something like that to the five of you.”
“Okay, then. Maybe now is a good time to finally tell us what really has been going on these past few months.”
“It’s . . .” Serge fell silent. The rain was falling hard, droning on the roof while we sat wordless. And then Serge bolted for the door—that honey-tongued fucker tried to flee. This from a guy who could charm his way out of a buried coffin. What a tard. If he’d stayed put, he probably could have sweet-talked his way around us—but he didn’t.
It was a good thing Harj had had the foresight to stand between Serge and the door, because when Serge bolted, Harj rolled a kitchen chair into his path, causing him to fly ass over teakettle and bash his head on the top corner of the mud room’s bright orange Honda space heater. He was knocked out for a minute.
“Right,” said Diana. “Get the duct tape.”
We duct-taped Serge to a kitchen chair. I thought the girls were gentle souls, but the two of them were lashing the tape onto his wrists and ankles with such energy that I was spooked.
“Uh, gals, maybe you could ease up a bit on the tightness?”
Sam looked up at me. “You’re siding with this lying French fuck?”
Harj said, “We are not fully sure that he is a lying French fuck, at least not yet.”
We turned on Harj: “It was your story.”
“You’re right. It was. And . . . I must stand by it.”
Diana, ripping a three-foot strip of tape off a roll, asked, “How did you figure all of this out?”
“Google. More or less.”
“Seriously?”
“I connected a few dots. Perhaps I misconnected them.”
“If you’re wrong, then why did he try to scram? Personally, I think we should drag him down into the basement and let him rot for a while. Ugh. I can’t believe that everything we’ve been through has been about Solon.” Diana was disgusted.
Sam said, “Yeah. Let’s cram his nose into the crack between the floor and the dryer by the dead mouse.”
Instead, we placed Serge in the middle of the room. We then sat in sofas and chairs, staring at him; for the first time in my life, I felt like I was in a scene from a violent indie film. We’d nabbed the evil villain. Would we slice off an ear? Bring out a car battery and some cables and generate a bit of nipple fatigue?
Waking up, Serge realized he’d miscalculated badly. “So I’m now your prisoner?”
“You are.”
“That was brilliant,” said Sam, “making a dash for the front door.”
“I think you’d better release me. You all think you know the truth, but you don’t.”
“You mean the truth that lies on the other side of the front door? Were you running to fetch it for us?” I asked.
“You don’t trust me now. I understand that.”
Diana slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth. “Whatever he tells us is going to be smooth, and it’s going to be untrue. We know that. So I think we need to have a quick talk before we listen to one word more of this guy’s crap.”
But Harj had a question for Serge and removed the tape. “Serge, can you please tell me how you found me a few days ago in Kentucky? I have no chips in me. How did you do that?”
“Actually, you do have a chip in you. All of you do.”
It was like we had spiders crawling inside our skins. I have to say, few things in life are creepier than knowing there’s something buried inside your body. Tapeworms have nothing on chips.
“My phone’s got a chip detector in it,” Diana said. “I never thought to use it.” She scanned Harj; there was a chip on the back of his leg, behind his knee. “Okay, then, that won’t be too hard to remove.”
Harj asked why they should remove it.
“Because until you remove it, you won’t be free.”
“Ah,” said Harj. “Freedom: the elusive goal of the Craig.”
Diana snapped, “Do you want it gone or not?”
“Okay. Yes. I do.”
Diana said, “Good. I’m going to scan everybody.”
It turned out we all had chips embedded behind our knees. Diana said, “Okay, the next hour isn’t going to be much fun, but I know Serge has a bottle of Oxy in his kit, and there’s a kickass bowie knife in the kitchen.” She set up her chip-removal surgery in the lower bathroom tub. The Oxy made us feel like birthday balloons adrift in a summer sky, but it didn’t fully kill the pain of the bowie knife slipping in and digging around in search of treasure. One interesting thing I noticed was that pain isn’t actually so bad as long as everybody around you is experiencing it too. In any event, Diana’s work was quick and clean. She dug out her own chip last, and I was impressed by the cleanliness of what could have been bloody geysers. After our surgeries were completed, we entered the living room, stitched and limping.
Julien asked, “So what do we do with Serge—torture him?”
I said, “You know, I don’t think we’re torturing types.”
Sam removed the duct tape. “Okay, Serge, talk. We’re listening.”
“Perhaps I could tell you some stories myself.”
“You? Telling stories? Why?”
“You have every right to be concerned.”
“Concerned? We want to fry your ass.”
“Then let me tell stories—the way the five of you have been telling stories.”
“Why should we?”
“Because the night is still young. Because, in the end, you’ll do whatever it is you’re going to do. Because if you add my stories to yours, you’ll understand the full story.”
“The full story?”
SERGE
“The full story. So please sit back and listen to me.”
Sam said, “Okay. Start telling.”
So I began.
The Gambler
by Serge Duclos
There was once a young French scientist who found himself one cold night in the darkened bedroom of an apartment in Locarno, Switzerland, a room that looked out over frozen Lake Maggiore, a beautiful, tiny, dull place where Italy kisses Switzerland. The apartment was not the scientist’s; it was a corporate VIP guest suite that technically belonged to a pharmaceutical kingpin whose wife had died a decade before. He never used it. Why was our scientist in this bed room? Because, as happens with so many people, he had crashed and burned. This was on his mind as he looked out the window and saw rooftops, alpish mountains, some cold, glinting lights to the south in Italy and the silhouettes of Washingtonia palm fronds, static in the windless night.
No, the scientist was not in the bedroom with the pharmaceutical executive; the executive was, that evening, in Qatar, selling half a silo of generic Wellbutrin to a convention of Arab building contractors to give their homesick workers from the Asian subcontinent. The Qatari contractors didn’t know it, but the antidepressants were time-expired and would have been landfilled had not, half jokingly, the young French scientist suggested, during a laboratory meet-and-greet, that homesick Asian subcontinent guest workers were a potential market for those drugs. His reward for this brilliant idea was a set of keys to the beautiful but quiet Swiss apartment, plus a week to do as he wanted. As for the executive, on his fifth day in Qatar, he contracted reverse flesh-eating disease and returned to Switzerland in a charcoal grey Tyvek bag.
Now, our young French scientist didn’t live in Locarno. He lived and studied in Montpelier, France, a university city, the capital of the province of Languedoc-Roussillon, which bordered the Mediterranean Sea. His specialty was human proteins, specifically neuroproteins that work as markers inside the brain to signal both the beginnings and endings of specific thoughts—that act as signposts, street lights, highway signs, bridges for the way all people and animals think. Peo
ple were only beginning to understand the role of these proteins in all aspects of thought and existence.
The scientist had a lot on his mind, only part of which was guilt at being complicit in the moral and economic clusterfuck that was the Qatari antidepressant deal. Other parts of him were worried about different things. For example, he was worried that his girlfriend was cheating on him. She worked in the lab two down from his and spent her lunch hours eating steak tartare (for the animal protein) and reading pro-Palestinian political tracts while using an isometric thigh-slimming device that gave her a near-goddess status in bed. Suzanne was moody, and young enough to not even realize she might one day not have the liberty of picking and choosing her bedmates. So, because of his near-crippling jealousy, our young scientist found it hard to concentrate on his specific laboratory task, which was this: he aimed laser pulses through a micromisted protein broth. This allowed him to isolate and separate specific proteins within. It was a job that needed much skill and decades of education but was about as fun as stocking cardboard boxes at a Body Shop. The scientist wondered if his entire youth had been wasted in attaining what was essentially an ultra-high-tech McJob. And, to go back to what was stated earlier, he was worried that his girlfriend was cheating on him simply because she could, and because her take-him-or-leave-him attitude kept his own brain’s neuroproteins on constant nuclear alert.
“Wait,” Zack said. “You’re talking about yourself here, right?”
“This is a story,” I said.
“Can you at least stop using the phrase ‘young scientist’? It’s driving me nuts.”
“What name do you suggest?”
“Trevor.”
“Trevor? Why Trevor?”
“I don’t know. It’s a good name. Very science-y. If a Trevor invents something smart, you think to yourself, ‘Man, that Trevor is right in character, being a smart dude, discovering stuff.’ ”
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