Bobby was a could-have-been-handsome white boy, twenty-three years old, with stiff black hair and almond eyes, so maybe a little Asian in the mix. A former ward-mate, and batshit crazy. But a good kid. More importantly, he lived in Toronto, and he owned a car.
I let him hug me. The price to pay for the ride.
“You look all healthy,” he said. Hanging from a leather thong around his neck was a small plastic treasure chest, one of those aquarium accessories with Real Working Hinge. He never went anywhere without it.
“Where are we going?” he asked me.
“Take me to my dealer.”
He blinked in surprise. “Uh, are you sure?”
“Relax. I just want to talk to him.”
“You just got out of the ward. Don’t you want to go home?”
“I don’t have a home. That apartment is long gone.”
“Oh, then maybe a hotel?”
“I’m getting cold out here, Bobby.”
He opened the passenger door for me, then hustled around to the other side.
Dr. Gloria said, “I can’t protect you if you don’t listen to me.”
“Then stay here.”
“Oh, you don’t get away that easy.” Dr. Gloria’s wings unfurled from her back with a snap, and the world vanished in a blaze of heavenly radiance. I winced and looked away.
“Lo, I am with you always,” she said. I opened one eye. She pulsed like a migraine aura, throwing off megawatts of holy glow. Then her wings convulsed, and she was airborne.
CHAPTER TWO
We rode into Toronto on the 401 with Dr. Gloria flying point: a star to guide us. Bobby couldn’t see her, of course. The doctor was my permanent hallucination, a standing wave thrown up by my temporal lobe and supported by various other members of my mental parliament. My supernatural companion was a fake, but unlike Francine, I knew it.
We left the highway and dropped south toward the lake. I rolled down the window, and cold wind filled the car.
“What are you doing?” Bobby asked.
I tossed out the bag containing my prescription bottles. “Ballast,” I said.
“What?”
“Eyes on the road, kid.” He slowed as we entered the university campus. It was a Wednesday, the start of the college weekend, so Brandy, my old dealer, would be working the frats. We cruised past Victorian houses lit up and vibrating with heavy bass. College boys in shorts stood outside, ankle deep in the snow. Girls in microdresses teetered on high heels across the icy sidewalks. Bobby drove slow, one hand on the treasure chest and the other on the wheel, while I kept an eye out for Brandy’s vehicle, a beat-up VW delivery van. Twice we jerked to a stop as drunken kids lurched into the street.
“Jesus Christ, pull over,” I said.
“Why are you mad?”
“You’re distracted. You keep playing with yourself.”
He let go of the treasure chest. “No I’m not.”
His first week on the NAT ward, Bobby shyly explained to me that he used to live up here—he poked a finger at the spot between his eyes—but now he lived in there—the plastic chest. Most of us have the illusion that our consciousness sits behind our eyes like a little woman at the controls—very handy for steering a body, or a car. Bobby, however, thought he lived inside an aquarium toy. Who the hell knew what that did to your reflexes?
I climbed out of the car. A few feet away, Dr. Gloria descended in a nimbus of righteousness. She folded her wings, adjusted her glasses. “Of course,” she said. “If you want to find a drug dealer, go to a college.”
“Higher education,” I said. We were in front of a row of rundown frat houses that I assumed looked more glamorous through the alcohol-blurred eyes of the young. I walked up to a group of boys, all holding red plastic cups. “I’m looking for a guy named Brandy,” I said.
They ignored me. I smacked the nearest one in the shoulder, and he jerked away from me, sending a fan of piss-colored beer across the snow. The other boys fell out laughing.
I pointed to the next closest kid. “Where’s Brandy?”
“Are you her mom?”
“It’s a guy,” I said. “Brandy. Deals specialty stuff.”
“Narc!” one of them said. Another of them took it up, quacking like a duck. “Narc! Narc!”
“Yes, very good. You’ve penetrated my disguise. Now where the fuck is he?”
The guy I’d whacked said, “Sigma Tau maybe?”
“Yeah! The GFD party.”
Most of them pointed in the same direction.
“Thanks, boys.”
I waved Bobby over to me, and the three of us walked the street, reading the giant Greek letters on the fronts of the buildings. Every house was rocking, the parties spilling outside. Scent trails of marijuana etched the cold air.
A boy burst out the front door of the Sigma Tau house, threw up his hands, and screamed a war cry. He was skinny and naked but for a pair of flip-flops, grinning madly, with an erection like a wall sconce. He jumped down the steps, and half a dozen naked boys charged after him, hooting, beer sloshing from red cups. They ran straight at us, hard-ons first, like a herd of rhinos.
“Oh geez,” Bobby said. The stampede broke around us. The lead boy ran for the corner, white ass shining, with the frat brothers in pursuit.
“GFD,” Dr. Gloria said, getting it now. “Gay for a Day.”
“Maybe we could come back later,” Bobby said nervously.
I marched up the steps. The party was going full tilt. The crowd was all boys, many of them naked, others in boxers and tighty-whities and terrycloth kilts. I started asking for Brandy, and followed a chain of nods and maybes through the house. Doors hung open, every room part of the party. In some of them the brothers had thrown down mattresses and set up display tables stacked with condoms and lube. The kegs were decorated with rainbow bumper stickers. A male blow-up doll dressed in vinyl bondage gear lay sprawled across a foosball table. Nobody did gay kitsch like straight boys. And they were enjoying themselves. A pile of white bodies writhed in a kids’ wading pool, slathered and shining in Crisco. I stepped over two kids going at it on the stairs, the one on the bottom trying to hold onto his Natural Lite can.
“Watch where you put your feet,” Dr. G said.
In the basement, a dozen boys in various states of undress played beer pong, shouting over music that was half a beat behind the bass thumping from upstairs. I spotted our guy sitting on the couch. He was the only male in the house over twenty-five, and the only one wearing all his clothes. Chubby, grinning like a Baptist preacher, with tufts of gray hair sprouting from the neck of his sport shirt.
He’d made the couch into his office. A shaggy-headed kid in Valentine-heart bicycle shorts held out a HashCash card, and Brandy tapped it with his smart pen—presto, crypto, anonymous monies transferred. He gestured for the boy to hold out his hand, then dropped four blue-and-green pills, one at a time, into his palm.
“How you doing, Brandy?” I said.
He looked up, then smiled wide. “Lyda Rose! My home-again rose!”
I was afraid he was going to start singing. My mother liked musicals, and had named me after a number in The Music Man. This was not the worst gift she ever gave me—that would be her tote bag of genetic predispositions I inherited—but it was one of the most annoying.
“I thought you left town!” Brandy said.
“I’m back now.”
“Wrong night for you!” I could never place his accent. Something Eastern European. “No action from these boys.”
“I bet,” I said. “May I?”
“I can’t see how they will do you much good.” He laughed, then handed me one of the capsules.
I rolled it between two fingers. Blue with a band of green, a smudged “50mg” on the side. The drug had several street names—Flip, Velveeta, Vertical—but its brand name was Aroveta. Made by Landon-Rousse to treat hypothermia, it massively increased the production of vasopressin, a busy little peptide with a hand in vascular constriction (which is where the hypothermia application came in), but also kidney function, circadian rhythms, and sexual attraction. Aroveta had a few side effects, including water retention and wakefulness at night. Oh, and if you owned a dick, other dicks suddenly looked a lot more attractive. Not something that most fishermen pulled out of the chilly ocean were likely to appreciate.