BROMBERG: You’re kidding me. You’ve got some cash? You really got some cash?
ROURKE [laughing]: Relax, Lisa. What I’ve got is something better than cash. What I’ve got you can’t get out of your all-night teller machine …
BROMBERG: No money, do you believe this?
JACOBI [quietly]: Let the man talk.
ROURKE [quietly]: You can open the envelopes now.
Eva raises her head slightly until she can see out the grille again. Everyone at the table is busy ripping open the flaps of the small envelopes. Jacobi gives himself a paper cut on the thumb and says, “Oh, shit,” and plugs the thumb into his mouth and starts sucking.
Bromberg is the first to spill the contents on the table. Eva can’t see much, just something tiny and reddish, smaller than a dime.
“Oh, you stupid mother,” Bromberg says, her voice so low and halting, Eva thinks she might fall off her chair.
Rourke seems to be dancing slightly in his seat. There’s another uneasy silence, as if no one knows what to say. Eva gets nervous and ducks again to listen.
ROURKE: Yeah, yeah, so I scammed a little off the top. Who’ll notice? They’ve all got enough to worry about. Think of it like we’re these quality-control guys, okay? We’ve got to randomly sample some of the merchandise before we can vouch for it.
BROMBERG: No one’s asked us to vouch for it.
ROURKE: Relax. Think of it like the way you read Playgirl before you deliver it. Or how I’ve seen you take home those detergent samplers when the people are on vacation, right? Relax.
WILSON: Weird stuff. Kind of like a noodle, you know. Like the noodles in soup or something.
JACOBI: Little harder than a noodle. But just a little. A little more rubbery.
BROMBERG: Is everyone’s in the same shape?
JACOBI: The letter Q?
ROURKE: Like alphabet soup. Like one letter plucked out of a bowl of alphabet soup.
WILSON: Why the letter Q?
ROURKE: Who freakin’ knows? These chemist guys are weird mothers. Who knows what reasons they got?
Eva lifts her eye to the grille and watches them all studying the substance in their palms until Rourke says, “Since this is our first time, I think it might be a good idea here to go easy, if you know what I mean. Why don’t we just break them in half if we can?”
“Just half?” Jacobi asks.
“Better make it a quarter,” Rourke says, hunching over the table and going to work on his Q. The others follow his example. Someone says, “Not that easy to break.”
When they’re all done, Rourke says, “Cheers,” and brings his hand up to his mouth. Then they take turns swallowing while the rest watch, no one swallowing at the same time, as if a capacity audience were needed for the ritual to be legitimate.
BROMBERG: How long does it take to kick in?
ROURKE: Guess we’ll find out. We’re explorers.
WILSON [upset]: What about the beer? What if it doesn’t mix with the beer? Maybe we shouldn’t have drank the beer.
ROURKE: Knock it off. Don’t you think they would have taken that into consideration?
WILSON: Who? Who’re you talking about?
ROURKE [exasperated]: The chemists. The freakin’ doctors who invented the shit in the first place. You think they’re morons? You think they’ve got no feel for their market? For the social settings this thing will be introduced into? They think crap like this out. They take stuff like this into consideration. You people have got to learn to relax or you’re not going to make it—
WILSON [interrupting]: Not going to make it? Do you mean like in general, in life in general, we’re not going to make it, or do you mean right now, when the thing takes effect, like if we’re tense or nervous or upset it will have some awful side effect—
ROURKE [yelling]: Just cut it out right now. Knock it off right now. Let’s just take it easy here and give this thing a chance.
There’s a second of silence and then,
BROMBERG: Yeah, okay, I feel something happening already.
WILSON: I think I feel something too.
JACOBI: Is it getting hot in here?
ROURKE [cutting him off]: Now, everyone calm down. We’re not—
BROMBERG: Oh yeah, I’ve got a rush starting here. I’ve got—
WILSON: Jesus, Billy, I feel—
ROURKE: I know what you mean. I know what you’re saying.
JACOBI: I’m getting a little, ah, Billy, you feeling kind of—
ROURKE: I know what you’re saying—
Bromberg gets up out of her chair suddenly and knocks it over. Eva watches her face as she cranes her neck out a bit and starts to look quickly around the table, an odd smile spreading over her lips. There’s a small flutter of her right eyelid, but either she’s not aware of it or it isn’t bothering her. She runs a hand around the back of her neck, comes around the front, and runs her index and middle fingers down the line of her Adam’s apple and into the shallow cavity below, then further inside the front of her blouse. She says, “I am fucking buzzing,” in a quick, clipped voice that raises slightly in pitch with each word. Her free hand starts to slap against the side of her leg.
Rourke leans over to Wilson, gives out a quick, high laugh, sticks his tongue into her ear. Wilson starts a rolling giggle and Rourke tries to whisper, “I’m hard as a freakin’ rock,” but it comes out fast at full volume and suddenly the whole room is convulsing with laughter.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Jacobi chokes out. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Wilson slides out of her seat and into Rourke’s lap and they start kissing, a weird, birdlike peck around the proximity of each other’s mouth, their tongues suddenly taking on lizardlike movement, darting in and out of the holes of their mouths like enraged snakes. They begin to lick each other’s face as Jacobi, still in his seat, begins to spit out filthy limericks that get unintelligible after the second one. Jacobi’s head starts to jerk in unexpected directions, as if someone had harnessed it and was tugging in random directions with too much force. The motion doesn’t seem to bother him, though. He smiles a big idiot’s grin as the head leaps side to side, up and down in jagged Tourette-like seizures.
Rourke starts to unbutton Wilson’s blouse, his fingers flying, either unaware or uncaring of the others’ presence.
Bromberg’s the only one who seems to be growing unpleased with her condition. She’s squatting against a wall, on the verge of hyperventilating, talking to herself. Eva tries to make sense of the sounds, but between Jacobi’s singsong babbling and the sucking noises issuing from the tangle of Rourke and Wilson, she has no success.
All she can do is watch as Bromberg’s mouth starts to move open and closed, faster and faster, until the lips, tongue, teeth, gums, and black and pink interior are a blur, a messy haze of spastic tissue. An arena of muscles stimulated past known kinetics and into a world of helpless speed. It’s as if a point will come where the mouth will be forced to explode, where the tongue’s absolute, maximum capacity for movement will not be enough.