Fourpetal has estimated that Lacebark came to London around January. And Raf didn’t hear about glow for the first time until last week. But when he searches on Lotophage for the earliest mention of glow, it’s in a post from 28 October 2009. ‘Anyone heard anything about this new stuff “glow”? Haven’t been able to track any down yet but apparently it’s a very potent entactogenic:)’. (An emoticon like that is the closest anyone on Lotophage ever gets to a moan of anticipation.) In another post in a different thread, the same user happens to mention that he lives in London. The timing is exactly right.
Still, it can only be glow if glow does have a botanical precursor. As Rose dozes at his feet like a small black hole on loan from a particle accelerator, Raf reads through every single forum post about glow in chronological order to see what he can find out. Most of them are no help. Everyone wants to try glow, but almost no one can get hold of any, and no one knows for sure where it comes from. However, even though scholars at the University of Lotophage don’t usually have much tolerance for speculation, there’s something about glow that seems to give rise to a lot of competing tattle. One user says that all extant glow comes from a single batch of experimental medication that was stolen from a hospital in South Wales where the Ministry of Defence were using it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq War veterans. Another says that glow is rare but not new and he tried it for the first time in Ibiza in 1995. And another says that all this hype about glow is just more evidence of how the placebo effect is getting stronger every year in the feeble-minded populations of the developed world.
But there is one Lotophage user who seems to know a lot more than anyone else.
His username is ‘Fitch’, and rather than showing off his expertise, he steps in only when he wants to correct a misconception that he finds particularly irritating. In one thread, for instance, people are speculating that part of the difference in the respective effects of glow and ecstasy might result from a faster enzymatic conversion of dopamine to noradrenaline.
‘you think glow might feel like that “because” the dopamine/noradrenaline balance different???’ writes Fitch. ‘what the fuck you think you mean by “because”?! all you bitches need to read L’Amour Médecin by Molière. one doctor says “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why opium makes one sleep.” the other doctor says “The reason is that in opium resides a dormitive virtue of which it is the nature to stupefy the senses.” nothing changes in three hundred years except the terminology. “Most learned bachelor, whom I esteem and honor, I would like to ask you the cause and reason why MDMA makes one dance.” “The reason is that through the brain gushes a catecholic neurotransmitter of which it is the nature to inflame the senses.” no explanatory power, no predictive power, no falsifiability. . no real theory. there are >100 neurotransmitters in the brain. we don’t know shit about what most of them do. dopamine used to get all the research funding. now oxytocin. soon octopamine/enkephalin/substance P/something else. when we still so ignorant, none of this has any meaning!! anyone who uses an individual neurotransmitter to support an explanation of human emotion or behaviour is talking out of his ass. we all be old or dead before anyone get a handle on how subjective experience supervenes on brain activity. . and, by the way, it’s obvious that anything with an N-methylyhio-tetrazole functional group gonna have an indirect inhibitory effect on dopamine β-hydroxylase, so your whole bullshit chain of causation backwards.’ There follows a GIF of a sailor in a tricorne hat looking the wrong way down a telescope.
It’s the final sentences of these posts that are especially intriguing to Raf — Fitch insists that these debates are pointless and yet he can’t resist winning them anyway. Compile the whole lot, and it becomes clear that Fitch is an expert on glow. He also makes occasional contributions to threads about some of the more esoteric new chemicals from China, concluding one dense post about the possible neurotoxicity of halogenated amphetamines with ‘so, yeah, all you guys playing russian roulette with your brain tissue.’ But he never mentions taking any drugs himself. As Raf sees it, there are two obverse reasons you might talk a lot about drugs without ever indulging in them: either you’re very distant from the drug world, or you’re deep inside it. Fitch might just be some pharmacology graduate student at a rural college in the US who enjoys making Lotophage users look stupid. Or he might be directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of glow.
So Raf makes a list of the exact times of every one of Fitch’s posts, hoping to triangulate him not in space but in time. This is going to be fuzzy at best, since most Lotophage users keep odd schedules. But Raf can’t find any statistical tendency whatsoever. Fitch has posted at least once at every different time of day. Could he have non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome? Could he work in a corner shop?
Rose, meanwhile, is up and yawning. Raf leans down to knuckle her under the chin. ‘All right, girl, what do we know?’ he says to her. ‘Lacebark’s “high-value target” is a Burmese chemist making something shady in his kitchen. That might be glow. Fitch might have something to do with making glow. So Fitch might be a Burmese chemist. Fitch might be Lacebark’s “high-value target”. Bark if you think that makes any sense at all.’ In that case, would Fitch’s written English be quite so good? Would he be quoting French playwrights? Cherish is fluent, but that’s because she moved to America when she was ten.
The only way to get any further is to contact Fitch directly.
But if Fitch is on the run from Lacebark, and he gets a message groping behind his alias, then of course he’s going to suspect Lacebark of sending it. They could have found him through Lotophage just like Raf did. And there’s nothing Raf can put in the message that will prove otherwise. Any collateral he offers for his identity could just be another meticulous Lacebark creation like the plastic fruit outside the ‘greengrocer’. Also, that goes in both directions. Even if Fitch says, ‘Yes, you’re right, I am a Burmese drug chemist, a thousand congratulations for finding me,’ it might still be a ruse. In fact, for all Raf knows, Fitch is a Lacebark operative himself, sitting in an office somewhere with carpal tunnel braces on his wrists, writing well-researched posts to win the trust of some other ‘high-value target’. Raf could ask Fitch to tell him something that only a Burmese drug chemist would know. But for any given datum that only a Burmese drug chemist would know, there will, by definition, be no means for Raf to confirm it.
For a moment he feels frustrated that most of the internet is only mutters in the dark, but then he thinks of Cherish and all her pretence. What difference do screens and keyboards make? You can be skin to scalding skin with a naked human being, you can feel them squirm in what you assume at the time is total abandon, without any inkling of who they really are. And every powder Raf has ever taken at a rave has been white and bitter like rat poison. You learn nothing from the surfaces of things. An anonymous email address, a pill capsule, a padlocked warehouse door, a joyful look in a girl’s eyes — you just have to push blindly through to the space behind them and hope there’s no void there to trap you.
‘Lacebark killed my friend. I don’t know what they’re going to do next, but I want to stop them. Can you help me?’ That’s the message Raf sends to Fitch through the Lotophage private message system. He finishes his whisky. Rose has fallen asleep again in that disconcerting way she sometimes does with her eyes half open and her pupils rolled back like someone having a 3-methylfentanyl overdose. He’s still in his funeral suit and he decides to take a long shower. When he returns in his dressing gown, he finds that Fitch has already replied.