“Don’t you think reading can be useful sometimes?”
“Sure, that’s what they all say. You get some of these guys and they take lexic tinctures and they can read like a thousand words a minute! But still, they don’t ever do anything! They just read about doing things. It’s a disease.”
Maya stood up reluctantly. All the standing and all the fittings had made her legs ache and her feet swell. Striking and holding poses was more physically grueling than she had ever imagined. “Well, it’s too late to return any of this stuff tonight. You know any safe place we can store this junk overnight? Where do you live?”
“I don’t think my place will do.”
“You living up a tree again or something?”
Brett frowned, wounded. “No! I just don’t think my place will do, that’s all.”
“Well, I can’t carry all this weird stuff into that pricey hotel that I’m in, I’ll never even get it past the doordog.” Maya tossed her ringlets. She loved the new dark wig. It was infinitely better than hair. “Where can we squat with a closetful of prop junk at two in the morning?”
“Well, I know a really perfect place,” said Brett, “but I probably shouldn’t take you there.”
Brett’s friends were up at three in the morning, because they were hard and heavy tincture people. There were six of them and they lived in a damp cellar in the Trastevere that looked as if it had harbored thirty consecutive generations of drug addicts.
Drug addicts in the 2090s had entire new labyrinths of gleaming pathways to the artificial paradise. The polity would not allow any conventional marketing of illicit drugs, but with a properly kitted-out tincture set, and the right series of biochemical recipes, you could make almost any drug you pleased, in quantity sufficient to kill you and a whole tea party full of friends. The polity recognized that drug manufacture and possession were unpoliceable. So they contented themselves with denying medical services to people who were wrecking their health.
The situation, like all dodgy situations in the polity, had been worked out in enormous detail. Crude compounds that could stop your heart or scar your liver clearly damaged life expectancy, so their use drew stiff medical penalties. Drugs that warped cognitive processes in tiny microgram quantities did very little metabolic damage, so they were mostly tolerated. The polity was a medical-industrial complex, a drug-soaked society. The polity saw no appeal whatever in any primitive mythos of a natural drug-free existence. The neurochemical battle with senility had placed large and powerful segments of the voting populace into permanently altered states.
Maya—or rather Mia—had met junkies before. She was always impressed by how polite junkies were. Junkies had the innate unworldly gentility that came with total indifference to conventional needs and ambitions. She’d never met a junkie who wasn’t politely eager to introduce others to the plangent transcendalities of the junkie lifestyle. Junkies would share anything: mosquitos, pills, beds, forks, combs, toothbrushes, food, and of course their drugs. Junkies were all knitted into a loose global macrame, the intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics.
Since they were allowed hearty supplies of any drug they could cook up, modern junkies were rarely violent. They rarely allowed themselves to be truly miserable. Still, they were all more or less suicidal.
Many junkies could talk with surprising poetic eloquence about the joys of internal chemistry. The most fluent and intellectualized junkies were generally the people who were most visibly falling apart. Junkies were just about the only people in the modern world who looked really sick. Junkies had boils and caries and stiff lifeless hair; junky squats had fleas and lice and sometimes that endangered species, the human pubic louse. Junkies had feet that peeled with hot itchy fungus, and noses that ran. Junkies coughed and scratched and had gummy bloodshot eyes. There were millions of people in the world who were elderly and in advanced decline, but only junkies had backslid to a twentieth-century standard of personal hygiene.
The junkies—a man and two women—made them welcome. There were two other men in the cellar as well, but they were peacefully unconscious in hammocks. The junkies were very tolerant of Brett’s heap of stuff and, with a touching investment of effort, they somehow found a threadbare blanket to cover the goods. Then the male junkie went back to his disturbed routine. He was reading aloud from an Italiano translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had reached page 212. The two women, who were higher than kites, gave occasional bursts of rich, appreciative laughter and meditatively picked at their toenails.
Maya and Brett hoisted themselves into a double hammock. There were bloodstains in it here and there, and it smelled bad, but it had been a nicely woven hammock once and it was a lot cleaner than the floor. “Brett, how did you come to know these people?”
“Maya, can I ask you something? Just as a personal favor? My name’s really not Brett. My name’s Natalie.”
“Sorry.”
“There are two kinds of life, you know,” said Natalie, spreading herself in the swaying hammock with great expertise. “There’s the kind where you just grind on being very bourgeois. And there’s the kind of life where you really try to become aware.”
“That isn’t news to me, I’m from San Francisco. So, what kind of crowbar are you using on the doors of perception, exactly?”
“Well, I’m kind of fond of lacrimogen.”
“Oh, no. Couldn’t you stick with something harmless like heroin?”
“Heroin shows up in your blood and your hair and they mark it down against you. But hey, everybody’s brain has some lacrimogen. Lacrimogen’s a natural neurochemical. It’s a very vivid drug because it’s surveillance-proof. Sure, if you use too much lacrimogen, it’s a big problem, you get clinically depressed. But if you use just the right amount, lacrimogen really makes you a lot more aware.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Look, I’m a kid, all right?” Brett announced. “I mean, we both are, but I can admit that to myself, I really know just how bad that really is. You know why young people have it so hard today? It’s not just that we’re a tiny minority. Our real problem is that kids are so stoked on hormones that we live in a fantasy world. But that’s not good enough for me; I can’t live on empty hopes. I need a clear assessment of my situation.”
“Brett, I mean Natalie, it takes a lot of maturity to live with genuine disillusionment.”
“Well, I’ll settle for artificial disillusionment. I know it’s doing me a lot of good.”
“I hardly see how that can be true.”
“Then I’ll show you why it’s true. I’ll make you a bet,” Natalie declared. “We’ll both do one hundred mikes of lacrimogen, okay? If that doesn’t make you recognize at least one terrible lie about your life, I promise I’ll give up lacrimogen forever.”
“Really? I can hardly believe you’d keep that promise.”
“Lacrimogen’s not addictive, you know. You don’t get the sweats or withdrawals or any of that nonsense. So of course I’d give it up, if I didn’t know it was helping me.”
“Listen, there’s a monster suicide rate with lacrimogen. Old people take lacrimogen to work up the nerve to kill themselves.”
“No, they don’t, they take it so that they can put their lives into retrospective order. You can’t blame the drug for that. If you need to work up the nerve to kill yourself, then it’s pretty likely that you ought to go ahead and do it. People need to kill themselves nowadays, it’s a social necessity. If lacrimogen lets you see that truth, and gets you past the scared feeling and the confusion, then more power to lacrimogen.”