“No, we haven’t, we haven’t. I swear. There are so many more.”
“Okay,” he says. “But this one isn’t so great. Are you ready?”
I say that I am. I lean in close.
“Balls.”
I squeeze his hand. “There you go.”
“Balls is blowing at forty-eight mph.”
“They sure is,” I say. “Hurricane Balls rolled in this morning and people are afraid to leave their homes.”
James doesn’t laugh. I need to leave him alone. He needs his space.
“Beloved,” James whispers, and it’s the last thing I hear him say to me before he falls asleep. “Beloved is coming,” I say to no one, listening to his breathing slow down. “Close your windows. Go down into the basement and don’t come out until she’s gone.”
The Trees of Sawtooth Park
Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something. In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder. He proposed to puff this powder, with his medical straw, into my face. A precisely regulated expulsion of air, he called it. To exhale just so until I was caked in it.
“Just take it passively, if you would, Lucy,” Dr. Nelson said. “Relax your face. If possible, relax your head.”
“You take it passively.” I was so not in the mood. I pictured him shamed by animals, dogs with pants at their knees lining up to defile him.
“Too late for me, I’m sure,” Dr. Nelson said, touching his face as if he’d just discovered it. “I’ve had my hand in the cookie jar so much on this one that I can’t feel the effects anymore. I can’t feel anything, really. I need more subjects.”
So do we all, I thought, but tough luck and boo-hoo.
Dr. Nelson was speaking in a high, shitbird whisper, but no one in the office bothered to look. Because ho-hum. Because who really cared? If a so-called scientist hadn’t approached you directly at your cubicle for a turn on his chemical merry-go-round, you kept your head down. Otherwise we were just too used to these eureka freaks sprinting through our wing, spritzing us with boutique medicines. Dr. Nelson was just another white coat haunting the office, with scarcely a body beneath. I called him Half Nelson, because he lacked a badge, had no ID, and worked so far off-book that he hardly seemed to exist. Just a little boy in a sweater, with a huge, grotesque brain pulsing behind his dear, dear face.
“Are you ready, Lucy? Sweetheart?” He brought the straw to his lips, poised to administer a puffback.
I wasn’t ready, not really.
“There’s not a pill or just, maybe, a lotion?” I asked. I so preferred the cold lotion they’d been deploying recently in the drug trials. Cold lotion was better than human touch by a pretty far cry. A kind of finer boyfriend. With one of these newer lotions, applied just so, I could see myself living alone, feeling loved, feeling complete, in the mountains somewhere, very far from here.
“Nope, there is not,” he said, speaking around the straw. “And now I’m going to count to three.”
I closed my eyes and relaxed as the sandstorm hit, jagged crumbs pelting my face. Holy holy holy it hurt. Some of it went up my nose. It smelled of flowers, but the sweetness turned rancid and started to burn inside my face. It was like I was smelling myself get cooked.
“Jesus, was there glass in that? Did you just fucking spray glass on me?” I groped for my water.
“Hardly,” Dr. Nelson mumbled. He always seemed surprised to find that his subjects weren’t corpses. That they could speak or shout. He wiped his mouth. “That’s just the coarseness of the grit, so that it doesn’t spike too soon on you and blow out your levels. We ground it at forty-one on the, uh.” And here he whispered something in German. I think. His speech sounded laced with ancient obscenities. He made a gesture to indicate a large machine, pointing to a room down the hall I had no clearance for. I knew the door that led there. It had no handle. It had no code box. No retina thing, either. It was just a slightly cleaner slab of Sheetrock. But what wasn’t, when you thought about it.
Dr. Nelson had a big smile on his face. A shit-eating scientist smile. Whatever he blew into me didn’t seem to have much of an opening act. I wasn’t seizing, and I wasn’t writhing on the ground in some kind of unbearable euphoria. My levels, whatever that meant, were pretty much unblown. I felt the same as always. The same, the same, the same. Fuck it all.
I picked some crumbs out of my hair. They were moist, like bread chewed by a baby. “You’re such an asshole, Nelson. That was like the least professional medical trial I’ve ever been a part of. You don’t just. That’s not how. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“It’s not a trial, Lucy, and this isn’t really happening,” he said. “You were just sitting at your desk when you felt a breeze. Maybe there was dust in it. It could have been anything. It was anything.”
Good grief, the caution we endured. It was hard not to read it as extreme self-importance. Did anyone anywhere, in the entire world, have a hard-on for corporate espionage when it came to our doomed and mildly illegal experiments?
“Right, of course, right. I just mean that you have no idea what dosage you gave me.”
Nelson had his little phone out, which looked like a soft, baby bird, and was already lost in numbers. “I don’t want to argue,” he said without looking up, stroking the swollen body of his phone with a finger. “Mostly because you’re wrong and it would be boring and exhausting to explain why. But I know the dosage down to the milligram. The puffback is actually a precise delivery system, and that’s the go-to-market play, anyway.”
Dr. Nelson turned theatrically covert. He shaded his mouth with a hand as if he had a secret that people might lip-read from the surveillance cameras. “Ah-choo,” he whispered.
“Uh, bless you?” For, like, the fakest sneeze ever?
“No,” he said. “Jesus. I mean the sneeze. That’s the delivery system. This drug will be delivered via sneeze. Or maybe a yawn. Something that one person does to another. Because, well. Beyond that I can’t say. You can probably figure out the rest.”
Right. I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I absolutely couldn’t figure out the rest. The rest was an unwritten world I was not invited to. I was too far down the chain in this puzzle, another mule without the code. Whatever. It hardly mattered. I was talking to a ghost.
“So what will I be feeling?” I asked, and I must have sounded too eager. Mommy just wants new feelings. Please, please, make Mommy feel something.
“Probably we don’t want to give you any help with that. Don’t want to game the books or whatever they say.”
“They don’t say that. That’s not a saying. Cook the books, game the system, queer the pitch. Anyway, are you that insecure about your work that you can’t tell me anything about it?”
He just blinked.
“Medical pathway? Part of brain targeted? Side effects? Give me some crumbs so I can at least make a goddamn biscuit.”
I knew his rules. I knew his life. It was pointless to ask. The secrecy was so bone deep here at Thompson that a false narrative of this bit of medical terrorism, him standing at my desk blowing powder over my head, had already been scripted. The dailies, when they came in, would reflect a different scenario entirely, one in which I had not been medically sneezed on by a hulking gray skeleton. Dr. Nelson looked like he didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep, and didn’t really breathe. So much abstention. What, really, was there left to erase except the idea of the man?
“How about you just tell me what you feel whenever you have a minute. Use the logger on the…” He pointed at my terminal. “I added an identity for you.”