He told me the name of the experiment. It had the word “bear” in it. It had a longish number, with some letters, too, and I instantly forgot it. He told me the name I’d be logging in with: Terry Corbin. For the purposes of the experiment I was a fifty-three-year-old woman, with no medical issues, and a family history of depression. Not so far from the truth. He told me that my fictional background was necessarily scattershot, because he didn’t have time to flesh out a real and believable past for me. Because why bother, and bleh, and gross?
“The system requires medical subjects to have a past, as such, but that level of information has no technical bearing.”
I blinked at him. When the scientists spoke that way I tended to turn to ash.
“The past isn’t interesting. It doesn’t matter. Sentimental value only, if that. Legacy software demands it and we comply, but we phone it in and that’s been approved all the way at the top. We’re not going to make a fetish out of stuff that has already happened. I sort of actually hate the past.”
Like, he hated the past on principle, or certain specific things that had happened in the past? And did he hate his own past, which would be understandable—I imagine he was a small, unnoticed figure in his childhood, perhaps frequently set upon by larger children who tried to drink from his body—or was it the past of the entire world that troubled him?
“Thanks for the sexless name,” I said. “And the age. Nice. I can practically smell my coffin.”
We did this sometimes. We took on guinea personas for Nelson and his crowd before we romanced the FDA with our product. How did we put it when we congratulated ourselves about the work we did? We inhabited nascent identities to spread the data to a broader population. Maybe this was deceitful but it felt scarcely more problematic than using a real person. Scarcely. Crowdsourcing worked really well when you could handpick your crowd and rename them at will. You know, like drafting a football team or casting extras in a gladiator scene. It also saved some pennies on testing and it gave all of us in data collection a chance to sample how people would be feeling in the future, if any of this ever, ever, was approved and came to market. Yeah, if. And if and if and if. It was the unspoken word before a good deal of the sentences we punted at each other. And it was usually the last word, too. Along with many of the words in between.
The burning eased off in my nose and I’d shaken the crumbs free. I still felt nothing from the dose. No rush, no sudden clarity, no blast of sorrow. I was not high and I was not sleepy and I had not been put on some teetering edge that could only be soothed with sex or violence or kindness, which was good, because I wasn’t sure what the likely outlets were. This chemical friend looked like a quiet actor. Maybe an out-of-work one. The subtler drugs were always harder to bear, ha ha, because they triggered a bottomless disappointment. In me, anyway. Which I was arguably on the verge of feeling anyway, and who wanted a spotlight on the real? Ever. At times like this I realized how much I wanted out of myself, how blitzed and bored I was by my own thoughts and feelings, my own little story. Terry Corbin could have licked me into some new, intriguing shape, but she was turning out to be a fucking dud with limited powers of rescue. I kind of hated her already.
The other option was a placebo. It could always be that. Maybe it always was. In which case I’d just been sneezed on by a creepy man for nothing.
Just then there was an intercom announcement. Possibly in French. I looked at my coworkers, who all groaned at once. People reached for their coats. A crowd started to gather at the window.
I had questions, even though my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t really anywhere.
“What’s the time frame on this, or whatever? What’s the onset and then how long will this shit last?”
Dr. Nelson looked at his watch. “Yeah, uh. Onset is, you know… now.” He looked at me and blinked. Still nothing on my end, although I hated evaluating my feelings. It was like looking into an empty room, trying to see if the walls were breathing. Sometimes when I scrubbed in as a monkey for these experiments I was already shaking with the blast of the initial dose by now, quivering under my desk, running for the toilet. For some reason, experimental medicine often led to a thunderous shit. Today was different. This drug might as well have been called Status Quo. Who was going to pay for more of the same?
“As far as duration, this one might be pretty long term. We’re working on something sustained, and, uh.”
“Sustained?”
“Pretty much. That’s how we refer to it. It’s one of the words we’re comfortable with. But I’m not going to get too involved with language right now. The language for this experience will come last.” For some reason Dr. Nelson gestured out the window, as if that was where the language would be coming from. I looked in that direction, right into the sun, and for a moment forgot myself, who I was, where I was, what I was doing. Jesus it felt good.
“So this will last a full day? Two?”
Nelson just stared at me. I was playing cat and mouse with a dead man. Both of us were dead, maybe. Which explained the lack of repartee.
“Or what, like, a week? I should have probably asked you that. I have things to do at home. Stuff I have to take care of.”
There was, really, nothing of the sort. There was simply a man named Richard at home, my betrothed, and then the two children we had fashioned out of wedlock, using techniques we’d long since forgotten. These days I bent over a chair to receive his anxiety, but this happened merely monthly, and was marked by a great fatigue. The children walked the rooms of our home collecting food. Sometimes they left for long periods of time and returned home, silent and unchanged. They still called it school but Jesus Christ. When the kids slept I thought of examining them, but for what? From time to time I grabbed them and held them and sometimes they grabbed me and held me. I felt very little when I did this, so I did it more, and the children grew quieter and more remote, hanging from my arms like ornaments on a tree. You could almost hear a bell go off when we hugged, as if we were all good little subjects in the great experiment that was our family. You didn’t need special glasses to see where it was all going. You could watch a movie in which people like us were burned alive. We had just slightly more agency than stuffed animals. I’m sure there was more to it, but I didn’t know what it was.
Dr. Nelson touched my face. “Lucy, sweetheart.” He was one of those men who talked this way, applying human touch that felt both deeply inappropriate and entirely welcome. I allowed it, however cold his hand felt, however much I shivered. Maybe he could undress me. Maybe he could cut into me with a knife and it would seem like chivalry. I think I am only half kidding. There was a funny way that human law seemed kind of arbitrary when it came to the doctors on our wing. Human law, in the end, would have a short half-life—human law could seem so overwhelmingly polite sometimes. He was always kind enough, but in an overcompensated way, as if he’d just come from the killing floor somewhere up north, freshly showered, blood free for the first time in months. Whatever nice thing he did for you was out of guilt for something especially heinous he’d done literally seconds before. Sometimes in the break room we discussed the various doctors, and we had silent ways of singling out the creeps and corpses among them. The ones who were so recently dead that they twitched just enough to seem functional in the world, tripping and stumbling through rooms on their way to the burial pyre.
“It’s a moon shot,” Dr. Nelson said. “But we’re going really more sort of long term with this one. ‘Indefinitely’ is one of the words we might use. Maybe. We don’t know. I mean, we do know, but we also are not saying that we know.”