In my last year, both Aaron and David Artemis Kuhn left. Aaron graduated early with a job offer for a cutting-edge R&D group so deep, even its name was under nondisclosure. Kuhn left to take a tenure-track position at Nankai University on Luna, heading up their nascent nanoinformatics program. I acquired other friends and professors in my time at Tel Aviv, but I found the absence of those two particularly unmooring, and my use of drugs ramped slowly up. I came to include sedatives in my study rituals, telling myself that they helped me rest and recharge. That I enjoyed the sense of release and mindlessness they brought, I chose to interpret as the measure of the stress I was under.
My graduation ceremony took place in a synagogue with white pillars and arches, beautiful sculpture in gold along the walls, and Hebrew script inlaid around the ceiling. The notes of “Auld Lang Syne” reverberated in the space, the melody taking on a depth and gravity I had never ascribed to it. My body, struggling from the massive nootropic abuse surrounding final examinations compounded by several whisky-and-sodas, punished me with nausea and dizziness. I spent my glorious hour, the pinnacle of my new life, trying not to vomit. I didn’t know whether to imagine my mother’s spirit viewing me from the afterlife with pride or despair. Afterward, diploma in hand, robes draped from my shoulders, I walked to a public park, sat on a stone bench, and wept, calling my mother’s name with an oceanic grief I had avoided for years.
It would be difficult to say which sign of trouble deserved the title “first.” When I visited my placement advisor after graduation, I spent an hour explaining to her what my degree entailed and applied to. It left her only slightly better prepared to help me find work. Letters began to arrive—actual physical letters on thin, yellow paper—from the benefits administration office asking whether I would be returning to the basic rolls. My applications to Stravos Group, Beyaz/Siyah, and Unfinished History all brought acknowledgments of receipt, and then nothing.
I laughed it all off for three months. I told myself and my friends that the cutting edge always confused the people who weren’t part of it. My advisor’s job wasn’t to understand me, just to make connections. If she couldn’t, other paths existed. I played it as more an inconvenience than a problem, and the prospect of going back on basic as laughable. I had a degree from a recognized university. I had letters of recommendation. The cheap housing, gray-tasting food, recycled clothing, and minimalist medical care of basic marked where I came from, not where I was going. The applications took longer than I’d expected, but I could be patient. I still had six months of supported postgraduate housing, until I had three, and then seven weeks, and then twelve days.
When I could no longer ignore that I would be out of housing allowance before I found employment, my friends had for the most part scattered to new positions of their own. The sense of isolation pressed at the back of my head all through the days and nights. I began growing angry at the slightest provocation.
In practice, the course of study meant to give me the most options had instead left me as the fourth-rank pick for everything behind people who had specialized. And even that was not the worst of my problems. I assumed that after my last exams, my use of nootropics and sedatives would end more or less of its own accord. The need, after all, evaporated. If now and then I used a tab to help me navigate the surprising complexities of my postgraduation world, others did as much with no stigma or ill effect. Without the drugs, my merely normal cognition felt sluggish and unfocused. And the sedatives were only to make my sleep deeper, more restful, more productive.
The penny dropped for me at a café on Yigal Alon Street where I sat under a copper awning with my hand terminal cradled in my palms. Over a cup of tea and a bit of scone, I reviewed my expenses with an eye toward how I could extend my job search without going on basic. The first-pass numbers felt like a kick in the gut. When I redid the math, I found the same thing. In the months since completing my program, my drug use had gone up.
I don’t know how long I sat there, the waiter coming by now and again to touch my shoulder and ask if I was well. I remember very clearly that there were two young women at the table beside me planning a wedding while I came to grips with the truths I had denied. I’d exchanged Londrina and life on basic for a degree I couldn’t use and a rainbow of addictions. I was, if anything, worse off now than when I had spent my days watching my mother fade into death.
I can’t say why at that point I didn’t fall into despair. Despair was certainly open to me. In practice, I did not. Instead, I made what I called my rescue plan: a list of fifty work positions that, while they fit poorly with my education and ambitions, would suffice to keep me off basic; a consolidated account with what little actual money remained to me; a month’s supply of fruit and whole grain foods; a hotel room where I could sleep and pace and weep while I withdrew. I put in my fifty applications all at once, checked in to my exclusive and unlicensed treatment center overlooking an alleyway, and prepared myself for hell.
I did not sleep for the first week. My body ached like I’d been beaten. My eyes dried until my vision grew blurry. I watched my emotions cycle up and down and up again, the wavelength of my illness growing shorter and shorter until I could no longer tell where in the cycle I was. The cravings were like hunger or thirst or overwhelming lust, and I only postponed acting on them by promising myself that if I still wanted so badly when I was done, I would indulge myself to death. I anticipated my eventual overdose like a zealot looking forward to Armageddon.
I have no clear memory of the second week. When I came to myself again in the middle of the third week—ten days still remaining on my rented room—I felt weak and hungry and clear headed in a way I had not realized until then how much I missed. My mind was my own. I could not help but think of my mother and the way her disease blinded her to its own symptoms. I understood her better then. My own addiction functioned in a similar way. In the exhaustion of my recovery, I dreamed of finding doors that had been plastered over that opened to rooms I’d had once and forgotten about, filled with books and scientific instruments that I needed and had been unable to locate. The metaphor wasn’t subtle. I swore that I would never compromise my mind that way again, though like all such resolutions, I have since broken it profoundly.
With seven days remaining, I bathed, shaved, and took myself out for a meal of eggs and coffee I could barely afford. My time in the underworld nearly over—so I thought—I had to prepare for my return to the world of the living. If there was nothing waiting for me, that meant turning myself over to benefits administration. I cannot express how terrible that option seemed to me, but I was willing to face it, should it prove necessary. I thought I had moved beyond illusions about myself and what I was capable of enduring. That might even have been true. Remembering what I felt then and feeling it again now are very different things, and one is easier than the other.
I had five messages waiting. Four were from the applications I had sent out, two asking for more information about my qualifications, two scheduling interviews. The last, to my surprise, was Aaron returning to my life. His research-and-development gig had come across something that justified bumping up the budget. There were new positions opening up, including a full nanoinformatics team. Later, I would wonder if I saw the changes in him even then. A recording on a terminal can’t carry the same weight of nuance as an actual conversation and sociopathy often approaches undetectability, even under the best of circumstances. I hope that I genuinely missed it. If I saw it and chose to edit it out of my perceptions, if the leaping hope in my breast was more important to me than the new-won integrity of my mind, it speaks poorly of me. I would rather be damned as naïve than willfully ignorant.