“I am hydrogen,” she says as she stares to the empty patch of space to the left of my ear.
My immediate response is to turn to the others for an explanation. They want to see my reaction — as is evident from the eager looks in each eye. I turn back to her. “That's a pretty song.”
“No,” she says with sudden severity. “I am hydrogen.”
“What's that like?”
She replies with a tepid smile, what I assume will serve as the preamble to a series of Pythian verses. Before any utterance gets made, however, she runs off to a makeshift dance-floor directly in front of the doors leading to the bathrooms. As she goes, she manages to spread mayhem and a general sense of alarm throughout the bar; she's ranting in an amalgam of languages, some of which she may have no knowledge, which leads some to stare with curious expressions as they catch words like “ojos” and “danke” and “schlep” and “mboo” and “how zi” and “flambeaux,” but have no reply when they hear salutations in no less than thirty different languages, most of which are dead, besides a look in our direction, which intimates the following query: “Is this chick insanely smart or just plain insane?” As she goes marauding through the relative peace, she kicks over a table of drinks, sending cosmos and various concoctions with the suffix “-ini” into the air, though the bartender, most of the patrons, and the second bouncer fail to notice because a 4/4 song in the key of C is busy condemning conformity and all of the adjuncts of apathy at decibels surpassing rusty-tracked G levels. By the time the drinks start landing on the unassuming dancers and standers and talkers and others just floating around too close to the epicenter of the collision for their own good, Nixi has already taken the second or third step of — what I'm informed is called — the Rampaging Monkey, an exercise/dance ritual established by the same Hindu sect that believes the flu can be cured by sprinting up a Himalayan trail. That, or she appears to have stumbled upon the same stuff that caused the infamous Dancing Plague of 1518, which most scholars claim is ergot, though there is the possibility that a little bit of that southern magic, with which Pynchon was once so enamored, snuck into Europe like a dispossessed Palestinian looking for a construction job.
“I thought they said she could drink on that shit,” Trixi says. She is wearing a powder-blue wig and a pink T-shirt that reads i'm the coolest in letters that appear to be crystallized in cartoon ice. A poet would have spent afternoons devising clever similes for her breasts, which were perky and celestial. A more straightforward person would have simply stated what happened to be the same unit in which Connie lived while in her junior year dorm: 34-C. “That Cenobe is seriously fucking with her head,” she adds.
“Cenobe?” I ask. “What the hell is that?”
The rest of the party, with the exception of Trixi, groans. This is clearly a subject ready for retirement.
According to Trixi, Nixi is taking part in an experiment for a new drug born from the collective mind of a pharmaceutical company with a research facility somewhere in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (“I know, totally sketchy, right?” Trixi adds). Nixi had decided to subject herself to such experimentation upon finding herself still wallowing in the depths of heartache after taking virtually every drug she could get from her shrink to relieve the pain of a particularly difficult breakup — elements including: a best-friend, a broken condom, an abortion, a confession. Vulnerable and alone, Nixi replied to a Craigslist post from a clinic that was recruiting a group of thirty people for a new drug, Cenobe. They promised eight hundred dollars, on top of the elimination of the malaise caused by her horrible experience. And so, without thinking too much about the potential dangers of legal drugs, which the medical community calls side effects, she signed a waiver and began taking the mischievous pill.
The drug, Trixi relays, is unlike most other anti-depressants on the market; the major difference is the way in which it goes about curing what it called “circumstantial depression,” which, if you ask this word-obsessed geek, is actually dejection. Regardless, the drug does not artificially increase the levels of serotonin or prolactin in the body, nor does it inhibit the production of norepinephrine; rather, it augments the amount of dopamine released during exercise, thereby turning a runners' high into a runners'…well, what's an experimental drug if it doesn't demand a change of pants every once in a while? The medication also reduces appetite, something that the scientists who designed the drug felt would be beneficial, as it serves to reduce the likelihood of a subject seeking releases of dopamine by means of eating. Incidentally, the drug provoked a slight jump in oxytocin production. The architects did not anticipate this element, but they considered it to be a good thing: high levels of oxytocin have been known to decrease, if not eliminate, feelings of anxiety and fear. As has been said, however, this was just an added bonus: The idea behind the treatment was simply that depression thrives in lethargic personalities — eliminate lethargy, eliminate depression.
The full strength, 25-milligram Cenobe bars were not meant to be used for longer than two weeks, as their purpose was to establish a healthy lifestyle by means of inducing euphoria from so little as walking from the bed to the toilet. Following this initial period, in which habits conducive to physical fitness were to be established, the patient was to be weaned off of the drug: two weeks of 20 milligram pills, followed by one month of the 10 milligrams, followed by another month of the 5 milligrams. After the treatment, the patient was to emerge healthier and happier without dependence on the drug, only the dopamine released during exercise.
The lab mice upon whom the initial trials were run did not seem to build up a tolerance to the drug, nor did they appear to become addicted to it. Their behavior changed as the scientists predicated it would: the mice exercised more frequently than they had in the past in order to obtain the dopamine high they craved, they did not seek ulterior ways to get their fix, and they even became increasingly gregarious (possibly because of the increased oxytocin levels, though it must be said that neither Trixi nor I know if oxytocin naturally exists in the rodent brain). Some of the mice developed ulcers, but this was the most pernicious side effect the scientists observed. “Somebody told her that one mouse developed a condition called pterolabia, but they didn't explain what that is. They just said that it was reversible.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Tomas asks.
“Think Pterodactyl,” I respond. He smiles.
Another thing the developers of the drug failed to mention was that the mice were in solitary confinement for the initial stages of the testing; and, like Pavlov's dog, these mice learned that exercise sufficed for more dopamine. Nixi, however, was free to roam wherever she wished. Consequently, she learned that other activities produced far more dopamine than any run on a treadmill ever could. Furthermore, while she was supposed to be just beginning her month on the five milligram pills, it turns out that humans, while not always murine in their physical features, do share at least one behavioral trait with any rodent, mouse or otherwise: that of being able to obtain things others believe they should not have. For these reasons (and probably a whole lot more), Nixi found herself still on the twenty-five milligram pills, dripping with sweat, dry-humping the legs of passing strangers, and massaging various parts of her body in front of the bathroom door.