K.’s not sure what has convinced him to submit to the study. Maybe it was Christmas’s enthusiasm about the project: “It’s nothing, they give you a bunch of placebos and they let you play video games all day to test your reflexes. They feed you cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. You love cream cheese.” She had beamed at him insanely. Her excitement seemed disproportionately high considering the fact that they were discussing selling his brain to science. Plus, her face still hadn’t arranged itself properly. She had that kind of asymmetrical European look to begin with, all sharp curves and sunken cheeks, so it always took a minute or so to decide whether she was stunning or mannish. Today, the shocked expression didn’t seem to leave her face. Also, there was borscht on her lower jaw, smudged and organic like some forgotten assassination detail.
Maybe he needed little convincing; after all, K. had blown the last of his savings on tuition, several required books for grad school, most of which had the words Bone and Civilization in their titles. Then there was the small matter of his exorbitant west end rent — why did he pay nearly two thousand dollars to live in a basement apartment that smelled like mothball dog and had a moldy ceiling, why? Just so he could pay seven dollars for a G-and-T and catch ageing, pseudo indie-rockers deejaying Bowie songs at the Beaconsfield? Really?
He sighed and pushed in the big institution doors of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. This was why he was going: because he was desperate. Desperate for cash. And there was nothing more obscene than fretting about money. According to Christmas, this study paid better than any of the other guinea pig gigs did — Christmas should know, she survived on weight-loss-ad modeling gigs (Christmas was the “After” model) and these drug-testing studies. She claimed starving herself and wearing long-sleeved shirts in the summer to cover her track marks (how else would they monitor her blood during the studies?) was a small price to pay for being a “professional nothing.”
K. announced himself at the desk and was directed to the eleventh floor by a woman in scrubs with cartoons of pigs in scrubs on them. Before K. could ask her about the pigs, what internal logic or reference they signified, what insight into the mysterious world of Western medicine they hinted at, the young nurse/receptionist, who looked about twelve years old to K., said, “Wait a minute, are you involved with Dr. Bot’s study?”
K. nodded as she flipped through a bunch of papers and answered the telephone in a chirpy yet business-like manner. She typed something into her computer and the printer spat out a fluorescent blue wrist-band, the kind you get at hospitals, all-inclusive hotels, stadium gigs: human-style branding. He examined it carefully and verified the spelling of his name, his date of birth, his gender, and his allergies (yes, penicillin). The brown-haired girl snapped it on his wrist eagerly, as if hungry for physical human contact with someone lucid. He gave her a floppy kind of smile and began shambling down the hall, as if he’d already ingested some Valium or other painkiller and was in the foggy world of decision-free living.
It wasn’t until the elevator bell rang out, and the formaldehyde smell had been absorbed completely into the back of his throat, that K. realized he hadn’t once given his name: He’d failed to fill out a single form that would alert anyone to his allergies, or his June birthday.
Dr. Bot was bald and overly friendly in the way that people are when they know others fear them. As he explained to K. what the study would consist of — two weeks of drug- and alcoholfree living, daily blood samples, and some hand-eye coordination tests (“You like Xbox, Kenny? Well, this is a little older, but the same idea.”) — and handed over some documents describing the types of drugs they’d be using, K. watched the way the gloomy institutional light flounced off various parts of Dr. Bot’s perfectly proportioned cranium. He wondered if its shine was accidental or purposeful and if the doctor intended his incredible globular centerpiece to be admired, or whether it served as pure distraction for his nervous subjects.
As he took blood from K., and asked him about his hobbies (“Have you heard of this rollerblading craze, Ken, or are you more the intellectual type?”), K. tried to revert the questions back to the doctor.
“So, my friend Christmas tells me this is a drug-testing study, but I see here these are tried and true oldies — clonazepam, amitriptyline — so what are you testing, effects?”
The doctor smiled at K. condescendingly but didn’t answer. Bot plugged up a vial of his blood with a small black stopper, and a nurse, who looked like she’d been sucked into a vacuum from a planet of porn stars and then deposited into the orange room with K. and the doctor without any instructions, came to take his blood away. She nearly tripped on her big white platform nurse shoes that seemed to be very impractical, given her occupation.
“Dr. Bot? What effects are you testing?”
“I like Christmas,” Bot said, leaning casually on the counter, which contained a large glass jar with a ridiculous amount of cotton swabs in it. “She’s very spontaneous, what I call a free thinker, a truly free thinker. There really are no predictable patterns of thought going on there whatsoever, I find it fascinating. Have the two of you been dating long?”
K. sighed and studied the fold in his arm that was tightly sealed with cotton and tape, it was slowly bruising into a light green color. The doctor was obviously full of prevarications, wasn’t allowed to, or wouldn’t, talk.
“Everything you need to know about the study is in the forms, Ken,” Bot said, as K. pulled his hoodie on carefully and tucked his skateboard under his pricked-up arm. “Okay, see you tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. sharp.” Bot turned back toward the window, which displayed the varied gruesomeness and decrepitude of College and Spadina: It was the only place in the city where you could get rolled by crackheads, buy six white miniature eggplants for $1.99, and see female U of T students in Uggs rushing from their psychology classes to get hammered on vodka ice coolers at O’Grady’s Irish pub, all within a six-block radius.
“Ken,” Bot said, without turning around, “you didn’t sign the forms.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, catching the door with his foot, “I forgot.”
K. had eaten three Hungry-Man TV dinners he’d gotten from the Price Chopper and was feeling a little ill. As Christmas’s voice hummed along the telephone line, he thought about what a good decorator he was. Small white, twinkly Christmas lights, it’s all about the Christmas lights. He sprawled his long body out on the floor and examined the layers of delicately latticed thumb-sized lights. As long as things stayed relatively dark — or “ambient,” as his favorite show, Decorate This, Girl!, described it — you couldn’t tell that most of his furniture came from the Ikea dumpster and Lansdowne’s Value Village.
“Obsyline,” Christmas said, her voice cutting through his fantasy of the triplet horse-faced decorating girls visiting his dank subterranean rooms and throwing his world into a renovating frenzy.
“K., did you hear me? The new drug is Obsyline. I Googled it, there’s nothing about it, except that it’s in the Valium family. You were right. Looks like that’s what Bot’s using on you.”
“Sounds like a combination of obvious and Vaseline,” he said.
Impatient, Christmas sighed, “Yeah, I guess it does.”
“Well, whatever it is, I have these naps for hours, and I wake up feeling like someone’s taken a shovel to my skull.”
Two weeks had gone by since K. started drug testing with Dr. Bot and he’d been too exhausted to do anything with Christmas after the long afternoons of sleeping; watching women with unmovable hair negotiate badly attended fundraisers on soap operas; responding to Dr. Bot’s lengthy and often nonsensical surveys (“Would you describe yourself as lethargic or woozy? How many pistons in a diesel engine? Can you think of a word that rhymes with orangutan?); eating the semi-comestible tuna fish sandwiches that tasted like fancy cat food; and flying a green video airplane through an obstacle course on what appeared to K. to be one of the first computers ever built.