Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Bucky.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you at . . . I was so sorry to hear about Margie, I left a message on your machine but maybe you haven’t been home to . . . listen, I need to see you, Gene. It’s important. Please.”

  “It’s late, Bucky. I have to teach tomorrow. I teach now, at—”

  “Please. You’ll know why when I see you. I have to see you.”

  I closed my eyes. “Look, I’m pretty tired. Maybe another time.”

  “Please, Gene. Just for a few minutes. I can be at your place in fifteen minutes!”

  Bucky had never minded begging. I remembered that, now. Suddenly I didn’t want him to see where I lived, how I lived, without Margie. What I really wanted was to tell him “no.” But I couldn’t. I never had, not our whole lives, and I couldn’t now—why not? I didn’t know.

  “All right, Bucky. A few minutes. I’ll meet you in the lobby here at St. Clare’s.”

  “Fifteen minutes. God, thanks, Gene. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it, I need to—”

  “Okay.”

  “See you soon.”

  He didn’t mind begging, and he made people help him. Even Father Healey had found out that. Coming in to Bucky’s life, and going out.

  The lobby of St. Clare’s never changed. Same scuffed green floor, slashed gray vinyl couches mended with wide tape, information-desk attendant who looked like he could have been a bouncer at Madison Square Garden. Maybe he had. Tired people yelled and whispered in Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese. Statues of the Madonna and St. Clare and the crucified Christ beamed a serenity as alien here as money.

  Bucky and I grew up in next-door apartments in a neighborhood like this one, a few blocks from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. That’s how we defined our location: “two doors down from the crying Broad.” We made our First Communion together, and our Confirmation, and Bucky was best man when I married Marge. But by that time he’d entered the seminary, and any irreverence about Our Lady had disappeared, along with all other traces of humor, humility, or humanity. Or so I thought then. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Even though he always made straight A’s in class, Bucky-as-priest-in-training was the same as Bucky-as-shortstop or Bucky-as-third-clarinet or Bucky-as-altar-boy: intense, committed, short-sightedly wrong.

  He’d catch a high pop and drop it. He’d know “Claire de Lune” perfectly, and be half a beat behind. Teeth sticking out, skinny face furrowed in concentration, he’d bend over the altar rail and become so enraptured by whatever he saw there that he’d forget to make the response. We boys would nudge each other and grin, and later howl at him in the parking lot.

  But his decision to leave the priesthood wasn’t a howler. It wasn’t even a real decision. He vacillated for months, growing thinner and more stuttery, and finally he’d taken a bottle of pills and a half pint of vodka.

  Father Healey and I found him, and had his stomach pumped, and Father Healey tried to talk him back into the seminary and the saving grace of God. From his hospital bed Bucky had called me, stuttering in his panic, to come get him and take him home. He was terrified. Not of the hospital—of Father Healey.

  And I had, coming straight from duty, secure in my shield and gun and Margie’s love and my beautiful young daughter and my contempt for the weakling who needed a lapsed-Catholic cop to help him face an old priest in a worn-out religion. God, I’d been smug.

  “Gene?” Bucky said. “Gene Shaunessy?”

  I looked up at the faded lobby of St. Clare’s.

  “Hello, Bucky.”

  “God, you look . . . I can’t . . . you haven’t changed a bit!”

  Then he started to cry.

  I got him to a Greek place around the corner on Ninth. The dinner trade was mostly over and we sat at a table in the shadows, next to a dirty side window with a view of a brick alley, Bucky with his back to the door. Not that he cared if anybody saw him crying. I cared. I ordered two beers.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  He blew his nose and nodded gratefully. “Same old Gene. You always just . . . never any . . .”

  “Bucky. What the fuck is wrong?”

  He said, unexpectedly, “You hate this.”

  Over his shoulder, I eyed the door. Starting eighteen months ago, I’d had enough tears and drama to last me the rest of my life, although I wasn’t going to tell Bucky that. If he didn’t get it over with. . . .

  “I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals,” Bucky said, suddenly calmer. “After I left seminary, after Father Healey . . . you remember . . .”

  “Go on,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. Father Healey and I had screamed at each other outside Bucky’s door at St. Vincent’s, while Bucky’s stomach was being pumped. I’d said things I didn’t want to remember.

  “I went back to school. Took a B.S. in chemistry. Then a Ph.D. You and I, about that time of . . . I wanted to call you after you were shot but . . . I could have tried harder to find you earlier, I know . . . anyway. I went to work for Kelvin, in the research department. Liked it. I met Tommy. We live together.”

  He’d never said. But, then, he’d never had to. And there hadn’t been very much saying anyway, not back then, and certainly not at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.

  “I liked the work at Kelvin. Like it. Liked it.” He took a deep breath. “I worked on Camineur. You take it, don’t you, Gene?”

  I almost jumped out of my skin. “How’d you know that?”

  He grinned. “Not by any medical record hacking. Calm down, it isn’t . . . people can’t tell. I just guessed, from the profile.”

  He meant my profile. Camineur is something called a neurotransmitter uptake-regulator. Unlike Prozac and the other antidepressants that were its ancestors, it fiddles not just with serotonin levels but also with norepinephrine and dopamine and a half dozen other brain chemicals. It was prescribed for me after Marge’s accident. Non-addictive, no bad side effects, no dulling of the mind. Without it, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t stop wanting to kill somebody every time I walked into St. Clare’s.

  I had found myself in a gun shop on Avenue D, trigger-testing a nine-millimeter, which felt so light in my hand it floated. When I looked at the thoughts in my head, I went to see Margie’s doctor.

  Bucky said, quietly for once, “Camineur was designed to prevent violent ideation in people with strong but normally controlled violent impulses, whose control has broken down under severe life stress. It’s often prescribed for cops. Also military careerists and doctors. Types with compensated paranoia restrained by strong moral strictures. Nobody told you that the Camineur generation of mood inhibitors was that specific?” If they did, I hadn’t been listening. I hadn’t been listening to much in those months. But I heard Bucky now. His hesitations disappeared when he talked about his work.

  “It’s a good drug, Gene. You don’t have to feel . . . there isn’t anything shameful about taking it. It just restores the brain chemistry to whatever it was before the trauma.”

  I scowled, and gestured for two more beers.

  “All right. I didn’t mean to . . . There’s been several generations of neural pharmaceuticals since then. And that’s why I’m talking to you.” I sipped my second beer, and watched Bucky drain his.

  “Three years ago we . . . there was a breakthrough in neuropharm research, really startling stuff, I won’t go into the . . . we started a whole new line of development. I was on the team. Am. On the team.”

  I waited. Sudden raindrops, large and sparse, struck the dirty window. “Since Camineur, we’ve narrowed down the effects of neuropharms spectacularly. I don’t know how much you know about this, but the big neurological discovery in the last five years is that repeated intense emotion doesn’t just alter the synaptic pathways in the brain. It actually changes your brain structure from the cellular level up. With any intense experience, new structures start to be built, and if the experience is repeated, they get reinforced. The physical changes can make you, say, more open to r
isk-taking, or calmer in the face of stress. Or the physical structures that get built can make it hard or even impossible to function normally, even if you’re trying with all your will. In other words, your life literally makes you crazy.”

  He smiled. I said nothing.

  “What we’ve learned is how to affect only those pathways created by depression, only those created by fear, only those created by narcissistic rage . . . we don’t touch your memories. They’re there. You can see them, in your mind, like billboards. But now you drive past them, not through them. In an emotional sense.”

  Bucky peered at me. I said, not gently, “So what pills do you take to drive past your memories?”

  He laughed. “I don’t.” I stayed impassive but he said hastily anyway, “Not that people who do are . . . it isn’t a sign of weakness to take neuropharms, Gene. Or a sign of strength not to. I just . . . it isn’t . . . I was waiting, was all. I was waiting.”

  “For what? Your prince to come?” I was still angry.

  He said simply, “Yes.”

  Slowly I lowered my beer. But Bucky returned to his background intelligence.

  “This drug my team is working on now . . . the next step was to go beyond just closing down negative pathways. Take, as just one example, serotonin. Some researcher said . . . there’s one theory that serotonin, especially, is like cops. Having enough of it in your cerebral chemistry keep riots and looting and assault in the brain from getting out of control. But just holding down crime doesn’t, all by itself, create prosperity or happiness. Or joy. For that, you need a new class of neuropharms that create positive pathways. Or at least strengthen those that are already there.”

  “Cocaine,” I said. “Speed. Gin and tonic.”

  “No, no. Not a rush of power. Not a temporary high. Not temporary at all, and not isolating. The neural pathways that make people feel . . . the ones that let you . . .” He leaned toward me, elbows on the table. “Weren’t there moments, Gene, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie?”

  I looked at the window. Raindrops slid slowly down the dirty glass, streaking it dirtier. In the alley, a homeless prowled the garbage cans. “What’s this got to do with the elderly suicides? If you have a point to make, make it.”

  “They weren’t suicides. They were murders.”

  “Murders? Some psycho knocking off old people? What makes you think so?”

  “Not some psycho. And I don’t think so. I know.”

  “How?”

  “All eight elderlies were taking J-24. That’s the Kelvin code name for the neuropharm that ends situational isolation. It was a clinical trial.”

  I studied Bucky, whose eyes burned with Bucky light: intense, pleading, determined, inept. And something else, something that hadn’t been there in the old days. “Bucky, that makes no sense. The NYPD isn’t perfect, God knows, but they can tell the difference between suicide and murder. And anyway, the suicide rate rises naturally among old people, they get depressed—” I stopped. He had to already know this.

  “That’s just it!” Bucky cried, and an old Greek couple at a table halfway across the room turned to stare at him. He lowered his voice. “The elderly in the clinical trial weren’t depressed. They were very carefully screened for it. No psychological, chemical, or social markers for depression. These were the . . . when you see old people in travel ads, doing things, full of life and health, playing tennis and dancing by candlelight . . . the team psychologists looked for our clinical subjects very carefully. None of them was depressed!”

  “So maybe your pill made them depressed. Enough to kill themselves.”

  “No! No! J-24 couldn’t . . . there wasn’t any . . . it didn’t make them depressed. I saw it.” He hesitated. “And besides . . .”

  “Besides what?”

  He looked out at the alley. A waiter pushed a trolley of dirty dishes past our table. When Bucky spoke again, his voice sounded odd.

  “I gave five intense years to J-24 and the research that led to it, Gene. Days, evenings, weekends—eighty hours a week in the lab. Every minute until I met Tommy, and maybe too much time even after that. I know everything that the Kelvin team leaders know, everything that can be known about that drug’s projected interaction with existing neurotransmitters. J-24 was my life.”

  As the Church had once been. Bucky couldn’t do anything by halves. I wondered just what his position on “the team” had actually been.

  He said, “We designed J-24 to combat the isolation that even normal, healthy people feel with age. You get old. Your friends die. Your mate dies. Your children live in another state, with lives of their own. All the connections you built up over decades are gone, and in healthy people, those connections created very thick, specific, strong neural structures. Any new friends you make in a nursing home or retirement community—there just aren’t the years left to duplicate the strength of those neural pathways. Even when outgoing, undepressed, risk-taking elderlies try.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “J-24 was specific to the neurochemistry of connection. You took it in the presence of someone else, and it opened the two of you up to each other, made it possible to genuinely—genuinely, at the permanent chemical level—imprint on each other.”

  “You created an aphrodisiac for geezers?”

  “No,” he said, irritated. “Sex had nothing to do with it. Those impulses originate in the limbic system. This was . . . emotional bonding. Of the most intense, long-term type. Don’t tell me all you ever felt for Margie was sex!”

  After a minute he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Finish your story.”

  “It is finished. We gave the drug to four sets of volunteers, all people who had long-term terminal diseases but weren’t depressed, people who were willing to take risks in order to enhance the quality of their own perceptions in the time left. I was there observing when they took it. They bonded like baby ducks imprinting on the first moving objects they see. No, not like that. More like . . . like . . .” He looked over my shoulder, at the wall, and his eyes filled with water. I glanced around to make sure nobody noticed.

  “Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other. In knowing each other. Not each other’s memories, but each other’s . . . souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the psychological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost were each other.”

  I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an illusion.”

  “No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone, share something intense with them?”

  I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself, unstoppable.

  “What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said, greater pleasure. And all of those responses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just reverses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the rate of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples . . . does it only work on men and women?”

  A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained.

  I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you . . . have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him
, to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”

  “I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer. My liberal, tolerant daughter. But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the territory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.

  Bucky didn’t look offended. “All right. But just imagine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our whole tiny lives. . . .” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.

  “And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a . . . what did you call it? A neuropharm. They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”

  “No,” Bucky said.

  I stared at him.

  “It would have taken years. Maybe decades. It’s too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”

  “You knew there was no approval.”

  “Yes. But I thought . . . I never thought . . .” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those unlogical flashes, and I saw there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths depressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his hair, or hating himself. Bucky, to whom guilt was the staff of life.

  I’d seen him try to kill himself over leaving the Church. I’d watched him go through agonies of guilt over ignoring answering-machine messages from Father Healey. Hell, I’d watched him shake and cry because at ten years old we’d stolen three apples from a market on Columbus Avenue. Yet there he sat, disturbed but coherent. For Bucky, even serene. Believing he’d contributed to murder.

  I said, “What neuropharms do you take, Bucky?”