by Rowan Massey
There was a note on the back of some scratch paper from the lab. I felt my face go hot while I read it because he was worried about my “anus”. There were instructions to take the antibiotics if I got anything that looked or felt like a bacterial infection, and a single pill to take right away for anxiety. I popped that one in my mouth and chewed it. It didn’t taste like anything.
But the note went on much longer than that to talk about other things. It was hard to read some of the words because my reading wasn’t very good, but I understood what he was saying. He’d written about…but he was wrong. He didn’t understand.
I hated him.
He didn’t have the right.
I crumpled the paper without meaning to. My hands wanted to turn into fists. I was turning into some kind of new emotional thing I couldn’t name. I wanted to tear the paper into tiny pieces and flush it. Fold it and keep it. Eat it. Treasure it forever. It made me feel insane.
I came back from another staring moment and put the paper in my pack. I sat on the toilet and used the goo on my asshole.
Done. If he asked me, I could say that yes, I’d done it.
I paused. My clothes were washing, and I wouldn’t have anything dry to put on.
Fuck.
How did I forget something that obvious? Doc was about to think I was an idiot. I opened the bathroom door slowly, quietly, and looked out. Doc was hunched over his computer keyboard. I stepped through the doorway, walking on my toes, and spotted a little pile of clothes on the table nearest to me. I breathed in relief when I picked it up and took it back into the bathroom with me. He payed a lot of attention to my needs. It made me feel secure.
Pajama pants, a T-shirt, socks, and some ugly slippers that were too big for me. No underwear, but the shirt was big and covered my crotch so I didn’t feel weird about it. But god, I felt like I was dressed up for a sleepover. I imagined what the rooms on the third floor might be like—what it would be like to actually spend the night like a...a friend, or family. It was never happening in a million years, but imagining it made me feel safer than I had all day. So safe that I realized I’d been feeling unsafe in the first place. Things were just crazy out there. People were acting strange and losing their minds, including me. I was lucky to have Doc’s place to take a break, relax, and feel like the world was locked out. No wonder he liked all the iron bars, locked doors, and security people.
I left the bathroom and took a deep breath of that chemical smell on my way to the table I always sat on. When had I started liking that smell? It wasn’t always the same exact fumes, and sometimes it was stronger or barely there, but it was part of the lab, and I loved the lab.
The anxiety pill was kicking in. My emotions were getting calmer, and I knew the doc had written that stuff because he cared about me, so I decided to try to let it go. We didn’t have to talk about it. I lifted myself onto the table by the palms of my hands and remembered just in time not to sit down too hard.
The doc turned to me in his chair, and the eye contact made my lungs feel a little tight.
He knows everything.
He pointed at something on the table to my left. It was a nice cell phone with a thick, black case. There were white earbuds attached to it. I picked it up and pushed the button at the bottom to wake the screen up. It showed me the time and a background picture of green trees. When I pushed the button again, it asked for a password.
“I set the password to your birthday,” Doc said, fingertips pressed together in front of him, “Month and day.”
I typed it in and got the screen of little square pictures that would open up all the apps. I’d seen good phones like it when dealers used them, but I’d never been able to play with one. The smile on my face was growing despite my bad day. I flicked my finger across the screen and was treated to a second page of apps.
Doc reached over, and I held it out so he could touch the glass. He opened an app with a green circle on it, and when I saw the pictures and read some of the words, I started grinning so big it hurt. I started laughing and had to rub my jaw because of the ache. It was nutty to laugh after being so miserable in the bathroom.
“Can I listen to any of these I want?” I asked.
“You can listen to thousands of songs if you want to. I subscribed because all your singing made me want to listen to some old songs I remember my dad listening to when I was growing up. Look. There’s a playlist here with a lot of songs you know.”
He poked the screen a couple times and showed me a playlist called “Rock Classics”.
“You might be more tempted by new songs though,” Doc said. “Just have fun with it while you’re in New York. But keep it charged.
“Thank you.” A swelling sensation pressed up out of my lungs until I felt it in my head, behind my eyes. “This is amazing.”
His smile was crooked, relaxed, and it made me calm. I was almost back at a ten. I’d never had to deal with emotions that went up and down so fast, and extreme.
“If you take care of it, I might let you keep it in place of the other one when you come back,” he said.
My eyebrows went up, and I gripped the phone in my hand, trying not to squeal like a girl. He laughed and took it from me, poking at it and showing me an app with a road map. He showed me the routes he’d saved for me and asked me to compare the map on the app with the one he’d drawn. It was easy to line the two up in my head, and I tried to memorize it in case something happened to the phone.
The washing machine buzzed loudly, and I put the phone down and hurried to take care of it. I thought about everything while I put the wet laundry in the dryer, checking to see if the blood stains were gone, and they were.
Maybe the trip would be a good thing. It was starting to seem like an adventure. I just wished I could bring Spitz and Fiona. They had each other, so would they miss me as much as I would miss them?
Going through my clothes, I noticed more than ever how stained and ripped all of it was, even though I sewed up tears. Everything was faded, thin, and too small. My back pack had all kinds of messy sewing and patching done to it. The pajamas Doc had given me were thick, colors still bright. I’d thought my clothes looked nice after coming out of the machine every day instead of getting washed in an alley, but they still looked like trash. I went around most of the time covered in dust and grime so it had seemed like a big improvement. Now, I realized that I’d always looked like yesterday’s garbage.
Maybe, after the trip, I’d get to keep the new clothes and start looking sharp. Even sharper than Nando and Rydel. I was the Doc’s assistant, after all. I should probably start looking the part.
I stuffed it all into the dryer and switched it on.
Doc was messing around with the things in his freezer when I stepped out and shut the door to cut off the noise.
“I called in some orders today,” he said, without turning around, “They told me you did a good job, but you have a few things to learn. I think you’ll learn plenty in New York. A few of the men you talked to are there. You might meet them. Just stay alert around them. Don’t let them mess with you.”
He piled a tray of little glass bottles and a jar of gray powder into his arms and kicked the fridge door shut. “I’m making sure you’ll be taken care of. You’ll be shown around and might meet some shady characters where you’re staying the night, but don’t worry about them. I’ll tell you which ones to stick to and trust.” He carefully placed the bottles and jar on the middle table. The big, middle table. Was today the day? God, Doc really knew how to keep me busy.
“So, Wally,” he said, leaning his hands on the table and smiling like we were about to play a game together, “How would you like to know what goes into make fielders?”
There were two machines under the middle table he said were dehumidifiers. My first job was to turn them on. Next, we put on safety glasses, paper masks, rubbery aprons, and sleeves made out of the same stuff. They were like gloves without the part for your hands and went up to our elbows. Doc
showed me how to scrub my hands with stinky soap before we put on some latex gloves. At that point, I couldn’t imagine how else we could protect ourselves.
“Jesus,” I said, “how dangerous can fielders be?”
He was setting out two pans and rubbing them down with an oil that smelled like piss. He paused and looked over at me. “Look at how many people it kills,” he said. “The ingredients are dangerous and the programming we’re about to do turns it all into something less deadly. But only by a few measures.”
I nodded. This was the cool stuff that everybody thought I got to do, and I wanted to keep going.
He gave me the jar of gray powder and showed me how to use a heavy set of scales to measure it out. It was a pain to get it just right, but when it was ready, I felt proud of myself. I grinned at the doc and his mouth was covered but his eyes crinkled like he was smiling.
“The powder we’re making is dangerous if it’s blown into your face,” his voice was muffled behind the mask. “But the part that can burn your skin happens while you’re mixing it all together. Pay attention. I’ll be doing this part, but I expect you to have an understanding of what goes into it on a basic level.”
“Got it.” I didn’t let myself smile about doing dangerous shit. He’d probably tell me to go sit on my table if I didn’t take it seriously.
He took a blue stopwatch out of his pocket. It made me itch to push the buttons.
I had an idea and went to his desk to grab a pen, quickly snatching a piece of paper from the printer. I put it on his clipboard and went back over to stand next to him. Trying not to look like I was being silly, I stood the way he always stood—feet standing wide, clipboard gripped so that it rested on my wrist. I was ready to take notes.
“Good thinking,” he said. I tried not to let it go to my head.
Before I knew it, he was working fast. Powders and liquids mixed, changed color, and were left to sit while he timed it. When it was inky blue, it was poured into thin vials and capped.
“What now?” I asked, trying to write like I’d never written before. I knew it was all scribbly and spelled wrong—the lines bending down to the left—but I could redo it later.
“Now we’re done with the sensitive part,” he said, and placed a vial into a thing I couldn’t think of a word for. It was a machine that held the vial in place and lowered a needle down through the rubber cap, but all behind a plastic shield. When he turned the machine on and the stuff in the vial started vibrating, rising to the top, I’d never seen anything like it. It started turning a lighter shade of blue.
“Holy shit,” I said. I hadn’t imagined anything in particular, but I hadn’t expected it to be that dramatic. No wonder Nando was into this chemistry stuff.
“Now, the formulation. What you’re seeing in there is alive. It’s a man-made life form that wasn’t ever present on earth before my father invented it with his colleagues.”
I took a step back. Nando had been right? Drugs were alive? And what did he mean, his dad had invented it? God. No wonder he had a lot of money.
“I’ll use the computer to input the formula,” he went on, “telling it what to do to your bodies. Making a new formula takes days of careful guessing, but this will be three clicks away. Then we crush it, cut it, and make the pills.”
“What kind of batch is it?” I asked.
“The kind that will be least dangerous to you, as far as I know. This is all for you and your friends. Don’t share it with anyone else, and don’t take chances on anything else from here on out. Can you promise me that? Especially that last.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I promise. But, what is the rest of the field going to be on? More experiments?”
He pushed his safety glasses and mask off his face. “Unfortunately, yes. I don’t feel like I have any choice. They’ll be on the same thing as you for a while until I formulate…I don’t know what, actually. I’m starting almost from scratch now.”
“You’ll figure it out.” I gave his back a couple hard pats and started taking the gear off. He chuckled and shook his head.
“I hope so,” he said. “I’ve focused on enabling safe withdrawal and getting rid of the crawls, but maybe something less lofty will save more lives in the long run.”
“Like what?” I sat on my table, and he took his usual place at the computers.
“A cheap sedative to take beforehand and prevent the crawls from driving quite so many to cutting themselves. Giving it to the volunteers to sell might give me a loophole I could use long enough to get some data. It would mean less serious infections and diseases. That’s for starters. But I don’t know if anyone would buy it, no matter how cheap. Half of you are homeless these days and won’t spend a penny on other drugs.”
I wiped at my nose. “We’ve never liked other drugs. They’re pointless.”
“If I could give you something to deal with the crawls, would you buy it for about fifteen cents?”
“C’mon.” I gave him a look and shook my head.
He sighed. “So, what if I put it in the mix? You would see a pill yellow on one side and blue on the other side. One part is a sedative, the other is your fielders. Problem is, would it make the fielders more expensive, and by how much, and how effective would it be?”
My head went slowly up and down. “Doesn’t a sedative make you heavy? What if we can’t dance or we just fall asleep?”
“It would have to be mild enough not to do that. I’d also probably have to change the sedative just as often as the fielders. People would become tolerant in a matter of weeks, some in just days. Those are the problems that have kept me from taking such an indirect approach.”
I wanted to say, Just make the drug and let us dance. What’s the real point? You’re wasting you’re time. We’re fielders. We don’t play survival games. But I kept my mouth shut. When I didn’t answer, Doc started taking some of the gear off, and I did too. We put things away and cleaned up after ourselves without talking.
When he went to his computer to fill out a report on what we’d done, I picked up the new phone. In just a few touches, I was listening to awesome stuff I’d never heard before. I sat on the table and closed my eyes, forgetting what happened last time I’d closed them, and started memorizing. My brain didn’t take me back to those ugly moments. Doc was like a warm oven beside me—one that gave out safety instead of heat.
I hadn’t let myself think about that note, and now that I did, I wasn’t so upset over what he’d said. The more I thought about it, the more I wished he’d said even more. Someone caring enough to get in my business about something was new, and weird, but nice, even if he was wrong.
It would have been fine if he’d been angry and said that stuff to my face, or if he’d insisted on playing doctor and touching me to make sure I was okay, or really anything he thought I needed. Nobody had ever payed attention like Doc did. Spitz was different because he was family. You don’t choose family, you just luck out. Or not. It was different because Doc chose me out of all the people he could have had in his lab, which was basically anyone, anywhere, ever. I didn’t know what it was, but he’d seen something special about me. I needed to work a lot harder to prove he hadn’t made a mistake.
I replayed the song I was listening to and hummed along, bouncing my foot to the beat. I put the phone in my pocket and sat up to redo the notes to make it nice and neat, adding things here and there.
Whatever Doc needed me for, I could do it. I could go all the way to New York City. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt that confident a week ago, but he’d trusted me with things so far, and he had been right about what I could learn to do. The city would be completely different from Emporium, where I’d lived all my life, and I was scared of going farther away than I’d ever thought I would; far from Spitz, far from the field. But I wanted to. Part of me wanted to do something crazy to work all the recent emotions out of my system. Leaving town on a train to New York City would do the trick.
Chapter Thirteen
I st
epped up into Doc’s SUV and slipped into the seat as if I’d been doing it my whole life. I’d discovered how satisfying it was to slam the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at the doc, who was buckling his seatbelt. Would he be annoyed if I opened the door just so I could slam it again? I decided to be mature and leave it. As we pulled into the street, I hit the power button for the stereo, and it started playing some kind of news station.
“We’re meeting them at the same house,” Doc said. We were going to pick Spitz and Fiona up. He’d told them when he dropped them off that he’d also pick them up.
I nodded, having figured that out. We were quiet while we drove through the nice neighborhood. The radio was all political stuff I didn’t keep up with. Politicians staking claim on all kinds of cities and getting shouty at the other politicians. They talked about the militias that had taken over some places. The world outside Emporium sounded so crazy, but Doc had said I’d be safe, so I told myself not to sweat it.
I enjoyed the view out the window. I couldn’t get used to how fast it was to get from one place to the next. It made me feel hypnotized to watch everything go by so easily.
After a few minutes, the political argument ended, and I heard the familiar opening line to a hip hop song. I didn’t feel like singing. I thought about the fielders in my pocket. As soon as we got close to the field, I wouldn’t be able to hold back anymore. I kept running a picture in my head of pinching a pill between my fingers and popping it in my mouth. The bitter taste breaking over my tongue. That chalky feeling in my teeth. I looked at my hand, and it wasn’t shaking, but I felt as if my insides were. I really needed to dance.
It took us ten minutes to get to Spitz and Fiona, who were ready and walking out to the SUV before we stopped. I climbed into the back and opened the door for them.
“Hi, Doc. Thanks,” Spitz said as they got in. We all sat in the back so we could sit next to each other, me in the middle.
“No hello?” I said. My smile felt like a stranger on my face.
