Liquid Fear

by Nicholson, Scott

  “Hello, Celia. How are you?”

  “Great. I didn’t know they let the scientists over on this part of campus. This is liberal-arts turf.”

  “Some people would argue that neurobiology isn’t really a science.”

  “Well, you’ve got a lab and stuff.”

  Alexis smiled at the “stuff.” “As we come to understand more about the brain, the closer psychology edges toward science. Mood, disorder, and emotion are nothing more than various combinations of electrical impulses and chemical compounds.”

  “You sound like Dr. Briggs.”

  Alexis drew to a halt, spinning to face Celia and grab her forearm. “Briggs?”

  Celia looked down at her flesh, where Alexis’s fingers pressed hard enough to create red rings. “Ow.”

  “Sorry.” Alexis drew back, appalled. “I didn’t mean…are you talking about Sebastian Briggs?”

  Celia nodded, eyes wide with a look Alexis realized was fear. “Yeah. I’m a volunteer in one of his research projects.”

  “Briggs is here?” Alexis couldn’t believe it. She would have seen his name on the faculty roster, and he almost certainly would have been assigned to her department. Besides, Briggs had left UNC with a black mark on his record, and in academia, no administrator was willing to risk repeating a mistake. Especially one of the magnitude made by Briggs.

  She had shared in that mistake, but her resume was spotless. However, the ledger in her memory bore a few smudges and eraser marks.

  “He’s working under contract,” Celia said. “I drive over to RTP once a week. They pay us fifty dollars a session.”

  So Briggs is working in private industry. “What’s the project?”

  Celia shook her head, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “We’re not supposed to say. We signed a whatchamacallit, where we have to keep it a secret.”

  “A nondisclosure agreement?”

  “Yeah. I could get in trouble just saying this much. Plus I could lose the bonus at the end of the trial.”

  The crowd around them grew denser, people picking up the pace as the next class loomed minutes away. Alexis felt the urgency in her own bloodstream.

  She didn’t know how to fish information from Celia without further frightening the girl. “I won’t tell anybody, Celia. I used to work with him and—well, I didn’t know he was around. I wouldn’t mind saying hello.”

  Celia backed away, looking over Alexis’s shoulder. “Sorry, Dr. Morgan. I’m late for chemistry lab.”

  Celia turned and hurried into the crowd, which seemed to have thickened in the space of seconds. Alexis was about to shout at Celia, but someone bumped into her, causing her to drop the books she was carrying. As she was flung forward, she bounced against a tall man with the muscular physique of an athlete.

  “Hey,” the man yelled in a deep, gruff voice. In the commotion, Alexis felt a sting in the small of her back.

  Her first thought was bee, even though it was March and bees were still a little sluggish in the cool air. A spider was more likely, since the spindly arachnids were so ubiquitous and would bite if trapped in clothing. She reached to rub the wound as the jock turned and sneered.

  “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” he said, obviously used to inciting fear through a display of force.

  Classic case of insecurity and overcompensation. He probably had performance issues in bed. But, despite Freud’s own suspect logic in linking every problem to sex, maybe this case was simpler. Maybe the guy was just a flaming asshole.

  “Sorry,” Alexis said, looking past the gathering crowd in hope of sighting Celia. The student was gone.

  The jock kicked at one of the books that had fallen near his foot. “You could have broke my toe,” he said. “Knocked me down a few rounds in the draft.”

  Alexis gave her most winning smile, though the spreading pain of the sting tightened her lips. “I advise you to get your degree, then, so you’ll have a fallback position.”

  “Fallback? I’m a fullback.”

  “I’m sure you are,” she said. Another student, a geeky guy in a ragged knit cap, bent and collected her books as the crowd, now bored and running late, lapsed back into its chaotic stream. The football player trudged forward as if it were second down and goal to go from the three.

  Knit Cap Boy handed her the stack of books. “You okay, miss? You don’t look so hot.”

  The stung area had begun to swell, and heat radiated across her back and down her buttocks. She looked around, her throat dry, wondering if she might be suffering anaphylactic shock. A campus policeman stood watching from the steps of a nearby student-services building.

  “I’m fine,” she said thickly, taking the books. “Thanks.”

  Alexis wiped a sudden sweat from her temples, wondering if she’d be able to finish the quarter-mile walk to her office. The student infirmary was across the compound, behind the library. Anaphylaxis could kill in minutes by constricting her throat and cutting off her air supply. The campus cop, evidently noticing her distress, hurried down the steps.

  She swayed, dizzy, and Knit Cap Boy reached to steady her.

  “Here, let me,” the cop said, taking Alexis by the shoulder. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  The cop’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and the dwindling trickle of pedestrians reflected in the twin black lenses. He slid his arm around her shoulder and guided her toward a concrete bench that was half-surrounded by low shrubbery.

  She sat, gazing at the oak canopy above, the new leaves bright green in the sun. The clouds drifted by in a cotton-candy kaleidoscope.

  As an undergrad, Alexis had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms once, and this experience mimicked that trip. Her body felt simultaneously weightless and thick with fluid, as if she were a warm, water-filled balloon.

  “Can you talk?” the cop said. His face was pocked with large dark pores, one side of his mouth drooping. The roundness of his shoulders suggested a former weightlifter whose muscles were now making their slow surrender to gravity and age.

  Something about his demeanor tugged at her, but her sensory distortion prevented her from focusing. She noticed the books were gone from her hands. The grass of the courtyard buckled like the waves of a turbulent sea, the people crossing it bending and swaying as if made of soft rubber.

  Oxygen deprivation. It’s making me hallucinate.

  Yet she could feel air circulating in her lungs. Indeed, she could imagine the oxygen entering her bloodstream, flowing through her limbs, racing back through her system to be exhaled out her nostrils, laden with carbon dioxide. Her skin itched with cellular regeneration, and she was acutely aware of her saliva glands. This was no ordinary spider bite.

  Clarity descended, and with it a deep unease, as if something had gone horribly wrong and couldn’t be fixed.

  “Listen to me,” the cop said. He bent forward until she could smell his mint toothpaste.

  I’m all ears, she wanted to say, and the image of her naked flesh, covered with aural cavities, made her giggle. If she could make her fingers work, she would get rid of these clothes. The sun was a glorious patch of golden pleasure, melting against her skin. The bright-green odor of spring was as thick as the curling clouds.

  “Do you remember talking with Celia Smith?” the cop said, though his tone was not like that of a demanding interrogator working a victim behind a two-way mirror. This was no detective-show copycat, a type she’d found most university cops to be. Though trained and certified, they often had inferiority complexes that sometimes caused them to overstep their authority.

  Not that a cop implied menace in her new, vivid world. She licked her lips and found they tasted of mangoes. A phrase, a name, niggled at the back of her mind like a thin wire trying to fish a wedding ring from a drain. Celia?

  “Dr. Briggs wanted me to give you a message,” he said, maintaining his low, melodic voice. She gazed into his sunglasses, saw her own face doubled, both reflections smirking with swollen, leering lips.

&n
bsp; Briggs.

  The name stirred something inside her. Briggs had taken something from her, long ago. Was he some frat boy she’d dated? Someone who had treated her badly?

  The cop’s head tilted toward the sky. The Bell Tower clock clanged in the distance, the vibrations tickling Alexis’s cochlea, digging into her skull like the fast, silvery bit of an electric drill.

  The sudden pain caused her to clamp her teeth down on her tongue and the sensation was that of biting tinfoil. Her hands and feet, which had been so bloated and warm moments ago, now burned with static. The pain allowed her to focus, finally recognizing she was on a campus bench.

  “Briggs wanted me to tell you this,” the cop said, leaning close enough that she thought he was going to kiss her cheek. Instead, he whispered, “The Monkey House is open for business.”

  The man drew away, the dampness of his breath lingering a moment on her earlobe before evaporating. He stood, looked around, adjusted his sunglasses, and headed for the nearest building, his simian movement a reminder that evolution was an ongoing process.

  Monkey House.

  Alexis rocked back and forth, fever sluicing up her spine, the limbs of the nearby oaks swaying as if driven by a frantic, fierce wind. No, the limbs weren’t swaying. They were reaching, scooping down with spindly, cracked hands to claw at her, tangle in her hair, scratch her face and bare skin.

  The roots lifted, shaking away dirt and the stiffness of long sleep. The nearest one stepped toward her, quivering with eagerness.

  Nothing in her index of diagnostic manuals, textbooks, and clinical observations could explain away these hallucinations. And though her trained mind insisted trees could not walk, the massive oaks couldn’t care less about symptoms of delusion.

  Crazy people always believed in the peculiar reality that imprisoned them, and Alexis understood for the first time that a delusion wasn’t just a distorted perception.

  For the sufferer, it became reality. And even a delusion could make you bleed.

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Students sat around the compound, oblivious to the monstrous miracle in their midst. A blackbird lifted from one of the tree branches, fought a waft of wind, and rose into the sky.

  Alexis leaned back, shielding her eyes from the grasping limbs, the tannic aroma of green oak burning her nostrils. Her legs were damp sand, her throat a cold pipe, her lungs buckets of dead ash scooped from an ancient burial pyre.

  The gathering oaks breathed, their whispered words taunting her in the voices of wood. Lumber creaked, sap spat, leaves rattled.

  The Monkey House was real.

  “You okay, miss?”

  These trees, which had been young when the first English speakers had landed on the Eastern shore with their muskets and axes, had their own language. How could she reply in any way but a scream? She clamped her hands over her ears and wriggled against the unyielding concrete bench.

  Nothing like the “brink of madness” existed. She understood now. No soft gray fog created a foreboding borderland between sanity and the land beyond.

  The two states existed simultaneously, commingling in the same ether, built of common atoms. The stuff of stars was all the same, only some burned while some bled.

  “Miss, you don’t look so hot.”

  She blinked. Students crowded the sidewalk around her, moving in twin but opposing streams. The young man in the knit cap held her books, brows scrunched above the plastic frames of his glasses. Across the stretch of lawn, the trees stood majestic and gray, and a whiff of cigarette smoke trailed past as a student grabbed a nicotine fix before class. The sun reflected off the neat rows of windows, the bricks of the buildings as solid as the hands that had stacked them.

  Reality.

  It wasn’t a state of mind or an illusion of perception. It was nothing more than a shared and mutually accepted madness. An agreed-upon delusion kept the Earth fixed in the heavens and the trees knitted deeply into the soil.

  And Briggs was no longer a fantasy. He had happened. The Monkey House had happened.

  The Monkey House was real.

  And she couldn’t let it show. No matter what, she had to maintain appearances. She was Dr. Alexis Morgan, respected neurochemist, not some trippy-dippy English professor.

  “I’m fine,” she said, taking the books as she spied the knotted shoulders of the fullback bobbing above the crowd, hurrying away. From the concrete steps, the campus cop observed her behind frigid shades.

  A fugue experience. Mind slip. Déjà vu of an event that couldn’t have happened.

  Yet the warm glow of a pinprick emanated across her back, and she was afraid the dizziness would return. Before the cop could climb down the steps, before the trees could walk, before the injected venom could taint her bloodstream, she smiled in gratitude at Knit Cap Boy and hurried across the compound, toward the center of campus and the safe, familiar walls of her office.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Kleingarten smirked.

  The university cop uniform had been easy to fake, and nobody looked at patches or badges. In fact, by changing from the blue shirt to a brown shirt, he could just as easily have passed for a member of the landscaping crew. He’d paid a little visit to Dr. Morgan’s office and the crowd in the hall had parted like a creek around a boulder. These college brats were so damned cool they couldn’t even acknowledge authority, much less respect it.

  The day was warm and he enjoyed ogling the sweet young coeds, and probably a few were into men in uniforms. He might find out if he held his post long enough to draw them in. But despite all the budget cuts, a real university cop might show up and cause trouble.

  Kleingarten could handle trouble, but part of the fun was in working outside the system. Any idiot could go out guns blazing, playing Die Hard and hoping for a sequel. It took real skill and genius to go completely undetected.

  And he liked this little game Briggs was playing. Hell, he might have taken the job for half price.

  Still, he had overhead, like the jock sidling his way, trying to blend in despite his letter jacket, spiked hair, and a steroid-bloated neck that made his head look like a ferret-covered bucket of rocks.

  Kleingarten rolled his eyes to a secluded alcove that led to a basement entrance, indicating the jock should follow him.

  The guy mouthed, “What?”

  Fucking amateurs. Kleingarten gave an impatient jerk of his thumb and turned away. After a moment, the jock followed.

  “Did I do good?” he said.

  “Sure, kid,” Kleingarten said, pulling the roll of unmarked bills from his pocket. They were bound by a rubber band. He should have tucked the money in the envelope, but this was part of the game, too.

  “It won’t hurt her none, will it?” The jock was making an effort to be concerned, but compassion was a few too many rungs up the IQ ladder.

  “Would your government do anything to harm one of its citizens?”

  The jock shook his head, visibly stiffening as if looking for a flag to salute. He struggled to stuff the bills into the pocket of his too-tight jeans.

  “What about…you know, the other stuff?”

  “Of course.”

  Kleingarten handed over the vial of anabolic steroids. “This should be good for six extra touchdowns and moving up a couple of rounds in the draft.”

  “Sweet. You know how hard it is to get this stuff these days?”

  “Hey, there’s always the Canadian Football League.”

  The guy didn’t catch the humor. “Yeah, sure. So, are we done here?”

  “That’s it. Easy as pie, just like I promised.”

  A couple of students passed, and Kleingarten gave an exaggerated slap to the jock’s arm and guffawed for their benefit. “You kick State’s ass for us, okay?”

  The jock nodded. “If Coach gives me the ball more.”

  Kleingarten winked as the students moved on past to join the human stream. “Take enough of that, and he will. Now, how about that needle?”


  “Right,” the guy said, as if he’d forgotten. He reached into the pocket of his letter jacket. “Ouch. Fuck.”

  He pulled the needle out and looked at the little pinprick on the side of his thumb. “You sure this stuff is okay?”

  “Safe as mother’s milk, my friend. And, remember, it’s a secret.”

  “A matter of national security,” the jock recited, those magical words that allowed people the world over to get away with murder.

  “Now get out of here and forget you ever saw me.”

  The jock hunkered away and Kleingarten pretended to check the locks on the doors. Someone might be watching. These eggheads lived in their own oblivious little fantasy land, though, and considered their island immune from the ills of the real world.

  They were worried about people taking the word “nigger” out of books and how many goddamned butterflies were dying in the rain forest. That stuff was too important for anyone to notice an anonymous rent-a-cop.

  A cute coed walked by and gave him the once-over, and Kleingarten resisted the temptation to open the door for her. Instead, he just touched the bill of his cap in greeting. He didn’t smile too broadly or she might remember him.

  As she entered, he followed, using his foot to hold the door open. He retrieved the backpack he’d tucked behind an air unit, and then went to the private faculty restroom that was little more than a closet. Those with extra college degrees couldn’t just shit in a stall like the rest of the crowd.

  Kleingarten removed the uniform shirt and now wore only a “Go Heels” T-shirt featuring the horned head of a ram, the school mascot. He never could figure out why a school nicknamed “Tar Heels” used a ram, but he supposed you couldn’t just walk around at halftime holding up a black, splotchy Styrofoam foot.

  He crammed the cop hat and blue shirt into the backpack and changed into scuffed loafers. He was mussing his hair when someone tried the handle and then knocked.

  “Just a sec,” Kleingarten said, and then cut a fart so the room would smell authentic.