Afterparty

by Daryl Gregory

  “I’m sure that would be fine,” Todd said. “If I sign on for this.” But of course he had already made up his mind.

  * * *

  The NAT ward was small, a population of twenty-five to forty, depending on the season. News traveled the floor with telepathic speed. Two of the residents believed they were telepathic, so who knows.

  I was packing when Ollie appeared in my room. Five foot two, hair falling across her face. Quiet as a closed door. And like everyone on the ward, Severely Fucked in the Head.

  She stared into the room, eyes pointed in my direction. Trying to work out the puzzle. That stack of shapes probably belonged to one thing, those horizontal shapes to something else. Once sorted, labels could be applied: bed, wall, duffel bag, human being.

  To help her out I said, “Hi, Ollie.”

  Her face changed—that slight shift of recognition as she assigned the label “Lyda” to an arrangement of red hair and dark clothes—then went still again. She was angry. I’d made a mistake by not telling her I was leaving. Not as big a mistake as sleeping with her, but enough.

  At last she said, “Can I see it?”

  “Sure,” I said. Ollie concentrated on the changes in the scene: The object that swung toward her in her visual field must be, logically, my arm. From there she found my wrist, and slid a finger along my forearm. Tactile information integrated more easily than the visual. She peeled back the Band-Aid, pressed the tiny pink bump. She was as unself-conscious with my body as with her own.

  “So small,” she said.

  “My new portable conscience,” I said. “Like I needed another one.”

  Her fingers lingered on my skin, then fell away. “You’re going to look for that dead girl’s dealer.”

  I didn’t try to deny it. Even on meds Ollie was the smartest person I’d ever met, after Mikala.

  She closed her eyes, cutting out the visual distraction. She looked like a little girl. Told me once that her Filipino mother was 4’10”, her white Minnesota father over six feet, and she was still waiting for those Norwegian genes to kick in.

  “You can’t know that it’s the same drug that hit you,” she said without opening her eyes. “There are thousands of countertop tweakers out there. Somebody just happened to whip up something with the same symptoms.”

  The glories of the DIY smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and an internet connection could download recipes and print small-batch drugs. The creative types liked to fuck with the recipes, try them out on their friends. People swallowed paper all the time without knowing what they were chewing. Half the residents of the NAT ward weren’t addicts; they were beta testers.

  “You’re right,” I said flatly. “It’s probably not the same drug at all.”

  She opened her eyes. Now seeing right through me. “I can help you,” she said.

  There was a certainty in her voice. Ollie used to do things for the US government, and the US government used to do things to Ollie.

  “I don’t think they’re going to let you walk out of here,” I said. Ollie was not one of the voluntary patients. Like me, she’d been convicted of a crime, then sent here because the docs thought she was an interesting case. “Just stay here,” I said. “And heal.”

  Heal. That was a NAT joke.

  She said, “I can be out of here in two—”

  “Nurse,” I said in a low voice, warning her. We residents did this a lot on the ward, like kids playing in the street calling “car.”

  “Seconds,” Ollie finished.

  Dr. Gloria and one of the day-shift nurses walked toward the room. “Ready?” the nurse asked me.

  Dr. G looked at Ollie, then back toward me, a knowing smile on her face. “If you’re all done here,” she said.

  I picked up my bag. “I’ve got to go,” I said to Ollie. I touched her shoulder on the way out. This is me, the touch told her. This is me moving away from you.

  * * *

  “She’s in love with you, you know,” Dr. G said.

  “Hospital infatuation,” I said.

  We stood on the sidewalk outside the hospital, waiting for my ride under a gray sky leaking sunlight. Dirty snow banked the sidewalk, peppered with black deicer pellets. Behind us, staff and visitors passed in and out of the revolving doors like ions through a membrane.

  I folded up the plastic bag that contained my prescription and jammed my hands into the pockets of my thin jacket. It had been early fall when I went in, and my street clothes had failed to evolve while in storage. But I was not about to go back inside that building, even to stay warm. I was a free woman—tethered only by the plastic snitch attached to my vein, broadcasting each taste of my bloodstream to the ether.

  Dr. G had followed me out. “You’d be better off staying with her and finishing your sentence inside,” she said. “Less temptation. You were staying clean, Lyda.”

  “Edo’s making NME One-Ten.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “All Francine could talk about was ‘the Numinous.’ That is no fucking coincidence. Edo broke his promise.”

  “He never made that promise,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I made a promise to him.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Dr. Gloria said. “You’re pissed off. Have you considered that you’re overreacting to the girl’s death? You have a blind spot for little lost girls.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Lyda—”

  “I’m responsible for the drug that killed her.”

  “Even if the substance is the One-Ten, which is doubtful, that doesn’t mean that it’s Edo Vik.”

  “Then I guess I have to find out who is making it.”

  A car pulled up to the curb, a decrepit Nissan hybrid. The cost of the gas had to be enormous. The driver jumped out of the car, ran to me with arms out. “Lyda!”

  Bobby was a could-have-been-handsome white boy, twenty-three years old, with stiff black hair and almond eyes, so maybe a little Asian in the mix. A former ward-mate, and batshit crazy. But a good kid. More importantly, he lived in Toronto, and he owned a car.

  I let him hug me. The price to pay for the ride.

  “You look all healthy,” he said. Hanging from a leather thong around his neck was a small plastic treasure chest, one of those aquarium accessories with Real Working Hinge. He never went anywhere without it.

  “Where are we going?” he asked me.

  “Take me to my dealer.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Uh, are you sure?”

  “Relax. I just want to talk to him.”

  “You just got out of the ward. Don’t you want to go home?”

  “I don’t have a home. That apartment is long gone.”

  “Oh, then maybe a hotel?”

  “I’m getting cold out here, Bobby.”

  He opened the passenger door for me, then hustled around to the other side.

  Dr. Gloria said, “I can’t protect you if you don’t listen to me.”

  “Then stay here.”

  “Oh, you don’t get away that easy.” Dr. Gloria’s wings unfurled from her back with a snap, and the world vanished in a blaze of heavenly radiance. I winced and looked away.

  “Lo, I am with you always,” she said. I opened one eye. She pulsed like a migraine aura, throwing off megawatts of holy glow. Then her wings convulsed, and she was airborne.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We rode into Toronto on the 401 with Dr. Gloria flying point: a star to guide us. Bobby couldn’t see her, of course. The doctor was my permanent hallucination, a standing wave thrown up by my temporal lobe and supported by various other members of my mental parliament. My supernatural companion was a fake, but unlike Francine, I knew it.

  We left the highway and dropped south toward the lake. I rolled down the window, and cold wind filled the car.

  “What are you doing?” Bobby asked.

  I tossed out the bag containing my prescription bottles. “Ballast,” I said.

  “What?”


  “Eyes on the road, kid.” He slowed as we entered the university campus. It was a Wednesday, the start of the college weekend, so Brandy, my old dealer, would be working the frats. We cruised past Victorian houses lit up and vibrating with heavy bass. College boys in shorts stood outside, ankle deep in the snow. Girls in microdresses teetered on high heels across the icy sidewalks. Bobby drove slow, one hand on the treasure chest and the other on the wheel, while I kept an eye out for Brandy’s vehicle, a beat-up VW delivery van. Twice we jerked to a stop as drunken kids lurched into the street.

  “Jesus Christ, pull over,” I said.

  “Why are you mad?”

  “You’re distracted. You keep playing with yourself.”

  He let go of the treasure chest. “No I’m not.”

  His first week on the NAT ward, Bobby shyly explained to me that he used to live up here—he poked a finger at the spot between his eyes—but now he lived in there—the plastic chest. Most of us have the illusion that our consciousness sits behind our eyes like a little woman at the controls—very handy for steering a body, or a car. Bobby, however, thought he lived inside an aquarium toy. Who the hell knew what that did to your reflexes?

  I climbed out of the car. A few feet away, Dr. Gloria descended in a nimbus of righteousness. She folded her wings, adjusted her glasses. “Of course,” she said. “If you want to find a drug dealer, go to a college.”

  “Higher education,” I said. We were in front of a row of rundown frat houses that I assumed looked more glamorous through the alcohol-blurred eyes of the young. I walked up to a group of boys, all holding red plastic cups. “I’m looking for a guy named Brandy,” I said.

  They ignored me. I smacked the nearest one in the shoulder, and he jerked away from me, sending a fan of piss-colored beer across the snow. The other boys fell out laughing.

  I pointed to the next closest kid. “Where’s Brandy?”

  “Are you her mom?”

  “It’s a guy,” I said. “Brandy. Deals specialty stuff.”

  “Narc!” one of them said. Another of them took it up, quacking like a duck. “Narc! Narc!”

  “Yes, very good. You’ve penetrated my disguise. Now where the fuck is he?”

  The guy I’d whacked said, “Sigma Tau maybe?”

  “Yeah! The GFD party.”

  Most of them pointed in the same direction.

  “Thanks, boys.”

  I waved Bobby over to me, and the three of us walked the street, reading the giant Greek letters on the fronts of the buildings. Every house was rocking, the parties spilling outside. Scent trails of marijuana etched the cold air.

  A boy burst out the front door of the Sigma Tau house, threw up his hands, and screamed a war cry. He was skinny and naked but for a pair of flip-flops, grinning madly, with an erection like a wall sconce. He jumped down the steps, and half a dozen naked boys charged after him, hooting, beer sloshing from red cups. They ran straight at us, hard-ons first, like a herd of rhinos.

  “Oh geez,” Bobby said. The stampede broke around us. The lead boy ran for the corner, white ass shining, with the frat brothers in pursuit.

  “GFD,” Dr. Gloria said, getting it now. “Gay for a Day.”

  “Maybe we could come back later,” Bobby said nervously.

  I marched up the steps. The party was going full tilt. The crowd was all boys, many of them naked, others in boxers and tighty-whities and terrycloth kilts. I started asking for Brandy, and followed a chain of nods and maybes through the house. Doors hung open, every room part of the party. In some of them the brothers had thrown down mattresses and set up display tables stacked with condoms and lube. The kegs were decorated with rainbow bumper stickers. A male blow-up doll dressed in vinyl bondage gear lay sprawled across a foosball table. Nobody did gay kitsch like straight boys. And they were enjoying themselves. A pile of white bodies writhed in a kids’ wading pool, slathered and shining in Crisco. I stepped over two kids going at it on the stairs, the one on the bottom trying to hold onto his Natural Lite can.

  “Watch where you put your feet,” Dr. G said.

  In the basement, a dozen boys in various states of undress played beer pong, shouting over music that was half a beat behind the bass thumping from upstairs. I spotted our guy sitting on the couch. He was the only male in the house over twenty-five, and the only one wearing all his clothes. Chubby, grinning like a Baptist preacher, with tufts of gray hair sprouting from the neck of his sport shirt.

  He’d made the couch into his office. A shaggy-headed kid in Valentine-heart bicycle shorts held out a HashCash card, and Brandy tapped it with his smart pen—presto, crypto, anonymous monies transferred. He gestured for the boy to hold out his hand, then dropped four blue-and-green pills, one at a time, into his palm.

  “How you doing, Brandy?” I said.

  He looked up, then smiled wide. “Lyda Rose! My home-again rose!”

  I was afraid he was going to start singing. My mother liked musicals, and had named me after a number in The Music Man. This was not the worst gift she ever gave me—that would be her tote bag of genetic predispositions I inherited—but it was one of the most annoying.

  “I thought you left town!” Brandy said.

  “I’m back now.”

  “Wrong night for you!” I could never place his accent. Something Eastern European. “No action from these boys.”

  “I bet,” I said. “May I?”

  “I can’t see how they will do you much good.” He laughed, then handed me one of the capsules.

  I rolled it between two fingers. Blue with a band of green, a smudged “50mg” on the side. The drug had several street names—Flip, Velveeta, Vertical—but its brand name was Aroveta. Made by Landon-Rousse to treat hypothermia, it massively increased the production of vasopressin, a busy little peptide with a hand in vascular constriction (which is where the hypothermia application came in), but also kidney function, circadian rhythms, and sexual attraction. Aroveta had a few side effects, including water retention and wakefulness at night. Oh, and if you owned a dick, other dicks suddenly looked a lot more attractive. Not something that most fishermen pulled out of the chilly ocean were likely to appreciate.

  The party culture had turned all these bugs into features. Stay up late, stay hydrated, fuck your buddies … what’s not to like?

  Flip couldn’t turn you gay—sexual orientation was too deeply wired for that—but the drug did let the brothers get down for a night of uninhibited man-love, with a chemical third party to blame for any morning-after regrets. That wasn’t me, bro! It was the Flip!

  “The colors are wrong,” Dr. G said.

  She was right. The casing was too thick, opaque where it should have been translucent, and the blue was the wrong shade. The capsules definitely didn’t come out of a Landon-Rousse factory. Probably the product of a small-batch gel-cap press in somebody’s basement.

  I said to Brandy, “Do these kids know they’re knockoffs?”

  I didn’t raise my voice, and maybe he didn’t hear the whole sentence above the music. But I’m pretty sure he made out that last word. “Hey!” Brandy said angrily. “Enough of your crazy talk!”

  Bobby took offense at this. “She’s not crazy! She saved my life from a werewolf!”

  Brandy raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say?”

  “Were-hyena, actually,” I said.

  “Okay then,” Brandy said.

  “I’m looking for something,” I said. “Got a minute?”

  “Amphetamines? Oxy? I think I have all your favorite ingredients.”

  “Something special,” I said. “Can we talk somewhere without all these…”

  “Genitalia?” Dr. G asked.

  “… distractions?” I said.

  * * *

  Brandy had parked his van around the corner. I told Bobby I’d ride with Brandy, which may have been a mistake: The inside of the van smelled exactly like what it was, a rolling drug lab. I climbed in the front passenger seat, then pushed aside
the curtain that separated the compartments. Steel racks lined each side, bending under the weight of beige chemjet printers and car batteries. Foil precursor packs were scattered over the floor. The c-packs were technically legal for someone with the right papers (and Brandy had all the right papers), but break open those silver packages, and some major toxic shit would hit the air.

  “Jesus, Brandy,” I said. “You’re a movable cancer cluster.”

  We drove to a diner on Bloor Street. Brandy knew the waitress, who seated us in the back. I made Bobby sit next to the dealer, because Dr. Gloria wanted to sit down with us. God knows why.

  “I’m looking for something designer,” I said. “I think it’s new.”

  He opened his hands: Yes?

  “Some people call it Numinous,” I said. “Ever hear of it?”

  “Nope. What else does it go by?”

  I doubted anyone was calling the substance by its birth name of NME 110. “I don’t know. Maybe Logos. This one makes you see God.”

  “Like LSD?”

  “This is different, it operates on the temporal lobe, makes you—”

  “Because I can print LSD out in the parking lot,” Brandy said.

  “Please shut the fuck up and listen to me,” I said. Bobby winced. He didn’t like conflict.

  Brandy chuckled and raised his hands in mock surrender. The waitress arrived with water glasses and a plate of french fries and gravy, which she placed in front of Brandy. He thanked her with enthusiasm.

  “She walked away without taking our order,” Dr. G said, miffed.

  “The drug makes you feel like you’re in touch with a higher power,” I said to Brandy. “The supernatural being is there in the room with you. You can see it, integrated in the visual field. Sometimes it talks to you.”

  “It’s very convincing,” Dr. G said.

  “And it’s very annoying,” I said. “The drug makes you believe in the higher power. Depending on the dosage, the effect can last for hours or days. And if you OD…”

  Then it doesn’t go away. For the rest of your life, you have to expend a tremendous amount of energy, every day, reminding yourself that it’s a delusion.

  “Well, it’s exhausting,” I said. “Have you seen something like that?”