Afterparty

by Daryl Gregory

  “Nope,” Brandy said, chewing. Didn’t even pretend to think about it. Bobby eyed the plate of fries.

  “There was a homeless girl named Francine Selwig,” I said. “Cute chick, colored streaks in her hair. Her friends were getting it from some guy who ran a church.”

  “Does this preacher have a name?” Brandy asked.

  “I don’t have that, either.”

  “You’re wasting my time, Dr. Lyda.” He shoved several more goop-laden fries in his mouth, but chose, unfortunately, to continue talking. “I have horny college boys waiting for my product.”

  “You mean your placebo.”

  “My customers are happy. Did you not see how happy?” He lifted his forearm and made a fist. “Grrr.”

  “How much did you cut it?”

  “I’m offended.” He looked anything but offended. “Okay, maybe twenty-five percent dextrose. But it doesn’t matter, because what I give them is better than Aroveta. I add a secret ingredient.” His eyebrows levitated. “Sildenafil.”

  Everybody’s a cook, I thought. “That would work.”

  Bobby looked at Brandy, then back to me. “Wait, what would work?”

  “Sildenafil is what Viagra’s made out of,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “These boys are so easy,” Brandy said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin, then took out his smart pen and waggled it at me. “When the mast is high, it’s any port in a storm.”

  “I don’t think he knows how metaphors work,” Dr. G said.

  Brandy gripped the pen with two hands, snapped it in half, and dropped the two pieces onto his plate. It was a practiced gesture, like stubbing out a cigarette. Drug dealers, I thought, went through a lot of phones.

  He stood to leave, and I put out a hand.

  “Here’s what I’m buying,” I said. “Pass the word to your suppliers. Your other customers.”

  “You don’t want to talk to my suppliers, Doctor.”

  “Have them call Bobby. I don’t have a phone yet. I’ll pay good money to whoever tells me where to find Numinous.”

  “Oh, the good money?” Brandy said. “Not the bad money?” He fished a new smart pen from a plastic-wrapped six-pack of the devices.

  “Fine upstanding money,” I said. “Goes to church on Sunday.”

  Brandy grinned. “You look like a person who used to know money, but he left you for another woman.”

  “Back to metaphors,” Dr. G said.

  “I’ll look around,” he said. “But are you sure you don’t want me to print up one of your old favorites?”

  I thought of the little daub of plastic fastened to the inside of my forearm. “Maybe later,” I said.

  * * *

  My apartment was long gone, and all my belongings had been left behind in a storage locker. I didn’t have the energy to find out if the locker had been emptied and my stuff auctioned off because of lack of payment. Bobby seemed a little too happy that this meant that I was going to spend the night at his apartment. Not anything sexual to it; he just liked sleepovers.

  He waved his key fob at the door, but it refused to unlock. He fiddled with the lock, waved the fob again. Finally he got it to open.

  “No pillow fights,” I said.

  “Ha!” A bark like a Tourette’s outburst, direct from his body and unmediated by the consciousness in the treasure chest.

  His apartment was a single-bedroom place over a Turkish takeout, and the smell of fried onions had risen up to bake into the carpet and paint every surface. The furniture looked like it had been collected from a variety of garage sales: a brown-and-orange couch; a blue swivel chair with a broken strut, tilted at an angle; a white wicker table from a lawn set. The kitchen was just big enough for one person to stand in and spin. No room for an oven, just a fold-down cooktop and a hanging microwave.

  So. This is where Bobby lived. We’d spent three months together on the ward, and in that time I learned what he was most afraid of, and the kind of person he wanted to be, and how he felt about me. I understood, for lack of a better word, his heart. But I didn’t know what his job was now, if he had a job at all, or who his friends were, where his parents lived, or what he liked on his pizza. That was the nature of bubble relationships. Prison, army, hospital, reality show—they were all pocket universes with their own physics. Bobby and I were close friends who hardly knew each other.

  He smiled, embarrassed. He gestured toward the bedroom door. “My roommate lives in there,” he said. “He never comes out. Well, hardly ever. I sleep on the couch.” He quickly added, “But not tonight! That’s for you. I’m going to sleep on the floor.”

  Dr. G said, “We can’t let him do that.”

  I thought, Sure we can. I’m a forty-two-year-old woman. He’s a twenty-something kid with a good back. “I’ll need clean sheets,” I said.

  His eyes shifted up and right. Trying to picture where, in this tiny apartment, there might be undiscovered clean linens. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and turned toward the front door.

  “Wait, can I borrow your pen? I need to send some messages.”

  He fished it out of his pocket. “Pull on the side-thingy to get the screen.”

  “I am familiar with your advanced technology,” I said.

  “Right, right.” He pointed at me. “Breakfast! What should I buy for breakfast?”

  “Just coffee,” I said.

  Bobby locked the door behind him—trying to protect me. I went to the bedroom door and listened for the hermit roommate, but I heard nothing but a hum that could have been a room fan.

  Still, I moved to the far side of the room before I opened the pen’s screen. “Message to Rovil Gupta,” I said. A stream of faces and contact details scrolled down the screen. Dozens of Rovils, starting with those geographically closest to me. I recognized the one I was looking for, even though it had been ten years since we’d seen each other. He worked for Landon-Rousse, and his title was now VP of Sales—a promotion since the last time I’d checked. Good for you, little Rovil.

  I touched the icon of his face and said, “It’s me, Lyda.” The words appeared under Rovil’s face: It’s me, Lyda. “I thought we should talk.” There was too much to say for one message. Hey, so I’m out of the crazy house for the third time, I’m on electrochemical probation, and oh, Edo’s cooking our old product.

  “Call soon,” I said. “It’s about … spiritual matters.” I signed off.

  I wasn’t sure the message would get through. This phone ID wouldn’t be on his white list, and Rovil’s spam filters might block me out of hand.

  The pen chimed. The screen was still extended, and now Rovil’s face—streaming live, no icon—smiled up at me.

  Shit. I’d sent the message, but I wasn’t prepared to have the conversation now. Who immediately calls back like that?

  I put on a pleasant expression, then clicked to answer. “How you doing, kid?”

  “I can’t believe it! Lyda!”

  Still the enthusiast. Rovil was our first and only hire at Little Sprout, our designated Rat Boy, though we had stopped calling him that when a visitor thought it sounded racist. He was fresh out of school then, but in no time became Mikala’s right hand. The chemistry wizard’s apprentice.

  “You look like you’re doing all right for yourself,” I said. “VP now?” Landon-Rousse was one of the Big Four pharmaceutical companies, with headquarters in Belgium but offices everywhere.

  He looked bashful. “Everybody’s a vice president,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy here.”

  We hadn’t spoken since the Greenland Summit, ten years before. That meeting hadn’t ended well. I told both Edo and Rovil to fuck off and never talk to me again. Rovil, obedient kid that he was, did as I asked. Even Edo gave up eventually—before disappearing completely.

  Every so often over the past few years, usually when I was drunk and feeling maudlin, I’d do a search on my friends from Little Sprout. Gil’s status was always the same—still incarcerated.
And all the news on Edo Anderssen Vik was either (a) corporate PR-speak from his own company, or (b) speculation on why he’d disappeared from public view. But Rovil seemed to be leading an actual life. I was relieved when he went to grad school, happily surprised when he was hired at Landon-Rousse, then pleased every time his title changed to something more important. I wondered if he’d managed to hide his crazy, or if he was so good that the company kept him on despite it. Maybe Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles, had cleared the way.

  The small talk stuttered to a stop. He had to be wondering why I’d called him after ten years of silence, but he was too polite to ask. Did he know about my stints in rehab, the car crashes, the psych wards?

  I said, mock-casually, “So, have you heard from the others? Edo, Gil…?”

  He blinked. “Gilbert, no, of course not!” Poor Rovil, walking on eggshells just saying the name in my presence.

  “I hear he’s allowed to have visitors,” I said.

  Rovil’s eyes widened. “You’re not thinking of—?”

  “No, no. It’s Edo I want.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That may be difficult.”

  “I tried calling him on an old private number, but it’s dead now. Every address I’ve found online for him is corporate, blocked by either voicemail or receptionists. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t called me back.”

  “I know, I know,” Rovil said. “A couple times over the years I tried to reach out to him, but he never responds.” He grinned. “Like some other people I know.”

  Wow, little Rovil yanking my chain. “I’ve had some issues,” I said. “But Edo … what happened to him?”

  “He hasn’t been seen in years,” Rovil said. “I’m not even sure what country he stays in. He’s a, what’s the word? Not a hermit…”

  “A recluse. Growing his fingernails, storing his urine in jars, that kind of thing.”

  “What have you heard?” Rovil said, shocked. Missing the reference entirely.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “I have a favor to ask.”

  Rovil considered this, then with complete earnestness said, “If I can provide it, it’s yours.”

  “Get me Edo’s private number.”

  “I told you, no one knows—”

  “He’s got to have lawyers, staff, whatever. Get a message through to him. He likes you, Rovil. He’ll respond to you. Tell him it’s important.”

  “What is it? What’s happened?”

  My instinct was to keep him out of it as long as possible. Rovil was the youngest of us at Little Sprout, and not even a partner. He shouldn’t have been caught up in what happened at the party. But he had been there, and he’d gone down like all of us. The little Christian boy woke up with a Hindu god in his head. We were part of a very small club.

  I asked, “Is this a company line?”

  He processed the meaning of the question. “It’s my personal device.”

  That didn’t mean that no one was listening. Landon-Rousse might be monitoring its executives’ private communications. Plenty of corporations had been caught doing the same. But if Rovil was comfortable, I decided to risk it.

  “I met someone who saw God,” I said.

  Rovil tilted his head, not quite getting it.

  “Someone is making Numinous.” That he got. The word went off like an information grenade, and I watched his face shift through several emotions before he controlled himself and settled on an expression of Polite Doubt.

  “You … did you have some of One-Ten left over?”

  “No. It’s new.”

  “Perhaps it’s some other drug. Do you have it with you?”

  “Not yet. I’m working on it.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see how that’s possible. Little Sprout shut down before the trial. We all agreed that no one—” His eyes widened. “You think Edo is doing this?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just want to talk to him.”

  “But he’s a … spiritual man,” Rovil said. “We are all spiritual people now.”

  “Not all gods are created equal,” I said. “Rovil?”

  He wasn’t looking at the screen. He was imagining our friend Edo breaking the law, and our trust. I’d blown his mind.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “A coincidence.”

  His eyes slid back to me. “How can I help?”

  “Now that you bring it up,” I said. “I need to borrow five thousand dollars.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Oh, we were such geniuses. A company of smarty-pants. Mikala the chemistry wizard, Gil the tech brain, Edo the money man, and me—the neuroscientist with the brilliant idea that we could cure the Afghanistan of mental disorders.

  The disease of schizophrenia was a quagmire, swallowing the careers of scientists of all stripes. The definition of what it was and wasn’t constantly shifted. Its causes were various and overlapping, with research pointing to everything from genetic mutations to socioeconomic status to amphetamine use … or all at the same time.

  Whatever the causes, one effect showed up clearly on the MRIs: The brains of actively schizophrenic patients withered with each passing year. Frontal and temporal lobes shrank in volume, and the connections between the lobes became unreliable. The brain literally disintegrated. The illusion of a unified consciousness broke down; now when other parts of the brain spoke, the messages seemed to be coming from outside agents hovering menacingly just out of sight, whispering threats. My mother had fought this civil war for thirty years, and lost.

  I’d had the idea for a drug that could trigger new growth in those withering lobes, a little sprout in the dying forest. Mikala was going to make it happen. We were as confident as marines.

  But no drug, especially one that crosses the blood-brain barrier, can change just one thing. Unintended secondary effects abound. A drug for hypertension can become a treatment for erectile dysfunction. A hypothermia medicine can find new life in sex parties. And a chemical designed to grow neurons in damaged brains can destroy five lives in a single night.

  Edo threw the party at Cité at the Lake Point Tower. A private room big enough for friends and family, surrounded by glass, Chicago lit up around us like an undersea kingdom. Kensington Inc. was buying us out. We were all going to be rich. True, Edo was already a billionaire, and we’d never approach his heights, but we were all going to be so much more wealthy than we’d ever been before. New Molecular Entity 110, the latest NME in a long string of disappointments (a hundred and nine, to be exact), was showing promise, and in the world of bioengineering start-ups, promises were bait, and a big fish had taken the line.

  Mikala didn’t attend the restaurant, and we were all relieved. She was the only one of the partners who didn’t want to sell. Outvoted and angry, she’d told us we weren’t just wrong, we were fools. Not just greedy, but evil. She accused me of voting against her out of spite.

  The marriage had come apart over the past year. However, until the buyout offer we had never argued, never yelled. We slept in the same bed, ate breakfast across from each other, drove together to the industrial park where Little Sprout’s labs were located, and worked in the same room, never more than twenty feet apart. We kept up our routine. Eventually I realized that it was the routine that was keeping us. The marriage had become a set of autonomic responses that let us absent ourselves without having to separate.

  I told myself that Mikala exited first. She’d started working later hours, going in to the building without me. She no longer needed me for her work, and maybe, I realized, not at all. She’d always been smarter than I was, but now there was something new in her face, something like pity, as if she understood things I’d never comprehend. What wounded me most was her newfound calm. She was happy. Happier than she’d ever been when we depended on each other. I should have known when she began calling our product Numinous that she’d started using it. She’d found her god, and we mortals had stopped mattering to her.

  The party at Cité stretched on, until the
friends and spouses and parents went home and the hotel staff kicked us out of the glass room. The four of us—Edo, Gil, Rovil, and me—took the elevator down to the condo Edo had borrowed from equally rich friends. Edo, burly and towering over us all, was so drunk he kept skimming the walls of the corridor. Gil, who was a foot shorter than Edo but at least the same weight, seemed only a few drinks behind him. Rovil and I, the sober sherpas, guided them to the room.

  It was sometime past 3 a.m. when Rovil said, “Guess who’s here?” Mikala had appeared, carrying a bottle of champagne, already opened. She wasn’t intoxicated—not with alcohol, anyway. She was wide awake, vibrating with energy.

  Edo threw open his arms and cheered. Too drunk to realize how awkward the moment was. Edo and Rovil the only ones happy to see her.

  “I came to apologize,” Mikala said.

  Gil said, “You sure about that?”

  “We made something great,” Mikala said. “It’s right to celebrate that.”

  But only Mikala truly understood what we’d created. The rest of us knew only that NME 110 had passed the preclinical tests. The FDA had approved us to go forward with phase I trials, the “first-in-man” trials. Kensington would now finance the human testing, which could cost millions. Only then, we thought, would we find out if we’d created something that could change the lives of people, or only change the behavior of rats. The NME was a lottery ticket that Kensington was willing to pay for, one drug of thousands that went to phase I every year. Only a handful made it to phase II.

  Mikala filled our glasses with her champagne. I told her no, I wasn’t drinking. Her eyes narrowed. Rovil said, “Well I am,” and held out his glass.

  Edo roared with laughter. “If the Christian boy from India’s drinking, we’re all drinking.”

  I held out my glass. What could one drink hurt?

  I do not remember anything after that moment except fragments. Edo’s booming voice. Mikala touching my belly. A light so pure and white that it seemed to bore holes through my eyes to the back of my skull. And a knife.

  I remembered staring at the blade. It was a big kitchen knife, and someone was prying my fingers from the handle. I don’t remember seeing the face of the person who took it from me. I felt the wood slipping out of my hand, and I did not want to let it go.