by Rich Horton
He blinked. “So if it's that easy to get people unhooked, why didn't—"
Mac shook his head and he looked almost pitying. “You really are naïve, man. Get back to your desk before Madison starts wondering. And let me know how it goes."
"Yeah,” Sam said. “Thanks so much.” He slipped the pill bottle into his pocket. It shook and danced with every step he took back to the office.
* * * *
When Sam got home, he could tell Liz had been out.
They ate dinner in sullen silence, and once she fell asleep, he went hunting for her stash. Six pink pills went out of the folded napkin in the stereo speaker, and five pink pills went back into it.
* * * *
For a day, there was relative peace.
Sam managed to make his excuses to Mom and cooked them Christmas dinner, the old-fashioned kind where he fumbled through an ancient recipe book and left the turkey in the oven too long and bought egg nog. It was hard to take his eyes off Liz even to cook. Of course it was too soon for any changes to show, if there were to be any changes. But the way she held her glass at dinner looked just different enough, and the way he remembered her doing it before was just fuzzy enough...
He shook his head. She might get off the drug, but he was going to drive himself crazy.
She was quiet throughout dinner, not the angry-quiet of the last week, but ... almost pensive. Content. It was vaguely unnerving.
She offered to do the dishes, and she offered to warm up the eggnog, and he let her, just to get a break from staring at her face for a few minutes. He sat down on the black leather couch and stared at the black and silent television instead, stark against the white walls, reflecting across-the-street's Christmas lights through the window in a weird blur of green and red.
"Sam?"
Something was wrong. She'd found out. She was going to run off again and he'd never find her in time. He stumbled over his own feet and practically jumped into the kitchen.
She was sitting at the table, and there was a mug before the empty black wood chair across from him. “Eggnog's ready.” She was looking into her mug, and there were faint worry lines creasing her forehead.
Had she figured it out? What would he say if she did?
He took a long swallow of the eggnog, another.
Something small and solid went down his throat.
Sam almost gagged, but it was gone; he could almost feel it wending its way down into his stomach. “Liz ... what the hell—"
"Oh, c'mon,” she frowned softly. “You need to loosen up. Baby brother, always so serious. It's not good to be so serious this young. That's how you end up all perfect and empty and you don't know where it all went."
The warmth going down through his body started to burn. He coughed, then harder, as if he could force it up. But it was gone, it was in him and she'd put it—"You put something in my drink! Liz, how could you—"
She shrugged. “You're always so sad. I don't want you to be sad. I'm the big sister. I'm supposed to take care of you, right?"
She'd given him Bliss. He was going to fail his next drug test. He was going to turn into an addict. It would fry his brain.
But it wasn't Bliss, of course.
Mac's medication.
Sam's eyes went wide as his mug crashed to the floor, his knees buckled, his body hit the black-and-white tile with a thud.
All those thoughts went through his head at once, and then that one did too, and he realized he could see spectra in the fluorescent track lighting, he could see minute flaws in the floor tiles, he could feel the humming of the fridge in his back and calculate its frequency, and through that calculate just how cold of a temperature it was maintaining: two degrees higher than it should, and of course that was why the milk had spoiled last week.
It was incredible.
He thought he heard Liz scream.
* * * *
He couldn't sleep.
Thoughts burned through his mind one after the other, hissing like racecars he could only perceive a second after they had already passed. Liz had carried—no, dragged—him to bed: he could feel soft pillow pressure texture springs. He could calculate his weight from how hard the mattress pushed back into his spine and a few equations he'd forgotten from first-year Physics. The zipper of his suitcase, the rustle of his phone book's pages, and then Mac was there; Sam could hear his voice somewhere above, blurring with speed, refracted into frequencies. He could pinpoint how far away it was from the acoustics alone.
The thoughts crowded his head like they never had, every bad night of worried insomnia in the world compacted into one little pill. He remembered things long forgotten or pushed by the wayside: flavours, feelings, all fuzzy and half-there, almost as if they were a dream.
I've been sleeping my whole life. I've only come awake just now.
He couldn't sleep now. He was alive.
Phone ring; Liz's voice, worried and with a strain of snappish stress he hadn't heard in forever; time, in which he viewed the entirety of a Picasso exhibit he'd seen at fourteen all over again, listened to symphonies, calculated his annual budget, realized what he needed to get promoted and planned it all out; then more voices, his mom's voice, hysterical, this is all your fault you stupid—
Shit.
His brain started planning damage control.
If Mom was here then Liz must have called, so they must have been talking, but it didn't sound good, it sounded really bad, and there it was again—I should have known you should have been responsible you were older and your father would never have put up with he would have dealt with you—and they were going to fight, and that couldn't happen because he had to keep the peace one way or another until he could understand her and maybe make Mom understand her so there would be peace in the house and it was Christmas, for God's sake even if statistically that was the worst time for families didn't Mac say something the other day about that? and ohyeah Mac was here, pushing something into his mouth, he could tell because Mac always smelled like those damned cleaners they used in the lab, stingy and sharp, and had to swallow or he'd choke and throw up and people died like that—
And then—
Joy.
It rocketed through his veins for just an instant before the centrifuge of his brain slowed, before his eyes could open, before his heart stopped pounding hard enough to break his ribs.
Liz's face hovered above him, tight with strain. “Sam?"
His mouth worked, experimentally. “Ummm."
"Oh God.” Tears sprung from her eyes and spattered his chest. “Oh God you're okay. I'm so sorry, I'm sorry. I'll never touch the shit again. I swear. I swear."
"You're goddamned right you'll never touch—"
"Ummm.” He said to his mother.
His eyes closed and the darkness took him.
* * * *
When he woke up again Mac was sitting beside the bed. His eyes were far away again, the scientist eyes. Observing, calm, not at all like he'd probably been pulled away from a Christmas dinner of his own—was Mac even Christian?—and dumped into the middle of a family fight.
They were fighting. He could hear Liz screaming through the solid bedroom door. He could hear his mother's angry low cold tone sneaking beneath it.
His eyes fluttered. His thoughts were so damned slow. Why couldn't he think?
"Sam?” Mac stood up. Fingers pressed against his forehead, and they were freezing. “Shit, you're running a temperature. You need liquids."
"...sorry...” he squeezed out, but Mac was already out the door.
He came back after what felt like an eternity with a mug and blankets, propped Sam's limp body upwards, and held the mug up to his lips. Sam sipped: hot chocolate, just warm enough to feel good, just cool enough so it didn't burn his tongue. Chocolate releases endorphins into the bloodstream, his mind whispered. We like it because it's chemical. After a few more sips he could hold it himself in steadying hands.
"Are they...?"
Mac shrugged, but
his eyes were dark. “I don't know what's normal around your house. They're fighting. Your sister's pretty torn up. She's a smart woman: addicts don't usually have short-term memory retention that good, especially for names.” He paused. “You're lucky, man."
"She said she wasn't going to take it anymore."
"Yah. I told them about the meds."
"It works. The pills. It felt...” he shook his head. “Fast."
Mac's impassive Doctor Face twitched just a little. “That's something.” He stood before Sam could get a good look at his face. “I'll go get your sister. I have to get home; it's almost two in the morning. Kim's probably worried sick."
"How'd you come up with that so fast? I mean—” Sam paused as the Doctor Face slipped; there was a wistfulness, a hunger in Mac's eyes that he'd never seen before.
"It's been a long time since I did research,” Mac said quietly. “But I always keep my notes."
He opened the door and then shut it again behind him. A few quiet words—Sam caught don't fuss, fragile, untested before Liz came in and carefully sat herself down.
Sam huddled under the blankets and cupped his fingers around the mug of hot chocolate. They were freezing cold, and they moved so slowly, almost as slow as the thoughts in his head. It made him want to whimper or cry or scream; he'd been moving so fast.
And now it was gone, and he was empty, and everything was still the same. Slow and sticky and living in a dream. A nightmare of illusion and stupidity and not understanding a damn thing.
"What?” Liz said sharply.
He realized he'd been speaking out loud, that he was still muttering under his breath. Sam shook himself and took another sip from his mug. It was shiny black, and his sheets were crisp white, and both were hurting his eyes. The whole apartment was hurting his eyes.
"Sam?” her voice was anxious, raw-edged.
"Nothing,” he said. “Nothing."
* * * *
Hours passed, he drank, he stood up, he lay down. Liz took his temperature; his mother fussed and wept and scowled despite whatever Mac had said to them.
Finally, he was alone in bed, with the night greying into winter dawn. Christmas Day. He couldn't sleep.
Liz was going to take the meds and get off the Bliss. She and Mom were talking again. Talking loudly, yeah, but talking. He didn't need to keep her secret from Mom anymore. He could go back to his job and his life and it was going to be okay.
There was something missing.
He should have been happy.
Instead there was just this slow, dull, thickness swirling through his brain. He couldn't live like this; it was like having his legs cut off. He had had such capacity, such ability. He'd been so himself.
It was a drug, Sam. It wasn't real. You know it wasn't real.
"Then why do I feel so...?” he asked the walls.
Curled up on the floor of his bedroom in a sleeping bag, Liz stirred and rolled over in her sleep.
He wasn't going to be an addict. Maybe he did think he was better than Liz, because he could function without fake happiness just fine, so he could function without fake knowledge too. He would go back to work and back to his life and forget this had happened, bury it away. He would never touch anything so strong as a martini ever again, and it didn't matter if he forgot things, or if there were things he never figured out or didn't know, or if there ended up being limits to his own intelligence—
It felt like being alive. I could remember how Dad's aftershave smelled.
He shoved that thought away.
He knew exactly where Liz's stash was. Three little pills wrapped in a napkin, stuffed into the back of his stereo speaker. He slid out of bed, opened the white door on silent white hinges, and padded across the living room, past his sleeping mother on the black couch, to the black wall unit with the black stereo. One hand dug in, removed one little pink pill from the folded napkin, replaced it in its warren.
Maybe he'd need it someday. Maybe there'd be a problem he couldn't solve. It was wise, he reasoned, to save something like this for contingencies, for emergencies. For a rainy day.
Sam ghosted back into his bedroom, eased himself shakily into bed with a careful glance at Liz. She didn't even twitch. There was no peace on her face this time, just sheer blank exhaustion. With or without the Bliss, she was never really going to be happy. People made their own happiness. It didn't get handed to them on a silver platter, or in a little pink pill. He'd made his own happiness.
He tucked his pill into a tissue, wedged it in the back of his nightstand drawer where the particle-board pieces met. It would be safe there, if he needed it.
He rolled over and fell asleep just as the sun started to rise.
* * * *
After the holidays, Liz moved back in with Mom. The pills had worked. She didn't need the Bliss anymore, or at least her body didn't. Their mother still called him every few days, worried, tense, frustrated with the idea of a teenager she hadn't seen for ten years and hadn't been able to handle even then. She cried at night, Mom said. She went to work, and she went out with guys every so often—always checked out for drugs and home by eleven—but there wasn't that light in her eyes anymore, Sammy. She just isn't how she was as a little girl.
Sam would listen, and nod, and uh-huh, I understand, we have to understand. She's not going to be the same. She'll never be the same, Mom. We just have to love her how she is.
But she was such a perfect little girl, his mother would say, and trail off confused.
Sam went back to work. He remembered enough of his plan to write it down and get promoted. Mac changed jobs too, but into a new department: Chemical Research and Development, a department funded by some uncanny new developments R&D had reached; by rights it should have taken years to write a programming language like that. Sam didn't see him in the lab anymore, and the lab tests stayed quarterly. Every so often someone had an unexpected few days off after Lab Day, and nobody could quite understand it, because they seemed normal, right?
Days like that, Sam went home and his thoughts felt slow as mud. He stared at lines of code and couldn't think. Something cold and empty started gnawing at his guts, and the black-and-white tiles, the white sheets, the black electronics hurt his eyes and head and heart and it was just too damned much for one person to take.
Days like that, Sam went into his bedroom and dug a ratty tissue out of the back of his nightstand drawer, unwrapped it until the little pink pill rested in his hand, and stared at it for hours.
So long as he had that little pink pill, it would be okay.
He could use it if he needed it, and be fast again, be happy and sharp and powerful again, and then everything would be all right.
He had it right there.
Just in case of an emergency.
Then he would wrap it up and put it back, and make some hot chocolate.
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Finished by Robert Reed
—
What did I plan? Very little, in truth. An evening walk accompanied by the scent of flowers and dampened earth, the lingering heat of the day taken as a reassurance, ancient and holy. I was genuinely happy, as usual. Like a hundred other contented walkers, I wandered through the linear woods, past lovers’ groves and pocket-sized sanctuaries and ornamental ponds jammed full of golden orfes and platinum lungfish. When I felt as if I should be tired, I sat on a hard steel bench to rest. People smiled as they passed, or they didn't smile. But I showed everyone a wide grin, and sometimes I offered a pleasant word, and one or two of the strangers paused long enough to begin a brief conversation.
One man—a rather old man, and I remember little else—asked, “And how are you today?"
Ignoring the implication, I said, “Fine."
I observed, “It's a very pleasant evening."
"Very pleasant,” he agreed.
My bench was near a busy avenue, and sometimes I would study one of the sleek little cars rushing past.
"The end of a wonderful day
,” he continued.
I looked again at his soft face, committing none of it to memory. But I kept smiling, and with a tone that was nothing but polite, I remarked, “The sun's setting earlier now. Isn't it?"
The banal recognition of a season's progression—that was my only intent. But the face colored, and then with a stiff, easy anger, the man said, “What does it matter to you? It's always the same day, after all."
Hardly. Yet I said nothing.
He eventually grew tired of my silence and wandered off. With a memory as selective as it is graceful, I tried to forget him. But since I'm talking about him now, I plainly didn't succeed. And looking back on the incident, I have to admit that the stranger perhaps had some little role in what happened next.
I planned nothing.
But a keen little anger grabbed me, and I rose up from the bench, and like every pedestrian before me, I followed the path to the edge of the avenue. Later, I was told that I looked like someone lost in deep thoughts, and I suppose I was. Yet I have no memory of the moment. According to witnesses, I took a long look up the road before stepping forwards with my right foot. The traffic AI stabbed my eyes with its brightest beam, shouting, “Go back!” But I stepped forwards again, without hesitation, plunging directly into the oncoming traffic.
A little pink Cheetah slammed on its brakes. But it was an old car with worn pads—a little detail that couldn't have found its way into my calculations—and despite the heroic efforts of its AI pilot, the car was still moving at better than eighty kilometers an hour when it shattered my hip and threw my limp body across the hood, my chest and then my astonished face slamming into the windshield's flexing glass.
Again, I tumbled.
Then I found myself sprawled in a heap on the hot pavement.
For a thousand years, I lay alone. Then a single face appeared, scared and sorry and pale and beautiful. Gazing down through the mayhem, she said, “Oh, God. Oh, shit!"
With my battered mouth, I said, “Hello."
Leaking a sloppy laugh, I told her, “No, really, I'll be fine."
Then I asked, “What's your name?"
"Careless,” she said. “Stupid,” she said. And then she said, “Or Bonnie. Take your pick."
