Afterparty (3 page)

“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?”

“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.