“Okay. Sure. I mean, it’s pretty standard. I just…” She reaches for a mortar and pestle on the windowsill next to the table, sets it down beside the bowl of spines. She selects three spines, drops them in the mortar, and as she crushes them with the pestle, says, “So I just put these spines in, and crush them up into powder with this mortar and pestle, and that’s…that.” She tips the mortar toward the camera, revealing a fine, beige/white/gray powder peppered with larger, sharp fragments. She crushes the fragments in the mortar with the pestle.
“This seems like a pretty standard preparation,” says the woman.
“No shit,” says the girl, crushing the fragments.
“I thought there was some kind of special preparation. All the kids on campus who we’ve interviewed say you’re famous around here for your spidge. That it’s the best.”
“I am. It is. Like I told you before we started, though, the spines is the special part.”
“I thought you meant that the…Well, how so? How are they the special part?”
“How so? Okay. So, most other people,” says the girl, “use all the bones. I use only the spines.”
“You’ve said that, but I still don’t—I mean, that’s it? There’s nothing else that—”
“That’s it, sister.”
“How can that be it?”
“Do you know what spidge is?” says the girl. “I mean, do you understand what gets you high?”
“I think so, yes. But why don’t you tell me.”
“Well what gets you high are these chemicals that the Curio’s body produces when it auto-deactivates as a result of losing access to your body heat. And you know, if the Curio’s formulized when it autodacts, that, too—that’ll affect it.”
“Formulized or PerFormulized?”
“Doesn’t matter. I mean, the type of high differs a little on the like upsies-downsies scale depending on what formula you gave the Curio, but no matter what formula—if you use any at all—the chemicals I’m talking about get produced while the Curio’s doing all that grievy-looking stuff before it autodacts, and those chemicals get stored in the marrow, and the marrow, that’s what gets you high, right? You digest the marrow, you get high. You dry it out, burn it, inhale the smoke, and you’re high. And if you’re some kind of weird nasal masochist, you snort it, and—”
“You get high. Okay.”
“Now, for whatever reason, the marrow in the spine has a higher concentration of those chemicals in it. Like literally twenty-five to thirty times as high as in a rib or a femur or whatever. I heard that has something to do with the spinal fluid—I don’t know—but it’s a lot higher, you know? And incidentally, that’s why when you get little kids who want spidge but they aren’t willing to do the so-called dirty work of making it, and they don’t know anyone they can get it from—that’s why, when those kids try, as they invariably do, to get high by swallowing a whole, autodacted cure, it doesn’t ever work.”
“You lost me.”
“Because the spine is the hardest thing to digest. That is: one doesn’t digest it. Can’t digest it. And when it leaves your body the next day or whenever, it’s mostly intact, marrow and all. So the majority of the chemicals that get you high go…out with it, the spine.”
“That’s interesting, if that’s true—”
“It’s true.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t. I believe you. But what’s interesting is that, in principle, if someone were to swallow, what, maybe five or six whole autodacted Curios, they could maybe absorb enough of the chemicals from the other, more digestible bones to get a little high, no?”
“Well, yeah. In principle. But who’s gonna do that? Have you ever swallowed an autodacted Curio?”
“No. It’s…”
“Inexplicably gross.”
“Yes. But maybe that’s just a matter of taste.”
“Sure. And maybe the same goes for eating carrion. There’s probably, like, ten people out of seven billion who love to eat them some carrion, but, well…You’ve probably met a lot of people who’ve swallowed down or tried to swallow down an autodacted cure, right? I mean, I know I have.”
“Sure.”
“One in three? One in four people?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s call it two in five.”
“So that’s a lot of people, right? And how many of them you know have swallowed down or tried to swallow down an autodacted cure a second time?”
“Right.”
“None, right?”
“Right. Good point.”
“Anyway.”
“So you were saying that you only use spines in your spidge because the concentration of the drug in the spine marrow is higher and—”
“A lot higher.”
“A lot higher, and so, what do you do with the rest of the skeleton? You just throw the rest away?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because there’s still drugs in it, no?”
“In this little documentary exposé movie thing you’re making, you have any footage of anyone smoking out?”
“Of course. Lots.”
“Well have you noticed how, after each hit, they take a pin or a toothpick or whatever and kind of poke and stir around the spidge inside the bowl?”
“I guess I’ve seen that.”
“They’re doing that because the bowl is filled up with powder, and most of that powder is bone, which does not get you high, and so they’re trying to expose the unsmoked marrow so that when they light the bowl the next time, they don’t just char bone and swallow a bunch of heat. And it’s a not-so-fun thing to do, you know? Especially after the fifth or sixth hit, when a) you want to be just enjoying your high already, and b) the remaining, ever-shrinking proportion of marrow is harder and harder to expose. And so if you use a whole skeleton, you do it a lot, this poking, whereas if you just use a spine, which adds up to about an eighth the powder of a whole skeleton, you get more high in fewer hits, and with way less futzing around with your toothpick or safety pin or whatever.”