“A panacea!” I said. “I wish someone would bring me a panacea.”
“Oh? You’re not feeling well, Belt?”
“I’ve been better,” I said.
He took his cellphone from his pocket. “I’ll have Hogan bring some on over for you.”
“Right, sure. Please do that, Burroughs. Bring me my panacea posthaste!”
“I don’t get the tone,” he said, lowering the phone.
“The tone?” I said.
“Do you not want any Panacea, or are you…I mean, it wouldn’t put us out at all to give you some. We have a lifetime supply. A two-lifetime supply. Trip’s godfather brought some over back at the end of last summer. Big old carton of sample boxes. He was really excited about it. I guess he was the one—Baron Swords, I mean—he claimed he was the one on the board who came up with the angle to sell it as a dietary supplement instead of a drug, which made it a lot easier to get through the FDA trials. Anyway, he brought this carton of the stuff for Jonboat, who wouldn’t touch it. Doesn’t even like the idea of it, Jonboat, so he gave it to me.”
“I’m completely lost,” I said. “Panacea’s a drug?”
“Yes and no. That’s what I was saying. It’s a drug by any conventional definition of the word—it’s derived from spidge, comes in a pill, and it ‘increases acumen and promotes general psychological well-being’—but Swords bobbed and loopholed and convinced the FDA it was a dietary supplement, which means that, far as the FDA’s concerned, it’s a food.”
“And it works?” I said. “Increases acumen and so forth?”
“It sure seems to. Valentine, he can get pretty depressed sometimes, and he and Lotta, just a day or two before Jonboat gave me the Panacea, well the young lovers had themselves a pretty ugly falling-out, and Val was down about it—they’re all good now, engaged actually—but he took some Panacea for a week or so, and it really worked for him. He’d tried a lot of other stuff in the past, too—antidepressants, I mean—and they never did much for him. And, like I was saying before, I convinced Trip to take some, and he snapped out of his funk, posthaste as you’d say. He woke up the very next morning all full of purpose and energy. He ditched school for the week—I let him—and it was during that week that he made Colorized War Crimes. Ever since then, he’s been back to himself.”
“He’s happy again.”
“Happy? I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s ever really happy, but he’s definitely got that sense of purpose again, that energy. I mean, he made the movie, he’s kept up his grades, apologized to the former Yachts, and he’s even half-convinced Jonboat to move the family back to Manhattan and let him finish high school at this international arts academy for kids who are less…kids who are more like the people who’ll be buying his work. We’ll see what happens with that.”
“Well how much would you want for it?” I said.
“What are we talking about?”
“A week’s supply, I guess?” I said.
“Wait. What? What do you take me for, Belt? You just fed me fine Scotch and listened to me spill my guts for…” he said, and looked at his watch. “Oh dear, no time to take umbrage. I have to get back.” He stood, I stood, we shook hands and shoulder-clapped. “I’ll have some Panacea sent over,” he said. “Swords said it should be available to consumers in June, but I read one of these ‘cool your jets’–themed editorials in the Journal the other day that claimed the FDA approvals wouldn’t come through til October, so I’ll send you enough to last til October. If you like it, but for some reason the launch gets delayed past October, just call me, and I’ll send you more. We might be in New York by then, but I’ll have the same number.”
I thanked him and he left. On the stoop, at my feet, was a jewel case containing a disc marked Colorized War Crimes. I brought it inside, threw it away.
*1 Annie was my mother’s name.
*2 Owing to its pop-cultural provenance, I’m not certain that the phrase “hear the matrix” won’t soon become too anachronistic for future readers to make heads or tails of, yet given how accurately it describes what I mean, I’m (obviously) not quite uncertain enough about that not to deploy the phrase “hear the matrix” here, and so, in the spirit of splitting the difference, dear future reader, I’ve added this footnote.
The Matrix—a 1999 masterpiece of high-budget, paranoid, special-effects-driven sci-fi-action cinema by the Wachowski Sisters—relays the story of Neo, a talented cuddlefarmer/amateur formula designer (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who has a very special gift: he can hear and—as the film progresses, and he comes under the tutelage of Morpheus (played by Edward James Olmos)—disrupt “the matrix” of communications between Curios, which, as the film would have it, are not the adorable little robots the rest of the world (and, of course, the film’s audience) believes them to be, but rather the drone-like constituents of a large-scale, hive-minded artificial life system (“Just a bunch of glorified, goddamned ants!” Morpheus calls them, just before a small platoon of beautiful, acrobatically preternatural Curios forces him, via its irresistible adorability, to overload by mouth on ten of its constituents, one after the other, in rapid succession, until he chokes to death). This hive-minded artificial system’s aim, Neo discovers eventually (via hearing the matrix), is to continue to seduce (and thereby enslave) unknowing human beings into helping it reproduce and feed itself, until such a time when human scientists will create a formula for cures that allows the system to evolve into a wholly self-reliant (i.e. nonparasitic) being that, beloved as the cures are by all nonfeline animals, will take over the world after slaughtering all the cats.
I suppose that, to those who haven’t seen it, it sounds like a pretty silly movie, and perhaps it is, but, even at this writing, more than fifteen years past its theatrical release, it’s gorgeous to look at—all the CGI’d acts of adorability especially; particularly during the climax of the film, when Neo telepathically “enters” the matrix of cure communication, hearing that which is inaudible to the rest of us, then disrupting it via instructing the army of cures that is converging upon him to perform acts so overwhelmingly adorable that the cures themselves go into overload at the sight of one another, thus paralyzing their own advances—and, when it came out in theaters, it seemed inspired and unpretentiously postmodern.
A genre- and sequel-spawner exceeded in its cinematic influence only by the Star Wars trilogy, The Matrix was the fourth-highest-grossing film of the twentieth century, and it is thought to be, in large part, responsible for much of the seemingly inexhaustible market energy behind the Third Cute Revolution (for a couple of years in the early aughts, some even marked its theatrical release as the start of something they claimed to be “The Late Third Cute Revolution”). Furthermore, it launched the unparalleled film career of Benedict Cumberbatch, partly un-geeked the pursuit of formula design by garage-based enthusiasts, and, presumably, granted tens of thousands of young cuddlefarmers worldwide a greater capacity to fantasize that they innately possessed nascent superpowers that might one day enable them to save the world.