“Cute,” he said.
“It’s the best!” I said.
“By the way,” my mom said, “where’d you learn about Valium?”
“What do you mean?”
“They teach you about it in Health Class?”
“In Health Class?” I said. “Like in a hearing unit or…?”
“A hearing unit?” she said. “Is there a hearing unit in Health Class? I was thinking maybe a psychology unit or—”
“I don’t know if there’s a hearing unit,” I said. “Maybe. There hasn’t been yet.” I was very confused. “But who doesn’t know about volume?” I said.
“Valium,” my mom said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not volume. It’s Valium.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Valium is a drug,” my mom said. “A sedative. It keeps you calm. People take it so they don’t have nervous breakdowns—that’s what the joke was. They were running from the biker gang, and Eddie Murphy was scared, but the golden child was completely calm so he asked him, ‘Did somebody give you a Valium, or what?’ ”
“That’s not that great,” I said. “Why would that be great?” I said. “No. It was volume.”
“It was Valium,” my dad said.
“You didn’t see the movie.”
“I don’t need to see the movie, Billy. It was obviously Valium.”
“It was Valium, Belt,” my mom said.
“How would volume be funny, anyway?” my dad said.
“It’s like he’s saying there’s a volume knob that…Forget it.”
I didn’t want to explain. I knew they were right and I felt like a fool. Worse than a fool. A couple months earlier, inans had begun attempting to speak to me. Just a word here and there—no complete sentences: a ||Please|| or ||Please help|| or ||need|| or ||I need,|| but nothing more, and whenever I would ask whatever had spoken to me, “What do you need?” or “How can I help?” there would be no response. It was frustrating for me. It seemed like I was failing. I didn’t possess any concept of gates yet; didn’t even know to think of inans as inans. My first real conversation with an inan—the Olive Garden booth—wouldn’t occur til the following March. What I did know, right from the very start, was that I shouldn’t let on to anyone else that I had the ability to hear inans speak, let alone that I was glad to have that ability; I knew none of it was normal, would make me seem crazy and unreliable, alarm my mother and piss off my dad.
And then I thought I’d heard Eddie Murphy tell the golden child, “Did somebody give you a volume, or what?” and I thought what he meant was something along the lines of, “Golden child, you’re so calm in the face of mortal danger, whereas I, Chandler Jarrell, am panicking. It is as though your sense of your surroundings is controlled by a volume knob installed inside your head, and amidst all this scary stuff, you have turned that volume knob all the way down, all the way to the left, and so your sense of your surroundings is greatly decreased and doesn’t affect you, and you are not afraid.” This concept wasn’t merely funny to me, it was revelatory.
Eddie Murphy, I thought, wouldn’t make a joke in a movie that no one in the audience was able to get. So if Eddie Murphy made a joke about a figurative volume knob installed inside one’s head, a knob that controlled one’s sense of one’s surroundings, that would mean that, to some degree at least, other people—even many people—must have possessed some shared notion of there being a way to decrease one’s sense of one’s surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside one’s head (if they didn’t possess that shared notion, where was the joke?). And if so many people possessed that shared notion, the notion must have come from somewhere. If so many people possessed that shared notion, it very well might have been because some of those people—perhaps many of them, though more likely just a few (or else the joke would not have been that funny)—it very well might have been because some of them were in fact able to decrease their sense of their surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside their heads. And if some people could decrease their sense of their surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside their heads, maybe I could, too. And if I could, too, then it would stand to reason that I could also increase my sense of my surroundings as if with a volume knob installed inside my head. It would stand to reason that I could turn the volume up on the inans.
But Eddie Murphy hadn’t said volume. The joke was my own, and no one else got it.
* * *
The morning after Burroughs picked up the transcript, I found sixteen sample boxes of thirty Panacea sitting on our doorstep in a sealed brown carton. Along with the pills themselves, the boxes held tiny fold-up pamphlets containing information about active ingredients (SP-10B, SP-10C, SP-14—varieties of spidge, I guess) and recommended dosages (a pill a day for children under twelve; two a day for adults), as well as warnings about poisoning, allergic reactions, and potential interactions with other drugs (e.g. Tricyclic antidepressants and SSRI’s)*. What stood out to me, thankfully, was the warning concerning Temporary Paradoxical Effects:
One in ten users of Panacea will initially experience paradoxical effects. These effects can last for as many as 48 hours, and may include sleepiness, lucid dreaming, anxiety, loss of appetite, and/or loss of sex drive. If any of these paradoxical effects continue beyond 48 hours, immediately cease taking Panacea and call a doctor. If you are taking Panacea for the first time, do not drive or operate heavy machinery for at least six hours after your first dosage.
Whether Panacea initially caused me to lose my appetite or sex drive, I couldn’t say. Only ninety minutes after taking my first two pills, I passed out on the couch for thirteen hours. I woke to piss at two in the morning, saw the clock, felt both alarmed and exhausted at once, thought I might be dying, then reminded myself, “Anxiety’s a paradoxical effect,” and made my way up the first flight of stairs, passed out on the landing for some seconds or minutes, woke again, crawled on all fours up the second flight of stairs, into my room, and passed out on my bed. Around 9 a.m., I snapped awake, very briefly disappointed at having had no lucid dreams—they were rare for me, and I really liked them—but neither anxious nor sleepy in the least. In fact, I felt more thoroughly rested and ready to get shit done than I had since Blank had been an infant.
Down in the kitchen, I filled my empty stomach with fistfuls of almonds, swallowed two more Panacea with a cup of coffee, lit one of the all-time best-tasting Quills of my life, sat back in my chair, and took a good look around. What a kitchen we had! The way the smoke-yellowed blinds on the sliding glass door were chopping the light up, and spreading that chopped light across the table? As if they were saying, “We can block the sun, sure, but that aint even close to the best thing we do!” And the roughened and bubbling linoleum floor, noisily sticky beneath my bare feet? “Cleanliness,” it might as well have been saying, “may be next to godliness, alright? But grittiness? clamminess? peeling-type sounds? That’s the stuff lets you know you’re a human, brother.” And the range, with its overscrubbed ghostforms of yesteryear’s fat-spatter jizzed between the burners? the inwardly encroaching rust at its corners? The range seemed to say, “Stainless steel shines, but it’s cold and distant as a flying saucer. An off-white finish on a thinner, lesser alloy ages, develops, possesses character. Lets you know people live here. This house is a home.”