Lying on my bathroom floor writing this, I can’t stop thinking I have to stay here. I can do this. I can do this.
But what I also keep thinking—in the voice in my head that doesn’t sound like me, the one that sounds like my grandmother—what will happen if I don’t make it out of here all right?
27
Dear Tanya,
It started on Day 68 of the experiments—an ordinary day according to the sheet they gave me, nothing special except my new headset had come in—and they announced this morning that we were beginning another phase of the memory study. We were in the conference room, all of us were given two pills. When I held them up to the light, they were a shimmering gray. Fog trapped in a bottle.
What are the benefits of this, I asked.
Dr. Lisa looked up from her clipboard and raised her eyebrows at me. If you’re uncomfortable doing this, she said, you can always leave. I know last time was rough on you.
Everyone else had stopped talking. They were watching her face. No one had swallowed their pills. She paused. You could see she realized her reaction had been a mistake.
What are the benefits, Mariah asked. She was sitting with her face resting in her palms. Everyone else had their arms crossed. I was so grateful to her for backing me up that I wanted to reach under the table, squeeze her arm, find some way to say thank you.
Faster mental processing, increased memory clarity, faster reading comprehension and retention, less risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer’s when you’re older, Smith said, keeping his eyes down. He spoke quickly. Charlie, Tom, and Judy relaxed. But Ian, Mariah, and I shared a look. It was too good to be true. How could one pill do all those things?
Dr. Lisa asked if there were any other questions. Her face was relaxed, but her voice came out clipped.
I had so many, but the situation felt that if I breathed the wrong way, I would be thrown out. Now I wish I had kept asking questions, talked and talked until they got fed up, sent us all home for the day, sent us all home for forever.
The day before, Day 89, I’d come home and made myself dinner. I pretended that I was tired, not from a morning spent running and an afternoon when I gave blood, but from having my fake job at Great Lakes Shipping Company. Spreadsheets, tracking routes, worrying about shipments. A job where I said things like This is such a Tuesday. Flirting with a non-creepy truck driver, the type of guy who said things like I know you’re fine, but how are you. I could call my mom at any time and tell her exactly what had happened during my day.
What else did ordinary people care about? A house. Paying off student loans. Finding someone I liked enough that I was willing to see him every single day, that I was willing to build a life separate from my mother’s. From there, kids. But I’m not ready to think about those things yet; it felt too fake and was starting to break the spell.
So, I searched online for adoptable cats and dogs. A pit bull mix named Snake Plissken. I distrust all people who say bad stuff about pit bulls. All dogs can be bad dogs. I seriously considered adopting a one-eyed cat named Star War. The people at the closest humane society are so bad at naming animals. Blackie 2, Blackie 4, Colon, Vodka Cat. After reminding myself there was no way I could be responsible for a cat in the middle of all this, I brainstormed vacations.
Deziree and I in Paris. Going to a restaurant and eating a plate of brightly colored vegetables in butter sauce. Walking through the Louvre. Being a basic and crying when I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time. Going to the Pompidou. Drinking wine. Seeing so many wonderful things, being somewhere so different that my brain aches from how exciting life can be. Eyes liquid with emotion, having to attempt to communicate with gestures about how big you’re feeling in that moment. The only place outside of the country either my mom or I have been is Windsor. I promised myself that when I was done here, we would go, we would see everything.
We took the pills. Each tasted like nothing. Dr. Lisa gave us words to memorize. I waited to drift off again, for my arms and legs to quit. They didn’t dismiss us. The observers kept writing notes. Someone made a noise like they were choking. I looked up. Mariah’s eyes were rolling back in her head, blood was coming out of her nose, she was having a seizure. I ran around to the other side of the table. I helped stabilize her, got her on her side, with Smith’s help. Charlie was still coughing. I was tired and weak, but I kept whispering to Mariah that she was okay, she was okay.
Everyone was watching. She kept bleeding. It was coming out of her nose, out of her mouth. She went limp in my arms. I stopped whispering.
Mariah died.
Smith kept trying to help her, but I knew she was dead. I let go of her hands, ran out of the conference room. I wasn’t a person any longer, I was shock and anger and fear. There was a moment when I was sobbing by the vending machine, the chip bags shiny navy and matte red. I went into the bathroom, tried to barf, but it didn’t work. Then the old man was there. He took my hands, guided me up the stairs.
We went up to Dr. Lisa’s office. The old man said he had something for me to take, it would calm me down. He pulled out a box. It contained golden pills, like something a witch offers a dumb peasant in a fairy tale. If you take one, your life will be filled with riches. If you take one, your life will be filled with riches because everyone you touch will turn to gold. The old man’s eyes were shining with excitement.
Where would you be, he asked me, if you could be anywhere right now?
I would be 7, I said, and riding my bike.
He laughed as if I were joking, but I wasn’t.
NPR played out of the laptop speakers. A woman with a serious voice was speaking about how several nations had collaborated to make a kind of super-steroid in advance of the next Olympic Games. There were severe repercussions: sanctions against all the participating nations, health issues for the subjects. Liver damage, high blood pressure, weakened bones. One had died while lifting weights, skeletal collapse.
Can you believe people care so much about the Olympics, the old man asked.
Not really. The Olympics are boring, I said.
He told me that it’s all a cover story. People want to believe these research studies are about something simple that they can relate to like winning a contest. They don’t want to think about why a government would want to experiment on its citizens.
They do it because they can, I said. Because you don’t see us as people.
He didn’t like that and handed me a pill, a big glass of water. It looked cloudy, as if there was some soap in it.
Take it.
I did. After I swallowed the pill and water, I started coughing. I coughed harder and harder. My eyes squeezed shut. When they opened I was outside. The sky and clouds were moving quickly, blurring as if they were in a race. Cumulus shape-shifted into diamonds, the blue folded around them, so it looked like art deco wallpaper. It all kaleidoscoped: diamonds, crosses, squares. I understood I was crying, but I couldn’t feel it on my cheeks. The world felt fluid, holy. I turned, and Smith was there, watching and writing. The clouds continued behind him. I watched him turn and follow my gaze, but he didn’t react. I understood that to him everything was ordinary. He wasn’t beyond reacting to a spectacle. If it had been a dream, he would have seen it too.
Smith said my pupils were a little too big for how bright it was. I might be risking damaging my eyes. He pulled out sunglasses, handed them to me. I couldn’t feel the plastic in my hands. My fingertips were dulled, maybe. Or it was like whatever I had taken had somehow made it so my brain could no longer process tactile sensations. I put the glasses on.