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.