“We don’t have those.”
“On our way home from Pasadena today, Ronnie Feurtag was on the news. They found her in a drainage ditch in Huntington Beach.”
“That’s good news.”
“Not for her it isn’t. She was dead. They think murdered.”
“Oh, Geez.” Ronnie had disappeared from the beach on the Fourth of July, and it was front page of the Register for a week and even made the L.A. TV news. She lived a few blocks away. First they thought she ran away to Knott’s Berry Farm or Disneyland, then police said it could be foul play. I didn’t know her but I’d seen her around, always roller skating down the block. Ten years old—same as Marie.
Adlyn takes my hand and leads me from her room down a wide hallway. We pass one closed door on the left, another on the right, then on the left another closed door that has steel bars across it. The bars run horizontally across the door, from top to bottom, spaced approximately six inches apart. They look like stainless steel, and I think at first this is some science-fictional design flair for advanced, sophisticated people like the Lamms. “Larkin’s room,” whispers Adlyn, stopping and running the backs of her fingers up the rungs. Sounds like steel alright. “You can only open it from outside and guess who has the key? Mom.”
She smiles, pecks me on the lips, and takes my hand again. Bitchen! I smell the strawberry perfume very strong on her. I spring one again and as we walk down the wide marble staircase I put my hands in my pockets and shove it up and to one side where it won’t show as bad. It always happens at the worst times, like catching some rays at the beach, like watching TV, like now. Somehow Dad seems to know, warns me about becoming “a bathroom idiot.”
We sit side-by-side on a black leather-and-steel sofa in their living room. The room is very large and high and it has more of the hidden lights up in the ceiling. The walls are plain white, and the carpet is white. There are paintings hung everywhere, huge things that don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. No frames. I wonder if some of them are hung upside down then wonder: how would you know?
“Would you like to try a confession pill?” asked Adlyn.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It makes you want to confess.”
“A pill does that?”
“Pills can make you do anything.”
“Hmmm. What’s it called?”
“Just X62-13. There’s no name for it yet because it isn’t approved. The X means experimental. The 62 means it was first formulated in nineteen-sixty-two, and 13 makes it the thirteenth drug created in that year. Nineteen sixty-two was a good year, so far as numbers go. The number of drugs created, that is.”
“So, drugs like pot or speed or downers?”
“Oh, no! X62-13 is not recreational. Although not-real-smart people might think so.”
“Your mom or dad work at a pharmaceutical place, then?”
“Well. Let me just take the pill first. Then I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Probably more!”
She runs across the carpet, up the stairs. Her legs are beautiful and the bottoms of her feet are white, like the carpet. I try to distract myself by making some sense of the paintings, but they make no sense. I look out the windows, but it’s dark and there are no streetlights nearby. The Lamms’ big, unreal house seems to sit in a nest of darkness. It’s on a slight rise. I go to one of the big windows and can see our tract below—Heritage Acres—huddled in orderly fashion, gridded off by the streetlights that lie in perpendicular rows and burn strong, none of them flickering, none of them out. There are orange groves surrounding Heritage Acres, though some of them are being cut down to build houses. Out there, beyond the streetlights, where the groves and partial groves are, it’s very dark. A new moon.
Behind me Adlyn clears her throat. When I turn she’s got a glass in one hand and a large white pill in the other, which she holds up to me like a treat for a dog. She’s wrapped a long, airy, green scarf around her neck. She smiles and sits primly back down on the big black sofa and I stride over, beginning to spring again. Damn. I sit near but not close to her, and cross my legs. She drops the big pill down into her mouth and swallows half the glass of what looks like water.
“Larkin discovered what Dad does years ago,” she says. “Which is, he’s a doctor and he works for the military. He creates tactical drugs. Helps create them. It’s extremely top secret, but Larkin figured it out anyway. Larkin’s kind of talented like that, and Dad’s very absentminded and careless sometimes. Dad’s fundamental belief—I read this in a top secret paper he wrote—is that drugs are a better way to win a war than bullets. He wants to have wars without any killing. Or hardly any. He says that ‘targeted malfunctioning of the human organism’ is the goal of his drugs. On a battlefield, that will probably have to be a gas. But there are pills too. This one, the one I just took, was developed to make prisoners confess. Larkin gave me my first one of these when I was six. I spent the next four hours confessing exactly what kind of horses I had dreamed of having, and every detail about my ranch in the mountains, where the horses and I would live. I confessed things I didn’t even know I knew. And then I confessed the name and gave a full description of every boy I had ever had a crush on, and every person who had ever scared me, which turned out to be really only one—him, Larkin.”
I look hard at Adlyn then, harder than I’d ever looked before. Yes, she’s a pretty, lightly freckled, suntanned redhead with green pools for eyes, wearing a bikini and a white lacy top and a bright green scarf around her neck. But she also seems… compelled? Driven? What I mean is, when I look into those really bitchen green eyes they are really, really eager. Like she can’t wait to get there, can’t wait for the next thing. So I wonder where she thinks she’s going. And what the next thing might be.
Adlyn shudders then, as if a cold blast of air has come through the room. She twists the green scarf tighter and holds it over her eyes. “Would you please tie it?” She turns her back and wriggles closer to me. You know what that causes. I manage to tie the scarf in a loose knot. The green ends fall across her back. In the strong light I can see the fine golden hairs dusting her suntanned shoulders showing through the lacy openings. Because she can’t see me I lower my right elbow to my zipper area and grind down hard.
“It’s hitting me strong now,” she whispers. “The 62-13. One day Larkin found drug samples Dad had hidden in the garage. Later we found out it was because Dad thought there was a Soviet spy in his research lab. This was back in Bethesda. Larkin started sampling the pills. There was X59-11, X61-14, and X62-13—what I just took. The first one put Larkin in a coma for eleven days and he woke up feeling happy and relaxed. The second one gave him seizures and he broke out in red measles-like triangles. The third one made Larkin confess to me his very… scary fantasies about, well… me, and other girls my age. In the garage Larkin also found some things Dad had written. Larkin slipped some 62-13 into Dad’s vitamins then demanded to know what Dad did, and where, and when, and for whom. Everything. Of course Dad told him without a fight, because the drug can’t be defeated. Larkin tape-recorded it and said he’d play it to the Washington Post unless Dad brought home plenty more samples—he wanted everything Dad had because Larkin enjoyed trying them out. He also demanded a fifty-dollar per week allowance and a new car, even though he was only fourteen. It was a Roadrunner.”