“You didn’t connect it to your, uh,” Ida asked, trying to be funny, pointing at the stupid thing on his wrist that barked his inner workings at him all day long.
Mort looked at the watch and didn’t laugh. His wallpaper was of a cartoon bear, rubbing its belly.
So he’d managed to rid himself, through diet, of his male burden? Ida wondered. Could one say “manhood” anymore? It seemed problematic, but Ida wasn’t especially sure. A good deal of the language was mired in lunacy and it sometimes seemed better not to partake. When talking about sensitive matters, or, really, when talking at all, it was safer to just breathe loudly, in different accents, adding a little bit of body English with your face—then the transcript could never come back and fuck you down into the mud. What proof would there ever be? You had only sighed. You just kept sighing and sighing. How could anyone be offended by that? Even biological terminology had taken on a wobble and when you messed up and said something out loud, you dated yourself. You prepped yourself for the dumpster. It was a little bit like using your own tombstone as a sandwich board.
So Mort was soft and she was tired and the night was late, late, late.
“I’m sorry,” Ida said, in her flattest voice. It was stone-cold, she knew, but maybe Mort didn’t even catch the shade. His self-punishment techniques were too powerful. She was mostly relieved not to have to get sweaty with this remote coworker who often smelled like her third-grade homeroom teacher, which confused things a good deal, but she felt some vague pressure to take the situation personally. Torn a little bit. You know, he was impotent because of her. She had not inspired a proper baton. It was difficult not to play along and pretend that if only her ass had a steeper switchback, or her breasts didn’t spill to the side, Mort would be seesawing away at her with a diamond cutter. Except they’d consummated before, over the past few months, and her fun happy body, which she loved and loved with all of her blessed heart, oh yes she did, hadn’t changed much in the interval. It hadn’t spoiled or fallen apart or grown discolored or sloughed off a mild, gray powder from its lower parts. Nope, it sure hadn’t. So whatever and whatever and whatever to this young gentleman with his lifeless baby wiener.
She patted Mort on the back. Cleanup would be easier tonight, but what the hell was she supposed to do with this naked person sitting on her bed, on the verge of feeling sorry for himself? Mort was too polite to openly emote about his misfortune—young sensitive men had turned into such exemplars of emotional restraint!—but he parked on the bed as if it was here that his problem would be fixed, and Ida knew that no such thing was in the cards. Must. Get. Sad. Man. Out. Of. House. Now. She’d had her quota of emotions for the week, caring for her mother and father, and right now her store of pity, or really anything else, was empty. She wanted to feed a little, get high, and maybe let the bathtub faucet thunder down on her and finish her off.
Thompson Systems demanded regular physicals of their employees, maybe so you didn’t die at one of their cubicles and cause a lapse in productivity. Ida’s number was up, and in the course of a routine exam, she was prescribed a legacy drug called Rally. Not for moods, she was told, but possibly for the lack of them. This was not a new drug, the doctor stressed. She was to please not think for a moment that she was taking anything new. Sometimes only the older, forgotten drugs could touch that sweet spot, explained her doctor. And we do need our sweet spots touched, Ida had said back, laughing a little too loudly, though the doctor looked at her with boredom and said that the pills were especially hard to swallow. Don’t assume, he told her, that just because you have taken pills your whole life, that you can take these. It’s not that simple. He paused. She wasn’t sure what to picture. She couldn’t picture anything, just a field with dead people in it, for some reason. It wasn’t that the pills were so large, either, the doctor explained. They were just, trust him, really hard to swallow.
Ida signed in as a fake customer on the Thompson server—one of the hordes of false identities they cultivated in order to spread praise about themselves, along with a certain kind of low-key criticism, in order to build brand authenticity—and did a quick land grab on the drug, but instantly got bored reading about it. It had changed and ruined people’s lives, they loved and hated it. They were indifferent and sad and happy, near death and reborn. Some of them said that if you let the pill sit in your mouth for too long before swallowing it, rather than dissolve it grew larger. It could choke you out, but it also taught you to be a person. Others said it didn’t work and still others complained, at length, about the packaging. It was so soft and it crumbled into your hands and you’d never wash it off. As in ever. People seemed to agree that the drug could take years to kick in, a lifetime. Although some people claimed to be buzzing and cheerful and deeply changed after just one dose. An antidepressant for the afterlife, someone called it. Not a happy pill, no way. Not even really a pill. It works in your sleep. It might not affect you, but could leech over to a friend. Drugs like this, claimed one customer, were only for people who didn’t think they needed them. It wasn’t really a drug. It was more of a bomb, but it had no fuse and would never detonate. You never really swallowed it. You just held it inside you for a while. If you were lucky. We exist to give safe harbor to these pills, someone said. Your body is the bottle. Chemically the drug seemed kind of mild. More like a food than a drug. More like a sample of wind, trapped in a vial. Supposedly they were working on a cream.
Ida filled her prescription and took her bottle of Rally tablets home. With a toothpick she daubed some butter on her pill and it went down fine. But soon it had risen back into her mouth—it felt like a small insect crawling up her throat—and she had to take it out and butter it again. After that it stayed down, and as much as she wanted to claim some change over the next few weeks—to her mind, to her moods, to anything—she noticed nothing different whatsoever.
The next time Ida visited her mother at the nursing home, she asked her about Rally. Her mother had been a physician’s assistant before she retired, and would maybe have heard something, or seen this drug in action. It turned out that her grandfather had taken the same medication, which was called Forlexa back then, for his issue, which could only be described, after a long silence on the part of Ida’s mother, as estrangement.
Not the official diagnosis, Ida guessed, but still, it possessed a certain diagnostic elegance.
“Did it work?” Ida asked.
Her mother again paused, and it seemed she’d forgotten the question. Her clarity could be fleeting. Clearly she was thinking. And thinking and thinking. Her face strained so, and Ida felt bad about putting her mother through this. It wasn’t so important. She didn’t need to know. But another part of her was curious about how her mother’s thoughts sounded now, given the change. Or maybe how they ever sounded.
Of course at work they had talked and talked about a system of capture, an extraction tool, for thoughts. This was a big R&D area for companies like Thompson. The last frontier of privacy, blah blah blah. How hard could it be to finally reach into people’s faces and claw away at what they were thinking, and to turn that noisy chatter into a cogent transcription? Really stupendously hard, it turned out. But probably not entirely totally impossible. Probably just a matter of time, even if that meant that they’d all be dead and the world would be dead, just a cold and lifeless rock, but it would still happen. Maybe. Ida saw the appeal, and she’d done some grunt work on a mock interface, mostly just color blocking, building a palette, that might have been part of a black cloth project along those lines. She was on such a don’t-need-to-know basis at Thompson that she might as well have been wearing a blindfold. In the end, though, she didn’t want to live in a time when such tech came online and her own thoughts were on offer to the shimmering seals with human genitalia who seemed to encircle her with questions, punching straws into her head to draw out what little she had left. Her so-called thoughts. Her precious precious. She’d have to jump off a building, and she wasn’t in an especially big hurry to do that. Not always, anyway.