Scott Nicholson - Liquid fear

“Oh, you’re finally coming around to the Sapphic way, huh? Every intelligent woman visits the island sooner or later.”

“If I was after women, you couldn’t handle the competition, sweetie,” Wendy said, dabbing the endearment with sarcasm as gooey as the waffle-house syrup. “As it is, I don’t need anybody in my life, male or female.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Anita said, misquoting Shakespeare. As a catalog model, Anita had quickly learned she was more at home in front of a camera than on a live stage.

Despite the drama of her past, or perhaps because of it, she still clung to a delusion of eventual A-list movie stardom.

One delusion of many, Wendy thought. Hence the psychiatrist.

Wendy jumped in before Anita could harmonize with Billy Ray Cyrus’s addictive yet mind-numbing chorus. “So who killed her?”

Anita forked waffle in her mouth and flashed a wad of soggy dough. She had the appetite of a wrestler, but genetics and an obsessive fitness regimen held her at a firm 118 pounds despite her generous bosom. “Nobody killed her. Cardiac arrest. People die all the time.”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“Because I figured you’d assume the worst. You’re always assuming the worst.”

“No, I’m not.” She sipped her coffee, confirming it was terrible. “Besides, sometimes the worst blindsides you and you don’t get a chance to assume anything. Take my marriage, for instance.”

“Well, enough about you.” Anita flashed a smile that always earned instant absolution, no matter the degree of rudeness. “Anyway, it took me six months to start trusting her, and then she has the nerve to go and die on me.”

“She died on her other patients, too.”

“And that’s my problem how?”

“Never mind.” Wendy glanced at the clock. Ten was fast approaching, and she had to prep for her nooner. “I’ve got to get to class.”

“Some people never leave college. And at your age-”

“I know, but college was God’s way of bringing us together. The School of Hard Knocks.”

“Or Fuck U. That’s U like in university.”

The sarcasm, like most, contained a good bit of truth. Anita had served as a model in one of Wendy’s graduate studio art classes, stripping off her clothes for a dozen people without batting a luscious eyelash.

After the session, Anita had remarked that Wendy’s rendering, though obviously exaggerated and not all that flattering, had captured her personality better than any of the more technically exact illustrations. Perhaps because Wendy instinctively appreciated the sensual radiance Anita projected.

An uneasy friendship was formed, and it had lasted through a shared apartment, a traumatic clinical trial, different sexual attitudes, and now one hell of a heart-clogging breakfast.

“Don’t you want to hear what my psychiatrist’s psychiatrist told me?” Anita said.

“Shrink a shrink and pretty soon you get down to nothing.” Wendy put her pinky to her lips and thumb to her ear in the international sign language for “Call me.” She reached for the bill, which was stuck to the table by a dot of syrup.

“No, really. I need to say this.”

“Okay. But make it fast. The next generation of Pablo Picassos and Frida Kahlos are waiting.”

“The pills I was on, the samples my psychiatrist gave me for free so the diagnosis would stay off my insurance?”

The topic bugged Wendy, but she couldn’t pinpoint the cause. “Yeah. New class of antidepressants. I thought we’d learned our lesson about untested drugs.”

Anita lowered her voice and became guarded. “We need to talk about that, because I’m starting to remember.”

Wendy squeezed her fork until the metal cut into her palm. “That was a different lifetime, Nita. That wasn’t us. That couldn’t have been us.”

“I know we’re supposed to remember it that one way, but what if it happened the other way?”

“It could have happened a million ways,” Wendy said. “The lesson is not to play around with drugs.”

“Oh, so now we get all moral?”

Wendy was about to explode, to tell Anita to shut the hell up, and the rage was a warning sign. You could bury the past, but the stench had a way of rising through the cracks. But the best way to forget was to change the subject. “So tell me about this new drug they gave you.”

Anita nodded. “Supposed to treat my stress, anxiety, depression, and all the rest of it. I’ve been on it for two weeks.”

“And it seems to be working.” Wendy eyed the half-full cup of coffee and weighed the need for an extra boost of caffeine against the additional destruction of taste buds.

“Sure. I’ve even gained a few pounds.” Anita slapped at her lean thighs under the table. “But dig this-my new psychiatrist said she can’t find any record of a written prescription. She has no idea what it is.”

Billy Ray Cyrus’s cornfield yodel faded and the late breakfast crowd filled the void with chatter and rattling tableware. “Maybe it’s a generic,” Wendy said, alarm bells clanging in her head. “Drug companies sometimes give their cheaper versions names that make them sound fancy. I’ll bet the records just got screwed up.”

With the volume in the room dropping, Anita hunched forward and lowered her voice. “The pills may not be legit.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the Monkey House trials.” Wendy used the term despite her promise to never utter it again, upon pain of death or madness. “So stop getting paranoid. Briggs is finished and none of that ever happened.”

“I know.” Anita chopped at her waffle, scooting piles of limp whipped cream and strawberry sauce across the grid. “Well, anyway, the new shrink told me to stop taking them and to bring her a sample so she could turn it in to the authorities.”

“Yeah, like we could ever trust ‘authority’ again.”

“I told her I’d run out the day my shrink died. Seemed sort of fitting.”

“So you have some left?”

“Sure. Six pills.”

“A shrink was giving you illegal drugs?”

“Well, she’d been acting weird for the last few weeks. A couple of times she said stuff that sounded fatalistic. You know, like, ‘Live in the moment, because the past lives forever.’”

It sounded like the kind of crap Briggs used to say. “Sounds like generic shop talk to me. If a shrink can’t dish out the feel-good platitudes, then who can?”

Anita looked around the restaurant. Her sunglasses flashed in the greasy fluorescent light. The entire breakfast, Anita had been acting shifty, as if fearing someone would approach her table and ask for an autograph.

Not that the consumers of her films would have much chance of recognizing her. Her hair was now its natural light brown instead of blonde, and she’d had her boobs deflated down a cup size from their heyday.

Besides, Chapel Hill was a sophisticated university town, not a place where people expected to encounter a porn queen in a bacon-and-eggs joint.

Wendy followed Anita’s gaze. An unkempt man sat at the counter near the register, talking loudly to himself while the wait staff aggressively ignored him.

“I’m kind of worried,” Anita said. “The pills worked great, but I stopped them. They reminded me of the stuff we took during the trials.”

“Did the new psychiatrist give you something else?”

“Effexor. Started Saturday. She said it might take a month before the effect kicks in. I could go nuts before then.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Wendy’s eyelid twitched. A dark shadow crept from the corner of her memory, but it vanished when she turned her mind’s eye toward it.

“We talked about it yesterday.”