Katie Williams - The Happiness Machine

CASE NOTES 3/26/35

On the night of 2/14/35, Saffron Jones (age 17) was dosed with “zom,” short for “zombie,” so named for the drug’s effects of short-term memory loss paired with extreme suggestibility. Basically, if you’re on zom, you’ll do whatever anyone tells you to and you won’t remember any of it afterward, won’t remember much of what came before it either, which is the nastiest part because you won’t remember who dosed you. While on zom, Saff was told to strip naked and recite conjugations of the French verbs dormir, manger, and baiser (respectively, “to sleep,” “to eat,” and “to fuck”). She was told to shave off her left eyebrow and to ingest half a bar of lemon soap. These events occurred in the basement of Ellie Bergstrom (age 18) during a party at Ellie’s house and were recorded on Saff’s screen. No one besides Saff is visible or audible in the video. As is typical with zom, Saff woke up the next morning with no memory of the previous night. She remembered leaving her house for Ellie’s party, that’s it. She thought she’d gotten drunk. She didn’t realize anything more had happened until she accessed Facebook and discovered the video posted to her account. It had 114 dislikes, 585 likes.

“IT COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE,” Saff tells me.

We’re sitting in her car in Golden Gate Park, pulled over on one of the access roads behind the flower conservatory. I can almost see the white spires of the conservatory through the treetops, but my clearest view is of the dumpster in the back where they throw out the flowers that have wilted and gone to rot.

“Saff. They made you eat soap.”

Saff showed me the video. (I don’t go on Facebook anymore.) In it, she took bite after bite of the thick bar of soap like it was a tea cake. Her pupils were huge and lavender in the dim basement light. (So were her nipples.) Her eyes weren’t dead, though, not zombified like you’d think. She has big, dark eyes, Saff does. And in the video, they glittered. Also, she smiled as she chewed. We think she must have been told not just to eat the soap, but to like eating it. I stared at her mouth so I wouldn’t look at her breasts, all too aware that the clothed Saff was sitting across from me, watching me as I watched her. In the video, the tip of her tongue darted out to collect a stray flake of soap from her bottom lip. Her lips parted, and a bubble formed between them, quivering like a word you can’t speak. Then she threw it all up, a foamy yellow torrent. After that, the video cut out.

Saff shrugs. “At least my eyebrow is growing back. Can you tell?” She’s penciled in the missing brow with care, but I can tell because it’s a slightly different shade of brown from the real one. “It could have been worse.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t? Are you sure you weren’t …?” Raped is what I’m not going to say.

“I think I could tell. It would have been … new.” I’m a virgin is what she’s not going to say.

Saff is sneaking looks at me, but this time it’s not because she’s trying to flirt. She’s embarrassed, either to tell me she’s a virgin or maybe just to be one. I want to tell her not to bother being embarrassed, not around me. When I left school last year, all the kids in our class had started declaring themselves straight, gay, bi, whatever. Me, I had nothing to declare. Because I was nothing. I am nothing. I’m not interested in any of it. The doctors say I would be if only I ate more, but they think every true part of me is just another symptom of my condition. What they don’t understand is that my condition is a symptom of me. That I am a stone buried deep in the ground, something that will never grow, no matter how good the dirt.

“You were, though.” I decide I’m going to say the word this time. “Raped.” And when I do, Saff ’s breath hisses out. “Even if you weren’t actually. They made you do those things. They forced you. I know how it is.”

“Yeah. Well. Everyone knows how it is because of that damn video.”

“No. I mean I know how it feels. To be forced.”

“Oh, Rhett,” Saff whispers. “Oh no.” And she’s misunderstood me. She thinks I mean that I was raped. What I mean is that the doctors shoved a feeding tube down my throat when I was too weak to resist. That my parents told them it was okay. That it felt like I was drowning. I let Saff misunderstand, though. I let her clasp my hand and stare at me with her big, dark eyes. Because I know that when people comfort you, they’re really just comforting themselves.

CASE NOTES 3/27/35, LATE MORNING

Opportunity holds no clues for us. Everyone in the class had the opportunity to dose Saff. Zom is taken transdermally. It’s loaded on a see-through slip of paper, like a scrap of Scotch tape. You press the paper to your bare skin—your arm, your palm, your thigh, your anywhere—and it dissolves into you. You can take it on purpose for the side effects: slowed time, heightened sense of smell, euphoria. Even though you won’t remember much of any of it the next day. Or you can get dosed without knowing it. A stranger’s hand on your bare shoulder as you push through the crowd, on your cheek pretending to brush away a stray eyelash, on the back of your hand in a show of sympathy.

At the clubs, everyone stays covered up: full-length gloves, turtlenecks, pants, high boots, even veils and masks. In fact, the more covered you are, the more provocative, because you’re saying that you might let a stranger touch you anywhere there’s cloth. Some kids will let bits of skin show through, peeks of upper arm, ankle, and neck. Not too much skin, though, just enough to stay vigilant over. You have to protect what you show.

Saff wasn’t covered up when she left her house. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and had left her sneakers at the door: bare arms, bare hands, bare neck, bare feet. So many vulnerabilities. But Saff wouldn’t have thought she was vulnerable. This was a party at Ellie’s, just like a hundred other parties at Ellie’s going back to her platypus-themed fifth-birthday party, an event all the same kids had attended, add me. Seneca Day School is exclusive, meaning tiny, designed for kids with parents in big tech. There are only twelve students in each graduating class. (Eleven in mine, since I left.) We’ve all known each other forever. We all trust each other.

Except of course we don’t. After all, where is there more distrust than in a small group of people trapped together for eternity? Old grudges; buried feelings; past mistakes; all those former versions of you that you could, in a larger school, run away from. Trust? You’d be safer in a crowd of strangers.

I EXPLAIN TO SAFF that we’ll solve her mystery by looking for three things: means, motive, and opportunity. I tell her that everything everyone does can be predicted by this trinity of logic: Are they able to do it? Do they have a reason to do it? Do they have the chance to do it?

“Everything everyone does?” Saff repeats with a raised eyebrow, her real eyebrow. “What if I did something, like, totally spontaneous?”

Her hand whips out and knocks over the saltshaker. We’re meeting in the diner across from school in Pac Heights. Salt cascades across the table, over the edge, soundlessly to the floor. The waitress glares at us.

“You’ve just proved my point,” I tell her. “Your arm works. That’s means. You wanted to challenge my theory. That’s motive. The saltshaker was right there in front of you. That’s opportunity.”