Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

I picked some crumbs out of my hair. They were moist, like bread chewed by a baby. “You’re such an asshole, Nelson. That was like the least professional medical trial I’ve ever been a part of. You don’t just. That’s not how. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

“It’s not a trial, Lucy, and this isn’t really happening,” he said. “You were just sitting at your desk when you felt a breeze. Maybe there was dust in it. It could have been anything. It was anything.”

Good grief, the caution we endured. It was hard not to read it as extreme self-importance. Did anyone anywhere, in the entire world, have a hard-on for corporate espionage when it came to our doomed and mildly illegal experiments?

“Right, of course, right. I just mean that you have no idea what dosage you gave me.”

Nelson had his little phone out, which looked like a soft, baby bird, and was already lost in numbers. “I don’t want to argue,” he said without looking up, stroking the swollen body of his phone with a finger. “Mostly because you’re wrong and it would be boring and exhausting to explain why. But I know the dosage down to the milligram. The puffback is actually a precise delivery system, and that’s the go-to-market play, anyway.”

Dr. Nelson turned theatrically covert. He shaded his mouth with a hand as if he had a secret that people might lip-read from the surveillance cameras. “Ah-choo,” he whispered.

“Uh, bless you?” For, like, the fakest sneeze ever?

“No,” he said. “Jesus. I mean the sneeze. That’s the delivery system. This drug will be delivered via sneeze. Or maybe a yawn. Something that one person does to another. Because, well. Beyond that I can’t say. You can probably figure out the rest.”

Right. I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I absolutely couldn’t figure out the rest. The rest was an unwritten world I was not invited to. I was too far down the chain in this puzzle, another mule without the code. Whatever. It hardly mattered. I was talking to a ghost.

“So what will I be feeling?” I asked, and I must have sounded too eager. Mommy just wants new feelings. Please, please, make Mommy feel something.

“Probably we don’t want to give you any help with that. Don’t want to game the books or whatever they say.”

“They don’t say that. That’s not a saying. Cook the books, game the system, queer the pitch. Anyway, are you that insecure about your work that you can’t tell me anything about it?”

He just blinked.

“Medical pathway? Part of brain targeted? Side effects? Give me some crumbs so I can at least make a goddamn biscuit.”

I knew his rules. I knew his life. It was pointless to ask. The secrecy was so bone deep here at Thompson that a false narrative of this bit of medical terrorism, him standing at my desk blowing powder over my head, had already been scripted. The dailies, when they came in, would reflect a different scenario entirely, one in which I had not been medically sneezed on by a hulking gray skeleton. Dr. Nelson looked like he didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep, and didn’t really breathe. So much abstention. What, really, was there left to erase except the idea of the man?

“How about you just tell me what you feel whenever you have a minute. Use the logger on the…” He pointed at my terminal. “I added an identity for you.”

He told me the name of the experiment. It had the word “bear” in it. It had a longish number, with some letters, too, and I instantly forgot it. He told me the name I’d be logging in with: Terry Corbin. For the purposes of the experiment I was a fifty-three-year-old woman, with no medical issues, and a family history of depression. Not so far from the truth. He told me that my fictional background was necessarily scattershot, because he didn’t have time to flesh out a real and believable past for me. Because why bother, and bleh, and gross?

“The system requires medical subjects to have a past, as such, but that level of information has no technical bearing.”

I blinked at him. When the scientists spoke that way I tended to turn to ash.

“The past isn’t interesting. It doesn’t matter. Sentimental value only, if that. Legacy software demands it and we comply, but we phone it in and that’s been approved all the way at the top. We’re not going to make a fetish out of stuff that has already happened. I sort of actually hate the past.”

Like, he hated the past on principle, or certain specific things that had happened in the past? And did he hate his own past, which would be understandable—I imagine he was a small, unnoticed figure in his childhood, perhaps frequently set upon by larger children who tried to drink from his body—or was it the past of the entire world that troubled him?

“Thanks for the sexless name,” I said. “And the age. Nice. I can practically smell my coffin.”

We did this sometimes. We took on guinea personas for Nelson and his crowd before we romanced the FDA with our product. How did we put it when we congratulated ourselves about the work we did? We inhabited nascent identities to spread the data to a broader population. Maybe this was deceitful but it felt scarcely more problematic than using a real person. Scarcely. Crowdsourcing worked really well when you could handpick your crowd and rename them at will. You know, like drafting a football team or casting extras in a gladiator scene. It also saved some pennies on testing and it gave all of us in data collection a chance to sample how people would be feeling in the future, if any of this ever, ever, was approved and came to market. Yeah, if. And if and if and if. It was the unspoken word before a good deal of the sentences we punted at each other. And it was usually the last word, too. Along with many of the words in between.

The burning eased off in my nose and I’d shaken the crumbs free. I still felt nothing from the dose. No rush, no sudden clarity, no blast of sorrow. I was not high and I was not sleepy and I had not been put on some teetering edge that could only be soothed with sex or violence or kindness, which was good, because I wasn’t sure what the likely outlets were. This chemical friend looked like a quiet actor. Maybe an out-of-work one. The subtler drugs were always harder to bear, ha ha, because they triggered a bottomless disappointment. In me, anyway. Which I was arguably on the verge of feeling anyway, and who wanted a spotlight on the real? Ever. At times like this I realized how much I wanted out of myself, how blitzed and bored I was by my own thoughts and feelings, my own little story. Terry Corbin could have licked me into some new, intriguing shape, but she was turning out to be a fucking dud with limited powers of rescue. I kind of hated her already.

The other option was a placebo. It could always be that. Maybe it always was. In which case I’d just been sneezed on by a creepy man for nothing.

Just then there was an intercom announcement. Possibly in French. I looked at my coworkers, who all groaned at once. People reached for their coats. A crowd started to gather at the window.

I had questions, even though my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t really anywhere.

“What’s the time frame on this, or whatever? What’s the onset and then how long will this shit last?”

Dr. Nelson looked at his watch. “Yeah, uh. Onset is, you know… now.” He looked at me and blinked. Still nothing on my end, although I hated evaluating my feelings. It was like looking into an empty room, trying to see if the walls were breathing. Sometimes when I scrubbed in as a monkey for these experiments I was already shaking with the blast of the initial dose by now, quivering under my desk, running for the toilet. For some reason, experimental medicine often led to a thunderous shit. Today was different. This drug might as well have been called Status Quo. Who was going to pay for more of the same?