God’s Addiction — chapter 2
Happy Rats
As we rounded the corner, a shiny black car accelerated toward us with smoking tires. Happy yanked me into an alley. We raced past bolted doors, garbage bins, and a wino who reached up to us. Coming out the other end, Happy pulled me to the left and we sped past several dingy stores. It was a narrow street with cars parked along both sides, leaving little room for traffic down the center. Trash littered the sidewalk.
“Run, Lola, run,” someone yelled from a second story window. That’s one of my favorite movies. To hear the reference from a ghetto window felt like a validation of one of the film’s themes — synchronicity of events may signify a normally invisible order of reality. My momentary distraction was broken by Happy screaming “Come on!” and the squeal of tires down the block behind us. Though Happy bore little resemblance to Franka Potente, she could sure run like hell.
Four men lounged against a light pole and a trash can, smoking cigarettes. Happy grabbed both sleeves of one of them, who appeared to be Indian or Pakistani. The others were black. “Tariq,” she said, panting. She pointed down the block with her glance, “That fucker Angus’s after us. Help us, Tariq.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, moving off the lamp post and touching her cheek, “for you I would buy the moon.”
We tore down the block. Behind, we heard a crash, and sounds of shattering glass. Men shouting angrily. Shots fired. Approaching sirens. Happy shoved me into another alley, and halfway along she knelt to pull on an iron grate over a ground-level window. It came away, and we squeezed in, one after the other. She replaced the grate quickly. In the darkness, Happy led the way, holding my hand behind her. We stumbled through what felt like a broken hole in a wall.
If my reckoning was correct, we were following a rough tunnel under the street. After twists and turns in the dark, and some shaky wooden stairs, we emerged into a dimly lit room. The outer door was chained with a padlock. Happy unlatched a window, and we struggled through. This building faced onto a wider street with lots of traffic. A look of certainty crystallized on Happy’s face. “We’re gonna see Doc. Maybe he can ‘splain this whole fuck-ass thing.” She pulled me around the corner. “Got any cash?” I showed her my twenties. “Sweet.”
Despite our disheveled appearance and Happy’s unconventional clothing, we successfully flagged a cab. “Show me your money,” the cabbie said. Happy held up a bill, then opened the door and got in, pulling me after her. She rattled off directions to the driver.
Smells of sweat and what must have been cigarettes permeated the taxi’s interior despite a sign proclaiming a smoke-free environment. Happy turned to me. “I saw you get stabbed. Ain’t riskin’ talkin’ about you at the hospital but I heard some nurses. You don’t know who you are.”
“Nobody knows who I am.”
“I do.”
“No you don’t. You know who I was.”
“Crap. You’re still that guy. Don’t you remember…”
“Don’t speak,” I whispered, putting my hands up like Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway. “Don’t,” I said again, covering her mouth with my hand to block her response. “Don’t speak.”
After I said it a few more times, she glared at me and then turned to look out the window. I smiled at her and took a deep breath. Happy’s odors had now improved the air inside the taxi.
The cabbie let us out at what I guessed, from American Pie 2 and Animal House, was a college campus. Happy gave the driver one of my Jacksons and argued before getting change. We walked up to a broad building with arches, with Beckman Institute in stone across the top. An oddly pleasant smell was in the air. The word eucalyptus floated in my head. Happy pulled me through a door behind an arch.
Inside, people were walking to-and-fro, most young and carrying books. Nearly all turned to stare at Happy and me as we hurried past. Down a hall and then another and Happy opened a door into a room like the genetics laboratory in Jurassic Park. “Where’s Doctor Bloom?” she demanded of the several white-gowned workers.
“He’s giving a lecture in the auditorium,” a pretty black-haired woman said. She eyed me with recognition. Indistinct and arousing visions batted in my mind as Mr. Perky prepped for action. A fine line between pain and pleasure, more an impression than words, floated there too. Happy dragged me back down the hall before I could say anything.
We entered a massive room through double doors. Happy hurried down the elongated steps between descending tiers of seats, inviting curious looks from students on both sides. We reached the floor and approached a stage where a short stocky man had been speaking into a microphone, a huge projected picture of weird blobs behind him. He had stopped halfway through our incursion, and now looked at me with abrupt recognition. The irony of my real name blasted from the speakers: “John. Where the hell have you been?”
The man was a spitting image of Danny DeVito, with, I soon learned, a personality to match. At least his characters — nasty-funny with a cruel edge. He hopped off the stage and herded us to a side door, rising fuss coming from his audience. Making no excuses, he hustled us out into the hall, then down to a room with big windows and a long table surrounded by chairs. There were bookshelves along one wall, and several thick volumes lay on the table. At Danny’s gesturing, we three sat around one end. Danny was Doc, I guessed. He took a long look at Happy, eyeing her skimpy outfit. “Who’s your whore-friend?” he said.
Happy looked at me sideways with a crooked smile. “Don’t worry, I get that a lot.”
“I wonder why,” Doc said.
“Asshole.” Happy spat on the table.
“I thought you knew him,” I said to Happy.
“Knew of him. You were always goin’ on about how you an’ him was gettin’ the noble prize.”
“Oh, I get it,” Doc said, rolling his eyes. “This is the girlfriend you were always yakking about. Didn’t know she was from that side of town. Man, are you fucked up. ‘Course with your dick on both sides of the fence, what do you expect.”
I stood and took Happy’s hand. “Come on,” I said. “This pendejo is getting me down.”
Doc rose as we did and walked quickly to get between us and the door. He was nowhere near Mack’s bulk but would still make a meaty obstacle. “You aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “You’ve got a report to make! That was my most promising batch so far.”
I surged forward, ready to shove him aside, but Happy grabbed my hand. “No,” she said. “We gotta find out what went down.” Then to Doc: “John’s memory is shot.”
He stopped in his tracks. “No way! What the hell are you saying?”
I shrugged and smiled. We sat again at the table and I gave Doc the short version.
“No fucking way!” he said. “You mean you don’t even remember…ahh, shhhit!” He pounded a fist on the table, making it shake. Happy jumped half an inch. “You blew it! You son-of-a-bitch. Motherfuck! You can’t follow a goddamn fucking simple rule. You have any idea what you’ve thrown away here? Do you, you dumb fuck?” He stood and paced back and forth several times, then put his palms on the table and stared at me. “Do you?”
I pulled a book over and began leafing through the pages. “The thing is,” I looked up, smiling at his rage, “I don’t give a flying fuck.”
* * *
Not like I didn’t have better things to do, but Happy was convinced we needed answers, so I let Doc usher us to another lab room with electronics along the walls. Computer displays flickered and wires snaked overhead to bulky machines. Along one bench were white rats in clear plastic boxes.
Doc sat Happy and me at a small table in a side room and told a story I didn’t really want to hear. I didn’t care a rat’s ass about my past. I just wanted to walk around in the sunshine and enjoy the breeze on my face and the smell of eucalyptus. But I knew Happy was desperate to understand what had happened to me — I wasn’t sure why. I listened absently, leafing through journals that were lying on the table.
Doc was a biophysicist working on brain chemistry. He was inventing new molecules that worked by what he called quantum entanglement — as in What the Bleep Do We Know. He said it was breakthrough research, and if he went through normal channels to try things out, it would take years to do what he had already done — with my help — in months.
Doc, pacing as usual, came around behind me and leaned over my shoulder. “You were just a pants-shitting mediocre grad student with no future,” he growled. “I made you part of something that’s gonna blow brain research wide open.” He paced some more. Then he slapped my head from behind. “And what do you do? You can’t follow one goddamn simple rule!”
I stood. I was as tall to Doc as Mack was to me. I grabbed his shirt with both hands. “I don’t have to take this crap from you, Danny boy. I don’t care what I did or who you are.”
He was totally pissed, but he controlled it and ignored my calling him Danny, which surely wasn’t his real name. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Let me go. Let me finish.” I let go of his shirt. “Sit down.” He paused, then added lamely with little enthusiasm, “Please.”
I sat, shrugged at Happy. Doc stepped out of the room and came back within thirty seconds, holding a round glass dish with some liquid in it. He set it on the table and I saw it contained a small brown living thing.
“Know what this is?” he said.
“Planarian worm.”
“What the fuck! I thought you lost your memory.”
“It’s in this journal,” I said, flipping to a page with a picture of the worm.
“Oh. Okay. Know what we do with it?”
“According to the article, you train the worm to seek food, illuminated by bright light that it ordinarily avoids. Then you cut the head off, and the body grows a new head. The new worm still has the memory associating food with light. So the memory wasn’t stored in the brain.”
Doc stopped pacing, put his two hands on the table and turned to look at me. “My god, you’re a quick study.” Then he frowned. “Wait a minute. You and your slick chick are putting me on. Assholes! You didn’t lose your memory.”
“Believe what you want Doc,” I said. “‘The story of McCannibal and his Mau Mau has become part of the folklore of psychology. Often used in textbooks as a humorous hook to grab students’ attention in chapters devoted to learning and memory, two things are typically included: references to memory pills or professor burgers’.”
“What’s that?”
“From The Memory Transfer Episode, an article by Larry Stern about the planarian experiments, in the June 2010 issue of Monitor on Psychology. It was on the table in that first room we were in.”
Doc sat down and stared at me. I laughed. His beady eyes, balding head, and chubby face sure did resemble Danny DeVito. “Come on,” he growled. “You could have memorized that beforehand.”
“Try me,” I said.
Doc took a book from a shelf and held it open in front of me. “How long do you need?”
“That’s plenty.”
He pulled the book away. “Second paragraph.”
I sighed theatrically. “‘Dr. Feynman won his Nobel Prize for successfully resolving problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He also created a mathematical theory that accounts for the phenomenon of superfluidity in liquid helium…’”
“Okay, okay,” Doc interrupted, closing the book. Then he resumed pacing, hands behind his back, looking down and talking to himself. “Damn. Photographic memory. Side effect. Worth a bundle! Not like the big one though.” He shook his head. “Stay on track.” Then he looked up at us. “All right. Look, they thought the planarian thing meant memory is stored in molecules — salt your Big Mac with Italian lessons, whatever.” He whirled quickly and slapped palms on the table. “That’s all been disproven and the establishment gurus just let the whole thing slide. It’s as if Einstein never took relativity beyond elevators and trains, f’Chrissake.” Doc plopped into a chair across from us. “But Einstein was a fool too — he never made any serious cash.” He pointed both index fingers at us. “So here’s what we do. I tell you the whole megillah — the plan. You keep doing it. Your connections don’t have to know you burned out your memory.”
“Tell us the story,” I said, “and then I’ll decide.”
Doc frowned, turned, and stumped out of the room. “What the hell,” Happy said. “You think he’s coming back?”
“Beats me.” I resumed flipping pages, going from one journal to the next. “This is great stuff!” Then I started on a book titled Entangled Minds. Shortly Doc returned carrying one of the imprisoned rats. The animal wore a cap with multi-colored wires leading to a plug mounted on the box. He set the plastic cage on the table rather roughly, causing the rat to jump several inches and try to find a way to escape.
“1950s. Olds and Milner. Give a rat a lever that shoots electricity into the right part of its brain and it’ll keep pressing that lever hundreds of times an hour. Until it dies of starvation.”
“Gross!” Happy said. “Why would it do that?”
Doc turned his palms up in the air and made a frown and a flat smile like he was going to say duh. “Pleasure center, sweetheart. You should know all about that. Why do your johns — “ he looked at me and laughed, “ — why do they keep coming back with wads of cash, risking STDs, divorce, broken careers and what-not?” He paused, then answered his own question. “Pleasure, sweetheart. It’s what makes the world go ‘round. And I hate to tell you, you don’t even need sex. When my stuff goes live, you’re gonna be out of a job, angel-twat.”
I started to rise but Happy held me back. “Oh, sorry Romeo,” Doc said, bowing and speaking sarcastically. “I apologize. The point is, researchers have been barking up the wrong tree. They didn’t get the planarian thing. Life isn’t just chemicals — it runs on quantum entanglement. They’re all babes in the woods! Idiots. The answers were staring them in the face for decades.”
“Photosynthesis,” I said.
Danny looked at me like I had two heads. “What?”
“‘Until recently, living systems were thought to be too wet and warm to rely on delicate quantum properties such as entanglement and coherence. However, over the past decade physicists have begun to suspect that quantum properties play important roles in biochemical processes — including photosynthesis.’” I patted one of the journals lying on the table.
“Kee-rist!” Doc said. “Yeah, well it’ll take them another decade to get from green sulfur bacteria to the human brain. At least a decade! But I’m there now, almost.”
“Ya think sex got sumpin’ t’ do with this — what’s it — ‘tanglement?” Happy chirped. Sometimes she sounded like one of those cartoon birds.
We both looked at her. “That ain’t the half of it, Babe,” Doc said. “See this rat here? I’ve trained her so she’s got to hold her breath to get the ecstasy thing. Already tried it on her sister rat — held her breath ’til she died pumpin’ the fuckin’ lever! Ever hear’ — he made air quotes — ‘if God made anything better than smack, He kept it for Himself’? Well this is it — God’s addiction.” A gleam came into Doc’s eyes and I almost laughed out loud seeing this short chubby balding sweating caricature march around with hands in the air like a televangelist. “Can you imagine if I can put this in a fucking pill? Fuck the Nobel Prize. I’ll be king of the fucking world.”
I caught the reference to Titanic, but I sure didn’t get the rest of what he was talking about. I guess Happy did. She got up and faced Doc across the table. “You’re an asshole scumbag. You don’t give a shit ‘bout nobody ‘cept yourself. Now you’re gonna fuck wit’ peeps brains?” She came around the end of the table toward Doc, and he backed up a step or two. “You fuckin’ goch. You wanna mess wit’ sex? You gonna screw up the fuckin’ planet. They don’ need me no more? That pleasure thing’s what keeps the diaper business goin’, ‘case yo’ mama dint tell ya.”
Happy was advancing and Doc was retreating, like some comic duo. She went on. “You don’ give a shit, do you? Let the whole fuckin’ human racers die out. Wha’ do you care? You’ll be dead and rotted.” The two were about the same height, she skinny, he porky. I laughed out loud as they rounded the other end of the table, she poking him in the chest. “Make fun of me all you want, jerkoff. But don’t think I ain’t gotchyer number. You’re one a them Trump types. Fuck a whore, fuck a soldier, you don’t give a fuckin’ damn about nobody.”
Now it was Doc’s turn. He grabbed the poking finger and pushed her hand in her face making her step back. “You’re a real bitch. I’m gonna make your lover boy rich, and you’re giving me this crap? You stupid git! You should be happier than a dog with two dicks. What the hell do you think I am, one of your chanky tricks? I have two PhDs.” He pushed Happy roughly on the shoulders. “Wake up, you cocksucking slut. I’m trying to help you!”
* * *
I’d had enough. Happy wasn’t happy anymore, and none of what Doc was saying made me in any way want to revisit my former life. I stood up between the dueling duo and pushed them apart. “Goddamn it!” I yelled. “Fuck this whole thing. I’m not the old John, I’m the new John. Screw you Doc.” I started for the door. “You coming, Happy?”
Her curly brown hair flounced as she spun and began to follow me. “Wait! Wait!” Doc shouted, doing his short-legged hustle after us. “One more thing I gotta show you. That’s it. I promise. Then you can go. Just one more thing.” He grabbed Happy’s hand. “You’re gonna love this.”
I looked at Happy and she looked at me with an ah-why-not nod of the head. “Okay,” I said. “But we’re not sitting down.”
“Great.” Doc sped out the door. “Right back,” he said over his shoulder.
Within about ten seconds he returned with a cloth over one hand. He bustled over to Happy and took one wrist. “Look at this,” he said with a little too much enthusiasm. He flipped the cloth off his other hand, revealing a hypodermic syringe, which he stuck into Happy’s arm. Then he let go of her wrist and stepped back.
I reached Doc within seconds and gripped his neck with both my hands, pulling him away from Happy. I started shaking him. “Are you crazy?”
As he spoke, the words choked out in rhythm to the flopping of his head. “It’s-a-poi-son. If-you-want-the-an-ti-dote, you-will-do-what-I-say.” His beady black eyes stared up at me and his expression was one of triumph.
I stopped shaking him, but held onto his neck. I glared. “What kind of poison?”
“First let me go,” he gurgled.
“Not a chance,” I said, staring him down. I squeezed harder on his neck. Happy looked freaked out. She was sweating and trembling. “Happy,” I said, “pick up the syringe.”
I turned Doc around and got him in a headlock from the back, using only one arm. Doc was so short his toes barely touched the floor, and his arms flailed in the air. My free hand took the syringe from Happy. I kept it where Doc couldn’t see it. “Good news,” I said to Happy, “There’s still some in it.” It was empty, but I figured in the heat of the moment, Doc wouldn’t remember for sure if he’d pushed the plunger all the way. I jabbed the needle into his buttocks through his pants.
“Now,” I said, “what about that antidote?”
There was a long pause, and then Doc’s head drooped as much as it could with my arm around his neck. “Shitfuck!” he said. “It’s just saline. Get the fuck off me.”
After a second, I released him and shoved his ass with my foot, the needle still hanging. He stumbled forward and landed on hands and knees.
“I…I ain’t gonna die?” Happy stammered.
“We’re all gonna die,” I said, smiling. “But this isn’t your day.”
Happy proved she had great strength in that lissome frame. She picked up a heavy chair and swung it over her head, about to bring it down on Doc’s back. “Asshollllle,” she yelled, just like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda.
“No,” I said, standing in front of her. With my height advantage, I caught the chair legs in the air.
Doc had scrambled away. He yanked the syringe from his ass, then shook fists at us and danced around the room. “You fucking zeros! Can’t you get it through your flyspeck brains that what I’m onto is bigger than TikTok? It’s bigger than fucking Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Elon Musk put together!” Apparently getting his chutzpah back, he marched right up to me and looked up, as close to eye-to-eye as he could manage. “It’s bigger than electricity — the internet — iPhones. For Christ’s sake!”
I grabbed him by the ears. I was no longer angry enough to use whatever it was I’d done with Mack in the restaurant, but I sensed there was an alternative. I struck my forehead against his, hard enough to cause minor pain. With less hurry than the last time, I was more observant. There was a slithering from my head to his, like an invisible soap bubble tunnel open on both ends. An indescribable force merged us for a fraction of a second, and then it was as if nothing had happened. For me. Doc, however, fell gasping and moaning to the floor. We didn’t hang around to view the depth of his rapture.
* * *
“That went well,” I said to Happy, out in the hall, wondering if she got the irony.
“What a shithead,” she said. She took my hand and pulled me along. “What th’ hell is that thing you do?”
“I have no idea,” I said, trying to keep up with her. A few heads turned to follow our progress. We rounded a corner and almost ran into the black-haired woman from the first lab we’d looked in on. “John,” she said, smiling coyly. “We’ve got to talk.”
I hadn’t eaten since a lousy hospital breakfast — we’d skipped out on the Salvadoran restaurant, after all. “I’m starving,” I said. “Anywhere to eat around here?”
“There’s a cafeteria,” the woman said. She looked a lot like Rachel Weisz in The Mummy. “Or we could go out somewhere.”
I looked at Happy, who shrugged. “Cafeteria’s fine, Rachel,” I said.
“What’s with the Rachel bit? My name’s…”
I did the finger-on-the-lips thing to her. “I don’t wanna know.”
“You ‘mind him of some movie star,” Happy said. “That’s what he does.”
A fellow in a white lab coat patted my shoulder in passing. “John-boy. Good to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I replied to his receding wave.
“Oh-kaay,” Rachel said. And to Happy, “And you are?”
“John calls me Happy,” she said. “We was livin’ together. See, John’s lost his mem’ry. Don’t know who he is, don’t know who you are. Don’t wanna know neither. But I wanna find what happened. I want my John back.”
“Let’s go eat,” I said, letting the double endtendre die. “You ladies can talk in the cafeteria.”
I loaded up two plates on the food line and added a bagel, a salad, a cup of soup, and a cup of coffee. Rachel offered to pay. “Shit,” Happy said, “you gonna eat all that, John?”
I nodded, stuffing a French fry in my mouth and smiling around it. “This is highly superior to hospital food.”
We sat down, and I began noshing with gusto.
“You lost all your memories?” Rachel asked. “You don’t remember me at all?”
There was a distinct feeling of pleasure in Rachel’s presence, similar to what I felt with Happy, except with Happy there was more depth. “I think we did those bed things,” I said. “You know, like in Enemy at the Gates. She looked a lot like you. But I couldn’t tell what actually happens under the covers.”
Happy didn’t look happy. “You had sex with this bimbo?” she said.
“Who’s calling whom a bimbo? Pretty clear what you do at night, Honey.”
I was devouring a cheeseburger and enjoying it immensely. It wasn’t clear what the women were talking about, and I didn’t care. My mouth was full and I couldn’t try to answer Happy’s question, so Rachel did. “And yes, we’ve fucked more times in a night than you do in a week.”
Given Happy’s spontaneous nature, I was ready to drop my fork and grab her hands. But that proved unnecessary. “You ain’t his type,” she said in a surprisingly resonant voice. Then she laughed. A few heads turned toward our table. “Whatever you had with him, weren’t no better than me wit’ my johns.” Then she smiled at the pun. “Ha ha, get it?”
Rachel sat across the rectangular table from Happy and me. I had a sense the women were silently evaluating each other — like the scene in The Hunt for Red October where Ramius confronts the Americans for the first time. Rachel pulled her chair closer. “Know what?” she said to Happy. “You’re right. I guess John didn’t tell you much about what he was doing with us. But it was business. Some girlfriends’d be upset about it. The ones that can’t separate love and sex.”
“Right-on, Twinkie,” Happy replied. “Lotta guys woulda shat their pants ‘fore they’d take up wit’ me for serious. But John and me, we was serious.”
I swallowed the fried chicken I was working on. “Right now,” I said, “I feel like Guy Pearce in Memento. Who the hell am I? I get some feelings and a few visions, but no real memories from before the attack. The thing is though, I don’t really care.” I turned to look directly at Happy and received a deeply peaceful feeling from her light brown eyes. “You say we were having a thing, so let’s give it a try. I like you.” Happy put a hand on my hand.
“Well I’m happy for you two love birds,” Rachel said, “but you can get a room later. Did you connect with Bloom?” Happy looked at me and I looked at Happy. We smiled at each other, then nodded definitively toward Rachel. “And what did he say?” she wondered.
“That I should keep on doing what I had been doing.”
“And did he say what that was?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Why don’t you tell us?”
Rachel looked puzzled. “Where is Dr. Bloom now?”
“…indisposed,” I said, much as Captain Kirk replied to Starfleet Commander Morrow’s query about the whereabouts of Bones in The Search for Spock. I did not add the “sir.”
“Yeah, ‘disposed,” Happy chirped.
“Well he did tell us,” I went on, “that he’s working on some kind of brain pill that makes people feel really good.”
“Like those rats,” Happy said. “Feelin’ that good ain’t good though,” she added.
Rachel looked at us skeptically for a moment, then came to some internal decision. “Okay,” she said. “John, you were a drug dealer.” I nodded, knowing from several movies what that meant. “Well, you weren’t on the front line pushing smack to junkies. Doc needed to see the effects of the chemicals he was making. You would sell them to a local dealer you know — knew — as party drugs. Then you’d report back what effects they had on the users. Unethical as hell. Doc’s problem, not mine.”
“How,” I wondered, “would I know what those effects were?”
Rachel raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Well, John, you were a grad student here and you were in the party set. You hung out and watched. The druggies didn’t know you had ulterior motives.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said.
“Yeah, damn ‘terestin’,” Happy added, appearing truly engaged in the conversation.
I took a bite of a bagel loaded with cream cheese and smoked salmon and spent my chewing time thinking. “So why should I go back to that life now?” I asked Rachel. “Given that I’m happy just to be alive. And this food tastes amazing! And Happy and me are going to do the bed-thing tonight.” Happy punched me playfully in the shoulder.
“It’s up to you, of course,” Rachel said. “Doc was on the verge of a breakthrough. His work was about to…”
“Take a quantum leap?” I filled in.
Rachel looked at me with new respect. “Exactly.”
“But still, why would I do it? I don’t give a rat’s ass about any breakthrough.”
“Yeah, we don’ give a crap ‘bout no noble prize neither,” Happy added.
“Well,” Rachel said, pursing her lips and squinting ever so slightly, “you just might be that breakthrough. Me, I’d want to know more.”
