by

J o n a t h a n   L e t h e m

"Should there be music?"

"What, our song? We could play it backwards."

"Did - do we have a song?"

"Or Dylan - 'Sooner or later you'll go your way -' "

I hated Saundra Beatitude, and she hated me. She was too tall and hard, not like a woman at all, really, more like some kind of predatory sculpture dressed in skin and leather and hairdo. And yes, she was fun to be with, for an hour or two. It was fun to watch her chainsmoke menthol pot and listen as she complained about the people she knew - often while sitting in their midst - but anyone who formed a relationship with her had to be completely insane -

Which brings us to me, I guess; Peter Louise Fittinger. The one who hated Saundra and the one who somehow loved her too, I guess. Anyway, we were stuck in the dribbling last stages of an interminable love affair, and no real end in sight. Oh, the relationship was over, certainly, it's just that the fighting and the fucking wasn't. And since fucking and fighting was all we ever did anyway - am I confusing you? We'd entered a null-space, you see, a void between a chance at happiness together and any kind of successful break, and the distance either way seemed equally impossible.

So we tried modeling our breakup on the computer. We set up a little HIS program, a little HERS, and fixed them up in a virtual relationship, threw in a lot of emotional baggage, crippling psychic scars and the like. Waited for the damned thing to devolve. It wouldn't. We ran it through every scenario we could think of, injected the theorem brimful with hatred and boredom, but fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years up the line, HIS and HERS were still together. Yes, I stayed with her if she had a sex-change (in fact, the picture brightened somewhat, a detail she felt it was appropriate to needle me with) and yes, she stayed with me if my teeth all rotted out (they were working at it), I grew obese, or converted to Islam.

That made me feel a little better about failing out here, in the real world. It just couldn't be done. I'd call her or she'd call me and we'd go from warily comparing our pain to ridiculing one another to sleeping together again, and it would spiral away from us, all the hard work we'd put in together to be apart.

Then we heard about NitroP, a new street drug. My good friend Rudy Messer told me about it, said it might be what I was looking for, and that he knew a guy -

"It was developed by the CIA as an anti-patriotism drug," explained Rudy's mysterious friend. "For debunking allegiance in EPOWS - enemy prisoners of war. But it wasn't reliable enough for them, got shelved - you know. One of the lab people noticed the other effect, the personal thing. None of the guys who'd worked on the project were on speaking terms anymore, and it turned out their marriages had all gone down the tubes."

"How's it -"

"Like an hallucinogenic. A trip. You take it together, lock yourselves in a room and trip together. Done that before, right? Only at the end of this trip you find you've actually gotten somewhere. A trip with a destination. Last stop, everybody off."

"And that's it. The relationship is over."

"That's right."

We waited until dark. Inevitably, the moment recalled others like it, explorations together, chemical ceremonies. The four little white tablets nested in her palm, looking almost iridescent. We downed them and entered that other null-space, the line between taking a drug and being taken by it. While we waited we fought: about the music, the food, unplugging the phone, and whether or not to take a last roll together.

"Let's just see if we feel like it. We don't even know -"

'I want to. I think it's perfect. I want you in me while it happens, when I realize I don't care any more."

"I don't think it's all of a sudden like that. I think it's more of a process -"

"God, you're so uptight."

"I don't know, it just doesn't seem right to want to, seeing as how -"

"Right to want, wrong to want. That's just like you. What do you want?"

"Let's wait and see? Do you -"

"Hate you already? Yes, it's happening, oh God, I feel it coming, it's like an orgasm of hate!" She shrieked with laughter, then gasped and laughed again. 'Oh God, it was so good. Was yours good?"

"Cut it out. Be a little bit serious. Anyway, it's not a matter of hating me. If it were that we'd already be out of this."

"Okay." She sighed. "Is there anything to drink?"

Initially it was a trip like any other, everything digital and chocolate, while our synapses struggled to adjust. I'd doubled our doses to be safe, and it meant a rather long period of clinging to one another and bellowing commands and pleas and insights and insults across what seemed a void of starstrewn galaxies.

But soon enough we settled into that familiar half-lucid and half-idiotic crypto-profound sort of dialogue which means so much as it's uttered and ordinarily so little the day afterwards.

"It's incredible, you know, how fake it all is -"

"Fake incredible you mean."

"Yes fake incredible how we ascribe all this incredible fake importance to our fake emotions."

"You mean given that we're like infinitesimal specks on an empty flat surface moving through just such a tiny slice of time and space that it hardly even matters -"

"That's you. I'm not a speck."

"Fake pride. Fake pride."

"No, no. Fake insight. Fake metaphor. Listen: you're a speck. It's perfectly you. You're a speck moving around inside a huge empty cathedral, trying to inhabit it, trying to understand what it's doing in there, looking out through the stain glass windows for eyes, totally unable to see another person. Whereas I'm all on the outside, all encrustation and buttresses, I'm all cathedral and nothing inside. You live -"

"I'm wandering out now. The speck is wandering out of the cathedral. I'm sick of it."

"No, it's hopeless. You're lost in the basement."

"I am?"

"Don't be fake afraid -"

"I'm not. It's just -"

"What. Fake sympathy. What."

"It's a little sad, for the speck. That out of the windows of the cathedral there was only one little glow - but now there's nothing -"

"I know. It's fake sad. That not fake loving you any more means not getting to fake hate you any more either."

"I know. Our fake hate. It was beautiful."

"Fake beautiful."

"Yes."

"You shit, you poor-ass snake - oh no, oh God, it's slipping away -" She giggled. "I hope I can at least remember what a jerk you are, otherwise -" She dissipated in laughter.

"What?"

"I might make friends with you -" She gasped to keep from laughing again. "- and I don't want you for a friend."

"Thanks."

"Awww, don't be fake hurt. You know it doesn't fake mean enough to get all fake hurt about. Go back and look at the inside of the cathedral, speck. Go speck yourself."

"That's Mister Speck to you."

The drug did what was claimed for it. There was no last fuck, either. It was simpler than I'd imagined; we didn't care anymore. As the evening progressed, and we moved through intoxication, giddiness, and last flarings of dependence and bile, we emerged into a new world, one where Saundra was, well, smaller, principally. Very much still herself but more discrete, her boundaries no longer blurring with mine. She was so suddenly harmless I might have laughed, but I was incapable of even as profound an emotion as bemusement. Exhausted too, of course, from the physical ordeal, but there was no emotional hangover. I sought randomly in myself for any sense of depth, value or importance pertaining to her, and came only again and again to shallowness, distraction, dearth.

At the end she'd fallen asleep in the armchair, leaving me the bed. I woke early in the morning, still too wired to sleep properly, and stumbled away, leaving a short, polite note on the table. That was the last communication between us for several years.

At first I thought I'd gotten off scot-free. Our association was over, and the drug resulted in nothing like the conventional flashbacks I'd so feared. No, it was only visible from the outside, the awful truth, when it did emerge, about NitroP.

First went my livelihood. I worked as a jazz producer, entrusted with the delicate task of eliciting studio performances from musicians accustomed to live interplay and audience response - it had been one of my few talents, and loves.

"It doesn't relate." This was Stannard Mainway, my - or rather, Groundfog Records' - balky superstar, with whom I'd shown a previously golden touch. "I don't see it, you understand? I can't see why play the solo in there. It's got no place to go, there's no point -"

There's no point to jazz at all, and that's the point. I felt like saying, but instead I took him through it again, played the backing track and let the MAINWAY program extrapolate his solo again for him. He listened intently and shook his head. "It's not there."

"It's not all there, but you can surely see a way in - that's why you're here, Stan. To bring it home."

"Nope. It's not there. No connection. I rely on a feeling, babe -"

A feeling it was my job to provide, of course. But I seemed incapable of inspiring anything other than a sense of the futility of expression now. My presence in the studio seemed only to promote an intense awareness of the lack of relation between disparate parts, and of the absolute pointlessness of pretending that they did somehow relate.

A few weeks after our trip I was called into the front office by Sterling Groundfog.

"You know I was mad at you? I was, really, Peter, actually mad and I thought I was going to call you in here and fire you. But one look at you -" He took his cigar out of his mouth and switched it off, the red ember dying instantly. "I dunno, Pete. Something's not right, Stan's upset, the other players are upset, they say you're not there anymore. If I thought you were fucking up on purpose I would be mad, I swear I thought I was mad, but looking at you here -" He put down his cigar and got out of his seat. "I dunno. I should just send you on a vacation but why should I send you on a vacation? Do I give a shit? Does it matter? Aw jeez, what's the matter with me?" He went and opened the window and took a deep breath of LA fog. "Okay, I called you in here because there was a problem, right?"

"Uh, right."

"And I'm supposed to like, wanna fix the problem, right? Aw, crap. I dunno what I'm talking about. This thing's got me feeling all empty inside - listen to me!"

It was me - I was beginning to recognize the effect. My personal life, what there was of it after dropping out of Saundra's orbit, which if it had nothing else to recommend it was at the very least populated, had taken a similar turn. One night at an expensive uptown flirting salon I pulled up a seat at the bar, punched up a line on the network, and began inserting some comments into the conversational pool. Immediately I felt the energy onscreen dissipate. Conversationalists began dropping out of the network - I could hear them switching back to realtime conversations at the tables around me, though even those soon died out.

At about a quarter to twelve - just when the place should have achieved a real ferment of pheromones and photons, the proprietor, Evil Steve Pierglass, came on line.

"Listen folks, some nights it's got it and some nights it ain't. Tonight the magic ain't here. I'm closing up shop 'cause it pains me to see it founder like this - better now while you've got a chance of finding some other place to hang. Sorry. Goodnight." At that the screen blipped off, and a minute later the bartender yelled last call.

I went to a movie and couldn't help seeing how little the supposed lovers cared for one another, how little the actors cared for their director or their parts, couldn't keep from seeing how it all was riddled with indifference, until by the end I could only watch the sloppy pointless splicing of one section to another and think of how it was once a pile of disparate fragments and might as well have been thrown together at random, or, better, not at all.

It was in me, still, the NitroP. It was there between me and my perceptions, and it was leaking out of me too, to infect others. And I wasn't the only one, it turned out.

The side effects were common to the first wave of NitroP users, common enough that a scare had gone out, and we first would likely also be the last. I was typical, apparently, in the way I'd fallen through the safety net of my own life. "Watch the donut, not the hole," went an advisory song of my childhood, but unavoidably now I was fixed on the hole. And, understandably, it was difficult getting anyone interested in the problem.

So a foundation appeared, founded and staffed by sufferers who'd come far enough to want to reach out to the rest of us. Came the day I crawled through their entrance, bereft, mumbling and whispering out broken shards of speech.

They took me in. Gave me a hospital garment, a room and a roommate as hopeless as myself, and fifteen hours of therapy, group and solo, a week.

"Can't you see that you're not even listening to what she's saying? You're pretending to have a conversation but the two halves don't connect -"

"Peter -"

"I mean you wouldn't even be here talking to one another if it weren't for some bizarre chain of coincidences, so why think there's any basis -"

"Peter we're trying to say that there might be some motive for wanting to flesh out the bizarre chain with some attempt at bridging the gulf - much more interesting and warmer too, don't you think, than just pointing it out again?"

"I can't help but feel incredibly bored that you're trying to patch this sort of feeble concept of 'interest' and then 'warmth' onto my very clear perception that there's absolutely nothing there -"

"God, Peter, you're always -"

"Good, Marcia, don't stop, say what you're feeling towards Peter right now."

"He's such a jerk!" she erupted, and wept. The group applauded this breakthrough.

"I don't, I mean, I just say what I'm thinking, what comes into my head. I don't know why I bother. I'm just trying to say that I'm not particularly fake interested in fake warmth and I don't feel any particular fake warmth about the idea of fake interest -"

I bottomed out of the group sessions, again and again, or the rest of the group graduated up around me; whichever it was I ended up alone each time, until they stopped trying. My solo work went on a bit longer, though I drove several of my counselors back to lower levels by the sheer invasive force of my disinterest, glimpsed up close and alone.

"Let's talk about the woman you left, Peter. It was a woman, wasn't it? Who you took the drug with?"

"Uh, yes."

"Do you remember her name?"

"Sa - no."

"Is it possible it was a mistake? That you belonged together?"

"What - what would it mean to 'belong together'?"

Gentle laughter. Increasingly, as the others left me behind, I met with laughter. "You're different, Peter. You know that by now. Now, as silly as any idea of 'true love' is, even to me, I wonder if we might explore the possibility that in order to cut her out of your life you may have had to cut out large parts of yourself, too. More than any of the rest of us, I mean. The majority of yourself."

"I - I doubled the dose, you know. Have we bothered to talk about that, or was that someone else? Because I really think that the fake problem lies in some other fake direction than the especially fake fake fake -"

"It wasn't your dose, Peter. I myself took the drug several times. There are others who took more - but you know that."

"Oh, that was our conversation, then. I fake forgot."

The foundation dissolved, its members all pulled up by their own and one another's bootstraps into a coherent life again. Leaving me behind. They did arrange for me to keep my room in the sanitorium, though my roommate's bed was empty, and for private care to continue. Their visits trailed away, understandably; how far could empathy extend? They'd done enough. I watched - or rather, dissected - a lot of television.

Then, one day just recently, they returned, bringing me a new roommate. "Someone like you, Peter. You two are the last, in fact. We're sure you'll find a lot not to say to each other." Saundra, of course, though we both pretended disinterest until our keepers were gone.

"I remember you."

"Yes. I remember you too."

"How fake ironic it is to have to look at you all day, after all this. You know, nobody else can stand me any more. That's why they brought me here. Is that why you're here?"

"Yup."

"You know I still fake hate your guts, if only just a little. What do you think of that?"

Her grin was the ugliest thing I'd seen in years.

"Darling," I said.

Now I understand my fate. Only if I can learn to love her again, can I be fully human. Only by working through my indifference and hate, back to that center where I bathed in her glow. Only then will I be strong enough to leave her. Which I'll do, I swear, if it's the last thing I do. Which it obviously will be.