NOVEL WEB Ch 4. They Told Us We Wouldn’t Dream
I made my way back into 392, slipping off the layers of clothing as I made my way towards the back of the room where my bed was placed. Shoes discarded by the foyer, the coat thrown over the back of a dining chair, sunglasses carefully set down on a desk. An entire persona undone, leaving only more constructed personalities underneath. But the constructions were useful, the employee uniform helpfully tagged with a name, most probably my name. Similarly, under the disguise of brown corrugated paper would lie marked medicine, a useful contraption both for its street value and in figuring out who Thalia was.
The bed creaked nervously under my thin frame as I sat upon it, slowly picking at the tape. Carefully, methodically, the cardboard came undone, and out fell two little orange containers and a folded sheet of printer paper.
In a flash of what almost could be construed as excitement, I picked up the bottles and turned them round, expecting to inspect their labels but instead finding them blank. No label, no name. In lieu of words, I opened the bottles themselves to more closely examine their contents. As I unscrewed the first cap, a pungent sting hit my nose, its source evidently the long white pills inside. Whatever this was, Thalia was evidently willing to put up with it for its supposed benefits. The other bottle was filled with small blue tablets, and smelled rather sweet. Sealing both, I ruminated briefly on their unmarked nature. No words, no labeling could speak for them. I picked absentmindedly at my own employee badge, pinned helpfully to my chest. Would that I had the freedom these pills had somehow obtained.
I turned next to the piece of paper, which apparently contained instructions. Swallow one of the white ones and let one/two of the blue ones dissolve under the tongue, daily. Vague. Very vague. I’d seen some bad packaging in my day, but this seemed to be worse than even some of the grey market material. The note even looked to be handwritten. I folded the paper again and placed it next to its two orange siblings on the mattress.
This was… dangerous. I didn’t recognize the pills, didn’t have any clue what taking them would do. Seeing as how they at least came with dosages, I could probably take them and see what they did, but that would be irresponsible beyond words. It could get me high, yes, but it could also kill me. On that same note, it would be similarly dangerous to sell them on the street. At that point, I’d be flirting with manslaughter charges in addition to possession and distribution. Alice might know what they are, I mused. But seeing as how I had no idea, just handing unknown substances over to an underground crime lord and letting her set her price was also irresponsible, just along a different dimension.
I could also just give them back to Thalia.
It took a moment to peel myself away from that thought, of simply repackaging the pills, sticking them back inside her mailbox, and forgetting anything had ever happened. But then what was the point? Moreover, I considered, what was a girl like her doing with unmarked pills being sent from an unknown source? Perhaps this went deeper than I thought.
A small part of me told me no, that was patently unreasonable, there’s no way a random girl would somehow be involved in the trafficking of strange drugs. But then, there was that large bird I’d seen one night. The dreams of the city… I stared out my tiny window at the mostly obscured cityscape. An orange glow was beginning to creep in, and the massive mechanism of humanity along with it. In the morning light, when dreams end, perhaps the city’s horrors and wonders would too, and the mundanities of an impoverished trans girl who needed constant highs to get through her day would be revealed.
I let the bottles and paper sit on the bed as I got ready for work. I would need time to think about this.
The day had gone by almost in a blur. Jared was his usual chipper self, with a persona so well-practiced I almost believed he genuinely liked being who he was. Nothing strange had happened at work, nothing untoward. I had replaced the labels on some shelves, shuffled items around, talked with little old ladies and little young men. An endless list of tasks to be performed by an ever-vanishing workforce. I wondered sometimes about where the people cut off for efficiency’s sake ended up. Wisdom told me I didn’t want to know, that this was one secret the city could keep.
I’d gone back to the Rabbit Hole, though I hadn’t collected more trinkets for Alice. She still let me drink on a tab, but I noticed she cut the alcohol with water, not that I could taste the difference. She nodded her head like always, not letting undue emotion slip onto her face at any point in our conversation. Finally, she offered me a job. A package had gone missing, she said, a shipment that had been bought and paid for. The client was displeased, and it would be costly to replace. I was to look into it, and either return the material or ensure the safe delivery of future shipments. Simple, right? She smiled at me, evidently expecting me to agree.
I shook my head. All of that sounded far above my paygrade, like something a real gang would get involved in. I was just a thief.
Alice clucked her tongue, bemoaning the lack of ambition among today’s youth. Then she went back to serving other people drinks, and I went back to drinking my soul away.
I made it back to my bed barely drunk at all, feeling bad but not sure if it was the alcohol or the everything else. As I plopped myself down on the mattress, a terrible wrenching noise emanated from the bedframe, and a sharp jab in my midsection reminded me that the bottles were still there. Sympathizing for my aching parts, I reached underneath and extricated the plastic containers. The unlabeled, translucent orange pill bottles were still as ineffable as they were this morning. I set them besides myself on the bed, not having a nightstand to properly place them on. Maybe I’d have a clearer head in the morning.
I awoke with a start, feeling sweat all over my torso, making me uncomfortably aware of how hairy my chest and arms had gotten. Where was the—the light? I stumbled over myself rushing to the switch, finding it where it had always been. It clicked on, bathing most of the small apartment in a garish yellow-white glow. Any other day, I’d have found its terrible electric buzzing sound annoying, distracting, even deafening, but on this occasion I was glad to have my thoughts wrenched away from the… the what? The nightmare.
Ah, yes, the nightmare.
If I were in better command of my mental activity I could have stopped thinking about it then and there, but unfortunately I lacked the kind of control over my thoughts that I had over my physical actions. Wiping my forehead free of sweat, I made my way over to the kitchen area to pour myself a glass of water.
Alice was in the nightmare, I believed, or wait, no, Alice had not been in it. Neither had Thalia, or Germund. I was with… a faceless woman. Not just anonymous, but a veil of skin had been stretched around where her features would otherwise be. She had been next to me on our wedding day dressed in splendorous gold, and I stood in a tailored suit. A dark red one, I thought as I finished my first glass of water and proceeded to pour myself a second.
And I had lived a successful life, yes, in the dream. But that was not the nightmare. It couldn’t have been, surely not. The nightmare was… it was a large bird, feathers dark as the clouded night, dripping pitch from its inky appearance. It had come to me, when I was dying, and I had seen myself reflected in its glossy exterior.
And I was faceless, too.
While one glass had not been enough, two was apparently too much, and I set the half-empty cup down on the counter as I made my way back to bed, still considering what had terrified me so. The world outside the window was mostly obscured by taller buildings, and was dark enough that I saw a reflection of myself more than I saw the city. And I was not faceless. The body I piloted had features, terrible as they were. I traced the outline of my skull in the foot-wide glass, and came to the horrible realization that I did not recognize whoever was in that frame.
I decided then that life was far too short not to get high. I took the bottles from off the bed and made my way back to the kitchen, where I finished the rest of the water along with one white pill. I placed a blue one under my tongue and flicked off the light, and waited for the effects to kick in.
Ten minutes passed. I sat down on the bed. Did I feel different?
It was fifteen minutes now, or maybe twenty. Either way, the blue tablet under my tongue had gone, dissolved away into my system. I licked the inside of my mouth. It had tasted slightly sweet, and an irrational impulse told me to try downing the entire bottle like candy.
Was it thirty minutes now? Forty? I felt nothing coming on, no alterations of my mind good or bad.
The world outside was dark as pitch, its only provenance of life the occasional sound of motorists down below. An hour had passed now, and I slipped back into dream, the last thing I saw being a large crow flying in to perch on my windowsill, the last thing I heard—or imagined, possibly—being the sound of its wings.
I awoke peacefully, though I was sure I had dreamed. Pleasant dreams, perhaps, and I closed my eyes in search of memory. Nothing quite came to mind, except a flourishing plant, and broad hues of pink and blue, a veritable ecstatic phantasmagoria. A psychedelic dream, then; I smiled appreciatively. If it had been such, I certainly wasn’t hallucinating anymore. But the world did seem brighter in some way. I stretched out my hand into the dim sunbeam coming into the room, finding fascination in how the light seemed to gleam off my skin. Out of sheer impulse, I stuck out my tongue, trying to taste the sunlight and finding it mildly sweet. Shrugging, I made my way over to the bathroom. Maybe a bit of sensory modification had taken place, but at least I was alive and feeling pretty good about it.
That nice feeling dissipated when I met in the cracked mirror the same unpleasant face and stubble that I’d always had. I would almost say I was disappointed, if not for the fact that if these drugs could change my appearance then I would really be in deep trouble. Some government agency would probably be on me. As it was, my body was the hand I had been dealt and it looked like nothing could change that, even if these pills did seem to make me feel better somehow. Sighing, I took my razor and got to work.
On the way down to the lobby, I grabbed an empty plastic bottle that I refilled with water. For the first time in a long time, Chloe would be getting a good watering today.
“Right on time!” Jared declared, shooting me a big thumbs-up from his station near the entrance of the store.
I smiled back, and was surprised to find that it came easier than normal. For once, it seemed my body was behaving itself, and I wouldn’t need to conduct my usual internal fights with its mechanisms. Either that or I was actually feeling happier. “Well hey, it’s nice that someone notices.”
Jared made a show of shrugging. “What can I say, I appreciate a punctual employee.”
“We’ll just ignore the fact that I get paid to do it,” I stage-muttered.
He nodded sagely in response. “And right now, you’re also getting paid to restock aisle 5—that’s toiletries since we swapped 5 and 15 yesterday. Then after that…”
I nodded along and made my way over to my task, already appreciating the newfound ease with which my body operated. Maybe these pills were antidepressants? Except no, I’d taken SSRIs before, and this didn’t feel the same. Similar, perhaps, but definitely no antidepressant I’d handled before.
Thalia probably needs these, actually, some small part of me thought.
Thalia is already an attractive girl, what more does she want? I countered, carefully hanging toothbrushes one by one on their metal hooks. The world’s handed everything she could ever want to her, except no, she’d run away from home at sixteen, hadn’t she. I stared at my hands, coming dangerously close to truly considering the ramifications of my actions.
Besides, that part of me objected, not everyone wants to be a pretty girl. I’d seen plenty of trans guys at the—
I set my face and resolved not to think about that thing. It had been a temporary lapse of emotional barriers, nothing more. Well, possibly also an attempt by a mark to get me to reveal sensitive information in a moment of weakness, but definitely nothing more than that.
That literally makes no sense, an increasingly annoying subversive element pointed out.
Grumbling to myself about mental discipline, I moved over to push in rolls of toilet paper onto the bottom shelf. Jared popped his unwelcome head around the corner and, in a show of bland corporate cheer, reminded me that I’d look prettier if I smiled. Somehow, that almost convinced me.
I walked along a sidewalk after work, retracing all the steps I usually took. The crowd rushed around me, paying me no heed. If I wanted to, I could probably swipe something off someone. Or maybe not; maybe today someone would finally yell “thief!” and I’d be taken away for good. I stayed my hand for the time being. And on that note about thievery…
No. I was not prepared to think about Thalia, or her striking practical streetwear, or her short blond hair, or the way that her silver piercing really drew out the green of her eyes in an aesthetically pleasing manner.
The medication I’d taken from her, that was a far more immediate (and appropriate) concern.
I still had no idea what these pills were. So far as I could tell, they were antidepressants of some kind, maybe a new type that wasn’t out on market yet, so new that they wouldn’t even label the package. True, I didn’t know what they did exactly, or what side-effects I could expect to see, but so long as I stuck to the dosage written on that piece of paper, I should be fine.
Or maybe I wouldn’t be fine, maybe I’d die foaming at the mouth and no one would discover my body until the landlord made an eviction. I turned that thought over and over in my head, weighing the risks of my current situation. What was I gaining, exactly, by taking these things? If they were actually valuable, I would just be pissing away money. On the other hand, it would probably only be responsible of me to keep unknown drugs off the street. Besides, it wasn’t like I was increasing the dosage on these things, at least not yet. And above all else, the way they’d made me feel today… I wanted that. I wanted more of it. I wanted it for the rest of my life, hopefully.
Going over these thoughts, my feet slowly walked on autopilot back to my dingy apartment, where I swallowed another long white pill with water and dissolved another oval blue tablet under my tongue.