by David Drogowski
The air in Control Room 34A is cold and invasive, and Melvin wonders how they can really expect him to sleep. But that’s nothing compared to the spaghetti-mess of wires and sticky pads layered all over his body, gingerly secured to humming boxes all around the room. A smattering of tiny sensors are suctioned to nerve centers from his head to his toes. A large screen across the room, glaring bright white, shouts SLEEP PEACEFULLY.
He groans; He’s a belly sleeper, but rolling over would destroy about $300,000 of Ferndale University equipment. In the pit of his stomach, Melvin can feel the effervescent green tablet swimming and burbling.
This experiment is for a highly anticipated drug known as “SOMNOMAX!®” PharmUtech is very confident that this drug will speedily reach the market. After watching an hour’s worth of promotional videos, Melvin had figured out that the ® and the exclamation point are part of the name. They are critical to the spelling. SOMNOMAX®! is vastly superior to its competitor, Dozetrophil. Dozetrophil can be spelled with any particular punctuation, and in lower case if so desired.
He likes to picture the insides of his brain like an enormous blue ocean cove, and the walls are composed of huge pink fleshy appendages like the uvula at the back of your throat. Melvin thinks that little dangly thing is called a vulva. He is very fortunate to have never used it in a sentence.
Melvin has slept in this little room every day this week. Dr. Scripps and his research assistants wire him in and poke him all over with a small electrical device, making notes on some charts before leaving. Then Melvin tries to rest. Every time he starts to nod off, a huge scanner lens extends down and spins, pulling his brain into focus. The machine is loud and it wakes Melvin up. Then the machine retracts and waits for him to fall asleep again. Melvin doesn’t think that this is how the experiment is supposed to go.
Wednesday morning, Dr. Scripps saunters in with his twitchy flock of grad students.
“Doctor, I can’t feel my face.” Melvin is smooshing his numb lips in circles.
“Well, you did read the waiver carefully, correct?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember reading anything like this.”
Dr. Scripps clicks his pen wildly. The gaggle of students immediately mimic him, clickclickclickclick. “That’s what you’re here for, Mr. Meese,” he says with his fiery eyes in a hard stare. “This is how we figure these things out.”
Friday comes, and Melvin gets his paycheck. $1,000 from PharmUtech Corporation, just like last week and the week before. It has been a few months like this. That night, resting in his own bed, he scratches at the little pink rashes that the sticky pads left behind. He sleeps, curled up like a little happy ball.
The summer that he started at the university, Melvin survived solely on condiment sandwiches. He had them sorted out for each day of the week, so as to avoid boredom as well as distribute the nutritive qualities of each into something resembling a healthy diet. Mondays were ketchup and hot sauce sandwiches; Tuesdays were cheese whiz and black pepper; Wednesdays were an indulgent peanut butter and jelly day; Thursdays went back to condiments, with the barbecue sauce sandwich. Friday was a wild card.
This decision was mostly the product of economic necessity. It had enabled him to survive on the pocket change he salvaged. “The best parts of the food I love without all the pricey add-ons, like meat,” he used to say, pale with pronounced ribs but culinarily satisfied.
Now, thanks to PharmUtech, he is going to treat himself to a grilled cheese. It is Saturday, now infinitely better than the Italian Dressing Sandwich Day it used to be. He opens the door, struggling with the grocery bag and his research materials, and delicately gets everything just inside the door. He then drops everything.
Curtis bursts around the corner, dressed as an enormous, richly-colored foam burrito, with a plastic crown on his head. In a loud and poorly-executed accent, he hollers “HOLA, SEŇOR!”
Melvin is stunned. “Curtis, what the hell are you doing?”
“I am the BOOREEEETO KEEENG!” He reaches behind his back, and presents a piping hot burrito. It burns him, and he bursts out with “Sonovabitch!” and drops it on the floor. “Five second rule,” he says, and brushes the carpet lint off of it, and takes a huge bite. Slowly. Really slowly. Melvin is pretty sure Curtis is baked.
Curtis Pushwell is, nine times out of ten, pretty baked.
“Curtis, I know you don’t wanna work for your money, but if this is your latest business plan I can already tell you it’s a bomb.”
“Bullshit dude. Why would you say that to me?”
“To save you a lot of embarrassment. You’re ripping off two existing franchises. Poorly.” Melvin gathers his bags up from the floor.
“Fuck fuck fuck, no. Wrong, man. This shit is like evolution: Man didn’t rip off the apes, man improved on the formula. That’s not stealing, that’s innovation.”
Curtis was right about evolution but wrong about the Burrito King, and either way it was impossible to take him seriously while he was dressed as a giant entrée. Melvin frowned. “Alright, man. But you’re putting the cart before the horse anyway. You don’t have a business plan, do you?”
“No.” Curtis is trying to eat the burrito and burning the roof of his mouth.
“So why did you make the mascot first?”
Curtis just stares, eyes narrow and hurt. “Fuck you, dude. You’re off the team.”
Melvin laughs, and throws the groceries on the counter. He butters bread and starts toasting it, and pulls the plastic inpatient armband from the sleep experiment off of his wrist. Curtis eyes up the wristband, and laughs in disapproval.
“I don’t know what you need PharmUtech for.” Curtis says, his bulging white eyes rattling in his head as he paces the living room. “That shit is killing you.” He flips forward, landing on his hands, and walks upside-down on his hands down the hallway, kicks off the bathroom door, and hand-walks back.
“I don’t know about you, Curtis, but I like having real food and furniture. Plus, this is good, noble work. They’ve already fed all this stuff to rats. It didn’t kill them. It’s completely safe. Someone just has to try it first. It’s like a technicality.”
“Oh yeah, dude? So why is your face hanging off your skull?” Curtis flips upright and lurches over Melvin with one eye open like a jeweler scrutinizing a diamond.
It’s true. Melvin tries to put his grilled cheese into his mouth with marginal success. His lips keep getting in the way and flapping over his teeth.
“You’re crazy.” Melvin pushes a smile through those lips and stands up, smoothing the crumbs off of his pleated khakis and vest. “I’m not that hungry.” He pushes the remaining half of the sandwich into the trash. “That’s all. Just not that hungry.”
“Melvin, hear me out, dude.” Curtis stands right in front of him, too close as always. The smell of bottom-shelf weed and Michelob occupies the space between them. “First it was the anti-anxiety pill, you remember that? And that made you tired all the time, so you got on board with that Energuice shit. And that kept you up all night, so you started eating Somnomax…”
“You know you’re supposed to yell that, right?” Melvin interjected. “It’s spelled in all capitals.”
Curtis sighed. “Whatever. SOMNOMAX®! You started popping those so you could sleep, and now your muscles are all slack, dude. You look like a corpse. Don’t you see a pattern?”
“Curtis, you have to lay off. It pays the bills, right? Besides, all these medicines work. They all do exactly what they say they will.” Melvin winces at his self-deception just a bit, but fortunately the SOMNOMAX®! had rendered that wince imperceptible. “Come on, Curtis. What do you propose instead?”
Curtis itches his face, and the doorbell rings. He shoots around the corner, studies the peephole twice, and then opens the door a crack. Some kid in a green hoodie is standing outside, and Curtis motions him in and talks in a low voice, taking a wad of cash from the kid and counting it. Curtis hands him a baggy full of white powder, and in agreement the kid leaves happy. He turns around and jumps at the sight of Melvin. “Were we talking?”
Melvin shrugs, and Curtis’ face lights up. “Oh! Yeah, yeah…” He starts pacing again. “It’s like this, man: You’re anxious? Smoke a bowl. You can’t focus and get shit done? I got three eight-balls of decent coke in my sock drawer. It’s a great wide world of uppers, downers, shit to make you trip, shit to chill you out, shit to turn your brain on and off and put you on the fuckin’ moon if you want. So again, I ask you,” he stands with his feet close together and his hands in a conscious prayer gesture, “What do you need PharmUtech for?”
Melvin didn’t have much of an answer, only the nagging hope that there was some sort of difference.
Scripps has made up more names than he can hope to remember. He’s sorting through the enormous stack of E-628 forms on his solid mahogany desk, the “Subject Identification and Wellness Certification” forms that are so multitudinous and routine in his work. But this particular stack is unlike the rest of the forms. This is the stack of revisions.
On one form, his hand rests over the phrase “Subject reports severe nausea, vomit accompanied with blood,” the name at the top of the form reads MELVIN H. MEESE. Scripps crosses this out and writes JACOB LAURENCE. He overwrites all the other personal information, and places this in the outbox.
The next few sheets are the same. MELVIN MEESE becomes KIRK ODELAY, BYRON SHUMACHER, DONALD GREEVEY. These all go in the outbox.
On one of the yellow walls is a large certificate that reads “This accolade is presented to Dr. Percival H. Scripps for accuracy and standardization excellence in all laboratory procedures. – PharmUtech Corporation.”
On Scripps’ desk are the keys to his Miata, a half-dozen separate bottles of herbal supplements from Ginkgo Biloba to Flax Seed Oil, and a photo of himself. The photo smiles at him, and on occasion he smiles back. He rarely sleeps for more than a couple hours a night. But even that exhaustion won’t persuade him to try SOMNOMAX®! He doesn’t trust the stuff.
The intercom on his desk buzzes. “Yes?” he irritably mumbles into he receiver.
“Dr. Scripps? Someone’s here to see you.”
“Do they have an appointment?”
“No, he doesn’t,” she says, but she hasn’t even finished her sentence before Melvin has already rushed in, throwing the door open and then shut. “What the hell is this stuff doing to me, Scripps?” Melvin is panicked, and Scripps grabs a clipboard and pen. This is what he does when people storm his office, as they occasionally do.
“Mr. Meese, bite your tongue. Start over. What’s wrong?”
Melvin is breathing heavy, and he looks like he’s trying to rage, except that his face isn’t complying. He’s squeezing out just a few drops of anger at a time, slowly turning red. Scripps is uncomfortable, so he looks at the desk photo. The photo smiles. He smiles back.
“Are you kidding me? This is very, very wrong. This was never part of the deal. I feel like my muscles are falling off. I can’t eat. I creep myself out. What is this stuff doing to me?”
Scripps laughs, clicks, and writes. “Mmhmm… Mmhmmm? Mmhmm…” He grins and makes curly squiggles on the pad. A tear wriggles out of Melvin’s eye as he speaks, and Scripps is already planning out his response. That’s what the program is for, Mr. Meese. That’s what it’s for.
It’s the next week, and Melvin is in another cold grey room, covered in sticky pads. Before him on a little white tray is a single, Sunkist-orange pill with a placard label behind it that reads “Stimudrine.” The television on the wall is showing happy people running through the greenest of green pastures, and some grandpa that looks like old-school S.S. easing right out of his wheelchair and running after them. They play frisbee. No one ever steps in dog shit or gets a tooth knocked out in Stimudrine’s universe. Grandpa may as well be walking on water.
The onscreen image changes to reveal an image of a smiling woman. Melvin smiles with her, and the electrodes attached to his cheeks jolt him, freezing his muscles in a contraction. He leaks a whimper of a scream through his hideous electric grin as his mind is reprogrammed. The screen blanks, then reads YOUR SMILE HAS BEEN RECONFIGURED. The neural pathways between his muscles and his motor centers have all been redirected with nothing more than carefully placed current.
As he attempts to form a genuine smile, the mirror across the room reveals his horrifying joker grin, lips pulled high up past the gums. From now on, every time Melvin is genuinely happy, he will look like a thousand watts of ghosted agony. He can hear static pops and hisses steaming from the top of his skull.
The screen is instructing him to frown, but he’s already in tears. His throat feels like it’s on fire: the current must have run right through his esophagus. With one more huge shock, his body suddenly weighs a ton, and he slumps forward, and his eyes are heavy. He collapses unconscious into the medication tray, and lands with a thick smack on the tile floor, the placard for “Stimudrine” fluttering down and landing beside his head. The bottom edge begins to soak in his blood.
The halls of the research department in the Ferndale University College of Medicine are stainless steel to prevent the transmission of infection. Any aberrant strains or biological material must never leave this floor. Scripps is walking down the main hall, clipboard in hand, peeking into windows as he passes.
Room 13A is lined with cages, a small nude mouse in each one. He reads the clipboard on the door, and is reminded that these mice are being tested with a cancer-fighting drug called Carcinol. They’re engineered to have no immune systems. On closer look, the mice all have hideous red welts marring their otherwise pure, furless bodies.
Scripps replaces the board and keeps walking. Room after room are the same story, mice and rabbits and even a room of chimps, all in sterile environments. Clipboards all document their stories and purposes. As Scripps peeks into the room of chimps, they don’t even move. They used to jump up and hang from the wire cages. Now they just stare.
In the next room, a cat walks across the room back and forth, dragging its head on the ground. This one is part of a litter who have had memory loss induced, and are being medicated to restore brain function. The cat bumps into the wall, stumbles blindly, then goes off walking in the other direction again.
Scripps walks into room 24B, an observation room, and shuts the door. He lights up a cigarette, pulls out his tape recorder and has a seat in the miniature theater-like row of chairs. “Dr. Percival Scripps, June nineteenth, two thousand and seven. Subject 173 shows significant improvement. Visual recognition seems to have improved dramatically. 173 also appears to have improved cognition; toy blocks have been inserted into the room to monitor its puzzle-solving aptitude.” Scripps presses the stop button on the recorder, and leans forward, studying the subject.
It is a small adolescent baboon, splayed out on the floor on its belly with its tongue hanging out. Its posture is resigned and delirious, and it looks at its own eyes in the mirror, displaying a fuzzy awareness of self. If it wasn’t for that vague expression, you could mistake it for dead. Its head is shaved and lined with surgical scars. Spit pools under it on the floor, and in the corner a stack of jumbo Lego blocks is arranged into something resembling a tower. Scripps exhales a cloud of smoke, and can’t quite get over the fact that, despite all the fur and wrinkles, these things kind of look like little people. They honest to god look like little chil–
With a haunting awareness, it flops, turning in his direction. No arm movement or stumbling, just horrible belly flops, full-torso spasms as it rotates, grunting as it comes to face him. Its head is raised, looking right at the mirror. It looks like a damn zombie, its jaw slack and spitty, its eyes vaguely menacing. Scripps’ heart is in his throat, and he can feel his pulse pound. The fucking thing is looking right at me.
The door flies open, and graduate assistant Meyers bustles in, and slams the door. “Sir, I’m sorry, I tried to page you but I couldn’t stop them! They’re here, and they’re serious. I told them you were out for the day, but they knew I was lying. That bitch receptionist must have said something…”
“Bill, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Doctor Scripps…” Bill Meyers huffed, “It’s the feds, sir. They’re here, and they have their noses in everything. Everything, sir.”
“Christ…” Scripps walks hurriedly down the hall now towards the fire stairs, and Meyers is scrambling to catch up. They’re heading for the basement exit, which is his best chance of leaving the building without handcuffs.
The baboon’s head is still suspended by its weary neck, its cockeyed glare fixed on the mirrored glass. The recorder sits on the observation room floor, and across the bottom edge it proclaims: PharmUtech Corporation – excellence in standards.
“Unnhh….” Melvin groans, slowly opening his eyes to a white wall, and a beige guard rail on the side of his unfamiliar bed. He rolls over, only to find that right beside him in bed is none other than Curtis.
“Aw, little buddy!” Curtis wraps his arms around him. “You scared me to death. I have good news for you, champ: You’re back on Team Burrito King.”
“Get out of my bed, dude.”
“Right!” Curtis springs over the rail and lands in the plush chair beside the bed. Melvin looks around, not entirely surprised to find that he’s in the hospital. There’s a line of liquid running into his left arm.
“You know how you got here, dude?” Curtis asks. His feet are up on Melvin’s food-tray table, three inches from some awful liquid dinner that has been set out for him. It looks like a Jell-O cup, a glass of juice, and soup, and the soup smells positively awful. Curtis is wearing a school sweatshirt that’s covered in food, ash, and god knows what else. The sweatshirt displays “F.U.” on the front in huge block letters, and “PUSHWELL” across the back.
“I found you outside of the apartment, dude. You were all sprawled out on the mat, and you smelled like burning hair. I though, ooooooohshiiiiiittttt…” he says, his eyes popping out of his head. The nurse walks in, and he keeps on rambling. “So I threw you over my shoulder and ran. You looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of Cuckoo’s Nest, dude. You looked like you sank your teeth into a power transformer.” He pulls a glass bowl shaped like a falcon out of his pocket and starts stuffing it with cannabis. “You mind if I have a quick toke, nursie?”
“I AB-solutely do mind!” she says, reaching to snatch it from him, but he’s too quick. “Woah, woah, lady. Easy.” He puts the thing back in his pocket. “So you can smoke cigarettes in here, but not a fresh bowl of nature’s own.”
“You can’t smoke anything in here,” the nurse says, and Curtis snorts. “Anti-drug nazis. What do they think they’re putting in your arm right now, dude? Rainbows? Unicorn piss?”he says with a sigh. The nurse leaves the room in a huff.
“Anyways,” he continues, “I figured it had to be PharmUtech that left you there. I called the research department and they had no record of you. But the receptionist I talked to put two and two together. Looks like they were writing you out of the program. They had fake names for you, dude. Nobody’s EVER supposed to take that many of those drugs. I had a bad feeling about those people from the get go.” He takes a gulp from a huge 3-liter of generic Mountain Dew.
Melvin sighs, and stares up at the featureless ceiling. Medicine is like anything else in the natural world, he figures. For actions, there are equal and opposite reactions. Matter isn’t created or destroyed, just made into different forms. And for all the myriad treatments and enhancements and supplements and every other chemical we flood ourselves with, there is never benefit without side effects. There are no actions without consequences. Melvin thinks to himself: There is a Law of Conservation of Wellness.
Melvin feels his face, and is pleased to find that he no longer smiles like a coked-out Ozzy Osbourne. His face is burned where the electrodes were attached. But he seems to have shaken off the effects of the Stimudrine treatment.
On the television, which had been placed on mute while Melvin slept, there is a newscaster mouthing words over the headline, “PharmUtech Top Researcher Arrested on Charges of Malpractice.” The inset picture is a stock photo of Scripps, an awkward photo taken when he was in the middle of saying something, his lips pulled back in a toothy, simian grin.
The commercial break comes in, and a woman with red rings under her eyes is clawing at her mattress, rigidly glaring at a clock that reads “3:45” in red LCD numbers. The word “SOMNOMAX®!” is superimposed over her anguish, and she rolls over and rests like an infant. Melvin is glad that the television is on mute. There is no quiet way to talk about SOMNOMAX®!, at least none that he’s ever seen. And in the pharmaceutical rat race, the truth belongs to whoever is loudest.
“Thanks for taking me to the hospital, man,” Melvin says, his eyes pleasantly closed. He peeks over at Curtis whose face is expressing an exotic combination of vacancy, delight, and wonder. He shakes his head and takes a deep breath. “Sorry,” he concedes. “I’m trippin’ balls.”
Melvin closes his eyes. “Drugs, man. Drugs. Fuckin’ PharmUtech.” He stretches, letting out a deep gurgling growl. He rubs his throat. “My vulva hurts.”
Curtis cocks his head and spits Mountain Dew in a fine mist. “Dude, what did they DO to you?”
David Drogowski is a Senior at Youngstown State University. He will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing and Editing with a focus in Creative writing. This is his first publication.