CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Think about it,” I told the girl. “The end of religion.” I say “girl” but she was in her mid-twenties, a sleek brunette in black tights and Marc Caisan shoes. Her pupils were the size of dimes. She worked with Rovil at Landon-Rousse, or perhaps worked for him—I was not in a state to catch details. Half the people in the bar seemed to be employees of Big Pharm. Pharm Boys and Pharm Girls.

“If you had your own god,” I said. “If She was right there with you, what would you need church for?” My voice had gone gravelly from shouting above the music. “You wouldn’t need to seek God. You wouldn’t need to learn about Her. You sure as hell wouldn’t need to learn the rules of your religion—She’s right there! Ask Her!”

The girl nodded as I talked, her fingers automatically unfolding a white piece of paper.

Dr. Gloria said, “You’re making a fool of yourself.” She was perched on the back of the loveseat just behind me.

“Church isn’t for people who already have God,” I said. “It’s where they go when they’re looking for God’s last known address.”

“Here,” the girl said, and handed me the paper. “You need this.” On its face was a cartoon duck holding a red-and-blue beach ball.

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Gloria said. “You have no idea what that—Lyda!”

The paper dissolved in my mouth. “What is it?” I asked. I’d taken a lot of paper tonight. Also a lot of scotch. It turns out that Rovil’s coworkers liked the old-fashioned drugs as well as the new ones. I admired the closed-loop economics of their field: Make the drugs, sell the drugs, use the money to buy the drugs. But where was Rovil? And where was Ollie? Oh right—she was back at Rovil’s apartment. She’d refused to come with us, and gotten angry with me that I was leaving the apartment at all.

Well, that high horse don’t ride itself. I reached for my scotch glass just as the paper went off in my brain. COLOR BOMB! Maroon and aquamarine light exploded behind my eyes with a thunderclap. Dr. Gloria tumbled off the back of the couch and hit the ground with a thud that shook the building.

“Paintball,” the girl said.

I blinked hard. Coral and turquoise smeared across my vision. “I like it,” I said.

Dr. G pulled herself to her feet, looking bedraggled. She shook out her wings, and loose feathers drifted down. “What was that?”

“You seem sad,” the girl said. “What do you take?” I gave her a blank look, and she said, “Let me guess—Paxil. I can always tell. You seem like a Paxil person.”

“Lately I’ve been taking it straight,” I said. “Sorrow, no ice.”

“Not tonight you aren’t,” Dr. G said. She put out a hand to steady herself.

“I’m on Nardil and Oleptro,” the girl said. Her skin had turned gecko green. “But not for long, right?” She laughed like I was in on the joke, and I laughed with her.

“Everyone develops a tolerance to happiness,” I said.

“Rovil has told you about Stepladder. I knew it. He’s so paranoid about the NDA, but he can’t stop bragging about those mice. As soon as he kicks the tolerance problem, we’re golden.”

Stepladder? “He does love his mice.”

“We’ve got some very happy mice. LR is going to sweep the competition with this. Forget Paxil and Marvoset and Nardil. We will own this space.” The girl leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He told you to buy stock, didn’t he? Everyone’s buying stock.”

Whump. A flash of scarlet and turquoise, and Dr. G stumbled sideways, flapping to keep her balance. I stood, a little shakily. “I need to find Rovil.”

The girl put a hand on my arm. “Wait.” She wasn’t making a pass at me. Her expression was 80 percent pity, 20 percent high as a kite. “Be careful.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, he’s going to make a lot of people rich,” she said. “But he’s a soulless prick.”

Rovil? “Yes, well, thank you for the…” I pushed off through air rippling with parti-color currents. The bar was crowded and loud, and the synesthesia was kicking in hard now, neon sounds ricocheting off the walls.

I found Rovil at the bar, talking with a handsome young Pharm Boy in a tight-fitting suit. Rovil broke off the conversation when I approached. “How are you doing?” he asked chartreusely.

Like I’ve eaten an entire box of sixty-four crayons, I thought. But I said, “That girl thinks you’ll make her rich.”

The guy in the tight suit raised his glass. “Truth.”

“She also said you’re a prick,” I said.

“Also truth,” the young man said, and laughed. The noise zigzagged across the color spectrum, ROY to the G to the BIV.

Rovil frowned and looked past me. “I’m sorry about that. Ilsa and I once … never mind. Are you ready to leave?”

“I’m drunk, I’m in New York, and it’s three a.m.,” I said. “I need a fucking slice.”

*   *   *

We walked three blocks, following the map on Rovil’s pen. I was growing hungrier by the minute. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he said. “What exactly did Ilsa say?”

“She said you’re soulless.”

A car horn sent up a misty pastel plume, but the effects of Paintball were fading in the cool air. New York was returning to its proper level of grayscale grittiness: black sky, buildings the color of headstones, bone-white sidewalks.

Rovil shook his head unhappily. “I’m not very good at breaking up. When I realized I could not be with her, I stopped talking to her, stopped taking her messages. She was not happy.”

“Because you were being an asshole. Is this it?”

On the map our blue dot had arrived at the pizza shop, but we had not: The place was closed. Long closed, the front crawling with graffiti, the windows shellacked with paper notices of rock bands and lost kittens.

“This is unacceptable,” I said. I turned in a circle, desperate.

High overhead, Dr. Gloria said, “Food truck!” and flew off.

“That way,” I said, pointing after her.

Rovil hurried to catch up. “I suppose it was because I did not know what to say, and I wanted to stop thinking about what to say.”

“I get it, kid. I spend most of my energy trying to not think.”

It was not a food truck but an aluminum trailer, a single guy working a propane grill. Pictures of each food item were tiled across the top and sides, a necessary feature when serving the drunk community. I pointed at a faded picture of a gyro and said, “That. In my belly. Now.”

Rovil ordered a water. While we waited for my food he said, “Did she talk about our new product?”

I decided not to get her in trouble. “What product?”

“Because we have a strict policy at LR. I could be in trouble if one of my staff violated the NDA.”

“Relax, kid. Your ex-girlfriend is fine.”

The cart man wrapped up my pita and set it on the counter. Rovil waved his pen at the man.

“Wait,” I said. “I’ve got the tip.” I dug in my purse. And what a miracle it was that I still had a purse! I never carried the damn things. I found the bronze coin I was looking for and slammed it down on the counter. The gyro guy took one look at it and shook his head.

“What? Bad juju?” I asked. “One ju? You got something against jus?” At that moment, I believed this to be the most hilarious thing I had ever said.

Rovil picked up the coin, my six-month AA chip. He obviously didn’t recognize what it was. He read aloud the words on the face: “Unity … Service … Recovery…”

“Back in the U-S-R,” I said. “Rhymes with User.”

I saw his expression change as he understood. “Lyda, I’m so sorry. This is why Ollie didn’t want you to go out.”

I thought, Have you not read my history? I started walking back to the club and Rovil’s car. The gyro tasted wonderful. O steaming slabs of processed lamb! O Tzatziki sauce!

Dr. G looked at me over the top of her glasses. She was not amused by my little joke with the AA chip. I knew what she was thinking. Day one of sobriety starts now.

“Well it ain’t dawn yet,” I said.

“Pardon?” Rovil asked.

“The women in my life are overprotective.” I wiped sauce from my lips. “There’s nothing you could have done about it—I was going out with or without you. Sometimes my brain needs a little hammering to get it to shut up.”

“You’re worried about your daughter.”

I stopped short. “I don’t have a—wait. I’ve been talking about her, haven’t I?”

“A lot,” he said. “And not just to me.”

I flashed on a memory of telling the brunette at the bar about Sasha. And someone else as well—a tall man with a chinstrap beard. And someone else …

I tossed the remainder of the gyro into a doorway. Rovil looked at me in surprise. I’d only taken a few bites.

“What was I thinking, buying the street shit?” I said. I started walking again. “All I wanted was a fucking slice. Take me home, Rovil.”

“Please, one more thing.” He touched my elbow to stop me. “Are we friends?”

“Of course.”

“Then please trust me when I ask this of you.”

“Yeah?”

“Stop fighting your god. You will be happier.”

“Amen, brother,” Dr. Gloria said.

“If you do that, I believe you will not need all the other … substances.”

“Oh, Rovil,” I said. “You better hope the other Pharm Boys don’t hear you say that.”

*   *   *

By the time we returned to Rovil’s place, dawn was muscling its way past the skyscrapers. Ollie was asleep on the living room couch, fully clothed. She jerked awake when Rovil shut the door behind us.

“Don’t get up,” I said, and headed for the guest room.

“Where have you been?” Ollie said.

“Later,” I said. I left the living room before she could turn those Analyst Eyes on me or smell my breath.