The Voices in Our Heads Page 21

  Stephen giggled and sat back in his chair.

  “What’s it taste like? Grape soda?” He got a real laugh out of that one, and Ben shut his palm around the half-pill, closing his eyes. It was a mistake. Even a gift this powerful couldn’t make a dent in a kid this impaired.

  “Marcus, I was only joking. Tell me what I gotta do.”

  Ben opened his eyes slowly.

  “OK. But I have to tell you a story. About me, about my past. And you have to listen to the whole thing, front to back, or this won’t have a happy ending. Clear?”

  Stephen nodded, knuckles up by his mouth as if he was ready to jam them between his teeth if he felt the urge to laugh or burst out with some silly comment. Ben sat forward, elbows on the desk, old horse-pill propped between his thumb and index finger. Most of this he said to the pill. Occasionally, he caught Stephen’s eye, and Stephen listened quietly. Listened to the whole thing.

  “When I was a boy,” Ben started, “I had special needs. I couldn’t read even in the fifth grade, couldn’t do fractions or subtraction, couldn’t keep up with conversations. I also had no memory so to speak. At dinner, my mother would tell me to pick up the clothes on my floor and put them in the hamper before I went to bed, and I’d forget. She’d tell me to go fetch her a broom, but I’d get so fascinated with the neat way the tools hung off the pegboard in the laundry room I’d forget to get the broom, let alone the dust pan she would have needed. A given teacher would try to explain some concept to me, but I’d get wrapped up in the way her mouth looked while it made the sounds, like a little face in itself, and then it was just sounds without meaning like alien chatter, and then she was yelling because she thought I wasn’t listening. Do you see, Stephen, do you get it?”

  He was nodding, eyes riveted. Oh, he got it all right. Ben sniffed and looked back at the pill.

  “It got bad in high school, because I hung around with the wrong crowd, kids who smoked weed, kids who stole stuff. I don’t think I have to tell you the whole sad story, Stephen, just know that I walked through life in a daze, on the edge of what people were planning and talking about, looking to be accepted in any way I could even if it meant I was played for the stooge, do you feel me?”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Y’all did dumb stuff and people thinks you just bein’ bad, like on purpose, or that you’s bein’ funny so they make y’all they clown.”

  “Right,” Ben said. “Then just before we had to take the SATs senior year my dad took me down the basement. He said he had something to give me, and I thought for sure it was going to be a beating for something I didn’t remember, as usual. He sat across from me at his work bench and got out a small drawstring sack that held the pill I’m holding in front of you, only in its full form. And he had the same look on his face as mine now, Stephen. He was fighting with the idea of giving something to me that could save my life, and at the same time take a life, maybe two if things weren’t handled just right.”

  “I’m lost,” Stephen said. “Sorry, Mr. Marcus.”

  Ben waved it off.

  “Be patient. It’ll all make sense in a minute.” He held the pill up to the light from the window for a second, a rainbow seeming to refract through it in a slow curve. He smiled. Brought it back to desk level. “Still like to look at the dumb stuff, like rainbows, you know? Anyway, Stephen, my dad tells me about being in the Korean War, and he was doing some early morning surveying on his side of a valley that was technically smack in the middle of the front line. So he’s working his way through some rough terrain, and he suddenly runs into this old North Korean guy hiding in a cave. My dad pulls his firearm, and the guy pleads to him in broken English, offering this drawstring pouch and the pill and the small folded paper inside it in exchange for his life. And even though my dad was no language expert, he got enough to realize that this old guy took the gift seriously as all hell, that it was sacred to him. Evidently the backstory was a little unclear, something about dark magic and some ancient dynasty and a Sorcerer Prince who concocted this pill, then lost it on a quest for some forbidden emeralds in a mountain cursed by the Lord of Serpents. Of course, my father didn’t really believe any of it. All he cared about was the old man caring about it enough to let him exit the cave without getting a bullet in his own back for his trouble. Story over, at least the first section, but it’s the next part that’s really important, Stephen, so you’ve got to listen real hard for me, OK?”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. And I ain’t looking at no rainbows either.”

  “Good. Well, here goes. My father took the pouch and the pill and the folded-up paper inside it back to camp and buried it in the bottom of his duffel bag until his term ended and he came home. When he unpacked, he stumbled across it and almost threw it in the garbage. But he was curious. What was written on the paper? So he made an arrangement through the library to pay some exchange student going to the community college to translate it for him for a reasonable price. But when they met on campus the kid took one look, muttered something in a shaky voice, and walked right on out of there. Looked as if he’d just seen Satan. Then Dad tried getting another translator, this one from an advertisement he took out in the Consumer’s Exchange trade newspaper. But that guy bolted too, face going sheet-white, and leaving his hot tea sitting untouched there at the Country Squire Restaurant on Route 3. Finally my father went to Chinatown, found a Korean hooker, which was no easy feat in itself, and paid her two hundred bucks to read it to him. And what my dad finally got translated scared the living shit out of him. That day, he decided he wanted nothing to do with the pill, at least for himself. Too much risk. To much like making a deal with the Devil.” Ben paused. Something in his face twitched. “So here goes, Stephen. You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “OK. The Korean whore told my father that if you took the pill, it would increase your intelligence, like ten times whatever was in your head to begin with. But there was . . . no, there is a condition.”

  “What you mean, condition?”

  “A possible consequence.”

  For a second, Ben thought Stephen was going to comment on what could have been considered a Tanner reference, like a joke, but he didn’t seem to be giddy right now, not in the least.

  “What’s the consequence?”

  Ben looked over and past Stephen’s shoulder. Empty room; some gum wrappers and a couple of empty plastic bottles on the carpet, no students to be seen. Usually, there would have been some muffled voices and occasional bumps and scufflings coming from the law academy where the girls on the yearbook committee often met, but the sunny March Friday had left the entire floor vacated. He leaned in, stomach pressing against his desk drawer, and Stephen bent in as well. Ben’s voice went down to a whisper despite their obvious solitude.

  “All right, here it is, Stephen. Take the pill and you get smarter. It lasts pure for two days. Then it wears off, but it leaves behind traces . . . leaves you better than you were, like, you remember what it was like to be smart and what roads you had to take to get there. I took half so I could save the other part for an emergency if one ever came up. And I got five times smarter. Instantly. I still remember being in that basement and seeing things as if for the first time, everything clear, so crystal and vivid that all kinds of formulas—emotional, mathematical, logical, all of them—were child’s play. My dad had a linoleum business that was going bankrupt, and I dedicated my Saturday to rearranging his entire portfolio, his stocking system, his choice of vendors, his advertising. Sunday, I spent in the library, speed reading Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Franklin, Emerson, Ellison, Dickens, Orwell. I was a human computer before computers were invented, taking information, ingesting it, synthesizing it, seeing the world as configurations of parallel and intersecting rivers and channels rather than some incomprehensible blur.”

  “Yo!” Stephen said. “What you saying, dog?”

  Ben laughed.

  “Sorry. Got lost in the vocabulary. Back to basics, Stephen, when I woke up
Monday morning, the surge of intelligence was gone. I was ‘me’ again, but the surge had left the aftermath I told you about, like a perfume that sticks around long after the girl has left the room, you dig?”

  Stephen nodded.

  “I went in and took my SATs. Scored 1100 and went to Temple. Worked hard. Got somewhere. The memory of intelligence is intelligence, just on a lesser scale. It gave me an opportunity to know how to work hard and for what. But that’s the fairy tale part. There’s also a horror movie part, a part you really have to understand, Stephen, a risk to this thing that I have to make you aware of right here and right now. When you take the pill, you get smart for two days, it leaves its trace, and you also get stuck with a curse.”

  “What curse?”

  “If you contact someone’s body fluids with any of your fingers, he or she dies. Right then and right there. Then you die. On the spot. Period.”

  “That’s why you wear gloves!” Stephen exploded, grin wide as the moon.

  “Right.”

  Stephen’s smile vanished. His eyes blazed.

  “We got a drug store right ’roun’ the corner sells gloves, Mr. Marcus. I’ll steal them if I have to. Gimme the pill.”

  “There’s more, Stephen, so just hold your horses.”

  Stephen surrendered a bit of a laugh, most probably at the ridiculous image of literally holding one’s horses by the reins as they bucked and kicked, but the laugh was clipped rather quickly. Ben now had the pill closed in a tight fist.

  “Understand that this also applies to the bedroom. Be prepared, Stephen, that there are women who will want nothing to do with you.”

  “I ain’t worried ‘bout that.”

  “I hear you, sorry, it had to be said. Yeah, the thing I always feared the most was sweat, like when you play basketball with the boys or shake hands with a stranger. So you wear the gloves. Always. Anyway, once you take the pill you won’t forget about stuff anymore, so being responsible enough to wear your protection won’t be such a chore.” They shared a smile at the pun on protection. “Still, there’s one other scenario, an important scenario, you have to know about. If by some weird stroke of bad luck or skewed circumstance you were to touch someone’s body fluids right before taking the pill, more specifically within thirty seconds of taking the pill, you would experience ‘Hananim ui Keob.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means ‘Cup of God.’ A drink no man should take, a drink that no man could possibly endure for any substantial period of time. You know how I got five times my intelligence with half a pill and I fixed my dad’s business and read all those books? Well, touching someone’s body fluids and then taking the pill within thirty seconds would increase your intelligence a thousandfold. And it wouldn’t last a weekend, but rather for the rest of your short life. You see, that’s the catch. No man can drink from God’s cup and live, Stephen, so let’s be clear. Touch someone’s body fluids, then take this pill within thirty seconds, and you become Superman. Then you die in a year. One year. On top of the fact that no rational human being could possibly handle a thousand times his own initial intelligence, no one can ever have prior knowledge of the moment of his passing and stay sane. That’s why God arranged it so death is a mystery. So be careful, Stephen. When you take the pill make sure you are alone. Lock the door. Don’t risk it.”

  “What would happen to the guy you touch . . . that is . . . if y’all fucked up and got his sweat on you right before taking the pill?”

  Ben frowned.

  “Down the dose and he’d die at the end of a new thirty seconds, right in front of you. And you’d have to watch. That’s part of it.”

  “How would he die?”

  “The same way you would die a year later. The same way both you and your victim would die if you came in contact with his or her body fluids after taking the pill. The word the old Korean had for it was ‘Saram Yangcho.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Human candle.”

  They both paused. The air seemed thick, and to Ben it seemed everything had dimmed a bit, as if his eyes had been focused too closely on something for too long a period.

  “Well?” Stephen said finally.

  “Repeat it for me, just once, Stephen, so I’m sure you understand what you’re getting into.”

  Stephen closed his eyes, and said,

  “Yeah . . . K . . . Take the pill on Friday and I get five times as smart all weekend. Then it goes away but I’s still smart ’cause it left stuff in my head, like the gummy shit on the soap instead of the soap. And as soon as I take the pill I’s got to wear gloves because if I touch someone’s sweat or something, I die and they die, like right off.”

  He came out of regurgitation mode.

  “You sure we’d die like a candle even if it was an after-pill thang? Seems like that would be lef’ for the victim of the guy who went for a thousand.”

  Ben shrugged.

  “I didn’t make the rules, Stephen. And either way, I wouldn’t want anyone to die on account of me.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” He closed his eyes again, tight. “So the other side is I gots to be careful before I take the pill, ’cause if I touched someone’s sweat or blood or whatever and then took the pill within thirty seconds, I’d turn him into a candle thirty seconds after swallowing it.” He opened his eyes and found Ben’s. “That’s one hot minute, huh?” Ben nodded, and Stephen continued, face dead serious. “Then, I’d get smart like Jesus, but I’d only live for a year. Just to go up in a blaze o’ glory.”

  Ben put the pill down on his desk.

  “Remember to lock yourself in the bathroom before doing this if you decide to do it at all.” He nodded at the pill sitting there on the surface between them. “It’s up to you. Take it or leave it.”

  Stephen took the pill in his hand and held it tight in his fist. He got up, and Marcus stopped him.

  “Stephen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Right now, before any of this goes down, tell me. Can you read at all?”

  Stephen’s light brown face actually colored with blush, making the freckles on his cheeks darken a bit.

  “Yeah, I kin read,” he said. “Like real slow. But I don’t understand books any harder than Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s . . . too hard, and the words run together.”

  Ben bent over, reached into his leather carry case, and drew out a text.

  “Stephen, this is a collection of essays by a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. I am reading it for my graduate literature class. He is known for being difficult to comprehend because of his word games and his belief that what is important doesn’t happen out in front of us, but rather at the edges, like the margins on a piece of notebook paper. I know . . . it seems difficult, but you will get it, I promise. His theory is called Logocentrism. After you take the pill this weekend, read this and write me a report on it.”

  Stephen looked at the dirty blue carpet.

  “I can’t write no more than the alphabet letters, Mr. Marcus.”

  “Do you know what they sound like?”

  “What?”

  “The letters.”

  Stephen shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Then that’s enough of a base. Trust me, the pill will do the rest. Read Derrida and write me a report. Even when the magic drains out of you after the weekend, the traces will leave you in a place where you’ll be able to write, at least on some functional level. The Derrida report will be a good memory, like your personal Bible.”

  “OK, Mr. Marcus.” He took the book. “Uh . . . thanks.”

  “Be good,” Marcus answered.

  He only hoped Stephen would remember all the instructions required to harness the power that lay there in his fist, long enough to avoid killing himself and possibly some family member in the process.

  The weekend was torture. Friday night Max went out to Narberth to hang out with his friends and hit on girls, and Kim drank too much wine, falling asl
eep on the living room couch, snoring, the Sony flat-screen droning on with some Law and Order marathon, pictures dancing in and out of the contours of her face. Ben drank a six-pack and had to get on the horn and beg Nick’s mother, Doris, to go make the pickup he’d promised. She wasn’t happy. Max came in pissed for other reasons and stormed up to his room to Facebook, and text, and then video chat with Heather Gregorio, initiating enough dirty talk back and forth over that thing to make Ben worry that he was going to get a phone call from her father, and soon.

  And besides that, Ben couldn’t get Stephen out of his mind. What if the kid made a mistake, or worse, had a mean streak he couldn’t control with even five times his initial intelligence? He would die, and so would his victim. Ben would be responsible for two deaths. Could anyone trace it to him? He hated himself for thinking this way, almost as if it was dirty or cheap to consciously bring things to the level of “getting away with it,” but he couldn’t help it. While he didn’t really think anyone would dream of pinning anything on him out of the blue, it might be different if Stephen left some kind of will. Would he do that, not meaning to stick Ben with anything, but just for posterity? Ben hadn’t covered journaling and secrecy and about a million other scenarios that could put him in jail, or worse.

  It had been just one of those things you did with your heart, sure that you were in the right before thinking about . . . well . . . consequences. And according to his sense of universal justice, by “the book,” at least the fairytale version, Ben had done a good thing, a moral thing, even beautiful considering Stephen Wagner’s probable future alternatives. But in the real world of legalities and liabilities, Ben probably made the biggest mistake of his life. He drank yet another Irish beer and went to bed, forgetting to turn on his humidifier. He slept poorly, cold sweats, couldn’t get a good angle.

  The next day was a blur, sleeping late, moping around, making shitty eggs and cheese that stuck to the bottom of the pan, half-heartedly reading old King he was sick of, vague lesson planning, drinking early, tossing and turning upstairs in bed for what seemed an eternity and trudging into his Sunday where Kim spent most of the crisp blue day gardening, as he hogged the couch and flipped between college basketball games he didn’t really care about. He also kept returning to local news, waiting to hear Stephen’s name, to hear his own, to see his blurry People First Charter School I.D. picture on the screen with the half-smile because he had been hiding the gum he’d been chewing, and the reddened face from the hangover he’d been nursing, a bit less than the one he was dealing with today.