Pain Killers (39 page)

“So what does it do?”

I hated to admit it, but I was curious.

Mengele chewed a few wet mustache hairs before he answered. “Why should I tell you? What I will say is that every race, from subhuman to superior, produces its own best of breed. Its valuable essence. A by-product of adrenaline, which can be generated and gathered.”

“You honkin’ on that shunt again?” The reverend was getting less ambivalent about his affections.

“The science is complicated,” said Mengele, pleased to have been asked. Then he turned to me, his sudden friendliness more disturbing than imperious repulsion. “I lied,” he said to me. “I didn’t just give her adrenaline. I shouldn’t have teased you.”

“What?”

For the second time, I was ready to lunge, but the reverend caught me.

Mengele, meanwhile, had gone weirdly mellow. “No, you’ll like this,” he said. “It’s a
good
thing.”

When the insane sound reasonable, the ground always gets shakier.

“A couple of months ago,” he said, a little wearily, “there was a headline in the
New York Times
: ‘Scientists Develop Love Serum Oxytocin?’”
_

“Oxycontin? The Rush Limbaugh drug?” Now I was the one so nervous I sounded like a chatterbox. “Man, I gotta tell you, anybody don’t believe in evolution, take a look at the American dope fiend. From Charlie Parker to Rush Limbaugh. That fat fuck should get an award for makin’ dope uncool.”

“Maybe that’s why he does it,” the rev said. “For the kids. Who wants to be a junkie when the poster boy is a pasty Republican fat-ass looks like he skated on a MSNBC
To Catch a Predator
bust?”

Mengele took another hit off his pocket vial. The blast left his voice slightly warbly. “Not oxycontin,
oxytocin.
It’s a hormone, mostly found in vaginal secretions when a woman climaxes. It induces bonding by decreasing cuddle inhibitors.”

“So I guess you can see how I might be able to help out with that,” said the reverend, surprising me again with his shifting alliances.

“Not really,” I said, putting no finesse in it. “Can girls even get moist when they’re that tweaked?”

Reverend D flashed the gold in his grill. “When I’m on the case, there’s a smile at both ends.”

Mengele harrumphed. He wanted the attention back. “Johns Hopkins found that oxytocin injected into cerebrospinal fluid causes spontaneous erections and weeping. Your CIA thinks it might be useful to spray at political rallies. To sway opinion. And your Pentagon wants it for chemical warfare. One spritz and Moishe puts down the rocket launcher and kisses Mohammed.”

“Wow. I wonder what an OD would look like,” I said.

Mengele looked pleased. “That’s a very important question. That’s what we’re here to find out!”

Apparently this was the reverend’s cue to open a locker on the back wall. He pulled out a hazmat suit and green rubber booties that Velcro’d over the ankle. When he handed one to Mengele my mouth went dry. The reverend and Mengele stepped into the gear like they dodged toxins together all the time.

So there it was. No matter how you divided “they need gas masks” by “I don’t get any,” the result was not good. Mengele cracked an ampoule and filled a narrow-gauge syringe. The reverend tightened and retightened his Velcro bootie.

I could think of no compelling reason to let myself and the woman I loved, whatever condition she was in, be fumigated in a van in front of masked men. I would never call myself brave, but given the choice between a protracted death and a fast one, it hardly seemed heroic to go for slow.

“It’s been fascinating, but we’re gone,” I said.

I launched myself off the bench and screamed in Tina’s face. “Get up!”

Nothing registered.

I shouted again.
“Tina!”

Still no response. I slapped her face and pulled her off the bench. Nobody stopped me. Both men, now in masks, watched with mild insect-interest. I tried the door handle. I kicked and punched at it. “You think I’m gonna stand here and get exterminated? Open the fucking door!

“Whose side are you on?” I asked the reverend. He pointed to himself. Big surprise.

Then Mengele yelled through his mask, so that it sounded like he was talking on a cell phone, “Nobody’s exterminating you. On the contrary, I’m going to make your life worth living.” For one weird moment, he sounded like a televangelist. Jimmy Swaggart with a Colonel Klink accent. “I am going to infuse your existence with emotions few people ever get to experience. The feelings of love oxytocin generates—”

“You’re not doing shit,” I said with all the bravado a thimble could hold.

I felt the reverend’s steel grip on my shoulders as Mengele approached with a syringe.

“You’re going to thank me,” he said, going for “soothing” despite the grinding, fork-in-the-garbage-disposal unpleasantness of his voice. “It makes women want to cuddle. In men, feelings of love are magnified. Introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid of rats, it causes spontaneous erection.”

“Sounds like MDMA,” I said, babbling to hide my panic. “I tried that once in the nineties and French-kissed my mailman.”

“MDMA and Ecstasy are pale imitations of a hormone we produce naturally during orgasm. What I’ve done, as I did with adrenals, is harvest it.”

“You’re the Mr. Green Jeans of glands. Do they make a lab coat that comes with bib overalls?”

Mengele was too busy to listen. He began to whistle, some grating mash-up of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and Wagner. Then, biting the orange cap off the syringe, he tapped three times on Tina’s throat, like it was a secret code, and plunged the point in her neck. I wanted to pounce, but not when he had a needle in my soon-to-be-ex ex-wife’s neck.

He got a blood register, then thumbed the plunger back down while the reverend held me in place by the shoulders. “Somebody,” he said, “is going to have a very wonderful evening.”

I tried to stomp the reverend’s shoe but he moved his foot.

“So you shoot up her up with O juice, and she goes mad?”

“Actually, I just injected her with superadrenaline. Oxytocin is delivered nasally, in a mist. You’ll both be getting the love.”

Mengele nodded and took his seat on the bench beside the reverend, who kept a pincer grip on my shoulder. He banged a few times on the front of our rolling party pad, to whoever was in the cab. Then he pulled a video camera from the compartment where the hazmat suits had hung. He fiddled with the lens, then pointed the thing my way. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but at the moment, acting without a SAG card was the least of my worries.

The floor began to rattle and hum, building up to a brain-rattling epic MRI.
Clack…Clack…Clack.
I wanted to eat my arms. But Tina showed no reaction. Mengele—and again, I tried to remind myself, it might not be Mengele—refastened his mask. Then the clacking stopped. Replaced by a hiss. Mist rose from a grate in the bottom of the van.

Time went sideways. Adrenally fired up, Tina’s eyes focused. She took in the pair in gas masks and slowly rising fog at her ankles and screamed at me.

“They’re gassing us, and you’re standing there?”

“You were out of it. It’s not that kind of gas. It’s oxytocin. The bonding hormone. It—”

“I know what oxytocin is!” she shouted over the rising fog. “I read it in
Jane.
I just can’t believe you believed him!”

She stepped around the rising vapor, seething, and punched me in the face. I thought the veins in her eyes were going to bleed. She swung again, connecting with my neck. Then she tried to slap my face. I grabbed her by the wrists and she tried to head-butt me.

I tried to dodge her, more pissed at the reverend for filming the assault than at Tina for launching it.

“Well, I guess—ouch, ow,
hey
!—I guess the adrenaline’s working.”

She dropped her arms to her sides, literally snarling. “Josef Mengele puts on a gas mask and tells you he’s pumping love gas?
And you believe him?
Are you on drugs?”

“The wrong ones. But the oxytocin’s on the way.”

Tina kicked me in the knee. “So why do they have gas masks on? They don’t want the love?”

The fumes rose in slow, expanding circles.

I let in a staggered breath of almond-flavored vapor, expecting the worst. Instead, I crumpled against the wall, in the sudden grip of a wrenching, up-from-the-toes swoon. Suddenly I wanted to lick the color out of Tina’s eyes. Longing was almost like a drug—and borderline unbearable enough to make me need one.

Tina glared. So I got the love and she got the hate. That would be an experiment. I pressed my hand over my chest like I was pledging allegiance but was testing to make sure I could still breathe.

“There’s a second oxytocin receptor in the heart,” I heard Mengele say.

I needed to kiss her so badly I didn’t care if we were going to die. The need dragged me toward her, like a dog tugging on a leash. I stared at her mouth, recalling how Carlos described the mouths of men who died from carbon monoxide: like they were wearing cherry-red lipstick. The stuff didn’t just kill you, it turned your corpse gay. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. The love coursing through my veins crowded everything else out. Because there was no everything else. Or everything was love.

I know how this sounds.
Today.
But in that whirling moment, I had no thoughts at all. Some Big Bang had happened. I had been blasted apart and reassembled with delicious new ingredients. Gripped by the delirious, inchoate sensation that some obvious, beautiful, terrifyingly perfect thing had been missing all my life. And now it had been revealed. If I could just remember what it was…

The universe vibrated with happiness. All I had to do was let it. But buried under the cosmic bliss was the dim sensation that my past had been amputated. Fear was like a phantom limb that was just beginning to itch. Somehow, I knew that if I scratched, I would make it real.

Then I opened my eyes, and Tina’s face was better than never dying.

We charged toward each other.
Yes!
I opened my aching arms.
Oh, God, thank you, yes!
Tina moved in to meet me. She raised her eyes. I parted my lips. She opened her mouth. “Oh, baby,” I groaned. Tina clutched my face. Her fingers shot knee-wobbling pleasure rays straight to my heart.

She stared in my eyes.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I backed off, shattered. “What do you mean what’s wrong? You don’t feel it?” My voice degenerated to a desperate rasp. “The love?”

“The
what
?” Tina slapped at my tears like they were flies. “You fucking asshole!”

By now the cloud was floating up to our faces. We inhaled, as if by mutual consent, and breathed into each other’s mouths. I wanted to sew myself to her back, like one of Mengele’s demented twin experiments.

Then I began to choke. I could not tell dying from love.

Tina’s words made puffs of vapor: “Son of a bitch!”

Her teeth ripped at my lips. My lungs needed her lungs. We kissed like people trying to kill each other with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Suddenly—I had forgotten we were even
traveling
—the van swerved. The reverend slid sideways on the bench, slamming into Mengele as Tina and I crashed into a whorled metal wall.

I couldn’t tell if the wailing siren came from inside my head or leaked in through the airtight gas van. Tina kept tearing at me. I tried to pin her arms. She fought by kissing harder. Then we swerved the other way. And—

BOOM!

Something hit us. Metal crunched but the walls held. The van was spinning. My head slammed the floor inside the almond gush of mist. A fire extinguisher fell out of its wall brace and clanked on the floor. I thought,
What was that for?
And crawled on top of my never-more-beautiful ex-wife.

For a long time, maybe years, Tina and I clung to each other. The van spun like a plate on a stick. I ended up underneath her. Tina, to my dizzy surprise, positioned herself with legs apart, producing her own batch of oxytocin. I felt her slide down onto me.
Grinding.
Then the van tipped over and floor became ceiling. The fire extinguisher sailed past my head, then clanged by me, bouncing the other direction and crashing into the whorled metal wall.

Stillness.
The silence that only comes after a crash. Eyes closed, I waited for my cosmic bliss to reintroduce itself. I tried to stay positive, to be grateful I’d had the gift of knowing such a feeling existed. But I knew the truth: now I had the curse of knowing it was gone. Joy had become the phantom. As ever. And fear was real.

I slowly opened my eyes. Before me, the reverend lay still, facedown. Mengele, crawling slowly and muttering in German, was reaching for his mask. Then someone banged on the van door and he froze.

I heard voices. Gunshots, or a car backfiring. Or somebody firing back at a car. I rolled on top of Tina, done moving but still inside her. Carlos had not said if Mengele had bulletproofed the van when he customized it.

I was in the mood to take artillery for a woman I loved. Mengele pulled a gun from inside his hazmat suit. His hand shook, but a gun’s a gun. Before I could go for it, Tina kicked it out of his hand without taking her lips off mine. She always had scary reflexes.
“Growing up,”
I suddenly remembered her saying,
“the family motto was ‘Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.’”
Somehow, in the crash, my amputated past had become reattached. Now I remembered everything.

The van door swung open, sucking out a whoosh of love mist. My vision was blurry. But my ears had stopped ringing for the first time since Zell brained me with his walker. I heard a cackle I recognized. White Bob Marley’s. I blinked until I could see the head full of exploding-squid dreads. Rasta Jim, with a blue windbreaker with an FBI shield dangling on a chain around his neck. He took a whiff and backed off, keeping his eyes on Tina as she held on to my shoulder with one hand, tugged clothes on with the other. “Some people can party anywhere,” he said, coughing into his hand.

“I wouldn’t call it a party,” I said, feeling weirdly compelled to defend my wife—or ex-wife’s—honor. “More a command performance.”