The Beam: Season Two (12 page)

There was a knock at the door.
 

Leo didn’t answer immediately. His foot had become far too interesting. On the table across from him was a wind-up clock, equally awe-inspiring. It had a magic hand that circled one time each minute. Leo was eagerly anticipating another three loops. When that happened, he’d get to dose, and would finally feel so much better.
 

The knock repeated.
 

“Leo?”
 

“Hang on.” The clock’s magic hand circled. Watching required intense concentration. Whoever was at the door would have to wait.

“Let me in, Leo.”
 

Who was that? Scooter?
 

Leo didn’t care enough to spend much thought on it. He held a tiny bag of moon rocks in his right hand and kept rolling the ball of his thumb across the plastic’s tiny protrusions. Soon, he’d get to set them under his tongue, and that simple ritual had become much more fascinating and less mundane than it had been two weeks ago. Now it was an event to be anticipated.
 

As he watched the clock and grew excited about his upcoming fix, part of Leo’s mind wondered if he was making things worse — if he was training himself to look forward to his highs as rewards for hard work. During his childhood, McDonald’s restaurants had done the same thing with their food, training parents to reward their children with a trip to their favorite fast food depot. Happy Meals became a reward for doing a good thing and became linked to good feelings. Who didn’t want more good feelings, and hence more McDonald’s? And wasn’t that what Leo was doing now, exercising discipline so he could reward himself with the very thing he was using his discipline to resist? But then again, what the hell was he supposed to do? Lunis withdrawal had a history of being violent or deadly. Almost nobody got off of it without medical help, and those who did were usually drawn back into using by their social circles or habit.
 

The door opened. Leo wouldn’t have believed in locked doors even if any of the homes in the compound had locks. The Organa were peaceful addicts. A town of friendly derelicts.
 

Dominic Long entered. Leo’s eyes flicked up for long enough to register the police chief’s presence, but his head didn’t bother with surprise. He had to watch this clock. And he had to keep an eye on his tapping foot.
 

“Leo,” said Dominic.

Was that magic hand
ever
going to get where Leo needed it to go?

“Just a sec,” Leo replied.

Dominic leaned down, looked sideways into Leo’s eyes, then reached a big paw into Leo’s line of sight and snapped his fingers. The fingers blocked Leo’s view of the clock. That was unacceptable.
 

“Move your motherfucking hand!”
Leo yelled, slapping at it.

Dominic flinched and drew back. Then his face regained its policeman’s solidity, and he leaned in again, keeping out of Leo’s direct line of sight.

The hand had two more laps.
 

Dominic was still looking at Leo’s face. His own, from the corner of Leo’s eye, lit with realization.
 

“Noah West, Leo. You’re completely dry.” He snapped his fingers, this time off to the side. “Leo, are you dry?”
 

“Shh.”
 

“The package they sent was supposed to be enough. I brought more. Just a little because I had to be creative to get it. But being ‘The Man’ has its privileges, and I know exactly how sensitive the sniffers are and how much I could bring. It’ll get you a few days. Omar swears up and down that he’ll have more soon. He’s got a new girl who, again, he swears up and down is the best he’s ever had. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say I have good reason to believe Omar this time. I have a Plan B in place if he fails me. Again.”
 

Dominic reached for his pocket. When his hand was halfway in, he stopped as if debating with himself. Leo, even through his intense concentration (one lap to go!), could see that Dominic felt flip-flopped. He hadn’t come here to deliver dust. The dust was a by-the-way — a secondary errand he’d decided to run while at the compound for another reason. But Dominic
never
came to the compound. He’d come for something else, but now here he was, making drugs his first order of business.
 

The hand came out of Dominic’s pocket, holding what looked like a pack of gum because it mostly
was
gum. Inside were foil-wrapped sticks of synthetic chewable material that hadn’t improved since Leo had been buying Doublemint and Fruit Stripe. The only difference in Dominic’s Doublemint was that two of the sticks inside, when unwrapped, would reveal themselves to be grayer than the others. If you placed those two into a bowl and tapped them, they’d break into a scree of high-grade narcotic pebbles.
 

“Here,” said Dominic. “Just fix. You look like you’re going to pass out.”
 

“Pusher,” said Leo. Then, all of a sudden, the idea of calling Dominic a pusher struck Leo as hilarious. He barked laughter.
 

“Go ahead,” said Dominic. He pulled the pack away and began to unwrap it. “Here. I’ll break it up for you.”
 

“No.”
 

“No?”
 

“Noah Fucking West, Dom, just shut up for a minute,” said Leo.
 

Or, more accurately, a half minute.
 

Dominic watched him for most of that half minute. He was beginning to say something when the magic clock-hand passed its goal. At that point, Leo raised the rock he’d fingered from the small plastic bag and shoved it under his tongue as if it had been burning his hand. Then he leaned back, closed his eyes, and exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d held.

“Fuck,” said Dominic, watching. “What the hell, Leo?”
 

Leo held up a finger to tell Dominic that he was conscious, aware, and going nowhere. A larger, more typical dose of dust would make him nearly catatonic — surrounding him with a haze in which the most spectacular, ethereal, nature-exploring and pleasurable things would occur. But this was only one small rock, and all it was doing (all it was
already
doing, blessedly) was clearing the cobwebs. His foot would finally stop tapping. He’d be able to focus on something other than the clock. He’d be able to function. For slowly recovering Lunis addict Leo Booker, normal was the new high.

Dominic shifted to rise from his half squat, but then Leo opened his eyes and said, “Wait. Here I come.”
 

His anxiety had departed. Latent anger diffused like steam from a pressure valve. He felt once again inside his body, not watching it from above and loathing it.
 

Keeping his eyes on the old man, Dominic sat opposite Leo, making his chair groan. It had been made by Organas, with an Organa mindset. Few Organas were overweight, but Dominic was. The wicker creaked with protest.
 

“What are you doing, Leo?” he said.

“Trying to detox.”
 

“From Lunis?”
 

Leo nodded. He felt like he’d run a sprint. Every word required more effort than it should have.
 

“I didn’t think that was possible outside of a hospital.”
 

Leo closed his eyes briefly then reopened them. “I guess we’ll find out.”
 

“Or you’ll die. Or kill someone.”
 

“Like I said, we’ll find out.”

“You don’t have to ration like that anymore,” Dominic said, his eyes wide and concerned. Maybe even outright frightened. When he’d entered the room, he’d appeared confrontational, as if steeled for a fight. Leo’s plight seemed to have softened him. “I can guarantee you a steady supply.”
 

“I appreciate that, Dom. But do you remember how I used to tell you that we all prefer to believe pleasant lies rather than face an unpleasant truth?”
 

Dominic nodded.
 

Leo shook the tiny bag and rattled the few loose gray rocks. “‘Moondust opens your mind.’ ‘Moondust is spiritual.’ ‘Moondust allows you to see truths The Beam cannot.’”

“Lies?”
 

“At least partial truths. I’d say it opens the mind, and we’ve
made
it spiritual. But we say those things as rationalizations. Nobody talks about addiction and dependency until the supply runs low.”
 

“You really think you can just quit?”

Leo left the question with space it deserved then slowly nodded. “Yes. I think I can.”
 

“And the others?”

“I’d like to be optimistic, but I seriously doubt it. Some of the people who live here practically became Organa
because
of Lunis. In my day, it was hippies and marijuana. Before that, it was hippies and just about everything you could swallow, smoke, or shoot. You embraced the lifestyle, and the drugs came with it. You didn’t have to wonder if you were an addict if you did things that way. You could just tell yourself that you were a hippie, and got whatever went with it. But we’re addicts, Dominic, true and true. There are some people I might be able to convince to see things that way, but even Leah has her doubts. I don’t know if she actually
needs
to be high to work her magic tricks or not, but she certainly thinks she does.”

Still leaning against the chair’s back, Leo thought of the way Leah had navigated through District Zero to find Crumb, as if floating on instinct. He thought of the story she’d told him about finding the diary, and her preceding prescient visions on the train into the city. All of those things had been handled without more than baseline Lunis in her system, with Leah not truly high at all. What would she say if he pointed that out? Would she say that none of that had been hacking, and that it was hacking that required the drug…or would she argue that
everything
was hacking in the age of The Beam, reality and the digital worlds melding in each moment like the vision of herself as a melting spoon of chocolate?

Dominic extended the pack of gum toward Leo. “Here then. Take this. There will be more.”
 

Leo shook his head, ignoring the pack. “This wasn’t what I wanted for Organa, Dom. It snuck up on me. Now that I’m weaning, it’s like
life
is showing me truths that
moondust
cannot. And once I saw those truths, it was all there in front of me, as if I hadn’t been a perpetuator of the lie.”
 

“What lie?”
 

“That we’re every bit as plugged into the system as everyone on the grid. And that as long as we’re addicted, we’re vulnerable.”
 

“To a supply cut-off,” Dominic said. “But what if I can get you stocked up? You can bunker down with stores for months or years.”
 

Leo’s head tilted. He was still trying to make sense of Dominic’s earlier mood, before he’d watched Leo struggle and nearly crash. The police captain had come in ready to argue, and was now acting like a willing savior.
 

“What do you have up your sleeve, Dom?” said Leo.

“What’s the withdrawal like?” Dominic countered.

Leo shook his head in a quick, almost distracted motion. “What? Why do you want to know?”
 

“Just wondering. You’re really able to do it yourself?”
 

“So far.”
 

“Is it painful?”
 

“Brutally. And exhausting.” Leo eyed the captain. “You ever done dust?”
 

“Me? Noah Fucking West, no!” Dom looked offended, like a bullshitter.
 

“I’ll just say this,” said Leo. “You get out of the haze, and it’s like the dust gets fingers out of your brain that you didn’t realize were there. It’s like it sits in your mind and whispers to you that everything’s fine. I suppose it’s that way for any addiction, be it dust or another drug…or food or The fucking Beam. ‘It’s okay; you’re perfectly normal; you could quit if you wanted.’ All lies. So even if you got us a year’s supply, what then? A year isn’t forever. We’ll always be chasing supply.” He gave Dominic a look. “Like any addict.”
 

“Hmm.”
 

“Besides, there’s control within control. There’s been a real edge to the dust lately. It’s like they changed the formulation. It’s not making people as mellow as it should. Instead, it’s making them edgy. I’ve woken up with horrible headaches, feeling like I’ve been hollowed out. It’s a lot harder to imagine dust as being natural and benevolent and a carrier of universal truths when it makes you feel like the bottom of an ashtray in the morning.”
 

Dominic was nodding.
 

“Know what I mean, Dominic?”
 

Dominic blinked. “Oh, sure. But for you, for the Organa, I mean? Nothing really changes from my end. You still need supply.”
 

“Change takes time. So yes, unfortunately we still need supply. Enough to keep it from getting as low as it has been.”
 

“Have you been rationing with the others?”