How High We Go in the Dark(13)
“And remember,” the voice said, “what is laughter but a moment of release where pain and memory are washed away? When we laugh, we are stronger. When we laugh, we heal the world.”
But outside of these management-organized events, no one really hung out much. Once, Victoria, the churro kiosk girl who dressed like an elf, came into my trailer in the middle of the night, threw a condom in my face, and told me not to get any ideas. We spent the night together and when I draped my arms over her body the next morning, she immediately got up and got dressed, reminded me this wasn’t the real world.
Sometimes, when I just had to shake up my routine, I’d drive to the Olive Garden in the next town over. The park keeps it open for the guests. A bartender there told me that serving people from the park feels like being surrounded by ghosts—they come in alone, drink quietly, and leave.
“I totally get it,” he said. “Doing what you people do. Nobody wants to linger. People get hurt that way.”
“I don’t know,” I said, sipping on my mango margarita medicine. But I wondered how long it would be before I became like the other staff, one foot in a parallel universe where nothing mattered except laughter and forgetting and sad fucks with whoever lived in the trailer next to yours. Two months at the park meant I had placed nearly one hundred fifty children on Osiris.
It was a regular Saturday when the drug trial patients moved into the cottages next to our trailers. Most of the staff sat on lawn chairs outside as the families arrived, some of the kids in wheelchairs, others walking at a snail’s pace, holding the hands of their parents. We waved if the children waved. Otherwise, we just watched. One of the kids, maybe six or seven years old, arrived on a stretcher topped with a plastic bubble, as if he were some sort of buffet dish. He pressed his hands against the plastic, watching as one of the local coyotes made a snack out of someone’s half-eaten basket of fries. The guards carried him. Behind the boy, a woman I assumed to be his mother struggled to drag two large suitcases. She was dressed in an oversized silk poncho that kept getting caught in the wheels. I looked around at my coworkers—watching, drinking, refilling their pipes with mediocre pot—and finally decided to offer my help.
“I’m Dorrie,” she said, as I approached and took the luggage. “And the troublemaker in the bubble is my son, Fitch.”
I followed them to their cottage, beyond the central playground area, and into a squat two-bedroom affair with a sloped roof punctuated by several skylights. The pharmaceutical company had furnished the place with modernist Swedish furniture prone to straight edges, except for a blue plastic coffee table that was shaped like California. A wicker gift basket sat on top of it. I waited in the living room with their suitcases, watched the guards bring Fitch into his room. Everything the boy could need—his bed, toilet, sink, shelves filled with children’s books, a television with a gaming console, an IV stand, an array of medical machinery—was all separated from the rest of the house by a glass wall with a sliding door. The guards turned on what appeared to be an air filtration system from a panel built into the wall and the room hummed to life. Fitch quickly crawled out of the stretcher and closed the glass door behind him.
After the guards left, Dorrie invited me to stay for dinner. She inspected the fridge, which had been stocked with essentials and precooked frozen meals.
“I’ll give him this,” she said, still inspecting the freezer. “My ex-husband made sure we wouldn’t starve.”
“I didn’t want to ask,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s normal for the study participants.”
“My ex and I have different views on how we should care for Fitch,” she said. “He’s a research doctor. Convinced that any day now he’ll find a way to save our son. I was tired of waiting and these studies are happening now. Some kids seem to be getting better.”
I could hear Fitch settling in, playing a video game. I leaned back and saw that he was on the bed with a controller. He’d already peeled the paper adhesive off the ends of the monitoring electrodes and pressed them onto his chest, hung an IV bag at his bedside, waiting for his mother to finish the rest. As she went to help her son, I arranged a folding table on the other side of the glass partition.
“There’s wine in the gift basket,” Dorrie yelled from his room. “And can you blend one of the shake cups in the freezer? It’s all he can keep down lately.”
By the time we sat down to eat, Fitch had already sucked down his Very Berry protein shake and was playing a game of Pictionary with us, holding up a frenzy of squiggles.
“Um, windmill,” I guessed.
“Nope,” Fitch said.
“Helicopter,” Dorrie guessed.
“Nope again,” Fitch said. “But close!”
“Wait, I know. Hovercraft!” Dorrie said.
“Ding, ding, ding!” Fitch said.
We played three more rounds before he threw up his shake. Dorrie explained that the pills the doctors had given him when they arrived might do this for the first few days. She sanitized her hands and entered the clean room. It was supposed to help prevent anything else from compromising Fitch’s already weak immune system. She removed his shirt and put on an audio version of A Wrinkle in Time, and rocked him in her arms. I watched the constellation of scars and welts on his chest rise and fall as he slowly drifted off to sleep.