My Third Prison - Part II

My Third Prison



Part II



Later than night, I went for a run at the gym.  This was a simulated run on a treadmill, another virtualized experience whose creators catered to people who did not wish to deal with the inconveniences of real life, such as rainy weather, city smog, and stoplights. 

I mounted the treadmill and pressed a couple of buttons.  The experience began.  That evening, I was yearning to establish a meaningful connection with my distraught body, to give it something physical to fight in order to help it overcome all the emotional pain and cognitive dissonance that it had been subjected to in the preceding weeks. 

To enhance or not, that was the proverbial question.  Growing up, I didn’t have an opinion either way.  The issue of cognitive enhancement did not have any bearing on my life, no immediate impact at all, so I never gave it any thought.  Besides, I had always thought that this tactic was reserved for the weak and dishonest, those who were incapable of proving their talents by conventional means, such as hard work and perseverance.  As embarrassed as I was to even admit this to myself, I didn’t consider those people real competition.

Little did I know.  The advent of the drugs designed to mitigate my ex’s condition and many other conditions like his, some of them imaginable and others real, seemed bound to skew the IQ curve.  This development would make competition at the top more rigorous, and it would also exacerbate already existing disparities in access to the best opportunities—in this new world, opportunities belonged to those who enhanced most shamelessly. 

In college, things started changing.  Drugs were all around me, and I often wondered if people were just using them to kill time and eradicate uncomfortable thoughts.  I mostly felt bad for such people and considered them lost causes because the natural high—the energy rush and a sense of fullness and complete totality of experience, when simply being in the moment was enough—this high associated with creative experiences was the purest, and no drugs even came close.  I had done some of them, certainly the more fashionable ones, so I would know.

After graduation, I started working as an analyst for a large corporation.  My mind was getting slowly annihilated by the need to produce countless spreadsheets and sales figures, and that’s when I started to realize that there must have been more to life than mechanical number-crunching that benefited some abstract interests who probably did not believe in world peace and other idealistic nonsense that happened to be important to me.  Instead, they believed in making healthy profit margins by selling socks.

My mind had been captured, and the spreadsheet grid was its prison, my prison number two.  What’s worse, I had voluntarily surrendered in exchange for a comfortable, but un-engaging life.  This particular imprisonment was more painful to come to terms with than my earlier temporary incapacitation because this time my captivity was a result of my own decisions. 

Because work was such a large part of my life, it felt like my life itself lacked meaning.  I finally got tired of this feeling of utter uselessness, gambled with my future, and took on additional debt for graduate school, which would make me eligible to knock on doors of elite not-for-profits.  How could I have known that the game would remain the same no matter where I went?  Back then, I didn’t know that I would have to change something fundamental about myself in order to keep myself from encountering the same situations time and again; I did not realize that attending grad school did not always count as initiating a revolution within.

But that understanding wouldn’t come until later.  For now, I had found what I thought was a better solution.  As I continued to run, I was becoming more aware of my body with all of its triumphs, aches, and limitations.  Perhaps I had been wrong in thinking that my body required special care; perhaps it was just an ordinary collection of flesh and bones.  If a chance to gain a position of power, the universal currency in which all things, even equality of outcomes if not opportunity, were measured, meant that I had to risk losing a part of myself, perhaps this risk was justified, maybe even miniscule in comparison to all the great things I could do for others if I only had access to the right means.

With the realization that I had options came a surreal sense of new possibilities, of all the great things I could accomplish if I only allowed my body to accept some help from a generally safe, well-tested substance.  My job was all about statistics—there were few things that I valued more than the scientific method—and now I realized that Smarties had been developed in accordance with exactly the principles I valued. 

Yes, there had been some side effects and there were risks associated with this drug, but wasn’t life itself one huge risk?  Weren’t people accepting consequences at least in the form of opportunity costs, if not outright losses, every second of their lives, with every decision that they made?  Life was naturally about making tradeoffs and accepting the consequences. 

Thus, on the treadmill, out of sweat a decision was born.  I opened up to the possibility of medicating myself to accomplish more and, in doing so, had put myself in prison number three, one where I would surrender control of the part of me that exercised control over all the other aspects of my life.  I was about to surrender my self.

~

In the meantime, Lexie was preparing her resignation letter.  After several months at the PR firm, she could no longer stand being mobbed.  She called up some of her old clients and found a couple of independent gigs, and, as soon as she secured an alternative to the daily grind at the PR company, she was going to be out of there. 

The excitement in her voice when she called me to share the news was palpable.  One would have thought that she had just won the lottery—a million bucks, perhaps, or, at the very least, a big box of first-class bitter chocolate.  In her resignation was her personal triumph, and she invited me to celebrate it.  I was a little jealous that she had been able to part with a secure job in order to pursue a dream and, of course, I wanted to know more about what she was getting in return for her crazy decision, so I accepted and met her in Cityview, an eclectic neighborhood where she lived.

The area was well-gentrified, yet full of sights that were far from mainstream.  Lexie and I agreed to meet in a tiny sandwich shop before venturing out for drinks.  The shop was a mile away from the bar, and we walked all the way, on our way passing all kinds of storefronts—from an Iranian carpet shop to an African hair place.  We saw interesting characters.  We passed Eastern-European girls who were dressed like hookers, yet appeared to be in happily monogamous relationships with their muscular, menacing-looking men.  We also encountered quite a few well-dressed yuppies of all nationalities, on whose faces I could only see one desire as they rushed home from the train station—to get home, kiss their girlfriends, take their uncomfortable dress shoes off, put down their heavy laptop bags, and be left alone.  The foreign stuff may have been intriguing, but it was the presence of these people that made the walk feel safe and he whole experience familiar, like a well-worn, favorite pair of old slippers.

As Lexie and I walked to the bar, we talked about her plans.

“I just hate those bastards who think they’re better than me because I don’t act like them.”  She was animated and full of passion as she spoke, swallowing the endings of some words as if she was in a hurry to get her point across as fast as she could, as if her words were melting ice-cream or time bombs strapped across her chest.  I wondered if she was just drunk with success or if she had already had a couple of celebratory drinks.

“So, I take it, you did not give in to their demands to take the pills?”  I didn’t tell her about my plans to try Smarties because I didn’t think she’d understand.  I thought that I would tell her when I got the job.

“Are you kidding?  Of course not.  My brain is my most precious asset.  That’s what I do for a living—I think up crazy shit that makes people want to buy stuff they don’t need.  I wasn’t going to compromise that by taking some piss-ass drug.”

I couldn’t help but ask Lexie if she thought she had given anything up by not going with the flow.

“Here’s the thing,” she responded.  “You can either be part of someone else’s system or you can make your own.  You can either put shit in your body for someone else’s benefit or make others do that for you.  I want to run the show.”

“You’re finally starting a full-blown business?”  I was impressed and, again, a little jealous.  I had always thought that this goal of hers was illusory, unattainable, kind of like an office drone’s dream of retiring at forty and telling off the boss before he can finally retreat to a private island surrounded by five hot chicks, at least three of them topless Brazilians.

“Uhum.  I’m starting a PR company.  Some of those condescending assholes will one day work for me.  Then, they can take these stupid drugs.”

I suddenly felt sad because what Lexie was saying clashed with my own beliefs:  I didn’t like the us versus them duality, and there was something wrong about forcing others to do what she herself was too chicken to attempt.  This incongruence even came across in Lexie’s demeanor—normally cheerful, tonight, she was bitter even though what she was saying was good, positive stuff.

“What can I say, my friend.  You know how it is—if you don’t screw someone over, you’re the one who gets fucked.  I decided that I’d rather be on top and do the fucking, that’s all,” she said—and then turned around and suddenly changed the subject.  “Hey, a tarot place!  Psychic readings for the price of a lousy drink!  Wanna try?”

“No way!”

“What, the stuff you can’t easily place on a shelf in your cluttered little mind scares you, Mia?  Come on, it’s going to be fun!”

How could I say no?  This was a dare—I was being called closed-minded—and I had to rise to the occasion.  Besides, what if there was something to the tarot nonsense?  What if there was more to the world than people could grasp using intellect alone?

The tarot reading was uneventful, even disappointing.  I expected to find a place full of New Age knickknacks and manned by a wise, white-haired woman with all-knowing eyes.  She’d be waiting to jump into my psyche, untangle every knot that she could find, and gently reassure me that the future was going to be good to me because I was doing the right things in the present.  Instead, I was greeted by an indifferent young girl dressed in a Nike t-shirt and cheap, white sneakers.  Her face bore traces of beers rather than tears, and in her eyes one could see something that people, when noticing a hint of it in the mirror, expediently hide behind grimaces of fake happiness. 

The tarot lady asked me what I did for a living; then she shuffled a bunch of greasy cards and had me pull two.

“Let’s see,” she said as she grabbed the cards and glanced at them.  “Ah, the World card and then the Hanged Man.  There are many ways to go about your problems, but you’ve created your own prison.”  What kind of nonsense was that? 

As if to echo my thoughts, Lexie snickered.

I was irritated by this vague, meaningless prediction made by an obviously dishonest drunk who could not find anything better to do with her life than to make money off tormented souls by stating the obvious.  If anything, the problem I had been thinking about had already been solved—all I had to do was find a doctor who would prescribe Smarties despite my medical history.  I had decided to go about obtaining Smarties the right way—by stretching the boundaries of some of my experiences in order to obtain a prescription.  After all, the condition I was about to fake was not even identifiable by medical imaging techniques or any other kind of formal testing despite the fact that said condition had earned a prominent spot in the International Diagnostic Code Classification.  It was an intangible condition, its existence justified by our society’s thirst for inclusiveness and its cure legitimized by widespread commoditization of talent. 

To top off the bizarre evening, the tarot lady refused to look at Lexie. 

“Get out of here!”  She barked out.  “You don’t need to know.” 

Lexie and I left hurriedly, perplexed by this sudden outburst of aggression.  We figured that the tarot lady must have been dealing with a nasty hangover or that perhaps she was late for a date with some sleazeball used car salesman.

~

Finding a doctor to prescribe Smarties turned out to be easy.  All I had to do was call my family physician and ask him to refer me to a cardiologist to run some tests.  After that, I scheduled another visit with the family doctor for a final evaluation and to share my test results.

I was sitting on crinkly paper, trying to stay on the very edge of the patient examination couch, when the door opened and he appeared, a thick folder describing my medical history in tow.  He waived the folder in front of me like a flag, as if to welcome me to distant, new lands full of adventure.  His round, fifty-eight year old face was cleanly shaven, and he was smiling with his eyes.  His demeanor inspired confidence.  During the visit, I was considerably more nervous than when I had first made the decision to try cognitive enhancement, so I really appreciated the doctor’s guidance. 

Making my case to him wasn’t difficult.  In fact, he took a great deal of initiative explaining Radopin to me.  He took for granted that I was overworked and underperforming.  This was a very common thing, he said. 

“Do your thoughts race sometimes?  Do you find it difficult to focus?” 

It was amazing how well Dr. Watson knew what to expect from a patient like me.  I thought of Jerry’s countless humiliating interjections, whose quantity seemed to be positively related to the quality of my work, and remembered how difficult it was for me to keep following my train of thought at such moments, when the pressure in the room was so high and people seemed so unforgiving. 

“Yes,” I answered.  “Concentrating is a challenge,” which, in all honesty, wasn’t a big stretch.  It really wasn’t.

It was at this affirmative and reassuring moment that I was diagnosed with ADD.  My stroke was not recent, the heart test turned out fine, so there was no reason for Dr. Watson not to issue a Radopin prescription.

“You’re all set,” he pronounced.  “Here’s the prescription.  We’ll start you on ten milligrams, three times a day.” 

That’s all it took, thirty milligrams of a chalky white substance taken at regular intervals to make me a confident, charismatic woman capable of taking on Jerry and proving to Meg that I was like her, after all, that I was worthy of her attention and mentorship, perhaps even respect?  My heart started racing.  I was excited.

“You may experience irritability and headaches when you start taking these.  Perhaps even increased energy.  That’s completely normal.” 

Enhanced energy!  I yearned for it, for as much of it as possible. 

“If you have any chest pains or weakness, call 9-1-1,” Dr. Watson added.

“Can I just call you, Dr. Watson?”

“No.  9-1-1.  We provide routine care here, they deal with medical emergencies.”  His gaze averted mine as he answered.

I thought that this was logical.  Yes, Dr. Watson was my gateway to the help I needed, but he couldn’t be there 24/7 to hold my hand. 

I glanced at a caddy full of croquet balls visible in the corner of his office across the hall.  For some reason, he got slightly nervous and started removing imaginable wrinkles from his impeccably white coat.  He handed the prescription to me and left. 

Now, I was on my own to do as I pleased with my life.  The feeling was exhilarating.  I rushed to the pharmacy to fill the prescription and could hardly wait the thirty minutes it took to process my request.  There were many other people who needed drugs. 

While waiting, I sat down in one of the narrow pharmacy chairs in the waiting area and pulled out my laptop.  A couple of seconds, and I was online.  As usual, the search engine was standing by, ready to spit out a multitude of bits and pieces of information in response to any query.  Searching for answers online was an obsession these days—no one looked inside themselves, but everyone wanted to know everything, not in depth, but just enough to get by.

I started typing.  The search engine did some thinking of its own and translated my query into the form that it could work with:  Radopin + side + effects.  The equals sign was missing, but that was the point.  It was up to me to make sense of the information; all that the search engine did was offer unbiased suggestions—preordered, of course, to reflect the distribution of online advertizing dollars.

I followed a couple of links to user blogs and online forums.  Most people were highly, extremely positive about Smarties—so positive that most had forgotten all rules of punctuation when writing about it, their words turning into uninhibited and uncontrolled streams of consciousness.  These raw testaments to the power of synthetic creativity were truly beautiful.  Humanity had progressed so far as to make people the best they could be, and a little dizziness along the way was not an obstacle worthy of discussion, even if this dizziness and disorientation were collective, resembling mass madness.

Finally, my wait was over.  Thankfully, my credit card, which had been stretched to its limits, went through, and the transaction got approved.  The orange tube was mine, complete with little tokens of happiness and self-assurance.  When I grabbed the tube, I noticed that my hand started shaking uncontrollably, but I dismissed the feeling.  I had my answer now, my secret weapon, and I was only going to use it to do good things.

~

I didn’t want to give in to regret or fear, so I didn’t make a big deal of taking my first pill.  I just swallowed it with a full bottle of water, which I also purchased at the pharmacy—right then and there; I couldn’t wait any longer.  The first couple of times I took the pills, I didn’t notice much of an impact, but one day, as the time had approached to take another dose, I got jittery and moody. 

I welcomed these symptoms, hoping that they were a sign that the medication was working.  I had done enough research to know:  that was how my body would tell me it needed more of the stuff. 

Happy that the drug was kicking in, I took some more.

Within days, Smarties started working.  I would swallow a couple of pills in the morning and arrive to work with a clear head, ready to take on Meg and Jerry and, if needed, the entire world.  I no longer noticed any distractions, such as the annoying chatter generated by a new batch of interns who populated the cubicles next to mine, or that growling stomach noise that used to remind me every few hours that it was time to eat.  I became extremely productive, and, more importantly, I found more joy in my work.  Everything I did now had a purpose.  I was quick and decisive, and, most of the time, my decisions turned out to be good.

As a side benefit of Smarties, I stopped obsessing about Meg.  She was just another coworker, a team member who was susceptible to the right relational algorithm.  All I had to do was find a way to stroke her ego at the right times:  smile at her here, politely joke with her there, challenge her ideas at times.  This strategy required very little thinking, little effort; I was doing everything intuitively and exactly when needed.  I no longer worried about the times she was distant.  They didn’t matter. 

Meg seemed to like the new me.  Now, I was so much easier to work with, she once told me.

One of the greatest benefits of taking Radopin was that it allowed me to live in the present.  I stopped obsessing about futures and pasts—mine and other people’s.  Everything was being addressed as it came, efficiently, at precisely the right moments.  I still took initiative, but it was a different kind of initiative:  rather reactive than proactive, tactical and not strategic.  My head was no longer full of big, unsolvable questions and, in their place, every six-hour dose helped me break down and tackle the day’s tasks in the most efficient manner possible.  I loved the new me.

~

The important day—the day Jerry and I would find out who had made it—was approaching.  The big news was scheduled to be announced in a Friday team meeting.  Coincidentally, a large project was due to be completed on the same day, so I spent the entire evening before the big day running numbers and refining my models. 

Now, my spreadsheets were nothing but canvases for self-expression.  I was playing with numbers as if they were music notes and the spreadsheet grid was the cliff that housed the magic these notes were making.  My thoughts were racing, well-rounded, elegant, and unstoppable—akin to elite horses.

I was irritated when my phone went off several times that night.  First it was Lexie; she left a whiny voicemail about some big headache she was having, and I thought of how rude it was of her to interrupt me when she knew I had an important event coming up.  I did not return her call—I figured she could complain about how slowly her business development efforts were progressing at some other time.  Lately, that was all that she would talk about, and, just as I had predicted earlier, she had started to lose faith in her ability to carry through with her endeavor. 

Later that evening, my phone rang again.  This time, I was even more annoyed because the number displayed on the slick liquid crystal screen was one that I did not recognize.  At first, the caller did not leave a voicemail.  Then, fifteen minutes later, as I finally threw myself onto the futon, tossed aside an old throw that somehow smelled of heartbreak, tension headaches, and sweaty palms—that is, it reeked of Jerry—and was preparing to fall into the depths of my dreams, the phone again issued a light, bird-like chirp. 

I wasn’t sure if this was not just a product of my imagination—after all, my brain had had its share of stimulation for the day and then some—so I decided not to pick up.

~

“Mia Andrews?”

I was still sleepy and struggled to collect my thoughts as I answered the phone.  It was irritating that I had to get the phone before I’d had a chance to find my pill bottle and take a morning dose.

“This is Southwest Catholic Medical Center.  You know Alexis Chan?” 

“Yes, is something wrong with her?”  My heart sunk into my stomach, but I didn’t know if I could stomach what I was about to hear.

“She listed you as an emergency contact.  You need to come collect the body.  Today.”  The voice on the other end of the line was matter-of-factly to the point of rudeness. 

The body?  Lexie’s body?  This was surreal. 

“What happened to her?”  I started to shake.

“Meningitis.  Came in yesterday with an intense headache and sunlight intolerability and expired a few hours ago.  We tried to reach you last night, but couldn’t get through.”  I heard reproach in the woman’s voice. 

I was in shock.  What was happening was unreal.  I couldn’t cry, not right now.  I had to go to work and make a presentation.

When I walked into the conference room, a little late and disoriented, everyone fell silent. 

Meg shot a smile at me. 

A poster on the wall said in big, cartoon-like characters, “Congratulations, Jerry!” 

“Congrats,” I uttered before I ran out of the room and slammed the bathroom door behind me.  I heard the chatter resume in the distance—no one had followed me.  I was history, and my personal history was staring me in the face, armed with all of its ugly and heart-wrenching facts:  my obsession with work, missed phone calls, endless spreadsheets, endless pills.

Pills.  I pulled the orange tube out of my purse and threw it against the wall.  It cracked open, and little white things spilled out of it like crushed pieces of chalk.  My consciousness registered a noise, something between a squeal and a howl, which I must have let out as I slammed my foot on the bottle.  The heels of my shoes, those very shoes in which I was going to conquer the corporate world by subduing assholes like Jerry and mesmerizing them with toe cleavage, were now crushing the pills, crushing them with all the force that I could summon, with all the rage and disappointment and self-hatred that a useless joke like me could master. 

I cried for Lexie:  she had done so much for me, and in return I sent her plea for help into a voicemail queue.

I wept for our friendship. 

I mourned myself:  my shattered dreams, my poisoned body.  My poor poisoned for nothing body.

~

After I lost three important constants that had dominated my life in the weeks leading up to the tragedy—my friend, my chemically induced creativity, and my job—I started spending days curled up under the covers, the blinders, both in my bedroom and within my soul, shut as tightly as possible.  I was trying to recover my mind and summon recollections of the old me.  I was putting myself back together piece by piece.  Like a blind kitten who’d already lived eight lives, I yearned for anything, any reminders of my old life, of the old, principled me. 

A growing pile of bills from various creditors indicated unequivocally that I was running out of chances.  As my credit card statements indicated, my five-hundred dollar tote was costing me more and more with each passing day.  It turned out that what they said was true:  if you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

It was a slow process, but one day, the new me emerged.  This time, she was wiser and stronger.  She was not willing to compromise herself because others thought they knew what was best for her.  I liked the new me—it was then that I realized how much the values that I had lost to Smarties were reflected in everything I did with my life.  Not that I blamed the drugs for what had happened—the only thing they were guilty of was taking away my ability to perceive life in its raw, unbeautified form, and to deal with it accordingly—but the drugs did represent a set of limitations on what I could be, the limitations that I didn’t want anymore.  I wanted freedom.

One sunny morning, I woke up and things came together.  I finally experienced the stillness in my mind that I had been craving for days, and that’s how I knew this was the day to start making changes.  Inevitably, I would have to make meaning for myself, find something to hold onto that could help me get back on my feet.  The harder I thought about things, the more I was convinced that the tarot lady was right:  I did have more options than I wanted to believe.  I lined up in front of me several articles:  a succinct job ad I had found in a dated copy of a coffee-stained Economist, Mark’s gold-embossed business card, and a newspaper page that featured a big, impressive ad for a company called Karley Law Services. 

I could take legal action against that bitch Meg for coercing me to use cognitive enhancement and holding my job over my head.  I could continue to take Radopin and find another high-pressure job.  There, I could hope make lots of money and pray that my body would last long enough to make that possible.  I could find work in a lower-pressure environment, a small NGO, perhaps, a place where people would make so little that there would be no incentive to compete. 

Then again, I could take up Mark on his offer.  We could make others compromise themselves for our benefit.  Alternatively, we could build an entirely new structure, one where people could simply be themselves.  I could tell people my story, and Lexie’s story, and Jerry’s, too.  Let them draw their own conclusions.

My options were right in front of me, and all I had to do was act. 

I picked up the phone and started dialing.  For the first time in months, my soul had finally found peace as I gave myself permission to make mistakes and released myself from my third prison.  Perhaps I was trading one prison for another—time will tell.