“What about?” Arctor said.
“Your cephalochromoscope that cost you nine hundred dollars, that you always turn on and play when you get home—Ernie and Barris were babbling away about it. They tried to use it today and it wouldn’t work. No colors and no ceph patterns, neither one. So they got Barris’s tool kit and unscrewed the bottom plate.”
“The hell you say!” he said, indignant.
“And they say it’s been fucked over. Sabotaged. Cut wires, and like sort of weird stuff—you know, freaky things. Shorts and broken parts. Barris said he’d try to—”
“I’m going right home,” Arctor said, and hung up. My primo possession, he thought bitterly. And that fool Barris tinkering with it. But I can’t go home right now, he realized. I’ve got to go over to New-Path to check on what they’re up to.
It was his assignment: mandatory.
Charles Freck, too, had been thinking about visiting New-Path. The freakout of Jerry Fabin had gotten to him that much.
Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler’s Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely. “It’s a heavy decision,” he said. “That’s cold turkey they do. They just keep with you night and day so you don’t snuff yourself or bite off your arm, but they never give you anything. Like, a doctor will prescribe. Valium, for instance.”
Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread. “What kind of bread is this?” he asked.
“Look on the menu,” Charles Freck said. “It explains.”
“If you go in,” Barris said, “you’ll experience symptoms that emanate up from the basic fluids of the body, specifically those located in the brain. By that I refer to the catecholamines, such as noradrenalin and serotonin. You see, it functions this way: Substance D, in fact all addictive dope, but Substance D most of all, interacts with the catecholamines in such a fashion that involvement is locked in place at a subcellular level. Biological counter-adaptation has occurred, and in a sense forever.” He ate a huge bite of the right half of his patty melt. “They used to believe this occurred only with the alkaloid narcotics, such as heroin.”
“I never shot smack. It’s a downer.”
The waitress, foxy and nice in her yellow uniform, with pert boobs and blond hair, came over to their table. “Hi,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
Charles Freck gazed up in fear.
“Is your name Patty?” Barris asked her, signaling to Charles Freck that it was cool.
“No.” She pointed to the name badge on her right boob. “It’s Beth.”
I wonder what the left one’s called, Charles Freck thought.
“The waitress we had last time was named Patty,” Barris said, eyeing the waitress grossly. “Same as the sandwich.”
“That must have been a different Patty from the sandwich. I think she spells it with an i.”
“Everything is super good,” Barris said. Over his head Charles Freck could see a thought balloon in which Beth was stripping off her clothes and moaning to be banged.
“Not with me,” Charles Freck said. “I got a lot of problems nobody else has.”
In a somber voice, Barris said, “More people than you’d think. And more each day. This is a world of illness, and getting progressively worse.” Above his head, the thought balloon got worse too.
“Would you like to order dessert?” Beth asked, smiling down at them.
“What like?” Charles Freck said with suspicion.
“We have fresh strawberry pie and fresh peach pie,” Beth said smiling, “that we make here ourselves.”
“No, we don’t want any dessert,” Charles Freck said. The waitress left. “That’s for old ladies,” he said to Barris, “those fruit pies.”
“The idea of turning yourself over for rehabilitation,” Barris said, “certainly makes you apprehensive. That’s a manifestation of purposeful negative symptoms, your fear. It’s the drug talking, to keep you out of New-Path and keep you from getting off it. You see, all symptoms are purposeful, whether they are positive or negative.”
“No shit,” Charles Freck muttered.
“The negative ones show up as the cravings, which are deliberately generated by the total body to force its owner—which in this case is you—to search frantically—”
“The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path,” Charles Freck said, “is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there.”
“Your spleen next,” Barris said.
“They what, they cut—What does that do, a spleen?”
“Helps you digest your food.”
“How?”
“By removing the cellulose from it.”
“Then I guess after that—”
“Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa.”
“How long can you live that way?”
Barris said, “It depends on your attitude.”
“How many spleens does the average person have?” He knew there usually were two kidneys.
“Depends on his weight and age.”
“Why?” Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.
“A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he’s eighty—”
“You’re shitting me.”
Barris laughed. Always he had been a strange laugher, Charles Freck thought. An unreal laugh, like something breaking. “Why your decision,” Barris said presently, “to turn yourself in for residence therapy at a drug rehab center?”
“Jerry Fabin,” he said.
With a gesture of easy dismissal, Barris said, “Jerry was a special case. I once watched Jerry Fabin staggering around and falling down, shitting all over himself, not knowing where he was, trying to get me to look up and research what poison he’d got hold of, thallium sulfate most likely … it’s used in insecticides and to snuff rats. It was a burn, somebody paying him back. I could think of ten different toxins and poisons that might—”
“There’s another reason,” Charles Freck said. “I’m running low again in my supply, and I can’t stand it, this always running low and not knowing if I’m fucking ever going to see any more.”
“Well, we can’t even be sure we’ll see another sunrise.”