Watching Dylan wrench ineffectually at his bonds, the stuff-peddling maniac clucked his tongue and shook his head disapprovingly. ‘If you struggle, I might tear your vein… or accidentally inject an air bubble, resulting in an embolism. An embolism will kill you, or at least leave you a vegetable.’ He indicated Shep at the nearby desk. ‘Worse than him.’
At the burnt-out end of certain bad black days, overwhelmed by weariness and frustration, Dylan sometimes envied his brother’s disconnection from the worries of the world; however, although Shep had no responsibilities, Dylan had plenty of them – including, not least of all, Shep himself – and oblivion, whether by choice or by embolism, could not be embraced.
Focusing on the shining needle, Dylan stopped resisting. A sour sweat lathered his face. Exhaling explosively, inhaling with force, he snorted like a well-run horse. His skull had begun to throb once more, particularly where he’d been struck, and also across the breadth of his forehead. Resistance was futile, debilitating, and just plain stupid. Since he couldn’t avoid being injected, he might as well accept the malicious medicine man’s claim that the substance in the syringe wasn’t lethal, might as well endure the inevitable, remain alert for an advantage (assuming consciousness was an option after the injection), and seek help later.
‘That’s better, son. Smartest thing is just to get it over with. It won’t even sting as much as a flu vaccination. You can trust me.’
You can trust me.
They were so far into surreal territory that Dylan half expected the room’s furniture to soften and distort like objects in a painting by Salvador Dali.
Still wearing a dreamy smile, the stranger expertly guided the needle into the vein, at once slipped loose the knot in the rubber tubing, and kept the promise of a painless violation.
The tip of the thumb reddened as it put pressure on the plunger.
Stringing together as unlikely a series of words as Dylan had ever heard, Doc said, ‘I’m injecting you with my life’s work.’
In the transparent barrel of the syringe, the dark stopper began to move slowly from the top toward the tip, forcing the golden fluid into the needle.
‘You probably wonder what this stuff will do to you.’
Stop calling it STUFF! Dylan would have demanded if his mouth hadn’t been crammed full of unidentified laundry.
‘Impossible to say what it’ll do, exactly.’
Although the needle might have been of ordinary size, Dylan realized that at least regarding the dimensions of the syringe barrel, his imagination hadn’t been playing tricks with him, after all. It was enormous. Fearsomely huge. On that clear plastic tube, the black scale markings indicated a capacity of 18 cc, a dosage more likely to be prescribed by a zoo veterinarian whose patients topped six hundred pounds.
‘The stuff’s psychotropic.’
That word was big – exotic, too – but Dylan suspected that if he could think clearly, he would know what it meant. His stretched jaws ached, however, and the soaked ball of cloth in his mouth leaked a sour stream of saliva that threatened to plunge him into fits of choking, and his lips burned under the tape, and greater fear flooded through him as he watched the mysterious fluid draining into his arm, and he was seriously annoyed by Shep’s compulsive waving even though he remained aware of it only from the corner of one eye. Under these circumstances, clear thinking was not easily achieved. Ricocheting through his mind, the word psychotropic remained as smooth and shiny and impenetrable as a steel bearing caroming from peg to rail, to bumper, to flipper in the flashing maze of a pinball machine.
‘It does something different to everyone.’ A sharp but perverse scientific curiosity prickled Doc’s voice, as disturbing to Dylan as finding shards of glass in honey. Although this man looked the part of a caring country physician, he had the bedside manner of Victor von Frankenstein. ‘The effect is without exception interesting, frequently astonishing, and sometimes positive.’
Interesting, astonishing, sometimes positive: This didn’t sound like a life’s work equal to that of Jonas Salk. Doc seemed to belong more comfortably in the mad-malevolent-megalomaniacal-Nazi-scientist tradition.
The last cc of fluid disappeared from the barrel of the syringe into the needle, into Dylan.