through the blinds cut into his vision like a razor wheel. He lumbered to the bathroom, thrust his mouth under the faucet, and gulped tap water.
Then he threw up, another familiarity.
He could tell by looking at the bed that Faye hadn’t slept with him. What the fuck happened? he wondered. He stumbled downstairs in his shorts, guzzled some orange juice, and threw up again. It was 8:30; he was going to be late. No note had been left on the fridge, and Faye wasn’t here. He tried to think, but he could remember nothing of last night past his sixth drink.
Birds chirped cheerily on the window ledge. Shut up, he thought. First he called work. “Running a little late.” He tried to sound nonchalant. The desk sergeant didn’t sound surprised. Then he called Craig.
“Everybody do me,” Craig said.
“Hey, Craig, it’s Jack. Did I wake you up?”
“No, I always get up at eight-thirty when I go to bed at four.”
“Sorry. Look, I need to know what happened last night.”
Craig serviced a bemused pause. “You got faced. Bad.”
“How many did I have?”
“I don’t know. Ten, twelve. I tried to stop serving you but you threatened to shit on the floor and close us down on a health violation.”
What could he say? Nothing, he thought. Nothing he hadn’t said before. “What happened with the girl?”
“Faye? Oh, she sat it out — she’s a good girl. At last call you passed out. We stuffed you in the car, drove you home, and dragged you upstairs.”
“Did she stay? At my place, I mean.”
“Yeah, in one of the downstairs rooms, I think.”
“I guess she was pretty pissed,” Jack lamented.
“If she was pissed she would’ve walked out hours before. Like I said, she’s a good girl.”
Don’t remind me, Jack thought. “You were saying something before I got tanked. Something about someone looking for me?”
“Yeah, what’s his name. The guy with the Ivanhoe haircut.”
“Stewie,” Jack said, like the name was phlegm in his throat.
“Yeah, that guy.”
“What did he want?”
“He said he was looking for you, I said you hadn’t been in. He drank up and left. That was a few hours before you and Faye came in. The candyass left me a nickel tip.”
That’s Stewie, all right. But what did he want that was so important he actually came looking for Jack?
Now what? Jack held the phone, his head thumping through silence. “Look, Craig, I’m really sorry about—”
“I know. You’re really sorry about getting fucked up and making an ass of yourself in public.”
“I guess by now it goes without saying.”
“Of course it does, so don’t worry about it.”
Jack was grateful for Craig’s barman’s couth — breaking Jack’s balls and being a good guy about it at the same time. “And thanks for helping Faye get my drunk ass home.”
“Forget it,” Craig said. “Before I go back to sleep, you want some friendly advice?”
“Quit drinking,” Jack guessed.
“Hit the nail on the head. And the girl, Faye — she’s a decent kid, and I think she really likes you.”
“So what’s Craig’s divine advice?”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
Jack reflected on the words through the dial tone. He was beginning to wonder what in his life he hadn’t fucked up, and his present hangover only amplified the question. He went up to the shower, not just wondering what the future might hold, but wondering if he even had one.
* * * NARCOTICS, RITUAL USE OF: Medieval counter-worship displays a vast utilization of narcotic substances. In fact, many pre-Christian-era belief systems revered particular entities who supposedly presided over the existence of narcotic properties and pharmacological knowledge, and it is through such demonographies that similar influences probably became insinuated into later Christian counter-worship.
Boring, Faye thought in her study cubicle. She skimmed down the text, eyeing only for key words of significance:
known as elixirists, of special note with the aoristic orders of the late 1200s. Here we find an astounding logistic of narcotic manufacture. Drugs were generally used communally, during group rites of Mass, mostly root and botanical derivatives. Prelates often spiked thuribles with a preparation they called “cavernsmoke,” which was said to “fortify the spirit for the service of our lords.” What it really did was extend the initiate’s susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion, increasing the likelihood of the commission of a crime. Cavernsmoke, as it turns out, was a tuber extract of a butyrophenone chemical chain which when induced affects a CNS depression and lowers a subject’s conscious resistance to suggestion. Its chemical constituents are nearly identical to a modern psychiatric drug called Raxidol, which is still used to this day as a therapeutic hypnotic and involves a complicated synthesis process. This is just one example of a long series of sophisticated pharmacologies that included hypermanic drugs, psychostimulants, amphetamines, and opiate-based hydromorphinic pain killers and euphorics used today. One may find this premise very interesting: how did such cults, composed primarily of ignorant peasants living a thousand years ago, develop such a pervasive and comprehensive knowledge of pharmacological science?
You’re right, Faye rejoined. It is an interesting premise. The aorists were using narcotic technologies that hadn’t even been invented. It explained quite a bit, though — how the prelates were able to influence their subjects so effectively: drug addiction and hypnosis. She skimmed down further:
to the extent that any ritual occasion demanded the antithetical gesture of sexual sin, which was viewed as a paramount affront to God, the more perverse in nature the greater the homage to Lucifer and his appellate demons. Orgies en masse were common from the earliest times, covenheads making liberal use of crude aphrodisiacs in order to provoke rampant sexual behavior among the congregates. Such substances were largely physical in mechanism, and often quite dangerous: harsh astringents such as bergamot and distilled tarweed roots which irritate mucous membrane linings — such as those of the vagina, the anus, and the urethra — and hence affect an accelerated urge to stimulate the irritated areas via intercourse. The aorists, however, whose pharmacological prowess is aforementioned, used much more sophisticated aphrodisic substances, which might help to explain the ease with which the aorists executed such excruciating sexual acts as bestiality and necrophilia. Somehow, sect prelates managed to isolate narcotic substances that directly affected desired dopaminergic mechanisms in the brain. One chief aphrodisiac compound was known as “rootmash” or “loveroot,” whose formulation required a complex series of distillation syntheses of the tubercore of the stalky pod-bearing black apple plant, or Taxodium lyrata, exclusive to lower Europe. Properly processed, the distilled aggregant when taken internally stimulates an overproduction of certain biogenic amines that regulate sex drive, causing hypersexual impulses, abnormal excitation states, and an aberrant willingness to partake in acts which would otherwise seem unappealing or extreme. This particular extract is classified today as a cantharadine, which is, in pharmacological terms, a cervical-channel dilator and libidinal stimulant.
Faye reread the passage, then photocopied it. Jack might be very interested in this.
