He slept until three the next afternoon. He woke as he usually did, head smashing into consciousness, too much consciousness, alive awake alert enthusiastic, as the song Julie used to sing to him went, minus the enthusiasm. Except even more alive more awake more alert than usual, maybe, or maybe that was just the result of having experienced a moment of less awake less alert with which to compare. If the drug had any hangover associated, or any gradual return, he’d slept through it. His brain was back along with the loud bird outside his window the icemaker in the fridge his heartbeat in his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to recapture the quiet but quiet was gone, gone, loud bird gone.
By Monday, he was completely back to his own normal. Back to a job he didn’t want but was afraid to give up. Back to the noise nobody else believed, noise that people played at during parties even while saying it’s a nice place but we wouldn’t want to live there. He hated everyone.
He tried to remember what the quiet felt like. His own personal Fortress of Solitude. He tried to get himself back to that state, but it had never been a thing he could do. Meditation, yoga, alcohol: he’d tried it all a hundred times. Nothing had ever worked, until that pill at that party, and how long had it worked? Hours. He’d left his car there and walked all the way home, four miles, eyes open for stranger danger but awareness gloriously dulled. Anyone could have snuck up on him or stepped out of the shadows, and he’d have missed it entirely, laughed at the novelty even while handing over his wallet.
His day consisted of two health fairs, morning at a high school and afternoon at the downtown jail, the latter for the employees at both the jail and the nearby federal prison. He’d never been to a jail before, and he’d been curious, but the health fair was situated in the outermost vestibule and he didn’t actually get to see anything. About half the staff already had Pilots, and his job was to convince the other half to get them. This wasn’t the worst gig he’d had. It was probably true that in their line of work a Pilot would make them safer. If he worked in a jail he’d want heightened awareness, the same way he’d appreciated it on deployment.
The trickier thing was answering questions about Piloted inmates. What would it mean to have a prison full of Pilots? All the more important for the guards and inmates to be evenly matched. Was there a way to turn their inmates’ Pilots off? No. Well, there was a way, but it involved surgery; not something they’d be doing for people who were with them for the short haul, and an invasion of rights for even those on the longer ride.
He almost mentioned the pill he’d taken. Wouldn’t that be their solution? Something temporary to mute the effect for the people they didn’t want heightened? But that involved explaining the party, and possibly getting his friends in trouble, and he hadn’t yet even researched whether it was an off-label use of a legal drug or something over-the-counter and legit or a controlled substance that could get him fired.
Better not to know, so he could claim ignorance. It would be nice to find out it was a legal option, but if it wasn’t, he’d feel obligated to leave it alone. He was already itching to take it again, to reclaim that blessed quiet that had been his, however briefly. He hadn’t wanted anything that much for years. He didn’t want definitive answers that would force him to decide.
Instead, after he’d packed his display, he drove to the Installation Center. Not the VA, not the clinic in the building where he worked, but the civilian place where he’d first gotten his Pilot installed. He hadn’t been in it since that appointment he’d made on his own in high school, and he wouldn’t have noticed much at that time, but now he took it in: the slick and modern design, silently speaking we are the future to the prospective patients; the baking cookies scent, designed to put them at ease; below it all, not waiting-room Muzak, but a low hum at a frequency that seemed to want to settle him, even if it couldn’t.
The clinician, a Dr. Nguyen, didn’t hide her surprise at seeing him. “Don’t you have your own doctors at BNL or the VA?”
“I do, but I’m allowed to come here, right?”
“Of course. Is there a problem?”
There has always been a problem, he didn’t say. He’d said it so many times, but nobody had listened. “I was wondering if there’s a way to . . . dampen the effect sometimes? To quiet my head.”
“You should be able to cycle down with the app.”
“Yes, but what if I can’t?”
“I can check if you’re working with the most up-to-date app.” She reached for her tablet.
“It’s current. What if the cycle-down isn’t enough?”
“I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They never did. He took a deep breath. “Can you turn it off?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Can. You. Turn. Off. My. Pilot.” He repeated himself slowly.
The doctor frowned. “Why would you want that? Is there a problem with it?”
“I told you. It’s too loud. It never cycles down. You can look in my file; I came in about this years ago.”
“Are you sure you don’t just need to practice the exercises again to regain your focus?”
How many times did he have to say it? “This is not about exercises. I shouldn’t have
