Life can seem pretty good with a little chemical enhancement. Too good,
perhaps...
When my personality started to wear off, Sheryl told me to go see Dr. Cheff again.We were sitting in her living room. The wall screen was muted, splashing colored light over her pale grey furniture and paler skin.
"You're not like you used to be", Sheryl declared. "You're down all the time. No fun to be with." She jiggled the ice cubes in her drink. "I can't remember the last time we went to a party."
But I could. Throbbing music, just loud enough to mask conversation. Men and women, dressed in the latest sleek fashion, bouncing from one conversation to another, babbling. We were into another round of happiness. Happiness, the drug my body was becoming habituated to.
"It all seems so...pointless", I said. "I mean, what use is there in going to parties?"
"I don't want to hear it. Go see Dr. Cheff. He probably needs to up your prescription. What are you at now, twenty milligrams?"
I checked the pad on the inside of my wrist. "Thirty."
"You see, that's just like you", she declaimed. "You're a naturally dull person, no fun at all. Ask him for something ultra-strength."
Sheryl stood up abruptly, pulling her cloak around her. "I'm going out to a party. I don't want you to be here when I get back. Talk to Dr. Cheff."
Maybe she's right, I thought as I left her building and hailed a cab to my all-night pharmacy. It was all a matter of perspective, after all. The right dose of Happiness and the world looked wonderful. But was that the way the world really was, or was it just the drug talking?
Dr. Cheff and I had already hashed this argument out several times on my last few visits. "The drug you're on increases neurotransmitter function in the brain", he'd told me. There's no personality change, per se. Every positive thing you experience is enhanced through a complex series of events that we don't fully understand. You remain the same person, but life is fuller."
Outside the cab window, the city was drab. But who needed bright colors and fantastic forms when the mind's landscape could provide all that? The sunsets painted across the landscape of the mind were far more vivid than nature could provide.
There was one person ahead of me waiting to see the doctor at the pharmacy, so I passed the time reading the tattered magazines. Already the weight of my life was settling around my shoulders: the debt, the boring job, even Sheryl seen in a new light. If I stopped taking Happiness, would this be my everyday experience?
The magazines were filled with dozens of ads for tablets, capsules, patches, and liquids, each guaranteed to give you a new outlook on life. One magazine was so old, it had an ad for the first patch I ever tried, Contentment. I can still remember the feeling I had after wearing the patch a few days; a super-slow-motion rush that crept up on me, hit, and outlined everything in my mind in a glow of light.
"Come in, David", Dr. Cheff said through the intercom. The previous client had already left through the back exit I was so familiar with. Once I was seated, Dr. Cheff beamed. "What seems to be the problem?"
"I think I'm becoming habituated to Happiness. I'm not getting the same enjoyment out of life I used to when I was starting on it."
He tapped a few keys on the computer in front of him and frowned. "We've already upped your dosage twice, David. I'd be hesitant about upping it again. You might begin to suffer some of the side effects."
"What kind of side effects?" I asked.
Dr. Cheff flipped through the patch desk reference. "Palpitations, perspiration, nothing serious, but it would interfere with your enjoyment of the patch." He closed the book before I could get a better look.
I paused. "Doctor", I said finally, "I've been thinking about quitting using my patches completely. Going cold turkey."
His eyebrows rose. "Take a drug holiday? I wouldn't advise that at this point in your life."
Dr. Cheff smiled. "You're feeling upset, down, maybe a little depressed, right?" I nodded. "Well, that's only the tip of the iceberg if you stop right now."
"Then am I really getting any better if I have to stay on my patch forever?"
"We've had this conversation before", Dr. Cheff said, glancing at his watch. "The patch is supposed to give you the get-up-and-go so that you can get your life back on track. Once you feel satisfied that you've got things under control, we ease you off."
He forestalled my next comment with a wave of his hand. "Don't tell me everything is all right. The very fact that you're so resistant to Happiness tells me your life needs a lot of fine-tuning."
"Maybe I feel a little guilty about using it as a crutch", I said.
"Eighty to ninety percent of our society uses some kind of patch. There's nothing to feel guilty about, and no social stigma. It's what we need to keep up with the pace of today's life." He flipped through the book again. "We have some promising new patches. Joy is one I'm using, and there are some others here that are even more radical."
I looked at the pictures and read the descriptions. "All right, Doctor", I said at last, "I don't want Joy, or Glee, or Delight. I've made up my mind."
I knew where the party Sheryl had gone to was; the cab ride was over a half hour long. Every block that passed, I could feel the colour drain out of the scenery, the light fade from the sky, the rank smells of the city grow. As the Contentment left my system, it stripped layers of perception away.
I saw that the patch had been based on gestalt -- the incomplete made whole. For what is contentment without a sense of closure? But without Contentment, cracks grew in buildings, bits of glimpsed advertising remained elusive, and thoughts came to abrupt, unfinished ends.
The party had been thrown by a mutual friend, and I was buzzed up as soon as I announced myself. Still, I wasn't prepared for what I saw.
Ever had a hit of LSD? More than anything else, it exposes the stage on which we strut out lives; it drags our artifices and constructs into the ugly light of day.
I had expected frantic, giddy activity. Instead, the partygoers stood leaning against the bare walls, waving drinks like batons, looking at each other with wide smiles. Every time someone said a word, a fragment of conversation, the knot of people around the speaker would burst into laughter.
The floor crunched with discarded sniffers and hors d'oeuvres as I made my way through the crowd, searching for Sheryl. But by the time I saw her, my mind was already made up.
She came over to me, smiling. She would have expressed even more emotion if it was possible, but once you get far enough along the spectrum, there's nowhere left to go.
"Well?" she asked. "Are you ready to join the party?"
I turned over my arm and peeled off the patch labeled 'Reality'. Crumpling it in my hand, I said, "Actually, I was just leaving."
is a part-owner in a new communications firm, Visionary Communications, and spends his spare time surfing the net, writing, and keeping his cat out of mischief.
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Copyright Circuit Traces Communications 1995