diethylcathinone’; another about the acetylation of opioids explains that ‘adding a cinnamyl ester to the 14-hydroxyl group on oxycodone can increase potency through means other than simple lipophilicity changes by acting as additional binding moieties – the 14-cinnamyl ester on oxycodone can raise potency to over fifty times that of morphine, for instance.’ Raf and Isaac might know a bit of trivia about the pituitary but they’ve never burrowed down this far. If anyone ever invents a cost-effective method of synthesising real MDMA without sassafras as a precursor, this is where the news will break.
The forum reminds Raf of conversations he’s overheard between engineers at Myth FM (including one friend of Theo’s who used to be a Communications Systems Operator in the Royal Corps of Signals before he was discharged for petty theft) about radiation patterns and capacitor rods and feedpoint impedance: the expertise is so commonplace that it should be boring to anyone with an A level in science and yet here it all feels occult, lawless, newly discovered – a pragmatic trade that does not have and has never had a theoretical or scholarly crust. And while there are sub-forums for salvia and ayahuasca and opium, the most animated discussion is about novel synthetic compounds imported from laboratories in China. Like medieval naturalists, the Lotophage users know that everything they study has been created for a purpose, but the prime intelligence is so distant and mysterious that they can only guess at its thinking.
Nonetheless, at the centre of it all, Raf feels a gap. What is absent is pleasure. In this sense Lotophage also reminds him of talking about sex with the boys at school when he was about sixteen. One of the main reasons human males have sex is because it is enjoyable to feel your penis being stimulated to ejaculation. To Raf this is not a controversial claim. But back then they always did their best to pretend otherwise. It was acceptable to talk about getting a ‘good blowjob’, for instance, but if you had ever been careless enough to talk about a ‘good orgasm’, or just ‘coming really hard’, everyone would probably have called you gay for weeks. Somehow there was felt to be something clammy and effete about valuing direct physical pleasure for its own sake – which is absurd, because the truth is that the supreme priority of any mammalian brain, especially a teenage boy’s, is to put itself in situations where it will get the chance to bask in hedonic neurotransmitters. Lotophage is the same. They fetishise the means, but never the ends. Why do these people even take drugs? Why do they spend their money and break the law? Presumably because they want to feel pleasure. And yet you wouldn’t know that from reading their posts. Pleasure is always hidden behind words like ‘potency’ and ‘recreational dosage’. They seem ashamed of pleasure, even though really they’re pleasure hobbyists. By contrast, when Raf and Isaac cut pleasure open with neurochemistry, it’s not because they want to kill it – it’s because they want to look deeper inside its lambent heart.
Day 8
4.56 p.m.
Does it still count as a surveillance operation if, instead of planting a bug, you just tune your radio to the FM frequency on which your targets are voluntarily broadcasting? Raf wonders this as he sits in Isaac’s car listening to the Burmese DJs come to the end of their show. Isaac isn’t here, but Fourpetal is in the driver’s seat beside him, and they’re parked by the playground across the road from the council block where the Myth FM studio is hidden. At 17.09 by the clock on the car radio the two men come out of the exit doors and Fourpetal puts the car into gear, ready to follow.
‘I think they’re going on foot,’ says Raf.
‘So?’
‘We can’t just drive along slowly behind them. We’ll look like we’re trying to pick them up for a sex act.’
‘If we get out of the car,
The forum reminds Raf of conversations he’s overheard between engineers at Myth FM (including one friend of Theo’s who used to be a Communications Systems Operator in the Royal Corps of Signals before he was discharged for petty theft) about radiation patterns and capacitor rods and feedpoint impedance: the expertise is so commonplace that it should be boring to anyone with an A level in science and yet here it all feels occult, lawless, newly discovered – a pragmatic trade that does not have and has never had a theoretical or scholarly crust. And while there are sub-forums for salvia and ayahuasca and opium, the most animated discussion is about novel synthetic compounds imported from laboratories in China. Like medieval naturalists, the Lotophage users know that everything they study has been created for a purpose, but the prime intelligence is so distant and mysterious that they can only guess at its thinking.
Nonetheless, at the centre of it all, Raf feels a gap. What is absent is pleasure. In this sense Lotophage also reminds him of talking about sex with the boys at school when he was about sixteen. One of the main reasons human males have sex is because it is enjoyable to feel your penis being stimulated to ejaculation. To Raf this is not a controversial claim. But back then they always did their best to pretend otherwise. It was acceptable to talk about getting a ‘good blowjob’, for instance, but if you had ever been careless enough to talk about a ‘good orgasm’, or just ‘coming really hard’, everyone would probably have called you gay for weeks. Somehow there was felt to be something clammy and effete about valuing direct physical pleasure for its own sake – which is absurd, because the truth is that the supreme priority of any mammalian brain, especially a teenage boy’s, is to put itself in situations where it will get the chance to bask in hedonic neurotransmitters. Lotophage is the same. They fetishise the means, but never the ends. Why do these people even take drugs? Why do they spend their money and break the law? Presumably because they want to feel pleasure. And yet you wouldn’t know that from reading their posts. Pleasure is always hidden behind words like ‘potency’ and ‘recreational dosage’. They seem ashamed of pleasure, even though really they’re pleasure hobbyists. By contrast, when Raf and Isaac cut pleasure open with neurochemistry, it’s not because they want to kill it – it’s because they want to look deeper inside its lambent heart.
Day 8
4.56 p.m.
Does it still count as a surveillance operation if, instead of planting a bug, you just tune your radio to the FM frequency on which your targets are voluntarily broadcasting? Raf wonders this as he sits in Isaac’s car listening to the Burmese DJs come to the end of their show. Isaac isn’t here, but Fourpetal is in the driver’s seat beside him, and they’re parked by the playground across the road from the council block where the Myth FM studio is hidden. At 17.09 by the clock on the car radio the two men come out of the exit doors and Fourpetal puts the car into gear, ready to follow.
‘I think they’re going on foot,’ says Raf.
‘So?’
‘We can’t just drive along slowly behind them. We’ll look like we’re trying to pick them up for a sex act.’
‘If we get out of the car,
Similar Books
