When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger Page A

the sun as he drove around the city, was burned a bright red, like forbidden crayfish in a pot. In his red face, his pale blue eyes stared with an insane intensity that always made me look quickly away. Bill was crazy, with a craziness he’d chosen for himself as carefully as Yasmin had chosen her high, sexy cheekbones.
    I met Bill when I first came to the city. He had already learned to live among the outcasts, wretches, and bullies of the Budayeen years before; he helped me fit myself easily into that questionable society. Bill had been born in the United States of America—that’s how old he was—in the part that is now called Sovereign Deseret. When the North American union broke into several jealous, balkanized nations, Bill turned his back on his birthplace forever. I don’t know how he earned a living until he learned the way of life here; Bill doesn’t remember, either. Somehow he acquired enough cash to pay for a single surgical modification in his body. Rather than wiring his brain, as many of the lost souls of the Budayeen choose to do, Bill selected a more subtle, more frightening bodmod: He had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a large, artificial gland that dripped a perpetual, measured quantity of some fourth-generation psychedelic drug into his bloodstream. Bill wasn’t sure which drug he’d asked for, but judging from his abstracted speech and the quality of his hallucinations, I’d guess it was either l.- ribopropylmethionine—RPM—or acetylated neocorticine.
    You can’t buy RPM or acetylated neocorticine on the street. There isn’t much of a market for either drug. They both have the same long-term effect: After repeated doses of these drugs, a person’s nervous system begins to degenerate. They compete for the binding sites in the human brain that are normally used by acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. These new psychedelics attack and occupy the binding sites like a victorious army swooping down upon a conquered city; they cannot be removed, either by the body’s own processes or by any form of medical therapy. The hallucinatory experiences are unparalleled in pharmacological history, but the price in terms of damage is exorbitant. The user, more literally than ever before, burns out his brain, synapse by synapse. The resulting condition is symptomatically indistinguishable from advanced Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Continued use, when the drugs begin interfering with the autonomic nervous system, probably proves fatal.
    Bill hadn’t reached that state yet. He was living a daylong, nightlong dreamlife. I remembered what it had been like sometimes, when I had dropped a less-dangerous psychedelic and had been struck by the crippling fear that “I would never come down,” a common illusion that you use to torture yourself. You feel as if this time, this particular drug experience, unlike all the pleasant experiences in the past, this time you’ve gone and broken something in your head. Trembling, terrified, promising that you’ll never take another pill again, you huddle up against the onslaught of your own darkest dreams. At last, however, you do recover; the drug wears off, and sooner or later you forget just how bad the horror was. You do it again. Maybe this time you’ll be luckier, maybe not.
    There were no maybes with Bill. Bill was never coming down, ever. When those moments of utter, absolute dread began, he had no way to lessen the anxiety. He couldn’t tell himself that if he just held out long enough, in the morning he’d be back to normal. Bill would never be back to normal. That’s the way he wanted it. As for the cell-by-cell death of his nervous system, Bill only shrugged. “They all gonna die someday, right?”
    “Yes,” I replied, clinging nervously to the rear seat of his taxi as he plunged through narrow, twisting alleys.
    “And if they go all at once, everybody else has a party at your funeral. You don’t get nothin’. You get buried.