The Magic Pill (part 7)

[This is the seventh in a series of posts that tell a single story.  You can refresh your memory on Part 6 HERE, or start at the beginning if you didn’t read the others.]

And even that, all of that, wasn’t enough to assuage the lurking sense of unease I felt. As new questions kept popping up, no matter how many answers I found, and as I felt no closer to any sort of resolution, I was forced to acknowledge a simpler truth. This has no logical basis, it dawned on me. This resistance is emotional. I’m just afraid! And that sudden realization swung the door forward halfway open. But why?, I thought, sitting down on the edge of my bed. What’s the problem here? What am I so afraid of?

You’re afraid, said the Voice, that it will work.

The statement held no surprise for me, not even a glimmer of amusement at the irony. Welcome back, I thought.

I never left. It didn’t wait for me to ask the obvious question. If it works, then it’s one more thing you’re responsible for, one more thing you have to help provide. And things aren’t going so well in that respect. The Providing Department. You’re worried that pretty soon you won’t even be able to give him the essentials, let alone enhancements.

Yes, I thought.

But really, more than that, it continued, it’s the implications you’re afraid of. The religious implications. The question you keep dancing around when you ask, “What will this do to his creativity? What will this do to his imagination? What will this do to his self-esteem?”– dancing around, but never landing on– is more fundamental than any of THOSE questions. The question you WANT to ask is, “What does this mean for his SOUL?”

Because you don’t believe YOU have a soul, it added. Not on most days. You think of yourself as meat with pretensions, and you avoid thinking about what’s going to happen to you in the end, because you know that if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to function day-to-day. You’d just sit there crying. But you believe that HE has one. Because you love him so much. Even if that’s bizarre, even if it doesn’t make any kind of intellectual sense. It paused. If they do this, and it works, if they can give him a pill and change how he behaves on that basic a level, then the idea that he might HAVE a soul is a lie. He’s doomed, and you’re doomed. He’s just meat with pretensions, like you and everyone else, and he’ll suffer the same fate in the end. He’ll just die and be gone. Just like you’ll die, and be gone. It paused again. And then there’s no hope.

Yes, I thought, hanging my head. That’s what it means. In the end. I chewed on that, sadly. Not a terribly rational basis for decision-making, is it?

No. Not really.

So what is? I thought.

You tell me, the Voice said.

I mulled it over. That he’s struggling, I thought. I don’t tend to see him struggling, because the interaction between him and I takes place in its own sphere. And he never says anything about it, for the same reason– when he’s with me, he’s happy. Even if he had the language to discuss it with me, why would he? When we’re having fun, it’s just not on his mind. I stared at my feet. But he is struggling. And it’s wearing him down, slowly, and frustrating him, and starting to make him averse to things he might enjoy, or might need to learn. Starting to make him limit his own choices. I have to stop that. I have to try. I looked up then. I have the responsibility to change that if I can, however I can, with whatever I can bring to bear.

Bingo, said the Voice. And it left me alone after that, because the door forward had swung the rest of the way open.

I asked all those good questions I had thought of anyway, of course. I went back to the second meeting with the medical doctor, the meeting without Jack, and I kept them in my head, and I worked to frame the debate in ways that would get them answered. I didn’t have to work too hard. I learned quickly enough, for instance, that no-one had the goal in mind of changing Jack’s personality; the intent was to enhance his ability to focus without changing his personality. If we judged his behavior as “off”, or felt that he wasn’t acting like himself, then something was wrong and needed to be adjusted. And I learned that the drugs were very short-acting, with no lingering effects on his body, so that they could be started and stopped more or less with impunity. And that the likely result of finding the right dosage for him would be an increase in his self-esteem, as he struggled less and improved his ability to deal with things that had been giving him trouble. All of which made the decision I had already come to, the decision to have him try the medication, that much easier.

I did not ask the MD the soul question. Not her province, after all. But I couldn’t resist asking Weaver, later on, over the beers we ordered at a local bar after we got out of the doctor’s office. What the hell, I thought. I already threw everything else out there. And she’s a Christian.

Her eyes slid sideways to the run-down bar, then the other way, to the dark wooden walls, glancing over each surface as if she thought I might have rigged them to collapse on her. “Why are you asking me that?” she said, brows wrinkling. “You’re an atheist.”

I am? For once, I didn’t have anything clever to say, so I simply echoed myself. “I am?” I said.

Her face wrinkled even more, confused. She lowered her glass and opened her mouth as if to say something, but stopped without speaking, more inside herself than out, as if she had wandered past a door of her own mental house that was normally locked and found it sprung unexpectedly open.

She shut it. “Yeah,” she said, emphatically. “You are. Unless something has changed.” She took a swig of her beer. “It doesn’t mean anything about his soul,” she said, looking at the table. “It has nothing to do with that.”

Hnnnnnnnh. I’ve questioned a lot of decisions I’ve made over the course of my life, but somehow divorcing her has never been one of them. “I guess,” I said, letting it go. I doodled on my cocktail napkin with a pen I had brought, making intricate squiggles. “Hard not to wonder a lot of things,” I added genially, picking up my beer with my left hand. “After sitting through all these meetings, hearing all these descriptions, reading all this literature, I start to wonder, ‘Maybe I have ADHD.’” I drank an inch off the top, chuckled suddenly. “Would I even know if I did?” I said, tilting the glass towards her.

The confused look disappeared from her face, replaced by hooded eyes and a funny, knowing smirk; her eyes slid away from me again. I stopped laughing. “Something you wanna say?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I think you have… tendencies,” she said, still smirking. She looked at me directly, for the first time. “You don’t really listen when you’re told things. And you don’t remember anything unless it’s important to you.”

“Hnnnh,” I grunted. And you wouldn’t be particularly biased towards that assessment, I thought. Would you? Being my ex-wife and all? But she wasn’t the one who looked away in the end. I was.

“Fair enough,” I said.

[continue to the last part]