Sensalon

“Free yourself with Sensalon,” a soothing female voice spoke from the viewscreen embedded in the wall of the subway station.

Calex was slumped on a bench, sipping an energy drink and taking massive hits from his vapor stick. Oodie, his best friend, was lounging on the other end of the bench. There was a long string of drool trailing from the corner of his mouth.

Calex looked over at the viewscreen where a family was frolicking through a field, big smiles painted on their faces. It was absurd. No one smiled while on Sensalon. The whole purpose of the drug was to treat SOS, Sensory Overload Syndrome, so it dulled the emotions and numbed the senses. The family would not have been holding hands, or smiling, or frolicking. They would each be in individual rooms, sitting in the dark, not interacting, certainly not smiling.

“Ask your doctor about Sensalon,” the soothing female voice said. “Side effects may include uncontrolled diarrhea, anal leakage, vomiting, depression, anxiety, sensory overload, stroke, heart attack, and, in some cases, even death.”

“Why would you treat sensory overload with a drug that causes sensory overload?” Calex said to Oodie.

Oodie did not respond. He was deep into a painkiller binge, which Calex knew. The question had been rhetorical. Calex looked around at the other people in the subway station. There were only four or five waiting for the train, and most of them were staring at their phones. One seemed to be gazing at the empty spaces in the universe.

Then he noticed a woman cradling a bundle to her chest. The sight reminded him of a mother holding a baby, but it couldn’t possibly be an actual baby. Since the fertility rates had dropped to zero, babies were created in labs and raised in the government creches for the first four years of their lives. Something about ensuring positive development.

“Yada, yada, yada,” Calex said.

Oodie looked over at him and muttered, “I keep her hair in a heart-shaped locket.”

“Creepy,” Calex said.

Oodie was always saying crap like that when he was in a stupor. When he was blitzed, he wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but that didn’t mean he was silent. Sometimes he released a torrent of nonsense. It probably made sense to someone somewhere, but Calex never knew what he was on about.

“I keep her hair in a heart-shaped locket,” Oodie said. “I keep it here in my left side pocket.”

Oodie patted the left pocket of his black windbreaker. Calex wondered if there was actually a heart-shaped locket in there. He didn’t think so. Calex had known Oodie for most of his life, but he didn’t really know Oodie. It was hard to get to know someone who was constantly blitzed on one drug or another.

“Yeah,” Calex said, “you tell me this every time you’re deep in the morph. It’s not even a good poem.”

“I keep her hair in a heart-shaped locket,” Oodie repeated. “I keep it here in my left side pocket.”

The subway came screeching into the station. Calex waited for the people to unload. There were only about a dozen passengers, such was the case most days. Everyone worked remotely and whatever they needed from the outside world was delivered by drones. Standing, Calex took a final slug of his energy drink and tossed it in a nearby rubbish bin. He then grabbed Oodie’s arm, pulling his friend to his feet and leading him into the subway car.

After pushing Oodie into a seat, Calex flopped down next to him. The woman with the bundle sat down directly across from them, still looking down at her cargo with affection. At least Calex thought it was affection. There was no telling these days because most people were on a spectrum of medications or street narcotics. You had to be to survive in the world as it was.

The woman glanced up at Calex, studied him for a moment, then returned her attention to the bundle. She dipped her finger into an opening toward the top and then giggled. Normally, he avoided talking to anyone, but her actions were curious enough for him to neglect his avoidance rule.

“What is that?” he said.

Not realizing Calex was addressing her, she continued to smile and coo at her bundle. Oodie groaned and put his head between his knees.

“What is that?” Calex said.

He stomped his foot at her to draw her attention. After fussing over her bundle, she finally looked up at him, then glanced over at Oodie, who was rocking back and forth now, humming an uneven tune.

“Is he alright?” the woman said.

The question surprised Calex. He expected her to be blitzed, which would have made her attention to the mysterious bundle more understandable.

“Morph binge,” Calex said. “He’s about three days in.”

She nodded as if encountering someone on a painkiller binge wasn’t uncommon, because it wasn’t. Since the babies stopped coming, narcotic consumption had been an accepted and legal form of recreation.

“What is that?” Calex asked one more time. “The thing you’re holding.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“It has to be something,” Calex said. “I’ve never seen anyone pay so much attention to nothing.”

He looked at Oodie. His friend was drooling again, the saliva pooling on the floor between his feet.

“At least not anyone sober,” he said.

“You think I’m sober?” she said, a tempestuous smile spreading across her face. “That’s a far shot these days, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” Calex said.

He took a massive hit from his vapor stick as if to emphasize the point, exhaling the cloud toward the ceiling. The subway car rocked forward as it began to move. Oodie leaned so far to one side that Calex reached out to keep him from toppling over. He righted his friend, who quickly resumed his uncontrolled drooling. Maybe it was the cannabis oil in his vapor, but when Calex looked down at the pool of drool, he found it kind of beautiful. The fluorescent light was reflected in the thick liquid like the moonlight on the surface of a country pond.

“Are you night workers?” the woman asked.

“No,” Calex said. “I design games from home. Oodie doesn’t do much of anything.”

“I keep her hair in a heart-shaped locket,” Oodie said. “I keep it here in my left side pocket.”

The woman ignored the couplet and said, “So where are you going?”

“Where are you going?” Calex asked.

“I’m donating eggs,” she said without a moment of hesitation. “Doing my part.”

“Perpetuating the species,” Calex said. “So, what is it?”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

She clamped the opening in the bundle closed. There was a fierce look of protection on her face as if what she held was the most important object in the universe.

“I won’t ask again,” Calex said.

Leaning back in his seat, he pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, his face disappearing into the small shadow. They rode in silence for a few moments. Then Oodie suddenly shot to his feet.

“I keep her hair in a heart-shaped locket!” he screamed “I keep it here in my left side pocket!”

The lights of the subway car flickered. Then the whole train groaned. Calex felt his body lift from the seat, and he went flying toward the front of the car, slamming into one of the support poles in the middle of the aisle. Everything went black.

He couldn’t see himself spinning through the air, but he could certainly feel it. At one point, his legs lifted above his head and he flipped completely over. There was a stabbing pain in his leg as he slammed against the subway car floor. At least he thought it was the floor. Then the lights came on again. Calex realized that the entire subway car was now upside down. There were broken bits of metal and plastic everywhere. Some severed wires sparked with electricity.

Calex felt the stabbing pain in his leg again. He checked his legs for wounds, finding a six-inch piece of metal stuck in his right thigh. He touched it, realizing immediately what a mistake that was. Pain rocketed up the entire right side of his body. When he finally regained his senses, he got to his feet and began climbing through the wreckage to where he, Oodie, and the woman had been sitting.

He saw a hand sticking out from underneath one of the dislodged seats. Using his shoulder, he pushed it aside, another shock of pain rushing through him. He found Oodie underneath, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, blood and spittle dripping from his lips, eyes wide in a sickening death stare. Calex expected to be overwhelmed with emotion, but he felt nothing. Oodie had been his best friend in the world, so there should have at least been some tears or even terror from seeing someone mangled in such a way. Yet there was nothing. Calex was numb.

He noticed that Oodie had something silver clenched in his right hand. Before Calex could find out what it was, he registered a soft whimpering a few feet away. Moving aside more debris, he found the woman lying face down. He thought maybe she was injured, but then she moved, rolling over on her side, revealing the flattened bundle on the ceiling beneath her. He pulled back, terrified that he would find crushed remains.

“What happened?” the woman asked.

“I think there was an accident,” Calex said.

Pulling her to her feet, he checked her for injuries. She seemed a little dazed but otherwise fine. Seeing nothing immediately wrong with her, he went back to Oodie’s corpse. He was careful to avoid causing himself more pain as he bent over and removed the silver object from his friend’s dead hand. It was a heart-shaped locket, about the size of a thumb tip. As often as his friend had repeated the couplet about the heart-shaped locket, Calex had always thought it was some drug-induced fabrication or delusion. Releasing the clasp, he found a length of red hair curled inside. Then the tears came.

Calex quickly wiped the moisture from his cheeks. He shoved the locket deep inside his own pocket, then turned back to the woman. She was leaning over the bundle making a soft keening noise. Then her body shook as she released a heart-wrenching sob. Calex stood over her, watching as she unwrapped the bundle. He didn’t want to see what had happened to the contents, but he felt like he needed to.

“My baby,” the woman said.

When she finished unwrapping the bundle, what Calex saw caused another surge of pain, but not from his leg this time. Something in his mind was ready to snap. There was nothing inside. It was just a blanket. He took a step back from the woman, studying her as she emotionally deteriorated. He thought about how Oodie spent most of his life in a complete fog, and that was exactly where Calex wanted to be at that moment, at the very bottom of a drug-induced rabbit hole. Any other reality, including the twisted reality of a psychotic break, had to be better than this one.