Read Indecision for Free Online Page B

myself.” He just looked at me with zero expressiveness from those lacquered brown eyes.
    “There must be risks. With abulia. I mean Abulinix. Side effects maybe? Or dangers?”
    He shrugged. “Minimal so far. Some stomach upset. Some satyriasis.”
    “Meaning—?”
    “Meaning excessive desire for fucking in the adult human male. Also it’s a potentiator with regard to alcohol. One drink will equal two. Two plus two will equal five.”
    “I’ll save lots of money at bars.”
    “Ignorance will be strength.”
    “Except I don’t like bars—I don’t like standing up. It’s the same with rock shows and museums. Don’t you feel like that? I feel like we’d all be much more receptive to things if we had more contact with the ground.” Or maybe this was the Knittel talking.
    Dan lit up another Marlboro Light, as I note because without smoking myself I know that smokers can perform characterological analyses of each other by means of brands, and frankly Dan sometimes mystified me. Ignorance will be strength? “I must warn you,” he was saying. “I do have one concern. So far no one has gone nuts—or more nuts than already. But I think the possibility must exist. What if the id—to use outmoded terminology—but what if the stalemate between id and superego in the medial forebrain is what’s preserving civilization. Decency. Homeland security.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Right . . .” I suffered a vision of myself charging up Madison Avenue in a rented gorilla suit, grabbing at the asses of wealthy female shoppers and looking for flower planters to overturn. “I would hate to run amok.” I saw myself driving through Nevada in a stolen red convertible with a rocket launcher in the trunk, occasionally stopping to take out a billboard. “I wouldn’t like to go berserk.”
    “But I’ve thought about this. You’re a highly socialized person, Dwight, you’re very polite—”
    “Thank you Dan.”
    “Nice. Kind. Whatever. Even Mr. R thinks so.” Mr. Rorschach, or Dan’s dad, had on several occasions shaken his big gleaming head at me and pronounced me the genuine article. Somehow my not knowing what he meant seemed particularly to confirm him in this impression. “So I would hazard that you pose less of a risk than another more or less ‘normal’ person. At the same time Abulinix may affect you more powerfully than people whose abulia is more truly pathological. I’ve given you the lowest dose. Twenty migs. Should be interesting. You understand”—he stubbed out his second cigarette—“I’m committing a serious breach of medical ethics.”
    “Thanks, man. It’s good of you.”
    I borrowed Dan’s bathrobe and we crept out of the apartment, going down to the street to buy at the corner deli another pack of Combos and some Jiggy Juice (I refer to the popular if controversial caffeinated malt-liquor beverage) so as the better to solemnize my first swallowing of an Abulinix. “Someday are they really going to have a drug for everything?” I asked.
    “For everything, yes. For everyone, no.”
    He always was a riddler. Possibly he should have been called that: the Riddler. And then wistfully I thought of the Joker, as I did every so often in those days and late nights before I received Natasha’s email from Quito and then became far too excited to think of her at all.
    “I’ll regret my intervention,” Dan was saying, “if you end up in Vermont.”
    “That’s like the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. You’re not on Ecstasy now are you?” Dan had remained a big proponent of Ecstasy and a downplayer of its neurotoxicity even after we’d all taken it about nine months previous on the night of Ford’s birthday and the eve of a pretty seriously bad day.
    “If I were on E my pupils would be dilated.”
    “Are you depressed Dan? Because sometimes I’ve wondered.”
    He was spared from answering by the appearance right in front of us of a jostling cohort of drunken prosperous young men