When I needed a special service, I thought of Rick. Rick was odd: a fear addict, for want of a better term. He was notorious in the crowd he ran with for the quantities of drugs he took and the number of bad trips he could handle. His occupation was testing sleeping drugs for a pharmaceutical company, and he had scads of pills lying around his place. He was the one.
Rick’s pills were never quite ready for public consumption, or were already rejected for commercial sales due to severe side effects, or were manufactured in distant countries and known to be unsafe or even deadly. Most had been sampled by only a few unsuspecting lab animals in secluded places below the equator, and by Rick. Any normal person would have been afraid to swallow them, but fear was what Rick loved.
I first met Rick at a colloquium organized by the sales company I worked for, a few years before I retired at age 69. (I was 74 now, and at the end of my rope.) Over drinks Rick told me privately of his personal experiments. It turned out we lived not far apart, and he invited me over to try some of his pills for kicks. He said the drugs could be horrifying, but also highly rewarding for the psychological insights they provided. A number of people in his crowd, some of whom I knew, had profited from them, Rick confided to me.
I declined his invitation, but every so often we ran into each other around town. Each time he asked me to come over and indulge myself. I never went, but now I needed his help in ending my unbearable life. I could not endure one more hour of the shame it brought me, and felt sure Rick would have the chemical means for me to bring myself to a close. So one Saturday afternoon I stopped by his apartment. After I knocked on the door, I began to hum the Doors’ lyric “Break on through to the other side” as if I were really breaking through to something transcendent—in my case, death.
Rick was in, and received me with a knowing smile. He figured, I supposed, that I could no longer resist his invitation to undergo illicit terror, and that I was unable to restrain myself at the prospect of a truly hair-raising experience.
He looked the same as usual, no different from how he had looked at the sales colloquium some years ago and every time I ran into him after that: bald on top with his remaining fringes of hair styled into a sort of medieval tonsure, a purplish nose from which the bone seemed about to burst forth, crusty eyes whose whites had turned yellowish, thick dried-out lips, and teeth brilliantly white but somehow, I suspected from their black highlights, rotten beneath the sheen.
He kept himself thin, too, as seemed natural for a man who likely preferred drugs to food, and wore a skintight suit of gray sparkly material that might have befit an ensign at Starfleet Academy. This outfit also showed off his bowed legs. He looked as if he had been born to the saddle, or since that didn’t seem likely, as if his femurs were buckling due to an advanced stage of rickets.
“Rick,” I said, “you’re looking good.” Since I wanted a favor, I figured a lie was called for.
“You too,” said Rick, no doubt just as truthfully. He let me inside.
Rick put some soft psychedelic rock on his stereo—some band from the sixties I probably didn’t know, he correctly said, whose LP he may have kept on hand to entertain his older guests. Then, with the low-volume music going, he introduced me to a large green parrot. The bird supported itself on a perch in the center of Rick’s living room by one claw, and with the other claw grasped a peanut like Hamlet holding a tiny skull.
“Don’t let Kafka fool ya,” said Rick. “He imitates perfectly the sound of my landline phone ringing and the toilet flushing upstairs. But I’m not expecting any calls, and there’s no one here but us two.” With that he walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Kafka. I took a seat on the couch.
Rick hadn’t told me where he was going, but he was headed up the stairs, so I assumed he was grabbing some pills from his bedroom or bathroom. But as soon as he left my sight, the phone rang. Rick didn’t return to pick up, and I looked at Kafka. The parrot mimed an attitude of innocence, worrying his peanut. I couldn’t see where the phone was, but it sounded close by: a loud clatter unlike the melodic ring of my smartphone. It kept on ringing, too, until Rick returned. The moment he did, it stopped.
Flashing a handful of small white plastic vials with white caps, Rick took a chair facing me on the couch. As he lined up the vials on the coffee table between us, I saw there were four of them. When he had finished arranging them, a toilet flushed. The loud noise definitely came from upstairs, or so it sounded. Rick paid no attention to the ruckus.
“These are all completely unapproved and potentially harmful,” he said. He appeared to be gloating. “I have the only existing supplies. I don’t doubt that the right amount of any of them, taken at bedtime, would scare the holy crap out of you. I’ve tried them all in light to moderate doses, and they’re incredible.” He waved his hand at the vials and cleared his throat. His windpipe sounded like an old car backfiring.
In awe of all this, I sat in silence. Or it would have been silence, except for that old rock playing on the stereo. The gentle sound didn’t bother me, but maybe I looked like it did, because Rick got up and switched the music off. Then he sat in his chair again.
“Here’s what happens,” said Rick, getting back to business. “Every time I swallow a pill, day or night, from any of these vials, I fall asleep and have a bloodcurdling dream, the same dream each time depending on the pill. You’re looking for vivid, horrifying dreams, right?”
“Uh, I’m actually interested in death,” I said, clarifying. “See, I was supposed to join my wife in a suicide pact a few days ago. She had cancer and I have severe depression. But only she managed to hold up her end. It’s embarrassing. She finished herself off with all the pain meds from our last surgery, and left me with nothing. I want to catch up with her.”
“Seriously?” said Rick. “Death? You know what? I don’t ever plan to die. Death is for losers. Only saps die, and people who get mangled by machinery or asphyxiated by gas heaters or kill themselves are bigtime saps. No offense.”
“None taken,” I put in. I was in no mood to argue. “So you won’t help me?”
“Sure I’ll help you, as long as no one holds me accountable. Just understand that with any of my pills you’re going to do some significant dreaming before you croak, because they’re all terrific dream-inducers. Still, I’m sure the right dose of any of them will put you out of your misery, too.”
The phone rang once, then stopped. Rick ignored it and pointed to one of the vials.
“When I take that one,” he said, “I fall asleep and dream I’m a German foot soldier at the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II. I’m freezing to death in a shattered building and, as I look out a hole in a wall, I see a Red Army tank headed my way.” He paused. “I don’t say your dream would be the same as mine, but that’ll give you some idea.”
“I see,” I said. The upstairs toilet flushed again, and we both stirred a bit, Rick in his chair and me on the couch. Kafka didn’t budge.
“And you say you get the same dream each time you take it?” I asked as the roar of the plumbing faded…and if it wasn’t the plumbing, it was a damned good imitation.
“The same,” said Rick. “And it’s like that for the other pills too. Each kind of pill gives me its own peculiar dream that doesn’t change, so four of my dreams are represented here.”
He picked up a second vial. “Now this one,” he said, “puts me soundly to sleep, but then I dream that hairy demons are coming to snatch my penis.”
The phone rang once, then stopped.
“I don’t know,” I said after a moment. “I guess losing my penis beats Stalingrad. What else do you have? I’m actually looking for something deadly minus the terror element, you see.”
“I got you, I got you,” said Rick, putting the penis demons down and raising another vial. But the moment he opened his mouth again, it was clear that he didn’t get me at all. “Now this one knocks me out and makes me dream that I’m in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600s. I’m being tried as a witch or a wizard or whatever. I feel the weight of the two-ton judicial rock pressing down on me, and am vaguely aware of a lot of grim, dark-garbed folks watching me, to see what I’ll do. I think I know that to be found innocent I need to turn into a bird and fly off, but I can’t manage it. I don’t even sprout a feather. I wake up in about an hour completely refreshed, though.”
I was sure I looked mystified, not only because of Rick’s description of the pill’s odd effects on him, but because I couldn’t get him to see that I didn’t want to be terrified, but only to die. Oblivious to my needs, Rick put down the witch vial and held up the fourth.
“These babies I call the Doomsday Bombs. They bring on a good nap, but the dream I have is so awful I hardly ever take one. Imagine drowning in glowing nuclear waste for thirty minutes. It’s too much even for me, and I’m usually cool with that kind of scene.”
It struck me, out of the blue, how much Rick sounded like an old hippie with this “cool scene” talk, though I had always taken him to be years younger than the aging love child I was. Probably he belonged to a later generation than mine altogether, I had decided, though I wasn’t sure why I ever believed that. Maybe it was the younger crowd he hung with, or the fact that he was still employed at his pharmaceutical company long after I retired. Even his wasted looks gave him a youthful aura somehow, and he was probably always the handsomer of us two, especially now. At 74, I was more decrepit than he was, I knew without anyone telling me. But his choice of words made me wonder if he wasn’t a baby boomer like myself, still coming on groovy out of habit. In short, I had no idea how old Rick really was.
More importantly, I realized I had never asked Rick why he got a kick out of fear and terror, but since he admitted those feelings made for a cool scene, I had to say something. “That’s a weird vibe you have,” I said, and left it at that.
“What can I say?” said Rick, leaning back in his chair. “It’s my job, and I love my job.” He smiled broadly, and his parted liverish lips beneath his purplish nose looked unattractive to say the least. I hated to think what I looked like to him.
“You know,” I said, giving it one more shot. “Maybe I’ll go with the penis one after all. It doesn’t sound too bad to lose my penis at my age, as long as the pill puts me to sleep and kills me soon after. How many do you think would be a lethal dose, in my case?”
“For a man in your shape,” said Rick, shaking the penis pills, “I’d say one pill, or maybe half of one. Still, if you want the full radiance of the dream, I’d pop at least one. It’s strange, but aside from the terror, any of these pills is fully relaxing. I do one, get drowsy, fall asleep and experience gut-wrenching horror, and wake up shaking and drenched in sweat. But I go right back to sleep again and wake up feeling crisp as the president.”
“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “But I’m definitely looking for the exit, don’t forget.”
“One thing you might try,” said Rick, “is mixing the pills. I haven’t, but it might be a killer idea. You’ll be surer to die that way, since the terrors could combine and give you a heart attack. Imagine you’re a German soldier freezing at Stalingrad, and you see a Red Army tank rolling your way with a platoon of hairy penis-snatching demons marching behind it. Or you’re a warlock at Salem feeling the rock squeezing the breath out of you, and suddenly a Russian tank turns its cannon in your direction.”
“That would be amazing,” I said. “But what I’d really like”—by now his lack of comprehension was starting to make me angry—“is something that would kill me without the terror, if you have anything like that.” I was trying hard not to raise my voice.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “Maybe I could look around at work. Terror’s what I bring home.”
There was an abrupt knock at the door—more of a pounding, it was so loud.
“Hey, that’s odd,” said Rick. “I’m not expecting anyone.”
The pounding came again, and Rick and I both looked at Kafka. The large green bird, with both claws on his perch, looked around the room, slowly turning its head, unaffected by anything.
“Did you teach him that?” asked Rick.
“No,” I said, “of course not. Maybe somebody really is there.”
“I’m going to hide these, just in case,” said Rick, and snatched up the vials of pills. Heading upstairs, he called down, “See who that is, will you?”
I got up from the couch after he left, but I didn’t go to the door. Anyway, the pounding had stopped. “Learn a new trick, Kafka?” I asked the bird.
In answer, it held out a claw. A pill vial was in its grasp, the penis demons, perhaps, though it could have been another. To me the white vials had all looked alike. As far as I was concerned, the pills inside them were all about the same, too.
“Ah, so you think I should do some pills, bird?” I said then. In response came the flushing sound I was used to by now. There seemed to be no reason for Rick to dump the pills down the toilet upstairs, so it had to be Kafka. But did Kafka mean I should flush away the pills—all of them, including the ones he held in his claw? Or did he mean I should ingest enough of them to flush away my life? Most likely, of course, the parrot meant nothing at all. It was only a parrot.
Kafka swiveled gracefully and held himself upside down on his perch by one claw, the vial still in the other. I went out the front door without any pills. It seemed I had more living to do, at least a little more, curse my luck.
Oh, and no one was out there.