The Trial, by Thora Dahlke
I signed up for the trial because it paid well. I saw it online, the ad. Participants needed for a biomedical research study. Details were sparse, even after my phone call with them. Even after my initial interview, where I kept my expression obediently neutral as they had me take off my shoes and itchy jumper so they could weigh me, and I lied about my smoking habits. They wanted healthy adults up to 35 years of age, high school graduates, non-smokers. The remuneration was 3,000 American dollars, which was simply too good to let go, so I didn’t mention my occasional slip-ups. Figured they didn’t count. I’d been picking up extra shifts at the corner shop where I worked. The job itself, I was mostly indifferent about. It was not what you’d call mentally stimulating. Intellectually enriching. It was, for the most part, boring. Tedious. Some hours would dawdle by without the bell above the door jingling even once. I’d reorganise shelves, unpack big boxes of ramen and potato chips. Restock the liquor down in the back. This would tempt me, occasionally, to steal a bottle with me behind the counter, sneak a sip now and then. I knew where all the CCTV cameras were placed. In a pinch, I could work the angles.
Our busiest time was that lull between night and morning. People on the way home from a bar would drop in and pick up Twizzlers, cigarettes, energy drinks. Condoms, often, gummy bears. They were tipsy, chatty. A man once reached across the counter and pressed his thick thumb to my forehead and recited a chant in a language I didn’t understand. His smile, afterwards, was so big it showed all his teeth. They were as big and square as the rest of him. Drunk college girls would giggle, inspect the chocolate bars, touch each other’s wrists and shoulders. Like strips of wax, they adhered to each other.
The job had completely upset my circadian rhythm. I’d come home in the morning, take a shower, crawl into bed. From outside, the sounds of construction work and frequent sirens would make it difficult to sleep. I used earplugs. I put on white noise, whale sounds, YouTube videos of pretty women whispering and tapping their manicured fingernails against eyeshadow palettes. I’d pass in and out of consciousness. In the afternoon, I’d drink black coffee and eat big handfuls of cocoa puffs before going back to the shop.
For the clinical trial, I had to take one pill every day. The pills were oval, mint-coloured, and had a faint taste of sidewalk chalk. They were to be taken at the same time every day, and I followed this rule like a saint. I was good at rules, the act of obeying them. Every day, at nine in the morning, which, sometimes, was right before crawling into bed, and other times right before vamoosing, I’d pee and then put the pill on my tongue, let it dissolve disgustingly for a little bit before washing it down with tap water.
I wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do. I didn’t really know what they were researching. This was a red flag that I ignored. I could be good at that, too. And, truthfully, I didn’t really care. It could be that they were looking for a cancer treatment or, perhaps, something against Alzheimer’s. Or the entire thing could’ve been a scam. But the payment trickled into my bank account, 500 dollars for each month I completed. I didn’t spend the money on anything. I just liked looking at it, seeing it there. I didn’t need a new handbag, but it was nice knowing that, if I wanted to, I could buy one.
I told nobody about what I was partaking in. One time, when a man stacked four Red Bulls on the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboros and my phone number, I thought of telling him sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you that, I’m part of this clinical trial, they’re looking for the cure for lymphoma, they’re really close to a breakthrough, and we—us, the participants—aren’t allowed to have sex or it could throw off the results. Do you want that? Do you want to be the guy that kept cancer alive?
I didn’t even tell Frances. She would, I know, be unsettled by the lack of information. She would suggest that I was prostituting myself. Then her eyebrows would narrow and her mouth would purse with concern, and she’d remind me that she could take care of me, if there was anything I needed, she’d get it for me. She wouldn’t see the irony. I liked Frances, I really did. I probably borderline loved her, too. We’d been having sex for almost a year. I didn’t call her my girlfriend. I didn’t even think of her like that. I just thought of her as Frances.
We’d met outside the corner shop. I was leaving after a ten-hour shift, and I must’ve looked like utter shit, but she introduced herself to me. She asked for my name. She couldn’t help but notice me, she said, she’d love to see me again, somewhere else, somewhere nicer.
This was, of course, very flattering. With someone else it might not have been, but Frances was, is, shockingly beautiful. Her hair is blacker than a raven’s beak. Her eyebrows are straight, her lips full and almost always painted red, her teeth look like little pearls. There was no special reason I didn’t tell her about the trial and the pills I now took. Even if I knew she would’ve worried, fretted, judged, not understood, I still could’ve told her. She wouldn’t have dropped me, I don’t think. But it was nice to have a secret. Not just from her, but from everyone. It made the days pass easier, to nurse the clandestine fact. In a way, because I didn’t know what the pills did, the secret was also kept from myself.
Around this time is when I first woke up on my kitchen floor. I was holding a butter knife. There was parsley scattered over the counter, parsley and salt and crumbs of dark bread. For a while, coming back to consciousness, I stared dumbly at the mess and the knife in my hand. I touched the blunt edge with my thumb. Had I been preparing a snack? Had hunger zapped through me like lightning, undefeatable? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t reach the truth. It was odd, this scene. I’d never sleepwalked before. My mum would’ve mentioned it, might’ve made it a running joke, said something about tying my ankles down to the bedposts, keep me tethered. Stunned, smiling, I ate flecks of parsley and cut a fresh slice of bread, smeared it with butter, sprinkled salt on top.
It was almost time for another pill.
At work, I restocked a shelf with orange sodas. I rang up three Mars bars and a bottled iced coffee for a young woman with facial tattoos. She smiled, blindingly, and I smiled back at her. I didn’t think much more about the parsley scene until two days later when something similar happened.
This time, I came to in my bed, but I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Normally, I’d sleep in an oversized t-shirt, stolen from Frances, and cotton shorts. When I looked around my room, I saw the t-shirt flung over my computer, hiding the screen. My shorts were nowhere in plain sight; later, peeing, I found them in the shower stall. The tiles were wet. Had I showered in my sleep? My hair was completely dry, and still greasy at the roots. My skin felt like sandpaper.
I showered. I ate cocoa puffs. I talked with Frances on the phone while breezing to work where I scanned candy hearts, sugar-free gum, a sixpack of cheap beer before noon.
These things kept happening. I would wake up, bleary-eyed, wearing a black dress from the back of my wardrobe. There’d be wads of cotton, drenched in acetone, in my sink, my fingernails freshly gold. I wondered if I could hurt myself in these moments. Then I wondered if someone else could hurt me.
It had to be connected to the clinical trial, I contended, it was the only new thing in my life. But I wondered, while scanning muesli bars and menthol cigarettes, if this was a side effect, an unforeseen and unfortunate symptom, or rather the purpose of the trial? Were the pills meant to incite this behaviour?
During my next check-up, when, after they weighed me and checked my blood pressure, they asked how I was doing, I said I was doing fine. I worried they’d drop me if I were honest. If the pills were not supposed to make me do these things, the researchers would surely cut off my supply, and stop transferring me money.
I went back home with a new pack of pills tucked into my inside coat pocket.
One morning, Frances told me I’d been talking in my sleep. Oh, I said in return, thinking again of the strewn parsley, the blunt knife, my discarded shirt, What’d I say?
She couldn’t tell me, exactly. It was mumbled, incoherent. It didn’t make any sense.
Ah, okay. Did I do anything weird?
Like what? She was drinking her coffee. She had a bite mark on her left breast, it had darkened overnight; when I blinked, my teeth could still remember her skin.
I don’t know, I said. I could’ve tried to jump out a window.
Her smile stretched with ease, and she told me she wouldn’t have let me get away with that. She put down her coffee cup and came back into bed—her bed, not mine, of course, we only spent time together at her place, with its large windows and lush towels and blown-glass chandeliers, and in restaurants where she ordered, and paid, for us both. Deftly, she pressed me against the mattress and kissed my mouth, flicked her tongue against mine. My thighs pressed together, then spread, and I rocked up against her, slung my arms around her neck, kissed the taste of coffee off her tongue.
I don’t think I would’ve jumped out a window. But there were other things I might’ve done. I could imagine, in glossy detail, slinging my leg over Frances’ legs, curling as close as possible. Rutting against her, frenzied, unaware. It was a good thing that my job was so boring and uneventful; all day, I could think about the things done in my sleep that I couldn’t remember. I would wake up somewhere and not know how I’d got there. What else could I not remember?
Frances could touch me and I would have no idea. The pills, I imagined, made sure of that. I remembered nothing, and it was strange and scary, but, I realised, potentially also erotic. I thought of her hands parting my thighs, her fingers inside me as I slept through it. Waking up in my kitchen with sea salt stuck to my fingertips and a mark on my hip I couldn’t trace towards any origin. From a knife, or her mouth. From the corner of the dining table.
I thought of asking her, giving her permission. Fuck me when I’m blacked out, I imagined saying, but it sounded so crude. Not that we were ever wholesome, or even that sweet. Probably, she wouldn’t even have been opposed to it, would’ve done it, would’ve told me nothing about it afterwards, just flicked on the fancy espresso machine and made herself a morning coffee, looked at me sideways with a secret smile that would’ve made me gasp.
Which, it turned out, was enough. My grip on memory had turned so slick. My sleep, which had always been fitful, interrupted by the city’s noises, had darkened. I thought of my mother, the joke she never had to make when I was a kid, but which could rightfully be made now. I thought of rope tightened around my ankles, my wrists, my mouth letting out incoherent noises. I wondered what I was trying to say that night at Frances’ place, and whether I had said anything when I dirtied the kitchen counter, when I tugged off my sleep shirt, when I crawled across the bathroom rug.
This uncertainty was so thrilling. I sneaked glances at Frances and imagined that she had touched my body in its sleep. I pressed the showerhead against my vulva and trembled for long, wet minutes. The idea that I might really hurt myself, that I could grab a blade sharper than a butter knife next time, didn’t faze me enough to flag the instances to the researchers. The idea that Frances might hurt me tangled my prefrontal cortex like a cat with a skein of yarn.
I never fell asleep at work. The pills didn’t make me drowsy, didn’t knock me out; I was just suddenly, jarringly, active in my sleep in a way I had never been before. I had drifted through my life like a shadow, done, for the most part, what was expected of me. The trial had stolen control from me—now I did things, things I couldn’t remember, but I was still the subject, the one doing them, and realised I wanted, rather, to be the object.
I kept my secret and tended to it like a knife cut. No matter how hard I tried, I could never remember what happened during the blackouts. When Frances took me out to eat, I looked at her fingers curled around her steak knife, her mouth as she chewed, her throat as she swallowed. Soon, the trial would be done. I would have 3,000 dollars in my bank account for my trouble, and I’d never taste one of the chalky pills again. When it was all over, I wondered, would I still want this new, dark thing? Would it cling to me, insistently, like algae tangled around my shins, like a tapeworm you can’t expel? Frances’ mouth curved and a faint blush crept up her cheekbones. What’re you thinking about, she asked. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
Thora Dahlke is a fiction writer living in Berlin. Their work appears in Hobart, Talk Vomit, Nat. Brut, & Wigleaf.