While Elijah leaned against the counter for strength, praying that his medicine would miraculously appear, a large brown bear shuffled in. He was from the Animal Instincts sexy acrobatics show, Stage 3. Elijah had fixed their trampoline last week. The bear went to a second cash register. Elijah was too far away to hear the bear’s conversation with another clerk, but in his mind he heard perfectly that the bear was picking up his blood pressure medicine. Elijah hoped this bear appreciated the ease with which he refilled his prescription. Having MAD was a bummer, but Mentafixol at least allowed Elijah to function. He swore that when he finally got his hands on this drug, he would never, ever take modern medicine for granted again.
Two Mile High Candy Co.
Icarus, CO
With a start, Elijah blinked the words away and looked around. Visions like this, voices in his head—these were exactly the symptoms MAD had served him seven years ago. But this time they came with a side order of panic, because he recognized them for what they were: a dinner reservation in the loony bin. Sure enough, even before the clerk reappeared around the shelf, Elijah knew she was coming, with bad news.
She held an empty box. “Sorry! That shipment still hasn’t come in. Have you tried other pharmacies around town?”
“I have,” Elijah said. That morning he’d called half the pharmacies in Las Vegas. Shane had called the other half while eyeing Elijah and telling him he didn’t look so hot. “They’ve never heard of Mentafixol.”
“I hadn’t either, until now. I wonder if we get it on special order just for you.”
Elijah knew they didn’t get it just for him. For him and Holly, maybe, but not just for him. “Is there a generic?”
“Your doctor would have to prescribe the generic.” The clerk examined the empty box curiously.
Two Mile High Candy Co.
Icarus, CO
Elijah blinked and leaned weakly against the counter. It was unnerving to have something pop into his head like that. This was not how normal brains worked, and it was not how his own brain worked—not in the last seven years, anyway.
The clerk continued to stare at the box, unaware that she was giving Elijah a conniption. Edging closer, Elijah glimpsed the address label that held her attention. Surely it didn’t say “Two Mile High Candy Co., Icarus, CO.” If it did, he was going to freak out, because that would certify he could see in his head what someone else was reading. He nodded to the box. “Can I look at that?”
The clerk made a motion to hand it over, then froze. Elijah heard what she was thinking: Oh no, this is the guy they were talking about on dinner break, the one who’s been in here five times in the past forty-eight hours and has some kind of mental illness. Should I call the police?
He had to know whether he’d really predicted what the box said. But he couldn’t risk snatching it from her and landing himself in jail, then the loony bin. “Never mind. Thanks.” He backed out of the room.
He pushed open the door and hurried toward the elevators, trying not to look like he was hurrying, because the casino had surveillance cameras everywhere. The underground corridors recently had been repainted from dull white to gloss white to fool employees into thinking they weren’t underneath megatons of concrete and steel that could collapse on them at any second. Don’t panic.
The elevator ride was torture. The imagined problems of strangers assaulted him from all sides. Finally he escaped onto the casino floor, which was crowded at 9 p.m., the busiest time of night. Carefully he wound his way through the gaming tables and the islands of beeping, blinking slot machines, staying as far away from people as possible so their thoughts couldn’t stomp into his consciousness. Veering toward the far wall, he swung open a door and ducked inside.
After the hyperactive lights of the casino floor, the Peacock Room was so dark that he could hardly see at first. He waited until his eyes adjusted and the giant peacock feathers appeared, the design starting in the center of the room and extending through the carpet and up the walls to touch the ceiling. Elijah had always thought the room looked as if a giant bird were sitting on him until he cried uncle, but he’d never felt the pressure of the peacock’s gargantuan ass until his MAD started acting up.
He slid into a chair at the nearest empty table and braced himself against the bar waitress’s X-rated thoughts about him. She slid a nonalcoholic beer in front of him and kissed him on the cheek, leaving oily lipstick that he rubbed off his skin when she wasn’t looking. He couldn’t mix alcohol with Mentafixol, so when he’d started coming in to see Shane’s band and she’d offered to bring him anything he wanted, he’d given her a line about not wanting to drink because his dad had been an alcoholic—which could have been true, for all he knew. Of course, now that he was off Mentafixol, he supposed he could drink real beer. It might do him good. He watched the drops of perspiration on the bottle loosen with the vibration of the music and scoot down the brown glass, onto his shaking hand.
Onstage, Shane’s dad, looking every inch Frank Sinatra in the early 1960s, ended “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” with a flourish of his guitar. He took a bow along with the other members of the band: Shane in the shadows, Shane’s uncle on drums, and Shane’s brother playing bass. Over the smattering of applause, Shane’s dad turned around and said something to Shane.
Shane stepped forward to the edge of the stage and squinted at Elijah. He held up one finger: one more song until the end of that set. He spoke in his dad’s ear before melting into the background.
“This next one goes out to our friend Elijah,” Frank Sinatra announced into the microphone. “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Come.’ One, two . . .” Either Shane was optimistic about Elijah’s prognosis and wanted to cheer him up, or he knew Elijah was doomed and had a sick sense of humor.
After the song, the rest of the band cleared the stage to take ten. Shane motioned Elijah into the wings, where he sat in a chair with his guitar in his lap and twisted one of the tuning pegs, unwinding a string.
“I need you to go with me to Glitterati,” Elijah said.
“Glitterati!” Shane exclaimed without looking up. He pulled the slack string out the back of the guitar and bent down to fish in his case for a replacement. “That’s a dance club for girls and transvestites. We won’t fit in.”
He had a point. Perhaps fifty percent of Glitterati’s patrons would be wearing feather boas. Elijah might not fit in, but he was used to that. MAD was never far from his mind. He didn’t fit in anywhere. And he could have said something droll in response to Shane’s claim that Shane himself didn’t fit in with weirdos, what with the tux and the slick 1960s hairdo. But Elijah wasn’t in the mood to laugh right now. He was in some serious shit.