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Cooking drugs is a little more complicated than I anticipated. Especially since this isn’t a simple compound. It’s a mix of MDMA, LSD, THC, and a dash of amphetamines. The MDMA is the base, providing the euphoria and the stamina to stay awake all night long. The amphetamines provide a tiny jolt on the front end, so the energy hits right away. The LSD makes music sound heavenly, so our partygoers will want to dance. And the THC acts like nitrous oxide in an engine, juicing the other drugs while mellowing out the jitters from the ex and the speed.
There’s only so much information we can look up online. These are scheduled substances, and they haven’t been studied in systemized trials, not to the degree they should have been. In the ’60s MDMA was used in marital therapy, but the hysteria of the anti-drug crackdown in the Reagan era put paid to all that. Only just now is the medical community finally acknowledging the benefits of psychedelics in treating depression and PTSD.
Hakim and I read everything we can, but at the end of the day we’re just a couple of mad scientists using our own bodies as guinea pigs. Or, more often, my body—Hakim is paranoid that we’re gonna fry our brains, and in any case, he’s no use evaluating certain “side effects” I want to examine, as he has no girlfriend at the moment.
Still, he’s just as brilliant as Adrik promised. He’s the one who figures out the time-delay capsules so everything will hit at the right time. He’s also got way more experience with lab equipment, so he finds us just the right painted lightbulbs to make sure our lysergic acid doesn’t degrade under UV light, and constructs our respirators and ventilation hoods so we don’t asphyxiate.
I’m the one who designs the pill itself: a lemon-yellow lightning bolt, the size of your pinky nail.
“Can’t we just stamp the pills?” Hakim complains, when the custom casing proves devilishly tricky.
“No,” I insist. “This will be easier to recognize, harder to counterfeit.”
“You’re stamping your logo all over a brand that doesn’t exist yet.”
“It will soon enough.”
Hakim and I spend all day in the lab together, sometimes twelve or fourteen hours in a row, both of us sweating heavily inside our protective gear. The lab fills with a witch’s brew of steam and smoke, shimmering and toxic. It’s a relief when the temperature drops at the end of October, even though it makes the ride to and from the brewery much chillier. Adrik buys me a new set of leathers, thick and warm, with a black mink trim around the hood.
“A helmet would keep you warmer,” he urges.
“It’s the only fresh air I get,” I say. “I spend my whole day inside goggles and a respirator.”
As we near a finished product, Hakim and I work late into the night. The textile plants and purse factories run twenty-four seven. We often leave as the haggard workers change shifts, their conversation a babble of languages, their shoulders stooped from long hours hunched over machinery, attaching buttons and stitching straps.
Hakim and I don’t eat while we’re working—there’s too much danger of cross-contamination. Instead, we take breaks at the American diner on the other side of the purse factory.
The diner is located inside a chrome trailer shaped like a bullet. The neon sign with its retro script reads Shake Burgersin good old English, the spelling accurate even if the syntax is a little jumbled.
I made Hakim come here the first dozen times because I missed American food more than I expected. The thick-cut fries and sizzling burgers with lacy, browned edges are a taste of home, even if they’re cooked by a scowling Russian girl who seems to loathe everything about her own establishment.
Lately, however, Hakim has been suggestingShake Burgersof his own volition, an alteration I credit to the miserable cook, who will only answer Hakim’s questions in single-syllable grunts. On the other hand, she’s got facial piercings and no eyebrows, sharpie on her fingernails, and hair cut and dyed at home, possibly using the same Kool-Aid packets provided with the kid’s meal. In short, she’s just Hakim’s type.
The cook’s name is Alla, her little sister is Misha.
Misha perches on a stool at the long Formica countertop, poring over her homework. She has a lot of homework for a twelve-year-old. I can’t read the covers on her textbooks, but from the thickness of the spines and the complexity of the diagrams inside, I suspect she’s in some kind of gifted program. And she’s real uppity about it. She likes to fire questions at me, like, “What was the most expensive war ever fought?” and, “Why do you think Venus and Earth developed so differently?”
“I’m not doing your homework for you,” I tell her.
“You just don’t know the answers.”
“Your questions are subjective. Or unknowable.”
“Everything is knowable.”
“Maybe in the future—not today.”
“Not for you, you mean.”
I tap the cover of her astronomy textbook.
“If I read that thing, I’d remember everything in it. But guess what? I don’t want to fill my head with a bunch of shit about exoplanets. I’m more interested in what I’m doing right here on earth.”
Misha narrows her eyes behind the thick lenses of her granny glasses. Because these glasses magnify her eyes to double their actual size, the effect is something like an adorable little tree frog squinting at me from its perch on a branch.
“Which is … working at the purse factory,” she says.
She knows damn well that’s not what Hakim and I are doing.
