Disconnect (Work In Progress)

This is the first chapter of a novel I recently started. I thought I'd share it with you and see what you think.

Yesterday, you worked for your family. The money you won through years of blood, sweat, and tears, you spent it feeding yourself, your wife, and your children. You didn’t worry yourself with world affairs, as long as the people around you were taken care of. Then, after a lifetime of service, someone told you to stop working. You were a teenager again, living on an allowance, doing whatever made you happy. After you’ve traveled the world, sampled every delight you could afford (and a few you couldn’t), you realize how old you are. The golden years you dreamed about fall apart, and you’re left with the dim reality of things.
Just getting out of bed in the morning is so painful, some days you just lie there. Those days, you notice how hard it is to breathe. How your head hurts when your eyes strain to focus on the television you’ve had for 20 years. Waiting to die, you start wondering why you didn’t concern yourself with anything but work. On your way out, all you can think about is how all those years of work are now a few dusty trophies, children and grandchildren to keep your genes alive, and just enough money to pay off the debts you racked up over the years. You beg for a second chance, but you know you’re just talking to the ceiling above your hospital bed. With your last breath, that empty ceiling hears you whisper “Why?”
         Today, you’re some old man’s second chance. You don’t know it, but you’re supposed to know the meaning of life. You’re supposed to be making something of yourself. But you don’t know that. You’re just another fucked up teenager, shuffling between home, school, work, and the girl you think you love until you find out she’s slept with half the people you know.
One day, you convince yourself to do something with your life. To go to school, to make a difference. Some part of you knows that you don’t know what the hell that means, but those motivational slogans have been rammed down your throat since you were making paper hats in kindergarten. Somewhere between the Third Reich and the CIA, someone figured out how to brainwash the public. Start ‘em young, that someone told his boss. It might not make a Manchurian Candidate, but we can raise kids to think the way we want them to. “Be yourself.” What a joke.
         I’m thinking this while I’m standing in line. 2400 kids, still growing and riddled with hormones, jammed in to a space designed to hold 1200. Shuffling my feet a couple of steps, one space closer to my government-approved, well-rounded lunch, I think about cows lined up around the back of every slaughterhouse across America. Dull expressions, a little interaction, but none of them even think to leave the line. They keep going, space by space, until their time comes. Is this the master plan of the powers that be? Turning us slowly in to cattle, marching slowly toward some horrible fate?
         I shake my head to get these thoughts out of my head. My therapist, she told me to try as hard as I can not to think about these things. I’m just paranoid. Keep taking your medicine, she says with a soft smile, and you’ll start to feel normal.
         Massive lunch tray in hand, loaded with just enough food to keep my body working, but nowhere near enough to satisfy my hunger, I survey the lunchroom for familiar faces. I could go sit with my ex, but I hear she’s been obsessing over me. That’s just a little too much trouble to go through to have some company while I eat.
         Not recognizing anyone, I sit alone in the corner. Choking down the tasteless food, I look out at the hundreds of kids exactly like me. They’re talking to each other between bites, pupils dilated with interest. Some of them forget about their food and make out in the dark corners, the school officials too embarrassed to pull them apart. All of us, pumped full of hormones from our body and drugs from our doctors, are chemical reactions waiting to happen. Sometimes, they happen slowly. You notice some girl crying while her friends hold her hand and pat her head. Sometimes, they happen quickly. You wonder which one of the kids dressed up for Halloween in January is one step away from playing himself in our own school production of Columbine. Maybe he already has all the guns and ammo, maybe he’s just waiting for an excuse.
         “John? John!” I turn to look who’s trying to get my attention. “I swear, sometimes you look like you’re dead on your feet.” It’s my latest love interest, Alex. We haven’t been together long, in the grand scheme of things, but long enough for her to know when I’ve checked out.
         “Oh, hi,” I look up at her, faking a smile. “I tried looking for you before I sat down. Where were you?”
         “Mr. Smith kept me after class to talk to me about my research project. By the way, you know you don’t have to put on a smile for me,” she says, opening her pre-packaged grill sandwich, “I know you’re almost never happy, but I’m okay with that.”
         “Oh,” I say, poking at my entrée with a fork, “What did he want?”
         “I don’t know, maybe he wanted to use our class projects as an excuse to stare at my tits for a few minutes.” Alex is a painfully honest person sometimes. She’s the kind of girl who’d tell you how horny she is before you knew how to tell. She scares most guys off that way, she tells me, but I don’t care. Who has time to play cat-and-mouse nowadays?
         Alex tells me to hold on a minute with her hands while she’s chewing her food, and starts digging in her purse. I roll my eyes when she pulls out an orange pill bottle, and dumps two of the candy-colored capsules on to my plate. “What, did you think you’d get out of taking your meds?” I sighed heavily before I took them. Maybe if I wasn’t already high, I’d argue with her.
         “So, what are we doing tonight? You know, there’s that new movie with Brad Pitt opening tonight.” She drinks some of the milk, standard with any school lunch, through a straw, looking up at me with those big, blue eyes that could make God give her what she wants.
         “Well, okay. I’m a bit short on cash, though.”
         “Don’t worry about it, I’ve got you covered,” she says this as she pulls a stack of fives out of her purse. One day, I made the mistake of showing her my collection of drugs I refused to take over the years, before I gave in to those eyes. She found a website to identify each one, and sold the ones that people without any problems liked taking. Ritalin was a big hit, especially to the meth users who couldn’t find or couldn’t afford another bag. Tranquilizers, opiates, anti-psychotics, hypnotics…I’d been on them all at one time or another.
         When my stash started running dry, she convinced her older brother, a pharmacist, to start forging prescriptions and doubling his orders. She made more money than you’d think, even having to pay her brother for the pills he ordered with a slight mark-up.
         “Sounds great, then. What time?” I’m getting up to dump my tray in the garbage can just a few feet away.
         “I was thinking midnight, so my parents will be asleep when we get home.” She’s twirling her hair. I don’t need any more details. I know what she’s up to.
         Even though it was opening night, the movie theater was deserted for the midnight showing. Alex knew what she was doing. By the time the lights came up again, neither of us had any idea what we’d just watched. We spent the whole time kissing and touching each other. It’s strange, how the drugs robbed us of every emotion, but left our sex drives intact. We left the theater quietly, not the giggling couple you see on TV every day.
         After we got to her house, she made good on her promise. Her bedroom was in the basement, and her parents’ was on the second floor. We quietly made our way down. By the time I shut her door behind me, she couldn’t contain herself anymore. She pushed me up against the wall, playfully biting my neck, while I pulled her closer to me so I could feel her through our clothes. I glanced over at her clock, the only source of light in the room, and wondered if I should have taken my pills before we went to the movies. She’s biting at my chest now, working her way down. You could say I had something more important to think about now.
         An hour or two later, I’m asleep on Alex’s chest. She’s running her fingers through my hair, long and straight, and staring up at the ceiling. She takes a long drag off of her cigarette, and blows the smoke straight up in to the room. She flicks the already spent ash off her smoke, when she notices that I’m twitching. She takes another drag and puts out her cigarette, moving the ashtray on to her night stand, and pulls me close to her. I don’t ever remember my dreams, so I don’t know why, but I start crying in my sleep. I’m completely unaware of what’s going on, but I’m sobbing like someone who just watched their child die. Alex is used to this by now, so she isn’t bothered. In fact, she liked it in a sick way.