The Pill

The case came to trial early in the spring when everything was cold but hopeful. He sat in the living room alone in his suit, crowded by furniture and the rush of the clock. He was waiting for his lift to the court room. He stood up and looked, out the window there was no one and so he ambled into the kitchen. Tenderly placing a dripping mug in the dishwasher he heard the beep of her horn, wiped his clammy hands and set himself. They had agreed to go together thinking the impression made would be greater, he hadn’t actually felt like agreeing but he wanted to see her before the coldness of the courtroom. She was here now sitting expectantly in the car with a small smile, he shut the house and locked it, climbed into the car and kissed her politely. It was a brisk conversation, what have you been up to and all that, it was only a short drive. There was a huddle of journalists out of the wind in the lobby and when they saw the ex couple arrive they held the door open for them before breaking into questions. Mr X and the former Mrs X, Mrs Y, answered very little as they had been separately instructed and kept milling through to the clerk’s office. They would wait there for the trial to commence. It was the first of its kind in the country and it didn’t go unnoticed in the national press. The wider world was keeping a slanting eye open to it as well as there was a trace of hope to this one from the outset. There had been precursors in other countries in Europe, two in Sweden and one in France, but all had been found against the ex couples, but they had been slightly different cases. The red top rags were their usual witty selves, the high court injunction barring mention of actual names didn’t stop them publishing a lewd tell all from “Mr X’s Exes”, two shy country girls that had their eyes blacked out in photo’s from their mother’s nightmares. It was big news when it was revealed in shouting headlines that the ex couple had the intention of suing, the media fanfared it for a good two weeks. Seeing evidence of their past everywhere made it real for them, their hopes at the start with all this wonderful scientific advancement and their dead love at the end, corridors at night and draining tears.
The two had only met briefly in the reception by chance before they entered into the clinical trial, two fresh students without jobs. He was too shy to stare but he noticed her. She was pretty and he was handsome, in another life they could have been a normal couple with kids on the side and a house they would have to wallpaper every second year but with the recent breakthroughs in neurological research the whole game was changed. The most influential paper on the matter was published by two scientists from Thailand and was at first ridiculed, the disdain collapsed however when the clinical trial results were published revealing a 100% success rate. The most ardent opponents claimed it was a short term neurological adjustment and it was impossible to chemically change a persons mind-frame on a long term basis, they were not in a minority. As the initial trial cases passed the seven and eight year mark quite happily most of those in the scientific community resigned themselves to the fact that this was not a temporary change and the issue gained tacit acceptance within the community. In some sectors it was a wonder drug and it may have genuinely changed people’s lives for the better, but as with all drugs it was abused. Before the embryonic legal statutes that now cover the issue were written up there were all sorts of horror stories. The lovesick teenager who slipped a powdered form of the drug into his intended sweethearts drink, the middle aged woman whose gardener loved her lemonade and then came to love her, cases all over the world. This particular couple were one of the early cases. She had been heartbroken most of her life, would pine for a love and when he came she would drive him away, she was a glutton for misery. He was reserved, so reserved that he found it hard to talk to women, people in general in fact. He was just a little dull I suppose but he was solid.
He was in his mother’s kitchen watching the small static filled TV when he saw a news report on the drug. Both him and his mother could feel the awkwardness in the room when it came on. She was tired of his hulking frame hovering around the house and he really needed a companion, he was thirty-four and time felt like it was speeding off into the dusty distance. His mother would never say anything as it would mean bringing up the spiky fact of his silent loneliness but she felt for him, she felt like telling him to try it. She thought he hadn’t even noticed the ad but he had, and the following Wednesday would see him waiting for the early bus under pretence of going to Dublin for tools, appointment made.
She was lovesick again and had taken to bed for the week when she heard about it. When she saw the cure for heartache advertised her long suffering friend had thought of her and had planned how to slip it innocuously into her bedside conversation. She sat up in bed when she heard it and smudged her make up when she wiped her eye. So that was how they met. In the first batch of trials they had been matched using some of the more traditional matchmaking skills. Personality tests were intended to decide which of these strangers would suit and they would then be given a dose of the drug and spend the next twenty four hours in the company of this stranger. The initial results were so promising the researchers decided to jettison the personality tests and were soon matching at random and dosing the subjects with love. Mr and Mrs X were matched according to the statistics and they were actually quite well suited. She was a talker, he listened, they had things in common, they could argue, it might have worked out. But they had signed for the test and would not be paid unless they followed the instructions outlined before the trial.
The twenty four hours were a strange mix for both. For her it began while she was watching him in the chair by the window. He was sat facing her but looking away at a mass print picture on the wall. She didn’t know at the time but it was the chemicals that were triggering these long held memories and as she slipped into them she began to feel a warmth towards this stranger. Remembering a rainy day bedroom and his warm wool jumper worn to pieces feeling all the delight of skipped lectures and soft afternoon love again. It had ended badly but she had forgotten because she was inventing him anew in this man and any anxiety she felt was being repressed.
He had never tried drugs and the influence he tried to resist was strong and unknown. He was feeling nervous, was close to pressing the bell for the nurse, looking around at the walls and trying not to look at the girl across the way. And then when he did catch her eye he relaxed. She was sitting there with such a serene look on her face like a lake and he was with someone else in a different time on a quiet country lane. The cold splash on skin and his summer swim with his girly love and though she was behind high windows in a city now with her successful husband he didn’t feel left behind this time. He had felt like he could never forget her and every woman he met was compared to her but the girl across was new born beauty to him now.
This is how it starts, inducing powerfully happy memories whilst repressing any negative emotions associated with these memories, it creates a feeling so intense that the subject feels it must be shared, which is why the two subjects are confined together. Researchers had refined and extracted elements of the street drug ecstasy that caused the intense feelings that gave birth to love in sweaty toilets with dripping walls, and this was building inside both of them now. The manic jaw chewing side effects of the illegal drug were not completely removed and he felt his jaw slowly grind while he watched her. They sat opposite each other for the best part of two hours, glancing and smiling, both lost in their own memories and slowly growing across the room to the other.
A tasteful curtain was provided in the room for the inevitable passion of two people newly involved and it was usually an unenviable job for the cleaner every day. As the trials awkward bumps became fewer and began to pick up pace the flow of subjects increased daily, the melding of man and woman became rigid and mechanical. The couches became uncomfortable and the springs soon wore out. The rooms were later remodelled to have a bed concealed behind a partition wall, as the drug spread luxury franchises emerged that offered all the elegance of an old fashioned romantic getaway.
This was one of the main points of the case with Mr and Mrs. X. They claimed that they never consummated on that day and were thus not bound by the proceeding contract clause that stated their relationship was the intellectual property of the pharmaceutical company, and as a result were not under any obligation to the unnamed company. The case had drawn a lot of negative publicity and even though general public opinion seemed to be behind the unnamed claimants there were sectors that thought their comeuppance was just. They had been the first public break-up of one of the trial couples and the news was worldwide in two hours. They had been living in a little place temporarily, trying to get away from the city down by the sea where there wasn’t much to do. She would go for walks and he would cook her scrambled eggs when she returned but there wasn’t much to do at that stage, they were ended already. She went to her mother’s and dusted out her old teenage room, didn’t see anyone for two weeks. But word had surfaced; she had been noted in her old area and the vague smudge on her reputation from when she went away, it never goes away in small towns. By the time the dust of their campfire love was trampled the world knew.
The dormant opponents fired into life and their fingerprints were soon smeared on the case. This was the failure they had predicted in the beginning and they were so eager to attack they had no time to be smug. Television and paper men blew into town and hounded her doorstep for a week, hidden down by the beach he was no better. They found him a few days after her and the thin door was soon splintered. With the news came details and half truths that the pharmaceutical company could not dismiss. Clauses in the contracts regarding abdicated parental consent in the case of childbirth caused the biggest furore and it was after this broke that the high court super injunction was imposed. No one would speak, no one would listen or print any of it without risking jail time. So it was quietened down for two months of summer but when it was announced that the first separated couple were planning to sue the omnipotent company it all went off. Going on in every paper and talk show, screen wide all over the world. The details were scarce at first and the usual conjecture was mooted and argued and disregarded, no one was quite sure. The most powerfully convincing argument was from a London based journalist who cited precedents of physical deformities in test cases as proof that either Mr. X. or Mrs. Y., or both, had some sort of physical abnormality, but no confirmation from any party. It was four weeks into the trial before the truth emerged. The former Mr and Mrs X were not suing, they were in fact countersuing. It seems that each were approached separately and subtly offered large cash sums if they would run through another procedure, ie. Dose themselves again. A shock haired tubby executive had seized on his masterpiece and pitched it with new world gusto. The idea that the drug could reconcile parted lovers, he had thought it up alone with a drink and was convinced that it would sway public opinion and pick up recently flagging sales. The idea flew and the offer was made to the two but was turned down. The case history gives no reasons. It was suggested at the time in the news that he was hopeful and was more willing than her to try it, she was quoted as saying she couldn’t go through it again.