Youth

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Youth

By Plot Roach

When Peg came into the office the other day, I thought she was on drugs. Not the legal and over the counter kind, but something that her stepson might have slipped into her brownies. As it turns out, she was on drugs -just not the type that are easy to get.

“It’s all thanks to Dr. Donaldson.” she said. “I went to see him after work with the worst depression I have had in years, and it all disappeared with the first pill.

“What pill?” I asked..

“It’s some proprietary blend he had made for him.” she said. “I don’t even think it’s been approved by the FDA.”

So naturally I plagued her like and irate debt collector until she gave me the address and phone number of his clinic. A few days later I found myself sitting in the waiting area as one patient after another burst from the back office with grins as wide as their faces. It has to be something pumped into the air, I told myself. No one can be that depressed going in and that happy coming out, no matter how good the doctor is.

Finally it was my turn to enter happy land, and I told myself it had to be worth it for the three hundred dollars that they charged for a fifteen minute session with the guy. The door closed behind me with a muffled thud, and the doctor was facing away from me, looking out through the window.

“It’s a little rude to not greet your next patient.” I said.

“That presumes that I want you as my next patient.” he said. “The process might not work for you as it had your coworker. This might all be a waste of time. What would you do if I could not help you?” he asked, finally turning away from the window to face me. A thick brush of beard and mustache hid the lower half of his face. He might have been twenty or forty years old, except that his eyes twinkled with a life all their own which reminded me of the laugher of a small child.

“So…How do we figure this out then?”

“I want to ask you a series of questions and I need you to be completely honest with me in order for this to work.” he said.

“Okay. Start asking already.”

“Are you unhappy now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you find that as you get older, it becomes harder and harder for you to become happy or hold any happiness for an extended period.”

“Um…maybe. I never really noticed before.”

“Birthdays. Do they fill you with dread? Knowing that you will get older, be even closer to death and still worry that you have not tapped your full potential?”

“Um, I think everybody feels that way every now and again.”

“Do you feel that way now?”

“Well now that you brought it up…”

He pulled an item out from his desk drawer. It looked like a snow globe, but there was nothing in it. “What do you see?” he asked me.

“Is this one of those ‘the glass is half empty’ kind of things, or is this ‘the emperor’s new snow globe‘?”

“Just tell me what you see.” he said.

“Nothing. There’s nothing in it.” I said. “Obviously there’s air in it, but nothing else that I can see.”

“You’ll do.” he said and tossed me a bottle of pills. “Take the first one now. You’ll need to sit and wait here while it works, then you can leave.” He pointed to a chair next to his desk. I poured a cup of water for myself from a water cooler in the corner. I swallowed one of the pills, a small sphere that swirled with the primary colors of blue, red and yellow. For all the world it reminded me of a child’s cat’s-eye marble as I popped it into my mouth and swallowed it with cold water. I took the chair the doctor had pointed out for me to use and waited as he turned back around to face the window.

“Um, don’t I need to tell you about my childhood or something?”

“I can tell you, dear, that I am neither interested nor will it help the current situation. Now please be quiet, you are distracting me.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Watch the orb and tell me when you see something different.”

So, like an idiot, I sat and watched the orb. Ten minutes into it I felt like a fool and was about to rush back out into the waiting room and demand my money back from the receptionist when the orb changed. it filled with ribbons of color, like the ones that had been in the pill. They swirled and danced as if in the wind. I couldn’t help myself, I giggled.

“I see that the pills work for you.” Dr. Donaldson said. “You may go now, but be back in a week if you want more.”

I got to my feet, breaking my eyes away from the orb to find that the office had changed as well. The room seemed brighter, the smells were more pronounced and it seemed that anything was possible. I went out into the lobby and waited for the receptionist to fill out an appointment card for the following week. “Are there any side effects?” I asked. I noticed that the threads of her sweater were alive with a sub color that I had not noticed upon entering the room. The music from the speakers in the hallway was louder, and had an almost primal beat to it.

“Not for you.” she said, handing me the appointment card.

I left the room in a new appreciation of the world that I was in. It wasn’t until I was out of pills and the grayness of my old life began to haunt me that I remembered her words and wondered what she meant by them. The next day I was at my appointment, all but begging for the pills and the release that they provided from the pain of my dreary little life.

Once in the office, Dr. Donaldson was again looking out the window and ignoring his patients. I popped a pill into my mouth, not waiting for a glass of water, in order to speed up the process. Almost from the beginning I saw the blandness of reality pushed away and replaced by the vivid colors life had to offer.

“Doctor Donaldson?” I asked. “What did the receptionist mean that there were not side effects for me?”

He sighed and turned slightly in his chair, he pulled a remote control out of his desk drawer and aimed it at a nearby monitor. When it came to life it showed a room where a little boy was surrounded by toys, but sat listlessly among them, barely looking up into the camera.

“Hello Adam, don’t you want to play?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too tired and I don’t feel like it.”

“Can you smile for the camera?”

“Do I have to?”

“Well… If you don’t want to cooperate, then I guess you’ll have to go into the other room to give blood again.”

The boy on the screen started crying. He was lead away by a lab technician. Dr. Donaldson turned off the video and turned to me. “We get the drug from the veins of children.” he said. “We filter it out of them through a process similar to dialysis. We tried many times to duplicate the hormones that we found with other chemicals, but it cannot replace the real thing. For each pill that you take, a child looses one day of happiness.”

“Oh my god.” I gasped. “Is this legal? How can you do this to young children?”

“My dear, you have heard the saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young?’” he asked. “Well, there are those that would see that loss invested in other people. A paying customer like yourself being one of them.”

“But you can’t do this. It’s wrong.” I said

“You don’t seem to be fighting it very hard.” he said and turned back to his window. And I could see that he was right, as I had already slipped the pills into my purse and had no intention of facing another day without them.