Pilling a Fast One

by Homa Mojtabai.

After your début novel bombs you wonder what went wrong. At least you have a job even if it’s teaching composition to college kids on academic probation, which means a lot of frat boys who drive trucks worth more than you make in a year and their girlfriends who treat you with mannered pity. Famous writers come to your college because they are paid to. What they earn talking about writing is more than what they earn from writing. It’s a game. You’re losing.

One writer gives a talk and you’re there because you’re interested but also you have to make sure your students show up for extra credit. He is handsome and broad, as if he handles a rifle as easily as a laptop. Later, when the writer joins you and your colleagues at a local dive bar, you blurt how do you do it? He says persistence and the conversation moves on. He finds you after the bar is packed with sweating bodies so everything is more private. Look I feel sorry for you so here’s the honest truth. He’s jamming a little plastic baggie in your hand with a few pills inside like rocks against your palm. These help.

You laugh because this is ridiculous, like answering one of those weird spam emails from dispossessed foreign princes.

You should say thanks he says.

How do I know they’ll work?

He waves you off. You won’t until you try.

In the morning you slip a blue tablet under your tongue and it dissolves before you can chase it down with sparkling water. Your hangover is gone and you sit at your computer and draft a chapter of your next novel. It’s like each of your fingers is a magic wand and the piece unfolds like a conjuring. It’s better than good, the characters more than lifelike. You send it to your agent and she calls you, actually uses her phone, her vocal chords, to tell you fantastic.

You need more tablets. You send the famous author a DM via the socials and when you check for a reply he’s written back accusing you of lying, trying to implicate him in something. In your thirty years on the planet you’ve done some stuff, a little Adderall, some weed, always swallowing or inhaling what comes around but never buying it yourself. The drug economy is a mystery. Down to your last pill and facing ruin, you go to your coolest looking student.

I like to check in with my classes. Especially students with active social lives. If you’re involved with drugs… What you want is intel so you’re sort of rambling in circles, trying to be discreet.

Ma’am I don’t do drugs. He sits up straight.

Oh, I’m not saying drugs are wrong per se. You smile and nod, your head loose on your neck. As long as they’re used responsibly.

Ma’am?

It’s impossible to find any in this town anyways. You keep your voice light and look out to the cathedral, which is sounding God Bless America with its bells.

When you look back his eyes are lit up with understanding. Sick he says and offers to get you the narcotic. He has thick, wavy hair and eyelashes that catch the light. You offer cash, a lot of it, but he laughs. He wants a good grade. You agree without hesitation because you know you’ll write enough to quit in any case.

He pulls through, only his tablets seem darker. They taste different too, sweeter. They flash through your body hot and icy at the same time, lifting a fog you didn’t realize had settled over your brain. The characters make a movie in your head and you write it all down, and now the trees are talking to you. The big magnolia outside your apartment reaches in the window and taps you on the shoulder, making suggestions as you excrete another chapter, trailing its sweet perfume. In class the students are good humored, you are good humored, your lectures are tinged with easy laughter. Then your student-dealer finds you during office hours. His face is twitchy. Maybe the feds are onto him. But you had a tablet this morning and the poster on the wall, of an even more famous author, dead for sixty years, is talking over him. He is describing his unfinished manuscript and oh my god —

Ma’am? There might be fentanyl in the pills. I don’t know; people are dying.

You nod because it’s true. People are dying all the time. From the way the kid nods back you realize you must have spoken out loud.

You mean to say something serious but then you’re telling him what the dead author described except you’re making it better, more alive. The heat and ice pop sweat out of your skull. The kid is leaning back in his chair a little and his eyes are widening so much his lashes scrape his eyebrows.

Listen, listen! you say. How bad is death really? How good is this story?