Mark says, “Why don’t you just surprise us, Paul.”
The drink list is daunting: over eighty cocktails divided into one-term, self-conscious categories: bubbles, risky, foreign, medieval. He scans the menu, flipping through the pages, his eyes tripping over words like coriander and cloudberry. He mustn’t look too long at it, Paul knows, lest he find himself paralyzed by choice, and so when the bartender asks him what he’d like, Paul tells him three Orange Willys, even though the only ingredient he recognizes is gin. Between his two hands he balances the three drinks, all of which are the color of dusty, smoggy sunsets, and by the time he’s reached Alcott and Mark, he hasn’t spilled a single drop, and although Paul’s duly impressed with himself, the two men are too engrossed in a whispered conversation to notice.
Paul sets the three coupes on the table around which Mark and Alcott are huddled and says, “What are you talking about?”
Mark’s head shoots up. “Nothing. Forget about it.”
Alcott rolls his eyes and laughs. “Oh, come on, Mark. He’s not a child.” Then, glancing down at the cocktail, he says, “An Orange Willy, eh? Bold choice.”
“What aren’t I a child about?” Paul asks.
Alcott grins at Mark; Mark frowns at Paul.
“I’ve brought us a little surprise,” Alcott says. “Just to make the evening a bit more interesting.”
“What kind of surprise?” Paul sips from his drink: it tastes like fermented orange cough syrup and burnt rosemary.
“Have you ever heard of mephedrone, Paul?”
“No, I don’t—”
“You Americans.” Alcott laughs. “So unimaginative when it comes to your drugs. If it’s not coke or hash or heroin, it might as well not exist. Hmm … I’d forgotten how … chemical this drink tastes. In any event, mephedrone. A lovely stimulant that makes its home in the amphetamine and cathinone classes. Typically snorted, it carries a high not entirely dissimilar to ecstasy or cocaine. For years it could be bought, legally, as plant food—”
“Plant food.”
“Yes. Plant food. But then, well, you know how these things go: some bloke up in Manchester took a little too much and ended up cutting off his own thumb before stabbing his mother eight times. The authorities stepped in, made the drug illegal, and ruined the fun for those of us who are capable of holding our substances in a more responsible fashion.”
Paul swallows another mouthful of Orange Willy. Viscous syrup coats his mouth, his throat. “And you said it’s called mephedrone?”
“Yes,” Alcott says. From his pocket he produces a small plastic baggie, the sort that Paul’s used to seeing filled with coke, except the substance here is light brown, the color of weak coffee mixed with too much milk. “A lot of folks call it Meow Meow, but frankly I can’t imagine a chavvier name, so I stick to mephedrone.”
Discreetly glancing over his shoulder to ensure no one’s watching, Paul takes the baggie from Alcott. The drug’s not as fine as coke; instead, it clumps together in rocky crystals.
“You’ve got to crush it up, obviously,” Alcott says.
“And you say it’s like ecstasy?” Paul tries to remember the last time he did ecstasy.
Alcott nods. “A bit. With the mental acuteness of blow.”
“Oh.” Paul grimaces. “Blow gives me the worst hangover. It makes my soul feel like it’s drained, or something. And the headache. Jesus.”
He starts to pass the baggie back, when Alcott says, laughing, “Oh, come on, Nervous Nelly. Don’t be such a bore!”
Paul looks over at Mark, whose glass is empty and whose eyebrows are arched, knowingly, glibly.
“I’m not a bore.” He snatches the baggie back. “Where the fuck is the bathroom?”
“It’s on the other side of the looking glass.” Alcott digs into his pocket. “Here, take my key.”
“The looking glass?”
He points to one of the mirrors along the wall, this one framed in chipped gold paint.
“Push that mirror open—it’s actually a door. On the other side there’s a small back bar. Next to it you’ll see signs for the bathroom.”
Paul does as Alcott instructs—he leans his weight into the heavy glass—and, after the door groans and swings open, he emerges into an even dimmer room, this one entirely empty, with the exception of a sole, lonely bartender, dicing up cilantro beneath the faint green glow of a banker’s lamp.
“Loo?” he says, glancing up.
“Er, yeah.”
The bartender nods toward a corner of the room, where there’s a row of three identical stalls. After locking himself in the one farthest to the left, Paul scrambles in his pocket for the drugs. Two sconces are affixed to the wall on either side of the sink, but the light they throw is anemic, so instead he huddles around a candle that reeks of patchouli and inspects the mephedrone. He shakes the bag so the chunks gather at the bottom, and he’s reminded of how this moment was often his favorite part of doing coke, back when he did it more frequently than he should have, during those wilderness years of his early and midtwenties: the standing-alone-next-to-a-cheap-scented-candle-in-a-bathroom-with-which-you’re-quickly-becoming-too-familiar-wondering-if-you’re-taking-too-long-wondering-if-the-cilantro-dicing-bartender-will-start-to-suspect-that-you’re-doing-a-little-more-than-taking-a-piss. That’s not to say he didn’t like the instant the drugs kicked in, that devastatingly beautiful split second when he swore he could feel his arteries tighten and his mind burst open with clarity. The problem, though, was that as soon as he felt that moment he simultaneously began to anticipate its inevitable death; he saw before him the twilight of the high where instead of feeling phenomenally interesting he started worrying that he’d made a terrible—and predictably boring—decision.
“You’re bad at doing drugs,” Alice said to him once, when he explained all this to her. “Some people are good at drugs, and some people are bad at drugs. You’re bad at drugs.”
He disagreed. “No. People who are bad at drugs start doing them in their thirties, and then talk about them with the same immature excitement that we had about stealing Dad’s vodka when we were teenagers.”
Alice shook her head. “No. Those people are just tacky.” She repeated herself. “You’re bad at drugs, Paul. I’m bad at doubles tennis, and you’re bad at drugs. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—it’s just the way it is.”