Chapter Eleven: Side Effects May Include

It felt like the morning after. Like mourning.

...Hey, pun.

He cracked an eye open, blinking slowly until the blurry vistas before him resolved into a close-up view of his desk.

His desk. Which was definitely not the smoking area.

Huh.

Exhaustion must have finally caught up with him -- months of accumulated sleep debts at last called attention to by the Mafia of his body, who seemed to have called in a hitman or two.

That was just judging from the headache, mind you.

And judging by the metaphor, his body wasn't the only thing sleeplessness had pushed to the limits of endurance.

He took his head off the desk. From further away, the paper on top of the stack he'd been using as a pillow stopped looking like a salt flat used as a dance hall by birds with ink on their feet, and started looking like it might have English words written on it.

Or at least technobabble.

He had to put his glasses on before the words on the page finally gave up the ghost and became legible.

It was definitely his handwriting.

He just didn't remember writing it.

--Oh wait, it would help if he turned it right-side up.

Even right-side up, he... didn't really remember writing it. Judging from its place on top of the clutter, it wasn't more than a week old.

It was a list of questions. One that he saw a few too many technical words on to even try to make sense of so soon after waking up. (If you could call dozing with his head down on his desk sleeping. Which it was in the same way that instant ramen was cooking. There was a difference, but for students, the difference didn't matter.)

He still made a pretty decent effort at it, though, staring at the page until he'd determined that no amount of focus was going to force the words to make sense.

Having given up on reading his pillow, what remained were practical questions to be answered: What day is it? How long was I out of it? And why do I have such a bad headache?

side-effects may include headache

He rubbed at his aching temples. Medication. Something to do with the medication.

Memory loss? No, that wasn't one of the known side effects -- he'd have heard if it were.

Blackouts? Also not a side effect of the... medication...

Well, son of a bitch.

Finding answers, for Jeb, was a bit like a game of hide-and-seek. There are times when you have to go looking for the answer; there are times when the answer is standing right in the middle of the room with its eyes closed, honestly believing it's hidden very well.

And then there are times when the answer just follows you around, politely waiting for you to notice it.

Was he usually this oblivious?

It wasn't the medication causing side effects.

It was that he hadn't taken the medication in the first place.

Duh.

As Max would have said.

Now really wasn't the time to be thinking about her, though. Save the melancholy for later. He had things to do.

He started looking for the little plastic bottle of pills on the desk. Which was where it should be, given that that was where he remembered putting it.

Then again, since when had things ever stayed where he'd left them?

Once things came into contact with him, they tended to take on lives of their own. Seemed he just couldn't leave inhuman things inhuman -- goddamnit, there he went again.

(It was like Dostoevsky's fucking polar bear: when you tell the human brain not to think about something, it will oblige. For a few seconds. And then, like a faithful retriever fetching a stick of dynamite, it will proceed to think about whatever it was you specifically told it not to think about.

(Not that that trait hadn't been helpful at times.)

It wasn't on the desk -- no matter how many times he rearranged his meticulously scattered piles of paper, computer printouts, and various... whatever, he still couldn't find it.

Which meant that either it was determined to play a really great game of hide-and-seek, or... (he really had to stop attributing human characteristics to non-human things) or else he hadn't put it on the desk at all.

Meaning that it was... God only knew where.

Probably not even God, come to think of it, could comprehend the machinations of a mad scientist's mind -- much in the same way that certain breeds of artist will, when asked what methods they used to produce such an effect, throw up their hands and exclaim that they don't know, it just happened like that.

He jerked his mind back to the subject at hand. Where was it?

He checked next to the bed. No. (Why would it be there, anyway?) Under the bed. No. (Dust bunnies, yes. They had established a breeding colony under there, from the looks of it, and after apologizing for the intrusion, he hastily fled the scene.)

Under the desk?

Unsurprisingly, no.

In his sparsely-furnished, hardly-lived-in room, there was really nowhere else to look.

Which meant that he'd probably left it... somewhere in his lab. (Come to think of it... the more he considered that possibility, the more sense it made. It sounded like something he would do, and anyway what did he have to lose?)

Damn.

He'd have to go get it, then. (Duh, said an inner voice [that sounded remarkably like Jeb during his brief teenage phase], before shutting up to watch the show.)

The clothes he was wearing were, technically, clean (by some standards -- they weren't moving of their own accord), but common decency demanded that he at least have a shower before exposing himself to the public eye. (Such as it was at the School.) Probably a shave, too.

...When had his inner monologue started sounding like his mother?

Never mind that. There were more important dealings afoot.

Such as the matter of finding clean clothes. (Unwrinkled ones? He could worry about that later. Like if it were ever a priority, or if anyone ever gave a damn.)

Unfortunately, he was interrupted in this bold adventure by a knock at the door.

"Yes?" he said, belatedly noticing that his shirt was unbuttoned.

"Don't kill me," said a muffled voice.

"Normally people say 'Hello', or 'Jeb, I need to talk to you'," he said, going to unlock the door he definitely didn't remember locking. "What is it?"

He cracked the door open a little, to be confronted by a somewhat rumpled-looking ter Borcht.

Somehow, Jeb was entirely unsurprised.

"You're not dead," ter Borcht said. (Jeb would have given quite a bit just to know one person who actually said 'Hello' and 'How are you' and 'How's that weather', rather than jumping into conversations feet-first with blunt statements of what had gone wrong this time.)

"This had better be good," Jeb muttered.

"That depends on whose point-of-view you're looking from," ter Borcht said, blazing new trails of making-very-little-sense.

"The last thing I remember before ten minutes ago is smoking my first cigarette in years," Jeb said. "Either tell me what happened after that or go away."

Ter Borcht looked vaguely disappointed at the thwarting of his philosophical train of thought. "No one's seen you since lunch -- you remember lunch, right?"

"Yes," Jeb said, clutching the edge of the door in a death grip (and very grateful that the door couldn't complain). "Sloppy Joe. Depression. Would I forget?"

"You seem to have given the most interesting parts a total miss," ter Borcht said, with the air of someone temporarily distracted enough to say things they only meant to think. Distracted by what -- who knew?

"Depends on whose point-of-view you're looking from," Jeb said smugly.

"It was two days ago. No one's seen you since then, and frankly, I'm glad you've come to your senses."

"Oh." Jeb paused. "Come to my senses?"

Ter Borcht smirked, and then abruptly thrust a small, familiar pill bottle at Jeb. "This is yours, I think."

Jeb took the pill bottle (the other course of action would have been to drop it, and he really didn't feel like going all the way down to the floor to retrieve the damn thing).

"You're welcome," ter Borcht said, then added, "Any time you want to button your shirt up is fine by me."

"Thanks," Jeb said, still a little too fuzzy-headed to really go in for a full-on glower, before shutting the door.

At which point another answer (to a question he hadn't asked -- how handy) politely tapped him on the shoulder.

You didn't just snap out of a PBD-induced blackout like (presumably) the one Jeb had just suffered.

The only thing that ended one was... a dose of medication.

Jeb leaned back against the door, stunned.

The sensation of suddenly realizing the grandeur of a plan presented to you by someone else has been favorably compared to being whacked upside the head with a two-by-four.

And it was that feeling that had just assaulted Jeb, fangs bared and ready to attack.

"That devious bastard," Jeb said. "He spiked my coffee."

Of course, he worded it that way for the sheer purpose of dramatic effect.

There had been sleight-of-hand involving his beverage, but actually it had been a carton of 2-percent milk. Not coffee.

Honestly, though, which of those sounds better? Which is more dramatic?

Which makes a better end to Act One of the play?

Correct answer:

Whichever one is funniest.