Lovesick

That there was a medical term for what happened to me did, in fact, give me some relief. That the term involved the word crisis only vindicated my fear, made my reaction seem almost nonchalant in retrospect. An oculogyric crisis. The word was usually reserved for problems that were global or existential in their scope, the stuff of nightmares and great art, things like financial crisis and mid-life crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis. And here was my crisis, at home in this club of catastrophes: a crisis where you lose control of your eyes and they roll into the back of your head, literally roll, like beach balls spinning helplessly in a pool, and of course I should have realized at the time that it was a sign of things to come.

It happened during one of our Sunday dinners. Frances had started this tradition where, every Sunday, we cooked a random meal, split a bottle of wine, and generally tried to act as childlike as possible to prepare ourselves for the drudgery of the workweek. This week, we’d made burritos full of marshmallows and orange slices; they were delightfully disgusting.

Frances was sitting across from me with Harold, our Boston terrier, in her lap. One second everything was normal, Frances laughing as she tried biting an orange slice hard enough to make it squirt on me, her eyes watery from citrus or laughter. But then she was sliding out of frame, until I could only see the top of her head beneath an expanse of scratched drywall and ceiling.

Even then, during the onset of this crisis, simply having Frances somewhere in my field of vision was enough to fill me with warmth. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how much of this feeling was generated by Orexis.

I closed my eyes. I hoped Frances didn’t think I’d rolled my eyes at her. I opened them again, and for a second, I thought I’d imagined it; there was Frances, light of my life, giggling as she let Harold lick her chin. But then she was gone, my eyes once again exerting their newfound agency.

“Frances,” I said. I tried to look at her, but she kept sliding away. 

“What the hell,” said Frances.

“Help,” I managed. Everything was sliding away; it was like I was doing backflips without leaving my chair. Every time I opened my eyes, there’d be a split second where they looked straight ahead, a false promise of stability, but then they’d start their nauseating roll upward, pitching my world into chaos.

“Oh god, oh god,” Frances was saying. She’d taken my head in her hands, a gesture both loving and diagnostic, but now I could hear her pacing the living room, perhaps traumatized by what she’d seen. Somewhere nearby, I could hear Harold scurrying and wheezing, mimicking her panicked movements.

I became aware that my neck was twisted upward and to the left. Moving it felt nearly impossible; my neck, apparently, was also no longer mine to control. I experienced a brief moment of depersonalization, observing myself with a crooked neck and eyes rolled into the back of my skull. I wondered if this would slowly spread to my entire body, as some ancient and aggrieved spirit had its way with me.

“Okay, thank you, okay,” I heard Frances say.

Within twenty minutes we were in the emergency room. Frances kissed the top of my head and told me to wait while she spoke with someone. She was fierce when she needed to be, and hypercompetent, and the part of me that wasn’t panicking about losing control of my body was feeling grateful for her protection.

I sat in a squishy chair in the waiting room that I imagined had held thousands of dying bodies before me. The room reeked of disinfectant. More than once, I had the unpleasant experience of opening my eyes and having them roll upward until I was staring directly into a fluorescent ceiling light.

Frances was struggling to explain my condition to a triage nurse. “Just look at him,” I heard her say.

There were others in the waiting room, some of whom were groaning in pain. I felt competitive with them. I had to demonstrate that my needs were more immediate than theirs. I angled my body toward the intake counter and tried to lock eyes with the triage nurses, but they kept slipping out of frame. I let out a low moan and lolled out my tongue for good measure.

Some combination of Frances’s advocacy and my horrid appearance did seem to accelerate the process. I’d only just begun to go through my mental Rolodex of happy memories with Frances, searching for an image to hold onto as I drew my last breath, when we were ushered into an examination room.

As soon as the curtains were drawn, Frances threw her arms around me. 

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. 

“I think I’m being possessed by a demon,” I said. I could feel the beginnings of a migraine, as though someone were slowly inserting a steel rod into my brain. I decided to keep my eyes closed unless strictly necessary; the rolling had started making me queasy.

I felt Frances move her face in front of mine. I knew its every line and curve. What if I had to live without seeing it again?

“Knock, kno-ock,” said a lilting voice behind the curtain. A pause, then the tinny scrape of the curtains being forced open. I felt Frances move away.

“Mr. Robles, tell me what’s going on,” the voice said.

“His eyes keep rolling, and his neck is tilted. Look,” said Frances. “It’s like he’s lost control of his muscles.”

“I’m being possessed by a demon,” I said.

“How long has he been like this?” The doctor directed this question to Frances.

“About an hour. We were just eating dinner and then suddenly this happened.”

“Has this ever—” 

“Never happened before, no,” said Frances.

“First time for everything,” I added. I braved a look at the doctor. In the second before my eyes migrated north, I locked eyes with a short, bald man with a pubic goatee. I was reminded of a cartoon turtle. He quickly slid out of view.

I heard the scribbling of pen on clipboard. “Are you taking any medications?”

“No,” I said.

“Just Orexis,” Frances corrected. “We’re both on it.”

“Ah,” said the doctor. More scribbling. “Which lines?”

“Blue and yellow.”

“My head is going to explode.”

Scribble scribble. Then what sounded like a page being folded in half. “Oculogyric crisis is a known side effect of adamafil,” the doctor said. “Atroxafil, too.”

“You’ve seen this before?” asked Frances. 

The doctor breathed loudly. “It’s in the literature. It’s a rare side effect, but definitely associated with Orexis.”

It took me a minute to digest what he was saying. He couldn’t possibly mean, he couldn’t be saying—

“I would recommend that you stop taking Orexis immediately, Mr. Robles,” he said.

Silence erupted between us as we considered the doctor’s words. How could he suggest such a thing? It felt like a gross breach of etiquette, like he’d propositioned Frances and was waiting to see how both of us reacted. 

“But,” said Frances. “But everyone takes it.”

Another crushing silence, broken a few interminable moments later by the sticky salivary sound of the doctor opening his mouth to speak. “I know this isn’t easy to hear,” he said. 

Through my blindness, I imagined the doctor staring at his clipboard, either feeling or affecting an appropriate level of awkwardness. 

“How about you, doc?” I managed. “You on the blues? The full marital suite?” 

“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. But of course he was.

“We’ve been taking it for four years,” Frances said. “Why would this just happen now?”

It didn’t matter to us whether or how much we were relying on Orexis; we were in love, and happy, and that was all that mattered.

I tried to imagine our relationship from the doctor’s perspective, stripped down to its clinically significant facts penned in shorthand on an intake form: 30 y/o M-F couple / cohabitating / together 5 years / started Orexis after year 1. The objective truth was that our relationship was about as pedestrian as it got, from the Judeo-Christian choreography of our lovemaking to our decision to foster, then adopt, our beloved arthritic terrier. But somehow I wanted to convey to the doctor how special we were, how extraordinary our love was in its ordinariness, if only to make him feel the gravity of his suggestion that I stop taking the pills that bound us.

“If you’re interested, there’s a new version of the drug in clinical trials. It’s intravenous, administered biweekly. Early results seem promising.”

“We’d have to get injections?” Frances asked. 

“You can read up on it here.” The doctor handed something to Frances, and I guessed—correctly, I’d later learn—that it was a glossy brochure featuring photos of smiling couples.

Pen on clipboard again, then a quick tearing of paper. “Your symptoms should resolve in a few hours. In the meantime, I’ll give you something for the pain.”

The doctor pushed open the curtain partition. “Many couples find they can manage just fine without the meds.”

•

Over the next few days, Frances and I became newly awkward around each other. We tiptoed around the subject, but we were both clearly waiting to see whether I’d fall out of love with her now that I no longer had the pills to help.

We’d been on the standard regimen: blue pills to stay in love with each other, yellow pills to ensure that we didn’t fall in love with anyone else. Part of what made the waiting so excruciating was that we didn’t know how much we relied on the pills. It would have been easier if we knew that there was no love between us absent the blues, that the only thing keeping us from running off with other people was the yellows. But that wasn’t how it worked. Most couples started taking Orexis after just one year, before the end of the honeymoon phase, precisely because doing so allowed them to maintain the fiction that they didn’t actually need them, that they were merely taking them as a prophylactic measure and to smooth out any awkward imbalances in attraction. 

If there was an imbalance in attraction between us, I think both of us would have assumed that Frances was the one who needed the pills more.

On our first date, Frances had seemed less entertained by me than by her power over me. 

“This is the part where you hold my hand,” she’d said as we walked from dinner to a cocktail bar, interlacing her fingers with my own.

When I walked her back to her car, she stopped and grabbed my jacket, pulling my face inches from hers. “This is the most important moment,” she said. “Don’t mess it up.” 

Frances always seemed to play two roles, oscillating between an ironic observer of herself, as though intimacy were a joke she wanted to make it clear she was in on, and a vulnerable person who wanted nothing more than to be loved unconditionally. When she suggested, at the end of our first year, that we take the aphrodisiac of the masses, I believed it to be the most romantic gesture Frances could offer. To suggest that we take the most traditional step for couples in our position, to commit our bodies and brains to love one another exclusively, to be common schmucks in a monogamous arrangement: she might as well have proposed then and there.

And it worked. For the next four years, our relationship was nearly perfect. It didn’t matter to us whether or how much we were relying on Orexis; we were in love, and happy, and that was all that mattered.

But now, it was all in jeopardy. Our apartment had started to feel less like a home and more like a museum of our relationship, full of artifacts that reminded me of how hopelessly intertwined our lives were, how many decisions we’d made under the assumption that we’d stay together indefinitely. Here was all the furniture we’d picked out together; there was the pile of unopened mail addressed to both of us, with account statements reflecting our shared assets and liabilities; and there was Harold, our little tachycardiac munchkin, who’d probably die of a panic attack if he knew that his co-parents might split up. How could I live without Frances? Who even was I without Frances?

•

The first difference I noticed, three days after the ER visit, was that my world was suddenly teeming with beautiful people. They were everywhere: smiling at me from bus decals advertising Orexis, stepping on my foot in the crush of bodies boarding the metro, frowning at me during my mid-year performance review. I felt like I was fifteen again, at the mercy of my hormones. In a training I led at work, I couldn’t stop looking at one of the new hires and his chiseled jawline. Then I’d catch myself staring, and I’d make a point to look at every other participant before letting my eyes wander back to him again, some distant and unprofessional part of me imagining myself tracing my fingers along his cheekbones, his lips. Later, in the cafeteria, I was so distracted by the athletic figure of a woman in the marketing department that I overheated my leftover lasagna, creating a crime scene in the microwave that took most of my lunch break to clean.

But I still felt the same way toward Frances. When I got back to my desk after lunch, I found a package waiting for me: flowers, an assortment of fruit, and a card. The front of the card featured a drawing of a goateed turtle in a lab coat, with a speech bubble that said, “Frances loves you, Mr. Robles.” When I opened the card, I had to stifle my laughter; the inside featured a detailed drawing of the turtle receiving fellatio from another turtle.

I propped the card on my desk—folded so only the front was visible—so I could look at the words Frances loves you throughout the day.

It wasn’t until later that evening, when we ran into Frances’s college friends at the grocery store, that the changes began to feel significant.

As usual, the store was packed with couples. I’d read that over ninety percent of couples were on Orexis, so I’d been playing a silent game as we shopped, trying to figure out which couples were on the pills just by looking. I thought I saw it in the placid smiles, the strides in rhythm—those couples whose movements looked synchronized, like they were different appendages of the same organism.

Then one of the couples—whose movements were decidedly not in sync—mistook my concentrated stare for an attempt at recognition.

“Is that … Eric?” said the taller of the two, who I then recognized as Russell. He was accompanied by his partner, Carter. “And Frances?”

Frances screeched and greeted them with a joint hug, which caused Russell and Carter to bump heads.

I’d met them a few times before. I’d never liked Carter much, but I’d always enjoyed spending time with Russell. At their most recent college reunion, while Frances and Carter made the rounds with their former classmates, Russell made a point to hang back and spend time with me. He kept joking that he hated those kinds of events, but given the number of people whose faces lit up when they saw him, I had the sense that he was just saying that to make me feel better about keeping him from his friends.

This time, though, I immediately knew something was different. I guess I’d always thought of Russell as beautiful in an abstract sense, but I’d forgotten what it was like to feel that attraction, the kick in the midsection that leaves you short of breath and fumbling for words. But there I was, clutching a bag of frozen green beans, worried that Russell would be able to feel my heart pounding when my chest touched his as we hugged hello. He smelled like vanilla and leather. Could he tell I was smelling him?

“Eric had this crazy reaction to the O,” Frances was saying. “We had to go to the ER.”

Carter and Russell exchanged a look. I stared at the floor.

“Did you have the eye thing?” Russell asked. He made a face intended to represent an oculogyric crisis. It looked like someone on the receiving end of intense pleasure.

I tried, uselessly, to prevent my cheeks from flushing. “Yeah. How did—” 

“You’re still doing it,” he said.

I grabbed my face, horrified. Russell and Frances laughed.

I rolled my eyes and flipped Russell off, hoping the gesture would come across as playful. He grinned at me, and I was reborn. I was gripping the bag of green beans so tight it might burst.

Before we parted ways, Russell suggested we all get dinner this week. His eyes lingered on mine as he said this. He said he and Carter didn’t take Orexis—if I weren’t melting under Russell’s gaze, I would’ve felt proud for guessing this correctly—and they’d be happy to share with us their experience of love au natural.

Frances was thrilled at the idea. She was less thrilled, however, when I suggested they come over on Sunday.

After Russell and Carter left, Frances turned on me. “What about our date night?” 

Date night. Sunday night dinners. Of course—how could I have forgotten? “I wasn’t really thinking about that,” I admitted. “I guess I forgot.”

“You forgot,” Frances repeated.

“We can just do date night on Saturday?”

Frances shrugged and pushed the cart farther down the aisle. If you don’t care, neither do I, her shrug seemed to say.

 As Frances continued on, I lingered in the ice cream section, appreciating my cornucopia of choices. So many brands and flavors competing for my attention. I held the door open long enough that it became opaque with fog.

It took me a few minutes to find Frances—she was already halfway through checking out. I caught up with her and scanned my pint.

Frances stopped my hand with hers. “What’s that?”

I looked down at the ice cream. “Ice cream?”

“You’re lactose intolerant.”

“Only a little,” I said, placing the ice cream in a bag. “I just saw it and was kind of craving it. I haven’t had it in a while.” 

Frances’ eyes bounced from me to the ice cream and then back to me. “Ice cream,” she said.

•

Frances usually stayed up later than me and slept in later than me, but when I woke up the next morning, she was sitting upright, already awake. She was staring straight ahead, her face blank, but her red and puffy eyes told me she’d been crying. I felt certain she’d been awake for hours—possibly all night.

“Hey,” I whispered. “What’s wrong?”

Her voice was dry and scratchy when she finally spoke. “I’m going to stop taking it, too.” She kept staring at the opposite wall, as though afraid to look at me as she said this. 

This had never occurred to me. Of course it made sense for her to stop. It was unfair to ask her to keep taking it once I was no longer on it. But still, could we survive both of us stopping Orexis? 

I nuzzled my head into her neck. “We’ll get through this,” I said. 

•

Sunday finally arrived and brought with it Russell, holding a bottle of red wine and grinning at us from our landing. He wore a tight V-neck romper that teased his smooth, muscular chest, and how could I not imagine what he looked like without it?

Frances, Russell, and Carter spent most of the dinner reminiscing about their college years. I kept myself busy by moving plates in and out of the kitchen. When I ran out of tasks, I mostly scratched Harold and drank my wine. When I found myself staring too long at Russell, I made sure to give Frances and Carter an equal amount of eye contact. 

I thought I’d done a pretty good job of being nonchalant about this crush, but when we all began to migrate from the dining room to the living room, Frances pulled me into the side hallway. 

Maybe love just meant always assuming the best intentions from your partner; maybe Orexis was more about empathy than attraction. 

“You like Russell,” she said. 

Her gaze was a challenge that I instantly backed away from. I could feel my cheeks burning. I craned my neck to see if our guests could see or hear us.

Frances laughed. “It’s okay,” she said. “You know they’re in an open relationship, right?” 

I stood there stupidly, agape. 

She added, “You should go for it,” before walking into the bathroom and shutting the door.

I stayed in the hallway for as long as I could before I felt it would become obvious that something had transpired between us. I had no idea what to make of it—was she teasing me? Testing me? We’d never discussed being open before. I decided to just ignore it for the moment. 

While Frances was in the bathroom, I refilled everyone’s wine glasses—including my own, twice. There was a space on the couch next to Russell, but this felt like a trap, so I perched on an ottoman in the middle of the living room. Harold immediately jumped into my lap. 

“So,” Russell said. He swirled his glass, an innocuous gesture that I somehow felt was imbued with sexual significance. “What’s it like being off the O?” 

I could feel the heat of Russell’s gaze. I imagined I must have been blushing so much it would look like I was having an allergic reaction.

“No, no, no,” called Frances, who had re-emerged from the bathroom. “We invited you so you could tell us how to cope without O.”

She plopped down on the floor beside me. “So, tell us. Do you fight a lot? Do you have less sex?”

Carter rolled his eyes and turned to us. “When I look at Russ, I don’t just see a beautiful face that makes me feel gooey inside.”

“That’s what I see when I look at Russ,” said Frances. 

Me too, I thought.

“I see all our fights. I see our sacrifices.” He reached out and held Russell’s hand. “I see the work we put in to make our relationship stronger. I see all of it.”

“And he still feels gooey inside,” Russell added.

Harold pawed at my leg, a reminder to keep petting him. It occurred to me that Harold would never need a pill to love me unconditionally, nor I to keep loving him.

“I don’t know,” I said. As soon as I started speaking, I felt the clumsy weight of my own tongue. I wasn’t sober enough to articulate myself properly, but no longer sober enough to care. “It sounds like you’re describing the sunk cost fallacy. Or Stockholm syndrome. Or some project at work that’s been giving you so much hell you’ve finally convinced yourself it’s important.” Frances gave me a warning look, but I avoided her eyes as I continued. “What if all the bad stuff isn’t indicative of some deeper love? What if it’s just bad stuff, and it’s better not to have it?” 

Carter snorted. “Or what if, when your limbic system is drowning in adamafil, the problems are still there, but you just don’t see them until they’re too big for you to deal with?” 

“How would you know if you haven’t taken it?” I instantly regretted my tone—I sounded like a child in a spat with a sibling. 

“We have.” 

Three heads rounded on Russell. Four, if you count Harold, who seemed drawn to Russell’s soft baritone.

“You total fraud,” said Frances, giving him a playful kick.

Russell smiled, and the room suddenly felt brighter. “We’re not still on it. This was years ago.”

Something in Russell’s tone told us a story was coming, so we let his words resonate while we settled in for the tale. I was grateful for the story as an excuse to look at Russell for an extended period of time. It was ludicrous how enjoyable it was to simply look at his face, to drink it in.

But the longer I looked, the more I began to feel a creeping unease. Before Frances confronted me, this had just been a silly crush. But now it was as though she’d spoken it into existence, and it was a thing that had to be dealt with.

I tried to focus on the content of Russell’s story instead of its source. He and Carter had been in a triad with someone named Phil, apparently, and all three of them had been taking the blues. This revelation wasn’t too surprising: Orexis had led to a rise in polyamorous relationships because the pills allowed people to share love more equitably among all partners. Russell and Carter were happy in their triad for several months, but at some point, things started to deteriorate. Carter and Phil started fighting more. Phil accused Carter of trying to steal Russell. Carter, meanwhile, was apparently trying to steal Russell, and he started trying to convince Russell to end things with Phil.

They all discovered later that they’d mixed up their bottles of Orexis, and the formula didn’t work on the person it wasn’t made for. Without the blues, Carter and Phil could barely stand one another.

“But Russ and I discovered that we still loved each other,” Carter was saying. “So here we are.”

Turning my attention back to Carter, I had a small realization about the mechanics of Orexis. Though I’d never liked Carter—I never understood what Russell saw in him—it occurred to me now that this dislike had likely always been fueled by my attraction to Russell. While the Orexis had been blocking me from feeling the attraction to Russell, the attraction was still there beneath the surface, generating a dislike of his partner that I understood now to be nothing more than simple jealousy.

I looked over at Frances. Something in her expression made me certain she’d been watching me for quite a while. I tried sipping the dregs at the bottom of my glass, but I’d emptied it long ago.

•

I spent most of the next week browsing Orexis forums, searching for reasons I should be happy to be off the O. I read plenty of accounts from folks like me who were told to stop taking Orexis because of the side effects. Several people reported disregarding their doctor’s orders, usually with gruesome results; some swore that over-the-counter alternatives worked just as well, without the side effects. The only posts I saw about the newer, injectable version were from people who were hoping to be admitted to the clinical trials.

I was particularly interested in the accounts of O-intolerant folks whose relationships survived without the drug. They were few and far between, to be sure, but the people who went cold turkey typically shared their experiences with religious fervor. They assured us lurkers: it wasn’t just possible to have a happy relationship without Orexis; indeed, that was the only way to have a truly happy relationship. I suspected that at least one of these posts was written by Carter.

But if I’m being honest, it wasn’t this online escapism that buoyed me through an otherwise dreadful week. It was the idea of seeing Russell again.

I probably should have questioned whether there was some connection between my fear of Frances leaving me and my eagerness to dive headfirst into a crush on some guy I barely knew. But off I went, daydreaming about futures where Russell and I eloped to Alaska and he spent his days shirtlessly chopping wood for our fireplace. Sometimes Frances was in these daydreams, too, and the three of us had formed a happy, stable triad, where we all loved one another without pharmaceutical help.

In the meantime, Frances and I continued to avoid each other. Some part of me knew that we should have been talking about this, perhaps fighting, having some honest discussions about what it meant for us to stop taking Orexis. But we’d never needed to work out our problems before. We lacked the vocabulary to do so.

On one particularly dreary evening in which Frances and I sat in silence on opposite sides of our living room, both texting other people, Frances suggested we break this bleak cycle and go out. I couldn’t think of a reason not to, so an hour later we were outside of a club, passing a flask back and forth, shivering in line behind a dozen twentysomethings who were already too drunk to communicate without shouting. They wore trendy outfits that seemed designed to distinguish their generation from ours; in my jeans and button-down shirt, I felt like a chaperone on a school trip. Frances, on the other hand, could’ve fit right in: she’d gone for a somewhat gothic aesthetic that suited our mood and made her look classically cool. 

Even after we made it inside, we stayed in line: the line to get in had become a line for drinks; the unflattering yellow streetlights were swapped for unflattering strobing black lights. A syncopated reggaeton beat was blasting; most of the people around us were swaying to it. Frances was dancing, too—it started as just a bobbing of her head, then she deftly spread the undulation throughout her body. 

“Loosen up those legs, Señor Robles,” she said, placing her hands on my hips. 

I had a prudish urge to resist dancing anywhere other than the designated dance floor. I knew I was being the wettest of blankets, but I stayed rooted, feet glued in place.

“Touch me, baby … ” Frances sang along with the chorus. She was smiling at me, trying to get me in the mood.

I could sense a decision point approaching. I could reciprocate her effort, try to enjoy the night, dance with her and hope our performance of happiness precipitated the real thing. Or I could continue to sulk.

“I don’t know this song,” I said.

“Yes, you do. Everyone knows this.”

“Everyone but me, I guess.”

Frances pulled away from me. “Why do you always do this? This whole no-one-understands-me thing?”

“I’m just saying I don’t know the song.”

“Cool. I’m going to go dance. Come find me when there’s a song you know. Or don’t.”

She was halfway to the dance floor before I could protest. Her black clothes blended with the darkness of the club, absorbed it. I watched her head jostle through a thicket of bodies until I could no longer distinguish it as hers.

I ordered a whiskey sour at the bar before heading to the dance floor. Some sort of synth-heavy pop song was now blaring; I felt like I was in an MRI machine. When I found Frances, she was dancing with another guy, some beefy, tight-shirted college kid whose arms were the size of my legs. Her choice of dance partner seemed deliberate, designed to inflame the toxically masculine part of me. He was grinding on Frances from behind, and his hands were roving each of her legs, getting closer and closer to meeting in the middle. 

It occurred to me that one of the things I’d lost since being off Orexis was a generous lens through which to view Frances’s actions. Maybe love just meant always assuming the best intentions from your partner; maybe Orexis was more about empathy than attraction. Frances and I could choose to view each other’s actions—my flirtation with Russell, her increasingly sexual dancing with this brute—as deriving from an insecurity about our own relationship and our sloppy attempts to communicate this insecurity to one another. Maybe, on Orexis, I’d look at Frances and feel what she was feeling, and my desire to make her happy would triumph over my own jealousy and hurt. Maybe someday there’ll be a universal version of Orexis where you view everyone through this lens, not just your partner, where you’d see all these sweaty and striving people as beautiful and equally deserving of love, even the ones who were flailing like beached carp on the dance floor, even the ones who were feeling up your girlfriend a few feet in front of you.

But I felt none of that now. I skulked back to the bar and ordered another drink. When I checked my phone, I saw that Russell had texted. Seeing his name on my phone’s lock screen gave me a perverse, possessive sort of pleasure. I waited a moment before opening his message, savoring the feeling.

How’s date night?

I responded immediately: looking pretty grim. what’re you up to?

I’m at the Dolphin. Want to join?

I had no time to formulate a response; Frances sat down on a barstool to my right, leaving an empty seat between us. Sweat had caused some of her mascara to run, heightening her gothic aesthetic.

“How’s Russell?” she asked.

I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. “How’s Tarzan? Teach him any words yet?”

Frances was smiling, but it wasn’t in response to anything I’d said or done. “You know, I’d forgotten what it felt like to date you before Orexis.”

Her eyes were crawling over me, and I felt like she was mentally cataloging all the flaws that she could finally see clearly without the rose-colored glasses of Orexis: my psoriatic, acne-scarred skin; my prematurely receding hairline; my birdlike, crooked nose with one nostril more prominent than the other. For the first time in four years, I felt self-conscious in front of her. 

“Don’t you feel it, too?” she asked. “Don’t you feel the difference?”

“No,” I lied. I drained the rest of my drink. “I love you. Do you still love me?”

“Sweetie,” she said. She was smiling that inward smile again. “It’s easy to love you. But it’s hard to be attracted to you.”

I tried to come up with some response, something that could put back the broken pieces of this conversation. But all I felt now was hurt, felt it in my entire body, a child-being-bullied sort of hurt.

“What are you doing?” I managed.

The scene around me had become blurry—I had to blink away tears to see clearly. I became dimly aware that a bartender was watching this interaction unfold, and for some reason, it was important to me to hold myself together in front of him.

The reality of my situation was setting in, and it felt like it was closing in on me from all sides. 

A new song started playing, and it appeared to exert a gravitational pull on Frances. She was swaying again, inching closer to the dance floor, this time making no attempt to get me to join her.

Before she disappeared into the crowd, she said, “I’m going to have fun tonight. You should, too.”

After Frances disappeared, I ordered another drink and tried to ignore the void that was opening inside me.

The Dolphin was just a few blocks away. It was just Russell there tonight, apparently; Carter was out with his work friends. That was what Frances meant by having fun tonight, right?

My legs were carrying me before my mind caught up to them. Or maybe my mind never did catch up to them—it was still at the bar with Frances, and I was happy to leave it behind. 

I don’t remember what I said to Russell before I kissed him. Maybe we didn’t talk at all. I just remember our mouths lapping against one another, occasionally clinking teeth, before he gently pushed me away and said, “You’re drunk.”

Russell sat with me at the bar while I drank water and tried to keep the void from swallowing me whole. I wanted to tell him that this was not the glorious union that I’d been envisioning in my head all week. 

The reality of my situation was setting in, and it felt like it was closing in on me from all sides. My entire life was bound up with Frances: my finances, my friends, my memories from the past five years. Who would take Harold? How could we disentangle our lives? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay together, even if the pills no longer worked?

“Can I tell you a secret?” Russell said. He was looking at me with kindness, but I imagined it was the sort of kindness you’d direct at a child.

“I’m still taking O,” he said. “The blue pills.”

Half-formed thoughts sloshed around my mind. Are you saying you don’t love Carter, I wanted to ask. Why not leave him? Why not take the pills with someone else? But in my fragile state, I only trusted myself with one-word responses. “What?”

“I pay for the prescription in cash so Carter doesn’t see it on my credit card statement.” 

“Why?”

Russell smiled, and he looked at me as though the answer were too obvious to be said. “Let’s get you home.”

•

It wasn’t Harold’s growls that woke me up the next morning, or the late-morning sun crashing through our living room windows. It was pain. Pain everywhere, the hangover duo of headache and nausea, topped off with a feeling of dread that had settled into my muscles like lead. I had to strain to recall what happened the night before, but whatever it was, the feeling in my body convinced me that it was dire, possibly irreversible. 

I’d also ended up on the couch. I imagined that Frances was asleep in our bedroom, but I was afraid to look.

When I rolled over to pet my apologies to Harold, something crunched under my arm—the brochure the doctor had given us. Had I been reading it last night? The couple on the front beamed at me with those lobotomized smiles, promising me a return to the days of easy love on Orexis.

I flipped the brochure over. Emblazoned across the back was the phone number to enroll in the clinical trial. Beneath that was a fine-print list of warnings and possible side effects; this version of the drug had fewer known side effects, and, thankfully, none of them featured the word crisis.

At that moment, Frances emerged from the bedroom. She had one sock on, was wearing one of my old workout shirts, and her hair was a tangled mess. As she walked closer to me, I could see that tears had left streaks of eyeliner and mascara on her face. Her lower lip was trembling. 

“I stained the pillows,” she said, with a half-laugh, half-sob.

I handed Frances the brochure. I could feel her warmth, could feel my body instinctively wanting to be closer to hers. She opened her arms, and I folded into them.