After Leanne, nothing for an hour or so, then Buddy had an appointment booked with his GP, Doctor Blinkhorn, up on Cook Street. “Depression,” he had told the receptionist when she asked the reason for his visit.
Not that he felt any diagnosis a doctor could render might cure him. Whatever’s infected me won’t show up on x-rays or go thump-thump in a stethoscope. But in the spirit of due diligence, he followed through with the checkup. Perhaps there was a capsule—a sort of digestible depth charge of micro-bots—that would attack the dense matter of despair coagulating inside him without causing too much collateral damage.
Not a happy pill, he shuddered, but something that might restore an earnest equilibrium.
Dr. Blinkhorn, a very nice, very professional young man who took Buddy on when his colleague Dr. Cook on Cook Street retired, delivered his diagnosis in a small, clinically cubical, whitish room equipped with all the furniture and instruments needed to measure the symptoms of Human Being. He poked, jabbed, squeezed, tapped, and asked his questions.
How I was sleeping? Was I eating properly? Did I feel down all day, part of the day, or in sudden, crushing episodes? Then, gingerly, about suicidal ideation.
In the end, he prescribed Zoloft, and told Buddy to book an appointment the following week ‘so we can check up on your emotional chemistry’.
“We’ll get you into a higher orbit,” he promised cheerfully.
Back in the Matrix, Buddy called up the Everyday Health site on his mobile. Zoloft, it informed him, is the brand name for the ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor steraline’, which works by ‘controlling the levels of serotonin (a neurotransmitter) in the brain’.
An accompanying diagram depicted neurones as one-eyed octopuses, entangled in some sort of sexually suggestive embrace, their intertwining tentacles exchanging chemically encoded data across synaptic gaps without ever actually making contact.
Sort of like waltzing close up, but never touching. No wonder we’re so fucked up. Buddy made a pained face. How can anything like a sane thought or emotion possibly make it through that kind of circuitry?
We’re spirit, the Matrix’s radio chirped.
Oh fuck! Not you again.
No matter how close our fingers come to touching, we can never heal the wounds of separation. We are alone, yearning to touch, but perpetually, eternally isolated in an uncertain world.
Who are you this time?
An English poet, it responded bashfully. A dead English poet, then it switched off.
Buddy grinned. What if neurons could actually escape their embodied state, become individual entities walking around on their gangly limbs? Spludge, spludge, spludge, he heard them stalking, did a 360 scan of the Matrix’s windows as if the neuroctopi might actually be out there. Spudge, spludge, spludge, their suction cup axion terminals closing in, a sound that suggested they could probably climb walls and squeeze through unsealed windows.
A sudden, ghastly vision superimposed itself on his waking reality. The gargantuan neurones’ feet must be receptors, too, wriggling and squirming, perpetually on the hunt for information. Data! What might they do, now that they were out of body and mind, to achieve intellectual climax?
Certainty! What might they fasten themselves to in their urgent quest for knowledge and stimulation—more and more of it—until they had achieved ultimate proof?
Buddy sighed. He turned the key in the Matrix’s ignition. Told himself not to panic.
Next: Comfort Food