I didn’t have any methyl-thiobutyrate. It was shitcanned with whatever was in my apartment when I got evicted. It wasn’t illegal to own it. It was basically a garden variety supplement, so it just went in the trash, I’m sure. I wasn’t really sure what to do about Pearl and her friends though. Normally I just dissolved it in water. It had an odor, but otherwise it wasn’t really anything of note. I used what little money I had left to buy some paper Dixie cups. I bought a bottle of water and ripped the label off. I was worried it was too suspicious, so I stole some salt from a local fast-food chain and threw it in. I put my concoction in my backpack and headed off the to meet Pearl and her friends.

Everyone was a little suspicious as to why a top rate scientist like myself was still wearing the same clothes and served his remedy out of a water bottle and Dixie cups, but I think hope got the best of them. I did warn them that it couldn’t mask everything and the more they used the less likely it was to work. That wasn’t a lie. Everything else was.

The truly sad part about it all? I could’ve afforded the methyl-thiobutyrate. I could’ve done things “right”, I just chose not to. Why? I don’t know. I guess it was because I was broke. $8 means something when it’s 10% of your net worth. It’s not like it was going to help this crowd anyway.

“Look, my uhh…connection said he can only move the list around so much, so we agreed on ten. One of the girls dropped out for your position. So, we are even, right?”

“Sure. Sounds fair,” I said.

“This is all the info.” She passed a piece of paper into my hand. “You need to make sure you get all this right, or things won’t get processed right and you won’t get in. Do you understand?”

“Yep. Sounds great,” I said.

“Do you really think this will work?”

“Absolutely,” I lied emphatically.

Do I seem like the bad guy in this story? I’m not. Maybe you don’t like me, or you don’t like my actions. I understand. This story has a villain, but it isn’t me. You’ll see.

“Tell me how this deal works,” I said.

She lit a cigarette and smoked while she talked. “You remember 20 years ago all that shit with the fucking gunk that was melting people’s faces off and shit? Some fucking asshole dictator from an ocean island tried to kill everyone? And they had to bomb Kansas City? Everything got all fucked up after they tried to fix that shit. Like the drugs they gave to fix it just killed people. Anyway, I know a guy from work (I mentally noted “John”, not my name but the other meaning…also I just realized I was named after a frequenter of hookers and a name for toilet) who is at one of those Pharma places. He said he can get us in to a clinical trial and because of that deal they gotta pay us now. A bunch of money. Cause of that shit with the face melting junk. You just gotta show up. We got all the papers. Bring those papers and you’re good. They say it isn’t all that safe, but I don’t got a lot of other choices. Maybe you do though. I just thought you should know. So now you know.”

I did remember what happened. Everyone remembered it. Grey Plague. Facemelt. Melt. Jeep. G-bombs. A thousand names. Some nutsack Banana Republic island dictator found some fucking death virus or something on a comet or in a cave or up a monkey’s ass or God knows where. No one knows what it is. No one even knows where it came from. Anyway, he dirty bombs Middle America and threatens to destroy the entire US with it for crimes against humanity or whatever else we were doing over there at the moment. 24 hours later Kansas City looks like a warzone. People’s faces literally melting off left and right. Death toll in the millions. They had to firebomb the whole area, including the people still left.

It’s not something you forget.

Either way, the dipshit that attacked us seemed to forget that on a world-wide scale you only get to commit atrocities if you are a first world country. Seven countries bombed the living shit out of the aggressor and that’s not even the bad part. They bundled up a bunch of the corpses and dropped them all over this tiny island. I don’t remember the name of the place, but last I checked no one is allowed in or out. Ever again. Ever. They bombed the whole thing to rubble, and it’s just gone now.

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All the face melting shit, Grey Plague was the name they used in the news, it was stored away God knows where and they cordoned off Kansas City and made it a federal offense punishable by death to even be caught there. Some teenager kids thought they would get cute and went in like three days after and got caught. There was this uproar about how the government baited them, but it didn’t matter. They executed all three on national TV to Super Bowl level ratings. No one went back anymore, but that didn’t stop the corporations from trying to make money off it. Every single military and pharmaceutical group on the planet immediately started applying for licenses to work on it, but no one made any progress. If it touches human cells, it just annihilates everything. When one of the Big Pharma companies said they had come up with some antidote or some shit that needed testing in humans, a few people offered to do it. No one lived. After that most people stopped working on it. Too dangerous, no profit. Now the government has a rule that if you are one of the first entrants into a potentially high-risk clinical trial, Pharma must compensate you substantially. In exchange, Pharma was basically given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to people. You get rich quick if you don’t die but getting in is almost impossible. If there is one thing America has more of than it needs, its human capital. A whole lot of folks out there value their life a lot less than a hundred grand. Like us I guess. Like me.

There we were, the bright and shining epitome of modern Urban America, a collection of sex workers, drug addicts, fuckups, has-beens, never-wases and ne’er-do-wells suffering from everything from fetal alcohol syndrome to advanced crotch-rot, all of us ready and willing to stake a $100,000 dice roll using nothing but our own lives for collateral. God Bless America!

We stood together in a shitty little park in a shitty neighborhood. Pearl’s friends each took a small paper cup and downed it. She did the same. Some complained about the taste. One girl said it made her nauseous. Placebo effect is funny. After it was all over, everyone left. Pearl stayed behind just a second. I wondered if it was intentional.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she said.

“Uhhh…” I muttered.

“Yea?” she asked.

“Are you doing anything now?”

“No.”

“Want to like…get something to eat?” God dammit, that was dumb. I don’t have any money. Should’ve said coffee.

She brushed her hair back from eyes and I saw how magnificent she was.

Some girls are beautiful because they are perfect. Their faces are symmetrical. Their hair is shiny and kempt. Their skin glows. Their figure perfectly aligns with designer clothing manufacturer’s expectations of women. These girls end up on the front of magazines that sell makeup and hair products.

Pearl was beautiful for other reasons. Her teeth weren’t perfect. Her blonde hair was almost too thick. Her skin was creamy but freckled in a way that made her accessible. Some of those freckles looked like track marks. Her body wasn’t toned, but she had perfect curves. Girls like her also ended up on magazine covers, but usually the kind with a black bag over the top so the kids can’t see.

She was built for sex. Built for fucking really. Not 40-year-olds putting it together for old time’s sake, but porno shit that 20-year-old college kids cranked down to five times in a day. She wasn’t sexy like those oiled and tanned bikini clad bunnies of the 1980s, the artificially infused way where oversized globs of plastic hang off the rotting corpse of someone who long since lost any trace of beauty. Her clothes were too small because her proportions weren’t realistic. They were real. She was the kind of girl that couldn’t wear a size 4 because her tits would fall out the front of her tank top and couldn’t wear a size 8 because there was twice as much fabric as needed everywhere else. She didn’t wear make-up because she’d never be just “pretty”. She wasn't the kind of girl you saw yourself marrying. She was here to fuck. Her blush was natural. Her lips were pouty. Some girls have bedroom eyes. Hers were more like “the bedroom, the couch, twice in the car, and after a couple of pills, three more times anywhere we can find.” No one taught her how to strip. No one needed to teach her anything. She was a Phoenician fertility Goddess poured into tight jeans, an ill-fitting shirt that couldn’t help but expose most of her shiny black bra, and some Converse All-Stars that barely held together.

For a strung-out 28-year-old with a semi-permanent erection, a serious case of withdrawal and no prospects in the world, she looked like heaven.

I stared at her and wondered if this was a re-kindling? Had we been together before. The last few months were…not really there in my memory. There were nights at The Buffalo where many of us went home together. I saw at least one girl I remembered fucking in the crowd that had already left. Time spent the in the back room. The room behind the Champagne room. Was she there? Had I been with her before? Maybe she came to me because we had a connection. Had we been in love? Was this the one that got away?

While I was contemplating our future together, I barely processed her answer. “No.” She walked off but said, “Good luck.”

I ran after her. “Wait up…did I…did I miss something?”

But she was already gone. As I watched her leave, I realized I had missed a lot of my own life recently and I wondered what I had missed with Pearl.