Alone Again Or

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Alone Again Or
A Novel
By Michael Bassette
2006
Part 1: Sleeping
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Syd sat in his one room apartment looking out his window onto the street several stories below. He ate a peanut butter sandwich that stuck to the roof of his mouth like paste and tried to dislodge it with the bitter taste of foc. His normal midnight snack.
He thought about how he was in a poor area of Steeple City, and how even though the people drove battery cars and only ran the room disinfecting Spaires Machines if they had children, the people walking in the street below were happier than him. The foc, an anti-depressant and stimulant, only made his head pound so he set the mug down.?
Down in the street along the sidewalk he saw a young couple holding hands. They walked through the cool summer night together. The boy wore a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a screw; a sign he was of the Neo Freudian faith. The girl wore a circular medal. From the height he couldn't tell what religion it was but he knew she wasn't a Neo Freud. He hated Neo Freuds and felt his stomach churn with bile.?
The foc, he thought, I need to cut back.
He knew that he was really avoiding thinking about a topic that was in the back of his head. It had been there for weeks. He wanted to go to the agency and adopt a wife. He blocked the usual pattern of thought: finding someone the usual way hadn't worked for him since University, he would think, and at twenty four he was sick of sleeping by himself at night. And who would look down on him for it? Only his brother, and he hated Dave.?
In instinct he filled his mouth with the bitter liquid from the mug and felt his eyes dry and his thoughts accelerate even more as the drug passed through the membranes in his mouth before he swallowed it.?
You're going to drink yourself into a spiraling thought depression, he thought, you're going to be depressed for hours. Again. You need to stop doing this to yourself.?
To stop himself from drinking more he stood up and dumped the brown liquid into the sink on the wall behind him. The apartment had a bed, a sink, a desk which doubled as he dinner table, and a television. Showers and toilets were communal. The rent was low, but he had millions of dollars under his bed in boxes. He couldn't use a bank; The Mayor's Police would ask where the money was coming from, ask how an un-employed university kid living on the outskirts of the city, almost on the city walls, had made that much money?
Three successive knocks pounded out on his door. His racing brain pictured the mayor's police, in grey suits with handguns drawn. The rational part of his brain reminded him that he wasn't under lockdown; the alarm in his room had never sounded. The police couldn't be outside.
His door had electrical problems. The current that powered the electro magnets was shorted and the door itself actually carried some current through the metal reinforcement strips. The electro magnets that could hold the door shut under his command or under the command of The Mayor's Police if they ever came for him. He heard a soft female voice swearing and he knew she'd touched the metal part of the door when she knocked and received a slight electric shock.
Syd opened the door and a pretty young girl stepped in. Her hair was blonde and long, and her breasts stood high on her chest. The skin along her face and upper neck was smooth like glass; she had the look of someone raised with money. If her face had not been surgically altered, Syd thought, he cheeks would probably be flushed red with the panic of having to enter the outer arc of the city. A university girl, probably.
Her skirt was short and Syd forced himself not to stare. The girl wore the necklace of The Followers of Kenna, and Kenna's girls did not like men staring at them.?
Or men at all, Syd thought.
"I was on my way out," Syd said, "I don't have time for negotiations. I have some good stuff, green and not too tasty, but it'll give you the shakes like the hangover from a week long whiskey bender. Only much more pleasant."
The girl touched the necklace which hung above her artificially raised cleavage subconsciously, and stood with her legs slightly crossed.
She's trying to manipulate me, Syd thought; she's not new at this exchange.
"Do I look like the kind of girl that would be happy with green?" she said.
"I really was on my way out," Syd said, "you want brown, it's four dollars a spoon. I don't have any white, no one