We Live in Water by Jess Walter Page A

did I know Marci was using Replexen? I don’t think so. It’s hard to separate what you suspect from what you know later. Certainly, she seemed off that spring, disoriented, nervous, wearing more makeup, eating more, yet somehow getting thinner. Then I got promoted at work, to the Asian desk, only days after Marci’s job was eliminated. We’re fine, I kept telling her, and I meant financially. But it must have seemed insane to her, the way I just kept saying we were fine. That March there was a story on the sim-tweets about a couple in the Magnolia neighborhood who had chosen to go zombie. I turned away from the screen to Marci and I just . . . asked. Would you ever?
    I think she’d been waiting for me to bring it up. “Yes,” she said quietly.
    “Yes, what?” I asked.
    Yes, she had used Replexen. A few times. Snorted it.
    I asked, “Recently?” She slumped in her chair.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “How recently?”
    “I’m using it now,” she whispered.
    We were in the living room. I stood. And for some reason, the question that popped into my mind was this one: “Where did you get it?”
    She glanced up at me and, in that moment, I suppose we were thinking the same thing—why, when Marci tells me she’s taking the most dangerous club drug in the world, the first thing to pop into my mind would not be her health, but where she had gotten it.
    A few months earlier, Marci and I had gone through an especially difficult time. Her company had just been bought up and the inevitable squeeze had begun. Marci had wanted to leave Seattle, to move closer to her family, but my company was thriving, so I said no. She said I was imperious and blind to reality; I said she was defeatist. We split up for a few weeks before we realized we’d made a mistake and got back together. It was only after she came back that time that I began to suspect Marci had gone back to her previous boyfriend, Andrew. He was a club owner and a nonbie , one of the lucky fifteen percent who could use Replexen without any of the undesirable zombie side effects.
    So I asked: “Did you get the drugs from Andrew?”
    “No,” she said, “I got them from a woman I used to work with.”
    “What woman?”
    “You don’t know her.”
    “Why would you do that, Marci?”
    “Oh, Owen,” she said, “this isn’t about you. It’s about me.”
    It was the cliché that got to me. (“Yeah, you’re right, it’s about you, Marci . . . you’re becoming a fucking zombie! ”) I yanked her sleeve up and saw the red marks against her white skin, and Jesus, shooting it is twice as dangerous as snorting it. Once your skin starts to go you’ve already done permanent damage. She shrank away from me, cried, apologized, promised to get treatment, and when we went to bed that night I honestly believed we could get through this, that we’d caught it in time. I spent the next day applying for loans from all the food-service-banks—Starbucks-Financial, Walmart-Schwab, KFC/B-of-A. I would have debited my apartment, my car, my organs for her treatment, but I came home from work that night and she was gone. No sim, no note, no nothing.
    I simmed our friends and her parents, her old coworkers, but no one had heard from Marci. I even went to see her old boyfriend, Andrew, at his club in what was still called the U-District, even though the state university there had shut down years earlier. Andrew was bald and lean—a little taller than me, with a long neck and cavernous eyes, pock marks on his sunken cheeks. Nonbies always have that feral look, as if they just finished running a road race in their clothes, or they haven’t slept in months. We had met once, in passing, but I would never have picked him out of a lineup, so many years had been put on his face. Andrew came from behind the bar, and I could smell the nonbie on him—like a soup of sweat, smoke, and old bacon. He stared at my suit and tie, at my wool coat.
    “Slumming, Owen?”
    I looked around the seedy