Dr. Newfangle Stapleton
A story by Joe DeBritz. This is #24 of 52 short stories that will be written and released every week this year.
Dr. Newfangle Stapleton woke up, he was tired, the weight of the day felt concentrated in his eyelids. The night before he had taken some kind of weed edible from his research assistant. He was unsure if the effects had worn off yet. He located his hand and looked at it, he examined both sides. They appeared to still be there.
Newfangle’s assistant was a pretty good guy, but he was a social climber—a star fucker—as it was called in the industry. This man, Raj was his name, was fixated on sucking up to the department head, Newfangle’s boss, who was completely not interested, until he found out that Raj had drugs. Certain men slightly passed middle age act like giddy school girls around drugs. Rajesh opened a case, a little wooden case full of pills, some acid tabs, there might have been true old fashioned weed in there, the green stuff, Newfangle wasn’t sure.
He’d been riding Raj kinda hard the week before, so he felt it was okay to let him have his moment of being cool at the cocktail/dinner party that Mary Festelman was throwing. Mary taught comparative linguistics to students from all different language backgrounds. She was the preeminent authority in the field of indecipherable communication. Raj tried to suck up to her too but she was more of a drinker.
Dr. Stapleton threw the blanket off of him and walked to the bathroom. He looked into the mirror, then shimmied over to the toilet. His pee was a deep yellow, almost orange, which helped explain the headache that was crushing his spirit. He must have had seven or eight negronis the night before. Mary had made big batches of them in pitchers, she had other cocktails too but Newfangle believed in sticking with one drink all night. Plus he was always attracted to the savage bitterness of a proper negroni. He lumbered down the stairs after throwing on his bathrobe. He hoped breakfast and coffee would improve his condition.
Raj presented the edibles to Newfangle and his department head, Dr. Jerry Middleblower, PHD, sometime after dessert was served and around Newfangle’s fourth negroni. It was after the peak of the buzz he had after two on an empty stomach, he started to level out.
Newfangle was half listening to Raj explain the effects of the capsules he had but he also overheard Scandal Mirrorborrough, distinguished professor of alternative medicine, telling a joke holding a martini in her hand.
“You know…a martini is like a woman’s breast.”
A scared research assistant, a man of maybe twenty six, looked up at her with his nervous brown eyes and said, “how so?”
“Well, one is not enough…but two is just right.”
He smiled, unsure of how to react, she continued, “three is too many,” she paused and smiled at the poor kid, “and four is a party.”
Newfangle turned away and looked back at Raj.
“Do you want one, boss?” Raj smiled. He had an evil little mischievous smile.
Newfangle poured coffee into the big machine his ex-wife had bought on one of the three credit cards she maxed out before she left him. He wondered why he had said yes to Raj. He wondered why they only repossessed big items. If you defaulted on your mortgage, the bank foreclosed on your house. If you missed your car payments, they came to take your car. But if you bought a bunch of plastic bullshit, coffee makers, blenders, food processors, a crib for a nonexistent child and three closets worth of clothes, they didn’t come to take that. They made you hold onto it, and even if you declared bankruptcy, you still got to keep the stuff. Newfangle had always wondered that. He’d always wondered why that was different from stealing.
If you extrapolate the possibilities, you really start to understand the way the legal system functions. The basic rule is, the more primitive the crime, the harsher it will be punished. Say you bash a man’s head in with a rock, that’s pretty primitive, it’s really quite natural, used to happen all the time, if you do that, they’ll lock you up and throw away the key. But if you design some drug that ruins the lives of millions of people and causes untold suffering and death, they just ask you firmly to stop. It matters not how insidious the crime is, it matters more how one executes it. We can blame God for that, for it was Cain who murdered Abel, they didn’t work together to defraud the American taxpayer out of billions of dollars. Newfangle looked down as he poured the tiny brown beans into the coffee grinder. He found acute pleasure in pulverizing the beans.
He remembered speaking to Remy Martindale, a non-human primate behaviorist after he’d taken Raj’s dastardly edible the night before. Remy was fixated on one thing his whole career: laughter.
“We take for granted that monkeys laugh,” Remy said to Newfangle.
“What do you mean we take it for granted?”
“I mean, it’s revelatory, it’s amazing, if other animals laughed we’d be astonished, but because chimpanzees look humanoid, we take it for granted.”
“I don’t really see what you mean. Aren’t they closest to us?”
“Sure, in some ways, but there is no evidence that they are closest to us in intelligence, or rational thought.”
“I see.”
“They find stuff funny, that’s a beautiful thing. That means they expect things, laughter is often a form of surprise.”
“Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”
“I might be.”
“How do we even know what we think of them laughing is the same as how we understand human laughter?”
“Brain scans, we observe the same phenomenon.”
“What about other animals?”
“What about them?”
“Maybe dogs laugh, you just don’t recognize it.”
“Because they aren’t primates.”
“Yeah they don’t make noise or whatever,” Newfangle had a hard time forming his thoughts all of the sudden.
“It’s an interesting point, Newy.”
“Listen, maybe you’re too bogged down in what you think you know.”
“Huh?”
“I think you are the one who takes monkeys laughing for granted.”
“I don’t think so I—”
“You’re studying what you have observed, you’re trying to confirm a bias based on your limited human perspective. You need to rethink the way you work”
“I just…I mean I—”
“You should live among animals for at least a year.”
“How would I do that?”
“Figure it out,” Newfangle started laughing.
“See, you’re not serious, Newy, I was interested,” Remy took a long drink from his beer.
“I am serious.”
Remy smiled in an insincere way. He tapped Newy on the thigh and got up and walked away. The silence after he left was deafening. Newy’s field of vision began to tighten. He looked around the party. The men all looked like they were wearing wigs. The women all seemed to be laughing, simultaneously but separately, at different topics. He wondered how much they influenced each other. He felt hollow and scared. Why were all of these people fake pretending to talk to each other? He felt like he walked into a rehearsal for an amateur play.
The coffee dripped down into the pot. Newy snuck a mug before it was done brewing. He did so without allowing the drip to burn, he was very skilled, even in this state. Remy was sensitive. Newy wondered if he should apologize. He thought not, but he could call him and ask if he wanted to go to lunch. That gesture would absolve him. He enjoyed going to lunch with Remy, but he often forgot to ask, and Remy never did. Even though sometimes he’d say things like, I haven’t seen you in so long, we never have lunch anymore. Newy felt like shaking him sometimes.
Remy was one of those people, Newfangle thought, as he buttered some toast, who paradoxically seemed to love him, to almost worship, to venerate him in a way that made him uncomfortable, but at the exact same time, was perpetually disappointed with Newfangle’s behavior. Their relationship oscillated between an uncomfortable imbalance in affection to uncomfortable tension. Newy was either made uncomfortable by Remy’s effusive complementing or he’d find himself stuck in a weird position where he was trying to win back Remy’s friendship because of some offense he had committed without even knowing it. It was exhausting.
Newfangle was usually in control of his interactions, relationships, and was universally well-liked, but he often would allow a single feeling of doubt to paralyze him. All of the sudden the world would feel like it was crashing around him. He’d wonder how everything he’d ever said was perceived and he’d start to wonder if he were actually a pariah, that people just humored out of desperate pity. Other days he’d wake up feeling like a hero, and he’d completely understand why little worms like Remy worshipped him.
His ex-wife used to tell him that he couldn’t go back and forth so quickly and so often.
“Why not?” he asked her. They were arguing in the kitchen after a party at her colleague’s house.
“Because it’s weird. One minute you’re holding court and everyone is laughing at your stories. You’re just telling them about going to the store and they’re loving it, and then you just take a few sips of wine and go mute.”
“I don’t understand, other people were talking.”
“And you stopped contributing. Why? Because it wasn’t about you?”
“No, I just was in my head about what I said.”
“This is what I mean. You can’t do that.”
“I thought you liked it when I tried to be funny. I was trying really hard. Everyone was eating it up.”
“Then you just stopped though. That doesn’t work. You disrupted the whole flow of the conversation. It’s like you don’t understand that there is a hierarchy, there is a way people interact. If you come out swinging you have to keep it up. People don’t know their place anymore. We all got used to you controlling things. You’re like a bull in a chinashop, then you transform into a guy and look around and say, why is all this glass broken?”
“You aren’t making any sense, these are the ravings of a lunatic.”
“Don’t do that!” she screamed.
“What?”
“You know what! You’re undermining me, making me out to be crazy. You’re the weird one. You were so quiet and short with everyone after your twenty minute stand up routine. People don’t know where they stand with you…it’s…it’s…off-putting. You intimidate people!”
“What? I’m nice.”
“I know you are but you don’t act nice. You start being so warm and inviting then you shut off, I see it confuses people…they walk on eggshells the rest of the dinner.”
“I just think you’re expecting a lot from me at your company dinner.”
“I just want you to be the person that you are, that I’ve seen you be, how you are when you’re comfortable. That is not too much to ask.”
Newfangle decided he was still a little bit high. He had been fixated on everyone’s hair last night. He was sure it wasn’t real. Especially the men who looked like they had plastic helmets on, in the shape of hair. The women kept touching theirs. They kept touching their hair after they laughed. He couldn’t get the chimps laughing out of his head. He looked over at Remy sulking in the corner by the punch. As crazy as it sounds, he felt like his relationship with Remy was a lot like the relationships he had with girls in high school. He always remembered they would get upset with him, and he’d spend hours trying to figure out why they were upset, then he would finally figure it out, and he’s spend so much effort trying to get back into their good graces and when he finally did, he’d remember that they didn’t even really get along that well, but he often kept seeing them. It was like they didn’t even like him either, they had this sort of incorrect perception of who he was and they spent their days trying to figure out why he kept not quite living up to their expectations.
He poured a big glass of water. This had to cure him, if it didn’t, he’d surely die. He sipped the water. It was always the highest highs he was chasing, that had to be the problem. Those conversations where he was absolutely firing on all cylinders. Everything he said just fit in. People were laughing. He was in the zone, that perfect buzz. Two cocktails on an empty stomach. He could feel the world around him, but it was a little bit fuzzy on the edges. He let his guard down for a second, everything he said was authentic, he just let it out. But then, he ate dinner, he had more cocktails, someone offered him drugs and he couldn’t say no even though he knew it wouldn’t help. He chased the highs of conversation but he also craved that deep, scary, uncomfortable feeling of a conversation going sideways. He couldn’t help it. Like people who can’t look away from a car crash, except he was driving. It might have been subconscious, but he couldn’t stop. He was deeply unsettled but maybe not uncomfortable, something else, like excited.
The water didn’t cure him, so he poured another glass and walked back up the stairs. He placed the glass of water on his night stand and got back into bed. He was looping through his mind back to his relationships with women. He had the same problem. He chased those feelings of connection so much he forced them. His relationships were always either too serious or the exact opposite. He couldn’t maintain a steady, casual fling. He couldn’t gradually get serious with someone. He had to turn it all the way on, or shut it off.
This was why he chose Raj to be his research assistant. Raj was essentially evil. He was cynical in the most basic sense. He trusted no one and nothing. His total lack of faith in institutions had made him perfect to advance in one. He was also funny, cutting, and easy to be around. Newfangle could say anything to him and he wouldn’t ever be offended. He wasn’t capable of being offended, so Newy felt safe. Just a blank slate of forgiveness, but that would imply that he registered offense, so not forgiveness—just a blank slate.
Raj was in a particularly savage mood the night before. He seemed to be on a mission to get everyone at the party as fucked up as possible. He would challenge other research assistants to drinking games and offer them psychedelic treats. He had a legendary, pathological tolerance to drugs and alcohol. It was shocking. He approached Newy at one point in the night.
“Hey man,” he smiled, he was so naturally charismatic, it pissed off Newfangle, but he couldn’t help liking him.
“Hey Rajy boy, how are you making out?”
“Good, lot of inroads tonight, professor, tons of inroads. I would say that I have overperformed tonight. Once again, I have outclassed even my own high expectations for myself,” his eyes were bulging out of his head.
“Excellent news. And do I get anything out of this?”
“You get everything,” he smiled again, “I exist to serve you.”
“Until you don’t.”
“Until I don't then I will be forced to take you out of your misery. But since we’ve had a good time together, I will do it humanely. You’ll hardly feel a thing.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Say, Dr. S., do I look fucked up to you?”
Newy looked into Raj’s eyes.
“Not especially.”
“Awesome, you know Dr. Contrinelli, right? He’s straight-edge isn’t he?”
“He’s sober, yes.”
“Same thing.”
“Not really.”
“Don’t split hairs with me, sir, come on. I want to talk to him but I don’t want to seem fucked up, since he’s sober.”
“Ten years ago he would have been lying face down in a pool of his own vomit by now.”
“That would explain the sobriety, I gotta run, I see he is free,” Raj patted Newfangle on the elbow and scurried off.
Newfangle looked up at the ceiling of his bedroom. He figured this day was ruined. He’d try to go back to sleep and when he woke up, he’d close all the curtains in his house and order Chinese food. There is some old piece of advice that Newy’s grandpa gave him at some point, where if you’re driving on an icy road and you start to lose traction, you aren’t supposed to slam on the brakes. You're supposed to steer into the direction of the skid. That’s what Newy was going to do today. The delivery man would arrive later with his hefty bag of food with three or four sets of chopsticks and forks, even though it would just be him. Maybe, if he was lucky, by five this evening the hangover would have subsided enough for him to eat his General Tso’s chicken.