The clips ends. Craig and Shannon stand side by side, staring down at the still image on her phone. The tension feels like rising water. Shannon slips the phone into her pocket, slides her hands over Craig’s hips, and presses her nose into the tendons of his neck. She’s shocked but not offended to learn that he’s mixed up in this. For her own safety, she needs Craig to know she doesn’t care.
“I lost four hundred bucks at blackjack last time I was at the Wynn,” she whispers. “And the service sucks. Let me see your arm.”
Craig takes off his shirt and peels back a corner of the bandage.
“Jesus,” Shannon says, “how’d you get stitched up so fast?”
“These boys had a doctor standing by.” Craig tilts her head back with a finger underneath her chin, looks down into her eyes, and says, “This never happened.”
“What never happened?” Shannon asks with a coy smile.
When he opens his mouth, she covers it with hers. Craig grabs the hem of her shirt with his good arm and Shannon raises her hands as he pulls it over her head.
One
A small suburban gathering, six cars parked in the gravel driveway of a large brick home. Alex Cassidy is the last to arrive. The monthly invitation gives a start time of 8 p.m., but the hour before the main event has become the kind of freewheeling social occasion that Alex avoids. At 7:56 p.m., he parks his late-model Volvo station wagon across the street and sits, listening to talk radio. A chance of thundershowers tonight, apparently. Alex makes a fist with his left hand. His wrist aches where the bone broke years ago, a childhood injury that sometimes feels this way before a storm.
The July air is thick with humidity and the buzzing of cicadas. Alex recognizes all the cars parked in the drive except a freshly waxed white Mercedes truck with Pennsylvania plates. He scans the house as he crosses the street and peers through the driver’s window of the Mercedes: file folders, tangled cell phone chargers, packs of gum. Stuck to the rear window is a platinum Policemen’s Benevolent Association badge, the kind reserved for friends and family, husbands and wives.
Dr. Mallory answers the door himself.
“Mister Punctuality,” he says, opening his arms. “Come in, come in.”
At six-foot-three, Alex stands a full head taller than his host. Their embrace is awkward but customary; the two men share a history that leads Dr. Mallory to believe there are no secrets between them. Alex follows the doctor to the sunken great room, a recent addition to the Civil War–era Colonial, its walls covered in books and abstract paintings. Tall windows look out on Lake Carnegie, but tonight the blinds have all been pulled.
The other guests are seated on low sofas around a marble coffee table. Mark Willard, a local money manager, salutes as Alex enters. Next to Mark is Dr. Raymond Klein, an orthopedic surgeon at Princeton Medical Center, where Dr. Mallory is head of anesthesiology. The driver of the white Mercedes sits alone on an ottoman.
“Alex,” Dr. Mallory says, “this is Ralph Imperato, orthopedic sales rep at the hospital—artificial hips and knees.”
This does not explain the PBA medallion or put Alex at ease. Ralph wears polished loafers, dark jeans, and an untucked purple dress shirt—an outfit for entertaining surgeons at Manhattan nightclubs. If Ralph came to party, Alex thinks, he’s in for a surprise. Ralph looks Alex up and down as they shake hands, taking in the paint-flecked chinos, denim shirt, and canvas high tops—clothes for yard work, errands. No fancy watch, no wedding ring. Ralph wears both, but this is Princeton, where families with historic fortunes keep their clothes and cars for decades, shop at Costco, raise chickens in their yards.
“Hey, nice to meet you,” Ralph says. “And what do you do, Alex?”
“Events,” Alex says. “Event production.”
Before Ralph can dig further, Alice Mallory emerges from the kitchen with a silver tea tray in her hands.
“Mr. Cassidy,” she says, smiling warmly as she sets the tray down on coffee table. “I was wondering if we’d see you.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Alex says.
Ralph is transfixed by the tray. “So, what does this feel like?” he asks.
“It’s like a freight train, at first,” Dr. Klein says. “Knocks you right on your ass. That’s when things get interesting.”
He’s interrupted by the doorbell. Alex, it turns out, was not the last arrival. Alice disappears down the hallway and returns with a woman on her arm—trim and tan, her dirty-blond hair wet at the ends. White sneakers, white jeans with threadbare thighs, a faded navy Joy Division tee shirt. Her face is bare and beautiful.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says. “Hope I didn’t hold up the show.”
“Not at all,” the doctor says. “Everyone, this is our friend Diane.”
Diane waves and smiles as she scans the room. When she spots Alex, she cocks her head and narrows her green eyes.
Dr. Mallory rolls up his sleeves and says, “Should we get started?”
Mark Willard, a man accustomed to going first, stands and unbuttons his suit pants. He wears baggy white briefs underneath, an unselfconscious choice that Alex admires. Mark resumes his seat, and Dr. Mallory kneels on the floor in front of him. Ralph watches intently as the doctor pulls on latex gloves and fills a short syringe from a small glass vial. His left hand steadies Mark’s knee while his right hand holds the syringe like a dart. Mark winks at Ralph as the doctor sinks the needle into his thigh.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. Numbing and immobilizing, it’s used for veterinary surgery, emergency field surgery, minor pediatric procedures. It’s abused as a club drug for the vivid hallucinations and out-of-body experiences it induces in adults, but these psychedelic properties may have some therapeutic value. Dr. Mallory screens his guests for any history of mental illness but actively seeks people struggling with depression and anxiety for these get-togethers. Clinical trials suggest that ketamine can help where talk therapy and antidepressants have failed. The first time Alex tried the drug, the doctor warned him about “ego death,” in which users watch their bodies dissipate, sometimes violently, and experience their consciousness as a pervasive, shape-shifting, and unconfined force. Dr. Mallory discovered the drug’s off-label use during a period when he put a pistol in his mouth at least one night a week. These injections, he says, saved his marriage and his life.
Alex comes here for relief. Work-related stress has lately left him anxious, edgy, unable to sleep. Talk therapy is not an option, and every natural remedy he’s tried has failed. Ketamine forces a perspective shift, uncomfortable at first but ultimately calming. The combination of hallucinations and paralysis reminds him that control is mostly an illusion, something Alex knows intuitively but would rather not believe.
Dr. Mallory wipes a spot on Diane’s shoulder with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab while Dr. Klein administers the shot himself. Ralph asks about dosage and takes the needle in his right thigh, below the hem of his designer boxer briefs. Buckle up, Alex thinks. Finally, it’s his turn.
“Ready?” Dr. Mallory asks with a friendly smile.
Alex drops his chinos and sits on the sofa. The doctor preps a mid-thigh patch of skin.
“Relax the muscle,” Dr. Mallory says, pinching Alex’s flesh like unripe fruit.