Back home at last after a long day at work, I head straight to the kitchen for the amber pill I’ve been yearning for ever more desperately over these past couple days. Once I’ve swallowed the gleaming oval with a gulp of water, I take a shower then wait on the sofa for the medication to take effect.
As always, ae appears first as a haze of colors then coalesces into a definite form. A kangaroo this time.
“It’s been a little while,” ae says. “Did your prescription change?”
“Yup. Down to twice a week now,” I answer.
“That means things have improved!” ae cheers, ever enthusiastically supportive.
“So my therapist tells me.”
Ae gives me a look, but coming from a kangaroo, I can’t tell what aer tilted head and lowered ears mean.
“Well, I am feeling better these days,” I admit. “The emptiness has been… more manageable.”
“I thought so,” ae says. “After a couple days went by without us meeting here, I figured no news is good news.”
“Where do you go when these meds wear off?” I ask. I know the answer but want to know aer answer.
“Back into the aether of possibility,” ae says.
“I’ll miss you when I can’t… summon you from there anymore.”
“I’ll miss you too. These months we’ve spent together have been nice. But after a while, you won’t miss me that much. You’ll be having a grand old time with your new friends. Drinks after work, brunch on weekends, birthday parties. Road trips, even. And if things take a turn, I’m just a pill away.”
Ae sounds so sure about all this, but casual certainty has always been part of aer personality.
“How do you know you’ll return if I go back on these meds?” I ask. “Couldn’t someone else from the aether appear instead?”
“That could happen. But our relationship has a lot of inertia. So it’s bound to keep going once it gets the opportunity.”
Despite aer words of reassurance, it occurs to me that I should start saving pills, just in case.
But that means going from seeing aer twice a week down to once a week. Which will be hard. If only I had started saving pills when my prescription called for one pill daily. It would have been so much easier going without aer for 1 day instead of 6.
Since the alternative is to risk losing aer forever, I have to try. So I skip my next dose. As expected, I want to talk with aer very badly, to tell aer about how the persistent emptiness still looms large in my mind, to listen to aer tales of fantastical adventure and philosophical insight. To get my mind off aer—and the emptiness I so keenly feel without aer—I go out to see a movie. At the theater, I choose the option with the best chances of enthralling me for 2 hours: the latest blockbuster. Full of action and suspense, it does the trick. But afterwards I want to tell aer about it.
The next day, I do another movie night, then spend the rest of my evenings without aer at whatever events are available nearby: a poetry slam, a comedy show, board game night at the library. All the while, I worry that I’m undoing all the progress I’ve made with aer, that I’m letting the emptiness become oppressive, the way it was after I moved here—as though the world had another 3 dimensions, all imperceptible but unmistakably occupied by nothing. But I must’ve made substantial progress with aer because although my need for aer company intensifies, the emptiness doesn’t get any worse.
When I finally see aer again, I’m overjoyed, grinning almost maniacally once ae has coalesced into an emu. Naturally, ae knows what I’ve been up to.
The first thing ae says is, “Are you sure stockpiling Copairin pills is a good idea?”
“It’s just so I can see you occasionally after my prescription ends,” I answer. “Like maybe once a month.”
Hearing myself say this, it strikes me as too optimistic. At the rate I’m going, I won’t be able to save up enough pills to see aer any more than once a month if I want them to last.
“OK, if holding on to some pills makes you feel better, that’s fine,” ae says with the sympathy I’ve been so reliant on lately. “We all need something to give us a sense of security.”
“Thanks for being so understanding.”
“Of course. I’m always on your side.”
Outside the living room window, a luminous cloud drifts eastward, unveiling the full moon. I marvel at how much it has been throughout history. Tide maker, timekeeper, midnight lantern, sky ornament, destination.
“Tell me more about the Liminal Plains,” I say.
“Oh, they have the best ambiguities! Amenable to so many compelling interpretations. Once, I went there to visit an epilogueur to get an additional scene for the end of my then favorite story. Just as a favor, nothing official. The ending was already perfect, but I wanted a little more. Well, I never got that scene. What I got instead was a tour of the dreamsmith district that took me into all the nooks and crannies. The forge was stunning, the way it dwarfed everything with its massive cauldron full of the molten stuff of dreams.”
I close my eyes and let her words carry me into that hothouse of creativity.
Eventually, I’m able to see aer just once every 2 weeks, saving 3 pills between meetings. Doing this takes much more than going to movies and museums. I have to resort to spending coffee breaks with coworkers, getting lunch with new acquaintances, even attending an office party for longer than my customary 15 minutes of mingling. Anything to distract myself from the yearning to talk with aer and the emptiness aer company alleviates.
The recent arrival of springtime warmth helps. Sitting on a café patio or standing on the office balcony makes chitchat more pleasant with fresh air and bright birdsong to ward off the claustrophobia that might otherwise sink its claws into me. Still, keeping up this new social life is more like work than leisure—annoyingly effortful and hardly enjoyable—but it’s all worth it when I see the pills accumulating in that old jam jar like grains of sand steadily piling up at the bottom of a slow hourglass.
I end up at a housewarming party hosted by a friendly backgammon enthusiast I met at board game night. For moving in only 2 weeks ago, he’s remarkably settled in. His assortment of antique furniture and modern art seems to naturally belong in his apartment, creating a homey ambiance that the guests fit right into, at ease in little cliques by the credenza and around the coffee table—a scene with a logic that I’m compelled to follow by making my way over to a woman gazing at an abstract painting, not looking at it straight on but just off to the right, encouraging me to step into the space where it seems someone should be standing beside her.
“Is it telling you something about the artist or about yourself?” I ask her.
“Only that abstract art doesn’t agree with me,” she says.
“What kind of art does?”
“Impressionism.”
That launches us into a discussion about the use of purple in landscape and still life paintings. It’s a spirited conversation that delves into the psychology of color, but I know it will pale in comparison to the next one with aer.
And it does, even though this evening’s meeting is hardly a conversation—mostly me listening to aer as I lie on the sofa in what feels like therapy in reverse with the lemur in the armchair posing no questions about my life and instead telling me about mermaid adventurers and manticore scholars, stories that make sense of a world remote from mine. They’re folktales from aer homeland, as I requested so I’ll have something to muse upon during aer long absence. Everything she recounts is riveting. Part of it is admittedly the exoticism, but there’s such verve in aer voice as she renders a world of engrossing cultural lore detail by detail, like ae’s reconstructing an elaborate dream—one that will soon become a bulwark against the emptiness.
I’m out enjoying the abundant sunshine of a Saturday afternoon when I happen to see the woman I met at the party sitting by the pond tucked behind the woods of the city’s main greenway. She’s a short ways down the path ahead of me, alone on a bench with a bag of pretzels on her lap, talking excitedly, probably on a phone call. But when I get closer I don’t see a phone. Or earphones. She isn’t wearing smartglasses either. And her body is turned to her left as though she’s facing someone sitting next to her.
I’m about to avert my eyes when hers abruptly flit in my direction. They widen, and her cheeks redden. Now there’s no doubt in my mind who she’s been talking to, and I imagine that there’s a tiger or loris or cloud next to her.
Trying to give the impression that I only just saw her, I smile and wave.
I’m about to walk on by when she says, “Would you like a pretzel?”
“Oh, sure, thanks,” I answer and reach into the bag she’s holding out.
As I chew the pretzel I’ve just taken, my gaze drifts to the empty space beside her.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asks.
“I’m also on Copairin,” I tell her.
“I see,” she says in nearly a whisper, and I realize I’ve made a mistake.
So I hastily reply with, “Sorry, that was presumptuous. I shouldn’t have leapt to conclusions. I mean, maybe you were practicing lines for a play just now or—”
“No, no. You’re right. I am taking Copairin. I’ve been taking it since middle school.”
Though I try not to let it show, my eyes must have given away my surprise because she says, “Yeah, no one is supposed to be on it for that long. I’m a highly unusual case.”
I expect her to leave it at that but she continues.
“My family moved when I was in 6th grade, and switching schools was pretty hard on me. Copairin helped ease the transition. I immediately responded well to having an imaginary friend. It was nice to have someone to turn to. So nice that I got very attached to my imaginary friend very quickly, and my dad has been signing off on my prescriptions ever since. Being a therapist, he should know better, but he’s never stopped overindulging me. I’ll probably be on Copairin forever now.”
“What’s it like taking Copairin over so many years?”
She gestures for me to sit down beside her, so I do, curious if her imaginary friend is now standing beside her or down by the pond.
“Mostly, it’s been liberating,” she says. “For the last decade, I’ve felt pretty much socially self-sufficient. Impervious to loneliness with the ultimate forcefield against it. The promise of hanging out with my best friend whenever I want to. That’s why this neuroceutical is supposed to be a short-term measure. Otherwise you risk forsaking all real social interaction and getting stuck with long-term dependence on Copairin. Withdrawal would be excruciating for me.”
“I can imagine. When my dosage went down from once a day to twice a week, that was a hard adjustment. Now I’m dreading going down to once a week.”
“Well, if you ever need more pills…”
She pulls a little pharmacy bottle out of her coat pocket. It rattles with abundance when she gives it a shake.
She chuckles then says, “I really shouldn’t be enabling you, but if your imaginary friend is anything like mine, deprivation would be practically inhumane.”
What is ae like? I want to ask. Instead, I say, “Thanks, that’s a kind offer. It’s a relief to know I won’t have to bid farewell to my imaginary friend.”
“I’d be happy to help. And in case you’re wondering, it wouldn’t be the first time. Far from it.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve been sharing the wealth for a while. Back in college, I had these classmates who were getting terribly lonely without realizing it. They needed social connection but were reluctant to seek it out for whatever reason—shyness, obsession with academics, fear of being a burden, those kinds of things.”
“I know what you mean. When I was in college, a lot of the students took Copairin. Especially freshman.”
“Exactly. A lot of youngsters need it during that time. And most of the classmates I helped out just needed a pill or two. That’s how it’s supposed to work. By alleviating loneliness and renewing the capacity for social connection.
“But this one guy kept coming back to me for an entire semester. At first, I thought he was interested in me and needed an excuse to meet up. Then I thought he needed Copairin as a way to deal with stress since he’d ask me for a bunch of pills whenever there was a midterm exam coming up. So when he called me two weeks before finals, I wasn’t surprised. But I was surprised by how much he wanted.”
“I need 40 pills this time,” he said.
Way more than he’d ever asked for. Than anyone had ever asked for.
“I can pay you for them,” he quickly added.
“There are better ways to cope with stress,” I said.
“It’s not stress. I need the Copairin for my grades.”
I didn’t follow. It was like he had just skipped over a dozen steps in a logical argument.
“I started taking Copairin while studying,” he explained. “Just to see what it would be like. It’s always been helpful for me to talk through things with someone, and I thought that might work even if I was talking with a hallucination.”
“And it did work,” I said.
“Yes, very well.”
“But why do you need 40 pills? Are you planning to pull all-nighter study sessions with your imaginary friend?”
“No. Cemina goes to class with me.”
“Cemina?”
“Yeah, you know.”
“OK, so you go to class together.”
“To discuss what the professor is covering. I sit in the back so we can whisper to each other. And we also talk about class afterwards.”
“And will Cemina go to your final exams with you?”
After some hesitation, he simply said, “Yes.”
I imagined him writing tentative equations below a tough test question then looking up to see if Cemina was nodding encouragingly.
“Isn’t that cheating?” I asked. “You’ll have an unfair advantage. A study partner taking your exams with you.”
“I won’t ask Cemina anything during the exams. I just need that… presence. To be in the right state of mind.”
I thought it over, then said, “OK, I’ll give you 20 now and 20 next week.”
“I can’t believe you gave him all the pills he asked for,” I say.
“It was on the condition they were the last pills he’d get from me. I told him that after the semester he’d need to get his own prescription or find another way to do well in his classes.”
“But still… I mean, he must have been on Copairin for a third of his day.”
“I know. But I didn’t have the heart to break his reliance on Cemina during that crucial time.”
“I would probably have done the same thing you did. He must have been so grateful to you.”
“Oh, he was. And still is.”
I raise an eyebrow at this little addendum—the hint of an epilogue to her recount.
“He sends me postcards from a research lab for medicinal plants in the tropics,” she says. “He wouldn’t have ended up there without Cemina.”
“Well, I’m glad there’s a happy ending to this case of self-medicating for the sake of academic achievement.”
“Me too. But given my experience with Copairin, I had a feeling it would.”
Then it hits me. The visceral certainty that I have to take her up on her offer. I want to find out where my imaginary friend will take me. Ae could lead me somewhere no one else can, so I should follow aer—whether it’s through fanciful stories or across continents and oceans. And maybe, just maybe that’s the key to overcoming the emptiness—or outgrowing it.
“So how would getting pills from you work?” I ask.
She smiles with palpable delight.
“All you have to do is call when you need some,” she says. “Just don’t ask for 40.”
“What if I have to go somewhere for a while?”
Now she raises an eyebrow.
“We’ll figure something out,” she says. “Maybe I can go with you.”
“To do some globetrotting with real and imaginary friends?”
“Of course. That gets us the best of both worlds. There’s nothing like travel for quality time with new and old friends.”
Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of A Psychography of Modest Intimacies. Soramimi’s recent work is forthcoming in The Good Life Review and The Worcester Review.