Disgusted, I pop a few Perrelet and take another shot. I’m untouched by the liquor, naturally, but after the pills I’ve got a little buzz working, and at first I don’t notice Alpha behind me, pantomiming swallowing a handful of pills and rubbing his stomach. What else can you do with a mime?

“Fuck off,” I tell him.

As the Goldfish giggles and poses, my cell vibrates against my leg with an incoming text. The subject heading says NAKAMURA RESULTS.

Schermer: 694. Starks: 687. Herkimer: 641. Ellis: 640. Iovine: 636. Murgos: 630. Sharp: 569.

At first it does not compute.

At first I think it’s a typo.

Maybe that six should be an eight? Maybe it’s the result of sloppy penmanship; they didn’t complete the double loop for that first digit. That makes sense: 887. Or maybe it’s an inverted nine: 987. The six is right by the nine on the keypad, isn’t it? That’s possible, right? I keep waiting for it to change, but it doesn’t.

My heart crumples like a piece of tinfoil and rattles around inside my chest.

The cell vibrates again and a second envelope swoops into the screen.

C me 1st thing Mon morn. PoMo.

I don’t even look to see what I’m popping. I just squeeze the lids off the bottles and throw them back. There are so many pills in my mouth I can’t get them down—there are so many pills that Kobayashi would have a hard time getting them down— and I choke on the wad and spit it back up onto the bar, making a Pollock-like spray of bright multicolored pills and milky spit.

Three of the pills, I see, are long, red, torpedo-shaped ones: Nix.

Thirty damn milligrams’ worth. A record for me. Probably a record for Guinness.

Fuck it. I lube my throat with a gusher of whiskey, claw up the mess of them, Nix included, stuff them back in my mouth, and force it all down. This time they go. It only takes about fifteen seconds for me to feel the sting.

Oh yeah, I think. That one’s going to leave a mark.

It hurts plenty but it doesn’t distract me from the score. I feel as if a trapdoor has opened under my feet and I’m falling, falling, falling. Where do I land? Where else. On another stool. That’s the ghost of Otto future: a fucking stoolie. That’s what they should have as my gravestone. Not a cross or angel or obelisk or anything cool like that. Just one huge stool. Facing a fucking monitor like an underpaid, underappreciated, underchallenged jackoff with a girlie magazine and a bag of Combos.

Alpha notices what’s transpiring and starts rubbing a knuckle in his eye socket with his mouth sagging in faux grief. Boo hoo hoo, he mimes. Then he swallows invisible pills, gulps an invisible shot, and recommences his silent sobbing. When he sees me clench my fist he mocks that, too. With one hand he wipes away weepy eyes, with the other he puts up a feeble duke.