QUOTE : All that was left of the Navane was a dark orange film, hardened against the plastic walls of the dropper bottle, segmented and flaking like dried earth. I remembered this stuff. It was the worst of the worst. It came with all kinds of warnings about going out into the sun and what to use on your skin to protect yourself from the extra sensitivity, which seemed like jokes to me, like they had to be meant as jokes. I think it was years before I stood outside in the sun at all for longer than the few minutes it took me to get from a transport van into the cool shade of the indoors.<br /><br />I sniffed at the bottle. There wasn’t a whole lot of scent left; just enough for me to grab hold of the memory of what it had been like getting this stuff from the dropper to my tongue. Like forcing a cadaver to drool something sweet into my mouth. Whole sweeping narratives had formed inside me around this medication, I remembered: stories I’d told myself to make taking it less numbing, to give not just meaning but intrigue to my dull condition. Explorers on distant South American mountainsides retrieving flowers from rock cliffs whose petals alone could yield the essence that would make the nauseating syrup in the tinted bottle: but you couldn’t get the essence directly from the petals; it was far too potent for human beings, it’d kill you; first you had to feed it to sparrows, whose livers filtered out the toxins, then cut out the livers and boil all the remaining organs in water. Then you strained the resulting decoction through cheesecloth and diluted it in a ten-to-one solution, and capped the bottles you’d drained it into and kept them away from light, because what you were left with was thiothixene HCl, known commercially as Navane, which I took in oral suspension because the doctor thought without it I might see or hear bad things.