Chapter 23

I went to bed, but lay awake for a long time in the dark thinking about Liz and how I felt about her. I was afraid that it was true, that I was falling in love with her. Nothing wrong with love, but I wasn’t sure how she felt about me. I was afraid that it might be, “you’re a good friend, let’s not spoil it”.

Beautiful women learn early to establish force fields to fend off the unrelenting attacks from smitten men who profess adoration and devotion, but really just want to get them naked and humping. Women looked upon every endearment as part of a larger plan for getting them into bed. So I had no idea if she had any feelings at all for me. Even the kiss on the cheek could be just a friendly peck, a thank you, and have no other hidden meaning.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was exactly how I’d felt in high school and was trying to work up the nerve to ask Sally Cowan to the movies. It took weeks of agonizing before I’d worked up the courage to do it. She’d finally said yes, and we did go out, but it turned out that, while she was pretty, she wasn’t that interesting after all and we hadn’t had much to talk about. My imaginary Sally had been much more enticing than the real thing.

I knew that wasn’t the case here, but I still felt the same set of nerves. I had to figure out a way to find out if she did harbor some feelings for me. Preferably through other than chemical means.

The next morning I woke with something dancing around the back of my brain, just out of reach. I don’t think it had anything to do with Liz, it didn’t feel like that, it was more like an idea trying to form itself into something tangible. I’d always found it was hopeless to try to drag them out from the dark corners. Better to let it resolve itself and poke its head out when it was ready.

So I had breakfast and planned my day. Well, ‘planning’ was probably the wrong word. It was more like ‘what the hell am I gonna do today?’ All I could come up with that absolutely needed doing was laundry, so I did that.

Then I thought back to Saturday and my panic about clothes, and thought it wouldn’t hurt to buy a couple of new shirts while I was already out. Maybe it would impress Liz. And then I thought about my not having shoe shining supplies, so I bought some of those, and that led me to a contemplation of my stock footwear and how beat up they were, so I went and bought a new pair of shoes.

For an aimless Sunday with no goals other than laundry, I’d spent a lot of money. I resolved to go home and eat leftovers for dinner. Afterwards I typed up a few notes on Liz’s latest chapters, but it looked a little sparse because I had very little to contribute.

Monday the brainworm was still there and still not showing itself. It was starting to bother me. I had decided it had something to do with opioid receptors and cravings because that felt ... close, or something. I let it continue to fester until it was ready to announce itself.

The big news was that Frank finally admitted that he and Eden were now an item, and it was getting serious. They were talking about moving in together. I tried to recall what my estimate had been for this to happen when I was first talking to Sara, but the details were gone now. Regardless, I was happy for him. They seemed to get on well together and it’d be good for him.

I went for my afternoon snack at my usual time, and scrolled through my phone messages, deleting the ones trying to sell me time-shares or offering extended warranties for my car. I raised my head when Liz put her tray on the table.

I looked at her. “Two cookies? Was the apocalypse announced and I missed the memo?”

“Make fun of me. I don’t care. I felt like two cookies, so I got two cookies. I was in a good mood.”

“All right. I’m just teasing because it’s such a rare occurrence that it was worth an ironic comment.”

She took a very small bite of the first cookie. “I was productive over the weekend, so I felt it deserved a small reward. Is that a new shirt?”

“Umm, yeah. I broke down and bought a couple of new shirts.”

“Another difference between men and women. Women never think of it as ‘breaking down’ when they buy new clothes, it’s more like ‘expanding the wardrobe’. Anyway, very nice.”

“Thank you. I feel guilty having indulged myself like that. It’s like we’re programmed to wear something until it develops torn seams or holes in the elbow.”

“You know your problem, Sam? You need a personal shopper, someone who checks your closet periodically and buys you clothes when you need them, not when you think you need them.”

“Are you offering?”

She blushed. “No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, there are services that do that kind of thing for people just like you who don’t have the inclination or the awareness to know when to shop.”

“Sounds like a service for rich people. I’ll probably have to pass for the time being. Before I forget, here’s your latest stuff back, and I had a few -- a very few -- thoughts.”

We went over what I’d written out, and again I was feeling embarrassed that I had so little to contribute. “Sam,” she said, “I think this is the way it’s supposed to work when the writing’s going well. When an author has problems with a story or a character, it comes out in the writing and a sharp reader or an editor will see it immediately.

“When the author has a clear sense of the story line and the characters who inhabit it, as I think I do now, then there’s not much obvious to fix when it’s set on paper. Earlier, when I was starting this, I was making more mistakes, and you helped me clarify those ideas in my head. That’s why you’re not seeing them now, I think. Because you did your job.”

“That’s kind of you to say, but I still feel like I should be finding more, like I’m not working hard enough at it.”

“I don’t think so. Remember what I told you about my meeting with Deb Morrow? She’d said she hadn’t seen much that needed fixing, maybe some added color and detail, but nothing substantive. So don’t feel bad if you’re not finding lots of errors. I think we’re past the point of picking out the kinds of problems you’d be likely to find. She’ll find different things. You just saved her a bunch of work by pointing out those things before she found them.”

“Okay,” I said, not yet convinced.

“So, after you left on Saturday, since there weren’t dishes to do, I sat down at the computer and started unrolling the story. That’s how I think about it. The story is in my head, and I’m unrolling it like a scroll, adding some detail and dialog and color as I type it out. I got really involved and it was after one when I looked up again. I usually don’t stay up that late, but I was on a roll.

“Then when I got up on Sunday, I wrote a bunch more. I was surprised where the story was going -- I don’t always have it mapped out completely, and sometimes I’ll change things from the way it was originally in my head. I’ll have to see what you think about it. And what Deb thinks about it. When it’s ready.”

“Well, that sounds a bit mysterious.”

“Maybe. I may change it back again, I have to think about it, see if I like what’s happening to the characters.”

“Fine. I’ll be right here, chewing on my fingernails, when you’re ready.”

She really did have a lovely smile.

“I’m glad you were able to come to dinner, Sam. It was nice to cook for someone, and on some strange level I think it got me thinking about my characters again. That may have been where that sudden writing jag came from.

“Listen, I had a thought, Sam. Since you’ve been so helpful and involved with my writing, I wondered if you might be interested in attending a reading one of my friends is doing later in the week at Morley’s Books downtown? She’s further along in her process than I and her first book is at the printer’s. She’ll be reading a chapter or two from her novel and I thought you might be interested.”

I thought to myself, if you’ll be there, I’m interested.

“That sounds different from my usual, might be fun. When is it?”

“Thursday at seven, I believe.”

“Maybe. That means it’ll be after eight, maybe pushing nine before it lets out, and I’ll be pretty hungry by then.”

“I was thinking we could grab a quick bite at the deli around the corner from there before it starts.”

Ah, so she’s definitely going to be there, and we could eat together, too.

“Okay. It’ll be good for me to get out of my rut, try something new. We can work out details later, but it sounds like fun to me.”

“Oh, good. I think you’ll like her stuff. I’ve read some of it in manuscript and I’m a little jealous.”

“Has she read any of yours?”

She lowered her eyes. “No, you’re the only person I’ve let read it. And Deb Morrow, too, of course. But I was too self-conscious to let Jane read my stuff because she’s really good and I didn’t want her to say she didn’t care for it.”

“I think it more likely that she’d read your stuff, and then throw away her computer and everything she’s written.”

She looked a little shocked, but also a little flattered. She gathered up her snack things and the chapters and stood up. “Gotta get back. We’ll talk about Thursday later. So long.”

I watched her leave, and thought, “Did she just ask me out?”

I wandered back to the lab, my head spinning with possibilities. What if ... No, as she had said about meeting Deb Morrow, one step at a time.

The lab had become so accustomed to my sitting with Liz that it was no longer a topic for conversation, unless she exhibited excitement or attraction, and then they’d want to know what occasioned the display. But they registered each meeting internally and made an entry in the mental log. I thought that I was probably a subject of conversation elsewhere in the building as well, as ‘the guy who’s friends with Liz Conway’.

I sat at my desk and pulled out my notes on the latest experiment and underneath it I found half a candy bar. Who knows how long it had been sitting there. And as I looked at it, I started thinking about snacks and why I wasn’t suddenly craving a candy bar. Because, of course, I had just finished a snack in the cafeteria, so I wasn’t hungry.

But that led to my thinking about cravings, because food cravings weren’t all that different from cravings for drugs. They both made you feel good, in different ways. I thought, what we’re trying to do with opioids is to reduce the desire for the drug while also suppressing the body’s need for the drug. Removing one and not the other means the user still has an addiction problem which will manifest itself again and again.

And that’s not much different from the problem people have with dieting, trying to lose weight by reducing the caloric intake. It’s hard to do because the brain tells the body “This will taste really good, and you need this, you have to have this candy bar/hamburger/bag of chips/bottle of soda/piece of cake, or you’ll become weak, anxious, crabby.”

Diets mostly only worked if the dieter had enough willpower to suppress the body’s insistence that it needed more for a long enough time that the body eventually realized that it didn’t need all those extra calories and re-calibrated itself. The dieter spends weeks, months, constantly fighting the body’s urges, while still having the ever-present desire for the snack. That’s why most diets failed. The dieters weren’t able to hold out long enough to reprogram the body’s insistence that it needed more than the normal caloric intake.

So what Ted and Art were doing with blocking opioid dependence should work as an approach to food cravings. It was well known that cravings for drugs and food were located in the same part of the brain.

I got up and wandered into the lab’s library, which was pretty good as scientific libraries went. I found some books and articles on cravings and their underlying mechanisms, most of them drug-oriented, of course, but found I was right. μ opioid receptors are linked to mood, pain and reward triggers, but they are also linked to the brain’s reward system in a more general sense, such as having a snack because it makes us feel good.

Food cravings seemed to be centered in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain. I found several articles saying that increased activity in the DPC improves self-control in dealing with food cravings, and that decreased activity lowers self-control in resisting cravings.

There had been some interesting studies showing that deep-brain stimulation (DBS), for example generated by magnetic fields from an implant or by a focused external magnetic field, can increase activity in that area, thus reducing food cravings.

What if there were a chemical means to cause that stimulation? If we could block the craving and also suppress the body’s need for the snack, much as we were trying to do with the opioid blockers, that could prove to be a really effective dieting aid. And if there was an even bigger moneymaker for the pharmaceutical industry than drug treatments, it was diet aids.