September 6th, 1964
Gemma felt better today. Not by much, but enough to think there was some improvement. Or maybe she was growing used to the discomfort that it was fading into background noise. As she pulled her blanket tighter and sipped her chicory, she assessed her condition. The headache and fever both persisted, but she found they didn’t take up all her mental energy when she was alone with no one to focus her attention on.
Lucky thing too, as Gemma felt she’d made enough progress with Verloc to proceed into the compliment phase of Mary Ann’s interview tactics. She’d need more to talk about than his hair though, she thought as she bit into her apple. She’d probably played that angle out as far as it was going to go, but she was coming up empty on anything else to praise Verloc for. Gemma couldn’t see what Sally ever saw in him, and her theory that their relationship was only ever a facade on Sally’s part was starting to look a lot more likely. Still, if Sally had managed to stick with him for three years, there had to be something admirable about Verloc that Gemma could use to flatter him into submission.
Gemma supposed Verloc must be some sort of brilliant if nothing else. Even if the internal memos she had showed that Sally was the one who came up with the formula for Strawberry Joy, Verloc would never have been in his position at the labs to begin with without some merit of his own. He must have accomplished something impressive enough for Haworth to choose Verloc as his protégé and successor. Too, The Wellington Health Institute seemed perfectly enamored with Verloc, enough to erect a statue of him on their laboratory floor, though Gemma never found out a particular reason why. No one much remembered. Of course. She needed a specific distinction to work him over with though.
She wasn’t convinced of his genius by his Coconut formula. When she’d been gassed this morning, it made her feel vaguely antsy and anxious, which she was sure was not the desired resu- The Coconut Joy! It was obvious! That was the thing to compliment him on. He thought he was skilled enough to make a permanent formula of Joy, enough to have promised Penelope Snug, but that tiny note of doubt she’d detected when she asked… If she pretended it was working, then he’d not only have her praise to grease the gears of his ease with her, but also his own sense of superiority – and perhaps relief at apparent progress – to move things along.
This was going to be the easiest play she’d had yet in here. Gemma left her apple core on her plate and moved from her table back to her bed. Verloc’s daily visit couldn’t come soon enough.
—
Gemma made sure to smile. It wasn’t a wide grin; she didn’t want to oversell it. She forced a smile only just big enough to exceed the one imposed by her mask. Her target level of apparent cheer was somewhere around remembering a half-funny joke someone told her at the office.
When Verloc entered her cell, he noted her little smile and regarded it with narrow-eyed suspicion.
“What?” he asked.
“What?” Gemma returned the question, matching his defensive tone but her tiny smile holding fast.
“What are you smiling about?” Verloc asked again.
Gemma arched an eyebrow at him. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” Verloc said. He crossed his arms and took up his sullen post leaning on the wall by the door.
“Am I?” Gemma made a show of pulling her mouth into a grimace against her mask and letting it resettle back into her tiny fake smile. “I don’t think so.”
“You are. How do you feel today?”
Gemma shrugged under her blanket. “Better than yesterday, but not by much. Still feverish.” Verloc stepped way from the wall and stood in front of her, leaning down to inspect Gemma’s face. He was uncomfortably close and Gemma suddenly worried that he’d be able to see some tell of her con at this short a distance. He squinted at her, then leaned a little to the left, then back to the right, swaying back and forth a couple times like a snake. Gemma let out a nervous chuckle at the proximity, until she realized he was just checking her pupils for dilation. He wasn’t looking for signs of deceit. If anything, he was probably hoping to find signs of success. In which case, she could chance goading him on.
“Do you think it’s working, Doctor?” she asked in her most hopeful voice and throwing that magic word in for good measure. She’d come to Haworth Labs skeptical of the Permanent Solution, but as long as she was pretending the Coconut was working, there was no harm in also pretending to think it was good news.
Satisfied with what he saw, Verloc pulled back. “It’s a data point,” he said, using her phrase from the day before. “We’ll need to observe further to see if there’s a pattern or if it’s a one-off.” He returned to his spot by the door. “This process takes time, but… you do look happier despite your withdrawal symptoms and you didn’t even realize it.” He regarded her with a shrewd squint. “Do you actually want it to work?”
“I didn’t come here to make you out as some mad scientist,” Gemma sighed. This was technically true: in situations as these, one always hoped the evidence wouldn’t bear out, that one would find it was all a misunderstanding. She just didn’t think that was how this was going to end. “I came to find out the facts. It’s not my fault if the facts thus far don’t reflect very well on you. But… if your new formula were to work as well as Joy used to, if it was reliable like it used to be… we didn’t completely stop farming until 1962, you know. Everyone just… forgot to after that winter.” The winter after Strawberry was introduced in ’61, she purposely didn’t specify. The town had a marvelous harvest that autumn and then forgot to plant anything but flowers the next spring. “If we could at least get back to how it was before that, if people weren’t tripling up their doses and losing their heads, there could be hope for the town to right itself.”
Verloc said nothing to that, but Gemma thought he might be disarmed enough to press him a little.
“You said everyone always paints you as a villain,” Gemma said. “Who else did you mean?”
“No one,” Verloc said. Then, rethinking the quickness of his answer, he shrugged and said, “Sally.”
That was a curious assertion in Gemma’s estimation. When she had gone to Sally’s chemist shop for her Blackberry consultation, she’d tried prodding Sally for details on the breakup. She was evasive about though. To be sure, she’d had been charming and smooth in her deflection, such that one wouldn’t have noticed if one wasn’t trying to get that information, but Sally refused to actually speak on the topic. Gemma had even asked Mary Ann – who still met Sally for tea quite often – and even she had no worthwhile information to share, much to her own annoyance. Gemma therefore couldn’t guess who Sally might be venting her frustrations about Verloc to that it would be getting back to him.
And Sally certainly wasn’t “everyone”. He’d thrown her name out so readily; it was an obvious answer. Too obvious? Maybe he was deflecting too. Gemma considered whether it was worth pushing harder, but decided it would be better to ask again later in a different way.
“Breakups are always like that, a matter of he-said, she-said,” she dismissed, letting Verloc out of the topic. He checked his watch and straightened up.
“We’ll see how your response develops tomorrow, but… it could be the start of real progress.”
—
Every day after dinner, Dr. Hughes came to take vital statistics. Thus far, Gemma had found these visits uneventful. Despite having caught her in her lie about being on Strawberry, he’d made no comment about it. His bedside manner was typical of trained Doctors, charming bordering on flirtatious even and full of reassurance when properly medicated, creepy with an underlying threat when not. Gemma learned to disregard the feeling of unease Doctors provoked once she was on Blackberry and could risk being within more than five feet of them again. She continued to do so now with Dr. Hughes as he knelt down in front of her to check her pupils.
“Dr. Verloc mentioned that you’re showing some signs of positive response to the Coconut formula,” he said. His face sat very close to hers, the same way Verloc’s had earlier. Gemma wore her tiny fake smile for him too.
“He says it’s just a data point so far,” Gemma replied.
“Quite. Your temperature and pupil dilation are still consistent with Downerism and withdrawal,” he said, standing from his kneel to return to his full imposing height. “But perhaps they’ll catch up to that little smile you’re wearing.”
“Hopefully,” Gemma agreed.
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