MAUREEN WAS RELIEVED TO FINALLY BE OUT OF THE apartment and free and on the street—Oh God! George! She’d forgotten all about him. He was probably worried sick about her. She’d been gone all night. Well, good. Let him worry, because the more you were nice to them, the more you considered their feelings (Ha! Like they even had any feelings. They only had the one feeling: stick it in and go at it) and the better you were to them, the worse they treated you. But she knew she should go down to George’s. But first she was going to the library, the Gosling Memorial Library on Duckworth Street.
Maureen had always loved the library, despite having been in the stacks when some guy had hauled it out and waved it at her. Another time, a fella standing in Biography was pulling away at himself. Jesus, why did they always have to find her? It was like she had a sign on her that said, “Abuse me. I’m no fucking good anyway. If you require someone to waggle your dick at, here I am.” I’m like a walking buffet for the pervert crowd. She was getting worked up.
To calm herself down, she went straight to the card catalogue. She loved the card catalogue: everything there was numbered and in its place. Good old Melvil Dewey. She looked under the 500s, for Science, maybe 540, she supposed for Chemistry. Oh, it was glorious. All the books on one subject all together on the shelves, all numbered, no chaos, three numbers to the left of the decimal point and a limitless amount of numbers after the decimal to indicate what each book was and where it was, and the cutter number to tell you the author of the book.
She found Poisons and Pesticides of the Modern Age by G. Botkin. Chlordane was even listed on the typed-up part of the card. She wrote out the number 542.580973B8261956COP2. She knew she didn’t have to write it all down, but she wanted to—she wanted to head into the stacks fully armed.
Maureen looked for chaos and instability and loved the unpredictable. But there was a part of her that longed for the comfort of order, a part that felt so much better inside structure. She loved the soothing certainty of a place for everything and everything in its place. She loved that 542.580973 was right there in the stacks after 542.580972. It brought her a real moment of joy that there were two copies, just like it said on the card. Yes, she loved the library and all the glorious organization that the library contained. But she had never let on to anyone that she felt that way. She was ashamed of the dweeby person who loved all that order. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was one of those foolish, pasty-faced, overweight, drippy dorks going around being joyous about books, lurking about in the stacks, burying their heads in texts, with food stains on the front of their blouses from always reading while trying to eat. Who she wanted to be was someone more like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, or Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, beautiful and hungry and living wild and free and . . . She wasn’t really sure what the words were to describe who it was that she longed to be, but she longed to be that other person so badly, she could practically taste it. It wasn’t just that she wanted to be someone else; she physically needed to be someone else.
Maureen sat down with Poisons and Pesticides of the Modern Age and opened it up to the section on chlordane. “Chlordane: a man-made mixture of chemicals widely used as an insecticide . . . Chlordane is moderately to highly toxic. Symptoms usually start within 45 minutes to several hours after exposure to a toxic dose.” Okay, but what was a toxic dose? How much straight chlordane had she poured in the orange juice that morning, and was it enough to be a toxic dose?
“Convulsions may be the first sign of poisoning,” she read. Oh! Convulsions? Oh dear Jesus! “May be preceded by nausea, vomiting and gut pain.” Of course, if Bo had those symptoms, he’d assume that it was because of the almost full bottle of whisky he’d baled back into him the night before. “Initially, poison victims appear agitated.” Well, Bo was always up on bust agitated-wise. “But later, they become depressed, uncoordinated, tired and confused.”
Except for the convulsions, it sounded like a real bad hangover, the kind where you wake up still drunk, and then as you start to sober up, you feel worse and worse. She kept reading and finally found what a toxic dose would be. The amount of chlordane that was lethal orally was called LD-50, meaning that 50 per cent of the subjects died. The dose that would kill 50 per cent of study subjects was 50–500 milligrams of pure chlordane per kilogram of body weight. So, how many kilograms was Bo? And how many the fuck was 50–500 milligrams? How much did that mean? What was it in ounces or pounds, or whatever the fuck?
All she wanted to know was would the amount of chlordane she put in the orange juice be enough to kill Bo. God, she was drowning in her own ignorance. She had to look up everything. She knew fuck all about fuck all, just like Bo always said. According to the librarian, the slash in “mgs/kgs” meant “per,” so it meant “milligrams per kilograms.” But, Jesus, she was still no further ahead, since they’d only just brought in the metric and Maureen still thought in the old ounces and gallons. She got out the Encyclopedia Britannica, which had weights and measures conversion tables. Oh God, why don’t I just kill myself? Math had the opposite effect that the Dewey Decimal System had on her, though she knew it was all numbers. Some numbers gave you comfort and some numbers—like conversion tables—just fucked with your head and made you angry and hopeless all at the same time.
Okay. She could do this, but she’d need a piece of paper. So grams. Okay, how many grams are there in a cup? Turns out there are 340 grams in a cup. And it would only take six grams to kill a 210-pound man. So it was starting to look like it would only take a very tiny amount of chlordane in the orange juice to kill at least 50 per cent of the people who were given chlordane-laced orange juice. The thing that was becoming clear to Maureen was that she’d probably really overdone it on the chlordane—she’d always had a heavy hand. The Sarge told her that’s why she was no good at making cakes.
So, she had poured a lethal amount—actually probably a thousand times the lethal amount—into Bo’s orange juice. She’d tipped up the bottle of chlordane and poured glug glug, and maybe even a third glug, into the decanter. But where did all that fancy number fuckery get her? It was now clear that she could have killed him, according to what she could understand from the book. It seemed like she had definitely put enough poison in the orange juice to kill him, but the question was did he even drink the orange juice?
The person across the table from her got up and walked away, leaving behind a pile of books. Maureen looked at them, desperate for a distraction. One was called Alcoholics Anonymous. On the cover it read, “This is the Third Edition of the Big Book, the Basic Text for Alcoholics Anonymous.” Geez, everywhere Maureen looked these days, there it was. It was like AA was haunting her.