Glow by Ned Beauman Read Free Book Online Page A

from the bedroom window skipping off her sweat; second, the persuasive impression of what she told him an hour ago about the auras you see when you swallow the right drugs; and third, the joy he now feels, as dim as this illusory light he’s trying to explain, but still real joy, like he hasn’t felt since his girlfriend left.
    Then he remembers an article he once read about an experiment they did in Japan, where volunteers sat for three hours in a dark room, motionless and naked and very clean, as if for some purgative temple rite, and they were photographed by a camera chilled to 120 degrees below zero. Over the course of that long, long exposure, enough light trickled from the chemical reactions in their cells to make a portrait. In other words, humans really do glow, although a million times less brightly than even a baby firefly. And the researchers found that the glow has a diurnal cycle, like the sky. If you could make a film with that camera and speed it up and boost the contrast, humans would strobe. (Raf, of course, would strobe at a different rate.) He also knows that sex, like drugs, dilates your pupils. Could your pupils ever gape so wide that a naked body would disclose its light to your naked eye? Maybe if the sex was good enough.
    ‘Do you have any vodka?’ says Cherish.
    ‘Yeah, in the kitchen. Why?’
    In a typical instance, when Raf lies back to watch a girl climb out of his rumpled bed and pad across the room, it’s with such unconcealed pride that you might have thought he’d assembled her himself, but this time he’s still too surprised by the whole episode to feel like that. He hears the toilet flush. After a minute Cherish comes back with his half-empty bottle of supermarket vodka, sits down on the bed, and takes a swig. ‘Bleh!’ She wipes her mouth and looks down at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not getting the shakes or anything. It’s for the oxytocin.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I came a couple of times, so my brain’s all full of oxytocin – plus you wouldn’t leave my nipples alone, which was, you know, nice, but that means even more oxytocin – and that’ll make me want to pair-bond with you and then, like, cry when you don’t call. But alcohol messes with hormone release from the hypothalamus and the pituitary. So if I drink something neurotoxic right after we fuck, I don’t bond with you so much. It’s folk medicine, I guess, but I kind of trust it.’
    ‘Why don’t you want to bond with me?’ says Raf; not forlorn, just curious.
    She puts a hand on his lopsided butterfly of chest hair. ‘I’m not saying I don’t like you. But I don’t want to like you any more than I would if you hadn’t squeezed some hormones out of me with your dick. Nothing personal. It’s policy.’
    ‘Should I drink some?’
    ‘You’re a man, so you mostly just get dopamine and some prolactin, not oxytocin. Unless you’re a real pussy, I guess.’
    It’s oxytocin, Raf recalls, that makes your pupils dilate when you’re aroused, and that helps MDMA work as a truth drug. Isaac once ordered three bottles of a product called Liquid Trust, which described itself on the website as ‘The world’s first and only product to attract women by getting them to trust you’. It was just synthetic oxytocin diluted in alcohol, and you were supposed to spray it on your clothes every morning like a cologne and keep it in the fridge between uses. Isaac was going to use it in a club, a subliminal broadcast on a secret frequency. But then Raf pointed out that unless you were wearing a gas mask you’d inhale the majority of the Liquid Trust yourself, which would be like trying to date-rape someone by putting one temazepam in their drink and five in your own. So instead, Isaac sprayed some up his own nose and then spent an hour on YouTube watching conspiracy videos about the July 7th bombings to see if the oxytocin would make him more gullible, but the results were inconclusive.
    The two of them have