Day Thirtyseven

Having slept at 3:00 am this morning I was out of this world upon waking. Between packing my bag and digging my labcoat out of the locker I passed Jez's house where I spent most of some 30 minutes watching the boy sexify his hair.

I'm 15 minutes late when I arrive at the pre-dispensing tute, but as per usual nothing happens during the first half-hour and unsurprisingly people are idly sitting around. I join Bao and Derek and nearly fall asleep.

Romano begins going through slides on the overview of today's schedules and questions us on methods and what not. By some quirky misfortune, he scans the room for someone to volunteer the answer and every single week I very unintentionally look up with impeccable timing to catch his eye and then he looks at me expectantly for an answer and I don't have one so I just stare back like a silent sheepish idiot.

I yawn as Gladys raises her hand and outlines her methods with overpowering enthusiasm.

By the time dispensing begins the consequences of going to bed in the ungodly hours of morning creeps back on me and then I'm completely out of it. I weigh out my salicylic acid haphazardly and it flies everywhere. I feel myself inhale some and it immediately stings my nostrils. A bit of it drifts into my eye and that stings too. Despite the fact that the salicylic acid looks as finely powdered as flour, we're told that it is in fact crystalline and must be ground in a mortar. I do so and it clings so tightly to the sides that it's impossible to remove. I scrape at it with my spatula, send more powder flying, and inhale it all.

A few minutes later I'm mixing last week's aqueous cream into the powders on a giant glass slab, my biceps seizing up with the effort. I wonder mindlessly whether compounding pharmacists are all tanks.

The last item of today's schedule is supposed to be tricky. Romano warned us earlier that it could initially resemble white vomit, but with perseverance the product will be a "very good-looking cream". I absently imagine how good-looking I might be had I been born a tub of cetomacrogol.

To my pleasant surprise it turns out smoothly in every sense of the word. And Romano was right. It's a pure-white, fluffy and incredibly consistent semisolid and I can't stop playing with it. Bao hovers around my bench, frantically stirring a hideous white mixture that has the texture of foundation in vegetable oil. He crawls to Romano for help and a few minutes later produces a cream as smooth as mine.

We print instruction labels off the computer from the Fred dispensing program. Everyone is supposed to type up their own label, save it, and print. Nobody bothers to delete their labels after they're done with it, and as a result there are dozens of them on file.

Bao prints labels for both of us, and tells me that he has been clicking on other people's saved labels and substituting our bench numbers for theirs to save him the trouble of starting from blank. The instruction for our product is apply to scalp at night for dandruff.

"I wonder if other people re-use our labels after we're done with them." I say.

"I don't see why they wouldn't."

"Let's change the instructions."

We sit at adjacent computers and edit labels that others have made and saved. We change the instructions for the salicylic acid cream.

Rub generously into scalp when Venus is aligned with the fifth moon of Jupiter, Bao writes.

Apply sparingly on inner nostrils before snorting coke, I write.

Insert into rectum when required before activity.

We print them and leave them on the printer. A few minutes later someone has removed them.

I'm hungry after dispensing. We go to the city and eat dinner, and on the train back home I fall asleep.