The Bubble

Our moon colony had grown in the past few years, expanding past the main hub, which everyone but tourists from Earth called The Bubble. The Bubble was the size of a small city with roughly 250,000 permanent residents, a far cry from when my parents had moved my older brother and me up here. 

The growth meant more transplants from Earth arriving on a slick galactic cruise liner with their expensive SSRIs and antipsychotics. Which should have meant that Rafael’s epileptic medication would be easier to find, but sellers were on the low because the government was cracking down on illegal possession of prescription drugs. They had recently upped the sentence despite the fact doctors were hesitant to give out any kind of script. A couple had recently sued their child’s doctor on the basis of discrimination for giving their child some abnormal antipsychotic the kid had a reaction to. The parents had found a damn good lawyer and won the suit, saying the doctor had discriminated against the child because of her condition and forced the parents into an experimental treatment for the sake of the doctor’s own beliefs.

Many doctors after the trial, fearful of losing their license, only prescribed anything if it was a life or death situation. Coincidentally, suicidal rates rocketed after this became a widely-embraced practice, and despite Rafael’s condition making me fear for his life, every doctor on this godforsaken moon colony refused to give him a script for epileptic meds. So, I am relegated to scouring social media, sketchy websites, and forums for someone willing to sell me carbamazepine or phenytoin or even oxcarbazepine (though that only works to minimize his seizures, not stop them entirely.) 

We ran out of the last round of phenytoin a week ago, and he’s had one bad seizure since. I try not to let him watch TV at all because I’ve learned the quick flashing sequences can trigger him, but he turned it on while I was taking a nap the other day. Thankfully, I woke up soon after it started, so he wasn’t alone for very long. 

Every time he has one, I remember when he was little, sitting at the kitchen table for the first time without his high chair. His eyes rolled back in his head, and I wasn’t quick enough to catch him. He fell to the concrete floor, splitting his head. That amount of blood is not something I will easily forget. I’m not even sure what triggered it that time. I can’t even remember if I had started him on anything yet.

I wonder sometimes if we should just move to Earth, but I can’t afford the tickets. The space cruise liners are still relatively expensive, and all of the savings I have managed to scrape together on a meager teller’s salary go to Rafael’s medicine. Earth isn’t as stingy with medicine, or so I’ve heard. They do have strings of insane weather patterns that impact shipping and supply though. Maybe that’s not such a good idea then.

But combing The Bubble for anyone willing to part with their epileptic meds is taking a toll on me. I can’t risk getting caught. Rafael would have no one because his father is long gone, and my parents are dead. My older brother became a doctor and moved back down to Earth because he’s a Good Samaritan with an eye for emergency medicine. Obviously, he was always the favorite. I’m sure my parents are smiling down at him and glaring at me. Well, unfortunately for them, I have a child to look after, and my brother isn’t here to make sure his nephew doesn’t crack his head open and bleed out.

On the fourth Saturday after we ran out of the last round of meds, Rafael had another seizure. A mild short-lived one thankfully but one all the same. I knew that I had to pluck up my courage and rely on my last resort, so I texted a friend from work who has a daughter Rafael’s age, dropped Rafael off at her house, and went in search of The Bubble’s floating black market.

***

I had no idea where to start. The Bubble was condensed and crowded like a space New York City without the flashy Times Square. I had only been to New York City once when I was small, five or six years old. It had been rebuilt since WWIII, but my parents had seemed sad that entire trip. They had grown up in the Bronx, but they had lived in a tiny apartment in the city, holding down starter jobs that never quite became the careers they had envisioned. They had moved to Trenton, New Jersey when my older brother was born.

The main streets of the Bubble were what I imagined New York City smelled like: street vendors frying up processed meats, an overloaded sewer system oozing a foul smell from its grimy underbelly, and sweat. Always sweat.

People crowded the sidewalks because only emergency vehicles were allowed in the Bubble. Even suburbanites had to adhere to that rule. Those who commuted from the housing developments outside the colony proper rode on trains that ran on pure ethanol, and twice a day, air scrubbers initiated along all ten mile radius of the Bubble, but the air was still stale and heavy in my lungs. It was better at home where the oxygen-recycling system could work its magic in my and Rafael’s more confined space.

I had no idea what I was doing. I knew the floating market would not be anywhere near the main streets (at least that would be a stupid idea), but I thought someone around here might know how to find it. I just needed to figure out how to ask covertly, which had never been my strong suit. 

With a prey animal’s heart, I walked up to a group of kids spilling out of a narrow alley. “What are you kids doing?” I said, not sure what the hell I was doing.

The kids were older, approaching adulthood. They were shaggy-haired, wearing thin clothes and beat-up sneakers. They all looked the same, worn down and sad. I wondered if I’d looked like that at their age. “Who the hell are you, lady? Some kinda cop?” one of the kids said. She looked like the leader, a few inches taller than the others with a shock of box-dyed red hair buzzed close to her scalp. “Fuck off. Jesus.”

Every gut instinct I had told me this was going nowhere. The kids pushed past me, muttering and laughing among themselves. I heard a distinctive, “Nosy bitch.” 

Kids, I thought with disgust. I had no idea how to get them to wait, how to get them to understand my desperate situation. Couldn’t they see it on my face? I felt like they could, like they could hear my thoughts, like I was projecting them to every harried person who walked by. I knew that was crazy, but the feeling remained all the same, a quiet buzzing at the base of my skull.

          I peered into the alley after the kids had disappeared, but there was no neon arrow that said, Black Market This Way!

           My disappointment was palpable, and panic bubbled up in my stomach. My skin felt hot with fear, and I wished to be sucked into the vacuum of space where it would be cold and dark and empty. And I wouldn’t have to worry about finding medicine or being poor or getting arrested. 

          I walked on, slipping through the crowd pressing against the sidewalk and the narrow one-way street. The air was hot on the street. Or maybe I was simply sweating because I was panicking. Because I was panicking. I had hardly searched for ten minutes, but the back of my neck was surging with heat, prickling as if some Earth creepy-crawly was skittering up into my hair. 

The buildings weren’t altogether sleek, having grayed out over time, but they had originally sparkled in the sun like diamonds. I remember that from when we first moved here. The apartment complexes and storefronts had seemed new and modern. They had captivated my little mind. My father had sighed in a dreamy way when we had begun walking down the ramp from the cruise liner, his eyes glued to the city spread before us. A new one, unravaged by nature’s cruel hand. “It’s like the future we imagined,” he had said.

“Mm, without any of the social benefits. Chrome can’t cover up all the rust,” my mother had muttered. I don’t know why I remember their words specifically, or if I had turned the memory over so much in my head that the words were forever lost and that was my best approximation of their short-lived conversation.

I spun past a corner store and nearly tripped over my own feet. I press away from the crowd, finding reprieve against the dented wall of the corner store. 

Police vehicles flashed, reflecting off the artificial ozone layer bubbling around the city. The officers stood around, hands on their hips, radio watches garbling. Their cars were sleek electric numbers, and through the tinted windows, I saw moving shadows in the backseats. It hit me that the strangers in the backseat might not have ever ridden in a car before. Perhaps they were born here or didn’t have a vehicle on Earth. Being arrested was a double life experience, and for some reason, that realization crippled me.

The prickling heat in my neck burned like a firecracker, and I swept my hair to the side and took a deep breath, which helped nothing. I was trembling. The awful feeling that the people in the backseat had been part of the black market rooted in my bones. There were a thousand other reasons the police could have come out to the north part of main street. Maybe it wasn’t a red-light district but the southern part still glittered silver. 

I turned around. Headed to a rundown cafe a few blocks away for an hour to calm myself. I clutched a cup of ice coffee, trying to stem my shuddering. I would just have to try tomorrow to find Rafael’s medicine or luck out on the forums tonight. This couldn’t happen again, this panic. Rafael needed his medicine, and I was his mother, and I had a spine. Or so I had been told. The panic, the molten fear and shame, was trying to convince me otherwise. 

But I had to try again. And again and again until I succeeded. There was just no other choice here.