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Liz has discovered something better than coffee.
This is not something that is very difficult to do, actually. Since her freshman year of college, Liz has regarded the stuff as a sort of necessary evil, like getting clothes dry-cleaned instead of relying on Febreeze and buying friends presents on vacations, not just giving them the little soaps and shampoos from the hotel. (What works for Jenna does not work for everyone; Pete had, in fact, not been appreciative of the shower cap she brought him from Darwin, Minnesota.) So, when Liz discovers Metabosplosion at her local Mexican grocery, she is delighted to discover it has three times the caffeine and más azúcar que azúcar, whatever that means. The label does not offer a translation. It also has guarine and taurine and other things that rhyme with each other, and when she drinks it, she can see stars. No, she doesn't just see stars; she can taste them.
The stars taste the way sunshine smells. The taste makes her want to do stuff. The stuff she wants to do does not necessarily need to be done. The stuff that needs to get done does not get done. But Liz has painted each of her fingernails a different color, picked that color off, and then painted them again using high lighters. Until just before she did it, she had not known that high lighters came in that many different colors. The teal was an especially pleasant revelation. Almost as pleasant as the discovery of Metabosplosion, without which she would not have found out about the tealness of the high lighter.
Metabosplosion is without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to her.
She has moved on to contemplating giving herself a jailhouse tatt using a ballpoint pen and a paperclip -- she thinks it will be the Chinese characters which the internet informs her represent her name -- when Cerie appears in the doorway to her office. At least, Liz thinks it's Cerie; the guarine or the sugar or the caffeine or maybe the things on the label she couldn't pronounce has made her eyelids start to vibrate and this makes seeing things clearly difficult at times. There is also the fact that she has mistaken her stapler for a hot dog and/or a hot dog vendor more than once in the last hour.
"Jack wants you in his office," Cerie says.
"Did he say when?" Liz asks, trying to bring Cerie into focus or at least stop seeing more than three of her.
"Jonathan said yesterday, but I don't think that's possible."
"Oh, goody." The stars now taste like freezer-burned orange popsicles, like sunshine gone wrong, and her eyelids are jittering so fast, Cerie now looks like a blonde flamingo in a sweater tunic.
***
When she arrives at the reception area for Jack's office, Jonathan has the head of a beetle and she can see his feelers twitch at the sight of her.
"What took you so long?" Jonathan demands, and his right feeler goes click clack against his shiny black shell.
"Got lost," she says. The men's bathroom on the floor below was much nicer than the women's on the floor the TGS offices were on. The attendant hadn't even look flustered by her sudden appearance; this might have been because he was an anteater.
Jonathan's feelers come together in front his mandibles in a frown.
"Are you drooling?"
Liz slides the back of her hand across her mouth.
"Not anymore," she says.
If anything, Jonathan looks more suspicious, but he opens the door to Jack's office anyway and shuts it behind her once she's inside.
"Ah, Lemon," Jack says, and miraculously, he does not have the head of an animal. He is just Jack. Liz isn't sure why she was expecting him to be anything else; Jack is himself no matter what substances she has consumed. Even when things got out of hand at Kenneth's party that one time, and she had consumed what might have been bird medication but also might have been something prescribed by Dr. Spaceman (which does not necessarily rule out bird medication), Jack had stayed Jack. Always Jack. Never not Jack.
"Jack!" she says, then decides that her voice is too loud for normal conversation, so she says it again in a whisper, and then giggles because she can feel her breath on her lips and on her toes. And that tickles.
"Are you on something?" Jack asks.
"Gotta piece of carpet all staked out, right here," she replies, pointing emphatically at her feet. "I am on this carpet."
Jack comes across the carpet to her piece of carpety real estate and leans in toward her, and, wow -- he is a lot of man. He blocks out the sunshine coming in the windows, and she is at first disappointed that she can no longer taste it, but then she realizes she can smell Jack. And Jack smells the way Cheezy Blasters taste, which beats sunshine any day of the week.
He takes a deep sniff -- he is smelling her. She has a moment of panic wondering what she tastes/smells like; she bets it is neither sunshine nor Asian fusion restaurants.
"Not vodka," he says, and sniffs again. "Not cooking sherry, either, or white wine." He smells again, and his eyes narrow in triumph. "Energy drink. You have been drinking something made with guarana extract."
"There was other stuff, too," she informs him. "I could not pronounce it, because it was in Spanish. Like azúcar."
"That's Spanish for sugar."
"Well, there was a lot of it."
The floor has turned into clouds, or her knees have turned into rain drops, and she finds it suddenly necessary to collapse onto the sofa. Which, as it turns out, is a lot farther away than she had estimated, so she ends up falling on the floor and then dragging herself onto the sofa with an elbow and a leg. She hopes both of them belong to her.
"God give me strength. This is just like my mothers' fifth 32nd birthday party," Jack says, dropping down on the couch beside her. His weight makes her slump toward him and her arm flops across his leg.
For a moment, he is the only thing that is steady in her world, all black wool suit and sensible silk tie and hair that could make business professionals weep with envy. Then she remembers to breathe, and the Metabosplosion makes him into a bear which could also make business professional weep, but not with envy. Unless their business was the circus, in which case Bear Jack would make them weep with greed. It would be quite the sensation, a bear which speaks five human languages and three spoken only by dolphins, chimps, and hippopotamuses.
Bear Jack picks up her arm with his paw and drops it into her lap.
"What are we going to do with you, Lemon?" he asks, and pats her wrist. "That tienda is going to be the death of you."
"This is not like the cheese puffs," she says. "I know what the Spanish words for bull semen are now."
"What are they?"
"I will tell you," she says and then stops.
"When will you tell me?" Jack asks, and, shark farts, now he sounds amused instead of concerned.
"Tomorrow. I will tell you tomorrow."
And then he laughs and pats her wrist again, and she hopes that he laughs so hard he either forgets about needing to know the Spanish words for bull semen or he forgets that this entire thing ever happened.
Once this chemical haze wears off, she is going to have to buy a Spanish-English dictionary, because Jack might actually have a totally legitimate need to know how to say it, and she would hate to let him down.