Head Case (11 page)

I shook my head. “Do you really think I’m going to help you get free medication so you can impress your boyfriend, Polly? I would be offended if I weren’t so concerned that you’d completely lost it.”

I would have expected Polly to fight back right then, maybe even storm out of the restaurant. But she just sat there, taking it, listening to my obnoxious, Chianti-fueled rant about her carelessness, her stupidity, her desperate need to be liked.

“Are you finished?” she asked when I stopped to catch my breath.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Look,” she said. “I know. This is going to sound crazy, but I really need your help. I’m serious. There really are lives are at stake.”

“Lives are at stake?” I laughed. “Come on, if you really think that one of your friends is actually suicidal—or Mitya’s friends, good God—you know as well as I do that you should not be the one administering the medication.”

“No one is suicidal.”

“So what the hell are you talking about?” I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Honestly, I don’t want to drag you into this any further than I have to. Can you please just trust me?”

“Trust you? This isn’t about trust. First of all, I’m not sure this is such a great drug to be passing around. And secondly… No, you’re right. I don’t trust you. Not lately.”

“Oh, come on, Olivia. You’re just being obstinate for the sake of it. You just can’t forgive me for getting involved with someone you don’t approve of, can you? That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

“That again? You want to go back to that?”

“No, I don’t.”

“So don’t.”

Polly looked at me, straight into my eyes. Something in her demeanor seemed to shift. “You know what? If you were a real friend, you would help me out here. I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t really need this.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. Not kidding. Which is when she said the stuff about only being friends because of time, out of habit. Which is when I called her a bitch and stormed out of the restaurant, leaving Polly with two half finished glasses of Chianti and the bill.

28

November 5 (B.D.)

Today, a Very Short While Ago.

5:52 P.M.

Backing up again, or I suppose moving forward, to how I got here three months and change after our fight at the Italian restaurant, to how I found myself in the back of a taxicab, zigging and zagging through the old cobblestone streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn at a breakneck pace, trying to pull away from the Lexus that was now hot on our tail. The Lexus Mitya was sitting in, with the gun pointed at his head.

As we drove under the elevated platform on Brighton Avenue, Lumpkyn slammed on the breaks and the car stopped short. So short, in fact, that the Lexus drove right past us before swerving around with an almost deafening screech and pulling up next to us, trunk to hood.

That was when I peeked out the window and realized we were parked right in front of Charity.

And that’s when thing got weird. I mean, weirder.

The passenger door of the Lexus opened and Mitya rolled out. Literally rolled out onto the street between the cars. The door slammed behind him, but they stayed put, the big boxy guys watching us from behind the Lexus’s tinted windows, watching what Mitya was about to do.

Lumpkyn opened the window a crack and Mitya pulled himself up, pressing his face close to the window, eyes shifting momentarily in my direction, ascertaining that I was there.

He was clearly shaken, and paler than I remembered.

“Be careful,” he whispered, nodding at me. “Keep your head down, and don’t get out of the cab.”

As if I had some place to go.

“What’s going on, Mitya?” I demanded. “Why am I here? Where’s Polly?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“What?”

“Shotkyn wanted to talk to you,” Mitya said in a whisper I could barely make out through that crack. “That guy in the car I was just thrown out of? He said he wanted to talk to you about the formula for the drugs. To verify that Lumpkyn’s formula was similar enough to the real stuff to tide us over, and that this new Pharmax supply we’re getting him isn’t just like irregulars or something that they’re trying to unload. But now I’m not so sure that’s all he wants. I think he thinks you might know too much.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t know anything. I have no idea what—”

“Just be quiet. Just keep your head down and stay in there.”

Lumpkyn shook his head. “Mitya, you too. You get in taxi,” he said. “Quickly.” He unlocked the doors but I was frozen in my seat, unsure of what to do, of what Mitya was trying to tell me. I mean, there were men with guns out there. Or at least there was one man with one gun. Nothing I wanted to mess around with without having a solid plan.

“Are you fucking kidding? Do you know who’s over there? Or did you not see that gun that was pointing at my head? Which I believe is now trained on my ass.”

Lumpkyn thought for a moment. “They do not want us dead,” he said. “We die, and they losing much business.”

“Don’t be so sure. Anyway, right now, they want her.” Mitya nodded in my direction. “We need to buy time. So just open the fucking truck, Ivan. Give them what’s left back there, throw it out here, and maybe that’ll give us some time.”

“Time for what?”

“I don’t know,” Mitya said through his teeth. “But it’s all I’ve got right now. They sent me to get her out of the cab, but we can’t let them have her. You want her blood on your hands? We’ve fucked up enough lives with this shit as it is.”

I, of course, still had no idea what was going on, though I did understand that any way I sliced it, I didn’t seem to be in good hands, whatever anybody wanted with me.

The one saving grace that I could see was that the streets were packed. The stores were open for business and it seemed like a pre-pre-holiday street fair was taking place in front of them. Scores of puffy-coated outdoor vendors were selling an enormous variety of goods—books, food, clothing—as far as I could see. The bars were filling up with their happy-hour crowds, and people on the sidewalk were spilling onto the curb, brushing the car as they walked past.

Lumpkyn was shaking his head, muttering in Russian something about someone named Zhanya, something about depression and I think something about mania.

I didn’t hear the rest. All I could focus on was the fact that the door was still unlocked and this was my chance. I jumped at the handle and sprang out onto the sidewalk, thinking that if I just could get deep enough into the crowd—

“Olivia! No!”

I turned to see Mitya running around the car, reaching out toward me. Which got me thinking about Polly again. I mean, what kind of friend gets you into this sort of mess?

“Olivia!”

A sharp, piercing pain ripped through my head, back to front. My body froze—not just in the sense of standing still, but like I had just taken a dive into a snow bank. A stinging, prickly freeze.

“Oh, shit!” someone yelled. I think it was Mitya.

And the next thing I knew, from an increasingly expanding distance, I could see two men rushing out of the Lexus to pick up my body. My body. I saw them as they threw me in the trunk of their SUV. And I saw Mitya and Lumpkyn looking terrified as they quickly opened the back of the cab and started handing, tossing, throwing small boxes and bags over to those men. I saw the men throwing them over me, stuffing the trunk to the brim with little bags and boxes. It took two tries to close the door. The car pulled forward, and I could see that inside, the boxes were pressing down on me, digging into my face, my arms, my chest. And from my distance, from up here, I watched the people on the darkening street, hustling by and pretending not to notice. I saw the car start to zip away, the license plate clear, a small spot of blood left behind, and Mitya and Lumpkyn just standing there, arms akimbo, completely shocked as a bullet flew through Boris Shotkyn’s driver’s side window and the Lexus flipped over and crashed into a tree.

Depressing, right?

Well, if you want some antidepressants, I can get you some. My body is practically drowning under boxes of them.

Part Two

Black Market Grannies

You often hear stories about ghosts remaining among the living because they have
things
to sort out, unfinished business. Like Marilyn Monroe. She has often been sighted at the house where she died from a drug overdose. Psychics report that her death wasn’t a suicide, but an accident, and her spirit is there to let that be known. Apparitions of Bonnie and Clyde lurk around the spot where they were so violently shot down. Even in the White House, former presidents and their families haunt the halls, still trying to make peace with the nation’s ills. Lincoln’s ghost has been spotted gazing out the window from the Oval Office. Dolly Madison’s spirit returned to protect the Rose Garden after Woodrow Wilson’s wife had ordered workmen to dig it up. People have even reported hearing Jefferson playing his violin.

During my life, I dismissed such stories as just that—stories. It never occurred to me that there might actually be some truth behind those tales. Why would it have? I was a woman of science, of logic. None of this was logical. It’s not logical now, now that I’m no longer
here,
that, freed from my body, I can suddenly be almost anywhere, at any time, past or present. Well, anywhere or any time relevant to me, that is. There do seem to be some limitations. As I’ve said, I’m just starting to figure this whole afterlife thing out. I have a lot to learn, both about my present state of being and, obviously, about my past. All of which might help with the future, whether I’m part of it or not. I owe Polly at least that much. So, here I go, fiddling with the clock. I need to dial it back a few months again to reinvestigate certain matters. I’m channeling Cher again and turning back time. Or whatever. I never was any good with musical references. I guess death hasn’t changed that.

29

October 30 (B.D.)

About a Week Ago

Back When I Had My Head In a Beaker, so to Speak, and not Splattered all Over the Street.

Morning.

“D
id you see this?” Polly asked Mitya, pushing the New York Times across the sticky tablecloth in his aunt’s Brighton Beach kitchen.

They had spent the night there, waiting for Mitya’s elderly aunt to come home.  She had been staying out a lot lately, and everyone was getting concerned. It was 4 a.m. when Zhanya had straggled in that morning, refusing to answer their questions but kissing them both on their foreheads before throwing herself into bed. Zhanya had been acting erratic lately, more so than usual, and Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn had asked Mitya to come down and see if he could make sense of things.

Mitya put down his coffee, took the paper, and looked at the photograph spread out across the front page of the Sunday Style section.

“Holy Moses!” he said, mouth agape. “Is that Zhanya?” he asked, though he knew full well that the woman in the picture, the seventy-seven-year-old babushka with the floral scarf wrapped over her head and tied under her chin, the one standing in the middle of a gaggle of similarly coiffed women, all of them pushing up against the newly reopened Chippendale’s night club, was in fact his aunt Zhanya. Zhanya, who had bathed him and dressed him, who had held his hand on the first day of school, and who was there crying with pride on the day he finished, that was her standing at the threshold of the latest incarnation of the infamous male strip club, now located in Manhattan’s meat-packing district, arguing with a bouncer as if she were fighting for a loaf of bread. That was what she had been out doing every night.

“Chippendales, Hoping For the Jet-Set, Gets Overrun by the Granny Set,” Mitya said, reading the headline aloud. “Jesus.” He looked up at Polly, raising his eyebrows high enough that they hid behind the hair flopping over his forehead.

“I know.” She bit her lip. “I think they all might have taken one too many of those pills.”

“That,” he said, shaking his head and a little bewildered, “or maybe they took exactly the righ
t amount.”

***

I ha
d read that headline, too.

It ran last week, when I was still alive. I read it alone, sitting on the couch while resting my feet on top of the files I had stacked on top of the milk crate, having no idea that the women in the photograph had any connection to me, tangential or otherwise. I just read the article and laughed out loud and wanted so badly to call Polly to laugh with her. But I didn’t. To do that we would have had to have been on speaking terms, which we more or less were not. Basically, since our big fight at the restaurant in July, the only contact I’d had with her was due to the crumbs she left on the counter and the wet towels she left scattered across the bathroom floor.

Polly was the messy one. Historically. The whole cleaning up the apartment thing, or the airing out the college dorm room thing, or the really pretty much anything that had ever involved the two of us—whatever it was—it usually fell on my plate. But I was too overloaded with my work to be bothered. So, between my ever-increasing stacks of files I was bringing home from the lab and Polly’s surreptitious sloppiness, the apartment was looking like a library and a clothing store had been struck by a tornado and been combined into one big heap. Essentially the only way we were communicating with each other was to leave traces of ourselves for the other to trip over.

It’s really too bad, and I mean that sincerely. Because had I read that newspaper article with Polly, maybe she would have had some interesting background information, or opened up about and been willing to share. Maybe she would have told me that before the whole geriatric set of Brighton Beach started bouncing around like oversexed bunnies, there were even crazier shenanigans starting to bubble. There were bribes and blackmail, overdoses and arrests (actually, I did know about those. I read the paper like everyone else). It was out of control. The whole situation had become quite explosive.

Good Lord, this is reall
y making my head spin.