Head Case (13 page)

33

July 7 (B.D.)

Yes, the Same Day Polly First went Down to Brighton Beach Midtown.

Midday.

My marching orders from Stanley Novartny and company couldn’t have been clearer. Or easier. While Polly was off ingratiating herself into Mitya’s scene, the scientists over at Pharmax, the ones working under Eugene Throng’s tutelage, were busy sending me piles of incomplete reports that I was supposed to complete. They looked like MadLibs, with fields for me to fill in the missing words. But instead of adjectives like “smelly,” I was supposed to write equations in scientific and neurological terminology.

For example:

In patients exhibiting symptoms of Fatico Dystopia, there is pervasive reoccurrence of _______ in the _____ lobe. Our research demonstrates that when consumed in amounts of _____mg a day for a period of _____weeks, the medication Ziperal TR helps to lessen the ______ reaction, causing the activity in the ________ to increase, thereby giving the patient an improved sense of job satisfaction and work performance.

The first time I had read one of these, before that night with Polly at the restau
rant, I put it down on the small, cluttered desk I had shoved into the corner of the lab (more space for the rat races) and started to dial Polly; she would have gotten a big kick out of all of this. Then I remembered my confidentiality agreement. And I remembered she hadn’t come home again the night before, and, knowing that she rarely got to work before ten, I figured she was probably still curled up in Mitya’s bed and most probably wouldn’t answer.

I called her anyway.

She picked up on the third ring, right before it would have sunk into voicemail.

“Ughmmm,” she said, not hiding the fact that I had woken her up. “What?”

“Good morning to you, too,” I said.

“Sorry.” Her voice became clearer. “Hey, honey?” she said, not to me. “Can you bring me some coffee if you’re headed to the kitchen? I have a nasty headache.” Then she turned her attention back my way. “What do you want?”

I looked down at the paper on my desk. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so funny. “Never mind,” I said and hung up. It was obvious who my real allies were going to be. Or ally, anyway. 

I lifted Raskolnikov out of his cage and looked into his beady little eyes. “What do you think, little guy?” I asked, trying to get a read from him. “You ready for this?”

34

July 25 (B.D.)

A Few Weeks Later.

10:57 P.M.

Yo
u can just guess what happens next, right? I mean, what was going on with Polly and Zhanya and all of them while I was busy filling in blanks? It’s pretty incredible that I didn’t have a better sense of it when this all started going on; back when Polly was trying to get me to hit up Missy for additional samples, back around the time of our big schism.

It kind of kills me, no pun intended, because had Polly just been straight with me about Mitya and his family earlier on, and, in fairness, had I been willing to listen to her, and had she been willing to listen to me, things could have been different. At least I think they could have been. If you’re thinking that it’s outlandish—totally absurd—that somehow medicating little Aunt Zhanya in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with a jerry-rigged, wrongly-prescribed antidepressant could lead to murder, well, as I’m starting to understand, when you’re dealing with issues of brain chemistry, anything can happen. Especially when there’s money to be made.

I should probably rewind again. I know my thoughts are flitting around so fast it might be hard to keep up, so let me track back. Let me spell out for my own clarification what I’m seeing now as I turn back time and shape shift and all that jazz. Actually, let me just switch on the television set and turn the dial back about three months and change to late July, a few weeks after I started my Pharmax work and Polly had started Zhanya with popping her pills. This bit I don’t even have to burrow into someone else’s memory to access. This bit I remember quite well.

I was alone in the apartment, brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when the story came on the 11 o’clock news. The correspondent was fiddling with her hair, not having sprayed it thoroughly enough to contend with either the summer’s humidity or the breeze coming in from the beach just a few blocks away.

“Sarah?” the anchor asked.

“Wha—” Sarah Schture looked at the camera. “Are we on?”

Kate Craft, the venerable blond news anchor sitting comfortably on the studio set, didn’t answer the question, preferring, perhaps, to let the attractive, younger correspondent figure it out for herself. (Jealousy. The binding of 3H-paroxetine in the serotonergic system. It sure can make people do strange things.)

“Oh. Okay. Well, Kate,” she said, pulling herself together and dropping her voice an octave or two. “It was pandemonium at the Brighton Beach police precinct earlier today, after a drug raid in which five elderly women, one believed to be in her eighties, were arrested on charges of distributing and selling illegal narcotics and drugs. It was, police are saying, something they never would have expected. News Six was along for the ride.”

The picture flipped to a pre-taped segment with an opening shot of a patrol car pulling up to the red brick police precinct. Two handcuffed women, head scarves pulled down to hide their faces, are led perp-walk style into the building.

“Police say that at around 4 o’clock this afternoon, they received an anonymous tip,” Sarah Schture’s narration began. “Amid the mostly legal vendors along Brighton Beach Avenue,”—the shot changes to show a man selling caviar—“an illegal drug trade has been taking route.” Sarah was in the next shot, walking past a fruit stand and an ice cream vendor. “But the pills and tablets that are for sale aren’t substances you might normally associate with street drugs,” she said, starting to walk toward the camera. “What is being sold on the streets of Brighton Beach, in the light of day, are medications like codeine, diazepam, and even …” she shook a small white bottle, “the new antidepressant Ziperal.” She stopped walking and the shot changes to a scene at the precinct. “The dealers,” she narrated as the camera panned across a row of elderly women sitting on a bench, plastic cuffs on their wrists, faces blurred just enough to make them unidentifiable, “are as surprising as the drugs themselves.”

I was brushing my teeth, alone in our apartment and getting ready for bed when the story came on. I was more bemused than anything else when I saw it. I mean, just a couple months before, Polly and I were doing something not so different from those little old ladies, right? It was kind of the same thing. We never asked for money, but still. So the story kept my attention. It kept the attention of the media as well. What late night comic could resist making a joke about popping pills with old ladies? What tabloid newspaper could turn a cheek on such juicy headline opportunities? “The New Drug Czars?” asked the Daily News. “Black Market Grannies!” shouted the early edition of the New York Post. 

If only I had known that Polly had been tossing about the same phrase just a
few weeks before.

35

July 26 (B.D.)

The Next Day.

8:45 A.M.

“H
ey,” Polly said, stopping short at a newsstand as she and Mitya raced toward the subway station down the street. She pointed at the papers stacked up in front of the candy and gum. “They stole my line!”

“Come on,” Mitya said, grabbing her wrist to pull her along. He wasn’t in a joking mood. Early that morning, Ivan Petrovich had woken them up with a hysterical phone call. He’d told Mitya Zhanya hadn’t come home the night before. Again. He said he’d last heard her around 5 a.m. the day before, singing in the shower (at the top of her lungs, no less), which he thought was quite odd, and then the next thing he knew she was out the door, before he could even say good day. He hadn’t seen her since.

This odd disappearance and sudden shift in moods was concerning to Mitya. He immediately called the police to report a missing person and, well, you can guess what they told him. And now he and Polly were charging down to Brighton Beach in the clothing they’d worn the night before to get his aging but apparently no-longer-depressed (now apparently hypo-manic) aunt out of jail.

“I thought the police ignored all of that stuff, those street vendors,” Polly said, smoothing the skirt of her summery dress over her knees as they settled into the subway car’s hard plastic seats. “Hasn’t it been going on for years without them doing anything? Like what we saw the other week, all those drugs for sale? The Valium and codeine. All that stuff?”

“I don’t know.” Mitya placed his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands. “I don’t understand what’s going on down there. This makes no sense.”

Polly stared out the window, trying to make out the ghosts of decades-old graffiti images on the walls as the train barreled down through the dark tunnels. “You know what I don’t get?” she asked after a few minutes had passed. “It’s not like I gave your aunt such an enormous supply. Why was she selling off everything that remained in her own medicine cabinet? Does she need the money that badly?”

Mitya shook his head. “No. No. This is so not like her. She doesn’t need the money. She gets Social Security, plus I send her a decent amount every month. There has to be a mistake. I can’t even imagine …” He sat up. “Wait a second.”

“What?”

“Ziperal, that medicine you gave her, what do you know about the side effects it can have? That could be it, right? She’s been taking it for more than a couple of weeks now.”

“Are you blaming me?” Polly asked, moving a few inches away from Mitya. “You think this is my fault? You’re the one who had to convince me to give it to her in the first place!”

“No. No. I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.” Mitya put his tattoo-mottled hand on Polly’s bare shoulder to reassure her. “It’s just, I don’t know, this is really weird. Really unlike her. I was just thinking maybe the medication might have something to do with that.”

“I don’t know. I know a ton of people who’ve taken it, and I haven’t seen anything strange happen, have you?”

“No, but when our friends take it, it’s usually a one-shot deal. Just as a quick stimulant to enhance the evening. They aren’t taking it over the course of a few weeks. They aren’t trying to treat anything chronic.”

But Polly had. She didn’t want to tell him, but she’d been taking a low dose of Ziperal for months now, ever since her Prozac had run out.

“I think there’s something else at work here,” she said. “Because if Ziperal created this kind of mania … that is what this seems like, right? If Ziperal did it, don’t you think we would have heard of it before? Don’t you think they would have pulled it off the market?”

“Maybe it just causes it in some people, a small percentage,” Mitya said. “Like how some drugs have a slight risk of heart failure, or whatever. Maybe Zhanya is just in that small percentage.”

“Maybe.” Polly looked back out the window. The train was pulling out of the underground tunnel onto the elevated tracks that led into south Brooklyn. “I never pay attention to the disclaimers on those commercials.” 

Maybe she should have. Maybe everyone
should.

36

July 26 (B.D.)

A Couple Hours Later.

10:15 A.M.

Raskolnikov wasn’t doing too well. Or rather, he was doing really, really well. Over the course of a week, according to the protocols of a study I’d found in the Ziperal documents Eugene Throng sent me, I had administered the highest dosage of Ziperal that a 1-pound rat could possibly tolerate. The results were quite alarming. I walked into work one morning to find him dancing; he was doing the rhumba, waltzing across his cage like rodent version of Fred Astaire.

“Well, you sure seem happy,” I said, plucking him out of his cage. Suddenly, he went limp in my hand, as if all the bones in his body had melted. Like when the Abominable Snowman follows Bugs Bunny to Florida and dissolves into the sand. Well, maybe it’s not that funny. But you know what is? Timing. Timing is funny. There’s that joke about the world’s most famous Polish comedian, do you know that one? It requires two people to tell it. The straight man says to the comedian: “Sir, I understand you’re the world’s greatest Polish comedian. What’s the secret to your success?” But the joke is that before the straight man can finish the word “success,” the comedian interrupts and says “timing.”

The timing of what was going on with me back then and what was going on down there in Brighton Beach at pretty much the same moment is actually kind of funny. Because, funnily enough, this stuff with Ras was all happening at the same exact time that Polly and Mitya were headed down to Brooklyn. The same day, anyway.  I swear, if I still had a frontal lobe, it would probably be kicking it into high gear about now.

37

July 26 (B.D.)

Pretty Much the Same Time as the Previous Chapter.

10:28 A.M.

It wasn’t even 10:30 in the morning, but the summer heat was already rising off the pavement in front of the precinct house, creating a blurred effect when you looked into the distance. And there they were. Mitya with his low-slung jeans cut off at the knee, Polly in a light yellow, fluttery dress, both of them shielding their eyes as they stepped out into the sun.

Mitya turned around and pulled his aunt elbow-first onto the sidewalk. “Zhanya, come on,” he implored. “It’s time to go home.”

But Zhanya didn’t want to go home. She was having too much fun flirting, demurely batting her eyes at the admonishments of the young officer who was holding the door open. “Now, I don’t want to see you here again, missus …” the officer was saying.

“Are you sure?” she asked, pulling away from Mitya so she could playfully pat the officer on his behind. 

“Zhanya! Come on! I’m so sorry, sir,” Mitya said, turning to the officer. “My aunt, I don’t know what …”

The officer smiled and shook his head. “Just take her home,” he said, gently prying Zhanya’s puffy fingers off of his back pocket. “Try to keep her out of trouble. She got lucky this time. Just a slap on the wrist. No charges. Next time it won’t be so easy.”

Mitya pulled his aunt off the young cop and anxiously pushed her in the direction of her home.

Zhanya’s apartment was only a few blocks from the precinct, but the walk back was slow, hot and silent. Zhanya was taking her sweet time, literally stopping to smell the flowers in the window boxes and watching the birds flying overhead.

“I cannot believe what I have been missing,” she whispered repeatedly to no one in particular. “I cannot believe …”

Mitya held Polly’s hand, squeezing tighter every time Zhanya stopped to observe something or issue another proclamation.

After the third or fourth floral sniffing, Polly couldn’t suppress a small laugh. “Man, I’ll have whatever she’s having.”

Mitya relented and laughed, too. What else could one do at a time like this? “I can see what you mean,” he said. “But what say we hold off a little while?”

When they finally arrived at her building, Zhanya bounded up the stairs to the entry door. “Ivan! Ivan Petrovich!” She ran down the corridor, shaking her house keys ahead of her as if they were pulling her magnetically toward her apartment. Mitya and Polly struggled to keep up behind her. “Ivan! Petrovich! Ya preshla!” she shouted. Ivan Petrovich, I have arrived.

It turns out that another nice thing about the afterlife is that my lifelong inability to pick up foreign languages has become irrelevant. In life, I might have been good at math and science, but French? Spanish? Forget about it. Those required classes always pulled down my GPA. I’m positive that’s why I wound up at my safety school and not Harvard. But now? Speak in Thai. Speak in Portuguese. Speak in Arabic. Speak in Russian. I’ll understand every word.

Ivan Petrovich was sitting at the kitchen table, beads of sweat dripping off his head, looking as bedraggled as the father of a teenage girl who had been out all night. As soon as Zhanya waltzed into the room, he sprang out of his seat.

“Zhanya! Are you okay? Did they hurt you? How are you feeling?” he asked in Russian.

Zhanya lunged forward, leaping over Ralph, the old dog who was sleeping, half-deaf and undisturbed, in the middle of the floor.

Zhanya grabbed the puffs of white hair sticking off the sides of Ivan Petrovich’s head as if they were handles and pulled him toward her to kiss both his cheeks. “I’m fine! Great! Never better!” she said as if she had just come back from a Caribbean vacation, not like she had just spent a night on a hard cot in jail. She planted platonic cousinly kisses all over his face.

Polly and Mitya arrived breathlessly behind her, and Zhanya turned and greeted them as if she hadn’t seen them in days, giving Mitya a big sloppy smacker on his forehead and Polly a demonstrative hug that briefly knocked her off balance.

“Zaichick” she said, pinching Polly’s cheek. Little squirrel. Then she whirled around the room like a dervish until she reached the refrigerator, opened it and stuck her head in to see what was there. 

Ivan Petrovich looked helplessly at Mitya and Polly.

“She’s been acting like this since we got her from the precinct,” Mitya said. 

“Pelmeni?” Zhanya swung around with a plate of cold dumplings covered in plastic wrap. “Or meat? You want meat?” She pulled out a long string of sausages and waved it over her head before tossing it on the countertop and grabbing a knife to cut it all up. The dog, smelling the meat, briefly looked up, and Zhanya threw a few pieces his way.

Ivan Petrovich sighed. “I think she, how do you say, settle down soon,” he said in his strongly accented English. “I think the, what you say, concoction? I think it last twenty-four hour.”

Mitya and Polly looked at each other, dumbfounded. “Concoction?” Mitya asked. “Do you mean the Ziperal?” He looked at the bedraggled old cherub in front of him. “Do you mean the Ziperal?” 

“No, no,” Polly corrected before Ivan Petrovich could answer, the truth suddenly dawning on her. “Ziperal is extended release. It isn’t supposed to cause a sudden change like that. It takes a while to start working, and then it takes a while to get out of your system.” 

“How do you know—,” Mitya began to ask Polly, but Ivan Petrovich grabbed his arm before he could finish.

“It still in system,” he said. He tapped his chest. “Will be for days. But immediate effects of such big dose should …” He couldn’t find the English word he wanted, so he fluttered his fingers into the air over his head. “It go away.”

A sharp odor suddenly shrouded the room.

“What’s that?” Polly asked.

Mitya pointed at the dog. “It was Ralph. He’s getting old.” He turned back to Ivan Petrovich. “How much did Zhanya take? Did you tell her to take more than Polly told her to?”

“Here!” Zhanya shoved a large platter between them and pushed a dumpling into Ivan Petrovich’s mouth before he could answer. “Eat! Eat!” she cheerfully demanded, refusing to take no for an answer. She tossed the food on the table and set out chipped china cups.

Mitya, Polly and Ivan Petrovich, unsure of what else to do, sat down obligingly and let Zhanya pour them lukewarm, day-old tea, her voluminous breasts spilling out of her purple polyester house dress each time she leaned forward. Cups brimming over, she placed the kettle back on the stove, only to return with another plate of food. “Here,” she said, “these I bought down the—” She stopped, and then, in a fit of unprecedented narcolepsy, slid down against the oven and fell asleep next to the flatulent dog on the floor, scattering cookies across the yellowed linoleum tiles.