Head Case (15 page)

41

August 21 (B.D.)

A Few Weeks Later.

I burie
d myself in my work. I tweaked the dosing and scanned the brains of rats. I set up controls to monitor the effects of increased dosages of Ziperal. I completed the incomplete forms and sent progress reports over to Missy Pander. She made minor adjustments and then sent them back, along with nice bundles of cash—well, direct deposits into my bank account, but you know what I mean. But I did not talk to Polly. I didn’t tell her how good it felt not to have to worry about money for the first time in my life. I didn’t tell her about how well my research was progressing, how excited I was that I was having success at identifying the specific location in the frontal lobe that regulated boredom, how concerned I was that even though he was enjoying his treatments, if given a dose high enough to have a valid efficacy, Raskolnikov kept passing out. I didn’t tell her about my strange conversation with Eugene Throng. I didn’t tell her anything; we were hardly speaking at all.

After that night at the restaurant, Polly and I had both pretty much thrown in the towel on our friendship. We started acting like a couple going through a bitter divorce, staying out late (either at work or in the clubs, depending on which one of us it was), skulking about to avoid seeing each other when we were in the apartment, and making forced, empty pleasantries when we did. She still borrowed my clothes without asking, but I didn’t care. I was spending so much time at work that all I really needed was underwear and a lab coat. Obviously I wore clothes in between those two items, but I stopped thinking so much about what it was (“who” it was in celebrity parlance) because the coat only came off when I left the office. Nobody but me, the people on the cross-town bus, and the mirror in the living room ever got to see what was underneath.

One day, not long after the fight, and after pulling an overnight at the lab, I dragged myself home around noon. It was a Wednesday, I might add, a day when most people are at work.

Polly wasn’t.

She was sitting on the spot on the couch where I usually tossed my bag, hunched over and picking lint out of the cracks between her toes.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Watching TV, what does it look like?” she responded without looking at me.

I looked at her.

She looked like shit. Even worse than before. Her hair was stringy, like she hadn’t washed it since I’d seen her at the restaurant a few weeks before. It’s amazing how quickly she had deteriorated. I could count the vertebra sticking out from under her shirt. The circles under her eyes looked like hockey pucks. A large whitehead was emerging out of her chin. Her reflection in the funhouse mirror actually looked better than she did. Had I been less absorbed in my marinating anger at that moment, I might have been concerned. I might have asked if everything was okay.

“Whatever,” I said instead. I went into my room and slammed the door behind me.

A few minutes later there was a knock.

Polly slowly opened the door and poked her head in. “Sorry to bother you,” she said, sounding mildly contrite. Or maybe I was projecting.

I crossed my arms and waited for her to explain herself. Or apologize (for what happened at the restaurant, not for opening the door). “Yes?”

Polly stood there a moment. She was wearing the jeans she had bought to go clubbing with Lillianne. They used to be tight on her. Now they looked like they were going to fall off.

“Fuck. Never mind.”

“No, tell me. I want to hear what you have to say.”

Polly sighed. “Do you have any sedatives?”

“Are you serious? You’re hitting me up for drugs again?”

“No, no. Not like that. I just need one. For me. Right now. I feel like I’m having a panic attack.”

I just shook my head. “Whatever, Polly. I have a bottle over there, on top of my dresser. Take what you want.”

And she did.

42

November 5 (A.D.)

Back to Now.

Oh, God, I hate myself!

Why did I do that? Why did I just hand a few pills to her and leave it at that? Why didn’t I push her, ask her what was going on, why she was such a wreck? If I had, Jesus, if I had asked and she’d told me, who knows where we would be now, where I would be. Not here, though. I don’t think I would be here.

It turns out that there’s a lot she could have told me. She could have told me that her boyfriend’s elderly aunt was being threatened by a mobster thug, for one thing. Or maybe that she and Mitya were desperately lying to any doctor who would see them, trying to load up on Ziperal prescriptions to buy them some time. She could have told me that she hadn’t gone to work in a week, that she was a nervous, terrified wreck, and that she was convinced they were all going to be killed. I wish she’d said something. I wish I’d asked. I wish she’d told me that, in a fit of desperation, she had broken down and called Missy Pander.

Talk therapy can sometimes be more effective than drugs.

43

September 26 (B.D.)

A Couple Weeks Ago.

“As you can see by these flow charts, Stanley,” Missy Pander was saying as she pointed the red laser beam to the top right corner of the screen, “Olivia has done a tremendous job of showing how, at doses above 5 mg per kilogram of body mass, Ziperal has a more immediate and demonstrative effect on the activity around the ventromedial region of the nucleaus accumbens, the same region that is shown to have significantly lower levels of synaptic activity in patients exhibiting symptoms of Fatico Dystopia.”

“People who are bored at work,” I muttered under my breath. As well as they were paying me, and as much as I enjoyed locating and identifying emotional orbs, I still couldn’t get my mind around the idea that this was actually a condition that needed to be treated chemically. Certainly not with a medication that, as I was starting to find out, held a large degree of risk. Missy shot me a look that said, quite clearly, that I needed to keep my attitude in check.

The conference room was filled up again, this time with all eyes on me. Or they had been, anyway. I had walked in to a round of applause, Novartny leading the charge.

“I read the preliminary reports. Nicely done, nicely done,” he’d said, patting my shoulder as I sat down next to him at the head of the table and settled in for Missy Pander’s presentation of my findings.

“On these next slides,” Missy continued, clicking the remote to flip to a multi-colored image from a scan of Raskolnikov’s brain, “the reactions become quite obvious. Here,” she said, pointing the laser, “you can see this area of the ventromedial region is gray, with limited activity.”

Novartny leaned back, studiously crossing his arms. A number of the folks around the table followed suit.

“And here,” Missy said, changing the screen, “after one week of treatment at the new, higher dosage, it’s a nice deep purple, indicating greatly enhanced activity.”

After the whole fainting incident, I had adjusted the dosing slightly. Raskolnikov was able to maintain his high for longer durations. However, I still couldn’t get it quite right. Raskolnikov was still prone to sporadic fits of narcolepsy. But Missy, even more so than Eugene, was disinterested in the side effects. That was a different department, Missy had said, and not her job. What she was interested in—what Novartny, et al wanted to know—were any positive effects I might find, anything they could take hold of and run with. That was all. They just needed me to prove what they wanted me to prove, show them what they wanted me to show. How to handle the negative information I was beginning to unearth, well, I hadn’t fully figured that out.

What I could show, however, was that Ziperal acted pretty much like any other antidepressant or mood enhancer in its category, the only difference being that, regardless of any side effects, it was easy to show how high doses affected the suprachiasmatic nucleus—one of the places where boredom is regulated in the brain. Whether other similar medications could do that too was irrelevant. Whether that boredom was work-related or not was more of a problem for the marketers than for me.

  “Perhaps this speaks best of all,” Missy said. She clicked to show a video image of Raskolnikov sitting at a tiny dollhouse office desk I had bought for him as a little joke to amuse myself. There the rat was, swaying happily from side to side, kind of like Stevie Wonder does when he’s singing. Everybody laughed. They loved it.

“Brilliant!” Novartny cheerfully slapped me on my back. “Not only is she a talented neurochemist, Olivia’s a comic to boot. Cheryl, this might even be worth considering for the campaign, what do you think? The rat race allusion is killer.”

“Good idea, sir,” said a woman at the other end of the table. “We can try to work something into our consumer marketing agenda.”

Novartny nodded agreeably and turned back to the screen. “Look at the little guy. Forget about the rat race, he’s as happy as a clam in a cubicle. I can’t wait to get this stuff to market. When can we begin human testing for the higher dosages for the new diagnosis? Can we launch this product in time for December’s convention?”

I held my breath. Because just as Novartny said that, the video showed—as I knew it would—Raskolnikov fainting and falling off his little chair, landing on his back with his legs in the air like a drunk dog.

Missy’s mouth fell agape. I had promised her I would edit that portion out. I suppose there might have been a better way for me to start raising subtle flags about this drug, but at the time, this did seem like a good way to get some attention.

“Just a little joke, sir,” Missy stammered as her cheeks reddened. “The results have been very encouraging.”

Novartny wasn’t pleased. Neither was Missy. She shot me a look that said she wanted to kill me. Metaphorically sp
eaking, of course.

44

October 2 (B.D.)

A Tad More Than a Month to Live.

Here’s the thing. For all of my talk about the inner workings of the human mind, the more I began to unravel the how of things, the less I could understand the why. I know, that’s basically the essence of the whole religion versus science debate; it’s the existential question every single college freshman ponders while smoking pot in the dorm basement. It’s the question we all keep asking until we die. We don’t even stop asking it then. Clearly. But since I can’t figure out the why by raking through my own brain, I’m learning how to go elsewhere. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. And as I tour around, as I learn to traipse through the gray matter and navigate around hemispheres of cerebra, the synapses are starting to connect, so to speak. Quickly. The better I get at hopping about and accessing other people’s memories, the quicker the information unfolds. The chain of events flickers before me like a hallucinogenic trip. Well, maybe more like a movie trailer.

Fade up from black.

Scene:

Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn is hovering in the guest bathroom, admiring the jerry-rigged laboratory he’s built, preparing to begin breaking down chemicals over Bunsen burners while molding new chalky white pills on a piece of plywood balanced over the tub. He’s cursing and muttering like a mad man. In Russian. If you could translate (and I can) you would understand that he’s berating himself for not having better success at manufacturing this pill in his bathroom, that if he can’t pull it together to keep feeding Shotkyn’s supply, they will all be killed. What he’s saying is something along the lines of, “You idiot. You failure. You pathetic excuse for a scientist. You can do better. You can prove this to them, make them take you seriously. You can make this drug. Stop fucking around. You’ve got to make it before he kills us. This is your chance.”

And then suddenly one of the glass vials heating over the Bunsen burners explodes, shooting a fireball to the ceiling and causing the tied up shower curtain to burst into flames. 

Scene:

A beet-red Boris Shotkyn is shouting more obscenities into the phone. Mitya, on the other end of the line, is answering obsequiously. Yes. No. Of course. Of course. We understand. Yes. We’ll fix the bathroom, I mean the lab, immediately. Okay. We will try to get more while we do that. Right. Trying is not enough. We’ll get it for you. Yes. We understand the stakes.

Scene:

Polly and Missy are at the dive bar down the street from our apartment building. Polly is begging, her hands pressed in front of her as Missy sits across from her looking bemused.

“Seriously?” Missy says. “Why the hell would I do something like that?”

At which point Polly, feeling the stakes with every cell of her body, takes a deep breath and says, “Because I know you can.”

Missy runs her tongue over her newly enameled teeth the way people sometimes do when stalling for a thought. “Is that why you called me? Your fancy friends need a fix? I’m not repping anymore, Polly. I don’t have packs of Ziperal samples stuffed inside my purse, you know.”

“Well,” Polly says, followed by a dramatic pause. “Considering the work you’re having Olivia do, there should be plenty to go around.”

Missy uncrosses her legs under the table and places both high-heeled feet firmly on the floor. “What? What did she tell you?”

“Enough.” Polly says this more as a question, testing the waters to see how far she can swim. Her heart is beating as if she’s just done a few Olympic-length laps. “She told me enough.”

Missy contemplates this for a moment.

I’m quite sure, knowing what I know, that this knowledge—the fact that Polly might be potentially privy to private information (even if, in fact, Polly didn’t actually know the half of it)—wouldn’t have sat well with Missy. Obviously not.

“So, why not just get the pills from Olivia if you think she’s got such great access to them?” she asks, leaning back and wrapping her arms across her waist.

“Well, first of all, Olivia refused to help me. I suppose you’ll be happy to hear that. Anyway, I doubt she would have a large enough supply. I hate to have to go here, but we need to get them from you. You are my last resort.”

Missy sighs demonstratively and says, “Sorry. I’m going to have to disappoint.”

At which point Polly places her palms flat on the table, leans forward and metamorphoses into someone almost unrecognizable to me. 

“I have a feeling you won’t want to say no to what we have to propose,” she says, as if impersonating an antihero from some sort of noir-ish thriller.

This sassy, take-no-prisoners attitude is so unlike Polly. It is so out of sync with her usual MO that a less-experienced person (ghost, poltergeist, whatever) might think she’d resorted to snorting meth (something she had never done before, I should add). But they’d be wrong—the only supplement she seems to be on at this at moment is an enormous influx of adrenaline. Death threats can do that, I suppose.

“What if I refuse? It’s not exactly like I can just walk into the warehouse and grab a dozen boxes, Polly. Ziperal is a prescription medication. You have to account for it.”

“You were able to account for it before, Missy. I think you can figure this out.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Missy says, snatching her Louis Vuitton purse from the back of the chair and reaching for the oversized sunglasses she’d tossed on the table. “What are you going to do? Tell your dad on me if I don’t give you more drugs? Rat me out because I gave you a few samples once upon a time? Come on. You can’t even prove you got the meds from me. And even if you did, so what? You’d probably be in more trouble than I would. It’s pathetic. I’m getting out of here.”

Polly smiles, but not in a nice way. Silently, she reaches to the floor to pick up that ubiquitous periwinkle bag. She sticks her hand in, grabs something and scatters half a dozen snapshots across the table.

“You might want to look at these, first,” she says. She points at a picture of a grinning Missy Pander holding a tablet over Vivian’s open mouth. “I’m sure those ‘celebrity endorsements’ were great for you, but it really depends on how a publicist wants to spin it, never mind that it wasn’t really legal, now was it? A Pharmax rep handing out medications all willy-nilly like that, pushing pills on drunken movie stars? Probably not the greatest form of PR, celebrities blaming you and your pills for their addictions. And don’t think my friends won’t back me up.”

Missy picked up the photo on top. “God, I was so drunk that night,” she says, sounding mystified. “I hardly remember any of this.” She picks up another and another, faster and faster. She looks up. “Where did you get these?”

“Where do you think?”

Missy doesn’t need to answer. As all the sites like TMZ.com can attest, every person there that night at Charity had a cell phone. Heck, aside from that, Mitya probably had access to images from the club’s security system recordings. But the photos that didn’t make it to People, that US Weekly and Star didn’t pay thousands to publish, were the ones with Missy Pander. But there she was, mugging for the camera with her arm around Lillianne Farber, each holding blister packs of various Pharmax pharmaceutical products the way people sometimes hold up their colorful, umbrella-adorned pina coladas in those snapshots from drunken party boat sails in Cancun. There she was, Missy Pander, small town girl turned big shot pharmaceutical executive, doing the same with a bleary-eyed but still gorgeous Vivian Ward.

Missy places the pictures down, face first.

“I thought I asked you to delete the pictures of me.”

“Well, I did. From your camera. But it turns out I had already sent them to a friend,” Polly says with a shrug that masquerades the fact that her heart is still pounding as if she were an actress with stage fright, struggling to get out some overly rehearsed words. “Sorry, I was a little drunk that night if you recall. I just thought it was funny. Wasn’t thinking straight.”

Missy exhales slowly. “You realize that if you release these, it will be just as bad for your job as it is for mine. Some of these people are your clients.”

Polly laughs. “I realize that, Missy. But the thing is, the pictures of Lillianne and her friends popping pills are already out there. You know that. You’re probably the one who cropped yourself out and posted them.”

“I didn’t do that.”

“Right. Sure you didn’t. Regardless, those images are old news. Who cares? I was already raked over the coals about them. Anyway, I have nothing to lose. I hate my job. I haven’t shown up in over a week, and they’re probably about to fire me anyway. Which, come to think of it, might be the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time. For you, well, I believe there might be a lot more at stake.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Polly says. Except, as it turns out, what Polly means and what Missy thinks she means are two entirely different matters.

“Fine,” Missy sighs. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“No, what you will do.”

“Jesus, Polly. I’ll try, okay?”

“Listen,” Polly says in a conspiratorial whisper, “you really can’t fuck this up. There are lives at stake. Maybe even yours.”

Missy cocks her head. “Oh, come on. Is this some sort of prank? This is completely absurd.”

“Boris Shotkyn doesn’t think so,” Polly says, pulling out her trump card.

“Boris Shotkyn?”

“Yes. You’ve heard of him, right?”

Missy, dumbfounded, nods. Of course she has. “Where are you going with this?”

“He wants to meet you. Tomorrow. And you need to make sure you have something to give him. He doesn’t mess around.”

“I won’t even ask how…”

“Then don’t. Just do it.”

“Wow,” Missy says, shaking her head as if jostling it about might help make sense of this all. “Amazing,”—she looks up as if talking to someone, something, above—“do a girl a little favor and get blackmailed in return.” She looks back at Polly. “I would never have pegged you to be such a brilliant manipulator. Or so … nefarious. Your father would be very disappointed, you know.”

“Then don’t tell him. He wouldn’t believe you, anyway.” Polly stacks the photographs together and places them in her purse. “I’ll have one of Shotkyn’s people call you to give you an address. You two might actually like each other. You have more in common than you might think.” And with that, Polly walks out of the club, straight into the taxi that is waiting for her on the curb.

“How did it go?” Mitya asks, turning around from the passenger seat up front.

“Fine,” she says, collapsing into the back seat. She taps the glass behind Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn’s head. “Ivan, can you open a window? I think I’m about to throw up.”

Fade ba
ck to black.