Head Case (3 page)

6

March 15 (B.D.)

About a Week After I First Met Lillianne.

8:30 P.M.

“Does this look okay?” I asked Polly as I watched myself pivoting in front of the mirror. I could see her behind me, sitting on the ratty couch with the soles of her feet pressed together, her knees bouncing up and down in what she called “the butterfly pose.” I can see us both as clearly as if the scene were unfolding in front of me right now, like I just stepped into a time machine and got spit up into our apartment, obliterating the past eight months or so of my life. Poof. Suddenly I’m there again, anxiously studying my reflection in the billboard-sized mirror we had precariously hung after many failed attempts at hammering a bent, rusty nail into the exposed brick wall that framed our diminutive living room (our living room-ette).

“You look like Olive Oyl,” she laughed, fluttering her legs.

We had found that mirror on the street right after we moved in. It did a good job of making the space feel larger, but it was no mystery why someone had tossed it in the trash. It was warped, and at certain angles it would either dramatically lengthen or shorten our body parts, never to flattering effect. From my vantage point at that moment, my limbs looked not dissimilar to a stretched out Gumby doll. But Polly looked like she had been steamrolled and spread out wide. Like Wily E. Coyote after an anvil fell on his head.

I told her as much. It was a ritual, trying to think of new ways to label our distorted reflections. Without a functional mirror, we depended heavily on each other to ascertain how things actually appeared, what reality looked like, but we had too much fun with this one to replace it. We promised each other we would still have it when we were old and sharing a room in a nursing home in New Jersey.

“Should I belt this?” I asked, tugging at the hem of the black silk tunic I had bought that afternoon. Or I guess I should say that the bank bought. At least I won’t need to worry about my credit card debt when my body is six feet under.

“Try that one,” Polly said, extending a leg and using her toe to point at the wide red suede belt jumbled on the floor amidst a bunch of other belts. “A little color might not hurt.” She folded her leg back into place.

I wrapped the belt around my waist and turned back to the mirror. As far as I could tell, I looked pretty good. The long tunic and the slim dark jeans made me look effortlessly stylish. I had my hair pulled back in a low ponytail, a thin gold headband adding a little glam to the front of my head. No one would ever take me for a laboratory scientist. Or a drug dealer, for that matter. I smiled at the absurdity of the thought.

“What are you going to wear?” I asked Polly, who still hadn’t taken off the yoga attire she’d been wearing all day. “Maybe you should try that silver tank I bought last week, the one with the low back?” I said, answering my own question before she had the chance. “I think it might be better than the dress you bought today.”

“This is so silly,” she said, uncrossing her legs and extending them onto the milk crate in front of her. She bent forward, grabbed her flexed toes, and touched her nose to her knees. “You’re acting like we have a big date or something.”

“We kind of do,” I said. We were heading out to meet Lillianne and some of her friends that evening, just a few days after that first Sentofel handout. Lillianne had decided to kick around town for a few more days, and had been calling us repeatedly, just to check in, as if we were the tightest of friends. That morning she’d left a message saying that we should meet her at a new restaurant called Spade, that her friend Leo was a part-owner, and that everyone would be there. What “everyone” meant wasn’t exactly clear, but we knew she wasn’t talking about Polly’s co-workers. Or mine, for that matter. So Polly and I had spent the better part of the afternoon shopping and fretting about what to wear. 

After taking a shower and pouring herself into my silver tank top and a new pair of fashionably tight jeans, she took her turn in front of the mirror. “Good?” she asked as she sucked in her cheeks, puckered her lips and spun around to check out how her butt looked. “Okay. I admit it. I’m kind of nervous.”

“You look fine.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She bent over and starting digging into her blue suede bag. “Couldn’t hurt, right?” she said, pulling out a blister pack of Sentofel. She pushed one of the pills through the foil backing and popped it into her mouth. “Want one?”

I shook my head. “I’m good.”

Polly shrugged and swallowed the pill dry, with no water to chase it down. “We’ll see. You ready to go?”

“Yup,” I said, and off we went, teetering in our strappy high heels and smelling like a mixture of peppermint Certs and samples of eau de toilette, Polly’s oversized purse filled with the former contents of our medicine cabinet.

7

November 5 (B.D.)

Today. Again.

5:41 P.M.

When we passed the 59th Street Bridge, the car picked up speed and the driver, this Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn, seemed to relax. Well, relax enough to start talking to me. Unfortunately, what he said made very little sense.

“Chyort voz’mi!” he exclaimed, as if he just had a startling revelation. He lightly pounded his free round fist on the wheel, causing the car to swerve for a moment. “Idiots,” he said, over articulating the word as he steadied the car again. “Ee-dee-yots. They no have respect!”

“Excuse me?” I wondered for a moment if he might be psychotic.

“I am scientist, too,” he said, taking his hand off the wheel again (causing the car to swerve again) and proudly tapping his chest as he eyed me in the mirror. “Much more experience than you. You just the child. They think I no good dyedooshka. Grandpa. They think I am old doorak, old fool.” He spoke fast, anxiously, mixing Russian words in periodically. Words that I obviously did not understand. Not at the time.

I reached for the seatbelt.

“We go to lab,” he said. “Fix formula. I can do myself, I am hero of Sovyetskiy Soyooz. But no. Shotkyn, he want you.”

“Shotkyn?”

“Boris Shotkyn?” He seemed surprised I didn’t know the name. “He boss. He send for you. Say you can help. Be man in the middle.”

“Middleman? Between who?” I honestly had no idea what we were talking about.

“So no one get sicker. So no one get killed,” he said, confusing me even more.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted, uncharacteristically losing my calm for a moment. I took a breath. “Can you just slow down and explain this to me?”

He shook his head. “My English no good. My Mitya, he explain. We pick him up and he bring us to meeting and he explain.”

“Mitya?” I said, sitting forward, pressing my face up to the thick Plexiglas divider that separated the front from the back. Holy shit. “Do you mean Mitya Stoopsky? The DJ? Skinny, tall. Dark hair? That Mitya?”

Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn hit the brakes and spun around. “How you know my Mitya? You have met before?”

We stared at each other, ignoring the loud honks of the cars forced to stop short behind us. I’m not sure who was more scared and confused at that point, him or me. But one thing was suddenly crystallizing—Polly’s hysterics about that loser boyfriend of hers might actually have been warranted.

The driver behind us leaned on his horn, creating a deafening noise that finally drew our attention. Ivan Petrovich turned back around and stepped on the gas. I picked up my phone again, this time without any intention of hiding it.

“No, no! It is danger.”

Danger? What was this? A late-night B-movie?

“You call the police and they—” He jerked his head back, miming being shot through the skull.

I put the phone back in my pocket and sat back to think.

I know I’m telling this like I was all cool and collected. I actually was. I’m like that—I was like that—in high-stress situations. The more ratcheted up the insanity, the more zen I would get. An excessive amount of tetrahydropregnanalone would pump through my head and instead of racing adrenaline, I would have flowing serotonin. I think that’s why I always tested so well. My exams, my boards, all of that, I always went into them with the focus and calm of a monk. Polly used to joke that I should try to map out the firings of my own synapses under stress and market it. If you could bottle that, it could make a very popular drug, she said with a laugh. She was right, of course. But I have to say, the stress of schools and tests and exams had nothing on being driven blindly into Brooklyn with a raving Russian rambling about laboratories, bosses and murder. And about Mitya.

Man, I knew he was bad news. Not only was he fucking around with Polly, now it looked like the hipster slime-ball was also fucking around with me.

I was, however, extremely collected. Had Mitya suddenly appeared at my side at that moment, I am fairly certain I would have, with great calm and coolness, slugged him in the face and then sat back with a serene smile across my face.

Any pharmaceutical company would have paid millions to know what was going on with the nerve endings in my brain.

“Can we dial this back?” I asked, pressing my face up to the Plexiglas partition. “First of all, can you please just tell me who you are?”

I suppose I said it calmly enough, because once again he relented. He told me his name was Lumpkyn, confirming what I had just read above the dashboard. Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn. He spoke quickly, in broken English, like he didn’t have time to properly think through sentence formation, like this information was a waste of some very precious time.

“I am chemist,” he told me. “Just like you. Well, now a cab driver, but really a chemist. One of the best of Sovetsky Soyuz.”

“Wow,” I said, encouraging him to go on.

“Yes. I invented Leninzine.” I had no idea what that was, but he kept talking like this information should impress me. “But they no trust me. Say I am, what the words, washed up?”

“Who is ‘they?’”

He did not explain, but rather continued his rant. He said they wouldn’t trust him because he was Mitya’s third cousin. Or maybe fourth. He wasn’t sure. Apparently genealogy wasn’t his thing. But, regardless, he and Mitya and Mitya’s aunt Zhanya were all relatives and he was sure that was creating some bias against him. His work, he said, was solid.

I could see in the mirror that his face was reddening. The supraorbital vein in his forehead was throbbing, and his eyes were darting nervously from the road to the mirror to the sides of the car.

“But what do you want from me?” I finally asked. “Did Mitya send for me?”

“Mitya is not the one who want you. Boris Shotkyn. He want you.”

“Fine. Whoever. But can you tell me why?”

“You study psychopharmacology, yes?”

“I’m studying neurochemistry, if that’s what you mean.”

“Boris think you can help.”

“And who is this Boris?”

“Boris Shotkyn,” he said, his frustration palpable. “You will understand. At the laboratory, we talk. With Boris, with the boss. You tell him I do good work, make good medicine.”

“You make your own medicine? What are you talking about?”

The car in front of us pulled into the left lane, and Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn took the opportunity to accelerate.

“Why didn’t you just ask me to come?” I asked, although, to be fair, if a strange man had asked me to come to a strange lab somewhere at a secret location in Brooklyn, I might have been a bit reluctant to oblige. But it seemed worth asking. “Why didn’t you just call and invite me down?”

Ivan Petrovich turned around and looked at me square on. “It was not the question.”

8

March 17 (B.D.)

Going Back About Eight Months Again.

8:55 P.M.

(But First, a Slight Digression.)

Back around the turn of the century (this past one, not the one that happened a hundred plus years ago), when I first got into this stuff—the chemistry of human emotion—it was paranoia that triggered my interest, how paranoia acted in our transmitters and synapses. I knew I was interested in the science of brain chemistry, and I knew I wanted to pursue it as a career; I just wasn’t sure how to focus my calling.

One night a bunch of us were sitting around the laundry room in the basement of our college dorm, getting stoned while we waited for the rinse cycles to finish.

“Shit!” Polly said, handing me the joint she had just smoked and jumping off the large wooden table that was supposed to serve as a place to fold and sort clothing (an absurd concept, since no self-respecting college student ever did either). “Do you see that?” She ran over to the washing machine and plastered her hands up to the round window. “Something’s in there!”

“Your underwear,” one of our astute friends observed. “And probably some socks.”

“No, no,” Polly insisted, tapping at the glass. “Something like an animal. Something’s in there. It’s going to ruin my clothes!” She slammed the stop button and pulled the door open, causing most of her clothing and not a small amount of water to tumble to the dirty cement floor. When the cascade was complete, a large and overly padded leopard print push-up bra was left sitting on top of the pile.

We all fell over laughing, Polly included.

“I swear I saw something,” she sputtered.

It became a catch phrase of ours, used as a jarring non sequitur whenever we wanted to keep each other from doing something stupid—whenever we needed to call each other out on some absurdity or little white lie. A bullshit meter. For example, if I caught Polly staring longingly at the ice cream in our freezer and she denied coveting it. “I swear I saw something,” I would say, and we would fall apart laughing before tearing into the pint. Or, if I was about to drunk-dial the frat boy I had met the night before, the one who had a girlfriend and was generally known around campus to be a womanizing twit, Polly, knowing I was likely setting myself up for yet another rejection, might say “I swear I saw something” when I picked up the phone. I would freeze and then sheepishly put the receiver back down. By the same token, if I caught Polly washing her latest boyfriend’s laundry or doing some other way-too-desperate and ultimately doomed ploy to solidify the fledgling relationship, I might swear I “saw something” as a gentle start to the mini-intervention that inevitably followed. It was a simple phrase, but it often worked to shift a frame of mind.

All this to say, between the marijuana-induced paranoia and the verbally induced head-spins, I became intrigued with the ways in which emotional triggers can be set off in the most fascinating ways. I still am. I still was as we got out of the taxi that cool early spring night eight months ago.

“I swear I saw something,” I said as we walked into the sleek foyer of the restaurant.

“Ha, ha. It’s going to be fine.” Polly took my hand and led me deeper inside.

Spade was cavernous. The din of the diners bounced off the walls, hitting us with an auditory assault as we opened the door. It sounded like the restaurant had been invaded by cicadas—a situation made worse by the souped-up industrial décor. Cold sheets of burnished metal covered the walls, and pipes and light fixtures were left bare on the ceiling. The hostess—tall, skeletal, dark and brooding—matched the interior perfectly. She was typing away at the black keyboard on her copper-topped podium, scanning the flat screen monitor for I cannot even imagine what. Seating charts, I suppose.

“Do you have a reservation?” she asked with snide derision when she finally acknowledged our presence.

“No,” I began, “but we’re meet –”

“I can put your name down on the list,” she said, interrupting, not moving her eyes from the screen. “But it is a four-hour wait. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Polly placed her hand on the edge of the podium. The hostess looked at her like she had just pinched her ass. “We’re meeting Lillianne Farber,” Polly said. “She said she’d be here around nine? She said we should say Edie Sedgwick sent us.”

The hostess looked up and studied us for a moment. “She’s here,” she said, relenting. “Follow me.”

Over toward the back of the room, we saw Lillianne waving at us. Polly grabbed a couple of breath mints out of her bag, pressed one into my hand, and popped another into her mouth. She always had them on her, claiming peppermint Certs had a better calming effect than any prescription medication she’d ever tried. “Why do you think peppermint tea is so popular?” she often asked.

Lillianne’s waving grew more frantic. “Polly! Olivia! Over here!” Even if she hadn’t been shouting, she would have been hard to miss. Decked out in a precariously low-cut red silk blouse and tight jeans, Lillianne may as well have had a spotlight illuminating on her. Of course, her table was discretely located, situated just so in order to give celebrity guests like her a semblance of privacy. A semblance. The spot also assured enough visibility that Page Six could report a sighting, and enough light that if someone wanted to take a cell phone photo to upload to a gossip site, well, they could. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Lillianne and friends stayed implanted in the zeitgeist and the restaurant got some priceless PR. Polly could probably write the whole evening off as a work meeting if she wanted to. If she actually had to pay for anything, that is.

“Can you believe I work for these people?” Polly asked as we watched Lillianne making a display of herself. “I mean, really. At the end of the day, it is all a bit ridiculous.”

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” I said, tugging my shirt down to make sure it was straight. I wondered if the lipstick had smudged off of my lips.

“This is silly.”

“I hear you.” I shrugged to suppress my increasing giddiness. I mean, come on. It isn’t every day that you get to play with the brain chemistry of your favorite movie star.