Head Case (4 page)

9

March 17 (B.D.)

About Thirty Seconds Later.

8:56 P.M.

Confidence is a hard thing to measure. Unlike some of the other emotions I’ve been studying (guilt, fear, anger, joy, etc), confidence—a belief in one’s own powers, abilities and worthiness—is determined by a much more complicated chemical structure, one that I haven’t been able to identify. I suppose it could be argued that confidence is not really an emotion at all, but rather a symptomatic expression of a variety of equations, both external and internal.

That said, show me a person who is completely confident both inside and out, and I’ll show you someone who is dead.

Yes, yes. Dead like me.

Complete confidence would require an almost Zen-like state of existence, and from what I understand with my rudimentary knowledge of Buddhism, while you might strive to achieve that state during life, Nirvana tends not to be fully reachable until you’ve finished living up all of your lifetimes.

And that said, I doubt there’s any living creature—from tree slugs to prime ministers—who wouldn’t want to at least try to attain more of it. Confidence. Especially if all it would require was getting your hands on the correct combination of the proper pills. Even some of the most popular and beloved people on earth might want that.

Lillianne jumped up and kissed the air next to our cheeks.

“I love your shirt,” she said, touching the silver top that Polly was wearing and then taking her hand to introduce her—and me—to all her friends.

“This is Vivian,” she said, moving to the side to make room for a busboy to hustle together an extra table and two more chairs. “Scott, Sarah, Reuben ...” She pointed at each of them while reciting their names, the soft fabric of her shirt fluttering with every gesture.

I blushed. This was so obviously an exercise in redundancy. We knew who they all were, and they knew that we knew. We’d seen their movies and their television shows. We’d followed their heartbreaks and DUI arrests. Their rehab visits and their exercise habits. Vivian Ward, the painfully thin ingénue whose latest romantic comedy had flopped dramatically but whose illicit sex tape was still making the rounds on the Internet. Sarah Young, the YouTube singing sensation who had gotten so big that she’d recently appeared as a guest on American Idol. Reuben Manns, the latest Australian import. And so forth.

They each gave us brief, well-enameled but disinterested smiles. We dimly smiled back, trying to act like this was a normal dinner gathering, just a typical night on our calendars.

“This is Olivia. And this is Polly,” Lillianne said, demanding deeper attention. “Those girls I told you guys about?”

“Oh, right!” said Adam Fald, the doe-eyed former child actor with the perfectly styled pageboy-length dreadlocks whose directorial debut had been recently trashed in The New York Times; “Pretty Boy Makes Ugly Film,” read the headline. His eyes were blood shot, and he looked like he might already be drunk. Or something. He scooted his chair over slightly to make more space.

I sucked in my stomach and sat down, hoping the seams of my jeans didn’t rip or that the straps of my thong weren’t sticking out over the pants’ low-rise waistband.

I took a deep breath. 

Everybody smelled good.

That was the main thing I noticed, the first major difference between them and us—an overwhelming presence of aldehyde, the molecular key to Chanel perfume. Real perfume, as opposed to my eau de toilette.

I looked over at Polly. Even though the lights were quite low, I was relieved to see that, just like mine, her cheeks were aflame; I could see the pulsing of the arterial veins in her neck, and her shoulders creeping up toward her ears. I reached under the table to pat her knee, hoping to give us both some encouragement. Or at least to remind us both how silly this all was. She looked at me through the corner of her eye and grinned. Chalk it up to another Polly and Olivia adventure, she seemed to be saying.

“Let’s get you some drinks,” Lillianne said. “Are you hungry? The kitchen’s closing, but I’m sure they can whip something up.”

She ordered us dry martinis but we passed on the food. After, most of the evening was a blur. It’s funny now that I think of this, but it felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Then. Which I actually am now. It didn’t feel that different than this, this feeling of separation and distance, this sense of helplessly watching the action but not being able to participate in it.

We had no idea what to say. Nice weather? Come on. It was too embarrassing to talk about their movies or music. And we certainly had nothing to add when they were gossiping or talking shop. Polly and I sat politely, laughing at inside jokes we didn’t understand.

I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. When I returned, the climate had changed; the attention had been refocused.

All eyes were on Polly. Everyone was animated, energized and inclusive, and vying for her attention. Polly was smiling, her shoulders relaxed. She almost seemed like a different person than the young woman I’d been sitting next to just moments before. With a quick glance, the trigger for that transformation was pretty obvious.

Polly had taken a few blister packs out of her purse—I couldn’t initially tell which ones—and spread them out on the table in front of her. They fingered them like poker chips, sliding them back and forth across the table, holding them up as if to estimate their worth.

I lowered myself into my chair and picked up a pack. Vivarex. A stimulant they give to kids who get irritable on Ritalin, and who can’t tolerate Adderall. I put it back down and picked up another. Sentofel. Old school stuff. I placed it back in the pile of assorted meds, mostly stock in trade for Polly’s dad’s office—medications for the lucrative chronics—depressives, insomniacs, mood fluctuators and the hyperactively disordered.

“Hey!” said Scott, the doe-eyed flop, “let’s play Russian Roulette!”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Vivian said. She reached forward to finger one of the packs. “What’s this one? Sanitol?”

“I think it’s a sleep aid,” said Polly, “but Olivia knows about this stuff better than I do.” She nodded in my direction.

Everyone turned to me. Vivian with her famously lush brows and infamously skinny thighs. Sarah with those newly inflated lips. Lillianne and her mile-high cheek bones. Scott with those eyes that were starting to bug me out.

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t really know all that much about –”

“Bullshit,” Lillianne said, laughing. “I’ve heard you doing that science-speak. Olivia is getting a PhD in this psychopharmacology,” she explained. “Or was it neurochemistry?”

“The latter.” I smiled.

“No shit,” said Scott.

“So do you have rats and shit running around your lab and stuff?” asked Sarah Young.

“Well, the shit doesn’t run,” I said. “But unfortunately, sometimes the rats do get out of their cages.”

“No shit!”

“Gross!”

“But what do you do with them?” they all wanted to know.

I wasn’t about to tell them about the dissections and injections and other gory stuff done in the name of science. I just told them about the skullcaps. It was always good cocktail party fodder. “They have these little antennas sticking out of them so we can get feedback, but I always imagine them as little alien creatures out of a bad sci-fi movie.”

“I’d love to see that,” Lillianne said. “I just got a script for an animated movie about time-traveling mice.”

“Well, the funding is drying up, so you should try to come soon. There’s no money for academic research, anymore,” I said. “Not in this financial climate.” Which was enough to change the subject.

“So, this is a sleep aid?” Vivian held up the pack of orange pills.

“Actually, no,” I said. “It’s a new antidepressant. It’s basically an updated version of their first SSRI, Proloft, but that patent expired. Now you can get the generic version of that, so they made this.” I picked it up. “Apparently it does a good job of targeting the usual bunch of neurotransmitters associated with depression, and has a number of off-label uses that they aren’t allowed to officially market but somehow everybody knows about. Like weight loss. And I think it’s supposed to clear up acne. I’m not totally sure about that, though.”

Vivian laughed. “Man, I’d pay a mint for a drug like this!”

“Oh, the tabloids would love that,” said Scott, playfully pinching Vivian’s twiggy arm. “‘Ward Withering With Weight Loss Drugs!’ I can see it now.”

“Whatever,” Vivian said. She pulled her light blue crocodile skin Birkin bag off the back of her chair and dropped the little packet inside. “Do you have more of those?”

I looked at Polly with an eyebrow raised in question.

She smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I know where we can get some.”

And so it began.

10

November 5 (A.D.)

A Tad after 6:00 P.M.

i.e., Now.

But is this the end? Here in the back of the car? Is this my end?

I know this isn’t a dream, I’m sure of that. But this doesn’t make any sense. If I’m dead, my brain cannot be functioning. By definition. And without a functioning brain, how can I possibly be remembering things? How can I be thinking? Because I’m clearly thinking right now. Maybe not thinking clearly, but clearly I’m thinking. And brain functions—including thought processes—are all chemical, right? And a person needs to be alive for those chemical reactions to happen. That’s the whole point. So maybe I’m not dead. Maybe all of these ruminations and recollections are just part of the split second flash I’m supposed to get, but the split second keeps getting longer. If I keep thinking, keep lengthening the second, maybe I can trick death and, in some fashion, stay alive. Does that make sense?

Not really.

Not if you consider that I can now see the crime scene from a distance. The police have arrived and they’re putting up yellow tape, clearing away the onlookers—the commuters on their way home and the teenagers on their way out—who have started to converge, pushing away the microphones of the reporters who are running toward them screaming out questions, hoping to slam a story together in time for their upcoming newscasts. I can see my body inside that dark trunk, like I have X-ray vision. Given that, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way I’m in my physical self. And my brain is part of that physical self. The synapses, the neurons, all of it. Blown out with the rest of my head. When you look at it that way, there’s no way I can possibly be alive.

Dammit.

Okay. So I’m dead. I need to make peace with that. Calm in a crisis, right? All that phenylethylamine that would have been floating around in my brain. But the thing I cannot get out of my non-existent head is how any of this—my body in the trunk, Polly crying on the phone, the trip to…

Holy shit! What is she doing here?

Missy?

See that woman down there? The blond one in the tight dark blue suit and impractical heels, lurking around the debris with a cell phone pasted to her ear? That’s Missy Pander. Essentially, she’s my boss. What in the name of fluoxetine is she doing here?

The police do not seem eager to answer that question. There’s nothing about her that is calling their attention—not the long run in her panty-hosed leg, not the burst capillary in her right eye, not the way she has her hand cupped over her cell phone’s mouthpiece, like either she’s trying to cut out ambient noise or she’s telling a secret. She has my attention though. It’s insanely weird that Missy Pander is here right now, sniffing around like a feral cat in a junkyard. Especially if you consider that she and I just had a meeting this afternoon, not more than four hours ago.

But linking her to this little joyride to Brooklyn hadn’t even crossed my mind while we were barreling down here. I haven’t been thinking about her at all. Missy. I mean, since the meeting. I haven’t thought about her since we had our meeting earlier today. It wasn’t a great meeting, I’ll admit. She hadn’t held back in showing her frustration with and disappointment in my work, threatening me with breach of contract and chucking a variety of threatening legal terms in my direction. It was pretty bad. But my general understanding is that in corporate America, a bad performance review does not usually follow with an abduction and murder.

Seriously, for the life of me I have no idea what the connection is between all of this—the strange Russian man, the car chase, the guns—and her, Missy Pander, the ambitious, overly well-groomed, impeccably dressed mid-level pharmaceutical sales executive who, when we first met her last year, was an ambitious, overly well-groomed, impeccably dressed low-level pharmaceutical sales representative with a very nice designer handbag. That was one of the first things I noticed about her, her bag. Which, come to think of it now, might say something about my clearly misdirected powers of observation.

11

April 11 (B.D.)

Seven Months Ago.

5:39 P.M.

“Mom? Dad?” Polly shouted down the long corridor of her parents’ apartment as she locked the deadbolt behind us. “Anybody home?” 

I followed her in and threw my jacket on the hook by the door. I was always very  comfortable in Dr. and Mrs. Warner’s home. We used to go up there fairly often—it was a free place to do our laundry, and we always got a home-cooked meal. Her folks were pleasant company and always made a point of treating me like family, not a houseguest. On that particular day last year, though, we were hoping not to see them when we arrived. We had invited ourselves over for dinner, but since dinner wasn’t the only thing on our agenda, we had made sure to get there early.

“Hello? Mom? Dad?” Polly double-checked that we were alone. Her voice echoed off the framed family photographs covering the walls. Photos from childhood, from ski trips, scenes of a solid family life. There was even a photo with me, from our college graduation—me and Polly proudly holding our scrolled up diplomas, armed and ready for entry-level jobs.

“Hello?” Polly shouted again. There was no answer, so she gave me a thumbs up, and we went into the kitchen to put down the groceries, which were meant to act as decoys when we went to the medicine cabinet in her dad’s office to see what it held, and whether there was enough there that he wouldn’t notice if we decided to borrow a pill or two. Or three. Polly had figured out the combination years ago. Actually, it required no figuring out. A while back, when we were living there—before we moved into our place on 92nd Street—Polly had run out of whatever antidepressant she was taking at the time. Her doctor was on vacation and her parents were at a conference out of town, so her dad just told her over the phone how she could get some for herself. 9-18-79. Polly’s birthday. It hasn’t changed. She’s been opening it up for years now. Whenever she was feeling down, she would just head on uptown to replenish her stock. “No time for talk therapy,” she would laugh, “but who out there couldn’t use a little synaptic boost now and then?” Given my own theories about chemistry and emotions, I couldn’t really argue. In fact, given my understanding of how these chemicals all worked, I often helped her figure out the proper dosing.

Polly unpacked some cheese. “We’re safe,” she said, and gestured toward the window. “Check out the view. It’s crazy.”

From the window over the sink, we could see the sun setting over the Hudson. The sky was a dark pinkish red, like the inside of a blood orange, and cast a warm haze throughout the room.

“Amazing,” said Polly, taking a moment to watch a tugboat make its way slowly south down the river.

“I guess,” I said. I put the fish we had brought into the refrigerator. “But do you have any idea how much toxic crap there is in the pollutants that make it that way?”

“Sourpuss.”

I laughed. “Did I tell you about that T-shirt I saw the other day? It said something like ‘Kiss your girlfriend where it smells—take her to New Jersey.’”

“Nice,” she said. “Want some?” She reached over me, taking a plastic bottle of seltzer out of the refrigerator. “We have a plenty of time. My mom said they wouldn’t be home until about seven.” She untwisted the cap and carbonated water sprayed all over her sweater. “Crap.”

I laughed and handed her a dishtowel. 

The doorbell rang.

We looked at each other. “Who the heck is that?” Polly asked, mopping herself up.

“Your folks?”

“It’s not even six. Anyway, they have their own keys. Why would they be ringing the bell?” Polly spoke quickly, as she often did when nervous.

“Maybe their hands are full,” I said softly, hoping to calm her down. She had the look of a proverbial deer in the headlights, even though, as of that moment, all we’d done was put away some fish. 

“Do you mind getting it?” she asked. She hung the towel on a hook. “They’ll be happy to see you, anyway.”

That was true. Like I said, Polly’s parents adored me. During college they always invited me home for the holidays, paying my fare so that I could accompany Polly on the plane. They even took me along on a few family vacations. I blended right in; everyone we met assumed Polly and I were sisters, a point we never refuted. “You’re practically a part of this family,” said her mom. “Why complicate matters by explaining the biology?” So it was fairly inevitable that whenever I had dinner with the Warners, at some point (usually after a few glasses of wine), one of Polly’s parents would take on the parental role and start asking me about my studies—and not miss the chance to point out Polly’s lack of them.

“Olivia, darling,” her mother would say, pushing back a strand of her elegant, graying hair, “you look a little tired. You must be working very hard, dear.”

“Of course she is,” Polly’s father would interject, waving a fork (often with food still on it) like a conductor’s baton. “I just read the paper you co-authored with Steven Flint, the one on guilt activation in the medial prefrontal cortex that ran in Pharmaceuticals Today. Very impressive.” And so forth.

The paternal adulation wasn’t unwelcome. My own family (of solid Nordic stock, by way of Romania—good fodder for a story, to be sure, but not this one) had no understanding and even less admiration for anything I did. We may as well have been from different planets. They weren’t bad people, but by the time I was thirteen, living with them had become so unbearable that I forged my mother’s signature and applied for (and received) a full scholarship to a boarding school 500 miles away. Since then, I can count on one foot the number of times I’ve slept in my childhood bedroom. Polly’s family, however, felt like the people I was supposed to have been born to. It would have been conceivable that we were switched at birth, except that we were born three months apart and four states away from each other.

So at these meals, Polly would sit quietly at the table, waiting for the inevitable moment when the comparative attention got turned toward her.

“Science just doesn’t interest you, does it, honey?” her mother might say. “You were always so good at it, though.”

Polly would roll her eyes. “An A in high school chemistry does not guarantee I’d be a Nobel Laureate, Mom.”

“I wasn’t saying you had to be a Nobel Laureate.”

“Of course not,” her father would say as he swallowed a bite of steak. Or garlic shrimp. Or whatever flavorful dish we were ingesting that evening. “But your mother is right. You’re so smart, Polly. I wish you would start thinking about graduate school. Find a field of study that inspires you.”

“Red carpets inspire me.” Polly’s tone at these moments was usually extremely droll.

“Oh, come on. You can’t be serious.”

“It was a joke, Mom.”

I would sit there quietly, hoping to stay out of it, but at some point either Dr. or Mrs. Warner would turn to me and egg me on for my opinion of my friend’s chosen career. They liked my opinion because it was fairly closely aligned with their own, which was that Polly was wasting herself on a vocation that didn’t fulfill her financially or intellectually. In fairness, when pressed, Polly always agreed.

“What about journalism school?” I might say. “That might be interesting.”

Polly would roll her eyes. “That’s a dying profession. I might as well try to get a job in book publishing. At least I’m in a growth industry. The Hollywood Industrial Complex.”

See, she certainly wasn’t stupid.  She just hadn’t found her direction. I wish I had been more constructive in helping her with that. It might have changed what happened next.

The bell rang again.

“No worries,” I said. I took the last box of crackers out of the shopping bag and handed it to Polly. “I’ll get it.”

I went back down the hall, turned the dead bolt, and opened the door. As I did, a large cloud of a spicy perfume wafted in. A woman was standing there, towering over me, her already substantial height enhanced by 4-inch stacked heels. She didn’t look like a family friend, at least not a friend of this particular family. With her tightly pinned bleached blond up-do and a fitted lightweight, low-plunging sky blue shift dress, she looked like a high-priced call girl. I couldn’t imagine that Dr. Warner was that sort of man, so I figured she was probably a patient. Even high-priced call girls need psychiatric help sometimes.

“I, uh, was trying to find Dr. Warner,” she said apologetically. “No one’s answering the door to his office.” She gestured toward the adjacent door.

“Could you hold on a minute?” I asked, and gently closed the door in her face.

Polly was peering down the hall from the kitchen while she poured what remained of the seltzer into a glass.

“Take her to the office?” I whispered.

Polly sighed. Our grand drug-stocking plan would obviously be postponed. “Yeah, let her in. I guess we can put her in the waiting area.” 

I opened the door again.

“Why don’t you come inside,” I said, and she tottered behind me into the kitchen, pulling a small, wheeled black suitcase behind her and clutching a Louis Vuitton clutch purse in her hand.

“That way,” said Polly, pointing to the door behind the kitchen table. As a child, Polly called it the “Secret Gateway” because while it looked like a pantry closet, beyond the cans and boxes there was a back entrance to the waiting room of her dad’s office. Her parents had secretly broken the wall between the two apartments a long time ago, before they actually owned them, and were careful to camouflage the passage in case the toilets ever got clogged and the superintendent needed to come upstairs.

I told the woman to have a seat on the couch and then went back to the kitchen.

“What, are you crazy?” Polly said as I re-emerged. “Go back in there with her!”

“Why? She’s just reading magazines in the waiting room. She’s fine.”

“It’s not her that I’m concerned about.” It wasn’t uncommon for people to ransack medical offices looking for drugs. And since her dad kept his supply of samples in a small closet inside (not to mention all of the confidential patient folders), he never left anyone in there un-chaperoned.

I suggested we lock the door between the reception and the office, but Polly thought that would seem rude or suspicious.

“So you think she might be unstable and you want me to sit with her?” I said. “You go in there.”

Polly finally agreed that we should go in together, to make it seem like we were looking for something. So we did, making a show of it by saying stupid things like “I cannot believe your parents don’t have a single working pen in their apartment” and “Have you ever looked at this bookshelf? There are some really interesting titles here.”

Polly started organizing magazines into neatly ordered stacks. She glanced at the elongated woman in the tight blue dress and nodded, acknowledging her. 

“Here,” the woman said, reaching up from her seat to hand the year-old Newsweek with a cover article about (no joke, you can look it up) Sigmund Freud, which she’d been flipping through, over to Polly. “You can add this to the pile.”

Polly took it and smiled a little too graciously.

The woman smiled back. She looked about our age, or maybe a few years older. But her sexy, impeccable attire, flawless makeup and sensual perfume made her seem substantially more mature and sophisticated.

“Are you Dr. Warner’s daughter?” she asked Polly. As she was speaking I noticed a smudge of lipstick on one of her front teeth.

“What?” Polly said. She turned to look at me, eyebrows raised like she needed guidance on how to answer. I could sense the gears in her head turning (funny, because I can actually see them now), her thoughts spiraling down, wondering if it would be a breach of all sorts of confidentialities if she talked about family matters to one of her father’s patients, if she could potentially ruin any transference this patient and her father had developed. Or worse. What if this woman got crazy jealous and did something weird? What if her parents came home to find us both dead, murdered on the old family couch?

“How silly of me!” The woman laughed before Polly gave her an answer. “Of course. You’re Polly! Your dad’s been showing me pictures of you for years. I feel like I’ve watched you grow up.” It was a funny thing to say, in part because she wasn’t that much older than we were.

Polly was speechless.

“Oh.” The woman uncrossed her giraffe-neck legs and leaned forward to pull a card out of her expensive-looking purse. “Here.” She handed it to Polly. “I should have introduced myself at the door,” she said, closing the little gold latch. “It’s been a long day, I must not be thinking straight.”

Polly read what it said and then nodded sympathetically. “She’s not a patient, Ols,” she said to me, relaxing into a broad smile. She handed me the card.

Missy Pander

Pharmaceutical Sales Representative

Pharmax Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

(212) 555-6337

“So,” Polly said, grinning as she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear in the way that she does when she gets an idea or a particularly interesting thought. “Are you the one who brings all those samples? I should thank you.”

“Thank me?”

“I mean, for all the pens and cookies and things over the years,” she said, quickly realizing that the she probably shouldn’t be telling the pharmaceutical rep that her dad had given her and not just his patients the sample packs. “They were pretty funny. My Prozac mouse pad was a big hit in my college dorm.”

Missy laughed. “I was just starting out then. They were very popular. I’m sure you’re not the only child of a psychiatrist to have one.”

Polly laughed. “I’ll bet I’m not. I wonder what they would go for on Ebay.”

“Ha. I hadn’t ever thought of that. I’m not with Eli Lilly, anymore though. Now I’m with Pharmax.” Missy pointed a manicured finger at the card I was holding.

“So what fun things do they have to hand out?” Polly sassily placed a fist on her hip.

“Actually, we do have some cool stuff. Lotions, pens, key chains. That sort of thing. I should get you some.” Missy smiled, once again revealing the offending lipstick stain on her tooth. I wanted to tell her to wipe it off, but that was like telling a stranger she had snot dripping from her nose. You knew it would be helpful, but it was too awkward to act on.

“Pharmaceutical swag,” I said, changing my focus. “That stuff goes over big at the lab where I work.”

“Pharmaceutical swag?” Polly said, practically snorting.

“You know, promotional gifts,” I said, “Like all the stuff they give your celebrities at Hollywood events.”

This time she snorted for real. “Yes, Olivia, I’m aware of what swag is.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course you are.”

Missy Pander looked at me like she had just noticed I was there. “And you are?” she asked, not aggressively but with a hint of demand. “You aren’t Polly’s sister, are you?” She looked over at Polly and then answered her own question. “You don’t have any siblings, right?”

“Oh. Oh, no. This is Olivia. She’s just a friend.”

“Just a friend?”  I said.

“You know what I mean, Ols,” Polly said. “Actually, Olivia is working on a graduate degree in neuro-pharmaceuticals. This is all right up her alley.”

“Neurochemistry,” I corrected.

Missy laughed. “Same thing in the end, isn’t it?”

“If I want to make money and pay off my student loans, then yes, I guess it is,” I said, which we all thought was somehow funny. And then, as we were laughing, Polly caught Missy’s eyes and made an exaggerated tooth-wiping gesture with her finger. Missy got the message and took out her compact. I immediately felt bad that I hadn’t told her myself. Guilt. It would have been great if I’d actually been able to nail the molecular structure of that.