The Suicide Effect

by L. J. Sellers

  Sula took a few long slow breaths to make sure her hands were steady. When she was in the zone, she buttoned her shirt up to the neck, pulled on her welding helmet, and donned a pair of heavy work gloves. She flipped the welder on and a spark jumped from the end of the welding wand. She held the end near the seam and watched as liquid metal oozed from the wand. With a steady hand she added a bead of molten metal to the two pieces. She loved to see the steel come together. Two seemingly unbendable and unaesthetic objects fused into one superior form.

  She’d learned to weld at the Center for Appropriate Transportation, a co-op that designed, repaired, and sold bicycles, as well as tried to teach life skills to teenagers who didn’t fit into traditional high school. The center also made metal bike racks for local businesses. Sula had welded dozens of the huge racks in her year at CAT and had loved every fiery seam.

  She’d also been encouraged to write a few news stories for its monthly cycling publication and that had sparked her interest in journalism. It had not been a traditional high school experience, but in many ways it had been better. The co-op owners were sweet passionate people, and its few students were misfits, which meant they were more interesting than most kids their age.

  The weld took forty minutes and didn’t turn out as well as she wanted. She could grind it down to make it look okay but that wasn’t good enough. Two sculptures she’d created in classes at the university had won awards at local art shows and she hoped to enter this one in a statewide show in Portland this fall.

  She would cut the piece off tomorrow after it had cooled and start over. Sula put away her tools, read a few chapters in a book about freelance reporting, then headed for bed. Tired as she felt, her brain kept leaping from one wild thought to another. The talk of suicides that morning had triggered childhood memories that had plagued her all day. She had managed to shut most of them down as they surfaced. But now the scene in which her father played Russian Roulette at the kitchen table with a loaded pistol could not be repressed.

  His sweaty forehead, the pink flush of skin, the blank stare. For a moment this afternoon, Rudker had reminded Sula of her dad, sitting at the yellow Formica table on that summer evening two days before her tenth birthday. Fate had intervened in the form of a barking dog and her father had survived—to play variations of the suicide game again and again, until one day he lost.

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday, April 13, 7:42 a.m.

  Robbie picked six white pill bottles off the conveyor belt, wrapped clear tape around them to create a bundle, then slid them into a box and taped it closed. Then he did it again. And again. For eight hours a day, unless the plant was on overtime. Some days he got so bored in the afternoons he nearly walked out. But so far, he’d resisted the urge. He could not afford to be unemployed again. Before he’d started taking medication, he’d lost a few jobs because he was occasionally too despondent to get up in the morning.

  He forced himself to look at the bright side. Clean, easy work for $8.50 an hour was considered a great job these days, and most of the people at Prolabs were quite nice. Keeping that in mind, the morning passed quickly. When the lunch buzzer rang in his ears, relief washed over him. He set down the six-pack and joined the moving wall of people in the corridor. From the back, they all looked the same. White lab-style coats, white booties, and white hair caps. He’d felt silly the first few times he suited up, but even the big bosses in suits and ties put on sanitation gear before entering the factory.

  Sometimes the white walls and stainless steel machinery made him a little snow blind, but it was still better than the stinking, wet mess of a dishwashing job he’d had before. This job didn’t make his father proud but it was a step in the right direction. Plus, working at a pharmaceutical factory gave him good material for his occasional stint at a local standup comedy club. Writing and performing comedy gave him a way to turn his gloom and doom personality into a positive, if fleeting, experience.

  The group moved silently until they entered the changing room. As booties and hair caps came off, their voices burst forth.

  “Want to run over to Taco Time?”

  “Did you see Rudker’s new wheels? The SOB is driving a Commander.”

  “No shit. What do they cost? Forty grand?”

  Robbie ignored them, changing as quickly as he could. He wanted to get to the lunchroom in time to snag a seat next to Julie the receptionist. Lunch hour was the only time he was able to see her. He shoved his booties and hair cap into the wall slot for disposables and hung the white coat in his locker. He grabbed his lunch sack, hurried out into the exterior walkway, then broke into a jog.

  “Hey, Robbie, what’s the hurry?” Mark, the mixing room operator, was going the other direction and mockingly jumped out of his way.

  “I heard Santana was playing in the lunch room and I wanted to get a good seat.”

  Mark was kind enough to laugh.

  Robbie pushed through the double doors only to discover he was too late. Julie’s table was full. Melissa and Monica, both secretaries, sat on either side, and three guys from the tablet press room sat across from her. Damn. He wanted to ask her out, but he felt like he had to give her a chance to get to know him. Otherwise, she would probably turn him down. She was pretty and popular and he was just okay. Okay looking, okay body, taller than most girls, and smarter than most guys. So far he’d only managed to sit with Julie twice in two months.

  Robbie looked away so she wouldn’t see him staring. Disappointment made his legs heavy and he plopped down at the nearest table. Knowing how quickly he could slide into despair, he focused on his food: two slices of leftover pizza, a banana, and a twin pack of Twinkies. Not bad. It was better than Cup-O-Noodle, which he often ended up with because he’d hit the snooze button one too many times and had to run out the door.

  “Hey Robbie, need some company?” Matt, a thin young man about his age who worked the other end of the packaging line, sat down across the table. He laid his hands out flat, the small triangular tattoos showing. It was obvious he had no lunch.

  “What’s new?” Robbie tried to be friendly.

  “I had to get a new battery for my piece of shit car and now I’m broke.”

  “Cars are like black holes. You put your money in and it never comes back out.” Robbie put a slice of pizza on a napkin and pushed it across the table to Matt. “Here, I’m not that hungry.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  A little later he gave him one of the Twinkies too.

  On his way out, Robbie stopped by the bulletin board, hoping Julie would walk by on her way to the front office. A company flyer caught his eye. In large purple type it asked: Do you suffer from depression? If you have three or more of these symptoms, you may benefit from a new medicine. To find out more about a clinical trial for an experimental new drug, contact Adriana at Oregon Research Center.

  Robbie knew the list by heart. He was a poster child for most of the symptoms—a sense of hopelessness, inability to concentrate, insomnia. The trial intrigued him. He’d been taking Zoloft for a year and a half now, and it wasn’t working that well for him any more. Before the Zoloft, he’d been on Paxil for almost a year. That drug had made him feel emotionally numb and he’d hated that more than being depressed. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing. Eventually, he’d asked his mother’s doctor to write him a script for something else.

  He’d never been in a clinical trial before. He visited online forums cheerily hosted by pharma companies like Prolabs that were keeping all the depressives medicated. Many of the people he chatted with had been in studies, and overall they reported good experiences. Often the research centers paid a nice compensation fee for time and travel expenses.

  As he stood thinking it over, the second lunch buzzer rang. Robbie took a moment to memorize the phone number. He had decided to give the trial center a call. He could help Prolabs test one of its products, pick up a little extra cash, and maybe start feeling better too.

  For now he had to
get back to the packaging line. The fact that his father was CEO of the company didn’t mean he could get away with being late from lunch break. He used his mother’s family name, so most of the people he worked with didn’t know he was Karl Rudker’s son. He didn’t want people either sucking up to or avoiding him because of his supposed connections. Hah! He and his father hadn’t spoken for months.

  The supervisors knew who he was and he tried to be an excellent employee. Even though they hadn’t gotten along for years, his father’s expectations were buried deep in his DNA.

  Sula walked into Prolabs with a sense of apprehension. She hadn’t fallen asleep until after one o’clock, then she’d had a long unsettling dream in which Rudker had chased her through a warehouse and she kept running into stacks of boxes. She was still unnerved by the whole encounter yesterday. Rudker’s threat had been intense and personal and she suspected she hadn’t heard the last of it.

  Sula handed her brown leather backpack to the security man and passed through the metal detector. “Good morning, Cliff.”

  “Morning, Sula. Looks like it will be a gorgeous spring day.”

  “Sure does. Have a good one.”

  She picked up her bag and clicked across the tile foyer. Sunlight through the narrow floor-to-ceiling-windows cast bright stripes on the floor. In celebration of spring, Sula had worn a short sleeve blouse and skirt for the first time since last October, but it failed to cheer her up.

  Even though she was only a public relations flack, up until now she’d felt good about working for Prolabs. The company had its problems, sure, but she had always believed it had a good soul because it developed therapies that were meant to help people. Now she didn’t want to be here.

  Sula stepped into the elevator and checked her watch: 7:53. She was three minutes off her usual time. Apparently, she was moving a little slow. She got off on the second floor and headed for the employee lounge, where she made herself a cup of coffee from the fresh ground stuff she kept in the fridge. The room was empty except for a guy in a suit whom she had never seen before. He was reading a report of some kind and didn’t look up. Sula remembered that most of the sales and marketing staff had gone to a training session in Seattle.

  Coffee in hand, she crossed the hallway into her office, a seven by ten room with a window, a desk, and a wall of filing cabinets. She turned on her computer and settled in to open e-mails. A few minutes later, an e-mail request from a PR person at JB Pharma reminded her to go see Dr. Warner. Sula zipped through the rest of the mail, deleting at least half without opening them, then headed back out to the elevator.

  The R&D staff was in a separate building across a small courtyard. Sula took a moment to stand in the sun, sip her dark coffee, and appreciate that she worked on the outskirts of town with a tree-covered hillside for a view. The Prolabs complex spread out over ten acres and had three main structures: the corporate office where she worked, the R&D building, similar in design but with only one floor, and the manufacturing plant, lower down the hill. Beyond that were wetlands, owned by Prolabs and soon to be bulldozed to make way for a new manufacturing plant. The company had applied for all the necessary permits and most had been granted. Only a city council vote and an environmental study were holding up the construction. In Eugene, environmental concerns could be a serious delay. Or complete shut down. The thought reminded her that she needed to craft a memo to the city council.

  She headed for the R&D lab. It was only her third time in the building but she knew Dr. Warner had the big office in the corner. The doctor didn’t answer her knock. Sula thought she might be in a meeting, so she checked the small conference room. It was empty. She heard voices in the hall so she quickly stepped out.

  “Excuse me.” Two middle-aged guys in lab coats turned around. She had met both before, but despite rapid brain racking, she could not remember either of their names. The one guy had a Christopher Lloyd, mad scientist look, but that didn’t help her come up with his real name. Sula strode toward them. “Have you seen Dr. Warner this morning?”

  “No. In fact, we were just looking for her.” The guy with the wild hair eyed her strangely. “She was supposed to meet us at eight.”

  Sula checked her watch: 8:23. “If she wasn’t coming in, who would she call?”

  “That would be me.” The other man, shorter and older, spoke up. Sula recalled that his name was Steve Peterson and that he worked on the Nexapra project. Now he looked at her curiously too. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was supposed to meet with her yesterday for a briefing but that didn’t work out, so I thought I’d see her this morning.”

  They shrugged in unison. The three of them stood for an awkward moment. Then Peterson said, “If she comes in, we’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

  “Thanks.” Sula forced a smile and moved on. It struck her as odd that Warner would miss a meeting with her colleagues. Especially, the day after a blowout with Rudker. Maybe Warner planned to quit. Sula wouldn’t blame her. Still, as the head of R&D, Warner was probably making $250,000 a year. People in that pay bracket didn’t miss much work. Even if they were upset.

  Sula spent the rest of the day fielding calls from real journalists asking about the merger. She envied them, writing for Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. Someday she would have a real reporting job, she promised herself. For now, she had to promote Prolabs, to cushion its announcements, good and bad, in a cotton candy spin. She tried to craft a memo to the city council but had trouble concentrating. She kept thinking about Diane Warner.

  Late in the afternoon she called Steve Peterson and asked him if his boss had ever showed up. He hadn’t seen Warner. Sula scanned the personnel database and found Warner’s home phone number. She copied it to a yellow sticky note and pressed the note to the top of her computer. She would give it a day. Warner might be offended if Sula invaded her privacy at home without good reason. The doctor might not want to talk about Nexapra either.

  At 4:15, Marcy Jacobson, the head of human resources, stepped into her office. Sula’s heart sank. She knew the woman had come to fire her.

  Chapter 5

  Marcy closed the door behind her, and Sula braced herself. She would plead for her job if she had to. If she explained about the custody hearing, maybe–

  “Hi Sula.” Marcy smiled as she took a seat in the visitor’s chair. “How have you been? I feel like we’ve been out of touch lately.” Marcy was in her early sixties, but only her sun-weathered face betrayed her age. The rest of her was still working hard at looking forty-something.

  Sula mind raced. What was this about? It didn’t sound like a dismissal, but Marcy was known for being evasive. “I’m good.” She tried to smile. “How about you?”

  “Also good.” Marcy paused. “I’ve got a delicate situation I need to talk to you about.”

  Sula’s heart pounded. Just say it!

  Marcy launched in. “An employee has filed a sexual harassment complaint about Sergio. I know for a while there he was rather flirtatious with you. Did he ever cross the line?”

  Sula wanted to laugh with relief. Sergio, the creep from marketing, had finally gone too far. “Not really. He bugged me to go out with him, but he never touched me.”

  “Sexual harassment doesn’t have to be physical.”

  “I realize that.”

  Some of Sergio’s comments had been offensive, but he was so annoying and so over the top that she had laughed at him most of the time. He had lost interest rather quickly. Sula couldn’t afford to be involved in the situation. “He was irritating, but not inappropriate. I believe he’s capable of sexual harassment, so whoever has complained, you should take her seriously.”

  “We are.” Marcy unexpectedly reached over and patted Sula’s hand. Sula fought the urge to pull away. Marcy asked, “Are you happy with the company?”

  “Sure.” Even small white lies made her uncomfortable.

  “Good.” Marcy stood to leave. “It will be different when JB takes over, but
I’m trying to stay optimistic.”

  “Will you have to lay people off?”

  “Most likely.”

  “What about my position?”

  “I think you’re safe. Thanks for being upfront with me.”

  “Sure.”

  Marcy gave her a small wave and left the room. Sula heaved a sigh of relief, shut down her computer, and followed her out.

  Rudker pulled his short-trip suitcase from the walk-in closet and set it on the bed. Packing had become a precise operation, no more complicated than preparing a familiar meal. Two white, long-sleeved shirts, a light-blue short sleeved one, the charcoal Brooks Brothers suit, casual black slacks, underclothes, and the bathroom kit that he never unpacked. Cell phone, laptop, and financial reports were already in his shoulder bag. Traveling suited his restless personality, but the timing of this trip annoyed him. He wanted to tie up the loose ends of the Nexapra data as quickly as possible, but he couldn’t miss this board meeting. Talking with the other scientists on the Nexapra project and locating the paper files would have to wait until he returned in few days.

  “Don’t forget your medication,” Tara chirped as she came up behind him. “I won’t.” Rudker turned and kissed his young, beautiful wife. He never tired of looking at her perfect face. Wide-set cobalt eyes, small upturned nose, full sensuous lips with scattering of freckles that he wanted to lick every time he saw them. She was a work of art.

  They had met at a fundraiser for a local charity called Food for Lane County. She was a hostess and he was a main donor. In essence, that summed up their relationship. Tara was a good natured soul. In addition to feeding the hungry, she put up with his mood swings and sometimes distant personality without much complaint. Unlike his first wife, Maribel, Tara never said no to sex. She was good for him, and Rudker needed her in a way he had never needed anyone before. The thought made him pull away.