Head Case

by Jennifer Oko

  I bunched up the stack of soggy statements and bills and overdue notices and, as hard as I could, threw the bundle at my reflection. The papers were wet enough to stick to the glass the way toilet paper sometimes sticks to bathroom ceilings, but one small card fell off the wad and fluttered to the floor.

  I picked it up.

  Missy Pander

  Pharmaceutical Sales Representative

  (212) 555-6337

  Missy Pander’s business card.

  I thought about the Chanel lipstick she had pulled out of her designer purse. Either she had a sugar daddy, which was unlikely, or—more likely—someone was paying her very well.

  I looked at the card again.

  Pharmaceutical Sales Representative.

  I could do that, I thought, laughing to myself. I mean, I was basically already doing it for free, wasn’t I?

  So I called Missy and asked if I could meet her for lunch or coffee, thinking she might have some good advice.

  16

  November 5 (B.D)

  Earlier Today. Back in the Cab. Again.

  5:38 P.M.

  “Would you please slow down?” I said, tapping on the glass divider that was separating me from Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn.

  “I am good driver,” he said, raising a short, hairy finger in the air to affirm the point.

  I pulled at my seat belt, testing its strength. “Well, you’re going pretty fast and whatever’s at the docks that we’re speeding toward, I’m sure your friend Boris would prefer that we arrive in one piece.”

  “He not my friend.”

  “Whatever. I was just saying …”

  He put his hand on top of what I assumed to be a camera or a GPS or a listening device installed under the rearview mirror. Without decreasing the acceleration of the car, he let go of the wheel, turned around, placed his finger to his lips, and then spun back around before we crashed into another car.

  “Well, can you at least tell me what—” I began.

  “Stay quiet.”

  “Is this about money? Because if it’s money you want, you’ve got the wrong girl,” I said.

  “Quiet!” he said, admonishing me with his finger. “When we find Mitya, he explain.”

  Mitya. He was pretty much the reason that Polly had basically stopped talking to me, and now he was the reason I had to stop talking as well.

  It’s funny, really. We spend so much time in life worrying about things like our relationships to money and men when, if you think about it, in the end death is all they will ever amount to. Friendship, though, real friendship—if you really work at it, if you can give each other space to change and grow, but still be there for each other—that is a relationship that can amount to so much more. I can’t believe how badly I screwed it all up.

  17

  June 11 (B.D.)

  Two Days After Polly and I Basically Stopped Speaking.

  Lunchtime.

  If you Google “pharmaceutical sales representative,” you have to dig pretty deep to get beyond the overwrought postings on job boards and numerous websites that tell you how to pad your resume accordingly to score one of these gigs. Judging by the search results, it’s a coveted and extremely competitive profession; the job can easily net someone, even someone without an advanced degree, up into the six figures, never mind the bonuses. You have to be smart, sure. You have to have a rudimentary knowledge of science. You have to have charm, chutzpah, and a fair amount of self-starting ambition. A bit of sex appeal never hurts. But once you get in (if you get in), you get first-class travel and company cars, expense accounts and fancy restaurants galore. Sometimes there’s even a clothing allowance. Take away the ambition thing, and it would have been the perfect career for Polly.

  Instead, I was the one trying to score the job. I was the one at Hedge, one of the hottest and priciest restaurants in Manhattan, meeting for lunch with a pharmaceutical sales representative who looked a bit too much like a high-priced call girl.

  “The usual table, Ms. Pander?” the maître d’ said obsequiously as he gathered two leather-backed menus from the stack on his reception desk.

  “I come here a lot,” Missy told me in a falsely conspiratorial whisper that anyone could hear. “The doctors love this place. It eats up a huge percentage of my expense account.”

  The maître d’ led us past well-spaced rows of tables covered with crisp white linen, past elegantly dressed diners clinking their silver-plated utensils as they put food into their mouths. He placed us at a table located in a quiet corner—coveted real estate in a restaurant, as I had learned from my forays with Lillianne.

  It was quite apparent that if it was money I wanted, pharmaceutical sales was a good place to start.

  “So,” Missy said, once we’d settled in and our watercress salads had arrived. She pushed a large forkful into her mouth, chewing it as she spoke. “You said on the phone you’re looking for employment? Didn’t you say you were finishing up your PhD? Wouldn’t that interfere with your studies?”

  I tried to ignore the contrast of Missy’s open-jawed chomps with the elegance of the surroundings. “Um. Well, maybe a little,” I said. “But in some ways it’s a logical fit. I mean, I understand the products already. I mean, I understand the science behind them, how they work. I was thinking there might be a way to structure part-time, flexible hours.”

  Missy asked me about my thesis, what I was concentrating on, and I explained that I was currently using functional magnetic resonance imaging as I activated regions of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex to investigate the neural substrates associated with the processing of moral emotions. She stared at me blankly.

  “I’m trying to pinpoint the parts of the brain that regulate emotions like guilt, to see if those emotions can be chemically manipulated in isolation,” I translated.

  Missy smiled politely through a mouthful of greens.

  I tried to explain further, in even simpler terms, that I believed that guilt, just like depression, had a chemical foundation, that you could in fact identify specific molecular components of every mood—happiness, joy, anger, envy, jealousy and so forth. I started to explain that everything we felt in life, from loving our pets to hating our jobs, was created by unique molecular formations in our brains, and that …

  “Olivia?”

  I turned my head. It took me a second to recognize her, she was so out of context.

  “Vivian! Hi!” I said, flustered. Lillianne’s friend and Hollywood cohort Vivian Ward was the last person I expected to see today. Especially at a place like this. Although with her almost iridescently clear skin, perfectly tailored shift dress and expensive scent, she fit right in.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, almost accusatorily, sizing both me and Missy up and down. It occurred to me that even though she had pretty much ignored me the other night at Charity, my presence here was giving me new credibility in Vivian’s eyes. I wish I could say I rose above her opportunistic superficiality, but I didn’t.

  “Um. Having lunch with my …” My cheeks started to burn, unsure of how to introduce Missy and feeling ashamed of her too provocative work attire and overly styled hair. I didn’t bother to finish the introduction, and Vivian didn’t bother to acknowledge Missy.

  “I didn’t know you were still in town,” I said, although there was really no reason I should have.

  Vivian said she had to come meet with a potential producer, and we chatted awkwardly about the weather, me acting like it was totally normal that I would be having lunch at a place like this, she graciously letting me act that way.

  “Hey, are you free Thursday night?” she suddenly asked. As if I would have other plans. “Adam’s in town. I was thinking if you had any more of those …” Vivian glanced over at Missy and quickly dismissed her as irrelevant.
“You know, those sample ‘candies’ you gave me and Lillianne?” She winked as she said that.

  I told her we were running low and weren’t really able to, well, you know… I rolled my eyes over toward Missy, implying that even if I had any meds, I couldn’t really talk about it in present company.

  Vivian’s smile faded. “Okay. Whatever.” She pointed at the maître d’, who had been patiently waiting this whole time. “I should get to my table.” She held her thumb to her ear and her pinky to her mouth and said in a whisper, “Call me if things change.” As if I had her number. That was Polly’s domain.

  Then she followed the maître d’ to join whoever it was that she was joining at a table opposite us.

  I turned back to Missy. I immediately knew that she knew.

  “That was Vivian Ward, wasn’t it?” she asked, sounding impressed and curious.

  I nodded.

  “Did she mean Lillianne Farber? That friend she mentioned? Do you know her?”

  “Sort of. Lillianne’s a client at Polly’s firm,” I said, really wanting to change the subject. “Polly’s worked with her a bunch of times.”

  “Seriously?”

  “She escorts her to junkets and stuff. Acts as her lackey when she’s in town.”

  “What a cool job.”

  “Not really.” I poked at a piece of bread.

  “She doesn’t like it?”

  I shrugged. “There are perks. But really it’s pretty shitty work. One minute they treat you like a friend, the next minute …”

  “Well, if you can’t be happy working with people like Lillianne Farber and Vivian Ward …” Missy’s voice trailed off, ignoring my point.

  “Yeah, too bad there isn’t a pill for that,” I said. “Tweak your brain and start loving even the most mind-numbing, soul-destroying employment.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, actually,” Missy said. She sat back and pensively crossed her arms. “I just might be able to do something with that.”

  I laughed. “It’s all about brain chemistry in the end, isn’t it?”

  “Not entirely,” she said, more to herself than me. “Job misery. Who can’t relate to that? I like it. Very marketable.” She sighed. “Anywho…” She picked up her knife and fork.

  We each took a few bites of our food.

  “So … sample candy?” said Missy, her mouth once again full of lettuce. “Is that what I think it is?”

  I silently picked at my salad.

  “Those samples I gave you in Dr. Warner’s office, to give to his patients? Is that what …?”

  I grimaced.

  She waved her fork at me in mock admonishment. “Olivia, darling, you should know better than that. Such behavior isn’t befitting a serious scientist like yourself, now is it?” She put down her fork like she was getting serious. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” I said into my salad, feeling my heart pounding against my ribs.

  “Do you think I want to be a sales rep for the rest of my life? Traveling all over town hawking drug samples like a door-to-door salesman?”

  I looked up. Huh?

  “I mean, really. Do you think this is what I want? That I’m happy with my job?”

  I had no idea where Missy was going with this, but I was happy to be off the subject of my celebrity “friends” and candy samples.

  “Listen.” She leaned forward. I could smell the garlic from the salad dressing hovering on her breath. It didn’t combine well with the abundance of her spicy perfume. “I think I have an idea. You need money. I’m tired of flirting with bloated, aging doctors. I think we can help each other out,” she said. “Anyway, considering your candy shop, you sort of owe me now, don’t you?”

  She had me there.

  “Look, you say you want to be a sales rep, right?”

  I nodded with tentative affirmation.

  She shook her head. “Don’t underestimate yourself. It’s shitty work and, honestly, I’m finding out the hard way that there seems to be a direct correlation between the gradual sagging of my boobs and diminished sales.”

  “I’m not really sure what you are talking about,” I said, because I wasn’t. Or at least I wasn’t sure about what she was getting at.

  “Come on, Olivia. It’s pretty clear that I’m selling my looks more than the actual medication, right? Let’s be realistic. It’s not like there’s great job security in that over the long haul. But with a good, marketable idea …” She held out her hand, palm open, her gold watch skimming the butter dish. “Can I see your resume again?”

  I showed it to her and she made some oohs and aahs and waved her salad-covered fork in the air whenever she saw something that interested her.

  She took a bite of endive. “Olivia, this is a no-brainer.”

  18

  November 5 (B.D.)

  Today, Just a Little While Ago.

  5:42 P.M.

  “You want some?”

  “What?”

  Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn held up a roll of breath mints. “You want?” he repeated. We had come to a stop at a red light, and he was shoving the half-unraveled blue roll through the small money tray carved though the center of the divider that separated the front of the car from the back.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. At that moment, my breath was the last thing that was worrying me. The chemical balance in this guy’s brain, however, was a definite cause for concern. One minute he was threatening me, the next he was trying to protect me from halitosis. “No thanks, I’ll pass.”

  I reached forward to push the roll back through to his side of the car.

  Holy shit.

  These were not just any breath mints. These were peppermint Certs. I snatched the unraveling roll.

  “Wait a second. Are these Polly’s?” I held the roll before me as if it were a sacred scroll, not a package of lumped together, synthetically manufactured ingredients like Sorbitol and Aspartame and magnesium stearate. And “artificial and natural flavoring,” of course. “Did you get these from Polly?”

  He shrugged, but I knew they were hers. Why they were here in this renegade taxicab was a mystery. Was this Lumpkyn guy trying to tell me something by offering them to me? Had Polly planted them here as some kind of signal?

  I didn’t have time to ask.

  The light changed and he hit the accelerator.

  “Jesus!” I said as my elbow slammed into the door handle, jamming my funny bone. I dropped the roll, and the blue-speckled white tablets dispersed across the floor of the car. I had an impulse to pick them up. They belonged to my roommate, after all, and they might help answer some questions. I unlatched my seatbelt and bent down, reaching underneath the seats to make sure I got every last one.

  I got more than that.

  In addition to six perfectly round, blue-speckled, naturally and artificially flavored tablets, there was a small oval caplet with the words “Ziperal ER” printed in small pinkish letters on one side. I knew from my work that these pills weren’t yet commercially available. And the ones from Pharmax that I had recently started working with in my lab were capsules, so if this caplet was Polly’s, she sure hadn’t gotten it from me.

  19

  June 14 (B.D.)

  A Couple Days after that Lunch with Missy Pander.

  10:39 P.M.

  Remember that old television commercial, the one with an egg frying in a pan of crackling grease as the narrator says “this is your brain on drugs” in a tone ominous enough to satisfy concerned parties but funny enough to work as a good punch line after you’d taken a hit of a joint or, if you were so inclined, snorted a line of cocaine? Well, I don’t want to get too graphic, but it seems arguable that drugs have caused my brain to look just like those greasy, bubbling eggs. I mean lite
rally. Right now. It’s been years since I’ve inhaled, snorted or popped anything nefarious, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that drugs are the reason my cerebral cortex is currently sunny-side up on the sidewalk in front of Charity—the club where Mitya works, I should point out—right next to the pole that holds up the red velvet rope, the same one that I stood in front of on that wet spring night just a couple days after my first business lunch with Missy Pander. She had called me earlier that afternoon and said she was making progress on her plan for my employment and wanted to celebrate; she wanted to meet some of my candy-chomping friends. I still had no idea of what my job was going to be, but I was desperate to have it, so even though I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of going to a club with Polly, I acquiesced.

  “I’m sure we’re on the list,” I said to the bouncer, pointing at the Lucite-backed clipboard balanced on his phonebook-sized hand.

  He glared down at us with a look that seemed to suggest that we might as well have been tourists from Kansas; we would have to wait our turn on the line with the rest of the riff-raff.

  “Can you please check again?” I asked plaintively, wrapping my arms around myself to keep from shivering. The sleeveless, backless black tank had been an overly ambitious choice of attire considering the unseasonable chilly and wet forecast I had heard on the news. “I’m sure my name is there. Olivia Zack.”

  He responded with an exaggerated sigh, as if what I was asking of him was offensively over the top.

  “Well, then can you just ask someone to tell Lillianne Farber that her friend Olivia is here, standing outside in the rain?” I tried again. “She’s waiting for me inside, and I’m sure she wouldn’t be happy to know I’m being blocked from entering.”