Head Case

by Jennifer Oko

  The video stopped and the lights went back on. The screen floated back up into the ceiling and the drapes disappeared.

  “Well,” said Stanley Novartny, “we don’t have the disclaimers for all the potential side effects up yet. For that we need to complete the studies. Or share them, anyway. But since it’s a drug we already have on market, I don’t think getting government approval for this usage will be much of an issue. Lance Lead, our old friend and former employee over at the FDA, already said he loves the stuff.” Novartny laughed. Everyone else laughed. Novartny looked over at Missy, who was sitting straight as a needle with her manicured hands clasped on the table in front of her, trying to suppress a shit-eating grin.

  “I’m not sure if you’re all familiar with Missy Pander,” he began. “Ms. Pander has been working for us as a sales rep, covering most of upper Manhattan. With great success, I might add. The low national numbers on some of our recent sale data are certainly not to be blamed on her. But as of today, we’re taking her off the streets.” He reached around me to give Missy a quick pat on her padded shoulder. “No more pushing sample packs for her. Ms. Pander is being promoted to Deputy Director, Disease Development, because this,” he gestures toward the space where the video screen had just been, “was all her idea.”

  The people around the table applauded long enough to be polite, but quickly enough not to interrupt the flow of Stanley Novartny’s speech.

  “As you all know, our new omni-targeted antidepressant, Ziperal ER, is not selling as well as we had hoped. The timing couldn’t be worse. Our patent for Smilax is about to expire, and as you know, this building, this,” he swept his hand to show the room, the windows, all of the extremely well-paid people sitting in it, “this is the house that Smilax built. Frank, tell us, as of last week, what percentage of our profit came from Smilax?”

  A man at the other end of the table stood up. “Sixty-seven percent. Down from 70 last month.”

  “And Candace, tell us, what’s going on with our stock price?”

  A few seats down from me, a petite brunette looked up. “Oh, you don’t really want to know,” she said and everybody laughed.

  “Exactly,” said Novartny. “So while our”—he held his fingers up in air quotes—“wonder drug Ziperal ER works very effectively as an antidepressant, as Sandy over there can tell you, the market for general antidepressants has reached its saturation point. We need to find a way to re-package the idea of Ziperal. What we need, ladies and gentlemen, is to alter Ziperal, or at least alter the perception of Ziperal, just enough for it to be considered a treatment for a chronic disease for which no other treatment currently exists. We need a chronic disease that affects millions of Americans, one that people can identify with, that people will hear about and say, ‘Hey, that sounds like my problem.’ And then we have to cure it. With Ziperal. We cure it with a drug which physicians are already familiar with, and are already comfortable prescribing, one that most likely already has a ring of familiarity for the patients. So I have to say, when Missy Pander here came to me with the idea for Fatico Dystopia, well, I was extremely pleased.”

  The men and women around the table stood up in unison, facing Missy and clapping their outstretched hands. I could see Missy struggling hard not to smile too much; instead she stood up in a half bow, like a Japanese businessman might do, still holding back her grin.

  Once everybody had settled back down, they looked expectantly at Novartny, waiting for marching orders on the next steps to take. And waiting, I assume, for a more complete explanation of who I was, what I was doing there, and how I fit into this picture. I was, too. Because as fascinating as this all was, I was just as clueless as they were.

  Novartny placed both of his hands on the table and leaned forward in his seat. “This is not going to be easy,” he said, slowly looking around the room for added affect. “But based on the preliminary projections from our market research team, if it’s done right, this campaign could increase our revenue tenfold, if not more. Let me make this very clear. I said tenfold. That would not only save this company, and with it, all of your jobs, my job as well … it could make each one of us sitting in this room—all of you stock-holding department heads—very, very rich.”

  After another round applause, this time more robust, a small man stood up at the other end of the table. Of all the people in the room, he was the only one who looked vaguely uncomfortable in his suit.

  “Um, sir?” he said so softly that he was almost inaudible down at our end of the table.

  Novartny sighed. “Yes, Eugene? What wrench do you want to throw at us now?”

  Everybody laughed. “That’s Eugene Throng,” Missy whispered in my ear. “He’s one of our chief scientists. He’s also responsible for handling governmental oversight.” She chuckled softly. “He makes a big deal of it, but really, we all know it’s not a very hard job. The FDA is basically in our pocket.” Then she resumed her pose with her clasped hands on the table.

  “Well,” Eugene began to say, his voice a high-pitched squeak one might associate with a cartoon mouse, not an (I’m assuming) highly paid pharmaceutical scientist. “I’m curious to know how we plan to pursue the necessary studies to prove or disprove the efficacy of Ziperal on this, what’s it called, Fatico what?”

  “Dystopia,” Novartny said, not without a hint of irritation.

  “And, and, it could take months, maybe years to study this properly, possibly not before the patent for Smilax expires, and—”

  “Enough.” Novartny raised his palm like a stop sign. “Enough. Look. We’ve done this before. We just did it with crusty eye syndrome and we did it with nose itch. If we’re the ones creating—I mean identifying—the problem, it shouldn’t be too hard to identify the cure. We can alter the recommended dosage, even the formula, if we need to. Call it Ziperal TR. Targeted Release. Give it the shiny happy shine of something new. I’m sure your department can handle this. You’ve done it before.” He waved Eugene back into his seat. “And in this case, Missy Pander could not have made it any easier. As I was saying earlier.” He put his hand on top of my head, like one might in a game of duck, duck, goose. “This is Olivia Zack, a PhD candidate at the Leary Institute. Olivia has done some tremendous work in the area of emotional isolation, identifying the chemical and molecular structures of a range of our moods. She’s agreed to identify a chemical reaction that occurs when a person is frustrated in the work place and link it directly to how Ziperal functions in the brain.”

  I had?

  Novartny continued. “It shouldn’t be too hard, as Ziperal Extended Release has already proven to be an effective antidepressant, so whatever it is that she needs to find, I’m sure it’s already working in there.” He taps his forehead. “And I’m sure, Eugene, that you can help assure that she succeeds.”

  ***

  When the meeting was over, after all of the participants came to shake my hand and Novartny’s assistant had loaded me up with Pharmax mugs and pens, Missy took me back to her brand new office to finish filling out the paperwork.

  “Missy, I’m not sure about this,” I said, looking out her window into the office building across the street as she took some bobble head dolls and other trinkets out of a cardboard moving box and placed them on her new desk. “Ethics aside, I’m not so sure I’m the one to turn this around for you. Why not just have your own chemists do the work, someone who already worked on Ziperal the first time around?”

  Missy laughed. “Sit down, Olivia.”

  I did as I was told and pulled up a small gray upholstered chair.

  “Look, they’ll do most of the work. You don’t need to worry about it too much. You just need to verify it, give their studies a seal of an unbiased approval. Show that the work has been reviewed favorably by a scientist at the venerable Leary Institute.”

  “But I don’t even have my PhD yet, Missy—”r />
  “You will soon enough. Don’t worry. By the time anybody decides to parse through it all—not that anyone ever would, it isn’t in anyone’s interest to do that—you’ll have it. We’ll make sure of it.”

  “I don’t know that I can get approval for this from my department head. There are some conflicts of—”

  “Dr. Soldoff?”

  “Yeah. How did you—”

  “Don’t worry. Soldoff is on one of our advisory boards. I looked into it. It’s fine.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes, Olivia. He is. So are half of the Institute’s professors.”

  “So why me?”

  “It was your idea, Olivia. Anyway, aren’t you the one focusing on targeting emotional chemicals?”

  “The chemistry of emotion. Mostly guilt, really, but are you sure—”

  “Olivia, you can do this. You need money, right? And I think we can work well together. Relax. This is going to be great.”

  “But what if I can’t give you what you want? What if I don’t agree with the findings?”

  “You will,” she said, patting the large pile of documents I had just signed that was now stacked on her desk. “Plus, you know all of those pills that you and your friend stole?”

  “We didn’t exactly steal them,” I said, even though I knew that technically one could argue that we had. And forget about the legality of distributing them.

  “Look, Olivia,” Missy said. She patted the top of her up-do, checking to see that all the strands were in place. I could hear the quiet crunching of dried hair spray. “All I’m saying is that you can make this hard, or you can make this easy. Easy for you, easy for me, easy for your wallet, and easy for your friend and her father. End of story.”

  I thought about it for a moment. And I thought about how the Warners had taken me in, welcomed me into their family when my own was so remote. I thought about how much Dr. Warner had encouraged me and believed in me over the years. Maybe it really wasn’t such a big thing Missy was asking of me.

  “Well, I suppose the material I would be looking at is right up my alley, anyway,” I said. “I mean, in the end, if nothing else, it can only help me with my research. I’d be curious to see how Ziperal breaks down along certain synaptic pathways, especially in the frontal lobe.”

  “There you go. And here you go,” Missy Pander said, handing me a corporate American Express card. “It has my name on it,” she said, “but you can use it however you like. And you can carry it in this.” She pulled a red Hermes Birkin bag from behind her desk. A real one, not a knock-off.

  “Oh my God. I can’t take this,” I said, taking it.

  “Consider it a signing bonus.” She winked and sat back in her pungently new leather chair and crossed her arms. “Good choice of suit, by the way,” she said. “It fits you quite nicely.”

  26

  June 21 (B.D.)

  Three Hours Later.

  “Wow,” Polly said, twisting a towel around her hair as she stepped out of the bathroom.

  I startled. I had just entered the apartment, and Polly being at home in the late afternoon was the last thing I expected to see. Or wanted to. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here, remember?” She smiled as if nothing had changed. “You look nice.”

  “You like?” I asked, figuring I would go along with the faked normalcy. Who knows. If forcing yourself to smile can increase your endorphins and therefore make you feel happier, maybe the same could be said of forcing yourself to be civil. Maybe it wasn’t just me who was eager for a truce.

  I hung my keys on the hook behind the door and spun around so that Polly could get a full view, not only of my new tweed skirt suit and the matching platform pumps, but also of the department store shopping bags now lined up on the floor in front of me.

  “It looks like you got a little carried away, there, Ols. I thought your credit cards were maxed out?”

  “I used Amex.” I stepped over the bags and crossed the room to look at myself in the funhouse mirror.

  Polly tightened the belt of her white terrycloth robe and sat down, tucking her feet beneath her in her usual position on the couch. “You look like an overstuffed tweed chair,” she said, because from her angle the mirror had me squashed down and spread out, like what might happen if a piano had been dropped on my head.

  “Thanks,” I said and plopped myself next to her, kicking off my new shoes.

  Polly fingered the collar of my jacket. “Nice threads. But seriously, Olivia, I think you might want to return some of that stuff.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so concerned,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  Polly rolled her eyes. “Come on, Olivia. I know things have been tense, but it’s me. Your best friend, remember? So of course I’m concerned about you.”

  “Now there’s a role reversal for you,” I muttered. “Really, it’s actually okay.”

  “Okay?” she said, graciously ignoring my first comment. “Did you win the lotto or something? Something you aren’t telling me?”

  “Actually,” I started to say. But I had to stop myself. I didn’t want to tell her about my meeting with Stanley Novartny, about Fatico Dystopia or about the new project they wanted me to commence. I didn’t want to drag her into it. And since I’d signed confidentiality papers, I couldn’t really tell her very much at all anyway. Besides, if the subject wasn’t Mitya, her attention span was worse than Raskolnikov’s on Sominex.

  “My funding came through,” I said.

  “And you spent the money on Ralph Lauren instead of on your rats?”

  “Well, no. There was a bonus …”

  “The government gave you a bonus? That’s an interesting grant structure.”

  “No. No. It’s not a government grant,” I sighed. “I’m sorry, Polly. There are some confidentiality issues I’m dealing with, and I’m not at liberty to tell you about it right now. Just trust me that everything is okay.”

  “You’re ‘not at liberty’ to tell me? Me? Wow.” She shook her head and stood up. “I’ve got to get going,” she said. “I have a date.”

  “With him?” I tried to make my inflection go up, like I was excited for her, like it was an apology and we were moving on. Which, in fact, is what I had intended.

  “If you mean Mitya, than yes, with him,” she snapped.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Right. I’m sure.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “I’m sorry,” Polly said, turning on her heel. “I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.” She walked into her room and slammed the door.

  27

  July 28 (B.D.)

  A Few Weeks Later.

  Honestly, I thought I knew Polly. Better than myself, even. But then she did her disappearing act on me and got herself involved in all sorts of nefarious doings. Up until Mitya arrived on the scene, we routinely spoke two to three times a day, texted each other constantly, and curled up on our couch every night, telling each other everything about how we spent our day. But then that all stopped. Suddenly. Because of Mitya. Because she thought I was being judgmental. Because, as she said, maybe after all these years, we were only friends out of habit.

  It hurt terribly when she said that, though in retrospect, I probably deserved it. I was definitely not on my best behavior that night. I’m deeply regretting that now, four months and a few hours too late.

  We had met up for dinner at a mediocre Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue, one of those restaurants that seem to exist only for moments like these, moments when having a meal is just an excuse to have a conversation lubricated with a glass of cheap red wine. It was her idea to meet up. It was just a couple of weeks after that night when I had brought Missy to Charit
y, but it may as well have been years later, given how much had changed for both of us since then. Polly called me at work and said she needed to talk. It was important, she said. I suggested we just meet at the apartment, but she insisted we go out. She said she would even foot the bill.

  “Extending an olive branch?” I asked when she called to invite me.

  “Call it a stick of serotonin,” she said.

  I missed her.

  I packed up my bag, locked up the lab, and rushed to catch a cab across town.

  Polly arrived late as usual, dragging the humid summer air behind her as she swept through the door.

  “Nice shirt,” she said once we sat down. “Normally pastels wash you out a bit, but that shade of green looks nice. It brings out the specks of hazel in your eyes.”

  I struggled to give her a compliment in return. She was getting thinner daily and her skin was smothered in so much foundation it looked waxy. “Nice dress,” was all I could come up with.