Head Case

by Jennifer Oko

  “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t know anything. I have no idea what—”

  “Just be quiet. Just keep your head down and stay in there.”

  Lumpkyn shook his head. “Mitya, you too. You get in taxi,” he said. “Quickly.” He unlocked the doors but I was frozen in my seat, unsure of what to do, of what Mitya was trying to tell me. I mean, there were men with guns out there. Or at least there was one man with one gun. Nothing I wanted to mess around with without having a solid plan.

  “Are you fucking kidding? Do you know who’s over there? Or did you not see that gun that was pointing at my head? Which I believe is now trained on my ass.”

  Lumpkyn thought for a moment. “They do not want us dead,” he said. “We die, and they losing much business.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Anyway, right now, they want her.” Mitya nodded in my direction. “We need to buy time. So just open the fucking truck, Ivan. Give them what’s left back there, throw it out here, and maybe that’ll give us some time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitya said through his teeth. “But it’s all I’ve got right now. They sent me to get her out of the cab, but we can’t let them have her. You want her blood on your hands? We’ve fucked up enough lives with this shit as it is.”

  I, of course, still had no idea what was going on, though I did understand that any way I sliced it, I didn’t seem to be in good hands, whatever anybody wanted with me.

  The one saving grace that I could see was that the streets were packed. The stores were open for business and it seemed like a pre-pre-holiday street fair was taking place in front of them. Scores of puffy-coated outdoor vendors were selling an enormous variety of goods—books, food, clothing—as far as I could see. The bars were filling up with their happy-hour crowds, and people on the sidewalk were spilling onto the curb, brushing the car as they walked past.

  Lumpkyn was shaking his head, muttering in Russian something about someone named Zhanya, something about depression and I think something about mania.

  I didn’t hear the rest. All I could focus on was the fact that the door was still unlocked and this was my chance. I jumped at the handle and sprang out onto the sidewalk, thinking that if I just could get deep enough into the crowd—

  “Olivia! No!”

  I turned to see Mitya running around the car, reaching out toward me. Which got me thinking about Polly again. I mean, what kind of friend gets you into this sort of mess?

  “Olivia!”

  A sharp, piercing pain ripped through my head, back to front. My body froze—not just in the sense of standing still, but like I had just taken a dive into a snow bank. A stinging, prickly freeze.

  “Oh, shit!” someone yelled. I think it was Mitya.

  And the next thing I knew, from an increasingly expanding distance, I could see two men rushing out of the Lexus to pick up my body. My body. I saw them as they threw me in the trunk of their SUV. And I saw Mitya and Lumpkyn looking terrified as they quickly opened the back of the cab and started handing, tossing, throwing small boxes and bags over to those men. I saw the men throwing them over me, stuffing the trunk to the brim with little bags and boxes. It took two tries to close the door. The car pulled forward, and I could see that inside, the boxes were pressing down on me, digging into my face, my arms, my chest. And from my distance, from up here, I watched the people on the darkening street, hustling by and pretending not to notice. I saw the car start to zip away, the license plate clear, a small spot of blood left behind, and Mitya and Lumpkyn just standing there, arms akimbo, completely shocked as a bullet flew through Boris Shotkyn’s driver’s side window and the Lexus flipped over and crashed into a tree.

  Depressing, right?

  Well, if you want some antidepressants, I can get you some. My body is practically drowning under boxes of them.

  Part Two

  Black Market Grannies

  You often hear stories about ghosts remaining among the living because they have things to sort out, unfinished business. Like Marilyn Monroe. She has often been sighted at the house where she died from a drug overdose. Psychics report that her death wasn’t a suicide, but an accident, and her spirit is there to let that be known. Apparitions of Bonnie and Clyde lurk around the spot where they were so violently shot down. Even in the White House, former presidents and their families haunt the halls, still trying to make peace with the nation’s ills. Lincoln’s ghost has been spotted gazing out the window from the Oval Office. Dolly Madison’s spirit returned to protect the Rose Garden after Woodrow Wilson’s wife had ordered workmen to dig it up. People have even reported hearing Jefferson playing his violin.

  During my life, I dismissed such stories as just that—stories. It never occurred to me that there might actually be some truth behind those tales. Why would it have? I was a woman of science, of logic. None of this was logical. It’s not logical now, now that I’m no longer here, that, freed from my body, I can suddenly be almost anywhere, at any time, past or present. Well, anywhere or any time relevant to me, that is. There do seem to be some limitations. As I’ve said, I’m just starting to figure this whole afterlife thing out. I have a lot to learn, both about my present state of being and, obviously, about my past. All of which might help with the future, whether I’m part of it or not. I owe Polly at least that much. So, here I go, fiddling with the clock. I need to dial it back a few months again to reinvestigate certain matters. I’m channeling Cher again and turning back time. Or whatever. I never was any good with musical references. I guess death hasn’t changed that.

  29

  October 30 (B.D.)

  About a Week Ago

  Back When I Had My Head In a Beaker, so to Speak, and not Splattered all Over the Street.

  Morning.

  “Did you see this?” Polly asked Mitya, pushing the New York Times across the sticky tablecloth in his aunt’s Brighton Beach kitchen.

  They had spent the night there, waiting for Mitya’s elderly aunt to come home. She had been staying out a lot lately, and everyone was getting concerned. It was 4 a.m. when Zhanya had straggled in that morning, refusing to answer their questions but kissing them both on their foreheads before throwing herself into bed. Zhanya had been acting erratic lately, more so than usual, and Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn had asked Mitya to come down and see if he could make sense of things.

  Mitya put down his coffee, took the paper, and looked at the photograph spread out across the front page of the Sunday Style section.

  “Holy Moses!” he said, mouth agape. “Is that Zhanya?” he asked, though he knew full well that the woman in the picture, the seventy-seven-year-old babushka with the floral scarf wrapped over her head and tied under her chin, the one standing in the middle of a gaggle of similarly coiffed women, all of them pushing up against the newly reopened Chippendale’s night club, was in fact his aunt Zhanya. Zhanya, who had bathed him and dressed him, who had held his hand on the first day of school, and who was there crying with pride on the day he finished, that was her standing at the threshold of the latest incarnation of the infamous male strip club, now located in Manhattan’s meat-packing district, arguing with a bouncer as if she were fighting for a loaf of bread. That was what she had been out doing every night.

  “Chippendales, Hoping For the Jet-Set, Gets Overrun by the Granny Set,” Mitya said, reading the headline aloud. “Jesus.” He looked up at Polly, raising his eyebrows high enough that they hid behind the hair flopping over his forehead.

  “I know.” She bit her lip. “I think they all might have taken one too many of those pills.”

  “That,” he said, shaking his head and a little bewildered, “or maybe they took exactly the right amount.”

  ***

  I had read that headline, too.

  It ran last week, when I was still alive. I
read it alone, sitting on the couch while resting my feet on top of the files I had stacked on top of the milk crate, having no idea that the women in the photograph had any connection to me, tangential or otherwise. I just read the article and laughed out loud and wanted so badly to call Polly to laugh with her. But I didn’t. To do that we would have had to have been on speaking terms, which we more or less were not. Basically, since our big fight at the restaurant in July, the only contact I’d had with her was due to the crumbs she left on the counter and the wet towels she left scattered across the bathroom floor.

  Polly was the messy one. Historically. The whole cleaning up the apartment thing, or the airing out the college dorm room thing, or the really pretty much anything that had ever involved the two of us—whatever it was—it usually fell on my plate. But I was too overloaded with my work to be bothered. So, between my ever-increasing stacks of files I was bringing home from the lab and Polly’s surreptitious sloppiness, the apartment was looking like a library and a clothing store had been struck by a tornado and been combined into one big heap. Essentially the only way we were communicating with each other was to leave traces of ourselves for the other to trip over.

  It’s really too bad, and I mean that sincerely. Because had I read that newspaper article with Polly, maybe she would have had some interesting background information, or opened up about and been willing to share. Maybe she would have told me that before the whole geriatric set of Brighton Beach started bouncing around like oversexed bunnies, there were even crazier shenanigans starting to bubble. There were bribes and blackmail, overdoses and arrests (actually, I did know about those. I read the paper like everyone else). It was out of control. The whole situation had become quite explosive.

  Good Lord, this is really making my head spin.

  30

  July 7 (B.D.)

  Turning a Few Months Back, to the Summer Again.

  Morning.

  By Which I Mean Noon.

  The first time Mitya took her down to Brighton Beach to meet his aunt Zhanya (Tyotya Zhanya, he called her, “tyotya” meaning “aunt”), Polly told him it felt like they had arrived in another country. When she said that, he laughed and said that in fact most of his Russian friends often joked that Brighton Beach was more Russian than Russia, that it was like a caricature of the Motherland, set more than two decades in the past, about the time when his family had emigrated (a time which Mitya said he hardly even remembered—he was just a little kid back then).

  As they descended from the elevated subway platform, Polly could see what he was talking about. The scene reminded her of the Russia from the news clips of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, not the glamorous, cosmopolitan and often very wealthy Russia of the Russians she knew from the Manhattan hot spots and gallery openings.

  They stepped off the metal staircase onto the street, but walking a straight path from the subway was a challenge. Vendors bled out over every square inch of pavement, and cars were double-parked with their hoods splayed open, exposing trunks overflowing with a wild assortment of merchandise. Mitya took Polly’s hand and led her through the dizzying maze of goods.

  Caviar, fur hats, wool scarves. Even though it was summer. There were sausage links, dried fish, and samovars. Tables were lined up along the curbs, displaying loaves of bread, large cardboard boxes with Cyrillic labels, books. Burly women of indeterminate ages stood like statues, holding small items in their swollen palms as if they were making offerings. There were small bottles, Zip-Lock baggies filled with gray capsules, and black lacquer jewelry boxes. Some of the women had skinny little kittens peeking from out from the depths of their bosoms. One even had a small dog. The shops overflowed into the streets as well, with shirts and jackets hanging from the canopies that covered an endless number of junk-filled bins. It was hard to figure where the storefronts ended and the street vending began.

  “See that?” Mitya said, nodding toward a handwritten sign taped in front of a small plastic table. “It’s amazing.”

  “What?” The sign was in Cyrillic, so it could have been a cookie recipe, for all Polly knew.

  “It’s a list of the drugs she has.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Stuff she’s selling.”

  Polly looked at the woman standing next to the display. Thin, bluish-white strands of hair peeked out from under her thick knit hat. She was short, maybe 5 feet in heels, if she ever wore them. And round. A caricature artist would probably draw her of equal height and width, but that would be an exaggeration. A slight one. She looked like the kind of woman you would want as a nanny for your children, not a person who would sell you narcotics.

  Polly asked Mitya what the list said after they walked past.

  “It said she has diazepam, codeine, and some heart medication.”

  “Wow. Just like that. For anyone to read.”

  “Anyone who reads Cyrillic.”

  “I guess none of the cops around here do,” Polly said.

  “Or maybe someone has been encouraging them to keep a secret.”

  “What do you mean?” Polly asked, turning to take a surreptitious photo of the granny dealer with her phone.

  “Well,” said Mitya, stopping to pick up a book up from a stack on a table. He chose the one on top, flipped it over to see whatever it was that was written on the back, and then put it back in its place. “Remember, a lot of these people, the older ones, grew up learning to distrust pretty much everything. So why would they trust a doctor or a pharmacist here? Maybe it’s more familiar and comfortable to buy medicine in boxes with directions you can read and from people you trust. My aunt buys stuff here all the time. She depends on it. I mean, I really don’t think the local police are looking at these people as being on the front lines of the drug trade. This isn’t meth they’re selling.”

  “Defensive, are we?” Polly mockingly crossed her arms and grinned. I must say, she looked particularly cute that day. And it’s funny, because even though we were barely on speaking terms at that point, she was wearing one of my favorite sundresses, a sleeveless one with a gray floral print. Sharing clothing had been so much a part of who we were that it made sense the tradition would continue, even through rough patches. The dress looked good on her. It’s nice to know it will probably continue to get some good use.

  Mitya was grinning back. And, yes, I admit it; he looked kind of cute. He had a nice, not too-toothy smile that created a deep dimple on his left cheek. “No,” he said, crossing his arms to mimic her, “it’s just that the black market is not always as insidious as it sounds.”

  “Well, then the market clearly needs a new publicist,” Polly said, suppressing a laugh. “They could put the grannies front and center in the campaign.”

  “Black Market Grannies.” Mitya laughed. “I like that.” He pulled Polly against his chest and gave her a sweet little kiss. “You are a clever one, Polly Warner.”

  31

  November 5 (A.D.)

  Today.

  A Little After 6:00 P.M.

  Okay, so maybe Mitya wasn’t so bad. Maybe Polly was right about me being too quick to judge. But how could I have known? I mean, short of being dead (and thereby attaining the ability to flit around, in and out of other people’s memories—actually, just Polly’s, I haven’t yet tried to access anyone else’s, and I’m not even sure if I could), how are you supposed to know what really happens in other people’s intimate lives? You can only make decisions and create opinions with what you know. And for the past few months, all I had in front of me was a rapidly disappearing best friend who wasn’t telling me much of anything at all. At least I can learn about it now.

  I have to say, this afterlife thing really isn’t so bad. Everyone should have a little taste of it. I mean, sure they will, eventually, but it would be nice if one could, while living, take a brief departure for a little while. Get s
ome perspective. Crunch years of psychotherapy into a tiny blip of time. Time span seems to be irrelevant here, so in theory it wouldn’t even have to take too long. Seriously. With all of my ruminating and remembering, you would think hours have passed. But look down there, you know, at that car and at Missy skulking away and whatnot, and you’ll see that we’re still right here, at the moment of my death. Well, not long after it, anyway. It hasn’t even been an hour and there they are, lifting me out onto that gurney. My arm is falling off the side. Rigor mortis hasn’t even set in.

  I can’t feel anything, though. Not physically, I mean. My body hasn’t hardened yet, but the strange thing is, I’m sensing a greater and greater emotional freeze. I feel my emotions freezing up with each passing nanosecond. They’re still here, but they’re fading. Emotional rigor mortis, I guess. Which is fascinating to me, given my research. Though I suppose that will soon subside as well, the fascination. It’s just an emotion, after all, even if it isn’t one I understand. I’ve never looked at its chemical components. I did look at a lot of interesting things, though. Thanks to Missy, really, though I hate to admit that. I mean, without her, without the funding from Pharmax, my research into emotional chemistry would have dried up completely.