by Jennifer Oko
Obviously (and I can admit this now that I’m dead), studying the actual chemistry of any emotion is only a part of the equation. Had Polly and I been talking in any real sense over the past few months, had she been telling me about what was going on in her life, and had I been telling her what was going on in mine, I might have really learned a thing or two. I might have learned, for example, that there’s a surprisingly fine line between contentment and euphoria.
32
July 7 (B.D.)
Turning it Back Four Months Again.
12:32 P.M.
They were not what she expected.
When Mitya had told Polly she would be meeting his distant cousin—a once-renowned-but-now-not-even-remembered-enough-to-be-considered-“disgraced” pharmaceutical scientist from the former Soviet Union—and his aunt, a depressed, aging Russian widow—she imagined she would be meeting an angry Dr. Strangelove-type, and a frail but nostalgically elegant old lady. Not a puffy fifty-something-year-old man with soft, boyish features and an overweight babushka stuffed into a threadbare floral housedress.
When they walked in, Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn and Aunt Zhanya were sitting at the kitchen table, illuminated by the flickering light of the television set on the opposing counter, their backs facing the door, an old dog sleeping at their feet.
“Tyotya,” Mitya said, flipping the switch for the overhead light. “We’re here.” Without turning to look at him, Zhanya muttered something in Russian.
“No, no,” Mitya responded. “I’m not staying the night. I brought Polly here to meet you, like I said I would.”
Zhanya mumbled something else.
“It’s fine. We can order in,” Mitya said with a hint of exasperation in his voice.
Zhanya brushed some crumbs off of her lap and slowly lifted herself out of the chair.
“C preyezdom,” she said, forcing a smile as she weakly shook Polly’s hand.
“Tyotya, she doesn’t speak Russian.”
Zhanya sighed and tried again. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said, sounding neither insincere nor particularly interested.
The distant cousin was another matter. As soon as Zhanya had finished her turn exchanging niceties (which didn’t take long), Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn bounded forward to greet Mitya and his new girlfriend. “Come, come. Sit down. Please.” He clasped both of Polly’s hands in his own and pulled her back toward the table.
“I am Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn,” he said, not letting go of Polly’s hands. She had to tilt her head back to escape the onslaught of his oniony breath. “So, so happy to meet you. So good. So good. You call me Ivan, yes?”
Polly nodded and looked back at Mitya, who shrugged as if he had no idea what all the fuss was about.
“Mitya, he say so much about you,” Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn continued, wiggling his bushy eyebrows as he spoke. “We wait too long to meet you. Such interesting young woman, yes?” He looked at Mitya and winked with great exaggeration.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” said Polly, although in truth she’d been determinately dragging her feet on this front, partly because, having heard about Mitya’s eccentric cousin who had recently arrived in Brighton Beach—this scientist character who Mitya had said might bore you to tears with halitosis-tinged stories of his faded glory—she was reluctant to meet him. But Mitya had been pressing Polly to meet Aunt Zhanya for some time. It was, if nothing else, an affirmation of how seriously he was taking their fledgling relationship. With his mother back in Moscow, Zhanya was the closest family Mitya had. And when family is in need, well … Mitya hadn’t sugarcoated the scene. He’d told Polly that his aunt Zhanya had been deeply, profoundly depressed for months now, for no discernible reason. She’d suffered bouts of depression throughout her life, but this one seemed to be intractable. Which was the real reason Mitya wanted Polly to meet her. He thought she could help. Actually, Mitya had initially thought I might be able to help, that because of my background—that I might be able to help convince his aunt to get help. Polly struck that idea down immediately, figuring I would never consent, at least not at that point in time.
She was probably right.
So instead, she suggested that she try to meet with Zhanya first, try to talk to her woman-to-woman, share her own stories of how medication had helped her, maybe even help get her started on a course of treatment. But now, looking at her, Polly was starting to think that Tyotya Zhanya was a woman no medication on earth could possibly assist.
“Can you pass me the sugar, please?” Polly asked Zhanya after they all sat down at the table and Ivan Petrovich poured out some tea.
Zhanya’s eyes were fixed on the floor, and she didn’t look up when she pushed the chipped ceramic sugar bowl a few inches across the table. The few moments of greeting had depleted her. She crossed her arms and slumped deeper into her chair. Ivan Petrovich reached over and took the teaspoon out of the jar.
“How many, sweet?” he asked Polly.
“One’s fine. Thanks.” She watched him stir the spoon around in her ceramic cup. “So,” she said, filling the awkward silence, “Mitya tells me you just recently got here?”
He nodded. Polly looked over at Mitya, who smiled back at her with encouragement.
“He said you got a job driving a cab? In Manhattan? That must be interesting. I mean, you must get a really wide range of passengers.”
“That what Mitya tell you?” Ivan asked, making an exaggerated frown and shaking his head. “That I just taxi driver?”
“Well, no. I mean, he said that you had been a scientist, and …”
“Da. This is right,” he said, tapping his chest. “I was Gyeroy Sovyetskogo Soyooza. Hero of Soviet Union.”
“Oh.” Polly looked at Mitya, who made a show of rolling his eyes, mouthing the words “here we go.”
Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn did have a story to tell, as much as one could follow it. At least according to him. Three months before, he explained, he had arrived at Zhanya’s doorstep unannounced, straight from immigration at Kennedy Airport. He was carrying little more than a small, tattered piece of paper with her address. In some way, he said, metaphorically speaking, he had been carrying this paper for the past few decades, from the moment Gorbachev, with his spotted brow and expansive outlook, unwittingly unclogged the pipes and let the Soviet scientific brain drain begin. By now, already deep into the next millennium, most of his renowned colleagues were well ensconced in prominent universities and well-funded laboratories around the world. But, because of who Ivan Petrovich claimed he was and what he claimed he had discovered, it had been a much harder sell for him to get permission to leave. The Russian authorities hadn’t wanted to let him go, he said, and the American authorities were not sure they wanted him to come. Until, that is, all the authorities had become too distracted by events elsewhere to give a hoot about someone’s connection with or at least cooperative support of the no-longer-such-named KGB, especially not a chemist whose discovery was about as relevant to the new world order as dial phones and typewriters.
What Ivan Petrovich said he had discovered, back when he was a twenty-five-year-old scientist of nondescript origin with a nondescript face, was the exact chemical and hormonal solution to create the perfect Soviet Citizen. Capital C. With his secret mix, he had laboratory monkeys humming party hymns and dogs marching in unfettered synchronicity. Even the rats and the mice were observed evenly dividing up their food and forming long lines to collect it.
Polly kicked Mitya’s ankle under the table.
Mitya smirked. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard this story. “Ivan Petrovich, tell her about the medicine.”
“Yes, yes. I get there,” he said, and went on to explain that the medicine developed from this formula, Leninzine, was given, first experimentally and then as commonly as kasha, to members of the convicted criminal class.
“It is proof,” he said, his excitement visible in the increasing range of motion of his hand gestures. “If you see records, you notice number of criminal peoples no more in prison was same as increase in year’s numbers joining Communist Party parades and events.” He said he was hailed as a genius throughout the Union, and spent the better part of the year lecturing at research centers and prison clinics, from Vladivostok to Lvov.
“That’s great,” said Polly, not sure if she should believe him or if he was a delusional maniac.
“Da!” Ivan Petrovich slammed his palm on the table. Even Zhanya looked up at that. “Was great. But no! No more!”
“What?” Polly silently mouthed at Mitya. “What did I say?”
“No, no. I sorry,” Ivan Petrovich reached across the table and patted her hand. He exhaled and explained that by the time the worst side effect of Leninzine was discovered—it metabolized in such a way that the body craved at least half a liter of Vodka every ten hours after taking it—the Soviet Union was dissolved, the research lost in the crypts of the Kremlin, and no one remembered what the purpose of the drug was in the first place.
Well, hardly anyone.
“If I can find job here, in laboratory, I could make much money! Become famous! Buy Zhanya new house!” Ivan Petrovich was practically bouncing off his chair.
Polly cocked her head. “So why don’t you?”
“Blat!” he said. And then Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn—Soviet psychopharmacology’s aging boy wonder—spit on the floor. “Menye Pizd’ets.”
“What does that mean?” Polly whispered to Mitya.
“You don’t want to know,” he answered.
“Oh, come on.” She crossed her arms.
“Well, I’m not sure of the literal translation, but basically he’s saying he’s fucked.”
“Why?”
Ivan Petrovich waved his hand in a circle. Mitya knew the story. Let him tell it.
“He says there are no records. His awards, his diplomas, his papers, his transcripts—all of them are missing. He says that everything was destroyed by the KGB right before the coup. They wanted to destroy any evidence that that drug ever existed, that anyone had ever worked on it—anything that might one day incriminate anyone involved.”
“And now I am here, driving taxi cab in the New York City. But if I had laboratory,”—Ivan Petrovich shook his head in dismay—“I could be help for her. I could make medicine for her.” He looked over at Zhanya, who was still slumped in her chair as she looked aimlessly into her teacup.
“I know,” said Mitya. “I’m sure you could.” He nodded at Polly. She took the cue and handed him her purse. “And I’m sure you will, someday.” Mitya placed his hand on his aunt’s shoulder and pressed the bag into her lap. “Tyotya, we have something for you.”
***
Zhanya held the Ziperal at a distance, trying to adjust her eyes so she could read the tightly printed text that wrapped around the bottle. It had taken a good ten minutes just to get her to open the bag, Ivan Petrovich lecturing them the whole time—about the advances in psychiatric medication, about what he saw as the lawsuit-averse timidity of the American market, about all the possibilities, if only he could have a hand in it.
Mitya finally waved his hand at his cousin, imploring him to shut up. “Tyotya?” he said to his aunt, “are you okay?”
Zhanya shook the bottle and then thrust it in Mitya’s face. “And I should trust this, why?”
“I know a lot of people who’ve taken it,” said Polly softly, gently touching Zhanya’s wrist, lowering her arm. “It might give a little buzz at first, and then might take a few days for the full effect, but I think it could make you feel better.”
“You should try it, Tyotya,” said Mitya. “It’s going to be fine.”
Polly picked up one of the seven-day sample packs scattered amongst the bottles from her purse. “It’s actually much faster acting than most antidepressants.”
“Apparently it has other benefits as well, Tyotya,” Mitya added, trying to sound encouraging. It was, after all, the other benefits that had been of interest to him and his friends in the first place. The increased ability to focus, the initial boost of energy, the clearer skin. Depression was never the issue. Not for him, anyway.
But antidepressants were just not part of Zhanya’s generation’s emotional vocabulary. Not in any language. To her, taking them seemed shameful, like Ziperal might as well have been an antipsychotic used in insane asylums. These were not medications she was familiar with. They weren’t medications she could buy from the babushkas down the street. Or that someone she trusted—someone who really understood these things—could vouch for. She turned to Ivan Petrovich, seeking his advice. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “The brain, it just one big chemical soup,” he said. “You not like taste of soup now. Why not add new spice?”
Zhanya was too tired to argue with that, and finally relented. “So, how many do I take?”
33
July 7 (B.D.)
Yes, the Same Day Polly First went Down to Brighton Beach Midtown.
Midday.
My marching orders from Stanley Novartny and company couldn’t have been clearer. Or easier. While Polly was off ingratiating herself into Mitya’s scene, the scientists over at Pharmax, the ones working under Eugene Throng’s tutelage, were busy sending me piles of incomplete reports that I was supposed to complete. They looked like MadLibs, with fields for me to fill in the missing words. But instead of adjectives like “smelly,” I was supposed to write equations in scientific and neurological terminology.
For example:
In patients exhibiting symptoms of Fatico Dystopia, there is pervasive reoccurrence of _______ in the _____ lobe. Our research demonstrates that when consumed in amounts of _____mg a day for a period of _____weeks, the medication Ziperal TR helps to lessen the ______ reaction, causing the activity in the ________ to increase, thereby giving the patient an improved sense of job satisfaction and work performance.
The first time I had read one of these, before that night with Polly at the restaurant, I put it down on the small, cluttered desk I had shoved into the corner of the lab (more space for the rat races) and started to dial Polly; she would have gotten a big kick out of all of this. Then I remembered my confidentiality agreement. And I remembered she hadn’t come home again the night before, and, knowing that she rarely got to work before ten, I figured she was probably still curled up in Mitya’s bed and most probably wouldn’t answer.
I called her anyway.
She picked up on the third ring, right before it would have sunk into voicemail.
“Ughmmm,” she said, not hiding the fact that I had woken her up. “What?”
“Good morning to you, too,” I said.
“Sorry.” Her voice became clearer. “Hey, honey?” she said, not to me. “Can you bring me some coffee if you’re headed to the kitchen? I have a nasty headache.” Then she turned her attention back my way. “What do you want?”
I looked down at the paper on my desk. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so funny. “Never mind,” I said and hung up. It was obvious who my real allies were going to be. Or ally, anyway.
I lifted Raskolnikov out of his cage and looked into his beady little eyes. “What do you think, little guy?” I asked, trying to get a read from him. “You ready for this?”
34
July 25 (B.D.)
A Few Weeks Later.
10:57 P.M.
You can just guess what happens next, right? I mean, what was going on with Polly and Zhanya and all of them while I was busy filling in blanks? It’s pretty incredible that I didn’t have a better sense of it when this all started going on; back when Polly was trying to get me to hit up Missy for additional samples, back around the time of our
big schism.
It kind of kills me, no pun intended, because had Polly just been straight with me about Mitya and his family earlier on, and, in fairness, had I been willing to listen to her, and had she been willing to listen to me, things could have been different. At least I think they could have been. If you’re thinking that it’s outlandish—totally absurd—that somehow medicating little Aunt Zhanya in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with a jerry-rigged, wrongly-prescribed antidepressant could lead to murder, well, as I’m starting to understand, when you’re dealing with issues of brain chemistry, anything can happen. Especially when there’s money to be made.
I should probably rewind again. I know my thoughts are flitting around so fast it might be hard to keep up, so let me track back. Let me spell out for my own clarification what I’m seeing now as I turn back time and shape shift and all that jazz. Actually, let me just switch on the television set and turn the dial back about three months and change to late July, a few weeks after I started my Pharmax work and Polly had started Zhanya with popping her pills. This bit I don’t even have to burrow into someone else’s memory to access. This bit I remember quite well.
I was alone in the apartment, brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when the story came on the 11 o’clock news. The correspondent was fiddling with her hair, not having sprayed it thoroughly enough to contend with either the summer’s humidity or the breeze coming in from the beach just a few blocks away.
“Sarah?” the anchor asked.
“Wha—” Sarah Schture looked at the camera. “Are we on?”
Kate Craft, the venerable blond news anchor sitting comfortably on the studio set, didn’t answer the question, preferring, perhaps, to let the attractive, younger correspondent figure it out for herself. (Jealousy. The binding of 3H-paroxetine in the serotonergic system. It sure can make people do strange things.)