by Jennifer Oko
“Oh. Okay. Well, Kate,” she said, pulling herself together and dropping her voice an octave or two. “It was pandemonium at the Brighton Beach police precinct earlier today, after a drug raid in which five elderly women, one believed to be in her eighties, were arrested on charges of distributing and selling illegal narcotics and drugs. It was, police are saying, something they never would have expected. News Six was along for the ride.”
The picture flipped to a pre-taped segment with an opening shot of a patrol car pulling up to the red brick police precinct. Two handcuffed women, head scarves pulled down to hide their faces, are led perp-walk style into the building.
“Police say that at around 4 o’clock this afternoon, they received an anonymous tip,” Sarah Schture’s narration began. “Amid the mostly legal vendors along Brighton Beach Avenue,”—the shot changes to show a man selling caviar—“an illegal drug trade has been taking route.” Sarah was in the next shot, walking past a fruit stand and an ice cream vendor. “But the pills and tablets that are for sale aren’t substances you might normally associate with street drugs,” she said, starting to walk toward the camera. “What is being sold on the streets of Brighton Beach, in the light of day, are medications like codeine, diazepam, and even …” she shook a small white bottle, “the new antidepressant Ziperal.” She stopped walking and the shot changes to a scene at the precinct. “The dealers,” she narrated as the camera panned across a row of elderly women sitting on a bench, plastic cuffs on their wrists, faces blurred just enough to make them unidentifiable, “are as surprising as the drugs themselves.”
I was brushing my teeth, alone in our apartment and getting ready for bed when the story came on. I was more bemused than anything else when I saw it. I mean, just a couple months before, Polly and I were doing something not so different from those little old ladies, right? It was kind of the same thing. We never asked for money, but still. So the story kept my attention. It kept the attention of the media as well. What late night comic could resist making a joke about popping pills with old ladies? What tabloid newspaper could turn a cheek on such juicy headline opportunities? “The New Drug Czars?” asked the Daily News. “Black Market Grannies!” shouted the early edition of the New York Post.
If only I had known that Polly had been tossing about the same phrase just a few weeks before.
35
July 26 (B.D.)
The Next Day.
8:45 A.M.
“Hey,” Polly said, stopping short at a newsstand as she and Mitya raced toward the subway station down the street. She pointed at the papers stacked up in front of the candy and gum. “They stole my line!”
“Come on,” Mitya said, grabbing her wrist to pull her along. He wasn’t in a joking mood. Early that morning, Ivan Petrovich had woken them up with a hysterical phone call. He’d told Mitya Zhanya hadn’t come home the night before. Again. He said he’d last heard her around 5 a.m. the day before, singing in the shower (at the top of her lungs, no less), which he thought was quite odd, and then the next thing he knew she was out the door, before he could even say good day. He hadn’t seen her since.
This odd disappearance and sudden shift in moods was concerning to Mitya. He immediately called the police to report a missing person and, well, you can guess what they told him. And now he and Polly were charging down to Brighton Beach in the clothing they’d worn the night before to get his aging but apparently no-longer-depressed (now apparently hypo-manic) aunt out of jail.
“I thought the police ignored all of that stuff, those street vendors,” Polly said, smoothing the skirt of her summery dress over her knees as they settled into the subway car’s hard plastic seats. “Hasn’t it been going on for years without them doing anything? Like what we saw the other week, all those drugs for sale? The Valium and codeine. All that stuff?”
“I don’t know.” Mitya placed his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands. “I don’t understand what’s going on down there. This makes no sense.”
Polly stared out the window, trying to make out the ghosts of decades-old graffiti images on the walls as the train barreled down through the dark tunnels. “You know what I don’t get?” she asked after a few minutes had passed. “It’s not like I gave your aunt such an enormous supply. Why was she selling off everything that remained in her own medicine cabinet? Does she need the money that badly?”
Mitya shook his head. “No. No. This is so not like her. She doesn’t need the money. She gets Social Security, plus I send her a decent amount every month. There has to be a mistake. I can’t even imagine …” He sat up. “Wait a second.”
“What?”
“Ziperal, that medicine you gave her, what do you know about the side effects it can have? That could be it, right? She’s been taking it for more than a couple of weeks now.”
“Are you blaming me?” Polly asked, moving a few inches away from Mitya. “You think this is my fault? You’re the one who had to convince me to give it to her in the first place!”
“No. No. I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.” Mitya put his tattoo-mottled hand on Polly’s bare shoulder to reassure her. “It’s just, I don’t know, this is really weird. Really unlike her. I was just thinking maybe the medication might have something to do with that.”
“I don’t know. I know a ton of people who’ve taken it, and I haven’t seen anything strange happen, have you?”
“No, but when our friends take it, it’s usually a one-shot deal. Just as a quick stimulant to enhance the evening. They aren’t taking it over the course of a few weeks. They aren’t trying to treat anything chronic.”
But Polly had. She didn’t want to tell him, but she’d been taking a low dose of Ziperal for months now, ever since her Prozac had run out.
“I think there’s something else at work here,” she said. “Because if Ziperal created this kind of mania … that is what this seems like, right? If Ziperal did it, don’t you think we would have heard of it before? Don’t you think they would have pulled it off the market?”
“Maybe it just causes it in some people, a small percentage,” Mitya said. “Like how some drugs have a slight risk of heart failure, or whatever. Maybe Zhanya is just in that small percentage.”
“Maybe.” Polly looked back out the window. The train was pulling out of the underground tunnel onto the elevated tracks that led into south Brooklyn. “I never pay attention to the disclaimers on those commercials.”
Maybe she should have. Maybe everyone should.
36
July 26 (B.D.)
A Couple Hours Later.
10:15 A.M.
Raskolnikov wasn’t doing too well. Or rather, he was doing really, really well. Over the course of a week, according to the protocols of a study I’d found in the Ziperal documents Eugene Throng sent me, I had administered the highest dosage of Ziperal that a 1-pound rat could possibly tolerate. The results were quite alarming. I walked into work one morning to find him dancing; he was doing the rhumba, waltzing across his cage like rodent version of Fred Astaire.
“Well, you sure seem happy,” I said, plucking him out of his cage. Suddenly, he went limp in my hand, as if all the bones in his body had melted. Like when the Abominable Snowman follows Bugs Bunny to Florida and dissolves into the sand. Well, maybe it’s not that funny. But you know what is? Timing. Timing is funny. There’s that joke about the world’s most famous Polish comedian, do you know that one? It requires two people to tell it. The straight man says to the comedian: “Sir, I understand you’re the world’s greatest Polish comedian. What’s the secret to your success?” But the joke is that before the straight man can finish the word “success,” the comedian interrupts and says “timing.”
The timing of what was going on with me back then and what was going on down there in Brighton Beach at pretty much the same moment is actually kind of funny
. Because, funnily enough, this stuff with Ras was all happening at the same exact time that Polly and Mitya were headed down to Brooklyn. The same day, anyway. I swear, if I still had a frontal lobe, it would probably be kicking it into high gear about now.
37
July 26 (B.D.)
Pretty Much the Same Time as the Previous Chapter.
10:28 A.M.
It wasn’t even 10:30 in the morning, but the summer heat was already rising off the pavement in front of the precinct house, creating a blurred effect when you looked into the distance. And there they were. Mitya with his low-slung jeans cut off at the knee, Polly in a light yellow, fluttery dress, both of them shielding their eyes as they stepped out into the sun.
Mitya turned around and pulled his aunt elbow-first onto the sidewalk. “Zhanya, come on,” he implored. “It’s time to go home.”
But Zhanya didn’t want to go home. She was having too much fun flirting, demurely batting her eyes at the admonishments of the young officer who was holding the door open. “Now, I don’t want to see you here again, missus …” the officer was saying.
“Are you sure?” she asked, pulling away from Mitya so she could playfully pat the officer on his behind.
“Zhanya! Come on! I’m so sorry, sir,” Mitya said, turning to the officer. “My aunt, I don’t know what …”
The officer smiled and shook his head. “Just take her home,” he said, gently prying Zhanya’s puffy fingers off of his back pocket. “Try to keep her out of trouble. She got lucky this time. Just a slap on the wrist. No charges. Next time it won’t be so easy.”
Mitya pulled his aunt off the young cop and anxiously pushed her in the direction of her home.
Zhanya’s apartment was only a few blocks from the precinct, but the walk back was slow, hot and silent. Zhanya was taking her sweet time, literally stopping to smell the flowers in the window boxes and watching the birds flying overhead.
“I cannot believe what I have been missing,” she whispered repeatedly to no one in particular. “I cannot believe …”
Mitya held Polly’s hand, squeezing tighter every time Zhanya stopped to observe something or issue another proclamation.
After the third or fourth floral sniffing, Polly couldn’t suppress a small laugh. “Man, I’ll have whatever she’s having.”
Mitya relented and laughed, too. What else could one do at a time like this? “I can see what you mean,” he said. “But what say we hold off a little while?”
When they finally arrived at her building, Zhanya bounded up the stairs to the entry door. “Ivan! Ivan Petrovich!” She ran down the corridor, shaking her house keys ahead of her as if they were pulling her magnetically toward her apartment. Mitya and Polly struggled to keep up behind her. “Ivan! Petrovich! Ya preshla!” she shouted. Ivan Petrovich, I have arrived.
It turns out that another nice thing about the afterlife is that my lifelong inability to pick up foreign languages has become irrelevant. In life, I might have been good at math and science, but French? Spanish? Forget about it. Those required classes always pulled down my GPA. I’m positive that’s why I wound up at my safety school and not Harvard. But now? Speak in Thai. Speak in Portuguese. Speak in Arabic. Speak in Russian. I’ll understand every word.
Ivan Petrovich was sitting at the kitchen table, beads of sweat dripping off his head, looking as bedraggled as the father of a teenage girl who had been out all night. As soon as Zhanya waltzed into the room, he sprang out of his seat.
“Zhanya! Are you okay? Did they hurt you? How are you feeling?” he asked in Russian.
Zhanya lunged forward, leaping over Ralph, the old dog who was sleeping, half-deaf and undisturbed, in the middle of the floor.
Zhanya grabbed the puffs of white hair sticking off the sides of Ivan Petrovich’s head as if they were handles and pulled him toward her to kiss both his cheeks. “I’m fine! Great! Never better!” she said as if she had just come back from a Caribbean vacation, not like she had just spent a night on a hard cot in jail. She planted platonic cousinly kisses all over his face.
Polly and Mitya arrived breathlessly behind her, and Zhanya turned and greeted them as if she hadn’t seen them in days, giving Mitya a big sloppy smacker on his forehead and Polly a demonstrative hug that briefly knocked her off balance.
“Zaichick” she said, pinching Polly’s cheek. Little squirrel. Then she whirled around the room like a dervish until she reached the refrigerator, opened it and stuck her head in to see what was there.
Ivan Petrovich looked helplessly at Mitya and Polly.
“She’s been acting like this since we got her from the precinct,” Mitya said.
“Pelmeni?” Zhanya swung around with a plate of cold dumplings covered in plastic wrap. “Or meat? You want meat?” She pulled out a long string of sausages and waved it over her head before tossing it on the countertop and grabbing a knife to cut it all up. The dog, smelling the meat, briefly looked up, and Zhanya threw a few pieces his way.
Ivan Petrovich sighed. “I think she, how do you say, settle down soon,” he said in his strongly accented English. “I think the, what you say, concoction? I think it last twenty-four hour.”
Mitya and Polly looked at each other, dumbfounded. “Concoction?” Mitya asked. “Do you mean the Ziperal?” He looked at the bedraggled old cherub in front of him. “Do you mean the Ziperal?”
“No, no,” Polly corrected before Ivan Petrovich could answer, the truth suddenly dawning on her. “Ziperal is extended release. It isn’t supposed to cause a sudden change like that. It takes a while to start working, and then it takes a while to get out of your system.”
“How do you know—,” Mitya began to ask Polly, but Ivan Petrovich grabbed his arm before he could finish.
“It still in system,” he said. He tapped his chest. “Will be for days. But immediate effects of such big dose should …” He couldn’t find the English word he wanted, so he fluttered his fingers into the air over his head. “It go away.”
A sharp odor suddenly shrouded the room.
“What’s that?” Polly asked.
Mitya pointed at the dog. “It was Ralph. He’s getting old.” He turned back to Ivan Petrovich. “How much did Zhanya take? Did you tell her to take more than Polly told her to?”
“Here!” Zhanya shoved a large platter between them and pushed a dumpling into Ivan Petrovich’s mouth before he could answer. “Eat! Eat!” she cheerfully demanded, refusing to take no for an answer. She tossed the food on the table and set out chipped china cups.
Mitya, Polly and Ivan Petrovich, unsure of what else to do, sat down obligingly and let Zhanya pour them lukewarm, day-old tea, her voluminous breasts spilling out of her purple polyester house dress each time she leaned forward. Cups brimming over, she placed the kettle back on the stove, only to return with another plate of food. “Here,” she said, “these I bought down the—” She stopped, and then, in a fit of unprecedented narcolepsy, slid down against the oven and fell asleep next to the flatulent dog on the floor, scattering cookies across the yellowed linoleum tiles.
38
July 26 (B.D.)
Just a Little While Later.
10:52 A.M.
Narcolepsy: A disorder characterized by sudden, unwanted episodes of abrupt sleep. Most people with narcolepsy also experience cataplexy, sudden muscular weakness without loss of consciousness, usually accompanied by laughter or anger. Other symptoms that occur after onset of sudden sleep or upon wakening include sleep paralysis and vivid hallucinations.
(Source: The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia)
I checked Raskolnikov’s pulse and put my face down to feel his breath. He was fine. He was sleeping. I poked him with my finger. I sprayed water on his face. I took half of the tuna salad sandwich I had been intending to eat for lunch and put it right next to hi
s nose. Nothing. No matter what I did, I couldn’t wake Raskolnikov up.
This was odd. Pharmax had sent me reams of documents from studies they’d completed before getting their FDA approval, but none of them said anything about occurrences of narcoleptic disorders. It certainly wasn’t on the list of symptoms on the television ad that was running for Ziperal Extended Release, version 1.0—the one for depression, not for Fatico Dystopia. The marketers still needed my results to start that particular campaign. These ads only admitted to occasional cases of dry mouth, a rash, even heightened sexual arousal (hardly a negative), but nothing serious. Nothing that made a person collapse spontaneously.
I called Eugene Throng to discuss the issue.
“Where did you find that study?” he demanded after I told him about the sudden onset of narcolepsy in my favorite lab rat.
“What study? I’m just telling you what I’m seeing with my rat.”
He was silent a moment. “That rat is awake. He has to be.”
“What?”
“He’s faking it,” chirped Eugene Throng in his shattering high-pitch. I had to pull the phone off my ear just to tolerate it. “He just wants a break from the tests, Olivia.”
“No rat is that smart,” I said.
“What?”
I brought the phone back closer to my mouth and raised my voice. “I said, ‘no rat is that smart.’ But even if Raskolnikov was, this performance would make him an Oscar-caliber actor.”