Head Case

by Jennifer Oko

  “Ols,” she continued, finally focusing for seemingly no particular reason on the elaborate and gaudy chandelier hanging over the center of the room. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I know you know that. And, if anything, it should be me in that coffin, not you. I’m so sorry.”

  A rustle swept over the pews, a few whispers waved through the aisles.

  All anybody actually knew, all the papers had said and all the police had divulged, was that I had been an innocent bystander in a neighborhood turf war. Why I was in a taxi in Brooklyn was never questioned. No assumption had been publicly made, nor had it been established that there was any connection, however tenuous, between me and the people responsible for my death. It was increasingly clear that the police were not going to go there. They weren’t going to go anywhere with any of it. In fact, if you go down to Brighton Beach, you might notice that Sergeant Jeffers and the undercover gang are all walking the beat in spiffy new suits. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out where the funding for their fashions came from. Someone has to keep the market going, right? The grannies depend on it.

  Polly wiped a tear with the back of her wrist. “I know if you were able to say something to me right now, you would probably be trying to reassure me like you always do—I mean did—telling me that’s nonsense, that of course it isn’t my fault because I wasn’t the one pulling that trigger, that I wasn’t even there. God, you would probably somehow even turn this around and find away to take the blame yourself.” She blew her nose. “You were right, though. I took our friendship for granted and lost sight of things. Of what was important and what mattered most. Everything spun out of control, and it’s completely my fault. I should have listened to you.”

  People were sitting up, pressing their coccyx bones into the hard wood benches. Could Polly have been involved in this somehow, they wanted to know. Could Olivia’s best friend actually been responsible for her death? Was there more to this story than an easy-to-dismiss case of wrong-place-at-wrong-time?

  Polly wasn’t an idiot. There was a limit to what she would tell.

  She took her eyes off of the lights and looked directly out into the audience. “She was coming to see me. I was upset and she was coming to see me. She left work early and unwittingly got into that taxi and …” she stopped short.

  A woman was sitting alone in the back pew, a wide-brimmed black hat covering her blond up-do, large dark glasses shielding her eyes. She tipped her head to acknowledge Polly’s recognition of her, and why not? As far as anybody knew, Missy Pander had no reason to hide. Except that … well, maybe I should give myself a little more ghostly credit. Missy Pander hadn’t actually shown up for my funeral. She had no reason to. It wasn’t like she was mourning my loss.

  The moment Polly shifted her eyes, the woman was gone.

  Polly looked back up at the chandelier. “Olivia,” she said, so sotto voce that no one else could hear. “I swear I saw something.”

  Which is exactly what she’s saying to Mitya now, as he rubs the back of her neck on the couch just a couple hours after they came home.

  “Mitya,” she says, “I saw something. I think Olivia was at the funeral. I mean, more than just her body in the casket. She was there.”

  48

  November 8 (A.D.)

  Three Seconds Later.

  “Did you hear me?” Polly says, removing Mitya’s hand from her neck and turning to face him. “I said I saw her.”

  “Hey, I’m not finished. Your back is a knotty mess.”

  “I need you to listen to me.” Polly pushes Mitya’s hand down. “I saw something.”

  “What, at the funeral?”

  “Yeah. When I was giving the eulogy.” She pauses because she knows what she’s about to say is going to sound ridiculous. “She was there, Mitya.”

  “Who was?”

  “Olivia. She was there. At the funeral. I mean, it wasn’t her, exactly. She didn’t look like her. She looked like Missy, that woman from Pharmax, but she wasn’t there either. Like in a dream. It was so odd, I mean, I know she wasn’t really there, but I felt like she was there. It was –”

  “Sweetie,” Mitya says, interrupting Polly as gently as possible. “I think you need—we both need—to relax. Take a breather so we can recharge, you know? I know things are crazy, this has been a crazy week, but it’s time to take a breather.”

  Polly nods. Maybe he’s right. This isn’t the time to push the point. Whether she saw me or not wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that they were safe. Her friend was dead, but so was Boris Shotkyn, and at least on that front she and Mitya and Zhanya could rest easy.

  “Can I ask you something?” she says.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you see him? The person who shot Shotkyn. You never told me. Do you know who it was?”

  Mitya is silent.

  “You do. You know. You saw him.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can’t tell me? What am I going to do? Call the police?”

  Mitya shuts his eyes. “It was Zhanya. I’m not positive, but I am pretty sure it was her.”

  “But, how …” Polly tries to imagine the aged woman, probably still in her house dress, pointing a gun. “How did she even know …”

  “I don’t know. Maybe somebody told her to be there. Maybe Ivan Petrovich. Maybe she knew something was up, that we were being threatened. Maybe she wanted to be helpful, to protect us somehow. She could have followed me out of the house.”

  “Did you see her there?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think I saw something, in the distance, some babushka down the street, walking away, but it all happened so fast, there was so much going on, I’m not one hundred percent sure what I saw.”

  “Have the police come by? Is she a suspect?”

  “A little old lady like her? No. But I have this feeling, I mean, it’s conceivable.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “I haven’t been able to. Ivan Petrovich told me she took a mouthful of drugs and now she’s been sleeping for three days.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “You’ve had other things to worry about, Polly.”

  “You’re right,” she says, and picks up the remote to turn on the television set. “This is all too much to process. We need to relax, get some clarity.” She hits the power button and a blue-hued light immediately fills up the room.

  “And later on Entertainment This Evening,” a busty anchor-ette is saying, “an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at Lillianne Farber’s life after rehab and a sneak peek at her next big screen adventure. We’ll be back after the break.”

  “Man,” says Mitya, “that Lillianne chick is everywhere these days.”

  “She wasn’t at the funeral.”

  The screen fades to black and then opens up to a commercial I’d seen before. There’s that opening shot of packed stadium at a college graduation, that ubiquitous march music beating underneath a montage of jubilant students hugging each other, throwing up their mortarboards, and popping champagne. “It’s just not how you imagined it would be,” the narration begins and the screen cuts to a shot of a pale, blond woman sitting in a cubicle, staring blankly at a monitor. “All of the studying, the sacrifices, the unpaid internships ...” Cut to a light-skinned black man standing behind a large desk, staring longingly out his office window. “For what?” Cut to a different cubicle shot with an Asian woman gently massaging her forehead. “For long, thankless hours. For tasks that often seem pointless, meetings that seem interminable. Work gives you headaches, fatigue, lower back pain. Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be this way. Like millions of Americans, you might be suffering from Fatico Dystopia, a condition that blocks the ability to find fulfillment in your career, a condition that can make you frustra
ted by the relentless nature of your work. If you’re one of these people, talk to your doctor. Ziperal Targeted Release might work for you.” The video fades and then reveals a shot of the light-skinned black man in his office, happily filling out a report. It cuts to a smiling group of people congregating around the now happy and more rosy-looking blond at a water cooler. Cut to the Asian woman smiling as she flips through a filing cabinet. As the background music gently swells, the narrator continues. “Ziperal TR is currently in clinical trials, and will soon be available for general consumption.”

  Polly sits forward, spilling some of her beer onto the floor. “Oh, my God.”

  “What? What’s going on?”

  She puts the bottle down on the crate. “That was what Olivia was trying to tell me! I know it!”

  “Polly, come on now—”

  “No, no. Listen to me. The shooting. Tell me. Was there a blond woman there at the shooting? Do you remember seeing a blond woman? Missy. The one I hooked Shotkyn up with? The one I basically blackmailed into wholesaling him drugs? You met her at the club last spring? She was having some sample packs delivered? She was probably in a low cut dress or a suit that was too tight?”

  “Yes, of course I know who she is. But calm down. Your head is spinning. There’s a lot going on, Polly …” Mitya places his hand on Polly’s forearm, but she pushes it off, jumps off the couch and starts overturning the papers and magazines stacked up on the milk crate.

  “Well, you might not have seen something, Mitya. But I know I did.” She hands him a large stack of files. “Start sorting through this.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says, overturning a jumble of textbooks and journals I had piled next to the lamp. “Something.”

  There are people who believe in ghosts of course, who believe they’ve seen them walking through walls or opening closet doors or popping out of gravesites. As I’ve said, a week or so ago, I would have chalked such beliefs up as nothing more than figments of imagination, strange misfirings of synapses and such, that cause people to hallucinate the impossible. I’m still convinced that such visions are nothing more than hallucinations; when someone thinks they see something that no one else would agree to be there, chances are something’s actually messing with their 5-HT2A receptor molecules in their brains. But the big question is—assuming no LCD, mescaline or psilocybin has been in the picture—how did those receptor molecules get messed with in the first place? Who or what is responsible for their gyrations?

  “Did you see that?” Polly says, standing up from the knee-high pile of folders she has sorted on the floor.

  “Polly …”

  “No, really. Look.” She points at the mirror. “There.”

  Mitya turns from the stack of papers he has been skimming—mostly unpaid bills and notices from collection agencies. “All I see is you, looking distorted. You look like you just got run over by a steamroller. That mirror really needs to be fixed.” He walks over and grabs the sides of the wooden frame.

  “How’s this?” Mitya pulls the mirror off the wall a few inches in order to adjust the increasingly leftward slant that’s been developing.

  My heart stops, so to speak. I was hoping this would happen.

  A manila folder falls to the ground.

  Polly and Mitya look at each other and then Polly races to pick it up.

  “What is it?” Mitya asks impatiently as she pulls out the report.

  She plops to her knees and spreads the first few pages on the floor.

  “Check this out,” she says. “It looks like MadLibs for science geeks.”

  “MadLibs?”

  “You know, the word game where you fill in the blanks.”

  49

  November 9 (A.D.)

  The truth is, in some ways, Polly had read my mind better than I had. Sure, I had stumbled across information that suggested something extremely fishy was going on at Pharmax. I had a hunch (more than a hunch) that this so-called disease and the enhanced antidepressant (an antidepressant on steroids if you want to get down to it) being pushed to treat it were dangerous things. But aside from stashing some documents and hiding some folders, beyond showing silly videos of rats falling off chairs, I still hadn’t figured out what to do with that information. I needed to do more research to back up what I was starting to find. What exactly that research would be and what I would do with it—those were ideas that were cut short in the development stage. Challenging the data being put forth by a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, risking my career and obliterating my bank account—the prospects were daunting.

  ***

  “Is he okay?” Polly asks, poking a finger into the sleeping rat’s cage. She and Mitya relocated Raskolnikov a few days ago, first to our apartment for a restless evening and then to Tyotya’s Zhanya’s bathroom, where Ivan Petrovich has once again jerry-rigged a laboratory. It was a good thing, too. Not three hours after they snuck into the Institute (not six hours after my funeral), looking for something that might lead to something else, Eugene Throng had come by to do the same. The difference being that Eugene Throng had known what to look for. Polly and Mitya were just hoping something might jump out at them. Luckily, something did.

  “Jesus!” Polly said, dropping her purse on the floor. My purse. The red Birkin bag Missy had given me when I first signed up to work on the campaign. Now, Raskolnikov was sitting on top of it, pawing at the clasps.

  He was hungry.

  I hadn’t been there to feed him in over a week, after all. So when Polly unbuttoned her coat and switched on the overhead lights, he sprung out of his cage. Smart little bugger had watched me enough times that he figured out how to open the latch.

  Mitya ran to Polly’s side to see what was causing the commotion. “Gross!” he said, squatting down so he could look at the rat at eye level. “Take a look at this guy. He’s huge.”

  Polly, bless her soul, did take a good hard look.

  “I’ve heard about this rat,” she said. She stretched out her pointer finger to stroke Raskolnikov’s head. “Olivia used to talk about him. Her beloved workhorse. I think his name is Rasputin.”

  “Rasputin?”

  “Something like that. No, maybe it was Raskolnikov. Some literary reference. Whatever.” She opened her palm and Ras obligingly crawled onto it. It was like he knew her. He knew to trust her. “Do you see food for him anywhere?” she asked, looking around. “God, look at this place, would you?”

  Actually, there wasn’t much to see. I had relocated the bulk of my work to the apartment, figuring that there I would have more peace and quiet to contemplate what I needed to contemplate. So, aside from a row of unused cages, a locked cabinet filled with testing chemicals and pills and assorted equipment, the room was empty of any obviously relevant material, anything Polly and Mitya could comprehend, anyway. It was not the most inspiring workplace one might imagine. I certainly hadn’t given any thought to the Feng Shui.

  Mitya unsuccessfully shook the cabinet door. He bent down and looked under the desk and tables. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure Olivia fed him special food? He’s a rat. Don’t they eat garbage?”

  Polly rolled her eyes and walked across the room to see if she could find anything in his cage. “Jesus!” she said, peering in from an olfactorally safe distance. “This is disgusting!” she said, jumping back to the entrance, where she picked up my—I mean her—$5000 purse. She gently placed the terrified rat inside. “Wait here a minute while I clean up your cage.” She buckled the strap.

  “What are you doing?” Mitya was still hovering by the door, unsure of what part of the office to explore first.

  “We’re taking him with us. Here, give me a hand.” Polly kicked a wastebasket toward Mitya. “Hold that up so I can shake this off,” she said, sliding the tray out from the bott
om of the cage and dumping out the moist refuse.

  The sawdust easily shook off, but the newspapers and pamphlets underneath it had absorbed most of the moisture and were sticking to the tray. Polly snapped on a latex glove from the box that was resting on top of the cage and started to peel the papers away. And that was when—to fully exhaust an expression—she saw something.

  “Look at this.” Polly held out a green tri-fold pamphlet, pinching the corner with her fingertips. A few drops of liquid, most likely rat urine, ran off the bottom and splashed on the floor.

  Mitya cocked his head and put his hands in front of his nose. “Jesus, that stinks.”

  Polly held it closer to him. “Read it.”

  “I’m not touching that.”

  “Just look at the cover.”

  He did as he was told. There he saw a graphic image of a medicine capsule curved around an illustration of the globe. “PharmaWorld Expo. Henry Javits Convention Center,” Mitya read out loud. “December Seventeenth through Nineteenth.” The date had been underlined three times with a thick black Sharpie. “It’s for a trade convention. So what?”

  Using her teeth, Polly pulled another latex glove over her other hand. She carefully unfolded the pamphlet and spread the document on top of the cage.

  “I think we might be getting somewhere, Mitya. That’s so what.”

  The internal image was simple enough. A small rodent running out of a maze. The words “Escape from the Rat Race” splashed across the page in 48-point font. Underneath that, in equally attention-grabbing lettering, it simply stated what Pharmax was hoping to sell:

  Because Your Work Life Shouldn’t Kill You

  Ziperal Targeted Release

  The Working Person’s Answer to Making Life Work