Head Case Page 3

  So, not a life-threatening emergency, to be sure, but it seemed enough of an excuse for me to bolt out of the laboratory and get out of the tequila shots one of the researchers was offering up at the bar across the street. And besides, I figured Polly calling me like that was her way of offering another olive branch, letting me know that when the proverbial pooh hit the fan, she still needed me. Which was fair. Because proverbial pooh and all, things were getting weird in my life and I needed her, too. I still do. More than ever.

  And so I ran, my heels drumming down the sterile white corridors of the Institute and out onto the street.

  Before I had a chance to put my hand up to hail a cab, a yellow taxi flashed its lights and screeched to a halt in front of me, splashing dirty water from the puddle at the curb. I brushed the gray drops off the bottom of my jeans and slipped into the back of the car.

  Maybe I should have thought it strange that the driver was able to sense my need for a ride before I raised my hand and gave the signal, but that happens—cab drivers often have a sixth sense when scouring for fares. So I got in. Anybody would have. I mean, what could possibly be suspicious about a New York City taxi driver being aggressive about getting some business?

  “West 92nd Street,” I said, slamming the door and buckling myself in. “Off Central Park.”

  We started to move in that direction. That is, we went south down Fifth Avenue. But when we hit 97th Street, the driver kept going, and then, at 96th, he turned left instead of right. East instead of west.

  “West 92nd,” I repeated, pounding on the glass partition separating the front from the back. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  The driver didn’t respond.

  Gingerly, I said it again. “West 92nd Street.”

  Which was when the locks on the doors snapped down.

  Which was when I knew I was in trouble.

  I took a deep breath, trying to remain calm, and then reached into my jacket pocket and attempted to dial 911 with my hand still inside. I wasn’t sure what would happen, because putting the phone to my ear seemed like it would be a provocation. I was just hoping that some smart emergency operator would have enough psychic intuition to know that the silence on the other end of the line was a cry for help and that they should key up the GPS and fast.

  I pressed the wrong button and my phone beeped.

  “You should not do that,” the driver said. It wasn’t said like a threat. It sounded more like fatherly advice. “I am sorry, Olivia. It is the Olivia, yes? I recommend you not make call.”

  He knew my name.

  The driver had a slight accent and he knew my name. And given that while one hand remained on the wheel, and one hand remained in his pocket, it occurred to me he might have a gun.

  I told myself to start making mental notes, try to remember every detail I could. I needed him to say more. He sounded Slavic, but I’m hardly a linguist.

  I glanced at his license and made note of the name: Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn. Expires in October, in eleven months. I wondered if he just got it, the license.

  I asked how he knew my name. I told him to stop the car. I demanded some answers, but he wouldn’t offer any. He just told me “it no problem, no worry,” and silently drove over to FDR Drive.

  We stopped at a red light and I thought about trying to unlock the door and jump out, but I could see that his eyes were peering at me through the rearview mirror. They appeared to be curious, like he was trying to make sure he got the right girl. Or maybe he was surprised that I, short of stature, thin of frame—conventionally attractive in a conventionally symmetrical sort of way, but not exactly anyone’s exotic fantasy, especially considering the weary, exhausted facade typical of a candidate for a PhD in neurochemistry who was hard up against a number of deadlines and concerns—was the girl he was sent to get. He was no looker, either. His face was puffy but his eyes were squinty, almost closed. The lids were drawn down—the gravity of age, it looked like. But there was something soft about them, something almost sympathetic. These were not the eyes of someone I should fear. At least that’s what I told myself. For a kidnapping cabdriver, this guy was a softie.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked again, as composed as I could muster.

  The traffic stopped and he turned to face me.

  His face was round, almost cherubic. A bulbous nose. Untamed, wiry white eyebrows, just like the photo on the license. A tweed cap was pushing down what appeared to be unmanageably coarse and long-since overgrown salt and pepper hair. He looked like a combination of Einstein and Mr. Magoo.

  I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket and started to pull it out again to see who was calling. Polly’s name was on the caller ID, but before I could answer, the driver waved his finger in the air, admonishing me. I put it back again and held up my empty hands like someone might do after the police tell them to drop their weapons.

  The traffic began to move. An icy drizzle started splattering on the windshield. He hit the accelerator and the car lurched forward.

  “Where are you taking me?” I repeated, this time a little louder.

  He sighed as if I were pestering him with my questions. “Brooklyn,” he relented.

  “Why? Where in Brooklyn? Where are we going?”

  “Please. Please, no worry,” he said, apologetically, like I should not think it a big deal that there was a strange man driving me against my will to a place I did not ask to go.

  I looked out at the East River passing on my left, trying to put all of this cryptic information together, trying to figure out what I should do next. Had I known that I was nearing, well, oblivion, I might have done something differently. I might have ignored Lumpkyn and picked up the phone—told my parents I love them, told that intern over in Oncology that I thought he was cute, told Polly that I was sorry. I mean, what would you do if you were locked in a New York City taxicab with only fifteen minutes left to live? What issue would you want to resolve?

  6

  March 15 (B.D.)

  About a Week After I First Met Lillianne.

  8:30 P.M.

  “Does this look okay?” I asked Polly as I watched myself pivoting in front of the mirror. I could see her behind me, sitting on the ratty couch with the soles of her feet pressed together, her knees bouncing up and down in what she called “the butterfly pose.” I can see us both as clearly as if the scene were unfolding in front of me right now, like I just stepped into a time machine and got spit up into our apartment, obliterating the past eight months or so of my life. Poof. Suddenly I’m there again, anxiously studying my reflection in the billboard-sized mirror we had precariously hung after many failed attempts at hammering a bent, rusty nail into the exposed brick wall that framed our diminutive living room (our living room-ette).

  “You look like Olive Oyl,” she laughed, fluttering her legs.

  We had found that mirror on the street right after we moved in. It did a good job of making the space feel larger, but it was no mystery why someone had tossed it in the trash. It was warped, and at certain angles it would either dramatically lengthen or shorten our body parts, never to flattering effect. From my vantage point at that moment, my limbs looked not dissimilar to a stretched out Gumby doll. But Polly looked like she had been steamrolled and spread out wide. Like Wily E. Coyote after an anvil fell on his head.

  I told her as much. It was a ritual, trying to think of new ways to label our distorted reflections. Without a functional mirror, we depended heavily on each other to ascertain how things actually appeared, what reality looked like, but we had too much fun with this one to replace it. We promised each other we would still have it when we were old and sharing a room in a nursing home in New Jersey.

  “Should I belt this?” I asked, tugging at the hem of the black silk tunic I had bought that afternoon. Or I guess I should say that the bank b
ought. At least I won’t need to worry about my credit card debt when my body is six feet under.

  “Try that one,” Polly said, extending a leg and using her toe to point at the wide red suede belt jumbled on the floor amidst a bunch of other belts. “A little color might not hurt.” She folded her leg back into place.

  I wrapped the belt around my waist and turned back to the mirror. As far as I could tell, I looked pretty good. The long tunic and the slim dark jeans made me look effortlessly stylish. I had my hair pulled back in a low ponytail, a thin gold headband adding a little glam to the front of my head. No one would ever take me for a laboratory scientist. Or a drug dealer, for that matter. I smiled at the absurdity of the thought.

  “What are you going to wear?” I asked Polly, who still hadn’t taken off the yoga attire she’d been wearing all day. “Maybe you should try that silver tank I bought last week, the one with the low back?” I said, answering my own question before she had the chance. “I think it might be better than the dress you bought today.”

  “This is so silly,” she said, uncrossing her legs and extending them onto the milk crate in front of her. She bent forward, grabbed her flexed toes, and touched her nose to her knees. “You’re acting like we have a big date or something.”

  “We kind of do,” I said. We were heading out to meet Lillianne and some of her friends that evening, just a few days after that first Sentofel handout. Lillianne had decided to kick around town for a few more days, and had been calling us repeatedly, just to check in, as if we were the tightest of friends. That morning she’d left a message saying that we should meet her at a new restaurant called Spade, that her friend Leo was a part-owner, and that everyone would be there. What “everyone” meant wasn’t exactly clear, but we knew she wasn’t talking about Polly’s co-workers. Or mine, for that matter. So Polly and I had spent the better part of the afternoon shopping and fretting about what to wear.

  After taking a shower and pouring herself into my silver tank top and a new pair of fashionably tight jeans, she took her turn in front of the mirror. “Good?” she asked as she sucked in her cheeks, puckered her lips and spun around to check out how her butt looked. “Okay. I admit it. I’m kind of nervous.”

  “You look fine.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She bent over and starting digging into her blue suede bag. “Couldn’t hurt, right?” she said, pulling out a blister pack of Sentofel. She pushed one of the pills through the foil backing and popped it into her mouth. “Want one?”

  I shook my head. “I’m good.”

  Polly shrugged and swallowed the pill dry, with no water to chase it down. “We’ll see. You ready to go?”

  “Yup,” I said, and off we went, teetering in our strappy high heels and smelling like a mixture of peppermint Certs and samples of eau de toilette, Polly’s oversized purse filled with the former contents of our medicine cabinet.

  7

  November 5 (B.D.)

  Today. Again.

  5:41 P.M.

  When we passed the 59th Street Bridge, the car picked up speed and the driver, this Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn, seemed to relax. Well, relax enough to start talking to me. Unfortunately, what he said made very little sense.

  “Chyort voz’mi!” he exclaimed, as if he just had a startling revelation. He lightly pounded his free round fist on the wheel, causing the car to swerve for a moment. “Idiots,” he said, over articulating the word as he steadied the car again. “Ee-dee-yots. They no have respect!”

  “Excuse me?” I wondered for a moment if he might be psychotic.

  “I am scientist, too,” he said, taking his hand off the wheel again (causing the car to swerve again) and proudly tapping his chest as he eyed me in the mirror. “Much more experience than you. You just the child. They think I no good dyedooshka. Grandpa. They think I am old doorak, old fool.” He spoke fast, anxiously, mixing Russian words in periodically. Words that I obviously did not understand. Not at the time.

  I reached for the seatbelt.

  “We go to lab,” he said. “Fix formula. I can do myself, I am hero of Sovyetskiy Soyooz. But no. Shotkyn, he want you.”

  “Shotkyn?”

  “Boris Shotkyn?” He seemed surprised I didn’t know the name. “He boss. He send for you. Say you can help. Be man in the middle.”

  “Middleman? Between who?” I honestly had no idea what we were talking about.

  “So no one get sicker. So no one get killed,” he said, confusing me even more.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted, uncharacteristically losing my calm for a moment. I took a breath. “Can you just slow down and explain this to me?”

  He shook his head. “My English no good. My Mitya, he explain. We pick him up and he bring us to meeting and he explain.”

  “Mitya?” I said, sitting forward, pressing my face up to the thick Plexiglas divider that separated the front from the back. Holy shit. “Do you mean Mitya Stoopsky? The DJ? Skinny, tall. Dark hair? That Mitya?”

  Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn hit the brakes and spun around. “How you know my Mitya? You have met before?”

  We stared at each other, ignoring the loud honks of the cars forced to stop short behind us. I’m not sure who was more scared and confused at that point, him or me. But one thing was suddenly crystallizing—Polly’s hysterics about that loser boyfriend of hers might actually have been warranted.

  The driver behind us leaned on his horn, creating a deafening noise that finally drew our attention. Ivan Petrovich turned back around and stepped on the gas. I picked up my phone again, this time without any intention of hiding it.

  “No, no! It is danger.”

  Danger? What was this? A late-night B-movie?

  “You call the police and they—” He jerked his head back, miming being shot through the skull.

  I put the phone back in my pocket and sat back to think.

  I know I’m telling this like I was all cool and collected. I actually was. I’m like that—I was like that—in high-stress situations. The more ratcheted up the insanity, the more zen I would get. An excessive amount of tetrahydropregnanalone would pump through my head and instead of racing adrenaline, I would have flowing serotonin. I think that’s why I always tested so well. My exams, my boards, all of that, I always went into them with the focus and calm of a monk. Polly used to joke that I should try to map out the firings of my own synapses under stress and market it. If you could bottle that, it could make a very popular drug, she said with a laugh. She was right, of course. But I have to say, the stress of schools and tests and exams had nothing on being driven blindly into Brooklyn with a raving Russian rambling about laboratories, bosses and murder. And about Mitya.

  Man, I knew he was bad news. Not only was he fucking around with Polly, now it looked like the hipster slime-ball was also fucking around with me.

  I was, however, extremely collected. Had Mitya suddenly appeared at my side at that moment, I am fairly certain I would have, with great calm and coolness, slugged him in the face and then sat back with a serene smile across my face.

  Any pharmaceutical company would have paid millions to know what was going on with the nerve endings in my brain.

  “Can we dial this back?” I asked, pressing my face up to the Plexiglas partition. “First of all, can you please just tell me who you are?”

  I suppose I said it calmly enough, because once again he relented. He told me his name was Lumpkyn, confirming what I had just read above the dashboard. Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn. He spoke quickly, in broken English, like he didn’t have time to properly think through sentence formation, like this information was a waste of some very precious time.

  “I am chemist,” he told me. “Just like you. Well, now a cab driver, but really a chemist. One of the best of Sovetsky Soyuz.”

  “Wow,�
� I said, encouraging him to go on.

  “Yes. I invented Leninzine.” I had no idea what that was, but he kept talking like this information should impress me. “But they no trust me. Say I am, what the words, washed up?”

  “Who is ‘they?’”

  He did not explain, but rather continued his rant. He said they wouldn’t trust him because he was Mitya’s third cousin. Or maybe fourth. He wasn’t sure. Apparently genealogy wasn’t his thing. But, regardless, he and Mitya and Mitya’s aunt Zhanya were all relatives and he was sure that was creating some bias against him. His work, he said, was solid.

  I could see in the mirror that his face was reddening. The supraorbital vein in his forehead was throbbing, and his eyes were darting nervously from the road to the mirror to the sides of the car.

  “But what do you want from me?” I finally asked. “Did Mitya send for me?”

  “Mitya is not the one who want you. Boris Shotkyn. He want you.”

  “Fine. Whoever. But can you tell me why?”

  “You study psychopharmacology, yes?”

  “I’m studying neurochemistry, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Boris think you can help.”

  “And who is this Boris?”

  “Boris Shotkyn,” he said, his frustration palpable. “You will understand. At the laboratory, we talk. With Boris, with the boss. You tell him I do good work, make good medicine.”

  “You make your own medicine? What are you talking about?”

  The car in front of us pulled into the left lane, and Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn took the opportunity to accelerate.