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  “Why didn’t you just ask me to come?” I asked, although, to be fair, if a strange man had asked me to come to a strange lab somewhere at a secret location in Brooklyn, I might have been a bit reluctant to oblige. But it seemed worth asking. “Why didn’t you just call and invite me down?”

  Ivan Petrovich turned around and looked at me square on. “It was not the question.”

  8

  March 17 (B.D.)

  Going Back About Eight Months Again.

  8:55 P.M.

  (But First, a Slight Digression.)

  Back around the turn of the century (this past one, not the one that happened a hundred plus years ago), when I first got into this stuff—the chemistry of human emotion—it was paranoia that triggered my interest, how paranoia acted in our transmitters and synapses. I knew I was interested in the science of brain chemistry, and I knew I wanted to pursue it as a career; I just wasn’t sure how to focus my calling.

  One night a bunch of us were sitting around the laundry room in the basement of our college dorm, getting stoned while we waited for the rinse cycles to finish.

  “Shit!” Polly said, handing me the joint she had just smoked and jumping off the large wooden table that was supposed to serve as a place to fold and sort clothing (an absurd concept, since no self-respecting college student ever did either). “Do you see that?” She ran over to the washing machine and plastered her hands up to the round window. “Something’s in there!”

  “Your underwear,” one of our astute friends observed. “And probably some socks.”

  “No, no,” Polly insisted, tapping at the glass. “Something like an animal. Something’s in there. It’s going to ruin my clothes!” She slammed the stop button and pulled the door open, causing most of her clothing and not a small amount of water to tumble to the dirty cement floor. When the cascade was complete, a large and overly padded leopard print push-up bra was left sitting on top of the pile.

  We all fell over laughing, Polly included.

  “I swear I saw something,” she sputtered.

  It became a catch phrase of ours, used as a jarring non sequitur whenever we wanted to keep each other from doing something stupid—whenever we needed to call each other out on some absurdity or little white lie. A bullshit meter. For example, if I caught Polly staring longingly at the ice cream in our freezer and she denied coveting it. “I swear I saw something,” I would say, and we would fall apart laughing before tearing into the pint. Or, if I was about to drunk-dial the frat boy I had met the night before, the one who had a girlfriend and was generally known around campus to be a womanizing twit, Polly, knowing I was likely setting myself up for yet another rejection, might say “I swear I saw something” when I picked up the phone. I would freeze and then sheepishly put the receiver back down. By the same token, if I caught Polly washing her latest boyfriend’s laundry or doing some other way-too-desperate and ultimately doomed ploy to solidify the fledgling relationship, I might swear I “saw something” as a gentle start to the mini-intervention that inevitably followed. It was a simple phrase, but it often worked to shift a frame of mind.

  All this to say, between the marijuana-induced paranoia and the verbally induced head-spins, I became intrigued with the ways in which emotional triggers can be set off in the most fascinating ways. I still am. I still was as we got out of the taxi that cool early spring night eight months ago.

  “I swear I saw something,” I said as we walked into the sleek foyer of the restaurant.

  “Ha, ha. It’s going to be fine.” Polly took my hand and led me deeper inside.

  Spade was cavernous. The din of the diners bounced off the walls, hitting us with an auditory assault as we opened the door. It sounded like the restaurant had been invaded by cicadas—a situation made worse by the souped-up industrial décor. Cold sheets of burnished metal covered the walls, and pipes and light fixtures were left bare on the ceiling. The hostess—tall, skeletal, dark and brooding—matched the interior perfectly. She was typing away at the black keyboard on her copper-topped podium, scanning the flat screen monitor for I cannot even imagine what. Seating charts, I suppose.

  “Do you have a reservation?” she asked with snide derision when she finally acknowledged our presence.

  “No,” I began, “but we’re meet –”

  “I can put your name down on the list,” she said, interrupting, not moving her eyes from the screen. “But it is a four-hour wait. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Polly placed her hand on the edge of the podium. The hostess looked at her like she had just pinched her ass. “We’re meeting Lillianne Farber,” Polly said. “She said she’d be here around nine? She said we should say Edie Sedgwick sent us.”

  The hostess looked up and studied us for a moment. “She’s here,” she said, relenting. “Follow me.”

  Over toward the back of the room, we saw Lillianne waving at us. Polly grabbed a couple of breath mints out of her bag, pressed one into my hand, and popped another into her mouth. She always had them on her, claiming peppermint Certs had a better calming effect than any prescription medication she’d ever tried. “Why do you think peppermint tea is so popular?” she often asked.

  Lillianne’s waving grew more frantic. “Polly! Olivia! Over here!” Even if she hadn’t been shouting, she would have been hard to miss. Decked out in a precariously low-cut red silk blouse and tight jeans, Lillianne may as well have had a spotlight illuminating on her. Of course, her table was discretely located, situated just so in order to give celebrity guests like her a semblance of privacy. A semblance. The spot also assured enough visibility that Page Six could report a sighting, and enough light that if someone wanted to take a cell phone photo to upload to a gossip site, well, they could. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Lillianne and friends stayed implanted in the zeitgeist and the restaurant got some priceless PR. Polly could probably write the whole evening off as a work meeting if she wanted to. If she actually had to pay for anything, that is.

  “Can you believe I work for these people?” Polly asked as we watched Lillianne making a display of herself. “I mean, really. At the end of the day, it is all a bit ridiculous.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for years,” I said, tugging my shirt down to make sure it was straight. I wondered if the lipstick had smudged off of my lips.

  “This is silly.”

  “I hear you.” I shrugged to suppress my increasing giddiness. I mean, come on. It isn’t every day that you get to play with the brain chemistry of your favorite movie star.

  9

  March 17 (B.D.)

  About Thirty Seconds Later.

  8:56 P.M.

  Confidence is a hard thing to measure. Unlike some of the other emotions I’ve been studying (guilt, fear, anger, joy, etc), confidence—a belief in one’s own powers, abilities and worthiness—is determined by a much more complicated chemical structure, one that I haven’t been able to identify. I suppose it could be argued that confidence is not really an emotion at all, but rather a symptomatic expression of a variety of equations, both external and internal.

  That said, show me a person who is completely confident both inside and out, and I’ll show you someone who is dead.

  Yes, yes. Dead like me.

  Complete confidence would require an almost Zen-like state of existence, and from what I understand with my rudimentary knowledge of Buddhism, while you might strive to achieve that state during life, Nirvana tends not to be fully reachable until you’ve finished living up all of your lifetimes.

  And that said, I doubt there’s any living creature—from tree slugs to prime ministers—who wouldn’t want to at least try to attain more of it. Confidence. Especially if all it would require was getting your hands on the correct combination of the proper pills. Even some of the most popular and beloved people on earth might w
ant that.

  Lillianne jumped up and kissed the air next to our cheeks.

  “I love your shirt,” she said, touching the silver top that Polly was wearing and then taking her hand to introduce her—and me—to all her friends.

  “This is Vivian,” she said, moving to the side to make room for a busboy to hustle together an extra table and two more chairs. “Scott, Sarah, Reuben ...” She pointed at each of them while reciting their names, the soft fabric of her shirt fluttering with every gesture.

  I blushed. This was so obviously an exercise in redundancy. We knew who they all were, and they knew that we knew. We’d seen their movies and their television shows. We’d followed their heartbreaks and DUI arrests. Their rehab visits and their exercise habits. Vivian Ward, the painfully thin ingénue whose latest romantic comedy had flopped dramatically but whose illicit sex tape was still making the rounds on the Internet. Sarah Young, the YouTube singing sensation who had gotten so big that she’d recently appeared as a guest on American Idol. Reuben Manns, the latest Australian import. And so forth.

  They each gave us brief, well-enameled but disinterested smiles. We dimly smiled back, trying to act like this was a normal dinner gathering, just a typical night on our calendars.

  “This is Olivia. And this is Polly,” Lillianne said, demanding deeper attention. “Those girls I told you guys about?”

  “Oh, right!” said Adam Fald, the doe-eyed former child actor with the perfectly styled pageboy-length dreadlocks whose directorial debut had been recently trashed in The New York Times; “Pretty Boy Makes Ugly Film,” read the headline. His eyes were blood shot, and he looked like he might already be drunk. Or something. He scooted his chair over slightly to make more space.

  I sucked in my stomach and sat down, hoping the seams of my jeans didn’t rip or that the straps of my thong weren’t sticking out over the pants’ low-rise waistband.

  I took a deep breath.

  Everybody smelled good.

  That was the main thing I noticed, the first major difference between them and us—an overwhelming presence of aldehyde, the molecular key to Chanel perfume. Real perfume, as opposed to my eau de toilette.

  I looked over at Polly. Even though the lights were quite low, I was relieved to see that, just like mine, her cheeks were aflame; I could see the pulsing of the arterial veins in her neck, and her shoulders creeping up toward her ears. I reached under the table to pat her knee, hoping to give us both some encouragement. Or at least to remind us both how silly this all was. She looked at me through the corner of her eye and grinned. Chalk it up to another Polly and Olivia adventure, she seemed to be saying.

  “Let’s get you some drinks,” Lillianne said. “Are you hungry? The kitchen’s closing, but I’m sure they can whip something up.”

  She ordered us dry martinis but we passed on the food. After, most of the evening was a blur. It’s funny now that I think of this, but it felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Then. Which I actually am now. It didn’t feel that different than this, this feeling of separation and distance, this sense of helplessly watching the action but not being able to participate in it.

  We had no idea what to say. Nice weather? Come on. It was too embarrassing to talk about their movies or music. And we certainly had nothing to add when they were gossiping or talking shop. Polly and I sat politely, laughing at inside jokes we didn’t understand.

  I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. When I returned, the climate had changed; the attention had been refocused.

  All eyes were on Polly. Everyone was animated, energized and inclusive, and vying for her attention. Polly was smiling, her shoulders relaxed. She almost seemed like a different person than the young woman I’d been sitting next to just moments before. With a quick glance, the trigger for that transformation was pretty obvious.

  Polly had taken a few blister packs out of her purse—I couldn’t initially tell which ones—and spread them out on the table in front of her. They fingered them like poker chips, sliding them back and forth across the table, holding them up as if to estimate their worth.

  I lowered myself into my chair and picked up a pack. Vivarex. A stimulant they give to kids who get irritable on Ritalin, and who can’t tolerate Adderall. I put it back down and picked up another. Sentofel. Old school stuff. I placed it back in the pile of assorted meds, mostly stock in trade for Polly’s dad’s office—medications for the lucrative chronics—depressives, insomniacs, mood fluctuators and the hyperactively disordered.

  “Hey!” said Scott, the doe-eyed flop, “let’s play Russian Roulette!”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Vivian said. She reached forward to finger one of the packs. “What’s this one? Sanitol?”

  “I think it’s a sleep aid,” said Polly, “but Olivia knows about this stuff better than I do.” She nodded in my direction.

  Everyone turned to me. Vivian with her famously lush brows and infamously skinny thighs. Sarah with those newly inflated lips. Lillianne and her mile-high cheek bones. Scott with those eyes that were starting to bug me out.

  “Oh,” I said, “I don’t really know all that much about –”

  “Bullshit,” Lillianne said, laughing. “I’ve heard you doing that science-speak. Olivia is getting a PhD in this psychopharmacology,” she explained. “Or was it neurochemistry?”

  “The latter.” I smiled.

  “No shit,” said Scott.

  “So do you have rats and shit running around your lab and stuff?” asked Sarah Young.

  “Well, the shit doesn’t run,” I said. “But unfortunately, sometimes the rats do get out of their cages.”

  “No shit!”

  “Gross!”

  “But what do you do with them?” they all wanted to know.

  I wasn’t about to tell them about the dissections and injections and other gory stuff done in the name of science. I just told them about the skullcaps. It was always good cocktail party fodder. “They have these little antennas sticking out of them so we can get feedback, but I always imagine them as little alien creatures out of a bad sci-fi movie.”

  “I’d love to see that,” Lillianne said. “I just got a script for an animated movie about time-traveling mice.”

  “Well, the funding is drying up, so you should try to come soon. There’s no money for academic research, anymore,” I said. “Not in this financial climate.” Which was enough to change the subject.

  “So, this is a sleep aid?” Vivian held up the pack of orange pills.

  “Actually, no,” I said. “It’s a new antidepressant. It’s basically an updated version of their first SSRI, Proloft, but that patent expired. Now you can get the generic version of that, so they made this.” I picked it up. “Apparently it does a good job of targeting the usual bunch of neurotransmitters associated with depression, and has a number of off-label uses that they aren’t allowed to officially market but somehow everybody knows about. Like weight loss. And I think it’s supposed to clear up acne. I’m not totally sure about that, though.”

  Vivian laughed. “Man, I’d pay a mint for a drug like this!”

  “Oh, the tabloids would love that,” said Scott, playfully pinching Vivian’s twiggy arm. “‘Ward Withering With Weight Loss Drugs!’ I can see it now.”

  “Whatever,” Vivian said. She pulled her light blue crocodile skin Birkin bag off the back of her chair and dropped the little packet inside. “Do you have more of those?”

  I looked at Polly with an eyebrow raised in question.

  She smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I know where we can get some.”

  And so it began.

  10

  November 5 (A.D.)

  A Tad after 6:00 P.M.

  i.e., Now.

  But is this the end? Here in the back of the car?
Is this my end?

  I know this isn’t a dream, I’m sure of that. But this doesn’t make any sense. If I’m dead, my brain cannot be functioning. By definition. And without a functioning brain, how can I possibly be remembering things? How can I be thinking? Because I’m clearly thinking right now. Maybe not thinking clearly, but clearly I’m thinking. And brain functions—including thought processes—are all chemical, right? And a person needs to be alive for those chemical reactions to happen. That’s the whole point. So maybe I’m not dead. Maybe all of these ruminations and recollections are just part of the split second flash I’m supposed to get, but the split second keeps getting longer. If I keep thinking, keep lengthening the second, maybe I can trick death and, in some fashion, stay alive. Does that make sense?

  Not really.

  Not if you consider that I can now see the crime scene from a distance. The police have arrived and they’re putting up yellow tape, clearing away the onlookers—the commuters on their way home and the teenagers on their way out—who have started to converge, pushing away the microphones of the reporters who are running toward them screaming out questions, hoping to slam a story together in time for their upcoming newscasts. I can see my body inside that dark trunk, like I have X-ray vision. Given that, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way I’m in my physical self. And my brain is part of that physical self. The synapses, the neurons, all of it. Blown out with the rest of my head. When you look at it that way, there’s no way I can possibly be alive.

  Dammit.

  Okay. So I’m dead. I need to make peace with that. Calm in a crisis, right? All that phenylethylamine that would have been floating around in my brain. But the thing I cannot get out of my non-existent head is how any of this—my body in the trunk, Polly crying on the phone, the trip to…