Authors: Jennifer Oko
21
November 5 (B.D.)
Extremely Recent History.
Not Even an Hour Ago.
5:48 P.M.
Of course, I didn’t know that the clock was ticking as steadily as it was. As far as I knew, I had my whole life ahead of me, and I liked it that way.
So I told Ivan Petrovich Lumpkyn what to do when we got through the tunnel, where to turn, though he was much less responsive when I asked him again to tell me about who we were meeting or about Polly’s involvement with all of this, why there was a commercially unavailable caplet of Ziperal Extended Release on the floor. That did not mean he didn’t want to chat. As he took my directions and merged into the rush-hour traffic headed over the bridge, he felt it somehow necessary to tell me about his past, as if that was a way to build my confidence in him, in the fact that he had, about three-quarters of an hour prior, abducted me and then, odder still, cryptically waved my best friend’s breath mints in front of my face.
“Do you know Leninzine?” he asked.
“You mean Leningrad?”
“No, nyet. Leninzine.”
“Leninzine?”
“Da.”
I had to admit that I did not.
He muttered something I didn’t understand, then sighed dramatically, shaking his head and jiggling his jowls. “No one does. Not anymore.” He looked up at the mirror, as if to make sure I was listening. “I was hero,” he said. “Hero of Soviet Union.”
Great, I thought. I had been abducted by a delusional schizophrenic. Could this get any more bizarre?
I nodded politely and smiled.
“I was great chemist,” he said, tapping his chest.
“I’m sure you were,” I said, slightly exasperated.
“I was great chemist!” he repeated, turning to look at me to make sure I got the point. I just wanted him to keep his eye on the road.
“I’m sure you were,” I said again.
“No, no. You must see. You will see.”
“See what?”
He didn’t answer me; he just kept on driving. Then his phone rang again. He looked at the screen and flipped it open.
And then, after talking in frantic Slavic tones for maybe thirty seconds and turning visibly ashen, he furiously spun the wheel, whipping the car around and throwing me off the seat.
“What the fuck?” I muttered as I pulled myself back into place and plucked off the Peppermint Cert that was sticking to my knee.
“New plan,” he said, flooring it. “It for you. You be okay. No worry. We figure this out. Just keep head down.”
“Look,” I said after a few more minutes of white knuckling the strap over the window. “I don’t know how I can be of any help to you if you won’t tell me what the hell is going on.”
But just then, a black Lexus pulled up to the left of us.
“Head down!” Lumpkyn shouted, hitting the accelerator to pull in front of the car to the right of us, moving us away from the Lexus and flinging me across the back of the cab.
“Jesus!”
I turned to look out the back window.
The Lexus was right behind us.
There was a large man in the passenger seat. He looked thuggish, like something out of a cartoon—boxy and wall-like, with a dark jacket and square jaw. He caught me looking at him and in a slow, steady move picked up a small gun so that it was impossible for me to miss seeing it. Then, with a big, teeth-baring grin, he pointed it first at me, and then at the head of the thin, dark-haired guy sitting between him and the driver.
It became immediately apparent why Mitya hadn’t called Polly. It’s hard to make a phone call when there’s a lethal weapon just inches from your skull.
22
November 5 (A.D.)
Right Now.
I’m totally PO’d. You know how they say that right before you die, your life flashes before you in an instant? Turns out there’s truth to that. Your thoughts and memories crush together, causing a huge chemical reaction and exploding in a flash. But for me, at the moment of my death, it wasn’t so much my life flashing before my eyes as it was Polly’s life. Polly arriving in at our dorm room on the first day of school. Polly crying after a lousy date. Polly skiing in a snowstorm. Polly getting her first real, deep kiss. You get the idea. Thousands of experiences like these, compressed in a millisecond, none of them mine. There’s Polly, beaming proudly as the bouncer lifts the velvet rope. Polly getting air kissed by the latest leading man. Polly splaying blister packs of medication across a bar, shuffling them around like a deck of cards, handing them out like a croupier. I see it like a movie montage, the fast cuts and fades that in the course of a moment spell out a life. The limos, the parties, the ratty old couch. The dancing, the strobe lights, the empty medicine cabinet. The doors shut, the long lines, the nights at home with her boyfriend, watching late-night TV. Without me. I’m hardly anywhere to be found in this movie, barely even in a cameo role.
Quite honestly, I feel cheated. I would much rather, for lack of a better phrase, be reliving my own seminal moments than Polly’s. I can only assume that the reason I was thinking of her and not myself as the bullet’s casing hit the floor of the car is because she was the person I was thinking of the moment before. Alternately worrying and stewing about, really. I just couldn’t believe that she had let things develop to this point, that she’d let that ridiculous relationship with Mitya go this far. I mean, if she hadn’t gotten involved with that jerk in the first place, then this mad ex-Soviet scientist, or whatever he is, would not have been compelled for some crazy and inexplicable reason to drag me down to whatever laboratory it was that he was talking about, and, by extension, to my death.
So, yes, I am pissed.
Who knows, maybe that is what makes a ghost; had I suddenly switched to thinking about myself, had I had that self-reflective flash, I wouldn’t need to be skulking about now, figuring all this out, figuring Polly out, and yes, feeling guilty that I hadn’t done that before, and thinking that if I had we’d all be in a different place right now. Maybe this is the universe’s way of saying that in order to eternally rest easy with yourself, first you have to rest easy with the people around you. There’s no pill for that—certainly not one that I can imagine would have any effect on me now. Though at least now, now that I’m getting a better grasp on this post-mortem thing, I’m starting to develop a clearer picture of what got me here. I’m starting to develop a clearer picture of what was going on inside my friend’s head, and—by extension—what had actually been going on all around me. Maybe it was me who was the jerk after all.
23
June 15 (B.D.)
The Morning after the Night with Missy at the Club.
9:30 A.M.
The next morning, after that night with Missy at the club, Polly lay in Mitya’s arms, gently caressing the small, faded blue tattoo carved into his ring finger, just below the knuckle. She was trying to figure out what it was—perhaps a picture of a bird, perhaps a shark, perhaps a heart. It was too malformed and difficult to tell.
“So, you still haven’t told me,” she said.
Mitya smiled and turned his palm over, taking Polly’s hand in his, pulling her closer, giving her a kiss.
“No, come on,” she said, coyly pulling back. “Tell me.”
“Let me wake up a little,” he said. “You tell me something first.” Of course, waking up would imply they had slept, which they hadn’t. Not really. Or at least Polly hadn’t. She’d been lying there for hours, watching the sunlight drift in around the edges of the drawn white blinds, watching Mitya’s thin chest gently rise and fall against the soft cover of her rumpled sheets, admiring his tousled, thick, curly hair and his thin aquiline nose, feeling an odd combination of contentment and fear. If those weren’t prison tattoos, what were they? It had been on her mind for hours.
Even though I was sleeping in the room next door, I could hear them through the wall, and found myself listening with more interest than I’d like to admit.
“What do you want me to tell you?” she asked. It wasn’t like she had any tattoos in need of explaining. “I wear my soul on my sleeve.” She wistfully presented her naked wrists to him.
“I want you to tell me …” he said, his very slight accent slightly thicker in the sleepiness of morning. “I want you to tell me something about yourself that you think I should know.”
“Is that a trick question?” Polly laughed.
“What? No, I’m serious. I want to know more about this mysterious woman who is now lying in bed with me.” He brushed Polly’s hair away from her.
“Oh, please.”
“What’s wrong? What did I say?”
“I’m not that mysterious, Mitya. Not like you. I’m not nearly as interesting as you.”
Mitya laughed.
“What?”
“I don’t believe you for a second. Even if you think you’re telling the truth.” He laughed again.
“What?” Polly softly pushed his shoulder. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. It’s just, well, I used to think that, too. About myself. That I wasn’t all that interesting. Which is what these are. I mean, which is why I have these, if you really want to know,” he said, making a fist to better show her his half-finished finger tattoos.
Polly raised her eyebrows quizzically.
“Well, you know how some kids wear ghetto-style clothing to imitate prison inmates, because there’s something cool to them about the idea of doing time? Like not wearing a belt and having your pants droop way down? That fashion all started years ago because the guys in Rikers couldn’t wear belts. Sympathy for the devil, I guess.”
“But what does that have to do with your hand?”
“The Russian version of the same, I guess. Or at least it was for me when I was a kid. Seriously. You know what I wanted to be when I grew up?”
Polly shook her head and smiled, enjoying these teasing revelations.
“A Mafia don.”
“Like Al Capone?”
“No, like Boris Shotkyn,” he said.
“Who?” She had no idea who or what he was talking about. But she should have. While not exactly a household name in my own parents’ house, Boris Shotkyn was well enough known in New York City that a number of delis had sandwiches named after him. They tended to have pickles and, more often than not, fried fish, but at the deli next to the Institute, the Shotkyn Sub was really nothing more than a hot dog with an overflowing amount of red relish and a sprinkling of capers. I never ordered it and probably would never have even thought about it if not for the fact that in addition to my new-found ability to hear about him while revisiting Mitya’s ruminations, the Lumpkyn guy driving the death cab kept mentioning his name.
“These were my homemade attempts at giving myself Russian prison tattoos,” Mitya said, ignoring her ignorance. “A lot of organized gangs have them. Just that theirs tend to be more complete. They’re symbolic, for things like how many murders they’ve committed, how many jail sentences, and so forth. The tradition goes back centuries.”
“But you didn’t commit any crime, did you?”
Mitya laughed. “Of course not.”
“So you did that to yourself?”
“Yup.” He grinned. “I was an idiot. I took my aunt’s sewing kit and dipped some needles in India ink. I read it in a book somewhere, how to do it. How they did it in prison.”
“Didn’t it hurt?” She reached over to touch the blurred blot.
“Hell, yes! This was supposed to be a dragon. It sort of looks like a slug, right?”
“I was thinking it looked like a bird.”
“That’s nicer, I suppose. But hardly what I was going for.”
“Why did you want a dragon?” Polly took his hand so she could get a closer look. The tattoo was so old and blurry and poorly done it was impossible to tell which side was the top. “Actually, it looks a bit like Snoopy from this angle.”
He laughed. “The dragon is the symbol of Boris Shotkyn’s gang.” And then, as if he were telling her ghost stories, he told her the story of his childhood hero, a story that, as I’m finding out now, has some pretty creepy reverberations.
What I did know then, though, and what Mitya further explained to Polly, was what anybody who read the New York Post on the way to work would know—Boris Shotkyn wasn’t the sort of person you would want to be indebted to, and he wasn’t the sort of person you would wanted to disappoint. What I didn’t know, but listening to Mitya, started to figure out, was that even though Shotkyn was, generally speaking, a pretty bad guy, he did have some merits. For years he’d acted as a kind of mayor of Brighton Beach, helping new immigrants get their bearings, helping old babushkas apply for food stamps, helping little kids convince their parents to get them a dog. Thanks to Shotkyn, Mitya had grown up with a dog. They named him Ralph, and he still lived with Mitya’s aunt Zhanya. But, Mitya told Polly, it didn’t end there. Soon after the pup arrived, there was a spate of robberies and Ralph proved to be a terrible guard dog. And so, after an onslaught of Zhanya’s insufferable pleading, Shotkyn relented and sold her a gun.
“He sold her a gun?” Polly asked, incredulously.
“That’s what she told me. I’ve never actually seen it.”
“Oh, come on. Do you really believe that?”
“Well, she does still have the dog. So, I know that part was true.”
“Wow. That’s quite a story. I can see how a little boy might be impressed.”
Mitya laughed. “You’re right. Either way, Ralph’s a cool dog. Maybe I should just tell people this Snoopy-dragon thing is really a tattoo of him.”
“Maybe,” Polly said, and kissed the blurry mess in question.
24
June 21 (B.D.)
About a Week After the Night with Missy at the Club.
12:03 P.M.
When Missy first called me back, I was in the middle of observing how one of my rats—I called him Raskolnikov, after the main character in Crime and Punishment, a murderer who was driven almost insane by his guilt—would respond to an injection of the latest chemical cocktail I’d cooked up. Whether—depending on my manipulations—he would alter the amount of food he hoarded, and if—when the chemicals changed—he would put some pellets back in the communal pile. In other words, did Raskolnikov act as if he felt guilty for hoarding in the first place, did he somehow feel beholden to the other rats?
Unfortunately, Raskolnikov wasn’t responding as I had hoped and it was making me uneasy. As I have mentioned, I’d almost blown through my latest round of grants, and unless I had something solid to present in a paper soon, I was sure there would not be any more federal money forthcoming. Soon I wouldn’t even have enough to feed the poor bugger. I was feeling quite dispirited when I picked up the phone.
“Olivia, darling,” Missy said with an excited trill in her voice, “how soon can you toss off your lab coat and put on a suit?”
“I’m sorry?” I said, clamping the phone under my ear and poking a long plastic prong into the cage, in the hope of nudging Raskolnikov out of his present stupor. “Who is this?”
“It’s Missy. Missy Pander. Can you be here by 2?”
“Huh? Be where?” I had pretty much given up on the idea that she would help me find employment, and aside from blackmailing me into arranging another night of partying with drunken celebrities, I couldn’t imagine what she would want from me. I lay the prong over the wire mesh on top of the cage. Raskolnikov looked up at me with some curiosity and then curled up into a ball, wrapping his tail around himself, literally tying himself into a knot.
“Shit,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh no, not you. The rat. Never mind. I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
Missy said she wanted me to come meet her at Pharmax’s midtown offices. Breathlessly, she told me she would explain it all when I got there, but that there was a great opportunity. For both of us. For both of our careers.
“You know what?” she said. “Don’t bother going home to change. There probably isn’t time. It’s already past noon. Just run over to Bloomingdales and buy an appropriate outfit on the way down. Think boardroom. Powerful people. Don’t worry about the cost of the suit. Just look good. Get some shoes, too. I’ll pay you back. Actually, after this, you might not even need me to.”
A free outfit from Bloomingdale’s would have been hard to turn down in most instances, but given Raskolnikov’s somnambulance and given that I really had nothing to lose, I flipped off the switch on the flickering florescent lights that had been illuminating his cage and, just as Missy had instructed, threw off my lab coat.