L Sellers - The Suicide Effect

“Hey Robbie, need some company?” Matt, a thin young man about his age who worked the other end of the packaging line, sat down across the table. He laid his hands out flat, the small triangular tattoos showing. It was obvious he had no lunch.

“What’s new?” Robbie tried to be friendly.

“I had to get a new battery for my piece of shit car and now I’m broke.”

“Cars are like black holes. You put your money in and it never comes back out.” Robbie put a slice of pizza on a napkin and pushed it across the table to Matt. “Here, I’m not that hungry.”

“Thanks, man.”

A little later he gave him one of the Twinkies too.

On his way out, Robbie stopped by the bulletin board, hoping Julie would walk by on her way to the front office. A company flyer caught his eye. In large purple type it asked: Do you suffer from depression? If you have three or more of these symptoms, you may benefit from a new medicine. To find out more about a clinical trial for an experimental new drug, contact Adriana at Oregon Research Center.

Robbie knew the list by heart. He was a poster child for most of the symptoms-a sense of hopelessness, inability to concentrate, insomnia. The trial intrigued him. He’d been taking Zoloft for a year and a half now, and it wasn’t working that well for him any more. Before the Zoloft, he’d been on Paxil for almost a year. That drug had made him feel emotionally numb and he’d hated that more than being depressed. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing. Eventually, he’d asked his mother’s doctor to write him a script for something else.

He’d never been in a clinical trial before. He visited online forums cheerily hosted by pharma companies like Prolabs that were keeping all the depressives medicated. Many of the people he chatted with had been in studies, and overall they reported good experiences. Often the research centers paid a nice compensation fee for time and travel expenses.

As he stood thinking it over, the second lunch buzzer rang. Robbie took a moment to memorize the phone number. He had decided to give the trial center a call. He could help Prolabs test one of its products, pick up a little extra cash, and maybe start feeling better too.

For now he had to get back to the packaging line. The fact that his father was CEO of the company didn’t mean he could get away with being late from lunch break. He used his mother’s family name, so most of the people he worked with didn’t know he was Karl Rudker’s son. He didn’t want people either sucking up to or avoiding him because of his supposed connections. Hah! He and his father hadn’t spoken for months.

The supervisors knew who he was and he tried to be an excellent employee. Even though they hadn’t gotten along for years, his father’s expectations were buried deep in his DNA.

Sula walked into Prolabs with a sense of apprehension. She hadn’t fallen asleep until after one o’clock, then she’d had a long unsettling dream in which Rudker had chased her through a warehouse and she kept running into stacks of boxes. She was still unnerved by the whole encounter yesterday. Rudker’s threat had been intense and personal and she suspected she hadn’t heard the last of it.

Sula handed her brown leather backpack to the security man and passed through the metal detector. “Good morning, Cliff.”

“Morning, Sula. Looks like it will be a gorgeous spring day.”

“Sure does. Have a good one.”

She picked up her bag and clicked across the tile foyer. Sunlight through the narrow floor-to-ceiling-windows cast bright stripes on the floor. In celebration of spring, Sula had worn a short sleeve blouse and skirt for the first time since last October, but it failed to cheer her up.

Even though she was only a public relations flack, up until now she’d felt good about working for Prolabs. The company had its problems, sure, but she had always believed it had a good soul because it developed therapies that were meant to help people. Now she didn’t want to be here.

Sula stepped into the elevator and checked her watch: 7:53. She was three minutes off her usual time. Apparently, she was moving a little slow. She got off on the second floor and headed for the employee lounge, where she made herself a cup of coffee from the fresh ground stuff she kept in the fridge. The room was empty except for a guy in a suit whom she had never seen before. He was reading a report of some kind and didn’t look up. Sula remembered that most of the sales and marketing staff had gone to a training session in Seattle.

Coffee in hand, she crossed the hallway into her office, a seven by ten room with a window, a desk, and a wall of filing cabinets. She turned on her computer and settled in to open e-mails. A few minutes later, an e-mail request from a PR person at JB Pharma reminded her to go see Dr. Warner. Sula zipped through the rest of the mail, deleting at least half without opening them, then headed back out to the elevator.

The R amp;D staff was in a separate building across a small courtyard. Sula took a moment to stand in the sun, sip her dark coffee, and appreciate that she worked on the outskirts of town with a tree-covered hillside for a view. The Prolabs complex spread out over ten acres and had three main structures: the corporate office where she worked, the R amp;D building, similar in design but with only one floor, and the manufacturing plant, lower down the hill. Beyond that were wetlands, owned by Prolabs and soon to be bulldozed to make way for a new manufacturing plant. The company had applied for all the necessary permits and most had been granted. Only a city council vote and an environmental study were holding up the construction. In Eugene, environmental concerns could be a serious delay. Or complete shut down. The thought reminded her that she needed to craft a memo to the city council.

She headed for the R amp;D lab. It was only her third time in the building but she knew Dr. Warner had the big office in the corner. The doctor didn’t answer her knock. Sula thought she might be in a meeting, so she checked the small conference room. It was empty. She heard voices in the hall so she quickly stepped out.

“Excuse me.” Two middle-aged guys in lab coats turned around. She had met both before, but despite rapid brain racking, she could not remember either of their names. The one guy had a Christopher Lloyd, mad scientist look, but that didn’t help her come up with his real name. Sula strode toward them. “Have you seen Dr. Warner this morning?”

“No. In fact, we were just looking for her.” The guy with the wild hair eyed her strangely. “She was supposed to meet us at eight.”

Sula checked her watch: 8:23. “If she wasn’t coming in, who would she call?”

“That would be me.” The other man, shorter and older, spoke up. Sula recalled that his name was Steve Peterson and that he worked on the Nexapra project. Now he looked at her curiously too. “Why do you ask?”

“I was supposed to meet with her yesterday for a briefing but that didn’t work out, so I thought I’d see her this morning.”

They shrugged in unison. The three of them stood for an awkward moment. Then Peterson said, “If she comes in, we’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

“Thanks.” Sula forced a smile and moved on. It struck her as odd that Warner would miss a meeting with her colleagues. Especially, the day after a blowout with Rudker. Maybe Warner planned to quit. Sula wouldn’t blame her. Still, as the head of R amp;D, Warner was probably making $250,000 a year. People in that pay bracket didn’t miss much work. Even if they were upset.

Sula spent the rest of the day fielding calls from real journalists asking about the merger. She envied them, writing for Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. Someday she would have a real reporting job, she promised herself. For now, she had to promote Prolabs, to cushion its announcements, good and bad, in a cotton candy spin. She tried to craft a memo to the city council but had trouble concentrating. She kept thinking about Diane Warner.