OM: Well, if it makes you feel any better, mine looks like it’s wearing a beret! You have only begun to discover your power.” KPM: “You do not yet realize your importance. Sometimes I imagine it whispering to me in the voice of James Earl Jones. OM: What’s special about Tamara? What does she have that your wife doesn’t? Like most people in Hudson, they were better-looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers. They met in hotel rooms in the city, but right now the man was talking to his wife, presumably, and holding her hand. His initials were AAG, and he was sleeping with his sister-in-law. She didn’t know him personally, but a piece of his transcript came to her while she waited for her Americano.
Just now, at the table where she sat waiting for Om, she recognized the drowsy voice of the man seated next to her. She couldn’t recall the entire transcript, obviously, as they were often quite long, but if she closed her eyes and concentrated, her memory was good for several pages. Greta always heard at least one voice she recognized. The place had perfect acoustics and was crawling with Om’s clients, because his office was located directly above it. The transcripts belonged to Om’s clients, and they came to her whenever she set foot in Cathedral, the most popular coffee shop in town. Long after she quit the warehouse, she continued spotting pill dust wherever she went. There it was again, sprinkled all over the popcorn at the movies. She saw pill dust on carpets, mirrors, screens, people’s sweaters.
She was convinced she could see floating particles in people’s personal breathing zones (PBZs). It wasn’t long before any kind of dust began to resemble pill dust, particularly the pale yellow dust of Norco 10s.
Warfarin, a blood thinner, was the drug she handled most, but there were about a dozen other friable tablets, usually generic versions of popular drugs, and she often ended her shift covered in pharmaceutical dust. She lives in Hudson, New York.Īs a pharm tech, Greta had spent eighteen months working in the warehouse of a mail-order pharmacy, filling prescriptions by hand. Her first novel Pretend I’m Dead was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and Vacuum in the Dark was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Beagin holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and is a recipient of a Whiting Award in fiction.
The following is from Jen Beagin's Big Swiss.
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