Magnitude 3.0

"ARE you disturbed?"

Standing there in his full-length lab coat, those rosy pockmarked cheeks, the droopy hound dog jowls, the crooked yellow bottom teeth, and that flawless white crew cut, Gregory Day seems to want a response. But I know better.

I don't appreciate the way he talks to me. If he talks to me. Direct questions receive monosyllabic responses. To Gregory, everything I do, say, or ask is unhelpful, asinine, and rhetorical. I clench my teeth and count out thirty pills in therapeutic fashion, sliding the lot into a burnt orange plastic bottle.

"Yeah Gregory, I'm disturbed," I burst out, my voice shaking.

"I'm an idiot because I told Mrs. Olivia to take her pills on an empty stomach. I'm an idiot even though she asked me, and I told her exactly what it says on the tiny green label. The label I put there."

Gregory pulls out his inhaler, awkwardly stuffs it in his mouth, and gives it three quick toots. This is how he exercises. The seventyfour-year-old quit smoking ten years ago, but it was too late. Emphysema had already set in. There's no erasing a half century's worth of nicotine plus some exposure to nasty chemicals in the war.

"No, you're an idiot because I've repeatedly told you not to dispense medical advice to our customers, Andrew," he says catching his breath.

For nine months now, Gregory has refused to call me "Andy."

After a long pause, he adds, "And for the record, you didn't just tell her to 'take the pills on an empty stomach.' You went into some long, complicated, totally off-base explanation about how food interferes with the drug's absorption into the bloodstream. For the umpteenth time: you are not a pharmacist."

I know.

"You're a pharmacy technician."

I know.

"That's all I need--to break the law and get my license yanked because you have a hankering need to feel validated," he says.

Oh, please.

In terms of all-out destruction, this argument rates low--a magnitude 3.0, tops--mere aftershocks from the 5.0 we had two hours ago over the effectiveness of zinc lozenges. I say they preempt the onset of the common cold. Gregory's professional opinion is they're "baloney."

As the crow flies, this tiny pharmacy is about twenty miles northeast of San Francisco and sits on solid bedrock, but the tiny township of Crockett is bordered on every side by precarious fault lines, the most threatening--the Hayward Fault Zone to our west. Of the ten thousand earthquakes that California experiences every year--in the last hundred years--only two have been catastrophic. In fact, most folks can't even sense anything lower than a 3.0. But not me. I feel them all the time. Right here. For Gregory and me, this pharmacy is our epicenter, and anything above a 5.0
generates intense feelings of nausea and vertigo.

Belinda is behind the front cash register too engrossed in People magazine and too consumed with the taste of her fingernails to give a damn about a measly 3.0. Gregory and I bicker all the time, and a mag 3.0 doesn't even break her concentration anymore. Some ripples in her no-foam soy latte. It's going to take at least a 6.0 before anything interrupts "Britney Time."

"Is this a 3 or 5?" Gregory asks with my back to him.

I spin around and realize that he's not referring to our argument at all.

"How do these doctors expect us to read their chicken scratch?" he complains, holding a streaky fax up to the overhead fluorescent lights that turn us all a sickly green hue. "Well, this medication doesn't come in 3 milligram doses," he informs the sheet of...

 

 

"Alex Wellen's engagement story is such a doozy, he lifted it frame by frame for his romantic, laugh-out-loud-funny first novel, Lovesick."