Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  “We’ll definitely get full scholarships,” Eva always says. Not that Eva needs one. Besides, on her bad days, like today, Dany can’t see how university is possible. Even with funding. The promise feels surreal. Like a tornado’s promise to deliver her to the Land of Oz. What’s she supposed to do with her little sister? Put her in a bicycle basket? Cart her along to physics lectures?

  No. It’ll never happen. Besides, Dany doesn’t need university. What she needs is to adopt Mac. What she needs is to be eighteen.

  Dany doesn’t need a scholarship. What she really needs is a lifetime supply of cheese and noodles and a time machine.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 3

  Dany cards her way into the lab. On her mind: the prison-hospice, her aunt, the Ministry of Child Services, the empty cupboards in her kitchen, the two months of rent past due, the poetry exam in English Studies on Friday, the food bank closing early today and worse, the oral presentation she has to give tomorrow, with Liz ­Greene, in spite of the fact that Dany does not ever open her mouth in class …

  Dany lays her forehead against the cold locker door, lets the cool seep into her brain. Screwed. With her aunt locked up, that’s what she is. Entirely, endlessly, screwed. For half a second she thinks of Antoine – Papa, he called himself. Anger tightens her chest and Dany shuts the thought down right there.

  She runs through her padlock combo, eighteen, twenty-nine, forty-seven, shoves her bag in and twirling the lock shut, heads into the lab.

  Dany passes a dozen researchers without so much as a nod. She makes a beeline for Jasper. As usual, his keyboard looks like it’s about to be buried under an avalanche of research papers and old candy wrappers.

  Under the fluorescent lights, she makes out the peppering of grey in his tightly coiled black hair. Then, glancing down, she sees the biologist’s hands, curled like crabs on the keyboard. His fingers dance over the keys.

  Here, at this desk, everyone but Jasper fades like background noise.

  In Dany’s book, Jasper is okay.

  Jasper is the one who taught her how to hold a test tube properly. Now, she can grip the tube and remove its cap with the fingers of the same hand. He lent her a book about Harry Harlow and monkeys and wire-and-cloth mothers – about trauma and the human brain. And just last week, he showed her how to do Yates’s correction. Now her P values are tighter than her high school math teacher’s.

  At the BioGENEius lab, variables don’t lurk in stairwells. Here, variables are neatly contained in equations and controlled. At least, all except for the virus – which nothing can contain or control.

  Jasper nods at a pair of take-away cups, but doesn’t raise his eyes from the screen.

  “Thanks,” Dany says and takes a sip. A half a beat later, she’s swearing. A mouthful of sugary tea sprays across the papers on his desk. Still, Dany can’t help but smile. “You want some tea with your sugar?” she asks him.

  Jasper absently dabs at the papers with a tissue. “What can I say? Sweet tooth.” He glances at her. “Yours is the other one.”

  Dany turns the other cup, sees her initials and takes a sip. Synth, black, just the way she likes it. Dany glances at her mentor. But today, Jasper looks different. Stress lines have settled in by the corners of his mouth. Finally, Jasper pushes his chair back from the computer. As he faces her full on, she drops her gaze.

  “I’ve got good news and bad,” he tells her. “Start with the good?”

  Jasper tries to catch her eye, but Dany takes in his shoes – those old beaten sneakers he wears, day after day, and that never look like they’ll last out the hour. His shoes put the faint scent of gym locker in the air. That and Lysol.

  “Well, take a look,” he says, nodding at his computer screen.

  Dany glances again at the screen, but what she sees is a lonely planet, suspended in a strange liquid. Only, no, this is no planet …

  “So, that’s it?”

  “Well, this,” Jasper says, “is in its own way both good news and bad.”

  “The virus is good news?” Dany asks.

  “No, not exactly,” Jasper says. “We isolated this from an outbreak at the hospice. So, what you’re seeing is a mutation in the virus, a new strain. Maybe we’ll be the ones to name it.”

  Dany’s heart skips a beat and she turns to the screen once more. But the thing is tiny. A little bumpy sphere, like a meteor or a rocky moon. Jasper gives over the keyboard and Dany adjusts the image. For a second, it’s almost as if she is looking at an ovum, a human egg. Dany glances from his screen to the wet lab. There, in a glove box, she can see the digital microscope he’s hooked up. Still, the whole thing makes her nervous. As if the idea of the virus is enough to infect her.

  “It’s hard to imagine,” she says. “I mean, how such a tiny creature can … unmake a person, like, unmake a world.”

  But Jasper corrects her. While some argue that a virus is alive, Jasper believes that a virus is a thing, no different from a chair or rock or soup ladle. “A virus,” Jasper tells her, “is just a bunch of molecules – that’s it. It’s about as capable of acting on the world as a wooden leg. I know some scientists argue differently but –”

  “Aren’t we just bunches of molecules, too?” she asks.

  “Think of it this way. Unlike us, a virus is at the complete mercy of its environment.”

  As far as that goes, Dany and the virus have something in common.

  Dany adjusts the focus, makes the virus grow so large that it takes up most of the screen. As the image sharpens, the scope’s focus finds the sweet spot and she gets her first real look at the thing. Binding proteins blossom like tiny mushrooms on its surface. Dany feels odd. She lays her hands flat against the desk to steady her gaze. A strange vertigo overtakes her. She isn’t afraid of falling, exactly, but afraid that something in her wants to fall. Looking at the virus, she is Alice, peering down a rabbit hole. The virus sings, You’re late for tea.

  “Viruses are amazing,” Jasper says. “Tiny microscopic miracles.” And he tells her that the human placenta evolved from a virus. “Imagine that, the placenta, a two-pound viral envelope.”

  “Um, yeah, I’d rather not,” Dany says, and flicks her gaze from the microscope feed to his shirt, the one peeking out from the folds of his lab coat. IX IN AI, she reads, but his coat obscures the rest of it.

  “Don’t get me wrong. The brain is amazing, too,” Jasper tells her. “All of it, imagine – all feelings, all trauma, all memory – the work of tiny electric pulses. All of you, heart and soul, just a bunch of flickering light bulbs. Amazing, right?”

  Dany doesn’t need to look at the feed to see it. Her mind has taken a perfect, precise photograph. As she looks at Jasper’s hands, she calls up the image of the broken light bulb in the stairwell. She sees the prison’s red rope, like a skinned snake. But then her mind leaps to this new thing, this new idea about the brain.

  “I sing the body electric,” Dany says. A line from the poem she is supposed to write about in her English Studies exam on Friday. Does it help to know this thing about the brain? Does it? Does it help to know that all of her bad memories are just a bunch of electrical pulses? That all of her memories, like her night terrors, are really just flickering light bulbs?

  Yeah, no, it doesn’t.

  She tunes out Jasper then. Peering at the computer, she nods in understanding. There, in the perfectly detailed image, she finds the knowledge she’s come here for. Each person’s mind possesses an off switch, a fatal breaker. A just-in-case. And this virus – which has as much right to call itself a creature as she does – knows the trick of it. “So, can I go into the hospice?” Dany asks, her eyes on the virus. “Like, to be part of the field study with you?”

  She’s been working up to this question for weeks. But yesterday, when she saw the sick prisoner at the hospice, the question became urgent. She has to get in. She has to. Soon.
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  The study will take her inside of the prison-hospice. Jasper doesn’t know about her aunt, imprisoned there. So he has no reason to say no. If she gets in, she can find a way to talk to Aunt ­Norah. Together, they can make a plan.

  But Jasper only sighs.

  She feels his eyes on her. Though her eyes are on his lab coat, she can see the subtle shake of his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, not under the best of conditions,” he tells her. “Sure, it’s a hospice, but it’s a prison-­hospice, Dany.” He shakes his head and stress lines reappear around his mouth.

  Still, that isn’t a no.

  But Jasper pauses, looks at her.

  She senses it, there’s something more – something he doesn’t want to tell her. Dany narrows her eyes and looks at the research papers strewn on the desk, sips at her synthetic coffee. “I can handle jail,” she says with a shrug. This won’t be her first prison visit. Not by a long shot. She’s grown up visiting prisons – Antoine’s made sure of that. “I’m cleared,” she tells him. “I got myself put on the visitor list.”

  Jasper turns to her sharply, and Dany studies the stubble on his chin.

  She shrugs again. “It’s just paperwork.”

  “Look, even if Isobel did say yes,” he says and holds up a hand, “which she won’t, the prison admin would never allow it – not now. There’s an outbreak at the hospice. It hasn’t affected the patients, the ones who have the original strain, but it’s been burning through the staff. It’s too dangerous. So, no. Not now.”

  Dany looks at Jasper, the tiny frown lines around his mouth. He looks … more than worried. He looks afraid. And that makes Dany afraid, too. She doesn’t want to think about her aunt being stuck in a place so dangerous that Jasper is scared to go there. Dany pictures the prisoner she saw the day before, the one thrashing on the ground. Infected. The prone prisoner was infected with the new strain.

  Version 2.0.

  “Okay,” Dany says slowly, her mind ticking over. “I can’t come with you. But I can ask questions, right? I can read field reports?”

  Jasper nods.

  “So, is this the bad news?” she asks. Dany takes in Jasper’s mouth. The tight lines. On his forehead, a little vein throbs.

  “Not quite,” Jasper says. His seat rotates, and he takes Dany in. “There’s been a small change with the timing of your experiment,” he tells her. “We’ve had to reschedule.”

  “You promised,” she says flatly. “Today. We’re going to do it today.”

  Jasper holds up his hands. “It’s just temporary. That’s all. Just a small delay. We’ll be moving the new virus over to the BSL-4 lab soon, really soon. That virus needs to be in a better wet lab. Honestly, if we’d had any idea, we’d have never brought the sample here … But until then? I’m sorry, no wet lab access.”

  She looks from that throbbing vein to the virus. It’s easier to hear him when she’s looking away from him, focusing on a screen.

  “We’ll still practise,” Jasper tells her. “We’ll get you in the blue suit and do a dry run. We can use the rat house.”

  “So,” she says, “no wet lab, no hospice. But even if I can’t go in, I can ask questions, right?”

  Jasper, with a look of relief, nods.

  But his relief first fades and then dies as Dany’s questions – more or less a bazillion of them – unfurl in his general direction.

  Dany stares at Jasper’s teacup. Barely touched, his tea is an ice-cold supersaturate. Add a grain of sugar, and the crystals will drop out of liquid form, leaving a heap of sweet at the bottom of his cup. When she asks him about the yellow plague jackets, her eyes are on that cold, sugar-soaked tea.

  Yesterday, at the so-called picnic, Dany saw the terminal cases wearing their yellow jackets – but she caught sight of something more. A glint of metal. The image came back to her the night before. The little metal hinge flashed in her dream.

  “What’s the metal thingie, on the jackets?” she asks.

  Jasper pauses, halfway out of his chair. Turns to take her in. Something in her tone has caught him, because Jasper sits back down. She can feel his eyes on her, taking her in. Jasper is thoughtful that way. He takes the time to be aware of the effect his words have on a person, because you never know who the person next to you has lost or how.

  “The plague jackets are devilishly clever,” he tells her. “They lock in place.”

  They are alone right then. Dany doesn’t think he’d ask otherwise.

  “This isn’t about my field study, is it?”

  Dany frowns and, looking at his fingers, shakes her head once. “Just tell me how the lock works,” she tells him. “I need to understand.” At this point, she doesn’t expect anything from him. She can feel it, desperation, the one chance she has to learn about the hospice squandered. If she is ever going to rescue her aunt, she needs to know how the place works. There is a hand around her heart, and the hand is tightening its grip.

  “Look,” he says. “Maybe I have a key kicking around.”

  Dany freezes. Even her breathing stops.

  As she watches, Jasper opens his drawer and rifles through a decade’s worth of crap. Old candy wrappers. Half a dozen paper clips, the wire roughly reshaped as little cats. A spool of twine. As he rummages through the drawer, he tells her all about the jacket. What’s more, he tells her what they keep in those shipping containers at the back of the prison-run hospice.

  “Ah,” he finally says. “Here it is.”

  He holds a slim hex key in his hand, considering it.

  “The yellow jackets have a reinforced band at the waist. They lock,” Jasper says. “It’s the only way to keep the damn things on them. This, it’s just a modified hex key, really.”

  Dany has seen what the virus does to the human brain.

  She pictures the hypothalamus – shrunken and rutted – like a miniature peach pit. All dried up. That little pea-sized part of the brain doesn’t seem like much. But it regulates the body’s temperature. It regulates hunger and thirst. Late in infection, when that little pea in the brain shrinks up, body temperature goes haywire. After that, the infected shed their clothes where they stand. Hence the yellow plague jackets, which come down just past the hips.

  Hence the locks.

  But by then, a person isn’t a person. Or so they say. At least, a person isn’t a person legally speaking.

  But if you love them, really love them, they have to be a person still. Deep inside. It just stands to reason. But then, that little pea in the brain also regulates feelings. Like how attached a mother is, say, to her children.

  Like the hypothalamus, after infection sets in, love shrinks up like a peach pit.

  When Dany pictures the woman in the alley, she sees the silhouettes of two kids in a framed picture, there, in her shopping cart, and her heart feels like it is being squeezed. Her heart is inside of a hand, and the hand becomes a fist. But Dany shuts her thinking down right there.

  No more pictures. No more thoughts. She narrows to the razor’s edge of the present.

  To the key.

  “Give it here?” Dany asks and holds out her hand, eyes focused on that little knot of muscle, the Adam’s apple, that bobs and dances beneath the skin of Jasper’s throat.

  Jasper looks at her hand, her trembling hand, and tries to catch her eye. A moment later, he frowns. “I can’t take you into the hospice,” he says. “It’s not going to happen.”

  Dany shrugs, her eyes dipping down to his shoes. “I just want the key.”

  Still, he doesn’t give it over.

  He holds onto that key, shaking his head. Already, she can see him doubting the impulse that had him excavate his drawer.

  “Please,” she says. “Just let me see it.”

  “Why? What’s with you and the key?”

  Dany takes a deep breath.

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nbsp; She wants to tell him all of it. She wants to tell Jasper the truth. About her mom. About her aunt. But she can’t. The truth is locked up too deep. So deep, maybe, there are no words. So she tells him the other part. She tells him about the nightmare. How this morning she woke up ice cold, covered in sweat. How she dreamed that she was inside of one of those yellow jackets. How, when she tried to take it off, her hands didn’t work. How she couldn’t get the thing off. That’s not all of it. That’s not even the worst of it. But somehow, it does the trick. Because a moment later, the key is in her hand, and she is holding the slender thing up to the light.

  “Have you had a chance,” Jasper asks, glancing at the screen, “to look at that book I gave you?”

  Dany looks at Jasper’s face.

  She finds it easier to look at him when his eyes are on the screen, absorbed by the virus. Harry Harlow and his wire-and-cloth mothers. She’s not only read the book, she’s named her damned lab rats after the man. Harry and Lolo. But she isn’t exactly going to admit that to Jasper. If she tells him she’s read the trauma book, he’ll want to talk about it. And, yeah, she knows where that conversation is headed… .

  “Yeah, no,” she says and bites her thumbnail.

  Jasper looks at her, but Dany shifts her eyes to the spool in his drawer.

  “Here, cut me some string,” she says, nodding at the spool. “I’m going to wear this key around my neck.”

  Jasper looks at her – and she knows there is no way. He isn’t going to let her keep it. Not in a million years. But then, she shifts her gaze back to him. Raises her eyes. Lets him meet her eyes for a moment. Even though it’s too much. Even though it feels like being touched, here, like fingers wetting themselves on her eyeballs. Even though it feels like letting him reach inside of her.

  “I just want to be able to sleep,” she says and shrugs. And when she can’t stand it a second longer, she looks down from Jasper’s gaze. Takes a shaky breath.