I try not to look too nervous as they bring in the next rat. It will be hard to fake the injections under the close watch of the camera lens. The men hover as I fill the syringes. Vasiliev leans so close I can smell the coffee on his breath.
My idea is to place the tiny syringe under the skin and then out again, plunging the solution onto my hands instead of the rat. It’s only 0.1 milliliter and shouldn’t be noticed. If I do it well it should appear as though I’m giving the rat an injection when I’m not. Then, of course, the rat will never recover.
Sorry, Rat Three, I think.
But Vasiliev is making this difficult. He’s figured out I’m left-handed and so he stands to the side and slightly behind my left shoulder. Positioned this way, I can’t tell what he’s looking at exactly. Meanwhile, the camera’s eye records everything. I continue with the rat, going through the procedure as before, waiting for the moment I can fudge an injection.
But the moment doesn’t come. If I want a distraction, I’m going to have to create one. I turn over one of the vials, push a needle through its stopper, then draw out several more milliliters of the solution than I need. I pretend to be checking the measurement, tapping it to remove air bubbles, all the while aiming the needle just behind my left shoulder. Then, all at once, I squirt the solution.
It hits Vasiliev square in the face.
“Idiot!” he shouts, and with his exclamation comes my window of opportunity.
While he’s dabbing his eye with his sleeve, I turn quickly to the rat. I bend over the rat so that hopefully my head obscures the camera’s view, then push the needle through one side of the skin and out the other, making sure to miss the muscle.
Then I place the empty syringe on the table. Proof that I am following the protocol.
Everyone is watching but seems none the wiser. I continue with the procedure, eventually nestling the rat into the incubator. It stays motionless, just as the first had done. No signs of life, no twitching of legs, no color returning to its pale ears or lifeless paws. We wait and wait, but the rat remains dead.
“What is wrong with this one?” Vasiliev says.
I shrug, holding my breath, hoping he’ll declare it a failure and move to the next rat. If my trick worked, I could “fail” with every third rat. Given such a performance, working on humans would be out of the question.
But Vasiliev isn’t convinced. He walks around the incubator, his hands clasped behind his back.
“You did something wrong,” he says.
“It doesn’t always work,” I say. I try my hardest to seem disappointed in the result. “I told you that.”
He stops at the camera, rewinds it back to the beginning of the procedure on the third rat, and watches silently. I focus my gaze on a spot of sunlight that makes a rainbow across the floor. The video continues minute to minute until the point at which I staged the accident with the solution. I feel a sinking in my chest as Vasiliev calls over the other men and they all crowd around the monitor.
The video is rewound, played again, then again. A feeling of weakness floods over me. My head is pounding. My arms feel light and useless. I’m terrified and trying not to show it. Then the guy with the sweatshirt points at something. Vasiliev squints into the viewer. I feel the sweat gathering at my neck, rolling down my back. A minute passes, another.
Vasiliev comes toward me. He stands directly in front of me, hands on his hips, looks me in the eye, then spits straight into my face.
I scream. Somebody slaps me hard across the ear, sending me flying. I’m on the floor as Vasiliev signals to one of the men to take away the dead rat. Then he turns to me again, hovering above me as I shield my head.
“You think we are stupid?” he shouts.
They pull me up by the elbows and I stand unsteadily, my head ringing, as another rat is presented. For a moment the room seems to throb in and out of focus. I struggle to stay standing.
Then I see it again, the hypodermic needle.
“Please!” I beg.
“Stop playing games,” says Vasiliev, the needle poised beside him. “Because we are not.”
The sight of the needle brings tears to my eyes. I start to cry and Vasiliev yells at me, telling me to stop making noise, stop complaining, stop acting stupid.
I’m falling apart. I know that. And I realize all over again how much it had mattered to have Will near. He’d always known when to distract me, to humor me, to reassure me. Where is he now?
“Fix this!” yells Vasiliev, handing me the dead rat.
Eight rats, one after another, hour by hour without pause.
When the final one has been restored I think I’m finished. I look at the rat, newly undead, bracing itself against the towel that pads the inside of the incubator’s wall, and pray that there will be no more of this.
The stress of the day has stopped me from feeling hungry, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling light-headed. I’m about to ask for a cup of coffee when Vasiliev speaks.
“Again,” he says.
Again? At first I think he wants me to stun the rats’ hearts so that they die all over again and he can watch as I revive them a second time, an unnecessary and cruel thing to do. But it turns out he wants me to revive the rat that I’d let die hours ago.
“You’re kidding,” I say. There’s no point. Too much time has passed. The damaged neurons have already shed their mitochondria. There are no longer organelles inside those cells. One of the things I do in post-death recovery is to support the brain’s astrocytes, another type of cell, so that they replace damaged neurons. But it’s too late for that now.
“We kept it on ice,” he says. I begin to protest, but his expression tells me I have no choice.
I take in a heavy breath, then tear open a package of syringes. They bring me the rat. It looks terrible, with stiff limbs, a mouth gaping to reveal yellow incisors, staring lifeless eyes. I work quickly and not very carefully (I’m certain this won’t work), eventually placing the rat into the oxygenated incubator.
Then I unclip my lab glasses and drop into the chair, exhausted. I turn my attention to one of the windows, wishing I could at least go look out over the trees. But the rule is no windows, no doors. Perhaps they fear I might jump.
“I read about you in America,” Vasiliev says.
I shake my head. “No, not me.”
“About a girl with a brain like a calculator. She went to university at age twelve.”
“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
“You read documents then process the information like a machine.”
This is kind of true. “Perhaps you can replace me with a machine and I can go home,” I say.
Vasiliev makes a sound, “Puh!” Then he comes closer, bringing his face down to mine. “If it were possible, I would do just that!”
I don’t look at him, or answer as he launches into question after question.
Where did you study?
How did you come up with the procedure?
Who taught you?
He wheels me around so that I face him. “Does America have secret academies where they keep their best and brightest?”
Secret academies?
“Of course not,” I say. “I’m a high school student.”
“They give you drugs to make you smarter?”
“What? No!” I say.
“Alter your DNA?” he says. “Your parents had this done, yes?”
And then, all at once, Vasiliev’s attention goes elsewhere. He cranes his head around to the incubator, then claps his hand over his forehead.
“Smotri!” he shouts. “The rat! He lives!”
And sure enough, there it is—the little rat I’d had no hope for is trying to get upright. Damaged, yes. Weak, yes. But alive.
“I’ll lower the oxygen a bit,” I say. “It won’t do him any good to have too much.”
The little rat fights his way back into life. Meanwhile, I come to the uncertain realization that I am of no further use to Vasi
liev. Now that everything is recorded on camera, they can dispose of me without consequence. And I have no doubt they’ll do just that. I feel my heart beat loudly in my chest. I have to get away somehow.
I wonder if I ran toward a window as hard as possible whether I could break through it and fall with the shattering glass below. I’d rather die like that than however they’re going to kill me. And maybe I wouldn’t die. We’re not that high up in the building. Maybe a miracle would occur and I’d live after all. I think of myself running through Moscow, escaping these men. It’s only a daydream, but it’s a nice one.
A sound brings me to attention. A gurney is being wheeled unsteadily through the doorway. I rise to my feet, my eyes fixed. When I see what is happening, I gasp, then rush toward the gurney, screaming.
“Will!”
Will is asleep on a white sheet, another covering him up to the chest. At first, I’m overjoyed to see him, but then I realize that he isn’t asleep. In the stark laboratory light, he no longer even looks like Will. His shoulders are pale and bare and cold to my touch. I see, too, that he is naked beneath the thin cover and that the whole of his body, once so tall and powerful and young, is lifeless and unmoving. He will never again be the menacing presence I’d feared back in Stockholm, nor the confident chum who’d used cheerfulness as a military tactic to get us through our days locked together on the train. I think of how we played checkers to pass the hours, how he held my hand. In death, he is younger, not much more than a boy. His golden hair still gleaming, his face unlined.
I scream, a single shrill sound that echoes across the laboratory and carries on in waves. I look desperately around at the men—the guy in the sweatshirt, the guy with the scalp tattoos—as if they could help. Their faces are unreadable, remote, as though a dead man is simply one of nature’s casual losses, no more important than a fledgling found dead outside its nest.
“It didn’t need to be him!” I say. But of course, I know it did. They want me to be super motivated. They figured out exactly how to make it so. I say, “You can’t just . . . just . . .” I have no words.
Vasiliev says, “I have every confidence in you.”
I’ve never seen a dead person before, let alone touched one. The only way I can approach him is to tell myself that he is not dead, not really. I recall what Dmitry once said, that death happens not at once but in stages. You must think of it as a process, he’d explained. Not like a closed door but like a revolving door. Only then can you imagine a way to interfere with it.
I shoot into action. “Get ice around his head!” I yell. “And the larger syringes! Those! In the back!”
“I will assist you,” Vasiliev offers. I glare at him as he expertly fills syringes, placing them one by one on a sterile cloth as I grab a large arterial cannula and look for the pump.
It’s hellishly difficult to work on such a large body. Turning Will, sticking him, keeping him in place, is all physically unmanageable, requiring assistance not only from Vasiliev but from the other men as well.
Unlike with the rats, everything becomes impossibly slow, as though I’m trying to ski through a jungle. The injections are much larger. I have to work periodically with the pump; the laser I used with the rats is inadequate. They bring out a larger one, but it works differently and I have to waste precious minutes figuring it out. Meanwhile, the clock ticks away, not only on the wall above me, but in my mind. Seventeen minutes, eighteen minutes. I know one day this procedure will be routine, but I’m failing now. Beneath my hands, Will’s skin grows colder, his lips darken. I want to reach up and hold his head in my hands. I want to cry out and attack Vasiliev with my fists. Instead, I stare hard at the monitor that shows me where my needle is moving inside Will’s spine. Twenty-four minutes, twenty-five . . .
Vasiliev sets up a machine that registers brain activity. There is some activity in the brain even after death, but the signals are very weak. I try not to be discouraged. I work on. It seems as though the whole enterprise is hopeless when, at last, Vasiliev leaps forward. The look on his face tells me that something has happened. And then I see it: a line of red peaks on the monitor, then peaks again, which shows activity has improved, not just by a small amount but by a significant margin. Will’s brain is working again, at least to some degree.
I begin CPR immediately, pumping his chest. If the heart begins to beat again, however irregularly, there is hope. “Defibrillator!” I call at Vasiliev, but he’s already on it, positioning the electrode pads.
Vasiliev calls loudly in Russian, then one of the men pulls me from Will before the charge from the defibrillator hits him. I watch as Will’s body jumps, then is still. I begin CPR again, placing the heel of my hand on Will’s chest, the other one above it, and pressing down rhythmically, one, two, three . . . Once more, I stand back as the machine sends a current through him. At last, his heart begins weakly. Vasiliev sets up an EKG machine and they roll Will into recovery position. I can see his heartbeat on the monitor and a brightening on his face as the skin pinks up as it had with the rats, indicating he has a functioning circulatory system. I work on him with new hope, a thrill rushing through me as though I’ve just outrun fire.
He comes to eventually in a series of unsettling spasms, his legs jerking out from the gurney, his arms flailing. It takes several minutes for him to stop convulsing violently, the involuntary jerks and spasms carrying on but with less intensity as the minutes pass.
“Will, can you hear me?” I say, my face inches from his. He’s too disoriented to answer. His eyes stare without focus into the distance. A strange sound emits from his throat and then he is silent.
“Blink if you can hear me,” I say.
Blink.
“Are you in pain?”
Blink.
“Is the pain between here and here?” I touch his hip bone, then his toes. No blink.
“Is the pain between here and here?” I touch the area between his hip bone and his shoulder. No blink.
“The pain is in your head?” I say.
Blink, blink, blink.
His head hurts. Also, he can hear. But when I swipe my hand in front of his eyes his pupils don’t contract. His optic nerve may not yet be back “online.” Then it occurs to me I’ve damaged his retinas with too much oxygen. Rats have bad eyesight. Albino rats can be nearly blind from birth. I’d never have known if the rats’ vision was worse after post-death recovery. I never had the opportunity to test anything.
“Will,” I say, my voice heavy. “Can you see?”
No blink.
24
THEY TAKE HIM away with me shouting down the hall after them, screaming and crying until at last the guy in the sweatshirt pins me against a wall and reminds me he has a gun. I go silent as the gurney turns a corner out of view. I tell myself that they can’t do this, they can’t, but of course they can do anything they like. Where will they take him? Not to a hospital, that’s for sure. What if they have no intention of helping him, but are planning only to study him?
I understand part of Vasiliev’s strategy is to keep me disoriented and alone. He’s succeeding there. I’m woozy with it all. But worse than the way I feel, worse even than being so far away from home and worried about my mother, is knowing that Will is somewhere else, apparently blind and in pain. He’s far more alone than I am. Every bone in my body wants to chase after him, but the guy who is holding me now pushes me aside, then fixes me with a look that says, Don’t move.
I stand for a moment, stunned. Then, incredibly, he gets out a pack of cigarettes and offers me one before lighting up right there in the laboratory.
“Geez, is there nowhere you won’t smoke?” I say. He looks at me with a blank expression. “Oxygen,” I tell him, pointing at the oxygen cylinders all around us.
He purses his lips and shrugs.
“You don’t mind if you explode?” I say.
He takes a long drag off the cigarette, then spits on the floor.
“Fine,” I say. “I hope you explode.
”
I’m brought back to the cinder block room, pushed inside, and told to change my clothes. I wonder what I am expected to change into, but the answer comes in the form of the dragonfly dress. It’s been cleaned and is carefully folded on the mattress with a tube of red lipstick and some blush arranged on top of it.
Amazing. They kidnap me, cage me, asphyxiate me, kill my friend, but bring me lipstick so I can look my best.
I dial the base of the lipstick until a chunk of red emerges. Then I write across the wall’s gray blocks the words I hate you, though I suspect they already know that much.
There is another surprise. When I hold up the dress something falls out: my eyeglasses.
“Thank God,” I say aloud. And I’ve got shoes again, too. They’re under the dress.
I pull off my scrubs and step into the dress. Then I sit on the mattress, my stomach growling, wondering if I’ll get any dinner tonight. I remember sourly what Will said on the train, that cheerfulness is a military tactic.
And then I think of Will.
I wish for the thousandth time that he were here. And that someone would help us. I think of Munn, who has all those contacts at the Department of Defense—surely, he’d know how to get us out of here.
And my mother. I wonder if I will ever hear her voice again.
And then I think—I hope—that the fact of this dress means that I can go home now. I’d happily travel the long train journey back, eat the cheese sandwiches, wash my clothes in the tiny sink, endure all the hours with nothing to do. I’m so tired of being scared, so altogether tired.
I hear footsteps and I jump. The door opens. Vasiliev has sent one of his lackeys to get me. It’s the one with the scalp tattoos.
“Where’s my friend?” I say.
“No English.”
“I see you gave me back my shoes. Where’s my watch?”
“No English.”
“My watch,” I insist, circling my wrist with my fingers, then pretending to check the time.
Dragonfly Girl Page 24