Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “No.”

  Fifteen years old. The age of defiance. I knew it well, having been there.

  Patrick came into the kitchen, emptied the coffeepot into a mug, and stirred in the last of the half-and-half. “What’s going on?” he said, tousling Steven’s hair and then pecking me on the cheek. “Kinda early for a domestic argument.”

  “Mom wants me to drop my AP Religion class.”

  “Why?” Patrick said.

  “I dunno. Ask her. I think she doesn’t like the textbook.”

  “The textbook is shit,” I said.

  Patrick picked it up and flipped the pages like they were an old cartoon. “Doesn’t look so bad to me.”

  “Maybe if you tried reading it, hon.”

  “Come on, babe. Let him take what he wants. It can’t hurt anything.”

  I think it might have been that moment when I started hating my husband.

  Now I’m back in my living room, hating the seven men seated or standing around me, waiting for me to join their ranks. “I need some details,” I say. Maybe they won’t notice I’m stalling.

  Maybe you think I’m crazy for not leaping at the chance to go back to work. I can understand that.

  We could use the extra income. There is that. And I’ve missed my research, my books, the collaboration with Lin and my graduate assistants. I’ve missed talking.

  Most of all, I’ve missed the hope.

  We were so fucking close.

  It was Lin’s idea to abandon our fledgling work on Broca’s aphasia and move on to Wernicke’s. I could see her rationale: the Broca’s patients stammered and stuttered with a palpable frustration, but they got their words out. For the most part, their language was intact; only the ability to transfer it into speech had been hamstrung by a stroke, a fall down the stairs, a head injury sustained while they waded through some desert country in the uniforms of the free world. They could still comprehend, still hear their wives and daughters and fathers encouraging them on. It was the other victims—the ones with damage farther back in their brains, much like Bobby Myers—who suffered the more sinister loss. Language, for them, had become an inescapable labyrinth of non-meaning. I imagine it must feel like being lost at sea.

  So, yes, I want to go back. I want to forge ahead with the serum and—when I’m ready—inject that potion into Mrs. Ray’s old veins. I want to hear her tell me about Quercus virginiana and Magnolia stellata and Syringa vulgaris in the way she did when she first came to my home, identifying the live oaks and the giant, starry trees and the lilacs with a scent that no perfumer has been able to match. She considered them God’s gifts, and I tolerated that. Whatever might be up there, he or she or it did a crackerjack job with trees and flowers.

  But I don’t give a shit about the president or his big brother or, really, any man.

  “Well, Dr. McClellan?” Reverend Carl says.

  I want to tell him no.

  THIRTEEN

  Christ, it’s hot in here. There must be a leak in the air-conditioning compressor again. Wouldn’t that be just our luck?

  I get up, jeans sticking to the backs of my legs, and go to the kitchen to refill my glass with water. “Patrick, can you give me a hand for a sec?” I call. He makes the rounds in the living room, collecting empty glasses, and joins me.

  While I’m pressing one glass after another into the ice dispenser, he takes hold of my left wrist. “You don’t want that back on, do you?”

  I shake my head, out of habit.

  “You should look at it like a trade, babe. They get something and you get something.”

  “I should look at it like what it is,” I say. “Fucking blackmail.”

  He sighs like he’s been holding the entire universe in his lungs. “Then do it for the kids’ sake.”

  The kids.

  Steven doesn’t care. He’s busy filling out college applications and writing admissions essays and boning up for exams, which are right around the corner. Also, he’s been making eyes at Julia King for most of this semester. The twins, only eleven, have soccer and Little League. But there’s Sonia. If I’m going to trade my brain for words, I’ll do it for her.

  The hamster wheel in my head must be making noise, because Patrick stops with the water glasses and turns me toward him. “Do it for Sonia.”

  “I want more details first.”

  Back in the living room, I get them.

  Reverend Carl has morphed from politician to salesman. “Your wrist counter stays off for the duration of the project, Dr. McClellan. If you agree, of course. You’ll have a state-of-the-art lab and all the funding and assistance you need. We can”—he checks the paperwork in another folder—“we can offer you a handsome stipend with a bonus if you find a viable cure within the next ninety days.”

  “And after that?” I ask, back in my chair with my jeans sticking to me.

  “Well—” He turns toward one of the Secret Service men.

  The man nods.

  “Back to one hundred words a day?” I say.

  “Actually, Dr. McClellan—and I’m telling you this in strict confidence, understand?—actually, we’ll be increasing the quota at some point in the future. Once everything gets back on course.”

  Well, this is new. I wait to see what other confidential tidbits he’s got up his sleeve.

  “Our hope”—Reverend Carl is in full preacher mode now—“is that people will settle down, find their feet in the new rhythm, and we won’t need these silly little bracelets any longer.” He makes a disdainful gesture with his hand, as if he’s talking about a trivial fashion accessory and not a torture device.

  Of course, we only feel pain if we flout the rules.

  I remember the day when I learned about these rules.

  It took only five minutes, there in the bleached white government building office. The men spoke to me, at me, never with me. Patrick would be notified and given instructions; a crew would come to the house—was this evening convenient?—to install cameras at the front and back doors, lock my computer away, and pack up our books, even Sonia’s Baby Learns the Alphabet. The board games went into cardboard boxes; the cardboard boxes went into a closet in Patrick’s office. I was to bring Sonia, barely five years out of my body, to the same place that afternoon so her tiny wrist could be fitted. They showed me a selection, a rainbow of colors I could choose from.

  “Pink would be most appropriate for a little girl,” they said.

  I pointed to silver for myself and blood red for Sonia. A trivial act of defiance.

  One of the men left, and returned with the bracelet that would replace my Apple Watch, the one Patrick had surprised me with for Christmas last year. The metal was light, smooth, an alloy of sorts, unfamiliar to my skin.

  He trained the counter to my voice, set it to zero, and sent me home.

  Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it. Not the sketches they showed me in their book of pictures, not the warnings Patrick read aloud to me over tea at our kitchen table. When Steven and his brothers burst in from school, full with news of soccer practice and exam results, while Sonia ignored her dolls, mesmerized by her new shiny red wristband, I opened the dam. My words flew out, unbridled, automatic. The room filled with hundreds of them, all colors and shapes. Mostly blue and sharp.

  The pain knocked me flat.

  Our bodies have a mechanism, a way to forget physical trauma. As with my non-memories of the pain of birth, I’ve blocked everything associated with that afternoon, everything except the tears in Patrick’s eyes, the shock—what an appropriate term—on my sons’ faces, and Sonia’s delighted squeals as she played with the red device. There’s another thing I remember, the way my little girl raised that cherry red monster to her lips.

  It was as if she were kissing it.

  FOURTEEN

  Finally, they leave.

  Revere
nd Carl slides into his Range Rover; the Secret Service men and Thomas ride in the other cars. Patrick and I are left in the living room with eight empty glasses of water dripping rings on the coasters beneath them.

  Nothing has been decided yet.

  He’s pacing the length of the room, sweat making his usually gelled-down hair stick in blond clumps around his face. Right now, he looks less like my husband and more like a caged feline. Or maybe a wild dog is the better choice; they’re pack animals.

  “They won’t take off Sonia’s counter,” I say.

  “They will. Eventually. Think how it would look if she turned up at school without that—”

  “Don’t you dare call it a bracelet.”

  “Okay. Counter.”

  I load the tray with glasses, using only my thumb and index finger so I don’t touch them more than necessary. Shaking Reverend Carl’s hand made me want to scrub myself with lye. “Can’t you do something? You’re the one who called it a trade, so let’s trade. I go to work for the bastards; they let my daughter talk.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Patrick, you’re the president’s fucking science adviser. You’d better be able to do something.”

  “Jean.”

  “Don’t ‘Jean’ me.” I slam down the glass I’m holding hard, and it shatters.

  Patrick’s over like a shot, catching the blood as it leaks from my hand.

  “Don’t touch me,” I say. There’s a single sliver of glass wedged in the soft pad of flesh under my thumb. And there’s blood. Quite a lot of blood.

  As water rolls over the wound, I travel back thirty minutes, back to when Reverend Carl was holding court in my living room, educating me on the plans for the future.

  Something was wrong. Maybe it was his eyes, which didn’t smile along with his mouth, or the pattern of his sentences. They were too well rehearsed, almost, too practiced in their even cadence and intonation. Even so, the hesitance was audible—a few too many ums and ahs littered his recital of the president’s intended changes, modifications, dispensations.

  I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the moment when I realized I didn’t trust him.

  “What if they’re playing some game, Patrick?” I called over the running water while he cleaned up the bits of broken glass and dumped them into the trash bin. I didn’t turn to look; those pieces of glass looked too much like our marriage.

  It wasn’t always this way. You don’t have four kids by accident.

  He joins me at the sink, scrubs his hands as only a doctor can, all the way up to his elbows, and looks a question at me before reaching for my wrist. He’s still got that gentle touch. “You want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “Good news.”

  “Okay. The good news is you’re not going to die.”

  “And the bad?”

  “I’ll get my sewing kit.”

  Stitches. Shit. “How many?”

  “Two or three. Don’t worry—it looks worse than it is.” When he comes back with his black bag, he pours me a short glass of bourbon. “Here. Drink this. It’ll take the sting away.” Then he sits me at the kitchen counter and takes the equipment out, ready to play doctor on the gash in my hand.

  I take a long swallow of the hard stuff, and the needle slides into my disinfected skin without much pain. Still, I won’t look, only hand Patrick the pickup when he asks for it.

  “Damn good thing you didn’t go into nursing, babe,” he says, and there’s tenderness again between us.

  For a moment.

  He makes an expert knot, cuts off the excess thread, and pats my hand. “There you are, Dr. Frankenstein. Good as new.”

  “Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t the one with the zipper neck,” I say. “Anyway, what do you think? Are they playing a game, or are they serious about what they said?”

  “I don’t know, Jean.” ‘Jean’ again. He’s pissed.

  “Look, if I take this job, how do I know they won’t—I don’t know—use my research to promote worldwide evil?”

  “With an anti-aphasia serum? Come on.”

  The blood loss and bourbon cocktail have made me light-headed. “I just don’t trust these people.”

  “All right, then.” He pours a drink for himself, then slams the bottle on the counter with enough force to hurt my ears. “Don’t take the job. We’ll deal with the AC when my direct deposit comes through next week, you can put your goddamned bracelet back on, and we’ll all go back to exactly the way we were this morning.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He’s mad, he’s hurt, and he’s frustrated. None of this justifies the next words out of his mouth, though, the ones he will never be able to take back, the ones that slice deeper than any shard of broken glass and make me bleed all over.

  “You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk.”

  FIFTEEN

  Even without the metal contraption on my wrist, dinner is a quiet affair tonight.

  Steven, normally garrulous in between forkfuls of food, hasn’t mentioned school or Julia King or soccer. The twins seem confused and shift a little in their chairs. Sonia alternates between staring at her plate and staring at my left wrist, but she’s been silent since she got home from school. Another thing—there hasn’t been a single fist bump between her and Steven.

  As for Patrick, he eats, takes his plate into the kitchen, and escapes to his study with a tumbler of bourbon and a few curt words about having to meet a deadline. It’s impossible to tell whom he’s more angry with—me, or himself.

  “You explain it to them, Jean,” he says before shutting the door to that book-lined sanctuary of his.

  Well, this is awkward.

  I haven’t had a real conversation with my kids for more than a year. What once would have been an animated debate over whether Pokémon Go was a time waster or the cleverest innovation in gaming since Xbox is now four young faces staring in silent expectation. And I’m the main event.

  I might as well get it over with.

  “So, Steven, what’s going on at school these days?” I say.

  “Two exams tomorrow.” It’s as if he’s the one with the daily word quota.

  “Want me to help you study?”

  “Nah. I’m cool.” Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “Thanks anyway.”

  Sam and Leo are slightly more eager, pummeling me with news of their new soccer coach and how they played a trick at practice this morning, each one pretending to be the other. The two of them do most of the talking. I suppose that’s what they’ve grown used to.

  Only Sonia watches me with wide eyes, the kind of look that makes me feel as if I’m a new person. Or have grown fur. Or turned into a dragon. She’s eaten none of the meat loaf on her plate, and only a few of the potatoes I’d run to the store to buy after the falling-out with Patrick this afternoon.

  “Will I have another bad dream?” she asks.

  Automatically, I respond with the wrong kind of question. “What makes you think that, honey?” I rephrase. “No. I won’t let the bad dreams happen. And I’ll tell you a story when I tuck you in, okay?”

  She nods. The number on her wrist glows 40. “Scared,” she says.

  “No reason to be.”

  Sam and Leo exchange a nervous look, and I shake my head at them. Steven raises one finger to his lips, his silent sign to his baby sister, something normal.

  Then Sonia nods again. Her eyes—Patrick’s Irish hazel—are glazed over with unfallen tears.

  “You’re still afraid?” I ask.

  Another nod.

  “Of the bad dreams?”

  Now she shakes her head.

  The thing is, Sonia doesn’t know what the wrist counters do, other than glow brightly and show her numbers and pulse against her wrist, one time for each word she speaks. We’ve been c
areful to keep this secret from her. Maybe it’s a foolish thing, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how to describe an electric jolt of pain to a six-year-old. It would be like telling a child about the horrors of the electric chair in order to instill some sense of right and wrong. Grisly, and unnecessary. What parent would enumerate the exact workings of Old Sparky to get their kid not to fib or steal?

  When the counters went on our wrists—there was no acclimation period, not even for children—I decided to go about it from the opposite direction. A scoop of ice cream, an extra cookie before bed, hot cocoa with as many marshmallows as would fit in the cup whenever Sonia nodded or shook her head or tugged on my sleeve instead of speaking. Positive reinforcement rather than punishment. I didn’t want her to learn the hard way. Not like I had.

  Also, I knew something else about the counters. The pain increases with each infraction.

  There was no time for me, on that first day, to process the steady surge in charge. Patrick explained, afterward, as he applied cold cream to the scar on my wrist.

  “First word over a hundred, and you’ll get a slight shock, Jean. Nothing disabling, just a little jolt. A warning. You’ll perceive it, but it won’t actually hurt.”

  Terrific, I thought.

  “For every ten words after that, the charge augments by a tenth of a microcoulomb. Get to half a microcoulomb, and you’ll feel pain. Reach a full microcoulomb and”—he paused and looked away—“and the pain becomes unbearable.” He took my left hand in his own and checked the number on the counter. “Whew. One ninety-six. Thank god you didn’t keep talking. Another few words and you would have hit one microcoulomb.”

  Patrick and I had rather different ideas of what “unbearable pain” meant.

  He continued while I held a bag of frozen peas to the circular burn and kept my eyes trained on the closed door of Sonia’s bedroom. The boys were in there with her, at Patrick’s insistence, no doubt making sure she didn’t speak. No one wanted a repeat performance of the Electrocuted Female, not when a five-year-old was cast in the lead role.