“What did they do, use a dull straight razor?” I say, not taking my eyes off the image on Patrick’s laptop. Steven has seen this, was forced to watch and join in his classmates’ name-calling.
Reverend Carl calls his audience to prayer and bows his head. “Lord, forgive our wayward daughter, and guide her as she joins her sisters in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Amen.” A chorus of shouts and hisses follows the prayer. A few people echo “Amen,” but mostly it’s a hate-fest. Reverend Carl presses the air under his raised hands and calls for silence, but when he lifts his head toward the cameras, I see the faintest of smiles on his lips.
Now the camera closes in, tight, on Julia’s tear-streaked face. Her lips tremble, and her eyes search from left to right, looking for a shred of sympathy among the shouters. Reverend Carl’s hand appears on her shoulder, and she shirks away, but the hand seems only to clench more tightly, fingers digging into her clavicle under the gray material. It fits high on her neck and has long sleeves. She must be dying in this heat.
It isn’t the first time I think about how much I hate Reverend Carl Corbin, but it is the first time I want to kill him.
FORTY-NINE
If I’d spent my last few minutes at home looking out our front window instead of unknotting my hair, I might have seen the anonymous black SUV parked across the street, its engine running and puffing out streams of exhaust smoke.
But I didn’t. By the time I walk out the side door and start my car, it’s too late.
Del the mailman is already up the porch steps, courier bag over his shoulder, his key to our mailbox in one hand. He waves to me, and I wave back through the Honda’s rear window.
The realization hits me like a tidal wave: keys, an envelope, Del peeking inside the mailbox yesterday and removing a single item, Sharon warning me about an underground organization that’s using a mailman as its go-between. And, finally, Patrick’s words last night after he told me what Olivia had done to herself, there in her bedroom, with the Dictaphone repeating its endless loop of her own words.
We’re doing everything we can.
When the dots connect, I’m left with one terrible, frightening, and at the same time relieving explanation: Patrick isn’t working for the government. He’s working against it.
I pull halfway out of the driveway, stopping when I’m in line with the porch. Del opens the mailbox, careful to shield his hands from the street and the porch camera. I want to shout at him. Stop! Stop! Don’t open it!
He slides the manila envelope out, holding it close and hiding it in his courier bag before relocking the mailbox. He won’t hear Poe’s silent steps behind him, coming up the walk, climbing the porch stairs. He won’t hear the quiet click and hum of the black stun gun in Poe’s massive right hand, or the crackle as it presses against his ribs, shocking him twice—first in his body, then in his mind.
Poe turns toward me and waves me down the driveway, as if to say Move along now. Nothing to see here.
And now two more men rush up to the house from the black car across the street. They lift Del by the armpits, dragging his rag-doll body down the steps, along the path, and to the car while I wait helplessly to see if Poe rings our doorbell and repeats the show with Patrick.
He doesn’t; he only walks away from our house, folds himself into the rear seat of the black car next to an unconscious Del, and waits for me to drive away. Then the black car pulls from the curb, following my Honda all the way to Connecticut Avenue, where it turns and heads south. It crosses my mind to reverse course and go to the Rays’ farm to warn Sharon, but I shunt the thought aside. I’d be caught or too late or—best case—have Morgan all over my ass for not showing up to work on time.
As I weave through morning traffic, I process the morning’s events. Poe must think Del had the envelope all along, that he was about to deliver it, perhaps to some other address.
I don’t have an eidetic memory—not even close. But I do have a head for text. In a previous life, or in a future life if I had access to books, I might make a decent editor. Not that I can write worth a shit, but I can process mistakes. And the ones I’m processing as I wind through traffic on my way to meet Lorenzo and Lin are the twin typos I found in the red and gold packets inside a manila envelope.
The errors aren’t the only things running through my mind like rabid hamsters on a wheel. The very nature of three distinct teams duplicating one another’s work shouldn’t merit classified status. And my team was never classified, or if it was, our president declassified it in a press conference three days ago.
I park the Honda in my designated spot, between Lorenzo’s Mustang and the space where Lin’s Smart car should be but isn’t. Inside the building, a soldier waves me through the checkpoint after taking my purse and laying it on the X-ray machine’s belt.
“What’s this?” I say.
“New security procedures,” the soldier says, watching me. This time, there’s no smile, no cheery Have a nice day!, only a pair of eyes, narrowed into slits, watching me from under the brim of his cap as I collect my bag and walk toward the bank of elevators where Morgan is waiting with crossed arms.
“You’re late,” he says.
“I was working through the night,” I lie, and step into the open elevator.
Morgan follows. “You’re not supposed to take work home, Jean. Or did you forget that one simple rule?”
I spin toward him, wishing I’d worn more than a pair of sandals so I could look down at the bastard. Still, our eyes are even. “No, I didn’t forget, Morgan. I don’t forget things. But I’ve got a working brain, so unless you want me to leave that locked up in your fucking lab, get off my back and let me do what I need to do, you little prick.”
“I won’t stand for that kind of talk,” he says.
“Then sit. Or lie down. Or crawl in a hole. I don’t care. I’m busy.”
“I’m writing this up. I’m sending a report to—”
“To who? To the president? Fine. Tell him I’m taking the rest of the month off for bad behavior.” I punch the Close Doors button on the elevator before slipping out, leaving Morgan to fester.
“What the hell was that all about?” Lorenzo says. He’s in the corridor between the elevator and the lab, dressed casually but smartly in a polo and khakis under his white coat.
“I hate that piece of shit,” I say. “Where’s Lin?”
“Hasn’t come in yet. Guess we have the lab all to ourselves.” Mischief lights up his eyes as he closes the gap between us.
A quickie on one of the epoxy resin counters isn’t part of my schedule today, but we do need to talk. “Show me what you’ve been working on,” I say, inserting my key card into the main door of the laboratory. Mice and rabbits greet us with a cacophony of squeaks and chatter. I wish Lin were here, not only because I don’t want to inject the animals myself.
What I know needs to be shared.
Lorenzo turns on the tap in the biochem lab and starts washing his hands, rubbing soap in between each finger, scrubbing his nails one at a time, inspecting each digit. “Well?”
“The three teams. They’re sort of the same, but different.” I think back to the goals statements, to the way two of the teams seemed identical in one way, and two others in another. All because of one little word: “anti.” At the time, sitting cross-legged on the cool of the bathroom floor, I thought it was a typo.
Lorenzo continues the charade of washing his hands, turning up the water, leaning in closer to the faucet.
“Our team’s goal is development of the anti-Wernicke serum,” I say. “At first, I thought the Gold team’s goal was identical, but then it hit me—there’s nothing top secret about what we’re doing here, I mean what you and Lin and I are working on.”
“You don’t advertise classified shit to a press conference,” Lorenzo says, agreeing.
“Right. So the Gold team’s p
acket left out one word.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Anti,” I whisper. “That team isn’t developing an anti-Wernicke serum, and the Red team isn’t working on water solubility for an anti-Wernicke serum. The ‘anti’ was missing there, too.”
“Holy shit,” he says, staring at his hands. “You’re sure it wasn’t a typo?”
“No. I’m not sure. I can’t be sure. But it makes sense. It’s the only thing that explains why the materials are classified, and why Morgan has a single binder labeled ‘Project Wernicke.’ We’d always called it Anti-Wernicke, or, later, Wernicke-X. Just like you wouldn’t be working on a cancer cure and name your study ‘Project Cancer.’”
“Not unless you were developing cancer in a lab,” he says. “It sounds wrong.”
I tell him about Patrick and Del, the locked mailbox, Poe’s men coming to take Del away this morning. “They know,” I say. “Poe or someone knows there’s an underground operation, and they know they’ve found out what’s really going on.”
For a long time, we look at each other over the running water, careful to keep our heads bent toward the sink. There isn’t anything to say, because we both know our work is being reverse engineered somewhere in this building.
Whether Reverend Carl is behind it, or Morgan or the president or the Pure Movement, doesn’t matter. It could be all of them, all working to create a serum that doesn’t cure aphasia, but causes it.
FIFTY
Lorenzo and I prep two groups of mice for injections. Each set will receive one of the two neuroproteins he’s been formulating, and, with luck, we’ll know which direction we need to take by the end of the day, when half of the mice are dead. As I remove the tiny creatures from their cages and shave a square patch of fur from them, one by one, a single word ping-pongs around my brain.
Why?
The answer comes much too easily, also in the form of a single word: silence.
Lorenzo reaches over and takes the brown mouse from my shaking hands. “I’ll do it,” he says, guiding the clippers along its flank. “There. You put Mickey in the Group One cage. And don’t worry, I’ll take care of the injections.”
“I’m that bad?”
“Let’s say you’re a little unsteady this morning. No big deal.” He pats me on the shoulder, and I jump. “One thing at a time, Gianna.”
I watch his hands with their long fingers, tipped with calluses from years of fret work and strumming, as he sedates the next mouse, waits for it to relax in his palm, and shaves another square patch. “This one’s Group Two,” he says, handing its limp body back to me. Another Mickey or Minnie goes into the second cage.
“They’re monsters,” I say.
Lorenzo nods. He knows I don’t mean the mice.
Now it’s two winters ago, and I’m back in my own living room sitting next to Olivia King as she sips coffee and watches Jackie go to battle with three Pure Women, their pastel twinsets a quiet contrast to Jackie’s red power suit. Olivia is nodding at the twinset women, shaking her head violently every time Jackie opens her mouth.
“Someone should shut that woman up,” Olivia says. “Permanently.”
Oh, Olivia, I think, what the hell did you expect?
They’ll start with the women in the camps, I suppose. Jackie, Julia, Annie Wilson from down the street. We won’t see any of it televised. Next, Reverend Carl will round up people like Del and Sharon, squelching the last hope of any resistance. Before they take away his voice, though, they’ll go to work on Del, maybe use his three daughters as an incentive. And Del, of course, will talk. What father wouldn’t?
Patrick will be next in line. I feel my heart stop as I think of the methods they’ll use on him, of the threats to Sonia that will encourage him to speak. And so on and so on, until every last member of what must already be a threadbare operation is found, forced to talk, and ultimately silenced.
With my own damnable creation.
I don’t believe this will be the end.
Lorenzo touches my shoulder again. “We’re all finished for now. You okay?”
I shake my head.
Minus a husband, and plus the wrist counter that goes back on once I’ve finished my work here, I’ll have no means to take care of a house or children. Steven might manage to hold things together for a while, if Steven ever comes back. If not, with Patrick’s parents both dead and mine in Italy, the McClellan clan is finished, extinct.
And then there’s my baby. Lorenzo’s baby.
I’ve spent so much of my time thinking about what used to be, how I used to be, but the future always remained a blur. Up until now, that is. Now I see ghosts of years to come, only malformed swirls at first, then coalescing into razor-sharp pictures in full color. Me, babbling nonsense phrases after they inject me with a serum of my own making. Me, bent-backed and gray, pulling at a patch of weeds with hands I no longer recognize. Me, lying on a cot under a thin blanket, shivering in winter. Me, vacant-eyed and, perhaps, teetering on the edge between awareness and insanity, wondering where they all went to. Steven, Sam, Leo, Sonia. Baby.
Only when Lorenzo takes me by the arm and pulls me up do I realize I’ve been sitting on the lab floor, my back resting against the bottom row of empty wire cages.
“It’s all right, Gianna,” he says, brushing the tears from my eyes with his fingers. “It’s all right.”
“It isn’t, you know.”
“It will be.”
I want to bury myself inside him, but I remember the cameras. “I’m fine,” I say, straightening myself out. “Let’s get on with the injections.”
When I first started experiments with lab animals, I had one golden rule: don’t name them. In other words, don’t think of them as pets; don’t think of them as anything other than a way to get from point A to point B. Think of them as test tubes or Petri dishes or microscope slides, nothing more than innate vehicles to fill and observe. While I hold each tiny mouse for Lorenzo to inject with a potion that will either cure it or kill it, all I can think of is the names I’ve given them:
Jackie. Lin. Jean.
FIFTY-ONE
Lorenzo’s idea is risky, but necessary.
After we’ve called upstairs for an assistant to clean up the lab and filed a report for Morgan, I leave first, retracing my steps through the security checkpoint. There’s a new pair of soldiers on guard during the afternoon shift, their uniforms pressed to sharp creases, their boots shined to a high polish that reflects the entry vestibule’s fluorescent lights. My purse goes back on the conveyor belt to be scanned while one of the soldiers pats me down, his hands running short, swift arcs over my hips, back, stomach, breasts. Once cleared, I walk out into the May sunshine.
May 31, I think, is my birthday, the day Steven ran off with a wad of cash from Patrick’s wallet, and the day I’ll meet Lorenzo for another secret rendezvous in a rented Maryland crab shack.
We decided to take opposite routes from the city, so I follow traffic south toward the highway that cuts through Washington, past the fish market that’s still there at the waterside. I wonder where the fish come from. Maine? North Carolina? Probably both. I don’t wonder who works in the processing factories, gutting and scaling, packing and freezing. Maybe one day, I’ll have a job doing the same. Long hours. No pay. Permanent stench of fish in my skin.
Lin was wrong about the economy falling apart. It might not be thriving, but the machine chugs along at a constant, working speed. Our workforce wasn’t cut in half, only reassembled and redistributed. Men who performed unskilled labor were replaced with whoever the Pure deemed unworthy of hanging about in society. Industries—and that all-encompassing industry, government—cherry-picked freshly graduated males from the country’s top universities to fill the gaps women left: CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers.
It was an eminently doable reworking of the system.
I’
ve been pushing Steven out of my mind all day, and now the sadness uncorks itself and spills out of me. There were so many times I wanted to blame him, but I can’t. Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb, artificial creations of madmen who, like the misguided Frankenstein, always think they know better.
He won’t get far, anyway, even with the cash. Steven will find his way back home. This is one thing I have to believe.
The traffic subsides at the same time my tears run out, just as I pull the Honda onto the exit ramp and turn eastward toward the Chesapeake Bay, that land of William Styron and blue crabs and sailboats skimming over calm waters. It’s a long drive, but a quiet one, and it gives me time to think.
If the Wernicke cure works, which I expect it will, I’ll ask Morgan to have a dose sent to my mother in the Italian hospital. That small benefit is a single bright ray of sun in an otherwise drab landscape. Not much, but it’s something to hold on to.
Lorenzo’s car sits in the driveway of the shack, radiating distorting waves of heat from its hood. Of course he’s arrived first—you can take the mad Italian driver out of Italy, but you can’t take the madness out of him. I drive past it, up to the next lot, which has stood vacant since the time Lorenzo rented our place. The rule is, first one arriving parks at the shack; second, in the empty lot. I’ve never been first.
He’s in the kitchen, or what would be a kitchen if it contained more than a sink, a two-burner stove, and a cube-shaped refrigerator for water and wine. We never wasted time cooking in this place. Not food, anyway.
I had everything planned out during the drive. Get in, talk, and get out. But when he lays a hand on my right cheek, the plans all go to hell. It isn’t Lorenzo leading me to the small bedroom off the kitchen, a dark and wood-paneled room with a single window we’ve never opened. Instead, I take his hand from where it rests on my cheek and lead him.
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