Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “You let me know if you need anything,” Sergeant Petroski says when the elevator reaches the first floor. He steps out, not looking back, and takes his post at the checkout point as five men file in through the main doors.

  So. Lorenzo and I aren’t the only ones working today. Quelle fucking surprise.

  I continue down to the basement, every second feeling like another step on a journey to hell. Inside the lab, Lorenzo is sitting before two cages of mice, studying paperwork.

  “Group One,” he says quietly.

  He doesn’t need to say anything. The cage labeled ONE is a circus of frisky rodents, chattering and squeaking, milling about their little mouse community as if they’re at a church social. The second cage holds a dozen lifeless creatures, their furry bodies already stiffening with rigor.

  I hate myself for giving them names.

  Mice don’t have the capacity for language, but we didn’t need them to, not for this final test. Because of Lin’s previous work—thankfully—I didn’t have to take part in the ape experiments of two years ago; we already isolated the neurolinguistic components of our serum. The mice today serve a single purpose: to test the two neuroproteins Lorenzo developed. None of us wants to inject a human subject with a toxin.

  But, of course, this is exactly what will happen.

  I sit next to Lorenzo and slide one of the blank lab reports from his pile toward me. In small letters, I write one word in the top corner of the sheet, covering it over with my other hand:

  Bioweapon.

  As soon as he’s read it, I crumple the page and take it through the internal door to the biochem lab. Lorenzo follows, and together we watch the paper turn yellow, then black, as it disintegrates in the blue flame of a Bunsen burner.

  “You’re sure?” he says, twisting the sink tap open and staring at the ashes.

  “No, but it makes sense.” I tell him about my conversation with Morgan upstairs. “Think about it, Enzo. Project Anti-Wernicke, Project Wernicke, and Project Water Solubility. Injections take time—rounding people up, training the medical techs. That would give them a chance to escape. Spike a city’s water supply, though, and you might as well drop a neutron bomb.” I snap my fingers. “Bang. But without the sound.”

  “That’s insane,” Lorenzo says.

  “So is Reverend Carl. And by the way,” I say, wiping down the epoxy resin counter, getting rid of all traces of burned paper before we call Morgan downstairs, “our fearless leader wants the trials scheduled for tomorrow.”

  “They’re moving fast.”

  “Yes. They are.”

  I let Lorenzo call Morgan on the intercom so I don’t have to talk to the son of a bitch any more than absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, I prep vials of the first neuroprotein serum and fill out the day’s report. The mice—the dead ones—I lock inside a freezer so Lin can work her postmortem magic on them when she gets here.

  If Lin ever gets here.

  “She didn’t say anything to you yesterday, did she?” I ask when Lorenzo is off the intercom.

  He shakes his head. “Only that she was going to meet a friend for dinner.”

  “Which friend?”

  “You remember Isabel?”

  “How could I forget?” I say.

  Isabel Gerber used to hang about our department when she wasn’t teaching advanced Spanish conversation. Argentine, but of Swiss descent, she stood a foot taller than Lin, wore her hair in a blond waterfall down her back, and spoke with a slight and charming lisp. The two women were poster girls for polar opposites, but they clicked in every way a couple can click.

  Until last year, when they cut it off, canceled their engagement, and did what every gay man and woman had to do to avoid being shipped off to a camp: they never spoke to each other again. Not that there was a hell of a lot to talk about once Lin’s and Isabel’s wrist counters went on.

  “I hope they’re being careful,” I say. The thought of Lin, big brained and small bodied, working off her sins of the flesh with her bare hands, makes me cringe. Jackie could deal with that shit. But Lin’s not Jackie. And then another, more sinister, thought weasels its way in: what if we’re all being followed?

  I shake the question from my head—there’s no room for any more thoughts, not one single neuron left to spare—and wash dead mouse off my hands while we wait for Morgan.

  “So. Monday,” Lorenzo says. He’s not talking about work.

  “Monday. Afternoon.”

  The clock on the lab wall says five. I have less than forty-eight hours to make what I know will be an irreversible decision.

  My parents, this baby the size of an orange inside me, and Lorenzo balance on one side of the scale. Patrick and the kids, on the other. Two seemingly inevitable but different fates hang over each choice like storm clouds. Stay and wait for Reverend Carl to ratchet up his terrible game, or go and watch Europe crumble to its knees, close-up, front row, best seats in the house.

  Next to me, Lorenzo inches closer, enough so that our hands touch. It’s a solid feeling, those fingers of his brushing mine.

  But it’s not enough.

  FIFTY-SIX

  It’s nearly seven o’clock by the time I pull my Honda into the driveway. The sky is still light enough that I can’t imagine winter or the darkness it brings. At this time of year, I always fool myself into thinking winter won’t come.

  But it will. It always does.

  Patrick has told Sonia and the twins a white lie, although I’m not sure how white it is, which explains why they’re in the middle of three simultaneous board games instead of moping about Steven’s absence. Sonia breaks away from her brothers to hug me. “I’m winning!” she says. “Again!”

  I raise an eyebrow at Patrick.

  “I said he went to stay with a friend for a couple of days,” he tells me, then glances over at the kids and their forest of plastic pieces. “Sam, Leo, watch your sister. Your mom and I are going outside for a few minutes.”

  “We are?” I say.

  “We are. Here, Jean.” He hands me the bottle of beer he’s just popped the cap off of. “You might need this.”

  Jean. Not “babe” or “hon,” but “Jean.” Patrick’s in business mode. Or he’s pissed off, which makes sense. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve committed two crimes. Maybe more, if I throw in tampering with the mail.

  “Come on.” He opens the back door and leads me as far from the house as possible. “Got anything you want to tell me?”

  I swallow, not sure which is worse—stealing the project envelope and reading it, or spending half of the afternoon with Lorenzo. Or, I think, being two and a half months pregnant. Don’t forget that one, Jean.

  He brushes a stray lock of hair from his forehead. “Look. I know you were in my office.”

  “I wanted to FaceTime my father,” I lie.

  “Nice try, babe, but no. I checked the call log on the kitchen phone.”

  Well. If nothing else, we’re back to “babe.”

  He sits down on one side of the bench, pulling me to join him. I back away. “I’m not going to bite, you know,” he says.

  Automatically, my right hand moves up to my collar, and I tug the material closer around my neck. Just in case I’ve brought home any souvenirs from the crab shack. “Okay,” I say, and sit next to him.

  “I saw a man executed once,” he says, staring straight ahead into the thicket of azaleas now past their late-spring flush of color. “It was last September. September first, actually. At two twenty-three in the afternoon.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I ask the first question that pops into mind. “You remember the time? The exact time?”

  “Yeah. I never saw a man—or woman—die before that. Hell, I never saw an animal die. Kinda sticks in your brain, you know? Anyway, he was from my office. One of the junior scientists, worked on liaisons
between the administration and the other organizations, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, NIMH, stuff like that. He was always throwing out those acronyms, Jimbo was. His name was Jim Borden, but we all called him Jimbo. Good guy. Had a young wife and a girl about Sonia’s age, maybe a year younger. He liked to tell jokes. That’s what I remember about him. Isn’t that funny, Jean?”

  It isn’t, but I say it is.

  Patrick takes a swallow of beer and smacks his lips. “The other funny thing, Jimbo was always blinking. I mean, like the way you blink when you’ve got a stray eyelash or a fleck of dust. He would do it in threes. Blink, blink, blink. Not to everyone, but I’d catch him at it every so often. Ever see anyone do that?”

  I nod.

  “Yeah. So, Jimbo kept his head down most of the time, shuffling around papers and making copies. Every afternoon, around three, he’d leave the office saying he had a meeting with some guy across town. He’d pack up his briefcase and walk right out the door. I don’t know if anyone noticed, not at first, but when he came back, that briefcase seemed lighter. You could tell by watching the way he swung it. I never said anything about that. Not to anyone.”

  My beer is warm now, and I don’t want it. I set the bottle down on the flagstone and turn back to Patrick. “But someone caught him.”

  “Someone always catches them, babe. Always. Sooner or later, you fuck up.” There’s a pause, and then: “I don’t mean you. I mean ‘you,’ like, in the general sense.” He pats my hand, and all I notice is how clean his hands are. “He must have seen it coming. Jimbo, that is. Because the week before they shot him, he came to me. Asked if I was as pure as the rest of them.” Patrick laughs lightly, but there’s no humor in it. “Guess I don’t look like a bad guy, eh?”

  “No. You don’t.” I’ve never thought of Patrick as a bad guy, only a keep-your-head-down-and-shut-up kind of guy. But I don’t say this. I know where the conversation is going.

  “Jimbo left something for me, before they took him out of the office in handcuffs. Just a name and a number. Said it was my decision whether to make contact or not, and that he hoped I would but wouldn’t hold it against me if I stepped aside. That’s how I got in touch with Del. You saw what happened to Del this morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll shoot him, you know. Like they shot Jim Borden. They put us in a bus, Jean. Well, two buses. Drove us up to Fort Meade, not saying a word about where we were headed. Some team-building exercise was the rumor. I can still see him. I see him every single day at two twenty-three in the afternoon. Jimbo there, cuffed to a post, staring out at all of us as Reverend Carl read the scripture. Glory, glory fucking hallelujah, we’ve got a fox in the henhouse, men, and there’s only one way to deal with a prying fox. Thomas—you remember Thomas—well, it was that son of a bitch who did the shooting. No trial, no jury of peers, no last request. They just fucking shot him, there in the rifle range of Fort Meade. I watched Jimbo go down, slump down the pole he was cuffed to, watched him bleed out life onto a patch of sand that was already stained red.”

  Patrick leans over, picks up my beer, and swallows it down in one long gulp. “Anyway, that’s why I didn’t tell you. When they come for me, it’s better if you don’t know anything.” When. Not if.

  “But I do now,” I say.

  “I guess you do, babe. I guess you do.”

  “Steven?” I don’t want to ask the question, but I can’t help myself. “If he makes it up to North Dakota and they find him—”

  Instead of answering, Patrick folds himself forward, head buried in his hands.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  There’s no love tonight, but there is.

  We put three children to bed and silently make a wish for Steven, that he turns back before it’s too late. Then Patrick takes me to bed, wrapping himself around me.

  “You need to get out,” he says. “Any way you can.”

  “I can’t,” I say, even though I can.

  “You know someone, don’t you? That Italian who worked in your department.”

  So this is what it’s like, having my own husband sanction my affair.

  I get out of bed and take Patrick’s hand. “Let’s have a drink.”

  On the way to the kitchen, I still haven’t fleshed out the story, not the whole story, not the end of the story, but I know how it begins. And it might as well begin with the truth. I take out two glasses and pour an inch of neat scotch into Patrick’s, a full measure of water into mine.

  “No grappa tonight?” he says.

  Everything is about to spill out: that first day in Lorenzo’s office with the music box, when I watched his long musician’s fingers and imagined them playing over my skin. The oldness I felt seeing Steven, only a baby yesterday, rush into his teens. Boredom after so many years of the same man, the same sex. Finally, my anger at Patrick’s passiveness, the meeting with Lorenzo after bumping into him at Eastern Market. The baby. My new passport.

  Except, before I talk, I think.

  I think all of these things, imagining the words bouncing off the tiled walls of our kitchen. In reality, there is no perpetual motion; all energy eventually gets absorbed, morphs into a different shape, changes state. But these words that I’m about to unleash, they’ll never be absorbed. Each syllable, each morpheme, each individual sound, will bounce and ricochet forever in this house. We’ll carry them with us like that cartoon character who’s always surrounded by his own dirt cloud. Patrick will feel them prick like invisible, poisonous darts.

  The way things turn out, I don’t have to say anything at all.

  “I think you should go with him,” Patrick says at last, as if he’s seen the whole story in my eyes. “With the Italian.”

  I should be relieved, I think, that I didn’t have to say the words. Instead, I’m sick from having to hear Patrick say them, sick realizing his knowledge of who I am comes not from prying, but from years of intimacy. His voice is cold; an artificial chill sharpens its edges. I reach out and lay my hand on his arm, and two things happen.

  His own hand covers mine. He also turns away.

  We stand there, a middle-aged married couple in a kitchen, a frying pan from dinner soaking in the sink, the coffee maker ready to go into action when morning comes. Everything about this tableau is normal, the simple routine of a life together.

  Finally, he breaks away. It’s nothing, really, only Patrick turning to busy himself by wiping a stray crumb from the counter or by checking the soaking pan. And at the same time, that break is everything. When he turns back to me, the V in his forehead seems deeper, almost branded onto his skin.

  “Take Sonia,” he says quietly. “I’ll stay with the boys and figure out something.”

  “Patrick, I’m—”

  Now it’s his turn to console, and the hand he lays on me feels like a weight. “Don’t, Jean. I’d rather leave things”—he sighs—“I don’t know. I guess I’d rather we not go into it all. It’s bad enough knowing. Okay?”

  I have no idea what to say to this, so I push all the pain somewhere dark, to be taken out and dealt with later, to feel the sting on my own, in my private time. For now, Patrick doesn’t need to know about the baby. “What will you do?”

  “I said I’ll figure out something.” The V that I didn’t think could deepen further does just that.

  “Like what? You know what they’re planning, don’t you? A new serum, a goddamned water-soluble serum. How long do you think we’ll last in Italy—or anywhere—before the whole goddamned world turns Pure Blue?”

  He doesn’t have an answer.

  But I do. I don’t need Patrick and his political insight to tell me what I already know. All those smiles and nods and How about some coffee, Jean? in Morgan’s office aren’t fooling me. I’m as disposable as an empty lipstick tube, or I will be the moment we test the new serum. The lab will keep me on, for a wh
ile, until we’ve established a successful track record, until they’re sure I’m no longer needed. It will happen like this:

  I’ll be in my office, maybe seated at the desk with no phone, maybe standing at the wall that should have a window but doesn’t. Morgan will knock at the door, only a perfunctory little rap, because I can’t prevent him from entering, from penetrating my space. My office door is lacking a lock.

  “Dr. McClellan,” Morgan will say, possibly stressing the title, either because he’s tired of having to use it or because he’s relieved he won’t have to use it anymore. “Would you please come with me?”

  This will not be an invitation.

  We’ll walk down the corridor of offices, Morgan stretching his short legs to keep one pace in front of me. Whether this is a gesture of leadership, or whether he doesn’t want to look me in the eye, I won’t know, but I’ll guess it has something to do with both.

  I’ll ask Morgan where we’re going. Another meeting? Did he find a flaw in the serum? What I’ll want to say, but won’t, is I’m next, aren’t I?

  If I leave now with Lorenzo, I’ll become Grazia Francesca Rossi. I’ll shop in fruit markets and at butchers’, visit my parents, make love to a man who’s my husband on paper only. One day, maybe in a few weeks or months, after I’ve come back from a pleasant walk around the streets of old Rome, I’ll have a glass of water in my own kitchen, as I’m doing now.

  Jackie’s words come back to me, trite but true.

  It all ends, Jeanie. Sooner or later.

  “Water,” I say to Patrick.

  He pours me another glass, misunderstanding. But then, I’ve only just figured it out myself.

  “What would you do to get rid of all of them?” I say. “To go back to the way things were.”

  Again, I hear Jackie:

  Think about what you need to do to stay free.

  Patrick swallows the last of his scotch, considers the bottle, and pours another finger. I have to take it from him before whisky spills all over the counter—that’s how badly his normally steady hands are shaking.