Super fucked-up, I decide. Either way, I lose.
The main door hisses open and shut again, and footsteps echo through the empty lab. The mice squeak at the intrusion into their space.
“Enzo?”
But it isn’t Lorenzo. The intruder is Morgan, and behind him a young man dressed in orderly’s scrubs wheels Mrs. Ray into the room.
She looks much older than the last time I saw her.
Steven, now on a fool’s mission to find his girl, was still struggling with multiplication tables when Delilah Ray came to the house with her plans for my garden. America’s first black president had taken the keys, and Mrs. Ray was in high form, all talk of politics and hope and how “it was about time, darlin’, this country got on the right track.” She always called me “darlin’” in that sweet Southern way of hers.
Until she had the stroke.
It happened not long before the hopeful president handed over his keys to a new man, the one Mrs. Ray would never refer to as a darlin’ or hopeful or charismatic, or anything else on the positive end of her rich vocabulary’s spectrum.
When I called that day to ask about a problem with one of my rosebushes, her son answered and gave me the news. I can still hear the hope in his voice, feel the breathless, wordless optimism hanging between us like a storm cloud as I outlined my research.
“What if it doesn’t work?” Del said. “What if my mother still speaks in riddles and nonwords?”
“Then we’ll try again,” I said. “And we’ll keep trying.”
That was when he mentioned money. I told him not even to think about it; there would be no fee.
I turn to my first human subject now, an old woman in a wheelchair gazing around the white emptiness of the lab. “How are you, Mrs. Ray?” I say, knowing she won’t interpret this as anything but a string of unfamiliar words.
Delilah Ray, the botanist who designed my garden and talked politics and pie recipes, looks up at me through a veil of confusion and noncomprehension. “Fine twinkles, today. Cookie for your thoughts and when the Red Sox gossiping and galloping, I don’t know. There’s going to be hypertension!” Her speech is fluid and unencumbered and meaningless.
I hope to change this.
Looking back, I can never recall whether I expected success or failure, but in my dreams I’ve always imagined the old woman’s first words that would hold real meaning since her stroke. As I fill the syringe with fluid from the single vial, I realize my hands are shaking.
“Here. Let me.” It’s Lorenzo. I was so lost in my memories, I didn’t hear him come into the lab.
He takes the vial and syringe from me and expertly draws out the prescribed quantity of serum, according to Lin’s instructions. He taps it twice with the knuckle of his first finger and holds it up to the light.
I look a question at him.
Lorenzo nods to Morgan, signaling that it’s time. As the orderly wheels Mrs. Ray into the room I’ve prepared, Lorenzo takes my arm. And he shakes his head no.
The Gold team—whoever they are—have the serum and the formulas.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s get to it.”
“I have tickets,” he says quietly.
“Tickets for what?” Morgan has poked his nose out of Mrs. Ray’s room.
“For the symphony next weekend,” Lorenzo lies. “Beethoven, you know. Hard to get if you’re not on the A-list.”
“Well, I don’t care about your A-list or your symphony,” Morgan says. “We’re waiting in here, and I have other meetings.”
“Sure you do, Morgan. Big wheel like you,” Lorenzo says. He’s almost snarling.
I put away thoughts of flight, at least for now, and walk into the sterile room with Lorenzo close behind me. Mrs. Ray is regarding Thumper with a quizzical look, as if she’s remembering something.
“Beauty is as beauty does and crops of corn. So silly,” she says.
The orderly reaches down and gives her a reassuring pat on the back. Morgan smirks. Lorenzo and I exchange a look.
I know what he’s thinking: an entire city, country, continent, of this. A modern-day Tower of Babel, except instead of being caused by some invisible deity, the confusion will happen at the hand of a very visible man, one who enjoys being on television and who has tasted the power that comes with millions of blind followers but still wants more. One who has no idea of the hell he’s about to unleash.
Reverend Carl Corbin must be insane, truly insane. Has he thought ahead to the inevitable outcome? Does he realize the havoc, not only in Europe, but everywhere, his plot will wreak? Supply chains—gone. Banks and stock markets—gone. Mass transit, any transit, really, other than foot traffic and the occasional horse—gone. Factories—gone. Within weeks, most of the world’s population will die of hunger or dehydration or violence. The ones who are left will be eking life out in a twisted Little House on the Prairie existence, building from the ground up, one haystack and corn silo at a time.
Maybe that’s what he wants, though. Maybe Carl Corbin and his Pure Blue followers aren’t as insane as all that. They certainly aren’t too insane to wield the strings from which President Myers dances.
“We’re ready, Jean,” Lorenzo says, holding out the syringe. “You do the honors.”
I take it from him, inspect the fluid for any remaining bubbles of air—such a necessary substance, unless it happens to work its way into Mrs. Ray’s cerebral circulation—and remove the plastic cap.
Morgan licks his lips as I insert the needle into the catheter, holding my breath, and steadily depress the plunger.
“You’ll be fine, Mrs. Ray,” I say.
The room has become a sauna, heavy and hot and airless.
Beside me, Lorenzo starts a stopwatch, and we wait, all eyes on the woman in the wheelchair.
It seems hours, but I’m told only ten minutes have passed when Delilah Ray checks the catheter, rubs at a spot on the left side of her graying head, and turns to the plexiglass box holding Thumper. “What a lovely rabbit that is,” she says. “A cottontail. Used to have a whole warren full of them when I was a girl.”
The air in the room clears like the tropics after a monsoon.
SIXTY-TWO
I feel like celebrating. Or dancing. Or turning cartwheels down the empty hall of the lab. I feel like champagne and chocolate and fireworks.
I feel, just a little, like a god.
Also, I feel my life may be over.
Morgan leaves us after a brief conversation on his phone, most of which involves references to “my team” and “my project” and “my work.” He’s still smirking as he walks past us and out the lab’s main doors, calling for the orderly to pick up his pace and take Mrs. Ray back to her nursing home. Morgan, of course, has more work to do.
“So,” I say, turning to Lorenzo, “I guess that’s it.”
“Not necessarily.” His eyes move to the refrigerated cabinet where six vials, all labeled with the red X of death, remain.
“No way,” I whisper.
“It’s the only way,” he says, and the very words I spoke to Patrick last night play over in my head, a broken record of Would you kill?
“We’ll never get them out of here.”
He opens the refrigerator door and slides out the tray with the deadly neuroproteins, the poison that, even in the smallest of quantities, killed a dozen mice. “We only need one, Gianna.”
I check the clock on the lab wall. Both hands point straight up. When I came in this morning, Sergeant Petroski was on duty at the security station. He yawned, said hello, and yawned again. If he was up all night, the only ally I have in this building will be at home, sleeping off a graveyard shift.
All right. On to plan B.
Except I don’t have a plan B.
Or maybe I do.
There’s a closet-sized washroom off the main lab
, nothing more than a five-by-five square of tile with a toilet, a sink, and one of those hand dryers that roar like twin jet engines and make the skin on your hands stretch into a taut, science-fictiony special effect. I lean over the fridge, pluck one of the vials from its tray, and wedge it into the front of my bra, then take a single surgical glove—the kind with no powder—from the dispenser on the counter.
“Be right back,” I say, blowing air into the glove. After considering what I’m about to do, I take two more and head in the direction of the washroom.
Lorenzo raises an eyebrow.
“Six vials, right?” I say, and hear a cabinet opening behind me, followed by the running of water from the lab sink’s tap.
The soldiers never check us over thoroughly when we enter the building in the morning or when we leave it at night. They’re men, after all. Perhaps, after a year of not having to worry about mouthy women and girl power and female wiles, perhaps after so long in their men’s world, they’ve forgotten our secrets, our ways of hiding small cylindrical objects. Perhaps, after all this time of our silence, even their suspicions have lapsed into nothing.
I check the vial’s stopper five times before I’m satisfied it’s secure, then fit the tube inside the latex finger of one glove, tie a knot before trimming the excess bulk, and repeat the process with the next two gloves. The end result is a wad of blue latex, not exactly cylindrical anymore, and not small, but likely leakproof. What the hell, I think. I’ve had four baby heads the size of Nerf balls pass through me. I can stand some minor discomfort for the next hour.
Once I’ve straightened myself out and blown my hands dry, I rejoin Lorenzo in the lab. He gives me a single warning look, and Poe steps toward me. For some reason, he seems even larger when I’m standing up.
“Problem, Dr. McClellan?” Poe says.
“Only if you lower my daily quota on bathroom visits.”
Poe has no response to this, but after checking each room in the lab and stopping to regard Thumper in his plexiglass cage, he turns to us. “Follow me.”
“We’re not done here,” I say. “Are we, Enzo?” The look I give him is hard and unmistakably a different question.
“We’re done,” he says.
Poe snoops around for another five minutes, and I hold my breath as he opens the storage refrigerator and spends more time than I think is necessary counting the vials. Then he leads us through the lab doors and down the corridor and presses the up button on the elevator. “Key cards, please.” He holds out one meaty hand.
“That’s it?” I say, pulling the lanyard over my head. It gets stuck in my hair, and Poe reaches over to untangle it. His hand brushes my temple and sends a shiver through me. He’s ice-cold.
I think of Del again, and Sharon, and their three girls. For the oddest of reasons, I wonder who’s feeding the animals on the Rays’ farm.
Once, when he was more child than man, Steven asked me if animals had language.
“No,” I said.
“Do they think?”
“No.”
He’d read a book about bees in school and showed it to me one afternoon in the kitchen. That was when Steven, not Sonia, wanted hot cocoa every day at four o’clock.
“It says that bees can go find pollen and then come back to the hive and tell the other bees where the pollen is.” He read part of the chapter aloud. “The bee dance is like a language. So there.”
I checked over the book, examining the bio of one of the authors. She was an apiarist with a long line of credentials, none of which had much to do with linguistics. “So there, nothing,” I said. “Yes, the bees dance. They do a little ‘Hey, guys! Here’s the good pollen!’ sort of a jig. But that’s it, kiddo. Tie their wings down and make them walk back to the hive, and they’re giving directions to the nearest rock. What bees have is communication, and only a specialized form of it. That’s not language. Only humans have language.”
“What about Koko the gorilla?” His book was cowritten by a team of animal experts.
“Koko’s terrific and she knows a few hundred signs, but she still doesn’t do what your brothers can.” Sam and Leo were four at the time. Koko was forty-five.
Steven took his textbook and went to his room to sulk. Another bubble burst, I thought. It’s pleasant to imagine our four- and two-legged friends have a linguistic mechanism of their own. Maybe that’s why people keep searching for proof. But it isn’t true.
Here, in the elevator, I find myself wishing it were.
“That’s it,” Poe says when we reach the first floor. “You can collect your laptops. They’ve been scrubbed.”
Lorenzo and I collect our bags. He’s allowed to take his coffee maker, but nothing else, from his office before Poe closes the door and leads us out to security. Everything is the same: two soldiers, one X-ray machine for our bags, and zero smiles now that Sergeant Petroski is off duty. One by one, we’re frisked, our pockets are searched, and the soldier working me over spends an unpleasant amount of extra time on my crotch and cleavage. From the look on Lorenzo’s face, he’s getting the same treatment down below.
Every possibility runs through my mind now. Full-body search. Anonymous hands—only obeying orders, ma’am—roaming over me, sliding into places they don’t belong, finding the latex-wrapped vial. What’s this, Jean? Morgan will say. I see myself on a thousand television screens, a surprise performance interrupting a news segment, a documentary on Bengal tigers, a cartoon. Me, next to Reverend Carl as he reads off another chapter and verse, as camera flashes blind me, as my scalp burns from the sting of a sloppy razor job. I see the horror in Patrick’s eyes as he’s bused to Fort Meade and forced to stand at attention while my blood mixes with the remains of Jimbo and Del and Sharon and god knows who else. Maybe my own son.
Instead, we’re shown the door.
“Nothing like a little Here’s your hat—what’s your hurry?” I say when we’re out in the late-afternoon light.
Poe watches us walk toward our cars. If he hears what I’ve said, I don’t know, but he calls out after us. “Leave. And don’t come back here.” He disappears inside the building, hands stuffed into his pockets. I think I see him sigh.
SIXTY-THREE
I use Lorenzo’s phone to call Patrick and tell him I’m on my way home. Lorenzo, of course, still has a cell phone; I don’t.
You would if you were in Italy, kiddo, I tell myself, but push the thought out of my head. I can’t think about that right now. I can’t think about anything except getting into my car and getting this poison out of my body.
“So,” Lorenzo says, taking hold of my left wrist, stroking the old burn with his thumb. “I have to get out, you know. While there’s still time.”
“I know.”
He breaks away and opens the passenger door of his car. From the glove compartment, he removes a slim envelope and hands it to me. “This is for you.”
It feels like a passport, and something else, something flat and hard. A smartphone is my best guess.
“Give me a second,” I say.
I pull the door closed and hitch up my skirt, ridding myself of the latex-wrapped package and stowing it in one of Sonia’s pastel sippy cups. She’s outgrown them, but juice in a plastic cup has always been a happy alternative to juice all over the Honda’s windshield. The lid snaps closed and I breathe easily again.
“Jean!” Morgan is running toward us, arms out, frantic. The soldier behind him takes measured strides, arms relaxed—except for the slight crook at the left elbow and the splayed hand poised too close to his service weapon. He’s a picture of military discipline. It’s a good thing for Morgan he wasn’t around during the draft era. The kid would probably die in his first foxhole. If, that is, his platoon didn’t get to him first.
Lorenzo’s envelope goes under my car seat, as if someone else’s hand is obeying instructions from a foreign brain. I don�
�t think about it, only reach down automatically, sliding the evidence out of sight before Morgan, now at my window, catches me with the passport of Lorenzo’s dead wife. I don’t know what the penalty is for carrying forged identification, and I’m not at all eager to find out.
The serum, unfortunately, has to stay where it is for a while longer.
“We need you back inside,” Morgan says.
“Why?” I say, starting the Honda’s engine and faking ignorance. “If I forgot something, I’ll get it tomorrow. I haven’t seen my kids all weekend.” Only then does it occur to me why I’m wanted back inside. The project’s over, and so is my reprieve from silence.
Morgan reaches into my window with one small pink hand. At the same time, Lorenzo steps in between us. “Let her go,” Lorenzo says.
The soldier hasn’t moved, except to draw his service weapon. I know shit about guns, but I know enough to understand where this could end up if I don’t take some control. Fast.
“Enzo. You need to leave,” I say, seeing in his eyes that he’s got zero intention of moving from his position between the steadiness of that steel barrel and my open window. He proves my point.
“Neither of you is leaving,” Morgan says.
The clock on my dashboard takes an eternity to turn from one thirty-six to one thirty-seven.
“Okay.” I take my hands off the steering wheel. “Okay. I’m turning the car off.” With my left hand still in the air, I kill the Honda’s engine with my right. “Okay? Can I get out now?”
Morgan, who has squirmed as far from the line of fire as possible, signals to the soldier, and the gun moves down slightly. It does not go back into its holster as I open the car door.
Morgan leads our four-person parade across the parking lot. I take little comfort in knowing Lorenzo is a few paces behind me, a vulnerable shield between several rounds of ammunition and my own body. We’re waved through the security checkpoint and herded into an elevator. This time, instead of hitting the button for the basement floor, Morgan inserts his key card and presses SB. Sub-basement.
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