Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  I meet Lorenzo’s eyes, my own filled with questions mixed with fear mixed with defeat, as the door slides open. He puts a hand on the small of my back, steadying me, and we follow Morgan out the door, the soldier still and quiet, but very definitely present, behind us.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  If our own lab and office floors were lonely tombs, the sub-basement is a buzzing hive of activity. Cubicles housing two men each sit crammed side by side, their flimsy shoulder-height walls allowing no privacy, only constant observation by the uniformed guards patrolling the corridors. I count twelve of them, each as devoid of any outward signs of jocularity as the man now walking behind me, close enough for me to get a whiff of some sickeningly sweet aftershave, tobacco, and burnt coffee. Not a single cubicle occupant raises his head as we move by; their heads are down, poring over stacks of Excel charts and handwritten formulas, or staring blankly at computer screens.

  There must be fifty people in this windowless, airless room. Some of them—most of them—are young, barely out of college.

  I pause and peer into one of the cubicles, thinking I recognize Lin’s handwriting. Morgan snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Eyes ahead, Jean.”

  The aftershave, tobacco, and coffee mixture is hot on the back of my neck. Lorenzo’s hand brushes against mine, lingering, reminding me I’m not alone in this.

  We pass through the bank of cubicles and reach the far end of the hive. Morgan inserts his key card into another slot, and double doors open to a room not different from the rodent and rabbit den one floor above us. Here, instead of squeaking mice and sniffing cottontails, the cages house primates. Great apes, to be specific. Three rows of wire doors line the walls to my right and left, each labeled with an identification number and four rows of data: age, species, date of experiment, overseeing technician. The hoots and grunts of chimpanzees as we enter are deafening.

  But this isn’t what bothers me.

  Three-quarters of the cages are empty. Labels remain on their doors: BONOBO, GORILLA, ORANGUTAN—three of the five great apes. The screeching chimpanzees make four, and half of them are already gone.

  I swallow drily and look over at Lorenzo, who is pale enough to blend in with the lab’s white walls. Of course he is; he’s thinking the same thought I am.

  They’re working their way through the apes, one species at a time, and they’ve saved the chimps, the closest human relative, for last.

  Or next to last. There’s a fifth great ape not in the cages, not yet, one they haven’t gotten around to. All the blood in my veins chills to ice.

  The fifth species of great ape is us. Human.

  My knees buckle, and I stumble to my left, hurtling into the cage of Experiment Number 412, a male chimpanzee that must outweigh me by seventy-five pounds. Lin’s repeated warnings sound in my head like a klaxon.

  “Never, Jean, and I mean never, get close to them. We have techs and handlers for that. Don’t feed them, don’t try to pet them, don’t even get within spitting distance of the cages. Stay in the middle. These guys have a reach of three feet, and, believe me, they’re not cute,” Lin said on our first tour of the lab, a few months after her grant funding came through and allowed us to purchase two chimps.

  “They look cute,” I said. “Check that one out.” Mason, a four-foot-tall diaper-clad male, was sucking on a Popsicle in a nearby cage.

  “Wait until he bares his canines, honey,” Lin said. “These guys are time bombs with no set timer. A pro wrestler couldn’t hold one still if he tried. You ever hear of Charla Nash?”

  I shook my head. “Do I want to?”

  “No. Tell you what, you think about that Hannibal Lecter dude. Think about what he did to that nice nurse when they forgot to put the weird hockey mask on him. Compared to a chimp, Lecter’s harmless as a kitten under anesthesia. And you’ll never know what hit you.”

  What hits me now is a swat to the face and the bitter taste of iron on my lips. Part of my scalp—the part Number 412 is pulling with the force of a monster truck in a redneck tractor-pull contest—has been either set on fire or pierced with the ugly end of a pickax. My knees sing high C when bone meets tile as two opposing forces act on me: gravity drawing me down, the chimp trying to heave me up by my hair.

  Lorenzo’s voice, faint and far away, calls out. “Do something, for fuck’s sake. Do something!”

  Is he talking to me? I reach up to the fire on my head, and a hand that’s not a hand but a claw grabs it with a vise grip. Charla Nash, Charla Nash, Charla Nash, I think, the name screaming inside me along with pictures of her missing eyes, her hands that looked as if they’d been fed into a meat grinder, the gash in her face where a mouth should be.

  A single shot buzzes in the air over my head, and I float down.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  I’m not unconscious. If I were, I wouldn’t feel fingers working their way through my tangled hair, putting out the fire of pain. I wouldn’t be adding zoos and safaris and childhood fantasies of Jane Goodall to my list of things never to think about again. I wouldn’t hear Morgan yelling like a petulant child who has just had his pacifier plucked from his mouth.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” he says.

  I open my eyes and see the soldier, gun hand still trembling after what might have been his first kill, looking from me to Lorenzo to Morgan to the dead Number 412 in the cage above me. Before he can answer, Morgan opens his mouth again.

  “That’s just terrific. Just great. You idiot. I should put you in one of these cages, except you don’t have enough of a brain for me to work with. Do you know how much these animals cost?”

  “Apparently more than I do, Morgan,” I say.

  “Christ.” He turns to Lorenzo. “What’s the damage?”

  Lorenzo has unworked the chimp’s fingers from my hair and lays me on the tiled floor as he inspects the gash on my face. A trickle of hot blood runs into my mouth. “Does that hurt?” he says, prodding at a spot near my temple.

  Hurt? No. It feels like I’ve been dragged across coarse sandpaper. It burns. “Yeah,” I say, moving my hand up to the injury.

  “No, you don’t. I need to clean this. Morgan, get me a first aid kit.”

  “How am I supposed to know where they keep the first aid crap? I’m a project manager.”

  “You’re a shit project manager, Morgan,” Lorenzo says. “You’re a lousy scientist and a poor researcher and if I ever get you alone, I’m going to tear you apart one bone at a time. For now, start looking. Try the cabinet in the corner marked with a red cross.” Under his breath, he says, “Asshole.”

  “Am I okay?” I say, wanting to touch my face, make sure everything is still where it’s supposed to be.

  “Better than okay,” Lorenzo says. “And, Morgan, when you find that kit, call a doctor.”

  Morgan’s shoes cross back until they’re so close I can almost see my reflection in them. “No can do. This is a secure facility, in case you missed that.”

  Lorenzo ignores him as he bathes the right side of my face with peroxide and fixes a clean bandage over the wound that runs from my hairline to the corner of my mouth. “Surface scratches, mostly. Can you stand?”

  “I think so.” The lab, with its remaining chimps, comes into focus. “What’s going on, Morgan?” I say.

  He’s all business now, my near brush as the victim of a rogue primate forgotten. “We need you back to work.”

  “Doing what? You said we were done. That hired thug called Poe said we were done. You scrubbed our files.”

  I wait while Morgan studies his shoelaces.

  “Follow me,” he says.

  We leave the animal containment room and go through another set of doors. Inside, a replica of the basement lab hums with activity. No one, apparently, heard my screams. Or the shot.

  Or maybe they did, and don’t care.

  It takes a few sec
onds before I see the gold emblems on their lab coats and the small gold squares on the key cards that hang around all the men’s necks. Here, as in the cubicle-cramped room outside, everyone keeps his head down and soldiers patrol the aisles.

  “Welcome to the Gold team,” Morgan says, sounding more like a game show host than a scientist. No surprise—the man can’t find a first aid kit when it’s staring him in the face. He leads us to four square feet of unoccupied lab top and pauses, waiting for us to sit.

  “Okay, Morgan. I’ll bite,” I say. “What the hell is this?”

  “This is your new team.” He stretches an arm out. And you can win all these prizes, I hear him say.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will.” Morgan nods to somewhere behind me.

  A man with bifocals as thick as glass brick appears and sets two thick binders on the counter in front of us, each one labeled TOP SECRET in gold lettering. Inside them are most of the data I had on my laptop. Before the bifocal man leaves, I catch another glint of gold on his left fourth finger. Morgan turns to the soldier who shot the chimp—with no time to spare, I think—and issues instructions I can’t make out.

  “Gianna,” Lorenzo says, nudging my elbow. He doesn’t look at me; his eyes are roaming the lab. Then he taps the ring finger on his left hand.

  The stool I’m sitting on is one of those adjustable numbers with a lever below the seat. I reach down and raise it until I can see most of the lab. Men are scratching their heads, twirling mechanical pencils, rubbing tired eyes. Every left hand I can see has a gold wedding band on its fourth finger.

  And every pair of eyes holds fear.

  “They’re not volunteers, Enzo, are they?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh Christ.” Every single man inside this complex is married, maybe has children. “Some incentive,” I say.

  Morgan, now finished lecturing the poor soldier, who looks like he’s seen his last paycheck, comes back to us. “I need a formula, people. By tonight. By tomorrow morning, I need a working serum.”

  “We just gave you the working serum,” I say. “And you have the vials. All five of them.” I steel myself for the Jean, Jean, Jean routine that he does, and grip the edge of the counter with both hands. Better to keep them gripping anything, since what they want to do right now is close around Morgan’s neck. Tight.

  He smiles. “You gave me a working serum, Jean. I want another one.”

  I feign complete ignorance.

  Morgan claps his hands together. “All right. Let me explain this in simple terms. We have an anti-Wernicke process. It works. We all saw Mrs. What’s Her Face make the leap from babbling idiot to bunny-rabbit enthusiast.”

  “Mrs. Ray,” I say. “She has a name.”

  “Whatever. Now we want the same thing, but different.”

  Lorenzo rolls his eyes. “You want semantic opposites, Morgan?”

  If this jab bothers our boss, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he doesn’t get the joke. Morgan never was a shining star in the linguistics universe. “I want the opposite of what you’ve already given me. I want a neuroprotein that induces Wernicke’s aphasia, and I want it by tomorrow. So get to work.”

  Lorenzo speaks first. “What did they promise you, Morgan? A lifetime membership to Washington’s finest girlie club? I didn’t know you could get it up.”

  “Just give me what I want.”

  Every pair of eyes in the lab is now looking at us.

  “No,” I say.

  Morgan leans over until his nose almost touches mine. “Excuse me? I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said, ‘No.’ It’s a negative, Morgan. A denial to your request. The opposite of agreement.”

  For the first time since I’ve known him, Morgan laughs. It’s a titter of a laugh, breathy and hollow. “It isn’t a request, Jean.” He checks his watch, sighs as if this business is taking up more of his valuable time than he anticipated, and calls one of the patrolling soldiers over to our corner of the lab. “Corporal, take these two to Room One and show them what’s inside. When they’ve had a good look, bring them back here.”

  Room 1 is on the other side of the lab, through a set of locked doors, which might hold anything. I try not to think of Orwellian possibilities like rats and snakes. In any case, they’re not my worst fears. My worst fears walk on two legs and have names like Sam and Leo and Sonia. My worst fears are my kids.

  The corporal, dressed in camouflage and combat boots, leads us to the steel doors. With his left hand—he also wears a ring, I notice—he slides a card into the electronic reader and stands aside as the doors slide open, revealing a vestibule and an additional door that remains closed as we leave the lab behind us. Only when the entry slides closed do I realize this space is like a tomb.

  I hate confined spaces, always have.

  Lorenzo reaches over for my hand. His own skin is hot; the entire room is a furnace, and sweat trickles down my face in what has to be rivers of salt, burning me underneath the bandage on my cheek. But I don’t feel warm at all. I feel as if an ice sheet has wrapped itself around me as the corporal steps forward and unlocks the next door.

  Inside, seated on the only furnishing in the room other than a lidless toilet, are three people.

  I think of the great apes, the hominoids. Gorillas and orangutans, bonobos and chimpanzees. And, of course, humans.

  The human on the left speaks my name, my old name, a name I haven’t heard for twenty years. By the second syllable in “Jeanie,” a jolt of pain knocks her back into the steel wall. The sickening thud echoes in the room.

  It sounds like the muffled shot of a gun.

  SIXTY-SIX

  I lunge forward on unsteady feet, but Lorenzo catches me by the arm. His grip is firm, almost bruising.

  “No,” he says. “If she speaks again, the current will—”

  He’s stronger than I am, but I break away, flinging myself at the woman on the bench, whose body sags like a lifeless doll under the harsh overhead lights. She’s not how I remember her, not in low-riding jeans and a crazily printed paisley blouse, not smiling from under a fringe of color-of-the-week hair while she brewed herbal tea in a crappy Georgetown apartment and cursed at the Ikea table instructions that defied minds with multiple degrees. She’s in a gray tunic that matches her hair and the color of her skin, except for the palms of her hands, which have been rubbed as raw as fresh meat from a year of labor that would make even the most stalwart farmer turn his back on the land and find a job pushing paper across a desk. She’s wearing a single black band on her left wrist where a charm bracelet of Chinese horoscope animals used to be.

  “Jacko,” I say, placing one hand over her chapped lips. “Jacko, don’t say anything else. Don’t let them make it worse for you.”

  Jackie Juarez, once the woman who I thought would stop the world, slumps wordlessly into my arms, and sobs.

  The door behind me slides closed, then opens again. I don’t need to turn to check who it is. I can smell the bastard.

  “Morgan,” I say. Then I hear the slap, the surprised whine, the metallic click of a firearm being cocked.

  This is another thing I know about guns: you don’t cock and aim unless you’re ready to kill.

  “Careful, Morgan,” I say, still holding on to Jackie. “You need him. You need his formula.”

  He doesn’t, of course; Morgan already has Lorenzo’s notes. I’m only buying time.

  And then it hits me: Lorenzo, dashing out of the upstairs lab to check his office, coming back and shaking his head to tell me the papers weren’t there. Morgan demanding a formula by tomorrow.

  “Soldier,” Morgan says, “put it away.”

  I turn from Jackie toward Lorenzo, who stands stock-still, ready to take a bullet in exchange for a slap, and I realize Morgan can’t possibly have taken the notes.

  So, who th
e hell did?

  The question stays in my mind, but I tuck it back in a quiet corner for later as I turn to the other women in the cell.

  Lin looks at me, then at Lorenzo. Next to her is the Argentine-Swiss beauty who used to hang out in our department. She’s still a knockout, even without the blond waterfall of hair streaming down her back.

  Isabel Gerber.

  The two of them are in the same drab gray as Jackie, sitting hip to hip, hands folded in their laps. Twin black bands circle their wrists.

  “Caught them making out in a car,” Morgan says. “Fucking dykes.”

  Lin opens her mouth to speak, then rethinks and closes it. The decision process takes all of a second, but it’s there, in her eyes.

  Over my shoulder, I catch Lorenzo’s hands curling into fists. “Don’t do it, Enzo. He’s not worth it.”

  Suddenly I wish I hadn’t left the vial in my car. I’d take it out right now and shove the entire thing down Morgan’s throat, glass and all. Or, better yet, I savor the image of Jackie, Lin, and Isabel locked in a small room with the bastard. A soundproof room, with no windows.

  “So. Ready to work now, people?” Morgan says. “Or do I send one of them up to Fort Meade?”

  The expressions on the women’s faces tell me Morgan has already filled them in, one vivid picture at a time.

  Time, I think. Everything comes down to time in one form or another: The time I didn’t have twenty years ago, when textbooks and orals and qualifying papers were more important than Jackie’s marches and Planned Parenthood tea parties. The twenty-four hours I’ll wait before I find out whether the creature inside me is a boy or a girl. Lorenzo needing to leave “while there’s still time,” although I’m not sure there is still time anymore, not for either of us. Morgan’s hard deadlines. The morning meeting in only eighteen hours.

  The time I slapped Steven. And all the moments I’ll spend wishing I could take it back.