Vox(32)

We haven’t used the sleeper sofa in a year and a half, not since the last houseguest came to visit. No one really visits anymore. There’s no point. We tried it once, a dinner party for some old friends I’d met when Steven was still in diapers, but after an hour of the men talking and the women staring into their plates of salmon, everyone decided to go home.

I pry up the corduroy-covered cushion next to me and slip my red-X folder in among a few cracker crumbs, a stray piece of popcorn, and some spare change.

This “it,” encased in a dull manila folder rubbed shiny by my own hands, is the work that will, when I’m ready, reverse Wernicke’s aphasia. I’ve thought about finding a more permanent hiding place for it, but given the year’s worth of crap I find beneath the sofa cushions, I don’t see the need.

No one, not even Patrick, knows we had passed the brink from “close” to “finished,” although I believe Lin and Lorenzo suspected.

The day before Thomas and his Taser-carrying men came for me the first time, I had been winding down a lecture on linguistic processing in the posterior left hemisphere—the area of the brain where temporal and parietal lobes meet. Wernicke’s area, and the language loss that accompanies damage to this complex cluster of gray matter, was the reason most of my students signed on for this seminar, and on that day the room was packed with colleagues of colleagues, the dean, and a few out-of-town researchers intrigued by our group’s latest breakthrough. Lin and Lorenzo sat in the back row as I talked.

They must have seen the gleam in my eyes when I moved through the slides of brain imagery on the projector, zooming closer to the target area. The serum we would use wasn’t mine. Repairs would happen naturally with the aid of an interleukin-1 receptor antagonist, a drug already widely in use to counter the effects of rheumatoid arthritis, and infant stem cells, which would increase the plasticity of the subject’s brain, encouraging rapid repair and rebuilding. One of my contributions—our contributions—involved pinpointing the exact locus of application without affecting the surrounding areas of cortical tissue and causing further damage.

We had another ace up our sleeves. One Wednesday morning last spring, when the cherry blossoms had exploded into photogenic candy and Washington had begun to flood with its annual onslaught of tourists, Lorenzo pulled me into his office.

Of course, he kissed me. I can still taste the bitter espresso on his lips. Strange how a kiss can turn bitter into sweet.

He kissed deep and hard, as lovers do when kisses are stolen or come with a price, but then he broke away and smiled.

“I’m not done yet,” I said.

His eyes swept up and down, from the widow’s peak on my forehead all the way to my black pumps, the ones I had started wearing to work instead of my more comfy loafers. “Neither am I,” he said. “But first I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I did like Lorenzo’s surprises. I still do.

While I floated down from my kissing high, he pushed files and journal articles aside on the desk until he landed on whatever he was looking for. “Here. Check the numbers for me.”

The stats looked good. Fine p values showed significance; solid chi-squares and experimental design told me he knew his statistics shit. I took in the data as if they were water and manna sent to a deserted Robinson Crusoe.

“You’re sure?” I said, checking over the data.

“Positive.” He stood behind me, his arms circled around my waist, creeping up like five-legged spiders to my breasts. “Of a few things.”

We hadn’t done it on campus, not the big It, not the holy grail of physical intimacy, only kissed and run our hands over each other’s bodies behind the locked door of Lorenzo’s office. Or mine. Once, he followed me into the faculty washroom and—I’m ashamed to say it—made me orgasm with nothing but a finger. After seventeen years of marriage and four kids, it didn’t take long.

He must have felt the heat growing in me, because he let go, let me read through the reports.

“Holy shit,” I said. “You isolated the protein?”

We had been searching for that one last piece, the biochemical substance we knew was present in some people and absent in others. Lorenzo had run the numbers on more than two thousand subjects, searching for an indicator that might predict lexical proficiency. He called it the Kissinger Project, and his background in both biochem and semantics made him exactly the right person to find the link between meta-eloquence and brain chemistry.

“You’ve got the map, and I’ve got the key, love,” he said while his hand snaked into the waistband of my skirt.

“How about we do a little practice unlocking?” I said. Lorenzo brought out my inner coquette. “Later?”

“Later. Same place.”

We had a small cottage—the Crab Shack, as we called it—over in Anne Arundel County by the Chesapeake Bay, far enough from the suburban Maryland bungalow I share with Patrick and the kids to be discreet. The lease was still in Lorenzo’s name two months ago.

Better not to go there right now. Besides, he’ll have already given the place up.

I pack my laptop and files, all but one, into the briefcase I’ve carried since my days in graduate school with Jackie, and head out the door, a pleasant smile on my face that I hope hides my trickery from Morgan. I want to buy as much time as I can this summer, stretch out the work long enough to get Sonia on track.