Vox(33)

In my car, driving from rural Maryland into the congestion of Washington, DC, I think about how I found the physical locus and how Lorenzo’s work on verbal and semantic fluency identified the protein. I knew it; Lin and Lorenzo knew it. But Morgan doesn’t need to know it. Not yet.





TWENTY-FIVE




My office is something between a cave and a monk’s cell, but less luxurious given the pair of desks and chairs crammed inside. Also, it lacks a window, unless you count the glass pane in the door that gives the work space all the privacy of a fishbowl. A scarf and purse, both on the tattered side of wear, sit on one of the desks. I recognize both as Lin’s.

Morgan shows me inside and leaves me to get settled. He says he’ll come back in a few minutes to take me around the lab, get me set up with an ID tag, and show me where the copier room and the printer area are. I now know nothing I do here will be unseen by other eyes.

Oddly, I don’t care. The idea of seeing Lin again, of talking to her and working with her, has me as high as a schoolgirl at her first dance.

“Oh my god,” a wisp of a voice says from the doorway.

Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pants legs—and I’m only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I’ve been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin’s breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain—her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn’t hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

Like me, Lin is a neurolinguist. Unlike me, she’s a medical doctor, a surgeon, to be specific. She left her practice fixing brains fifteen years ago, when she was in her late forties, and moved to Boston. Five years later, she left with a doctorate in each hand, one in cognitive science, one in linguistics. If anyone can make me feel like the class dunce, it’s Lin.

And I love her for it. She sets the bar as high as Everest.

Lin steps in and glances down at my left wrist. “You too, huh?” Then she bear-hugs me, which is interesting since she’s shorter and narrower than I am. It’s a little like being bear-hugged by a Barbie doll.

“Me too,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time.

After what seems like an hour, she releases me from her clutch and steps back. “You’re exactly the same. Maybe even younger-looking.”

“Well, it’s amazing what a year off of working for you has done,” I say.

The humor doesn’t work. She shakes her head and raises a hand, thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart. “I was this close to going to Malaysia to visit my family. This close.” Her fingers fly apart into a starfish as she blows out air. “Gone. Gone in a bloody day.”

“You sound like the queen,” I say. “Except for that bloody part.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Even QE2 knows how to curse. Speaking of which, did anyone tell you about the latest model of wrist monster?” When she says this, it comes out like “mon-stuh,” r-less and elegant.

“They didn’t just tell me about it.” I explained my eight-hour experience with the upgrade. “If I’d had to read that manifesto shit once more, I would have cut out my own tongue.”

She perches on the desk, one bare leg swinging in the air, and lowers her voice after checking the door. “You know they’ll put them back on, Jean, don’t you? As soon as we finish.”

“We don’t have to finish right away,” I say, my back to the door. “Even if we can, we don’t have to.” I pick up the silk scarf. “Tell me you haven’t started wearing this on your head.”

“What do you think?”

I think that’s—in Lin’s terms—about as bloody likely as a pig with wings, and I tell her so, which gets a laugh.

Then she’s serious again. “We need to do something, Jean. Something besides working on the Wernicke project.”

“I know. How about we reverse the serum and spike the White House’s water supply?” I say this knowing it’s even less likely than Lin walking around with a head scarf and a Pure pin on her collar.

“Now, there’s an idea,” she says. I can’t tell whether her voice carries a hint of sarcasm or approbation.

She hops up and takes my arm. “Let’s go get an espresso before Morgan the Moron comes back.”

“They have an espresso machine here?” I say, letting her lead me out of the office and down the gray corridor. All the workstations and offices we pass are empty.

“No. But Lorenzo has his little coffee maker.”

Oh boy.





TWENTY-SIX




Lorenzo’s office is an exact copy of the one Lin and I are sharing, except that it’s twice as big, the desk is wood instead of metal, the chair looks as if it came off a Star Trek set, and there’s a window that overlooks a park strewn with blooming cherry trees. I growl on the inside.

Lin pushes me through the doorway and escapes back down the hall before I can protest.

“Ciao,” Lorenzo says. His voice is the same, and different. Still low and musical, with the same softened consonants that bring me back to southern Italy, to a slower life. But there’s a weariness in that single syllable that matches the lines in his face, deeper now after only two months. I can’t help but stare into his dark eyes, and when I do, I see every word trapped inside him.