Vox(61)

For a long time, we look at each other over the running water, careful to keep our heads bent toward the sink. There isn’t anything to say, because we both know our work is being reverse engineered somewhere in this building.

Whether Reverend Carl is behind it, or Morgan or the president or the Pure Movement, doesn’t matter. It could be all of them, all working to create a serum that doesn’t cure aphasia, but causes it.





FIFTY




Lorenzo and I prep two groups of mice for injections. Each set will receive one of the two neuroproteins he’s been formulating, and, with luck, we’ll know which direction we need to take by the end of the day, when half of the mice are dead. As I remove the tiny creatures from their cages and shave a square patch of fur from them, one by one, a single word ping-pongs around my brain.

Why?

The answer comes much too easily, also in the form of a single word: silence.

Lorenzo reaches over and takes the brown mouse from my shaking hands. “I’ll do it,” he says, guiding the clippers along its flank. “There. You put Mickey in the Group One cage. And don’t worry, I’ll take care of the injections.”

“I’m that bad?”

“Let’s say you’re a little unsteady this morning. No big deal.” He pats me on the shoulder, and I jump. “One thing at a time, Gianna.”

I watch his hands with their long fingers, tipped with calluses from years of fret work and strumming, as he sedates the next mouse, waits for it to relax in his palm, and shaves another square patch. “This one’s Group Two,” he says, handing its limp body back to me. Another Mickey or Minnie goes into the second cage.

“They’re monsters,” I say.

Lorenzo nods. He knows I don’t mean the mice.

Now it’s two winters ago, and I’m back in my own living room sitting next to Olivia King as she sips coffee and watches Jackie go to battle with three Pure Women, their pastel twinsets a quiet contrast to Jackie’s red power suit. Olivia is nodding at the twinset women, shaking her head violently every time Jackie opens her mouth.

“Someone should shut that woman up,” Olivia says. “Permanently.”

Oh, Olivia, I think, what the hell did you expect?

They’ll start with the women in the camps, I suppose. Jackie, Julia, Annie Wilson from down the street. We won’t see any of it televised. Next, Reverend Carl will round up people like Del and Sharon, squelching the last hope of any resistance. Before they take away his voice, though, they’ll go to work on Del, maybe use his three daughters as an incentive. And Del, of course, will talk. What father wouldn’t?

Patrick will be next in line. I feel my heart stop as I think of the methods they’ll use on him, of the threats to Sonia that will encourage him to speak. And so on and so on, until every last member of what must already be a threadbare operation is found, forced to talk, and ultimately silenced.

With my own damnable creation.

I don’t believe this will be the end.

Lorenzo touches my shoulder again. “We’re all finished for now. You okay?”

I shake my head.

Minus a husband, and plus the wrist counter that goes back on once I’ve finished my work here, I’ll have no means to take care of a house or children. Steven might manage to hold things together for a while, if Steven ever comes back. If not, with Patrick’s parents both dead and mine in Italy, the McClellan clan is finished, extinct.

And then there’s my baby. Lorenzo’s baby.

I’ve spent so much of my time thinking about what used to be, how I used to be, but the future always remained a blur. Up until now, that is. Now I see ghosts of years to come, only malformed swirls at first, then coalescing into razor-sharp pictures in full color. Me, babbling nonsense phrases after they inject me with a serum of my own making. Me, bent-backed and gray, pulling at a patch of weeds with hands I no longer recognize. Me, lying on a cot under a thin blanket, shivering in winter. Me, vacant-eyed and, perhaps, teetering on the edge between awareness and insanity, wondering where they all went to. Steven, Sam, Leo, Sonia. Baby.

Only when Lorenzo takes me by the arm and pulls me up do I realize I’ve been sitting on the lab floor, my back resting against the bottom row of empty wire cages.

“It’s all right, Gianna,” he says, brushing the tears from my eyes with his fingers. “It’s all right.”

“It isn’t, you know.”

“It will be.”

I want to bury myself inside him, but I remember the cameras. “I’m fine,” I say, straightening myself out. “Let’s get on with the injections.”

When I first started experiments with lab animals, I had one golden rule: don’t name them. In other words, don’t think of them as pets; don’t think of them as anything other than a way to get from point A to point B. Think of them as test tubes or Petri dishes or microscope slides, nothing more than innate vehicles to fill and observe. While I hold each tiny mouse for Lorenzo to inject with a potion that will either cure it or kill it, all I can think of is the names I’ve given them: Jackie. Lin. Jean.





FIFTY-ONE




Lorenzo’s idea is risky, but necessary.

After we’ve called upstairs for an assistant to clean up the lab and filed a report for Morgan, I leave first, retracing my steps through the security checkpoint. There’s a new pair of soldiers on guard during the afternoon shift, their uniforms pressed to sharp creases, their boots shined to a high polish that reflects the entry vestibule’s fluorescent lights. My purse goes back on the conveyor belt to be scanned while one of the soldiers pats me down, his hands running short, swift arcs over my hips, back, stomach, breasts. Once cleared, I walk out into the May sunshine.