Vox(69)

“Dr. McClellan,” Morgan will say, possibly stressing the title, either because he’s tired of having to use it or because he’s relieved he won’t have to use it anymore. “Would you please come with me?”

This will not be an invitation.

We’ll walk down the corridor of offices, Morgan stretching his short legs to keep one pace in front of me. Whether this is a gesture of leadership, or whether he doesn’t want to look me in the eye, I won’t know, but I’ll guess it has something to do with both.

I’ll ask Morgan where we’re going. Another meeting? Did he find a flaw in the serum? What I’ll want to say, but won’t, is I’m next, aren’t I?

If I leave now with Lorenzo, I’ll become Grazia Francesca Rossi. I’ll shop in fruit markets and at butchers’, visit my parents, make love to a man who’s my husband on paper only. One day, maybe in a few weeks or months, after I’ve come back from a pleasant walk around the streets of old Rome, I’ll have a glass of water in my own kitchen, as I’m doing now.

Jackie’s words come back to me, trite but true.

It all ends, Jeanie. Sooner or later.

“Water,” I say to Patrick.

He pours me another glass, misunderstanding. But then, I’ve only just figured it out myself.

“What would you do to get rid of all of them?” I say. “To go back to the way things were.”

Again, I hear Jackie:

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Patrick swallows the last of his scotch, considers the bottle, and pours another finger. I have to take it from him before whisky spills all over the counter—that’s how badly his normally steady hands are shaking.

“Anything,” he says after a long gulp. “Absolutely anything.”

“Anything” is a funny little word, overused and rarely literal. I’d do anything to get a date with her. I’ll pay anything to get front-row seats to the concert. Anything you want. I don’t need anything. “Anything” never covers the whole gamut of existence.

I lean over the counter, close enough to smell the sweetness of scotch on his breath, until our noses are almost touching.

“Would you kill?” I say.

Patrick doesn’t blink. For a moment, I wonder if he’s still breathing. He’s that still.

I have to remind myself of who and what Patrick is. The quiet guy. The one who doesn’t want to get involved, who would rather talk theory than practice. The man Jackie called a cerebral pussy all those years ago in our crappy Georgetown flat with the rat-eaten secondhand sofa and the Ikea furniture whose veneer fell off a year after we’d assembled it. Also, he’s a man who once swore to tread carefully in matters of life and death, who recited the promise I must not play God.

When he speaks, he says one word:

“Yes.”

The kitchen, stuffy and still, turns cold.

Then he says, “But you know we don’t have to.”

“Exactly,” I say.

All we need to do is take away their voices.





FIFTY-EIGHT




They say there’s no rest for the wicked, so neither of us sleeps tonight. Instead, I go back into the rec room and retrieve my folder, the one with the red X I hid from Morgan only two days ago, and take it to Patrick’s office.

He’s waiting for me in the dark but flicks on his desk lamp when I come in.

Page by page, Patrick goes through the data. He stops at the section containing formulas written in Lorenzo’s neat, continental hand. “You did this?”

I shake my head, then realize he can’t see me. “No. Lorenzo.”

“Huh.”

“What?” I say, straining to read in the faint light.

“It’s some kind of beautiful.”

I understood, and still understand, little of Lorenzo’s work, but Patrick’s got the biochemistry background to process it. He reads every notation, every scribbled comment, his lips moving as he goes from page to page. When he reaches the bottom of the fourth sheet, he turns it, laying the paper flat on the others, facedown.

I’m not quick enough.

Patrick’s head moves a hair to the left, away from page five of Lorenzo’s notes, and his eyes settle on the back of the previous page.

We work differently, Patrick and I. My desks have always been cluttered with non-necessities: a framed photograph, a pack of gum, hand cream, more pens and pencils than I need. As a consequence, I move through loose paperwork by taking the top sheet and putting it at the back of the stack. Patrick, with a desk as sterile as a hospital floor, lays the stack down and makes two piles, one read, one unread, turning each finished page over and placing it to his left.

Which is why I’ve never seen what Lorenzo wrote on the back of page four.

It looks like a poem, but not a very structured one. The verse is chopped here and there, one word on a line, then a break, then a phrase. The upside-down text is impossible to read from where I sit opposite Patrick, but I make out the title clearly enough.

A Gianna.

To Gianna.

“Oh,” Patrick says. His Italian is on a par with his Swahili, so I know he won’t understand a thing. But there are certain words that will give it all away: amore, vita, my name. He takes off his reading glasses and looks across the desk at me. The light from the desk lamp shows every crease on his face. “He’s very much in love with you.”