Vox(79)

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.

Morgan steps forward and takes three identical pink booklets from the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. He passes them out like playing cards, first to Isabel, then Lin, then Jackie.

“Don’t forget to read your manifestos, girls,” he says. There’s a nasty emphasis on “girls.”

“Really, Morgan?” I say.

“Hey, Jean, I don’t make the rules. Take it up with Reverend Carl if you don’t like it.” He looks at my wrist and laughs a hollow chuckle. “Better hurry before your bracelet goes back on.”

Jackie, whose eyes are dry, and look like they have been this whole time, picks up the booklet from the bench next to her, and, without so much as a glance at it, flings it at Morgan. It hits him square in the forehead with a satisfying thwack.

He doesn’t stoop to pick it up, but kicks it across the small room. “You’ll learn,” he says, and motions to the corporal to open the inner door.

Lorenzo takes my hand, helping me up from where I’m kneeling next to Jackie.

“Stay cool, Jacko,” I say. “Promise?”

She nods.

“I’ll do everything I can.”

Everything I should have done, I think, as I follow Morgan out of the room and back into the hive of the lab.





SIXTY-SEVEN




There’s a television in the lab, a flat-screen the size of a football field. A reasonable size, I suppose, given that the kinds of men who buy these things spend most of their weekends watching other men toss a piece of pig around a hundred-yard-long swath of Astroturf.

When Reverend Carl appears on it, dressed in his usual funereal style, it’s impossible not to look at him. Also, someone has turned the volume up to a low roar.

“Friends,” he says, opening his arms in that trademark way he has, as if he’s Rio’s very own Christ the Redeemer. “Friends, I have some unfortunate news.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I whisper to Lorenzo beside me. He’s been busy at the stoichiometry again, a language as foreign to me as the words coming from the television.

“Settle down, please, settle down.” Reverend Carl’s hands press the air around him down, and the murmur in the audience dulls. It’s difficult to tell where he is, but the crowd is too large for the White House press room. And he’s on a stage. The Kennedy Center, maybe. Or the Arena Stage in southwest DC. More than a year has passed since I’ve seen anything that passes for live entertainment. Plays—the few that are performed—are either family-friendly drivel, censored down to unrecognizability, or off-limits to most of us.

He continues on, reading out the Pure’s manifesto, line by line, affirmation by affirmation, belief by belief. His current theme is suffering. It’s one of his favorites.

“Friends, my dear friends, suffering is an inevitable reality in our earthly world. We are called to suffer for doing what is good, at times, and no one suffers more than I at this moment.” A lengthy pause now, for effect. Reverend Carl likes to draw things out, suffering or not. “We have here a lost sheep.” The camera pulls in close to his face, smiling and tear streaked, then pulls back to show him extend his right arm and wave toward the wing of the stage. “That’s it. Come on, now.”

A lone figure emerges from stage right. I don’t know whom I expect. Del Ray, most likely. Or another Julia King. Anyone.

I don’t expect my own son.

The gasp of the televised crowd—if there is a crowd at all; it could be canned—is drowned out by the intakes of fifty breaths in the lab. Blinking under the floodlights, Steven shuffles shyly toward center stage, toward Reverend Carl’s outstretched arms.

“He’s seventeen,” I whisper to Lorenzo. “Only seventeen.”