Vox(80)

There’s no need to explain; Lorenzo has seen pictures of my children. Once upon a time, those pictures littered my office.

“Caught,” Reverend Carl says. “Caught in a place no man or boy should be.” He turns to Steven. “Isn’t that right, son?”

Steven starts to speak, then only nods. Rage boils inside me, through every vein and artery, until the pressure builds to a trapped scream.

I miss most of the remaining speech. I can’t hear anything except the sound of my own heart, deafening in my ears. The few words that make it through settle in my gut like lead weights: “fornicator,” “traitor,” “example,” “trial.”

Reverend Carl calls the audience to join him in prayer, bows his head, and takes Steven by the hand. Another close shot pulls in, showing their intertwined fingers. Carl’s are wrapped like tenacious constrictors; Steven’s are limp, five helpless digits having the life squeezed out of them. A few inches up from my son’s hand is a wide metal band circling his wrist.

A million years ago—it was only twenty, but it feels like a million, it feels like tens of millions, like all the lifetimes of the entire world—Jackie asked me what I would do to stay free. Last night, over a kitchen counter that seems as distant as that Georgetown apartment, I asked Patrick if he would do anything, if he would kill.

Right now, with a half-baked formula on the table and Reverend Carl scolding Steven on the television, I put all the questions together and come up with a single answer.

Yes, I would do anything. I would kill.

The woman who thinks these words doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or maybe she does.

In any case, I sort of like her, this new Jean. I like her a hell of a lot more when I catch Morgan smiling up at the flat-screen.





SIXTY-EIGHT




At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, on what should be a bright pre-summer evening full of barbecue smells and june bugs, Morgan informs us no one will be going home.

“Cafeteria’s on the third floor, people. Dorms on the sixth and seventh. If you need to make a call, see Sergeant Petroski.” Morgan nods to a makeshift security station at the entrance to the lab. “Nightie-night, folks,” he says before turning tail and striding out.

“Stay close to the cages on your way through the chimp room,” I call after him. The thought of Morgan having his face shredded by a few angry lab animals brings a satisfying tingle. I turn to Lorenzo.

“Petroski’s the key,” I say. “How’s the work coming?”

He leans against the back of his lab stool, smiling broadly. “It’s done.”

“What?”

Lorenzo runs me through the chemistry. “I need your eyes on this, Gianna.” He points to a set of correlations between the old neuroprotein we tested on Mrs. Ray and semantic fluency, then moves a finger down the page to the notes he’s been working on this afternoon. “Look good?”

It looks terrific. It also looks as if we’ve unleashed the very devil. “With this quantity, Enzo, we’re taking about total contamination, flat-out disruption of”—I check the numbers against my data a second time—“of more than three-quarters of the superior temporal gyrus. Forget Mrs. Ray’s disfluency; this thing would turn Henry Kissinger into a mute. In about five seconds.”

The grin hasn’t left his face. “Yeah. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Depending on what your idea of beauty is, I think. And I have a delicious idea that must be all over my face, because Lorenzo raises an eyebrow. “I can cook this up in a few hours, I think. Got a first subject in mind?”

“What do you think?” I say, scanning the lab. No one seems to be listening to us. What little chatter there is focuses on Reverend Carl and “that poor kid—I wonder what he’s done.”

“I think,” Lorenzo says, twitching one eyebrow and then the other, “great minds think alike.”

“And sometimes we do, too,” I finish. “Anyway, better Morgan than one of the women in there,” I say, and point my chin to the locked doors on the opposite end of the lab. “You saw how many chimps are left. When they run out, Morgan’s going to want to climb up the great ape food chain.”

Lorenzo stops chewing on the end of his pen and taps it lightly against his teeth. It’s an old habit, one I haven’t seen him do in more than a year. “There’s one hitch,” he says.

“What? It turns people blue?”

I watch the humor leave his face.

“No, not blue.”

“Oh Christ. Lethal?” I say.

“Could be.” He points to a series of formulas on the notepad between us.

“They don’t look anything like your old ones.” As I read further, Lorenzo’s work becomes clear. “This isn’t water soluble. Or injectable into the bloodstream.”

“Correct. Try that, and you’ll fry half his brain. This needs to be administered locally. In situ, as Caesar would say. It’s one thing to repair cells. Overshoot the target and, okay, no big deal, you’ve got a few extra happy neurons. Destroying them is a different pile of wax.”

“Ball of wax.” The correction comes naturally to me, so naturally I don’t hear it over the single word screaming inside my brain: Trepanation. “No way, Enzo. We’ll never pull it off.” Not only that, but the thought of wielding an electric drill within a mile of a human skull—even Morgan’s—makes me ill.