Vox(84)

“In here.” He opens the door to a side room. It’s vacant, except for two gurneys and a rolling surgical table covered in an array of stainless steel implements I’ve seen only in pictures—pickups, retractors, forceps, something that looks like a melon baller. On the stretcher closest to me lies a four-foot-tall female chimpanzee, her scalp partially shaved on the left side. On the other stretcher is a five-foot-six life-form of a slightly lower order. Both are heavily sedated, their chests rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

Petroski succeeded in getting Morgan to the lab; Lorenzo finished the job.

“I think I like him better this way,” I say. “Which one first?”

Lorenzo points to the chimp.

“All right. Bad joke.” But I need the humor to get through this. As soon as I see the craniotomy drill with its irregular steel bit, a little like a malformed tooth, I rethink. I don’t need humor to get through this. I need a goddamned neurosurgeon.

“Gianna?” Lorenzo says. He checks his watch. “They’re not going to be out forever.”

I pick up the perforating drill and turn it on. It makes a low hum as the bit whirs around. There’s no way this tiny contraption is going to bust through skull bone.

“I can’t,” I say, putting the drill down. So much for being willing to do anything.





SEVENTY-ONE




I don’t know how many times I’ve said “I could kill him” in my forty-odd years. Maybe a few thousand.

I could kill him for leaving the clothes in the washing machine. I could kill him for not calling to say he’d be late. I could kill him for breaking Mamma’s majolica vase. Could, could, could. Kill, kill, kill. Of course I never meant it. The words are as semantically vacuous as “I love you to death” and “I’m hungry enough to eat a horse” and “I’d bet my life the Sox are going to take a bath in this year’s series.” No one dies from love outside of a Bront? novel or eats entire horses or lays his life on the line for a baseball game. No one. But we say this garbage all the time.

The fact is, I don’t know whether I could have put down chimp Number 412, even while he was going apeshit.

I do know that I’m not taking a skull drill anywhere near either of the two sleeping hominoids on these gurneys.

And I don’t have to.

“Get Petroski,” I say to Lorenzo.

He stares at me.

“No. I’m not asking him to do it. I need the keys to Room One.”

Again, the stare.

“To get Lin out. And the others. Tell the kid I’ll say we doped him up and stole his keys, if it comes to that. But I think he’ll play.” I explain about the daughter.

“I would,” Lorenzo says. “Play, I mean. If she were mine.” His eyes wander down my body, stopping at the slight swell where my waist used to be. “I wouldn’t have left without you, Gianna. Never.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He does a quick tour around the room, searching for anything that might be a camera, and kisses me. “Never.”

“Now you know how I feel about Sonia. And the boys.” Sonia, mostly, though. Nothing is as bad as the idea of leaving her behind while everything goes to hell. Nothing except bringing another girl into the inferno. I push the thought out of my mind for the next twelve hours. “Go on—get Petroski to do a little jail-breaking.”

Five minutes later, Lorenzo comes back with Lin. When she sees the two gurneys, she turns to me, openmouthed and wide-eyed. I ask Lorenzo to explain while I see to Jackie and Isabel. They don’t need to be in here for what we’re about to do. Hell. I don’t want to be in here for it.

Lorenzo informs me I don’t have a choice. Lin makes a thumbs-up sign with her right hand and thumps her left palm.

“She needs you to assist,” he says.

I look at Lin’s black bracelet. “How’d she manage to say that?”

Lin rolls her eyes, waves both hands back and forth in front of her chest, then sets the index and middle fingers of each hand together and points them at me, shaking them.

“She says never mind and hurry up,” Lorenzo tells me. “I’ll translate.”

“You both know American Sign Language?” I say. “Why?”

He shrugs. “You speak some Vietnamese, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Okay. Point taken.”

Through Lorenzo, I hear each of Lin’s instructions while we scrub ourselves up to the elbows in one of the biochem lab’s sinks. It’s like Brain Surgery for Dummies. Monitor vitals at all times. Pass me the tools handle first. Stay the hell out of my light. And, in true Lin form, For fuck’s sake, don’t pass out.

The first three I can handle. I’m not so sure about number four.

Back in the white room, it takes Lin two full minutes to retract the skin on the chimp’s head and another thirty seconds to bore a hole the size of a dime. She turns off the drill, passes it to me along with a hunk of chimpanzee skull, and signs to Lorenzo.

“She says to think about it like the plug in a sink drain,” he says, passing along this gem of advice.

“Easy for you, Lin,” I say. “I was always more interested in the linguistics half of neurolinguistics.”