Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  We had been searching for that one last piece, the biochemical substance we knew was present in some people and absent in others. Lorenzo had run the numbers on more than two thousand subjects, searching for an indicator that might predict lexical proficiency. He called it the Kissinger Project, and his background in both biochem and semantics made him exactly the right person to find the link between meta-eloquence and brain chemistry.

  “You’ve got the map, and I’ve got the key, love,” he said while his hand snaked into the waistband of my skirt.

  “How about we do a little practice unlocking?” I said. Lorenzo brought out my inner coquette. “Later?”

  “Later. Same place.”

  We had a small cottage—the Crab Shack, as we called it—over in Anne Arundel County by the Chesapeake Bay, far enough from the suburban Maryland bungalow I share with Patrick and the kids to be discreet. The lease was still in Lorenzo’s name two months ago.

  Better not to go there right now. Besides, he’ll have already given the place up.

  I pack my laptop and files, all but one, into the briefcase I’ve carried since my days in graduate school with Jackie, and head out the door, a pleasant smile on my face that I hope hides my trickery from Morgan. I want to buy as much time as I can this summer, stretch out the work long enough to get Sonia on track.

  In my car, driving from rural Maryland into the congestion of Washington, DC, I think about how I found the physical locus and how Lorenzo’s work on verbal and semantic fluency identified the protein. I knew it; Lin and Lorenzo knew it. But Morgan doesn’t need to know it. Not yet.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  My office is something between a cave and a monk’s cell, but less luxurious given the pair of desks and chairs crammed inside. Also, it lacks a window, unless you count the glass pane in the door that gives the work space all the privacy of a fishbowl. A scarf and purse, both on the tattered side of wear, sit on one of the desks. I recognize both as Lin’s.

  Morgan shows me inside and leaves me to get settled. He says he’ll come back in a few minutes to take me around the lab, get me set up with an ID tag, and show me where the copier room and the printer area are. I now know nothing I do here will be unseen by other eyes.

  Oddly, I don’t care. The idea of seeing Lin again, of talking to her and working with her, has me as high as a schoolgirl at her first dance.

  “Oh my god,” a wisp of a voice says from the doorway.

  Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pants legs—and I’m only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I’ve been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin’s breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain—her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn’t hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

  Like me, Lin is a neurolinguist. Unlike me, she’s a medical doctor, a surgeon, to be specific. She left her practice fixing brains fifteen years ago, when she was in her late forties, and moved to Boston. Five years later, she left with a doctorate in each hand, one in cognitive science, one in linguistics. If anyone can make me feel like the class dunce, it’s Lin.

  And I love her for it. She sets the bar as high as Everest.

  Lin steps in and glances down at my left wrist. “You too, huh?” Then she bear-hugs me, which is interesting since she’s shorter and narrower than I am. It’s a little like being bear-hugged by a Barbie doll.

  “Me too,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time.

  After what seems like an hour, she releases me from her clutch and steps back. “You’re exactly the same. Maybe even younger-looking.”

  “Well, it’s amazing what a year off of working for you has done,” I say.

  The humor doesn’t work. She shakes her head and raises a hand, thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart. “I was this close to going to Malaysia to visit my family. This close.” Her fingers fly apart into a starfish as she blows out air. “Gone. Gone in a bloody day.”

  “You sound like the queen,” I say. “Except for that bloody part.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Even QE2 knows how to curse. Speaking of which, did anyone tell you about the latest model of wrist monster?” When she says this, it comes out like “mon-stuh,” r-less and elegant.

  “They didn’t just tell me about it.” I explained my eight-hour experience with the upgrade. “If I’d had to read that manifesto shit once more, I would have cut out my own tongue.”

  She perches on the desk, one bare leg swinging in the air, and lowers her voice after checking the door. “You know they’ll put them back on, Jean, don’t you? As soon as we finish.”

  “We don’t have to finish right away,” I say, my back to the door. “Even if we can, we don’t have to.” I pick up the silk scarf. “Tell me you haven’t started wearing this on your head.”

  “What do you think?”

  I think that’s—in Lin’s terms—about as bloody likely as a pig with wings, and I tell her so, which gets a laugh.

  Then she’s serious again. “We need to do something, Jean. Something besides working on the Wernicke project.”

  “I know. How about we reverse the serum and spike the White House’s water supply?” I say this knowing it’s even less likely than Lin walking around with a head scarf and a Pure pin on her collar.

  “Now, there’s an idea,” she says. I can’t tell whether her voice carries a hint of sarcasm or approbation.

  She hops up and takes my arm. “Let’s go get an espresso before Morgan the Moron comes back.”

  “They have an espresso machine here?” I say, letting her lead me out of the office and down the gray corridor. All the workstations and offices we pass are empty.

  “No. But Lorenzo has his little coffee maker.”

  Oh boy.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lorenzo’s office is an exact copy of the one Lin and I are sharing, except that it’s twice as big, the desk is wood instead of metal, the chair looks as if it came off a Star Trek set, and there’s a window that overlooks a park strewn with blooming cherry trees. I growl on the inside.

  Lin pushes me through the doorway and escapes back down the hall before I can protest.

  “Ciao,” Lorenzo says. His voice is the same, and different. Still low and musical, with the same softened consonants that bring me back to southern Italy, to a slower life. But there’s a weariness in that single syllable that matches the lines in his face, deeper now after only two months. I can’t help but stare into his dark eyes, and when I do, I see every word trapped inside him.

  All of a sudden, there’s a lump in my throat the size of a beach ball. I try to say “Ciao” around it, and what comes out has all the force of a mouse fart. My knees give way as the room spins around me, multiple Lorenzos and coffee makers and bookshelves, all swirling in a whirlpool of color and texture.

  He catches me on the way down and props me in the large leather chair behind his desk, taking the smaller visitor’s chair for himself. “Nice to know I still make you weak in the knees, Gianna.”

  In one reality, I recover completely from what women used to call la petite mort, stretch my neck to meet Lorenzo’s face, and wrap both arms around him. We kiss, slowly at first, then furiously. Then all hell breaks loose and I’ve got him on the desk or he’s got me on the desk or we’ve got each other under the desk. It’s fantastic and loud and wet and sweaty and perfect.

  Then there’s the other reality, the one that’s actually happening, the one where I have precisely enough time to drag the plastic-lined wastebasket from its corner, line it up under me, and lose my breakfast into it with a very unsexy slosh.

  All Lorenzo says is, “Wow.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” I say, pulling myself up, using the des
k for leverage. “Ladies’ room.”

  I think the true test of a man is how he acts when a woman pukes in front of him, in his office, into his wastebasket. What Lorenzo did, right before he walked me to the door of the women’s restroom at the opposite end of the hall from my office, was smile. A “wow” and a smile, nothing more.

  I love him for that.

  “I’ll be fine. Just need a minute,” I say, pushing the door open and heading for the closest stall. The rest of my bagel and coffee comes up, and I flush it away before sitting on the toilet seat with my head between my legs and the bitter bile and stomach acid in my throat.

  I never get sick, and I don’t have a sensitive gut, and I can’t remember the last time I puked.

  Yes, I can.

  The stainless steel box with its hinged lid and plastic liner is to my right, opposite the industrial toilet paper dispenser that could wipe the bottoms of a small country before it runs out. I don’t have anything to put in it, no carefully wrapped tampon, no rolled and taped napkin, not even a mini pad.

  Oh, holy shit.

  I’m forty-three years old. I have four kids, thanks to Patrick and his Irish virility. I had twins eleven years ago. And I know enough about reproductive biology to realize that my chances of having multiples are higher now than they were then.

  I also know I’ve got a one-in-two chance of having another girl. Will they snap a word counter on her wrist the second she pops out? Or will they wait a few days? In any case, it will happen quickly, and I won’t have any more bargaining chips.

  So I do what any woman in my position would do: I throw up all over again.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lin is waiting for me outside the restroom door, her face painted with concern.

  “You okay, honey?” she says.

  “Fine. Except half of my breakfast is in his office.”

  She puts an arm around my waist and leads me back to our hobbit hole, cleans a smudge of mascara with a wet wipe from the bottomless pit of her purse, and gets right to the point. “You put a rather literal definition on lovesick, Jean. And don’t pretend you have no idea what I’m talking about. Still got a thing for our Italian colleague?”

  I sink into the task chair behind my desk. “It’s that obvious?” Now I’m wondering whether the entire department, including Morgan, was onto my regular meetings with Lorenzo in his office. “Who else knows?”

  Lin leans in toward me, elbows on the desk between us. “If you’re worried about Morgan, don’t be. He’s an idiot, he’s self-absorbed, and he’s a guy. He wouldn’t recognize afterglow if someone poured a bottle of it on his head. I doubt he noticed your wardrobe change, either.” Her smile fades into a line, and the line becomes a frown. “But be careful. You don’t want Carl Corbin’s adultery wagon coming for you.”

  “No,” I say, and feel sick all over again.

  In our new, abnormal world, a surprising number of things are exactly as they used to be. We eat, we shop, we sleep, we send our kids to school, and we fuck. Only there are rules about fucking.

  “How long has it been going on?” Lin asks.

  “About two years, I guess.” There’s no sense in telling her I can point to the exact date when I first noticed Lorenzo’s hand on the satin wood of the music box, when I felt a pleasant electrical current run up and down my spine at the thought of that hand on my skin.

  “Only before? Or after?”

  I float away from her now, from the sterile functionality of our office to the cluttered crab shack in Maryland, its walls covered from floor to ceiling with marine-themed kitsch. A fishing net there, a bottled boat on the windowsill, a rusted anchor leaning against a wall in the corner. And a bed. It’s the bed I remember best because it was lumpy and squeaky and too narrow for both of us to lie on comfortably without overlapping limbs. I loved that bed.

  We shared it only once after the Pure Movement went national, which is what Lin meant by Only before? Or after? I’d taken the Metro down to Eastern Market in early March to the cheese shop that used to be run by an elderly couple and now was the sole concern of the husband. I can’t remember what I was looking for, maybe smoked scamorza, maybe fresh ricotta. Or, maybe, I wasn’t looking for cheese at all.

  He stood there at the baker’s stall with an armful of produce and flowers and with a distant look in his eyes. We’d spent ten months without seeing each other, not once, and we would have gone on not seeing each other if I hadn’t left the cheese shop and walked straight across the market hall.

  I risked two words. “Still here?”

  “Still here. I have a ticket home in August,” he said. “After the summer term finishes. I can’t stay in your country any longer.” As he spoke, he avoided my eyes and fixed on the silver bracelet. “I wouldn’t have stayed out the summer, but they made a generous offer.”

  August was five months away. When he left, I knew he would never come back to the States. Who would?

  Lorenzo paid for his bread. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

  He disappeared through the crowded market to the far end where the café and the wineshop were. This was a Tuesday morning, unusually warm for March, which had a habit of hitting Washington with a fresh blast of winter, as if to remind us that the season wasn’t over yet, not without one last bang. My head told me to run out the side door, forgetting the cheese, and hop the next train back home. Or anywhere. My feet disobeyed and remained glued to the floor. And then he was back, another bag added to the collection of groceries he’d already purchased.

  “Meet me in the Eighth Street alley in ten minutes,” was all he said.

  Officially, premarital and extramarital sex were illegal. They’d always been illegal in most states, a holdover from the days of pre–Middle Ages sodomy laws that forbade even a married couple from engaging in anything other than vaginal intercourse. “Immoral” and “unnatural” were the benchmarks. Rarely was anyone charged and criminalized for fellatio or anal play, though, and affairs outside the marital bed were regarded as normal, if not commendable, acts.

  And birth control? That’s a good one. The pharmacy shelf that used to hold Trojan and Durex and LifeStyles boxes is stocked with baby food and diapers. A logical replacement.

  Reverend Carl had a few things to say about sexual morality when he rose to his current seat of power. No elections were held, no confirmation hearings—the president wanted votes, and he got them. All Sam Myers needed to do was listen to an unofficial right-hand man, a man with the attentive ears of millions who thought moving one hundred years in reverse was actually desirable.

  Blessed be the loophole.

  I don’t know if there’s really an adultery wagon, but I do know what happened to Annie Wilson down the street when her husband called in the infraction. It was on television, a handful of days after my world changed.

  Annie Wilson was a tart in housewife clothing—at least she dressed down when her husband was home. I expect she made a beeline for her wardrobe on Wednesday mornings after he left for work, and reversed the dolling-up process in early afternoon after the man in the old blue pickup started his truck and left for another week. They had an arrangement.

  I shouldn’t call her a tart. I’m no better, and Annie’s husband was no Prince Charming. She’d been wanting to leave him for two years, and once he canceled her credit cards and stopped payments on her car, Annie might as well have been living in a maximum-security prison. One Wednesday, I remember cheering her on, silently urging her to just walk out of the house and get in that blue pickup and never look back.

  If she hadn’t had the two boys, both under ten, maybe she would have done that. And if she’d run off that Wednesday afternoon, maybe I wouldn’t have had to watch her on television that night as Reverend Carl Corbin handed her over to two blandly dressed women with gray faces that matched their long habits. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to hear h
im tell us about the convent in North Dakota where Annie Wilson would live out her life with a wrist counter set to a daily maximum of zero.

  What made up my mind to walk out of Eastern Market and head for Lorenzo’s car in the alley across the street wasn’t only lust, and it wasn’t only the one-sided argument I’d had with Patrick that morning. Rage had been crackling inside me like a fire, first a slow burn, then an inferno. I knew all about the double standard, the private clubs that had cropped up in cities and towns where single men of certain means could go to unload their stress and sperm on professional ladies of the entertaining sort. Patrick had told me about the clubs after overhearing a conversation at work. They were the last places where you could get your hands on a box of rubbers.

  Prostitution, they say, is the oldest profession. And you can’t kill anything that old. Also, the gays had been taken care of in their prison camps; the adulteresses like Annie Wilson were working farms in North Dakota or the grain belt of the Midwest. The Pure had to do something about single women who had no families to take them in—they couldn’t very well live on their own with no words and no income. They were given a choice: marry or move to a cathouse.

  When I thought of Sonia—of what would happen to her if Patrick and I were out of the picture, of whether she would be forced into a loveless marriage or sent away to a commune of whores where she could do nothing with her mouth but suck and moan—my blood boiled. Even the whores were supposed to shut up and behave.

  So I walked out of Eastern Market and across the street, dodging potholes and semifrozen puddles, and got into Lorenzo’s car. It was the only method I had of saying “Fuck you” to the system.

  Thanks to raging hormones and my own idiocy, the system said “Fuck you” right back. Lorenzo and I went at it three times. One with a condom. The others? Bareback all the way.

  Christ, it was good.

  Lin takes my hand, bringing me from that afternoon to this morning. “Be careful, honey. You’ve got a lot more to lose than your voice.”