Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “I know,” I say, and pull myself together just as Morgan knocks at our door.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Morgan leads us along the hall, collects Lorenzo from his office, and pauses with his nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?” he says.

  “I don’t smell anything,” Lorenzo says flatly, but his eyes are smiling at me.

  Lin plays along. “Neither do I.”

  “Hmph. Well, let’s get to it, people. Lots of ground to cover if we’re going to meet our deadline.”

  This is the first I’ve heard about a deadline, and any respect I might have had for Morgan drops down another several notches. He can’t possibly know we’ve already found the Wernicke cure, and I wonder what he’s promised the president. It’s not as if we’re baking a goddamned cake.

  “What deadline?” I say.

  Morgan hesitates, as if he’s inventing a story to tell us. When he finally speaks, it sounds like a well-rehearsed line. “The president is due to travel to France at the end of June, for the G20 summit. He needs his brother.”

  “This is May,” I tell him. “I thought we had more time. The contract didn’t say anything—”

  But he cuts me off. “You didn’t really read your contract, Dr. McClellan. If you had, you would have seen a clear deadline of June twenty-fourth, one week before the president flies to Europe. Any more questions?”

  “We’re scientists,” I say. “We don’t do deadlines.”

  Lorenzo, who has been quiet up until now, shuts his office door. “I’ll explain it to them later, Morgan. Let’s get on with the admin shit so we can start working on your problem.”

  I flash him a look of disbelief, as does Lin, but Lorenzo shakes his head. “Later,” he mouths.

  Our first stop is the security office, a series of rooms and cubicles staffed by twenty men. It isn’t in our section of the building, which is unpopulated except for Lorenzo, Lin, and myself, but one floor down. There are no windows here, not even on the main door, which Morgan unlocked by inserting a card from the lanyard around his neck into the reader.

  “We’re all about security,” he says, leading us through the sea of computers and surveillance equipment toward one of the smaller cubicles.

  Lin and I exchange a look.

  “Security for what?” I ask.

  Morgan doesn’t answer, but I know he’s heard me.

  I repeat the question.

  “Just general security, Dr. McClellan. Not something you need to worry about.” He turns to the man in the cubicle. “We’ll need card keys for my team, Jack.” Again with the “my.”

  Jack grunts but doesn’t smile. I put him at about fifty, maybe pushing sixty. His suit jacket hangs on the chair behind him, wrinkled and well-worn. The white shirt stretches taut against an ample beer belly, and yellowish patches bloom under his arms. His collar is pierced with a silver pin, a blue P in a circle. I wonder if he’s married, if some poor woman has to lie underneath him while he grunts and sweats. Or, if he’s single, is he high enough up in the hierarchy to merit right of access to one of the city’s private men’s clubs? For the second time today, I picture Sonia, twenty years old, playing courtesan, satisfying a monster’s appetite.

  “Sit here,” Jack says, nodding to me and indicating the chair next to his desk. “Right hand here, palm down.” He points to a flat screen on the desk, polished to a high shine.

  I place my hand on the surface. It’s cold, but not as cold as Jack. The machine whirs, and a band of light scans my handprint.

  “Look straight ahead. Don’t smile,” he orders.

  The camera in front of me snaps a picture.

  “You’re done. Now you.” Jack nods to Lin, and she goes through the same procedure. When Jack grunts another order, she stands up.

  “You’re in the dark as much as I am, aren’t you, Jean?” Lin says.

  “Shut up,” Jack tells her. He turns to Lorenzo. “Dr. Rossi, please take a seat. Right hand on the screen.”

  Asshole, I think.

  There are no pictures on Jack’s desk, no family portraits, no school photos of kids against a cloud or forest background, no decorations. His lunch, or what I think is his lunch, is in a crumpled paper bag that looks like it might not stand up to another emptying and refilling. I’m thinking Jack isn’t married and I find the thought appealing. Better to suffer through a few minutes of prodding and poking and heavy breathing once a week than to live with him 24/7.

  Lorenzo’s finished, and the printer behind Jack spits out three plastic ID cards. Jack holds out a hand toward Morgan, and they shake. When he holds the same hand out to Lorenzo, nothing happens.

  “I don’t think so,” Lorenzo says. “Something might rub off on me.”

  This is why I love Lorenzo, or one of about a hundred reasons. Patrick would have shaken hands with the fat creep. Patrick would have smiled and said, “Thanks,” when Jack handed him the laminated key card. Patrick would be seething on the inside, but he’d play the game.

  We leave Jack’s cubicle, and Morgan ushers us into a small conference room in the security complex. It’s set up not in conference style, but with the table pushed off to one side, two chairs behind it, and three chairs lined up like school desks, facing the table. Morgan takes a seat at the head of the class and holds out a hand, motioning for the three of us to sit in the chairs facing him.

  I exchange a look with Lorenzo, but he shakes his head, almost imperceptibly.

  And we wait.

  After ten minutes of listening to the wall clock tick, a sullen man with a scar on his right cheek and with all the charm of a Special Forces veteran enters through the open door to the conference room. “Morning, Morgan,” he says. “Morning, team,” he says to the rest of us. He doesn’t sit, but stands behind the table, looking down at his audience.

  A man of his size should have made at least some noise in the hallway, but this one crept up on us. It takes me exactly five seconds to realize I don’t like him. By the sour look on Lin’s face, she’s spent even less time contemplating his likability.

  “I’ll keep this short and to the point, because you all have work to do,” he says. “I’m Mr. Poe, and I’m in charge of project security.” His lips barely move as he speaks; his heavy chest doesn’t seem to rise and fall. I don’t think he’s blinked once since he entered the room. “You have one job to do here. The operative words are ‘one’ and ‘here.’ That means you do your work, you leave, and you come back the next day. I don’t want any discussion of the work with the rest of the lab, or any socializing among you outside office hours. Clear?”

  “As crystal,” Lorenzo says, examining one of his own fingernails.

  Poe glares at him. “You don’t talk about the project with anyone outside these walls. You don’t bring work home. If you need to work more than eight hours a day, you do it here. Lunch is in the cafeteria on the third floor.” He checks a printed schedule. “You three have the one p.m. slot to yourselves.”

  Lin shifts in her chair, uncrosses her legs, then crosses them again. Her foot brushes mine, and I push back on it. Yes, that sounds weird.

  I speak first. “Excuse me, Mr. Poe, but what about the lab assistants? We need to set up experiments, and we—”

  Poe cuts me off. “Any instructions to the lab staff go through Morgan. Also, you won’t be taking your laptops home. One of my men will set up appointments with you for this afternoon to secure your electronics and set up the intranet for your part of the team.”

  “I thought we were the team,” Lorenzo says, a bit drily.

  “That’s what Mr. Poe means,” Morgan says. His eyes dart toward the big man standing next to him. “Right, Mr. Poe?”

  “Exactly. Any other questions?” He doesn’t wait. “You’ll each go through a security checkpoint when you enter the building and when you leave. The building is staffed around the clock.”
Poe nods once to Morgan before turning his back on us and leaving the way he came in. Quietly.

  “Okay.” Morgan claps his hands together once, as if he’s calling an unruly class to order. “Let’s get to work. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you around the lab.”

  We file out of the conference room, past fat Jack, who is slurping down a Coke, and back through the windowless main door. Morgan opens this with his key card, which, unlike mine and Lorenzo’s and Lin’s, is blue. Ours are white.

  Lin pulls me back as we walk down the hall toward the elevator bank. “That Poe. Silent-but-deadly type,” she says.

  “Very,” I say. “What’s with the segregation and the deadline?”

  “Don’t know. But if we’re on our own at lunch, we’ll have a chance to talk. Lorenzo seems like he knows something.”

  “Come on, ladies,” Morgan calls from the elevator he’s holding open.

  We pick up the pace and arrive at the open doors. Morgan walks in first, Lorenzo last. When we’re inside, he reaches behind and squeezes my hand.

  “Very exciting day,” Morgan says.

  Yes. It is.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The first thing I hear as we walk the ten feet from the elevator to the lab complex is the squeak of mice. The animals are a necessity, but I still get squeamish about injecting the tiny beasts with untested sera. They’re so helpless, like babies. I can’t stand holding them and looking into their oil-drop eyes and squeezing whatever my latest potion is into their innocent veins. Lin has no problem with it; maybe her medical background makes her immune. I’ve always let her administer the injections.

  “They’re mice, Jean,” she would say, back in our Georgetown lab. “You’d set traps for them if they invaded your pantry, wouldn’t you?”

  Well. She had me there. But the traps were passive devices. I could deal with them better than I could deal with needles full of chemicals. I’ve always been a textbook kind of a girl when it comes to anything brain related. Let the MDs fiddle with the practical stuff.

  Morgan is poised with his key card at the door, then reconsiders. “Might as well try one of yours, to make sure it works. Dr. McClellan? How about you do the honors?”

  Lorenzo chuckles. “Come on, Gianna. You won’t know what’s inside until you open it.”

  I slide my white key card into the reader, wondering if Lorenzo realizes how like Pandora I feel as the doors swing open and we’re momentarily blinded by the fluorescent lights that come alive inside the lab. There can’t be any evil here, I think, only the hope that also hid inside Pandora’s ancient box.

  Still, something about Poe’s slip of the tongue about our part of the team—if it was a slip of the tongue—makes me uneasy. For that matter, Poe himself makes me uneasy. He’s built like a refrigerator and silent as a grave. And he has the look of a man who’s killed for God or country. Or money.

  Morgan beams as if the lab were his own firstborn son and motions us to follow him inside. Once again, Lorenzo waits for Lin and me to enter before walking through the double doors.

  The squeaks of a few hundred mice fly out of the cages lining the left wall. On the right, there are rabbits, sniffing silently, their pink noses twitching at the intrusion into their space. We’ve never had rabbits before, and I know Lin will have to take care of the injections when we get around to the larger animals. No way I could plug an Easter bunny with anything unless I was damned sure.

  But I am sure, and that’s the hell of it. If I want to draw out the project as long as possible, I’ll need to kill a few mice and bunnies.

  Lab tables, ten of them, each with its own workstation, fill the empty area between the rows of cages. Like the offices and cubicles in our department of three, they’re unoccupied.

  At the end of the room is another door, also with a key-card reader. This time, it’s Lin’s turn, and once again, Morgan walks past us, into the belly of the lab.

  “Holy shit,” Lin says.

  Morgan twitches at this. Good.

  Lorenzo utters a single Italian word, as ubiquitous and productive as English’s “fuck.” “Cazzo.”

  They’re both right. This space is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

  On my right are three doors, marked with the sign PATIENT PREP ROOM: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. Beyond these is an open area with a bank of computers and cabinetry to hold smaller equipment. PORTABLE ULTRASOUND, TMS, and TDCS are printed on neat labels below each cabinet.

  “Nice,” Lorenzo says. “Transcranial magnetic stimulation and direct-current stimulation. How many units?”

  “Five of each,” Morgan says, opening the cabinets one at a time. “And three portable ultrasound kits, all with various transducers.” He reads the labels. “Linear, sector, convex, neonatal, transvaginal.” There’s a pause before the last item, as if he’s put off by the mention of female anatomy, even though Morgan should know we need the transvaginal probes for our smaller subjects. I’ve said before, he’s a shitty scientist.

  Lorenzo winks at me.

  “There’s more over here,” Morgan says, and leads our tiny parade past the open area and toward the back of the lab. Here, two doors lead to the MRI rooms.

  “You’ve got two magnetic resonance imaging setups?” I ask, nudging Lin, who is almost drooling. Back at Georgetown, we had to beg for the use of one MRI in the hospital—a twenty-minute walk away. And that was when we were allowed the time, which wasn’t often.

  Morgan beams. “Two Tesla MRIs. And here’s the PET facility.” He opens another door and lets us peek inside.

  We had to wait months for access to the hospital’s positron-emission tomography, or PET, equipment.

  “What about EEGs?” Lorenzo asks. “And the biochem lab?”

  “All here. The electrocephalography stuff is over in the small-equipment area.”

  “Electroencephalography,” I correct. “That’s why they call it EEG and not ECG.”

  Morgan’s eyes scrunch together. “Whatever. Anyway, I forgot to mention it, but you’ll find the electrodes and the printer in the far right cabinet. The biochem lab is through these doors.” He motions to Lorenzo’s key card. “Go ahead. You’ll probably be most interested in the protein expression module. It’s just here, to your right.”

  Morgan points, but Lorenzo is still scanning the room, which could hold five high school chem labs.

  There are only three of us. Four, if we count Morgan, but I don’t think any of us is counting him. And only one biochemist.

  “Okay, people.” Morgan checks his watch. “Got a meeting with the big guys, so I’ll leave you to it.”

  “You do that,” Lorenzo says, and slides his key card into the biochem lab door. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Internet?” I say, pointing to a bank of computers with monitors the size of flat-screen televisions in the main lab.

  “No way, Jean.” Morgan fires up one of the workstations. “Excel, Word, SPSS in case you need to run statistics. MatLab. Whatever you need.”

  All I need if I want to work in a vacuum, I think. “How about access to the world of periodicals, Morgan? I don’t carry the past five years of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience around in my purse.”

  “Oh, that. Right.” He moves toward a rack filled with tablets. “All plugged into the academic databases. If you can’t find what you want, call up on the intercom. I’ll make it happen.” Morgan smiles, showing two neat rows of small teeth. They remind me of a hamster. Or a lab rat. “Gotta buzz now, people,” he says, and disappears through the rodent room and out the main doors.

  Finally, we’re alone.

  “Fifteen million for the two Tesla MRIs and the PET machine,” Lin says when we hear the double click of the main doors to the lab. “Fifteen million. And then there’s everything else.”

  We all know the numbers. The National Science Foundation did all but st
ick a laughing emoticon on our last grant proposal when we asked for a single MRI setup. I run some rough calculations in my head and come up with a figure.

  Lorenzo nods. “Twenty-five million sounds about right. But that’s not what bothers me.”

  “Me neither,” I say.

  We lock eyes, the three of us, alternately, and I know we’re thinking the same thing. Every piece of equipment is new, shiny, recently installed. And all of it is exactly what we need to work on the Wernicke cure. You don’t set up a lab with twenty-five million dollars’ worth of apparatus in three days. Also, there was that animal smell in the first room. The mice and rabbits have been here a while.

  They’ve been here longer than the president’s brother has been in intensive care.

  “It’s almost as if they already knew,” Lin says. “As if they’d planned for it.”

  I look around, moving from the biochem lab, past the MRI and PET scan rooms, toward the open area housing small equipment. In our world, small doesn’t mean cheap.

  “We need to talk,” I say, addressing them both, but I know I’m looking at only Lorenzo.

  THIRTY

  Lin leaves us in the small-equipment area, with an excuse about wanting to check out the Tesla MRI tubes. For a woman as petite as she is, she has eyes that can bore into me like the punch of a heavyweight boxer. Be careful, those eyes say.

  “Come with me.” Lorenzo crooks a long finger and stays quiet until we’re back in the biochem lab at one of the sinks. He turns the water on full blast, then leans on the black epoxy resin counter. Then he taps his right ear and looks up at the ceiling. “Cameras,” he mouths.

  I get it. If there are cameras, there are bugs as well. I lean in toward him and pretend to read the report he’s taken from his breast pocket. It’s a utility bill, but I focus on the page as if it’s Fermat’s last theorem.

  “You told them we’d be ready in a month? Why?” I say.