Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  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.”

  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.

  “Maybe not.” He checks around the lab, counting heads with the ink end of his pen. “Fifty people in here, not counting our boys in blue. A few of them look like they’ve been recruited young, straight out of school. But they’re not that young, Gianna. Grad students, at the least. How about we take a walk around and read ID cards?” He points toward the lab entrance. “You take that end; I’ll take the back. Nothing thorough, just a quick survey of titles, okay? Anyone asks, you’re on your way to the security desk to call your husband. About the car.”

  Of course I need to call Patrick, since it doesn’t look as if I’ll be getting out of this building soon. He’ll need the Honda, or, at least, what I left inside the Honda. I leave my four-foot-square work space and start walking down the nearest aisle toward Sergeant Petroski’s desk. Slowly.

  “I need to make a call,” I say. “To let my husband know I’m not coming home tonight.”

  Petroski smiles. “Sure, ma’am. Number?”

  “I’ll dial it.”

  “Afraid I have to do that for you.”

  Of course he does. He probably has to speak for me, too.

  I’m right about this. Petroski asks for the message and hands me a blank sheet of notepaper and a pen. “Just write it all down here, and I’ll convey it. Word for word.”

  The note’s short. Pick up car, get Sonia’s sippy cup. She’ll have a meltdown if she has to go to bed without it. It isn’t really a lie, not if you put some of the verbs in the past tense. I hand it over to Petroski and blink three times.

  He blinks back.

  “Anything else, Dr. McClellan?” he says.

  I remember a different soldier sitting at this desk when Lorenzo and I came in, so Petroski must have arrived recently. “You’re on duty tonight?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Another graveyard shift.”

  My eyes move to his left hand. “You’re married,” I say.

  Of course he is.

  “Yes, ma’am. Two years this month.” His mouth curls into an embarrassed smile. “We were high school sweethearts.”

  “I got married young,” I say. I omit the fact that it might not have been one of the smartest relationship moves. “Had kids young, too. You got kids?”

  Petroski hesitates, and the shy smile fades. “One. A girl. She turned a year old in April.” More quietly, he says, “One year. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Look, I’m no scientist or anything. I got a high school degree and some community college hours; then I joined up. Figured the army would give me a steady paycheck and all that. Plus, you know, if you make it twenty years you get a pension. Insurance and all that.”

  “They do make it sound good,” I say.

  He leans forward. “But I know something about kids. I’m the oldest, see. Have five brothers. Youngest one born when I was fifteen. Danny’s his name. Good kid.”

  I nod. Sergeant Salt-of-the-Earth keeps going. “Danny knew what ‘no’ meant by the time he was five months old. Before he was one, he could say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ and ‘Boo.’ Boo was the name of our dog. He didn’t make much sense, but he was talking. And then”—Petroski slaps the desk with the palm of his hand—“bang! Two words, questions, stuff like ‘Where Boo?’ and ‘Want juice.’ It was like some kinda miracle, you know?”

  I do know. I watched four babies go through all those stages. Prelinguistic babbling, one-word holophrases, two-word sentences—usually nothing more than a subject and a predicate. Then, in Petroski’s words, bang. It all started happening. At three, Steven would make demands: Take me to school in the morning; Please make chocolate in the afternoon.

  I also know the flip side, and so does Petroski.

  “I saw this documentary once, ma’am,” he says. “Couldn’t watch the whole thing—too gruesome. These people, see, they kept their little girl locked up in a room and didn’t talk to her for something like twelve years. Twelve years, ma’am. You imagine?”

  I shake my head, even though I can imagine. It’s happened in rare cases.

  Petroski goes on, an armchair linguist who doesn’t realize how right he is. “So you take a kid—any kid—and if you let them talk, they do it. If you don’t”—another palm slam on the table between us: bang—“that’s it. Like they have some kinda clock inside ’em.”

  “They do.” No need to mention critical period hypotheses, also known as the use-it-or-lose-it theory, to Sergeant Petroski. He gets the vibe without all the fancy jargon.

  “So my question is,” he says, looking straight into my eyes. His own are calm and blue, but there’s pain behind them. “My question is what’s gonna happen to my own little girl if she doesn’t ever get to talk? Is she gonna turn out like that Genie woman? End up in some kinda home?”

  I have a thousand answers for him, and none. Genie, the child in the documentary, never did learn to talk. After years of poking and prodding by linguists with more interest in the next big book than in Genie herself, the girl ended up exactly where Petroski suggested. In some kinda home.

  When I’ve put the finishing touches on my message to Patrick, I hand it back to Petroski. He grabs my hand.

  “Can you help? You’re a doctor, right?”

  I nod. Sort of.

  “Can you help?” He stops, looks down at the triple stripes on his sleeve, and says, “I took an oath, you know. Maybe we should ride it out. This Pure thing can’t last forever.”

  Time to throw a log on the fire. “You’re right. It can’t. It probably won’t. Another few years and Reverend Carl will be another footnote in a history book. Of course, he might stick around longer.”

  “Yeah.” Petroski’s on the fence.

  “You know, Sergeant,” I say, making it up as I go, hating myself a little as I stoke the flames, “I read an article a few years back. We used to think kids had until thirteen or fourteen to—you know, for that bang thing to happen. But I’ll tell you, as an expert, they have a lot less time than that. Three, four years, maybe. Afterward, their brains sort of”—I search for the right word—“click off.”

  His face pales, and I wince despite the fact that it’s the reaction I’m going for.

  “Well, I’d better get back to work,” I say. Better, I think, to give him a few minutes to mull things over while I work out the details with Lorenzo.

  Leaving him, and the key to the Honda, at his desk, I walk back to my corner of the lab, this time along a different route. Half the ID cards are turned the wrong way, but I read a dozen of them, keeping in mind Lorenzo’s advice to worry about the titles and nothing else.

  SIXTY-NINE

  Approximately two percent of the population holds a doctorate. If you ignore the PhDs in English, the percentage is less. Much
less.

  “I count nine,” I say. “Out of about twelve.”

  Lorenzo must have been luckier than I with the ID cards. “I got fifteen out of twenty.”

  Two-thirds, three-quarters, it doesn’t matter. We’re sitting in a lab filled with experts. Given enough time, you could get a monkey to type out Shakespeare. In a lab like this, you could build a rocket to Mars in a hell of a lot less time. A brain-scrambling neurotoxin? I’d estimate overnight.

  Which is just in time for the morning meeting Patrick will be attending tomorrow.

  I check the room again. Eyes are exhausted, but busy. Lorenzo gives them until morning to come up with something that might satisfy Morgan.

  “I think I’ve found us an ally,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Over there. At the security desk.”

  Lorenzo stretches his neck to see over the rest of the crowd. “You’re kidding.”

  Petroski might not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he’s got two qualities I want: he’s scared as shit for his daughter, and he’s strong. That he wears a uniform and carries a ring of keys on his belt doesn’t hurt.

  “Take a look around, Enzo,” I say. “These guys have been working around the clock. They’re dead tired.” As I say this, three men, each of them looking to be in his forties, file out of the lab, escorted by a single soldier.

  “Haven’t seen my kids in a week,” one complains.

  “Kids?” another says. “My kids are okay with it. My wife, on the other hand—”

  “If I don’t get some food and some z’s, I’m gonna be toast tomorrow.” The third man looks as if he’s about to fall asleep on his feet.

  “See what I mean?” I say, as another five worker bees signal they’re ready to hit the hay. “All we need to do is wait.”

  “Wrong, Gianna.” Lorenzo looks me over. “What you need to do is get some sleep. At least for a couple of hours.”

  I have as much chance of sleeping as I do of winning a Nobel Prize, but he’s right. I’ve run into the fatigue wall at full speed, and my next lab task requires absolute alertness. “Two hours. Max. Assuming Morgan is staying the night.”