Vox

by Christina Dalcher

  “He will be. Check with your new pal on the way out.” Lorenzo cracks a smile. “And don’t flirt too much. I’m the jealous type.” From the shelf behind him, he takes one of the tablets, swipes and taps a few times with those absurdly long, but elegant, fingers, and hands it to me. “A little light reading for you.”

  I read the title on the screen. “Comparative Neuroanatomy of Primates? You call this light?”

  “In the literal sense. The iPad weighs less than a pound.”

  “How much does the book weigh?”

  “It’s about five hundred pages. You want chapters seven and eight.” He must see the unspoken questions in my eyes, because he keeps going. “Look, I’d do it, but I’d be starting from zero. Besides, I can’t read that shit and set up everything down here at the same time. So brush up on your brain science, okay?” He turns to the computer behind him, pulls out the keyboard, and starts filling in a lab animal requisition form after consulting a chart of available subjects. In the space for the identification number, he types 413, then moves down the page to an empty block and starts hunting and pecking again. I watch him type Sedation, trepanation, and intracranial injection of experimental serum Wernicke 5.2.

  “Oh man,” I say, picturing myself with a drill in one hand and an iPad open to a set of step-by-step instructions in the other. This is so not what I signed up for. “I’m not really the hands-on type, Enzo.”

  “You’re all I’ve got.” In the blank space where the requisition form says Technician, he writes Dr. Jean McClellan.

  “We have to, don’t we?” I say.

  “Either that or end up with a dead Morgan.” Lorenzo’s mouth turns up at one corner. “Unless that’s what you want.”

  Of course it’s what I want. But there’s no sense in being greedy. A mute Morgan will work just as well.

  “All right,” I say. “I’m heading upstairs. Send someone to get me if I’m not back down here by ten. Okay?”

  “Deal.”

  I don’t stop by Petroski’s desk for an escort. Instead, I head toward the soldier closest to him and speak loudly enough for my voice to carry. “I need some shut-eye. Can you take me up to the dorms?”

  While my escort calls out to the now half-filled lab asking if anyone else wants the cafeteria or a bed, Petroski motions me to him with a slight nod of his head.

  “I made your call,” he says.

  “Great. Thanks.” I don’t want to ask him for help—better if the request comes from him.

  It does.

  “Anything I can do?”

  “As a matter of fact, Sergeant, yes. There is.”

  His face, smooth and whiskerless and innocent as a child’s, lights up as I explain, in detail, exactly what I need him to do.

  SEVENTY

  While Lorenzo is eight floors down sedating chimpanzee Number 4-unlucky-13 and setting up the equipment we’ll need, I’m sitting up in a narrow bed, fully clothed, digesting a stale sandwich from the cafeteria and chapter seven of the primate neuroanatomy text, also known as detailed brain maps of our closest relative, the chimp. My squeamishness has fallen aside for now, mostly thanks to this afternoon’s near mauling by 413’s compatriot.

  I swipe a new window onto the iPad, check the database of medical journals for articles on craniotomy and trepanation procedures, and take a long, last look at the uneaten half of my sandwich. It’s not the optimal companion for my bedtime reading, so I put the cheese on wheat aside while I review the components of my new friend, the Cushing perforator drill.

  When I think there’s no way I can bore a hole into an ape’s skull, let alone a human’s, I remember Jackie and Lin and Isabel.

  Steel up, Jean.

  And I keep reading until my eyelids succumb to gravity and the iPad slips from my hands.

  The knock on my door seems to come at the exact moment I fall asleep.

  “Dr. McClellan?” The voice is muffled, cloudy.

  “Yeah.”

  “Time to go. Dr. Rossi says he needs you in the lab.”

  Everyone needs something. I need about a week’s worth of uninterrupted nap time. “Okay. Coming.” I peel myself off the bed, smooth down my clothes—by the looks of them, I’ve slept hard, if not for very long—and open the door. It’s Petroski, and he seems to have aged a decade since I left him down in the sub-basement.

  “Have a good rest, ma’am?”

  My mouth makes the sounds of “yes”; my pounding head argues. One foot follows the other down the hall, automatic marching orders telling them to take it up a notch, and I get into the elevator with Petroski.

  “All set,” he says. “Everything’s exactly like you asked.”

  “Good. Now, listen, Sergeant. Your job’s done. The last thing you know is that Dr. LeBron accessed the lab at— What time is it now?”

  “Ten oh five, ma’am,” he says, holding out his left wrist for me to see.

  “Okay. LeBron entered the sub-basement lab at nine fifty. He told you he had a headache. That’s all you know.”

  In unsurprising military fashion, Petroski responds with a terse “Yes, ma’am,” and holds the Open Doors button as I exit the elevator. At the entrance to the lab, he pauses.

  Please don’t get cold feet now. I can’t be sure whether I’m talking to Petroski or to myself.

  He slides his key card into the socket and waits for the green light, and I’m in. We pass the remaining chimpanzees, still hooting in their cages, and I note that chimp Number 413’s holding pen is empty.

  As is the main lab.

  Petroski’s first job was to evacuate the sub-basement, which, judging by the unoccupied stools and the chaos of paperwork left on every flat surface, he did well. All it took was Lorenzo, a Bunsen burner, some foil, and a mixture of sugar and potassium nitrate. The biochem lab must have looked like a bomb went off.

  Well. That was the idea.

  I leave the sergeant at his security desk and walk back through the detritus of notebooks and calculators and reading glasses to where Lorenzo is waiting, half standing, half sitting on the counter where I left him two hours ago. He’s the picture of cool, and I wish he didn’t make it so easy to be in love with him.

  “Worked like a charm, Gianna. Silent, smoky, and nondeadly. First thing I ever made when I got a chemistry kit was a smoke bomb. Ruined my mother’s best pasta pot.” A devilish and boyish mischief flashes in his eyes.

  Boys, I think. They love to blow shit up. Or at least make it look like they’ve blown shit up.

  He swings a leg off the counter. “You ready?”

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I say, feeling the cheese on wheat work its way in a direction it shouldn’t be going. “Where are they?”

  “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 a
round. 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 Brontë 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.”

  She laughs, but her hands are too busy for chatter as she palpates the soft tissue inside the chimp’s skull. It’s stomach turning and fascinating and miraculous, all at the same time. How the hell could people like Reverend Carl and Morgan LeBron want to take this woman and throw her away? How could anyone think that makes sense?

  “Okay. Here we go.” Lorenzo draws two full syringes of clear liquid from a vial on the surgical table. It looks as harmless as water. He sets one down on the table between the gurneys and holds out the other to Lin.

  I watch her calm hands as she inserts the fine point of the needle a few millimeters into the chimp’s cortical tissue and squeezes the plunger, glancing at the readouts. She nods, apparently satisfied she hasn’t killed her patient, and injects the remaining serum before replacing the round piece of skull—plug, Jean, it’s only a plug—and stitching up her work. The entire process has taken five minutes.

  A good thing, really, since both the chimpanzee and Morgan have begun to stir.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  One close-up and personal encounter with an angry primate was enough for me. I don’t care to relive the experience.

  “We need to get her out of here, Enzo. Now,” I say, watching with horror as the chimp’s chest begins to rise and fall more deeply. “Lin? How much time do we have before she comes out?”

  Lin shakes her head back and forth, holds up four fingers, then two.

  There’s no need for Lorenzo to translate.

  “Six minutes?” I say hopefully.

  She shakes her head again, holding up two fingers, thrusting them toward me.

  I look around for something—anything—we can use as restraints, and find only suturing thread on the surgical table. Not good. “Okay. Okay.” No time to spare. “Lin—you make sure the cage is open. Enzo, you and I wheel this baby back where she belongs.” My own heartbeat marks every passing second as Lin races out of the makeshift operating room and follows the noise of the remaining hooting chimps toward the front of the lab.

  Chimpanzee Number 413, eyes filled with puzzlement, reaches a long and hairy arm up to her head. Then she turns her face toward mine.

  “Enzo? Push!” I yell. The gurney slams into a pair of lab stools, knocking them across the floor. Lorenzo catches one before it careers into two more, barely preventing a domino effect of rolling furniture that might block our path. Jackie and Isabel stand in the center of the lab, horrified and helpless.

  “Don’t say anything, Jacko,” I plead. “Don’t say anything. Take Isabel somewhere else. Lock yourselves into a closet if you have to.” Every mental image I have is of the mauled woman, Charla Nash, missing everything on her face save the skin on her forehead.

  “Petroski!” I yell into the empty white space of the lab as Lorenzo pushes the gurney past countertops of flying paper, eyeglasses, a fucking slide rule. “Petroski!”

  Petroski comes running from his station. The chimp utters a low moan, not a hoot, not a screech, but a woeful, hollow moan.

  Don’t look at her, Jean. Don’t you dare look at her.

  But, of course, I do.

  Fury shimmers in her soft brown eyes as we reach the open cage.

  Petroski draws his service weapon. His hand shakes as he clicks something with a thumb. The safety, maybe. What the hell do I know?

  “Don’t shoot her unless you have to,” I say. “All right, Enzo. On my count. One . . .”

  The chimp’s paw leaves her head and reaches toward me.

  “Two,” I pant.

  Iodine from the wound fills my nostrils as she extends.

  “Three!” With every ounce of strength, I heave the beast off the gurney with Lorenzo taking most of her weight. A claw brushes my lips as chimp Number 413 rolls into the cage. Lorenzo slams it shut and steps back t
o the centerline of the cage room, taking me with him. One furry paw shoots between the bars, clawed fingers splayed, then retracts. The chimp goes back to massaging one side of her head.

  It almost looks as if she’s trying to remember something.

  “Oh god, Enzo. Morgan. Where’s Morgan?”

  Based on the tour, I know there’s only one way in and out of the lab, and Morgan hasn’t come through. Lorenzo is back across the room in four long strides, as I yell to him to get Jackie and Isabel out of the way. I don’t know if he hears me.

  Lin signs something I can’t understand, points to me, then to the caged chimp.

  “Close one,” I say, unsure of whether this is what she means.

  She nods.

  “Go see about Jackie and Isabel,” I say. “I’m going to help Lorenzo.”

  Another nod.

  I don’t know whether it hits me while I’m still in the primate room, or whether I think it as I walk through the lab with its tilted stools and scattered papers, but it hits all the same. It hits like a fucking grand piano dropped from a high floor. Morgan. A syringe. Lorenzo.

  This isn’t water soluble. Or injectable into the bloodstream.

  Try that, and you’ll fry half his brain.

  My legs seem to move on their own.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Morgan LeBron stands five foot six and might tip the scales at 150, after someone wet him down with a fire hose. Lorenzo can pick me up with one arm tied behind his back. It’s no match at all, unless the smaller of the two has an edge.

  Morgan does.

  He has an edge with twenty cc’s of poison and one hell of a sharp needle.

  And he’s presently holding it to Lorenzo’s neck, in that soft spot an inch behind the ear.

  “Get out,” someone says. I can’t tell whether this is Lorenzo or Morgan yelling in the bright white room with one gurney and a table on wheels. It’s only a voice. Only two words that have no other purpose than to terrify me.