by Jean Roberta
The doctors moved around the thing that had been Rachel, taking samples, checking displays. They were all wearing protective gear—gloves, booties, breathing masks—but it wasn’t going to be enough. This stuff was manmade and meant to survive under any conditions imaginable. They were dancing in the fire, and they were going to get burnt.
All the steps I’d taken to keep my family safe. All the food I’d thrown away, the laundry I’d done twice, the midnight trips to the doctor and the visits from the exterminator and the vaccinations and the pleas…it had all been for nothing. The agent of our destruction had grown in the lab where I worked, the lab I’d chosen because it let me channel my impulses into something that felt useful. I hadn’t even known it was coming, because people had been protecting me from it in order to protect themselves from me. This was all my fault.
Dr. Oshiro was saying something. I wasn’t listening anymore. One of the nurses in Rachel’s room had just turned around, revealing the small patch of gray fuzz growing on the back of his knee. The others would spot it soon. That didn’t matter. The edges told me that it had grown outward, eating through his scrubs, rather than inward, seeking flesh. The flesh was already infected. The burning had begun.
“Mom?” Nikki pulled against my hand, and I realized I was walking away, pulling her with me, away from this house of horrors, toward the outside world, where maybe—if we were quick, if we were careful—we still stood a chance of getting out alive. Nikki was all I had left to worry about.
Rachel, I’m sorry, I thought, and broke into a run.
•
Ghost-Writer
Shannon Connor
Winward
“All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful.”
—Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.
Carla
The kitchen is dark, except for the glow of the clock. It’s three in the morning. The elation that carried me home is almost gone.
I set my keycard on the counter. I tell the kitchen, “I’m finished, Maggie. I did it.”
•
I’m up long before dawn, despite the sleeping pill.
It’s quiet in our room.
I stumble to the bathroom. The pain is bad, but the nausea is worse. There isn’t much in my stomach, maybe a glass of red wine. I miss the bowl, then have to fumble for a tissue. The floor is otherwise spotless—the woman who cleans has been here. What’s-her-name. Didn’t I let her go? Did I pay her? I think I forgot to pay her.
Vertigo. Sink. Cabinet. Four pills, chased with mouthwash.
I shower. Hot. Water is a whisper. My pulse is a drum. Better. I can’t hear the silence anymore.
•
I log into the household account while coffee brews. What is her name? My eyes are full of code. Anita. Yes, I paid her. Twice.
My head hurts.
•
It’s still dark when I board the Phalynx shuttle. I beg a seat from a teenager and close my eyes on departure. The lurch unsettles everything. My stomach, my balance. The pain behind my eye is a sharp wedge of light.
The shuttle belches heat from beneath the bench. It warms my feet, but the rest of me is cold. Your gray trench coat is too short for me. Too tight on the wrists. I’ve been wearing it all week.
I tuck my hands inside the coat, close to my heart.
•
The Ghost-Writer Project successfully engineered the contralateral conversion and overwrite of a chimpanzee’s right hippocampus in thirteen months. The Phalynx Foundation responded to our preliminary reports with an extended contract and a fifty-percent increase in funding to begin mapping the entire medial temporal lobe. The second phase is expected to take a little over three years.
Even with the patronage of a goliath like Phalynx, bureaucracy is a lumbering beast. The human brain, on the other hand, is a spectacular processor; efficient, resilient. With inspiration, motivation, and the proper tools, it can accomplish miracles—even on itself.
In the three months since I learned I am dying, I have plotted the code to reconstruct an entire hemisphere.
•
The guard on duty greets me. He asks me about the Celtics. I don’t remember the score. I don’t remember his name. I mumble something, let the whoosh of the opening door wash it away.
But I have to go back. I don’t have my keycard. I have to stand there, smiling and shrugging like an idiot while he makes my lapse of memory a matter of record, while he logs it and laughs about a game I watched and can’t remember. The computer spits out a new card and I sign for it. Chicken scratch. His smile wavers. I can’t do this much longer.
Where the fuck is my keycard?
•
The sky is lightening outside my window. Dawn breaks over rooftops, domes and glaciers of blue-tinged glass. I can’t see the streets from my office, but I can see the broad green palms in the Arboretum Wing. The trees are greedy for sunrise.
I wonder where you spent the night.
•
I activate my panel with a swipe of my card and access Ghost-Writer X, files buried so deep in a catacomb of sub-directories they would not be found unless someone at Green Level requested a full-system audit. Not that anyone would have cause to look; I’ve masked my access and data logs so that anyone checking my usage would see recycled forays into chimpanzee genetic code. Nothing more alarming than a divorcee throwing herself into her work.
Ghost-Writer X flickers to life on an array of monitors around my office—a collage of brain images, exabytes of human genetic script, synaptic maps spread out like star charts. Complete. And I feel nothing. I am the rat on the wheel, thinking, What’s the point?
•
The corridor to the observation lab is a bridge over downtown. Beyond the glass the city sprawls and spins in all directions, mute. It is all-over warm, here. Too warm. I pause, my hand pressed to the window. If I pass out, they will find me. It’s too soon.
The dizziness rolls over me. My handprint fades from the glass, spotless. As if I was never here.
•
Reilly is awake. He watches me approach. His eyes are somber. So are mine, I suppose. He shuffles over to his panel and nudges a button. A green light switches on above the window. I punch the key to let him speak.
“Hello.”
“Good morning, Reilly.” I am surprised at the sound of my own voice, drifting down the long corridor of cells.
“Hello. Hello.”
Green lights are popping on down the row. The troops are rousing.
Reilly strokes the panel. “Breakfast,” he says. Then, as an afterthought: “Please.”
“The techs will be in to feed you when it’s time.” I offer him a smile. It feels wrong. My cheeks feel stiff, unnatural. You always tell me the chimps respond to it, but Reilly doesn’t seem to notice, either way. He thumbs his panel.
“Hello. Hello.”
I am raising my hand to switch off the comm.
“Hello. Maggie. Hello.”
My hand stills, and now I see you, a ghostly reflection in the glass.
Maggie
I meant to ask her why she is here so early, but I guess I don’t have to. The answer is written on her face; bruises under her hazel eyes, a haunted look. She’s not sleeping, same as me. Same reason.
She’s so thin. She has her hair pulled back in a knot, pinned. It makes her cheeks look positively gaunt.
And now we’re staring at one another. The chimp is hiccupping my name. When Carla says it, it’s the computer’s voice I hear, with her lips moving.
Bless him, Reilly stops.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“Night shift.”
“So Kim has you babysitting his breeders now?”
Just like that, it’s between us again, this ache both new and painfully familiar. This knot of feelings: anger and hurt and pity and fear. In a breath, she has belittled my work, my friend, my choices. Is it the tumor talking, or is it Carla? Should I hold my tongue, or tell her to go to
hell?
I can hear what she’s left unspoken, the old rivalry, the disdain. I’m trying to prolong life, Maggie; Kim Kyong just proliferates suffering. The world is overpopulated enough. I can feel tears brewing that I won’t shed. But Carla, there’s something beautiful about creating life.
I want to hold her. That is strongest of all. I want to kiss her brow, her mouth, tell her it will be okay. But I think that’s a lie. Even before she was dying, it would have been a lie. I’m remembering every careless comment, every dagger thrown at me over morning coffee, the two of us facing off across that tiny kitchen. And worse—an army of days marching one after another; meetings and trials and code and trials and hearings and trials and a message in my hand-pod—we’re out of coffee, don’t forget the scans for today’s trial—when I’m standing in the next room, Carla!
Reilly barks my name once more, and I flinch. It makes my skin crawl. I brush past Carla to switch off his comm.
Reilly smacks the panel a few times more. Then, realizing I have muted him, he shuffles to the corner of his cell. He picks at the scars on his head. His baby doll is stuck face-down in the grating of his cell floor. I feel the twist in my heart, a flush of anger at Carla that doesn’t help this situation at all.
My transfer hurt her. She took it as betrayal. And maybe it was, but I couldn’t bear it any more. Her cruelty. A quick word, a flick of a scalpel. An hour, a day, and she’s forgotten the damage. She thinks my skin is tougher than it is. She thinks the chimps recover, and objectively they do—an overwritten left hippocampus functions flawlessly for its dead right twin on a MEG projection, but look at him, Carla. Just look at him. He is not the same. His heart is lost.
But I guess that’s not something you can quantify.
She is sitting on the bench now, across from Reilly’s window. Before I know it, I am on the bench beside her. I can smell her. She’s been using my shampoo. It’s all I can do not to pick up her hand and twine our fingers together. I wonder how it would feel. Will she be cold? Is there anything left?
“Have you told Bryant yet?” I ask.
Carla makes a noise through her nose. A laugh, of sorts. No.
She is looking away from me. I study her face. She is in pain.
“You can’t expect to hide it much longer.”
“No.”
“Carla, if you tell them now, you can have some say in…” I can’t bring myself to finish. How to break Ghost-Writer down. Where it all goes. As opposed to If you don’t tell them, and then you drop dead… Though maybe that’s the point. Maybe she doesn’t want to live to see her life’s work undone.
She still won’t look at me. She’s looking at Reilly, or nowhere at all. Is she angry at me for bringing it up? Is this a silent treatment? Or is she too tired to argue? Does she care? I want to shake her. This is not like her.
This is not Carla.
Carla
Your face is framed in curls. I can’t remember there ever being so much gray in your hair. You think I stopped seeing you. I think you’re right. I must have been blind.
You have those creases of worry. They tell your age, but you remind me of a child, with your blue, blue eyes. You are so beautiful. I wonder what you will look like when you are truly old.
Oh, Maggie, remember you at twenty-one? Not so lovely as this, but lithe, and laughing. You made it so hard to work, to study, how did I ever get by?
Remember that one night? In the apartment above Singh’s deli? (We always smelled like bologna. You stopped eating meat.) I read you passages from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat while you painted my toes, and, when they were dry, you took the book from me and sat astride, my hips to your hips. Your hair was longer, then. You used your hand and your hair as a screen, whispering sweet, sexy, romantic things into my ear, kissing my right eye. Secrets, you said, for the subtle half of me. I tried to tell you, “contralateral”—if you wanted the right hemisphere, you had the wrong side. But you didn’t let me get a word in edgewise.
You’re talking to me now. You mean well, but I’m barely listening. That’s pity in your voice. Is this what we have come to?
Reilly is watching us. He turns back to his panel, his hand dancing back and forth. Maggie. Carla. Maggie. Carla. He looks back, like he is trying to solve a puzzle.
I know how he feels.
Maggie
“Have you had any tremors?” I ask.
“No.”
“Fainting…seizures?”
I’ve earned a glance. “You’re not my physician, Maggie.”
“Well, when did you see him last? What has he said?”
“What has Alex said?” She echoes. She turns away again, back to Reilly, away from me. “Glioblastoma multiforme, left temporal and parietal lobes. Inoperable. What do you expect him to say?”
“I—” I can’t do this. “I just wish you would—”
“What?”
Let me in. “Be…proactive.”
Another soft exhalation. She is laughing at me. I throw up my hands. I feel like a child, but I can’t stop it. I can’t…
I am rising. I am mumbling excuses. It’s late. Early. Rotation… I have to go. I can’t stop the banal little words from tumbling out. Can’t stop feeling small next to Carla. Can’t stop her from leaving me—what difference does it make that I’m the one who packed up and left?
I meant to say “Goodbye, Carla.” Maybe that would have been cruel. Maybe I meant it to be. A parting shot. It doesn’t matter. What came out was, “I love you.”
I don’t think she even heard me.
At least the tears wait until I make it to the door.
Carla
It doesn’t take much to chase you away. Begs the question, doesn’t it…how did you hold on for so long?
I hear your footsteps retreating, and I clench my teeth. Maggie, I’m sorry. But it’s no good. Not now. Not like this.
Why didn’t I ever say it before?
The door slides open to the west-wing corridor, shut.
Reilly has watched you leave. His eyes flick to me, then to his panel. He raises a hand, considers, and looks back at me.
You are the one who insists on anthropomorphizing these chimps but, Maggie, I would swear he wants to tell me something more than his little panel can provide.
Maggie, I think—
•
The night of the Phalynx gala. August, so humid, your dress was wrinkled, your skin blotchy and pink from too much wine. You didn’t speak to me on the shuttle home. I thought you were tired.
And in the morning—my head hurt. You appeared in the kitchen doorway haggard and sallow, and I thought, “Mags, you don’t wear these parties so well anymore.” I thought you would ask me about coffee. I never thought you’d say, “I want a divorce.”
I saw it all differently, then. The way you squared your shoulders that night when I came in off the balcony with Amy—you knew. Oh, God, Maggie, you knew. The way you kept your face turned to the shuttle window, the distance between us under the sheets. When I put my foot against your leg, goodnight, and you shifted. Not shifted. Moved.
“Did you fuck her?”
No, no, I couldn’t say it enough, Maggie, no—but I can’t honestly say I didn’t want to, and you knew that, too.
Sunday. I slept on the sofa. I opened the windows. Space, time, fresh air. I thought you would change your mind, but you were so calm it scared me. I watched you assemble boxes.
“It’s not about the other women, anyway,” you told me. Women plural. Another death, that. How much did you know? The messages on the sly, the flirting over the operating table, that one, quick kiss with an intern in the ladies’ room—pointless diversions, not worth this. Not worth us. Not even the point…
“You don’t see me anymore,” you said.
“I see you.”
“I’m furniture.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Maybe,” you said. You finished with a box, left it sitting in the middle of the floor. To fill
with what? What do you pack up first, from a life? Lives—how do you tease apart what’s yours and what’s mine? Had you thought about that yet? “But I’m not much more than that.”
“You’re my wife.”
“I’m your employee,” you replied.
And you were.
A détente, during the day, until the transfer came through. A shared shuttle in the evenings, all so civil. By the end I was helping you; folding sweaters, making phone calls to charities to pick up your discards. It took the wind out of my arguments, but what could I do. Stand around and not help, like a spoiled child?
September was the last stand. I don’t think you even realized I was still fighting. You were clearing out the spice cabinet. I poured wine. I asked you when it fell apart. Another failed attempt to figure out, why.
You said, “You don’t compose poems for me anymore.”
I thought I misheard you. You packed a tin of saffron (from that little shop on Fifth Street, remember?).
“I don’t write poetry.”
“I didn’t say you wrote them,” you corrected, with a coy little smile.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You filled the box. You sealed the lid. “I know.”
I followed you to the front door, and you took pity on me, then. “There’s a moment,” you told me, “after we make love…just before you fall asleep… I used to call it our magic moment.”
I was scowling. I could feel it. I couldn’t help it. “What?”
You looked at me. Your eyes teared up a little. I couldn’t tell if it was really over, or if that was hope. You told me that sometimes, in that moment, I used to say things I wasn’t aware I was saying—like I was talking to you from inside a dream. You said I would never remember in the morning. They were like secrets, love letters from a part of me I never knew existed.
