VOX. Christina Dalcher

way. I’m kinda into it. I mean, there’s a crap ton to think about. Even a few of the girls say so.”

      “I find that hard to believe,” I said, not bothering to take the snideness out of my voice.

      “Julia King, for instance.”

      “Julia King isn’t exactly representative of the entire female population.” Poor kid, I thought, wondering what my next-door neighbors had done to brainwash their daughter. “Really, Steven. Drop the course.”

      “No.”

      Fifteen years old. The age of defiance. I knew it well, having been there.

      Patrick came into the kitchen, emptied the coffeepot into a mug, and stirred in the last of the half-and-half. “What’s going on?” he said, tousling Steven’s hair and then pecking me on the cheek. “Kinda early for a domestic argument.”

      “Mom wants me to drop my AP Religion class.”

      “Why?” Patrick said.

      “I dunno. Ask her. I think she doesn’t like the textbook.”

      “The textbook is shit,” I said.

      Patrick picked it up and flipped the pages like they were an old cartoon. “Doesn’t look so bad to me.”

      “Maybe if you tried reading it, hon.”

      “Come on, babe. Let him take what he wants. It can’t hurt anything.”

      I think it might have been that moment when I started hating my husband.

      Now I’m back in my living room, hating the seven men seated or standing around me, waiting for me to join their ranks. “I need some details,” I say. Maybe they won’t notice I’m stalling.

      Maybe you think I’m crazy for not leaping at the chance to go back to work. I can understand that.

      We could use the extra income. There is that. And I’ve missed my research, my books, the collaboration with Lin and my graduate assistants. I’ve missed talking.

      Most of all, I’ve missed the hope.

      We were so fucking close.

      It was Lin’s idea to abandon our fledgling work on Broca’s aphasia and move on to Wernicke’s. I could see her rationale: the Broca’s patients stammered and stuttered with a palpable frustration, but they got their words out. For the most part, their language was intact; only the ability to transfer it into speech had been hamstrung by a stroke, a fall down the stairs, a head injury sustained while they waded through some desert country in the uniforms of the free world. They could still comprehend, still hear their wives and daughters and fathers encouraging them on. It was the other victims—the ones with damage farther back in their brains, much like Bobby Myers—who suffered the more sinister loss. Language, for them, had become an inescapable labyrinth of non-meaning. I imagine it must feel like being lost at sea.

      So, yes, I want to go back. I want to forge ahead with the serum and—when I’m ready—inject that potion into Mrs. Ray’s old veins. I want to hear her tell me about Quercus virginiana and Magnolia stellata and Syringa vulgaris in the way she did when she first came to my home, identifying the live oaks and the giant, starry trees and the lilacs with a scent that no perfumer has been able to match. She considered them God’s gifts, and I tolerated that. Whatever might be up there, he or she or it did a crackerjack job with trees and flowers.

      But I don’t give a shit about the president or his baby brother or, really, any man.

      “Well, Dr. McClellan?” Reverend Carl says.

      I want to tell him no.

THIRTEEN

      Christ, it’s hot in here. There must be a leak in the air-conditioning compressor again. Wouldn’t that be just our luck?

      I get up, jeans sticking to the backs of my legs, and go to the kitchen to refill my glass with water. “Patrick, can you give me a hand for a sec?” I call. He makes the rounds in the living room, collecting empty glasses, and joins me.

      While I’m pressing one glass after another into the ice dispenser, he takes hold of my left wrist. “You don’t want that back on, do you?”

      I shake my head, out of habit.

      “You should look at it like a trade, babe. They get something and you get something.”

      “I should look at it like what it is,” I say. “Fucking blackmail.”

      He sighs like he’s been holding the entire universe in his lungs. “Then do it for the kids’ sake.”

      The kids.

      Steven doesn’t care. He’s busy filling out college applications and writing admissions essays and boning up for exams, which are right around the corner. Also, he’s been making eyes at Julia King for most of this semester. The twins, only eleven, have soccer and Little League. But there’s Sonia. If I’m going to trade my brain for words, I’ll do it for her.

      The hamster wheel in my head must be making noise, because Patrick stops with the water glasses and turns me toward him. “Do it for Sonia.”

      “I want more details first.”

      Back in the living room, I get them.

      Reverend Carl has morphed from politician to salesman. “Your wrist counter stays off for the duration of the project, Dr. McClellan. If you agree, of course. You’ll have a state-of-the-art lab and all the funding and assistance you need. We can”—he checks the paperwork in another folder—“we can offer you a handsome stipend with a bonus if you find a viable cure within the next ninety days.”

      “And after that?” I ask, back in my chair with my jeans sticking to me.

      “Well—” He turns toward one of the Secret Service men.

      The man nods.

      “Back to one hundred words a day?” I say.

      “Actually, Dr. McClellan—and I’m telling you this in strict confidence, understand?—actually, we’ll be increasing the quota at some point in the future. Once everything gets back on course.”

      Well, this is new. I wait to see what other confidential tidbits he’s got up his sleeve.

      “Our hope”—Reverend Carl is in full preacher mode now—“is that people will settle down, find their feet in the new rhythm, and we won’t need these silly little bracelets any longer.” He makes a disdainful gesture with his hand, as if he’s talking about a trivial fashion accessory and not a torture device.

      Of course, we only feel pain if we flout the rules.

      I remember the day when I learned about these rules.

      It took only five minutes, there in the bleached white government building office. The men spoke to me, at me, never with me. Patrick would be notified and given instructions; a crew would come to the house—was this evening convenient?—to install cameras at the front and back doors, lock my computer away, and pack up our books, even Sonia’s Baby Learns the Alphabet. The board games went into cardboard boxes; the cardboard boxes went into a closet in Patrick’s office. I was to bring Sonia, barely five years out of my body, to the same place that afternoon so her tiny wrist could be fitted. They showed me a selection, a rainbow of colors I could choose from.

      “Pink would be most appropriate for a little girl,” they said.

      I pointed to silver for myself and blood red for Sonia. A trivial act of defiance.

      One of the men left, and returned with the bracelet that would replace my Apple Watch, the one Patrick had surprised me with for Christmas last year. The metal was light, smooth, an alloy of sorts, unfamiliar to my skin.

      He