If I move the pictures, the shelf doesn’t look so abandoned, so I shuffle the frames around, stick the kitchen timer and scale in the empty spaces, and step back to admire this achievement of the day. With a little imagination, I can persuade myself I’ve just carved Mount Fucking Rushmore. Start the ticker-tape parade.
Mamma and Papà are now much more prominent than they were before this adventure in interior design. I’m not sure whether I want them to be. They call from Italy, or they Skype Patrick on the laptop he keeps locked in his office, the one with the keystroke logger and the camera and a thousand other custom bells and whistles attached to it. Usually, this happens on Sundays when the kids are home from school and the time difference works out so that they can say hello to the entire family. It’s supposed to be joyous, but Mamma ends each call in tears or hands the phone off to Papà before she breaks down.
So. Dinner.
The kids would love biscuits, and I’m pulling on jeans and an old linen blouse, ready to risk a supermarket trip, when Patrick’s car roars up the street. I know it’s his—if there’s one skill I’ve honed to a point in the past year, it’s sound discrimination. Mustang, Corvette, Prius, Mini Cooper. You name the car, I know the sound.
What bugs me as I look out the blinds isn’t that Patrick’s home early, but that three black SUVs are in a line behind him. I’ve seen those vehicles before.
I’ve seen their insides, too.
ELEVEN
Shit.
Three cars means at least three men. Something tells me they’re not bearing precious gifts. Not today, not after my backyard performance of last night.
There will be a lecture. Maybe more than that.
Mrs. McClellan, you have the right to remain silent—
Okay. Lousy joke.
I let the blinds fall back into place and I return to the kitchen, ready to put on my best Donna Reed face (an apron will have to do) and be the picture of domestic bliss. On the way, I hit the television’s remote and change the channel from golf to CNN. CNN isn’t what it used to be—nothing is—but Patrick’s job might have a better chance of survival if it looks like I’ve been overdosing on presidential propaganda instead of watching balls fly over manicured courses.
Breaking: President announces—
That’s all I get to see before Patrick and his escorts—I was wrong; there are six of them—invade my space.
“Jean McClellan?” says the first suit, a suntanned man who is all angles.
I’ve seen him before, of course. Everyone has, only he used to wear one of those black-and-white clerical collars instead of a necktie during his public appearances. On Sunday mornings, while Jackie and I chugged coffee to chase away a weekend hangover, he’d be on the TV, the star of his own show. Jackie turned it on as if she were one of the fold; she claimed it got her anger up.
“Listen. Saint Carl’s about to start his shtick again,” she’d say.
And there he’d be, in his minister’s uniform, preaching about the fall of the American family one week, the joy of surrender to God the next. He welcomed anecdotes, real-life experiences, and the bottom few inches of the TV screen always flashed the same toll-free number. After a few years, he added a second number; in more recent years there were Facebook links, then a Twitter account. God had sent him traffic, he said, and he would deal with it by whatever means the Lord provided.
At the time, Jackie and I couldn’t imagine more than a few hundred Southern Baptists from Mississippi followed Reverend Carl Corbin.
It sucks to be so wrong.
“Dr. Jean McClellan?”
Now, this is different. I haven’t been “Dr.” anything since last spring. Also, Patrick is smiling. I nod, because there’s nothing I can say.
In the den, on the television, one of the talking heads says two magic words: brain trauma.
Those words alone, those three syllables, would be enough to prick up my ears, but the words that surround them hit me like a runaway train. President. Skiing accident. Brother.
“Dr. McClellan, we have a problem.” It’s Reverend Carl again, although he looks less like paste and more like fungus in person than when he’s in front of a camera, speaking for the president.
“Great. Fix it,” I say. “What am I, fucking Houston?”
No, I don’t say this. I don’t say anything.
“Jean,” Patrick says. Not “babe,” not “hon,” not any of those sweetie-isms that spouses share. He’s all business now. “Jean, something’s happened.”
On the television, CNN is blaring. In between live footage of some snow-covered mountain, He Who Rules the Free World flashes on and off, a picture of solemnity. Anna stands at his side, lovely in her blue and beige ensemble. It does seem that she’s smiling, if only in her eyes.
Reverend Carl motions to one of the others, who steps forward into my kitchen. I don’t care for this intrusion; if I’m to be a silent domestic, let me at least keep some domestic sanctuary for my own.
“Go ahead, Thomas,” the man in charge says.
And then it happens.
Thomas of the dark suit and dark mien reaches forward for my left hand. I instinctively retract, like a frightened wild dog that knows the pain of a trap, but Patrick comes toward me.
“It’s okay, babe. Just let them do this.”
With his free hand, Thomas produces a small key. It’s like an elevator key, one of those round, single-purpose gizmos that don’t seem to have a reason for being except in an elevator, a device that brings to mind all the other silly little inventions: can openers, lemon zesters, melon ballers. Things that do only one thing. We have so many of them.
Where do we get this shit? Bridal shower and wedding gifts, stocking stuffers, spur-of-the-moment purchases at Ikea. They’re all so goddamned useless, hidden in the backs of kitchen drawers, taken for granted and never taken out. This is what goes through my mind as Thomas frees me with the high-tech equivalent of a can opener.
“You can speak now, Dr. McClellan.” Reverend Carl extends a hand toward my living room, like he’s turned magnanimous host.
It isn’t the only role reversal today. Everything they want is being broadcast on CNN as the story of the president’s brother’s skiing accident unfolds. As further details are reported—posterior left hemisphere, alert but uncommunicative, babbling—I know what else Reverend Carl and his crew want.
They want me.
If it were Anna Myers who had skied her way off-piste into a tree, I’d be out the door without a second thought. Although I doubt there would be any SUV-driving men here if it were the president’s wife lying in an intensive care unit.
“What do you want me to say?” My words come out slowly, tentatively, while I move out of the kitchen, past the television—which I click off—and over to one of the wing chairs. I don’t want to have to share space with any of these people.
“Hot in here,” Reverend Carl says, glancing toward the fridge with its built-in water and ice dispensers.
“Yep,” I say.
One of the other men, not Thomas, coughs.
I take the cue. “Patrick, why don’t you get our guests a glass of water, hon? Since you’re right there.”
He does, and neither of us misses the slight shake of Reverend Carl’s head. I’m the wife. I should be the one serving.
“So?” I say. “Sounds like Bobby Myers might have brain damage. Locus?”
Reverend Carl arranges himself on the love seat opposite my chair. “You’re the medical man, Patrick. Show her the reports the hospital faxed over this morning.”
My husband, who is on a first-name basis with the individual who single-handedly put that metal cuff on me, comes into the room with a tray of water glasses and a slim folder. He stops in front of me before passing around the drinks. “I think you’ll be interested in this, Jean.”
And I am. The first page is all text, and on the second line my eyes find the reason for Reverend Carl’s unexpected visit: lesion in posterior section of STG. Superior temporal gyrus. Left hemisphere. Patient is right-handed, therefore left-brain dominant.
“Wernicke’s area,” I say, to no one in particular. As I read on, my left arm feels light, and there’s a band of paler skin around my wrist, as if I’d taken off a watch before diving into a pool. One of the Secret Service men—I’m assuming that’s what they are, given Carl Corbin’s presence—rubs his own wrist. He wears a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. So he knows. What camp he’s in isn’t clear; like Patrick, they’re all trained to follow along, rather like puppies.
Reverend Carl nods. “The president is very concerned.”
Sure he is. I think Mr. President relies on his older brother quite a bit, and he is going to have one hell of a time getting information either to Bobby or from him. Pieces of future conversations play themselves in my mind:
There’s a situation in Afghanistan, Bobby, the president will say.
Bobby’s response will sound something like Nice twinkles for your banana flames. His speech will be precise and fluid, each syllable articulated perfectly and without hesitation. What comes out will be absolute gibberish: not code, not broken speech, but the ramblings of what we once called an idiot—in the clinical sense of the word.
It’s all I can do to keep from smiling. I have to bite the inside of my cheek—hard—to maintain the proper visage of seriousness, of concern, of duty.
I flip through the other pages. The MRIs, or magnetic resonance images, show a substantial lesion exactly where I expect it, in Brodmann area 22. “This was from a skiing accident?” I say. “No indication of prior damage?”
Of course they don’t know. Thirty-four-year-old men aren’t in the habit of having brain scans, not unless there’s cause.
“Did he suffer from headaches?”
Reverend Carl shrugs.
“Is that a yes or a no, Reverend?” I say.
“I don’t have that information.”
Now I turn to Patrick, but he shakes his head. “You have to understand, Jean, we can’t release the president’s family’s medical history.”
“But you want me to help.”
“You’re the country’s leading expert, Dr. McClellan.” Reverend Carl has stepped in, or leaned in across the coffee table. His face, all sharp lines, is inches from my own. There’s something anime about him, but he’s still handsome. He’s still wearing his suit jacket, despite the heat, but under the fabric is a solid frame. I wonder if women like Olivia King are secretly in love with him.
The chance to correct his tense is too good to miss. “Was,” I say. “I don’t need to tell you I haven’t worked for the past year.”
Reverend Carl doesn’t react, only sits back and steeples his hands together, his long fingers forming a perfect isosceles triangle. Maybe he practices this in front of a mirror. “Well, that’s why we’re here today.” He pauses, like he used to do during his televised sermons, a bit of extra razzle-dazzle suspense-building effect.
But I already know what he’s going to say. My eyes wander from his to Patrick’s to the other men in the room.
“Dr. McClellan, we’d like you on our team.”
TWELVE
On our team.
A hundred responses bubble up inside me, ninety-nine of which would mean forced resignation—or worse—for Patrick. But anything approaching agreement or eagerness will never make its way through my brain to my mouth. Instead of excitement, I feel a gut punch of pain, as if Reverend Carl just reached out with a claw instead of words and bored into me. They might need me, but need is different from want. And I don’t trust any of these men.
“Do I have a choice?” I say. It seems safe.
Reverend Carl unsteeples his hands, separating them into a saintlike gesture of prayer. I’ve seen him do this before, on television, when he’s asking for help, for more Pure Women and Pure Men and Pure Families to join his fold, for money. Right now, those hands seem more like the sides of a vise ready to squeeze me until I burst.
“Of course,” he says, his voice overgenerous and falsely kind. “I know how you must feel, how leaving your home and your children to go back into the daily grind must be—” He searches for a word as his eyes search my house. There’s clutter and mess everywhere: three pairs of my shoes where I kicked them off last week, dust on the windowsills, an old coffee spill on the carpet next to his shoes.
I’ve never been an ace at housekeeping.
He continues. “We talked to another scientist, Dr. Kwan, in case we need a backup. You know her, I think.”
“Yes.”
Lin Kwan is the chair of my old department. Or was, until they replaced her with the first man they could find. I don’t need to ask why they haven’t approached him for this project—if Lin had gotten her way, the guy’s funding would have been severed after the first disaster of an experiment. He was that inept.
“So,” Reverend Carl says. His hands are down now, and he’s no longer looking at me, but at the steel cuff Thomas has been holding for the past twenty minutes. “It’s your choice. You can set up a new lab, recommence your research, and move forward. Or—”
“Or?” I say. My eyes find Patrick’s.
“Or everything can go back to normal. I’m sure your family would like that.” He doesn’t look at me while he’s talking, but at Patrick, as if he’s studying my husband’s reaction.
As if anything about our lives in the past year has been normal. Then I get it—Carl Corbin actually believes what he preaches. At first, I’d thought he’d spun the Pure Movement, that his motives for resurrecting the Victorian cult of domesticity and keeping women out of the public sphere were purely misogynistic. In a way, I wish that were true; it’s less creepy than the alternative.
Steven was the first to explain it to me, on a Sunday morning two years ago.
“It’s sort of traditional, Mom. Like in olden times.”
“Olden times? Like what? Greece? Sumer? Babylonia?”
He poured himself a second bowl of cereal, mixed in two bananas, and topped it with half-and-half. By the time Sam and Leo reached fifteen, I’d have to buy futures in Cheerios. “Well, yeah. It was there with the Greeks, the idea of public spheres and private spheres, but it goes back further. Think hunter-gatherer communities. Biologically, we’re suited to different things.”
“We?” I said.
“Men and women, Mom.” He stopped crunching and flexed his right arm. “See this? You could go to the gym every day for a year and you still won’t have muscle like I do.” He must have seen the look of pure disbelief on my face, because he reversed course. “I don’t mean you’re weak. Just different.”
Christ.
I pointed to my temple. “See this, kiddo? Ten more years of school and you might have one like it. Or you might not. And it has absolutely shit to do with gender.” My voice was rising.
“Calm down, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.”
“You’re getting kind of hysterical. I’m only saying that it makes biological sense to have women do some stuff and men do other stuff. Like, for instance, you’re a really great teacher, but you probably wouldn’t last more than an hour if you—I dunno—had a job digging ditches.”
That was it. “I’m a scientist, Steven, not a kindergarten teacher. And I’m not hysterical.”
Well, I sort of was.
I poured my second cup of coffee with shaking hands.
Steven didn’t let up. He opened his textbook from that goddamned AP class—Religious Nuttership 101 or whatever they called it—and started reading. “‘Woman has no call to the ballot-box, but she has a sphere of her own, of amazing responsibility and importance. She is the divinely appointed guardian of the home. . . . She should more fully realize that her position as wife and mother, and angel of the home, is the holiest, most responsible, and queenlike assigned to mortals; and dismiss all ambition for anything higher, as there is nothing else here so high for mortals.’ That’s Reverend John Milton Williams. See? You’re queenlike.”
“Terrific.” I needed the coffee but didn’t want Steven to see how on edge I was, so I left it on the counter. “I think you should drop this course.”
“No 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 trained the counter to my voice, set it to zero, and sent me home.
Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it. Not the sketches they showed me in their book of pictures, not the warnings Patrick read aloud to me over tea at our kitchen table. When Steven and his brothers burst in from school, full with news of soccer practice and exam results, while Sonia ignored her dolls, mesmerized by her new shiny red wristband, I opened the dam. My words flew out, unbridled, automatic. The room filled with hundreds of them, all colors and shapes. Mostly blue and sharp.
