Gleam in My Eyes

Gleam in My Eyes (from Vox, by Christina Dalcher)

It's been so long since I've used my laptop, I'm worried it might not power up, that a year of nonuse will have sent it into the same dormant silence I fell into. But it's obedient, like an old friend waiting for a phone call, or a pet sitting patiently at the door until its owner comes home. I trace a ginger over its smooth keys, wipe a smudge from the screen, and collect myself.

A year is a long time. Hell, when the FIOS in our house went down for two hours, it seemed like the end of the world.

Eight thousand seven hundred ans sixty hours is a lifetime longer than two, which is why I need a moment before I walk out of this house, start the Honda, and follow Morgan to the lab where I'll be spending three days a week from now until I finish fixing the president's brother.

Also, I need a moment to sift through my files, the ones I copied and kept at home so I didn't have to lug the same shit back and forth to my campus office. There are reports I don't want Morgan to see, not until I can speak to Lin.

The bottom folder is the one I want, the folder with the red X on its front flap. Patrick has already gone to work, and Morgan is out in his Mercedes making phone calls, likely gloating to Reverend Carl about what a fantastic team he's put together, which leaves me here in the paneled room with its humming window air-conditioning unit and – I don't know – about five million pounds of books. They don't weigh that much, but the teetering piles of texts and journals are like academic mesas littering the rec room.

We havent't used the sleeper sofa in a year and a half, not since the last houseguest came to visit. No one really visits anymore. There's no point. We tried it once, a dinner party for some old friends I'd met when Steven was still in diapers, but after an hour of the men talking and the women staring into their plates of salmon, everyone decided to go home.

I pry up the corduroy-covered cushion next to me and slip my red-X folder in among a few cracker crumbs, a stray piece of popcorn, and some spare change.

This “it”, encased in a dull manila folder rubbed shiny by my own hands, is the work that will, when I'm ready, reverse Wernicke's aphasia. I've thought about finding a more permanent hiding place for it, but given the year's worth of crap I find beneath the sofa cushions, I don't see the need.

No one, not even Patrick, knows we had passed the brink from “close” to “finished”, although I believe  Lin and Lorenzo suspected.

The day before Thomas and his Taser-carrying men came for me the first time, I had even been winding down a lecture on linguistic processing in the posterior left hemisphere – the area of the brain where temporal and parietal lobes meet. Wernicke's area, and the language loss that accompanies damage to this complex cluster of gray matter, was the reason most of my students signed on for this seminar, and on that day the room was packed with colleagues of colleagues, the dean, and a few out-of-town researches intrigued by our group's latest breakthrough. Lin and Lorenzo sat in the back row as I talked.

They must have seen the gleam in my eyes... Illustration by Elena.