Vox-Chapter 25

Vox by Christina Dalcher (excerpt, chapter Twenty Five)

My office is something between a cave and a monk's cell, but less luxurious given the pair of desks and chairs crammed inside. Also, it lacks a window, unless you count the glass pane in the door that gives the work space all the privacy of a fishbowl. A scarf and purse, both on the tattered side of wear, site on one one of the desks. I recognize both as Lin's.

Morgan shows me inside and leaves me to get settled. He says he'll come back in a few minutes to take me around the lab, get me set up with an ID tag, and show me where the copier room and the printer are are. I now know nothing I do here will be unseen by other eyes.

Oddly, I don't care. The idea of seeing Lin again, of talking to her working with her, has me as high as a schoolgirl at her first dance. 

“Or, my god,” a wisp of a voice says from the doorway.

Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pants legs – and I'm only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I've been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin's breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain – her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn't hand out dual PhDs for nothing.

Like me, Lin is a neurolinguist. Unlike me, she's a medical doctor, a surgeon, to be specific. She left her practice fixing brains fifteen years ago, when she was in her late forties, and moved to Boston.

Five years later, she left with a doctorate in each hand, one in cognitive science, one in linguistics. If anyone can make me feel like the class dunce, it's Lin.

An I love her for it. She sets the bar as high as Everest.

Lin steps in and glances down at my left writs. “You too, huh?” The she bear-hugs me,, which is interesting since she's shorter and narrower than I am. It's a little being bear-hugged by a Barbie doll.

“Me too,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time.

After what seems like an hour, she releases me from her clutch and steps back. “You're exactly the same. Maybe even younger-looking.”

“Well, it's amazing what a year off of working for you has done,” I say.

The humor doesn't work. She shakes her head and raises a hand, thumb and forefinger a fraction of an each apart. “I was this close to going to Malasiya to visit my family. This close.” Her fingers fly apart into a starfish as she blows our air. “Gone. Gone in a bloody day.”

“You sound like the queen,” I say. “Except for the bloody part.” 

No one writes a long novel alone (Stephen King). Illustration by Elena.