Or there was every way Claire could have known that, and more. I should have reminded myself not to think I had some advantage of perspective here. What you are most certain of is what will undo you, had said Rabbi Burke, once long ago. I had scoffed. It sounded like the mantra of a high school teacher who trafficked in homilies that no one believed.
The naked Claire stepped behind a curtain.
“And your plans for her now?”
“She’ll serve as an associate tester for us,” said LeBov, bored. He motioned his technicians over and they helped him up.
I pretended to know what that meant, and LeBov caught me trying to decipher what he’d said.
“You think we don’t rank them?”
“Does it matter what I think?”
“Good point,” he admitted.
He went on to explain that her class of test subjects would not die immediately. Claire would be exposed to materials that had not formally been ruled out, scripts, historical speeches delivered in a spectrum of accents, languages laced into ambient room sounds at subvocal thresholds, even though prospects were …
LeBov did not finish saying what Claire’s prospects were.
“It’s possible she’ll even get to read one of your funny little alphabets. What a nice reunion that will be. Maybe you should encode a message to her? ‘Dear Claire, how are you today? I am fine. This script, by the way, I made it myself! And… it will kill you. Love, Sam.’
“Turns out it’s not too late to apologize after all. What’s the hieroglyph for ‘I’m sorry’? In fact, let’s arrange that,” LeBov said.
He laughed. “Don’t you love closure?”
LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel the words of an invader. This kind of concealment was supposed to create tension, build mystery. We spoke in code, but no one was listening in, and we no longer knew the original language to which our niceties would be translated back. We were trapped in the code now for good. A language twice removed, stepped on, boiled into a paste, and rubbed into an animal’s corpse.
We returned to the door outside the Forsythe Jew hole.
I thought of Claire covering herself with the robe they dispense to the subjects, moving into the final processing line, waiting with the others. I thought of her standing there missing her daughter, looking strong and indifferent on the outside, but missing her daughter so hugely that she worried it would show, it would show and then she’d do something wrong, something that would only hurt her chances of seeing Esther again, so she braced herself further, hardened her look, erasing all signs of desire, of interest, of anything. Such erasure of one’s appearances, how can it not seep into the interior, even a little bit? What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?
I pictured Claire going to bed tonight. I didn’t even know where the subjects slept, and under what conditions, but that just made it worse. It could not be good, they were not providing comfortable hotel rooms for these people. She’d go to sleep tonight, I thought, and she’d be thinking, Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll go to where the children are, and they’ll show me to my Esther, and then, and then… And maybe Claire would fall asleep before working out those details, because those details could not be worked out. Maybe she’d not be too hard on herself by realizing how little she knew and how little she’d planned ahead for any of this.
I returned more seriously to LeBov’s request that I change work assignments.
“And is one medicated for this work, poking around in that hole?”
LeBov registered this shift in my resistance. I saw the shit in his eyes, the shit that appears when he knows he’s getting his way. It filled his eyes and some of it spread onto his face, and even though he had blackened teeth and a festering wound on his neck and his cough seemed like the worst, scariest cough I’ve ever heard, he beamed with pleasure.
“Sometimes, in theory, you’d be given the serum, but it’s going to depend on some issues surrounding supply. Supply and priority.”
“Well, count me out of these medical trials. I can do my work without speaking.”
“But you can’t,” said LeBov. “Seriously, are these really the conditions that will allow scientific progress, working mutely in a mute room with mute fucks wandering by who can’t tell you what the mute loser down the hall is even doing, or even how what you’ve just done, what you’ve tried to pass off as adequate research, is more mute loser work that is only a setback for everybody? Don’t you find it hard to be productive when you can’t communicate with anyone?”
LeBov paused, pretended to think.
“Oh, right. You’re not productive at all.”
The chemical from the child serum left a taste of berries in my throat.
“I won’t be fed this liquid,” I said.
“Won’t you? Without this liquid you wouldn’t even be able to tell me you don’t care for it. You see the problem, I’m sure.”
I remained silent.
About this liquid, LeBov remarked that the children were not too pleased to part with it. What resulted, after enough of this liquid had been withdrawn—I got no specifics—was a person not quite a child, not quite anything. LeBov said that there might be abilities, or talents, for these children post-procedure, but that these were still, and here he paused, undiscovered.
“Maybe you can write stories for them. They can still read. I mean, we don’t take away their immunity to language. But their comprehension levels are quite low. What we’ve found, though, is that people with very low comprehension levels, people who fail to understand things, did not get sick so readily when the toxicity first hit. If your wife got sick faster than you, it means she understood more. Does that ring a bell? Some pretty smart people died instantly. It was nice. It cleared space for lots of less intelligent people to take over.”
“Can’t you duplicate this liquid in a lab?” I asked. “Make a synthetic version?”
“Have at it,” he said. He winced, gently touched the bandage on his neck.
I wished he meant it. Instead, I was having at something they had all agreed was futile. I didn’t want that anymore.
I asked who else was using this liquid, what the other side effects were.
“What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov? If you want access, and information that doesn’t even fucking concern you, then do what I’m asking, fix the motherfucker for me. Get some secrets out of that hole before I rip someone’s face off.”
The exertion triggered something in LeBov and he fell to the floor, coughing. Around him crowded his technicians, and by wagon one of them dragged in something covered by a blanket. It wriggled under there, groaned. A wet spot soaked up through the wool.
I thought of Claire waking up tomorrow morning thinking This is the day, stepping over the badly slept bodies of her cohorts, and then getting led down hallways and corridors and through rooms and out, finally, into the sickening light of the courtyard, where she could finally, she just knew, run to Esther and hug her close, and even if they could not speak, couldn’t they be near each other, maybe find a shelter somewhere to enjoy each other’s company in silence? Why, after all, would anyone want to keep Esther from her?