Vox: The bestselling gripping dystopian debut of 2018 that everyone’s talking about!. Christina Dalcher
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a long swallow of the hard stuff, and the needle slides into my disinfected skin without much pain. Still, I won’t look, only hand Patrick the pickup when he asks for it.
“Damn good thing you didn’t go into nursing, babe,” he says, and there’s tenderness again between us.
For a moment.
He makes an expert knot, cuts off the excess thread, and pats my hand. “There you are, Dr. Frankenstein. Good as new.”
“Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t the one with the zipper neck,” I say. “Anyway, what do you think? Are they playing a game, or are they serious about what they said?”
“I don’t know, Jean.” ‘Jean’ again. He’s pissed.
“Look, if I take this job, how do I know they won’t—I don’t know—use my research to promote worldwide evil?”
“With an anti-aphasia serum? Come on.”
The blood loss and bourbon cocktail have made me light-headed. “I just don’t trust these people.”
“All right, then.” He pours a drink for himself, then slams the bottle on the counter with enough force to hurt my ears. “Don’t take the job. We’ll deal with the AC when my direct deposit comes through next week, you can put your goddamned bracelet back on, and we’ll all go back to exactly the way we were this morning.”
“Fuck you.”
He’s mad, he’s hurt, and he’s frustrated. None of this justifies the next words out of his mouth, though, the ones he will never be able to take back, the ones that slice deeper than any shard of broken glass and make me bleed all over.
“You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk.”
Even without the metal contraption on my wrist, dinner is a quiet affair tonight.
Steven, normally garrulous in between forkfuls of food, hasn’t mentioned school or Julia King or soccer. The twins seem confused and shift a little in their chairs. Sonia alternates between staring at her plate and staring at my left wrist, but she’s been silent since she got home from school. Another thing—there hasn’t been a single fist bump between her and Steven.
As for Patrick, he eats, takes his plate into the kitchen, and escapes to his study with a tumbler of bourbon and a few curt words about having to meet a deadline. It’s impossible to tell whom he’s more angry with—me, or himself.
“You explain it to them, Jean,” he says before shutting the door to that book-lined sanctuary of his.
Well, this is awkward.
I haven’t had a real conversation with my kids for more than a year. What once would have been an animated debate over whether Pokémon Go was a time waster or the cleverest innovation in gaming since Xbox is now four young faces staring in silent expectation. And I’m the main event.
I might as well get it over with.
“So, Steven, what’s going on at school these days?” I say.
“Two exams tomorrow.” It’s as if he’s the one with the daily word quota.
“Want me to help you study?”
“Nah. I’m cool.” Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “Thanks anyway.”
Sam and Leo are slightly more eager, pummeling me with news of their new soccer coach and how they played a trick at practice this morning, each one pretending to be the other. The two of them do most of the talking. I suppose that’s what they’ve grown used to.
Only Sonia watches me with wide eyes, the kind of look that makes me feel as if I’m a new person. Or have grown fur. Or turned into a dragon. She’s eaten none of the meat loaf on her plate, and only a few of the potatoes I’d run to the store to buy after the falling-out with Patrick this afternoon.
“Will I have another bad dream?” she asks.
Automatically, I respond with the wrong kind of question. “What makes you think that, honey?” I rephrase. “No. I won’t let the bad dreams happen. And I’ll tell you a story when I tuck you in, okay?”
She nods. The number on her wrist glows 40. “Scared,” she says.
“No reason to be.”
Sam and Leo exchange a nervous look, and I shake my head at them. Steven raises one finger to his lips, his silent sign to his baby sister, something normal.
Then Sonia nods again. Her eyes—Patrick’s Irish hazel—are glazed over with unfallen tears.
“You’re still afraid?” I ask.
Another nod.
“Of the bad dreams?”
Now she shakes her head.
The thing is, Sonia doesn’t know what the wrist counters do, other than glow brightly and show her numbers and pulse against her wrist, one time for each word she speaks. We’ve been careful to keep this secret from her. Maybe it’s a foolish thing, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how to describe an electric jolt of pain to a six-year-old. It would be like telling a child about the horrors of the electric chair in order to instill some sense of right and wrong. Grisly, and unnecessary. What parent would enumerate the exact workings of Old Sparky to get their kid not to fib or steal?
When the counters went on our wrists—there was no acclimation period, not even for children—I decided to go about it from the opposite direction. A scoop of ice cream, an extra cookie before bed, hot cocoa with as many marshmallows as would fit in the cup whenever Sonia nodded or shook her head or tugged on my sleeve instead of speaking. Positive reinforcement rather than punishment. I didn’t want her to learn the hard way. Not like I had.
Also, I knew something else about the counters. The pain increases with each infraction.
There was no time for me, on that first day, to process the steady surge in charge. Patrick explained, afterward, as he applied cold cream to the scar on my wrist.
“First word over a hundred, and you’ll get a slight shock, Jean. Nothing disabling, just a little jolt. A warning. You’ll perceive it, but it won’t actually hurt.”
Terrific, I thought.
“For every ten words after that, the charge augments by a tenth of a microcoulomb. Get to half a microcoulomb, and you’ll feel pain. Reach a full microcoulomb and”—he paused and looked away—“and the pain becomes unbearable.” He took my left hand in his own and checked the number on the counter. “Whew. One ninety-six. Thank god you didn’t keep talking. Another few words and you would have hit one microcoulomb.”
Patrick and I had rather different ideas of what “unbearable pain” meant.
He continued while I held a bag of frozen peas to the circular burn and kept my eyes trained on the closed door of Sonia’s bedroom. The boys were in there with her, at Patrick’s insistence, no doubt making sure she didn’t speak. No one wanted a repeat performance of the Electrocuted Female, not when a five-year-old was cast in the lead role.
“I think what happened is this, babe. I think you were going so fast, the device couldn’t keep up.” There were tears in his eyes now. “I’ll go talk to someone about it tomorrow morning. I promise. Christ, I’m so sorry.”
It took only a second’s worth of imagination to see my little girl blasted from her chair, no idea why she was hurting, to turn my bowels into liquid fire. So I went about it the Pavlovian way, focusing on the reward, as if I were training a dog, all for the greater good, I thought at the time.
Now, in the middle of this odd nonconversation at our dinner table, I realize I needn’t have bothered.
Sonia’s tears have