You will open your eyes, but the person is gone. Who? You search and search for the name, but the whispers crowd into your ears, erasing all your memories.
They will find you. They will find the shell of you lying on the street. You will try to tell them you are just sleeping, but there will be no sound. Your throat parched shut. You will watch them move around you, their lips like fish in speech. Though the sounds once familiar are now nothing, just wind speaking through trees, you will try to understand what they are saying. They pluck at your skin. Your clothes.
You will struggle away from them. Crouch down and hold your hands over your ears, but the voices are not outside. Are they? Are they, you stupid fuck? Stand up. Get up. Worthless. You’re better off dead. Coward. Who do you think you are?
You will begin to cry. What do they want? You will begin to scream.
The warm breeze lifts the trash around you, blowing leaves, bits of torn paper, raising ghosts from the streets. The birds circle above, floating on the currents, dark shadows piercing sunlight. The red and blue lights flashing in your eyes, the men in black hats, the patch of gold on their dark shirts reflecting glints of light into your eyes. Until they close and roll back. The darkness will lift your body into the air. A weightless burden carried up up up on the riptides of grief like a particle of dust in a tornado.
Spring
Large flakes of snow swirl and drift all around me as I step out of my car in the parking lot of Genentium. Above me the brilliant azure sky dots with white flakes. I marvel at the sight, opening my mouth to taste the blue that flits down on my face. Cold and clean, of light and air, I want to stand here all day in the perfection of this moment. I feel myself lifting into the sky. If I died right now, I would be happy. Forever.
But too swiftly, the sky grays over with clouds, the blueness disappearing, and the fading light dulling my vision. I lower my eyes and turn toward the building in which I will spend the rest of my afternoon. From the outside, Genentium looks like a bank consisting of sheer walls of glass on three sides. A waiting area with lounge chairs, a couch, a receptionist sitting behind a high counter, and a few security guards loitering around to finish off the resemblance. In reality, Genentium is a bunker filled with scientist bees working toward a common goal led by a queen, Dr. Mendelson. With each step toward Genentium, the idea of work tames my mind and I feel a part of a larger organism that tethers my body. I step inside the aquarium building and wave to Connie, the stooped-back receptionist, as I show security my badge.
On the elevator down to my lab, the doors open on B4, the animal floor. A guy with a tan too dark to be real for this part of the world pushes in a cart loaded with small compartments holding rats, two, sometimes three, per cage. I glance down at the rodents climbing up against the bars and sniffing the air. A few begin to squeak loudly. The elevator doors close and I find myself facing the guy with the fake tan. He briefly flashes me a smile before turning his attention to the squealing rats on the lower shelf of his cart. The noise is getting louder and louder. I stare at the numbers lighting up as we pass the floors. Why does my lab have to be on the lowest floor? The odor in the elevator is getting unbearable, not to mention the noise. The tan guy keeps checking the rats and then glancing up at me as though I am somehow responsible for their craziness. I start breathing through my mouth. I am just about to ask the guy what is wrong with them when the elevator doors open and he steps out backward. He easily swings the cart around and heads down the empty hallway. The fluorescent lighting turns the skin on the back of his neck a tropical orange. A slight screeching noise from a wheel is the only noise emanating from the cart now; the rats have suddenly become silent. The elevator closes.
On my floor, all the labs are hidden behind heavy metal doors. From the hallway, it’s hard to imagine that there are close to a hundred scientists, lab techs, and assistants scurrying around the building. I remember my first day when Dr. Diaz, the supervising scientist for all the interns, gave us a guided tour as she introduced us to the various lab teams working on finding microscopic mutations—an extra gene sequence on some chromosome—chasing after a genetic history to different illnesses with a hereditary factor like breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression. They were all down there searching for the clues that would lead to a discovery, and the hope for a cure, or at the very least, medication designed to target that specific condition. What Dr. Diaz didn’t say, but Dad made clear as soon as he started working for Genentium, was that there was a shitload of money in patents to be made. Money that funded all the doctors that Dad could lure with abandon to work on what he wanted most—our family again.
I open the door to my lab and nod at some of the scientists standing at their stations. In a small room off to the side, I stow my gear on some shelves
