I
WENDY
This body
This body is white. This body is female. This body bears no recent signs of penetration. This body has never given birth, but may or may not have incubated a fetus. This body offers no means of identification. This body bears the following distinguishing marks: Crescent scar behind left ear. Surgical scar along left calf. Mole on right breast, lower quadrant. No tattoos. Medical history: Healed fracture in each wrist. Three silver fillings. Mild scoliosis. O-positive blood. Cholesterol, average. Blood pressure, average. Nearsighted, mildly.
Emergency room intake records indicate severe dehydration. Bruising to shoulders and back consistent with a fall or a struggle. No physical indication of recent head injury. No evident physiological cause of amnesic state. CAT scan: inconclusive. MRI: inconclusive. Rape kit: inconclusive.
This body is uncoordinated. Its breasts have ghost nipples, pale and undersensitized. Its clitoris is small, but demanding. Its sinuses often hurt. Its eyes sting in the sun. It wants to sleep on its side, wrapped tight around something solid and warm. Its fingers are uncalloused; they do not work for their living. Its nails are ragged, its cuticles bloody. Its teeth are cared for, nutrition maintained. This body is not a temple, but it has been loved. You’d think someone would be looking for it.
LIZZIE
For all the obvious reasons, Lizzie preferred rats. Rats were adaptable and interchangeable, smart and cheap. Rats proffered no opinions, demanded no small talk. You could anesthetize a rat, pierce its skull, lesion its brain. Then euthanize, extract, examine: comprehend. Rats were explicable. This was their whole point. Damage had consequence; behavior had cause. Here was a material link between spirit and flesh. Here, in the humble rat, was obviation of soul and its god. It was, of course, also the case that if your rats inhabited a climate-controlled basement whose climate controls failed, not one of them would think to call 911 before the colony overheated. Rats were replaceable; two years of carefully cultivated genetic lines were not. Lizzie tried not to blame the rats, whose death had nearly capsized the carefully constructed ship of her career—but the rats were not here to defend themselves. It was easy, as she packed for her year in exile, to imagine a rat god visiting hell upon her, not just for the crate of tiny parboiled corpses, but for the indignities she’d visited upon their forefathers, all those rodent generations for whom Lizzie had played both grand inquisitor and executioner. Not that this was hell, she reminded herself. This was Philadelphia.
Lizzie Epstein, home at last. Suburbscape depressingly unchanged: same mediocre Chinese takeout, same ticky-tack split-levels, familiar flutter of rumors regarding a new high-end mall eatery, in this case, the long-awaited Cheesecake Factory. Illusory adult independence given way to shameful squat in her childhood bedroom. She had, after an efficient hygiene layover in the airport bathroom, arrived at orientation straight from her red-eye, granting herself one final day of avoiding her mother. Lizzie Epstein, reporting for duty at the Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research, cheeks still sun kissed with California glow, ass neatly pencil-skirted, rat-brown hair primly bunned, glasses wire rimmed and not strictly flattering, semisensible mules already blistering her feet. Here was her last, best chance, a wonder-stuffed Willy Wonka factory of world-class memory research, the fellowship packet in her bag a golden ticket. Four graduate students from across the country had been selected to spend a year exploiting the Meadowlark’s scientific opportunities and—of more practical pertinence—to spend the next several years of their academic careers coasting on that glory: genius by association. So what if she had never intended to return east, if she had screwed up her research and, as a consequence, the closest thing she’d had in years to a successful relationship? So what if it had brought her here, to the threshold of Benjamin Strauss’s Meadowlark Institute, to the chance to work beneath cognitive psychology’s latest golden god, to relaunch her research with the help of his infinite resources and reputation, publish something—anything—with her name tangentially linked to his, then return west in triumph, her academic destiny manifest?
That at least was the plan she’d hatched after several sleepless nights grieving her rats. By then, the Meadowlark application was due in only three days, its requirements draconian—not just the standard research proposal, faculty recommendations, CV, personal statement, but also work samples, analytic essays on recent developments in the field, peer review of an anonymous preprint, and an extensive questionnaire that seemed part IQ test, part personality test, all invasive. Lizzie knew all this because the body snoring beside her had spent the last three months talking of nothing else; Lucas had his heart set on the fellowship and, as the second-best student in the country’s second-best cognitive psychology department, he was convinced he had a shot. Lizzie, generally agreed to be the best student in the program—although they discussed this about as often as they discussed what it would mean for Lucas to move three thousand miles away, i.e., approximately never—had spent several boozy nights brainstorming with him how best to position himself to appeal to Benjamin Strauss’s infamously peculiar tastes. She’d proofed his application materials before he dropped them in the mail only a few days before. She understood later the mistake she’d made not telling him about her decision to apply, but at the time, there had seemed no point. Her dissertation was dead; she had no reason to believe that her slapdash statement—with its overconfident implications about what she could accomplish with the Meadowlark’s resources; its overwrought paean to the grand unified theories of the past; its coda disclosing secret ambition to be a Newton, a Darwin, a (forgive the shameless flattery, she wrote) Strauss—would work. She also had no reason to assume the boy who claimed to love her would be unable to do so once she won what he had lost, but maybe she’d assumed this anyway, because when it happened, she wasn’t surprised.
Not that he broke up with her when the acceptance letter arrived. Lucas was not, or at least refused to be seen as, that kind of guy. Nor was he the kind who would say to her face that it had been to her advantage that she was a woman, that academia was making it impossible to succeed as a white man; but he said it to enough of their friends to ensure it got back to her. They had plenty of sex that summer, though decreasingly so as she signed her sublease and shipped her boxes, serviced her car, curled up alone in bed while he stayed late at the lab, cried. Let’s see how things go, he said, whenever she brought up the future, which she also did decreasingly as summer burned on. It was breakup chicken: she swerved first. If that’s what you really want, he said, the week before she got on the plane. What she wanted was for him to arrive breathless at the gate, declare his inability to live without her. She would have boarded anyway—she was able to live without him—but still, that’s what she wanted.
So Lucas was in California, already—rumor had it—de facto domestic partners with a blond undergrad he’d picked up at a frat party, and Lizzie was here. The Meadowlark Institute: a multidisciplinary mutual embrace of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, biologists, neurologists. Every -ology with a defensible connection to memory research was represented, or could petition to be. The promotional materials she’d received with her fellowship acceptance leaned, unsurprisingly, on the metaphor of the brain: parallel processing, functional integration—this was demonstrably nature’s most efficient method of knowledge production, so why was science so intent on segregation? Why not attack a topic without observing absurd rules of engagement? Science, Strauss wrote, is not a boxing match. It’s a street fight. Lizzie didn’t know what the intellectual equivalent of brass knuckles would be, but she was prepared to use them.