The central building was a disorienting jumble of colonial brick and space-age fiberglass. Despite faithfully following the receptionist’s directions, Lizzie took several wrong turns before finding her way to the cavernous lecture hall where the other three fellows had already arrived. She introduced herself, trying not to make it too obvious that she distrusted strangers on general principle—and these particular strangers on the more specific one that they were, by default, her competition. Only one of them would earn the right to publish with Strauss. The other woman, ponytail yanked so tight it tugged at her eyebrows, made no such effort to disguise hostility. She gave Lizzie a brief nod, then crossed her arms over her sweatshirt’s rhinestoned Mickey Mouse, and returned her concentrated gaze to the empty podium at the front of the room. Lizzie didn’t need an introduction, she’d done her homework. This was Mariana Cruz, Rhodes scholar with two years at the National Institute of Mental Health and what Lizzie had to admit was an exciting theory about neuroregenerative stem cells. Dmitri Tarken, the AI expert and piano prodigy from MIT who had the kind of taffy-pulled height that looked unnatural and was compulsively bending his spindly fingers backward one by one, offered his name and asked whether she’d seen any sign of Strauss in the hall. Lizzie shook her head. The final fellow was identifiable by process of elimination—a process unnecessary, because Clay Weld III was a type Lizzie knew all too well from college, a prep school boy who’d been slightly too smart and skinny to snag a prom date but hit freshman year high on blue-blooded cockiness, daddy an alum, daddy’s daddy an alum, already set for a scotch date with daddy’s old roommate the dean. He was hot in an obvious, chiseled-jaw kind of way, although not as hot as he clearly believed. He studied primate sexuality, he told her. You don’t know sex, he added, until you’ve seen those hairy red asses in action.
“Strauss is always late,” Mariana said, sounding sullen. “I hear it’s his thing.”
“Probably fucking his secretary,” Clay said. “I hear that’s his thing.”
“That’s not respectful,” Dmitri said, but Lizzie suspected the disapproval was for her and Mariana’s benefit only. The bro look he shot Clay suggested the boys would pick up their speculation later.
They waited. They discussed their projects, or rather, the other three did while Lizzie evaded summarizing her rat massacre and subsequent blank slate. They exchanged gossip about Benjamin Strauss, his research, his habits, his hypothetical affairs, all of them—even Dmitri, once he read the room—trying to disguise their hero worship, pretending they weren’t vibrating at a higher frequency just knowing he was in the building. Lizzie was no exception: she’d worshipped Strauss from afar since undergrad. It didn’t seem quite real that Strauss himself, the Columbus of neural pathways, codeveloper of the Strauss-Furman measure for flashbulb-memory-imprinting, MacArthur Foundation–certified genius, boy wonder—only in academia could you still be considered a boy wonder at forty-four—was about to stride through the double doors and change their intellectual lives.
The doors opened. The fellows silenced, straightened, held their breath, posed in their best brilliant intellectual posture. But the figure in the doorway was not Strauss, unless Strauss was secretly an elegant older woman with steel wool hair and a silver brooch the shape of a human brain. She stepped up to the podium and informed the fellows that Dr. Strauss would be unable to officially welcome them to the Meadowlark but had sent his regards. The woman was his secretary, she said (Clay nudged Dmitri, who swallowed a snort), and they should consider her at their disposal should any problems arise. “Of course, it would be preferable that none do.” This apparently being all the orientation they were going to get, she dismissed them. “You’ve received your lab assignments in your welcome packets, please report there forthwith.”
Clay, Mariana, and Dmitri propelled themselves from the room like runners from a starting gate. Lizzie did not move. She had no lab assignment and was seized with the irrational but persuasive thought that she’d made a terrible mistake, did not belong here after all. The secretary pointed at her. “You. Come with me.”
* * *
Lizzie paused before a baroque wooden door, the only thing standing between her and her future. She wanted to preserve the moment, the possibility that for once reality would live up to fantasy. Then she knocked.
An irritated voice. “What.”
“I’m Lizzie Epstein.” The ensuing silence left too much time for her to consider the negligibility of self. “Your assistant sent me.” Still nothing. “It’s my first day?”
The door opened. “That sounds like an excuse.” This was him, the infamous, the legend, the genius, peering down at her—well, not down; something about his bearing gave him the illusion of height—with disappointment at first sight. “Which begs the question of what you’ve already done wrong.”
He stepped past her into the hall and indicated with a crooked finger that Lizzie should follow. He led her backward, toward the lobby, toward the front door, toward the end of her last chance before it had its chance to begin. She tried not to panic. Then they were in the parking lot. A line from an old self-defense class—never let him take you to a secondary location—surfaced briefly, absurdly, floated away. She climbed into the car.
“You like Bach?” He didn’t wait for an answer before sliding in the CD. Dirgelike strings relieved them of the need for further conversation. She pretended to study the road—studied him. He wasn’t as attractive as he was in his official department photo. Also not as young: reading glasses, receding hairline, skin at his neckline starting to crepe. She pictured Strauss examining his reflection in the bathroom mirror, combing fingers through curls to urge them unrulier, a mad genius determined to look the part. Imagine if he were a woman, she thought, with that brusque, aggressively ungroomed Garfunkel halo… but she checked this line of thinking abruptly. She was growing tiresome on the subject of double standards. She knew this because Lucas had told her so.
Strauss drove them into the city, deigning to explain only once they’d reached the hospital and found their way to the mental ward that they were here to recruit a subject. It was Lizzie’s first trip to a locked ward. It was unlike she’d imagined: no shrieking, straitjacketed theatrics, only the occasional glassy-eyed patient shuffling down the corridor. The closest approximation to Nurse Ratched and her muscled goons was a clutch of pink-suited orderlies, one of them braiding a patient’s hair, another blotting an old man’s bloody nose. Still, Lizzie stiffened at the whine of the door closing behind them, its electric bolt sliding shut.
Strauss stopped at the door marked 8A. “Try not to get in the way.”
Inside, a woman lay propped on pillows, her face turned toward the television, where a bathing-suited bottle blonde pressed presumably fake boobs against the sheen of a new refrigerator, and Bob Barker bared his Chiclets grin. “You again?” the patient said, underwhelmed. Neon dollar signs blinked, a wheel spun, cash fell from the sky.
“Me again.”
“He’s been here three times this week,” the woman told Lizzie. “Doesn’t seem to realize I’m no one’s guinea pig.”