Chapter Text
It went like this: the class schedule was folded and tucked into the cover pocket of the binder behind the campus map. Both were annotated with ‘dorm’ or ‘student services’ or ‘audio record (lecturer)’ or ‘loud – earplugs’ in her impenetrable spidery shorthand. The phone and smartwatch with medical alert connectivity were set with discreet alarms for each class interval with a ten-minute buffer. Harrow checked before she left. It had been years since her last true episode of petit mal disorientation: dredging back to the surface on milkwarm kitchen tile, clutching the edge of the open fusebox, with no memory of her goal or the events of that morning. And that was within the confines of her home. She could allow no margin of error here.
Especially with the less than optimal transition to campus. Higher stress meant a greater likelihood of a complicating incident. And stress had taken on an inscrutable, subdued ubiquity since her phone interview with the Chancellor, which he had coordinated and carried out personally – (a fantastic sign, hand-picked, a shoe-in, damn near divine providence) – Harrow reminded herself of these things as she sweated all over the handset of her house’s landline. He mispronounced her first name and thanked her for the correction. ‘Ngutuawa’ he said perfectly.
The summer session helped. It had allowed the campus to feel less like some open-air catacomb. Still a frenetically uncontrolled space, but manageable, so long as Harrow was thoughtful in how she allotted her energy. Marshall had loudly bemoaned the lack of a medical bracelet in the days before the move. Harrow took one to appease him, but stowed it in a corner of her desk upon arrival. No explanation of academic biases or bureaucratic stigma would have extinguished his concerns. She was careful to withhold any actual promise to wear it.
“‘Nontraditional’ only goes so far, hate to say,” the handset had said. “But we can fast-track past a lot of the potato work.”
Ideal circumstances would have meant testing out of all the undergrad core classes. But Harrow was going nowhere near the horse’s mouth. Her schedule showed the two entry-level courses, both on the same day: integrated methods and kinesiology. It was debasing. Salting the wound, she had also been relegated to a freshman dormitory due to constraints of her financial aid – despite that she must be the oldest by nearly three years. Harrow had not spoken to anyone enough to arrive at an exact figure, and her resident advisor’s job title belied her apparent inability to advise. Unless one sought advisement in the realm of maximizing extensive, simultaneous usage of as many of the dorm’s washers and dryers for as long as possible. Based on the caliber of conversation Harrow was able to overhear through the walls and doors, three years was an astringently conservative estimate.
Methods and Kinesiology both were such callow sections as to be sources of ‘The First-Year Student Survival Guide’ including guest speakers offering mini-lectures on how to maintain a healthy diet, sleep schedule, how – to – navigate – the – library – system – and issues with the financial aid office. Harrow would much rather have the two timeslots open to reschedule herself into the smaller sections of cell structure and function and macroscopic anatomy that she had successfully tested into. Truly an eye-watering year of bracing herself against the slings and arrows of undergrad mediocrity and the ignominy of laboratory serfdom. But lying in wait at the other side: a chance for Harrow to petition for more pragmatic housing near the relevant research facilities, a full schedule of coursework appropriate to her skill level, and the crown jewel of potential research funding of her own. It was a start.
“There’s a lot of interest in your publication record – it’s an odd system we run with, I know, but you’re an exciting prospect for a lot of pending projects.”
The portable charger was stowed in the sidepocket of her bag. Its spare in the main pocket. Backup spare cables at the bottom therein. Her phone had a low battery alarm with reminder notations referencing all three of these things. The notifications could not be swiped away without a passcode confirmation.
She checked: 10:07. If only Dr. D’Angelo were on time.
Another cause to grudge the albatross of freshmen-level courses: they were the only kind that Harrow had in common with the Chancellor’s daughter.
It was a classic Cinderella story. Rare was the columnist who could write the name ‘John Gaius’ without cramming in some tagged-on mention of his long lost daughter: unearthed from the foster system as a destitute tween, now flourishing as an entitled jock dickhead. After rigorous years of partying, attention-grabbing, and spilling into the headlines from the gossip columns, she was enrolled in the best university in the hemisphere without lifting a pencil. Harrow had to staunchly plunk terms into her browser’s most aggressive blacklist when researching the Chancellor and his work outside of paywalls. She was disturbed by the sheer magnitude of ‘related articles’ that the world declined to notice were unrelated to… anything, really. Save for yet another piece of documentation of the fruits of failing upwards. Society's narrow fascinations well lubricated the machine wherein unmerited attention was fed into one end, and assholes of Olympic magnitude produced from the other.
Harrow had gotten an up-close observation during the first ‘public appearance’ obliged of her, right at the end of the summer session. A celebratory scholarship luncheon for recipients, donors, alumni, research leads, and generally anyone with a university ID who was interested in appearing in a human interest piece. The event was an extensive test of Harrow’s social skills and gustatory resilience – the limits of both which she crashed into with invisible violence as the waitstaff cleared the first course. There were cameras. Some chatty, enterprising graduate student with a slight lisp and a robust background in molecular genetics (the visible half of her nametent read ‘Juniper’) competed with the Chancellor for Harrow’s attention as Harrow attempted to chart his social orbit around the ballroom. Trying to time his trajectory, his arrival at her table. What she should say.
There was commotion at the entrance – and there the Chancellor’s daughter appeared, looking fresh off some plane from someplace. Trailing service staff who exchanged furtive and undercompensated looks. She scanned the crowd. She nodded leftways, grinning crooked. And swaggered towards one of the rugby scholarship recipients a few seats down from Harrow. She grabbed at the player’s shoulder and shook them chummily while reaching down to steal something from their plate – which they blocked. She laughed and looked around for witnesses, all along the other end of the table –
And found Harrow.
Froze: mid-swipe. Grin, melted. Stared. Deadpanned: "What the fuck is this."
Conversation calcified. In concentric ripples; a rolling blackout. One of the waitstaff put out a hand. The Chancellor’s daughter had both of hers spread in an oafish ‘voila,’ head on a swivel. “Hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa – hey! What in the fuck is this? Who – who let –? Hey!”
The Chancellor turned. He was not so distant that Harrow could not see his expression morph from confusion to fatigue. The table rocked – china chimed – when his daughter yanked away from one of the servers and knocked into the edge, more than once. Cameras turned. “Fuck off of me!” and “Man, get off my nuts!” and “Bullshit!” featured prominently.
She was hurriedly corralled and shunted out with a great show of shoulder-rubbing, and coddling, and ass-patting. A couple of the cameras followed her out into the atrium; some of the others pointed back to Harrow. Her heart moiled. Her watch chimed like a dying insect. She startled to find one of the servers had bent down to her ear. The smell of aftershave skinned her in one whiff: “I’m very sorry. We do have a dress code… in consideration of our other guests…”
“What’s the trouble?” The Chancellor. He arrived, bringing Harrow’s mortification to a crescendo. A camera flashed. She dizzied immediately. Had to block her eyes. “You’re not asking her to leave, are you?”
“It’s… a formal attire event, sir. Some of the guests seemed upset.”
“Ah, ‘formal,’ who says?”
“... you did, sir.”
“Oh. Psssh – never listen to that guy.”
People chuckled. Another camera flashed. Harrow’s eyes closed in time.
“Everyone's here already.” The Chancellor shrugged. “Why fuss? I'm not much for the formal thing myself. The only good ideas I've ever had were while I was wearing sweatpants.”
And he took the free seat beside Harrow for the next fifteen minutes. For candid photos of him talking with Harrow, the graduate student, and the others adjacent – hand on his chin, eyes kind and keen, listening closely.
Suffice to say. Harrow would rather avoid the whole thing. She should have been granted a full doctoral decade without need to share a room with… tall children. But that was up to luck, which largely favored slackers.
So D’Angelo’s tardiness rankled. It had been a bad morning. One where her constellation of wellbeing shone brightest at the star christened ‘Irritable.’ A subdermal hive of emotional dysregulation. Harrow knew. Medication helped to deaden the worst of it. But every so often she was granted a meaty, entomological sting through her eyes and into the sinuses. Harrow could have taken extra time to collect herself in the security of her cinderblock enclosure. Not here. Not overhearing the chronic Dailyword puzzle-player tapping his metal water bottle to the table with just a slight arrhythmia. Or the black coffee-drinker whose open tar pit of a thermos was enough for anyone to smell from the next city over. Or the jackassery of the scattered conversation held by the resident entitled dickhead and her hangers-on.
The first week, before D'Angelo's arrival, they had all watched the Chancellor’s daughter walk down the aisle where Harrow had sat to one-arm sweep her notebooks, bag, and tablet from the table to spill across the room onto the floor. No one said anything. The next class, Harrow was surrounded by a radius of vacant seats. Who cared. It was a bullshit 101 class that she only needed once. And she would never have to look at these overgrown, overfunded infants on their four-year fieldtrip ever again.
But the morning was wearing thin. 10:10.
“If it gets to fifteen minutes, we can all leave,” someone said.
“That’s for adjuncts. I think it’s twenty for legit professors.”
“Buuuull-shiiiit. Quarter past and I am gone. I have to go into town.”
“Did you do the pages for GWIC?”
“Dude, the close read was due at midnight.” (“Fuck!”)
“My pores are huuuge today…”
The water bottle tapped.
“– you mean ‘cold-reading.’”
“Buzzkill! Try it. Pick any number between one and ten. Add two –” (“Okay, so that makes –”) “– zzzzip don’t say it! Now multiply it by two – ”
The waterbottle tapped. 10:11.
“... by two. Now subtract the original number. You have the new number in mind? Think on it. No, really, think. Now give me your hand… strengthens the connection, see.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The number you’re thinking of… is one.”
“Haha, okay. Pretty cool.”
“Burn the witch!”
“Wait – okay, one more. I got a different number. Say the steps again.”
The water torture tapped. (Beep!: Harrow’s watch displayed a blood pressure notice.)
“Think on it. Think! Picture your number as bold as you can. Are you picturing it?”
“Graphically. Carnally, even. C’mon, what was the first part?”
“Add two –”
“It’s one,” Harrow snapped, “the answer’s going to be one, they’re all going to be one.” Her head was full tide inside – midlabor with a breech-born migraine. “Any number you use from those parameters with that series of operations will render an answer of one.”
With the inflection of idiot.
She did not look over at them in the pause that followed. Not before some girl towards the back of the pack spoke up, with mock sweetness, “Oh, you wanna play 20 Questions instead? How about, ‘Why the fuck do you keep getting extensions?’ You never turn in paper copies up front for D’Angelo to mark up. You didn’t sit for any of the summer exams, either.”
Shit. Harrow quickly studied her face. But could not place her. There were too many other students to keep track of.
A foghorn blasted: “Whoooo caaares?” The Chancellor’s daughter interrupted herself with a grotesquely fleshy raspberry. She had decided to spread supine on the table in the center of the others with someone’s backpack as a pillow. With her garish tracksuit of the day, she looked like the central focus for residents discussing the autopsy of a clown. “Fuck her. Ignore her. La la la la la. Don’t talk about her – don’t even look at her. Let her be a fucked up lil guy. Don’t waste your time or energy with cryptocurrency,” she ticked a finger for each item, “low carb diets, your car's extended warranty, or fucked up lil guys. Rules to live by.”
“Yes, conserve your strength for dicking around on your phone all class with the volume on,” Harrow returned. Someone or something shuffled. Harrow did not look. “Not just anyone can keep a chair warm. It’s a math trick. Did you learn any math in grade school? Before dropping out?”
“Jesus,” someone said.
“Top university in the hemisphere enrolls students thinking math is magic. Pop psychology. Mind-reading.” Harrow winced her disgust. For all that her head wanted to leak open at the seams, talking helped, even as it stung. Like massaging down a bruise. “I already know what’s rattling around your last two neurons,” she said to the clown autopsy, who had sat upright. “You’re thinking, ‘I could be doing so much more with my life, if only I weren’t a short-sighted, attention-grubbing layabout who peaked in high school. Now a living, breathing, texting monument to sponging off the work of others.’ You’re thinking –”
The floor shivered. The clown autopsy reanimated to her full height. And mass. Which had to be nearly double Harrow’s.
A cooling prickle of adrenaline. Harrow calmed herself. (Beep! Beep!)
“Is this the part where you try to intimidate me?” The jackass – she would not actually hit her. Despite what Harrow’s sympathetic nervous system clamored in 72-point font. Her hearing dimmed beneath an increased heart rate. (Beepeep! Beepeep!) Her head pounded. She calmed herself. “Lay down some neanderthal law and order?”
“Shut the fuck up.” The table shivered: she had dropped into the lower-level seat in front of Harrow, and still had half a head in height. “I know what you’re thinking. You smug little pissant.”
(The would-be cold-reader said dreamily, “Ooh, yes – use something personal to strengthen the connection.”)
She dug into one pocket and came up with… a cheap ring, of some sort, bent and misshapen. A funny little sneer spread as she dropped it to the table between them. Harrow hardly saw the masterstroke of that. It looked like it had been run over a few times and imperfectly molded back into an overlapping loop. Though it sounded like real metal.
(“Something of hers, not –”)
Harrow chanced a glance to the hangers-on. If this was some sort of ritual hazing token, they seemed similarly uninitiated. The whole gaggle of them had fallen dead silent. Some squinted to see the ring, and some were peering around at Harrow, but many were staring at their de facto mascot with a kind of pedestrian shock.
“I know exactly,” said the mascot.
The Chancellor’s daughter had his eyes. Every enabling magazine cover and news article had worked that into their composition – that and their glowing, enthused, photogenic faces. The same eye color, at least. Hers had none of the careful intellect or good will. Or the curiosity. Or charisma. Just a retaining wall of dank, room temperature aggression. From this close, without the smokescreen of image retouching, a stippling of acne scars was visible among the freckles along her nose and chin. A naked pock in her eyebrow where the hairs refused to grow. A little granule of skin like a sunflower seed scooped out from one cheek, and never quite replenished.
Perhaps some belated cost-benefit analysis concluded itself. Or the final stragglers of cogent thought at last summoned enough spark to propel themselves to a sane conclusion. But Harrow watched as the hostility slowly wilted: the furrowed brows smoothed; the chin rose; the tepid rancor curdled down in the eyes. The clown autopsy mascot pulled back a few inches. Her body met the edge of the table behind. Harrow did not know the face or its owner in any meaningful way, but it felt like watching a backfire made flesh.
“Whatever.” And – astonishingly – she looked away. Head, lowered, shaking. Slow at first. “God. What the fuck ever.” Then like a wet dog. “Who gives a shit? No one cares. Hey!” She crashed one hamfist onto the table. Harrow flinched only because it was so loud. The voice cracked, pubescent. “Nobody cares.”
Only a hairline fracture could be heard in Harrow’s. “Then stop talking to me.”
The skin around her nose wrinkled. Her mouth opened, as did the door.
D’Angelo poured into the room looking harried and short-tempered. “Sorry to be late.” A dog leash dangled out of their bag. They took in the scene at a glance and must have come away with an accurate estimate. “Seats, please, everyone. Actual seats, no table naps. Gideon, see me after class.”
She swore. “For what?” A couple students tittered.
“You’ll have to tune in to find out.”
“Hey, I was on time.” But she was already sulking back to hers.
“I’ll be sure to have my tenure join the discussion. If you please. Thanks kindly.”
Order restored. The comforting furrow of routine. Harrow’s shoulders unbunched. (Beep!) Minutely. It figured. The Chancellor’s daughter was no more than a garden variety bully. One who folded like a lawnchair at the slightest flash of backbone. A spoiled coward; that was all.
The morning actually improved from there. Until Harrow opened her inbox.
From: John Gaius. Subject: A moment to talk?
She quelled the rush of a panic attack in a deadend alcove near one of the service closets.
She had already fucked it all to hell. Her big chance. Barely made it past the second syllabus week. The Chancellor’s good will thrown back in his face. God, why was she surprised? She publicly ridiculed his daughter, just that morning! One of the other students must have recorded it and festooned it everywhere online. What a waste. What a pack of rats. They must have made a ritual sport of running off anyone they suspected would skew the grading curve.
No. Stop. None of that. Harrow did not come here to play victim. She would enter with her chin well clear of her chest, and her mind level. Her mouth closed. She would listen. She would understand. She might request another chance but would not put herself upon him by scraping or begging or something so demeaning for them both. She would explain the circumstances. Explain the factors. Which of those most lent themselves to her choices. And allow him to devise his own conclusions. She owed him that, at least.
The administrator’s building was not centrally located, but had quickly become familiar during the summer session after multiple meetings with student services to discuss accommodations. The Chancellor’s office was one of the top levels. A pinched-nerve feeling began between her shoulderblades as the elevator’s digital display of numbers climbed. She ran a hand over her hair to smooth it down. Nearly stepped off on the wrong floor twice.
The person at the reception desk glanced at her and asked, “For Gaius?” and waved Harrow back. Must have recognized her. No reprieve in the waiting room, then. “You can’t miss it.”
That was true. His office had been one of Harrow's very first stops upon arrival, her nerves raw as a thoracotomy from the travel and overstimulation. Now, three months later, the loop would be closed. Perhaps she would get another chance in the future.
The double doors were ajar. Harrow numbly knocked anyway.
“Come in!”
The Chancellor’s office was not a recluded space. Spacious, vaulted windows, bright enameled woods and well-loved books. A miniature replica of the Novosibirsk Mouse. So many articles on his life featured photos of him sidesaddle on that same desk with a self-effacing hand at the rest of the office. As if the camera failed to capture him saying, Would you get a load of this guy?
At his first meeting with Harrow, he had been chummily lounged in one of the chaises, talking with an assistant and a department head, finger-tapping at a tablet. She expected this time he would be properly seated behind his desk. Solitary. Sober. Discerning. Glasses square as the corners of a resignation letter.
Not only was the Chancellor again sidesaddle on his desk, he very much had company. Anton Ziegler was across in the chaise. Harrow was bad with faces. And names. But he was unmistakable by the manner of dress: an ivory suit, pinstriped like his others, and tidy gold-rimmed glasses. That and the fact he was talking to John Gaius.
Ziegler was not facing him. He nodded deeply at some thought of his own. He was gazing at the lacquered coffee table and its assortment of conversation-starter books on ecology and astronomy, its miniature rock garden, a biscuit tin.
They both looked up.
Harrow's stomach seized. “I thought –” She must have misread the email. Determined to do herself no favors, evidently. “Excuse me – I can come back.”
“No no, come in!” The Chancellor was tieless and rumpled. He dropped from his desk with an unnecessary playground hop and swept across the floor to her, arm wide. “Come on in. Great timing. Harrow – Anton Ziegler. Colleague of mine. He’s been good enough to stop by for awhile.”
“On tour,” Ziegler said. The Chancellor laughed, so it must have been a joke.
“I’m sure she’s familiar with you.” The Chancellor led Harrow closer with a goading scoop of the hand – and a genteel touch on the shoulder that he removed right away. The contact effervesced. “Ngutuawa. She’s spectacular. A real standout. Remember the name.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Ziegler said politely. He smiled politely. His eyebrows were very polite in his disinterest. Harrow hoped to God she would not be asked to shake hands.
The Chancellor scrubbed his chin and bent to hover raptorlike over the open biscuit tin. “She had little to no formal education. Entirely homeschooled – and self-taught.” He swooped in on a pretzel-shaped biscuit and took a bite, hip cocked against his desk. “She reached out to us last fall with an equivalency degree. Just started small this summer. We got her in on the sheer strength of her test scores and a cheeky publication record. Few rookie mistakes, but nothing a little elbow grease couldn’t fix.”
“‘Cheeky,’” echoed Ziegler. “Any project experience of your own?” he asked Harrow, which was terrible.
“Imagine she’d have a tough time getting any facility hours in, given the circumstances. But the potential! Sheesh. Radiated off the page. You can ask the directors, I could hardly sit down.”
“Impressive,” Ziegler said, politely.
“Imagine when I found out she was only twenty.”
“An independent learner, and thinker.” Ziegler made an invisible toast, within a stonesthrow of sincerity. “Well done. I think we need more of that. And,” he toasted again over his shoulder, “to your boldness, taking such a risk.” To Harrow again, “On what did you base your publications?”
“Bioprinting.” From behind Ziegler, the Chancellor waved her on. “... mostly cardiac and bone.”
“Ah, then you must have worked with some smaller university in some capacity. An advisor of some sort?”
”... I did not.”
“But you had access to literature. So I am sure you had a relationship. Even with only the library. Yes? What school? I may know them.”
She looked uneasily behind him – to the Chancellor, who waved with more enthusiasm. Smiling widely. Harrow’s head heated. “... I accessed them through other channels.”
The brisk Ziegler cooled further. He looked to the Chancellor. When he glanced again to Harrow, it was with courteous, murky rebuke. “Credibility. Principles. These are noble qualities. I expect a researcher to have both.”
The Chancellor threw out a hand. “Oh come on, Anton, knowledge is the noblest pursuit. And for the betterment of others! Let’s not rip out more livers than necessary. None of it should be paywalled, anyway.”
“Your walls, John. Not all walls are prison watchtowers.”
“They are when they’re cutting you off from something.”
“Always, you are overrun with your noble pursuits.”
“Always with the silvertongue.” He swatted the sentiment away. “C'mon – everyone should get a fair suck of the sauce bottle. Last thing I want is to end up like Collip and Banting.”
“So generous. How good that fortune seems to find you, regardless.”
“You’d think it would win me some friends.” The Chancellor laughed. “I’m not as popular as you are.”
“Oh?”
“‘Oh,’ sure. There was a lot of play for a long time in cancer. If you had a viable project, you could basically print money forever. I fucked that all up. Pissed off a lot of people.” He abruptly remembered Harrow was in the room; when he fanned his hand at Ziegler, he swept it back in her direction, too. “You know that. Both of you.”
Harrow had a far better view of Ziegler’s frown at the profanity. He smoothed his expression. “It’s made a lot of people very happy as well. Some of them are calling you a god.” Behind him, the Chancellor’s mouth quirked. “Some were right on your doorstep on my way in.” Ziegler reached into his suit jacket. He pulled out a sleek little pamphlet. “One asked me to take their literature.”
It was one of the standard trifold leaflets that adhere to any soul attempting to cross a college campus: student organizations, queer alliances, animal rights activists, grassroots groups, volunteer opportunities, blood donor recruitment, credit card offers, the Hare Krishnas, the Methodists, the Communists, the vegans. At the top: Death is not Decided!
Ziegler waited for the Chancellor to get a brief eyeful. “Your open-handedness…” He grunted as he leaned. Bad back. “... is quite attractive.” He flipped the pamphlet open to flatten it; tapped the portrait of the Chancellor that splashed across the three-page spread. “The ‘Father of Eternal Life’ is what they called you.”
(The Chancellor muttered, “Well, that’s not what I’m going for.”)
To Harrow, Ziegler again tapped the pamphlet with eyebrows raised. “You have seen them here? Please. Tell me. Do you know any who have joined? Any classmates? You frown, but I saw many youngsters there.”
She tried to coach her expression back to neutrality. “None that I know of.”
“If you do, please send me their names.” He grunted again to lean and reach into his pocket – for a card case. It came open with a metallic spang. He reached to hand one to Harrow. She took it, eventually. “I should like to invite them to speak with us.”
“Anton,” he warned.
“We must make informed choices. Hear from everyone. Why Ms. Ngutuawa, and not the young man who handed me this? Would you like a seat? You have been standing all this time,” Ziegler said to Harrow, which was terrible.
“Or a biscuit,” added the Chancellor, with a strange forcedness to his expression. Harrow could not parse it. “I promise it’s not a sewing kit.” He laughed.
In an involuntary moment of camaraderie, Harrow and Ziegler shared a glance: they did not get the joke.
“You are an interesting man, John.”
There was another knock. The assistant, with the tablet. She gave the requisite wincing secretarial smile of Oops, sorry to interrupt! and tipped her chin out into the corridor.
“Ah, right!” The Chancellor scratched one ear. “Sorry, sorry.”
“You’ve triple-booked yourself, John.” He laughed once with wafer-thin sincerity. “I should have reminded you. I had the thought fifteen minutes ago that we should be leaving.”
“Leilani, could you see him down to the car? I’ll be right there. I need just a quick word with Harrow.”
If this was all prelude to expulsion, he was certainly sending mixed signals. Once the door was again closed, the Chancellor made a simply haunting squelch with his mouth. “A business card? Who uses business cards anymore? He even had a case...”
Harrow stiff-armed it in offer. The Chancellor accepted and looked it over. He took his time giving it back. “His ‘personal line.’ Golly. Just don’t go blowing him up for a rideshare in the wee hours, hey?”
Harrow wasn’t sure she would touch the card ever again. “Was there something you needed from me?”
“Right! Yes. Sure did.” His eyes refocused upon her from something across the room. Rubbed his hands together, businesslike. “Your medical file – is it up to date, here? You don’t have any allergies listed. Is that correct?”
“... that’s correct.”
“Great. Any restrictions? Vegetarian?”
Harrow hated almost everything intended for consumption. But that answer was unviable. “No,” technically, “but… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
He leaned at the hip to point through the door. And ducked down to whisper, as if Ziegler was still visible just past the threshold. “We’ll be hosting him for a time. We have a little campus event in a couple weeks with a dinner – thing – after. I’d really like for you to attend.”
Some hitherto undiscovered facial expression found itself upon Harrow. The Chancellor gave a grimacing, seesawing nod – like, Yeah, figured. He leaned in closer and placed a hand on her shoulder again. His voice dropped in conspiratorial familiarity: two old colleagues tackling a private problem. “It’s likely he and I will… please don’t repeat this. We may become business partners, so to speak. I’d like him to get a better sense of what that would mean. I want your name included in this… whatever it ends up being. A project, partnership, research team. Help me with deciding. Dinosaurs like me and him… we get to be sandbags if we aren’t careful. We need fresh blood. Fresh faces.”
The Chancellor relaxed upright. It had surprised Harrow upon meeting him that he was so unimposing a figure. Everyone towered over Harrow, but more than a handful, like Ziegler, towered over him.
He read her expression. “It’s not gonna be like the brunch. A lot smaller, probably. Less crazy. I can add a reminder to your student portal.” A thought tapped his shoulder. “Uh – I can have Leilani add it to your student portal. She knows what she’s doing.”
The sluggish calculation of how to politely decline the chance of a lifetime came to a standstill when he gave Harrow's shoulder a final amicable pat and withdrew his hand. “Just think about it for now. But, um, please consider it. Really, really consider.” A splitsecond twist ribbed around his mouth. “Wow, ‘fresh blood’ sounds way weirder.”
“... I will really consider it, sir.”
“Please. I'm John.” He did the funny swat again. Perhaps the motion made more sense on camera. “How is everything else going? Settling in? It’s a different song and dance from summer.” He nodded as he listened to her brief summary of her courseload. “And the labwork, that’s going well? What project did you land with?” She told him. “Yes! Great. I hear good things. Just leave enough space for a little life in between classwork. No one’s giving you issues?”
‘No,’ would be a lie. ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ might incite him to ask more. Harrow calculated. (Beep!) She attempted to summon a suitable response beneath the same eyes from that morning – but they were open, friendly, expectant.
“Mr. Gaius?”
“Sorry! Right.” He straightened again and rubbed his hands together, like washing them. “I’m an email away. If it gets buried, well, hey – you know where I work.”
Palamedes Sextus took one look at Harrow and decided she required a granola bar.
“They’re for you,” she demurred. Polite refusal sometimes worked.
“They’re for blood sugar. I don’t have the corner on that market.”
Harrow did not want a granola bar. She wanted to finish assessing the biopsies and head back early enough to begin her ethics reading. Diligently, she avoided an eyeroll. “I am new to this, but I recall rule number one being 'No eating in the lab.'” Impolite refusal sometimes worked. His hands went up, forcing his oversized coatsleeves to furl fledge-like down to his elbows. Harrow did not believe the gesture of retreat. Sextus, she had learned, was not the kind to let things go for long.
“Alright,” he said. “But if you drop one shade lighter than my wallet, we’re taking a break.”
Just because her publication record attracted ‘a lot of interest’ did not mean it was appealing. The majority of the research leads and graduates in the shark tank in search of eager rookies had passed over a homely GED with no practical laboratory experience to speak of. Sextus was evidently desperate enough. He was research lead for one full-time designee (Harrow) and between four to six on a revolving, part-time basis. Harrow had never seen a selfsame researcher more than twice before they were shuffled off to another project, or dropped out, or otherwise.
She was grateful for a small team. It narrowed the chain of command. And it enabled privacy for the humbling experience of her learning what most of them had mastered during summer internships in high school. Harrow was eternally content to minimize witnesses.
Of course the team was not so compact out of respect for Harrow’s privacy. Their project’s area of focus was gradually and increasingly overlooked. The headlines had caterwauled about Removal of the cancer gene! but that was, firstly, a gross oversimplification of the reality of the development; and secondly, deeply misleading when the victory was inevitably assumed of adjacent conditions. The world at large decided anything that brushed elbows with the oncological could be safely shunted to the bottom of the priority list, thanks to John Gaius. The belief that these associated conditions would be resolved in another few years as a matter of course was its own epidemic.
Aplastic anemia was amongst the neglected areas, and the focus of Sextus’s research. It was not a cancer, though one condition could lead to the other, (and its treatment was similar to that of lymphoma or leukemia, which contributed to the misconception). Its creeping chokehold on the stem cells in marrow led to dwindling blood. It propagated bacterial and even fungal infections; it attacked the heart, which was at all times vulnerable to any number of fatal complications; and, half the time, the direct cause was largely undetectable. None of these facts softened the review board responsible for coordinating and renewing funding. Nevertheless, he persisted.
Harrow had grown to respect the man. But with his first impression, Sextus had failed to leave any mark. Anticipation made it clear that whoever had gotten stuck with her on their funding roster must have recognized the burden and been dismissive. Curt, at least. Instead, Sextus was cordial, even courteous, and so must have had little clue what he was in for. Harrow was chagrined in retrospect at how long it took her to see that he was brilliant. If eccentric. He was still on puberty blockers himself when he was published on accelerated regeneration of stem exosomes. The second week, Harrow felt her jaw soften at the hinges as he quoted an extensive passage, verbatim, from her article on complicating factors in bone porosity; and segued with millimetric perfection into how he envisioned her field of focus fitting his current and other tangential projects.
They worked well. The start of the summer session had been subdued, overall. Save for Sextus demonstrating some routine task or technique or method of operating equipment Harrow would need for the immediate future. Long stretches of silence would pass between them when he was in a moment of intense focus, broken only by the beep of his glucometer. When he looked over to her work, he would say, “Nicely done,” or “Nearly there.”
By the third week, he would think aloud and occasionally aim a question Harrow’s way. When it was relevant, and needed, she would answer. He filled the lulls in between with idle stories. Or anecdotes. Or what he had read that morning. Miniature, somewhat meandering theses on botany, which were interesting. The man was either unwitting or unwilling to acknowledge Harrow’s near-paralysis beneath the weight of the social sword of Damocles.
But he also asked inane questions like, “Did you ever have rabbits growing up?”
The marrow they worked with was harvested from them. Two of them that week had been found unresponsive, and Harrow needed a picture of what had gone wrong. It was part of her irritation at the distraction.
Mercifully, Sextus was fine letting a question drop. He would simply move onto the next one. But he would often come back to it later. Never did he seem to take silence personally, but he was pleased whenever Harrow broke it.
“No pets,” she said.
“We fostered one. A friend of a friend’s home… flooded.” He squinted at some reading he was receiving. “Pretty violently. Hurricane season.” He winced and tilted his chin. “So we inherited this traumatized rabbit while they got back on their feet. I was excited. We didn’t have much space, and most of the family had too many allergies to keep much anything, but I was a big animal lover. Still am, but boy. What a reality check. I thought rabbits were all sweet and skittish, but this one was mean. She would growl.”
“Growl?”
“Rabbits growl! I know. Somehow that gets left out of all the cartoons. We kept making Monty Python jokes. She did bite me, more than once. Trying to trim her nails. And keeping her from leaping off the staircase to a certain death-slash-sprain.” He tapped at his tablet to record some note, and jerked his chin to one side. It was a rueful movement. “She did give me the slip. Eventually. I was cleaning out her cage. I didn’t know my mother had the backdoor open to clear out smoke from the kitchen, and…” a funny little shrug, “one of the neighborhood dogs got hold of her.” He tapped on his tablet. “When animal control came by – they had to look for the dog, and collect the remains – my mother spoke with him first. She must have explained the whole arrangement. When he came over to talk with me, he patted me on the head. He said, ‘You know, in the wild, these guys are just food. They’re barely alive. That’s why there’s so many of them.’” His head shook. Harrow tried to envision him as a child. The aquiline nose. The whittled chin. However else he may have looked then, he could be found easily by the eyes.
“I’m sure he saw how torn up I was about the whole thing. He just wanted to try and lighten the load,” Sextus said, smiling, “but that made it even worse.”
Compared to other research projects, they had a pittance of live specimens. It made them easier to care for. They had elected to take turns in feeding and watering them but more often than not Sextus monopolized the task, often due to forgetful neglect on Harrow’s part. A humiliating shortcoming he nonsensically overlooked. Harrow had caught him poking his fingers through the cages once, when he thought she had left for the evening.
“The Black Rabbit of Inle must be angry with us. Taking them before their time… and so many." He took in air and let it out; he tapped at his tablet. And peered over his shoulder at her. His glasses slipped down his nose. “Watership Down? No? Well, what did you read as a kid?” He added, mock-archly, (pushing his glasses back into place), “Enough of something.”
Harrow failed the wallet test shortly after. Relegated to compulsory hallway snacktime. Her sole consolation was that Sextus seemed equally as, if not more resentful of the ritual. He had to pause over nutrition labels and tally up the carbohydrates in his head – what he called ‘becoming a T1-84 calculator.’ On opposite ends of a corridor bench near the personnel lockers, they quietly cheesegrated their gums with the things.
Harrow’s chewing slowed. Stopped. She squinted down at the bar in her hand. “Sextus.” His eyebrows rose as he looked over from an article on his phone. “You’ve given me an expired granola bar.”
“I’ve what?”
“The expiration date is past.”
“– what? No. Let me see.” He resettled his glasses on his nose. “... that’s the ‘best by’ date. Not expiration. They’re different.”
“It’s not labeled. It could be either.”
“If it was expiration, it would be labeled... I’m… pretty sure.” He grinned at her withering look.
“How long has it been in your bag?”
“What… what part of granola do you think could go rancid?” He tried to fight down an even wider smile, scratching at the corner of his mouth. “It’s oats, and honey, and…” Shrugged; sheepish. “Passes the sniff test.”
“‘The sniff test.’”
He laughed. “Granola bars aren’t even food. Not really… they’re a holdover until you can get to food.” He was just having fun with her now. “The rules are different.”
“If there’s a date printed, and the date has past –”
“Again: best by! Or sell by, whatever. It doesn’t mean it’s ‘expired.’”
“Its best state for consumption has expired,” she drawled. “It’s outlived itself.”
Sextus conceded the point. Harrow was given leave to dispose of the last third of her granola bar, but did so only after extending the rest to him in offer (declined). They settled in again to the work. Partway through the last task of the evening, both their phones pinged.
Political activity on campus has interrupted thoroughfare traffic. PARKING CLOSED. Please plan alternate route. Contact Campus Security at x111.
“Have you seen them lately?” Sextus lived in university-owned housing just off-campus. He must have passed them everyday. “Getting a bit rowdy.”
“The cult. No.” Harrow’s daily route mostly avoided the main arteries of traffic, foot or otherwise. “But I’ve heard.”
“Perhaps ‘cult’ is a bit strong…” His head bobbed, side to side. “Not very organized, from what I’ve seen. It’s more than one group, isn’t it?”
“Cult in function, if not necessarily form.”
“Well… they’ve got enthusiasm, at least.”
“Stop. They’re deluded. They’ve taken a development due to science and made it mythology.” Harrow muttered, “He isn’t a literal god.”
“Of course not. But is it really all that terrible? The chutzpah? They’re out there getting fresh air, exercise…”
Having fun with her again. Harrow’s tongue clicked in her cheek. Sextus turned to shoot her a glance that was part challenge, part playful. Fine. She would bite. “Taking knowledge and mystifying its process. The procedure. How medical advances actually function. It’s active, willful deletion of information and context. It’s not altogether far off from book-burning.”
She could not see his face when he turned back, but Sextus tipped his head in a way that told her his eyebrows were up. “That’s an idea. I would call it addition, though, not deletion. They’re saying the science happened because of the mysticism.”
“Obfuscation, then.”
“You don’t think science and mysticism can be bedfellows?”
“Is this another sniff test?”
He laughed. “Quick. Fair.” Hummed, long and low. It was a good sound. “‘What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?’”
“What’s that from?” Sextus took on a certain tone when he was reciting from memory.
“Not familiar?” he answered, mysteriously. “I remember seeing them on the news. When I was a kid. ‘Transhumanists’ – or 'immortalists' - retirees, then, mostly. Getting bilked by the young bucks for whatever deed they could sign away. Or 401k to clean out.” He sighed. “Poor Gaius. He’s really had them explode over the years.”
“‘Explode’ is a good word. Right outside your workplace. Every day. It ought to worry you.”
He did his rueful little chin-tweak nod – like a single scratch of an itch. “There are worse things.”
“How much of their messaging have you actually looked through?” Harrow asked. “I wouldn’t want them near a gas station, much less a medical school. A hospital. ‘The act of death is embarrassing,’” she quoted, trying to effect his eidetic tone, “‘I would be humiliated to die.’ And then to rally around 'removal of the death gene.'" Harrow made a disgusted sound. "It’s magical thinking at best, with all that accompanies. And beyond crass in a medical setting. Dying people and their families have been told they simply didn’t think just so, just correctly enough to be saved.”
That sobered him. Harrow looked over to find Sextus with a wooden expression aimed at one of the ledgers. Slowly, he nodded. “That’s terrible. But they aren’t all like that. There are different… branches, from what I can tell. Like anything else.” They got along well enough, from what Harrow saw. “And you can never just write anyone off as crazy if you want to get through to them. You have to see what they’re getting at, first, and go from there.”
“I’m not writing them off as crazy. I’m identifying them as dangerous.”
“Dangerous how? No, I can imagine so many ways,” he said, “I’m not playing dumb. But tell me exactly why you think that.”
“Death is frightening.” Harrow measured. She watched for the 45mL line. “Frightened people are desperate. Desperate people are vulnerable.” She watched for the 45mL line. “Vulnerability attracts parasites.”
She met the 45mL line. She looked to Sextus. He was watching her. She looked away.
He said, “The problem is that it’s not just fear. Or vulnerability. It’s also the idealism. It’s the appeal of the heights, not only escaping the lows. They point at the moon landing and say, ‘See! A century before, that had been pure fantasy.’ Or flight. Humans dreamed of it for – however many thousands of years. They say, ‘And here, now, we’ve got the next upgrade.’”
“Tell me you aren’t thinking of joining.”
“Don’t joke. But I think it’s important to note a decent metaphor when I hear one.” He shot a look over his shoulder at her again, which earned an eyeroll. “It’s science fiction. But that’s what makes it interesting to people.”
“Don't engage. Don't entertain it. Don't let it get a foot in the door.”
“A thought exercise can never hurt.”
“The only exercise a cult will offer your brain is a power-washing. They’re not scientists. Or priests. They’re salesmen. If you've begun listening, they're already halfway to a deal.”
Sextus sagged his shoulders with a frown, and pinched together all the fingers of one hand. “Ugh, see – love a metaphor.”
Harrow felt air puff through her nose. Her head shook. “It’d be less of an issue if they left the Chancellor out of it. He’s made actual advancements that have actually helped people. They’re not only sponging off his efforts, they’re eroding his credibility for whatever he tries next.”
He hummed. “What do you think – trying to piggyback into a brand?”
“Certainly. An obvious business decision. Fitting how backwards they are, going about it,” she muttered, “running the scam in reverse.”
It was by far the most that Harrow had spoken to him. The realization nerved her. Like the fluid in her body had been displaced very slightly – center of gravity migrated somewhere in her left thigh. She risked a glance at Sextus who was studying her with damning acuity. He was about to ask another question. But hesitating. Harrow did not need to be asked about cults.
“I-I just spoke with him. And his visitor. Anton Ziegler,” in a rush. “In his office.”
Palamedes Sextus might be considered handsome. Maybe. Or perhaps just gawky, Harrow wouldn’t know. Testosterone therapy had offered a middling contribution towards his build: above average height, but with below average muscle mass that stretched over his frame like a torture rack. He grudged his scanty beard genetics, but recalled warmly how he observed changes in his youth. How it filled in his eyebrows, sharpened his jaw.
Excitement highlighted both of these features. “Ngutuawa." He was delighted to play into a pantomime of scandal. "Are you gossiping with me?”
“I thought it was about his daughter.” Success. Harrow’s relief was so great, she even produced a detail. “We had an incident.”
“Another one? Really?” Sextus had been at the scholarship lunch. He frowned up at the ceiling as he pushed his glasses up his nose. “She’s usually not that bad. A bit excessive, sure. Though she’s quieted down the last… year, I think.” He tapped something against the tabletop in thought. “Cut her a good berth, maybe.”
“Easier said. We have the same section of Methods,” Harrow grumbled. “The first day, she slapped a note on my table that said: Drop this class now!!!” She arranged the micropipettes in the autoclave with more force than strictly necessary. “It isn’t her damn school.”
“Who teaches?”
“D’Angelo.”
“They’re pretty sensible. And discreet. Good luck getting your feedback write-ups more than twice a semester, though. Give them a heads-up to figure it out.”
“I don’t want special treatment.” That might have been what made her be so profoundly dickish in the first place.
"I don’t see how that applies. Even if it did, special treatment isn’t a bad thing. And not something Gideon’s cared about before.” His chin turned, thoughtful. “Do you two know each other?” But he immediately discarded the thought with a shake of his head. “What are you worried might happen?”
“That D’Angelo will sanction her. Somehow. And things will get complicated." As if there weren't enough complications for Harrow to think about. "Even if that were to go through without issue, I would have to share a 101 with her lingering, resentful, clown car retinue. What?” Sextus looked disapproving.
“Have you tried talking to any of them?”
“Yes. They were dickheads.” At his increased disapproval, she added, “I'm not a diplomat.”
He chose his words with great care. Like he wanted to say something else altogether. Sextus nodded, slow. “D’Angelo has sense. And tenure. Let them handle it.”
They were nearly finished for the evening. Harrow could let the topic find its natural resting point. It would allow her to move on, and let her mind settle upon the next item on her generous tasklist.
“It doesn’t bother you?” she said instead. “For someone to be expedited into the best institution in the hemisphere without lifting a finger.” Sextus had not gone into great detail, but Harrow gleaned a good amount of hardscrabble. He was accepted on the third try.
“If we're splitting hairs, I recall that you weren't technically qualified yourself. Grace can, on occasion, be granted.”
“... grace is meant to be earned.”
“Ah – maybe. I wasn't raised with much religion. Were you?”
Harrow pretended not to hear. She resumed attention to her final portion of data entry. She excused herself. Took water in the hall. When she returned, Sextus broached a new topic. “What did you think of Ziegler?”
“Exactly as he seems in the headlines.”
“They’ve been spending a lot of time together lately. What were you in there for? If not for sparring with Gideon.”
Please don’t repeat this. Harrow shifted her weight to one foot; she shifted it back. “The Chancellor invited me to dinner. With him. And Ziegler.”
Sextus left off pretending not to watch her from the corner of his eye. “Wow!” He pumped a fist in the air, smile stretching. “Congratulations! What a thrill… Harrow, you look like you just got a draft letter.”
“I told him I needed to think about it.”
He laughed, once. And cleared his throat. Finally, he said, “It could be an incredible opportunity.”
They completed in easy quiet. Then back to the lockers, stashing their coats, collecting their things.
“Sextus.” He looked over his shoulder. Still futzing in his locker. “Your decision to work with me. Was that an act of grace?”
His head tipped. “Not at all.” His locker shut with a clack. “I'm not a flatterer, Harrow. It was closer to a gamble than grace.”
“Oh, far better.” But with a humor.
“You did ask. I told you, I’m not into flattery. Myself included.” He pulled on his secondhand jacket; straightened the sleeves on his skinny wrists by the exit. “But for what it’s worth, I am a fantastic gambler. Have a good night.”
If Harrow’s brain was a library, some of the shelves have been removed.
Or pages within the books have been removed. Or sections of the pages within the books have been – muddied with coffeestains, or washed out, or torn in part. The most important things were simpler to maintain: her medical knowledge, her work. But she would briefly lose grip on items one rarely thought to keep hold of. The names of people, or their faces. Or when she had spoken with them last. What she was writing, midsentence. Certain words. The days of the week.
The solution was to replenish the library. This was an abuse of the analogy given by the occupational therapist years back; the library was metaphorical, but Harrow found the most success engaging with it as literally as possible. She journaled nearly every day of her life since emerging from the four-month nadir of her recovery. These days she stored, labeled, and dated in ink. The act of putting it to paper somehow contained the thing. Crushed the day down into seven-by-five. Nothing was ever remedied as a result of documentation, but the information was there to be perused at a later time if needed. The practice soothed her. It was a distant cousin to control. After six years, she had filled thirty-three of them to the brim – all whole, and secure, lined up neatly as saints on the shelf above her desk in the bedroom of her home. And granted an occasional dusting from Marshall when he found the energy nowadays. They had been hard to leave behind. But harder still it would have been to keep them safe here. She long had intentions of digitizing their contents, but had been interrupted by the upheaval in the bedrock of her day-to-day existence. Perhaps next summer.
The journaling served both as an exercise in regaining the fine coordination requisite to write legibly and fluently, and as a means of preserving memory in tandem with the Roman Room. It was not Harrow’s idea. It was not even her occupational therapist’s idea. It was the Romans'. It functioned thus: one visualizes a physical space with which they are familiar, and comfortable. A home or building – but ideally, for beginners, a single room. Memorized near photographically. Where one rarely thought twice, or even once, about the location of objects therein.
Say a laundry room. (If one were so attached to their laundry room.) With its machines, detergents, bleaches, fabric softeners, washcloths, shelves, cabinets, baking soda, and so on. Using this well-worn space as a backdrop, one could store important items to recall by associating them with these familiar and friendly faces. Say the compendium of Shakespeare’s works in order of chronology overlaid upon a specific arrangement of shelves. Should the bottommost shelf contain towels, t, this would align with The Taming of the Shrew. Say the next shelf holds handtowels which align with Henry VI parts two and three. For the more unwieldy Two Gentlemen of Verona, one could abbreviate TGV, and practice visualizing this abbreviation overlaid on the next shelf as ‘the garden variety’ linens, or ‘the guest vestments’ or some similar pseudonym. Or if the shelf is dedicated to a certain color, ‘the green and verdant.’ Or for a more advanced user, visualizing objects that were not at all present and never had been within the space, and projecting those onto the mental picture – say two gentlemen themselves, posed on the shelf, hopefully in miniature. Or any number of other abstract bells and whistles. And so on, and et cetera.
With each use of the Room, these things could become further concretized into an already well-worn and accommodating space. And so novel information became aggregated and huddled close to the hearth of pre-extant memory. Once one room was filled, the advanced user could create a doorway to another, and begin the process anew. And so on and on until one had a theoretical home of them.
For Harrow’s part, her room was in want of variety. She had few furnishings – needed few – and it had been some years since she required mobility aids to be stored. Her mnemonic objects were mostly journals of identical size and color. Her OT had warned against such ‘shortcuts.’ Harrow could not see the shirk in that: would the granularity of information not make the task an even more demanding one? But there were few options. A compendium of Shakespeare’s works was a hangnail compared to the body of information Harrow committed to preserving for herself. She could never be completely certain what was important, and had a greed for information. Years and years were spent keeping her sieve filled to the brim, at all times, as her brain worked in pieces to patch the holes.
The obvious concern was an enduring one: with journals making the bulk of her Room, they were dense as dark matter to the mind’s eye. They did not lend themselves to brevity.
This snag Harrow smoothed by pluming the journals with a system of page-markers whose position, placement, color, angle, height and depth, frequency, and specific demarcation added with pen per Harrow’s needs served as an another frame. A handhold for Harrow to take rein of when she sat in her Room and pictured them: changes to medication, especially the amantadine and anticonvulsants and beta-blockers; housing advocate names and numbers and their residential property deadlines for tax purposes (including her bank contacts); newly discovered aversions such as nylon, which made her want to grind her teeth to aquarium gravel; OT exercises; new names, and appointment dates, and addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, resources, things to research once her attention strengthened.
It took her two years to find consistent success. Sitting at her desk, visualizing, and checking, and sketching. Quietly describing the image aloud. Tracing the silhouettes on paper with her fingertip. With cauterizing focus. Lips moving silently, as though in prayer.
She had begun four months after her initial hospital release. If the dates were accurate. The first year was checkered. Piecemeal. At the time, she could manage marks only nominally resembling a sentence. Perhaps two. Her home address. Date of birth. Full name. An emergent sketch of the mug that must have been at her bedside. Date of birth, correct this time. The neurologist’s name. The neurologist’s name. The neurologist’s name (correct this time). An infuriated, impotent scrawl – one that careened off the page like the blundering track of a doomed insect.
On the third-to-last page of that first journal – painstaking, as if the paper had been her skin – “Slep Slept 5 hrs. Birds netse nested on the sill. Crux says they are juncos.” Below it, a very, very faint sketch of the nest, and the window. Beside it was a more skillful and cohesive twin, by Marshall, who had been an artist in his youth.
The second journal marked the beginning of her diligently dating each entry. There was still an embarrassment of dustclouds of strikethroughs, corrections, circles of the original writing, so on, but with a new addition: pages taped back into place as precisely as possible. By that point Harrow’s gross motor capacity had begun its return; pages were defenseless when she was overtaken by wild, electric surges of rage, frequent yet unpredictable in their timing and duration. These received a special dark red page marker. By the third journal she had committed to the habit of later returning to those ripped pages to notate any factors that she believed to have contributed to the response:
Still cannot cross the room alone. Desire to burn it, self included.
Smelled cooking. Saw time was 20 minutes to lunch. Nausea, vengeful, damning.
Neuropathy on left side becoming more painful as it improves. But improving.
Cannot look at laptop screen more than thirty seconds at a time.
Tried to picture what 4:30 looks like on a clock face.
The waves of wrath were not alone. Acute periods of cavernous terror joined them, less frequently but with greater staying power: the anoxic urgency that some inescapable and fated predator was headed for her exact location at that exact moment and there was nothing to be done. Panic events were noted with yellow, and an asterisk. Adrenaline and cortisol are released due to a lapse in the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.
Amygdala, temporal lobe, beneath the uncus. Uncovering the physiological causes for her brain’s reactions helped her to withstand the irrational swells and falls. It soothed. And it led to her course of study.
Entries became longer, neater, and more substantial. The dustclouds cleared. There was a brief lapse of legibility in the sixth journal when she began switching off between both hands.
The Chancellor’s daughter had not shown all week.
It made for a better learning environment. The vengeance of the clown car retinue extended only to rare dirty looks, which were easy to ignore. But Sextus was right: it was wiser not to antagonize her. Directly. If D’Angelo had removed her from the class on Harrow’s account, it would be better to confirm quickly, and consider her next steps with care.
The morning had been a good one. Harrow awoke on her desk again, but luck had timed it just so, lifting her from the dark at the correct beat of her sleep cycle to feel properly rested. The entire hour’s lecture sat unspilled in the basin of her skull, prepared to distill a few drops upon a journal page. A very minor headache was sniffing around her occipital bone, but some mysterious, calming aura had quilted a cushy buffer between Harrow and her typical sensory assailants. She might not feel this prepared if she waited until next class.
D’Angelo was hurriedly packing their materials as Harrow approached. They glanced at the clock.
“Ms. Ngutuawa, hello.” They glanced behind her in case of any stragglers. Their voice dropped regardless. “I was just about to reply to your email. Standard practice is 50% additional time, as a rule of thumb, but let me know if you would like to meet to arrange something different.” Their overstuffed bag closed only halfway. “I’m afraid I have to scurry out. My dog is being watched by a friend who is powerless to resist giving him treats.”
“I had a different concern.” Harrow would later regret her forgotten ‘Thank you.’ “I’m hoping that the Chancellor’s daughter wasn’t removed from the class on my account.”
Their eyebrows came up minutely. They thought. “I’ve removed no one.” Again they glanced behind Harrow. “She says she’s been sick all this week. I was going to reply to her email, too – something about insomnia.” Most of their face maintained its neutral alacrity save for the lines around the eyes. They pinched, like adjusting the eyepiece of a microscope. “Have you been getting enough rest?”
Sleep was crucial for recovery. And much simpler to prize from herself, early on. Harrow often had no choice. Her body simply made the executive decision to round off the corners of the room, soften the page before her, and power down. When she could move from room to room unaided, she began what the Marshall called her ‘willful misinterpretations.’ Not without affection. More than once he would knock thrice in the budding hours of the day to plead with her to extinguish her lights, and sleep; he could see the glow in the crack beneath the door.
A necessary system of barter emerged between them. When Harrow maintained adequate sleep, and grudged down enough dinner to Crux’s satisfaction, he would read to her. When she didn't, he would read to her anyway.
His voice was not a pleasant one. It was like something hoary and bristling that had crawled out of a housefire, dragged itself across a mile of barnyard, and found its end within the embrace of sixteen lanes of highway mastication. But Harrow found great relief in the sound. Its coarse edges were immune to illusion. It was without phantom. She could not deceive herself with its simulacrum. Harrow could still then fool herself with any number of funhoused sounds and imaginings – voices that should not have been in the home, whose holders she could not recall if she wished to – excepting his. The castigating, saturated cough alongside his 5 a.m. creak of kitchen floorboards brought more comfort than a cool hand upon the brow. The gruff voice was a promise of continued presence and mooring. This he knew; he read.
Harrow had no major qualms with Scripture, which was his default preference. It was narrative. It was digestible, often episodic, and in fact offered great utility as a metric of her recovery. A cherished measure of the sieve patching itself when Harrow could predict the next action or event. Elisha, Ehud, and the death of Absalom featured often.
They meandered through the Classics (the old pagans, Crux called them) when he was willing to vary. Once Harrow could read on her own for longer than a minute with no shattering migraine, she began with them, and found in herself a distaste for poetry. But they were already completed. There was nothing to be added, which meant there was nothing to be missed.
There was one notable gap in Harrow’s writing. She had cataloged each day save for a period of a week in the eighth journal. Harrow had no memory of it.
Harrow had exhibited sleeptalk and some forms of parasomnia throughout her recovery, but never before somnambulism. In the late autumn freeze, barefoot, she had made it outside of the house – through the quartermile of downsloping brush and brambles that made up the back of the property – drawn to the emaciated riverbed. It had given its last gasp over a year before, starved by the birth of a sinkhole a mile upstream.
Crux had come down to prepare his pre-dawn coffee and found the backdoor open. He followed the blazed trailed through the untamed yard and found Harrow right at the ledge where the bank dropped, long and sharp. She was bloodied. The paltry layer of her nightwear was filthied from stumbles. Chewed by briars. Her eyes were half-open. Gazing down into the desiccated bed, lips moving. Crux could never hear well. He did not catch what she was saying.
She did not hit a fever of one hundred and three until noon. He said that in the hours leading there, she was awake, but not herself. He hated to tell her. Said that she would not be consoled by him and shrank from him as though a stranger. All the while, she pleaded for the woman in the window.
“She’s right there,” she had cried. Said she had reached for the glass. “Take me to her.”
Crux did not take Harrow to her.
“Let her come to me. Let her in.”
Crux did not let her in. Harrow’s room was on the third floor.
When her fever refused to break, he took her to the hospital. She recovered. She knew him. They safeguarded the house with somnambulist countermeasures, but Harrow had not roamed in her sleep since.