Lexicon

now, I guess.”
    Rosenberg and Raine laughed, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” said Rosenberg. “I thought you were joking.”
    “Why would that be a joke?”
    “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”
    “You haven’t. But please, tell me what you know about me.”
    “Well, nothing. Just your name.” He pointed to her partition. There was a gray rectangle of plastic. A nameplate she hadn’t noticed before. Her first thought was that she was at the wrong desk. Then she realized she wasn’t. Because of Yeats. Because four years ago, he had said:
I have a name for you, when the time is right
. The nameplate said: VIRGINIA WOOLF .
    • • •
    The woman on the phone she’d passed earlier turned out to be Sashona. The last time Emily had seen her was on the hockey field at the school. “Screw me sideways,” said Sashona. “You’re Woolf?” She looked at Emily with her hands on her hips. Sashona had grown up. She had become a woman. “We thought you’d
died.
”
    “Nope.”
    “Holy cripes. Where have you been?” She shook her head before Emily could answer. “Don’t answer. Stupid question. Wow. Look at you. You’re so different.” Emily smiled awkwardly. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing. “What on earth did you do to earn that name?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Sashona looked at her and Emily realized she did not believe this at all. “You look great.”
    “You, too.”
    “Patty Smith,” said Sashona. “That’s my name now. Smith.”
    “Oh, Smith’s good,” said Emily.
    “Ah, fuck off,” said Sashona, smiling. For a second it was like being back at school.
    • • •
    She was reminded how much she disliked neurolinguistics. She had forgotten that, since school. At first, it was fascinating; it was all Amazonian tribes using recognizably Latin words and how saying
guh
could make you hungry. Then came syntax and semantic violations and synaptic coupling. It required enormous amounts of rote memorization—all of which she’d lost over the past four years—and the ability to juggle symbols in her head. At school, students didn’t talk much about what they thought of specific subjects, but when she had mentioned she was studying neurolinguistics to Jeremy Lattern, he had looked sympathetic. This was like those classes again, only now she was expected to know everything.
    Rosenberg and Raine taught her how to use the computer. There was a ticket system: When people wanted her to do something, they logged a ticket. And when she was finished, she plugged her work into the ticket and closed it. Mostly, the people who wanted Emily to do something were from Labs, which she gathered was located somewhere else in the building, although it was clear that other people were reading the tickets, too, because they sometimes requested clarifications. Those people, she thought, were higher-ups. Organization people like Eliot. But there were no names in the ticket system, only numbers. Sometimes she would read a ticket over and over, wondering if there was anything of Eliot’s mannerisms in it, but she could never tell for sure. After a while, she stopped expecting to see Eliot. Apparently she was to be left alone. To do what, exactly, she didn’t know. Maybe they really did want her to relearn NL. Maybe they were secretly observing her. But if this was the case, what they were observing was nothing very interesting.
    She was assigned an apartment, a bank account, and a cell phone. All this was arranged. Her apartment balcony overlooked the meatpacking district and sometimes she stood out there with a bottle of wine, wrapped in a jacket that never really kept out the cold, watching the city breathe.
    Every few days, she did something stupid. She stayed up late, or set the alarm early, and left the apartment in the freezing dark. She walked in a random direction for a random amount of time and found a pay phone and plugged coins into it. As it rang, she reminded herself to modulate her voice, avoid identifiable phrases, and end the call as soon as possible. She told herself,
This is the last time for at least a week
. Because if she was caught, she had no doubt that the consequences would be terrible. But then the line would connect, and Harry’s voice would fill her, and she would forget about that.
    • • •
    She got to visit Labs. It turned out to be in the bowels of the building, underground. It was brightly lit and full of techs in white coats and had two plastic,