Vox Mentis

Learn as much as you should for a first day in Neurolinguistics. Pick the computer apart, to learn how you'll be monitored and to perhaps throw you back to an earlier time

You're reminded how much you dislike neurolinguistics. You forgot that, since school. At first, it's fascinating; it's all Amazonian tribes using recognizably Latin words and how saying guh could make you hungry. Then comes syntax and semantic violations and synaptic coupling. It requires enormous amounts of rote memorization - all of which you've lost over the past four years - and the ability to juggle symbols in your head. At school, students didn’t talk much about what they thought of specific subjects, but when you'd mentioned you were studying neurolinguistics to Jeremy Lantern, he had looked sympathetic. This is like those classes again, only now you're expected to know everything.

Rosenberg and Raine teach you how to use the computer. There's a ticket system; when people want you to do something, they log a ticket. And when you're finished, you plug your work into the ticket and close it. Mostly, the people who want you to do something are from Labs, which you gather is located somewhere else in the building, although it's clear that other people are reading the tickets, too, because they sometimes request clarifications. Those people, you think, are higher-ups. Organization people like Eliot. But there's no names in the ticket system, only numbers. Throughout the day you'll sometimes read a ticket over and over, wondering if there's anything of Eliot’s mannerisms in it, but you can never tell for sure. After a while, you stop expecting to see Eliot. Apparently you're to be left alone. To do what, exactly, you don’t know. Maybe they really do want her to relearn NL. Maybe they're secretly observing you. You covertly disassemble pieces of the computer, poke through the registry. But there's nothing. Anyway, if they are observing you, what they're observing is nothing very interesting.

~

The woman on the phone you passed earlier turns out to be Sasha. The last time you saw her was on the hockey field at the school. “Screw me sideways,” says Sasha. “You’re Woolf?” She looks at you with her hands on her hips. Sasha's grown up. She's become a woman. “We thought you’d died.”

“Nope.”

“Holy cripes. Where have you been?” She shakes her head before you can answer. “Don’t answer. Stupid question. Wow. Look at you. You’re so different.” You smile awkwardly. You're not sure that's a good thing. “What on earth did you do to earn that name?”

“I don’t know.”

Sasha looks at you and you realize she doesn't believe this at all. “You look great.”

“You, too.”

“Patti Smith,” says Sasha. “That’s my name now. Smith.”

“Oh, Smith’s good,” you say.

“Ah, fuck off,” says Sasha, smiling. For a second it's like being back at school.

~

You get to visit Labs. It turns out to be in the bowels of the building, underground. It's brightly lit and full of techs in white coats and has two plastic, keypad-protected doors between you and anyone more senior than a receptionist. They interview people down here, you learn: attach them to probes and run them through fMRIs to record what happens when they hear words. Then they send the data upstairs to NL for analysis. Where these test subjects come from, you don’t know. Although once while looking for a pay phone near George Washington University, you'd seen a paper stapled to a light pole offering fifty dollars for volunteers for a psychology experiment, so maybe that. When the data comes through the ticketing system, sometimes under OBSERVABLE EFFECTS it says psychotic break, or loss of function, or coma. You try not to think about this too much. But it's obvious that people get hurt down there.

~

Sasha - Smith, as you'll never feel comfortable calling her - has changed a lot. She laughs, which she never did at school, and finds everything amazing. This strikes you as unlikely behavior, since Sasha should have been guarding her personality to prevent setting. You decide it's feigned; a behavioral smoke screen. The higher levels don’t do this; you talked with Eliot plenty and have no idea of his set simply because he gave nothing away. But it makes sense for a newer poet. It makes you wonder if you should be doing the same thing, and if Sasha thinks you're trying to figure out her set, and if Sasha is trying to figure out yours.

One day, as a tall, handsome barista delivers coffees to your café table, Sasha opens her mouth and a snarl of unintelligible words trip out. “Love me,” Sasha says, and the barista spills the coffee and goes away and comes back to ask for Sasha’s phone number. This is how you discover that in the four years you had been selling blouses in the desert, Sasha had been learning words. You murmur your appreciation, but the truth is you're shocked. You hadn’t realized how far behind you are, in terms of your knowledge of the words. How are you supposed to catch up? You have no one to ask but Sasha, and although you're friendly with her, you're afraid to expose your ignorance. How do you go about figuring out words?