The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  “Thanks, honey,” said Cat.

  “Ignore him,” said Richard. “He’s an asshole.”

  Cat completed the transaction, running the card through the computer, boxing up the cigarettes she’d rolled herself earlier in her shift. She could hear their muffled shouting. Only once did she glance up. They flashed their headlights. She waved.

  After that, Richard came to the vice stand regularly. He always bought the same cigarettes he bought that first night, although she never saw him in a suit again, just thread-worn sweaters and nondescript T-shirts. He asked her if she’d like to hang out some time. She said yes because he seemed like the sort of person her mother had wanted her to be. On that first date, she and Richard ate tapas and drank wine and went dancing at a rooftop club downtown. Richard couldn’t dance. They went on another date and then another, and then they were a couple. Richard started a new company, not yet profitable, that dealt with artificial intelligence.

  Cat still worked at that same vice stand where they met. She spent most evenings at the artists’ studio she shared with a few friends, working on her tapestries. That was the thing about dating Richard: he worked so much, sometimes weeks went by before she saw him again in person. It was an arrangement she liked, but this week he’d been coming around. This week, he wanted to take her to Mo Mong.

  When Richard wasn’t looking, Cat slipped a change of underwear into her purse. She suspected he would want her to spend the night at his apartment as well.

  * * * *

  On Cat’s next day off—a Tuesday, the sky that same unending gray, the air humid and cool—she rode the light-rail down to the yarn shop in the Stella. She was looking to start a new project. Another tapestry, maybe. Her last commission had been with a finance company, a series of abstract lines meant to suggest ticker tape. She’d enjoyed the project well enough, and was certainly grateful that it had become trendy in recent years for companies to display heirloom artwork in their lobbies and waiting rooms, but finishing up that tapestry had put her in mind to make one of her own.

  Cat walked the two blocks to the yarn shop, her skin clammy from the weather, and slipped in through the side door. She headed straight for the shelves of mohair and cashmere. The prices were more than she could afford, but she wanted the tactility of that overpriced designer yarn. She picked out a handful of skeins from the pile, looking for any color that caught her eye: pale green, cream, gunmetal gray. Gossamer strands of fiber tufted out from the skeins. They looked as though they were shrouded in halos. The cashmere was soft against the skin of her arms.

  She bought all of it, the entire armful. The old woman behind the counter recognized her, asked her about the finance company commission.

  “Oh, you know,” said Cat. “I’m having to deal with the repercussions of being a sellout.” She rolled her eyes and grinned.

  “That friend of yours was in here,” said the old woman. “The flamboyant one.”

  “Miguel,” said Cat. “He wants to learn how to knit.” She dropped her voice conspiratorially. “He’s hopeless at it.”

  The old woman laughed. She dropped the skeins one by one into a thin, transparent bag, one of those new bags made of synthetic material that dissolved harmlessly into water. “What are you making?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Cat hated that question. They always asked it.

  The old woman told Cat the total cost with a mercenary twinkle in her eye. Cat went dizzy for a second or two. It had been a long time since she’d come down to this yarn shop without some corporate account number. She handed over her credit card.

  Cat left the shop and walked over to the studio—a converted warehouse that somehow survived the storms and the floods of the early part of the century, that apocalyptic time before Cat was born. As she walked she sweated underneath her thin coat. The air was choking on its own moisture. The brief winters seemed shorter and shorter the older she got.

  Cat shifted her purchase from one hand to the other and wondered what she could make with all this designer yarn. Something personal, of course. No commissions. She had been in a strange mood lately, her sense of self tatted together like a piece of lace. Delicate. Barely held together. Richard had been stopping by her apartment too much. She knew without knowing that whatever she ended up weaving on the enormous floor loom in the corner of the studio, nestled between Felix’s potting wheel and Lucy’s scraps of installation art, would be as diaphanous as she felt. A cobweb, full of loops and gaps.

  The sort of fabric that when you hold it up to the sun becomes solid.

  * * * *

  Cat set up the warp threads on the loom, a canvas of white striated linen, but found she couldn’t proceed. A few weeks went by. A month. Greenery started budding out on the tree branches. She stared at the loom, her mind blank. Eventually, she always ended up sitting beside Felix as he threw clay.

  “How’s the reg?” he asked her.

  “Fine.” This was Cat’s stock answer to any question regarding Richard; in truth he had been acting strange. On her days off he messaged her constantly in the mornings, trying to convince her to have lunch with him—and Richard never took lunches. He left the office unimaginably early, running mysterious errands around the city. And although Cat never asked what he was up to, he repeated over and over again that he couldn’t tell her.

  He’d been the same way right before he began gathering venture capital for his new start-up. Right after he’d met her father for the first time. Her father, and Finn.

  “You should dump his ass,” said Felix. He drew the clay up into a long, slender silhouette, and then pressed it back down again. “He’s a boring bourgie nerd.”

  “It’d be more trouble than it’s worth,” said Cat. It was the truth. Her relationship with Richard, such as it was, didn’t particularly impinge on her quality of life.

  Felix peered over at her, his face speckled with droplets of clay. “You’re using him right up, you little slut. For his money. You’re a . . . what’s the word? A gold digger.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  Felix dipped his fingers in the bowl of gray water he kept beside his feet and flicked them at her. She shrieked and slid behind the battered old dim sum cart, the shelves sagging with crusty brushes and half-empty cans of turpentine. Lucy’s mess of platinum curls appeared from behind a support column.

  “I’m not cleaning that up,” she said. “Not like last time.”

  “The hell are you talking about?” asked Felix.

  “The paint fight,” said Cat.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Felix. “That was like three years ago.”

  “I hold a grudge.” Lucy glowered at them, her pixyish face curled up tight as a seashell. “I was up for three hours while the rest of you slept on that nasty-ass mattress Miguel kept in here.”

  “I remember that mattress,” said Cat. “It was an STD farm.”

  “Which is why I burned it.” Lucy ducked back over to her space on the other side of the warehouse. Cat lay against the studio’s cold cement floor. She remembered that night: they’d all had Mexican martinis down at the cantina on 52nd Street. All of them except Lucy, who didn’t drink, smoke, or eat candy, three activities she thought introduced too many impurities into her body. Then they came back to the studio and used up all of Miguel’s cheap acrylic paint by hurling globs of it at one another. Cat remembered curling up on Miguel’s thin, stained mattress afterward, the paint drying into stiff patches on her hands, and messaging Finn, telling him the entire story. She missed him and she was drunk enough to think he missed her back.

  She missed him most days, really. Even those days she saw Richard. Especially those days she saw Richard.

  Cat sat up and went out on the studio’s stoop to smoke a cigarette. She had a few Marlboros left in her holder, a few hand-rolled, a single fuchsia-colored Fantasia. She took out one of the Marlboros. How long since she last saw Finn? In person, not through the distortion of the camera in her comm slate. Christmas. Three months ag
o. They had sat in front of the spindly, crooked tree. The lights glimmering in the darkness made the living room look like the inside of an aquarium. Her father was asleep or working. They didn’t speak for a long time, just sat close enough for their thighs to touch. Eventually, Cat leaned over and kissed Finn on the mouth. He slipped her sweater up over her head. The house had smelled of pine and sugar cookies and dust.

  Cat dragged on her cigarette, watched the smoke swirl out over the narrow, potholed street in front of the studio. She wondered if she could convince Finn to borrow her father’s car and drive to her apartment this week. It was so much easier for him to drive now, ever since those fully automated cars came on the market. Designed for use by humans and robots both. Humans could program in their destination, robots could hook directly into the car’s computer. Her father had bought one last year.

  Cat pulled her comm slate out of her purse. She pulled up the string of code that connected directly into his mind. Like she was whispering in his ear.

  Can you drive here? she wrote. To see me? She hesitated. She wanted to write, I miss you but wasn’t sure she should. The wind rustled the thin, silvery green leaves of the trees. The wisteria was already blooming.

  Her comm slate flashed his response.

  I’ll be there this weekend.

  * * * *

  The night before Finn came to visit, Cat went out to dinner with Richard. He took her to a sushi bar that had just opened. They sat at their table and watched the sushi roll by on a silent conveyor belt. The arrangements looked like orchids.

  “I’m going to be busy tomorrow,” Cat said. “I’m having Felix and Miguel over to do gallery submissions.”

  Richard looked up at her, his eyes wide, his mouth full. He swallowed and nodded. “When do you think you’ll be done?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Cat. She dipped a piece of pink tuna into its pool of soy sauce. “Miguel’s been putting it off for like a month.”

  Richard wasn’t listening to her. He kept glancing around the bright room, tapping his fingers against the counter, pushing his hair away from his forehead. He picked up a California roll and then set it back down.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fantastic.” Richard leaned over the table. “I’m cooking something up. It’s going to be huge. But I can’t tell you yet.” He put one finger to his mouth, as though to shush her.

  The next day she woke up early and alone, having sent Richard home after dinner, reminding him of her imaginary submission party with Felix and Miguel. The lemony morning sunlight fell in a triangle across her face. She opened up all the windows so the air, sweet from the honeysuckle and the wisteria growing along the power lines, could erase the staleness of her apartment. She cleaned the sink in the kitchen. She swept the dirt off her porch. She tried on dress after dress in front of her bathroom mirror, finally deciding on a flimsy vintage thing she found in a thrift store years ago. In the bright spring daylight, she could see the faint outline of her underwear. She put on mascara.

  When Finn finally arrived, pulling up to the curb in her father’s dusty car, Cat was sitting on the porch, waiting for him. She had smoked one cigarette after another for the last thirty minutes. Finn stepped out, his hands dangling at his sides.

  “You were able to make it,” she said.

  “Yes.” Finn walked across the green yard. “Dr. Novak has been busy, but he told me it was all right for me to take a break.” He came onto the porch and sat down beside her. Cat tapped her cigarette into the teacup. Finn frowned.

  “You know that’s not good for you.”

  “People do lots of things that aren’t good for them.”

  She watched Finn consider this. She reached over and put her hand on his. What passed between them, these times they were alone together, was always unspoken. Cat did not know how to discuss the intricacies of desire with someone made of circuits and wires. She was afraid of the damage she might do. And he never spoke of it directly.

  “Let’s go inside,” Cat said softly. The wind picked up as she spoke, rippling the grass in the yard. They stood up at the same time.

  The light in the apartment was slanted and filled with dust. Cat had never shut the windows, and her gauzy curtains billowed like ghosts. Purple wisteria blossoms scattered across the floor and stuck to the soles of her bare feet. She let the wind slam the apartment door shut, and then she turned to face Finn. She lifted her hair up off her neck.

  “I’m glad you could come,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  She dropped her hair back down and entwined her arms around his shoulders. He rested his hands on the curve of her hip. She kissed him, and he kissed back. Finn reached down and slipped the dress over her shoulders. He kissed places on her skin that made her shiver. Cat didn’t care that the windows hung open, that she could hear cars driving by in the alley behind the house’s yard. Her hands were at the zipper of his pants. He picked her up as easily, as carefully, as he would a circuit board out of a machine and rocked her back and forth, slowly, against his body. She entangled her fingers in his hair, clenched her eyes shut, moaned against the side of his neck. Later, he carried her into the bedroom, laid her across her clean bedsheets, and kissed a trail from her mouth, over her belly, into the V of her thighs.

  Time dripped by and all the oxygen in Cat’s blood flowed out of her: through her mouth, her eyes, the space between her legs. The light changed, turned amber and then violet and then blue, and the warm breeze of evening fluttered through the window, the scent of wisteria fermenting the air. She became so dizzy she nearly lost track of him. Of course, he didn’t come. He never did. He had told her it was impossible, once.

  Eventually, Cat was too exhausted to do anything more. She stretched breathless and flushed across her rumpled bed, Finn beside her, their hands barely touching. He turned his head toward her. His eyes gleamed the way they did in darkness. Cat let out a long contented sigh, and then Finn slid off the bed and disappeared into the dark hallway. She heard the sound of his footsteps moving through the apartment.

  “Don’t leave yet!” She stood up, wrapped a sheet around her waist, and followed him into the apartment. Her steps were shaky and uncertain. She found him in the kitchen, gazing into the refrigerator.

  “I wasn’t going to leave.” He looked over at her. “I thought you might need to eat.”

  Cat laughed, touched. “How do you remember stuff like that?”

  Finn looked back at the refrigerator. The light made his pale skin the color of frost. “I observe.”

  “I can just order some Chinese food.” Cat pushed the refrigerator door shut. Finn looked at her. Cat was suddenly aware that she was naked, that the sheet had slipped down low on her hips. Her heart thumped in her chest. It was not desire. She’d burned up all her desire hours ago. It was something else, something that could not be reciprocated.

  Her breath came out shallow, like puffs of steam.

  A few hours later, Cat fell asleep. She curled up like a cat on top of her bedspread, her head leaning against Finn’s smooth, pale chest, listening to the familiar absence of a heartbeat.

  “Promise you won’t leave until morning,” she said, her words blurred with sleepiness.

  “I won’t leave.”

  She closed her eyes and then she dreamt of smudges of light filtering between the branches of black trees, of curls of kudzu twisting around her bare waist. She dreamt of circuit boards.

  She slept for a very long time.

  * * * *

  Cat sat straight up. Her entire body vibrated. When she breathed, her breath materialized on the air in front of her. “Finn! What’s happened?” Cat realized she was cocooned in quilts and woven blankets she had made years ago, things she kept stashed away in the linen closet because she’d never been able to sell them to a gallery. She pulled the blankets back up around her neck and drew her legs up tight against her stomach. She called out Finn’s name again.

  The windows in the bedroom were
still open. Ice fringed the sills. The curtains rattled in the wind. Cat shivered and then Finn appeared in the doorway, unfazed, wearing the same short-sleeved shirt he had on yesterday.

  “God, you didn’t close the windows!” Cat pulled the blankets more tightly around her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” said Finn. “I didn’t realize—I only saw you shivering while you slept.” He strode across the room and pulled the windows shut and the bangs reverberated through the apartment, fading into twinkling, starlit echoes.

  “What’s going on?” Cat asked. “It’s freaking April.” Her teeth chattered. “Get over here and warm me up.”

  “It’s still March. It won’t be April for another two days. Please, let me close the rest of the windows—”

  “Okay, right. Sure.” Cat pulled the layers of blankets over her head, blocking out the pale, milky sunlight. The windows slammed shut, one after another, like gunshots. She heard Finn’s footsteps come back into the room. She poked her head out.

  “Get into bed with me.”

  And he did. She threw the blankets around him and pressed herself tight against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her. His skin was cold but a faint heat emanated from his body’s core. Cat brought the blankets over both their heads.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought the blankets would be enough.” He paused. “It’s rather enjoyable listening to the wind blow in. That is why I didn’t close the windows.”

  Cat smiled in spite of the cold. She knew what he meant. Whenever northers blew in, the trees rattled outside her bedroom window, and the sound always comforted her. It reminded her of Christmas.

  “I still can’t believe it got so cold. It’s spring. Everything was blooming.”

  “The weather patterns are still very difficult to predict,” said Finn. “Even for me.”

  They lay there, pressed close to each other, until Cat warmed up. She directed Finn toward her closet and told him what clothing she wanted, and she dressed under the covers. Then she padded into her living room to turn up the heat, her breath condensing on the air. The heater shuddered on, smelling faintly of burning dust. When she came back into the bedroom Finn was staring out the window. The air around his face was empty, no clouds of breath curling like mist out of his mouth.