The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  Just you and me, thought Cat. No, it’s me. It’s just me. But aloud, she said, “I know.”

  * * * *

  The next day, Cat decided she would finish the tapestry. She woke up late, after sleeping dreamlessly for nearly twelve hours. The sun flooded the room, and she stretched out beneath her thin, cool bedsheet, feeling her blood pumping out to her extremities. Her fingers tingled. The tapestry was a gift for Finn. In the golden sunlight of her bedroom she allowed herself to believe that, if she finished it, Finn would come back.

  For an hour, she wove the spindle through the warp threads and combed the wefting threads down with her fingers, over and over again, the movement as rhythmic as a heartbeat. Then she came to the end. Cat stopped and wondered if the image of the tapestry in her head would match the thing she’d created.

  She went downstairs and dug a pair of scissors out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. But then she stopped, standing in front of the sink, scissors dangling from the crook of her finger. She never liked cutting warp threads alone. Usually Felix watched her, urging her on, telling her it was okay. But Felix wasn’t here.

  She knocked on the door of her father’s laboratory. “Come in!”

  Cat pushed on the door with her shoulder so the weight of her body swung it open. Her father stood in front of a computer monitor, his fingers moving shakily across the console. He looked up at her expectantly.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Cat slipped into the lab. She knew the place had been updated many times over, but it still seemed the exact same as when she was a little girl, all blinking lights and electronic humming. The only difference now was the lack of Finn.

  “What’s up?”

  “I need you to do me a favor.” Cat looked down at the cement floor. “It’s silly, but . . . it’s important, too. If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course! What is it?”

  “I finished the tapestry I was working on.” She hadn’t told him it was for Finn. “I need to cut the warp threads and tie it off and roll it out and . . . well, I have this kind of superstition, where I don’t like being alone . . .”

  Her father laughed and held out one hand. “I understand. Give me a second. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

  Cat nodded, then ducked out of the laboratory. She took the stairs two at a time. She heard her father moving through the house, more slowly than he used to, as though he were a windup toy on the verge of stopping.

  In the room, in the dusty sunlight, Cat took one last look at the rolled-up tapestry, alone.

  Her father appeared in the doorway and nodded at the loom. “All finished?” he asked.

  Cat nodded. She stepped over to the loom. Held up the scissors like a gun. She took a deep breath and on the exhale she snipped the first string, only one, and when the entire thing didn’t unravel she cut cleanly through the rest. The tension in the tapestry sagged. She tossed the scissors aside and began the slow process of unrolling the tapestry.

  The gift.

  Her heart beat quicker. The tapestry grew too large for her to hold, and Cat looked at her father and gestured with her chin toward the pile of knotted yarn overflowing her arms. He took hold of one end and held it up so the tapestry didn’t drag across the dusty floor. As she unrolled, Cat watched the tapestry wrapped around the warp beam. It appeared in fragments, strips of green and gray and silvery white. She remembered the cold snap that had first inspired her. How she’d sat straight up in her bed, her breath forming a cloud around her face. How Finn had left all the windows open so he could listen to the north wind. How he’d wrapped her in blankets, how his hands had kept her warm as she shivered and shook.

  “Wow.” Her father’s eyes shone. “You did this? It’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks.” Cat laughed. “I’ve been working on it forever. Since before . . . since I lived in that old duplex.”

  Cat finished unrolling the tapestry. She untied the warp threads. For a moment she and her father stood with the tapestry cradled awkwardly between them.

  “We need a table,” she said. “Or a bed.”

  “Right.”

  Carefully, they shuffled into the hall, toward Cat’s bedroom. They laid the tapestry over her unmade bed, her father straightening and smoothing out all the wrinkles and folds.

  Cat lost her breath.

  The tapestry glimmered in the sunlight streaming through the windows. Its image was an abstraction, but it still reminded Cat of the way the world had looked through the window, after her breath fogged the glass.

  The stitches were loose, twined together into a web of loops. Cat slipped her hand underneath and lifted it up, the cashmere and silk luxurious against her skin. She found the strand of Finn’s hair, that narrow line of darkness. Her own hair was lost in the weaving.

  “What about the ends?” her father asked. “The loose threads? Do you leave those?”

  Cat shook her head. “I’ll tie them off. I’ve got a tapestry needle somewhere.” She smiled dimly at her father. “You don’t have to stick around. I know you’re busy. It’s just . . . cutting the threads makes me nervous.”

  Her father smiled. His skin was as transparent as paper. “I can’t believe my daughter made this. This is what you do. I can’t believe I’d never seen it before.” He enveloped her in a hug and Cat closed her eyes, pressed her face against his new thinness, the bones in his chest pushing up through his T-shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For not taking enough of an interest.”

  Cat laughed. “I’m glad this is the first thing you ever saw. It’s . . . it’s the most special to me.”

  Her father nodded.

  Cat found a tapestry needle in the top drawer of her dresser. She pulled a chair up to the edge of her bed and began tying off the warp threads so that the tapestry would not unravel. Her father watched her for a few moments longer, then set his hand on her shoulder before he walked out the door. His footsteps echoed all the way down to the laboratory. Cat knotted off the warp threads as deftly as she could—for some reason, her hands would not stop shaking. As she worked, she thought about Finn. Then she thought about nothing at all.

  The sunlight in the windows turned burnished gold as the afternoon wore on.

  When she finished knotting the threads, Cat stood up and stretched. The tapestry lay waiting and sparking in the sun. She folded it up, neatly matching the corners. She folded it in half, in quarters, in eighths. It was complete; it was unfinished. She sat back down in her chair. She had expected to feel different afterward, the way she used to feel whenever she donated to ADL. She didn’t.

  She could put it in his old room. But she hadn’t been to his room since she came home, and she couldn’t bring herself to go up there yet.

  Cat clutched the tapestry to her chest, the fibers of the yarn intertwining with the hairs of her arms. Then she opened her closet door and set the tapestry on the shelf above the clothing rack.

  Someday, she would go upstairs to the attic bedroom, she’d lay the tapestry on his empty desk, she’d do the best she could.

  * * * *

  Two weeks passed. Cat carried on, working in the garden in the cool mornings, sleeping in the afternoons. She scheduled another visit to the doctor and began to practice the breathing exercises—even though she hadn’t decided whether she wanted a natural birth or not.

  She found she enjoyed working in the garden. She pulled out weeds and piled them along the side of the house for compost. She trimmed the unwieldy jasmine vines and twisted them around the fence. Pruned the citrus trees. Planted a row of rhododendrons to add color amidst autumn’s brownness.

  One morning she decided she would set about the task of uprooting the rosebushes, now dead, that had once grown along the perimeter of the fence. She pulled on a pair of thick woolen gloves to protect her hands, but the thorns still scratched up and down her arms, trails of pink etched like tattoos across her skin. After an hour, she pulled off the gloves and wiped the sweat beading along her brow. It
wasn’t hot outside but the work warmed her up. She filled a glass with water in the kitchen and then sat beneath the lemon tree and admired her work, the row of dark, waiting gouges in the garden’s soil. She’d read that you should plant roses in February.

  And then she felt it, a flutter of movement below her stomach, like a hand touching the surface of water.

  Cat went still, waiting to feel it again, to ensure it wasn’t her imagination.

  There. Another ripple. Cat pulled up her shirt and laid her hand against her bare stomach, her skin smooth beneath her fingers. She felt it again. Proof of life.

  Cat leaned against the narrow tree trunk and looked at the clear, cloudless sky through the tree’s branches. She thought about her baby—her son, the doctors had told her at her last visit. A little boy.

  She thought constantly of names. They came to her without any reason, like a song that had wedged itself into her consciousness. Jordan. Henry. Frank. Salvador. Name after name after name.

  She always pictured him with dark hair and dark eyes. She always pictured Finn.

  Cat spread her hand across her stomach and closed her eyes. Finn. Although of course Finn had never been born. He’d only sprung to existence somewhere in Kansas, the product of intelligence rather than desire, delivered by strings of code rather than doctors. And that, Cat realized, was all she knew. All this time and all she knew about his origins was that he came from Kansas, a place that had turned to desert a long time ago.

  That had been the secret in this house throughout her entire childhood. Where Finn came from. Her father refused to divulge any information when she was younger. By the time she was an adult, she had stopped asking. She didn’t like what that said about her.

  Cat stood up. She left her gloves and her garden spade and her glass of half-drunk water sitting in the garden, and she walked down to her father’s laboratory and went in without knocking.

  “Cat!” Her father was hunched over a computer. “What brings you down here?” He glanced up at her, glanced back down, glanced back at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I want to know about Finn. Where did he come from?” The question shimmered on the air.

  Her father straightened, ran one hand over his head. “That’s . . . abrupt.” He peered at her. “Are you okay? What happened to your arms?”

  Cat glanced down. “Oh, I’m fine. I was pulling out the roses in the garden. You know, the ones that all died.” She smiled. “The baby kicked. And I started imagining him, you know—” She stopped herself. “I just started wondering where Finn came from. You never told me.”

  Her father shuffled his weight from one foot to the other. Scratched at his arm. “Cat,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure this is the best idea—”

  “You told me once you didn’t make him,” she said. “Then who did? Why did you bring him here? Did you have anything to do with his . . .” She fumbled for the right word. She wanted to say production; she wanted to say birth.

  Her father hesitated. Then he hit a keystroke on his computer and walked around the long low table to Cat’s side. “Marginally,” he said. “I was marginally involved. A colleague of mine, Judith Condon—he was her project.” He grimaced a little. “I hate talking about him like that.”

  “Judith Condon.” The name was unfamiliar on Cat’s tongue. Heavy. “So Judith Condon is his . . . So she made him?”

  “She took the credit. She had a whole team of people.” Her father looked at her. “Do you really want to know this story?”

  “There’s a story?”

  “There’s always a story.” He paused. “Here, sit down.” He gestured at the cheap rolling chairs he kept shoved under the table. They both sat. Her father tapped his fingers against the table’s Formica veneer.

  “I met Judith when I was in grad school. I’d see her at conferences and so forth. She was brilliant. That’s what everyone said. I was a little scared of her.” He laughed. “She had this intensity . . . I don’t know. I didn’t know anyone else like her. Anyway. This was back at the tail end of the Disasters, and we were all idealistic about saving the world and doing all these amazing things, like we’d suffered and now was our chance to start over new. And we did do a lot of amazing things back then. Some of us are still doing them. But Judith . . .” He leaned back and looked at the ceiling, his hands folded into a steeple beneath his chin. “She started to drop off from what the rest of us were up to. She was older than us, not old enough to be senile but we attributed it to that anyway.” He shrugged. “She called me right after I met your mother. Wanted me to help her with some circuit design. She didn’t tell me what it was for, though. Just said she was working with artificial intelligence, but that meant something different than it does now. She didn’t say an artificial human intelligence.”

  Cat listened, one hand clenching the other in her lap.

  She thought she felt the baby’s heart beating.

  “Anyway, I did the work for her, but then I got involved with this huge NSF grant so I had to bow out. I didn’t hear from her for a long time. I basically forgot about her, honestly. She had fallen completely off the radar. Then one day I get a call from Dr. Ramirez. Do you remember him? We used to have him over for dinner.”

  Cat nodded. Distantly, she recalled the warm golden glimmer of the dining room lights, the hum of music in the background, her mother’s forearm reaching across the table as a silver bracelet jangled against the bone of her wrist.

  “You were very young,” her father said. “He’s passed on since then, of course. Well, he called me one night. Told me he’d been working closely with Judith for pretty much the entire duration of the project. He was damn near hysterical. Asked me if I knew what it was, started shrieking that they’d made a life—wouldn’t give me any details. Just made me promise I’d fly out to Judith’s workshop the first chance I got. Apparently she’d set up something in the desert, the Midwest. Wanted total isolation.” He grinned and shook his head. “People call me the mad scientist.”

  “Is that when you found Finn?” Cat asked. “When you flew out there? That was the life they’d made, right?” She closed her eyes. She wanted to picture everything in her head. A laboratory in the middle of the desert. Finn when he was brand-new. In her mind, Judith Condon looked like her own mother, just with dark sleek hair and black, black eyes.

  Her father nodded. “John—Dr. Ramirez—met me at the airport. Looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. As he’s driving me out there, he pulls a goddamn bottle of Jack Daniel’s out from under the seat and starts drinking it straight up. Then he tells me that Judith has gone total psychopath, and that she wants to kill it. That’s what he keeps saying, over and over. She wants to kill it, she wants to kill it.” Her father looked at the air above Cat’s head. “One time, one time he said him. That she wanted to kill him. We were almost to the house at that point. The Jack Daniel’s was basically gone.”

  “You saved him,” said Cat. “Finn.”

  Her father’s face turned very serious. “I suppose you could look at it that way.”

  “What . . . What was it like? When you saw him for the first time? What’d you think?”

  “He was shut off.”

  Cat’s throat tightened.

  “John led me straight to the workshop. Said something about how we didn’t have much time. The whole house was a mess. We walked through the living room, and I just remember everything was covered in dirt from outside. You could taste it in the back of your throat. The workshop was spotless, though. It was remarkable. And lying there, right in the center of the room, was Finn.”

  “Shut off.” Cat remembered how he looked the first time she kissed him, crumpled up and empty.

  “Yeah, shut off. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. Something like Finn—even now it feels like magic, sometimes. Like something that shouldn’t exist. I thought it—he—was some sort of model. I had no idea what she was up to. But then John went over and reached behind Finn’s neck and his eyes opened.
God, I’ll never forget that. Those eyes lighting up. He looked right at me.” Cat’s father bit his lower lip, and Cat had the sudden sense that he wasn’t speaking to her anymore.

  She wondered when he had last told this story. If he’d ever told it at all.

  “He sat up and looked around the room. Looked at John. Greeted him, you know how he is. Hello, Dr. Ramirez. But then”—his voice trembled—“then he asked how he’d gotten there. He didn’t . . . didn’t seem to understand that he’d been switched off. And it bothered me. It bothered me that you could act upon him and he wouldn’t realize it.” He took a deep breath. “God, I hadn’t thought about that in so long . . .” He closed his eyes. “Shit.”

  “Daddy?” Cat put her hand on his forearm. He opened his eyes and looked at her like he was surprised to find her sitting there. She asked him if he was all right.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “It was a strange experience.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it . . .” But she wanted him to keep going. She wanted to know everything.

  “There’s not much else to tell. Not much else that’s important.” His eyes flicked away from hers: that tic. He was lying. She didn’t push it. He looked too frail in the sallow laboratory lights. “John led him out to the car. Told him ‘Mother’ was sick and he was going to stay with Dr. Ramirez. I realized later he was talking about Judith, but—well, it’s not important.” He shook his head. “I knew John didn’t want to keep him, though. We drove straight on into Texas. John probably shouldn’t have been driving but I had to examine him. Talk to him. Learn how he worked.”

  “Is this when you brought him home with you?” Cat asked. This part of the story, bringing Finn back to Texas, was as gauzy as lace. But her heart still hammered in her chest because Finn’s world had opened up for her a fraction wider. Judith Condon. She had a name. Her father shook his head.

  “No, that was a few months later. John told me he couldn’t . . . he couldn’t see past all the circuits he’d built. He was afraid he’d get cruel.” Cat’s father shrugged. “I couldn’t imagine it. He was a wonderful father. But I accepted it, of course. To be honest, it was too good of an opportunity—scientifically speaking—for me to pass up. Plus, I’d enjoyed speaking with him when we drove back to Texas.”