“Well, get over here,” she said. “You wanted to know about my work.”
It was a hidden bookshelf, set into the wall. But there were no books, only a tangle of electrical engineering junk—wires, circuit boards, soldering irons. Dr. Condon pulled out a black, old-fashioned laptop. “Hope this still works,” she muttered, setting it down on the table in the center of the room. The computer beeped and rang off a series of electronic notes. Cat walked around the table and stood next to Dr. Condon as the computer booted up. “These are the plans,” Dr. Condon said. “I stored everything on here. The circuit maps. All the programming. The shell designs. Everything.”
“You talk about him like he’s a computer.” Cat thought of snow dusting across the top of her head. Why?
“He is a computer,” said Dr. Condon. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Cat frowned. “I’ve seen his schematics already,” she said. “The code and stuff. I don’t think of him as a computer.”
Dr. Condon ignored her.
The laptop was old enough that it still had a built-in keyboard and a mouse track pad, and Cat listened to the click of the keys as Dr. Condon typed in a series of passwords and then a series of commands. “Here,” she said, swiveling the screen around so Cat could see. “Your lover.” It was a circuit diagram, much more complicated than the schematics she’d already examined. It was so complicated it looked like a work of art. Like an Oriental rug, a postmodern painting. Cat squinted against the screen’s backlighting, trying to sort out what she was looking at. It was unfathomable to her, as unfathomable as the models of the human circulatory system she had once seen in a science museum.
“This is him?” she said. “What part of him? I don’t recognize it.”
“It’s just a circuit,” said Dr. Condon. “For the brain.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard. “Here, look at this.” The diagram was replaced by a photograph. Click, click. The photograph filled up the screen. Cat gasped in spite of her best intentions to stay calm. It was Finn, it had to be Finn, but the figure in the picture had no head. The torso was split open. Below that, the narrow hips, the top of the pubis—it was familiar. Dr. Condon watched Cat and smirked, and Cat forced herself to keep her eyes on the picture. She looked at the open torso. The inside of him didn’t look the way she expected. It didn’t look like the inside of a computer or a lightbulb or a car. The wires were transparent, silvery, and seemed lit from within.
“It’s not so terrible,” said Cat.
“Liar,” Dr. Condon said. “Let me show you something else.” She walked back to the row of shelves, pushed aside a stack of cardboard boxes. The muscles in her back rippled through her shirt. “I built some test parts,” she said. “They don’t work, but . . .” She turned around, cradling a hand. The skin tone was pinkish and fake-looking. She set the hand on the table next to the computer. Cat remembered the schematics she’d been able to decipher. This looked more like Finn’s hand than they did. Cat put her own hand on top of it and compared its stillness to her trembling.
The hand didn’t feel like Finn’s hand at all. It felt like plastic.
“The skin’s wrong,” she said.
“Yes,” said Dr. Condon. “I hadn’t brought in my prosthetics guy yet. I was more interested in getting the fingers to work properly.” She flipped the hand over, palm-side down, and tugged at the skin. “Every time you let it touch you,” she said. “Every time it pushed that perfect hair of yours out of your face, that was my work.”
“And were you the reason he knew to do all those things in the first place?” Cat snapped.
Dr. Condon didn’t answer. She peeled the skin away from the hand to reveal the rows of transparent wires, as thin as threads. They were dimmed and dull, reflecting the tawny color of the underside of the skin, but there were thousands of them, twisting around one another on their way to the fingers. Cat was entranced. She imagined the way they would look inside of him as he ran his hand down the side of her body in the dark: Illuminated. Luminous. Beautiful.
“This is the reason you couldn’t love him?” Cat could hardly believe it.
Dr. Condon slid the skin back into place. “It’s not flesh and blood,” she said. “It’s not normal.” She picked up the hand and threw it on the shelf. The sudden clatter of plastic against metal made Cat jump.
“Show me more.” Cat’s heart beat as fast as a hummingbird’s. “Show me everything.”
“Everything?”
“I want to know everything about him.”
“How selfish. Knowing everything about one’s lover never works out in the long run.”
Cat scowled. “I want to know how he works,” she said. “Not how he thinks. Not how he feels—”
“It can’t.” Dr. Condon’s voice was dark. “That was the whole problem. I couldn’t get it to feel. Not if I wanted it to be a son, a perfect son.”
“I thought the problem was the wires and the circuit boards.”
“It was both.” Dr. Condon pushed the computer over to Cat. “You want to know how it works? You know AktOS?” She leaned back against the wall, her arms folded over her chest. Cat pushed the screen around so she could look at it while she typed. The high school had had AktOS installed on some of the computers in the lab, but she hadn’t used a manual keyboard in so long. She sifted through the files clumsily, trying to determine what she was looking for. Anything, anything at all. She found more elaborate schematics: the inside of his forearm, the length of his conductive spine.
“There,” she said. “What’s that?”
It was another new schematic, one not as complicated as the others. Cat whispered the commands under her breath, trying to picture what it was describing. Some kind of reaction. It seemed familiar.
She looked at Dr. Condon. “Is this another way to . . . to switch him off?”
Dr. Condon raised an eyebrow. “Of all the things,” she said. “Of all the things you’d pick up on.” She slid forward, took the computer out of Cat’s hands, hit a couple keys. “Here’s the second part of it.” She shoved the computer over the table. On the screen was a list of body parts: left neck, sternum, forehead, right cheekbone, left shoulder. Then, at the end: deactivation.
“I don’t understand.”
“It was a joke,” Dr. Condon said. “I brought in a couple of grad students to help me. They wrote it in, hid it. I didn’t find out about it until later. You touch him in a certain way and then press the deactivation switch and he . . .” She did not look at Cat. “One of them fancied himself a poet. He called it the second little death. The first little death being normal deactivation, I suppose.”
The little death. “Orgasm,” said Cat. The word was sharp and clinical and didn’t sound at all like what it was. Desire. Ecstasy. “He can—”
“Mmm.” Dr. Condon closed the laptop and pushed her hair away from her eyes. Fidgeted.
“He told me it was impossible.”
“In the biological sense, it is.”
“But—” Cat stopped. “Does he not know? Does he not know he has that . . . capacity?”
Dr. Condon shrugged. “The storm’s almost passed over.” She shoved the laptop back on the shelf, dragged the metal doors shut. “You’ll have to ask it yourself.”
“Stop calling him it!” Cat shrieked, heat inching up her face. Dr. Condon pressed one hand against the metal door that hid the beginnings of Finn.
“I’ll call it whatever I want,” she said. “I made it.” She looked over her shoulder and her gray hair fell in her eyes and for a moment it could have been Finn looking over at Cat so reproachfully. “Don’t think because you let it feel you up in the back of your daddy’s car you know anything about why it exists. It shouldn’t exist.”
“Please don’t say that,” Cat whispered.
“My son,” said Dr. Condon. “I just wanted my son to grow up.” She slammed her hand against the door, and the metal rang out. The dangling electronic vines shook. Cat jumped. She took a few hesitant ste
ps toward the door. Dr. Condon had turned away from her but Cat could see her distorted reflection in the metal door: hair wild, eyes dark smudges against her pale skin. Her shoulders shook almost imperceptibly.
“Thank you,” Cat said. “Thank you for letting—”
“Please leave.” Dr. Condon didn’t turn around, didn’t look up.
Cat walked backward out of the laboratory and into the silent house. She hadn’t noticed earlier that the winds had stopped shrieking and pounding against the walls but now the lack filled the rooms with an unbearable emptiness. The computer console in the wall blinked bright green. Cat walked over to it. Release storm guards? A yes or a no. Cat tapped the yes and listened to the clank and whine of the house unfolding. Grainy sunlight filtered in through the windows. Cat turned the knob on the door, pushed it open slowly. Dust spilled out across her feet. It got into her lungs and she coughed and sputtered but there was still no sign of Dr. Condon. Cat thought of her weeping silently against the metal door. She thought about the serious little boy in the picture on the mantel. She thought of Finn, her Finn. He had told her he was a machine but she thought of him as a man, she had always thought of him as a man.
She had even used him like a man.
Outside, everything was still. The vivid colors of the garden were muted by a layer of brown grime. When Cat walked down the path her steps stirred up little typhoons of dust that clung to her tights. The taste of dirt filled up her mouth. It was inescapable.
At the gate, Cat stopped and ran her hand across the climbing roses that twisted around the fence. Dust fell away; a few slivers of green appeared. She wrapped her hand around the branch, ignoring the quick stab of pain from the thorns, and bent her wrist sharply. The branch snapped but didn’t break: beneath the woody exterior was a rope of wires. Cat wondered what would happen when the dirt got inside those tiny machines. Would they wither up and die? Had Dr. Condon made them that realistically?
Had she made Finn that realistically?
Cat’s car bled into the landscape. She wiped away the dust from the windows with her jacket, then wiped off the handle and unlocked the car and climbed in. When she slammed the door, dust billowed up across the front seat. She threw the filthy, probably ruined jacket into the back. She sat for a moment, looking at that tiny house in the middle of the desert.
There it is. The house where you were born.
Cat turned on the car. The engine sputtered to life. She plugged her music player into the stereo and flipped through the songs until she found one that always reminded her of Finn.
And then she drove in the direction of home.
SEVENTEEN
After coming home from her trip to the desert, Cat went outside at night more and more, particularly on nights when the moon was heavy and bright in the sky. One night Cat cut across the backyard into the woods, an electric flashlight bouncing unused against her hip; the moonlight was enough to see by, even through the new growth of the trees. She could feel that moonlight like a glass of ice water pressed against hot skin.
Cat walked all the way down to the river. It trickled thinly over the rocks, gray in the moonlight. It hadn’t rained much this spring. The drought had lasted since last summer. Cat heaved herself down the side of the bank, her knees knocking up against her stomach. The baby kicked, protesting maybe, or excited at this sudden burst of movement. She still hadn’t thought of a name for him. When she came to the scatter of smooth white stones at the shore, she sat down with a sigh, legs stretched out in front of her, ugly pink maternity dress hiked up around her thighs. She leaned back and looked up at the veins of stars. The moon. She ran her hands over her stomach. “Baby,” she said. “What do you think your daddy is doing right now?”
The river whispered an unintelligible reply. “I think he’s taking soil samples,” she said. The baby fluttered and rippled. “He can go out on the surface without any protection.” She closed her eyes. “He can breathe the useless air. You won’t be able to do that, of course, but neither can I. No shame in it.”
She paused, listening to the river and the creak of the woods. The humidity made the air as gauzy as a butterfly net. Her eyes slid open. She looked at the man laughing in the surface of the moon. There were still those times when she wanted nothing more than to pull out her comm slate and type the string of numbers and letters that once tethered her to Finn. She wanted to talk to him, to apologize to him, to see his words to her appear on the screen. But that code tied her only to the house now.
More and more, though, she found that the urge to call him had faded, that it was enough to go outside with her baby and look up at the sky.
“Some nights,” Cat said, and she thought of her son, a translucent pink curl spinning inside of her. “Some nights your daddy goes out on the surface where it smells like the Fourth of July and he looks at Earth. At us. When you’re born I can show you pictures of what he sees. But really he’s looking at the two of us, here on Earth, waiting for him to come home.”
The moonlight reflected off her damp eyelashes. “Some nights,” she said, “he’s even forgiven me.”
She knew they were all lies, but when she spoke she spoke the truth.
* * * *
Cat was pulling weeds in the garden when she heard the gate scraping open across the loose, dry soil. She leaned back on her heels and rested one hand on her stomach and brought the other hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. It was her father. “The garden,” he said. “My God. It’s just like when your mother was alive.”
“Thanks.” Cat smiled at him. “What’s up?”
Her father shuffled forward across the narrow stone path, over to the black metal chair Cat had bought at one of the antiques stores in town and then set up next to the gush of wisteria. He sat down, his body hinging at the waist. Cat turned to face him. For a moment he just sat, his arm crossed over his knees, his eyes squinting at some point in the distance. Then he spoke.
“You visited Dr. Condon.”
Cat didn’t move. The grass prickled the backs of her legs. The sun warmed her skin. Distractedly, she laid her arms across her stomach.
“How did you know?”
“I called her.” Her father shifted in the chair. “I saw you’d bought a charter plane ticket to Kansas. Thought I’d investigate.” He paused. “I’m not angry.”
Cat listened to the blood pounding in her ears.
“Granted,” he said, “if you had asked me point-blank about it, about going up to visit her, I’d have . . . discouraged you. But to protect you more than anything else.” He shrugged, looked over his shoulder. “I can’t help but want to protect you. And that must have been . . . so painful.”
“I’m an adult.” Even though I don’t feel like it sometimes.
“Oh, I know.” Her father laughed a little to himself, then let his grin fade away into a frown. “I know.”
“Daddy, I’m sorry I lied—”
“It’s not that.” He pushed his hands through his thinning white hair and looked at the sky. The plants in the garden rustled. “Cat, I’m sick.”
For a long time, the only sound was the sound of the wind, rushing through the garden, rushing through the pine trees in the woods. Cat’s first thought was that he had a cold. She would need to make him soup tonight. But as she looked at him—his gaunt face, the loose skin hanging off his arms—she began to understand.
“What?”
“I’m sick. I’ve been sick for a long time.”
“What,” she said. The heaviness of tears welled up behind her eyelids. She dug her hands into the soil. “What do you mean a long time?”
Her father bit his lower lip and looked away from her. “I mean,” he said, “a long time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Why didn’t I ask? Why didn’t I notice?
“I wanted to protect you. The first episode, Finn was able to help me, you know—”
“Finn!” Cat wanted to leap to her feet and pound her fists against the lemon tree but her p
regnancy weighed her down like an anchor. “You knew since before Finn left! And you didn’t tell me? Oh my God.” She covered her face with her hands. Dirt streaked over her eyes, over her cheeks. It covered up her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You seemed so unhappy, I didn’t want to burden you—”
“What is it?” She dropped her hands to the ground. “Tell me that at least. Is it . . . Are you dying?”
Her father sighed. He let his head drop. “We’re all dying,” he said softly. “We all die. But I have . . . a growth. In my brain. It was a little over two years ago when I found out. Maybe two and a half. Please . . .” He looked at her then, and already he looked like a ghost. “Please. I understand if you don’t forgive me, but I ask—”
“Daddy,” said Cat. She had begun to cry without realizing it. Tears streaked the dirt from her face and onto the top of her blouse. “How long do you have?”
“Years, probably,” he said. “I don’t know. They don’t know. It’s not . . . It was that one time, and I feel great most of the time. You know I’m still working. They gave me medication. I take it every day, I promise. Finn got me in the habit.” His shoulders shook. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Cat felt as though her entire body were disintegrating. The baby turned over inside of her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“To protect you.” He gave a short nod. “Yes, to protect you. You had so much sorrow in your life. I couldn’t bear to add to it.”
Cat took a deep breath. She wiped her muddy tears away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize.”
I’m selfish, she thought, and then she thought it over and over. I’m selfish. I’m selfish.
Her father stood up. Cat pulled herself to her feet, struggling the way she always did now. Her father clucked. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “I kept it a secret. I didn’t want you to know.”
“Why are you telling me now?” Cat walked across the garden so she was standing close enough to hug him. Her father laughed.