The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  One day Finn knocked on Cat’s door while she was lying under the fan and listening to music. He came in and sat down in the chair at her desk.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “about the question you posed to me.”

  “What question?” Cat swept half of her hair to the side and began to comb it into a braid.

  “You asked if I thought you were pretty.”

  “What?” she said. “Oh my God, that was like two years ago.” She had forgotten it—mostly. At night sometimes, or soaking in a cool, lavender-scented bath—then she remembered, how he didn’t answer.

  “It was a difficult question,” he said. “It’s not something I’m generally called upon to consider. Previously, I had only contemplated the concept of beauty with regards to works of art.”

  Cat finished braiding the other side of her hair. She sat up and stared at him.

  “If you’re going to say no,” she said, “I don’t really want an explanation.”

  “I’m not going to say no.”

  Cat’s heart stopped beating, and then started again, fluttery and strange.

  “I realized, after you asked me, that I needed to work with a different algorithm. The definition of beauty in a human being is different from the definition of beauty in an object. This is a philosophical question, of course, and philosophy is difficult for me. It’s too abstract. I still have problems with abstraction.” He paused. His eyes shook. “I considered facial shape and the writings of Vitruvius. I also took into account my own experiences with you. I find it . . . pleasant to be around you.” He looked at her then. Cat’s skin warmed.

  “So my answer to your question,” he said, “is yes. I do think you are pretty.”

  All the breath left Cat’s body. Since the night she’d asked Finn that question, she had been called pretty—by boys at school, by friends of her parents. She had, in fact, been called a myriad of adjectives for that same concept. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Hot. But all other compliments were thoughtless compared to this one. This was the only time such a statement had any thought behind it.

  “Thank you,” she said finally.

  “You’re welcome.” He regarded her with his dark eyes. Cat crawled forward on her bed and reached across the chasm between them to pull the chair, with him in it, closer to her. It was heavier than she expected. She took one of his hands in her own and he looked down at it, their hands holding, but he didn’t say anything.

  There was something electric in the air, like static or lightning. It shimmered against Cat’s skin. Her room was so bright. The inside of a lightbulb. It made her dizzy. The only thing she could clearly see was Finn’s face: everything else receded into the distance, blurring away at her periphery. She heard the sound of her own breath. She heard the fan clicking overhead.

  She leaned forward and pressed her mouth against his. At first he did nothing. Cat did not give up. When three or four seconds had passed, his head tilted and his mouth parted. Cat wrapped her arms around his shoulders, leaning across the space between the bed and the chair, pulling him close. His mouth was dry and tasted vaguely metallic. He kissed as though he knew how. His hands looped around her waist. They pulled their faces apart and looked at each other. Cat could barely breathe. He moved forward, out of the chair, and sat down on the bed beside her and resumed the kiss, seamlessly. She put one hand against the side of his face. That soft skin. She touched his hair, lightly, and it clung to her fingers as she moved her hands through it.

  His hands stayed at her waist, pulling her in tight, pulling her in close.

  Cat ran her hand over the top of his head, around to the base of his neck. He seemed to stiffen slightly in her arms, but she kissed him more intently, afraid he would pull away, and her hands found something just above his hairline, an imperfection in the skin, like a—

  Finn suddenly slumped over, dead weight on top of her. Cat screamed. Finn didn’t move. She put her hands on his shoulders and shimmied out from underneath him. “Finn?” she whispered. Panic rose up in her throat; her mouth was dry as cotton. She pushed his hair out of his eyes. They stared blankly at the wall across the room. “Oh God, Finn, oh God, oh God. What the fuck happened?” She nudged him, and then shook him hard, but nothing happened. He didn’t even look like a person anymore. He looked like a mannequin. He looked like a doll. He looked like the empty shells of cicadas she found clinging to trees.

  Cat backed away from the bed. She stared at Finn so long and so intently that she was certain he’d moved—but no. It was only the fan blowing his hair.

  “Get up,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Nothing. The sweat prickling up out of her skin felt like ice. Cat stumbled out of her room. “Dad!” she called out. She ran downstairs, looked for him in the living room and the kitchen. Not there. She went down to his lab and found him standing in front of a computer, frowning at the screen. She ran in without knocking. “Daddy! Something’s happened to Finn!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He just . . . We were talking and he just . . . slumped over and he’s not moving and—”

  “You were just talking?” He hit a keystroke on the computer and started walking toward her. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs, in my room.”

  Her father pushed past her and jogged upstairs. She followed him. When he saw Finn slumped over on the bed he took a deep breath and turned back toward Cat, who leaned against the doorframe, her hands in her pockets, not wanting to look her father in the eye.

  “You were just talking, were you?”

  “Yeah.” Cat tucked her hair behind her ears and widened her eyes.

  “I see. Well, it looks like he got shut off somehow.”

  Cat didn’t say anything. There was a sickening weight at the bottom of her stomach. Shut off.

  Her father walked over to Finn. He gently lifted up Finn’s head and slipped his hand underneath the hair at the back of Finn’s neck. Finn’s eyes flashed silver and then faded back into black. He sat up abruptly and looked around the room.

  “What happened to me?” he said.

  “Cat said you were talking,” her father replied, in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe it.

  “Oh yes,” said Finn. “Yes, I remember now.” He looked over at Cat and she wanted to shrink up into the shadows in the hall, her cheeks burning. “We were talking. Something—” He stopped.

  “Right,” said Cat’s father. “Finn, go down to the lab. I want to check to make sure nothing’s damaged. Cat . . .” He walked up to her and leaned in close. “For God’s sake, be more careful,” he whispered. “And don’t tell your mother.”

  “We didn’t do anything!”

  “Save it.” He pushed past her, turned to look over his shoulder. “Come on, Finn.” His heavy, angry footsteps faded down the hallway. Cat ran up to Finn before he could follow.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” She resisted the urge to touch him. “You’re not mad at me, right?”

  “I understand,” he said. “You didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “No, God, I would never do that! That would be a . . . a violation.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A violation.” His eyes vibrated. “But how could you know that? You can’t be shut off.”

  Cat stared at him hopelessly, not knowing what to say. She wanted to kiss him again, wanted to do it over. She felt a surge of desire, thinking about it. She could keep her hands away from the back of his neck. She could use them to explore every other part of his body.

  But he only nodded at her, and left the room.

  * * * *

  Her father never said anything about Cat accidentally shutting off Finn. Not to Cat, not to her mother.

  The kiss was never repeated. Cat was too embarrassed to ask after it, embarrassed and shy, and Finn never said anything about it, either. Things went back to normal, more or less. She spent less time weaving fabric and painting pictures in Finn’s bedroom. She went back to eating lunch with Miranda a
nd even attended the occasional house party, although she always guarded herself carefully at them and avoided Oscar as best she could.

  In her last year of high school she took the various standardized tests needed to get into college, the only one of her friends to do so. Her math scores were abysmal. This didn’t surprise anyone.

  “I suppose,” her mother said, “some people just aren’t cut out for college.”

  They were eating dinner. Cat pushed the food around on her plate. She wanted to go to college. She liked learning—she just didn’t want to study engineering. One of the academic counselors at school had told her about an old-fashioned liberal arts university in the city, where they studied in the classical style, reading works of literature and philosophy spanning three thousand years. To Cat, it sounded like her childhood, reading Homer with Finn. She had applied that day, not telling anyone, spending two hours in her room writing an essay about the nature of personhood. She wrote about Finn.

  “Have you thought about trade school?” her mother said. “You could learn to be a lab technician, maybe.”

  “No,” said Cat.

  “Helen, just leave her alone,” her father said. He was working at the table, on some contract from China that Cat understood was vaguely related to the space program. But right now he looked up from his computer in earnest. “I’m sure you’ll find your way, sweetheart.”

  Cat sighed and stabbed a green bean.

  Her senior year passed uneventfully. She went to a football game for the first time and sat for three hours on the grass-covered cement bleachers, drinking a Coke that tasted of cardboard. She finally built a functioning circuit board in one of her engineering classes (although Finn helped her, a little). Miranda convinced her to go to the prom as her date, since Miranda had sworn off boys and all their perfidy for the time being. Miranda drove the two of them into the city to buy dresses, and on prom night Cat’s mother took pictures of them with their arms linked together underneath Cat’s citrus tree in the garden, the yellow sun catching the highlights in their hair, making them both glimmer. They gave each other corsages but danced with other girls’ dates at the dance.

  Then, Cat received an e-mail notice that she had been accepted to the liberal arts college. It was waiting for her when she woke up one morning, sunlight washing out the computer screen almost entirely. Cat read and reread the e-mail: they were even offering her a scholarship. She brought up the e-mail on her comm slate and ran downstairs. She went to the laboratory first, sticking her head into the doorway and shouting, “I got into college!” before ducking back out. She found her mother out in the garden, pulling weeds.

  “Mom,” Cat said, pushing through the wrought iron gate. “Mom, I got into college.”

  Her mother looked at her, dropped a clump of weeds to the ground. “What?” she said. “Where? Your scores weren’t high enough—”

  “Just my math scores. My qualitative scores were almost perfect. Here.” She thrust out the acceptance e-mail. Her mother slipped off her gloves, took her comm slate, and read it.

  “Oh, Cat, this is one of those pointless rich kid schools. You’re not going to be able to get a job—”

  “Who cares?” snapped Cat. “They gave me a scholarship. And I am a rich kid.”

  Her mother sighed and drew her hand across the top of her forehead. “Cat, you don’t understand how the world works. You’re too sheltered. You’re going to wind up a housewife or a secretary, going to a school like that. Women can do anything they want now.”

  Cat snatched the comm slate away. “I’m going.”

  The screen door slammed, and her father and Finn appeared at the gate of the garden.

  “Now, what’s this I hear about college?” her father said.

  “I got in!” Cat ran up to him, showed him the e-mail. “They’re giving me a scholarship and everything.”

  “That’s wonderful!” Her father encircled her in his arms, drawing her up to his massive chest.

  “Congratulations,” said Finn.

  Cat thought about hugging him, too, but just smiled shyly instead.

  “Where’s the school located?” Finn asked.

  “In the city,” said Cat’s father. “Not far from here. Still.” He paused and stroked the stubbly beard that had begun to appear over the last few days. “Still, we’re going to want you to come back and visit. And that’d be a lot of easier if you had your own—”

  “Car?” said Cat. “You’re finally going to let me get a car?”

  “I think you only deserve it.” Cat shrieked and threw her arms around his shoulders. He laughed and picked her up off the ground, the way he did when she was still a little girl. Her mother stayed in the garden. She pressed her hands to her hips and smiled weakly, but her features darkened, and Cat’s celebratory mood, for a moment, wavered.

  FOUR

  One night at the end of Cat’s first year at college, they all went out to the bar—Cat and her roommate, Lucinda, and some of Lucinda’s friends, as well as Cat’s recently acquired boyfriend, Michael, a pale, intense boy who was obsessed with folk music and mid-twentieth-century office supplies—to watch the landing of the first manned mission to Mars.

  The bar was the same dim, ruby-lit bar they always went to after class. Usually it was half-empty, and so sometimes the owner let them smoke cigarettes inside while they listened to the lo-fi bands that played there during the week. But on that night, the night of the Mars landing, the room was crowded with students from both the liberal arts school and the school of technology down the street. The bartender had turned on the huge in-wall monitor, and everyone was hushed and still as they watched, like they were sitting in the pews of a church. Cat and her friends crowded around a tiny, wobbling table and ordered a round of imported beer. Michael pulled out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He leaned back in his chair, trying to look nonchalant.

  Up on screen, a newscaster interviewed a trio of scientists who had worked on the project. Cat thought she recognized one of them, from her parents’ dinner parties. A tall, thin man with a puff of brownish gray hair. The other two were Chinese, subtitles flashing as they spoke. Cat pulled out her comm slate, set it in her lap under the table, and sent a message to Finn: Are you watching?

  He responded yes. Cat smiled to herself. She had spoken to him a few days ago over video chat, sitting in the empty bathtub with her slate propped on top of her knees so Lucinda couldn’t listen in.

  “Your father was contracted by the Chinese government to work on the Martian exploration project,” he’d told her. “I helped him.”

  “Seriously?” asked Cat. “When?”

  “Your sophomore year of high school, I believe.”

  “Wait—that’s what you were doing back then? I thought you were just repairing the satellites or something. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think you were interested.”

  “Oh, come on, Finn! Freaking Mars!” She ran her fingers through her hair. She didn’t want the conversation to end. “This drunk aeronautical engineering student told me some company’s thinking about building a station on the moon. Like, a dwelling. Where people can live. But he also said the moon smells like cordite and I have no idea how he’d know that, so . . .” She shrugged.

  “I didn’t know that about the moon’s scent, but your father mentioned the lunar station two months ago. He may accept a contract offer.”

  Cat laughed. “Well, I want you to tell me about it this time, okay? If he does decide to do it?”

  Finn smiled a programmable smile and nodded.

  Cat thought about that smile as she sat in the crowded bar. She folded her hand over the screen of her comm slate. Michael leaned over in his chair and looped his thin arm around her shoulders and squeezed.

  “Who were you talking to?” His still-unlit cigarette bounced across his lower lip.

  “No one,” Cat said. “Someone I used to know as a kid.” She slipped her comm slate into her purse a
nd then set her purse on her lap. Michael smirked at her. He plucked out his cigarette, then leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

  All the sound in the bar seemed muffled, as though they were caught in a snowstorm.

  Michael sat back in his chair. Up on the monitor, the shuttle had just landed. She pulled away from Michael, leaned eagerly across the table. Michael shifted in his seat beside her.

  The video’s color was brighter than Cat expected, brighter and laced through with silver veins of static. Both of the astronauts had cameras mounted into their helmets, and the screen was split, one side for each astronaut. They looked at each other: two mirrored helmets, reflecting each other. And then they looked out onto Mars. Mars. It looked like pictures Cat had seen of the Midwestern Desert, only rockier, with a dusty yellow sky, and no sad, decaying farmhouses. Nothing moved. Not in the landscape on-screen, not in the bar on Earth. Cat held her breath and thought about Finn: he’d made something, some tiny thing—a chip, a jumble of wires, something—that helped propel that shuttle to another planet. But of course her father had taken the credit. He had to.

  Someone sitting a few tables over from Cat and her friends started clapping, and then suddenly everyone was clapping and cheering and hollering. A couple of Cat’s friends, despite all their neo-Beat technophobia, lifted their beer glasses up to the air. Even Michael looked pleased with the human race: a rarity for him, Cat had learned in the short time they’d been together. The cameras panned across the ocher landscape. The astronauts spoke to each other in Mandarin, their voices rippling with static. Cat pulled her slate out and wrote, Everyone’s clapping for you.

  Afterward, Cat and Michael and all the others spilled out of the bar into the cool, balmy night to have a smoke. Michael lit Cat’s cigarette for her, leaning across the old wooden picnic table the bar had set up on the patio. He dropped his lighter into his shirt pocket and exhaled smoke up toward the starless, light-polluted sky.