Engineering Infinity (5 page)

Nils flushes, and forces himself
to listen. The judge continues: Madeline ordered into a program for obsessives
- if, and only if, she ever wants to see her daughter again. Madeline curses - “She
needs me!” she shouts, and the judge, seemingly unaffected, says, “You have
just provided us with a perfect illustration of the problem,” which, for once,
shuts Madeline up.

The judge gives a timeline, and
targets for Madeline. She may only see Suze if she achieves certain goals,
goals - the judge says - that will be hard for an obsessive.

Then he looks at Nils.

“Perhaps,” the judge says with a
surprising amount of dispassion, “you can undo the damage. Maybe it’s not too
late.”

In a tone that says it is.

Suze is five - too young for
permanent enhancements. Too old for genetic manipulation. Suze, who will have
to survive on his wisdom and his love.

That’s all we
had, boy
, Nils’ grandfather had said when he heard about the problems,
the lawsuit.
You’ve all made the mistake of thinking
children come with a guarantee. They don’t. You do your best, hope for the
best, and take what you get.

Nils doesn’t like that. He needs
something certain in his life.

Something he can’t - won’t -
screw up.

Daddy calls the new place an
apartment. Suze knows apart. She knows ment. “Ment” is what they add to words
to make them stronger.
Improve
, Mommy used to say,
is an order
.
Improvement is an
achievement
.

So this place is apart - away.
And more apart than other places. Which is why it has a ment.

She says that to Daddy, who looks
confused. He looks confused a lot. He says that things will be different now.
No Mommy. Mommy is sick and needs to see doctors.

Suzette could’ve told him that a
long time ago.

She likes the apartment on that
first day, mostly (she knows) because it doesn’t smell like Mommy’s perfume.
She knows Mommy won’t be there, and Suze isn’t quite so tense. Tense. Mommy’s
word.

Why’re you so
tense, honey? Feel how tight your muscles are? Relax. You’ll play better. Just
relax
.

Daddy brought the piano, and her
bed, and all her dolls, even the ones she doesn’t like. But he didn’t bring the
window seat. He put her cushions on a big old chair near a small window, but it’s
not quite the same.

Nothing’s quite the same.

Her furniture is the only stuff
that is the same. Her furniture and her toys. The living room, all new. The
entertainment screen, new. Daddy’s bedroom, new. His clothes, the same, so his
closet smells the same - shoe leather and cologne and Daddy. Sometimes, she
goes in there and sits.

In the quiet.

Because he forgot her music.

She tells him, and he says that
he couldn’t bring it.

Can’t afford
it, babe
, he says, and gives her a handheld music device. With forbidden
buds. Which, he says, are programmed so they won’t hurt her.

But it’s not the same. There are
no notes. The music doesn’t dance around her in multicolours. It’s flat and
tinny, not at all what it used to be.

She touches behind her ear to
turn on the music, but nothing happens. She doesn’t know why. She’s with
family.

But she thinks, maybe, Mommy lied
about the ear thing. Mommy lied about a lot, mostly to Daddy, but sometimes to
Suze. And Suze hated the lies, because Mommy sometimes wanted Suze to lie too.

Suze used to hide in her room.
Her old room.

Where the music danced.

She asks Daddy for her music
every day, and every day, he tells her he can’t.

So she waits. After the first
week, he says, she’s going to Grams. Grams will watch her after school. Grams
and Gramps - Daddy’s mommy and daddy - they love her and they have good music,
with dancing notes and colours. She can’t wait. Grams is a better cook than
Daddy. Gramps doesn’t talk much, but he hugs good. And they have music, real
music.

And she’ll be there real soon.

The end of a long day. Nils has
held onto his job through this entire mess, his boss understanding, but now
that it’s over - at least as far as his boss is concerned - Nils must perform
again. Long hours, stellar work.

And he does. He has been. He’ll
continue.

Thank God he has his parents.
Thank God they love Suzette. Thank God they understand.

He walks into their house - the
house he grew up in - a one-hundred-and-fifty year old Craftsman, original
wood, polished floors, real Tiffany lamps, put away since Suze will come over
every day. When she gets old enough, the Tiffany will come back out. The
antiques will fill the living room again, but for now, everything is as
familiar as his childhood.

His parents had put out this
furniture when he was a kid, so he could scuff the tables and break the springs
on the couch. Suze can do the same.

She’ll have a real childhood
here.

Only the comfort he expects as he
pushes the door open isn’t here. The air is fraught with tension. He can sense
it in the silence. He knows this place, knows the people in it, almost better
than he knows himself. And he knows how this house feels when something is
wrong.

His stomach lurches, turns. He’s
had stomach troubles so bad that he is saving for an enhancement - although the
doc probably won’t give it, saying reduce the stress instead.

Sure. When the lawyer is paid,
the experts are paid, the bills are paid. Thank God he doesn’t have to pay for
Madeline’s care. Her parents will do that.

Although they blame him.

What did you
do to her?
Her father shouted outside the courthouse.
She was perfect until she met you
.

The signs
were there,
Nils had said more to himself than to her father.
The signs were there from the beginning
.

He tries not to worry about this
with his own daughter. They enhanced her intelligence, messed with her mind,
made her better, the doctor said, but the technology isn’t perfect. Did they
enhance her tendency toward perfection, which she inherited from her mother?
Will things show up later that might not have otherwise been there?

He goes into the kitchen, which
should smell of his mother’s lasagne. Instead, it smells of the morning coffee
and dirty dishes. His mother sits in her favourite kitchen chair, looking old.
Her eyes are red-rimmed.

She’s been crying.

“What?” he says. “What?”

She points to the den. He hurries
in, afraid - what happened to his daughter? His girl? What would he be without
Suze? God, once he didn’t even know her and now he can’t imagine losing her.

Or he can, really, that’s the
problem. He can, and in those few seconds, filled with the hint of his mother’s
tears, he can imagine life without Suze. And it is beyond bleak.

Then he sees his father in his
overstuffed chair, arms around Suze. Suze, who is asleep. Suze, whose face is
puffy and red, like it always is when she cries.

Nils lets out a relieved breath,
then sees the rest of the room. The destroyed wall mount, the scratches on the
side of the old family upright. The overturned table, the broken lamp.

“What happened?” he asks softly,
so he doesn’t wake his daughter.

His father looks at him.
Accusing. That’s the look. A look Nils hasn’t seen since he was a teenager.
You should’ve known better. What were you thinking? What’s wrong
with you?

“What happened?” Nils asks again.

“She says the music’s broken,”
his father says.

Nils sinks into a chair. “What
does that mean?”

His father shrugs a single
shoulder, effortlessly, a man who has had practice communicating with a child
in his arms. A sleeping child.

“She turned on the music, then
started yelling and when we tried to fix it, everything got worse. She did
this. She was screaming and crying and holding her head. What did you do to
her, Nils?”

Nils stares at his daughter. She
never has tantrums. She’s the best child. But she’s been complaining about
music.

Music, Madeline’s obsession.
Madeline spent so much money on apps, apps he couldn’t renew with all their
monthly fees - a quarter of his wages in fees, for apps for his daughter.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? In a nutshell, as they say. In something
small that will grow into something big.

Has grown into something big.

He didn’t do anything. He watched
the enhancement money disappear, but his wife - who used to use enhancements to
remain thin - grew fat. He watched five dollars go away here, fifteen there.

What did you
buy?
he would ask her.

Lattes
,
she’d snap.

Lattes.

She lied. She bought music apps. Inappropriate
apps. Apps for lounge singers, who had to know every single request from every
single patron. Apps for garage bands, who needed to learn how to play. Apps on
music theory. Music appreciation. And sight-reading.

He’d come home, and Madeline would
be hunched over the piano, telling Suze to try again. Try.
Make
it sound right the first time
. With no music in front of her.

Make it sound
right
.

He never questioned. He never
did. He got his wife away from his daughter, had dinner, read to his little
girl, spent time with her, pretended everything was all right. And he loved it,
loved it, when she’d hold him tight and say,
I wish you
could always be here, Daddy. I like it when you’re here
.

Not realizing what his wife had
been doing.

His ex-wife.

“You cannot blame Madeline for
this,” his father says. “You both raised this child. You could have stopped
things.”

Echoing his own thoughts.

“I know,” he says. “But I didn’t.”

Except he did. Cold turkey. His
daughter, without her music. Like a drinker without his booze.

He closes his eyes.

“What should I do, Dad?” he says.
“Please tell me. What should I do?”

He takes Suze to doctors who all
chastise him, tell him she’s too young for enhancements, too old for genetic
modification. Then he tells them about the apps, and the doctors pull him
aside, tell him his daughter will lose her mind without her music.

Lose her mind, like her mother.

He can see bits of it already -
the desperation, the haunted looks. She walks into a room and shuts off any
music she can hear. She won’t watch entertainments. She won’t let anyone sing.

She destroyed the player he
bought her, and smashed the earbuds.

She’s five going on forty,
disillusioned and bitter.

He can’t afford the apps, but he’ll
ruin her without them.

A quarter of his income. More
when she can actually get the enhancements when her skull stops growing.
Different doctors give him a different timeline: ten, thirteen, twenty.

His decision, they say. His.

Alone.

She’ll be in silence until then.
No music, no refuge. He does know that much about his daughter. Until her
mother left, until he discontinued the apps, his daughter lived inside her
music.

Escaped in it.

Became it, in a way he - a
non-musical person - can never really understand.

But it is essential to her, one
doctor says. As essential as breathing.

Nils shakes his head.
People die when they can’t breathe
, he says, hating it
when people overdramatize.

But the doctor stares at him, and
says, in that same tone the judge used. The too-late tone,
I
know
.

She’ll die? Suze will die?

Maybe. Not physically die. But
stop. Stop being Suze. Stop being the person he loves.

He begins to see it: She can’t
sleep, won’t smile, reverts - thumb in mouth, baby talk. She won’t let anyone
touch her, not even her grandfather - Gramps, whom she loves most of all.

Nils can’t lose her. He can’t. He
won’t
.

So he does the only thing he can:

He moves back in with his
parents, taking over the basement. He lets the apartment go. He gives Suze the
large bedroom, him the small one. She complains only once - no window - and he
tells his father, who makes her a window seat in the den.

What kind of thirty-five year-old
man with a good job and a daughter moves in with his parents?

A failure, that’s what.

But a failure who can afford
improper apps for his daughter. A failure who can spend a quarter of his income
on Sight Reading For Lounge Singers, on Music Appreciation, on Multi-coloured
Notes.

A man who will not lose his
daughter, no matter what.

Daddy found it. The music. He
says it lives in a tiny chip, one that goes behind her ear. He puts it there,
and reminds her to turn it off when she leaves the house.

She does.

But she can go upstairs in the
den (
I’m sorry, Gramps, so sorry I broke everything. Please
let me in the den again. I’m so sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
) and she
sits in her corner, and she plays Gramps’s old-fashioned music machine which he
fixed after she hit it, and notes fly around her face - light blue for flutes,
red for trumpets, purple for piano, black for vocals.

She can sit in her corner, with
Dolly, and watch the music, listen to the music, and sometimes, when she closes
her eyes, she misses Mommy.

Just sometimes.

But she doesn’t have to hide here
because nobody yells. And Gramps holds her when he reads to her before bed, and
Grams makes good food, and Daddy smiles sometimes.

She wishes she could show him the
music. She knows he can’t see it. He doesn’t even understand it.