The Return: A Novel (7 page)

Skelly waved goodbye; the sisters blew kisses and waved back. In the driver’s seat of the truck, he inserted the key and said, “How about some breakfast, chief? I’m hungry as a mule.”

“So breakfast wasn’t part of the package over there?”

The truck roared to life and started rolling. “No, we were otherwise engaged,” said Skelly. “Those were the Cromer sisters of Amarillo, by the way. Sunny and Bunny. Touring this great land even as you and I are.”

“A little more mature than your usual taste, no?”

“Has nothing to do with taste, chief. That was what you all call an act of corporal mercy. I don’t believe those ladies have had a serious gentleman caller in some time. Good Christian women too. How often did they call upon the deity during our exertions! You know, I should’ve invited you in there. The gratitude of those girls would’ve melted your cold, cold heart. Whoa, there’s a Pancake House.”

“They must’ve been really hard up to settle for an old guy,” said Marder as they pulled in to the restaurant lot.

“You know, that kind of cruelty doesn’t suit you, Marder. As a matter of fact, they had all the necessary supplemental devices and chemicals, some of them that would probably shock your right-wing Catholic killjoy sensibilities, so I won’t mention them at this time.”

They got out of the truck, and Marder made sure to head for a seat with a good view of the parking lot. When they were seated, he remarked, “You know, speaking of Sunny and Bunny, I was just thinking about old Honey Folger. Do you remember him?”

Skelly wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, that douche bag. What made you think about him? You never think about the war.”

“I don’t know. Maybe hanging with you has unstopped the waters of memory. But it’s got all kinds of holes in it. For example, those two guys who trained with me. One of them was called Sandhog—”

“Sweathog Lascaglia. Edward G. The other one was Hayden, Ford T. They called him Patches, or Pinto, because of that white thing he had in his hair.”

“I didn’t have a nickname, did I? You were Skull, as I recall.”

“No, I don’t believe you did. We just called you Marder. You were too bland for a nickname, everything hidden away under your poncho, if memory serves, a cryptic person. As you still are.”

“Unlike yourself, as open as the southern skies.”

“Just so,” said Skelly, and to the waitress, through a blazing smile, “Yes, black coffee, miss, and a stack of pancakes as high as pretty you.”

3

Carmel Marder cruised through the water of the Zesiger Pool at MIT, her long arms consuming the meters, a niggling worry afflicting her thoughts. She understood that this constituted lack of focus, that real champions thought of nothing but the perfection of their movements while they worked out, but she was not that sort of champion. She was training for a meet in the eight-hundred-meter freestyle, her best event, which meant that every single day she had to come to this excellent Olympic-style pool and swim that distance at least ten times. Responsible to a fault, she rarely missed a day, but she also knew she lacked the killer instinct of the true champion; you simply could not think about anything else except (as a true champion had once said, and truly) eating, sleeping, and swimming.

She, in contrast, thought about many other things; she was thinking about them now as she completed lap fourteen, probably adding fractional seconds to her time, tiny bits of psychic drag on the wetted surface of her body. Her work also had to be stuffed in there somehow, between swimming and eating. She was part of a group designing the future of manufacturing, in the form of a 3-D printer-plus-robot that could actually make copies of itself. Theoretically, you could put one of these babies in an open field, supply it with power and raw materials, and after a time you could have a complex that could make anything makeable out of metal or plastic, at virtually any scale, since your original machines could also be programmed to make parts of larger copies of themselves. Of course, they’d had 3-D printers for years, but these were largely toys for producing prototypes or art objects. Her team was interested in making real things, starting with the machine itself. They called it the Escher Project, from the famous drawing by that artist of the hand that draws itself drawing a hand.

The work ran on its own track; a constant, it danced in her dreams, it invaded her infrequent romances. (What are you thinking about, he would say, smiling, and she would say, Nothing. But it was the work: everything.) Now, however, this extra non-work thought, this niggling worry: Where was Dad? And what was he doing?

Sixteen laps. She slid up onto the edge of the pool in one motion, like an otter mounting a rock, and checked the time of the final lap on her watch: 8:29.12. Better than virtually every female on planet earth, except the hundred or so women who competed at the international level, almost all of whom could swim the eight hundred meters in less than 8:20. Sighing, she let herself hurt, let the muscles dump their lactic acid, allowed her breathing to recover its normal tempo.

Then she rose, snapped a tiny crescent of buttock back where it belonged, and pulled her cap and goggles off, revealing pale-green eyes and dark-red wavy hair, parted in the middle and cut into short wings. As she picked up her towel and logbook and headed for the locker room, those who knew high-end swimming could observe that she possessed the ideal female swimmer’s body—the small head, the broad shoulders, the exiguous breasts and hips, hands like shovels, feet like flippers. There was also that face.

“Yo, Statch,” said a young man, another pool rat, as he walked by on the corridor leading to the lockers. She waved back, not pausing to chat. When strangers asked her the origin of the odd nickname, she would shrug off the question—a family thing, she would say, and partially true, since her older brother had been the first to bestow it. Later, if she liked the person, and in private, she would strike the pose: foam-rubber spiky green crown on her head, right arm upraised and holding a flashlight, large volume under the left arm, and her remarkable features set in a stern expression.

“Holy shit” would be the usual response, or startled laughter, for Carmel Beatriz Maria Marder y d’Ariés, her brow broad, her nose bold, wide-bridged, and straight as a die, her eyes deep set and heavy lidded, her mouth a set of generous petals, looked (except that her complexion was rosy gold and not verdigris) exactly like the Statue of Liberty. Her appearance both fascinated and terrified the typical male denizens of MIT engineering labs, which was fine with her: she tended to treat her male colleagues asexually, as if they were somewhat rude but endearing little brothers. Nor was she interested in professors or the occasional touring genius. She had no trouble getting dates when she so desired but selected the lucky men from nerd-free venues far beyond the university districts of Cambridge.

She changed from her tank suit into jeans, Converse high-tops, and a khaki safari shirt with lots of pockets, all of which bulged with various bits of gear she felt naked without: knife, tools, Rotring pen, notebooks, cell phone, electronic scraps. She walked across Mass Avenue to Building 3, where she shared a tiny office with a Chinese-Vietnamese grad student named Karen Liu and where the Escher Project was located. Liu was there, as she almost always was, earbuds socketed, staring at a CAD/CAM screen’s representation of an effector arm. Statch sat at her own machine and continued with what she had been working on before she broke for swimming, which was the design of a three-fingered hand that was supposed to take a part out of the sinter bath, expose it to an air blast that would blow the steel dust off it, move it into the oven, take it out when it was finished, and send it down to the assembler. As with all parts of Escher, the problem was constrained by the requirement that everything in the machine would also have to be made by the machine, using the same 3-D manufacturing process. It had to be simple and it had to work. Either of these goals was easy to achieve; doing them both at the same time was Engineering. A Schue Saying, as it was called in the lab.

She lit up her screen and brought up tables of various materials, strength vs. weight vs. cost, plus whether or not they could be used in 3-D, and made notes, then brought up her CAD/CAM and tried them in her designs. But none of them worked, which meant she would have to redesign from scratch, which meant she would not have a prototype ready by next Monday. Dr. Schuemacher would give her a sad, disappointed look and not say anything, which was worse in a way than if he’d been a ranter, and then go on to the next member of the team—Liu, maybe, whose design would be perfect.

Liu let out a yell, jerked off her headset, and said something in Chinese, which by its tone was something her mother would not have liked to hear.

“What does that mean?” asked Statch.

Liu colored and rolled her eyes. “It means someone has mixed pubic hairs in the bean sprouts. You know, when something doesn’t work because of one detail? What do Americans say?”

“A fly in the ointment? What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that the space allotted for this arm is too short. I could use a compound lever, but then the part would be too complex, a bull to assemble, yes?”

“A
bear
to assemble,” Statch corrected automatically. She leaned over Liu’s shoulder and studied the vast screen. After less than a minute she saw the solution.

“You could use two smaller arms, above and below. That would fit.”

“Two arms? Can I do that?”

“Sure. It’s 3-D manufacturing—material is a minor constraint. They’d have to be mirror reversed, but that’s a piece of cake.”

“A piece of cake,” Liu repeated. “Yes, I see. Thank you, Statch!” She replaced her headset and applied her supernatural intelligence once again to the screen. Not too good outside the box was Liu, but matchless within its walls.

“No problem,” said Statch, returning her attention to her own screen. She could solve other people’s problems with ease but not her own, story of her life—or, no, stupid, let’s not descend into despair, self-pity’s a mug’s game, pull up your socks and drive on. One of her father’s sayings, that. And another one: if you’re stuck, don’t pound on yourself; take a break, do something you like, and let your unconscious work out the solution. She’d tried that with her swimming, although swimming was yet
another
demand, not quite the same thing as a trashy novel or a walk in the woods.

She pressed a key. A chime sounded and a new window appeared. “Call Dad,” she commanded. A pause, some warbling rings, and a machine voice told her that the cell-phone customer was not available. She waited for the voice-mail beep and asked her father to call her. She was about to add that she was getting worried but did not. In fact, she
was
worried. She’d been trying to reach him for three days, with no response. Of course, she knew how to track the location of a cell phone and had done so, but the last time Richard Marder’s phone had been turned on it was located in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and it was either still there or had been turned off since. She could not imagine what her father was doing down in that Gulf Coast city or why he had stayed dark since.

She now decided it was time to use a program her father did not know about, which was not exactly a legal program either, but, like most technically adept people of her generation, she had a fairly shriveled idea of what privacy and legality meant. The program was an exploit of a defect in the credit-card-charge recording system of a major bank. She patched herself into her personal computer, brought up the program, ran it, and discovered that her father had not used his credit card this week. Moreover, there were no travel-related expenses—neither air tickets nor hotel reservations nor ground transport. She knew that Richard Marder never carried significant amounts of cash, so this meant either that he had another credit card she didn’t know about, had modified long-standing habits, or (impossibly) was out traveling without spending any money at all. It was easy and barely illegal to check for other credit cards in his name; she did so and found nothing.

This was seriously disturbing. Statch had been spying on her father in this modest and caring way for some years and increasingly in the three years since her mother’s death. She’d heard of people going batty after the death of a spouse, spending money on weird stuff, getting involved with malignant people, and she wanted to keep tabs on what he was up to, especially since he was involved with at least one malignant person already. She had, of course, also tried to keep tabs on Patrick Francis Skelly, to no avail. According to the all-knowing Internet, such a person did not exist: no credit cards, no bank account, not even an email address.

The possibility that her father had gone off with Skelly popped into mind. Her father had never gone off with Skelly before. Why should he start now? Skelly had been a presence throughout her childhood, an attender of parties, a giver of large, generally inappropriate presents. The family, her mother especially, had treated Skelly like an unruly but beloved dog; a dish was always full for him, but he was not to be taken seriously. The Marder kids had used him as a Dutch uncle, of the sort always good for forbidden pleasures—the R movie, the first sip of bourbon, the straight skinny on sex, on bad stuff kids were not supposed to know about, secret lesson in driving a car, age ten. The Marder kids had no uncles—Marder was an only child, and their mother was deeply estranged from her Mexican family—so Skelly was it in that necessary role. They knew he’d saved their father’s life in Vietnam and was thus responsible for their own existence, which conveyed a certain primal fascination, but they’d also picked up some of their father’s attitude toward the man—a slight diffidence, a vague boredom. Statch did not think her father would willingly spend more than a long evening with Patrick Skelly. So where was he?

With a mumbling curse, she closed down the snooper program and scrubbed all traces that she had used it off the university system. She sent the latest version of her design to her laptop as a sort of promissory note. Perhaps she would work on it later after she … after she what? Got rid of this antsy feeling, this unease in her mind and limbs, after she determined where her father was and what he was doing.