The Woman Who Died a Lot

I was pondering over Jack Schitt’s curious behavior regarding the copied Zvlkx book when the emcee suddenly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to call on . . . Tuesday Next!”

There was more applause, and Tuesday walked nervously onto the stage.

“It is a great honor to be here,” she began, “speaking at a conference that my great-uncle loved so much and gave so much energy toward. I’d like first to thank the staff of MadCon and the board of trustees for their generous help in . . .”

I moved closer to Landen and grasped his hand, and he squeezed mine in return. Despite recent events— the smiting, Goliath, HR-6984— all I could think of was how much I loved my children and how proud I was. I like to think I’m pretty resilient, but listening to Tuesday talk, I felt my my eyes water and my chest tighten. I remembered what a small baby she had been, how she had walked late, talked early. Of her first Erector Set at two, her first long-chain polymer at four, and of learning Latin at five, so she could better understand the Principia Mathematica. I remembered her first day at nursery school and how the teachers said how much they’d learned, her first patent application for an improved alphabet with only eighteen letters, her going up to collect her doctorate in mathematics at age eight.

But through all that she had been our little girl, and despite her dazzling intellect, we had endeavored to bring her up as normally as possible. And while I watched her fluff over her lines with the nervousness of a normal person rather than the detached and mechanical tone of her contemporaries, we knew at least that we had succeeded in attempting to make her as human as she was brilliant, and with that, we trusted, given her an ability to see beyond the pure science and the application of knowledge and to be able to make a distinction between what science could do and what it should do.

“Makes you proud, doesn’t it?” whispered Landen. We listened to the rest of her speech, but it had become increasingly technical, and by the end we could understand only one word in seventeen. But we were delighted to be on the list of people she thanked at the end, in particular for showing her “the value of normality.”

“That was really good,” said Landen as she came off the stage to thunderous applause. She hugged us both, then was whisked off to do a press conference, leaving us standing quite alone. We wouldn’t be telling her to go to school anymore. As far as we were concerned, our job was done.

“Well,” I said to Landen, “how are things with you?”

He looked at the tattoo on my hand and said that he was fine, that Friday wouldn’t be back until late, given our last trip in to see the Manchild, and that we were parentally redundant. “I suppose that’s what we should be striving for,” I said.

“Thanks for telling Tuesday I was bringing Jenny.”

“What was I supposed to say?” replied Landen. “Tuesday wanted her to be here. Which reminds me, did you get into Image Ink this morning?”

“I forgot again.”

“Me, too. Twice. Hang on,” I added. “What’s Gavin Watkins doing here?”

I had seen him through the crowds, sitting quite alone at a small trade stand. We walked over.

“Hello, Gavin,” I said, using a conciliatory tone of voice. “Oh,” he said, glancing up dismissively, “it’s you. The tart’s mother.”

It wasn’t a good start.

“Okay,” I said, “we need to talk. You don’t want to be killed, and we don’t want to have to visit Friday in prison for the next three decades. Do you want some tea?”

He gave a resigned shrug.

“All right.”

33. Thursday: Gavin Watkins

The content and use of slow-release patches was once totally deregulated, in order to allow those for whom drugs have an unavoidable lure a safer method of ingestion. The concept was simple in that it was thought impossible to overdose from a patch—but human ingenuity and stupidity know no bounds, and after two people were found dead covered in patches from head to toe in a steam room, the illegality in nonapproved patches was reconfirmed. They remain, of course, hugely popular.

Julia Scrott,

The Nonsense of Prohibition