Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Are you married or anything?” she asked abruptly, catching him in the middle of a trip down the Fissure of Rolando.

He said, “No, I’m not. Why do you ask?”

“Just nosy. How come? Are you, like, gay?”

“Nope. I guess I was just waiting for someone like you to come along.”

She rolled her eyes and blushed charmingly. “You know, you could get arrested for stuff like that,” she said primly.

“Hey, I can wait. Listen, it’ll be great. After I describe your brain and make you famous and win the Nobel prize, you can push me around in a wheelchair for twenty years. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

At that point the phone rang. Shadkin picked it up and said, “Hello. Yeah, it went great. Yeah, we’re just about finished for today. Uh-huh. Yeah, here she is.”

He handed the receiver across the desk. “Your mom.”

While Lucy spoke on the phone, Shadkin took the opportunity to study his electroencephalograms, but his eyes kept sliding over to study the girl. This was their first session, and already he was making plans to write up a major grant, with her as its chief object of study. Ronnie Chau, his post-doc, had found her; apparently she was quite a figure in Chinatown, where a lot of Chau’s relatives still lived. Even from the scant data he had already, he could see that she was a true linguistic prodigy, possibly the rarest quirk of which the human brain was capable, far rarer than math whizzes or plain vanilla geniuses. It really seemed as though in Lucy Karp’s head the hard-wired apparatus that enables babies to learn their native tongues, and which switches off in most people at about age five, had stayed on. She claimed that she had learned French in a couple of weeks and, from what Shadkin had already heard, she was perfectly fluent.

The talent seemed to have affected the rest of her personality, too. Shadkin liked children and, as a student of the development of language, he naturally had much to do with them. He could tell that there was something odd about Lucy Karp, fascinating-odd, not annoying-odd. The body language: straight in the chair, hands folded and still on her lap, none of the extravagant slumps, tics, and gestures normally associated with American kids. Her look was direct, remarkably so, as if she had contrived to let a thirty-year-old woman peer out from her twelve-year-old eyes. Funny eyes, too, the color of cigarette tobacco and set slightly aslant in the face, richly lashed above prominent cheekbones. But aside from those eyes and the good cheekbones, an unlovely child, unnaturally thin and dull of complexion, with a nose and mouth too large for the pointed little face. Not what he would have called a cute girl in his own dimly recalled adolescence, no, nothing cute about Lucy Karp. There was also a certain air of neglect about her. She wore baggy black cotton trousers, cheap black high-top Asian sneakers, a red T-shirt with Chinese characters in white on the front, and a worn black velvet vest over it, covered on the front with ragged embroidery. Her hair, which was dark, neck-length, thick and curly, and not terribly clean, was parted severely in the middle and drawn back over her broad forehead by two barrettes, green plastic alligators, a little remnant of childhood there, Shadkin thought, and thought further, this kid has something negative going with the mom. Lucy was answering whatever her mother had to say in tense monosyllables, and a sharp, deep line had appeared between her brows. Another short volley of uh-huhs and yes, moms, and she hung up the phone, looking pinched around the nostrils.

“A problem?” Shadkin asked.

Her expression resumed its neutrality. “Oh, not really. She’s involved in a case and can’t come to pick me up. She wants me to take a cab home.”

“Do you have cab fare? I’d be glad to-”

“No, thank you, I have enough,” she replied quickly. “So, what now? Do you want to examine me some more?”

“Oh, yeah. In fact, I was just thinking about writing a grant, just for you. How would that be? A couple, three times a week? I mean, you’d have to check with your parents. .”

“They won’t mind. Is there folding money involved?”

Shadkin let out a startled laugh. “For you? Yeah, I guess. What did you have in mind?”

“How about twenty-five an hour? Plus expenses.”

He whistled. “That’s pretty steep for a kid.”

“A unique kid. You said it.” She looked at him coolly.

I wonder where she learned that look, he thought, and then he agreed, and they shook hands. Her grip was firm and strangely hot. A metabolism like a vole, he thought. No wonder she can’t put on any weight.

She said good-bye and left. Shadkin let out a long breath, laughed, and sang “Sank heav-ahn for leetle gurrls. .” and the rest of the verse in the same stupid accent. Then he rummaged out a lined pad and a pen from the clutter and began the process of asking the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for an enormous shitload of cash.

Lucy Karp had no intention of taking a cab, although a slow cab caught in midtown traffic was going to be part of the cover story. Instead she slipped into the subway at 168th Street and took the A train downtown. She would pocket the cab fare, of course. Money had lately become more significant. She was assembling a trove, for what purpose she could not quite articulate, but it had something to do with her mother, with breaking away. At some level, of course, she understood that she was twelve, that she was not, in fact, going to light out for the territory anytime soon, even that her lot was not in the least comparable to that of kids with serious problems, but still there was that itch to have a little secret pile. Shadkin’s money, which would remain a private matter to the extent possible, would make a nice addition.

When the train came roaring in, she boarded the first car and settled herself in the corner seat across from the motorman’s booth. She amused herself by memorizing the appearances of the other people in the car, closing her eyes and describing them to herself, then checking to see if she’d got it right. She was pretty good at it by now. She had learned it a year or so ago from a middle-aged Vietnamese gentleman with an interesting past, an employee of her mother’s. It was an art useful if one is liable to be followed by people of evil intent. Lucy had not to her knowledge ever been so followed, but given her mother’s activities, it was not excessively paranoid to think that she might one day be on some psychopath’s list.

At 125th Street the first wave of rush hour boarded the car, ending her game, and she took a worn yellow-covered paperback book from her backpack. One of her great disappointments had been the discovery that facility in learning to speak foreign languages did not mean that she could automatically read them as easily. She had to learn to read French and Chinese and Arabic with sweat, just as little French and Chinese and Arab children did. Most pedagogues would not have started a young girl off with Claudine a l’ecole , Colette’s racy account of sexual silliness at a girls’ school circa 1890, but Lucy had rifled it from her mother’s bookshelf, attracted by the title, and had thereafter fallen under its spell. The book had immediately become her favorite, alongside Kim , for it supplied the girl-specific material in which the Kipling novel was lamentably void. Lucy had consigned Catcher in the Rye , her favorite of the previous year, to the closet bottom; compared to Claudine and Kim, Holden was a gormless dickhead. The problem was how to combine the two into a model for life. It was rather easier to imagine a turbaned, filthy Claudine slipping through the alleys of Lahore, speaking all the languages of the bazaar, the Little Friend of All the World, than it was to imagine Kim having thrills in the washroom in the Montigny school, but the problem remained. That her own mother had confronted the same quandary at about the same age and had solved it, after a fashion, was an idea that did not occur to Lucy, for her relations with that woman had degenerated into a series of border skirmishes, with the prospect of a major battle to come.