The elevator took them to Roon and Dot’s place, opening onto their foyer. Through the frosted glass door came soft bumps of music.
“Be nice,” Chiho said.
“Don’t immediately start crying,” Skinner said.
“Deal.”
“Deal.”
Dot let them in, grinning, hugging. Hard to tell how much of it was a pantomime of a greeting and how much was real. She stood barefoot, in a tank top and jeans, tattoos of Gustave Doré’s woodcuts from Purgatorio wrapped around her forearms. She wore chunky black-framed glasses and her hair was in pigtails.
“Come, come,” Dot said. “Roon is putting the little one down for his nap.”
“Shoes on? Off?” Chiho asked.
“Off?” Dot shrugged.
They removed their shoes. Inside was like a glossy spread in a magazine. Skinner didn’t recognize a single author on the spines of the books on the cases that wrapped the walls. He thought maybe he should sit, but didn’t know which piece of sitting-related furniture to select. Chiho effusively complimented the place as if she’d never set foot in here before. Dot gestured to a couch and rattled off a list of five beverages. Skinner didn’t catch any of them. “Water?” he asked.
Dot asked about their trip. “How was the coast? Did you stop to see the aircraft carrier? How were Hiroko and Carl? Tell me all about it.”
Now having a few places to start a conversation, Chiho focused on their visit to Hearst Castle, describing in great detail the decor and amenities. Dot nodded and interjected questions at the right intervals, keeping her mother-in-law going. They drank their waters and Skinner said, “The aircraft carrier is still beached. Craziest-looking thing.” And that was the end of that anecdote.
Just as the conversation came to a bloated moment of silence, their daughter emerged from the baby’s bedroom, uneasily smiled, then said, “Mom? Dad?”
“Come here, you,” Skinner said, embracing his daughter. “Come here, my sweet.”
Chiho kept her promise to not immediately start in with the waterworks. Instead she beamed and said, “Well, look at you. Look at you.”
“Little Waitimu just went down for a nap but he’s a light napper and should be up again soon,” Roon said.
“I’m sorry, who?” Skinner said.
“We named him after Waitimu,” Roon said.
“Oh, your son,” Skinner said. “That’s good. A good name.”
“Well!” Chiho said. “You two must have your hands full—”
“Which one of you carried him?” Skinner asked.
Roon said, “I did. I was the pregnant one.”
Here Chiho steeled herself and came close to breaking her deal with her husband. She’d spent the whole drive from Portland worrying about this. To not have been with her daughter when she was carrying a child, oh, God. She swallowed and forced her lips into a quivering smile. “That’s so wonderful, Roon.”
“How’s work?” Skinner asked, the question both wildly off-topic and providing some relief.
“Work is beyond crazy,” Dot said. “We’re both on the island most days.”
“We’ve been working with the newmans on Wall Street,” Roon said. “There’s an on-site day care Waitimu goes to and I can get down there a couple times a day to feed him. You should come over with us and see how it’s coming. I can get you visitor passes.”
“Sorry, I can’t get over that you named him Waitimu. I’m cool with it, it’s—I just didn’t expect it,” Skinner said.
Dot and Roon exchanged an uneasy expression. Skinner mistook it for having made them uncomfortable. “I don’t mean I think it’s bad you did it, not at all. It honors your brother, obviously.” He looked around the room for something to divert his attention. “Say, are those blueprints?”
On a drafting table lay several bound volumes of plans for New York Alki. Roon preferred to work with actual paper; the task of re-creating a city as it appeared in the distant past would seem to require such an affectation. They pulled open the first volume. “Yeah, they’re facsimiles of the Marc Fedderly blueprints. Amazingly, he did these all by hand.”
Skinner leaned in to get a better look. A map of Bainbridge Island on the left page, a map of Manhattan on the right.
“So even though Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size, there are some major geographical differences they’ve had to contend with. First is the coastline. While the landmass is roughly the same, the surface area of the coasts are wildly different, right? Owing to the irregularity of Bainbridge’s coast. But no one has ever figured out a way to accurately measure how long a coast is. Do you measure at high tide? Low tide? A coast is constantly in flux, expanding, contracting. The water’s edge never stays in one place. And topographically it’s wildly different, too. All those hills. So regrading and reshaping the coast were the major challenges during phase one.”
Skinner listened, nodded, reflected on the fact that this wasn’t really a conversation about civil-engineering challenges so much as Roon’s courting his approval.
“…to build the seawall, see? So the reshaping could happen without having to contend with wakes and tides… They surrounded the whole island. It’s thirty feet thick, reinforced concrete, has a system of locks for letting the barges through…”
A toddler appeared in the bedroom doorway, rubbing his eyes, his hair a brilliant fountain of blond ringlets. He wore a shirt with a brontosaurus on it. Seeing the visitors, he shyly smiled and hunched up his shoulders, as if he’d been caught doing something.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Roon said. “Come meet Grandpa and Grandma.”
Skinner steadied himself.
“We thought we should tell you in person,” Roon said, her voice trembling, as she scooped up her son. “We wanted you to see him when you found out.”
Chiho fell to her knees, pulled herself up, and reached for the boy. Here, miraculously, was her dead son again, not as she last remembered him, but as she first remembered him, identical to the painfully beautiful child she’d lost. Everything she remembered about her Waitimu filled her chest to bursting. Roon’s Waitimu looked the same, smelled the same, he was the same. “It’s you. Oh, my dear heart, let me hold you.”
Skinner’s palms went cold. “You cloned your dead brother?”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 3
[unintelligible] I mean, it’s flattering to imagine that you’re so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate. But what if it’s just the opposite? What if we’re too insignificant for anyone to really give a shit about what happens to us? The only way you become of interest to shady cabals is if you have some piece of incriminating information or you can make someone fabulously wealthy.
Anyway, so after Nick returned to San Jose I kept running it through my head. It didn’t add up. I knew Nick was a genius, but come on. He got whisked away to some superexclusive club on the basis of a lousy science fair project? Had these guys been watching him secretly for years? What did they know about the shed full of schematic drawings of New York City? I’d grown up with a couple skeptical academic parents who’d installed a pretty resilient bullshit detector in my head. There were gaps in Nick’s story. If I hadn’t been so knocked back on my heels by his reaction to my sleeping with his mom, I might have noticed that his stories about the academy were thin. They had an almost rehearsed quality. He avoided direct questions about the academy, his professors, who this Kirkpatrick guy was. When he left after Thanksgiving break I rolled everything around in my head and found that my curiosity was pushing me toward making a set of decisions. I had to find out what was going on at the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Then Nick wrote us that he wasn’t going to make it back for Christmas. He had things he needed to “sort out.” He was “really busy.” I decided to head down to San Jose and surprise him.