She stared at me blankly, as if I’d suggested she sacrifice a sheep to predict the future. When she didn’t respond, I said, in the bright tone you reserve to mask your anger, “Why don’t we go to his room now, and you can tell me whether he took camping gear or a laptop, or what.”
After fiddling with her hands and her sweater for another moment, Kitty got to her feet and stumped off toward the back of the house. I followed her through a dining room crammed with sideboards and more lace into the kitchen. This was where she lived; it held a television, bookshelves, and stacks of unopened mail.
She opened a door to a set of open-backed stairs and led me down them, past the mechanicals, to a wall made of dark-stained wood with a door set in the middle.
“I did most of this work,” Kitty said. “My dad was a builder and you knew when something broke he could fix it. He taught all us girls the same. When I married Len—we met in Vienna; he was working in the army motor pool—I thought he might be like my dad, but Len wasn’t a builder. He was good with machines, but he couldn’t do carpentry. I ended up doing all those kinds of things.” The words might have been part of an ongoing plaint, but it was clear from the way she looked at her knobby fingers that she was proud of her skills.
She pushed open the door to her grandson’s room. A deep voice intoned, “Beware, mortal, you are entering Sovngarde, where Alduin has set a snare for your soul.”
I jumped back and flung a protective arm around Kitty, but she wasn’t disturbed. She even produced a faint smirk at seeing me knocked off balance.
“I’m so used to Martin’s gadgets, I don’t notice them. Martin is a clever boy with engineering projects, so if anyone besides him opens the door, they hear a warning. The message changes; he’s got five or six programmed in.”
Peering closely, I saw a small speaker and two tiny camera eyes mounted into the door frame. Martin must be a clever boy indeed to disguise their mounting so carefully.
When I walked into the room, I thought if Kitty had built this space, she was pretty clever herself. Soffits were set into the low ceiling, with three sets of recessed lights. One illuminated the built-in workstation, which held two computer monitors, a second an alcove where Japanese-style screens were open to show a carefully made bed. The third set of lights covered a separate little living area where Martin and his friends met—if he had any friends, poor guy.
The floor was tiled in a soft-colored stone. I opened a door and saw a bathroom, tiled in the same pale stone. An old tube of toothpaste and a dried-out bar of soap sat on the sink, but a trailing vine, its leaves still thick and green, covered part of the wall next to the shower.
I wondered if Kitty came in to water it, then saw that a little hose hung over it, attached to an electronic timer. “Was this your invention or Martin’s?” I asked.
She gave a half-smile. “That was one of the tricks we learned from my dad. Martin made the electronics for it, though. The last thing we ever did together.”
Back in the bedroom, I poked my head into a walk-in closet, where a lone sports jacket hung. Most of the closet was a storeroom for Martin’s overflow of electronics, old computers that he was hanging on to, a bassoon, some stereo speakers. His whole little apartment was severely bare, as great a contrast as possible to the musty rooms above with their collection of junk.
Two rockets about a yard long, made with a painstaking attention to detail, stood on a shelf above the computers. In between them was a framed snapshot of Martin as a young teen, holding up a plaque that read “First Prize.” His grandfather stood next to him, beaming with pride.
The rockets and photo, with a poster-sized copy of a book jacket over the bed, were the room’s only decoration. The poster showed the laughing face of the author, Richard Feynman, positioned so that his eyes seemed to be looking at the pillows.
“He was Martin’s hero,” Kitty said, noticing me staring at it. “Martin read everything he wrote, which gave him the idea he ought to go to some fancy science school, like the one in California where Feynman taught. We fought about that.”
Feynman’s name was familiar. “A scientist, right?” I guessed.
“A physicist.” Kitty bit off the word, as if it were something despicable—a symptom of degeneracy, like her daughter’s drug abuse. “He won the Nobel Prize, so I guess he was smart, but what good does that do you? He’s dead like all the rest of them, but Martin doesn’t see it like that. Martin always says Feynman’s work made him immortal.”