She had made this mistake enough times in the past; every person in the project had clicked on to a site whenever the Infinite Family was mentioned online in articles or blog postings. Izzy had scrolled through nearly 1,500 comments on a Yahoo cover story and felt both angry and intensely embarrassed by the vitriol of the commenters.
Way to fuck up your kids, LIBTARDS
2 to 1 odds that Doctor is fucking all the women in that place
How mentally handicapped would you have to be to bring your own child into something like this? This is why our country is falling apart. No more traditional family values.
The women are ugly as dogs, bet on that.
This project could work, but you can’t mix up the races like that. It needs to be pure.
The kids are all gonna be transgender vegan serial killers.
This is socialist propaganda; this is the future, people. A welfare state for lazy poor people.
Izzy now avoided social media and the Internet, preferring to stay in the complex, where everything was clear and thoughtfully arranged. Still, she worried, there would be a time when she would leave the complex and return to the world where all those commenters currently lived, waiting for her to come back.
“You’ll have dudes from all over the country wooing you,” Susan added.
“Best of luck to them,” Izzy said. From time to time, Susan, Nina, and several other women in the complex seemed intent on getting Izzy to admit that she wanted to find a man. And though they never believed her when she said as much, Izzy really wasn’t interested. So much of her time was given over to the family, still getting used to the unique aspects of each person, that it seemed overwhelming to try to date someone and have to deal with learning all of their own quirks. And sex, though the women joked with Izzy frequently about it, to her embarrassment, wasn’t something she thought about much. She’d first had sex right after her mother died, the connection between the two events so obvious that it made Izzy feel so simple, so psychologically trite. There had been four different boys, one after the other, and then it was as if the process had been demystified and there was no need for it any longer. At least, this was true until she met Hal, when she again became infatuated with the act. But perhaps it was the sadness that accompanied that relationship, or just her own disinterest now, but she rarely thought about sex and it was simply easier to handle it herself than to imagine a series of events that would lead to an outsider coming into the complex to sleep with her. And, finally, there were the children. They took up so much of her time, so much of her emotions, that it seemed like sex was something available to people without such complications. Whatever the reason, Izzy wasn’t interested and this seemed to drive the other women crazy.
But there was the kiss, Asean’s hand on the small of her back, holding her close. There was something pleasurable in that. But, no, it wasn’t pleasure. It was just an experiment. No emotion behind it. An experiment that had failed, she hoped.
“Eventually you’ll get tired of us,” Susan said, “and you’ll want someone in bed at night to talk shit about us.”
“Is that what you and David do at night?” Carmen asked.
“Not yet,” Susan admitted.
“I’ll have time for guys and relationships later,” Izzy said, for what felt like the thousandth time. “When we all leave the complex and set out on our own. Then I’ll look for someone.”
“That’s a pretty damn long time, Izzy,” Carmen said.
“It’ll happen faster than you think,” Izzy said, hoping that this wasn’t true.
“I still can’t believe we’ll have the kids with us in the house in a few more years,” Carmen said, and Izzy felt the atmosphere around the three of them grow dense and staticky. They all knew it was coming, when the children would move out of the sleep room and live full-time with their birth parents, but it seemed so unnatural, strangely enough, that they tried not to think about it. Or, rather, they tried not to think about it until they let their guard down and admitted that they thought about it all the time. Izzy couldn’t wait for the chance to have Cap in her own house at night, to know that it was just the two of them sharing the air in that space. And then, in her fearful moments, she thought of the possibility that she could not handle it on her own. This whole experience, she reminded herself, was to prepare her for that day, to take care of her son as if she knew exactly what she was doing.