Perfect Little World(54)
Once the children were freed from their seats, Dr. Grind hooked up the complex’s iPod to the sound system and shuffled the music. The iPod held a playlist specifically for the children, new songs added daily based on what they were listening to in the nursery. The songs usually had some kind of dance or action associated with them, and Izzy was always shocked to watch the children, still babies almost, so young, instantly performing their own variation on the dance, as if each child was in their own music video. The reporter and photographer from Time seemed fascinated by the spastic dancing as the playlist shifted from the Wiggles’ “Taba Naba” to Pretty Tony’s “Get Buck.” After only a few songs, the children had moved on to other interests, but they occasionally stomped their feet in appreciation of a song they particularly liked.
As the party wound down, Izzy prepared a plate of food for both the reporter and photographer to take back to the hotel. “I’m sure you can understand why I was intrigued by this place,” the reporter told her as she handed over his covered dish of food. “It just sounds so strange in practice. But it was really wonderful to witness. You’re a part of something special here.”
For a split second, she felt an unknown and yet unmistakable dread settle in her stomach and she wanted to tell the reporter that Jeremy didn’t want Eli to have his nails painted pink with the other kids, or that Carlos and Nina had brought up several times that they thought it wasn’t fair that the kids couldn’t play with weapons like swords or toy guns and that they thought it cut them off from a necessary part of childhood. Or that sometimes the children all sounded exactly the same, their cadence and vocabulary like a professor’s lecture that’s been given many times with great success, and the parents, late at night, worried that Dr. Grind was going to somehow make all their children in the Infinite Family supremely autistic. She wanted to tell him that her mother had struggled for her entire adult life with mental instability and morbid obesity, and she worried that the stress of living with all these strangers would somehow pull these aspects out of her genes and ruin her. She wanted to tell him that sometimes everything was so perfect, that she worried that the rest of the world might have been wiped out in a nuclear event, and no one had told them. She wanted to tell him how terrified she was of what would happen when it was over, that this project would both save and ruin her. She wanted to tell him how stupid they all were, how easily they could break the delicate thing that they all held in their clumsy hands. Instead, she simply said, “I think so. It’s really special.”
“Best of luck,” the reporter said, and as he left, walking side by side with Dr. Grind toward the entrance of the complex, Nina and Susan came up to her. “You’re going to be the star of the article,” Nina said, poking Izzy in the ribs.
“Just don’t read the comments,” Susan said.
“I know, I know,” Izzy replied.
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.