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By Root 630 0

been closer to her father than to her mother—he had been the one who played with her, who read with her, who was patient with her—and with Solomon gone and their last name on the front page every morning, Elizabeth and Nada had become bitter adversaries. Awful words that could never be taken back were spoken by both mother and daughter. Rich girl Nada spent long days and entire nights in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot trading family secrets and angst with runaways and prostitutes even younger than she was. She got her first tattoo the same night she lost her virginity between packed coatracks in a massive Belmont Avenue thrift store to a kid without hope or money, a kid she knew to be gay even if he didn’t yet, a kid whose picture was probably plastered by his frantic parents in every Barrington shop window, a kid who was just a few desperate weeks away from finally approaching the open window of one of those slowing cars and nodding at the much older married man inside. It was the last good story she ever shared with her mother, and she told it only to horrify her.

Jameson looked like he was making calculations in his head. “For the record, Ms. Gold, I believe your father was one of the great geniuses of history. Aristotle. Galileo. Leonardo. Michelangelo. Caravaggio. Newton. Pascal. Leibniz. Van Gogh. Mozart. Frank Lloyd Wright. Solomon Gold.”

She smirked. “His film score for NeedleBots Two was that good?”

“Actually, it’s excellent. Perhaps it’s not the requiem, but how could it be?”

No, she thought. How could it? The Gold Completion of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor was a myth, a legendary composition. The only person known to have seen it was her father’s lawyer, who said it had been stolen from Solomon’s hands by the man who murdered him. Nada knew only that it was the most important achievement in her father’s life and he never even mentioned it once to her while he was alive. Now it seemed like she was constantly trying to avoid the endless discussion and debate about it, which she often heard acutely in the background.

“Who’s Leibniz?” she asked.

“What?”

“Your list of geniuses. There was one I don’t know. Leibniz.”

Jameson nodded. “Leibniz was a philosopher and mathematician, among other things. He’s best known, along with Isaac Newton, as the inventor of the calculus. Or maybe it’s better to say they were the discoverers of the calculus. Leibniz saw the entire universe as a giant system that was both an expression and an instrument of God’s plan. Asian migration into Persia, the Mongols’ invasion of Europe, Magellan’s death on Mactan, kangaroos, the fur trade, Charlie Chaplin, the Eisenhower administration, Vietnam, the Gold Completion, you, me …”

“Leave me out of it, if you can.” She said it pleasantly.

He drew a breath. “Do you believe your father killed Erica Liu?”

She answered without conviction, as if she were just ejecting another random fact from her head. “Yes.”

“As an admirer, I’ve always held out hope that he might have been innocent.”

She waved. “People say I have a photographic memory, but I don’t remember everything with pictures, or words. Sometimes I remember detailed abstractions—shapes that represent ideas. They’re more like charts than photographs. The chart of my father I keep in my head tells me he’s guilty, but it’s nothing like proof. It’s more like faith.”

“Most people reserve the word faith for beliefs that are more inspiring.”

Nada said, “The next time I see you, I might recognize your face or I might recognize your chart. It’s all data that’s in my head. Converting that data into the things I believe takes an act of faith.”

“But you will recognize me.”

“If I want to. Actually, I’m almost as good at forgetting as I am at remembering. It’s not even forgetting really. It’s more like deleting.”

“How much of your father have you deleted?” he asked.

“None of him.”

There were a lot of people dancing suddenly, as if the DJ had put on a popular song. She turned the music off in her head and now she watched the young couples hop and weave and nod and wave in silence. Some of them danced