Wetware

by Craig Nova

  In fact, though, this was what he lived for: a disruption in the market, a panic, a need for liquidity, for reassurance. He was at his best in those moments. He liked to make hard decisions. In the beginning he had been aware that many people had this knack, but he knew, too, that it was usually good for only one business cycle. He didn’t want to be one of those who only lasted a single cycle. He had stayed up-to-date. But even though he had done so, he was careful about new ideas, since he didn’t want to confuse the merely clever with knowledge. Fads, novelties—these were the kinds of things that he had spent his life resisting. Knowledge, as far as he was concerned, was something you could depend upon, and while it was sometimes accidentally discovered, it had the quality of not being diminished by time.

  The car stopped in front of the building where he worked. Jimmy pulled open the door and Blaine got out and went into the lobby. The floor was marble, and the shine of it was still maintained the old way, with buffing machines at night, and above it was a domed ceiling on which was painted sky and clouds with angels moving through them, stern ones to be sure. They reached out to touch one another, each of their fingers perfectly suffused with the roseate glory of God. Around the dome was a gilt edge. At regular intervals, chairs were arranged in the hall just far enough from one another so that anyone who sat in one of them couldn’t talk to someone else in another without shouting.

  Inside, people went about their business, carrying papers, briefcases, murmuring to one another, although when Blaine came in, they all instantly hesitated. They seemed to say, in that momentary hesitation, This is the man who knows what to do. Thank God he is here. He nodded to one or two of them, and walked over the polished floor. The elevator waited. He went up to his office at the top of the building.

  CHAPTER 3

  December 2026

  LESLIE CARR had a dream of who she wanted to be, and she dedicated herself to trying to live up to it. Of course, she had the anxiety of someone who is trying to manufacture a sense of self from the things she had seen in movies, magazines, and advertisements, and from what she could learn from the occasionally attractive and powerful women she ran across. Carr didn’t really understand these women, and when she tried to model herself on them, she did so with the exaggerations of ignorance. This didn’t show in her sense of style, but in her carefully maintained aloofness, which, she erroneously believed, was what a successful woman needed.

  Her father had owned a junkyard in Connecticut. Carr had disliked his bluntness, his vulgarity, and his insistence on the futility of just about everything. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and ate sardines from the can, forking out the silver fish with his fingers. When Carr had been twelve years old she’d stood at the part of the dump where used computers were kept, and there she’d taken a hammer to the piles of mother-boards and mounds of printed circuitry and broken these things into bits, glad that she was able to smash the mysterious order of these objects into something she understood, which was the finality of broken junk, ragged edges, and shards of plastic bound together with electric cables with frayed ends, looking like whitish snakes with copper fangs. Sometimes her father took a turn, too, getting as much pleasure as she did out of the sudden fury that both of them barely understood. Then they stood there, sweating, breathing hard, over the machines they had broken. Her father winked at her. They understood each other perfectly. They had been angry together and had had fun. This understanding was bound up, in Carr’s mind, with the odor of her father’s wholesome sweat and the strength of his arms. She clung to this memory with the fierceness of someone who has told many lies, but is able to continue because she has made an effort to remember one hard, precious truth.

  She had gotten a scholarship to Stanford, and she had learned how to behave and how to dress, how to use a knife and fork and pronounce the names of French wines. She noticed just how it was that people impressed one another. But almost always, when things weren’t going right, when she felt a little false and unsure of herself, she longed for those afternoons when she and her father had stood in the pale, smoky sunlight and worked until they were both short of breath. “That’s the beauty of this stuff, Les,” her father had said. “It breaks.”

  The first meeting for the project at Galapagos had taken place in the conference room on the second floor. Mashita, the project director, had stood at the head of the table there, his hair brush-cut, his eyes showing pleasure in his ability to put these people together, his confidence filling the room like a gas. Everyone there was reassured by the fact that this man had personally picked each one of them, and that he had done so— or so his attitude seemed to imply—with the conviction that each of them was perfect for the job. Mashita’s handshake was firm and dry (at least it had been in the beginning), his clothes gray and well cut, and he wore a black shirt and a white tie, like a gangster, but he did it in such a way as to appear cool. No one at the meeting looked twice at the people who were cleaning out their desks to make room for the new team.

  Until Leslie Carr met Wendell Blaine, she hadn’t worried about much aside from where was she going to be in two years, in five years, in a decade. But as things progressed, she found that she was easily bored, and while she thought she had made her peace with boredom, this was only one stage in a metamorphosis that progressed as smoothly as light seeping into a room at dawn. She didn’t want to admit that her boredom had turned into loneliness. Her plans reassured her, and each new position, each advancement, had a wonderful quality, a glow that had a romantic component, as though everything were possible after all. She clung to this sensation, although from previous experience she knew that it drained away, not suddenly, which she could have accepted more easily, but with a constant, unstoppable progression until one day what had seemed grounds for self-congratulation and pleasure was just another confinement. Secretly she longed for an ally.

  Carr walked along the avenues at night. The windows in the office buildings above her were filled with a blue, almost starlike light, as though the power of the people who worked there lingered as a sidereal tint. Her sense of romance increased when she saw the upper floors of the buildings in an island of clouds, and then, in the blue haze of vapor, the light in the windows seemed even more illusory. One night she looked down from the blue, diffuse lights above her to the window of Tiffany’s. Behind the glass, diamond bracelets were hung from the limbs of a leafless tree to suggest glittering fruit. Then the scene changed, and the tree sprouted green leaves as the jewelry morphed into crystalline flowers. Still, she liked the diamonds the best, like some fruit harvested in the depths of winter.

  After six months at Galapagos, Carr often woke up in the middle of the night and sat listening to the silence of her bedroom. Then she told herself there was nothing wrong. She was being silly. She had a new job. She knew precisely what to do with it. She had often felt this way, and she had always been able to define herself as someone who did not give in to momentary fear. Yet in the morning she decided that something was wrong with the coffee she was drinking, that it was too hot, or too bitter, or too cold. Clothes that she had always liked seemed too dowdy, the skirts too long or too short, or somehow they had stains that were hard to see, but that she was convinced had ruined them. The way she looked in them, or the style of her apartment (brown leather chairs, green window shades, blood-colored carpets), or the touch of the sheets in her bedroom left her with a strong but only dimly understood claustrophobia. Sometimes when she was in this mood, she took a bath, but the water turned cold and led to that moment when she heard the harsh gurgle as it spun around the drain and disappeared like finality itself. Then she would look in the mirror to see if there were any lines around her eyes. Not yet.

  A friend gave her a ticket to the Philharmonic and she went, not really caring much about music, but hoping for an evening in which she would be distracted. She had never really liked crowds, since they made her feel somehow diminished, and yet the ones at the concert hall were different, not like the claustrophobic pr
ess of people at an amusement park, where the cries of people on a roller coaster, the sweet fragrance of cotton candy, and the buzz of old-fashioned neon lights left her on the verge of panic. At the symphony, men and women wore evening clothes and drank champagne, the glasses bright in the light from the chandelier. Carr stood in her black dress at the side of the lobby, where she drank her champagne quickly and then stood there with her empty glass.

  Her seat was not far away from Wendell Blaine’s, who came here regularly and who was a member of the Philharmonic’s board. He arrived at the last moment, and a frisson rippled through the crowd as he went down the aisle. People turned to look at him with a combination of exquisite curiosity perfectly combined with fear of being caught gawking. The whispers spread out from his wake with a hissing, almost hallucinatory sound in which some words or phrases could be heard. Wendell Blaine, that’s Wendell Blaine. Is that Blaine, yes, that’s Blaine . . . Then he sat down and the conductor tapped his music stand with his baton, the small noise hitting Carr as though she were a hypnotist’s subject who had suddenly awakened at the snap of fingers. She recalled the thrill of those voices, and as Blaine folded himself into his seat, she thought, Well, look at that, would you?

  The music came to an end. The audience filed out, still glancing at Blaine, who was oblivious to it. He got up and walked out to the lobby, where the chandeliers glittered and people drank champagne in the hard, thundering echo of their voices on the marble of the floor and walls. Carr went down to the place where Blaine had sat and saw the seat number, 6L, engraved on an oval brass tab on the seat back. She sat down and put her hand onto the armrest where Blaine had put his hand. Her skin in her black dress looked white, and as she sat there, close to the deserted stage, she appeared exhausted. Her dark hair, the black material of her dress, her expression as she closed her eyes, all left an impression of someone desperately isolated, an impression so strong as to change the space around her, which, before she sat down, had been merely empty, but now had the electric quality of disordered feelings. As she sat there, mystified that she should be doing such a thing, she thought, What am I doing here? and almost instantly, answered, Oh, you know.

  At home, when she played a recording of the music she had heard at the concert, she imagined the audience, the mass of people, their dark clothes pierced here and there by the flash of a diamond. She thought of the space that had been enlivened by his presence, and as she did, she told herself that she was behaving this way because she was restless and that if she ever got a chance to meet Blaine, she would despise him. Didn’t that make her feel better? No, she would not feel better if she met him only to find out she detested him. She told herself that she was interested in novelty, which, after all, usually distracted her at other times when she felt like this. Why should this occasion be any different?

  She called the box office and bought a ticket next to seat 6L. She would have to wait a few weeks to use it, but at least she had it. She found that it was hard to concentrate on her job, and out of sheer anxiety she thought that perhaps she should be checking Briggs’s work more closely, but when she tried, she found that she could only glance here and there.

  Her seat was on Blaine’s right. He came in just before the last call and brushed by her, apologizing quietly, trailing the usual wake of murmurs in the crowd. Carr and Blaine sat together in the dim light of the hall, which was relieved only by the pool of luminescence on the conductor’s podium and the cones of light on each musician’s sheet music. The tuxedos, starched shirts, and shiny ties of the musicians appeared as a conglomeration of black and white, among which one saw the sheen of instruments, and all of it was imbued with an anticipatory rustle of sheet music. In that moment, which was similar to one in which something was about to happen (a first kiss was what came uncomfortably to Carr’s mind), she put her hand next to his on the seat’s armrest. It was dry in the auditorium, and a blue spark of static electricity jumped from her finger to his hand. Blaine looked down at the almost invisible fleck of voltage.

  As she glanced at Blaine, her eyes had small points of light from the conductor’s podium. Her dress rustled as she sat back, her hands folding in her lap. He hesitated, glancing at her, and then said, “Excuse me.”

  “It was my fault,” she said.

  “What can fault possibly have to do with a spark?”

  She blushed. “I meant I didn’t mean to . . . ”

  “To shock me?” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I didn’t want to shock you.”

  “Between the two of us,” he said, “I’m not easily shocked.” He offered his hand. “Wendell Blaine,” he said.

  “Leslie Carr,” she said.

  There was another spark, a small fit, when she took his hand.

  “I guess we’ve got to be careful or we’ll get electrocuted.”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s nice to meet you. Whatever the voltage.”

  Blaine made a noise that might have been contempt, but then it might have been pleasure. The orchestra played Schumann’s First Symphony, and as they listened, Carr felt the lingering, diminishing buzz on the back of her hand from the touch of his fingers. What could she say when the music was over? Something about the markets? Surely that would be a mistake. Of course, the best thing would be a comment that would make him laugh, or at least smile. Or perhaps she could tell him a piece of trivia—for instance, that Mozart had never owned a piano. Did he know this? Would he be interested to hear it?

  She sat there, feeling his starched, crisp presence. He nodded as though he knew the score by heart and might be turning the pages of it and letting the orchestra read it aloud to him. As she sat next to him, she thought that everything about her was just a handful of tricks, a couple of gestures, a few phrases, and all of it added up to what she felt herself to be at this moment, a rude young woman, or not-so-young woman, sitting next to a man who really understood the way things were.

  The music ended. The applause began. She sat there. Blaine turned toward her.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  She stood up too, and stepped into the aisle.

  “I wonder what you thought of it,” she said.

  “The question is,” he said, “what did you think of it?”

  She looked him in the eyes and said, “I thought that it was more form than substance.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “It was his first symphony. How could it be otherwise, no matter what the critics say?” He looked at the shape of her lips, the heated, fervid intensity of her eyes, which had more to do with the fear of embarrassment than anything else. “Would you like to have a glass of champagne? Leslie Carr, isn’t that it?”

  They went up the red carpet toward the door at the back of the auditorium, through which came the loud, almost hysterical sound of people in the lobby.

  A mass of people stood at the bar, but one of the barmen stepped to the side and said, “Mr. Blaine. How nice to see you. What can I get you?”

  “Two glasses of champagne. The Cliquot,” said Blaine. He took a bill from his pocket, a new one that looked as though it had been ironed by his housekeeper before he put it in his pocket.

  “Did you know that Mozart never owned a piano?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t. Why not?”

  “He couldn’t afford one,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose that’s right. Here.”

  He pressed a glass of champagne against her fingers.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But, you know, that’s one of the things about money. You can see its beauty sometimes not by its presence, but by its absence.”

  “Not its beauty,” said Blaine. “Its power.” He smiled. “Let’s step out of the mob. Over there, where we can look out the window.”

  She saw Blaine against the chandeliers, which were shaped like toy tops, constructed in circles of light. Blaine said, “I always like to look out this window. You know, glass isn’t firm, not really, but plast
ic, although it takes a long time to collect at the bottom of a frame. In a couple of hundred years, it is thicker at the bottom than the top.”

  Carr looked up at the dark squares of night sky, on which there was a film of light from the chandeliers, and as she stepped up, the heel of her shoe snapped off.

  “Oh, no,” she said, blushing, putting a hand to her lips.

  “May I confess something to you?” said Blaine.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They were both looking down at her shoe.

  “I have always wanted to walk on the marble of this floor in my stocking feet. Would you mind if I took off my shoes?”

  He then reached down and undid his laces and stepped out of his shoes.

  “Just as I thought,” he said. “It feels wonderful. Would you like to try too? Let me hold your glass.”

  She took off her shoes and they both stood on the marble floor.

  “I wonder if you would like to have dinner with me,” he said.

  She laughed and said, “Yes. But how are we going to get out of here?”

  “We are going to walk,” said Blaine. He took his shoes in one hand as though he had picked them up from the floor of a closet. “I always thought it would feel good, but I never imagined anything like this. Don’t you agree?”

  Outside, Blaine’s driver opened the door, the car appearing in the crowded street like an object of certainty, almost like a monument, a black, sleek monolith. The pavement was cool and damp, its texture rough against her feet. The car was instantly silent after the driver closed the door, which shut like an expensive refrigerator.