Wetware

by Craig Nova

  CHAPTER 2

  March 28, 2029

  KAY AND JACK walked along the river. At the bridge, they crossed over to the older part of town, where they stopped in front of a pawnshop window. The pistols were laid out on black velvet. They were big, humped up, with a large bore showing under the burnished luster of them. The finish was just right: it wouldn’t reflect light at an awkward moment. Kay looked through the glass into the dark hole of the muzzle, and when she glanced up, the pawnbroker was right there on the other side of the glass. He had a thin beard, his hair in a ponytail. He tapped on the window.

  “I want to go in here,” said Kay.

  She put the fingers of her left hand into the palm of her right and rubbed the slight tingle. It was similar to the sensation an amputee has in the missing limb, at once haunting and irritating. She could imagine touching the handgun, as though she had spent years practicing with it.

  They came into the pawnshop. Musical instruments were lined up on one wall, not arranged in any particular order, and Kay went along the trumpets, clarinets, violins, guitars, all of them looking like animals that had been killed and hung up to age. She ran her finger over the black neck of a violin that was curled at the end like a new fern.

  “Over here,” Jack said to her. He pointed at the case with the pistols in it.

  “Can I help you?” said the pawnbroker.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “I think you can.”

  The pawnbroker unlocked the case: they could reach through what had seemed like glass. Kay picked up a large pistol, and as she held it, seeing the fit of the handle in her palm, the pawnbroker said, “You were made for it.”

  “It sure feels that way,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” said Jack. “Oh yeah.”

  “I can feel the balance of it in my toes,” she said.

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” said Jack. “Here.” He reached into the case and took one, too. It had a large bore, a magazine like a bloated cylinder, and the grip was made of textured plastic. Jack swung it up with the air of a carpenter picking up a maul. “Yeah. That’s the one,” he said. “We’ll take these.”

  Kay and Jack emerged from the building and into the atmosphere of cooking pierogis, cabbage soup, newly baked bread. Kay rolled her head and put one hand up to the back of her neck. In this neighborhood, men in long, dark coats walked along, carrying books with loving devotion. Kay and Jack carried the guns in a bag.

  “It’s a good fit,” said Jack. “I mean both felt right.”

  “Yeah,” said Kay. “I like the grip for mine. The sights are about right. But, you know, handguns aren’t really for distance work. Everyone knows that.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “Do you think we need practice?”

  “No,” said Kay. “You never forget.”

  “A little tune-up wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Kay. “It’ll be all right.”

  CHAPTER 3

  April 3, 2029

  BRIGGS SET the table in his kitchen for one, a knife, fork, and spoon, a bowl, a glass with some water in it, a napkin. A lamb stew sat on the hot counter, the juices of it brown and fragrant, the peas appearing as small globes, fresh and not puckered with overcooking. A glass of dark beer, the head of it as rich as cream, sat on the table. He had thought that if he had an ordinary dinner he could think clearly, if only because the details of cooking and serving it would compel him to go through one task with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now, though, he sat with the napkin in his lap and just drank the beer. But even so, he thought, someone had to see Kay and Jack when they got away. Or someone had to help them go, and who was that? They hadn’t walked out naked, had they?

  It was late, after two in the morning, when Briggs came up to the Galapagos building. The streetlights glowed in the fish-colored fog, and in the distance Briggs heard the unemphatic bleat of a horn, out in the harbor. He stopped in front of the black doors, above which the turtle squeaked, its mouth opening and closing, its flippers endlessly swimming, its slow breath coming as a labored Unh, Unh.

  About six inches of cleaning mist was spread out on the floor. It swirled around like a hurricane seen from a satellite. Then the stuff disappeared into the dark vents along the bottom of the wall. Briggs waited until it had all slipped away before going up to the reception desk.

  A new man was there, about forty-five years old, his gray hair in a crew cut. He had thick shoulders, and a flattened nose like that of a boxer who hadn’t had the sense to know when to get out. Hair like indoor-outdoor carpet, pale skin, as though he existed on a diet of suet pudding and sausage. The man looked up, his eyes blank, and yet not without menace. How could he seem to care so little and yet still look as though he could cause you such trouble? Maybe it was just his indifference; that always looked bad when you needed something. Briggs took a deep breath, just to buy a little time, to count to ten. They hadn’t even replaced Jackson with a man, but with one of the early models, a banged-up one at that.

  “I was looking for Jackson,” said Briggs.

  “Who?” said the man.

  “Jackson,” said Briggs. “He used to work here on this shift.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. People come and go. You know, people are so transient these days. I saw something on the TV just the other day. Lots of reasons for it,” said the man. “I’m new here. Kind of quiet at this hour, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Briggs.

  “What do you want with him?” said the man.

  “Who?” said Briggs.

  “Jackson,” said the man.

  Briggs shrugged.

  “I wanted to ask him something, that’s all,” he said. “What about Jackson’s boss? What was his name? Jarrell. That’s it. What about Jarrell? Is he around? Maybe he’d know where Jackson is.”

  “No,” said the man. “Retraining seminars this week. They have them all over, now. I think Jarrell went to Hong Kong. Seemed pretty excited about it. Said there were all kinds of things to do there you couldn’t do here.”

  Briggs waited. What now? He wanted to make it seem that all of this was of no importance, and that he was just passing the time of day. He shrugged. Well, that’s the way it goes.

  The new guard looked Briggs over more closely.

  “Should I take your name?” said the man.

  “That’s all right,” said Briggs. “Thanks.”

  “I better take your name,” said the new man. “In case Jackson shows up.”

  “That’s all right,” said Briggs.

  He had always liked the cool touch of fog, the mist of his breath seeming cinematic and romantic. That wasn’t the way it seemed now. Now it felt cold and damp and made it hard to see. He went on walking, going into the park, knowing that it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world at this hour. He sat down on one of the benches and put his head in his hands and wondered where Jackson was now. Laid off? Well, thought Briggs, that’s one way of putting it.

  CHAPTER 4

  April 4, 2029

  USUALLY, AFTER Kay played, when she put the lid over the keys and made a rustling sound as she gathered up the sheet music, Stone was drained, but underneath it all, he was exhilarated too. He found that when she was playing he remembered events that seemed inconsequential, yet meant everything to him. For instance, one afternoon he thought of a young woman he had known in Venice, a musician. As she had practiced, Stone had sat near her, the music somehow mixed up with the gleam of her hair and the hawklike expression in her eyes. Once she had winked at him, as though only the two of them understood what she was doing. Stone remembered this unstated but perfect understanding with an almost tactile sensation, as though it were a cool scarf being dragged across his fingertips.

  Each day when Kay finished, Stone began to anticipate the next day, just like a man who has taken a drug that leaves him with the desire for more, and who, even in the lingering effects of the last dose, makes plans for getting his hands on the next one
.

  Kay came to practice seven days a week. Each morning Stone awoke in his bed with its gray sheets and mismatched pillowcases in the room that was filled with slashes of light from the sides of the shades, and as he sat up, fingering the gray hair on his chest, he thought, She must be waking up now. She must be thinking about what she is going to play. She is pulling on her clothes, and as she tucks in her shirt, as she tugs on her pants, she is thinking about the music. It is in everything: the cadence of brushing her hair, her walk, the swinging of her arm, or her coat as it twirls out behind her when she puts it on.

  Then Stone sat up. The sheets were damp and the pillow was clammy. He ran his fingers over the damp cloth and wondered how much time he had. His diabetes was getting worse, and he had pains in his side and back. Every now and then he had angina, which he felt as a constricting band made of something stronger than leather. There were some new drugs, but he didn’t like to take them, since he didn’t feel quite himself when he was using them, as though he were buying time by no longer being who he was. The new drugs left him feeling that he was just hanging in a closet like an old coat. He sighed now, and stood up. Before Kay had come, he hadn’t been so concerned about when he was going to die. If anything, he just wanted it to be painless. But now he worried about each moment, each second, because all he wanted was to see her play in public. And as far as he could tell, she was almost ready, although he didn’t want to do it too fast, or to do her harm by bringing her along too soon. He had done that once years before, and the musician, a young woman, had hanged herself. He remembered going to her funeral and having the musician’s mother hit him, her hand open, just hitting him, saying nothing.

  The light came in not only from the side of the shade, but from the tiny holes in it too, which he thought looked like a constellation, one he had never seen before, maybe in some other part of the universe or in the sky after a hundred thousand years. A hundred thousand years, he thought. I’ll be lucky if I have two or three months.

  He had black coffee and a piece of black bread for breakfast, although now he gave himself a treat, covering the bread with jam that had whole strawberries in it, each one glistening, heart-shaped and covered with minute blonde fuzz. He held a berry in his mouth, the taste of it perfectly melding with the memory of Kay’s practicing.

  At lunch he went down to the store at the end of the block and bought caviar, of the highest grade they had, and he served it the way he used to eat it in Russia. He buttered bread and then put on a layer of gray-black caviar. Then he took a bite, closing his eyes. He let the taste remind him of the years he had gone through, the rehearsal halls, the students, those who had panned out and those who hadn’t. The moment Stone had lived for was just after a brilliant student had performed. This was the instant when the audience seemed to hang, as though suspended in air, between the trance of the performance and the fact of its conclusion. It was a moment of emotional free-fall that ended when the audience hit their seats with a start. Then the frenzied applause began, a hysteria that acknowledged how far the music had taken them from their ordinary problems and the mundane aspects of life.

  Stone had stopped thinking about these memories, but after he met Kay, he started again, and now at lunch he tasted the fishy caviar and the sweetness of the butter: this taste made it easier for him to remember his best moments, like an old song. Now, though, as Stone sat in his office, two flights up from the street, the place filled with those old books of sheet music, he took another bite and luxuriated in the thrill that came from no longer looking back, but anticipating the future.

  Kay usually arrived at one. Jack was with her. They went up the rubber tread on the stairs. Kay put the key into the door and Jack pushed it open, only to be greeted by the odor of paint and lacquer: the walls were clean and white and the floor had been redone. Stone went in and opened the piano, flipped open the cover over the keys, which lay like a dessert of some kind made with layers of white and dark chocolate. He touched one key, and the sound came into the room. Then he took his usual place.

  Jack took his, too, by the window, where he removed a striped paper bag from his pocket and shook some crumbs out of it onto his hand. Then he lifted the window, which made a squeak, and spread out the crumbs. Jack looked upward, searching the sky with methodical intensity. The pigeons appeared in the distance, first as a flock, like a shimmer of darkness, and then closer, the green luster of their breasts coming up to the sill. There was an almost inaudible scraping of feet on the stone sill, and a cooing, which replaced the beating of wings.

  Stone liked to have the light at his back so that he could see Kay as she bent to her work. The sun, on a bright day, allowed him to see her hands in an almost clinical light, as though he were a doctor and she were displaying her hands under a surgical lamp. Stone had been looking at the hands of musicians for many years, and he had never seen any like these: her fingers were long and somewhat delicate, but their strength and almost athletic grace were instantly obvious. Her skin was pale, and just under it lay a pattern of ivy-colored veins, not prominent so much as vital. She played hard, tired slowly, and seemed to have inexhaustible energy, although when she was finished her face had the expression of a marathon runner near the end of a race.

  While she played, Jack stood by the window and looked out, watching the sky or the birds, and when she was done with one piece and before she went on to the next, he might say, “Rising barometer,” or “You can see Venus, even at this hour.”

  Kay usually wore a T-shirt and some Spandex shorts, white socks, and running shoes. Filaments of light shone in her hair when the sun came in the window. She came in and put some sheets on the music rack. Little sounds filled the room, the squeak of her shoes, the leg of the bench screeching on the floor, the rustle of Jack’s coat as he took it off and dropped it on a chair, the zipper ticking against a leg of it. Kay rolled her shoulders and put one hand to the back of her neck. She opened her hands. Then she sat down, her hands in her lap, seemingly thinking nothing, just relaxing, but Stone knew that while it was relaxation, it was something else too, a peacefulness that was a contradiction. While she was calm, she was also taut, or very much in control, and this mixture of tension and relaxation was a quality that only the best had. For instance, a violinist, one of the best, had told Stone that the key to the touch of his fingers on the strings was the way his feet, and his toes in particular, touched the floor.

  He was happy with the room, which was fresh and new. Still, though, he was worried, because his experience with promising young people had been that many of them looked good, but just when you began to think they were the real thing, they showed some flaw, some reluctance to make the effort, or they had some inability, physical or emotional or spiritual, that left them looking like just another precocious kid who had fooled a lot of people. So, when Kay wasn’t playing, Stone thought about her, looking for a sign, a symptom, but so far he had found nothing. In fact, he was close to giving up on this last bit of suspicion. She was out of the first drawer. Or no, not out of the first drawer, but a new one altogether.

  So he listened to her, and the difficulty was that he couldn’t articulate just what it was about her performance that was so striking. Just when he thought he could put it into words, she came to the end of a piece, and the certainty of what he had felt was gone. But even then he had that watery sense in his eyes and the notion that he was in the presence of something he had only felt in the most religious music, in those pieces that had been written to be played and sung in the Sistine Chapel, for instance, or music that had come out of the monasteries of Russia. Kay was able to produce these effects when she was merely “playing around,” as she called it.

  Every now and then she tried to perfect the music that she was writing. The power of it was like coming across some forgotten item one had put away because it was too precious to discard and yet too emotionally charged to see very often. Oh, Stone thought when he heard it, Oh. The piece she was writing progressed too, in th
at each time she played it she had added texture and something that Stone apprehended as her dexterity with his most keen longings and misgivings. Love, God, a sense of the essential part of being human: diminishing time.

  These were the moments Stone recalled when he ate his butter and caviar and considered the future. He thought about what she was writing and how audiences would react when they heard that. It made him chuckle. Sometimes, though, he didn’t do anything but remember the hours when he sat in the studio with the heat of the sunlight on the back of his head and shoulders. Kay played. The shadows of the birds slid across the floor. Jack stood silently at the window.

  Once, when she had finished, and the flecks of dust in the air had flashed as a reminder of individual notes, he had said, “Kay, can you tell me something?”

  She had looked up, as though noticing him for the first time.

  “Yes,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “What are you thinking when you do that, when you allow the feeling to come into what you are playing?”

  “Oh, that,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That.”

  “I’m thinking of someone I miss,” she said.

  “Who’s that?” said Stone.

  She shrugged.

  “What’s the difference?” she said.

  “Is it important?” said Stone. “Could it get in the way of your playing?”

  She shrugged again.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” said Jack. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”