Wetware

by Craig Nova

  They filed downward, the sounds of their departure going around and around in a spiral until they vanished in the depths below. Kay looked at Briggs and said, “See? Nothing to worry about.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Briggs. He put a hand to his head.

  “Hey, Briggs,” said Jack. “Good to see you.” He listened as the last sounds died in the stairwell. Down below they heard the squeak and slam of the street door. “Well,” said Jack, still looking down, “I guess they’ve gone.”

  “They’ll be back,” said Briggs.

  He turned and saw Kay watching him.

  “Hey, Jack,” said Kay. “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve been inside all day. Dying to get out.”

  He started into the depths, his shape disappearing into the darkness of the stairwell.

  “Let’s go in,” she said to Briggs.

  She undid the sash of the raincoat.

  “Come on,” she said. “Don’t you want to?”

  CHAPTER 8

  May 1, 2029

  AS THEY lay in the warmth of the bed, they heard the water dripping in the bathroom. Kay put her lips against his ear and said, “That’s nice. Just to be here. Almost as good as the other.”

  Briggs said, “Well, they both have their advantages.”

  Kay touched his shoulder with her finger, tapping it in time to the dripping in the bathroom, and as she did so, she said, “Whenever you hear that sound, you’ll think of me, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Sure. And what about you?”

  “Me?” she said. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. That doesn’t seem like much, really, a drop of water. But it is. I could hear it when we were . . . well, a little earlier.”

  “Was it nice?” he said.

  “It was so loud I could hardly breathe,” she said.

  “Still, it would be nice to have something more than that,” he said.

  “Like what?” she said.

  He shrugged and threw back the sheets. He got up and stood there, looking for his clothes. Then he found his shirt and put it on. “You aren’t leaving, are you?” she said. “I mean, just like that?”

  “No,” he said.

  They got dressed and went out into the hall, and then took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, on the street, they saw some smoke in the distance where people had set cars on fire and where some windows were broken, the glass spread in the street as though someone had dropped a block of ice.

  She took his arm and they went toward the burning cars, the smoke rising into the lights of the buildings.

  “So, what are you going to show me?” she said.

  “In here,” he said.

  They went into the smoky atmosphere of a gaming parlor where men and women walked in a chiaroscuro haze, and while they appeared in silhouette, they were still sleek and muscular in the suits they wore. The booths where people played were lined up around the walls, and above each of them a small marquee stuck out, making it resemble a diminutive movie theater. The name of each game was displayed in stylized type on the marquee. In the back of the room, near the changing room, Briggs smelled the scent of opium and saw people in a nimbus of smoke. He wondered if it was being smoked by someone who was celebrating or consoling himself. He had always felt a moral certainty when smoking it, and he looked around and thought, Yes. It would be nice to have a little certainty now.

  The small marquees made the room appear like a miniature strip where movie theaters were lined up, and in the middle, men and women loitered at a bar, drinking slowly, killing time, not quite flirting, but not totally uninterested, either, all of them looking for the next mark.

  Briggs picked up a promotional gimmick, a collapsible fan, for a game called Bangkok. The fan was made of paper, creased like an accordion, and the wooden ends were painted gold. He showed it to the manager of the place and told him that he wanted to take a look around in the game. What was new in Bangkok? The manager had black, slicked-back hair and a small mustache, and he gave the impression of a croupier. He didn’t say a word, but just motioned to a booth along the wall.

  Inside, Briggs and Kay sat on padded benches that were opposite each other, the gimmick dangling from Briggs’s hand.

  “So,” said Kay. “What now?”

  Briggs looked at her and said, “I’m going to hot-wire this thing. So that means we are not going to stay long, all right?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “there’s no guessing about this. All right? We’ll leave when I say?”

  “Okay,” she said. “What is this, a cheap date?”

  He thought of the chance he was taking by using the game to show her what he was thinking.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  At the back of the booth was a panel that felt like flesh, like the inside of a woman’s thigh, and Briggs took the tools from his pocket and opened it up. Inside were a chip and a keyboard; the keyboard was used by the maintenance people, and now Briggs took it out and made some changes, doing so quickly, adding a line here or there, and as he worked, he heard the hilarity and drunken laughter of the people outside. The fluid from the slit that Briggs had made dripped onto the floor, clear, like a lubricant of some kind, and it fell with a steady, repeated cadence. Kay listened to it.

  “What are you thinking about?” said Briggs.

  “Oh, the sound,” she said. “It reminds me of the hotel. Of those moments when you came in me. I can still feel it.” She watched him work. “You know, when I made changes, I didn’t do it like that.”

  “Oh?” he said. “Well, it’s done now. It should last for a little bit.” He turned to listen. He supposed it was possible to set off an alarm doing this, but years ago he had done some of the security code, and what he didn’t know he guessed at.

  “Here,” he said. “Put this on.”

  She slipped the cuff over her arm. Then she sat back.

  Briggs put the cuff over his forearm and lay back, feeling the thrill of the registration, just as if his arm had been sprayed with rubbing alcohol. Then he put his head back and let his sense of the machine wash over him.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  She went on staring at him.

  “No. Trust me. Don’t be difficult,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “If anyone comes,” she said, “they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  “Maybe we can avoid that,” he said. “Just close your eyes.”

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  The noise of the room, the scent of opium became indistinct before they vanished, and for an instant Kay felt that she was descending, slipping into a cool and restful darkness. Then she woke up. She looked around and saw that she was in a city she had never seen before. She stood in a square with a fountain, and in it were muscular men and women, the water playing over them in enormous sheets tinted with the colors of a rainbow, and when she and Briggs walked up to the marble figures, the air was immediately filled with the wild beating of wings. Pigeons rose around them.

  It was just evening, and the Mediterranean light played on the walls of buildings that were only three stories high and had wooden shutters, but the remarkable thing, as far as Kay was concerned, was the way the setting sun played over the pastel wash of the walls. The wash was a tangerine color that glowed in the sun, although Kay noticed something else too, which was that the combination of light and color had an emotional quality, a warmth that seemed to spread through her. She couldn’t tell where the warmth of the colors ended and where she began, or where she ended and the skin of Briggs’s hand began.

  “I thought you’d like Rome,” he said.

  They went through the piazza and up to the corner, to Largo Argentina, and there they got on a tram, a green one, which moved along in a sparking locomotion as it got electricity from the overhead wires. The Romans sat in the grinding hum of the engine, the w
omen elegant and sultry and the men flirting with them, and as the car went past more of those walls with that glowing wash, Kay felt Briggs next to her, and when she turned to him, he flirted with her, just like the Romans, winking at her and smiling.

  They got off the tram and went into a restaurant, where they ate marinated lobster, potatoes, onions, and tomatoes out of a silver bowl, and they drank wine and had fresh berries for dessert. After lunch they walked along the bank of the river, and she tried to articulate to herself just what was wonderful about the temperature of the air. The caress of it and the warmth was indistinguishable from the sensation of being loved. They came up to the Ponte Garibaldi and walked out into the middle of the bridge. They stopped to lean on the stone balustrade and listen to the sound of the water and feel the temperature of the air. Kay tried to put the certainty of the moment into words, if only to be able to remember it, but when she tried to do so, it eluded her, and when she was afraid it was gone forever, she felt the warm certainty of his kiss, which was indistinguishable from the temperature of the air. The warmth of the kiss coalesced into the memory of their lovemaking and the possibility of having a child.

  They walked back toward Largo Argentina and then out toward the Coliseum, the thing snaggletoothed and broken here and there. But no matter where they went, she kept turning to the salmon-colored light, which left her warm and that much more able to understand her attachment to Briggs, or maybe it was better to say that here, where he had brought her, she didn’t have to think about this attachment so much as to feel it on her skin or to have that sensation of existing with him in that haunting, illuminating light. She wanted to thank him for bringing her here, but words seemed so useless and at odds with the warmth, the physical sensation that was so oddly a matter of understanding, too.

  She heard the harsh noises of the gaming parlor. Briggs sat up, turning to listen to what was going on outside, and said, “I think we should go. I’m not too sure about how long . . . ”

  “No,” she said. “Just wait.”

  “We agreed,” he said.

  “Just wait. Close your eyes. It won’t take long,” she said.

  He looked out and saw a policeman who had come into the room. The policeman spoke to the manager.

  “Kay,” he said.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. “Please.”

  Briggs lay back, forgetting the sounds in the room and the policeman, and he instantly saw a night sky, and as he looked at it, he noticed that the distances didn’t seem cold or intimidating, although they hadn’t lost their scale. Instead, as the distances became more obvious, as he saw a nebula in the shape of a horse’s head, the masses of stars of it so thick they looked like mist, he felt a hot sense of belonging and an increasing scale that would have scared him if he hadn’t been certain of Kay’s presence. It had been a long time since he cried, but as he gave in to his impulse to do so, as a complete abandonment of restraint, he had the sensation of rising into a cloud, like the mist of a star-speckled nebula, which was made up of Kay’s warmth. For an instant he was about to cry out, but he was soothed by the fragrance of her skin, her smile, and the reassuring touch of one finger. As he opened his eyes, he felt her breath against his ear.

  CHAPTER 9

  May 2, 2:00 A.M.

  BRIGGS LEFT Kay at the hotel. He hadn’t worn a coat, and when he had walked a short way, the chills began. They started as a vague discomfort and a sense of being a little seasick. He went down to the avenue and walked up to the corner, to the subway, but up ahead he saw some people in the street, a couple of hundred of them, and they were looking up at a man who was standing on a ledge. Briggs walked farther up and stepped into the crowd, glad he was with a lot of people, but when he felt the roll of chills, he stepped back away from them.

  The man on the ledge didn’t look down, and his demeanor had the false serenity that comes from facing the worst, but in fact he was waiting for a moment of clarity. Briggs looked up like the rest of the people, and then realized the man had lost everything—money, security, his sense of who he was. The markets were getting worse. Briggs wondered how many other people were standing behind windows and thinking about climbing out on a ledge. Up above, in the cold air, the man stared into the distance.

  Briggs turned and walked away. He didn’t want to see the man jump, and it probably wasn’t a good idea, he guessed, to be close to other people. He supposed it was possible that he was going to have a slight case of the disease, but what was a slight case? And then he wasn’t certain that this was just a reaction to the vaccine, since he might have missed some other pathogen altogether. That was one of the problems of working alone. It was easy to make a mistake, and no one was there to check up on you. The nausea came in earnest. He put his hand to his mouth and turned into an alley, not wanting to be seen vomiting on the street. Black fire escapes, trash cans, the skittering of rats, if that’s what they were, maybe just cats, and, here and there, old newspapers that seemed to stir in the late-night air like creatures that had only been half-killed and still wanted to live. He moved into the alley and leaned against the wall. The fever came too, with pains in the joints and a sense of disorientation. Oh no, he thought. Not like this.

  Well, he had learned one thing, which was that where Kay was concerned, he wasn’t able to resist her, but then how would he ever have been able to do that? She knew everything about him, what was exciting, what was mysterious, what left him with a sense of terror. She understood him. Now, as he sat against the damp wall, certain that the fever was getting worse, he didn’t know what left him more mystified: that he might have made a mistake with the vaccine, or that he had been unable to resist Kay. Didn’t his beliefs amount to anything? Or, he told himself, maybe it was the other way around, maybe he had gone with her because of his beliefs. Loyalty, beauty, the strength of a human being when things were bad. Didn’t she have all of those qualities? It’s like looking in a hall of mirrors, he thought. How am I ever going to see what is happening to me? It is as though I am living in a world where my best impulses are leading to a moment like this. And how am I going to make sense of that? If you can’t trust your best qualities, or your most fervent hopes, then what have you got?

  He turned and vomited slowly against the wall. The stink of his own sickness made him ill again and he tried to get away, first standing and putting his head against the brick of the wall. His face was dirty and he could still smell the sour odor. The alley had puddles of water in pot-holes here and there, and he walked over to one and knelt next to it. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and put it into the water. It was cool to his fingers, and he was glad to have it against his forehead and around his mouth, and while he wasn’t happy about where the water had come from, he felt a little better, not so much clean as differently dirty.

  He stood up and went to the end of the alley. The chills came and went in a way he had never experienced, since the wave was comprised of individual points that were so distinct he could almost count them. Or he could have counted them if they weren’t moving so fast across his shoulders and into his hair. The sensation was like being naked and having someone spray him with rubbing alcohol, and the chill was made up of individual droplets. He rolled his shoulders and stood there.

  A bar was at the end of the street. As he looked at the pink and green neon sign of the place, he realized that he had to urinate. His eyes itched a little, and when he rubbed them, he saw that the back of his hand had a black streak on it. Had he picked up something when he had washed his face, some soot? Some grease that had been in the puddle? Was that it? He thought of the clerk in the hotel, the dark stains on his face, the flecks of black skin around the man’s mouth, the inky stains that appeared on the man’s pants.

  Briggs went up the street, but the fever made it seem as though he were walking through wind that blew from one side. Then he stood in front of the frosted glass of the door. He guessed that he could get something to drink, a glass of water, but then that might just make h
im have to urinate more, and he didn’t want that. He looked around, seeing the late-night fog roll in from the river in a bank that obliterated everything.

  The bar was wooden, scarred here and there where people had scratched into it with a key or a knife, but those words or names had been cut into the bar a long time ago, and now they didn’t seem like vandalism, but the reminder of people who had existed a long time ago. Time had made the scratches on the bar into something quaint. The bartender looked at him and said, “What do you want? A drink? Or, do you want something to eat?”

  Briggs shook his head and put his hand to his mouth.

  “Scotch,” he said. “And a glass of water.”

  “Hey,” said the bartender. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” said Briggs. He tried to smile, but he was pretty sure it came out as a grimace. “Fine. Just a drink.”

  The bartender poured the drink and brought over the water, putting both down as though he had second thoughts about the entire thing. Briggs reached into his pocket for some money, and put a large bill on the wood in front of the bartender. Briggs rolled the liquor around in his mouth. A mirror was hung behind the bar, and through the collection of bottles Briggs tried to see the smudge on his face. It could have been dirt.

  “Have you got a bathroom?” he said.

  “Back there,” said the bartender, gesturing to the rear of the place.

  Briggs finished the drink and staggered down the line of chrome stools with red leather seats. He thought he could call Kay. Maybe she would know what to do, but then how could she? If he had something new, what could she do about it? He swallowed and turned into the bathroom. Maybe he had misread some of the specifications for dosage and concentration, or maybe he had been confused about the way the vehicle he had chosen conveyed the vaccine.