Wetware

by Craig Nova

  The most important aspect of these games was that they couldn’t be changed. They were tamper-proof. In fact, Briggs had done a lot of work to make sure of this: he had had a knack for it, and this job had been one of the things he had done right out of school. No one knew the complete key, but if anyone did, Briggs was close. It was inconceivable that anyone could obtain an advantage by changing a game. Billions of dollars were involved, and no one was going to be allowed to interfere with that by tampering with a machine. It wasn’t a local business, but an international one. Every now and then you heard a story about someone who had penetrated the first protective shell of a game, and the next thing you knew he was gone. Just like that. No questions asked. Briggs stood just outside the gaming parlor, but he had no real interest in going in.

  In the years when Briggs had smoked a lot of opium, the entire process had been ritualized, and part of the ritual had been the beginning, in which he began to build a case for letting go: he was working too hard, he had been successful, a little break would make everything easier, he worked better after a little relief. After all, he wasn’t made of steel, was he? Anyway, he wasn’t really going to do it. He was just out for a walk.

  After a few minutes he stopped at the entrance of an alley.

  Even from the entrance he could smell it, at once harsh and filled with promise. The alley had brick walls, fire escapes, trash cans fluted like Greek columns. Here and there a puddle of water was filled with light. Briggs remembered being here one night when the moon was reflected in the thin layer of water. He had often stood here, smelling the opium and telling himself that he wouldn’t go back to the end of the alley.

  Maybe he’d just have a “look around.” He lightened his step, if only because he was sure that everything was under control. He had faced up to the temptation and was probably going to defeat it. Adversity did build character. Then he came to the end of the alley.

  Just a little fun, wasn’t that all he needed? Just think of how tense things were. He knew what was in the basement at the rear of the alley. The receptionist had dark hair, and she usually wore a jade-colored dress, the material of it clinging to her figure, the bones of her shoulders disappearing into the green fabric, the folds falling from her hips and swinging over her legs when she walked. She wore red lipstick and a string of pearls. Everything about her had the musky scent of opium.

  Briggs had often stood here thinking about her, the shape of her lips when she saw him come in. Never a smile, just a look of keen understanding. It was all right, she seemed to say, she understood.

  He went to the end of the alley and down the steps into the light below. He could smell it.

  “Hey, Briggs,” said the doorman at the bottom of the stairs. “Where you been? Haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  “Here and there,” said Briggs.

  “Uh-huh,” said the doorman.

  Briggs went into the room. The golden light, the flowers in the vase, the woman who stood in the green dress, the clean walls were right there, as though he hadn’t been away at all. “So, hey, good to see you, Briggs,” said the woman.

  He sat down on a chair by the door.

  “I need to think for a minute,” he said.

  The woman smiled. Of course. He could think all he wanted. She knew what the outcome would be.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Kay. He knew she was out there, but what was she doing? And why didn’t she contact him? Maybe she was too smart for that. Then he thought of a dream he had had, of the blue sheen on Kay’s legs from the sky. He had been with her in an apple orchard in bloom, under the snowlike fall of petals. She had said to him, “Can you cry from happiness?” In the dream, he had felt the slight heaving of her chest. She had wanted him to taste the tip of her finger, salty with tears: the taste of happiness. All bound up with other things she didn’t understand, but still, would he taste it? It was the taste of childbirth, of passion, of everything that was so vital one cried in the face of it.

  Now he opened his eyes.

  “I just came in for a moment,” he said.

  “Sure. Any time,” the receptionist said. “We’re always here.”

  “I know,” said Briggs.

  He turned and went up the stairs, nodding to the doorman, who said, “Some other time, I guess.”

  “I guess,” said Briggs.

  At the mouth of the alley, where it opened into the street, Briggs heard a steady brushing sound, a hush, hush, hush, and when he looked up he saw a man, a dumpy one with short hair like indoor-outdoor carpet, who was sweeping the street. He had a wide push broom and he came down the street, propelling a growing moraine of dust and dirt. Every now and then he stopped to tap the broom a couple of times on the sidewalk. He put his hand to his head and rubbed it through his coarse hair, but he didn’t look around, and he stood there, resting, eyes on the ground ahead of him. One of the early ones, Briggs thought. Brutish, short, but dependable. Then the man started sweeping again, the hush, hush, hush haunting Briggs as though it had been a cry.

  A couple of young men came up the street, nineteen or twenty years old, one with an earring and the other with a black plastic coat that had been fashionable a couple of months before, and when they bumped into the sweeper, they stopped and looked back.

  “Hey,” said one of them, “what the fuck are you doing?”

  “He’s just a dummy,” said the other. “Ain’t that right. Yeah. You. I’m talking to you.”

  He stuck his finger into the sweeper’s chest.

  “Sorry,” said the sweeper, keeping his eyes down.

  “Sorry,” said the other. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  “I didn’t mean nothing,” said the sweeper.

  “Yeah?” said the first. “Well, you don’t know anything about meaning, either.”

  “Come back in here,” said the other. “I want to show you something.”

  “Is it a job?” said the sweeper.

  “Sure,” said the first. “It’s a job.”

  “I’ve got to do all the way to the corner,” said the sweeper.

  “You won’t have to worry about that,” said the other one. “Come on.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Briggs.

  “Yeah?” said the first one.

  “Yeah, leave him alone,” said Briggs.

  “What’s it to you?” said the other.

  Briggs turned and slowly looked at this one.

  “Go home,” he said.

  They stood there for a while. The sweeper started to use his broom, pushing the dirt he had collected with short, brutal, yet efficient strokes. His shoulders were somewhat dropping, and he kept his head down, working his way to the corner.

  “Ah, shit,” said the first one. He was the one in the black plastic coat. “Come on.”

  The two of them walked back into the alley, going toward the stairs to the room at the bottom. Briggs waited until they were gone, and then the sweeper came back and said, “Thanks, mister. They were going to hit me. They do that sometimes.”

  “I know,” said Briggs. “Why don’t you finish your sweeping?”

  The sweeper looked up, his eyes dull under his hair.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re the boss.”

  Briggs considered going back to the end of the alley, into the clouds of opium smoke, but instead he found himself looking at the sweeper. The man shoved his broom, a little cloud of dust rising and turning white with each repetitive movement. The sweeper’s insistence was a small echo of the one thing Briggs knew how to do, which was to persist. The sweeper limped up the street, his progress marked by the silver puff of dust, and everything about him, the sluggishness, the brutality, the single-mindedness of this drudgery, appeared to Briggs as an omen, since it left him considering the dangers of his own steadfastness. He had always depended on it, but now, as the figure limped up the street, so obviously doomed, Briggs wondered if his own perseverance was making things worse, getting him in deeper. He stood
there, smelling the distant scent of opium and hearing the hush, hush, hush of the broom.

  CHAPTER 5

  March 22, 2029, noon

  KAY AND JACK went down the street on which there were some signs in Ukrainian, and in the cafés and coffee shops, Kay saw people sitting at a counter where they ate pierogis, little dumpling-like items that were filled with potato or cheese. They passed an old man dressed in black, head down, carrying a book. The buildings had shops on the street level, and one window had been cracked and patched with transparent tape. Newspapers and wax wrappers formed a small drift in the recessed doorways, and people had written on the sidewalk with colored chalk. Awnings could be cranked down from the storefronts, and they gave the impression of a circus tent that is being used for its last season. A couple of bookstores were open, and in their windows were displayed volumes in many languages, some of them dead (Latin, Greek, Russian, and Polish). The entire neighborhood was at once impoverished and somewhat intellectual. An immigrant spirit imbued almost everything, the clothes people wore, the food they ate, and a hidden but still profound belief in progress perfectly mixed with a desire to hang on to everything familiar. Dead rabbits hung in the window, skinned, the membranes on them looking like ice.

  Jack and Kay were sweating even though it was cool. Kay took a handkerchief out of her pocket and pressed it to her forehead. Thin rills of moisture ran out of Jack’s hair and along the sides of his face, which he wiped with his sleeve.

  He stopped in front of a building.

  “This is the place,” said Jack. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  Kay shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It has a . . . well, a certain vitality.”

  “Vitality?” said Jack. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Yes. Vitality,” she said. “There’s a difference between vitality and newness.”

  “Words,” said Jack. “You are into words now. Jesus.”

  “Maybe I’m into accuracy,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Come on,” he said. “The place is on the second floor.”

  He had the newspaper turned back to the want ads, and he took one last look before dropping it into a trash can. Even now, people liked to read newspapers, and a few were still published. The paper fit perfectly in this part of town. Then Jack opened the door, and both of them looked up the stairs, which went up twenty steps or so and stopped at a landing, and then went up another twenty. Fluorescent lighting. More smells of cooking that is done on a hot plate. At the top, from the musty depths of the building, they heard a piano. The same piece, played again and again. Like two people going into the rain, they went into the sound and up the stairs. Kay shivered. Her nose was running. Her breathing had a wet, diminished wheeze. At least she had bought some Kleenex. She guessed that she had some allergies, but she hoped nothing else had gone wrong.

  The door of the office they wanted was brown, although the paint was chipped and underneath it the metal of the door showed through. In the middle was a round brass peephole, over which Jack put his thumb.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t know why you want to do it this way.”

  “It seems like a good thing,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he took his thumb away and knocked. Once and then again, harder the second time. From beyond the door they heard someone making a scurrying sound. The noise suggested a pile of paper on a desk, newspaper that had held fried food, pierogis from the coffee shop. The man inside was rolling the greasy sheets up, but he probably didn’t have the energy to do more than stick the greasy paper in an overflowing trash can or, at worst, into the pocket of a jacket. The door opened.

  The man who stood inside the doorway was about six feet tall, fat, and he wore half-glasses. He was bald, although he combed some strands over the top of his head, and his eyes, while small, were quite bright. They moved from Jack to Kay. He had crumbs on the front of his cardigan sweater, which he brushed in a slow, methodical, and yet absentminded way, as though he weren’t so much trying to get rid of the crumbs as thinking over what the appearance of these two people at his door could possibly mean. He had a paper napkin, one that had been used more than once, and he wiped his lips. He had a mole on one cheek. His eyelids were red, and his sweater was dim green, but the combination of his inflamed eyes and the color of the sweater was somehow fertile.

  “So,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “You put an ad in the paper?” said Jack.

  “And since when has it been against the law to advertise?” said the man.

  “He just wanted to know if we came to the right place,” said Kay. She smiled. The man looked at her for a while, as though it had been a long time since a woman like Kay had smiled at him that way.

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” he said. “Come in.”

  The room was filled with bookshelves that sagged like old barns, and on the floor, books were stacked in columns that looked about to fall over. The cloth covers of many of them were an antiquated oatmeal color from an era in which books like these existed in libraries where there were leather chairs, green-shaded reading lamps, and long oak desks. Here, in this office, the light from a lamp came down in a golden cone on a book the man had been reading, and now one of the pages slowly rose from one side of the open book and flipped over to the other side, making a little tick.

  He looked from one of them to the other and said, “So, have you got a cold?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Jack.

  The man didn’t look convinced.

  “Are you a musician?” the man said to Jack.

  “This one,” said Jack, gesturing to Kay. “She’s got the talent in this group. But I play a little.”

  “Umm,” said the man. “Talent. Uh, talent. A lot of people think they have talent. But, I don’t see so much of it, not really. And I suppose you want rehearsal space?”

  “Yes,” said Kay.

  “With a piano?” said the man. “We have them with pianos and without.”

  “With,” she said. “Or, I think I would like to look at the piano and decide.”

  “Oh, so you know pianos?” he said. “She knows pianos.” He said this last as though there was another person, invisible, in the room. “This is a good thing, because I have a good piano for you. If you know pianos, you will be able to tell.”

  By the door he had a set of keys hung on cup hooks, and he reached out for one now, his fingers picking out one and then taking it down. He turned back to Kay and said, “Come on. Come on. If you know pianos.”

  In the hall the landing creaked under his weight. For a moment he turned and looked up the stairs and listened to the sound of the playing. He nodded to himself, as though he had had a suspicion confirmed.

  He turned to Kay.

  “And so do you think that is talent?” he said.

  Kay listened for an instant, the turning of her head, the lifting of her eyes, the judgment all happening with a speed that was almost like a nervous tic.

  “No,” she said.

  “So, you make decisions fast. Is this a good thing, do you think?”

  Then he started climbing, doing so with the slow, patient gait of a man who knew that the thing he was doing was going to kill him one day, but what else could he do?

  “But between you and me,” he said, panting. “That is not talent. No.”

  They got up to the next landing and the man put the key into the lock of a door and turned it.

  He said to the door, “My name is Stone. What’s yours?”

  “Kay Remilard,” she said.

  “Ah, and where have you studied?” said Stone, pushing the door open, into the musty rehearsal room. Light slanted in through a dirty window, and on the floor, the shadows of pigeons moved as they fluttered up to the sill outside. “Kay Remilard?”

  “Here and there,” said Jack.

  “Ah, many people have studied here and there,” said Stone. “But, for instance, was it here and th
ere in Europe or here and there here?”

  “Europe,” said Kay.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. So it’s Europe. I wonder where? Somewhere near Salzburg? Or Vienna? Or was it a little farther north?”

  “Farther north,” said Jack. “Is this it?”

  Stone went over to the piano. The pigeons on the sill flew up, marking the floor and the walls again with sudden shadows.

  “Of course,” said Stone. “They have pigeons in Europe, too. Did you notice?”

  But by now Kay was looking at the piano. She sat down and worked the pedals. They made a little squeak. Stone shrugged. Jack went over to the window and looked out at the pigeons. The top of the piano was not open, and in front of Kay, on the surface, a layer of dust dulled the finish of the instrument. The dust was the color of the light that came in the window. Stone came over and opened the top of the piano, propping it up. Kay hit a note, just one, listening as it hung so definitely in the empty room as to seem as real as a clothesline stretched from one side to another. As it lingered, she looked up, almost as though she could see it. Then she hit another key and waited.

  “So it needs to be tuned a little. What can I tell you? If it needs to be tuned, I will have it tuned,” said Stone. “I am not a fraud. Do you think it is a good idea for a man to say he is one thing when he is really another? So, what do you think of the piano?”

  “It’s suitable,” said Kay.

  “Suitable, is it?” said Stone. “Unh. But is it enough for talent? That is the question.” He turned to his imaginary companion. “You see, maybe my piano is not good enough for someone who has talent and studied in Europe. North of Salzburg.”

  Jack looked at Stone. The lack of movement as he stood there was a little odd, as though he were not himself but a photograph of himself. Absolutely still. Stone reached into his pocket, making some paper rustle there. Jack shrugged, as though he had made a decision that he didn’t really like. Maybe later.