Wetware

by Craig Nova

  “Uh-huh,” said Briggs. “Do you know where my library card is?”

  “What’s a library card?” she said.

  “It’s a . . . ” he said, but then he stopped. The top drawer of his desk slid open on the air-brackets, silent as a snake. Briggs moved the stuff in there from side to side, a couple of old letters, a picture of him at school as a member of the crew, all of the young men with their hair short, looking out at the water where a race was about to begin. Underneath he found the card, green with a spectral hologram.

  THE NEXT evening, Briggs stood in a darkened aisle between the stacks. Even in the gloom he could see the gleam of a few titles, which had an exotic quality, like gold jewelry on the arm of a woman who stood in musky shadows. The overall impression, though, of the shelves of books, one opposite another, was of narrow walls and a low ceiling, with only a couple of bare bulbs that stretched away to a brick wall. Briggs reached up and touched a piece of string that hung there in the darkness and that had a little bell-shaped piece of metal on the end. The light went on. He turned to look at the books.

  A lot of them hadn’t been touched for years. The shelves were brown metal, and the ceiling was brown too, although the paint was curling away. The silence existed here with a hint of the serene, and as Briggs luxuriated in it, he looked up at the gilt titles suspended in the gloom. He put a finger onto the cool shelf. He was sure the silence here was different from that in a room, in which, say, old legal records were kept, receipts, checks, leases, contracts, motions to dismiss or to charge, to annul or to reinstate, to appeal or to cancel. The atmosphere here came from the record of what people had seen or done, wanted or imagined, known or desired. It had been built up one word at a time, through a ridiculous effort that couldn’t be explained and yet was filled, too, with an instinct for beauty. But still, the books had been abandoned in this place to wait for fate, like every other object. Beauty, he thought. Why can’t I just forget it? Why do I have to keep coming back to it like . . . Well, he didn’t want to say. He thought of the aroma of opium as it rose from the doorways in those alleys. He went along the books, checking back to the number on the slip of paper he had in his hand.

  He found the first one. It was heavy and printed on shiny paper. The publisher was Harvard University Press. He walked between the rows of books to a desk that sat under the window at the end of the shelves. It had an oak chair, with shadows falling away from its legs like sheets of black rubber. Outside, the pigeons flew up to the window, their wings spread as they came to the sill, the shape of them falling over the pages of the open book. The reading lamp above him had a round knob, textured so as to be easy to grasp, but when he turned it, nothing happened. He guessed the window provided enough light to read by, anyway. He opened the book, titled A Clinical Account of Obsession. The table of contents showed chapters having to do with theory, both historic and speculative. Then there was a list of cases. Briggs ran his fingers down them, the name of each one having a clinical, bureaucratic style, having to do with the notation of when the patient first appeared: Jun-fem-3. A female who asked for help on June third. Just the way Galapagos named its projects. Feb-Ma-8. Man on February eighth.

  . . . The subject was first seen by the examiners on May 14, [May-Fem-14, thought Briggs, what was wrong with these guys?]. She was then a woman of twenty-three, of medium height, with red hair and blue eyes. Physical examination revealed no scars or marks, no signs of disease, no lasting effects from any infection. Her scores on the California Personality Inventory and other diagnostic inventories, including the Benet-Richardson scales, were normal, or above normal.

  Her account was that when she had been twenty, she had gone with some friends to have a picnic by the river, and that as she sat there, laughing and eating a sandwich, a man came along. She can still recall the effect he had on her. She often refers to this moment as having a “light,” or a presence that seemed to “sweep” through her with a quality that she found hard to describe, but which nevertheless made her at once very happy, even ecstatic, and yet very fearful too, since it was so strong and so sudden. The man who produced this effect was about six feet tall, with dark hair and blue eyes, and he stopped and smiled. She smiled back and stood up. He introduced himself as Robert Berlin, and he said that he was a student at the university. She reached out and took his hand, and as she touched him she felt again that sense of keen “recognition” which nonetheless had a warmth which seemed to spread through her with the sense of making her seem, for the moment, separated from the bank on which she stood, or from her friends, the woods around them, even the sounds of the birds, which flitted from tree to tree and which made a repeated call. In her interview at the Institute, she insisted on imitating this call, which was a small chirping with increasing intensity. When she did this, she smiled, as though recalling something of exquisite pleasure.

  On a personal note, this interviewer, who has been in practice for forty-five years, has never seen anything that can compare with the intensity of feeling this subject revealed when she tried to describe certain details and sensations. And, no matter what happened or how extreme her circumstances became, she maintained that the intensity of the experience was such that she would do it again, on a moment’s notice, no matter how often she pledged not to, and no matter what penalty she was facing. Upon more-penetrating questioning, she became quite serene, and seemed to be certain that either the interviewer could understand what had happened to her or he couldn’t. Frankly, this interviewer finds it very difficult indeed to understand just what it was, although he can attest to the fact that it must have been exceedingly pleasant, at least in the beginning. Or perhaps there is another explanation, which is that as the experience became more intense, as she had to sacrifice more to continue, this only added to the intensity of that original feeling of pleasing warmth and recognition.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, and without the least embarrassment, she asked if she could see Berlin again. They agreed to meet the next morning at a coffee shop near the university. She said that she was there waiting for him, and what she recalled was a collection of details (typical of hysteria) that seemed to linger with photographic recall: she could remember the texture of the white tablecloth, over which she ran her hand, feeling the texture of the white threads against her fingertips. A blue vase, in which were four daffodils, the stems as green as celery, stood on the table, and across from her was a brown chair, which she described as being one like those used by lion tamers. The light from the window fell across the table in trapezoids, and she heard the voices behind her and could smell the cinnamon that the coffee shop used in baking sweets. As she waited, she imagined that she was imprisoned and that Berlin came to visit her. All that was between them was a sheet of glass, floor to ceiling, and that they were both nude and she tried to touch him, putting her hand against his face or chest, or putting it down opposite the space between his legs. She tried to press herself against this transparent surface, or to put her cheek against it. Then she imagined another visit, a little later, when there was only a screen between them, and then she could put her fingers against it, and almost but not quite feel his skin, his face, his chest. She put her tongue against it, trying to taste his skin, which she could, but which was tainted by the metal taste of the wire . . .

  He was late for the meeting in the coffee shop. She was agitated, but when he arrived she felt that same warmth and penetration, which she described, smiling, as a moment of revelation and certainty such as she had felt at no other time. They had tea in brown cups with white interiors, and she watched as he put honey into his, drawing the spoon out of the pot, the strands hanging from it as he looked at her and smiled. Everything about this moment, the texture of the honey, the shape of his hands, the look in his eyes as he smiled, the light, the shadow of the birds that flew down the street and passed by the window, all seemed to be part of that warmth and recognition. She thought of how she would like to pursue this feeling, not knowing definitely what
this would be, but nevertheless feeling a predisposition not toward the sexual so much as toward abandoning who and what she was for this moment, and if sex would help with that, all the better. She maintained that even in the most extreme moments, this was never, strictly speaking, a sexual infatuation or obsession, but something more profound and illuminating. Sex, she maintained, was not the purpose or the goal, but the mere expression of that warmth she had first felt by the river and seen again in the coffee shop, with the honey streaming from a spoon and the scent of cinnamon mingling with the sight of daffodils.

  Of course, later, when he did not have the time for her that he once had, when he tried to make excuses, she became frantic. This, she said with a smile, as though she had found a solution to her difficulties, was the moment she “bitched him up in earnest.” She had found the place of entry, the secrets he had kept to himself, but which she discovered and used to great effect. After that, she said, “nothing could stop us . . . ” What wouldn’t they sacrifice for a few hours together, when the innocent and sweet pleasure was invoked through such acts as are described in appendices 3–110a. . . . Of course, it is hard to believe in the stamina, in the sheer vitality needed to pursue such activities, day after day, until each of them was certain they were right at the edge of dissolution of self, which, if properly exploited, as they discovered, could be used to such sensual advantage. . . .

  Briggs closed the book, feeling a little whoosh of air that came out of the heavy pages. Then he looked out the window at the brick wall on the other side. Silence behind him. Well, he thought, he didn’t want to get to the end of this one, and he guessed it was best not to look too carefully at the appendices. He was curious about what the man’s secrets had been, but he guessed, in a way, that he already knew.

  What man doesn’t know just what it is that he would give anything for? Or what the moment would be like if a woman knew what this was, even better than he did, and that one day she sprung this knowledge on him, with a gasp of joy? And a shiver of excitement? He had always known that Kay had enormous power over him, but until this moment such considerations had been abstract. He looked up and saw the pigeons, their wings sawtoothed at the window ledge as they used them to brake just on the other side of the glass.

  He looked down the dark aisle. Then outside again. He thought about Berlin. At some point this man must have realized that he was in the midst of an attraction that had its own imperative, and that the confusing thing about it was that as it advanced, as it consumed everything in his life, it became that much more pleasurable.

  Kay had been interested in some other books too, and now he went looking for them. She wanted essays by Nobel Prize–winning economists. She was particularly interested in economic metrics. Indices. Movement of capital. Above everything else, she was interested in those theories having to do with establishing market trends. Briggs flipped through these things. It wasn’t his realm of expertise, and he guessed that she was smart enough to want to be clever about the money she must have gotten her hands on. Surely she was living on something. She would open an account someplace and use the money in some clever way. He nodded to himself as he held the book in his hand. She was practical. She would manage the money in a way that made sense.

  The last book she had wanted was an account of a slave revolt in Rome. This was in another section, and he went toward it, through the maze of shelves, going along the titles, finger up, like a man testing the wind. The books were pleasant to touch, the cloth of the bindings soft to his finger. He stopped. Here it was.

  The book was a collection of speeches, records, invoices from an itinerant executioner, all of it assembled with the order of sediment in a cross-section of geological strata, laid one on top of another in the order that they had been produced. Briggs stood in the brown dimness, holding the book. He realized that he would discover which of these accounts she responded to by his own feelings. She had looked as he did, if not here in this place, then in another library, and surely she had read what he did.

  Of course, he was interested in revolt too. What wouldn’t he like to say about the people who controlled his life, who decided which project he would be allowed to do, when he would be paid, the people who often decided, for the most tedious reasons, that he would be shipped out to some strip, downgraded to the second rate? How often had he fought back from this stigma, picked up the pieces, and continued? He was still doing it now. Or what he would like to say about the way he lived, or the way everyone lived, when the future arrived as a bullying rumor, a part of which would come true?

  He stopped at a speech by Tacitala, the leader of a revolt in Sicily in the second century. The words had been recorded by one of the men who had survived and who, as a secretary to a landowner, had been taught to write. And to remember, too, by the Roman method: the first thing to do was memorize the architecture of a building and then, when committing something to memory (a speech, for instance), to assign various parts of it to the rooms of the house. When the speech was recalled, one imagined going through the architecture: What was in the first room downstairs, what was in the second?

  Tacitala spoke from a few rocks on a hillside in the afternoon, and around him stood olive trees, the silver-white of their undersides flickering in the breeze. He spoke to five thousand slaves who knew that the Roman legions were about to arrive. The air was thick with smoke from the campfires, where the men had prepared a last meal, which they had eaten, slowly, with deliberation, and then they had stood before the hillside where Tacitala spoke.

  “My friends,” he said, “the Romans are just over the hill. You can see the dust from their approach. And with the dust there are vultures, who are clever enough to know what that dust means. There is not much time, but I wanted to speak to you from the heart. If I do not speak in this manner now, why, when should I do so? From the grave or from the cross where some of us are going to be hung in a few hours? No. I think the time to speak is now, with the dust in the air, when you can almost hear the sounds of the Romans as they march. Some of you worked on ranches, on the latifundia in chains, and some of you, as I did, in the mines. We know things that no other men know, and this knowledge binds us together. Let us be thankful for that closeness, for the fact of our unity. It is the one thing we have. We can depend upon it in the most trying circumstances. Surely this is one of them. I would not dare to tell you otherwise.

  “I want to speak honestly as well, because if this is not the time for honesty, then what is? In a few hours from now? No. The time for honesty is this instant. With vultures approaching in the train of the Romans. The first thing is to address the facts. It appears as though the gods love us less than others. This is what eats at my heart even more than the things we have all endured: Why should we be so shunned? I would cry if it wasn’t a futile waste. And, under these circumstances, what do I have to offer? Let us make a pact. Let us agree that when the Romans come, as they will soon, they will know that they fought human beings. Not some reduced creatures, not some fearful children, but us, informed of the circumstances as they are, as the universe really is, and that we have chosen to be remembered by this moment. You could call it defiance if you have to have a word, but we know what it is. By any word you want to use.

  “The Romans will stand on the ridge of the hill and make a war cry. But we are more practically minded. After all, we have had to work in places most people only see in nightmares. As a practical man I am going to do a practical thing. I am going to reach down and pick up a stone. Like this one. And I am going to use it to sharpen my sword. You hear? That scraping sound as the edge comes true? When the Romans come up the hill, when we see their dust as it streams up, every one of us will use a stone to work on his sword. Let us try it now. Yes. And again. Yes. Again. That is the sound they will hear from us when they first approach. Then we will be in a position to leave our mark and to show these men, brave men I am sure, that we were men, too.”

  The book made a little sliding sound as he pushed it ba
ck onto the shelf, and then he turned off the light and stood in the darkness.

  CHAPTER 13

  April 15, 2029

  IN THE evening, Kay sat up on the side of the bed and looked out the window at sky. Jack slept on the bed, and his pale legs, the marblelike definition of the muscles in his chest, the corded veins in his arms, the angle of his hips made him look like Renaissance sculpture. She touched his chest, the hair under one arm, ran a finger around one of his nipples. The pistol was on the nightstand and she picked it up, reassured by the heft of it. In the mirror she appeared in white and shadow with the pistol on the bed next to her.

  Kay got up and walked around, the pistol hanging by her thigh, which seemed to make her feel more naked. In the bathroom, the radiators clinked and the pistol made a clanking sound, a counterpoint to the radiators, as she put it down on the porcelain tank of the toilet. She turned on the shower and stepped into it like someone walking into a tropical rainstorm. She thought, It’s just nerves. Finally she took the small, cheap towel that the hotel left in the bathroom and began to dry off.

  She had gotten lucky when she had gone to Briggs’s apartment without being caught. But what good was luck once you had used it? She didn’t think it was a good idea to go back, and yet she didn’t know what else to do. Then she thought of Jackson. Jackson might help.

  Certainly, Jackson had helped them before. He had found them in the hall of Galapagos when they were trying to get away. He could have sounded an alarm, but he hadn’t. In fact, he’d looked as if he had been waiting for them. But no matter what he’d been thinking, he had said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on. Don’t worry. Jack. Don’t worry.” He had given them the jumpsuits and some money. On the night they had escaped, he’d taken them to his apartment for a couple of hours.