Free Wetware by Craig Nova

aside from herself. And what was the good of that? To try to outsmart herself? Well, she had done that well enough, thank you. Even as she reached down and picked up each one, pinching it between her fingernails to get it off the sidewalk, she had the sensation that these shards of light were evidence of how she was bound to him. The effect of his charm overwhelmed her even now like the scent of a flower, honey-suckle, for instance, that is associated with some piercing intimacy. He had power, and he had put it to use in his understanding of her, and this combination had been the essence of his charm.
    She refused to get down on her hands and knees (which, she realized, was a desperate gesture to her somewhat tattered dignity), and as she squatted in her high heels, she heard a
hush, hush, hush.
The street sweeper came along, pushing his broom with three quick shoves and then stopping, setting his feet and getting ready to do it again. He had short, thick, ugly hair and a pug nose, like some Irish prizefighter who should never have gotten into the ring. His clothes hung around him as though they had been cut from a tattered tent, and his gait was brutish, a kind of side-to-side swaying, as though he were a little unsteady on his feet but nonetheless unstoppable. One of Briggs’s early models. He halted just in front of her and said, “Hey. Look. See?” When she followed the direction of his finger, which had knuckles the size and shape of walnuts, she saw the one she had missed. “You don’t want to miss that, hey? That’s worth something, hey?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I guess it is.”
    In the morning she woke and sat at the side of the bed, where she was instantly alert to the silence of her apartment, which had a new, stark quality. It wasn’t just the bad scene with Blaine, but the presence of a terrifying isolation. In the mirror that was hung on the inside of the closet door she saw the freckles on her shoulders and arms which made her look younger than she was. The corners of her eyes had a few almost invisible wrinkles, and she was amazed that she should have them at all. The silence, the wrinkles, the sight of the diamonds on her dressing table, like disorder itself, made her think that her anger of the previous night had been a mistake, but not necessarily one she couldn’t handle.
Least said, soonest mended,
she thought.
That’s the way to handle this.
    She called Blaine, but she didn’t even get past the first secretary, who was new. A lot of people thought they wanted to work for Blaine, but the pressure got to them, and soon they looked for something else. Carr hung up and thought nothing of it, although she noticed a deepening of the silence in the room where she sat. If nothing else she would be able to find him at night, since she knew that he was going to a concert. Her plan was to run into him as though they had planned to meet, and to tell him that she’d had a headache the night before. She would act as though nothing had happened at all. If he had any lingering resentment, he would feel that he was making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, she wouldn’t appear to make much of it. No abject apologies, no begging for forgiveness, and this would throw him off balance. Was he going to be peevish or spiteful? She would use his best qualities against him. He hated being unreasonable, and her lack of concern would leave him no place to go. The diamonds lay on her dressing table, winking at her with a cold light as she moved around the room.
    At the theater, she didn’t have a ticket, and when she tried to walk past an usher, she was stopped. It made her uneasy, not just for the momentary embarrassment, but through the sense of having a guard, like an angel at the gates of paradise, telling her that she was no longer allowed. She had begun to think she belonged here as much as Blaine. She went across the street to a polite café and had a drink, and then another, and when she saw Blaine’s