Love Minus Eighty (10 page)

“Play the lute.”

“The
lute
? That’s right, you’re a musician. I didn’t know anyone played the lute.”

“No one else does,” he laughed. “When I was ten, I heard an old man playing one in a park near my house, and I…”—he cast about for words—“it just called to me. I can’t explain it.”

“You’re an old soul, then. You must have played one many lives ago.”

He smiled, not sure if she was speaking figuratively, or if she really believed in reincarnation. “When I’m playing, everything else fades away. It’s the purest joy I know.” He spoke quickly. He felt like every word should be meaningful. Winter was speaking quickly too; as quickly as she could, given the stiffness in her jaw and mouth.

Eighty seconds left. Five minutes was an astonishingly brief period of time.

“Will you bring your lute next time, and play for me?” The hope in her eyes told him it was not an idle request.

“Absolutely.”

“Maybe you could play while I’m waking? I’m so disoriented then. Music would give me something to focus on.”

“Do you have a favorite song?”

“No, nothing I know. Something ancient, from the time when lutes were popular.”

He nodded. “I can do that.”

Thirty seconds now. He wondered if he should tell her. “Is it easier if you don’t know when the time is up?”

“Oh, God. The time is almost up?” The panic in her voice was unnerving, somehow made worse by the distortion. “How much do I have?”

Rob glanced at the timer. “Only thirteen seconds.”

She whimpered. “I want to go home.” She looked at Rob. “Promise you’ll come back soon?”

“I will. Don’t worry. It’ll seem like an instant.”

That didn’t seem to comfort Winter. “It won’t. It’s not like sleeping—”

The fear drained from her eyes, leaving emptiness.

As soon as Rob got outside, he took out his handheld. She’d said her ex-boyfriend’s name was Nathan. Maybe Nathan would be willing to coordinate visits with Rob, if Rob could locate him. There was only one possible way to locate him with nothing but a first name. He scrolled to the text message he’d received from Winter’s friend Idris the day after she confronted him at the entrance to the dating center.

I miss her so much. You have no idea who you took from us.

He had never replied to the message. Now he did.
Can
you please tell me the last name of Winter’s ex-boyfriend Nathan? I need to contact him, for Winter’s sake.

Idris appeared via screen before he made it to the end of the block. “What do you mean, for Winter’s sake?”

Rob explained what he was doing, and how Nathan might help.

Two teenage girls passed Veronika, one wearing a falsie—a skin that looked like a system but didn’t actually do anything. She was speaking in inflected speech, her subvocalization nothing but nonsense syllables. Her friend, who didn’t even have a falsie, seemed impressed.

As the girls passed out of her view, Veronika returned to watching the Hudson creep by between the chrome slats of the bridge while helping Dora McQueen swap text with a guy who was completely wrong for her. FaceQ had Dora rated a four point four. She was a squat, stubby-legged woman with a big head and thin hair. The guy she was flirting with was a solid six point two, and Veronika knew the type—he was looking for someone who would not only happily do it doggy-style on their first face-to-face, but agree to wear a collar and a leash and let fifty of his friends watch. Most of her clients eagerly took her advice about how to meet someone, but so few listened when she offered expert advice on
whom
to meet.

Across the bridge and down a ways, a pedestrian caught her eye. Like countless others who’d stopped over the past six months, he was taking in the view, but there was something about his posture—a tightness, an unease.

He put a hand on the rail, and lingered.

He looked around and, spotting Veronika sitting on her portable chair on the other side of the bridge, quickly looked away. Even from this distance Veronika could see he was a big man, six-five or taller.

As Veronika pretended to work, he kept glancing over; soon Veronika was reminded of kids attempting to cheat on tests, back in the days of her brief, disastrous stint as a high school teacher. A glance to see if she was looking, then a quick look away when he saw she was.

Her heart began to thump. He might well be planning to jump. After all this time, finally.

She leaned forward in her chair, intending to stand, to go over and talk to this man, then sat back. It would be a long, awkward walk over there, and all the things she’d imagined saying to a potential jumper now seemed absurd.

The man glanced at her yet again. Veronika rotated her chair so she was facing away, toward the water, then discreetly opened a screen up in the rafters of the bridge.

When the man saw she was no longer facing him, he pulled a handheld from his pocket, worked it for a moment, spoke a few words into it.

Then he dropped it over the railing and watched it tumble, growing smaller until it splashed into the Hudson. He looked around, lingering on Veronika, evidently making sure she wasn’t about to turn around. He grasped the railing with both hands.

Shit, he was really going to do it. Barely able to breathe,
Veronika leaped from her chair and rushed toward him. The deafening bleating of a microbus horn startled her; she’d stepped right into traffic, was nearly clipped by the bus as it sped by. Shaking both hands impatiently, she waited for a break in traffic as the man struggled to get over the railing.

“
Wait
,” Veronika called, waving at the man, whose front leg was on the outer girder, his back foot still hooked by the rail. Veronika skirted across a thin opening in the traffic and sprinted down the curve of the bridge. She reached him just as he set his second foot on the girder.

“Wait. Hang on,” she said, breathless.

The man turned. His entire face was trembling. “What do you want? Get away from me.”

She grasped the rail with both hands. “Don’t do this. It’s a mistake. I know you’re feeling hopeless right now, but that feeling will pass.”

The man gaped at her. He was a black man, with a boyish, innocent face that seemed out of place on his tall, powerful frame. “Leave me alone. This is
personal
.” He looked over his shoulder, down at the river.

Veronika was taken aback by his reaction. She’d expected sadness, despair. That she understood. But he was angry. He also seemed embarrassed.

“What’s your name?” Veronika asked.

He reacted as if the question startled him. “I’m not telling you my name. Go.
Leave.
”

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Let’s talk. You can always come back later.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” he growled. “Just get the hell away from me. Do you understand? I don’t want you here.”

Veronika took a step away, feeling foolish. “I’m sorry.” She wanted to go, wanted to escape this man’s angry glare, but
her feet wouldn’t move. He was going to
jump
. How could she walk away from another human being, knowing he was going to kill himself? She held her ground. “If I was the one standing where you are—and that’s not totally inconceivable—I would hope someone would care enough to try to stop me, even if I didn’t want them to.”

“Well, that’s beautiful. Why don’t you go write a book of beautiful platitudes?” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Look, I’ve thought this through very carefully, and I’m at peace with it. Every moment you stay here, you’re just stretching this out for me. So please, I appreciate your good intentions, but give me my privacy.”

She’d known this was going to be hard, but this was hard in a way she’d never anticipated.

“I can’t,” she said.

A screen popped up, out over the water a dozen feet from them. It was a middle-aged woman with raccoon-eye tattoos. She didn’t say anything, just hung there, watching.

The man glanced over his shoulder, noticed the screen, just as another popped up. And another. Rubberneckers. Someone passing on the bridge must have alerted her friends.

The man looked back at Veronika as a dozen more screens popped into existence. “You’ve made my last few minutes on this planet even more intolerable than they would otherwise have been. Thanks a lot.”

Then he turned and jumped.

An icy, paralytic shock filled Veronika as the screens shifted as one to face the river so they could watch the man plummet. Veronika was left staring at the thin slices of the tops of the screens—a hundred of them now—her mouth still cranked open to beg the man to stop, to wait, to think about how beautiful the world was, if you could just get out of your own head.

The screens began to disappear. The show was over.

Her paralysis finally lifted, Veronika ran, her breath coming in tight gulps that threatened to turn into sobs as she avoided looking between the slats, afraid she might catch a glimpse of the man floating on the river, the man she’d been speaking to just a few seconds earlier. She didn’t ever want to set foot on this bridge again. While she ran, she sent a message to Nathan. She needed to see him, needed his confidence. Only he could convince her she hadn’t just done an awful, unforgivable thing.

People glided by on the sidewalk. Rob could feel a slight breeze as each passed. He felt like a big, dopey lunk, plodding along in his Low Town shoes. The two hundred dollars he’d gotten for his gliders didn’t help the Winter cause much, but Rob could imagine what people would think if he glided by in High Town shoes while claiming that he was taking a vow of poverty to make reparations for what he’d done. He wasn’t afraid to admit it: part of his reason for doing this was to redeem himself in the eyes of his friends and family. It wasn’t the only reason, or even the primary reason, but it was part of the reason.

As he walked, he kept reaching back to massage his neck. It ached, sent bolts of pain into his shoulders if he turned his head too quickly. Spending ten-hour shifts bent over discarded electronics was wreaking havoc on his back and neck. His fingertips were finally developing calluses, so at least he was past the point of walking around with raw, bleeding fingers.

Club Aishiteru wasn’t hard to find. The entrance was
raucous, pulsing, brightly colored—like a silk-gloved fist that grabbed you and tried to pull you inside.

They wouldn’t let Rob in without a system, so he had to rent one. He watched ninety precious dollars roll off his bank balance, on top of sixty for the cover charge. He sure hoped this guy Nathan showed up. He hadn’t sounded eager to meet.

It was a cheap system, and since it wasn’t custom-fit nor did it have a body-adaptive function, it hung from his arms like an old man’s sagging skin.

Then Rob had to create at least a minimal profile before the greeter would let him in. Did he want kids, or have any that he knew of? Was he interested in women of any ethnic mix? If not, he had to specify the maximum tolerable percentage of whatever ethnicities he found undesirable in a mate. Then he had to report his own ethnic makeup (fifty-four percent Asian, twenty-eight Anglo, eighteen Latino, not that it was anyone’s damned business).

As he passed through the checkpoint into the bar, his height and weight (evidently he’d lost nearly twenty pounds since the accident) were measured and added to his profile automatically. Rob was surprised they didn’t insist he drop his pants so they could measure the length of his dick.

A singles meetup was not the sort of place Rob would have preferred to meet, but Nathan had made it clear that if Rob wanted to talk to him, this was where he’d be. It was difficult to tell how big the place was, because the walls had been replaced with visual links to sister bars in other cities, which gave the impression that it stretched out almost to infinity in every direction. The idea was if you saw someone interesting in one of the other bars, you could pop over remotely and say hello.

People visiting remotely weren’t in screens—they were here in full head-to-toe, three-dimensional virtual splendor. This
was a private business, so the public regulations that required people to use screens so they wouldn’t be confused with live bodies didn’t apply. And it
was
confusing. Most of the nearby patrons were zombies—virtual images their owners weren’t monitoring. They were completely still, expressions frozen on unblinking faces. Evidently people set up in multiple locations so they could be seen, and waited for someone to approach them.

Scanning the bar, Rob spotted Nathan talking with a virtual woman. Rob hung back and watched, waiting for the conversation to finish. Nathan had a Mediterranean look, with pretty, long-lashed eyes and a three-hundred-dollar haircut, complete with stylish white highlights. Rob fumbled with his unfamiliar system, called up the profile of the woman Nathan was talking to, curious about what kind of woman Nathan went for. Ms. Petra Knox. Twenty-eight, compared to Nathan’s (Rob called up his profile) thirty-eight. She was a transportation analyst (whatever that was), didn’t want kids, an atheist from a Methodist family. Ratingsmart certified her attractiveness at eight point nine, FaceN at eight point seven.

The ratings firms used highly scientific programs to arrive at their ratings, but Rob was sure the programs missed important aspects of beauty they couldn’t teach a computer to recognize. There was no way Petra Knox was more beautiful than Winter West. Petra looked like a thousand other beautiful women; she had an elegant face, perfect cheekbones, a long neck. She was perfect to the point that she looked artificial. Even dead and frozen, Winter’s face was so much more expressive. When Winter smiled, the lines that formed around her mouth, and the way she seemed to show far too many teeth, made her look warm and real and unique. Also, Winter was more cute than classically beautiful, and from what
Rob could tell, the programs never awarded a “cute” woman a score approaching nine, no matter how achingly cute she was. Higher scores were only for women with aristocratic faces, faces that indicated superior breeding, but did nothing to make the heart skip a beat.