Jim towered above the woman and he leaned over and pointed to the wound, feeling like a schoolboy injured at playtime.
“I have nothing to do with actual human bodies. No look, no touch. I will send you to an examining room,” she said, “where a trained individual will either treat you or send you to someone else somewhere else. Everyone I’ve seen today has a story. You two are the plane crash. Others are the abandoned subway, the stalled elevators, then the empty office buildings, the barricaded storefronts. I tell them that we are here for injured people. I am not here to dispense advice concerning the current situation. What is the current situation?”
She pointed to the blank screen in the panel of devices set into the wall in front of her. She was middle-aged, dressed in high boots, sturdy jeans, a heavy sweater, with rings on three fingers.
“I can tell you this. Whatever is going on, it has crushed our technology. The word itself seems outdated to me, lost in space. Where is the leap of authority to our secure devices, our encryption capacities, our tweets, trolls and bots. Is everything in the datasphere subject to distortion and theft? And do we simply have to sit here and mourn our fate?”
Jim was still stooped over, displaying his wound. The woman leaned forward and twisted her head to look up at him.
She said, “Why am I telling you this? Because your plane crashed, more or less, and you are eager to hear what is going on. And because I’m still a talky little kid when the circumstances warrant.”
Tessa said, “We’re here to listen.”
The overhead lights blinked and dimmed and then went out. There was instant silence throughout the clinic. Everyone waiting. A sense also of fear-in-waiting because it wasn’t clear yet what this might mean, how radical, how permanent an aberration in what was already a drastic shift of events.
The woman spoke first, in a whisper, telling them where she was born and raised, names of parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, schools, clinics, hospitals, her voice suggesting an intimate calm tinged with hysteria.
They waited.
She resumed with her first marriage, first cellphone, divorce, travel, French boyfriend, riots in the streets.
They waited some more.
“No e-mail,” she said, leaning back, palms up. “More or less unthinkable. What do we do? Who do we blame?”
Gestures barely visible.
“E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.”
Her head bouncing slightly with each spoken syllable. Someone with a flashlight was standing in the doorway, training the beam on each of them, once and then again, before leaving without a word.
A brief pause and then the woman resumed speaking in the dark, her whisper more intense now.
“The more advanced, the more vulnerable. Our systems of surveillance, our facial recognition devices, our imagery resolution. How do we know who we are? We know it’s getting cold in here. What happens when we have to leave? No light, no heat. Going home, living where I live, above a restaurant called Truth and Beauty, if the subways and buses are not running, if the taxis are gone, elevator in the building immobilized, and if, and if, and if. I love my cubicle but I don’t want to die here.”
She was quiet for a time. When the lights returned, dimly, Jim was standing straight up, expressionless. A tall white android.
The woman spoke in a normal voice now.
“Okay I see the wound and I can say without hesitation that you need to go down the hall, third room on the left.”
She pointed in that direction and then put on a pair of wool gloves and pointed again, authoritatively.
“And when you’re finished there, then what?”
“We’re going to see friends,” Tessa said. “As originally planned.”
“How will you get there?”
“Walk.”
“Then what?” the woman said.
“Then what?” Jim said.
They waited for Tessa to add her voice to the elemental dilemma but she simply shrugged.
In a room down the hall a young man in an oversized tunic and a baseball cap stood on his toes to brush a medication on Jim’s wound and then bandage it securely. Jim started to shake his hand and then changed his mind and they left.
Out in the street they talked about the woman they’d seen jogging when they were in the van. It would have been encouraging to see her again. The wind was fierce and they walked quickly, heads down. The only person to be seen was a hobbling man pushing a battered cart that probably contained everything he owned. He paused to wave at them and then stepped away from the cart and took a few long strides, body bent, to imitate their movements. They waved back and kept on going. At a major intersection the digital traffic warden was stilled, one levered arm raised slightly.
There was nothing for them to do but keep on walking.
-6-
Counting down by sevens in the future that takes shape too soon.
There were six candles placed around the living room and Diane had just put a match to the last of them.
She said, “Is this a situation where we have to think about what we’re going to say before we say it?”
“The semi-darkness. It’s somewhere in the mass mind,” Martin said. “The pause, the sense of having experienced this before. Some kind of natural breakdown or foreign intrusion. A cautionary sense that we inherit from our grandparents or great-grandparents or back beyond. People in the grip of serious threat.”
“Is that who we are?”
“I’m talking too much,” he said. “I’m grinding out theories and speculations.”
The young man was standing at the window and Diane wondered if he planned to head home to the Bronx. She imagined that he might have to walk all the way, up through East Harlem to one of the bridges. Were pedestrians allowed to cross or were the bridges for cars and buses only? Was anything operating normally out there?
The thought softened her, made her think that she might offer to accommodate him for the night. The sofa, a blanket, not so complicated.
Stove dead, refrigerator dead. Heat beginning to fade into the walls. Max Stenner was in his chair, eyes on the blank screen. It seemed to be his turn to speak. She sensed it, nodded and waited.
He said, “Let’s eat now. Or the food will go hard or soft or warm or cold or whatever.”
They thought about this. But nobody moved in the direction of the kitchen.
Then Martin said, “Football.”
A reminder of how the long afternoon had started. He made a gesture, strange for such an individual, the action in slow motion of a player throwing a football, body poised, left arm thrust forward, providing balance, right arm set back, hand gripping football.
Here was Martin Dekker and there was Diane Lucas standing across the room, puzzled by the apparition.
He seemed lost in the pose but returned eventually to a natural stance. Max was back to his blank screen. The pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal. Diane waited for her husband to pour more whiskey but he showed no interest, at least for now. Everything that was simple and declarative, where did it go?
Martin said, “Are we living in a makeshift reality? Have I already said this? A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?”
“A power station failed. That’s all,” she said. “Consider the situation in those terms. A facility along the Hudson River.”