“Hey,” Bron said, “were you really that bothered because I ... ?”
“Oh,” Audri said. “Well, yeah,” which were words they used frequently with one another, sometimes phatically, sometimes not.
“Well, if you’d—” The thought came obliquely, sat a moment on his mind’s rim, threatening to fall either in or out like an absurd Humpty Dumpty; then, suddenly, it didn’t seem absurd at alclass="underline" “Hey, did you see Miriamne later, yesterday? I mean you didn’t go meet her somewhere after work ... ?”
Audri’s eyes came back to his from somewhere behind him. “No. Why? I never saw her before Personnel sent her down yesterday morning.”
“Oh, because for a moment I ...” Bron frowned; suddenly he picked up the veiled and sequined head—
covering and put it on. With the thought had come the sudden recollection of exactly when (in the gray, canyon-like alley leading to u-1!) and why (that fanciful, unfounded relation between Miriamne and the Spike!) he had decided on Miriamne’s transfer. Now it seemed ridiculous, cruel (he did like Audri), and self-centered. If he could have, he would have kept her on now. But the green slip—“I don’t suppose she’s still ...” His voice was hollowed by the dark shell.
“Mmmm?” Audri said, sipping; his own bubble rattled loudly, collapsed completely. If the thought had been a world, the one that came with it, circling it like a satellite, was: Miriamne was the Spike’s friend. Some version of all this would in all likelihood get back to her. What would she think? “Audri?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“What am I like? I mean, what do you think of me ... ? If you had to describe me to somebody else, how would vou do it?”
“Honest?”
He nodded.
“I’d say you were a very ordinary—or special, depending on how you look at it—combination of well-intentioned and emotionally lazy, perhaps a little too self-centered for some people’s liking. But you also have an awful lot of talent at your job. Maybe the rest are just the necessary personality bugs that go along.”
“Would you say I was a louse ... but maybe a louse who was—never mind. Just a louse.”
Audri laughed. “Oh, perhaps an off-Thursdays—or on every second Tuesday of the month—some version of that thought flickers through my addled brain—”
“Yeah.” Bron nodded. “You know, that’s the third time in three days someone’s called me that.”
“A louse?” Audri raised one multicolored eyebrow (and lowered one silver one). “Well, Ym certainly not one of the ones who did—”
“You mean Philip, sometime earlier today, he ... ?”
Both Audri’s eyebrows lowered now. “No, doll. You did—just now.”
“Oh,” Bron said. “Well, yeah.”
Back in his office, Bron sat and ruminated and flung more collapsed coffee bulbs into the corner heap.
They don’t understand, he thought; then thought it over. Philip and Audri and Sam and Miriamne and Lawrence—even Danny (whom he remembered) and Marny (whom he remembered with some affection) didn’t understand. And Alfred probably understood least of all—though from another point of view, Alfred probably understood the best; that is, Alfred certainly didn’t understand him—Bron—but Alfred certainly understood by first-hand experience the feeling of having nobody understand you; and—Bron could allow himself the self-flagellation—in a way Alfred’s particular type of nonthinking was probably pretty close to his own. Yes, Alfred understood by experience, even if he had no articulate awareness of that experience as a possible point of agony for any other human being but himself. And didn’t (Bron was still thinking, five minutes after closing as he walked, with rustling sleeves and cloak, out of the lobby and onto the Plaza) Alfred’s complete refusal to offer anyone else any interpretation—speculative, appeasing, damning, or helpful—of their own psychological state represent a kind of respect, or at least a behavior that was indistinguishable from it? Alfred just assumed (but then, didn’t everybody assume, till you gave them cause to do otherwise) that you knew what you were about .. •
Miriamne!
And Alfred’s drawn, adolescent face was blotted out He’d wanted to start an affair with her! She was his type. And now his own, involved, counterespionage against himself had lost her a job. His own responses that he should have used as flexible parameters he had taken as rigid, fixed perimeters.
Miriamne!
Of course she didn’t understand either.
Poor Miriamne!
How could she know the how or the why behind any of what had happened to her?
Suffering the wound of having wounded, he thought:
Help me. He made his way through the crowded Plaza. The upper edge of the eyeholes completely cut away the sensory shield with a darkness complete as the u-l’s roof. Swathed and black, he made his way across the bustling concourse, thinking: Somebody help me ...
Just like Alfred (he thought), alone in his room, his nosebleed already diagnosed, Sam and the others gone, wishing desperately, now that the catastrophe had abated, that someone, anyone, would stop by and say hello.
Bron’s jaw tightened.
The mask slipped further down, so that—the thought came brutally as pain, and, with it, he swung his cloak across his shoulder and hurried on—had anyone tried to meet his eyes, with gaze friendly, provocative, hostile, or indifferent, he would not have been able to tell, since all but the very shortest in the crowd were now, muzzily, decapitated.
But if you want help that badly (bitterly he ground his teeth as someone brushed his shoulder; he jerked away, knocking into someone else’s) and you still can’t get it, the only thing to take your mind off the need is to help someone else:—which revelation, since it was one of the rare times he’d ever had it, brought him up short in the middle of the Plaza.
He stood, blinking: two people in succession bumped his left shoulder; one person stumbled against his right. When he stumbled, someone else hit him on the rebound and said: “Hey, watch, will you? Where do you think you are?”
And he still stood, still blinking, in the half-veiled dark.
Somebody else stumbled against him.
And somebody else.
The green slip was already in. There was nothing he could do for Miriamne ...
Five minutes later, he found the smaller of the sex shops on the southeast corner and, well-muffled in his cloak, asked for the reserved package of ointment that had already been credited. There! The sense of moral obligations already slipping from his encumbered soul
(and the tubular package in one of his cloak’s numerous, secret pockets), he walked out onto the (almost deserted now) Plaza of Light.
Ten minutes after that, with his heart thudding slowly, he entered the greenlit tiles of the underpass, passing unheeded the admonitions from chalk, paint, and poster, scrawled left and right.
High and dim on the dark, one scrolled, archaic hand pointed to six, the other to seven. (Decimal clocks, he thought. Quaint.) He crossed the tracks, the gritty paving. He passed the high supports of an overhead walkway. Through the rails above, lights cast down a web of shadow.
At the next steps—on a whim—he turned up, pulling all his rustling clothes about him.
Bron gained the top.
They stood at the opposite rail, backs to him, looking out at a darkness that could have been a wall ten feet beyond or a night stripped of stars light years away.
He recognized her by the blonde, feathery hair, the high shoulders (no cloak now), the long curves of her back going down to a skirt, low on her hips: a ground-length swath, where brown and red and orange splotched one another like something from a postcard of an autumn hillside on another world.
Bron slowed, halfway across the walk. The cloaks and veils and sleeves and cuffs that had billowed behind him collapsed around his gloves and boots.
The other—?
Matted hair held a hint of blue (or green?).
Except for fur strips bound around one thick, upper arm, and one stocky thigh, he was still naked.
He was still filthy.
Bron stopped, ten feet away, frowning inside his mask (which, somewhere just beyond the underpass, he’d finally gotten to sit right), wondering at their quiet conversation.
Suddenly she looked back.
So did the man. Within the scarred and swollen flesh the sunken spot (even this close he was not sure if it could or could not see) glistened.