“So how did you end up on that bridge?” Veronika asked. “Why that day instead of the one before or the one after?”
“I could ask you the same question,” Lycan said.
“Yes, you could.”
Lycan glanced at her. “All right. What were you doing on that bridge?”
What could she say? That she’d decided to save people more screwed up than she as a way to save herself? That sounded awfully narcissistic. Maybe it was narcissistic. Was she a narcissist? No, how could you be a narcissist with self-esteem as low as hers?
“How about we call it a draw?” Veronika finally answered. “I won’t ask you if you don’t ask me.”
They’d come to the elevator to High Town. Lycan stuck out his hand, and Veronika shook it as they stepped into the elevator.
“Of course that implies we’ll have another opportunity to ask each other. What do you think? You want to meet up again some time?”
Lycan considered. “Kind of an ‘I’m alive, what now’ club?”
“Exactly.”
Lycan tilted his head. “I actually enjoyed myself.” There was surprise in his tone, as if he’d never expected to utter those words again.
Veronika was surprised, and pleased. She’d been able to sink her teeth into these last few hours and get real nourishment. The elevator opened and they stepped out, back home in High Town. Unable to hide her satisfied grin, Veronika said, “I’ll meet you on the bridge—you know, The Bridge We Don’t Ask About. Saturday at noon.”
Lycan smiled. “All right.”
They said good-bye with a wave.
As she headed home, watching copters buzz in a blue sky scattered with high, steel-gray clouds, she felt light, energized. It wasn’t butterflies—she didn’t feel attracted to Lycan in a romantic sense, but despite his prickly, depressive, obtuse nature, Veronika felt comfortable around him. She was sure she had just made a friend, and given the tragedy of their first meeting, that felt like magic. She would help Lycan learn to love life, or at least not despise it, and in doing so, teach herself as well.
22
Mira
An old woman peered down at her, squinting, frowning suspiciously, as if trying to penetrate some veneer.
“Hello,” Mira said.
“Hello.” There was even suspicion in her tone, as if Mira had come to her door uninvited and might be selling something.
“I’m looking for a companion.” She held up her hand as if Mira had tried to interrupt her. “Not a lover or anything like that. I’m too old for lovers, and for that I would need a man, in any case. I’m looking for a different sort of companion.”
“Okay,” Mira said when it was clear she wasn’t going to elaborate. “A friendship, you mean?”
The woman shook her head impatiently. “No. Deeper. Like family.”
That was perfect. A relationship she wouldn’t have to fake. Hope flickered uncertainly in her. Could she convince this woman that she was best suited out of all the women here? “I think I understand. Like a daughter, or a granddaughter?”
“No. I don’t want to put a label on it.”
Mira was fairly sure “like family” was a label, but kept her opinion to herself. “Oh. All right.”
“Do you think you could love me”—she glanced up at the readout on the wall—“Mira? Could you love me so much you’d weep beside my deathbed?”
Mira’s first inclination was to blurt, Yes, absolutely, but that must be what everyone here said to her. It must sound profoundly insincere for a complete stranger to assure you that she would love you like family.
“I know I’m capable of loving deeply. My heart is open. I’d only know if I could love you for sure by spending time with you, cooking dinner with you, hearing about your life, sharing mine with you.”
The woman studied her, breathing heavily through her nose, her head bobbing with the palsy of old age. “Well, you’re out. Do you think I’d pay all that money with no guarantee?”
Mira could only get out one word as the woman reached up to send her back to oblivion, and the word was, “Shit.”
23
Rob
Central Park was alive with joggers, loungers, buskers, chess players, hustlers. As Rob crossed Strawberry Field toward the steps to High Town, he barely noticed anyone. He was deep in thought, thinking about how much his life had changed since the accident. It was as if he himself had died, and had been revived into an entirely different, far more unforgiving existence. When people asked what he did for a living, he couldn’t honestly answer that he was a musician, so he answered that he was a manual worker. He didn’t feel the swell of pride he used to feel telling people he was a musician. What friends he had were new as well. When he’d moved in with Lorelei in High Town, her friends had become his friends. He’d kept in touch with his burb friends, but if friendships took place primarily via screen, they tended to atrophy, because you don’t talk about core things, intimate things, via screen. When he broke up with Lorelei and moved back home, he lost most of his new High Town friends, and because he’d given up his music, he lost touch with the friends he’d made playing Low Town clubs. What little time he had to socialize now he spent with Nathan and Veronika. They were High Towners, but they’d gone out of their way to cultivate a friendship with Rob. He was also friendly with some of the people at work, people on the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Nathan and Veronika, but besides Vince, he wasn’t sure he’d call them friends.
And then, of course, there was Winter.
He reached the bottom of the endless, twisting staircase leading up to High Town, grasped the railing, craned his neck to look up at High Town, and took a deep breath. His legs were going to be jelly. Still, part of him was looking forward to the climb. Saving the eighty-dollar elevator charge was his primary motivation for hoofing it, but as he took his first springing steps, he felt a strange freedom, like a raw-lifer living among the techies.
He got raw-lifers—he understood why someone might forsake all but the most basic tech, even though he wouldn’t willingly do so himself. You did gain something, always seeing things as they really were, being forced to stand face-to-face with someone every time you had something to say to them, even something trivial. People questioned whether there really was such a thing as technomie, if it did flatten out your emotions, dull your senses, to be wired all the time. He didn’t doubt it. What always tripped him up about raw-lifers was how they could choose to live without modern medicine. Rob had lived without it for most of his life, but not by choice. As far as Rob could see, medicine was the one area where there were no minuses to balance out the pluses. There was no downside whatsoever to having access to all that modern medicine had to offer.
In school, Rob had been taught that Chan-juan Yang was the greatest person of the past century, a trillionaire who selflessly funneled her entire fortune into the medical research that ultimately conquered death. As an adult, he’d read a biography of Yang that was less laudatory. It depicted her as a selfish shut-in whose only concern was extending her own life. The book had been far kinder to Yo Wen Chan, the researcher who actually discovered how to revive the dead.