Spirits in the Wires Read Free Page B

the wicker chair I found out on the balcony. The flavour of my meal still lay on my palate, the food itself a comforting pressure in my stomach. It was dark now, the city lit up with lights, but I was safe and unseen in a pool of shadow since I’d turned out the lights in the room behind me.
    I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else’s, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren’t islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else’s?
    But all the same, I understood loneliness right then. Not the idea of it, but the empty ache of it inside me. How one could live in a city of millions and realize that there was not one person who knew or cared if I lived or died. I searched my mind, but nowhere in amongst the neat and orderly lines of facts and work histories was there the memory of someone I could call a lover, a friend, or even an acquaintance.
    That will change,
the calm voice in the back of my head assured me.
    But I didn’t know—not how my life could have come to this, or if it even should change. Either I was so unlikable that I’d been unable to make a single friend in the—I counted out the years from the facts in my head— four years since I had apparently moved here from New Mexico—or I was some kind of freak. Neither, it seemed to me, deserved friends.
    I dreamed that night that I was flying, soaring, not over city streets, but over circuit boards, and rivers of electricity. …

    The next morning—my second that I could truly recall—I felt a little better. I still had a lack of hands-on memories and a calm, quiet voice in the back of my head that was happy to play encyclopedia for me, but the weight of a full day’s experience seemed to have steadied me. Even if all I’d done for the whole day was wander around in my apartment and then get terribly depressed as I sat out on the balcony in the evening, that one day still felt as though it had anchored me to the real world.
    In the morning light, things didn’t seem quite so bleak, so desperately black and white, it had to be this way or that. I was able to consider that I might be different and it didn’t cripple me. Last night’s loneliness and despair had no real hold on me this morning. I didn’t know quite how or where, but I was sure I had to fit in someplace.
    Today I meant to go outside.
    I finished my coffee and washed my breakfast dishes, then put on a pair of running shoes. I found my purse. After checking it for apartment keys, I stepped out into the hall.
    My neighbour across the way opened his door at the same time and smiled at me.
    â€œSo there is someone living in that apartment,” he said. “I’m Brad.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In 3F, as you can see.”
    â€œI’m Saskia,” I said and we shook hands.
    He was nice looking guy, dark-haired and trim, dressed in casual clothes. I could tell he liked what he saw when he looked at me and that made me feel good. But as we stood there talking for awhile, I saw something change in his eyes. It wasn’t like I had a bit of egg stuck between my teeth or something. I was just making him uncomfortable. By the time we’d walked down the two flights of stairs to the streets, I got the sense he couldn’t get away from me quickly enough.
    He gave me a brusque goodbye when we reached the street and headed off in the direction I’d been planning to go. I stood there by the door of the building, letting some space build between us before I set off myself. While I waited, I went back over our conversation, trying to see what it was I’d said or done to make his initial attraction toward me cool off so quickly. I couldn’t think of a thing. Whatever it was seemed to have happened on some purely instinctual level—almost a chemical