Harry wore his spacesuit when he walked in Central Park. To others, it looked like Harry was wearing a hat and a coat. But Harry knew better.
He liked to walk behind people. Couples, especially. He would listen to their conversations. He would imagine what it would be like to talk to them. He would listen to them talk about what they had just eaten. What they were going to eat. How unfair a coworker or boss was being to them. How unreasonable a mother or father or sister was being to them. Their fears or anxieties. A problem they needed to solve. A trip they wanted to take. A thing they wanted to make their own. A desire they had for the future. And of course, many times, their discussions were simply utter mush--words that Harry could understand, but words that, put together, created no coherent thoughts.
Still, Harry followed them in the park. He followed them on the streets. He overheard their conversations on the other side of aisles in his neighborhood bookstore. He went to Grand Central Station and just stood on platforms, and listened. Sometimes he rode a bus, or a train, just to sit behind two people talking.
All in the effort to give him some tenuous connection, to humanity.
Men usually didn't notice Harry.
Women sometimes did. When they did, it was often to avert their eyes. They would look away, or grab themselves tightly. They sensed the unpleasantness within him. It repelled them. The only women who talked to him were the ones who had to, at the bank, or the cash register. They gave him false smiles and equally false pleasantries. He could see that they would rather be somewhere else than talking to him. It was like that with all women. When it came to Harry, they all wanted to be somewhere else.
Sometimes he would follow a couple out on a walk. When he saw an attractive woman, he would imagine himself going on a date with her, even if she was already in the company of a man. He would seek out the most attractive women, with the blondest of hair and the roundest of ass cheeks, and follow them, filling in the story of his relationship with her in his mind while his eyes devoured her. Harry would imagine his temporary girlfriend smiling at him, not the man she was arm in arm with. He would imagine her saying flattering things to him, kissing him, touching him, doing everything a proper girlfriend did for the man she loved. Sometimes he would imagine taking her to bed, pumping between her legs while she groaned his name, copulating with this species which was so different from his own, and yet in some ways was still so very similar.
Sometimes the women didn't notice Harry staring at them. But sometimes they did, and that made them grab themselves, and walk more quickly. It made Harry feel like a hunter, and the women like prey, even though the only thing he was hunting was an imaginary experience with them.
Harry's work, by design, gave him no contact with other people. He watched the stock market every day, and invested his money when stock prices were low, and sold his investments when prices went up. It was an easy way to make money, for Harry, and it was perfect in that it afforded him no contact with so much as a single human being.
Sometimes he listened to the radio, at night, as he stretched before going to bed. Stretching didn't help him sleep better, not much; he had pills for that. But it helped a little. As he stretched he would listen to inane commentary on the planetary broadcast network, not to learn anything new, but to hear the sound of a living, breathing person, to feel a connection, however tenuous, with the rest of the world. He felt like he was at the bottom of a very deep well. All alone, unable to make his voice heard. All he had was a slender tether, a voice in the distance, a voice which would never know him, would never even know that Harry Crater existed, or ever existed, but a voice nonetheless that he could latch onto to assure him that he wasn't totally, totally alone.
And then Harry created Carl. Carl became his best friend. Actually, his best friend, second best friend, and third best friend, and so on. Carl would talk to him, especially at night, when he got lonely. Carl was an interactive adaptive program who Harry could talk to, who almost made Harry feel like he was talking to a real person.
And lastly, of course, there was Veronika. Harry hadn't created Veronika, but he had bought her program on the grey market. Veronika satisfied his
other
needs, his baser needs that Harry didn't like to acknowledge.
And that was Harry's life.
Get up. Eat. Watch the stock market. Maybe buy. Maybe sell. Watch the news. Eat again. Eat a third time, later. And then later, go to sleep, and restart it all again.
It was enough to make a man kill himself. Or,
not quite enough
.
And so Harry ventured out onto the wharf every day, and every day he thought about killing himself, the fast way, not the slow way he was doing it now, and every day he pulled back and didn't do it, and life continued much in the same way.
Until the day he met
her
.
********
Who was she?
Harry should have followed her. He had certainly followed women enough in his time. But this would have been different. The other women, at least initially, hadn't known that he had been following them. When they became aware of it, Harry would always walk in the other direction. This woman would have known from the start what he was doing. Harry simply didn't have enough courage to follow someone who knew he was following her.
Who was she?
Could this have been a completely random encounter?
Harry had been frozen in place, watching her, but after she had disappeared from sight, it was if a spell had been lifted. Harry got off the wharf at a fast pace. He went up and down the promenade twice, looking for her.
It was as if she were never there.
He went home and told Carl what had happened.
"That is most unusual," said Carl, in a carefully modulated voice.
"I'll say," said Harry, taking off his coat and hat.
"Do you think it was a random encounter?" Carl asked.
"No," said Harry. "Women don't just go up to men and start talking to them like that. It definitely was not random."
"Why did you not follow her and see where she went?"
"I... I..."
"You were surprised."
"Yeah," said Harry.
"Do you think you will see her again?"
"I don't know... maybe," said Harry.
That night, the usual pills were not enough to cause Harry to fall asleep. He had to take a double dose.
