The frenzy of the keystrokes had built up before she really knew she was angry, chewed-down fingernails clackering dervishes before battle. Like an old woman awoken by an off-key snore, it was only a break in the rhythm of her typing that startled her into an abrupt self-consciousness. Katherine looked down at her hands. They were trembling in the cold of the air conditioning and she was gritting her teeth. If someone had come by her desk just then and commented on the off-kilter oscillation in her cheerful voice she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold it together. It wouldn’t do to have people thinking she couldn’t handle the recent deadline crunch anyway. Her fingers had fallen mechanically into QWERTY and she took a deep breath. The region of the brain that processes smells is located beside the hippocampus but all she could smell in the office was ozone without recollection.
Katherine closed the new email window and stared at a spreadsheet of numbers that made sense to her with reassuring immediacy. Bill had come by earlier with a page-long spec sheet of data updates and reports to run, offering a blandly discreet task that had nevertheless been a reprieve. But the report data had been sent and now all that was left was the ominous tranquility of that empty email composition window. She’d left Harry three weeks ago. The breakup had been anything but emotional. He’d watched her cry and shake with the silent omniscience of a surveillance camera and had only said he understood as she left the apartment. She was living with Dawn until the end of the month, but hadn’t heard from Harry until yesterday. He’d left two messages on her phone, or one message that had been too long to fit into a single voicemail. The uncanny discontinuity of his rambling expulsion of emotion had saved it from any kind of emotional impact, and Katherine listened to both messages multiple times with a comforting detachment.
She’d tried calling once but hung up before the call could be completed, suddenly terrified that her voice would convey none of the emotion that had languished unattended for the last three weeks. Dawn had said she needed closure, but Katherine knew that a single conversation could never have manufactured the words that she needed to say. Instead she’d autopsied those last four years with emails; each unsent tirade a scalpel, each discarded analysis a bonesaw, each deleted plea an enteretome. A corpse could only be exhumed and reburied so many times before it crumbled away, but she had never been able to hit send. Every word typed had codified anew that lonely and desperate fury and self loathing and always it had fallen short by some critical word or metaphor; that fervour in her keystrokes and all the teary snot of premonition she’d swallowed back seemed untransferable through words per minute. Now there was either nothing left to type or nothing left to type about. She’d analyzed all the figures, knew their startling complexity but the tears never really came and from the shore of the playa Katherine cast another hook and caught another email. In this detachedness she was free to feel what she wanted; a telephone call could never have drawn out so many facets of suffering for so long.
Katherine wiped at her eyes reflexively and blew her nose with tissue generously supplied by her company. She typed with all the vehemence that remained after two days of practice. All that was left now was exhaustion, but to send this email would be to codify nothing, four years of friendship and fucking turned into radio static, a golden record cast out aimlessly out into space with only the hydrogen atom for reference. She hit send, then went to the bathroom to cry.
