As we skimmed along, I started thinking about fractals. In fractal theory, a bit like a pointillist painting, you start off at a distance where things look slightly disorderly, and then you look closer, and they look even more disorderly, and then you get even closer and at each point you think things will get clearer, but they actually descend into more and more obscurity. But the obscurity is part of the pattern: the illogic goes all the way down. And so it was with me and Sherry. Or was it the election returns? It hardly mattered.

. Because she was so close that I could almost feel the space between our skins. The others may have been there, the bimbos and Ralphie, but Sherry was perched just to my right, about a foot away. From where I was, I could look straight ahead and still catch sight of her tanned leg. If I turned my head, I could see her. I had done a lot of that over the last while, turning my head, seeing her, except now it was for real again. It was as if all the time there had been this vast space between us, full of the rest of America, insignificant universes of people and noise, but it was still our space between us, because it was between us. And then time had once again squeezed out all the rest of that irrelevant space, and now we were a swerve of the boat away, a shift in elemental gravity, that would bump our bodies together. A random act of fate.

"Hey, Blake," she said against the noise and the spray. The green swooshed by.

"Hey, Sherry."

"How have you been?"

"You always ask the tough ones, Sherry."

She looked at me and smiled: "You are so hopeless, why doesn't someone shoot you?"

"They keep trying, Sherry. I have this part of me that keeps ducking. Why I do not know. When I have saved up enough money, I intend to get it surgically removed, and then it will be fine. I won't duck anymore. "

She shrugged her shoulders, and headed her face back into the sun hurtling towards us across the skimming universe.

"Sherry?"

"Yeah, what?"

"Tell me about Hand Count Machines, Inc."

She got on her competent face. "HCMI does it all for you. They started off by making the machines for ballotting. Then they moved into hand counting. They use machines for hand counting too: you only check the ones that don't show up on the machine, and you can fix that too. You can fix it all. About a year ago they moved into handling overseas and absentee ballots as well. Erase postmarks, add signatures, you name it, they do it all. One stop fixes all. "

"And The Mudcat owns it?"

"No. He handed it off to Demarara some time ago. Demarara loves that sort of thing -- a tech kind of guy. The swamp vote is sort of recreational. The Mudcat is more of a people person, if you get my --"

The boat swerved. Our bodies bumped into each other. I got her drift.