Tomorrow and Tomorrow (10 page)

“Albion’s apartment,” Timothy says.

“It must be Albion’s apartment. I’m assuming that whoever deleted Albion is substituting information to make it harder to track—”

“Was she there?” asks Timothy.

“Albion? No, she wasn’t there. That same woman was there. That young woman. She always seems like she’s readying herself for a party. She welcomed me in this time—”

Examining herself in the mirror in the living room. Inky hair bundled high, held in place by two sticks. The woman’s tall—almost as tall as I am, I realize. She applies her makeup. I watch her darken her lips to the color of wine. She’s pale. She wears high heels—black, patent leather heels that reflect the faint apartment light. The dress catches my eye, something Gavril would be interested in—a damask print, black on a green the color of pale emeralds. She walks across the living room, her dress unzipped in the back so I see her white skin and the black strap of her bra. She enters the bedroom but returns a moment later, adjusting a pearl earring.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Zhou,” she says. “Who are you?”

I tell her I’m looking for Albion, and when she turns from the mirror I see a reflection of red—for just a moment, a flash of red hair in the mirror.

“Oh, of course,” she says, “John Dominic Blaxton, of Pittsburgh, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Temporary residences.” She returns to her own reflection. I search the apartment—the kitchen, her bedroom. In the bathroom I find curly red hairs on the porcelain of the bathtub and know I’m in the right place.

“Were you still dreaming?” asks Timothy.

“I don’t think so although I don’t know—”

“Is that why you mentioned the woman from your class? The woman who liked Schiele? You described what she wore, earlier—you were detailed when you told me about her, about her undergarments. You mentioned specifically that you could see the edge of her bra. Were you dreaming and pulling details from your memory through the iLux?”

“No—I don’t think so, though maybe the woman in the apartment made me remember the woman from my class.” I think I was awake when I saw Zhou, when we spoke, but think I’m dreaming as I explore her rooms. A hallway I hadn’t noticed branches out from the main room, a corridor—it’s narrow, with half-opened doors leading to other rooms, unfinished rooms. It dawns on me that the rooms are repeating, that I’m wandering through previous incarnations of the finished room. I come to another bathroom, but the red hairs are no longer on the porcelain.

“Go on,” says Timothy.

“The corridor continues and this is when I believe I was dreaming, because the episode has the hallmarks of a dream—I’m frustrated, lost, and can’t remember how I get back to the living room, to Zhou. Another corridor, and I see him—”

“Who?” says Timothy.

“This—man, I don’t know who. I’ve never seen him before, I don’t recognize him. I figure I’m dreaming or that the barriers between Albion’s apartment are blurring with another person’s private account, that maybe this man is a previous tenant of the apartment—another survivor come back to visit his space, or just another recording inserted from the cloud. I figure I’m interrupting something private.

“‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

“But he just looks at me, almost as if he’s not quite sure I’m even there with him—”

“What did he look like?” asks Timothy.

“Sitting in a wingback chair, the upholstery striped like a piece of hard candy, a cup of coffee near him on a low table. He wears slacks and a blazer over a T-shirt. The T-shirt says
Mook
.”

“How old?”

“Fifties, maybe early sixties. Or maybe late forties, but tired. I remember his eyes the most clearly—sad eyes, like his face was drooping. Like Droopy Dog? Do you remember that old cartoon Droopy Dog?”

“What else about him?” asks Timothy.

I tell him that I remember the color gray. Undefined. I don’t remember the man clearly. Gray, drooping, rumpled, sad—but arrogant in a way. I don’t like him. He sips his coffee, considering me. I apologize again, saying something about visiting a friend, that I’m lost here. He doesn’t move or speak with me, but I turn around to leave and he’s vanished. I’m sure I’m awake, now—but he’s gone so I figure he was part of the dream. I return to Zhou.

“How did you return to her? You were lost—”

“The program was like a Möbius strip—”

I turned away from the man in the Mook
shirt and saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, and when I went through the door I reentered her apartment. This is a loop. Now I understand—things have changed since first entering her apartment. Zhou is dressing for a party. I watch her. I hear the shower running—there’s no one else in the apartment. I can no longer find that corridor with several doors—no, now there’s just the short hallway that leads to her bedroom. I open the bathroom door and find Zhou in the shower. I watch her through the fogged curtain. She seems pleased when she notices me watching her, and lets me watch, rubbing soap over her breasts and dousing herself with shampoo. She asks if I want to join her, but I ignore the question and she laughs. Zhou dries herself and walks nude to her bedroom and there I watch her dress in an elaborate set of lingerie. She steps into the green dress that she doesn’t bother to zip. She makes her way to the living room mirror—this is where I’d first seen her, applying makeup in the mirror. There—the flash of red, Albion’s hair, flickers in the reflection and disappears. Here’s where it loops: She goes to her bedroom, returns adjusting the pearl earring, but once her earrings are on, she takes them off. Zhou unzips her dress and lets the fabric slide from her body. I watch her reach up and unlatch the front clasp of her bra. Very beautiful, the kinds of perfection women’s bodies have in dreams, uncanny and vivid. She undresses and makes her way to the bathroom, starts the shower and steps in once the water’s warm, lathering herself. I tell Timothy that I watched the cycle several times that afternoon, and that’s how I realize the loop is without variation.

“Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”

“Waverly may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.

“Sure,” I say.

“And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”

He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.

Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.

Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.

Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs.
1% finished . . . 2% . . .

Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a
No results found
message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.

Zero
doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.

I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of the lease, but again come up with nothing.

I ease the parameters further—search only “Accelerant” in the entire City-Archive and the results hit every Honda dealership, every model year, every truckload of new makes, every used Accelerant, every advertisement, every Accelerant parallel parked on every street, every car in every driveway, too many hits even to consider, but still nothing in the particular blind spot where I’m trying to see.

Pepsi helps me think, so do Ho Hos—I uncap a fresh two-liter and open a new box, take a five-minute break before immersing again. Think. The Archive’s still Java based, so I set the parameters to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but I don’t search for the Accelerant—rather, I search for a “TimelineException,” the telltale error in the code that means that something’s not historically accurate, that someone’s been tampering. I run the search, expecting to find a few hundred or even a few thousand hits, but the search locks up my iLux with an untraceable mess of TimelineException results—nearing a million exceptions before I kill the process. Christ—

Scanning the error report—whoever’s erasing Albion’s car intentionally mangled the code, it looks like, must have deleted or swapped out or tampered with just about every car archived near her apartment to crash searches with errors. I’ve seen similar with insurance scams—but whoever’s deleted Albion is especially thorough. There’s nothing I can use to track this mess. I can’t help but admire the work.

Think through the methodology—a reflection of red hair in the moment Zhou turns from the mirror. Nothing traceable in and of itself, but that leftover reflection is at least one slip—maybe the work isn’t quite as seamless as it seems.

Real-time hours loitering outside of Lili Café on the corner of Dobson and Hancock, the same building as Albion’s apartment, watching cars, or rather watching the reflections of cars in the café’s picture windows. When a car passes on Dobson, I note the make/model, then note the car’s reflection on a separate spreadsheet—sometimes only registering a blur of color. The cars that pass rarely match their reflections and I’m hopeful I’ll catch a trace of Albion’s Accelerant reflected in the window glass. Dull work, but something to slog through, a start. I recognize the barista archived here—Sandy, I think her name was—petite, with a cloche hat and black-framed glasses. She was a screen printer, I remember, her neon and pastel posters for Pittsburgh bands and the Steel City Derby Demons decorate the café. Theresa used to work with her—booked her to teach art workshops with the high schools, making prints using plant materials. She steams milk, pours leaf shapes onto the skim of lattes. Her customers are vaguely familiar to me, too, some of their faces—people I might have seen around. Another car passes and I note its reflection. Scanning over four days’ worth of footage until a silver Nissan Altima passes but casts a reflection of a green hatchback Accelerant on the café window and I know I have her.

Time-stamp the reflection, bookmark it.

I run another Facecrawler, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but instead of searching for Albion’s Accelerant, I search for this substitute car, the ’53 Altima sedan. Ready to kill the process if I hit the same flood of errors, but the hack’s slipped up: whoever deleted Albion’s car used the Altima as a universal substitution, probably with something as simple as Find and Replace All. The Facecrawler brings manageable results—I pin the results to a map of Polish Hill and the pins cluster around two locations like a trail of bread crumbs: Albion’s apartment on Dobson and the underground parking garage of another nearby apartment, a high-rise just a few blocks away tagged the Pulawski Inn. I save my search, reset the Archive to a date when the Altima should be parked at the Pulawski Inn, and walk to try and find the car.

Every floor of the Pulawski Inn is quartered into lofts, every loft expansive with picture windows and sliding glass doors that lead to slim balconies. The lobby’s the color of champagne, with wingback chairs and couches candy-striped in pale gold. A mahogany table centers the room, topped with a vase of orchids. The building manager receives visitors at a front reception desk. She’s reading Camus—her brunette hair matches the mahogany table, her skirt and blouse match the walls. She smiles when I approach, says, “How may I help you?” but when I ask if she’s ever heard the name Albion, she searches through her database of recorded conversations and says, “No results found—”

“Can you tell me how to get to the parking garage?”

“The elevator’s just off the lobby,” she says, pointing my way.