Tomorrow and Tomorrow (12 page)

“Who’s Albion?” he asks. “Domi, are you seeing someone?
Zkurvysyn
—”

“I’m tracking someone named Albion in the Archive. She was a model, you might know her—”

I flash him the picture of Albion to see if he can place her, but Gavril says whoever she is, she’s strictly small-market amateur. “A nice shot,” he says, “she’s a good-looking girl, and could have modeling work easily,” but says that for her to even blip on the professional databases she would have to be a careerist—really work to promote herself. “There are all sorts of do-it-yourself bullshit sites you might find her on,” he says, “but it would take a lifetime scrolling through homemade glamour shots made by every deluded high school girl who thinks she has a shot at fame in the streams—”

“She died in Pittsburgh—”

“Oh shit,” he says. “Shit, I’m sorry. Let me think a minute. Well, even if she’d been pro or semipro, the networks didn’t exist then like they do now. This picture was a small-market campaign, otherwise you’d have found a reference to it—the people who are into fashion history are fanatical. So this is a one-shot. Something indie, something local. No chance you’d find her through this picture—not with current resources. No chance. The image isn’t even signed. There’s no augment to it. Nothing to reference. Tell me about the pigs—”

I tell him I’ll catch him up over dinner. He wants to take me to Primanti’s. I suggest somewhere else, maybe that Thai place he’d found, but he insists. He drives. He finds the Beach Boys on the radio and sings along, fucking up the words, and I laugh.

He parks in downtown Silver Spring and we walk to Primanti’s, a gaudy Pittsburgh-themed restaurant next to an indoor amusement park. The smell of grease and alcohol waft from the restaurant, the outdoor tables full of people drinking East End Brewing, gorging on French fry–laden cheesesteaks. A souvenir shop almost as large as the restaurant fronts the place, loaded with key rings, postcards of Pittsburgh in spinning racks, magnets, porcelain beer steins. There’s a wall here called the Pittsburgh Wall where people have written the names of the deceased—I think it was meant to be like the Vietnam Memorial, a sober monument to the dead, but the wall’s a thick tangle of Sharpie ink and pocketknife engravings, utterly illegible. I wrote Theresa’s name here years ago, but it’s been long since buried over. Even now there are people scrawling more names while they wait for tables—most people just write their own names now. How many of us are true survivors? There were only a hundred or so people documented to have actually survived the bomb—people protected from the blast by odd flukes of coincidence, people who dug out of the rubble and were eventually saved by rescue crews. And there are many more people like me, saved through a quirk of scheduling that took us out of town for the afternoon—I don’t know how many people are true survivors, but I’ve read that the survivors of Pittsburgh are like splinters of the True Cross, that if you were to gather us all together, you’d have three or four times the amount of the peak population of the entire city. Adware flashing to the “Pennsylvania Polka” begs me to buy limited-edition We Will Never Forget clocks of the Golden Triangle beneath a waving American Flag, porcelain Hummel Steelers babies or commemorative Barbie Pittsburgh Girls, in Penguins jerseys or miniskirts made from Terrible Towels. We’re seated in a wooden bench beneath a picture of Franco and the Immaculate Reception. The waitress asks, “What’re yinz havin’?” Gavril likes hops but I go for a chocolate stout.

“So, who’s this Albion?” he asks.

“I’m working for a man named Waverly,” I tell him. “Private work. Albion’s his daughter. I’m searching for her in the Archive. I have iLux now—”

“How’d you come across that?”

“A perk,” I tell him. “You ever heard of a company called Focal Networks?”

“Of course I have,” he says. “Wait, is that the Waverly you’re working for? Theodore Waverly?”

“Where have you heard of him?”

“Jesus fuck, Dom, he practically invented Adware. He invented how we use Adware, at any rate. NPR talks about him. That Focal Networks is a think tank for the Republican Party. They write policy for Meecham—”

“Shit—”

“Shit’s right, cousin. Big shit—”

“I’m not involved in any of that,” I tell him. “Like I told you earlier, I’m just tracking Albion—”

“That’s an odd name,” he says. “Beautiful, but odd—”

“She’s been erased from the City-Archive. I checked the Pittsburgh Project, the Department of Labor and Statistics, cached Google and Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, and ran wildcard and hashtag searches using InfoQuest and Three Rivers Net. Nothing. E-mails to the librarians at the Map Institute and the Steel City Memorials here and Johnstown and a formal letter to the City of Pittsburgh Citizen and Corporation hard Archive in Virginia—”

Our cheesesteaks arrive and Gavril asks why a man like Theodore Waverly would want me for the job—he wonders why out of so many programmers and researchers in the workforce, a man as rich as Waverly would bother to pull me out of a rehabilitation program to handle something like this.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

“Dominic, don’t take it the wrong way—it’s a real question,” he says. “Theodore Waverly could hire Kucenic’s entire firm, if he wanted to. He could probably call in a favor from the NSA, you know? But he chose you, you of all people, my cousin Domi. It doesn’t make any sense—”

“He talked with Kucenic, but Kucenic told him that I was the best researcher,” I tell him. “Cream rises to the top. Now, listen to this: when I first started searching for Albion, I ran a Facecrawler on her picture, and the Facecrawler yields almost thirty thousand hits—but they’re all hits with less than two percent probability, so I figure it’s a wash—”

“Cream rises to the top? Bullshit rises—”

“Listen: I scanned through the results, and sure enough, Facecrawler found redheads, that’s all—not a single definite match for Albion. Well, one of the hits hovered around a seven percent probability, so I checked it out. It was this fuzzy, dim image captured in a dark corner of this place in Pittsburgh called the ModernFormations Gallery, at a poetry reading. The face I was looking for was totally obscured, so I couldn’t tell whether or not it was Albion, but, Gav, I was one of the readers that night. I was onstage, waiting my turn to read. I saw myself—”

“Oh, that’s creepy—”

“I was wearing a shirt and tie—I was skinny back then. I looked like I was twelve years old—”

Gavril pays—he’s prearranged the bill so I didn’t even have a chance to split with him. He promises he’ll poke around about that picture of Albion I showed him, see if he can find anything about her modeling or fashion work, but he’s doubtful. He offers to let me keep the printbook, but once we’re back at his place I take a few minutes to look at and scan every page, saving a digital file. Gav wants me to stay for drinks, but I tell him I’ll be working, that I won’t be around for a while.

Sixteen-hour immersion shifts, eight hours off—to piss, shit, sleep, shower, eat, drink and ping Gav or Timothy so someone knows I’m still alive. General Tso’s takeout and two liters of Pepsi. Instant oatmeal for breakfast and lunch. Sleeping fitfully for three or four hours before waking up to immerse again. My clearest lead to Albion is through Peyton Hannover, so I try to re-create her life, find where else she intersects with Albion. I’ve tracked Peyton to when she lived in her previous apartment, at the Cork Factory Lofts on Railroad Street, when her ink sleeve was colorless, only the beginnings of an intricately lined floral pattern, and even before that, to her freshman year at Chatham before she had tattoos at all, when she lived in the dorms and her hair was cut short, a boy’s cut she wore parted slick like T. S. Eliot. I follow her. Peyton bikes mornings, strapping on a pink helmet she keeps in a Schneider’s Dairy crate belted to the back of her seat like a basket. She keeps to main streets as she rides so she’s re-created in the mapping—security camera to security camera, traffic cams, dashboard cams, cams in everyone’s retinas who noticed the blonde as she passed. Railroad Street to Smallman through the Strip District to Lawrenceville. I follow. Faces in passing cars are only blurs—petals on a wet, black bough—impressions inadvertently captured in Peyton’s background and sculpted here as part of the environment. These faces unnerve me. Faceless. I feel like they try to catch my attention. I feel like they want me to notice them, to notice them specifically, to turn my attention from Peyton and fill in their features with some streak of memory, but there’s nothing to remember about them, no details or memories I have that can flesh them out. I’ve never known these faces and they pass away in the peripherals.

Before Peyton accrues successes with her modeling, she works as a waitress at Coca Café. She wears skinny black jeans and tight T-shirts screen-printed with the names of retro bands—Centipede Eest, Host Skull, Lovebettie, Anti-Flag. She serves French toast with lemon sauce, mixing lattes behind the counter, busing dishes between orders. I watch her—she slides gracefully through narrow gaps between tables. Theresa and I used to come here for brunch on Sunday mornings, and iLux coaxes my wife from my memories, cozy in the back booth with coffee, sharing warm banana bread, trading sections of the
Post-Gazette
.

“I don’t think I’ve told you about my new friend at the Conservatory,” Theresa tells me. “Mind if I have the last of this?”

“No, go ahead—”

“So good,” she says, spreading wild berry cream cheese on the heel end of the banana bread.

“Your friend . . . ?”

“Right, so after the Flowers of Thailand workshop, this guy comes up to me—probably in his forties, I’d guess. I’d noticed him from the tour—sweatshirt all disheveled, these giant holes in his jeans. He hangs around until everyone else is gone and asks me if we grow weed in the greenhouse—”

“Was he serious? You’re kidding me—”

“He tells me he’d be happy to show me better growing methods than the ones we’re currently using. So I told him that we don’t grow weed, but he might want to get in touch with the Pittsburgh Cannabis Society. He says, ‘What’s cannabis?’ I tell him, ‘Cannabis’ is another name for weed. You know what he told me?”

“Are you making this up?”

“He says, ‘Damn! You mean they smoke weed
and
eat people?’”

Theresa and I lingered over coffee these mornings—she was working on a book, I remember, combining her dissertation with a travelogue she’d kept about time she’d spent in Thailand when she was in graduate school, about ecology, farming and local cuisine. Or she’d polish up her grant proposals or press releases about the community gardens she’d created—she wanted to turn her work into her own nonprofit someday, to establish sustainable urban farming practices in the neighborhoods.

“Do you mind if we take a walk?” she asks halfway through brunch, looking up from what she’d been writing. She dresses up to come here—almost equestrian this morning, a white blouse and beige slacks tucked into knee-high boots of reddish leather. The iLux is flawless loading around my memories, loading the underside of Theresa’s hair like the color of wet sand and the top the color of straw in sunlight.

“I’d love to take a walk,” I tell her.

We saunter down Penn, Lawrenceville an eclectic mix of boutiques and cafés before the end, tree-lined boulevards and renovated townhomes. The trees are in bloom. We hold hands, looking through shop windows, swinging into boutiques. Sugar, Figleaf, Pavement, Pageboy. In Pageboy, Theresa skims through the racks, scoping for vintage. At the time, I was slightly bored waiting while Theresa looked at clothes—I’d lean against the wall reading something I’d brought along with me, but now I’m sick at myself for having wasted those moments—

A billboard mars the early afternoon—a King of Kings antiabortion image of a fetus, a burned and bloody coil. The billboard had been there for years, long enough that the image had faded. “Poor taste,” Theresa used to say, but the image was intolerable after she lost our child, who wasn’t yet our child, I remind myself. Cramping in the restrooms of Heinz Field, confused, wondering if this was early labor until she saw blood in the toilet water, returning to our mustard-yellow seats weeping, wanting to stay at the game, to stay for the fourth quarter for my sake because the tickets were expensive and hard to get and I’d always wanted to see a game, pleading with me to stay in our knit hats and waving towels, but hysterical. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.” This had been our first try. Allegheny General, the ER overflowing with patients that night. We waited hours for follow-up tests once the doctors explained what had happened. I lay with her in the hospital bed, eventually too worn and shocked numb to cry, holding each other while the end of the game we’d left played itself out on the television bolted to the ceiling, telling each other that we’d try again, we’d try.

“Intolerable,” Theresa says about the billboard. She’s shaken and apologizing to me for ruining our morning by becoming upset, telling me that it’s silly to feel this way, but the billboard’s bothering her, that it suddenly got to her, that fetus she’d seen dozens of times before. I tell her it’s all right, I tell her that they shouldn’t have billboards like that in the city, that it’s all right to cry, it’s all right—I told her that at the time, comforting her or trying to, but I want to tell her what I know now, that in a few years we will try again, that it will be a surprise to us both, that she’s going to tell me over dinner someday that we’re having a daughter, but I can’t finish the thought because I know her second pregnancy will end in light. We duck into Pavement so she can find a restroom and dry her eyes. Bamboo hardwood floors, folded cotton shirts on tables, sparse racks of sundresses. Facecrawler alerts me—the default tone that something I’ve searched is nearby—and the memory fades. I follow the alert to the boutique’s front door, the window collaged with handbills and posters for Mac Miller and Kellee Maize, Chinese language tutorials, Schoolhouse Yoga classes and glossies for the local fashion lines they carry here: Penny Lane, Zeto, Raven + Honeybear. It’s the Raven + Honeybear ad that Facecrawler’s hit, Peyton Hannover modeling as a prep school sexpot in a leather-cushioned library. She’s reaching for a book on a high shelf, exposing the long white parallels of her thighs between her powder-blue plaid skirt and powder-blue argyle knee-highs. In cursive:
Just a little higher.