Tomorrow and Tomorrow (14 page)

I’m too bewildered by what’s happening to quite understand his threat. I try to ping his socials, to find out his name, but his profile display is nothing more than a grinning pig’s head with a lolling tongue that repeatedly speaks the word
Mook
in a Porky Pig singsong.

“Are you the one who’s deleting her?” I ask.

“I think I understand your motivation here,” he says. “You’re acting here because you’ve had some trouble with the legal system and you’re looking for a clean record, some gainful employment. On top of that, you’re emotionally compromised because of this business with your wife. I pity you, actually. I’m not unfair, Dominic, but I have an agreement in place that I need to honor above all my other considerations. Nevertheless, I think we can come to an understanding. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Quit looking for this woman you know as Albion. Stop immediately. Find other ways to make a living. Terminate your employment with Waverly, let this go. Otherwise, I’ll take action against you—”

“What action?”

“Look at this young woman—Peyton Hannover, this bright young thing,” he says, guiding my attention to Peyton as she lifts her hair for Zhou to fit her for the corset top of the gown. In an instant, Peyton’s image corrupts and her body scrambles, her mouth ruptures outward, her teeth and gums splayed in flowering wet rows that sink through her neck to her chest, her face sinks, nipple-eyed, her body hunches, patches of blonde hair sprout in tufts, her genitals open and spill like water to the floor. A layer of dissonance—a spoiled body. I try to withstand this, to look at Peyton, to prove Mook’s threats are meaningless, but I can’t endure. I flinch away.

Mook says, “Imagine your wife—”

“Oh God,” I say, his words pounding me like a hammer striking meat. “Please don’t do that. Please—”

“It’s okay to look,” he says, and when I look again, Peyton’s been deleted, the space she occupied replaced by a smudge, like Vaseline swiped over the air.

“There’s a program I have access to called the Reissner-Nordström worm—do you know what that is?”

“No—”

“It’s a modified Facecrawler,” he says. “In the time it takes your heart to beat, I can desecrate every memory, every instance of your wife in this City. I can corrupt your presence here so that not even your iLux can access the moments you cherish with your wife. I run the worm, and she’s gone. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes. I understand—”

“Ask yourself: Is losing your wife a second time worth your loyalty to Waverly? I’m guessing not—”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’re not listening,” he says. “If I perceive that you haven’t let this matter with Albion drop we will take action against you. I will, Mr. Blaxton. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m through. Through—”

“I think you know your way out,” he says.

Vertigo as I’m shoved from this location, the Archive a blur but re-forming—I’m in the parking lot, looking up to Albion’s lit studio windows. The snow’s sticking now, falling in soft flakes that crunch beneath my footfalls as I run, squalls kicking up that blow blinding veils of snow from the branches of pines. Home—home to Room 208, the Georgian. I take off my wet clothes in the foyer. I find her asleep and crawl into bed beside her. Theresa. I put my arm around her and press close, feeling the simulated warmth of her body, the simulated rise and fall of her chest, trying to hold her, to keep from losing what I’ve already lost.

Whenever you visit this place, there are others here—too many survivors in mourning to get a sense of what we actually used to be like here. Katz Plaza, it used to be called—centered by a Louise Bourgeois fountain and benches shaped like laconic, watchful eyes. We come here to view the end. We stand like we’re in a gallery, ringing the plaza. We know it will happen at thirty-seven past the hour, and as the time nears we watch for him—there, the truck pulling up on 7th, the man climbing down from the cab holding a steel suitcase. Some of us begin to cry, but most of us have seen this before, many times before. We can’t stop him, we can’t rewrite history even as we pass through it, so we simply watch: the man kneeling in the center of the plaza, raising his arms in some sort of prayer. Some of us think we hear the name Allah. We watch the man unlatch his suitcase. The man pauses, and we wonder, millions of us have wondered if in that pause he was reconsidering, if he might have turned back. We watch as the man opens the suitcase. Light—

—

She loved walking here. On Walnut Street, in Shadyside. She loved window-shopping here—the Apple Store, Williams-Sonoma, Kawaii, e.b. Pepper—but her favorite place was an upscale general store called Kards Unlimited. Theresa died there—wearing blue jeans tucked into riding boots, an oatmeal-colored cardigan draped over her pregnant belly. I’ve stood with her outside of Kards Unlimited’s picture window as she sipped an iced mocha from Starbucks, looking at the T-shirts on display.
My Other Ride Has
a Flux Capacitor. Llamacorn. The Folding Chair Parking Authority. A
Clockwork Orange.
I’ve watched her many times looking at these shirts, and have come to believe that at the end, at the very moment the world ended for her, she was reading a Mr. Rogers T-shirt,
It’s a Neighborly Day
in the Beautywood.
The sky burns. Cameras record. Theresa squints. Her hair catches fire at the tips, then flashes like a diadem across her head. She dies too quickly, I believe, to have felt any pain. I’d always assumed that our child simply perished in the womb, but now Mook’s taunt thorns in my mind, and as I watch Theresa cocooned in fire, I imagine that our child may have known, may have kicked and squirmed as her mother died around her, may have understood and suffered.

—

Gossip heads and tabloids speculate on who she’ll wear, but Gavril’s already tipped me off that President Meecham’s tapped Alexander Porta this year, the Natalia Valevskaya protégé, and that tonight’s executions will feature at least seven full costume changes to coincide with the fall couture shows. I’ve scanned the League of Women Voters app—the U.S. Communist Party, the Greens, the Teas, the Army of God and the Mid-Atlantic Socialists aren’t even participating—show trials, they call them, a spectacle. Nine men will be executed tonight, federal criminals: alleged jihadists, traitors, multistate spree killers. I’ve accepted Timothy’s offer for a ride to Waverly’s for his viewing party. Standing in the rain, the streams exceptionally vivid in the overcast light—rioters in San Francisco are already burning city blocks in Hunters Point, rioters in Chicago are already burning police cars in Millennium Park. Timothy pulls up in the Fiat and tells me to get in before I catch pneumonia.

Timothy listens to light jazz, stuff like the Fontainebleau Quartet and Slim Vogodross. He asks how I’ve been and I tell him I’ve been busy searching for Albion, but I don’t mention Mook, nothing of the threat against my wife. I’m planning to tell Waverly myself, when we meet about his daughter—I’m planning to collect what I’m owed and quit. Timothy merges onto the Beltway and pushes the Fiat, weaving through congestion at eighty, eighty-five miles an hour until he takes an exit about forty-five minutes outside DC.

Virginia. An hour-and-a-half drive, Timothy exits the interstate and once off main roads, we drive through woods. Late afternoon, but the night falls heavy and gathers around the slim black trunks of trees. I’m tired, I haven’t shaved in days and my scruff’s grown thick down my neck, but it feels nice, like I’m half hidden and soft. The road narrows, begins to climb. Timothy’s dressed in a tuxedo and I’m nervous I’ll be conspicuously schlubby at the party—I wore what I thought would blend in, charcoal slacks and a flannel shirt, tucked in. A tweed jacket I’ve had for years. Timothy’s headlights illuminate the trees. He’s taking the turns close, driving breakneck through the rain. His windshield’s lit with night vision augments and I watch the pale green shapes of deer clustered at the edges of the woods, dozens if not hundreds of them. A miserable icy slush congeals on the windshield before the wipers push it away—if any of those deer bolt, I’ll die. I’d hit a deer once, years ago, and pulled over to the side of the road. Mine had been a doe, I’m fairly certain—it seemed small when I was near, but I don’t know how to tell much about deer. The middle of the night, in Westmoreland County. The deer moaned and whined—bleating, I guess you’d call it. I’d seen movies where calm men broke the neck or killed dying animals with one shot to ease their suffering, but I had no gun and I couldn’t bring myself to kill it, let alone touch it. The sight of my shoe prints in its blood froze me. I withdrew a pace and simply watched the doe die. When she was silent I said a prayer over her body and left. What else could I have done? My windshield was cracked and buckled inward where the deer’s spine must have ricocheted from me.

“He lives far,” I say.

“But it’s a nice drive,” says Timothy, “and Waverly doesn’t commute much. Every so often he has business in the city—”

Timothy slows for a private drive—a strip of pavement winding through a thicket of pines, footlights illuminating the drive like a runway. The drive must be heated, I suppose—slush sticks to the boughs of pines and the ground on either side, but melts into a wet shimmer on the drive.

The pines fall away like a robe to reveal Waverly’s house—built on a bluff overlooking a shallow valley. The house itself looks like a haphazard stack of frosted glass cubes, illuminated. Valet parking’s offered in the turnabout, but Timothy follows the driveway as it dips and curves around the far end of the house. We plunge into an underground garage large enough to accommodate twenty cars, at least.

“Usually this place is empty,” says Timothy.

Timothy circles once before settling for a rear space. His Fiat rattles when he cuts the engine, the sound almost offensive among the silent Maseratis, Porsches and Ferraris filling out the other spaces. A uniformed attendant wipes the slush from Timothy’s car with a white towel, never minding that the Fiat’s a piece of shit. Timothy’s quieter than usual—nervous, maybe.

“Don’t like parties?” I ask him.

“Not much,” he says.

An elevator with a parquet floor lifts us into the glass foyer. The doors slide apart and we’re washed in gold light—the interior of Waverly’s house is like a dream of art deco, the guests in slim-cut tuxes and flapper-style gowns shimmering like precious coins. Waverly’s there to greet us—he’s already flushed pinkish with drink.

“Have you fallen in love with her yet?” he says as he shakes my hand.

“I’m sorry?” I ask.

“Have you fallen in love with Albion?” he says, breath sour with alcohol. “You can’t spend time with her and not fall in love, apparently—”

“Not now,” says Timothy.

“I haven’t,” I try to say, but Timothy’s taken Waverly’s arm and nudges him away from me, separating our conversation.

“Drinks are in the blue room,” says Waverly as we part. “We’ll stream the executions in the Caraway room, I think—”

A hundred or so on the guest list, it looks like, and I’m as exposed in my flannel as I feared I would be. Pathetically underdressed. Timothy’s already abandoned me, disappeared somewhere. Adware profiles hover over each guest, names I recognize from the streams, Elric Broadbent, a presidential adviser, and Michelle Frawley, from Arizona, host of the
God and Guns
stream. Actresses I recognize from Disney sitcoms and reality-stream girls, Donna from
Hello Pussy
, season 3, and the guy from
Truth or Dare
. I ping Gav to see if he recognizes anyone here and he pings that I should watch where I step and be sure to clean my shoes when I leave. Everyone’s wearing those Meecham pins that were popular following Pittsburgh, her profile portrait like a cameo and twin crimson ribbons in the shape of a heart. A bit overwhelming, I suppose, but nothing I haven’t seen before—I’ve been the wallflower at celebrity-studded parties Gavril’s dragged me to, nothing terribly novel about gawking at recognizable faces. Zelda Kuhn, host of
Buy, Fuck, Sell
is talking with the Republican whip from Texas. Christ, there’s a lot of power gathered here—

I drift to the blue room for a drink, the blue room easy enough to find—a dining hall with expansive walls papered in royal blue damask. I pluck sushi from a passing tray—the waitresses look like they’ve been bused in from a modeling agency rather than a catering company, as much a decoration here as the Louis XIV chairs and oversize landscapes in gilt frames. The dining room table’s been converted into a bar and a waiter pours me a finger of brandy. I swallow quickly, cutting the edge off my anxiety. He pours another. Waverly’s not playing the Gatsby tonight—no melancholia for his lost wife and daughter—he’s practically giddy with his guests, if anything, glad-handing and laughing, already a bit sloppy with drink. Difficult not to notice when he corners one of the waitresses in a dim hallway and kisses her hard enough to force her head against the wall, massaging her breasts through the front of her uniform while she holds a tray of champagne flutes, trying to keep them from spilling.

One of the guests watches me—she’s across the room, leaning against the blue damask, her silk gown the color of cream, her hair dyed a rich Albion-shade of crimson. She sends gentle pings my way. Vaguely familiar, but her profile’s blanked and I can’t quite place her. I’m meant to notice her—I feel she’s like an invitation, if I want her, but I can’t help but feel repelled by the gag. She’s meant to resemble Albion with that red hair—did Waverly do this? Timothy? She knows I’ve noticed her. She accepts a drink from a passing waitress. She leaves the blue room and I’m invited to follow, but I hesitate. I finish off my brandy and go for a refill. The last glance I catch of her is so similar to Albion I’m convincing myself there’s a glitch in the Adware, that maybe there is no woman here, that maybe I’ve spent too much time studying Albion and now I’m hallucinating her.

I leave the blue room and find her—she leads me down a frosted glass hallway lined with black statues of nude women on white pedestals. Another hall—I’ve lost her somewhere in this maze of rooms, the design eighteenth century in style, stuffy despite the sleek modernity of the architecture. Framed photographs are arranged on a decorative mantel—many are of Waverly as a young man, his hair a dark sweep, his eyes the same color as the sea behind him. Most of these pictures were taken on the bow of a sailboat called, of all things,
The Daughter of Albion.
I can’t quite place the reference—Housman? Tennyson? Scroll through my e-library and search the
Norton Anthology—
find the poem:
Blake, William. Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
A few photographs show a woman, Waverly’s wife, I assume but can’t be sure. She’s younger than Waverly, but not by much—handsome rather than beautiful, with a square jaw and chestnut-colored curls. She appears only twice in these pictures, glancing at the camera but never smiling. There aren’t pictures of his children here, no images of the two sons I found listed in the census and none of his daughter. I roam through to another room and find the woman I was following sipping a drink lounging on a settee.