Tomorrow and Tomorrow (19 page)

Mook blinks out of existence, the house fire’s extinguished, the oceanic silence of the snow-filled night is painful to my ears. What has he done to her? Sift through my memories—I search for Theresa, but she’s nowhere. Through snow, Christmas lights hang from the branches of barren trees. The Spice Island Tea House. Layering, curry and candle wax. Our table, but Theresa’s seat is blurred, smudged like a corruption in sight.

“Theresa—”

She ran some blood work, she will say. She will tell me about the advanced amino test, our little girl, but the only sound I hear is a mumbled deformity of speech emitted from the empty blur, nothing at all like Theresa’s voice, nothing at all. She’s deleted now—Mook’s deleted her—every memory of her, every trace, every piece of her life that I clung to here, blotted and smeared.

Our apartment, the Georgian. Paisley carpets and walls stained the color of tea. Room 208. There is nothing left here,
nothing
—the foyer empty, only shadows remain.

“Theresa?”

My voice echoes in the emptiness. No one in the living room, no one in the kitchen. Our bedroom’s empty. I lie in bed and wait for her, wait for Theresa to undress in the half-light of the hallway light, to lie with me. I close my eyes to remember her body against mine, to wrap my arms around her and feel her, Theresa, oh God, Theresa, to feel the soft movement of her body, and I reach out my hand and feel her body but when I open my eyes I only see Zhou.

“Slow down,” says Gavril. “Are you all right? Tell me what’s happening—”

“Fuck, man. I’m fucked—”

“Where are you? Can you make it over?”

A Metro bus—
connected
. Layering, basil curry and candle wax. Forget about everything but my memories of Theresa, but already my memories of her seem thinner. The connection’s weak and the bus jostles and I’m in DC instead of Pittsburgh.
Reconnect.
The City loads and I access my memories of Theresa but see Zhou.
Zhou.
I can’t remember my wife anymore. I buzz up to Gavril’s, expecting Twiggy, but another woman opens the door, a pixie with a hentai faerie avatar—pinkish hair and jiggling cartoon breasts. “Upstairs,” she says, sparkling faerie wings and purple lipstick that stinks like grape Kool-Aid. The living room’s filled with Gavril’s models playing a space shooter on the sim, following the Amis guide
Invasion of the Space Invaders
,
storming the terrain of Mars—the apartment’s cast the color of rust. Other models are in the kitchen, snorting lines of cocaine, their faces hideous in the Martian light, one girl’s nose raw with a trickle of blood, but everything’s hilarious and they’re shrieking with laughter. The hentai faerie ignores me for the cocaine, and I wander back to Gavril’s darkroom.

“You look like shit,” he says.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Sugar—”

“Ah fuck, man,” he says. “It’s been ten years, brother—ten years since you lost her. Give this up, Quixote. You can stay on my mother’s farm for as long as you want. Clear your head. Or come to London with me when I go. I’ll pay. Let’s put all this shit behind you—”

“I need to fucking—I just need, Gav, please, you don’t fucking understand—”

“Fuck you, then—”

Two pills of brown and I swallow them whole. “Take it to the kitchen,” he says, “I’m working right now.” Ignoring the coked girls who’ve fallen in a giggling heap beneath the kitchen table, I sit in the corner, on the cool tile, the warped-space sounds of their video game interfering with the immersion—

Autoconnect to Gavril’s Wi-Fi, the burn hits and the Pittsburgh tunnel’s like swimming lights, I’m rushing through and hold my breath until the tunnel ends and I’m hovering midair above three black rivers. I swim down through the air and touch the surface of the river—I pull myself through the skin of water into the dark, descend through the depths to drown. The river swallows me, the water covering over me but I can still breathe, of course I can still breathe—it’s not real, nothing is real. Nothing is real. Looking up at the City through the rippling surface of the river, the lights of Pittsburgh waver like it’s the City that’s been drowned. I close my eyes. I want to die, but the City isn’t set up for suicides, and so when I open my eyes I’m standing in Shadyside, in summer. I’m here—

Vibrancy of the drugs—Jesus Christ, it’s all so real. The Uni-Mart—aisles of Doritos and Ruffles and Fritos and Combos. The faces of the cashiers are immortal here, the boy with a neck tattoo taking my money and handing me rumpled, sweaty cash from the drawer. I thank him and stuff the bills into my pocket. Walking home with a gallon of milk in a plastic bag. Nearing midnight, insects swarm the streetlights. A midsummer swelter. Our apartment was never air-conditioned, but box fans beat in the open windows and make a comfortable-enough draft. I take my shirt off in the foyer, sweating in the dark midnight room. Theresa’s already asleep—I remember Theresa asleep, but when I go to her now, the body in our bed is Zhou’s.

“Theresa,” I say, and Zhou turns to me like she recognizes that name.

“Where did you go?” she says, speaking words I remember Theresa speaking.

“Picked up some milk so we can have cereal tomorrow—”

Theresa’s things are still here. Her container gardens on the windowsills. Framed Audubon prints of mourning doves and flamingos. The book she was reading is facedown on the coffee table—
Zoya
,
Danielle Steel.

“Theresa—”

“Come to bed,” she says.

I open the refrigerator door to put away the milk and squint into the harsh white light. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness when I come back to bed and for a moment I see Zhou as Theresa, Theresa’s body lit by the moonlight, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, Zhou’s body returns and Zhou’s face fades in. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, trying to remember Theresa here, trying to force my memory of Theresa back into this place. Zhou sleeps with me just like Theresa would have slept with me, her body nestled into mine, her legs crossed over mine.

“Theresa,” I say, but Zhou answers, “Yes—”

I wake.

Gavril’s moved me to the bathroom, stretched me out in the tub, propped my head up with pillows. Cottony, my mouth—I’ve vomited down the front of my clothes. Face aching like someone’s punched me. I stand—shaky. He’s left a clean T-shirt for me, a yellow jersey—
Washington Redskins, est. 1937.
iLux lights to the jersey augs and Agatha, the Redskins cheerleader who implanted my iLux, flashes in the bathroom with me, a cheer routine from her vids, spandex high kicks disappearing through the bathroom ceiling. “Off, off,” I tell it, wincing at the stadium lights and reverbed crowd noise. She flickers out. Splitting goddamn headache. I splash water in my face. Whispers of bruises have formed under my eyes and blood’s dried on my nostrils. The apartment’s emptied out, Gavril’s party paused for the time being. Gavril’s in the living room, watching soccer. He turns when he hears me.

“Christ,” he says. “
Šípková Ruženka,
I thought you were going to fucking die—”

“I didn’t—”

I sit with him, head pounding but dull. I grab a handful of Fritos from the bowl but just hold them, stomach flopping at the thought of actually eating one.

“You started screaming in the kitchen—the girls got scared,” he says. “You were, like, slamming your face against the wall. Freaking the fuck out. Fucking blood everywhere—”

“Gavril, I’m all right—”

“I voiced your doctor friend, Simka—Once you started snapping out of it, I voiced back and told him not to bother coming and so he cussed me out for a half hour because he says I enable you. He still wants to take a look at you, but I never told him where I live—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your place so quiet—”

“A few girls are coming around for work a little later,” he says. “Crash here as long as you want. I don’t think you should terrorize the streets in the shape you’re in—”

“I’ll just collect my head a bit,” I tell him. Gavril gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge and hands them to me, telling me to drink both. Even the thought of swallowing Gatorade is enough to make me gag—but I sip and let the liquid slip over my tongue.

“Drink up,” he says. “Hydration. I mean it, brother—”

“Gavril, I have some things I need to tell you—”

“Say anything—”

“That job for Waverly’s gone sour,” I tell him. “The woman I was tracking. Everything’s fucked up—”

I tell him about Mook, about the Christ House in Pittsburgh where I followed Timothy and Hannah Massey. I tell him about Timothy’s drawings of dead women and the cops that assaulted Kucenic. I tell him that they’ve taken Theresa from me.

He’s stunned by everything I’m mixed up in. He rubs both hands over his bristly head and the shag of his beard stubble, pacing the room.

“You’re in serious shit,” he says.

“Listen to me, Gavril, this is important: I’ve put together a collection of evidence linking Dr. Timothy Reynolds to the death of Hannah Massey. If anything happens to me, you need to get it out to the streams—”

We set up an anonymous drop box using faked contacts, encrypt it with a mirror site, share the password—easy to trace documents I put into the drop box, but impossible to trace who retrieves them. I copy the files about Hannah’s murder. Gavril pulls a bottle of Sorokin vodka from the freezer and pours himself a glass. He offers some for me and laughs when I recoil at the idea of liquor.

“Sorokin will resurrect you, no matter how dead you feel,” he says.

“I should be dead already,” I tell him. “They’re going to fucking kill me, Gavril, because I found that fucking body but it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fucking fault—”

“You won’t die,” he says, “we can figure this out, figure out what to do—”

“I already know what to do. I need to recover Theresa so she can live on in the Archive. I need to help Hannah—”

My Adware’s a different region code than the soccer broadcast on Gavril’s
Praha
stream, so the play-by-play’s like excited gibberish. He finishes the first glass of vodka before pouring himself a second.

“Dominic, you know I love you,” he says, “but you piss me off sometimes. You’re thinking about that dead girl, thinking about your wife. You’re obsessed, Dominic. You’ve always been fucking obsessed with grief. Let them go, Domi. Let them go, steer clear of this. We’ll lay low until these people forget about you—”

“I can’t just let her disappear—”

“Is that all you can fucking think of right now? That’s what all this shit boils down to?” Gavril’s eyes swim with a sudden buzz from slugging down his vodka. “Theresa’s dead, but you have a life to live. I’m here for you. You have a family. We have lives to live, with you—”

“I know,” I tell him. “I know—”

“No, you don’t fucking know,” he says. I’ve never seen him quite like this, fraying at the edges. He pours himself more Sorokin and his hand shakes, splashing vodka on the table. “You almost fucking died in my kitchen,” he says. “From a fucking overdose. And now you fucking tell me you’re mixed up in this bullshit? What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”

“That’s enough,” I tell him.

“And now you’re dragging me into it,” he says. “Giving me files about a dead girl that might get me killed and all this fucking means for you is that you can’t mope about your dead fucking wife or some dead fucking girl you don’t even know—”

“Fuck you—”

“No, fuck you, Dominic. Fuck you. That shit was ten years ago. Enough. Open your fucking eyes. You can work for me, you know that. Anytime you want, I’ll set you up with a plum job, working with beautiful women all day, every day. But what do you do? Get involved with these fucking people because they promise they’ll let you live in the fucking past—”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I tell him.

“Go to the fucking cops,” he says. “It’s not more complicated—”

“I already told you why I can’t go to the cops. I told you what those cops did to Kucenic—”

“All the cops? They’re working with all the fucking cops?”

“Gav—”

He grabs me by the shirt and I hear fabric rip, setting off all the jersey’s augs—the Redskins cheer squad splays through the room like a crimson and yellow Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of legs and breasts and smiling teeth and flowing hair and shimmering golden pom-poms.

“I don’t want anything to fucking happen to you,” he screams.

“At least give me a different shirt before you kick my ass—”

“Shit,” says Gav, laughing.

He gives me a cardigan that covers up the jersey augs. He tells me he knows people who can hit the streams with my evidence if it comes to that, people in the tabloids who trade in true crime and the gruesome deaths of young women, but we both know this gambit of threatening to go public with the scant evidence we have is only short-term protection, that it escalates the situation rather than tamps it down.

“You need to find Mook,” says Gavril.

“Fuck him. Mook took Theresa from me—”

“Think rationally,” says Gavril. “Think: from everything you’ve told me, he’s not working with Timothy or Waverly. He might know how to protect you, how to hide from them—or at least he might have a few ideas to fuck them over. ‘I know hate and ice is great,’ or something like that—whatever Frost said. Right? Right?”

“That’s right,” I tell him.

“If you can track him down—what’s the word—it’s, um,
rošáda
, um, in chess—”

iLux catching up, the translation apps presenting options: “‘Castling,’” I tell him.

“That’s right,” he says. “Better attack options through defensive movement. Castling—”

“And if I find Mook, I can also get Theresa back—”

Gavril cracks his knuckles, collects himself with a deep breath. “Maybe that, too,” he says.

Gavril asks for details about what I’ve told him—he wants me to rehash everything for him. He wants to know about Zhou. He asks me whether Zhou is always the same when I encounter her, or if she’s different each time. Different hairstyles, different clothes? He wants to know if I’m able to add up all the hours I’ve experienced with her, specifically “unique hours,” he calls them, where she does or says things differently from the last time I’d encountered her—different gestures, different scenes.