Tomorrow and Tomorrow (20 page)

“I can’t even guess,” I tell him. “She’s always different. She’s not just a cardboard stand-in, if that’s what you’re asking—”

“Quick scenes?” he asks.

“Hundreds of hours, but I’ve already tried tracking her. There’s nothing in the exception reports—”

“She’s a stream girl,” says Gavril. “Either a model or someone’s program. If we can find out who she is, we can track Zhou to Mook—”

“I already ran a Facecrawler on Zhou and I’m telling you there’s nothing—or, there’s really too much. Someone ghosted her, probably Mook—”

“I don’t know what that means—”

“Someone, let’s say Mook, compromised the data points that facial recognition software would use to match her face to other images of her face. Made the sign point to an incorrect referent. Mook basically made her invisible to third-party software. No exact matches so Facecrawler starts pulling results for approximate facial matches, Asian women—billions of hits. I guess I could just start sifting through the results—”

“No, no—you don’t understand what I’m telling you,” says Gavril. “This woman, Zhou, is the kind of woman I work with all the time. She’s either a fully realized simulation or she’s an actress. If she’s a sim, think of all the hours to program her—not just what she looks like but all those little unique things she does. If she’s an actress, think of the hours to film her. My guess is that she’s an actress—but either way, a professional’s involved. This bullshit you’re caught up in is someone’s full-time job, even if it’s under the table. It won’t be impossible to track her down. Show her to me—”

I show him. He downloads Three Rivers Net and the City-Archive app and we synch, Gavril’s soccer match receding to a point of light as western Pennsylvania coalesces and we plunge through the mountainside into the tunnel. He tells me that he’s dreamt about this tunnel, this entranceway into Pittsburgh from the airport, that it reminds him of winter flights and snow-covered midnights, of childhood Christmases spent far from home visiting his cousin and aunts and uncles in America. I want to ask him what he remembers about those Christmases at my grandmother’s house, the midnight masses at Prince of Peace, the Pittsburgh Slovak Folk Ensemble dancing in the church basement, girls in white knee-highs and burgundy dresses, their hair in braids, their thighs flashing. Gav and I couldn’t understand a word each other was saying back then, but we didn’t need words—all we needed to know about each other was that we both wanted to melt away in those beautiful girls but were both too shy to talk with them. I want to ask him if he remembers his first year visiting, when we each unwrapped Optimus Prime, huddled together beneath my grandma’s dinner table, but the tunnel ends and the City unfolds around us, the streets and rivers and bridges like a dazzling crosshatch of light.

I take him home.

The paisley carpet, the gauzy curtains at the far end of the apartment hallway. An Exit
light flickers above the fire doors. Room 208. Gavril had met Theresa, only once—we vacationed in Prague for a week with Gavril as our guide. I expect him to seem dazed or dismayed when I unlock the apartment door and find Zhou greeting us instead of Theresa, but Gavril only looks her over and says, “Her, right?”

Odd seeing him here, in my living room. Gavril pulls Zhou aside and asks her to take a seat on the couch. She’s wearing my wife’s plaid pajama pants and Donora T-shirt and I feel protective of her, in a way, but as she takes a seat, doing what Gavril asks her to do, the environment snaps from the gauzy sentimentality of my personal memories—with Gavril here, I can see the apartment as a built environment, an illusion, nothing more.

“Serial number?” he says, but Zhou looks at me and asks, “Who is this man?”

Gavril lifts Zhou’s T-shirt above her abdomen and checks a spot on the underside of her right breast, checking her like a doctor might check for lumps. He lets her T-shirt fall and touches her near her collarbone.

“What’s your serial number?” he asks again and Zhou says, “Please—”

“A woman, not a sim,” says Gavril. “Sims are registered, trademarked. Even pirated sims have telltale signs of the engines they’ve cribbed—little codes or abraded markings beneath the breast area where the serial numbers are required to go, or on the collarbone—up here. There’s nothing like that on Zhou—”

“So she doesn’t have markings—”

“The people who create sims, the good ones, spend more of their budgets outthinking software pirates than they do in creating the sims in the first place,” he says. “It’s difficult to get rid of a bar code—”

“There are workarounds. Or custom—”

“Maybe . . . but do you realize how much fucking money it would take to create a sim this lifelike running on a custom engine?” he says. “Not only the work involved but the red tape, the laws. We’re talking megacorporation money, or state-sponsored money, if even then—but it’s not just a question of money. Look at Zhou—look at how she interacts with the environment, with us. She’s so perfect—so realistic. No one creates stuff this realistic, that’s why human models still have work—”

“Waverly has significant resources, maybe Mook does, too—”

“You aren’t listening,” says Gavril.

“We’re assuming Mook is the one inserting Zhou into the Archive, but it might be Waverly,” I tell him. “Waverly could have access to a lifelike, custom sim if he needed one—”

“I know who Waverly is, and he’s rich as fuck, but let me give you some context. A few years ago I was brought in as a consultant for PepsiCo after they’d fucked up their marketing—their idea was this whole virtual worlds component to their branding, so you could drink a Pepsi and enter this PepsiLand of the mind. They wanted the place populated with gorgeous women, of course, so they hired programmers to create sims. They wanted women created from scratch—they thought it would give them more control, more branding opportunities. The campaign was a disaster, though—we’re talking a marketing directive from a major corporation with a team of top-flight programmers and all the women they created looked like—like gum. Fake. They brought me in and the first thing I did was recommend they scrap the sims and vid real women but the suits wouldn’t let go of their brainchild so they stuck to their guns and the whole thing crumbled. Look at Zhou, though. She’s perfect—there’s nothing fake about her. Your Zhou’s a model or an actress working somewhere, you can be sure of that. Let me see more of her—”

At the Spice Island Tea House, Zhou’s revealing that the doctor ran an advanced amino test and told her we’re going to have a daughter. Gavril checks the tags of her clothes. “Bullshit H&M,” he announces, noting what she’s wearing and requesting a catalog match through the Adware. Coming home from Uni-Mart, in the sweltering night when Theresa and I sat in the wind of the box fans, Gavril looks over Zhou’s clothing, and in Albion’s apartment Gavril watches Zhou in her loop, infinitely preparing for her party, adjusting her earring as she crosses the room. Gavril follows her from the shower to the bedroom, observing her as she dresses and undresses.

“Something called Dollhouse Bettie,” he says, after inspecting the lace of her lingerie.

He examines her mantis-green dress, first checking for a tag, then tapping into the copyright and Consumer Protection Act information, strings of serial numbers he seems able to read.

“House of Fetherston,” he says, after helping Zhou zip up the back of her dress, then helping her undress as the loop repeats. “Look here, at the stitching. And this embroidery around the hem. That’s fucking trademarked—”

Gavril’s seen enough. I take him to the 61C Café in Squirrel Hill, an old haunt, finding a table in the courtyard on a summer night, the courtyard edged with sunflowers, strings of lights suspended above us. Gavril multitasks a patch in the Archive so he can stream the end of his soccer match, Dukla Praha scoring just as we’re settling in, making this one a rout. He tells me he knows people who work with House of Fetherston, that he’s already seen their newest collection but doesn’t recognize Zhou’s particular pieces. He wonders if they’re prototypes or scrapped designs, or simply haven’t been released yet.

“I can find out,” he says.

iLux accessing my account blends my memories into this night—Zhou joins us, a tweed skirt and knee-high boots, a cardigan over a Phipps Conservatory T-shirt about the African Grape Tree that reads
I’m Not Dead . . . I’m Dormant!
She sits with us, dipping biscotti into her chai. Gavril studies her.

“She’s here because I’m remembering nights when Theresa and I sat here—”

“I understand,” says Gavril. “She’s welcome—”

“Mook could have done anything to Theresa,” I tell him. “He could have made her a horror show, or he could have deleted her and left all the gaps—but he’s inserted Zhou so that I can’t track him. Skillful insertions make it difficult to track—”

Gavril’s not listening. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says, continuing some conversation he was having with me only in his head. “I’m sure your wife was very stylish for someone from Pittsburgh—”

“I guess so—”

“But whenever you show me Zhou substituting for your wife, she’s wearing clothes like these, generic things, things she could buy from Target or H&M or wherever your wife shopped, clothes probably pulled directly from your memories and filled in by the Archive’s corporate sponsors for historical accuracy. When you show me Zhou substituting for Albion, however, she wears unique clothes. She’s wearing high fashion, very interesting pieces—”

“What does that tell you?” I ask him.

“Let me make a call,” he says.

Waiting at the gates, Dulles International. Gavril’s flight to London departed on time earlier this morning but my flight’s delayed because of weather, an unexpected squall that’s iced the wings. The passengers are glued to the feeds, waiting to be seated, streaming CNN.

Buy America! Fuck America! Sell America!

CNN cuts to rolling blackouts in Quebec, a Wisconsin teacher gangbanged by her eighth grade class, elderly men dying in Mississippi floods, NASCAR burns into trackside crowds.

Gavril invited me to drinks the other night. I told him I didn’t want to go out but he insisted—he rarely insists. He told me to meet him at the Wonderland Ballroom. Our table cluttered with beer bottles, cartoons on the label augs, buzzed and feeling snapped on a microdose of brown sugar. A chemical giddiness stripping back layers of depression—laughing at almost everything Gavril said, everything around me. Face-pinned club kids and their girls inked in augged tattoos, dolphins arcing from ocean sprays and fairies fluttering in glitter. Gavril said he wanted to get me plastered. I told him I was already plastered.

“More plastered,” he said.

A waiter arrived with a bottle of absinthe and set our table with glassware and sugar cubes.

“You’ll think I’m a fucking genius,” Gavril told me. “House of Fetherston’s headquartered in San Francisco. Dollhouse Bettie is a boutique line of lingerie also designed in San Francisco. So I called a friend of mine on the West Coast, an editor at
Sick
, this L.A. fashion zine. I told him about Zhou and Dollhouse Bettie and these outfits that looked like unreleased House of Fetherston designs. I sent him images of Zhou. He got back to me in an hour. Here, have a drink—”

Gavril held the bottle of absinthe to me—teardrop-shaped, the augged label interacting with my Adware, the branding Mucha-inspired, art nouveau swirls around a lesbian orgy. The women kissed, stroking one another, writhed—and there, in the middle of the group, her hair like black tendrils of ink intertwining with the stylized frame of the design, was Zhou.

“Shit,” I said. “Holy shit—”

“She’s an actress in San Francisco named Cao-Xing,” he said, pronouncing it Sow-Sing, saying, “she’s American, born in Kansas, moved out to San Francisco. Goes by Kelly Lee. Small-time gigs. She’s hardly appeared in anything, but she’s registered with a couple different agencies—”

Gavril lent me enough money for a ticket to San Francisco and a hotel, with plenty left over for an extended stay if it comes to that. He told me he’s flying to London early, to lie low until our situation settles down. There’s a crush at the gates—nearly six hours to work my way through the queue. Staring into the streams: another murder in DC, another woman, her head and hands cut from her body. She was found in a dumpster trashed outside the Fur Nightclub. Despite six DJs and a raucous party, no one saw a thing. A flight attendant scans my Adware, checks my flight pass. The Channel 4 stream says that despite the lack of fingerprints or dental records, District police have identified the victim from a DNA match using her blood—she was living in DC from Manchester, England, on a student visa for Georgetown. The woman’s name was Vivian Knightley. A part-time model to finance her studies, the streams flash American Apparel adverts of an ethereal blonde in a soccer jersey belted like a dress and knee-high tube socks—Twiggy.

“Oh, God—”

“Is everything all right?” says the attendant.

“It’s horrible,” I tell her.

I file toward the rear of the plane, searching for my seat, Twiggy’s death reverberating in my mind and hovering in my eyes. Christ, I’m near tears. Twiggy’s crime scene pics illuminate my sight, headless, her arms severed at the forearms—red hair, that Albion-red shade of hair dyed for the party—I’m nauseous, remembering her. This dead woman, pictures from England, her modeling stint. She was a poet, they’re reporting, e-zine servers crashing from gawkers interested in her work, they post she was a genius fucking poet and she’s already a front-runner on
Crime Scene Superstar
, with the highest instant-fuckability score the show’s ever seen. Every passenger on this plane’s streaming tabloids, mouths gaping in titillated shock at Twiggy’s body, at performance vids of Twiggy masturbating while reciting “I reached for you this morning but you were gone,”
staring out the windows over the wings and the runway at Twiggy’s face, every passenger consuming this young woman, this beautiful young woman, oh God, oh God. Primary school graduation pictures. Pictures of Vivian with friends in Paris. CNN streams fuck-vids sold by ex-boyfriends, Twiggy the top story, millions worldwide watching her fucked and be fucked, watching footage of her body pulled from the dumpster, laid out in the alley, streaming autopsy photographs, gray-skinned, flaccid breasts, nipples the color of stone, veins visible, the stump of neck and stumps of arms, death shots and money shots, shots of her smiling face, streams of American Apparel ads, giving head, lesbian fucks with other models, behind-the-scenes photo footage, set for superstardom, they report, what a waste, what a waste, oh God, I collapse into my seat and close my eyes, I close my eyes to it all, to block it out, and I can no longer see but I still see her in my mind, the image of her face burned into my mind’s eye, her body beautiful, her beautiful hair like light, but in my mind I see her hair dyed that Albion color of blood, all that blood-red hair, and see her body cut apart, another missing woman, see her lips and eyes, oh God, I dig my nails into my scalp, Oh God, and want to rip it out, rip it all out, rip this world from me.