Tomorrow and Tomorrow (25 page)

Television’s no good, so I pay for sat-connect to lose myself in the streams.
Cricket
appears in block green font, iLux in gold cursive, Holiday Inn in retro-1950s lettering. Shitty offers and add-ons before I reach the streams. Mook’s body whenever I close my eyes and a barren sickness at reliving his zebra-slashed face. Prime-time listings—
Chance in Hell
’s on tonight, the season finale. I hit the vending machine for a dinner of cherry Pop-Tarts, Ho Hos and Pepsi. Walking the hotel hallways, I feel the dead body’s somehow still present with me—like it’s a black spider I’ve seen slip from view behind the furniture but know is still there. It’s there, across the city, but it’s there. Gwendolyn Tucker on
Chance in Hell
,
two-time CMA performer of the year, eighteenth birthday announced on the
Grass on the Field
blog. Eating the crusts of the Pop-Tarts first, then the middle, streaming Gwendolyn Tucker as she fucks her “Regular Joe,” a roofer from Tennessee. Recaps of how the Regular Joe entered the
Chance in Hell
lottery on a whim while buying hot dogs and coffee at an Exxon, of how he survived the initial Internet and text message voting, and the elimination challenges, Jesus Christ, I’ve dealt with images of the dead for so long I thought I’d be numb to something like this, but I’ve never seen a ruined corpse so close, never had to smell something like the tang of all that blood. Camera crews highlight the Regular Joe’s hometown, a hardscrabble cluster of trailers and ratty ranch houses, and show him working his job, hammering shingles with a crew of guys, rolling from house to house in his Ford F-250 Super Duty. A Republican, a good American. He’s married, his wife’s a spitfire brunette—
Chance in Hell
shows her laughing, uncomfortable. “I feel sick about it in a way,” she says, “knowing my husband will be having sex with Gwendolyn Tucker and all, but this is
Chance in Hell
so I’m real proud of him and Lord knows we could use the money and I’m such a huge fan of her anyway.” Everything’s confused when I try to sleep, Mook’s body and crime scene images of Twiggy—Timothy’s here, Timothy’s
here
—headless and handless, of Hannah Massey lying reposed in river mud. Take it as a matter of faith that nothing exists and maybe never has. I wake up screaming—

Dr. Reynolds,

The moment you contact me, or the moment you contact my friends or family, I will release all evidence in the Pittsburgh City-Archive linking you to the death of Hannah Massey. If you leave me alone, Hannah will stay buried—

—JDB

Simka would call it PTSD. The past week and a half holed up in my hotel room, thinking every cleaning lady that pounds my door is Timothy pounding my door—thinking every car in the lot outside my window is Timothy’s car, every headlight flash is Timothy’s headlights. I spend hours peering through a slit in the curtains, taking notes about the cars pulling into the lot, parking, leaving, trying to figure which one might be his, if any. No one to turn to. A police cruiser circles through every afternoon at 3:30—it’s some schedule, some patrol routine, but I break out in cottony-mouthed panic that they’ve tracked me here. Two in the morning, three, I want to confess to the murder, confess that I murdered Mook just to end this waiting, end seeing Mook whenever I try to sleep, fitful sleep, the blood scent of his room stinking up my room when all this place really smells like is pizza boxes and coffee. I finally let the cleaning service take care of things—the room smelled fresh for about a half an hour after they left but that blood scent’s seeped into everything again. It’s all in my mind, an hallucination of blood, that’s all, that’s all.

I spend most nights talking with Simka, but all we talk about is the past—I haven’t told him that whoever killed Mook will kill me, too—Timothy—that I’m waiting for my death sentence in a Holiday Inn.

I talk with Gavril. Zhou’s been staying with him—Kelly—he’s sent pics of the two of them in London, bouncing around like tourists in love at Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye. I tell him I’ve tried to ping Kelly, to explain what’s happened, but she won’t respond.

“She thinks you killed him,” he says. “I told her that’s ridiculous, but she’s scared—”

“I didn’t kill him. Tell her I didn’t kill him—”

Despite Gav’s swagger I know he’s terrified. He tells me he’s already been in touch with some producer friends of his, a stringer for TMZ and another at CNN, who are interested in the footage of the murder.

“I’ve teased the story—high-profile businessmen, college girl sex, murder, cover-up. I told them it’s breaking fucking news about one of the richest men in America. You give the word, the story hits the streams—”

Gavril’s reviewed what I’d sent him about Hannah Massey—and now the weight of her murder bears down on him, too, I can tell, like he’s carrying a bit of radiation close to his heart. Gavril’s world is beauty and fluff and light, or should be—but he’s feeling the threat against him now, knowing that he’s been drawn into this mess because of me, because of his association with Kelly.

“Maybe you should come out here,” he says. “Maybe we can hide out for a while. I have contacts in Brazil, maybe we could head down to São Paolo together, wait this out on the beach—”

“I don’t think I can wait this out,” I tell him. “Timothy’s been waiting this out for a decade at least—I can’t last like that. You can’t. Gavril, you can’t just disappear—”

“Fuck that, brother. I’ll transfer you cash and you can buy a ticket to Heathrow. You could be here by tomorrow. We could take the train to Prague, wait at my mother’s farm—”

“I shouldn’t have mixed you up in this,” I tell him. “Christ, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what was going on—”

“I think I’m falling in love with her,” he says long after midnight.

“Kelly?”

“I think once we’re finished with the shoot tomorrow, I’ll try the Lady Chatterley thing with her. Out in the fields—”

“Christ, Gav. You’re supposed to be channeling Robert Frost—”

“This business can be cruel to the ones we love—”

When his voice ends, the early hour silence is oppressive so I turn on the TV and classical music on KDFC and stream and piece together the traces I’ve saved of Albion. Albion. Every night I wait for Mook’s body and Hannah Massey’s body and Twiggy’s body. I close my eyes—and it’s like they’re lying in bed with me, these ghosts.

Waverly once asked me to track a ghost for him. Albion. I unroll the paintings of the Christ House and spread them out on the sofa—scan them and search the universal image cache. There are hits, but only low-res matches on San Francisco art blogs, unmarked and unlabeled. E-mail the bloggers through contact pages, inquiring about these images.

I pick up a magnifying glass at Walgreens and spend hours studying each painting—obsessively detailed, the wood grain’s drawn on every board, veins drawn in on every leaf of weeds. Are these Mook’s? No signatures—the style’s much different from Mook’s usual work, more like a cubist version of Andrew Wyeth than the graffiti agitprop he’s known for. Timothy? I saw Timothy’s memory maps in Simka’s office, and even though they were good, they weren’t this detailed, this perfect. I may have found a partial fingerprint in the charcoal dust of the drawing of the front porch. Studies of a single house. Fetishizing the house. Only one of the six paintings seems to be an interior view, a view of a window with hints of trees, a faint representation of a fleur-de-lis, partially erased, the planks of an unfinished hardwood floor, but the point of view of the painting is torqued, disorienting.

I pull the comforters over my head, carving a small tunnel through the blankets for fresh air. I load the City—the pay-as-you-go’s much slower than the iLux contract-plan, so the Fort Pitt tunnel buffers and the City skyline breaks apart in a digitized blur,
buffering
, before the stream catches up and the City resolves. Greenfield loads, the Run, Saline Street to the vacant lot near Big Jim’s restaurant—I’m outside in winter, seeing my breath. I skirt the vacant lot and approach the Christ House from a side street,
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God
. The house is smoke-charred from the fire, some sort of special effect still lingering here.

The porch smells like damp soot, the front door burned black. I use Kucenic’s override codes and brace myself for another bomb blast of heat, but it never comes—just a yawning, moist smell of rot as I step inside. The house is spare. Cold. No furniture in the living room, only soot streaks and blackened ceiling beams. There’s a fireplace in the corner that had been converted to an altar, a burned wooden crucifix intact except for the missing arms of Christ. A dining room, a cut-glass chandelier melted black. I kick through ash as I walk. A kitchen without appliances, just plugs and hookups, gas lines protruding from the floor. Between the dining room and kitchen, a stairway descends to the basement. The smell that rises is dank, but that’s just my imagination feeding this place, just impressions in the iLux—I flick the light switch, but it doesn’t work. Everything is darkness. Running the length of the wall is a pipe meant to be a railing. I hold on and descend the stairs, following through into impenetrable basement darkness until my foot touches concrete. I inch ahead—water running somewhere, a trickle sound somewhere nearby. My foot touches something and I reach out—porcelain. Wet porcelain, a leaking toilet at the bottom of the stairs. I feel along the wall, concrete blocks furry with mold. I find a utility sink and a drain. I hear sounds—breathing—from somewhere in the dark.

“Albion?”

The breathing’s coming from a root cellar, but when I open the door, the room is empty. The sound of breathing is silenced. I close the door and hear the breathing again. Whoever’s here in this basement room hasn’t been archived—just her breathing.

The rooms on the second floor haven’t been burned—bedrooms up here, the fleur-de-lis wallpaper I recognize from the watercolor is faded and peeled but intact. I find Albion in the second bedroom on the right. She and Peyton Hannover lie together in a queen-size bed, their bodies gaunt and white, naked together, wrists tied with twine to the bedposts, their ankles blistered and rubbed raw from twine binding their feet together. I work to untie their wrists, but this is not real, they’re not real, and just as I untie the knots, the Archive resets and the rope is retied.

Footsteps in the hallway—Timothy. His face is much younger than the face I know—gaunt, bearded. He unbuttons his shirt and undresses, he slides naked between the women, but the moment he touches them, their heads transmogrify into pigs’ heads. Maybe that’s why Mook was here, maybe that’s why this house is burned—maybe Mook mangled these archival scenes so no one could relive them. I look at Peyton’s and Albion’s eyes, and despite their pig faces, their eyes are still women’s eyes, terrified, wounded. Timothy gropes them, but they just stare—Albion at the ceiling, Peyton at the far wall. Timothy groans, barking almost as he licks their breasts, biting their nipples and caressing them. He kisses between Albion’s legs, then thrusts into her, using his hand on Peyton. The two women turn their eyes toward each other, almost willing each other to endure Timothy’s assault. Peyton whimpers. Jesus—what am I seeing? This is preserved in the Archive—which means Timothy must have filmed himself doing this. Albion clenches her teeth to keep from crying out. I kneel beside her and look up to the ceiling where she looks. I arch my head back just as she arches her head back, and I see out the window above the bed that she can see out of—the point of view is torqued, but I can see hints of trees. The watercolor of the interior depicts this view—the paintings of the house were made by Albion.

Albion disappearing from the Archive means she was alive when Timothy and Waverly thought she had died with Pittsburgh. Who is she? Waverly claimed she was his daughter—

Albion is Mook’s client—Albion hiring Mook to delete her from the Archive, to delete scenes like this from being eternally relived—

Waverly hiring me to distract me from Hannah Massey—

Waverly hiring me to find Albion and Mook—

Tie up their loose ends—

Albion, Peyton. The explicit violence of Timothy rutting women with pigs’ heads—I can’t figure out what I’ve seen. Albion and Peyton were lovers, but here they are with Timothy. Think through: Timothy’s history of abuse, of murder. Is Albion Timothy’s wife? Peyton? That doesn’t make much sense—but they’re his victims, like Hannah Massey was his victim, maybe, like other women he’s killed or tried to kill, or wanted to. Peyton’s documented as dying in the blast, but Albion—maybe she escaped from him somehow. Maybe she escaped, but Timothy thought she was dead until she hired Mook to delete her. Maybe the act of her disappearing was enough to signal she’d never disappeared. I need to find her—

I voice House of Fetherston studios, but no one’s ever heard of Albion Waverly. I explain to the receptionist that I’m looking for someone who works there, who’d have access to clothes that haven’t officially been released—I describe what Albion looks like. I’m bounced around, office to office—soon, someone asks who I am. I try to explain why I’m calling, who I’m looking for, but she says they’ve given too much of their time already and disconnect. I search the San Francisco white pages but no Albion Waverly—no hits for
Albion
at all.

Track the artwork: a Google search is useless—too many art galleries in the greater San Francisco metro region. Thousands of red flags pinned to Street View when I search “San Francisco AND art gallery.” I get a sense of which neighborhoods might have the most galleries—Lower Haight, gentrified parts of Hayes Valley, maybe around Haight-Ashbury, the Mission District, maybe the Castro. Two of the six paintings have smears or spots of Mook’s blood, so I leave them rolled in the hotel but I bring the other four paintings with me. I try art galleries almost at random, taking an AutoCab to a neighborhood and just walking wherever GPS points me. Some galleries are of obvious no help, dark holes foul with body odor and antagonistic scenesters on the streams that can’t be bothered to even acknowledge my presence. Other galleries are more professional, try to be helpful. Refurbished spaces with white walls and paintings hung with price sheets available. Chic young women who don’t recognize the paintings I brought with me, can’t identify the artist but show me other work about “the Pittsburgh theme,” as they call it, artists with no true discernible connection to the city, using the end of Pittsburgh as a metaphor for whatever pet cause they want to indulge in—governmental control, military culture, religious intolerance, capitalism, the spiritual death of the modern age—or using the Burn as nothing more than a pretext for depicting bodies and cities in flames, faux-visionary apocalypses. Artist Statements written entirely with mock-theoretical buzzwords, incomprehensible, about the
deconstruction
and
defamiliarization
of Place, the
ambiguity of Identity
,
the
Monologism of History
,
the
Society of the Spectacle
,
the
Articulation of Desire
. Of artists co-opting our sorrow, of how artists “respond” to the oblivion of a city, as if their “response” was somehow profound or even necessary. No one I ask can identify the paintings I’ve brought to them.