Tomorrow and Tomorrow (37 page)

I keep a filing cabinet for all the printouts I’ve made at the library—cached streams about Simka’s case, commentaries from DC legal analysts. I bought a whiteboard just like Kucenic’s that I’ve filled with starting points, suppositions about what might have happened, how I can prove that Waverly framed Simka, but I can’t figure it out—there’s nothing, no leads. Without Adware, I’ve taken to writing Simka letters, actual letters, addressing them care of his prison—I don’t know if he receives them or not. I never write a return address, I never specify who I am and am careful to leave out details of my life. I write about my recovery, mostly, that I use a cane when I walk, that my hand never healed correctly.

After one of my walks around the field, I pour myself coffee and cook up toast and a scrambled egg. My aunt joins me, splits her grapefruit with me, and asks if I’d like to go out to the studio with her.

“You want to see?” she asks, her English much better than Gav’s.

“I’d love to,” I tell her.

My aunt’s converted the barn into a print shop—nothing too fancy, just drywall and space heaters, a raised floor in case there’s ever a leak, fluorescent tubes like a lattice of light suspended from the roof slats. She opens the wide double doors for fresh air, but even so the place smells like ink and astringent chemicals, old wood and wet hay. Gavril used this barn as his studio when he was making art, and some of his things are still here, stashed in the corner—televisions, speaker parts, old computers still in their boxes. The rest of the barn is taken up with my aunt’s printing equipment—several presses of different sizes, cabinets filled with a rainbow of ink.

“Over here,” she says, leading me to her worktable—a massive wood slab with benches suitable for a mead hall. She’s a wood-block printer primarily, and her worktable’s covered with carving tools and wood panels for different steps of the layered printing process. Her work is fanciful, hyperdetailed, lush—mostly children’s book illustrations. She’s working on a series for a new Czech translation of the Brothers Grimm.

“I’ll use you as a model for the good prince,” she says. “He loses his eyes in the brambles, no? So I’ll model him after you, put your troubles with your eye to some good use—”

“All right, but my modeling work doesn’t come cheap—”

“I know, I know,” she says. “Strudel. More strudel—”

She’s especially interested in showing me a press she calls her “jobber,” a cast-iron old thing that looks like an overgrown typewriter.

“Letterpress,” she says. “For your poetry. You can work when I work—”

My aunt hands me two keys on a ring, the smaller key for the type-case drawers, the larger for the cabinet stocked with her expensive paper. “Here,” she says, pulling a drawer from the type case and setting it on a secondary worktable near the jobber—the drawer’s filled with metal blocks, each bearing a letter in a different font, capitals and lowercases.

“Easy,” she says, showing me how to fit each letter into the composing stick, how to tie off the galley. She spells out
John Dominic Blaxton lives here
, then shows me how to ink the letters and run it through the press.

“For your door,” she says, handing me the print. “Now you try. Something simple for first one—”

I rummage through the typefaces, picking out metal blocks—difficult with my hands the way they are, but my aunt helps. The heft of letters in my palm is comforting, somehow, like language become sculptural, tangible. I’m drawn to a blocky Cloister Black font, picking out uppercase letters. I’m not sure what I’m trying to spell until I collect the first two letters,
M-O
, then find the others,
O-K
.

MOOK.

“What’s mook?” my aunt asks once we’ve finished the print, that single black word in the middle of a bone-white page.

“I’m not sure,” I tell her.

—

I have trouble sleeping, so I spend the dead hours sitting on the front porch bundled in a quilt, staring into midnight and drinking brandy and milk, probably drinking too much, but I can’t relax until I’ve nudged myself into a dull buzz. I think about Mook. What he must have thought when I started finding those traces, tracking Albion like I was following a thread through a labyrinth, unraveling all the work he’d done to hide her. He knew about the Christ House. He knew about Timothy and Waverly and he knew about Hannah’s murder, maybe of other murders. He was recruited into this terror just like I was, and didn’t know what to do when he peeled away the surface story and found Waverly’s legacy of dead women, just like I don’t know what to do now—so he made that monument in Pittsburgh, the geocached installation of Hannah’s death because he couldn’t turn away from the evil he’d uncovered but he was too afraid to expose it, was too invested in helping Albion disappear, maybe he loved her. Will I just let this pass? For all his threats, for his deletion of Theresa, Mook was probably terrified of me—he probably thought I was one of them, one with Waverly. I hate him for what he did to me, for what he did to Theresa, I hate him—but I understand, too. I finish my brandy and milk and pour another finger from the bottle and wish Mook was here with me to help me think this through. I wish he was still alive.

Monuments to the dead—

The next time my aunt drives to Domažlice I check out a library tablet and log into my old e-mail account—someone’s been through my in-box, it looks like, some recent messages have been opened, others deleted. Risky to log in like this, in case Waverly’s monitoring the account, so I make it quick—sifting through old message folders until I find the poetry manuscript Twiggy once sent to me. I print out the thirty-five pages of her work.

My aunt works early in the morning, but I don’t make it into the studio until the afternoon. I bring her a fresh thermos of coffee. She pauses in her work to help me get started with the jobber and answers my questions, gives me advice about printing technique. I only make small edits to Twiggy’s manuscript, fixing typos or correcting obvious mistakes, then design each page for the letterpress by stacking every letter in the composing stick until I form her words. I begin my printing. I start with the first poem of hers that I read:

I reached for you this morning but you were gone.

My plan is to produce a limited-edition chapbook, no more than a hundred copies of her work. I’m slow at this, but I find the process calming—assembling the text, inking the letters. It takes me a full day to create two pages, sometimes a few days for a longer page of text. I pull each sheet and hang them to dry on lines that crisscross the barn, the studio starting to resemble a ship with sails unfurled.

Gavril and Kelly have flown in for the week. My aunt showers him with kisses. “Ma, Ma,” he says, wiping wet smudges from his cheeks and forehead.

My aunt’s warm with Kelly, but formal—still measuring each other, I suppose. They can’t quite connect, is all—Kelly a little too urban sophisticate, my aunt a hayseed hippie. They do their best bonding over food, Kelly a health-food obsessive and my aunt a champion of the farm-to-fork movement—they’re making plans for a trip into Prague, to try a raw-food tapas bar a friend of my aunt’s opened a few months ago.

I pull my cousin aside. “Gav, I need to talk with you—”

“Sure,” he says. “Can we go for a walk?”

I use the translator
app on my cell, holding it to my ear whenever Gavril talks—regaling me with tales of London nightlife, his contract negotiations with
Vogue
. He waxes rhapsodic over his love for Kelly. “I want to marry her,” he says. “Think of the cute little Gavrils we could make—”

The dropping temperature’s affecting my leg, cramping me up quicker than usual. We walk the driveway, turn left along the edge of the road. When we reach the forsythia, an unkempt riot of browning leaves and branches, Gavril says, “I think I still have some
Playboy
s buried in Tupperware over here. We can try to find them—”

Gavril digs around beneath the bush for ten minutes at least before he starts worrying that his mother might have found his
Playboy
s and thrown out the issues.

“It’s all right if she did,” I tell him. “You’re a grown man—”

“Hm,” he says, resuming his search, using a stick to poke deeper into the frigid clay. “Maybe I’ll come back in the summer when it’s not so hard to dig—”

“Listen, Gav, I have something I need to ask you—”

He stops digging, wipes his hands on his coat. “Sure, Domi. Anything—”

“You said you have some people who’d be interested in that stuff I sent you? The footage about the young woman who was killed?”

“Absolutely,” he tells me. “Mika Bronstein, he’s a producer for
Buy, Fuck, Sell America
at CNN. He was very interested—still is. In fact, he texted me about a week ago saying I’m an asshole for teasing him with celebrity gossip, then holding out—”

“I want you to release it,” I tell him, not sure if this is the right thing to do even as I’m asking.

“Why?” he asks, scraping at the dirt again for his
Playboy
s. “All of this bullshit is finally behind you. Why do anything? Leave well enough alone. Let it go—”

“I’ve been drinking too much,” I tell him. “I can’t sleep because I think of her—”

“The redhead?”

“No. The woman I found,” I tell him. “I wake up in the middle of the night and think her body’s on the floor beside my bed. Just down there, and I’m paralyzed thinking about her, not even questioning why her body would be there, just certain, absolutely certain, that if I looked over the edge of my bed I’d see her covered in ants—”

“You sound like you need another Simka in your life—”

“I want justice for her,” I tell him.

After dinner, we linger around the kitchen table with beer and wine, hunks of my aunt’s honey-wheat brown bread and sharp cheese. It’s started to snow—icy flurries that clatter against the kitchen windows. We talk until well past midnight, my aunt still awake in the other room, working on her cross-stitch, listening to Emil Viklický’s piano cover of “A Love Supreme.” Kelly’s gone to bed hours ago, and soon Gavril says he’s heading upstairs to join her.

“One last thing,” I say as he’s rinsing out our glasses in the sink. “When you release that footage, I need you to tell your producer friend that you received it from a man called Mook—”

CNN International breaks the story, but within a few minutes other networks have picked up the footage—I’m watching on my aunt’s television, drinking milk and brandy. BBC Europe, CT24 from Prague, Sky News, Al Jazeera—nearly every channel I flip through shows uncensored video of the murder stream, of Waverly screaming that Hannah’s no more holy than roadkill, of Timothy stabbing her twenty-four times. American officials say the evidence is being authenticated, that President Meecham has been briefed and is evaluating the situation. Waverly’s file photo flashes on-screen. Hannah on a constant loop, zoom shots of Hannah’s genitals, her breasts—zoom shots of her dying face, talking heads discussing whether or not her face expresses orgasm, whether or not her rape and murder were on some level consensual. A remix set to hip-hop of Waverly’s autotuned voice, singing, “You’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy.” Numb with shock that Hannah’s murder is going viral, that I did this to her. Hannah’s life’s exposed—pictures and vids from high school boyfriends, intimate after-prom footage sold to the streams, big paydays for Hannah Massey sex tapes, producers begging on-air for
newsworthy
footage. Naked. Sex tapes. Homemade. Beach vacations, headshots, ex-boyfriend spy cam footage. Interviews with Hannah’s extended family in Ohio, the same people who’d filed the insurance claim I’d investigated—they’ve already signed off for Hannah to appear on
Crime Scene Superstar
, already thrilled to see she’s scoring high in the pre-rankings, already discussing what they’ll do with the prize money if she wins.

I swig the rest of the bottle of brandy, then stumble outside in the vast lawn, the alcohol lifting me but I collapse. A light snow. The grass is frozen, prickly. I can smell the earth and wonder how many millions of worms writhe just below the surface, wriggling toward the sky to feast on me if I should die. I lie facedown for hours—
What
have I done to you? What have I done?
Beyond shivering, beyond freezing. My aunt finds me unresponsive but awake—I remember staring into the white sky.
What have I done
to you?
I don’t remember my aunt moving me inside, submerging me in a warm bath. I don’t remember the EMT’s visiting me, I don’t remember anything.

Gav calls.

“Turn on the television,” he says.

Eleven at night, drunk on rum—I turn on the living room television to reruns of
Takeshi’s Castle Revival
, Japanese women running an obstacle course, their voices dubbed over in Czech. Snow’s fallen heavily the past few days, shrouding the fields. My aunt’s in the barn, the barn lights the only brightness for miles and miles.

“What am I looking for?” I ask Gav, but flip through the news channels and see what he’s guiding me to:
“Breaking News. Shootout in Alabama.”

“I’m going to ping my mom,” he says. “Someone should be there with you—”

Helicopter shots of a sprawling farmhouse and acres of fields. Two barns, one of them on fire. A dead body’s in the yard.

“Authorities have ID’d the victim as Cormac Waverly, 36, an Alabama state trooper. At this time, Cormac Waverly is believed to have been one of the assailants in the Theodore Waverly death stream—”

“Dominic, are you all right?” my aunt asks, hurrying inside—she thinks I may have had another episode, a drunken fit or something. She’s relieved to find me sitting on the edge of the couch, even if I do have a drink in my hand. I set the drink down.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “They found him, it looks like. Waverly. There’s a shootout—”

She takes off her hat and gloves and after a few minutes leaves to brew us tea—a strong Earl Grey that reminds me of Albion, of our first night together. I wonder if she’s there in Alabama.