Tomorrow and Tomorrow (6 page)

Theresa. In this first glimpse of her, she’s edged with light—sculpted from a video when my retinal lenses were new, before I knew how to use them properly or understood the settings and light filters.

Theresa, Theresa, oh my God, Theresa—

I kiss her, but the moment I touch her, she’s no longer her—she becomes the VR sculpt I’d commissioned, nothing more. I remember Theresa too specifically for the cheap RealPlay engine I’m using—specifically what her skin felt like or the feathery feel of her hair or how she breathed or the tickling shivers when she placed kisses on my ears. If I’d had more money, the designers could have filled out the illusion using sense impressions from my memories, but all I could afford was to choose something from their catalog of ready-mades, scrolling through mannequin figures in their studio until I settled on the body model closest to my wife. Touching this body is close to my wife, but it’s not my wife—it’s not quite her—it’s as close as fantasizing about my wife while holding another, similar, woman. I step back and look at the woman I’ve been kissing and Theresa returns to focus. She’s standing in the foyer, hazed by a corona of overexposed light. It’s her, it’s her—

“Is this the camera?” she says, noticing the new lenses in my eyes, but the scene shifts—our first Christmas in the apartment, the tree in our living room, the glow of Christmas lights reflecting from the hardwood floors and casting us in a white dim. When I kiss her, I feel the warmth of her body. Holding her, I can smell her hair, or an approximation of her hair, the licensed scent of the Aveeno shampoo she used, the approximation of her body. Wrapping paper crinkling as I crumple it into balls for the trash bag. Ornaments ring as I touch the fir boughs. The creak of the hardwood as I step. She’s opening my gift, a set of Nina Simone vinyl—she’s excited, I remember, and says she’s wanted them, that she almost bought this set just the other day. She plays the first record and fills our apartment with “Lilac Wine.”

We have dinner at the Spice Island Tea House in midwinter. Snow blankets Oakland and strings of holiday lights still illuminate the barren trees. The darkness of the restaurant interior is pierced with candlelight. Glasses of Thai iced tea. Samosas and vegetable rolls on small plates. She’s wearing her beige skirt and leather boots, a violet cardigan over a halter top embroidered with calla lilies. Layering, the wax and flame. Layering, the smell of basil curry. Candlelight reflects in her eyes.

I have something to tell you, she will say.

“I have something to tell you,” she says.

“No wine?”

“I love you,” she says. “I’m glad we’re here tonight—”

I was at the doctor’s today, she will tell me. I thought I had the flu—

“I thought I had the flu this morning,” she says.

As it turns out, she ran some blood work, she will say.

“And, Dominic, we’re going to have a little girl,” she says. “She ran the advanced amino test and we’re going to have a little girl—”

“Oh, my wonderful, dear God—”

Home through snowfall—the car parked, stepping through slush. Thrilling in my belly, wrapping my mind around having a daughter—another chance at having a daughter, trying not to remember the earlier disappointment of unexpected blood. We’d been trying to conceive since the miscarriage—something was wrong, we’d thought, sure there was something wrong with us, that we wouldn’t be able to have biological children, but now—a daughter. My daughter. Theresa already describing outfits she’d seen at Tots and Tweeds, already letting herself remember again the Strawberry Shortcake bike still in her parents’ basement. We’re genuinely happy—in the Archive, at least, we’re happy—but I remember we were trying hard to be happy, trying to push away whatever apprehension had bred in us, trying not to acknowledge that a second miscarriage was entirely possible, trying instead to re-create the innocent excitement we’d felt the first time around. Layering, ice water from snow soaking through my shoes. Layering, tires and wet asphalt. Window lights in upstairs rooms. In our bedroom, her body softer, even softer somehow, and Theresa removes her cardigan and unties her halter and I’m holding her, kissing her shoulder, please don’t let it end, but it ends. It always ends.

My half hour of Metro.net expires. The wet click of autoconnection to DC’s Wi-Fi, but it’s too spotty to reload the City. A message from Timothy’s home phone blinks in my peripheral—he’s set up a meeting with Waverly.

“I’ll be there,” I respond. “Tell him I’ll be there—”

Others have boarded the bus since I’ve been under, commuters heading home after long shifts, I guess, or students late from the library, standing in the aisles—giving me a wide berth. I respond to Twiggy’s text asking me for poetry recommendations by suggesting she track down a copy of
Ouroboros
by Adelmo Salomar—one of my favorite writers, a Chilean poet. Passing near Fur Nightclub, police have cordoned off New York Avenue. Everyone on the bus rubbernecks the scene. Club kids huddle near the police cruisers, mascara running in smears from their eyes and blackening their lips. What’s happened? I search
Washington City Paper
for news, but the streams blare promos for the next episode of
Chance in Hell
, season 4, and
Candid, Homemade Personals
of middle-aged women masturbating into webcams. Gazing out the window at a heavily armed cop talking to a boy with eyebrow studs and lip piercings. The club kid’s girlfriend wears fishnets and a denim G-string, her hair in wild shocks of blue tube-thick dreads that quiver in the wind. What’s going on? The boy’s profile lights long enough for me to scroll his Twitter feed, @MimiStarchild—
Body in the bathroom,
it says.
Joanna,
it says.
Found her,
it says. A twitpic of the mess: the victim stripped, the remnants of her dress binding her ankles. Blonde, but her face is ruined. She’d been bent over the toilet, hands tied to the pipes, breasts down in the water. “Jesus Christ,” I say, and close out Twitter, but the
Washington Post
feed’s already picked up the story, knocking
Chance in Hell
from the top DC trends: Joanna Kriz, a student at George Mason, found dead in Fur. Pics of her flood the streams, discovered by tabloid Facecrawlers that hacked private accounts. A gorgeous girl—a student of architecture. Jesus Christ. The
Post
feed displays 3-D renderings of her school assignments, buildings she’d designed, architectural models. Pictures flash of her high school graduation and with her family at Thanksgiving, but I’m watching her life unspool, and now I’m watching sexts she’d sent to boyfriends, found by the Facecrawlers, nude selfies posing in front of mirrors, drunk tongue-kissing a girlfriend while a crowd cheers her—within minutes the feeds are only interested in Joanna Kriz if she’s fucking or mutilated, they’ve reduced her to the essence of what the viewing public will click on and trend. I ring the bell and leave the bus, the feeds saturated with Joanna Kriz. Hail a cab, slump in the backseat—I just want to go home. Within minutes the murdered girl’s family signs with
Crime Scene Superstar
, grieving but ready for their opportunity to share their daughter’s beauty with the world and collect royalties. #Kriz trends in the feeds, critiques of the dead woman’s body—face too horsey but nice tits—rating her fuckability based on crime scene photographs. I reach my apartment, out of the range of the public Wi-Fi. Everything in my apartment is silence and the only thing I can do to fill it is cry.

The District of Columbia in late November—a golden afternoon, another round of sleet predicted for tonight. Sunlight dapples the Potomac, tourists swarm the National Mall. We share an outdoor table at the Café du Parc, at the Willard InterContinental. Everything’s burnished crimson and copper in the autumn light—stone surfaces of government buildings, cherry-red double-decker tour buses, what leaves remain in Pershing Park. Clusters of tourists chase guides waving neon pennants—desperate to see the White House through the wrought iron gates, the house set back on the chemically lush lawn, the alabaster columns and the world-famous gardens that obscure the views, the tropical fauna engineered to live even through winter, so flower-swollen it’s as if the air itself had ruptured into blossoms. They’ve come to imagine they’re closer to President Meecham here. They’ve come to imagine her life in those distant rooms—to maybe even catch a glimpse of her, or at least view the landscape she views as if the land itself is already a relic or somehow infused with her. Meecham shimmers through everything here—every tourist advert, every set of “White House China” sold from souvenir stands, every police shield, strip club pop-up, every fashionporn ad for DC couture—a mass hallucination, an ineffable vision, as if the northern lights had been captured bodily. “America’s Queen,” they call her, and they come to her like supplicants at Lourdes, carrying signs and posters depicting Meecham as the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, seven knives piercing her porn-perfect breasts.

Waverly smokes. Blue eyes, disconcertingly blue—the color of Windex or antifreeze. A white sweep of hair. He’s like a publicity photo of a poet—stentorian, craggy and wrinkled, pausing in the conversation to savor his cigarette, or to gaze over the throng of tourists while he collects his thoughts. I’m bedraggled beside him in my hoodie and sweats. He’s wearing a suit, an Anderson & Sheppard that my Adware informs me is from Savile Row, London. Every other table is filled, I notice, except the ones contiguous to ours—like he’s arranged a buffer of empty plates around us, a bubble of relative quiet and privacy.

“New York,” says Waverly, when the conversation comes around to where he had been when Pittsburgh ceased to exist. “A fund-raiser at the Museum of Modern Art. You know, I swap stories with survivors all the time and love trumping them by saying I was staring at
Guernica
when it happened. I remember everyone in the gallery falling silent for a few moments—Pittsburgh must have sounded as distant to them as West Virginia or Alabama—until the notion hit that Manhattan might be the next to go. There was an unseemly panic—”

Adware overlays our table with adverts—Travelocity gnomes pitching Manhattan, Wheeling, Birmingham. Animated George Washingtons hawk cheap tickets to symphonies in the National Cathedral. I ignore them, try to concentrate on Waverly, but the George Washingtons morph into slutty Marthas in white wigs and low-cut gowns with powdered white breasts jiggling for my attention, seating charts nestled in their cleavage,
buy, buy
.

“I understand you work with an outfit called the Kucenic Group?” he says.

“I do. Or did—”

“Research, I take it? Insurance claims, that sort of thing? An impossible thicket of litigation—”

“Everything’s contested,” I tell him.

“You’d think it would be easier, having the City-Archive at your disposal—”

“It could be easier. Governments used to have the authority to issue mass death certificates,” I tell him, the patois of my job flowing mechanically, “but a case called
State Farm v. the State of Pennsylvania
changed all that. Since the Archive exists, the insurance companies argued they should be given the chance to verify every individual insurance claim, every property damage claim, everything. The checking takes years, slows down the payouts—”

“Are you good at your job?”

“I was dedicated, and interested—”

“You’re underselling yourself,” says Waverly. “I already know how good you are. I’ve talked with Mr. Kucenic and he tells me you were one of the best researchers he’s ever had, if not the best. Intuitive, efficient. He said your skills are far above your pay grade, but your personal difficulties hold you back from assuming greater responsibilities. He wonders if you have a fear of success—”

Waverly takes a drag on his cigarette and lets the smoke rise from his mouth. He’s reading something in his Adware while we talk—I watch his eyes twitch as they scan text. Why has this man bothered Kucenic? I don’t want him talking to Kucenic about me, I haven’t agreed to anything.

“Different priorities,” I tell him. “I don’t have a fear of success—”

“After talking with Kucenic, I realize your work must have been nerve shattering,” he says. “Watching people die, studying how they died, determining if their deaths are legitimate or somehow fraudulent, and all the paperwork. You must feel like you’re tracking ghosts sometimes—”

I’ve watched hundreds of people burn alive, but the woman buried in the river mud hangs over me like a burden of conscience. They haven’t left me—no one I’ve researched has ever left me.

“They are like ghosts,” I tell him.

“I want you to track a ghost for me,” says Waverly.

The usual nervous churning of butterflies when new opportunities present themselves—or at least distaste for stirring from my comfort zones. A fear of distraction from the things I care most about, maybe. I finish off my cappuccino. “You don’t need to waste your money on me, Mr. Waverly,” I tell him. “Accessing the Archive is free, if you sign up through the Library of Congress. There are plenty of actual librarians who are looking for research opportunities. Real professionals—”

“My daughter,” says Waverly.

A manila folder—an 8 × 10 of a woman that dissipates the Adware. Crimson hair the color of blood, languid eyes like emeralds. The photograph must have been for a fashion ad: the woman’s posed in a stylized hunch, her black gown exposing bone-white shoulders.

“This is your daughter?”

“I thought you’d be interested once you saw her picture,” he says. “Her name is Albion—it means the ‘white cliffs.’ Albion O’Hara Waverly. I’ve mourned her for ten years—just out of college when that picture was taken. Long after the end, I clung foolishly to the hope that she might have somehow escaped—but I’m sober now.”

“I’m sorry for your loss—”

Waverly dips a biscuit into his cappuccino. Illy pitches espresso in the Adware—I consent and soon our waiter brings a fresh cup and biscotti on Waverly’s tab.

“I schedule regular times to visit my memories of Kitty in the Archive,” he says. “Kitty was my wife of thirty-nine years. Katherine. There are certain memories I have—taking her to Mellon Park on Sundays for brunch, pastries and strawberries and champagne, and to the Frick in the afternoons for high tea. I commissioned designers to sculpt these moments so they would be more real for me than even my own memories of her. My daughter used to be there with us, but recently I haven’t been able to visit Albion—”