Tomorrow and Tomorrow (9 page)

Timothy drops me at my apartment.

“How can I see Waverly? I want to thank him—”

“Soon,” he says. “He’s actually having a little get-together in a few months, if you can make it—”

“I’m free,” I tell him. “I’m always free—”

I undress upstairs, learning my new system: the iLux suite from Panda with Meopta retinal lenses. The old SIM transferred over. Global Connect on Waverly’s account—no more hunting hot spots. My skull’s more valuable now, like it’s been gold-dipped and diamond-studded—horror stories of thugs breaking heads, stripping expensive tech, I’d make a much better victim now. The pain’s a residual ache—a discomfort, really—through my shoulders, behind my eyes, a chemical itch across my scalp.

Concentrate on Albion to dull the discomfort. The dossier Waverly’s secretary had forwarded me is titled
Albion
—but it’s just a thin profile listing her Pittsburgh addresses, the make of her car, the names of a few friends. An insubstantial résumé—he hasn’t even included samples of her design work, no portfolio. No places of employment listed, no personal details—no suggestions of where I might find her, where she spent time when she was alive. Wouldn’t Waverly know more than this? Attachments of a few other images, candid photographs unlike the glamour shot Waverly initially showed me, but the effect is still the same—Albion’s beauty is unreal, like a Pre-Raphaelite stunner even when she’s just lounging on a sofa or posing on the overlook of Mount Washington, the city skyline framed behind her. I run her name through the obvious databases—the
Post-Gazette
Archive, the
Tribune-Review
Online, the U.S. Census Historical Register and the Bureau of Labor Statistics—but the name “Waverly, Albion O’Hara” results in zero hits. I want to find her.

There is a certain pleasure I take in this work—the speed it takes to find my query, the forethought needed to cover every angle. Naked and bundled under comforters, my ceiling gridded with coupons and logos,
Café de Coral
,
Ben’s Chili Bowl
,
Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot
, the streams flash President Meecham’s beach body, spring break wet T-shirt sex, the Madonna Centennial, a new slate of Japanese hard-core torture games—but the streams dissipate as I slip back through the heart of the City.

Polish Hill. The Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. Hillsides coppered with autumn leaves and crosshatched by dream-twisted narrow streets, alleyways, forks and switchbacks, the Immaculate Heart’s green domes and cream brick facade surrounded by ramshackle row houses faded, sagging, worn. Gooski’s is nearby, flashing neon Duquesne Pilsener ads in grime-streaked windows. Albion lived here at the end—down on Dobson, 3138, third floor. Layering, the soaked-clothes damp of drizzle and wind. Polish Hill was one of the artist enclaves by the end, artists too poor to afford the gentrified properties down in Lawrenceville so they moved up the hill, buying cheap properties no longer needed by the dying last remnants of the neighborhood’s original stock, generations of Pittsburgh families with Old Europe still in their blood. Art spaces, open studios, cheap bar after cheap bar.

Albion’s building is a corner property, boarded windows tagged with stenciled graffiti of lingerie models who have the heads of pigs. The door’s password protected, its green paint flecked and scraped revealing rotten original wood and rusted hinges. Rainwater puddles at my shoes. Override with the Archive code and I’m in—so Waverly’s right, Kucenic left my old codes active. A dank lobby. Piles of unopened mail scattered on the stairs and window ledges. Tags hover in the foreground and I scroll through the tenants that had lived here before the end—there aren’t many, but Albion’s not listed among them. The stairs are bowed, the walls blue with several coats of rancid paint that sweats and glistens in what little light there is. I’m out of breath climbing the two flights of stairs. Dates of Albion’s lease—her door’s also password protected, but before I can enter the override code, I hear the dead bolts falling away, the chains, and a young woman opens the door, an Asian woman. She looks as if she’s readying herself for a night out, her mantis-green dress unzipped at the back. She’s holding the front of her dress to her breasts, barely concealing herself, her shoulders bare. She’s lovely, and I stammer for something to say. She looks at me as if she were expecting someone else.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, without thinking.

“John Dominic Blaxton,” she says, recognition dawning over her. “Focal Networks—”

“I’m sorry?”

She smiles—her profile’s blank. “You live in the public housing in Columbia Heights. Room R-17. Washington, DC—a temporary residence, previously of Pittsburgh and Virginia. Husband of Theresa Marie Blaxton. No children—”

“Excuse me?”

“You aren’t welcome here,” she says, shutting the door. I enter the archival override code and the door opens, what should have been Albion’s door, but the space is empty now—a small apartment, just a one bedroom, with one corner converted for use as a kitchen. The floor is unfinished hardwood. The walls are a generic cream, even the light fixtures are painted over. There’s no furniture here. There’s no woman. There’s nothing here.

“Hello?” My voice echoes in the empty room.

“Was this a dream?” asks Timothy.

“Parts of it were a dream, but I’m not sure what was real—”

Timothy’s office is cluttered, unlike Simka’s—stacked papers overflowing from plastic bins, bookshelves piled with true crime paperbacks and sets of leather-bound reference works, the
DSM-IX
in multiple volumes, dictionaries, thesauruses. His desk is clean, only a blotter, a pen and a leather-bound Bible. The chairs are mid-last-century, set around his desk as if for a meeting.

“Would you like some coffee? A drink?”

“I’d love some coffee—”

“I worry talk therapy will be counterproductive,” says Timothy. “When I look at the improvement you’ve made in this short amount of time—with a support system, supervised immersion, no drugs—it’s inspiring. Dominic, I don’t want you to identify yourself as someone who’s sick, as someone who needs to talk to a therapist. That sort of self-identification can often create problems. That’s not who you can become. Dominic, you’re healthy—”

An identity issue, he tells me. If I think that I’m sick, I will be sick. If I think I’m well, I will become well. Timothy believes in positive thinking—that physical health follows the
belief
of physical health, that the power of the spirit can heal the body. He tiptoes around calling his system the “power of prayer” but he quotes studies and clinical trials stating that God helps recovery much more effectively than medication.
What is your identity?
he asks.
Do you want to be ill? Or do you want to be healthy? Who are you?

“How did you start working in the Archive?” he asks. “Were you always interested in this kind of work?”

“I was still thinking of pursuing my graduate studies after Pittsburgh,” I tell him. “Everyone was very accepting of survivors—it was easy to transfer programs. I chose the University of Virginia, moved to Charlottesville. I’d been studying Klimt and Schnitzler and Freud—”

“You aren’t a graduate student now?”

“No. Not anymore—”

“Why give it up?”

“Why?” I wonder. “Truthfully, I was already giving up on that sort of work years before. I think I know the exact moment I gave up—in my second year of classes at Carnegie Mellon, I presented a paper about Lacan. The shifting nature of desire. I showed projections of Egon Schiele’s work, some of the more pornographic stuff, and theorized in front of the class about female masturbation. I was beginning to think of myself as a sort of intellectual provocateur of the department—”

“You’re cringing,” says Timothy.

“I’m still embarrassed,” I tell him, “even after all these years, I’m still embarrassed. I used to wear a bowler hat, if you can believe that. So, there was a woman in class with me, she—I remember she used to be a ballerina, a real, professional dancer, but gave it up for French theory. After my presentation about Lacan, I was cutting across campus and she called out to me. I remember what she was wearing—this gingham dress. She told me how excited she was that I had talked about Schiele, that Schiele was one of her favorite artists. She said our areas of research were strikingly similar and she wanted to talk with me more about it. She invited me to dinner at her apartment. She said she was an excellent cook and told me that she had invested in a catalogue raisonné of Schiele with giclée reproductions of his work, but she didn’t know anyone else who might appreciate it. I was—actually, I was terrified of her. I’d always been intimidated in classes with her because she seemed to understand all the readings we were assigned. I didn’t think I could legitimately spend more than five minutes talking to her without exposing myself as a fraud. I didn’t know much about Lacan other than a few essays I’d read. Derrida was incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t figure out Bourdieu. I mispronounced all their names. I’d never bothered to read Foucault. She’d left the top few buttons of her dress undone so you could see the edge of her bra—this black, lacy thing. Imagining her apartment, imagining all the dog-eared paperbacks of theory and philosophy I knew she must have read, imagining sitting next to her looking at Schiele, the book spread open across her legs, scared me. I felt like she was playing a very adult game with me. She was very attractive, very intimidating. After that afternoon I felt like a poseur, studying Freud and Schnitzler. Schiele, for Christ’s sake. I never took her up on her offer. I stopped wearing my bowler—”

“And this was before Theresa?”

“Oh, yes—Theresa wouldn’t have . . . not if I was wearing a bowler hat. By the time I met Theresa I’d already given that up. I’d already talked to my adviser about switching to 20th-Century American Modernism. Wallace Stevens. T. S. Eliot. I was more interested in an MFA in creative writing, to be honest—I thought I might transfer departments. I’d already started Confluence Press. A contemporary poetry series. That was always my real passion, to publish other people’s poetry—to curate a line of poetry books. I started taking classes in the computer science department, figuring out some coding so I could theoretically maximize e-content for the poetry press. I’ve tried to write poetry since. It’s odd to me—if I read a line by, say, Philip Larkin, I’ll be struck by how beautiful the line is, how perfect or how true. But if I write that line—that same line—just seeing it in my own handwriting sickens me and I’m overwhelmed by the depthless stupidity of the words. I don’t write poetry anymore—”

“Weakness,” says Timothy.

“Maybe,” I admit. “I was a disappointment to everyone at Virginia once I showed up. I didn’t go to classes. I didn’t research. I just spent my time buying used books at Oakley’s and Daedalus—just absolutely hoarding books and newspapers, burying myself in my apartment. I was—suicidal isn’t the right word. I was taking this class about the
Decameron
and was failing—the professor noticed I was in a tailspin, I guess. She invited me out for coffee and I told her how unhappy I was. She thought I might be able to use more structure than a graduate student life provided—maybe work for a few years, then come back to the program. I told her that sounded fine but I didn’t know what to do with my life. Her cousin owned a research group in DC and she thought what little I’d picked up about coding would make me a perfect fit with that kind of work. She got me an interview. It turns out her cousin wasn’t hiring, but he knew a guy who was. An entry-level job with the Kucenic Group—”

“And under Simka’s care for drug abuse?”

“My boss, Kucenic, placed me in the Employee Assistance Program and that program connected me with Dr. Simka—”

“The entry-level job was an archival assistant?”

“It provided enough of a salary, and my cousin Gavril helps me quite a bit. Blog writing, copy, blurbs, that sort of thing. It’s not much of a living, but it’s all I need—”

“Have you ever had this dream before?” he says.

“No—”

“What parts are you sure were a dream?” he asks.

“The dimensions of the apartment,” I tell him. “The interior was too large—”

“Tell me about the interior of the apartment,” he says.

I tell him. I’m on Dobson, in Polish Hill. It’s grown dim—twilight in the late afternoon. House windows burn orange and the bells of the Immaculate Heart are ringing. Timothy’s interested now.

“Did you intend to visit Albion’s apartment?”

“Yes—yes, I did. I’d gone to look for her—”

Lucid, at first. The shallow sleep Adware exploits for deep-penetration product placement. I’d bookmarked the entrance to Albion’s apartment building the first time I was there so that whenever I enter the City I’m loitering here, waiting for her. The green door, rotten around the edges. Windows boarded, spray-painted with the stenciled graffiti of lingerie models with the heads of swine. The pigs’ heads are goofy, grinning and slobbering, with razor blade teeth—the lingerie they wear is made for fetishists, eighteenth-century frills in the lace. I try the door to the apartment building and find it’s unlocked. The foyer, the unopened mail on the windowsills. Paint-flecked walls and the hardwood moaning as I climb upstairs—this is when the lucid dreaming stops and I fall into deeper sleep, I think, my attention drifting, the scene shifting, but not asleep heavily enough to engage the automatic offs. Upstairs to the third-floor landing, to her apartment. Is this when I woke? I’m not sure—I may have still been asleep. I scroll through past residents looking for her name, but Albion isn’t among them. This is typical. I type in the dates she’d lived there. The door opens. I step inside.

“You sound like you’ve been to her apartment before,” says Timothy.

“Many times—I’ve been trying to find her for Waverly,” I tell him. “But one of two things has always happened when I visit Albion’s apartment. Most often, the apartment is empty—just an empty space, just a place holder. I can walk through the rooms, but I might as well be studying a blueprint of the space. Every so often, though, a woman will open the door—a young woman, younger than I am, Asian. She seems to know who I am—she rattles off my name, information about me—but that could just be the AI pinging my profile. She’s always polite, but always tells me that I’m not welcome and always shuts the door before I can slip past her inside. The apartment changes. But that’s the nature of the City—the City changes. The bones of the City are facts but the flesh is memory, mutable. And with iLux, or any of the newer suites, the City pulls from memory and imagination and fills in with details that were never, strictly speaking, true. It makes an archivist’s job much more difficult—trying to find the truth through all that muck of fantasy. But this time, once I typed in the dates and opened the door, the apartment is different again. It’s decorated. Sparse, just a few pieces of furniture—but it’s furnished, lived in. I’d never seen the apartment like this. The furniture’s mismatched, all secondhand pieces, repainted. The walls are hung with paintings—large canvases, like Rothko color-fields the shade of bruises—and sketches of fashion designs. Bolts of fabric and dyes and a sewing machine. A lavender dress pinned to a mannequin—”