Tomorrow and Tomorrow

8, 23—

Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud. Time-stamped late April, the rains must have exposed her. Or maybe the rain-swollen river rose around her, the current rinsing away the foot or so of silt that had covered her. Time-stamped 6:44 p.m.—shafts of sunlight slant through the woods, dappling the mud in the clearings. The water’s a mossy green where the sunlight hits, but outside the direct sunlight the water’s a sooty brown, almost black. I think of the earth here, the history of this place, how accustomed it is to burning—the hillsides running steep to the riverbed were once slag heaps for the mills, rolling landslides of molten ash—but by the time I knew this place, everything was reclaimed and greened. It was a city park.

When the time stamp’s reached 7:31 p.m. it’s grown too dark to see so I adjust the light filters. The woods and the body brighten with the sickly pallor of digitized light. I can see her feet now, white like white mushrooms grown bulbous in the soil. Bookmark the body. I leave her, finding my way back through the woods along the jogging path in the utter dark.

At the trailhead parking lot I reset to 6:15 p.m., a half hour before I will find her body. The night reverses to a bluer shade of dusk. I follow the jogging path that runs serpentine through the woods before scaling down a tangle of roots and bramble, holding on to reedy branches to keep my balance. I’ve been this way before. Scan the underbrush for footprints or signs of struggle, scraps of clothing, anything, but I don’t find any tangible traces until I find the white lump of her body—a pallid curve I take as her back and a spray of hair much darker from mud than the honey-brown I know from photographs of her. I kneel near her. I study her, trying to piece together what happened—trying to understand. At 7:31 p.m. it’s grown too dark to see.

I retrace my steps. At the trailhead parking lot, I reset to 6:15 p.m. and the night reverses. Her body’s down there, half buried in mud. I start along the jogging path, scanning the woods for traces of her. I’ll find her in about twenty minutes.

10, 21—

People often ask us how their loved ones died, expecting extraordinary circumstances or wondering whether they suffered terribly, and I’m reminded of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” because, with rare exception, the deaths we research are banal—someone eating, opening a window or walking dully along. Nothing extraordinary—though often survivors remember how fine a day it was, how perfect for autumn, how almost like summer. The end occurred quickly, that much is verifiable—no one suffered except the ones who lived. Five hundred thousand lives ended in the blinding white flash. Shadows elongated and became like charcoal smudges, the City became like snowy ash and in a breath of wind vanished. Other than details, all we really answer about their loved ones is that they likely did not suffer and they likely died as they had lived. Even this dreadful martyrdom ran its course.

October twenty-first—

Ten years since the end.

Tuesday’s the last I used brown sugar. I’d even pinged Kucenic that morning to be courteous, to tell him I’d a touch of the bug and wouldn’t be coming in—but he informed me I’m already out of sick days and vacation days and some of the other archival assistants were tired of covering for me. That I would be docked pay and may face probation. There’d been complaints, he said. He voiced a few minutes later, his profile pic all snowy beard and kind blue eyes, his Adware left gaudily exposed like a crosshatch of silver wires threading his skull beneath his wispy hair. This was over at Tryst Coffeehouse, on their Wi-Fi to take the call. My Adware’s shoddy, running a skittish frame rate that augments reality with a shitty split-second delay. Kucenic’s image hung in my eyes like a transparency overlaying café menus, displays of lattes, Red Eyes, mochas, velvety coffees hovering wherever I looked, Fair Trade and Organic info scrolling over every bag of beans. He asked if everything was all right, but his lips weren’t quite synched up with his words.

“Everything’s fine,” I told him. “My sinuses, I think, just a sinus infection—”

“You’re researching homicide,” he told me.

“I’ll be better tomorrow—”

“I’ve trusted you with potential fraud and homicide,” he said. “There’s a schedule we have to follow, there are reports—”

“Her body was tampered with—”

Self-conscious discussing the body in a crowded café, but everyone at the nearby tables was immersed in their own Adware streams, chatting to unseen companions or slumped over their coffee lost in private fantasies—no one paying attention to me.

“RFI #14502—Hannah Massey,” said Kucenic. “You’ve written that the Archive’s corrupted around her—”

“Whoever’s trying to cover up the killing is sloppy,” I told him. “All those corruptions in the Archive are like fingerprints, but there are a million fingerprints and it will take time to make sense of them all—”

“You’re burning yourself out,” he said. “I understand this is a difficult time for you, and I’m sympathetic, I am, but I need to know if you can handle this report right now. It’s been months since you first found her. I need you to wrap this up. Do you need help? We can work out a leave of absence. We can reassign your cases—”

“I don’t need a leave,” I told him. “I can’t afford a leave—”

“What does your doctor say?”

“Leave personal shit out of this,” I told him. “Don’t turn this personal—”

“You’re doing taxing work,” he said, easing off a bit. “You’re always thorough in your approach, but there are gaps in your presentation. Significant gaps. What about the victim’s parents? Her friends? You haven’t even filled in her last hours—”

“There are no last hours, not yet,” I told him. “I’ve tracked her to the point of her disappearance, but that’s not when she died. She was on campus, a psychology lecture about human-computer interaction. After class she cut through campus and entered the lower level of a parking garage on Fifth Avenue, near Morewood. No security cameras down there. That’s when she was taken—”

I minimized Kucenic and stared into my coffee, at the nutrition facts appearing there like legible shimmers of light. There’s a gap in the Archive from when she entered the parking garage to when I found her body near the river. Security cameras were installed in that garage in the weeks after she vanished—there’s plenty of footage of the garage’s lower levels’ time-stamped weeks and months following her disappearance, of security guards making their rounds on golf carts, but all too late.

“We need to trim the scope of what you’re working on. State Farm just wants proof of how she died,” said Kucenic. “A documented cause of death—that’s all. A one-page summary. And when we’re certain we’re dealing with homicide, I’ll have to register her death with the FBI—there are legal implications if we don’t handle this properly. We need to stick to their timetables. I can’t go days or weeks without hearing from you—”

“I found her body,” I told him, thinking of spring rains sluicing away her shallow burial. “No one else would have—”

“Look, Dominic,” he said, “if you’re going to work in this field, you have to understand the bigger picture. You can’t just hole up in the research, block out every other consideration. You have to understand that when I meet with State Farm, their reps will be excited by what you’ve found, the work you’re doing, but their first question will be Why haven’t you told us how she died? That information means money to them—they care about the money, not the girl. You have to think like they think if you want to be effective in this line of work—”

“They don’t care who killed her, just that she was killed,” I said. “Isn’t that right? You want me to ignore what happened to her? I can’t do that, Kucenic. For the past few weeks, whenever I close my eyes I see her—”

“All these images aren’t real,” he told me. “You immerse into the Archive and if you’re not careful, you forget that it isn’t real. You spend so much time watching people die, it can affect you. It’s okay if you can’t keep up right now, if you can’t work like this—”

“What do you mean, ‘forget that it isn’t real?’ It was all real—”

“Log some hours,” he said. “Work through this. I’ll need an update by this afternoon—”

“Fine, fine,” I told him, but skipped work that afternoon anyway. I immersed at the Mount Pleasant Library, accessing their public Wi-Fi from a wingback chair in the gov docs room that’s hidden from the reference desk librarians. Private back there, no one to bother me. Brown sugar comes in blister packs—taupe heptagons—cut for use as a study aid. I dry swallowed the pill. I closed my eyes when the sweetness hit and my breaths grew deeper. I loaded the City. I was with my wife then. For a solid ten hours, at least, I was with her. The librarians kicked me out at closing so I slept the night in their parking lot, half hidden by a hedgerow. Still connected when I woke, but the City had timed out—the morning feeds blaring Cash Amateurs and looped promos for season 4 of Chance in Hell and the Voyeur Cam pay streams and Real Swingers of DC and groupons if I opinioned who was hotter between last week’s murdered Fur girls on Crime Scene Superstar, blonde versus redhead, dead teen bodies displayed in crime scene streams, Look here to vote, look here—

Dr. Simka has diagnosed me with major depressive disorder, substance abuse disorder and secondary traumatization. He’s prescribed Zoloft and suggests I should exercise more, that jogging through Rock Creek Park when the weather’s nicer or training for the National Half Marathon will cleanse toxins from my bloodstream. He says I’m putting on weight and it worries him.

“Maybe we should try to lose some weight together,” I’ve told him, but he just pats his belly and laughs.

Simka’s offices are over in Kalorama, near 21st and Florida, in the building with the bright red door. He’s filled his waiting room with furniture that he’s made—black cherry Mission-style chairs, a magazine table, a matching bookshelf filled with his early editions of Lacan. After our biweekly hour I feel I’ve pawned damaged goods to him, that my case is certain to hurt his success rate. I mention this to him while he’s signing my EAP paperwork, but he just smiles and nods and strokes his bushy mustache and says, “You don’t need style points to win—”

I’ve learned to trust Dr. Simka. I talk with him about Theresa, about my memories. We discuss the amount of time I spend in the Pittsburgh Archive visiting her. We try to set limits, boundaries—we try to set goals. Simka doesn’t believe in VR therapy, preferring face-to-face contact with his patients, so I relax on his cushy leather couch and have conversations with him—about anything, anything at all, whatever’s on my mind, whatever thoughts I’m trying to exorcise. I talk with him about my work for Kucenic, about the archival research I’m assigned—the information’s confidential, but I unburden myself to Simka. I told him about RFI #14502, the woman whose body I found.

“There was a dispute,” I told him. “The policyholder’s beneficiary—her sister, in Akron—filed life insurance claims for the woman and her three children, but State Farm contested the claims to avoid part of the payout, contending that only two of the woman’s children could be verified as dying as a direct result of the bomb—”

“So, your firm was contacted to confirm their deaths,” said Simka.

“Kucenic won the case in a batch bid and assigned it as part of my caseload,” I told him. “We were contracted to find evidence to bolster State Farm’s dispute, or if we found that all three children did die in the blast, to provide recommendations for a settlement—”

“Either way, you’re searching for a dead child,” said Simka.

“I found the first death easily enough,” I told him. “A boy at Harrison Middle School. Plenty of security cameras in the school, plenty of footage to reconstruct his life. I made sure I was with him in the classroom as he died, marking when the white light streamed through the windows, marking when he burned. The second child was only a few months old. Another boy. I logged several hours in the house with the policyholder, the mother. She spent almost every afternoon watching The Price Is Right while her boy cried in the bassinet. Sometimes I picked up the boy to try and soothe him, I don’t know why—I knew it didn’t matter, that the boy was long since dead, that the crying was just a webcam recording re-created there. I just held him, sang to him until he calmed, but the moment I put him down the Archive reset and he was back in his bassinet crying. He was crying in his crib when he died. Each child earned a separate report—”

“And the third?” asked Simka.

“Hannah,” I told him. “Nineteen years old. She’d been tampered with in the Archive, huge chunks of her life deleted. State Farm keyed in on the deletions when their researchers first examined the claim, which is why they put it up for bid, but they couldn’t track her—”

“And you could?” asked Simka.

“I can be obsessive about the research, is all,” I told him. “State Farm doesn’t have the manpower. When something’s been deleted from the Archive, it generates an exception report because the code falters. If you isolate time frames you can print thousands of pages of exception reports and slog through them, try to stitch back what’s happened. Clever hacks replace whatever they’ve deleted or changed in the Archive with something else, something similar—if you’re careful, you can delete something and insert a forgery without generating an error message at all. Whoever deleted Hannah, though, wasn’t skilled or very careful—I could reconstruct her life by following the exception messages, reading the code; it just took time. I imagine it’s like following a boar after it crashes through the underbrush—”

“Where did you find her?” asked Simka.

“I found her body in the river, half buried in mud over in this reclaimed slag site called Nine Mile Run. Academic footage of the watershed taken by Carnegie Mellon’s Environmental Science department. Her body had been buried there, but the rain washed away the mud that had covered her. Whoever deleted her didn’t think to delete JSTOR footage or didn’t know it existed as part of the Archive. By the time I found her body, she was swollen. Hard to even recognize—”

“You seem particularly upset over her death. You deal with this type of work on a regular basis—”

“You would have liked her,” I told him. “She was a psych major. An actress in a comedy troupe called Scotch ’n’ Soda. She was a head turner, vibrant—but I couldn’t even recognize her body when I found her in that footage. Only a few minutes of white in the mud, a partial of her back and her feet. I had to prove it was her through the exception reports—”

Nearly every death is contested, nearly every property damage claim. Billions and billions of dollars in lawsuits. My research is handled like a spreadsheet, but I told Simka those three children still troubled my sleep. Simka listened attentively—he always listens to what I have to say like he’s hearing essential news. I told him I replay those children’s deaths so often I can’t tell if I’m reliving their deaths in the Archive or if I’m just remembering what I’d seen. I ask him to help me stop remembering. He jots down notes on a yellow legal pad. He doesn’t interrupt me with too many questions. He lets me speak. When he does talk, he spends a lot of our time together asking about the Beatles—what certain lyrics mean.

“The Beatles dropped acid and ate psychotropics when they wrote,” I tell him, “so as a mental health professional, you’re in a better position to interpret their lyrics than I am—”

“True, true,” he says, “but I might miss literary aspects that you’re trained to find. You know, I picked up on a lot more of Baudelaire by talking with you than I did through the apps, so maybe between the two of us, we can make some sense of Abbey Road—”

He suggests I should keep a journal. Just write the date at the top of the page and continue from there. Just be free with it, it will help. He gave me an ultimatum—that I’d have to at least try journaling or he wouldn’t continue signing my EAP paperwork. I don’t believe the threat, but he actually bought me this notebook—real paper, I think—and presented it to me with a download called the Progoff Intensive Journal method. He says I should write in longhand, that it will help my concentration—that dictation apps don’t have the same calming effect as penmanship. Simka is holistic—he believes the building blocks to a healthy, productive lifestyle already exist within me but that I have to learn how to stack the blocks in a new way. He suggests I listen to classical music to improve my sustained concentration skills. Feeds and streams contribute to the fracturing of our consciousness, he says. Try John Adams and listen through—at least twenty minutes a stretch, without augments, without shuffle. He hums a tune the Adware eventually identifies as “Grand Pianola Music”—click to add to iTunes library.

I take my Zoloft every night, but every night I wake up dreaming of my wife. 4 a.m. 6 a.m. The clock radio plays HOT 99.5, crap pop, but I lie deadened and listen, wishing my bed were a sinkhole and that I’d somehow die. The clock radio plays into the afternoon before I bring myself to shut it off, before I bring myself to climb out of bed. I indulge in Pop-Tarts and Mrs. Fields. I’ve been eating Ho Hos. Gavril swung by late Friday afternoon to see how I was feeling and found me eating an entire box of Ho Hos for breakfast with coffee. “No wonder you’re sick all the time,” he said, his breath like espresso and cigarettes mixed up with those blueberry Coolsa strips he chews.

A few years ago, Simka ended a session by saying, “Dominic, a fish rots head first—”

He suggested I rediscover personal hygiene—that no matter how bad I feel, I was sure to feel worse if I didn’t shower. So, I shower—and that has helped. I shave every morning. Long strokes with the razor, over my neck and jaw, over my skull. It’s bruised up there—black splotches, violet. Labyrinthine ridges of Adware like a street map of a foreign city embossed on my skull. I look in the mirror and follow the lines of wires as if they might lead me somewhere—anywhere other than where I really am.

Simka says to find someplace comfortable to write. He’s described his home office to me, out in Maryland, with its oak desk and a picture window overlooking a woodland backyard. My apartment’s public housing, but there’s a fire-escape terrace with a view of the surrounding rooftops—air-conditioning units and service entries. It’s chilly out here. The neighboring terrace’s potted plants died weeks ago in the first frost but are still outside, brown and brittle. I sip my coffee and bundle in my robe and sweatpants, a gray hoodie and slipper-thick socks. The sunrise pinks the sky—beautiful. Quiet. Wi-Fi’s included in the lease, or should be, but the router’s been broken going on three years. I hear a wet click whenever my Adware tries to autoconnect—like a popping knuckle just behind my right ear—and have to dismiss the low-signal warnings again and again, even though I’ve asked never to be alerted. Every five minutes, click—the network connection icon in my peripheral spins and the low-signal warning pops up again like a floater in my line of sight. “Dismiss,” I tell it. Five minutes later, click. I can only take so much.

So, here it is: A Day in the Life. A chronicle for Dr. Simka.

Theresa. Theresa Marie.

Even writing her name feels like scratching a phantom limb.

I take the bus these days because I sold my Volkswagen for cash years ago. Seats are occupied, so I sit behind the driver, near a scratched glass poster looping commercials for Mifeprex and TANF and YouPorn. Closer to Dupont Circle my Adware autoconnects to wifi.dc.gov and the feeds tingle my skull—blacking out a few seconds before my vision reboots with a shitty display of augs and apps, freebies mostly, looming when I notice one, the others receding, my profile bundled with so many pop-ups and worms that my vision strobes while it loads. GPS info and route maps and Metro schedules hover midbus—real time supposedly, but the bus schedule’s off sync by a half hour or more and the map’s of a Silver Spring route that doesn’t even exist. The passenger across the aisle stares at the ceiling, giggling—he’s drooling down the front of his raincoat, utterly engrossed in the streams. He’s spamming indiscriminate friend requests, but my social networking’s locked so no one bothers me—I stare out the window and concentrate on the CNN Headline feed:

BUY AMERICA!!! FUCK AMERICA!!! SELL AMERICA!!!

The Buy, Fuck, Sell feed’s leading with a new leaked sex tape of President Meecham, the ten-year anniversary of Pittsburgh demoted to postjump news. PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT! MEECH’S PEACHES EXPOSED IN TEEN SEX SCANDAL!

Headaches from news torrents and commercials overloading my secondhand Adware, shit I picked up on Craigslist years ago from a U. of Maryland kid who’d already fried some of the wires without telling me. Hilfiger, Sergio Tacchini, Nokia, Puma. President Meecham from her days as Miss Teen Pennsylvania kneels in the aisle of the bus. Real footage, says CNN, not sim, not sculpt. She touches herself and the talking heads comment: Everywhere, Americans have been given the choice between Love and Filth, and they have uniformly chosen Filth. Al Jazeera America’s the only stream covering Pittsburgh as a lead, posting satellite imagery captured on that first sunny day after the end, of the scorched earth like a black harelip on the mouth of the Appalachian Mountains. Pull for a stop.

Gavril lives in Ivy City, a renovated loft on the corner of Fenwick and Okie—warehouses and abandoned tenements, a Starbucks on the corner, a Così. Gavril’s building’s slashed with graffiti and slathered with wheat-pasted handbills for Qafqa concerts long since past and photocopied pics of the Pittsburgh mushroom cloud and offers for sex with male models and cheap rates on love hotels. Spray-painted: One who is slain in the way of Allah is a martyr. BBC America loops the “Star-Spangled Banner” over aerial views of the way Pittsburgh was and the way it is now: radioactive weed growth and the black guts of buildings—but the stream interrupts and reloads, bothered by all the vandalized and nonlicensed Tags setting off my Adware’s net security. Are we any safer than we were ten years ago? I ring the buzzer.

“Kdo je to?”

“It’s Dominic—”

“Moment, please—”

Every time I’m here, the place is filled with girlfriends and bumming students, poets I’ve met around, politicians scoring cocaine, models passed out on the couches, editors, business associates of some sort waiting aimlessly, actors fixing sandwiches for themselves in the kitchen—who knows who all these people are, but the place is like a social lounge and there’s never anywhere to sit. Cousin Gav—my mother’s sister’s son. He grew up in Prague, a scene-star installation artist by the time he was seventeen, a college dropout once featured at Art Basel, but after Pittsburgh he gave up that momentum to be with me in the States. I love him for that, for everything. Since coming here he’s abandoned art but gone freelance with fashionporn and photography—he’s done well for himself.

One of Gavril’s women opens the door—this one a willowy blonde almost as tall as I am, so pale and thin it’s like her skin’s translucent. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wears a XXL Manchester United jersey belted like a dress but nothing else, the pink saucers of her nipples clearly visible through the sheer fabric.

“What’s with all this Frost bollocks?” she says.

“You’re English,” I notice and she rolls her eyes.

Her profile’s an obvious fake—Twiggy, it says, born 19 September 1949. Occupation: IT girl. The American Apparel sponsorship’s real, though, her profile displayed in arcs of copyrighted font.

“I asked a question,” she says. “Frost? Are you trying to be fucking funny?”

“You must be the poet,” I tell her. “Gav mentioned you might be around—”

“He says he’s reading Frost to find inspiration for his Anthropologie shoot. I told him if he wants pastoral imagery, then Wordsworth’s a better bet than Frost, but you have him reading all the wrong stuff anyway—”

“Wordsworth? Christ, don’t pollute him like that. Are you a student?”

“Georgetown,” she says. “Ph.D. 20th-Century American Modernism. I’m a Plathist—”

“‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’” I tell her. “I like that one.”

“She should have used Adware,” says Twiggy, “to distract her from all that shit she obsessed about. She was a gorgeous girl, would have been brilliant for the Mademoiselle app—”

“I shut my eyes and all is born again,” I tell her, misquoting the lines.

“Gavril expected you’d like me—”

The never-ending party is spare this morning, only a quartet of scenesters shuffling cards at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and eating eggs. Twiggy joins another young woman, a brunette, playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the VIM, the furniture pushed to the edges of the room, Tyson prancing bullish. The brunette’s in spandex and thigh-high tube socks, jabbing and kicking riotously, so model thin and gangly she’s like a spastic female skeleton raging in fits of laughter.

“You suck,” says Twiggy, readying herself for Tyson. “You’ve got to, like, sidestep the uppercuts—”

BBC America talking heads hover in my sight: Executions in the terrorist courts, a stroke of Meecham’s pen beheads a thousand jihadists, a thousand thousand—

Gavril’s in the back bedroom, the room he calls his darkroom even though he doesn’t develop anything, preferring digital work on his iMac even over imprints or holograms. Oversize prints of his static photography decorate the walls—young women he finds on the street, impossibly gorgeous the way he shoots them, catalog ready. Gavril’s in a tracksuit and smiles when he sees me. Jockish, when it comes down to it—his hug ends in a double fist bump handshake that I blunder and he laughs. The room smells like him—apple-scented Head & Shoulders, Clive Christian cologne. Cigarettes smoldering in emptied coffee mugs. When he first moved to the States he was wiry, but now he’s filled out from fine food and smiles easily, his physique rock hard from all the soccer and sex. He only wears pajamas or a tracksuit—I’ve never seen him in anything else.

“John Dominic,” he says.

“Gav—”

“What the fuck, man? Are you translate me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m translating,” I tell him, the app keeping up well enough as he speaks in Czech, but making him look like poorly dubbed cinema.

“I tell you I want to learn English to be inspired, to read Robert Frost in the original—”

“I’m teaching you Robert Frost—”

“I’m expecting trees and snowing woods and bullshit like that, but what do I get? Some kid cutting off his fucking hand with a saw and no one gives a shit—”

“They get him a doctor,” I tell him.

“For Christ’s sake,” says Gavril, “I want horses and trees and snowy fields and barns, and shit like that—”

“I know what you want—”

“Yeah, man, the road less taken,” he says, poets.org spam fluttering at the fringes of my sight—free credit scores, click here! FREE! FREE! FREE!

“We’ll get to it. How’s business?”

“Business,” he says. “Is good. Listen, if you want some work, I could use some copy for a few things—”

“Sure,” I tell him. “E-mail me—”

“I’ll also send you the contact sheets for Twiggy,” he says. “What do you think, eh? You let me know what you think—”

“About the girl out there? Christ, Gav—”

“Listen,” he says, “I was in preproduction for the Anthropologie winter catalog, up in New England, when American Apparel pings me out of the blue. They tell me they have a rush job, some last-minute interactive campaign they want to launch but their photographer pulled out, some guy I’d never heard of, and they wanted to know if I could do the work. They offered double what I usually get, so I told them, sure, sure, I can fit it in. The only condition is that I have to use the girls they send me. They want to use amateurs and Twiggy out there won an Internet modeling poll, a ‘Real Girl Next Door’ click-to-vote. You let me know what you think, okay? Built like a fucking—twenty-one years old, her tits point straight up. Vivian’s her real name, from England—hey, Dominic, that’s the job for you, cousin. Model scout—”

“No, no. Not for me—”

“I could hook you up, Dominic. Cure your depression better than all this bullshit therapy you go through. Get you with an agency. They’d fly you to Iceland or Brazil and all you’d have to do—You can work a camera, can’t you?”

Anthropologie and American Apparel portals in the Adware. Young women in flower prints in the Parisian countryside, farmlands, abandoned barns—the Anthropologie summer catalog portal so paradisiacal I can almost let myself forget I’m in this apartment, in this city, this life. I peel off ten bills and lay them on the desk. Gavril counts and pockets the cash, handing me a blister packet of brown sugar. We do this casually, almost as an afterthought, without words.

“What do you think?” he says. “You tell me about Twiggy. She told me she wanted to meet some poets, so I mentioned you were the best I knew. She’s interested—”

“I don’t think I’m all that interested—”

“Pittsburgh was ten years ago,” says Gavril. “That’s an eternity, cousin. You wallow in Pittsburgh, but you need to forget. You need distraction—if you want, I can let you be the stand-in while I film those two girls. I’ll film you in a threesome—”

“How’s my aunt doing?” I ask him.

“I’m serious, Dominic,” he says. “You need to clear your mind. Have some fun with life. It’s not too late to live—”

“I can’t,” I tell him. “I can’t—”

“Anyway, your aunt is good,” he says. “She spends all her time in her studio making wood-block prints—she’s very happy, but she worries about you. I showed her a picture from the other night and she said you look like a bear ate you. A bear, Dominic. She wants you to take a vacation, spend some time in Domažlice, out in the country. Relax a little. She misses her nephew—”

“I’ll visit,” I tell him. “Maybe going out to the country for a while is a good idea. Get away from everything—”

“Cuts off his fucking hand and no one gives a shit. Barns and horses, man. I want barns and horses next time. My Anthropologie concept is to channel Robert Frost. Barns, horses—”

“When are you free for dinner?” I ask him.

“I’ll hit you up,” he says in English. “My schedule’s a bit harsh this week. I’ll take you to Primanti’s for a sandwich—”

“Not there—”

“Keep your network open—”

“Out, out,” I tell him, leaving.

In the living room, Twiggy’s faring better against Tyson, landing combination punches—making tweety birds flit over Tyson’s eyes. When she sees me, she breaks off from the game.

“Can I talk with you?” she says.

She pulls me aside and asks if I’m using.

“No, nothing much,” I tell her. “Just some brown sugar, nothing hard—”

“You like uppers, then?”

“Just to help me concentrate sometimes,” I tell her.

“I want to give you something,” she says. She opens her purse, a gold tube hardly big enough to carry lipstick and car keys, and fishes out a heart-shaped pill wrapped in a plastic baggie.

“What is this?”

“A valentine,” she says, slipping it between my lips. “Let it kick in and then take the brown—”

I bite down—the pill tastes like cherries. Twiggy friends me, pushes her contact info into my address book.

“If you like it, I can get you more,” she says. “If you ever want to talk Plath sometime, or dig into Sexton—”

I watch her a heartbeat too long after she returns to her game, her jersey dress rising with every punch, and my Adware fills with pop-ups and redirected streams to escort services and live companions, to cam girls in lingerie who coo they want to meet me. Whatever she just gave me kicks in. I hurry from the apartment, illegally opaque sex ads blotting my sight and I almost tumble down the stairs, the advertisements showing girls so realistic in the streams I stand aside on the landing to let them pass, but they’re just images, mirages, all just light. “I don’t want any, I don’t want them,” but the ads are better at knowing what I want than I am and ranks of girls march for my approval, all slight variations of Twiggy, blonde hundreds in the apartment lobby until I’m out on the street and they fill the sidewalk, lockstepping in unison, like a mirror image of a mirror, a thousand Twiggies receding into space everywhere I look.

There’s a KFC in Dupont Circle, a two-tier restaurant. Crowds in lines, the place is swamped. Menu apps hijack my attention with flashing extracrispy breasts and thighs. Original, Cajun, Buffalo! Relax—the last thing I need is for some plainclothes KFC cop to think I’m jumpy and call for a drug sniffer. A two-piece extracrispy box from the menu kiosk and a restroom token from the cashier. They have semiprivate stalls here, on the second floor—I leave the chicken and hit the restroom. Someone’s washing his hands. A few stalls are in use. I lock myself in the far stall and peel apart the packet of brown sugar, swallow the pill. My tongue’s filmy with the aftertaste—chalky, bitter. JESUS CHRIST SAVED MY SOUL knifed into the door. Someone’s drawn Colonel Sanders shooting rainbows from his massive cock. A tightness in my eyes. Combined with the valentine Twiggy slipped me, the burn hits my nerves like a current—like everything I see is etched in light. The stall and the toilet pulse. Colonel Sanders looks real—absurdly real, textured, with volume, his hair like a spool of cotton, his rainbows shimmering as the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen. Infinite streams of flushing toilets and washing hands. I wander from the stalls, wander from the KFC—I’m in Dupont Circle, in the street—picking pebbles from the crosswalks. I concentrate on the City.

I concentrate on Three Rivers Net and the Archive app swims into focus, the icon an image of the golden triangle cradled by its rivers. I load the City-Archive and my vision blacks out, replaced by the gold and black crest of an eagle-stamped shield topped by castle parapets.

“John Dominic Blaxton,” I tell it, struggling to enunciate. Allow auto fill-ins, “yes.” Remember password, “yes.” I seem to remember traffic in Dupont Circle and the noise of horns and screaming. Someone asking if I’m all right—of course I’m all right—and when they try to help me out of the street, through the crosswalk, to safety on the sidewalk, I shrug them off and panic. I may have fallen to the concrete. There are other sounds, other voices, the noise of Dupont Circle as the City-Archive crest fades, as DC fades, as the City surrounds me, western Pennsylvania in summer twilight as real as any dream.

376, the Parkway from the airport—roads the gray of moondust, the surrounding hills dense with trees grown dark in the gathering dusk. The Parkway was like this at the end—congested lanes too narrow for the volume of traffic. The glare of onrushing headlights, taillights like lines of rubies. I’m here. I remember. Shopping malls and gas stations and restaurants illuminate the peaks of the shadowy hills. I’ve shopped in these malls. I’ve eaten in these chains. Beneath the rusted Norfolk and Western trestle, the road rises and finally cuts in lowering arcs, descending, gutting deeper through the hills until the tunnel. The tunnel, a square of burnished light cut into the mountainside. And through—a concrete blur of fluorescent light and ceramic tiles, the reverb whoosh of engines, wind, and when the tunnel ends the City bursts around me in riotous blooms of glass and steel. I plunge through the skyline. The light of skyscrapers floats on skeins of interstate bonded by golden bridges, a ghost image of the City reflecting in the black mirror of the rivers, my God, my God, I remember, it’s everything I want, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, it’s everything I want to remember.

I’m here.

I’m here:

“Pay when you leave—”

The bus driver, an older black man sipping from a thermos. Port Authority sweater-vest and slacks. I almost want to touch him, to touch his arm to feel him, to see how real he feels, but I sit toward the rear, thankful to smell the layering of body odor and stale air, the vinyl seats. This was the 54C—South Side to Oakland. There are others on this bus, others visiting the Archive—we’re different from the illusions, somehow lighter. We all look at one another, wondering what we’ve lost.

The driver takes us along Carson and several of us disembark to walk among the lights and people, to remember what it felt like to be on the South Side on a Saturday night. There are more people in the Archive than usual today, because of the ten-year anniversary—survivors enveloping themselves in these memories. The bars teem with faces basking in the bluish glow of a Steelers game on the flat screens. Reruns, but they can still cheer as if the games were new, as if they didn’t already know who lost. The crowds are thick on Carson, just as they had once been, but I stay on board the bus to look at the streets scrolling past, to see the places I’d known, places I could walk into and still see everyone I once knew as if nothing had happened, as if they were still alive, still here. Nakama, Piper’s Pub, Fat Head’s. Near 17th the bus stops and more people climb on. Real people, other survivors. We look at one another, wondering.

I ride the 54C loop farther eastward, between the brackets of the rivers, until the edge of Shadyside. I walk to Ellsworth Avenue down streets of mansions and tended lawns—these are houses of the dead, everyone who lived here is dead. Tree shade, a row of cars idling up ahead at the light at Negley—and just beyond the intersection, a sign for Uni-Mart. I used to buy milk there. Overpriced cereal’s on the shelves, and instant coffee, and Twinkies, Slim Jims. Antacid and aspirin behind the counter. They used to sell Playboy magazine there, and Penthouse—long after you couldn’t easily find actual magazines, but Uni-Mart sold them on a wire rack along with fashion magazines and Us Weekly and magazines with pictures of girls and trucks, all shrink-wrapped. I’d love to look at those. I’d love to wander the aisles, to smell the ammonia-clean of the bathrooms and the hot dogs juicing on their rollers and watch a Slushie gush bright cherry red into a waxy paper cup—but not now, not now.

The Georgian Apartment with its black iron gates. This is where we lived. Layering, the scent of mown lawns, of car exhaust, of fried food from the restaurants a few blocks away on Walnut. I’m here. Layering, every tree marked with a SmartTag: American Elm, White Poplar, special highlights on a Cutleaf Weeping Birch, and along the ground, Lily, Tulip, every flower—with links to Wikipedia, JSTOR, the Phipps botanical database. Moving SmartTags on insects, an annotated anthill with journal references about fifteen feet away.

I’m here—

On Ellsworth, the ginkgos have shed their leaves, carpeting the sidewalk with a vomit-sour sludge of crushed berries. I run through the Georgian’s courtyard, stone benches line the walk and columns flank the double front doors. Layering, the scent of the fuchsia peonies overflowing the Grecian planters. The apartment lobby’s tiled black and white, with brass mailboxes for the tenants and a carved mantel over an ornamental fireplace. It’s all so real. My reflection’s in the mirror above the fireplace but I can’t stomach to look. The paisley carpet on the central staircase is threadbare and stinks of cigarette smoke. The stairs and floorboards creak. Fire doors and ill-lit hallways. An Exit light at the far end of the hall, a window with gauzy curtains. I’m here. Room 208.

I’m here—

Just outside the room door, a section of the apartment wall’s been repainted as a SmartTag, scrolling through faces of 208’s previous tenants—the pictures pulled from driver’s licenses and student IDs, the census, or linked through cached Facebook profiles to the names on the leases.

Blaxton, John Dominic and Theresa Marie—

The SmartTag vanishes, loading my profile. I step into the foyer of my old apartment. The walls are cream and the floors are a gleaming blonde hardwood. The kitchen is a galley, the bathroom small—cracked tiles and a sink with separate handles for hot and cold. The radiators cough and clank. I take my coat off, my shoes. We didn’t have much furniture, but what we had is here—the seafoam Ikea couch in front of the bookshelves, a set of wooden Ikea chairs we’d painted red. The bookshelves sag with stacked poetry books and poetry manuscripts sent to me to consider, books and manuscripts I never read, never will read. Railroad tracks cut through the busway gully about fifty yards from the building. We’d hated the trains when we first moved in, but grew accustomed to the swaying iron lullaby as they rushed near our windows each night. I miss them, Oh God, how I miss them. Our bedroom is spare—a futon with pillows and comforters, the sheets tangled like we’d left them. A set of dresser drawers bought cheap in the children’s section of Target. A television with a DVD player. I undress. I lie in bed with her, holding her, waiting for the trains to sing us to sleep. I breathe in the scent of her hair. Night falls.

11, 17—

“Dominic—and I’m here because I’ve had problems with Adware, that sort of thing. I’m a survivor of Pittsburgh. I tweak to enhance immersion, so I’m here for substance abuse, too, but that’s considered a secondary on my paperwork—”

“Hello, Dominic,” they all say.

The leader sits beneath the clock. Sickly green walls. A chalkboard: What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.—Ralph Waldo Emerson. The others slouch on folding chairs in a semicircle staring at me, fluorescent tubes carving their faces in white and shadow. A few twitch for a fix—cigarette packs and lighters already in their sweaty hands.

“Dominic, you have the floor—feel free to speak your mind. Tell us about your grieving. What are you struggling with? You don’t have to stand—”

“Brown sugar, mainly. I’ve also done MDPV, Adderall, Dexedrine and LSD, but they don’t work as well, sometimes they kink the immersion with paranoia—”

I’ve casually become an expert of stimulants, the paraphernalia of attaining highs vivid enough to make the streams real, and I hate myself for it—I hate how easily I recite the litany of shit I’ve used and how quickly I can catalog their range of effects. I was never like this, I was never like this before—Theresa wouldn’t recognize the man I’ve become.

“I had an episode the other day,” I tell them. “Heroin in my system from a pill called a valentine when I dropped brown sugar at a KFC and lost control. I can’t even remember—the police picked me up wandering Dupont Circle. I’d stopped up traffic—a public nuisance, my fifth disturbing the peace charge. They arrested me and checked me into an Urgent Care clinic. They cleaned my blood. Dialysis with dopamine stims and a pack upgrade to the Adware that’s reconditioned my cravings—”

“Involuntary Assistance,” they call it: two dozen beds, male nurses with heavy hands used to subduing violent patients. Nylon straps, buckled down. The patient next to me retched crystallized blood—Christ. They laced me with tubes, plugged me into the machine. I gave up, stopped struggling. Intravenous fluids coursed through me. I didn’t feel the dialysis, but heard the whir, chug, whoosh of the machine cleaning my blood and rushing it back to my heart. I wondered where I was—The hospital. Did something happen to me?—savoring the last wisps of Theresa and Pittsburgh as Twiggy’s heroin valentine was filtered from my body. The Adware downloads completed and my personality numbed—fucked everything up, all my account settings. The nurses flashed visuals of drugs and measured my responses, tinkered with my Adware until I fell within the normal range. My addiction was cured.

“A clean bill of health?” asks the leader.

“A clean bill of health, but I was convicted on a drug abuse felony because of the heroin and sentenced to eight years of prison, but the sentence was waived in exchange for a correctional rehabilitation program. I lost my job—”

“What happened?” asks the leader.

“My boss’s hand was forced because of the felony charge,” I tell them. “But I think he was losing patience anyway. He voiced and told me that my employment status had changed, that I would no longer be working for him. I tried to argue—”

“And now you’re here with us, a grief support group for men affected by Pittsburgh-related PTSD—”

“The Correctional Health Board mandates I change treatment providers and go through a year’s worth of correctional health counseling before my case will be reevaluated. The clinics are overcrowded so I was enrolled in outpatient therapy—”

“I hope we’ll be able to help you make progress toward your goals,” says the leader.

“I never had headaches like I do now,” I tell him. “I can’t focus anymore—”

“That’s from the wiring,” says one of the others—Jason, maybe. Jayden, or something. I can’t quite remember his name. “If you don’t have that Lux shit, you burn it out and fry your head,” the guy says, rubbing his own surgery-pocked scalp. “Your brain sprouts tumors—”

“Thank you, but no crosstalk this meeting,” says the leader, a petite man, soft, sallow, with a thinning patch of hair gelled into wispy spikes that doesn’t quite hide the wormy white lines of his own Adware scar tissue. The men here obey him. When he smiles, his eyes remain dispassionate. His voice is soft. No Adware during the sessions for privacy—the leader runs a firewall fob to disrupt network connections. We can trust one another, I’m told.

“Dominic, tell us a little about yourself,” says the leader. “Where were you when you heard?”

It’s hard to talk about this—especially here, surrounded by strangers, all men, their own problems brimming in their eyes. One man yawns, and it’s disrespectful, disrespectful to her. It happens like this—overwhelmed by memories. The linoleum tile floor of the classroom, the ceiling lights—I don’t want to think about the end, I don’t want to think about her. Not here, not with these people.

“Shit… Oh, shit. I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right to cry,” says the leader. “Let it out. Talk with us, share your story. Hearing each other’s stories helps us to understand we’re not alone. We were all away from friends and family when it happened. We’ve all lost everything. We haven’t been uniquely chosen to suffer—”

“I’m sorry,” I end up saying.

“Please, tell us what happened,” says the leader, older than me by a few years, maybe ten years or so, but he has a boyish face and bright, condescending eyes that seem to diagnose me even as he pities me. He purses his thin lips. I cry and feel the others losing what patience they might have had with me. I meet the leader’s eyes, wordlessly begging him to let me off the hook, but he just watches me, waiting, his head cocked like a parent prepared to believe the lies his children will tell. The others in the group watch me, too—some do, anyway.

“Columbus, when it happened,” I tell them. “I was at a conference, at Ohio State—the Midwestern Universities Conference on Literature. MUCOL, it was called. I presented a paper on John Berryman’s Dream Songs and the notion of Subjectivities and Dialogism and the changing nature of the Speaker—I forget the specifics. We went out for lunch following the morning panels. On High Street, at a sports bar when we heard the news. I think I may have screamed and just collapsed. I remember screaming. I remember the scent of the carpet at the restaurant—like beer and cigarettes and stale fabric. The others, these colleagues of mine I’d met just the day before—they all just looked at me. Everything was confusing, I remember. Not knowing exactly what had happened, but within fifteen or twenty minutes as the news rolled in—no one was left alive, I knew that. No one in Pittsburgh was left alive. I don’t know what I would have wanted them to do, but they just sat there, looking at me—”

“And you visit the Archive of Pittsburgh through your Adware, to relive your life there, and you use stimulants to heighten your experience of the City—”

“The drugs help,” I tell them.

“And you immerse to see her?”

“My wife—”

“What was her name?”

“Theresa Marie,” I say, her name unnatural in my mouth, like chewing on a foreign phrase. I don’t want to speak her name for others to hear—she doesn’t belong here, not in this place, not with these men.

“What happened?”

“Nothing—nothing happened,” I tell them. “I was in Columbus and couldn’t get home. There was no home. I drove as far as I could—until the checkpoints in West Virginia. I was put up in temporary housing. FEMA. Someone told me I should head back to Columbus, where I at least had a hotel room booked, but I thought I’d be able to get through to Pittsburgh. I just couldn’t comprehend that it was no longer there. I tried calling Theresa all night. I could still leave her voice messages—”

“Brown sugar is a variant of methamphetamine,” says the leader. “Dominic, it’s killing you—”

“It helps make her real—”

“I understand,” says the leader, “but it’s killing you—”

“What does it matter if I die?”

“You don’t want to die,” he says, like he’s explaining simple math. “You want to see your wife again, you want to relive all the years you were blessed to have with her, and you want to somehow compensate for all the years you aren’t able to spend with her. You’re here because you want to remember your wife through healthy immersion. You want to live so you can grow old with the memories of your wife. You want her to live on through you. You don’t want to die.”

“You don’t understand,” I tell him, knowing that he does understand, that they all understand.

A fifteen-minute break with the smokers on 13th—we’re like derelicts out here, milling around in front of Walker Memorial Baptist, bathed in the light of the church’s video board: Do less Facebook, Do more Faithbook. A phalanx of DC police armored trucks pulls to the red light, the cops in riot armor looking our way, their eyes hidden behind black visors. What do they think of us? We’re all tagged, so they must know not to bother with us—they must see our blinking records proclaiming we’re being rehabilitated. The light changes and the armored trucks rumble on. Shop lights in the dusk—the Rite Aid at the intersection with U Street looks like a pool party over there. Jangling my Adware, that’s all. Women in bikinis overlaying the street, splashing and frolicking and sunbathing—every time I glance over, there are different faces and different bodies, different swimsuit styles, slight variations searching to find my ideal, to force my implied consent. What are they selling?

Pineapple Fanta! Coconut Xocola! Join the party! $5.50—

No, no—I don’t want any. Not now. I don’t want to buy—

Ogling white bathing suits and golden skin until Xocola gives up on me and I’m staring at nothing but the Rite Aid, the sidewalk, cars caught at the red light, mildly aroused and my brain still tingling from the failed sales pitch.

Ten o’clock. The leader encourages us to hold hands and pray—“Our Father, who art in Heaven…” We mumble through. The leader reminds us about the sign-in sheet and distributes plastic cups and asks us to fill them.

“We went through a thermos of coffee, tonight. No excuses—”

We file into the bathroom. We’re orderly, quiet. We’re all just checking boxes, putting ourselves through the paces. Share to prayer. Fill the cup. No one talks to each other—we just take our turns at the urinals, the words of the Lord’s Prayer already distant as we piss into our cups. We file back into the meeting room. The leader’s wearing latex gloves and collects the samples in a cooler. They hand him their plastic cups, they sign the sheet, they collect their coats and leave. When I hand the leader my cup, he says, “Stick around a few minutes—”

The last donut’s a sugar coated—I eat it, and pour another Styrofoam cup of coffee. Once everyone’s gone, the leader snaps his cooler closed.

“One of the more unpleasant parts of the job,” he says. “Collecting the samples. But outpatient therapy’s better than the detox ward. I’d much rather collect urine than deal with detox—”

“I’ve been through detox,” I tell him.

“A few times, I understand,” he says. “Don’t want to go back there again, I suppose?”

“Urine samples after every meeting?”

“I’m afraid so,” says the leader. “It’s part of the deal. You won’t clear your conviction until you test clean for about a year, give or take, although they’ll put you on probation after a few months if your tests remain clear. By the way, outside of group I’m not Dr. Reynolds. Call me Timothy—”

“I didn’t talk too much, did I? I hope I didn’t interrupt the group with my story. I didn’t mean to cry like that—”

“No, no,” says Timothy. “That’s not why I wanted to see you—you did fine, actually. You were very courageous tonight. Sometimes newcomers don’t like to share and it takes time to draw them out. I was actually hoping to talk with you about your work status for a few minutes, if that’s all right. You worked for the Archive, didn’t you? Your file says you worked for the Pittsburgh City-Archive—”

“Not exactly for the Archive,” I tell him. “The Archive’s run by the Library of Congress. I worked as an archival assistant for a research firm called the Kucenic Group, so I used the Archive quite a bit. Insurance claims, some genealogy—”

“Do you think you’ll be given your job back once you complete therapy?” he asks.

“I’m not sure—I guess I don’t think so. Not this time—”

“You’re not interested in the work anymore?”

“It’s not that—I’d take my job back,” I tell him. “I loved the work, but I fucked up. Mr. Kucenic has shown a lot of forbearance with me over the years, but he’d trusted me with something important and I failed him—”

Timothy packs up his papers in a leather satchel. A few moments pass before he asks, “What were you working on? If you don’t mind my asking—”

The question jolts me—the dead girl in the river mud, her bone-white feet spattered black. Her body flashes in my mind as clear as any memory.

“I research people who have died in the Archive,” I tell him.

“That sounds like difficult work,” he says. “Emotionally difficult. Who were you researching? Someone close to you?”

“I can’t—I don’t think I want to talk about it,” I tell him, but the silence deadens around us so I ask him, “Well, then—is that all you needed?”

Timothy considers me a moment. “It’s not so much what I need from you, Dominic. This is more about what you need. I think I can help you—if you want the help. No more of this ‘I want to die’ business, though. You’ll need a new attitude about your life and your recovery. I think I can accelerate this entire process for you if you’re willing to work. And recovering your physical and emotional well-being is work, don’t think otherwise. Reviewing your file, though, I just don’t think you’re an optimal candidate for group therapy—”

“I don’t understand,” I tell him. “Dr. Simka was specific in what would be required—”

“Dr. Simka and I disagree about your treatment,” says Timothy. “Please don’t get me wrong—I’m sure Simka’s a good doctor. He has an excellent reputation—”

“He’s been good to me—”

“You’re in my care now,” says Timothy. “I’ve been looking over your file—Dr. Simka’s compassionate, but lacks imagination. His knee-jerk reaction was to prescribe Zoloft and sign off on pharmaceutical app reconditioning. There’s plenty of published evidence to support the short-term effectiveness of pharmaceutical apps. I’ve seen them help. I’ve seen full-blown heroin addicts off the habit in about an hour following the right download, but I’ve also seen those same men and women using again weeks or even days later, because the underlying causes of their addictions were never treated—that’s what these RN techs don’t understand. They think a brain rewire will solve everything, like a miracle cure. Change is possible, Dominic, but it has to be a total change, body and soul—a reawakening. You, for instance. You’re clean, but nothing’s stopping you from using again. Tonight, even—”

“I want your help. I just don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me—”

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “I’ll treat. Or we can just grab some coffee if you’d rather. I’m starving, myself—”

Timothy erases the chalkboard and rearranges the chairs, pulling them from the circle and tucking them back into the desks. I help him. He’s like the teachers I had back in high school—slacks and a sweater-vest over his shirt and tie, hopelessly rumpled. He shuts off the lights and locks up, leaving the key in an envelope and sliding it under the office door. We leave together—it’s started to snow.

“Dr. Simka’s recommendation went a long way in influencing the Correctional Health Board’s conclusion following your episode the other night,” says Timothy, “but I believe they fit you into an incorrect treatment program. I feel so strongly about this that I personally requested your case slotted to my group—I don’t know if you realize that. I want to oversee your treatment, so you aren’t pushed in a counterproductive direction. I don’t believe group therapy will help you. I don’t believe Zoloft is a responsible long-term solution. These methods are a foundation built on sand, meant to treat symptoms, not the underlying causes. Once we find the correct treatment for your depression, I believe your other lifestyle choices will change. You’ll become healthier. I believe we’ll be effective in your case—”

“Good news,” I say.

“You’re placating me now, but in ten years when you’re trim and happy you’ll remember this conversation. It is good news,” he says, smiling—genuinely smiling for the first time, I think, this entire evening.

Timothy drives a powder-blue Fiat, twenty years old at least, parked crooked and scraped along the passenger side. He stashes the cooler of urine samples in the trunk while I climb in, these European cars cramped and awkward for my height. My knees hit the dash. The top of my head touches the roof—I’d be crippled if we wreck, my face windshield-kissed and my knees shattered.

He pulls into traffic, cutting between cars. I brace myself, the feeds kicking in with traffic patterns and weather reports on the windshield display, a snow front rolling in with little to no predicted accumulation. An eruption of nightingales—a flock swarming outside the windshield despite the wintry night: Twiggy’s ringtone, it looks like. Her avatar’s a webcam selfie in black-rimmed glasses and an All Things Considered sweatshirt, her hair a feathery halo. Her face hovers, but I let her nightingales sing as we pass through Dupont Circle, every building facade a fashionporn billboard, every storefront a video from Unwerth and Testino and Gavril—paradise after paradise. Every storefront tempts me—it looks like there are parties behind the show windows, rooms filled with models in slinky skirts sipping martinis and laughing, but there aren’t parties in there, it’s all Adware marketing, illusions. Twiggy gives up—she sends a text, asking for poetry recommendations. Her profile blinks out and the nightingales fly away.

“My wife and I were visiting her family in Atlanta,” says Timothy, Rhett and Scarlett cartoons breaking through the pop-up filters to offer discount packages to the American South, Gone with the Wind–themed tours.

“You’re a survivor?” I ask him.

“I’m a survivor in the same sense that you are,” he says. “We left Atlanta late, passed through Birmingham around midnight, and the highway just tapered off. Country roads overgrown with trees. Pitch-black two-lane interstates. I’ve never seen such darkness—the headlights reached out but I couldn’t see. Just the center line when there was a center line and the trunks of trees and dumpy roadside gas stations, long closed. We thought we were lost. We looked for a hotel, but never found one. Lydia fell asleep and I just drove, thinking I could push through until morning. My eyes would close, would close a little longer. I felt like I was dissolving. I was—depressed, Dominic. I was so sick of life—I know you understand. Headlights approached and I could see them from a long way off and I’d imagine swerving into the oncoming lights, at the last moment just twitching the wheel toward them—but the headlights would rush past and once the taillights disappeared in the rearview we were alone again in that utter dark. I was cheating on Lydia—my wife. More than just cheating on her. I was a terrible husband, very selfish. We’d grown bored and I think we were blaming each other for what we were losing. Two in the morning, three. It was just after three in the morning when I noticed the road change. There was something coating the road—it took time to realize it was blood. The road was covered in blood. I saw a deer’s body in the headlights, and then another two or three bodies, and soon I saw dozens of deer. I must have shuddered or made a sound because Lydia woke up. Their carcasses were torn apart and spread over the asphalt. I don’t know what could have happened. I imagine a big rig in that vast black night tearing through a herd as they crossed, but I don’t really know what could have killed so many. The meat came into our headlights and we saw heads and hoofs and torsos, the road just blood and torn meat and fur. Bones. It took a solid minute to drive through, a solid minute before our headlights lit nothing but the blacktop road—a minute is a long time. I think I laughed once we were out of it and Lydia wondered if she’d been dreaming, but laughed too a little—wondering where in the hell we were. Alabama. We checked into the first respectable hotel we came to, around five in the morning—this was all the way in Tupelo, Mississippi, by that point. We slept. We woke up late in the afternoon. We heard the news about Pittsburgh—no one at the hotel thought to wake us up to tell us. No one from our families or friends knew where we were staying or how to reach us. Lydia just turned on the TV while I was in the shower and screamed—”

“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, never knowing what to say.

“We’ve all lost,” says Timothy, smiling without his eyes smiling. “That’s my enduring association with Pittsburgh—when people ask where I was, I see that hotel room shower and hear my wife screaming—”

“I hear ‘Pittsburgh’ and my mind flashes to that sports bar in Columbus. Ohio State Buckeyes—”

“God created us with the ability to move on from overwhelming grief,” he says. “Coping involves understanding our own innate worth, understanding that if we’re the ones surviving tragedy, death, divorce or change, then we’re the ones ultimately responsible for sorting our complex emotions in order to fulfill God’s plan for us—”

“Is that what you believe?” I ask him.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords for dinner—a café and bookstore, a haunt of students and the chic intelligentsia, young professionals, writers. I’ve been here before, several times. We’re seated among the books, at a corner table. We order pasta—butternut squash ravioli and parmesan cheese. Hungrier than I realized.

“Lydia and I—our marriage wasn’t strong enough,” says Timothy. “After Pittsburgh I confessed everything about Emily—”

“Emily must have been the woman you were seeing?”

“Emily was there for me when my wife wasn’t,” says Timothy. “She was a beautiful, bright young woman, but she had self-esteem problems and before I fully realized what I was doing, I was taking advantage of her. We met through the clinic. I’m not proud. I still miss her. Of all the people I lost that day, I still think of Emily the most—I wish things had been different. I’m telling you this because I understand how you’re suffering—”

“Letting go’s difficult,” I say.

“Well. It is difficult,” says Timothy. “Lydia and I tried to work through it, but never stood a chance. Healthier for both of us, I think, when we separated. I moved out here to work in the psychology department at Georgetown—I was listless. I bought into a full suite of Adware—top-of-the-line stuff, at least for back then. I used to come home from campus and lie down on the basement couch and lose myself streaming the Victoria’s Secret catalog, that sort of thing—the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Agent Provocateur vids. Soft stuff, promotional kink—there was a scenario where two girls went to a country manor wearing nothing but lingerie. I streamed it so often that even now I could close my eyes and lead you through that manor house room by room, telling you everything that happened to those two girls. I didn’t do anything else with my life—I didn’t go out to eat, I didn’t have any friends, I’d just eat cereal or SpaghettiOs for dinner and stream this stuff. I’d spend entire days searching for perfect faces in the streams, trying to find the perfect model, the perfect scenario, and I’d snap from the Adware dehydrated and aching, my eyes bloodshot—”

The waitress delivers the check and Timothy pays for both of us.

“I was once like you,” he says, “drugs to realize the streams, my brain hardwired to pornography, secretly photographing girls in my classes with my retinal cams, girls I’d see on campus. I sank very low, Dominic—you wouldn’t believe what I was capable of. Think of the worst type of man—that was the man I was. I need you to know it’s possible for a man to change. Do you believe that a man can change, Dominic?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“A man can change—”

“The scales fall from our eyes, is that it?”

“I’d spend twenty, twenty-one hours a day streaming pornography, but I bottomed out—I blacked out in Georgetown Cupcake, of all places. I just collapsed. I woke up in the back of an ambulance, hooked up to an IV. Familiar?”

I nodded that it was familiar, yes, “Numerous occasions,” I tell him. “But you pulled through—”

“I didn’t pull through. I was saved, Dominic—”

“Saved?” I ask him.

“I experienced grace—”

“Look, I appreciate your interest in me, I do, but I’m not religious. I’m not looking to be saved. I don’t think I’m interested in this pitch—”

“I know better than to evangelize to my patients,” he says. “This is about finding the light within you that has gone out and flipping the switch so it comes back on—”

“Responsible immersion techniques, that sort of thing? How you get along with the streams?”

“Matthew 18:9,” says Timothy. “‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.’”

“I don’t understand—”

“I plucked it out, Dominic. I cut at my scalp with an X-Acto knife and pulled out the wiring. You can peel it right off the skull plate and just yank it out of your brain. I was in the hospital for three months recovering, but I was saved. Corneal laser surgery for the damage pulling out the lenses, but I was saved. Even if I would have lost my sight or lost my life at that moment, I would have gained my soul. When I recovered, he was there waiting for me—”

I glance at him and notice now that the scar tissue showing through his thinning hair is different from the usual Adware scars, not the grid ridges most people have, but an ill-healed white tangle.

“You’ve got to be kidding me if you think I’ll tear out my Adware—”

Timothy laughs. “My story—my personal story—is that I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and my faith in Christ gave me the strength to overcome my addictions. I don’t know what your personal story will be, Dominic. I’m hoping to help shepherd you to that crisis of change, and I’m hoping that you’ll come through that crisis a new man. I have a proposal for you—”

“I’ll just complete the group sessions, Dr. Reynolds. I really don’t want to get involved with any of this. No offense, I can tell you feel strongly—”

“Waverly,” says Timothy. “The man who was waiting for me in the hospital was a man named Waverly. He had a business proposal for me—a partnership. He needed my expertise for the work he was involved in and I believe he’ll need your expertise as well. Not everyone gets an opportunity to meet a man like him, but you came along at the right moment, Dominic. Dumb luck, in a way. If you work with Waverly, you won’t need to worry about Correctional Health Board regulations or completing therapy; you won’t need to worry about your arrest records, the felony charge, about money, your future employment status. He can release you from all these restraints, freeing you to take care of your own health, find your own change, pursue your own happiness. Waverly’s an influential man, Dominic. I think he can help you—”

“Let’s leave this stuff about happiness and change on the table for a moment. This man Waverly can clear my felony charge?” I ask him. “Is that what you’re telling me? Get me out of therapy, offer me work?”

“I just want you to meet him,” says Timothy.

Timothy offers a ride home, but I need to be alone. I need time to clear my thoughts—to Google Waverly, if nothing else. I take the bus. Empty at this hour, the rear seat’s vacant so I stretch out, unwelcoming to anyone who might board and find their way back here. Scan for signals—the bus’s router’s exceptional, Metro.net a stronger signal than the citywide Wi-Fi, so I switch connections even though it’s only good for a half-hour slot. New Hampshire to M, hoodie pulled low to block the city lights and the flash of passing ads. Waverly + DC nets hits—Theodore Waverly, Ph.D., head of something called Focal Networks, a consultancy firm it looks like. Adware marketing. His client list includes multinationals, the Chinese government, the European Union, the United States. A press-release bio’s repeated on every site he’s mentioned: a survivor of Pittsburgh, chair of the Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon, work in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology for DARPA. Developer of something called precognitive bypass communication. Deep roots in DC—an adviser to the Republican Party, a donor to the Washington Ballet, the DC symphony. He sits on the Kennedy Center board of trustees. Not much personal information, nothing specific—not even a picture of the man.

Timothy mentioned happiness—that he wants me to pursue my own happiness. I can’t fathom what happiness might mean anymore—it seems like luxury to someone whose life feels like a lead-lined discomfort, something that Timothy in his Christ buoyancy doesn’t seem to understand. I don’t seek out happiness, just pockets of alleviation—a drowning man sipping at bubbles of air. I load Three Rivers Net, the City translucent against the bus like a tissue paper overlay, thinner without brown sugar but I close my eyes and see more clearly: the stretch of Parkway through the hillside as the Archive loads. Happiness was Theresa. The City opens around me, the layers of architecture, the lines of rivers, steel bridges and curving brick streets that twist like tendrils of dreams.

I’m here—

Room 208.

The Georgian.

Gauzy curtains, paisley carpets, cream walls stained the color of tea from years of previous tenants’ cigarette smoke. Our apartment. I’m here—scrolling through the faces of past residents until I come to us: Blaxton, John Dominic and Theresa Marie. I can unlock the dead bolts with a key. I can feel the polished wood of the front door. We had one of my aunt’s wood-block prints of the White Rabbit in the foyer that’s re-created here—quirky decor once but grossly appropriate now, the illustration receiving me as I make my way through the longish, claustrophobic front hallway, falling back into everything I’ve lost.

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.

11, 21—

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—”

“You can’t bring yourself to it?”

“No, no, it’s not that,” he says. “She’s somehow vanishing from the City. Deleted. Someone’s deleting all her files—the public files and even my own private files. The job’s been thorough. The librarians—I’ve tried the librarians at the Library of Congress, and they’ve been sympathetic but haven’t been very helpful. They have too much work to do, building the City, maintaining it. I’ve filed police reports—but the police don’t have the resources. Besides, they don’t prioritize this as a missing persons case or anything of the sort but rather a data mismanagement claim or at worst cybervandalism or a hacking charge. Digital graffiti, that sort of thing, if they even want to entertain the notion that something like this is in their jurisdiction. I’ve searched on my own, but she’s vanishing. I have photographs—I know she exists. Existed—”

“Have you tried the Kucenic Group or one of the other research firms? They’re set up for work like this—”

“I trust Timothy about you,” he says. “When I talked with Kucenic, he wanted to transfer me to a sales rep, someone who handles accounts. He rattled off the names of awards and bragged about his U.S. News & World Report ranking, but when I asked if the person assigned to my case would be as skilled as you, he told me that he has a capable staff that can handle any query. He went on to tell me that your drug habit ruins you as a worker—”

“I’m clean,” I tell him.

“Good—”

“But it’s not difficult work. This is the type of research grad students are doing all over the country, that librarians are doing—”

“The cream rises to the top, Dominic. I don’t want ‘capable staff.’ I don’t want salesmen, I don’t want account representatives, and I certainly don’t want graduate students. I want someone with your skills, someone working for me. Someone with discretion—”

I scan the photograph of Albion, save the image to my Adware. Maybe the caffeine’s strafing my nerves but I feel sick and want to run from here, to hole up in my apartment and powder myself into oblivion, but something Timothy said snags my thoughts—you don’t want to die.

“You want me to find your daughter? Recover the files?”

“I want you to restore her to the Archive,” he says. “I want you to track down who is doing this to me, to my family, so that I can prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, or at least protect us from similar future threats. I want you to find out who has deleted her so that I can have my daughter back. Please. I’ve already lost her once—”

“I’ll help you—”

Qualia Coffee on my way home. Checking e-mail: Gavril’s written several times—all marked “high importance,” of course. Attachments of photos from fashion houses he wants me to caption—Anthropologie, House of Fetherston, Tom Ford—and his friends’ artist statements to translate into colloquial English, the usual odd jobs he lets me do. I mark them all as unread.

I ping Kucenic and when he doesn’t answer, I text him: Met with Waverly. Hard sell. What’s this all about?

A new message from Waverly’s secretary pops up as I’m pouring creamer into my coffee—he’s set up a per diem for direct deposit and negotiated with Kucenic so I can retain access to my archival security codes. I respond with my checking account number and PIN and within seconds the first deposit’s made—a rate substantially higher than Kucenic ever offered. Another file hits my in-box—a brief dossier about Albion.

Kucenic texts back: I’m sorry, Dominic. Please don’t contact me—

The heat’s off in my apartment again. Kucenic’s reply stings, but I try to understand—all the trouble I’ve caused him. Getting colder, so I wrap up in my comforter and watch a doc called A Round of Fiddles about Objectivist poetry but my mind wanders. Waverly’s daughter, Albion. By evening, another storm front’s dusting DC with snow and I shut off my lights and watch the encroaching winter—the weather here’s an odd mix of extremes, like Pittsburgh once. Warm enough in the afternoon to walk without a jacket yet snowing by nightfall. What would Gavril make of that photograph of Albion? What would he make of the clothes she wore—would he have recognized the gown? Maybe the whole production was something local to Pittsburgh, something amateurish. Scanning the dossier: Albion was twenty-four when she died, just shy of graduating from the fashion design program at the Art Institute. Images of her designs: tweeds and plaids, a prep fantasia. Other images of her: I’ve never seen a woman in real life who looks like these photographs, and I wonder how much of this imagery is false—camera tricks to make her seem tall, postproduction effects on her green eyes, coloring to make her hair that particular shade of blood red?

“Theresa Marie Blaxton—”

I say her name out loud, using her name the way Flagellants would have lashed themselves to remember the Passion of Christ.

“Theresa Marie Blaxton—”

I may be the only one on earth who remembers her, who remembers to speak her name.

11, 25—

Paperwork for Simka to sign, to transfer my care to Timothy. Visiting him, this morning, I actually wear a suit—to impress him, I think, even though it’s been years since I’ve worn this suit and the fit isn’t quite right anymore. Out of style now, or just too tight over my waist and rear, the jacket shoulders pinched, the collar like a stranglehold. Up the central stairwell to where his secretary, a cousin of his, a plump woman with a thatch of cranberry-red curls and heavy blue eye shadow, buzzes me into the reception room.

“Domi!” she says, “I don’t recall having an appointment for you today. Here, have a brownie—”

“It’s just a social call,” I try to explain, but take a brownie anyway. And another.

Nervous. Twenty minutes or so, drinking a complimentary Keurig. Simka escorts a patient from his office, a teenage boy—fourteen, maybe fifteen—studded with a Mohawk of pins and pierced with chains through his face. They’re talking about woodworking, Simka going on about his Zen theory of the lathe. He has the boy working on a project, a chair it sounds like.

“Excellent, excellent,” says Simka, “but remember, too, that you had trouble making picture frames at first, but now—”

Simka gives the boy his full attention—he asks about something the boy was to have read, The Woodworker’s Guide, Amazon portals linking Add to cart, but when the boy fesses up that he hasn’t yet read the chapters, Simka smiles and nods and says, “Next time, next time—”

Simka’s secretary mentions that I’ve been waiting. He’s surprised to see me, saying, “I didn’t recognize you in the suit!” He shakes my hand and asks how I’ve been. He tells me I look suave, stroking his mustache and grinning, asking if the suit’s new, complimenting the fabric. I tell him the last time I wore this suit was when I eulogized my wife.

“Well, you look good,” he says.

He invites me into his office—the familiar room—and I take my usual sofa seat. Simka doesn’t sit in his usual seat, though, a leather recliner near the sofa, but rather wheels around the ergonomic chair from behind his desk. There’s a potted ficus, but otherwise the room’s bare. Comfortable, though. The furniture’s oversize leather—I’ve been so tired recently I feel I could curl up on the sofa and sleep. He asks how I am and I answer. He offers me more coffee. He asks about Timothy and I tell him everything’s fine. Awkward gaps stud the pleasantries until I realize I’m hesitant, that I’ve been waiting for him to pick up his notebook and pen, the usual signal that our session has started. I’m not his patient anymore—

“I just brought some paperwork for you to sign,” I tell him.

“Oh, yes,” he says, and I hand the sheets over. “You know, you didn’t have to hand deliver these forms—”

He takes them to his desk, flattens out the creases I’ve made in them and reads them over. Everything’s standard, I’ve been told—but Simka is thorough. He removes an ink pen from a small box he keeps on his desk, shakes it twice, then signs in his looping official script. One page and the next. The third. He looks over what he’s done—ending an almost eight-year relationship with a few swipes of his pen.

“Since you’re here, though, I wanted to show you something,” he says, pulling a file from his desk. “When you transferred to Dr. Reynolds, I went through your old paperwork to pass along anything relevant and found some drawings you made. Do you remember these?”

He folds open several sheets of sketch pad paper—of course I remember these drawings, but haven’t thought of them in years. Drawings I’d made during our first sessions together, when I was defensive, cautious to talk with Simka about anything personal. I’d been sent to mandatory counseling by the Employee Assistance Program when the depression and drugs began to affect my work—my case was slotted to Simka. At first, our sessions were largely silent on my part, businesslike—Simka asking questions about the nature of my work, my work environment, wondering if I got along with my coworkers, with my boss, fishing for reasons why I might be having so much trouble. I rarely answered, or was vague. One afternoon several sets of crayons and a few pads of newsprint were spread out on an activity table in his office.

“I didn’t bring these for you,” I remember him telling me when I noticed the art supplies. “I run an art therapy group for teenagers. After-school stuff—”

I remember I told him that my wife used to do some art therapy as a volunteer at a place called the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. It was the first time I’d mentioned Theresa to him.

“We’ve been making memory maps,” Simka explained. “You draw the house you grew up in and write in everything you can remember about it, every detail. You’d be surprised how much you remember when you’re filling in a memory map, the specificity of the details. The kids never have enough room to write everything they want, so we journal, too—”

“What’s the point of all this?” I think I asked him.

“It helps you remember,” said Simka. “It helps you to understand yourself. The memory maps help people understand what is important to them, what they’re passionate about—it helps them remember significant signposts that they may have ignored, it helps them recover. Then you start drawing in the neighborhood you grew up in, sometimes on a separate sheet of paper. Everything you remember—”

I don’t remember how, exactly, he coaxed me into picking up a crayon to draw—I may have even suggested it, or maybe I just started drawing—but that’s how we spent our sessions for quite some time. Here’s the house in Bloomfield where I grew up, a brick three-bedroom row house, the building almost a hundred fifty years old when I’d lived there, my handwriting on the map impossible to read now, but I remember describing the crab apple tree in the back lot; the plank of wood my father had nailed between the branches to serve as a little bench up there; the shells of locusts left on the bark of the cherry tree; my dog, Bozworth—a German shepherd. Here’s my drawing of Bozworth—noodles of black and brown crayon, hardly recognizable as a dog if I hadn’t labeled him in pencil. I used to walk him down by the tracks and we’d stand aside on the gravel slopes to watch trains trundle by. Fourteen years old when we put him down. Simka hadn’t even known I was from Pittsburgh until I drew the rivers.

“I do remember these,” I tell him. Here’s one of Phipps Conservatory, where Theresa worked in the education department—I tried to draw in the walkways through the gardens, the vanilla bean trees, the butterfly forest and the café where we used to meet. Another map, labeled The Georgian—Room 208. Our shelves filled with vinyl records and books, our cupboards filled with exotic ingredients for Theresa’s cooking. Boxes of poetry manuscripts people had sent for my fledgling poetry line, Confluence Press, all unread when they burned. A few programming books, when I was studying coding to make Confluence Press viable as an e-book enterprise. Here’s the second bedroom, converted into Theresa’s office. I opened up to Simka through these drawings, and eventually I could talk freely without them. Simka had helped me immensely those early years—I used to collect things, back then. Hoard things. I used to buy crates full of old newspapers—anything printed from before the bomb. Simka helped me realize I couldn’t hold on to the past in that way, that I indulged in unhealthy obsessions that were bankrupting me and contributing to the squalor I lived in. “Let go,” he’d told me. He stabilized me.

“You can keep these drawings,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ll keep them tucked away in your file—”

“You should keep them,” I tell him.

Simka smiles. He carefully folds up the drawings and returns them to the file folder.

“And how are you handling your dreams?” he asks. “The last time we spoke, you were having some difficulty sleeping. You were thinking deeply about the young woman—Hannah, I believe her name was. Do you still think about Hannah?”

Horrified by the notion that I may have abandoned her, but for some reason I don’t want to tell Simka the truth—that I think about Hannah whenever I try to sleep, that I see her body and sometimes imagine her voice, so I say, “I stay busier now than I used to. Kucenic has her case now, he’ll take care of her. I don’t have much time to think about the past—”

“Well, then. Here’s your paperwork,” he says. “Good luck. I’m very proud of how far you’ve come. I know that it’s been hard for you recently. I should have realized that you might have needed some extra attention right now, and I’m sorry I failed you in that regard. The ten-year anniversary. I should have anticipated how hard this would be for you—”

“I’m healthy,” I tell him. “All’s well that ends well—”

“That’s fine, very fine,” says Simka, but tells me recovery rarely happens in one gulp, and that it’s a fine idea to still journal—that I’m still suffering from depression and anxiety, even if I’m feeling better and have been distracted by some exciting new changes.

“I’m still writing,” I tell him, and show him this notebook. He flips through, his Adware overlaying my poor handwriting with Verdana typeface. He reads a page. “Good,” he says, “good detail. Consider using some of the Progoff prompts…” I remember an early session when I showed him my poetry, the poetry I used to write. He’d read them attentively, twice over, three times over, and had said, “These are beautiful.”

“So, now we’re talking purely as friends,” he says. “Addiction and recovery from depression are difficult. There isn’t a quick fix—even complete dialysis and Adware reconditioning don’t treat the underlying causes of your addiction. You’ll have to work at this, Dominic. As they say, ‘You’re gonna carry that weight—’”

“Timothy told me a very similar thing but said you’d disagree. At any rate, I feel like maybe I can become happy again—”

“Hm,” he says. “Just so you know—indulge me, here, Dominic: you are still eligible for further substance abuse treatment through the District system. Dr. Reynolds pursued your case file once the Correctional Health Board determined you’d have to switch out of my care. I’m not sure why he pursued you, Dominic—but it makes me wonder if he has a predetermined treatment schedule in mind. If you find that your current therapy isn’t helping you meet your goals, and if you decide to sign up for further substance abuse treatment, Dr. Reynolds wouldn’t even have to know. There are confidentiality requirements if you apply directly to the Correctional Health Board. Keep that in mind, anyway. Once the novelty of switching treatment methods fades, you may search out substances again to bring clarity. Old habits die hard—”

“You know, Dr. Simka, bringing up substance abuse clinics with me is counterproductive. I’m beyond that. I’m with Timothy now—”

“I can’t argue with success,” he says.

We’re interrupted—his secretary doesn’t buzz but knocks discreetly, poking her colorful head into the office to announce his next appointment’s ready in the reception room. Simka shakes my hand and asks me to dinner, to talk further when we have more time, in a different setting, over cognac, but I’m noncommittal.

Timothy finds me as I’m leaving Simka’s office. He pulls over in the Fiat, rolls down his window.

“Nothing you’re doing is more important,” he yells to me. “Come on with me. Get in—”

The lingering cigarette stink of the interior, the lack of legroom. Timothy inches through a throng of pedestrians crowding the boulevard, laying on the horn, and peels away once he’s clear.

“How did you find me here?”

“You mentioned you’d be over this way,” he says. “Kalorama, at Dr. Simka’s office. I figured I’d take a chance, try to spot you—”

Again the exhilaration of potential death in wreckage as Timothy drives—he cuts off a garbage truck at the intersection, running a stop sign he claims never used to be there. He’s wearing a suit and tie, a wool overcoat. He’s a slight man but flabby, and when he smiles his face blossoms into double chins.

“I have meetings today,” he says. “Actually, you’re on the docket. I’m recommending to the board that they withdraw you from group therapy. Waverly will be your sponsor, if that’s all right with you?”

“That’s great news,” I tell him. “Absolutely. I have the paperwork you needed from Simka—”

“I’ll take over your case as a private therapist, because there are treatment requirements we have to keep up with. Red tape. I’ll keep the talk therapy to a minimum, though, so we don’t waste your time. I will hold you to staying clean, however. This isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card—”

“I understand.”

Timothy folds into traffic. I ask him where he’s taking me.

“A clinic Waverly uses from time to time. He has a gift for you, a sort of welcome to the company gift—”

“The company?” I ask. “Focal Networks? Is that who I’ll be working for?”

“You’ve been doing some research about him, I take it? You won’t be working for Focal Networks, not officially, but you’ll have some of their perks—”

“What is it, exactly, that Waverly does?”

“Psychology applied to business,” says Timothy. “Algorithms. Think of it like this: You see two advertisements. You pick one to pay attention to. Waverly figured out why you pick one and not the other—he can predict it. He can predict which images hold your attention in the streams, which ones you’ll remember. His work is mostly academic theory. I’ve tried reading his papers, but they’re all math—”

“So… Marketing?”

“Marketing consultancy, maybe, but you don’t quite understand. His company goes beyond marketing. Marketing is irrelevant once you hire Waverly—”

“Then why all this shit in the Adware? If he’s figured it out—”

Timothy laughs. “All that shit in the Adware is Waverly figuring it out. He’s programming you,” he says. “Every time you look or click or fantasize, you give him the key—”

A private Panda Electronics clinic in Chevy Chase. The showroom fills with spots for Panda Electronics, hallucinations of Chinese girls wearing cosplay lingerie and panda bear ears, cuddling with panda bear cubs, offering deals on personal devices. The clinician is dressed in Ralph Lauren, a polo shirt and white slacks—simple, but she’s a stunner, black hair and pale, high cheekbones and vivid violet eyes. A plastic surgeon must have installed her Adware because the scarring cresting her forehead resembles the veins of a leaf rather than the haphazard gridding most people have. Her profile’s set to public—Agatha Kramer, a biocommunications major at Georgetown, a cheerleader for the Redskins, vids of her in mustard and yellow spandex, doing high kicks on the sidelines. Her profile pic’s one of Gavril’s “Street Fashion” series—so she’d been one of his impromptu models for the blog. She smiles as we approach.

“Mr. Waverly?” she says.

“Yes, the Waverly appointment,” says Timothy. “This is Dominic. He’ll be yours this afternoon.”

Mannequins line the wall displaying the latest Adware—implants, SmartMed fashion, URL codes for upgrades and free app downloads. Timothy points out a mannequin with demo wiring—the iLux is beautiful, a net of gold wires set on a bioinorganic plate that rests on the skull, wire points that will grow naturally with the brain.

“This is what Waverly picked for you,” says Timothy. “I hope you like it—it’s already bought and paid for—”

“You can’t be serious,” I say. “The iLux? That’s too much—”

“Think of it as a show of support for the good work you’ll do,” says Timothy. “One of the perks I mentioned. Think of the iLux as your company car—”

I sign in, fill out the consent forms—in prouder days I may have balked at a gift like this, wondering at the quid pro quo, but now I accept iLux like I’d accept air to breathe. Agatha asks if I’m ready and leads us down sterile halls into a rear room. A dentist’s chair. I relax my weight into it, Agatha lowering the seat cushion and reclining me backward until I’m looking up at her, the ceiling lights like bright saucers in my eyes, the smell of her breath mints and makeup wafting down to me. She drapes a paper bib over me, tucking it into my shirt collar.

“Please turn off password protect for the transfer,” she says, and when I do, an alert surfaces about our mutual friend—Gavril. Agatha smiles, friends me. “You know Gav?” she says and I tell her he’s my cousin.

“He’s amazing,” she says. “I’m such an obsessive about his work. This one time he actually stopped me on the sidewalk and asked to take my picture—I almost died. The girl I was with couldn’t believe it—”

“He’s a good guy,” I tell her.

Timothy sits on the couch, settling in with paperwork on his tablet. Agatha shaves what stubble is left on my head, then preps me with an alcohol rub and applies a local anesthetic. As my scalp numbs it feels like my consciousness lifts several inches above my body, that I’m still aware of my legs and arms, but everything feels below me, down on the chair.

“Are you comfortable?” Agatha says.

“Very much, yes, thank you,” I tell her.

“Can you feel this?”

“What?”

“Any pressure of any kind?”

“No,” I say.

“Good—”

She leaves the room for a moment, wheeling in the surgeon arm when she returns—it’s chrome with a multipronged hand that she positions over my head. She flips a switch—glaring light—and lowers goggles over her eyes.

“Ready?” she asks.

“I’m ready—”

Her profile vids blink out as she cuts my current Adware. Unplugged. I feel pressure now—or imagine I can, hearing the quiet rotors of the surgeon arm operate. I feel the wick and whir when the arm slits me open and feel the liquid rush like a distant tickle and the towels Agatha holds against my neck to catch blood. Timothy’s watching the procedure, interested. Grinding, a spritz of something cold—an ice water bath or a chemosuture. The surgeon arm spools out the old Adware from my brain like winding spaghetti onto a fork, the old wires slipping out easily with only minor tugs and nudges, pinching a bit. Nothing to cause pain. It’s an odd sensation but not entirely unpleasant. Agatha makes a comment and laughs, but I miss what she’s said over the sound of the machine.

Agatha changes out my paper bib and dabs up more blood. The arm’s swiveled to a different needle, perforating my skull—I understand how this works, what’s happening. Jostling from the pressure and soon the arm begins stitching in the iLux, Agatha feeding the surgeon arm the gold netting like threading bullets into a machine gun. The surgeon arm replaces my scalp and sutures the wound with its heat needle—new scars from the operation, grids of scar tissue cutting across the scars already up there. The Adware boots. I lose my vision. The blindness is temporary but disconcerting—this total blindness is always disconcerting. I feel the surgeon arm swipe out the old retinal lenses and replace them with the Meopta lenses.

Timothy says, “Looks good.”

Agatha’s moving—a sink turns on. She’s talking, removing each tool from the surgeon arm—click, click. My hearing diminishes, but soon iLux appears in gold cursive on a field of black. The Adware welcomes me and begins transferring my account settings, using Focal Networks as the default for hosting information. When the progress bar fills, I open my eyes.

“How do you like it?” says Agatha.

Definition higher than reality—I understand what that pitch means, now—yes. The world was low-res and fuzzy before, like I’d been viewing the world through Vaseline goggles until now, everything suddenly so clear. Agatha’s face—glistening lips, wisps of hair, long mascara-thick lashes.

“I love it,” I tell her. “This is incredible—”

The world is designed—orderly apps, housed in spherical graphics. The augs are accessible but unobtrusive: date, time, weather, GPS mapping, social networking. Agatha’s profile populates my vision—her cheer vids spooling in half-light, but when my thought shifts to one it becomes opaque. The retinal cam is already autostoring imagery of Agatha, placing her in my address book, autodictating where and when we’d met, autocopying pics and vids from her profile that had caught my attention in the split second I’d scanned through them. FaceRank interprets my vitals, tracks changes in my baseline, places her near the top of recent looks, just below my memory of Twiggy. When I look at Timothy, the Adware captures his face but autocell populates info because he lacks a profile, the iLux interacting smoothly with my thoughts before they’ve even become my conscious thoughts.

Timothy signs that I’ve been successfully discharged and that he’s taking me home. He lifts my arm around his shoulder and helps me from the clinic—it’s difficult to walk, like my numbed consciousness floats a foot or so in front of me. Wide steps, unsure of where my foot will land and constantly surprised at the suddenness of pavement. Timothy eases me into the Fiat. He tells me to close my eyes so I don’t get motion sickness and vomit in his car. I close my eyes. He turns corners tightly, my body swaying in the passenger seat—I’m clutching the seat belt harness for support, nauseous from the heightened sense perception.

“Go ahead and try to sleep,” he tells me. “You don’t need to stay awake—”

I try to relax, consider sleep, but instead of sleep I load the City—the load time’s negligible, the processing speed of the iLux incredible. The Parkway East, the iLux defaulting to the highest resolution, rendering the City indistinguishable from reality, through the tunnel—

A rain-murky evening. The Starbucks at the corner of Craig and Forbes, a bare-breasted mermaid logo on glass. People drift through the café, once captured inadvertently on security cameras or retinal cams, their profiles pulled from cloud storage, archived in the City because of the Right to Remember Act and used to populate these places, even these minor corners of the City. Ghosts living their scant bit of electronic existence in a perpetual loop, ordering coffee forever, sitting at café tables forever, repeating the same conversations forever, trying to hurry home through the rain but ending up back in line for coffee. They seem to look at me, interact with me. I watch them through the rain-streaked windows holding umbrellas, their skin absurdly white in the failing light, like deep-sea fish swimming through the depths. They’ll disappear from existence as soon as they’re out of my view, until someone else is here to see them. Students from the Catholic schools and Carnegie Mellon and Chatham wait in line—the sound of steam in milk, of shouted orders, May I call?—every table filled, faces illuminated in the pale blue of laptop glow. Hannah Massey is here—she’s here, waiting in line to order a drink. Archived here from when she was still alive.

“Hannah,” I say, and she turns her head as if she’s heard me.

“Earl Grey,” she says.

I watch her leave Starbucks, tea in hand. I watch her cross the intersection in the rain. The moment she’s gone, she seems like a dream, like maybe I hadn’t seen her here at all. Across the street, the Carnegie Museum is shrouded in fog, graced with iron-black statues of angels that always reminded me of the angels of history sent to transcribe the end of time. What did these angels see when the end of time finally arrived? Were they burned? Maybe they melted or maybe survived, iron corpses ready for excavation. Everything’s re-created here—every detail. Corporate Starbucks feeds trademarked Sense details to the City—the trademarked smell of Komodo Dragon Blend. The trademarked taste and mouthfeel of an iced pumpkin scone.

I was working on a poem, I remember, waiting for Theresa.

What would our lives have been like? Never sure, but I try to be realistic with my regrets, memories like these affording me a window, I think, to my life as it was never lived. Theresa meeting me, wearing a rather expensive maternity dress she picked up from Nordstrom the week before—a Maggy London crepe de chine with indigo and gold. She looked stunning. I remember her carrying the weight of our child like someone burdened with secret good news. Reservations at the Union Grill up the street. We met friends of hers that night, Jake and Bex from the Arts Council—I remember feeling hopelessly out of my depth, unable to contribute to the conversation, really, beyond a dirty joke here and there and some talk about a poet I’d been reading that no one else had heard of. Impressed with Theresa—how quick she was, how she carried the conversation. I remember she chatted about sustainable horticulture and a set of adult classes she’d received grant funding to offer at the Conservatory—a community garden project she was eager to start in East Liberty, a greening initiative. We left that evening with plans to attend a young professionals networking happy hour the following week—and I assume this is what our lives may have been like, mundanely glamorous, new dresses from Nordstrom to attend fund-raising parties and cocktail hours, meeting new people important to Theresa’s work. I would have finished my Ph.D., I imagine. I would have gotten Confluence Press off the ground. Who knows? It would have been fun, though. Our lives together would have been fun. We walk to our car, parked a few blocks away near the Greek Orthodox church—drenched by the rain, but laughing. All the buses that pass by are filled with ghosts.

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.

12, 14—

“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—”

“Albion’s apartment,” Timothy says.

“It must be Albion’s apartment. I’m assuming that whoever deleted Albion is substituting information to make it harder to track—”

“Was she there?” asks Timothy.

“Albion? No, she wasn’t there. That same woman was there. That young woman. She always seems like she’s readying herself for a party. She welcomed me in this time—”

Examining herself in the mirror in the living room. Inky hair bundled high, held in place by two sticks. The woman’s tall—almost as tall as I am, I realize. She applies her makeup. I watch her darken her lips to the color of wine. She’s pale. She wears high heels—black, patent leather heels that reflect the faint apartment light. The dress catches my eye, something Gavril would be interested in—a damask print, black on a green the color of pale emeralds. She walks across the living room, her dress unzipped in the back so I see her white skin and the black strap of her bra. She enters the bedroom but returns a moment later, adjusting a pearl earring.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Zhou,” she says. “Who are you?”

I tell her I’m looking for Albion, and when she turns from the mirror I see a reflection of red—for just a moment, a flash of red hair in the mirror.

“Oh, of course,” she says, “John Dominic Blaxton, of Pittsburgh, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Temporary residences.” She returns to her own reflection. I search the apartment—the kitchen, her bedroom. In the bathroom I find curly red hairs on the porcelain of the bathtub and know I’m in the right place.

“Were you still dreaming?” asks Timothy.

“I don’t think so although I don’t know—”

“Is that why you mentioned the woman from your class? The woman who liked Schiele? You described what she wore, earlier—you were detailed when you told me about her, about her undergarments. You mentioned specifically that you could see the edge of her bra. Were you dreaming and pulling details from your memory through the iLux?”

“No—I don’t think so, though maybe the woman in the apartment made me remember the woman from my class.” I think I was awake when I saw Zhou, when we spoke, but think I’m dreaming as I explore her rooms. A hallway I hadn’t noticed branches out from the main room, a corridor—it’s narrow, with half-opened doors leading to other rooms, unfinished rooms. It dawns on me that the rooms are repeating, that I’m wandering through previous incarnations of the finished room. I come to another bathroom, but the red hairs are no longer on the porcelain.

“Go on,” says Timothy.

“The corridor continues and this is when I believe I was dreaming, because the episode has the hallmarks of a dream—I’m frustrated, lost, and can’t remember how I get back to the living room, to Zhou. Another corridor, and I see him—”

“Who?” says Timothy.

“This—man, I don’t know who. I’ve never seen him before, I don’t recognize him. I figure I’m dreaming or that the barriers between Albion’s apartment are blurring with another person’s private account, that maybe this man is a previous tenant of the apartment—another survivor come back to visit his space, or just another recording inserted from the cloud. I figure I’m interrupting something private.

“‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

“But he just looks at me, almost as if he’s not quite sure I’m even there with him—”

“What did he look like?” asks Timothy.

“Sitting in a wingback chair, the upholstery striped like a piece of hard candy, a cup of coffee near him on a low table. He wears slacks and a blazer over a T-shirt. The T-shirt says Mook.”

“How old?”

“Fifties, maybe early sixties. Or maybe late forties, but tired. I remember his eyes the most clearly—sad eyes, like his face was drooping. Like Droopy Dog? Do you remember that old cartoon Droopy Dog?”

“What else about him?” asks Timothy.

I tell him that I remember the color gray. Undefined. I don’t remember the man clearly. Gray, drooping, rumpled, sad—but arrogant in a way. I don’t like him. He sips his coffee, considering me. I apologize again, saying something about visiting a friend, that I’m lost here. He doesn’t move or speak with me, but I turn around to leave and he’s vanished. I’m sure I’m awake, now—but he’s gone so I figure he was part of the dream. I return to Zhou.

“How did you return to her? You were lost—”

“The program was like a Möbius strip—”

I turned away from the man in the Mook shirt and saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, and when I went through the door I reentered her apartment. This is a loop. Now I understand—things have changed since first entering her apartment. Zhou is dressing for a party. I watch her. I hear the shower running—there’s no one else in the apartment. I can no longer find that corridor with several doors—no, now there’s just the short hallway that leads to her bedroom. I open the bathroom door and find Zhou in the shower. I watch her through the fogged curtain. She seems pleased when she notices me watching her, and lets me watch, rubbing soap over her breasts and dousing herself with shampoo. She asks if I want to join her, but I ignore the question and she laughs. Zhou dries herself and walks nude to her bedroom and there I watch her dress in an elaborate set of lingerie. She steps into the green dress that she doesn’t bother to zip. She makes her way to the living room mirror—this is where I’d first seen her, applying makeup in the mirror. There—the flash of red, Albion’s hair, flickers in the reflection and disappears. Here’s where it loops: She goes to her bedroom, returns adjusting the pearl earring, but once her earrings are on, she takes them off. Zhou unzips her dress and lets the fabric slide from her body. I watch her reach up and unlatch the front clasp of her bra. Very beautiful, the kinds of perfection women’s bodies have in dreams, uncanny and vivid. She undresses and makes her way to the bathroom, starts the shower and steps in once the water’s warm, lathering herself. I tell Timothy that I watched the cycle several times that afternoon, and that’s how I realize the loop is without variation.

“Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”

“Waverly may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.

“Sure,” I say.

“And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”

He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.

12, 27—

Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.

Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.

Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs. 1% finished… 2%…

Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a No results found message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.

Zero doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.

I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of the lease, but again come up with nothing.

I ease the parameters further—search only “Accelerant” in the entire City-Archive and the results hit every Honda dealership, every model year, every truckload of new makes, every used Accelerant, every advertisement, every Accelerant parallel parked on every street, every car in every driveway, too many hits even to consider, but still nothing in the particular blind spot where I’m trying to see.

Pepsi helps me think, so do Ho Hos—I uncap a fresh two-liter and open a new box, take a five-minute break before immersing again. Think. The Archive’s still Java based, so I set the parameters to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but I don’t search for the Accelerant—rather, I search for a “TimelineException,” the telltale error in the code that means that something’s not historically accurate, that someone’s been tampering. I run the search, expecting to find a few hundred or even a few thousand hits, but the search locks up my iLux with an untraceable mess of TimelineException results—nearing a million exceptions before I kill the process. Christ—

Scanning the error report—whoever’s erasing Albion’s car intentionally mangled the code, it looks like, must have deleted or swapped out or tampered with just about every car archived near her apartment to crash searches with errors. I’ve seen similar with insurance scams—but whoever’s deleted Albion is especially thorough. There’s nothing I can use to track this mess. I can’t help but admire the work.

Think through the methodology—a reflection of red hair in the moment Zhou turns from the mirror. Nothing traceable in and of itself, but that leftover reflection is at least one slip—maybe the work isn’t quite as seamless as it seems.

Real-time hours loitering outside of Lili Café on the corner of Dobson and Hancock, the same building as Albion’s apartment, watching cars, or rather watching the reflections of cars in the café’s picture windows. When a car passes on Dobson, I note the make/model, then note the car’s reflection on a separate spreadsheet—sometimes only registering a blur of color. The cars that pass rarely match their reflections and I’m hopeful I’ll catch a trace of Albion’s Accelerant reflected in the window glass. Dull work, but something to slog through, a start. I recognize the barista archived here—Sandy, I think her name was—petite, with a cloche hat and black-framed glasses. She was a screen printer, I remember, her neon and pastel posters for Pittsburgh bands and the Steel City Derby Demons decorate the café. Theresa used to work with her—booked her to teach art workshops with the high schools, making prints using plant materials. She steams milk, pours leaf shapes onto the skim of lattes. Her customers are vaguely familiar to me, too, some of their faces—people I might have seen around. Another car passes and I note its reflection. Scanning over four days’ worth of footage until a silver Nissan Altima passes but casts a reflection of a green hatchback Accelerant on the café window and I know I have her.

Time-stamp the reflection, bookmark it.

I run another Facecrawler, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but instead of searching for Albion’s Accelerant, I search for this substitute car, the ’53 Altima sedan. Ready to kill the process if I hit the same flood of errors, but the hack’s slipped up: whoever deleted Albion’s car used the Altima as a universal substitution, probably with something as simple as Find and Replace All. The Facecrawler brings manageable results—I pin the results to a map of Polish Hill and the pins cluster around two locations like a trail of bread crumbs: Albion’s apartment on Dobson and the underground parking garage of another nearby apartment, a high-rise just a few blocks away tagged the Pulawski Inn. I save my search, reset the Archive to a date when the Altima should be parked at the Pulawski Inn, and walk to try and find the car.

Every floor of the Pulawski Inn is quartered into lofts, every loft expansive with picture windows and sliding glass doors that lead to slim balconies. The lobby’s the color of champagne, with wingback chairs and couches candy-striped in pale gold. A mahogany table centers the room, topped with a vase of orchids. The building manager receives visitors at a front reception desk. She’s reading Camus—her brunette hair matches the mahogany table, her skirt and blouse match the walls. She smiles when I approach, says, “How may I help you?” but when I ask if she’s ever heard the name Albion, she searches through her database of recorded conversations and says, “No results found—”

“Can you tell me how to get to the parking garage?”

“The elevator’s just off the lobby,” she says, pointing my way.

I take the elevator to P1 and pace the narrow lanes of the garage, scanning cars, cross-checking with the results of my Facecrawler, and find the Altima parked in a row of spaces reserved for guests. I save the image, but everything about the car’s been wiped—no license plate, no VIN, no garbage or stuff in the backseat or the floors, nothing but a generic sculpt of a Nissan, probably ripped from a dealer stream, nothing unique to Albion.

I loiter by the car, hoping for Albion to come. Waiting, disoriented by the odd angles of the garage sculpted from fish-eye security cam footage, I focus on the elevator and bookmark the moment when the doors slide apart. Zhou. A navy peacoat, her hair tucked down inside her collar. She wears a white knit dress, her legs luminous in the elevator light. She’s with a blonde, another stunner—taller than Zhou by a few inches, in tailored blue jeans and a crimson paisley halter that shows off her shoulders and neck, her hair in a loose braid that hangs well past her belt. The blonde’s features are pure Scandinavian, with sharp cheekbones and almond-shaped blue eyes. Her left shoulder to elbow is inked with a tattoo sleeve—a complex pattern of red roses and calla lilies. She lingers with Zhou in the elevator, laughing at some remark Zhou’s made, their fingertips touching, and before Zhou leaves, the blonde reaches beneath the collar of Zhou’s coat and untucks her hair. I follow Zhou from the elevator to the Nissan, but the moment she steps inside the Nissan she disappears, a red spot hovering in her place to let me know a TimelineException has occurred.

Follow the blonde. We ride together to the tenth floor and although the blonde and the elevator are illusory, I can smell the floral scent of her shampoo, the fabric of her clothes. I touch her arm and feel her muscles and skin—she responds to my touch. Someone’s sculpted her here—her specifically, layering in her scents and reactions. She doesn’t have the generic flesh feel that others have in the Archive. At my touch, she leans close and parts her lips, expecting me to kiss her, it seems, but I keep to myself and she eventually resets, watching the ascending floor numbers. Someone programmed this scene to relive intimate moments with her. When the doors open, I follow her. The hallway is the same champagne color as the lobby with wall sconces that emit a pale glow. She unlocks her door, Room 1001, steps inside and closes the door behind her. When I try to follow, the door is locked.

“Override,” I say and a keypad hovers in the wall. I enter my access code and the door swings open, but the room’s been replaced with a generic sculpt, nothing but the model floor plan for this type of room, generic furniture and generic decor, nothing else, nothing of the blonde.

I return to the lobby. The building manager tips a cup of water into the vase of orchids. I ask her for the name of the woman who lives in Room 1001, and after a quick search she responds, “Peyton Hannover—”

I note the name.

Checking the results of my image search for the pig’s head graffiti—nothing conclusive, but an interesting string of hits that’s surely the inspiration for the image: an etching and aquatint from 1879 called Pornokrates, by a Belgian artist Félicien Rops, of a woman nude except for stockings, opera gloves and a blindfold. She’s walking a pig on a leash. I find a hi-res version of the image and save it along with the graffiti on Albion’s apartment. Not sure what this all is supposed to mean—

12, 29—

The old houses here in Polish Hill feel like they’re sinking into mud or sluggishly collapsing downhill toward the riverbeds. Row houses with wood siding, the siding unpainted or the paint long since peeled away, the wood blanched silvery gray but gone to rot near the foundation and gutters. The gate in the chain-link’s padlocked but the fence is waist level so I climb it. Mud-swamped stamps of yards studded with dog shit and toys, the porch a slab of concrete that’s cracked apart. I’ve been working in the end unit. The screen door hangs on loose hinges.

I open the front door. I step inside.

The hallway’s dim from a mass of dead flies and gnats never cleaned from the fixture glass. “You’re in Steelers Country” in needlepoint, framed. Hardwood, the tap-scratch of claws and the wet suck-breath of a large dog. It turns the corner and I yelp—embarrassed by the start of terror at yellowish eyes and teeth the color of buttermilk, but it’s all so real, the guttural apparition of a pit bull pushing against my legs and nosing into my crotch, sniffing. The dog’s all muscle, its social profile glowing: Oscar, beloved of the Stanleys. I touch his ears, rub the folds of his velvety head. I know he’s not real—it’s not real—but iLux pulls memories to fill out the gaps of the sculpt, the smell of wet dog and the feel of dog’s slobber and moist nose. Hot breath and smooth tongue. “Okay, boy, it’s okay,” trying to push the bulk away from my knees.

Oscar doesn’t follow up the stairs. He watches me and sneezes a rope of snot that he shakes from his face. Carpeted stairs, a length of pipe for the rail. The Sacred Heart of Christ hangs on the landing. Other pictures clutter the upstairs hallway, of the owners of this house, Edith and Jayden Stanley, their friends and family, all dead—dumpy women with dull hair in scrunchies and wiry earnest-eyed men, baggy T-shirts and Steelers jerseys, nurses’ scrubs and bright white sneakers.

There’s an attic entrance in the hallway, a trapdoor in the ceiling. I pull the leather strap and lower the ladder. A single bulb lights the attic, low wattage. Hot up here—stifling. Boxes, Christmas decorations. Windows bracket the room, one looking over the street out front and down to the torn shingles of the porch roof, the other looking over the fenced-in backyard, the coiled dog chain in the grass and the kiddie pool filled with an inch or two of rainwater. Beyond the backyard, the broad face of the Pulawski Inn rises over the neighboring rooftops. The mustard-yellow bricks darken to ochre in the rain. There’s a folding chair already set up near this window. I sit. I watch.

Three windows from the top, on the eastern corner—Room 1001. Auto zoom ×3, ×9—scanning the windows, looping fast-forward and reverse in time. Peyton Hannover was a student at Chatham University, studying literature, and a part-time model in local commercials: Pirates season tickets, Mattress World, Shop ’n Save. I’ve watched Peyton Hannover’s commercials and have watched her dine with friends, have watched her walk alone through Frick Park and have watched her die—waiting in line at a CVS in North Oakland to buy a bottle of chocolate milk, squinting at the blinding flash before her skin caught fire and turned to ash, blown apart in the same scouring wind that blew apart the CVS as easily as if it were made of newsprint.

I watch her now, on a Thursday evening in late July, as she prepares dinner in her kitchen—a dinner I’ve watched her prepare several times now: slicing strawberries for the salad and scooping chicken from the bag of marinade. I’m able to watch her now, as she lays out each chicken strip in a skillet and waves smoke away from the alarm, because for ten months before the end, Jayden Stanley ran a Canon HD webcam with 27× optical zoom pointed toward her windows. He’d filmed her from his attic, recording to a password-protected 10-terabyte pay account from JunkTrunk that the Right to Remember Act rendered accessible using my archival override codes. He had filmed Peyton Hannover as she undressed after classes and on weekend mornings as she ate grapefruit and drank coffee in her pajamas on her balcony. He filmed her in spandex, practicing yoga in her living room. He filmed her having wine with friends and filmed long hours of her empty apartment while she was out. He filmed her through the picture windows that must have been appealing to her at the time she signed her lease, affording sweeping vistas of Polish Hill and the downtown skyline beyond. The view from the Stanleys’ attic window to Peyton’s apartment is unobstructed: I can see her apartment’s exposed brick interior walls from here, a poster of polychrome Warhol flowers, everything. I can see it all clearly. I’ve reviewed all ten months of Stanley’s footage, most nights watching Peyton doing nothing more interesting than watching HGTV or America’s Next Top Model—but there is one evening that interests me, this Thursday in late July.

For most of the evening, Stanley’s filmed the wrong room—hours of useless footage of Peyton’s darkening bedroom, polygon shards of sunset receding from the wall above her bed. He must have checked his camera at 7:42 because the frame adjusts. Peyton in the kitchen cutting strawberries and rinsing lettuce. She’s wearing spandex shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, one shoulder exposed. Plastic basins and metal tubs line the short hallway leading to the bathroom—but Stanley’s zoomed in too close, cutting off the view of the rest of the loft. I imagine Stanley hurrying here, maybe his wife calling him down from the attic, maybe Oscar moaning to be let outside, adjusting the video to capture Peyton in the kitchen, but keeping him from adjusting the shot the way he would have liked—but I’m guessing. Almost twenty minutes filming these washbasins. Albion steps into view nearing eight o’clock, carrying bolts of fabric. Her crimson hair’s lifted in a tight bun twisted together with pencils. Her skin is cameo white—I’d call her swanlike but that might sound like I’m falling in love with her. She’s not wearing much in Stanley’s video—a sports bra, spandex shorts, tennis shoes. She’s athletic despite her height, handling the bolts of fabric without goosey awkwardness. Maybe she’d once played volleyball. Or tennis. I watch as Albion measures and cuts the fabric and as she submerges lengths of cloth into each tub.

I imagine now they’re eating dinner together, but the table is out of view. I watch the basins. Peyton returns to the kitchen sink after nine. Albion returns to the frame nearing nine thirty. She kneels, pulls cloth from the tubs—it’s dyed a rich violet. She hangs the fabric dripping from a makeshift line, dye raining over painter’s plastic. Her hands and forearms are purple, like she’s been strangling grapes for wine. I watch her. Peyton crosses into view—briefly. Albion laughs. A few minutes later, Albion yawns and stretches, raising her arms above her head, cracking her shoulders. I finish out the view of her. This trace ends when the fabric is hung and she carries the basins into Peyton’s bathroom. That’s the last I see of her. I’ve looked forward in time, but Stanley misses filming when Albion takes down her fabric, misses the rest of the cleanup, or any other time Albion may have visited Peyton—or the footage may have already been deleted. I loop back. I sit in the folding chair in Stanley’s attic, watching out the attic window to the apartment building and wait for Albion. Peyton’s slicing strawberries and scooping chicken from the marinade. Albion enters the frame, carrying bolts of fabric. I watch her.

1, 8—

The graffiti on Albion’s apartment doesn’t stem from Pornokrates, like I’d first thought—but appropriates an image from an Agent Provocateur printbook called Manor House, one of those limited-run narrative catalogs fashion houses distribute to investors each season. I found a Manor House reproduction on kink.torrent: the copy’s shit quality, but I can tell what the image is—three women, two on leashes. The auteur of the printbook, a photographer named Coudescue, must have used Pornokrates as inspiration for his image—I pinged Gav with an attached thumbnail, wondering if he knew the work. He responded that I could see it in person whenever I could make it out to his place.

The printbook I’m hunting is several seasons old already, but Gavril collects this stuff: photography monographs, printbooks, catalogs, file folders stuffed with printouts of fashionporn editorials that have caught his eye over the years. Everything’s kept in a walk-in closet he calls his “reading room”—the only place Gavril separates from the ongoing party filling out the rest of his apartment. A cushioned folding chair’s crammed in there and an end table with a green-shaded lamp. A notebook. He’s nailed boards on every wall for shelves and has catalogs stacked three deep and in teetering stalagmite stacks on the floor. He’s excited to show off his collection, “the true art of our age,” he says, lighting a joint as he explains everything to me, running his palm over the stubble of his head like a baby discovering bristles, saying, “There’s no reason our age shouldn’t be defined by fashion imagists like La Havre, Coudescue, Smithson—”

He finds the printbook I came for, but says, “Look at this one, here—Gucci. This is Teenie Mizyuki’s breakout book—fucking political commentary, right here. He took the Gucci fall line and brought it into these bombed-out Palestinian villages following the civil war. Didn’t hire models, just used the girls he found. Brilliant, fucking brilliant stuff—”

“How long have you had this?” I ask him about the Agent Provocateur printbook I came to see—it’s thick, three hundred or so pages, all full color, glossy, promoting a line called Upstairs, Downstairs.

“Shit, brother. I don’t know. Ten or eleven years? The higher-end lines put out high-fucking-quality printbooks. There’s a collector’s market for these. I unloaded a spare copy of La Havre’s Gucci a few months ago and bought dinner for a month. The one you want isn’t worth as much, but don’t bend the corners—”

The catalog isn’t anything special as far as I can tell, a rambling narrative of a blonde and a redhead seduced by everyone they meet during a weekend at a country manor—stable boys, kitchen staff, the mistress of the house. Timothy described this to me—this might be the very scenario he said he streamed when he was going through his depression, before he tore out his Adware. Maybe this is a companion book to the stream he was obsessed with. Soft-core de Sade, every page slickly produced and shot like a fairy tale, the porcelain-skinned girls ravaged in various states of undress, the lingerie different for each scene. Page 136, I say, “Oh, shit, there it is—”

“What? What is it?” says Gavril.

The house mistress nude in stockings, opera gloves and a blindfold, the girls on hands and knees tethered by leashes. I scan and save the image, letting my thoughts clack against each other. “I keep seeing this picture,” I tell him. “There’s an image made from this picture, only with pigs’ heads on the two girls. It’s painted on Albion’s apartment—”

“Who’s Albion?” he asks. “Domi, are you seeing someone? Zkurvysyn—”

“I’m tracking someone named Albion in the Archive. She was a model, you might know her—”

I flash him the picture of Albion to see if he can place her, but Gavril says whoever she is, she’s strictly small-market amateur. “A nice shot,” he says, “she’s a good-looking girl, and could have modeling work easily,” but says that for her to even blip on the professional databases she would have to be a careerist—really work to promote herself. “There are all sorts of do-it-yourself bullshit sites you might find her on,” he says, “but it would take a lifetime scrolling through homemade glamour shots made by every deluded high school girl who thinks she has a shot at fame in the streams—”

“She died in Pittsburgh—”

“Oh shit,” he says. “Shit, I’m sorry. Let me think a minute. Well, even if she’d been pro or semipro, the networks didn’t exist then like they do now. This picture was a small-market campaign, otherwise you’d have found a reference to it—the people who are into fashion history are fanatical. So this is a one-shot. Something indie, something local. No chance you’d find her through this picture—not with current resources. No chance. The image isn’t even signed. There’s no augment to it. Nothing to reference. Tell me about the pigs—”

I tell him I’ll catch him up over dinner. He wants to take me to Primanti’s. I suggest somewhere else, maybe that Thai place he’d found, but he insists. He drives. He finds the Beach Boys on the radio and sings along, fucking up the words, and I laugh.

He parks in downtown Silver Spring and we walk to Primanti’s, a gaudy Pittsburgh-themed restaurant next to an indoor amusement park. The smell of grease and alcohol waft from the restaurant, the outdoor tables full of people drinking East End Brewing, gorging on French fry–laden cheesesteaks. A souvenir shop almost as large as the restaurant fronts the place, loaded with key rings, postcards of Pittsburgh in spinning racks, magnets, porcelain beer steins. There’s a wall here called the Pittsburgh Wall where people have written the names of the deceased—I think it was meant to be like the Vietnam Memorial, a sober monument to the dead, but the wall’s a thick tangle of Sharpie ink and pocketknife engravings, utterly illegible. I wrote Theresa’s name here years ago, but it’s been long since buried over. Even now there are people scrawling more names while they wait for tables—most people just write their own names now. How many of us are true survivors? There were only a hundred or so people documented to have actually survived the bomb—people protected from the blast by odd flukes of coincidence, people who dug out of the rubble and were eventually saved by rescue crews. And there are many more people like me, saved through a quirk of scheduling that took us out of town for the afternoon—I don’t know how many people are true survivors, but I’ve read that the survivors of Pittsburgh are like splinters of the True Cross, that if you were to gather us all together, you’d have three or four times the amount of the peak population of the entire city. Adware flashing to the “Pennsylvania Polka” begs me to buy limited-edition We Will Never Forget clocks of the Golden Triangle beneath a waving American Flag, porcelain Hummel Steelers babies or commemorative Barbie Pittsburgh Girls, in Penguins jerseys or miniskirts made from Terrible Towels. We’re seated in a wooden bench beneath a picture of Franco and the Immaculate Reception. The waitress asks, “What’re yinz havin’?” Gavril likes hops but I go for a chocolate stout.

“So, who’s this Albion?” he asks.

“I’m working for a man named Waverly,” I tell him. “Private work. Albion’s his daughter. I’m searching for her in the Archive. I have iLux now—”

“How’d you come across that?”

“A perk,” I tell him. “You ever heard of a company called Focal Networks?”

“Of course I have,” he says. “Wait, is that the Waverly you’re working for? Theodore Waverly?”

“Where have you heard of him?”

“Jesus fuck, Dom, he practically invented Adware. He invented how we use Adware, at any rate. NPR talks about him. That Focal Networks is a think tank for the Republican Party. They write policy for Meecham—”

“Shit—”

“Shit’s right, cousin. Big shit—”

“I’m not involved in any of that,” I tell him. “Like I told you earlier, I’m just tracking Albion—”

“That’s an odd name,” he says. “Beautiful, but odd—”

“She’s been erased from the City-Archive. I checked the Pittsburgh Project, the Department of Labor and Statistics, cached Google and Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, and ran wildcard and hashtag searches using InfoQuest and Three Rivers Net. Nothing. E-mails to the librarians at the Map Institute and the Steel City Memorials here and Johnstown and a formal letter to the City of Pittsburgh Citizen and Corporation hard Archive in Virginia—”

Our cheesesteaks arrive and Gavril asks why a man like Theodore Waverly would want me for the job—he wonders why out of so many programmers and researchers in the workforce, a man as rich as Waverly would bother to pull me out of a rehabilitation program to handle something like this.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask him.

“Dominic, don’t take it the wrong way—it’s a real question,” he says. “Theodore Waverly could hire Kucenic’s entire firm, if he wanted to. He could probably call in a favor from the NSA, you know? But he chose you, you of all people, my cousin Domi. It doesn’t make any sense—”

“He talked with Kucenic, but Kucenic told him that I was the best researcher,” I tell him. “Cream rises to the top. Now, listen to this: when I first started searching for Albion, I ran a Facecrawler on her picture, and the Facecrawler yields almost thirty thousand hits—but they’re all hits with less than two percent probability, so I figure it’s a wash—”

“Cream rises to the top? Bullshit rises—”

“Listen: I scanned through the results, and sure enough, Facecrawler found redheads, that’s all—not a single definite match for Albion. Well, one of the hits hovered around a seven percent probability, so I checked it out. It was this fuzzy, dim image captured in a dark corner of this place in Pittsburgh called the ModernFormations Gallery, at a poetry reading. The face I was looking for was totally obscured, so I couldn’t tell whether or not it was Albion, but, Gav, I was one of the readers that night. I was onstage, waiting my turn to read. I saw myself—”

“Oh, that’s creepy—”

“I was wearing a shirt and tie—I was skinny back then. I looked like I was twelve years old—”

Gavril pays—he’s prearranged the bill so I didn’t even have a chance to split with him. He promises he’ll poke around about that picture of Albion I showed him, see if he can find anything about her modeling or fashion work, but he’s doubtful. He offers to let me keep the printbook, but once we’re back at his place I take a few minutes to look at and scan every page, saving a digital file. Gav wants me to stay for drinks, but I tell him I’ll be working, that I won’t be around for a while.

Sixteen-hour immersion shifts, eight hours off—to piss, shit, sleep, shower, eat, drink and ping Gav or Timothy so someone knows I’m still alive. General Tso’s takeout and two liters of Pepsi. Instant oatmeal for breakfast and lunch. Sleeping fitfully for three or four hours before waking up to immerse again. My clearest lead to Albion is through Peyton Hannover, so I try to re-create her life, find where else she intersects with Albion. I’ve tracked Peyton to when she lived in her previous apartment, at the Cork Factory Lofts on Railroad Street, when her ink sleeve was colorless, only the beginnings of an intricately lined floral pattern, and even before that, to her freshman year at Chatham before she had tattoos at all, when she lived in the dorms and her hair was cut short, a boy’s cut she wore parted slick like T. S. Eliot. I follow her. Peyton bikes mornings, strapping on a pink helmet she keeps in a Schneider’s Dairy crate belted to the back of her seat like a basket. She keeps to main streets as she rides so she’s re-created in the mapping—security camera to security camera, traffic cams, dashboard cams, cams in everyone’s retinas who noticed the blonde as she passed. Railroad Street to Smallman through the Strip District to Lawrenceville. I follow. Faces in passing cars are only blurs—petals on a wet, black bough—impressions inadvertently captured in Peyton’s background and sculpted here as part of the environment. These faces unnerve me. Faceless. I feel like they try to catch my attention. I feel like they want me to notice them, to notice them specifically, to turn my attention from Peyton and fill in their features with some streak of memory, but there’s nothing to remember about them, no details or memories I have that can flesh them out. I’ve never known these faces and they pass away in the peripherals.

Before Peyton accrues successes with her modeling, she works as a waitress at Coca Café. She wears skinny black jeans and tight T-shirts screen-printed with the names of retro bands—Centipede Eest, Host Skull, Lovebettie, Anti-Flag. She serves French toast with lemon sauce, mixing lattes behind the counter, busing dishes between orders. I watch her—she slides gracefully through narrow gaps between tables. Theresa and I used to come here for brunch on Sunday mornings, and iLux coaxes my wife from my memories, cozy in the back booth with coffee, sharing warm banana bread, trading sections of the Post-Gazette.

“I don’t think I’ve told you about my new friend at the Conservatory,” Theresa tells me. “Mind if I have the last of this?”

“No, go ahead—”

“So good,” she says, spreading wild berry cream cheese on the heel end of the banana bread.

“Your friend…?”

“Right, so after the Flowers of Thailand workshop, this guy comes up to me—probably in his forties, I’d guess. I’d noticed him from the tour—sweatshirt all disheveled, these giant holes in his jeans. He hangs around until everyone else is gone and asks me if we grow weed in the greenhouse—”

“Was he serious? You’re kidding me—”

“He tells me he’d be happy to show me better growing methods than the ones we’re currently using. So I told him that we don’t grow weed, but he might want to get in touch with the Pittsburgh Cannabis Society. He says, ‘What’s cannabis?’ I tell him, ‘Cannabis’ is another name for weed. You know what he told me?”

“Are you making this up?”

“He says, ‘Damn! You mean they smoke weed and eat people?’”

Theresa and I lingered over coffee these mornings—she was working on a book, I remember, combining her dissertation with a travelogue she’d kept about time she’d spent in Thailand when she was in graduate school, about ecology, farming and local cuisine. Or she’d polish up her grant proposals or press releases about the community gardens she’d created—she wanted to turn her work into her own nonprofit someday, to establish sustainable urban farming practices in the neighborhoods.

“Do you mind if we take a walk?” she asks halfway through brunch, looking up from what she’d been writing. She dresses up to come here—almost equestrian this morning, a white blouse and beige slacks tucked into knee-high boots of reddish leather. The iLux is flawless loading around my memories, loading the underside of Theresa’s hair like the color of wet sand and the top the color of straw in sunlight.

“I’d love to take a walk,” I tell her.

We saunter down Penn, Lawrenceville an eclectic mix of boutiques and cafés before the end, tree-lined boulevards and renovated townhomes. The trees are in bloom. We hold hands, looking through shop windows, swinging into boutiques. Sugar, Figleaf, Pavement, Pageboy. In Pageboy, Theresa skims through the racks, scoping for vintage. At the time, I was slightly bored waiting while Theresa looked at clothes—I’d lean against the wall reading something I’d brought along with me, but now I’m sick at myself for having wasted those moments—

A billboard mars the early afternoon—a King of Kings antiabortion image of a fetus, a burned and bloody coil. The billboard had been there for years, long enough that the image had faded. “Poor taste,” Theresa used to say, but the image was intolerable after she lost our child, who wasn’t yet our child, I remind myself. Cramping in the restrooms of Heinz Field, confused, wondering if this was early labor until she saw blood in the toilet water, returning to our mustard-yellow seats weeping, wanting to stay at the game, to stay for the fourth quarter for my sake because the tickets were expensive and hard to get and I’d always wanted to see a game, pleading with me to stay in our knit hats and waving towels, but hysterical. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.” This had been our first try. Allegheny General, the ER overflowing with patients that night. We waited hours for follow-up tests once the doctors explained what had happened. I lay with her in the hospital bed, eventually too worn and shocked numb to cry, holding each other while the end of the game we’d left played itself out on the television bolted to the ceiling, telling each other that we’d try again, we’d try.

“Intolerable,” Theresa says about the billboard. She’s shaken and apologizing to me for ruining our morning by becoming upset, telling me that it’s silly to feel this way, but the billboard’s bothering her, that it suddenly got to her, that fetus she’d seen dozens of times before. I tell her it’s all right, I tell her that they shouldn’t have billboards like that in the city, that it’s all right to cry, it’s all right—I told her that at the time, comforting her or trying to, but I want to tell her what I know now, that in a few years we will try again, that it will be a surprise to us both, that she’s going to tell me over dinner someday that we’re having a daughter, but I can’t finish the thought because I know her second pregnancy will end in light. We duck into Pavement so she can find a restroom and dry her eyes. Bamboo hardwood floors, folded cotton shirts on tables, sparse racks of sundresses. Facecrawler alerts me—the default tone that something I’ve searched is nearby—and the memory fades. I follow the alert to the boutique’s front door, the window collaged with handbills and posters for Mac Miller and Kellee Maize, Chinese language tutorials, Schoolhouse Yoga classes and glossies for the local fashion lines they carry here: Penny Lane, Zeto, Raven + Honeybear. It’s the Raven + Honeybear ad that Facecrawler’s hit, Peyton Hannover modeling as a prep school sexpot in a leather-cushioned library. She’s reaching for a book on a high shelf, exposing the long white parallels of her thighs between her powder-blue plaid skirt and powder-blue argyle knee-highs. In cursive: Just a little higher.

A quick search: Raven + Honeybear’s referenced on a number of archived sites and listed on the Pittsburgh Business Registry as a fashion line, but the company’s cached home page is corrupted and every direct link’s been fouled. Filtering the Facecrawler to image plus text finds other Raven + Honeybear handbills posted on boutique tackboards, almost all featuring Peyton, waves of white-gold hair and eyes so blue they’re like a doll’s glass eyes. The line specializes in an aesthetic of polo matches, collegiate tenures, private girls’ schools and gentlemen farming; young women sipping tea at the Frick or playing croquet, Peyton in tweed slacks and plaids, tailored blouses and neckties, men’s clothes if such care wasn’t taken to flaunt the model’s figure.

I’ve found Peyton’s picture in other archived ad campaigns and fashion editorials, spreads for Maniac magazine and Whirl, even a few spots for American Eagle but she’s too ethereal to fully meld with the AE girl-next-door vibe. This Raven + Honeybear campaign feels different somehow, Peyton’s other modeling work capitalizing on her surface look, depicting her almost as an ice goddess or as unapproachably beautiful, but the Raven + Honeybear feel much more homemade, like I’m looking at a set of personal photographs rather than a slickly produced ad campaign. The images remind me of the style of the first image of Albion I’d seen. Thinking of Peyton and Zhou together in the elevator, every gesture of Zhou a forgery of a gesture of Albion, thinking of Peyton and Albion in the apartment dying fabric, imagining Albion taking these pictures of Peyton, dressing her up in plaid skirts and asking her to pose.

The Archive lists Peyton Hannover as arriving in Pittsburgh from a place called Darwin, Minnesota—population 308. Peyton’s parents are still alive in retirement in Florida. They’ve set up a VR memorial at remembrance.pit—Peyton their youngest daughter of five, but I’ve only spent a few minutes with her childhood pictures displayed at the memorial, videos of her first Halloween, pictures of a knockout at prom too perfect for the meathead kid in a tux who grapples with her corsage. I consider contacting her parents, to ask if Peyton ever mentioned a woman named Albion, but I’m too closely acquainted with loss to bother whatever memories they’ve let heal over. Leave well enough alone.

Peyton’s first appearance in the Archive is as a freshman at Chatham University. Cutoff jean shorts and steel-toed boots, a Chatham hoodie. She’s at the 61C Café, outside on the patio surrounded by blooming sunflowers, reading a Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre, oblivious to the attention her legs attract when middle-aged men sit with their coffee at nearby tables. When she speaks, you hear Minnesota in her voice. An eighteen-year-old shaking off small-town dust in what must have seemed like a big city. I track her: parties most weekends, girls on ratty couches sipping from red Solo cups, basements smoky and crowded with scruffy men holding cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Peyton’s like an orchid in a vegetable patch, smoking cigarettes in holders, occasionally sporting a monocle, aggressively flirting up other girls who don’t seem to quite know what to do with her. She led a wild life at first, destructive—sloppy drunk and sick at parties, passed out by the early morning, striking out with straight girls so letting random guys take her to bed. She laughs everything off—but spends most of her time alone, friendless until she gathers with people to party.

Tracking her life, I find Peyton in Schenley Plaza, at a WYEP summer music festival. She’s with a group of her acquaintances, sharing a blanket spread on the lawn. Peyton’s begun to grow her hair out by now, no longer the T. S. Eliot slick but a wavy blonde—it makes her look younger, somehow. She’s also started the tattoo that will eventually sleeve her arm, just a few flowers, lilies and roses, near her shoulder. We’ve gathered together at the concert, too, other survivors. I see their faces in the crowd—somehow lighter than the others. We notice one another and sometimes smile, but more often than not we simply ignore each other, knowing that the more we acknowledge one another, the more we ruin the illusion that these summer nights might never have ended. I take off my shoes and feel the grass on my feet. Donora’s headlining and Peyton’s enjoying herself, laughing, but by the time moths swarm the park lights, she’s moved away from her friends. I follow her and find Albion sitting alone on one of the benches edging the park. Her hair’s tucked beneath a knit beret. She wears a linen skirt and a suede jacket. She’s older than Peyton by a few years, but they’re comfortable together. Peyton slips her arm beneath Albion’s suede coat, and the intimacy—like Peyton’s fingers touching Zhou’s in the elevator—flusters me, races in my blood. They’re ignoring the concert, ignoring Peyton’s friends. By the time the concert ends I’ve seen the two women kiss, a short kiss but unmistakable that they’re lovers, discreet, but nevertheless drawing attention from the men around them, men with their families, playing with their children in the lawn but unable to keep their eyes away from two women kissing. Peyton and Albion leave together and I try to follow, but the footage runs out and I’m looped back into the crowd.

1, 19—

I’ve only seen two traces of Albion, once dying fabric in Peyton’s apartment, once kissing Peyton in the park. Hours might pass without thinking of Albion, but then the thought of her overwhelms me, at first just a recollection of what I’d seen but growing into a compulsive urge to see again, and again, the pull stronger than any drug I’ve used—I load and reload those traces of Albion and watch her, memorizing everything about her, every detail, perfect, so perfect. I watch until my mind’s like a worn rag and my eyes so strained they feel like they’re still open even when they’re closed. The rest of Albion’s life is a hole I’m filling in by the edges, like I’m figuring out the shape of an object by studying the shadow it casts. Obsessive about the research—my life’s become Albion. I reload the stream of Albion kissing Peyton in the park—

Never stray far from Peyton, because Peyton leads me to Albion—as Peyton reads Camille Paglia at an outdoor table at Panera, yoga classes at the Athletic and Fitness Center, cutting across Chatham’s campus to a class on Blake and British Symbolism. Occasionally, I find Peyton with Zhou and know that Albion’s been replaced in these moments—Zhou’s a forgery, so when I come across her in the Archive, I study her, trying to understand the original: Peyton’s quicker with a laugh than Zhou, Zhou much more serious, sober. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, Zhou stands back to study paintings, she’ll point something out to Peyton, give a quick rundown of the artist’s life or talk about materials. Zhou is Albion, I remind myself. They stand in front of a John Currin painting of two nude women, their bodies in illusory angles, awkwardly posed. Zhou’s mentioning that Currin spent time in Pittsburgh and Peyton listens but she mugs a bit, she poses like the women in the painting. She causes a scene until Zhou laughs along with her. Peyton’s in complete control of her effect on men—Zhou’s much more reticent, almost like she wishes for invisibility. Peyton draws her out, forces Zhou to pose along with her, gets one of the security guards to snap their picture in front of the painting.

I find an early reference to Raven + Honeybear as a participant in a couture show, a joint fund-raiser for Gwen’s Girls and Dress for Success Pittsburgh. The models are listed, “Peyton” by first name only. The Gwen’s Girls website is still cached, with a dozen untagged pictures of the fund-raiser on their Pinterest board, some showing Albion. If anything, Albion outstrips the models, her hair in crimson cascades, wearing a tweed three-piece suit I’m assuming is of her own design. Albion’s in the background of another image, suit jacket unbuttoned, hands in pockets, casually leaning against a column watching the catwalk—reserved, just as I’ve come to know her through Zhou. There’s a series of pictures showing designers’ studios—they’re all untagged, but I recognize Albion’s tweed and plaid designs in one of the images, the successive picture an exterior of a brick building that looks a lot like a Lawrenceville row house storefront. I run a Facecrawler match on the building and, sure enough, it pins a location: just off Butler Street in Lawrenceville, on 37th, but the location tag’s been corrupted. Someone’s been tampering with this place.

I follow Peyton as she leaves her shift at Coca Café and walks the few blocks to 37th—scant footage as she makes her way down side streets from Butler, but I pick her up again at the row house, a decrepit building bordered by a gravel lot, wild brush and weeds delineating one property from the next. Peyton must have been filming this footage herself—a POV shot taken with retinal cams as she types the key code and enters. The interior’s been redone—hardwood laminate flooring, an office and showroom on the first floor, decorated by a bird and bear mural, Raven + Honeybear in gothic script. This is Albion’s studio. The workroom’s upstairs, the second floor a loft-style space with picture windows and exposed ceiling beams. I find Zhou sitting at a sewing machine, working a pair of trousers. She smiles as Peyton enters the room.

“This is what you’ll be wearing,” she says.

Sifting through footage of the studio—there isn’t much, most days either already deleted or simply not filmed. I search the Archive’s timeline and find random hours of Zhou working at a sewing machine, or working with clothes pinned on cloth dummies, but finally come across an untagged series of events that haven’t been tampered with. Rather than Zhou, I find Albion documenting the preparation for a show, maybe with a flip cam on a tripod. She wears a sweatshirt and yoga pants, a Steelers knit hat. The footage is time-stamped September twenty-ninth before the end, at nearly three in the morning—Albion marks fabric before she sews. Peyton stands on a pedestal wearing a pink floor-length skirt like a spill of roses. Her breasts are uncovered, her corset top laid out on the worktable. An unusually heavy rainfall freezes into soft flakes that drift down outside the studio windows. I remember this snow, actually, waking up startled to see everything coated in thick, wet white. Three inches overnight. I remember Theresa and I walked to breakfast at Crêpes Parisiennes that morning, wondering if the snowfall was a fluke or an early start to winter. It would warm up again, though—by later that afternoon, in fact, the weather warmed and the snow melted. We’d have less than ten more days together. But tonight, while Theresa and I would have been sleeping as the rain froze and the snow dropped softly, Peyton stands on a pedestal bathed in the glare of studio lights while Albion brings her the corset.

Looking out the window at the snow, I notice a man standing outside in the lot—he’s wearing a wool overcoat, black or charcoal gray. His hair is white. He’s watching me as I watch him, snowfall accumulating on his shoulders and the top of his head, but it’s too dark to see his face. When I turn back to the two women, Albion has been replaced by Zhou. Outside, the man has disappeared—footprints in the snow lead to the building. He’s coming. I try to disengage from the City, but the system’s locked. I’m paralyzed. My Adware net security’s flashing red with warnings, alerting me to impending system failures but I can’t escape.

The studio door opens and he enters, shaking snow from his shoes and removing his coat.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I’m Legion,” he says. I recognize him, the man in the wingback chair I’d seen in Albion’s apartment who wore a Mook T-shirt. I should be able to push my way past, but he has me in his complete control—I can’t move.

“Dominic, isn’t it?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, isn’t that right?”

“Are you working for Waverly?”

Mook smiles.

“I figured you were another of Mr. Waverly’s junkies,” he says. “Disappointing—”

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, of 5437 Ellsworth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Visual Theory at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia, recently an Archival Assistant for the Kucenic Group. Drug abuse problems. Constant rewiring for Adware upgrades. A dull life, but you were in love. You spend an awful lot of time immersing to visit a woman named Theresa Marie Blaxton. Your wife—”

“Don’t say her name. You don’t ever say her name—”

“I’m correct, aren’t I? You log more hours reliving the same bits of memory than anyone I think I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Most people visit the Archive for quick visits, to relive some happiness or indulge in a past normalcy or visit loved ones on birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths. Most people like the convenience of paying their respects once or twice a year, but you’re different. This is an obsession you have. Over and over again, you have dinner with your wife at the Spice Island Tea House so you can hear her announce her second pregnancy, what a shame about the first—”

“Don’t you ever fucking talk about her,” I scream but my voice mutes when Mook whispers, “quiet.”

“I watched your wife die the other day because I was curious about her,” he says, “curious about what, exactly, you saw in her—have you ever watched your wife die? What was she, eight months pregnant? Nine? She was in Shadyside, window-shopping—all those cameras in Shadyside, her death is very well reconstructed. You don’t visit her death often, though, do you? Too painful, I assume? There’s a window of T-shirts at a store called Kards Unlimited. Obscene, dumb T-shirts. Your wife was reading obscene T-shirts when she died. I wonder if the baby kicked when the bomb went off. I wonder if it knew it would never be born. Mr. Blaxton, what was it? Boy or girl?”

He allows me to move and scream and so I shake him, but touching him is like touching a sack of sand—he’s heavy, too heavy to be real and I realize he’s not real, we’re not real, of course we’re not here, there is no here.

“Your child would have been a girl,” says Mook. “I know about you. You’re easy to track. Your drug habits, your stints in and out of hospitals, therapy. All that paperwork. Your death is very well documented, just like your wife’s—only your death is much slower and is dragging out over years. You’re a simple man, Mr. Blaxton. No mysteries to you. That very simplicity is why I’m giving you a second chance that I might not usually give—”

I’m too bewildered by what’s happening to quite understand his threat. I try to ping his socials, to find out his name, but his profile display is nothing more than a grinning pig’s head with a lolling tongue that repeatedly speaks the word Mook in a Porky Pig singsong.

“Are you the one who’s deleting her?” I ask.

“I think I understand your motivation here,” he says. “You’re acting here because you’ve had some trouble with the legal system and you’re looking for a clean record, some gainful employment. On top of that, you’re emotionally compromised because of this business with your wife. I pity you, actually. I’m not unfair, Dominic, but I have an agreement in place that I need to honor above all my other considerations. Nevertheless, I think we can come to an understanding. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Quit looking for this woman you know as Albion. Stop immediately. Find other ways to make a living. Terminate your employment with Waverly, let this go. Otherwise, I’ll take action against you—”

“What action?”

“Look at this young woman—Peyton Hannover, this bright young thing,” he says, guiding my attention to Peyton as she lifts her hair for Zhou to fit her for the corset top of the gown. In an instant, Peyton’s image corrupts and her body scrambles, her mouth ruptures outward, her teeth and gums splayed in flowering wet rows that sink through her neck to her chest, her face sinks, nipple-eyed, her body hunches, patches of blonde hair sprout in tufts, her genitals open and spill like water to the floor. A layer of dissonance—a spoiled body. I try to withstand this, to look at Peyton, to prove Mook’s threats are meaningless, but I can’t endure. I flinch away.

Mook says, “Imagine your wife—”

“Oh God,” I say, his words pounding me like a hammer striking meat. “Please don’t do that. Please—”

“It’s okay to look,” he says, and when I look again, Peyton’s been deleted, the space she occupied replaced by a smudge, like Vaseline swiped over the air.

“There’s a program I have access to called the Reissner-Nordström worm—do you know what that is?”

“No—”

“It’s a modified Facecrawler,” he says. “In the time it takes your heart to beat, I can desecrate every memory, every instance of your wife in this City. I can corrupt your presence here so that not even your iLux can access the moments you cherish with your wife. I run the worm, and she’s gone. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes. I understand—”

“Ask yourself: Is losing your wife a second time worth your loyalty to Waverly? I’m guessing not—”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’re not listening,” he says. “If I perceive that you haven’t let this matter with Albion drop we will take action against you. I will, Mr. Blaxton. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m through. Through—”

“I think you know your way out,” he says.

Vertigo as I’m shoved from this location, the Archive a blur but re-forming—I’m in the parking lot, looking up to Albion’s lit studio windows. The snow’s sticking now, falling in soft flakes that crunch beneath my footfalls as I run, squalls kicking up that blow blinding veils of snow from the branches of pines. Home—home to Room 208, the Georgian. I take off my wet clothes in the foyer. I find her asleep and crawl into bed beside her. Theresa. I put my arm around her and press close, feeling the simulated warmth of her body, the simulated rise and fall of her chest, trying to hold her, to keep from losing what I’ve already lost.

2, 1—

Whenever you visit this place, there are others here—too many survivors in mourning to get a sense of what we actually used to be like here. Katz Plaza, it used to be called—centered by a Louise Bourgeois fountain and benches shaped like laconic, watchful eyes. We come here to view the end. We stand like we’re in a gallery, ringing the plaza. We know it will happen at thirty-seven past the hour, and as the time nears we watch for him—there, the truck pulling up on 7th, the man climbing down from the cab holding a steel suitcase. Some of us begin to cry, but most of us have seen this before, many times before. We can’t stop him, we can’t rewrite history even as we pass through it, so we simply watch: the man kneeling in the center of the plaza, raising his arms in some sort of prayer. Some of us think we hear the name Allah. We watch the man unlatch his suitcase. The man pauses, and we wonder, millions of us have wondered if in that pause he was reconsidering, if he might have turned back. We watch as the man opens the suitcase. Light—

She loved walking here. On Walnut Street, in Shadyside. She loved window-shopping here—the Apple Store, Williams-Sonoma, Kawaii, e.b. Pepper—but her favorite place was an upscale general store called Kards Unlimited. Theresa died there—wearing blue jeans tucked into riding boots, an oatmeal-colored cardigan draped over her pregnant belly. I’ve stood with her outside of Kards Unlimited’s picture window as she sipped an iced mocha from Starbucks, looking at the T-shirts on display. My Other Ride Has a Flux Capacitor. Llamacorn. The Folding Chair Parking Authority. A Clockwork Orange. I’ve watched her many times looking at these shirts, and have come to believe that at the end, at the very moment the world ended for her, she was reading a Mr. Rogers T-shirt, It’s a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood. The sky burns. Cameras record. Theresa squints. Her hair catches fire at the tips, then flashes like a diadem across her head. She dies too quickly, I believe, to have felt any pain. I’d always assumed that our child simply perished in the womb, but now Mook’s taunt thorns in my mind, and as I watch Theresa cocooned in fire, I imagine that our child may have known, may have kicked and squirmed as her mother died around her, may have understood and suffered.

Gossip heads and tabloids speculate on who she’ll wear, but Gavril’s already tipped me off that President Meecham’s tapped Alexander Porta this year, the Natalia Valevskaya protégé, and that tonight’s executions will feature at least seven full costume changes to coincide with the fall couture shows. I’ve scanned the League of Women Voters app—the U.S. Communist Party, the Greens, the Teas, the Army of God and the Mid-Atlantic Socialists aren’t even participating—show trials, they call them, a spectacle. Nine men will be executed tonight, federal criminals: alleged jihadists, traitors, multistate spree killers. I’ve accepted Timothy’s offer for a ride to Waverly’s for his viewing party. Standing in the rain, the streams exceptionally vivid in the overcast light—rioters in San Francisco are already burning city blocks in Hunters Point, rioters in Chicago are already burning police cars in Millennium Park. Timothy pulls up in the Fiat and tells me to get in before I catch pneumonia.

Timothy listens to light jazz, stuff like the Fontainebleau Quartet and Slim Vogodross. He asks how I’ve been and I tell him I’ve been busy searching for Albion, but I don’t mention Mook, nothing of the threat against my wife. I’m planning to tell Waverly myself, when we meet about his daughter—I’m planning to collect what I’m owed and quit. Timothy merges onto the Beltway and pushes the Fiat, weaving through congestion at eighty, eighty-five miles an hour until he takes an exit about forty-five minutes outside DC.

Virginia. An hour-and-a-half drive, Timothy exits the interstate and once off main roads, we drive through woods. Late afternoon, but the night falls heavy and gathers around the slim black trunks of trees. I’m tired, I haven’t shaved in days and my scruff’s grown thick down my neck, but it feels nice, like I’m half hidden and soft. The road narrows, begins to climb. Timothy’s dressed in a tuxedo and I’m nervous I’ll be conspicuously schlubby at the party—I wore what I thought would blend in, charcoal slacks and a flannel shirt, tucked in. A tweed jacket I’ve had for years. Timothy’s headlights illuminate the trees. He’s taking the turns close, driving breakneck through the rain. His windshield’s lit with night vision augments and I watch the pale green shapes of deer clustered at the edges of the woods, dozens if not hundreds of them. A miserable icy slush congeals on the windshield before the wipers push it away—if any of those deer bolt, I’ll die. I’d hit a deer once, years ago, and pulled over to the side of the road. Mine had been a doe, I’m fairly certain—it seemed small when I was near, but I don’t know how to tell much about deer. The middle of the night, in Westmoreland County. The deer moaned and whined—bleating, I guess you’d call it. I’d seen movies where calm men broke the neck or killed dying animals with one shot to ease their suffering, but I had no gun and I couldn’t bring myself to kill it, let alone touch it. The sight of my shoe prints in its blood froze me. I withdrew a pace and simply watched the doe die. When she was silent I said a prayer over her body and left. What else could I have done? My windshield was cracked and buckled inward where the deer’s spine must have ricocheted from me.

“He lives far,” I say.

“But it’s a nice drive,” says Timothy, “and Waverly doesn’t commute much. Every so often he has business in the city—”

Timothy slows for a private drive—a strip of pavement winding through a thicket of pines, footlights illuminating the drive like a runway. The drive must be heated, I suppose—slush sticks to the boughs of pines and the ground on either side, but melts into a wet shimmer on the drive.

The pines fall away like a robe to reveal Waverly’s house—built on a bluff overlooking a shallow valley. The house itself looks like a haphazard stack of frosted glass cubes, illuminated. Valet parking’s offered in the turnabout, but Timothy follows the driveway as it dips and curves around the far end of the house. We plunge into an underground garage large enough to accommodate twenty cars, at least.

“Usually this place is empty,” says Timothy.

Timothy circles once before settling for a rear space. His Fiat rattles when he cuts the engine, the sound almost offensive among the silent Maseratis, Porsches and Ferraris filling out the other spaces. A uniformed attendant wipes the slush from Timothy’s car with a white towel, never minding that the Fiat’s a piece of shit. Timothy’s quieter than usual—nervous, maybe.

“Don’t like parties?” I ask him.

“Not much,” he says.

An elevator with a parquet floor lifts us into the glass foyer. The doors slide apart and we’re washed in gold light—the interior of Waverly’s house is like a dream of art deco, the guests in slim-cut tuxes and flapper-style gowns shimmering like precious coins. Waverly’s there to greet us—he’s already flushed pinkish with drink.

“Have you fallen in love with her yet?” he says as he shakes my hand.

“I’m sorry?” I ask.

“Have you fallen in love with Albion?” he says, breath sour with alcohol. “You can’t spend time with her and not fall in love, apparently—”

“Not now,” says Timothy.

“I haven’t,” I try to say, but Timothy’s taken Waverly’s arm and nudges him away from me, separating our conversation.

“Drinks are in the blue room,” says Waverly as we part. “We’ll stream the executions in the Caraway room, I think—”

A hundred or so on the guest list, it looks like, and I’m as exposed in my flannel as I feared I would be. Pathetically underdressed. Timothy’s already abandoned me, disappeared somewhere. Adware profiles hover over each guest, names I recognize from the streams, Elric Broadbent, a presidential adviser, and Michelle Frawley, from Arizona, host of the God and Guns stream. Actresses I recognize from Disney sitcoms and reality-stream girls, Donna from Hello Pussy, season 3, and the guy from Truth or Dare. I ping Gav to see if he recognizes anyone here and he pings that I should watch where I step and be sure to clean my shoes when I leave. Everyone’s wearing those Meecham pins that were popular following Pittsburgh, her profile portrait like a cameo and twin crimson ribbons in the shape of a heart. A bit overwhelming, I suppose, but nothing I haven’t seen before—I’ve been the wallflower at celebrity-studded parties Gavril’s dragged me to, nothing terribly novel about gawking at recognizable faces. Zelda Kuhn, host of Buy, Fuck, Sell is talking with the Republican whip from Texas. Christ, there’s a lot of power gathered here—

I drift to the blue room for a drink, the blue room easy enough to find—a dining hall with expansive walls papered in royal blue damask. I pluck sushi from a passing tray—the waitresses look like they’ve been bused in from a modeling agency rather than a catering company, as much a decoration here as the Louis XIV chairs and oversize landscapes in gilt frames. The dining room table’s been converted into a bar and a waiter pours me a finger of brandy. I swallow quickly, cutting the edge off my anxiety. He pours another. Waverly’s not playing the Gatsby tonight—no melancholia for his lost wife and daughter—he’s practically giddy with his guests, if anything, glad-handing and laughing, already a bit sloppy with drink. Difficult not to notice when he corners one of the waitresses in a dim hallway and kisses her hard enough to force her head against the wall, massaging her breasts through the front of her uniform while she holds a tray of champagne flutes, trying to keep them from spilling.

One of the guests watches me—she’s across the room, leaning against the blue damask, her silk gown the color of cream, her hair dyed a rich Albion-shade of crimson. She sends gentle pings my way. Vaguely familiar, but her profile’s blanked and I can’t quite place her. I’m meant to notice her—I feel she’s like an invitation, if I want her, but I can’t help but feel repelled by the gag. She’s meant to resemble Albion with that red hair—did Waverly do this? Timothy? She knows I’ve noticed her. She accepts a drink from a passing waitress. She leaves the blue room and I’m invited to follow, but I hesitate. I finish off my brandy and go for a refill. The last glance I catch of her is so similar to Albion I’m convincing myself there’s a glitch in the Adware, that maybe there is no woman here, that maybe I’ve spent too much time studying Albion and now I’m hallucinating her.

I leave the blue room and find her—she leads me down a frosted glass hallway lined with black statues of nude women on white pedestals. Another hall—I’ve lost her somewhere in this maze of rooms, the design eighteenth century in style, stuffy despite the sleek modernity of the architecture. Framed photographs are arranged on a decorative mantel—many are of Waverly as a young man, his hair a dark sweep, his eyes the same color as the sea behind him. Most of these pictures were taken on the bow of a sailboat called, of all things, The Daughter of Albion. I can’t quite place the reference—Housman? Tennyson? Scroll through my e-library and search the Norton Anthology—find the poem: Blake, William. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. A few photographs show a woman, Waverly’s wife, I assume but can’t be sure. She’s younger than Waverly, but not by much—handsome rather than beautiful, with a square jaw and chestnut-colored curls. She appears only twice in these pictures, glancing at the camera but never smiling. There aren’t pictures of his children here, no images of the two sons I found listed in the census and none of his daughter. I roam through to another room and find the woman I was following sipping a drink lounging on a settee.

“Forget me already?”

Hearing her voice—Twiggy. “I didn’t recognize you, not with the hair color,” I tell her. “Twiggy, isn’t it? Gavril’s friend, right?”

“That Twiggy’s just a stage name,” she says.

“Your valentine landed me in a heap of trouble. It was heroin, for Christ’s sake. A felony charge. I lost my job. You should have warned me what it was—”

“What’s that you’re drinking?”

“I don’t even know anymore,” I tell her. “Brandy, I think—”

She raises her glass to me. “Kentucky bourbon for me, straight. Cheers, Gavril’s cousin. Life’s on the up-and-up and I want someone to celebrate with. Come over here and sit by me—”

I take the far edge of the couch and she smiles at my hesitancy, extending her feet so her toes touch my slacks.

“What happened to the American Apparel sponsorship?” I ask. “There aren’t commercials blaring from you.”

“That’s Mr. Waverly,” she says. “He pays for commercial-free living. What are you doing here, anyway? I wouldn’t have taken you for a big baller. Shopping for birds, like everyone else? You look like shit, by the way—”

“I think it’s a mistake that I’m here at all,” I tell her. “I came with a friend, I guess to stream the federal executions. I usually stream this thing with Gavril, because it kicks off Fashion Week—”

“Executions? You think that’s why they’re all here?”

“Why else would they be here?”

“Pussy,” she says.

“Christ,” I tell her, and finish off my brandy.

“I love how bashful you are,” she says. “Look, you’re blushing—”

“It’s just the drink—”

“I won’t need American Apparel soon, anyway,” she says. “I’m having a series of brilliant fucking breaks that’s lighting up my career. You ever have a run of luck like that? What is it Plath says? ‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.’ I fucking am, that’s what my heart’s screaming right now—”

“Someone hire you for another ad campaign?”

“I’m Theo Waverly’s favorite girl,” she says. “Steady work until I’m too fucking old, that’s what that means. His company placed me with American Apparel, placed me with Gav. His request for the red hair, do you like it?”

“It resonates—”

“He has me up to an eighty-three percent click-through rate in the streams, that’s pretty fucking unbelievable. Chanel and Dior already contacted his company about me. Everything’s happening so fast—”

“I thought you were interested in poetry,” I tell her. “You texted me a while ago, asking for poetry recommendations—”

“Just because a girl gets looked at doesn’t mean she can’t think,” she says. “I finished that Adelmo Salomar book you recommended to me, by the way. I’ve never been much for Surrealism or automatic writing, all that stuff. I’m much more interested in the ‘Confessional School,’ all that Surrealism rings heavily of bullshit—”

“Salomar was writing about the Chilean Revolution—those poets had to invent ways to write around the censors, so they readapted Surrealism. ‘Tonight I write the voice of a serpent devoured by a thousand doves.’ Liberation Theology—”

“Well, anyway, poetry’s immortal, but beauty’s devoured by a thousand doves,” she says. “Plenty of time to study Chilean Surrealism once no one wants me to wear their clothes anymore—”

“I’d actually like to read some of your poetry,” I tell her, but before she answers, Waverly finds his way into the room with a bottle of wine.

“There you are,” he says. “Timothy was afraid you’d gotten lost—”

“Not yet,” I tell him.

“Why don’t you run along back to the party,” he tells Twiggy.

She swallows the rest of her bourbon and leaves the glass on the end table. “Makes me shivery,” she says.

“Dominic, let’s freshen up your glass back at the office,” he suggests. “We’ll finish up our business for the night so we can relax and enjoy ourselves—”

“Mr. Waverly, I actually have something I need to discuss with you about my employment—”

“Over drinks,” he says. “Not here—”

Waverly’s office is in a lower tier, through another frosted glass hallway, down a flight of stairs. A techie’s paradise—VR cams, an editing suite, a Bride 3120 stack with a fifty-two-inch monitor on the desk, a rat’s nest of ports and Adware jacks, sets of Adware like a tangle of mesh and a workbench with a soldering iron and motherboards and spools of wires and cable. One wall’s covered with built-in shelves stacked with books, leather-bound classics—Hesse, Blake—some Baudrillard, Schopenhauer, and yellowed paperback technical manuals, manila folders of printouts. A few framed photographs are propped up among the books—some shots of the Pittsburgh skyline, more of Waverly sailing on The Daughter of Albion, another of the woman I take for his wife, sitting on the lawn of the Frick near a rosebush in bloom. One of the photographs is a group portrait, Waverly with other suits—they’re clustered around a young Meecham, a radiant blonde electric with her pageant-trained smile.

“You’ve met her?” I ask.

“I know Eleanor very well. Let’s see—that must have been taken fifteen years ago or so,” he says. “We were at a campaign event in Canton, Ohio—at the McKinley Grand Hotel. This was during her first presidential bid—”

“You were with her from the beginning of her career, then?”

“She was just a stray before I adopted her,” he says. “I’m sorry, that sounds harsh, but Eleanor wasn’t realizing her full potential. She was shallow, but we saw potential in her. She was articulate—we knew that from the pageants—intelligent when she wanted to be. Compassionate. Much of politics is simply manipulating broad symbols. Here was a beauty queen who grew up not far from Pittsburgh, conservative politically, a Christian. She was what the country needed at the time. Still does—”

“Timothy says you’ve figured out how people will behave, can manipulate the outcome of their free will—”

“I see no reason why Eleanor Meecham would ever lose an election,” he says. “The ammendment passed with enthusiasm, and the votes are there—”

Another photograph. “I recognize this picture,” I tell him, of a view of a house in Greenfield, in Pittsburgh, a part of the neighborhood that cuts toward the river called the Run. A clapboard Victorian huddled with other houses in the shadow of the 376 overpass, worn out and unpainted, odd because of a whitewash cross and a Bible quote slathered in white paint on the broad side of the house: Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. “We used to call this the Christ House—”

Waverly sits at his desk, tinkering with wires that have been pulled from a miniature motherboard—in his slumped posture, I think I see what he may have looked like as a young boy, lonely, I’m guessing, or maybe I’m reading too much into what an old man looks like when drunk.

“It’s a church,” says Waverly, “or was. You remember that house? I guess with the lettering, it doesn’t surprise me it’s somewhat infamous. Tact and lying low were never that congregation’s strong suit. My wife’s congregation. Speaking in tongues, that sort of thing. An old farmhouse. Most of the rooms were used as a Christian women’s shelter. That was my great-great-grandfather’s first house in America. My family came from nothing. My great-great-grandfather came to Pittsburgh for the mills, and eventually my father owned the mills—Pittsburgh, Birmingham. I bought back that house, and when Kitty asked for a place to start her shelter, a place for her congregation to meet, I signed it over.”

“You don’t have any pictures of your daughter—”

“No,” he says. “I don’t. I don’t display any pictures of my children here. They all passed away in Pittsburgh, all three. I prefer to keep my past and present separate, private—”

I find another photograph of Meecham—taken shortly after Pittsburgh, during what must have been a tour of one of the FEMA camps in West Virginia they set up for people like me, the refugees and homeless.

“I was in a bar in Weirton when she was elected,” I tell Waverly. “Did you take this picture of her at the FEMA camp?”

Waverly nods. All the liquor’s gone to my head and I’m feeling loosely emotional, feeling my words sliding through my usual restraint: “I want you to know that we believed in her back then, when we had nothing left—I voted for her. She came from western Pennsylvania, she was one of us, and when the networks projected her as the winner, I remember I was crying like everyone else in that bar with me. I was—thinking, stupidly thinking, that her election would somehow bring everything back, that everything would turn out all right. She described the Kingdom of Heaven and told us that the dead were held in the palm of God’s hand, all that bullshit—that they had found peace, telling us the world continues because the love of God continues—”

“I think those words were meant more for the rest of the nation, Dominic, people who hadn’t gone through what we’d gone through, but who were still scared, who wanted comfort. I don’t think the consolation was ever meant for us—”

“I need to talk with you about our arrangement, Mr. Waverly. There’s just—”

“More money? We can make arrangements with my secretary. Timothy’s informed me about the excellent work you’ve been doing—”

“There was a man who confronted me in the City-Archive. He threatened me. He threatened to take my wife from me if I still worked for you, and I—”

“Who?” asks Waverly. “What man? What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his name—he says it’s Legion, so it might not be a man at all, it might be a collective—”

“That man’s threats are meaningless. I’ve had others in the Archive before you, Dominic, who’ve encountered this man. He’s a paper tiger. If you can ID him, I’ll pay you triple—”

“I can’t risk losing her—”

“What are you saying, Dominic?”

“I appreciate what you’ve done for me,” I tell him. “But I can’t risk losing Theresa—I’ll return to rehab, Mr. Waverly. I’ll return the iLux—”

“I’m disappointed,” he says. “Stay for the party, of course, and I’ll still transfer what I owe you for the work you’ve done. I’m very disappointed. You, in fact—you were working out well for me—”

“There are plenty of people who do this kind of research,” I tell him. “You could poach an actual librarian from the Archive with the money you’re paying me. It doesn’t have to be me—”

“Take a few days to think things over,” he says. “I understand what you’re telling me, that you feel threatened. I can protect you, of course—”

“You couldn’t protect Albion—”

The guests gather in the Caraway room, the Caraway a basement-level game room with amphitheater-style seating. The heads of antlered stags decorate the walls. Streaming, the Caraway room’s become a replica of the Capitol Building interior, live feeds of senators and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Supreme Court justices integrated seamlessly among us. The nine federal prisoners wear black robes that echo the robes of the justices. They’re shackled and on their knees.

“Madam Speaker, the President of the United States—”

Meecham walks among us in her Porta gown like a Valkyrie, something shimmering. Some senators cheer—they actually cheer and kneel to her, reaching out to touch her as she passes in the aisle. A petal-pink lace blindfold matches her gown and gloves, an approximation of blind justice, I suppose. She pauses before each prisoner, studying each body like a consumer pricing meat. She offers each prisoner a chance to recant, to swear their allegiance to the United States—but no one speaks. I’m not on the political fringe, but even I can’t stomach these executions—the pronouncements and prayer, the humiliation masked as honor, Meecham placing the black hood over each prisoner. They’ll be presented one by one and she’ll sign their execution warrants with a silver pen. They’ll be shot point-blank in the temple. Their bodies will be draped in black flags. There will be torrents of pornography derived from these executions, there always has been—of classic Meecham sex vids spliced with death shots and the prisoners bleeding out. I don’t want to be part of this, to hear her speech to the Senate, using the memory of the dead as justification for these public killings.

“Seen enough?”

Timothy’s found me. His jaw’s clenched like he’s keeping himself from screaming through sheer physical effort. I’ve never seen him lose composure like this—his eyes bloodshot, brimming with tears. He smiles for my benefit but the effect is horrific, and for a brief, terrible moment I think he will lean over and bite me.

“I have—I have seen enough,” I tell him. “I’m ready to go—”

The weather’s turned. Timothy’s venting his aggression, speeding the hairpin turns on the slick woodland roads, the Fiat’s windshield augs flashing snow caution and marking his triple-digit speed in red. I lean back, swimming drunk and letting myself believe that it would be all right to die if Timothy skids on ice and we wrap around a snow-laden tree. Believing it would be for the best…

“Mr. Waverly tells me that you’re quitting,” he says, breaking what felt like an interminable silence. I’d been thinking of Albion and Twiggy and staring at the dark blur of pines.

“Your treatment schedule is under review,” says Timothy. “I don’t believe you’re making the progress that I’d hoped you would. I may have made a mistake about you, and may have to recommend a more intense schedule to retrieve you—group therapy, work restrictions. I don’t think it’s out of the question that a stay at the psychiatric institute might be very good for your recovery. The Correctional Health Board may even find it necessary to intervene—”

“Don’t do this,” I tell him, understanding the threat implicit in what he’s saying, knowing full well he could snare me in bureaucracy if he chooses to. “I’m not quitting my treatment, Dr. Reynolds, and I’m grateful for the special care you’ve given me, but I just can’t continue with Waverly—”

“You have no idea how important your work is—”

“Why ‘Albion’?” I ask him. “Mr. Waverly named his boat The Daughter of Albion. He named his own daughter Albion—”

Timothy says, “There’s a common misconception about Christ—”

I don’t like this turn, I don’t want this conversation, but I don’t know how to stop it, either—the snow’s fallen heavy, the roads white except for a smear of tire tracks, but Timothy drives heedless. A real sense that I might die settles over me, a lightness of being, a surrendering of control. All I say is, “Slow down—”

“When I talk with people who are suffering,” says Timothy, “they often tell me that they’re comforted because Christ associated Himself with sinners. Prostitutes and taxmen. Drinkers. The thief who was crucified with Him. My patients often tell me that they’re comforted because no matter how depraved their lives, no matter what damage they’ve done to themselves or others, Christ will still save them. Christ will still save them. They think they will somehow transcend the world, somehow continue sinning but find a spiritual perfection when the time comes because they believe their soul is pure so it doesn’t matter if their body is corrupt. I tell them that Christ doesn’t accept us as sinners. We might be sinners when Christ calls us, but He doesn’t accept us as sinners. He demands that we abandon our lives to follow Him, to become like Him. That doesn’t mean turning our backs to the world—it means just the opposite. He demanded the twelve abandon their lives in order so they might fully embrace the incarnation. He demands this of us—”

“It can be difficult to change—”

In the light of the windshield augs Timothy’s eyes bore through me like I’m no longer a man in need of professional assistance or even personal grace, but more like I’m something already lost. I can’t bear the weight of his eyes. I lose myself watching the snowfall. This must be what it feels like to be caught in the tide—wading deep water and feeling suddenly tugged, my feet pulled from beneath me. Whatever I’m involved in, I realize, goes beyond therapy and paperwork and work permits. Timothy drives faster in our silence. Headlights approach, at first just pinpricks of light but growing into the elaborate quad headlights of a rig—how easy it would be, I think, for Timothy to flick his wrist, to swallow us in those lights, and I wonder if he’s contemplating how sometimes it feels easier to die than to live. I close my eyes, preparing.

2, 3—

BUY AMERICA! FUCK AMERICA! SELL AMERICA!

This is CNN.

A police checkpoint on Connecticut—queue with the others, waiting my turn through the scanner. Nip-Slip for Ri-Ri with upskirt dessert, traffic’s backed up for blocks, click here, District cops leading drug sniffers car to car, random inspections, pulling some drivers out for the scan, bypassing others. Raw feed of a New York woman pushed in front of subway, click here. I ping Simka: Checkpoint, I’ll be late. The usual paranoia that I’m carrying brown sugar or some other shit so I check my pockets, but I’m clean—I’m clean.

Simka pings: I’ll pick you up, stay by the checkpoint—

The District cops wear opaque visors and train their weapons on us, but we’re all complying, no need for intimidation here. There are three of them, enough to keep the peace. One of them waves me through the scanner archway. Yellow lights flip to green. I’m pulled aside—arms extended and feet spread shoulder width while another cop passes the wand over me. They perform an Adware sweep and my anti-malware catches, but I click allow to get this over with. Yellow lights flip to green. Stand against the brick wall while another cop snaps my photograph. My e-signature states that my identity matches the image. I’m free to go—

Simka picks me up in his Smart City Coupé. He shakes my hand and pats my shoulder.

“Cut your connection,” he says.

There’s a pock on the back of my head where the skull begins its slow eggshell slope toward my neck—an off switch. I push it and my Adware shuts down, the augmented reality blinking off, leaving me with a sudden, startling blurriness of vision without the retinal lenses.

“We can talk,” I tell him.

Simka keeps to the right lane on the Beltway, his cruise control set a shade under the speed limit as other cars flash past.

“When you contacted me, you said you’re having some problems with Dr. Reynolds?” he asks.

“You think he might listen through my Adware?”

“Possible,” says Simka. “Some psychiatrists use that trick to eavesdrop on their patients’ habits. Now, tell me: What’s going on?”

“Timothy threatened me,” I tell him. “He threatened my recovery schedule, he threatened me with incarceration at the health institute—”

“For what?” he says.

“Because I quit a job I was working. Because I quit helping this man Waverly with the Archive. I quit—”

“And he threatened you? That’s bad, Dominic. No, no—that’s illegal. I can write to some colleagues of mine—”

Simka lives out near Chevy Chase, on a solitary lane that borders Rock Creek, in a type of house common in Maryland: an oblong box, two-toned with brick along the bottom and white siding around the top. I was here once before, for a Christmas party he hosted, back when I was healthier—I was the only patient he invited. I met his family, his wife and twin sons. His boys were just babies the last time I saw them, but now they’re kids—brutal in their youth, toys and the debris of toys scattered throughout the living room, but still polite when I enter with their father. They don’t recognize me, of course, but they tell me their names and shake my hand before running off to another room, shaking the house with their wrestling. Simka’s wife Regina’s a few years younger than he is, her curly hair still jet-black—she hugs me like I’m a long-lost son, remembering my name, and begs me to sit at the kitchen table for something to drink. She takes my coat and brings me root beer.

We eat dinner together. I haven’t eaten so well in quite some time, the boys wearing Redskins avatars, filling in whatever gaps and silences exist among the adults with chatter about the play-offs. Regina’s made Wiener schnitzel, caloric information displaying in the Good Eats app, her recipe displayed in Recipe Swap. Dutch apple pie and coffee following dinner. Simka shows me off to his boys like I’m someone successful, like my education makes me someone important. His boys ask questions about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that I’m able to answer, and it feels good—great, actually. I tell them the whitewash scene is a founding document of American-style capitalism, and they look at me, befuddled. Simka tells them it’s just a clever trick, a funny story. He asks me to spend the night—a comfortable bed, away from my anxieties.

“Sure,” I tell him, “I have nowhere to be—”

We drink cognac in his office, his desk windows facing a woodland backyard, chatting for an hour or so while we drink, deliberately avoiding the topic at hand, wondering what the novel by a man named Lear was. He explains, “If you spell his name l-e-e-r, then it would be a dirty story about a dirty man, Dominic. But Freud would be interested in the pun, even if you do spell his name like the king—”

I’m left alone to freshen up while Simka and his wife put the boys to bed.

“Put your coat on,” he tells me when he comes back downstairs. He leads me outside through the mudroom door, down a path of pavers through his wife’s garden. He’s holding a lantern ahead of us, we walk in silence down a grassy slope into the woods and around to a barn he’s renovated as his woodshop. He flicks on the lights—rows of fluorescent tubes—and tells me to come inside. He uses a long match to light a black woodstove in the center of the room.

“I could use electric heat,” he says, “but I have so many scraps and besides I like the smell of smoke—”

I sit at one of the bench seats at the massive table near the stove. Simka’s brought a thermos of coffee.

“We can talk freely here,” he says. “I feel like my woodworking helps me with clearing my mind—like Zen, in a way. When I converted this barn into my shop, I insulated it with rolls of firewall. I didn’t want to be interrupted with pop-ups out here. This is a quiet zone. It’s peaceful—”

The furniture he’s made is elegant, really. I’ve seen the furniture in his waiting room, back at his office in the city, but his shop here is like a showroom. Bureaus and dining room sets, chairs and tables, all in a Craftsman style. Visible wooden joints and beautifully stained. Simka pours me a cup of coffee from the thermos before pouring his own cup. It is quiet, here—I realize I can hear the distant murmur of Rock Creek. It’s a sound I haven’t heard for years, the sound of water dribbling through a creek bed—probably not since I was a kid, hiking with my parents in Ohiopyle.

“Something went wrong between you and Dr. Reynolds,” he says. “You mentioned he threatened you—”

“Timothy’s too close to a man named Waverly,” I explain. “It’s almost like the only reason Timothy was interested in my case was to recruit me for this work helping to track Waverly’s daughter Albion in the Archive—”

“Theodore Waverly is Dr. Reynolds’s father,” he tells me, the connection between the two men slithering down my spine. Registering my shock, Simka says, “I’ve been doing some research for you. You called the other day on my landline—I thought it odd until I realized you were probably trying to keep our meeting private. I have a friend, a very close friend, on the Correctional Health Board. I asked him about Dr. Reynolds. I had to convince him—”

I open up to Simka freely, speaking comfortably to him, an old friend. Simka jots notes on a yellow legal pad, as is his custom when listening to me speak. I tell him about Albion, about Mook. I rehash Timothy’s threats against me.

“Dr. Reynolds has his own troubles,” says Simka. “I don’t know why he wanted your case specifically. Maybe it was because he had you in mind for Waverly, I don’t know. My hands were tied when you were arrested in Dupont Circle that night—the Correctional Health Board demanded changes because of the felony drug charge. I tried to keep you under my care, but Dr. Reynolds lobbied hard to have you transferred to him. I don’t know why—”

“What troubles?” I ask him.

Simka opens the folder he’d brought with him. “Dr. Timothy Reynolds’s file,” he says. “It’s relatively common for people in my field to undergo therapy once we start practicing, as sort of professional oversight to make sure we’re not adversely affected by the work we’re doing. Timothy and I both saw the same doctor for a number of years. This file represents the information our doctor kept about their sessions together—”

“How did you get his file?”

“Like I said, I called in favors from some influential doctors,” says Simka. “The doctor that Timothy and I both saw is a mentor of mine, a very old friend. I explained the severity of the situation—”

“You don’t need to discuss any of this with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to feel you have to, if you’ll get in trouble—”

“Sharing patient information goes against everything I believe in as a doctor,” says Simka. “But I’m worried—”

“What’s going on, Dr. Simka?”

“Reynolds is not his real last name,” says Simka. “When these files start, he goes by the name Timothy Billingsley. Before that he was Timothy Waverly. He has a history of spousal abuse, he’s been in and out of legal trouble—”

“Spousal abuse? Did he hit his wife? Timothy told me he wasn’t a very good husband, but I never thought—”

Simka leafs through the contents of Timothy’s file before saying, “I want you to look at these—”

He unfolds sheets of newsprint—drawings, the same type of memory maps I made with Simka, but these drawings are exceptional. The first several are of the Christ House, the house Waverly had donated to his wife’s congregation—that home for women. Timothy as Waverly’s son, living in that Christ House, his mother running the place. All of Timothy’s Christian bullshit starts coming into focus.

Simka finds another drawing and spreads it open on the table. The drawing’s a reimagining of a Rossetti, of a woman brushing her crimson hair.

“Albion—”

“Reynolds struggled with violence and depression,” says Simka. “Survivor’s guilt, after Pittsburgh. He was addicted to pornography, hard-core stuff. Violent. He and his therapist talked about this problem extensively. The treatments ended abruptly—the final report says that Timothy called his therapist from the hospital. He says he was born again—”

“He tore out his own Adware,” I tell him. “He told me all about it—”

“Almost killed himself,” says Simka.

Simka lets me leaf through the other drawings in the file, there are several here—all extraordinarily realistic, made with colored pencils or charcoal. Simka paces his shop, cleaning up odds and ends, keeping his hands busy, obviously troubled that he’s breaching his oath of patient privacy. Timothy’s old doctor had arranged these drawings in groups: several of the Christ House, several of Albion. The third group grows startlingly brutal. A woman chained by her wrists in a dungeon. Two women handcuffed in bed. A woman drowning in what looks like bog water, surrounded by swamp grass. Another of a woman buried in river mud.

“Jesus—”

It’s her, oh Christ, it’s her—

“What is it?” asks Simka.

Nine Mile Run drawn accurately. A woman’s body half buried in river mud, abandoned down a steep slope from the jogging path that worms through the park. The river’s drawn in like a black ribbon. Staring at this drawing, the scene recurs to me—kneeling in the cold mud, seeing the white flesh and the grime-darkened hair. Hard rain must have rinsed away the shallow burial, or the river rose, exposing her body—tugged by currents, the face of the woman I’ve been tracking, drawn here.

“This is Hannah Massey,” I tell him. “This is the crime scene. This is the body, it—”

“Are you sure?” asks Simka. “Are you absolutely sure? I’ll call the police—”

“No, no, that’s not the best for this,” I tell him. “I’ll get in touch with Kucenic. There are protocols to follow for something like this. Jesus. The regular police don’t care about crimes preserved in the City-Archive, and will only muck it up. Kucenic will know what to do—”

I tell Simka I need to think. He says he’s planning on staying up, combing through the minutiae of Timothy’s files to see what else he can uncover, if he can find any information that can help me. Nearing one in the morning, we return to the house through his wife’s garden. Simka makes up the guest bedroom for me, two comforters, in case I get cold.

“It’s a drafty house,” he says. “We can talk more in the morning—”

I climb into bed, the cooling grip of crisp sheets. My mind races. Staring into darkness, listening to the unfamiliar pops of the settling house. Autoconnect to Norwegianwood, Simka’s Wi-Fi. Thinking—

Maybe Waverly never intended me to find Albion—

Maybe there is no Albion, maybe there never was—

Albion the name of Waverly’s sailboat, nothing more—

Waverly and Timothy, father and son, bringing me into the fold because I found the body of Hannah Massey. Maybe they brought me in because they want to keep me under tabs, figure out how much I know, what to do with me—

Tangle me up in the fiction of Albion, keep me distracted—

A sickening certainty of comprehension, but some things don’t click: Albion exists, of course she does, because Timothy drew these pictures of her for his old doctor, years ago. And why would Waverly, a man like Waverly, need to go through all the bother of having me search for Albion just so he can keep tabs on me? He could hire someone to follow me, or… or something could be arranged—I wouldn’t be missed for long. Quivering with the thought, the panic in my nerves breaking down my disbelief—I don’t believe Waverly will have me killed, or Timothy, or try not to believe, but those drawings of women’s bodies are like confessions and the possibility of death grows around me like ice.

I ping Kucenic that I need to see him. Messages wait from Timothy in my in-box, vague warnings about my treatment—he seems to know I’m with Simka right now. Kucenic doesn’t respond so I ping him again.

Two a.m. I register for a chat session at the World News Catalog’s twenty-four-hour reference desk. An e-librarian joins me, some AI interface with a Hello Kitty avatar.

How may I help you?

I request a search in the hard archive of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the name Timothy Billingsley—the results are immediate. Timothy’s face. Thinner years ago, with a scruffy beard hiding his thin lips, but the eyes are his. I read. Domestic disturbances, arrests. I ask the AI to run a face match without limiting the news source and the bot returns hits from the Times-Picayune—under the name Timothy Filt, arrested for the murder of his wife, a woman named Rhonda Jackson from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was found in her apartment, her head caved in from the strike of an aluminum baseball bat. He’d been pulled over for a broken taillight and connected with the crime. Blood in the car, a DNA match. Scheduled for the death sentence but never executed—political influence and an eventual pardon from the governor of Louisiana.

Filt became Billingsley. He surfaces in Georgia on another domestic violence report, now married to a woman named Lydia Holland. Lydia—she’s the woman Timothy told me about, the woman he’d cheated on, his wife during the end. They lived in Pittsburgh but must have moved there from Georgia—Timothy told me he and his wife were traveling through the South when Pittsburgh ended. I request a search for the name “Lydia Billingsley.” Only one hit—as a volunteer at a Rotary pancake breakfast in Greensburg, PA. Timothy told me that he and his wife had divorced, so I search for her maiden name, “Lydia Holland”—the name appears in the Times-Picayune in the February issue, four months after the end of Pittsburgh. Her body was found bound and gagged, submerged in the Honey Island Swamp. A fisherman found her, didn’t know what he’d found at first. Her face was cut up and bloated in the water, a slash across the neck so deep she was nearly decapitated. Her hands had been removed.

A message hits my in-box and the chime in Simka’s silent guest room startles me from bed. I sit up, my account glowing in the darkness. From someone named Vivian Knightley, with the subject line: Aubade. I open it—You wanted to read my poetry, so here’s something. I hope you aren’t full of shit that you’re interested because I don’t show these to everyone. Love, Twigs—

She’s sent me a manuscript, the length of a chapbook—thirty pages or so. The aubade that starts the collection is just one line:

I can’t stay here. I schedule a cab and spend the next fifteen minutes leaning over the guest room toilet, staring at my reflection in the water, concentrating to hold down the vomit my nerves are sputtering up. Did Timothy kill Hannah, I wonder, or did he just know where she was discarded? The house is silent—Simka must have finally gone to sleep. I move out to Simka’s front stoop in the numbing early morning chill, watching my breath billow out, shaking my legs to keep warm. When the cab pulls up, I hurry over so the driver won’t honk and pierce the predawn skin of silence. I tell the driver Kucenic’s address. I think of Hannah’s body filthy from silt. I think of Albion—but thinking of Albion is like staring at something for so long that it begins to disappear.

2, 4—

Kucenic lives on G, just off Barracks Row on 8th, in a Federalist row house that cost him a couple million, easy, despite the street parking and the odd stone-paved patch that serves as his front lawn. Dawn’s breaking, but the streetlights are still on.

I press the doorbell and chimes ring through the quiet house. “Kucenic?” I pound on the door. “It’s Dominic—”

His Explorer’s parked out front, one tire on the curb. Although the curtains are drawn, I look through a slit and find his usual living room mess from the night before: Chinese takeout boxes, half-finished two liters of Mountain Dew—Kucenic’s typical cuisine for late nights of coding.

“Kucenic, open up. It’s Dominic. Kucenic—”

The whispering hum of accumulating traffic circulates on nearby, busier streets.

“Kucenic, open up the goddamn door—”

I hear him shuffling around inside, now. The dead bolts fall away and Kucenic opens up. He’s wearing what he must have worn since yesterday, blue jeans and wrinkled flannel, his cigarette-ash hair a wild puff of bed head. His thumb and forefinger smooth his beard from his lips—a nervous tic he has when he’s thinking, when he’s not quite sure how to respond to a pointed question.

“Dominic,” he says.

“I’ve turned off my connection—”

“Come in. Come on in. I’ll make us some coffee—”

The Kucenic Group operates from this house—meetings in the living room, staffers lounging on the couches or recliners, eating cheese curls and Coke while Kucenic writes on the whiteboard. I’ve actually never been here without the rest of the group—the place is strangely empty, the only real sound the click and hum of servers lining the front hallway, caged in cherry-red storage lockers. Kucenic leads to the kitchen, struggling with a pronounced limp.

“Coffee,” he says, and the coffeepot purrs to life. “Do you want any of this pecan roll?”

“Tell me about #14502,” I tell him. “Hannah Massey, that State Farm insurance dispute I was working on when you let me go. Who’s working it now?”

“No one’s working it,” says Kucenic. “That case doesn’t exist anymore—”

“Bullshit,” I tell him.

“Check with State Farm if you have to,” he says. “Their bid skips from 14501 to 503—”

“You can’t just fucking ignore this,” I tell him. “That girl was murdered, you son of a bitch. When you fired me, I trusted you to follow through with her. I fucking trusted you. She deserves better than this—”

“Dominic, I have a lot to lose,” he says, diminished, cowed, his usually elfin eyes now like a coward’s pleading eyes. He turns from me, cuts a slice of the pecan roll, heats it in the microwave.

“You tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I tell him.

We eat at the meeting table, the paperwork of open cases spread haphazardly around the room, notes in red marker on the whiteboard—historical notes about Pittsburgh, timelines. Working on the Union Trust building collapse, it looks like, framed animated printouts of the building on sheets of e-paper are spread across the table.

“What did Waverly tell you when he first asked about me?”

“You mentioned that name earlier. You pinged me, said you’d met with a man named Waverly. You said there was a hard sell. I never met with anyone by that name—”

“Theodore Waverly—”

“Jesus, Dominic, do you know who that is?”

“He said he talked with you, interviewed you as a reference check. He said you told him about my drug habits, my work habits. He said he was checking background to hire me for a freelance job—”

“Dominic, I never met him—”

“Tell me what you know about Hannah Massey—”

“Only what you’d presented to me. When you found her body in the Archive, I reported the case to State Farm and the FBI. An agent from the field office contacted me, said they’d been in touch with State Farm—I’ve worked with this agent before, many times. I explained we were still researching the case as part of a claim, but that we’d present any relevant information to them. This is all strictly paperwork for the FBI, low priority—a bot actually does the work for them, it’s just a formality. No one expects the FBI to follow up or bring charges to anyone over something in the Pittsburgh City-Archive. This kind of interaction is just a checklist we go through—”

“So what’s different about her case?”

“This was shortly after your—incident,” he says. “You had that meltdown in Dupont Circle and I had to let you go. You were a repeat offender and this was a felony, I had to. I reported your termination to the Employee Assistance Program and was told that you would be taken care of, that your case would be handled by the Correctional Health Board—”

Kucenic’s tearing a napkin into confetti. He rubs his knee and so I ask him to tell me about his limp.

“Dominic, you’re in some serious trouble—we both are. These cops showed up shortly after I terminated you—they just knocked on my door one night, around eight or eight thirty, told me that they had to talk to me about you,” he says. “There were three of them, District soldiers—I never saw their faces. Those black masks, the armor. Their badges were blacked out so I couldn’t ping their profiles or badge numbers. I figured they wanted to talk to me about your arrest, maybe your background, have me sign some more paperwork—”

“But they wanted to know about Hannah Massey—”

“They wanted to know everything about our involvement with that case,” says Kucenic. “Who researched her? Who saw the files? How you found the body, where you were looking, why you were looking there, what you were working on. They took all the files related to that case, corrupted my copies with a worm. They wanted to know everything about you. Were you a good worker, how involved were you with the firm, everything—”

“And you told them?”

“I told them what they wanted to know, of course I did, but they knew everything already, Dominic. They made it clear to me that case #14502 no longer existed—that it would be erased, and that I shouldn’t work on anything even remotely associated with it, that I would be monetarily compensated for the loss of workload. They told me they’d take care of communicating with State Farm, that no questions would be asked. They said they appreciated my cooperation, and that if I continued to cooperate I would be safe. That’s what they said, that I would ‘be safe.’ They said that you might try to contact me, but that I was not to respond—”

“You’re with me now,” I tell him.

“I’m going to report this the moment you leave,” he says. “I’m going to call the District police and tell them that you’ve been here—what else can I do? You just showed up—”

“Did they hurt you? I asked about your leg—”

“A parting gift,” says Kucenic. “I shook their hands, told them I would cooperate. I followed them to the door—and that’s when one of them turned back to me. He pulled his nightstick and punched me with it, here in my chest. The hit knocked me over, and the man struck me twice in the knee—”

“Jesus. I’m sorry,” I tell him.

“It’s all right, Dominic,” he says. “Just—you don’t know what you’re involved in. Just do what they want you to do, whatever they tell you. Just get clear of this thing—”

2, 5—

I want to see Hannah again—

Paths through Nine Mile Run—someone documented all this and re-created it here, every footpath and every bridge over every muddy creek, the trees and the undersides of leaves. Plenty of JSTOR footage fills in the gaps where people never filmed, acres of this area important to environmental scientists studying the long-term effects of brownfields. Theresa and I walked here in autumn, late autumn arcing toward winter, just a few weeks following our miscarriage. We never fought, like some couples we knew, some of our friends slipping into skirmishes following a few drinks or harried days of work. We only had a few significant fights in all the years we knew each other, most of them about nothing, nothing at all, but I hurt her once here in these woods and I’m unable to walk here now without reliving the pain I caused her. Theresa loved this park—the other city parks were beautiful, but too manicured for joggers and families with strollers. Nine Mile Run remained untended in spots, spots where she could wander off-trail and find flowers growing in patches of sunlight. Despite the countless other strolls we’d taken through these paths, my memories wander back to this single afternoon and the shame of hurting her. Layering, the trickle of nearby water. Layering, birdsong. Layering, cool shade and the smell of soil. Wind in the leaves. I remember Theresa wearing a cardigan the color of tree bark, her hair the color of the golden leaves dying on their boughs. We’re holding hands, her fingers cold. She was distracted, looking over her shoulder into the woods and the shadows gathering there.

“Maybe—I don’t know, maybe there’s a silver lining to losing her,” I remember saying. “Maybe we’re better off without having kids. All the hassle—”

She slumps instead of screams, collapsing to the trail like her lungs have been pulled from her.

“I’m sorry,” I think I remember saying, stammering something, trying to comfort her but failing. I still don’t know why I said those words, and every time I think of them my chest tightens in nauseous self-recrimination. A jogger runs past without stopping and I wait until he’s long past and disappeared from view before speaking again. “Are you all right?” I ask her.

She stays on her knees, her head bowed into her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” until the light fails and the damp seeps like dead fingers through her clothes and she lets me help her to her feet and walk with her.

We walk here now, in patches of late afternoon sun, to the creek to watch the dying light lie like scattered diamonds on the surface of the water. We were alone that evening, coming to terms with our loss, with a miscarriage just like the thousands of other miscarriages that occur every day, every year, but ours so unlike the others because it was our daughter, our child that never was.

Night gathers. I leave Theresa on the path, her cries about our child filling the spaces between the sounds of the woods. I use low-hanging limbs to keep my balance as I scuttle down the slope, down near the watershed. I’m looking for the body. The Archive resets to late April, the clock resets to a little before seven in the evening. I find Hannah half buried in mud and watch her white body as the sun sets and night falls. I adjust my light filters, continue watching.

Think.

Load notes for case #14502 and resume my research where I’d left off for Kucenic and State Farm, tracking Hannah during her final hours before she was reported missing—on campus, at Carnegie Mellon, a few weeks before spring semester finals.

She’s slept in late this morning, the night before a raucous double rehearsal for her acting troupe’s Spring Carnival performance of Spamalot. Hannah’s role is the Lady of the Lake, and in these final hours in the Archive she trudges through a late spring dusting of snow still singing the music she’d learned the night before, fullvoiced despite the relatively early hour. In a few weeks, her troupe will stage Spamalot without her, dedicating the show to her, the missing girl, the stage festooned with flowers. The programs will feature her high school senior portrait and a tribute written by her friends, and after each performance the actors will stand among the exiting crowds taking up a collection to aid in the search efforts. But now, this morning, Hannah sings “Diva’s Lament,” a freshman Psych major in Barbie-pink boots and a camel hair coat, blonde waves tumbling from beneath her knit beret. She’s effortless, burgundy sweatpants and a plaid sweatshirt, comfy stuff for a day shuffling between the library and her semester’s remaining few classes. I’ve followed her this morning before—

Before, though, I’d followed her to determine if she perished in the bomb or perished sometime earlier, an insurance dispute—but now I need to see who killed her, to make sure Timothy killed her, to link them together if I can—or discover who killed her. Save the evidence somewhere safe, somewhere I can access and disseminate if I have to—leverage against Timothy to protect myself until I can figure out what to do. Hannah has a quick breakfast at the University Center, of coffee and a cinnamon scone—she flips through Vanity Fair’s spring fashion issue. I canvass the University Center while she eats, checking the faces of the people around her, of everyone with visibility of her, but there’s no one threatening here, no one paying particular attention, just the faces of dead students and dead faculty and family, most likely everyone perishing in the burn when they returned the following semester for the resumption of classes. Following coffee, Hannah can’t make it across campus without being stopped every few feet by friends—other actors, girls on the track team, classmates, dorm mates, professors she’s friendly with—it takes her nearly forty-five minutes to make the five-minute trek to her Psychology lecture in Porter Hall. A freshman survey, eighty or so kids filling out the seats.

I settle in a rear seat, several rows behind Hannah but where I can still see her—I’ve sat through this lecture with her before, have already studied Hannah diligently taking notes, have already seen her checking her phone for messages, suppressing yawns but generally paying attention. The lecturer enters a few minutes late, swirling into the room in a charcoal overcoat and tartan scarf, dropping his leather satchel on the lecture hall’s front table—I’ve seen him enter several times before, have seen the students snap to attention at his presence… but this time when the professor enters, my stomach feels like it slides down through my bowels. The professor for this class, who I’d seen in the background of Hannah Massey’s life before but never recognized until now, is Waverly.

He looks different from the man I know—his hair here is a salt-and-pepper black and left longer than the silver hair Waverly has now. I didn’t know who Waverly was when I was researching Hannah for Kucenic, he didn’t mean anything to me then—but now I notice his ravenous blue eyes fall on Hannah while he speaks, I notice his eyes linger over her a few moments longer than he looks at the other students, an older professor noticing the prettiest girl in his class, nothing more sinister than that, I must have thought. He’s lecturing about artificial intelligence, about how Focal Networks sims human cognition, how they’ve created algorithms that can replicate human thought and how they can make predictions about human behavior based on his models.

“Our choices aren’t really our own,” says Waverly. “We are putty hardwired with biological imperatives. A very few number of us will gain the wisdom needed to overcome our material limitations, but the number is very small—my business depends on that number being extraordinarily small. You know, when I started out, when I was just your age, an undergrad, I pursued my research hoping that one day hospitals would adopt technology so that impersonal diagnostic kiosks could be replaced with a truly interactive, almost-human bedside experience that could be used for the First World and Third World alike, but my first million came in my senior year when I was approached by the Real Doll industry. The Creator modeled us using materials prone to lust and hunger. Do we have individual souls capable of overcoming the base nature of our being? Perhaps… but my paychecks depend on very few of us overcoming our impulses, and I’m a very rich man—”

The class ends, early afternoon. I’ve watched Hannah after this class before—as she mills around for several minutes to see the professor but becomes resigned as other students cluster around him first, asking clarifying questions. I’d always simply assumed Hannah waited after class because she also had some question about the lecture, but now I wonder at a prior relationship between the two, some other reason she may have waited to see him. No matter—Hannah gives up the wait, leaves the lecture hall. This is the last known hour of Hannah’s life.

The ground will be frozen through much of April of that year, maybe why she was buried shallow enough that the spring rains could wash away her grave. Snowing, now—a swirling powder. I don’t know why Hannah cuts across campus toward the athletic fields rather than heading up Morewood to her dorm in Morewood Gardens, or to the library or another class, or even to the University Center for a late lunch. Rather, she skirts around the front end of campus to the parking garage on Forbes. She enters the parking garage and disappears—the archival deletion yawning enough that even State Farm picked it up on their cursory analysis of her extended family’s insurance claim. Hannah will miss a three o’clock class that day, and will miss a rehearsal for Spamalot that evening, her friends trying to contact her but failing, her friends reporting her missing to campus security, initiating a search that will burn intensely for weeks but peter out over the summer months, when everyone will leave Pittsburgh for home. By late summer, when everyone returns to campus for their own October death sentence, Hannah will already have become just a specter, mostly forgotten.

I scan the exception report again, the listing riddled with ContinuityExceptions, time-consuming to track, tedious. It took me months to find her body, but could take as many months more to track exactly what’s happened here—

But I don’t have to work like this—

I can work backward now—like solving an equation by working from the known solution. Hannah’s with Timothy, or will be—I reset the City, run a Facecrawler on Timothy, including older images I’d found of him as reference points for the search, limiting to this parking garage. Facecrawler hits on security cam footage of the driver of a Ford Mustang SUV leaving the lot shortly after Hannah disappears—tinted windows, but he’d rolled down the window to swipe his debit card at the gate. I zoom in on the face: Timothy—got him. The gate raises, the SUV leaves the lot.

I follow—

He drives through Squirrel Hill, cuts through Schenley Park, Greenfield Avenue sloping downhill until a sharp switchback called Saline brings us beneath the interstate. We’re in the Run. He parallel parks on a side street that runs behind Big Jim’s—a neighborhood bar only a short half block away from the house whitewashed with the words of Christ. Timothy’s recognizable when he steps from the car, despite his beard and thinner frame, but Hannah’s been altered with a simple face swap—an easy enough trick to throw off basic Facecrawlers. Grace Kelly’s face, but the body is still Hannah’s, the clothes. Timothy takes her to Big Jim’s, and I follow.

Big Jim’s is sculpted from security cam footage—no sound, a monochrome environment. Timothy and Hannah in a corner booth, eating spaghetti. I wait for them outside, pacing, agitated by the adrenal rush of ferreting information from the Archive. By the time they leave the restaurant it’s already dusk. The neighborhood’s quiet, cones of streetlamp light illuminate the snow. Andy Warhol worshipped here in the Run, down the street at the Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Church, metallic onion domes shimmering in the lights from the overpass. Row houses here, or houses separated by the slimmest gaps, shot-and-beer bars still sooty from the mill days almost a century gone. Timothy stays parked where he is. He and Hannah step through a gap in a chain-link fence and cross a field strewn with broken bottles and beer cans, overgrown with stubby grass and weeds. A floodlight shines on the side of the Christ House so the white cross and the whitewash-slathered quote are always visible, day or night. The lawn’s mud, the front steps long since rotted and replaced by ascending cinder blocks. The front porch moans with wet rot. The door hangs open.

Timothy stands aside, lets Hannah enter the house first. He follows her, closes the door behind them. I try to follow inside but there’s a barrier in the simulation. Private Account hangs in the doorway in green Helvetica.

“Override,” I say and a keypad appears in the continuity of the doorway. I enter my access code, press Enter. Log-in Failed.

I think I remember Kucenic’s code, so I type in his number string and the barrier disappears like a discarded veil, but as I cross the threshold I hear a rapid series of mechanical ticks. I’m not certain where the flame originates, but I see it expanding from the front door, a spreading orange light like liquid roiling midair. The concussion a heartbeat later, like a mule kick. Weightlessness before the earth swings upward to meet me. Fuck. I try to stand. Fuck. Fuck. Can’t quite. Ears ringing. My breath’s knocked from me, a scalding cramping in my lungs gasping the winter-frozen air. A bomb? I’ve bit my tongue and blood pours from my mouth, snapping me briefly from the Archive, bleeding onto my shirt and bedsheets, but I force myself to stay immersed, to focus on the City, focus on the City. iLux keeps me here. The Christ House, burning. Fire streams from the windows and sweeps up through the gaps in the siding. Fire belches from the front door, swathing the house, casting stark shadows the color of char.

What’s happening? This house never burned, not that I know of, not until the end—

A special effect, I realize—clever, the blistering heat layered in as a sense impression, just as realistic as the coffee I drink in the Archive or the touch and scent of women here, the firelight enough to make me squint but perfectly safe. Safe. I could walk through this fire, enter this house—could still follow Timothy and Hannah—but as I’m pulling myself from the ground, convincing myself that the wind hasn’t been knocked from me, that it’s just a shrewd trick, someone stumbles from the front door, screaming. I can see his black body like a burning worm cocooned in fire. The man stumbles toward me, waving his fiery arms, trailing a curling vein of smoke, a fireball, and I want to escape but am paralyzed. The man seizes the front of my coat and puts his burning face close to mine. I can smell his melting skin, feel the waves of heat.

“I’m very disappointed to see you again so soon,” he says, flames pouring from his mouth like writhing tongues as he speaks. “You’re using the name Kucenic now—”

Mook.

“I told you to leave well enough alone,” he says.

“I don’t understand,” I tell him. “I quit Albion. I told them I quit. I quit—”

“Mr. Blaxton, I’m acting to uphold the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. I believe that part of the right to privacy is that everyone has the right to control their own image. Did you know there are sex tourists who come through the Pittsburgh Archive looking for other people’s memories? Perverts, you understand—complete perversion. Would you be surprised to learn that people have immersed in Pittsburgh and have lived out your memories of sex with your wife? It’s happened, Dominic. There’s an industry of people who search out private sexual encounters that have been archived here and sell them. The user’s sensation is just as wonderful as it is for you. How do you feel about that, Dominic? Wouldn’t it comfort you to have someone like me protecting your memories, the image of your wife? My client has a right to keep people away from her image, and I intend to protect that right—”

“Your client? Who’s your client?”

“You’re a thickheaded young man,” says Mook. “Your wife is dead now—”

The iLux net security flashes red—malware detected—a progress bar fills too quickly to even consider ways to protect myself.

“That’s the worm,” says Mook. “Reissner-Nordström—”

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“You pressed me to do this because you wouldn’t stay away. You wouldn’t listen to me. You did this to her. I’ve unlived your wife, but I can resurrect her. Remember that, Dominic. Be a good boy, and I can reward you one memory at a time—”

Mook blinks out of existence, the house fire’s extinguished, the oceanic silence of the snow-filled night is painful to my ears. What has he done to her? Sift through my memories—I search for Theresa, but she’s nowhere. Through snow, Christmas lights hang from the branches of barren trees. The Spice Island Tea House. Layering, curry and candle wax. Our table, but Theresa’s seat is blurred, smudged like a corruption in sight.

“Theresa—”

She ran some blood work, she will say. She will tell me about the advanced amino test, our little girl, but the only sound I hear is a mumbled deformity of speech emitted from the empty blur, nothing at all like Theresa’s voice, nothing at all. She’s deleted now—Mook’s deleted her—every memory of her, every trace, every piece of her life that I clung to here, blotted and smeared.

Our apartment, the Georgian. Paisley carpets and walls stained the color of tea. Room 208. There is nothing left here, nothing—the foyer empty, only shadows remain.

“Theresa?”

My voice echoes in the emptiness. No one in the living room, no one in the kitchen. Our bedroom’s empty. I lie in bed and wait for her, wait for Theresa to undress in the half-light of the hallway light, to lie with me. I close my eyes to remember her body against mine, to wrap my arms around her and feel her, Theresa, oh God, Theresa, to feel the soft movement of her body, and I reach out my hand and feel her body but when I open my eyes I only see Zhou.

2, 18—

“Slow down,” says Gavril. “Are you all right? Tell me what’s happening—”

“Fuck, man. I’m fucked—”

“Where are you? Can you make it over?”

A Metro bus—connected. Layering, basil curry and candle wax. Forget about everything but my memories of Theresa, but already my memories of her seem thinner. The connection’s weak and the bus jostles and I’m in DC instead of Pittsburgh. Reconnect. The City loads and I access my memories of Theresa but see Zhou. Zhou. I can’t remember my wife anymore. I buzz up to Gavril’s, expecting Twiggy, but another woman opens the door, a pixie with a hentai faerie avatar—pinkish hair and jiggling cartoon breasts. “Upstairs,” she says, sparkling faerie wings and purple lipstick that stinks like grape Kool-Aid. The living room’s filled with Gavril’s models playing a space shooter on the sim, following the Amis guide Invasion of the Space Invaders, storming the terrain of Mars—the apartment’s cast the color of rust. Other models are in the kitchen, snorting lines of cocaine, their faces hideous in the Martian light, one girl’s nose raw with a trickle of blood, but everything’s hilarious and they’re shrieking with laughter. The hentai faerie ignores me for the cocaine, and I wander back to Gavril’s darkroom.

“You look like shit,” he says.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Sugar—”

“Ah fuck, man,” he says. “It’s been ten years, brother—ten years since you lost her. Give this up, Quixote. You can stay on my mother’s farm for as long as you want. Clear your head. Or come to London with me when I go. I’ll pay. Let’s put all this shit behind you—”

“I need to fucking—I just need, Gav, please, you don’t fucking understand—”

“Fuck you, then—”

Two pills of brown and I swallow them whole. “Take it to the kitchen,” he says, “I’m working right now.” Ignoring the coked girls who’ve fallen in a giggling heap beneath the kitchen table, I sit in the corner, on the cool tile, the warped-space sounds of their video game interfering with the immersion—

Autoconnect to Gavril’s Wi-Fi, the burn hits and the Pittsburgh tunnel’s like swimming lights, I’m rushing through and hold my breath until the tunnel ends and I’m hovering midair above three black rivers. I swim down through the air and touch the surface of the river—I pull myself through the skin of water into the dark, descend through the depths to drown. The river swallows me, the water covering over me but I can still breathe, of course I can still breathe—it’s not real, nothing is real. Nothing is real. Looking up at the City through the rippling surface of the river, the lights of Pittsburgh waver like it’s the City that’s been drowned. I close my eyes. I want to die, but the City isn’t set up for suicides, and so when I open my eyes I’m standing in Shadyside, in summer. I’m here—

Vibrancy of the drugs—Jesus Christ, it’s all so real. The Uni-Mart—aisles of Doritos and Ruffles and Fritos and Combos. The faces of the cashiers are immortal here, the boy with a neck tattoo taking my money and handing me rumpled, sweaty cash from the drawer. I thank him and stuff the bills into my pocket. Walking home with a gallon of milk in a plastic bag. Nearing midnight, insects swarm the streetlights. A midsummer swelter. Our apartment was never air-conditioned, but box fans beat in the open windows and make a comfortable-enough draft. I take my shirt off in the foyer, sweating in the dark midnight room. Theresa’s already asleep—I remember Theresa asleep, but when I go to her now, the body in our bed is Zhou’s.

“Theresa,” I say, and Zhou turns to me like she recognizes that name.

“Where did you go?” she says, speaking words I remember Theresa speaking.

“Picked up some milk so we can have cereal tomorrow—”

Theresa’s things are still here. Her container gardens on the windowsills. Framed Audubon prints of mourning doves and flamingos. The book she was reading is facedown on the coffee table—Zoya, Danielle Steel.

“Theresa—”

“Come to bed,” she says.

I open the refrigerator door to put away the milk and squint into the harsh white light. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness when I come back to bed and for a moment I see Zhou as Theresa, Theresa’s body lit by the moonlight, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, Zhou’s body returns and Zhou’s face fades in. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, trying to remember Theresa here, trying to force my memory of Theresa back into this place. Zhou sleeps with me just like Theresa would have slept with me, her body nestled into mine, her legs crossed over mine.

“Theresa,” I say, but Zhou answers, “Yes—”

I wake.

Gavril’s moved me to the bathroom, stretched me out in the tub, propped my head up with pillows. Cottony, my mouth—I’ve vomited down the front of my clothes. Face aching like someone’s punched me. I stand—shaky. He’s left a clean T-shirt for me, a yellow jersey—Washington Redskins, est. 1937. iLux lights to the jersey augs and Agatha, the Redskins cheerleader who implanted my iLux, flashes in the bathroom with me, a cheer routine from her vids, spandex high kicks disappearing through the bathroom ceiling. “Off, off,” I tell it, wincing at the stadium lights and reverbed crowd noise. She flickers out. Splitting goddamn headache. I splash water in my face. Whispers of bruises have formed under my eyes and blood’s dried on my nostrils. The apartment’s emptied out, Gavril’s party paused for the time being. Gavril’s in the living room, watching soccer. He turns when he hears me.

“Christ,” he says. “Šípková Ruženka, I thought you were going to fucking die—”

“I didn’t—”

I sit with him, head pounding but dull. I grab a handful of Fritos from the bowl but just hold them, stomach flopping at the thought of actually eating one.

“You started screaming in the kitchen—the girls got scared,” he says. “You were, like, slamming your face against the wall. Freaking the fuck out. Fucking blood everywhere—”

“Gavril, I’m all right—”

“I voiced your doctor friend, Simka—Once you started snapping out of it, I voiced back and told him not to bother coming and so he cussed me out for a half hour because he says I enable you. He still wants to take a look at you, but I never told him where I live—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your place so quiet—”

“A few girls are coming around for work a little later,” he says. “Crash here as long as you want. I don’t think you should terrorize the streets in the shape you’re in—”

“I’ll just collect my head a bit,” I tell him. Gavril gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge and hands them to me, telling me to drink both. Even the thought of swallowing Gatorade is enough to make me gag—but I sip and let the liquid slip over my tongue.

“Drink up,” he says. “Hydration. I mean it, brother—”

“Gavril, I have some things I need to tell you—”

“Say anything—”

“That job for Waverly’s gone sour,” I tell him. “The woman I was tracking. Everything’s fucked up—”

I tell him about Mook, about the Christ House in Pittsburgh where I followed Timothy and Hannah Massey. I tell him about Timothy’s drawings of dead women and the cops that assaulted Kucenic. I tell him that they’ve taken Theresa from me.

He’s stunned by everything I’m mixed up in. He rubs both hands over his bristly head and the shag of his beard stubble, pacing the room.

“You’re in serious shit,” he says.

“Listen to me, Gavril, this is important: I’ve put together a collection of evidence linking Dr. Timothy Reynolds to the death of Hannah Massey. If anything happens to me, you need to get it out to the streams—”

We set up an anonymous drop box using faked contacts, encrypt it with a mirror site, share the password—easy to trace documents I put into the drop box, but impossible to trace who retrieves them. I copy the files about Hannah’s murder. Gavril pulls a bottle of Sorokin vodka from the freezer and pours himself a glass. He offers some for me and laughs when I recoil at the idea of liquor.

“Sorokin will resurrect you, no matter how dead you feel,” he says.

“I should be dead already,” I tell him. “They’re going to fucking kill me, Gavril, because I found that fucking body but it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fucking fault—”

“You won’t die,” he says, “we can figure this out, figure out what to do—”

“I already know what to do. I need to recover Theresa so she can live on in the Archive. I need to help Hannah—”

My Adware’s a different region code than the soccer broadcast on Gavril’s Praha stream, so the play-by-play’s like excited gibberish. He finishes the first glass of vodka before pouring himself a second.

“Dominic, you know I love you,” he says, “but you piss me off sometimes. You’re thinking about that dead girl, thinking about your wife. You’re obsessed, Dominic. You’ve always been fucking obsessed with grief. Let them go, Domi. Let them go, steer clear of this. We’ll lay low until these people forget about you—”

“I can’t just let her disappear—”

“Is that all you can fucking think of right now? That’s what all this shit boils down to?” Gavril’s eyes swim with a sudden buzz from slugging down his vodka. “Theresa’s dead, but you have a life to live. I’m here for you. You have a family. We have lives to live, with you—”

“I know,” I tell him. “I know—”

“No, you don’t fucking know,” he says. I’ve never seen him quite like this, fraying at the edges. He pours himself more Sorokin and his hand shakes, splashing vodka on the table. “You almost fucking died in my kitchen,” he says. “From a fucking overdose. And now you fucking tell me you’re mixed up in this bullshit? What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”

“That’s enough,” I tell him.

“And now you’re dragging me into it,” he says. “Giving me files about a dead girl that might get me killed and all this fucking means for you is that you can’t mope about your dead fucking wife or some dead fucking girl you don’t even know—”

“Fuck you—”

“No, fuck you, Dominic. Fuck you. That shit was ten years ago. Enough. Open your fucking eyes. You can work for me, you know that. Anytime you want, I’ll set you up with a plum job, working with beautiful women all day, every day. But what do you do? Get involved with these fucking people because they promise they’ll let you live in the fucking past—”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I tell him.

“Go to the fucking cops,” he says. “It’s not more complicated—”

“I already told you why I can’t go to the cops. I told you what those cops did to Kucenic—”

“All the cops? They’re working with all the fucking cops?”

“Gav—”

He grabs me by the shirt and I hear fabric rip, setting off all the jersey’s augs—the Redskins cheer squad splays through the room like a crimson and yellow Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of legs and breasts and smiling teeth and flowing hair and shimmering golden pom-poms.

“I don’t want anything to fucking happen to you,” he screams.

“At least give me a different shirt before you kick my ass—”

“Shit,” says Gav, laughing.

He gives me a cardigan that covers up the jersey augs. He tells me he knows people who can hit the streams with my evidence if it comes to that, people in the tabloids who trade in true crime and the gruesome deaths of young women, but we both know this gambit of threatening to go public with the scant evidence we have is only short-term protection, that it escalates the situation rather than tamps it down.

“You need to find Mook,” says Gavril.

“Fuck him. Mook took Theresa from me—”

“Think rationally,” says Gavril. “Think: from everything you’ve told me, he’s not working with Timothy or Waverly. He might know how to protect you, how to hide from them—or at least he might have a few ideas to fuck them over. ‘I know hate and ice is great,’ or something like that—whatever Frost said. Right? Right?”

“That’s right,” I tell him.

“If you can track him down—what’s the word—it’s, um, rošáda, um, in chess—”

iLux catching up, the translation apps presenting options: “‘Castling,’” I tell him.

“That’s right,” he says. “Better attack options through defensive movement. Castling—”

“And if I find Mook, I can also get Theresa back—”

Gavril cracks his knuckles, collects himself with a deep breath. “Maybe that, too,” he says.

Gavril asks for details about what I’ve told him—he wants me to rehash everything for him. He wants to know about Zhou. He asks me whether Zhou is always the same when I encounter her, or if she’s different each time. Different hairstyles, different clothes? He wants to know if I’m able to add up all the hours I’ve experienced with her, specifically “unique hours,” he calls them, where she does or says things differently from the last time I’d encountered her—different gestures, different scenes.

“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.

2, 24—

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.