Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

It was the smoothie coupon.

Very perceptive of you. Yes, it was the smoothie coupon. I found it in my pocket one night and sort of boredly read it while eating my room service dinner. There was an address, a photo of the strip mall smoothie shop, a dancing pineapple for a logo. I Google-mapped the address and saw it was about a mile off the Strip on Flamingo. The strip mall had a Jiffy Lube, a tux rental place, those kinds of businesses. The smoothie shop was between a Vietnamese grocery and a commercial real estate office. I went in and ordered my sixteen-ounce smoothie. The place was empty, just a teenage girl behind the counter. I asked her if she knew Tex. She seemed annoyed I had asked her a question not related to my power boost and said no. Outside, drinking the smoothie, I wandered over to the commercial real estate company. It was a shitty office, with photocopied listings for properties taped to the inside of the window. Most of the listings looked pretty bleached out by the sun. This place wasn’t doing much business. There were old warehouses for sale, a gas station, sad, sun-baked properties in the city’s more industrial and forgotten zones. And there was a listing for the Kirkpatrick Academy. It was the exact same picture from the brochure. Same white building, same pasture. The place was for sale for a couple million bucks. I dropped the smoothie. Then, without even thinking, I went inside and told the first person I saw that I wanted to buy it.

First, the wall: thirty feet thick, twenty stories of reinforced poured concrete, constructed to reconfigure the coastline without Puget Sound’s tidal meddling. A dozen locks spaced around the wall sucked in barges loaded with raw materials and spat out barges laden with soil, entire houses, coils of telephone wire, murdered trees. This brand-new ancient city appeared in mists as Abby held tight to the ferry’s upper-deck rail. Buildings clawed their way cloudward and the work songs of newmans echoed through the streets as battalions with numbers in the faceless thousands marched in formation to celebrate new conquests of engineering. Cranes and helicopters lowered masonry and I-beams, great steel frames and slabs of granite and tinted glass and wiring, countless right angles, sun glinting off the geometry. After passing through the locks the ferry docked at Battery Park, lurching awkwardly to a stop. Not a person who disembarked could do so without craning his or her head at this miraculous rebuttal to the forces that poisoned dreams, this gobsmackingly contradictory, otherworldly, ingenious masterpiece. Abby’d seen footage of the late New York City, watched movies set in its boroughs, scrutinized cinematic representations of its shrieking subways and museums and trading room floors, but nothing, nothing, nothing could have prepared her for the scope of this majesty. She felt she might die of awe.

A long row of rickety fold-out tables staffed by disabled newmans in wheelchairs processed the newcomers. These were former workers whose limbs had given out, been amputated or lost in accidents. They were, however, still capable of speaking and processing social information—all they needed for that was a brain and a pair of eyeballs. When Abby reached the head of the line, a male newman with a name tag that read “Neal” prompted her to fill out her information on a note card with a pencil stub.

“How long do you expect to visit?” Neal asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe a couple months?”

“Are you interested in staying in any particular neighborhood?”

“Maybe Greenwich Village?”

“Ah, yes, here we are, Abby Fogg. We’ve got a nice nine-hundred-square-foot condo in the Village, fully furnished, with the amenities of a woman in publishing. Her name was Sylvie Yarrow.”

“Works for me.”

“Fantastic. Here’s your orientation packet! Cabs are to your left.” The newman handed Abby a manila folder containing a key to her new apartment, a two-month E-ZPass, some coupons for pizza and dry-cleaning, and a map of the city. Taking a deep breath, Abby stepped into the fractured grid.

The apartment was nothing special but it suited Abby fine. Everything in the place appeared as it had the morning before the city vanished from the face of the earth, the morning of Manhattan’s last scan and backup, from the stone and steel composing the building to the six inches of dental floss curled in the bathroom sink. The scan—involving some really far-out software and a butt-load of satellites—had been performed under quasilegal circumstances by a company called Argus Industries, who’d intended to replicate New York City for a full-immersion gaming environment. The transformation of Bainbridge Island into Manhattan wasn’t so much a matter of building a to-scale model as downloading the backed-up version of the city in which every molecule was accounted for. There’d been some glitches. Abby spotted a few in Sylvie’s apartment right away. A cross section of an incompletely rendered coffee cup sat on the kitchen counter, and the aquarium had been filled with concrete instead of water. A few of the books on the shelves were missing actual words. Everything down to the graffiti and faded posters on the walls was being resurrected by insanely efficient and tireless newman labor, but there were still spots here and there that needed work.

Standing in the bedroom Abby thought this was the closest she’d ever get to living in the era to which she truly belonged.

Abby spent two hours studying the contents of the apartment with an intruder’s giddy concentration. Sylvie Yarrow had been an editor at a publishing company headquartered in midtown. Single, with a taste for Japanese-print clothing that looked to be Abby’s size exactly. Three bookcases dominated the space, bursting with hardbacks. The kitchen table had yielded its surface to manuscripts under consideration, great cursed reams of paper bearing words doomed to obscurity. The kitchen was fully stocked, and apparently Sylvie’d had a thing for olives, there being a dozen varieties preserved in jars in the fridge door. Abby hated olives. These would have to go.

Pictures of Sylvie’s parents.

A framed, signed broadside of John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around.”

A TV set, a Japanese cat figurine. Birth-control pills.

Abby took a seat on the sofa and spoke to the previous owner. “Even though this is a re-creation of your stuff, I’ll take care of it like it still belongs to you.”

She felt stupid as soon as she said this prayer of thanks or whatever it was. It appeared that Sylvie Yarrow had just stepped out and would return at any moment, that she hadn’t in fact died in a flash hundreds of years before. Miraculously, the clothes in the closet still smelled like a woman.

The phone rang. A chunky black thing connected to the kitchen wall, with a coiled cord running from the receiver to the box. After the sixth ring Abby picked up and said hello.

A man’s voice coughed out a greeting and said Sylvie’s name like a question.

Abby replied, “No, I mean, yes, this is her apartment.”

“Right, right. I know you’re not Sylvie. But her apartment is occupied now, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess. Who is this?”

“Sorry, I’m Bertrand. I was Sylvie’s boyfriend before the FUS.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, no, I mean I’m not really Bertrand. But I landed Bertrand’s apartment up here on West Sixty-third. My name’s actually Gavin? I got here last month? I’ve been going through Bertrand’s stuff, trying to figure out who he was, who he knew, what kinds of things he did. I’m wearing his clothes. He’s got a pretty sweet apartment. How’s yours?”

“Mine’s fine.”

“Bertrand was some kind of industrial designer. Designed stuff like computer printers and cell-phone cases. I’ve got a picture of him and Sylvie right here. You’re cute. I mean she was.”