Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

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.