Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“How many died here?” I ask her.

“I don’t know, Dominic—”

“But there were more, weren’t there? Jesus Christ—”

“I brought them,” she says, “I helped bring those girls here, I brought them here, I brought those girls—”

I watch as her emotion boils, as every humiliation and shame she thought she’d buried rises in her, as the horror and guilt at what she’d done brims in her eyes. When she cries, her sobs seem like pleas for forgiveness, but I can’t absolve her, nothing can. “I can’t get rid of it,” she says. “I can’t—”

I hold her, try to comfort her. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I tell her, knowing it never will be. I cradle her head to my shoulder, but when my hands touch her hair I realize that’s where Timothy’s hands were—the comfort I want to give curdles, I don’t know how to comfort her or whether I even should. The garden’s gorgeous here, full of garish flowers that thrive in the sweltering heat.

“Timothy used to tell me the only reason I was alive was because he loved me,” she says.

“What could you have done,” I ask, not really a question.

The stream was visceral, and the complicated residue it’s leaving feels like a sinkhole in my stomach. I look at Albion, now, in her sundress standing among blooming flowers in her absurd garden, archived here, and just as I hate her for recruiting girls, for playing at glamour to bring girls to Waverly, I remember the burning grip of Timothy’s fists in her hair and can’t blame her for what happened here, I can’t, I can’t. Now that I’ve seen how Hannah Massey died, I’m not sure what I can do with the information. Anyone piecing together what had happened at this house so many years ago would figure out Albion’s involvement and might not be as forgiving as I want to be.

“That stream will be here forever,” I tell her, “or at least until every satellite fails and falls. Eventually someone will come through here, eventually someone will see—”

“I asked Sherrod to delete everything, every moment I appeared in the Archive, but when he came across Hannah, he refused—he wondered if I was using him to bury her. We argued but came to an understanding, and when he came through here to buy the house for me in New Castle, he made his way to this place, installed this stream. He said he created this space so no one would forget what happened here—he called it a memorial. He didn’t want the house to simply vanish, he didn’t want it to be buried over in a mound of zeolite and disappear, rebuilt as something new in a city with amnesia. He wanted anyone drawn to this place to know what happened here—”

“But you’re implicated—”

“I kept quiet when others were suffering,” she says.

We close the Archive, step into the night wind and find our way back to our campsite by moonlight, sweeping our flashlights over the broken road to spot our footing. We climb the mud hill to our tent. We eat protein bars around a campfire and find that the coffee we brought with us in the thermoses is still warm. We undress from our rain gear and our Tyvek and slip together into the tent—the only living creatures in miles of dead lands, the desolate moon bathing everything in silver. We stay up late, remembering Pittsburgh together, recalling the patterns of streets we’d known like we’re plotting a map between us—discovering where our courses may have overlapped.

“I want life,” she says.

We immerse together. The Spice Island Tea House in winter—and although Zhou is sitting at the table Theresa sits at in my memories, Albion and I stay. We choose a table far enough away so we can’t hear Zhou’s voice endlessly circulating the words my wife is supposed to say. Layering, the scent of basil, the scent of curry.

Albion and I linger over chai. I tell her, “Tonight—the one we’re reliving here at this restaurant—was the happiest night of my entire life. Theresa and I tried for years for another chance to have a child, but couldn’t—but tonight, Theresa told me that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a daughter, and I knew everything would be all right for us. I’ve never been happier. After this night the future just opened wide—”

Snow’s on the ground when we leave the restaurant and strings of lights hang in the barren trees. We walk from Oakland to Shadyside, through the college campuses and Craig Street, the restaurants and cafés and bookstores populated with ghosts, forever frozen in their past lives. I bring Albion back to the apartment, to the Georgian. When we’re in the lobby, she kisses me.

We make our way upstairs, through the paisley-carpeted hallway, to Room 208. I don’t engage the room through my own account, because I don’t want to see anything other than Albion tonight—I don’t want Zhou, I don’t want memories of my previous life. I want Albion. An empty blueprint of rooms with generic furniture. We leave the lights off—I lead Albion into the bedroom where we kiss again.

“Let me help you remember,” she says.

I untie her dress and she unbuttons my shirt and we lie together. None of this is real, but it is real—there are consequences here, even if we don’t speak them. Albion is beautiful, certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but what I’m seeing isn’t her, it isn’t really her, and when I hold her or kiss her breasts, what I’m feeling is the closest the iLux and imagination can convince me that I’m feeling. This isn’t Albion, even though I’m with her here—it’s all so close, but it’s all just a beautiful lie.

Albion pauses. She separates from me, leaving a gap between us.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so, so sorry—”

“I can’t do this,” she says. “I’m just not ready to be with someone, not yet—”

She lets me hold her. We listen as a train rushes past the window and she says, “I don’t hear trains much anymore,” but it’s just the sound of the wind battering our tent as we wake.

—

Dominic—

Two thirty in the morning when I wake from a dream of Theresa. Fine rain taps the mud around us. I’m sweating in my sleeping bag. Wide awake, concentrating to recapture details of my dream, but the only thing I remember clearly is Theresa speaking my name. I’m uncomfortable, fidgety. Albion sleeps beside me. I hear her even breathing. I slip from our tent.

I don’t bother with the Tyvek, but hourly forecast displays rainfall throughout the night so I dress in rain slacks and the hard shell. Peckish, but I’m not sure where Albion’s packed the pudding and there’s little light to search by, only the overcast moon and the last of the fire sputtering whenever raindrops hit it. Careful down the hill, lighting my way with the flashlight—the only other thing I’ve brought with me is the bouquet Albion picked from our yard.

I ping Albion: Went for a walk. I’ll be back by breakfast.

I remember a set of stairs at the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnel that hugged the sharp ascent of the Bluff, topping off at the Boulevard of the Allies—the stairs were concrete and steel, maybe shielded from the blast by the Bluff itself, and when I check on them now, shining my flashlight over the steel rails and cracked concrete, I’m relieved to find the stairs are relatively intact. The moon hangs like a silver smudge as I climb. Sweating by the time I reach the hilltop, but cold in the haze of rain—I’m sure I’ll get sick clambering around out here in the mist, maybe catch pneumonia. Feverish already, shivering. Scorched cars and the ruined faces of houses through what were once the streets of Uptown, splintered wood and sheet metal, tendrils of wire and rubble.

Burial mounds warp the earth of what was once Oakland—the radioactive scrap of museums, row houses, lecture halls, bulldozed and interred under heaps of chemical sand. Heavy machinery’s parked here, excavators and dump trucks—Oakland must be PEZ Zeolite’s focus right now. Layer in the Archive to gain my bearings and Phipps Conservatory shimmers in a distant field behind the burial mounds, the greenhouse like a Victorian dream of white steel and glass, gardens and lawns. This was Theresa’s, this was hers—I used to come here from campus to visit her in her office, we’d have lunch together in the café. There’s nothing here, now—nothing but the poisoned dunes. The air’s tanged with the stink of burning plastic.