Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“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?”