Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I rummage through the typefaces, picking out metal blocks—difficult with my hands the way they are, but my aunt helps. The heft of letters in my palm is comforting, somehow, like language become sculptural, tangible. I’m drawn to a blocky Cloister Black font, picking out uppercase letters. I’m not sure what I’m trying to spell until I collect the first two letters, M-O , then find the others, O-K .

MOOK.

“What’s mook?” my aunt asks once we’ve finished the print, that single black word in the middle of a bone-white page.

“I’m not sure,” I tell her.

I have trouble sleeping, so I spend the dead hours sitting on the front porch bundled in a quilt, staring into midnight and drinking brandy and milk, probably drinking too much, but I can’t relax until I’ve nudged myself into a dull buzz. I think about Mook. What he must have thought when I started finding those traces, tracking Albion like I was following a thread through a labyrinth, unraveling all the work he’d done to hide her. He knew about the Christ House. He knew about Timothy and Waverly and he knew about Hannah’s murder, maybe of other murders. He was recruited into this terror just like I was, and didn’t know what to do when he peeled away the surface story and found Waverly’s legacy of dead women, just like I don’t know what to do now—so he made that monument in Pittsburgh, the geocached installation of Hannah’s death because he couldn’t turn away from the evil he’d uncovered but he was too afraid to expose it, was too invested in helping Albion disappear, maybe he loved her. Will I just let this pass? For all his threats, for his deletion of Theresa, Mook was probably terrified of me—he probably thought I was one of them, one with Waverly. I hate him for what he did to me, for what he did to Theresa, I hate him—but I understand, too. I finish my brandy and milk and pour another finger from the bottle and wish Mook was here with me to help me think this through. I wish he was still alive.

Monuments to the dead—

The next time my aunt drives to Domažlice I check out a library tablet and log into my old e-mail account—someone’s been through my in-box, it looks like, some recent messages have been opened, others deleted. Risky to log in like this, in case Waverly’s monitoring the account, so I make it quick—sifting through old message folders until I find the poetry manuscript Twiggy once sent to me. I print out the thirty-five pages of her work.

My aunt works early in the morning, but I don’t make it into the studio until the afternoon. I bring her a fresh thermos of coffee. She pauses in her work to help me get started with the jobber and answers my questions, gives me advice about printing technique. I only make small edits to Twiggy’s manuscript, fixing typos or correcting obvious mistakes, then design each page for the letterpress by stacking every letter in the composing stick until I form her words. I begin my printing. I start with the first poem of hers that I read:

I reached for you this morning but you were gone.

My plan is to produce a limited-edition chapbook, no more than a hundred copies of her work. I’m slow at this, but I find the process calming—assembling the text, inking the letters. It takes me a full day to create two pages, sometimes a few days for a longer page of text. I pull each sheet and hang them to dry on lines that crisscross the barn, the studio starting to resemble a ship with sails unfurled.

Gavril and Kelly have flown in for the week. My aunt showers him with kisses. “Ma, Ma,” he says, wiping wet smudges from his cheeks and forehead.

My aunt’s warm with Kelly, but formal—still measuring each other, I suppose. They can’t quite connect, is all—Kelly a little too urban sophisticate, my aunt a hayseed hippie. They do their best bonding over food, Kelly a health-food obsessive and my aunt a champion of the farm-to-fork movement—they’re making plans for a trip into Prague, to try a raw-food tapas bar a friend of my aunt’s opened a few months ago.

I pull my cousin aside. “Gav, I need to talk with you—”

“Sure,” he says. “Can we go for a walk?”

I use the translator app on my cell, holding it to my ear whenever Gavril talks—regaling me with tales of London nightlife, his contract negotiations with Vogue . He waxes rhapsodic over his love for Kelly. “I want to marry her,” he says. “Think of the cute little Gavrils we could make—”

The dropping temperature’s affecting my leg, cramping me up quicker than usual. We walk the driveway, turn left along the edge of the road. When we reach the forsythia, an unkempt riot of browning leaves and branches, Gavril says, “I think I still have some Playboy s buried in Tupperware over here. We can try to find them—”

Gavril digs around beneath the bush for ten minutes at least before he starts worrying that his mother might have found his Playboy s and thrown out the issues.

“It’s all right if she did,” I tell him. “You’re a grown man—”

“Hm,” he says, resuming his search, using a stick to poke deeper into the frigid clay. “Maybe I’ll come back in the summer when it’s not so hard to dig—”

“Listen, Gav, I have something I need to ask you—”

He stops digging, wipes his hands on his coat. “Sure, Domi. Anything—”

“You said you have some people who’d be interested in that stuff I sent you? The footage about the young woman who was killed?”

“Absolutely,” he tells me. “Mika Bronstein, he’s a producer for Buy, Fuck, Sell America at CNN. He was very interested—still is. In fact, he texted me about a week ago saying I’m an asshole for teasing him with celebrity gossip, then holding out—”

“I want you to release it,” I tell him, not sure if this is the right thing to do even as I’m asking.

“Why?” he asks, scraping at the dirt again for his Playboy s. “All of this bullshit is finally behind you. Why do anything? Leave well enough alone. Let it go—”

“I’ve been drinking too much,” I tell him. “I can’t sleep because I think of her—”

“The redhead?”

“No. The woman I found,” I tell him. “I wake up in the middle of the night and think her body’s on the floor beside my bed. Just down there, and I’m paralyzed thinking about her, not even questioning why her body would be there, just certain, absolutely certain, that if I looked over the edge of my bed I’d see her covered in ants—”

“You sound like you need another Simka in your life—”

“I want justice for her,” I tell him.

After dinner, we linger around the kitchen table with beer and wine, hunks of my aunt’s honey-wheat brown bread and sharp cheese. It’s started to snow—icy flurries that clatter against the kitchen windows. We talk until well past midnight, my aunt still awake in the other room, working on her cross-stitch, listening to Emil Viklický’s piano cover of “A Love Supreme.” Kelly’s gone to bed hours ago, and soon Gavril says he’s heading upstairs to join her.

“One last thing,” I say as he’s rinsing out our glasses in the sink. “When you release that footage, I need you to tell your producer friend that you received it from a man called Mook—”

CNN International breaks the story, but within a few minutes other networks have picked up the footage—I’m watching on my aunt’s television, drinking milk and brandy. BBC Europe, CT24 from Prague, Sky News, Al Jazeera—nearly every channel I flip through shows uncensored video of the murder stream, of Waverly screaming that Hannah’s no more holy than roadkill, of Timothy stabbing her twenty-four times. American officials say the evidence is being authenticated, that President Meecham has been briefed and is evaluating the situation. Waverly’s file photo flashes on-screen. Hannah on a constant loop, zoom shots of Hannah’s genitals, her breasts—zoom shots of her dying face, talking heads discussing whether or not her face expresses orgasm, whether or not her rape and murder were on some level consensual. A remix set to hip-hop of Waverly’s autotuned voice, singing, “You’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy.” Numb with shock that Hannah’s murder is going viral, that I did this to her. Hannah’s life’s exposed—pictures and vids from high school boyfriends, intimate after-prom footage sold to the streams, big paydays for Hannah Massey sex tapes, producers begging on-air for newsworthy footage. Naked. Sex tapes. Homemade. Beach vacations, headshots, ex-boyfriend spy cam footage. Interviews with Hannah’s extended family in Ohio, the same people who’d filed the insurance claim I’d investigated—they’ve already signed off for Hannah to appear on Crime Scene Superstar , already thrilled to see she’s scoring high in the pre-rankings, already discussing what they’ll do with the prize money if she wins.