Том Светерлич - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud. Time-stamped late April, the rains must have exposed her. Or maybe the rain-swollen river rose around her, the current rinsing away the foot or so of silt that had covered her. Time-stamped 6:44 p.m.—shafts of sunlight slant through the woods, dappling the mud in the clearings. The water’s a mossy green where the sunlight hits, but outside the direct sunlight the water’s a sooty brown, almost black. I think of the earth here, the history of this place, how accustomed it is to burning—the hillsides running steep to the riverbed were once slag heaps for the mills, rolling landslides of molten ash—but by the time I knew this place, everything was reclaimed and greened. It was a city park.

When the time stamp’s reached 7:31 p.m. it’s grown too dark to see so I adjust the light filters. The woods and the body brighten with the sickly pallor of digitized light. I can see her feet now, white like white mushrooms grown bulbous in the soil. Bookmark the body. I leave her, finding my way back through the woods along the jogging path in the utter dark.

At the trailhead parking lot I reset to 6:15 p.m., a half hour before I will find her body. The night reverses to a bluer shade of dusk. I follow the jogging path that runs serpentine through the woods before scaling down a tangle of roots and bramble, holding on to reedy branches to keep my balance. I’ve been this way before. Scan the underbrush for footprints or signs of struggle, scraps of clothing, anything, but I don’t find any tangible traces until I find the white lump of her body—a pallid curve I take as her back and a spray of hair much darker from mud than the honey-brown I know from photographs of her. I kneel near her. I study her, trying to piece together what happened—trying to understand. At 7:31 p.m. it’s grown too dark to see.

I retrace my steps. At the trailhead parking lot, I reset to 6:15 p.m. and the night reverses. Her body’s down there, half buried in mud. I start along the jogging path, scanning the woods for traces of her. I’ll find her in about twenty minutes.

People often ask us how their loved ones died, expecting extraordinary circumstances or wondering whether they suffered terribly, and I’m reminded of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” because, with rare exception, the deaths we research are banal—someone eating, opening a window or walking dully along. Nothing extraordinary—though often survivors remember how fine a day it was, how perfect for autumn, how almost like summer. The end occurred quickly, that much is verifiable—no one suffered except the ones who lived. Five hundred thousand lives ended in the blinding white flash. Shadows elongated and became like charcoal smudges, the City became like snowy ash and in a breath of wind vanished. Other than details, all we really answer about their loved ones is that they likely did not suffer and they likely died as they had lived. Even this dreadful martyrdom ran its course.

October twenty-first—

Ten years since the end.

Tuesday’s the last I used brown sugar. I’d even pinged Kucenic that morning to be courteous, to tell him I’d a touch of the bug and wouldn’t be coming in—but he informed me I’m already out of sick days and vacation days and some of the other archival assistants were tired of covering for me. That I would be docked pay and may face probation. There’d been complaints, he said. He voiced a few minutes later, his profile pic all snowy beard and kind blue eyes, his Adware left gaudily exposed like a crosshatch of silver wires threading his skull beneath his wispy hair. This was over at Tryst Coffeehouse, on their Wi-Fi to take the call. My Adware’s shoddy, running a skittish frame rate that augments reality with a shitty split-second delay. Kucenic’s image hung in my eyes like a transparency overlaying café menus, displays of lattes, Red Eyes, mochas, velvety coffees hovering wherever I looked, Fair Trade and Organic info scrolling over every bag of beans. He asked if everything was all right, but his lips weren’t quite synched up with his words.

“Everything’s fine,” I told him. “My sinuses, I think, just a sinus infection—”

“You’re researching homicide,” he told me.

“I’ll be better tomorrow—”

“I’ve trusted you with potential fraud and homicide,” he said. “There’s a schedule we have to follow, there are reports—”

“Her body was tampered with—”

Self-conscious discussing the body in a crowded café, but everyone at the nearby tables was immersed in their own Adware streams, chatting to unseen companions or slumped over their coffee lost in private fantasies—no one paying attention to me.

“RFI #14502—Hannah Massey,” said Kucenic. “You’ve written that the Archive’s corrupted around her—”

“Whoever’s trying to cover up the killing is sloppy,” I told him. “All those corruptions in the Archive are like fingerprints, but there are a million fingerprints and it will take time to make sense of them all—”

“You’re burning yourself out,” he said. “I understand this is a difficult time for you, and I’m sympathetic, I am, but I need to know if you can handle this report right now. It’s been months since you first found her. I need you to wrap this up. Do you need help? We can work out a leave of absence. We can reassign your cases—”

“I don’t need a leave,” I told him. “I can’t afford a leave—”

“What does your doctor say?”

“Leave personal shit out of this,” I told him. “Don’t turn this personal—”

“You’re doing taxing work,” he said, easing off a bit. “You’re always thorough in your approach, but there are gaps in your presentation. Significant gaps. What about the victim’s parents? Her friends? You haven’t even filled in her last hours—”

“There are no last hours, not yet,” I told him. “I’ve tracked her to the point of her disappearance, but that’s not when she died. She was on campus, a psychology lecture about human-computer interaction. After class she cut through campus and entered the lower level of a parking garage on Fifth Avenue, near Morewood. No security cameras down there. That’s when she was taken—”

I minimized Kucenic and stared into my coffee, at the nutrition facts appearing there like legible shimmers of light. There’s a gap in the Archive from when she entered the parking garage to when I found her body near the river. Security cameras were installed in that garage in the weeks after she vanished—there’s plenty of footage of the garage’s lower levels’ time-stamped weeks and months following her disappearance, of security guards making their rounds on golf carts, but all too late.

“We need to trim the scope of what you’re working on. State Farm just wants proof of how she died,” said Kucenic. “A documented cause of death—that’s all. A one-page summary. And when we’re certain we’re dealing with homicide, I’ll have to register her death with the FBI—there are legal implications if we don’t handle this properly. We need to stick to their timetables. I can’t go days or weeks without hearing from you—”