“You seem particularly upset over her death. You deal with this type of work on a regular basis—”
“You would have liked her,” I told him. “She was a psych major. An actress in a comedy troupe called Scotch ’n’ Soda. She was a head turner, vibrant—but I couldn’t even recognize her body when I found her in that footage. Only a few minutes of white in the mud, a partial of her back and her feet. I had to prove it was her through the exception reports—”
Nearly every death is contested, nearly every property damage claim. Billions and billions of dollars in lawsuits. My research is handled like a spreadsheet, but I told Simka those three children still troubled my sleep. Simka listened attentively—he always listens to what I have to say like he’s hearing essential news. I told him I replay those children’s deaths so often I can’t tell if I’m reliving their deaths in the Archive or if I’m just remembering what I’d seen. I ask him to help me stop remembering. He jots down notes on a yellow legal pad. He doesn’t interrupt me with too many questions. He lets me speak. When he does talk, he spends a lot of our time together asking about the Beatles—what certain lyrics mean.
“The Beatles dropped acid and ate psychotropics when they wrote,” I tell him, “so as a mental health professional, you’re in a better position to interpret their lyrics than I am—”
“True, true,” he says, “but I might miss literary aspects that you’re trained to find. You know, I picked up on a lot more of Baudelaire by talking with you than I did through the apps, so maybe between the two of us, we can make some sense of Abbey Road—”
He suggests I should keep a journal. Just write the date at the top of the page and continue from there. Just be free with it, it will help. He gave me an ultimatum—that I’d have to at least try journaling or he wouldn’t continue signing my EAP paperwork. I don’t believe the threat, but he actually bought me this notebook—real paper, I think—and presented it to me with a download called the Progoff Intensive Journal method. He says I should write in longhand, that it will help my concentration—that dictation apps don’t have the same calming effect as penmanship. Simka is holistic—he believes the building blocks to a healthy, productive lifestyle already exist within me but that I have to learn how to stack the blocks in a new way. He suggests I listen to classical music to improve my sustained concentration skills. Feeds and streams contribute to the fracturing of our consciousness, he says. Try John Adams and listen through—at least twenty minutes a stretch, without augments, without shuffle. He hums a tune the Adware eventually identifies as “Grand Pianola Music”—click to add to iTunes library.
I take my Zoloft every night, but every night I wake up dreaming of my wife. 4 a.m. 6 a.m. The clock radio plays HOT 99.5, crap pop, but I lie deadened and listen, wishing my bed were a sinkhole and that I’d somehow die. The clock radio plays into the afternoon before I bring myself to shut it off, before I bring myself to climb out of bed. I indulge in Pop-Tarts and Mrs. Fields. I’ve been eating Ho Hos. Gavril swung by late Friday afternoon to see how I was feeling and found me eating an entire box of Ho Hos for breakfast with coffee. “No wonder you’re sick all the time,” he said, his breath like espresso and cigarettes mixed up with those blueberry Coolsa strips he chews.
A few years ago, Simka ended a session by saying, “Dominic, a fish rots head first—”
He suggested I rediscover personal hygiene—that no matter how bad I feel, I was sure to feel worse if I didn’t shower. So, I shower—and that has helped. I shave every morning. Long strokes with the razor, over my neck and jaw, over my skull. It’s bruised up there—black splotches, violet. Labyrinthine ridges of Adware like a street map of a foreign city embossed on my skull. I look in the mirror and follow the lines of wires as if they might lead me somewhere—anywhere other than where I really am.
Simka says to find someplace comfortable to write. He’s described his home office to me, out in Maryland, with its oak desk and a picture window overlooking a woodland backyard. My apartment’s public housing, but there’s a fire-escape terrace with a view of the surrounding rooftops—air-conditioning units and service entries. It’s chilly out here. The neighboring terrace’s potted plants died weeks ago in the first frost but are still outside, brown and brittle. I sip my coffee and bundle in my robe and sweatpants, a gray hoodie and slipper-thick socks. The sunrise pinks the sky—beautiful. Quiet. Wi-Fi’s included in the lease, or should be, but the router’s been broken going on three years. I hear a wet click whenever my Adware tries to autoconnect—like a popping knuckle just behind my right ear—and have to dismiss the low-signal warnings again and again, even though I’ve asked never to be alerted. Every five minutes, click—the network connection icon in my peripheral spins and the low-signal warning pops up again like a floater in my line of sight. “Dismiss,” I tell it. Five minutes later, click. I can only take so much.
So, here it is: A Day in the Life. A chronicle for Dr. Simka.
Theresa. Theresa Marie.
Even writing her name feels like scratching a phantom limb.
—
I take the bus these days because I sold my Volkswagen for cash years ago. Seats are occupied, so I sit behind the driver, near a scratched glass poster looping commercials for Mifeprex and TANF and YouPorn. Closer to Dupont Circle my Adware autoconnects to wifi.dc.gov and the feeds tingle my skull—blacking out a few seconds before my vision reboots with a shitty display of augs and apps, freebies mostly, looming when I notice one, the others receding, my profile bundled with so many pop-ups and worms that my vision strobes while it loads. GPS info and route maps and Metro schedules hover midbus—real time supposedly, but the bus schedule’s off sync by a half hour or more and the map’s of a Silver Spring route that doesn’t even exist. The passenger across the aisle stares at the ceiling, giggling—he’s drooling down the front of his raincoat, utterly engrossed in the streams. He’s spamming indiscriminate friend requests, but my social networking’s locked so no one bothers me—I stare out the window and concentrate on the CNN Headline feed:
BUY AMERICA!!! FUCK AMERICA!!! SELL AMERICA!!!
The Buy, Fuck, Sell feed’s leading with a new leaked sex tape of President Meecham, the ten-year anniversary of Pittsburgh demoted to postjump news. PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT! MEECH’S PEACHES EXPOSED IN TEEN SEX SCANDAL!
Headaches from news torrents and commercials overloading my secondhand Adware, shit I picked up on Craigslist years ago from a U. of Maryland kid who’d already fried some of the wires without telling me. Hilfiger, Sergio Tacchini, Nokia, Puma. President Meecham from her days as Miss Teen Pennsylvania kneels in the aisle of the bus. Real footage, says CNN, not sim, not sculpt. She touches herself and the talking heads comment: Everywhere, Americans have been given the choice between Love and Filth, and they have uniformly chosen Filth. Al Jazeera America’s the only stream covering Pittsburgh as a lead, posting satellite imagery captured on that first sunny day after the end, of the scorched earth like a black harelip on the mouth of the Appalachian Mountains. Pull for a stop.
Gavril lives in Ivy City, a renovated loft on the corner of Fenwick and Okie—warehouses and abandoned tenements, a Starbucks on the corner, a Così. Gavril’s building’s slashed with graffiti and slathered with wheat-pasted handbills for Qafqa concerts long since past and photocopied pics of the Pittsburgh mushroom cloud and offers for sex with male models and cheap rates on love hotels. Spray-painted: One who is slain in the way of Allah is a martyr. BBC America loops the “Star-Spangled Banner” over aerial views of the way Pittsburgh was and the way it is now: radioactive weed growth and the black guts of buildings—but the stream interrupts and reloads, bothered by all the vandalized and nonlicensed Tags setting off my Adware’s net security. Are we any safer than we were ten years ago? I ring the buzzer.
“Kdo je to?”
“It’s Dominic—”
“Moment, please—”
E
very time I’m here, the place is filled with girlfriends and bumming students, poets I’ve met around, politicians scoring cocaine, models passed out on the couches, editors, business associates of some sort waiting aimlessly, actors fixing sandwiches for themselves in the kitchen—who knows who all these people are, but the place is like a social lounge and there’s never anywhere to sit. Cousin Gav—my mother’s sister’s son. He grew up in Prague, a scene-star installation artist by the time he was seventeen, a college dropout once featured at Art Basel, but after Pittsburgh he gave up that momentum to be with me in the States. I love him for that, for everything. Since coming here he’s abandoned art but gone freelance with fashionporn and photography—he’s done well for himself.
One of Gavril’s women opens the door—this one a willowy blonde almost as tall as I am, so pale and thin it’s like her skin’s translucent. Twenty? Twenty-one? She wears a XXL Manchester United jersey belted like a dress but nothing else, the pink saucers of her nipples clearly visible through the sheer fabric.
“What’s with all this Frost bollocks?” she says.
“You’re English,” I notice and she rolls her eyes.
Her profile’s an obvious fake—Twiggy, it says, born 19 September 1949. Occupation: IT girl. The American Apparel sponsorship’s real, though, her profile displayed in arcs of copyrighted font.
“I asked a question,” she says. “Frost? Are you trying to be fucking funny?”
“You must be the poet,” I tell her. “Gav mentioned you might be around—”
“He says he’s reading Frost to find inspiration for his Anthropologie shoot. I told him if he wants pastoral imagery, then Wordsworth’s a better bet than Frost, but you have him reading all the wrong stuff anyway—”
“Wordsworth? Christ, don’t pollute him like that. Are you a student?”
“Georgetown,” she says. “Ph.D. 20th-Century American Modernism. I’m a Plathist—”
“‘Mad Girl’s Love Song,’” I tell her. “I like that one.”
“She should have used Adware,” says Twiggy, “to distract her from all that shit she obsessed about. She was a gorgeous girl, would have been brilliant for the Mademoiselle app—”
“I shut my eyes and all is born again,” I tell her, misquoting the lines.
“Gavril expected you’d like me—”
The never-ending party is spare this morning, only a quartet of scenesters shuffling cards at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and eating eggs. Twiggy joins another young woman, a brunette, playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the VIM, the furniture pushed to the edges of the room, Tyson prancing bullish. The brunette’s in spandex and thigh-high tube socks, jabbing and kicking riotously, so model thin and gangly she’s like a spastic female skeleton raging in fits of laughter.
“You suck,” says Twiggy, readying herself for Tyson. “You’ve got to, like, sidestep the uppercuts—”
BBC America talking heads hover in my sight: Executions in the terrorist courts, a stroke of Meecham’s pen beheads a thousand jihadists, a thousand thousand—
Gavril’s in the back bedroom, the room he calls his darkroom even though he doesn’t develop anything, preferring digital work on his iMac even over imprints or holograms. Oversize prints of his static photography decorate the walls—young women he finds on the street, impossibly gorgeous the way he shoots them, catalog ready. Gavril’s in a tracksuit and smiles when he sees me. Jockish, when it comes down to it—his hug ends in a double fist bump handshake that I blunder and he laughs. The room smells like him—apple-scented Head & Shoulders, Clive Christian cologne. Cigarettes smoldering in emptied coffee mugs. When he first moved to the States he was wiry, but now he’s filled out from fine food and smiles easily, his physique rock hard from all the soccer and sex. He only wears pajamas or a tracksuit—I’ve never seen him in anything else.
“John Dominic,” he says.
“Gav—”
“What the fuck, man? Are you translate me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m translating,” I tell him, the app keeping up well enough as he speaks in Czech, but making him look like poorly dubbed cinema.
“I tell you I want to learn English to be inspired, to read Robert Frost in the original—”
“I’m teaching you Robert Frost—”
“I’m expecting trees and snowing woods and bullshit like that, but what do I get? Some kid cutting off his fucking hand with a saw and no one gives a shit—”
“They get him a doctor,” I tell him.
“For Christ’s sake,” says Gavril, “I want horses and trees and snowy fields and barns, and shit like that—”
“I know what you want—”
“Yeah, man, the road less taken,” he says, poets.org spam fluttering at the fringes of my sight—free credit scores, click here! FREE! FREE! FREE!
“We’ll get to it. How’s business?”
“Business,” he says. “Is good. Listen, if you want some work, I could use some copy for a few things—”
“Sure,” I tell him. “E-mail me—”
“I’ll also send you the contact sheets for Twiggy,” he says. “What do you think, eh? You let me know what you think—”
“About the girl out there? Christ, Gav—”
“Listen,” he says, “I was in preproduction for the Anthropologie winter catalog, up in New England, when American Apparel pings me out of the blue. They tell me they have a rush job, some last-minute interactive campaign they want to launch but their photographer pulled out, some guy I’d never heard of, and they wanted to know if I could do the work. They offered double what I usually get, so I told them, sure, sure, I can fit it in. The only condition is that I have to use the girls they send me. They want to use amateurs and Twiggy out there won an Internet modeling poll, a ‘Real Girl Next Door’ click-to-vote. You let me know what you think, okay? Built like a fucking—twenty-one years old, her tits point straight up. Vivian’s her real name, from England—hey, Dominic, that’s the job for you, cousin. Model scout—”
“No, no. Not for me—”
“I could hook you up, Dominic. Cure your depression better than all this bullshit therapy you go through. Get you with an agency. They’d fly you to Iceland or Brazil and all you’d have to do—You can work a camera, can’t you?”
Anthropologie and American Apparel portals in the Adware. Young women in flower prints in the Parisian countryside, farmlands, abandoned barns—the Anthropologie summer catalog portal so paradisiacal I can almost let myself forget I’m in this apartment, in this city, this life. I peel off ten bills and lay them on the desk. Gavril counts and pockets the cash, handing me a blister packet of brown sugar. We do this casually, almost as an afterthought, without words.
“What do you think?” he says. “You tell me about Twiggy. She told me she wanted to meet some poets, so I mentioned you were the best I knew. She’s interested—”
“I don’t think I’m all that interested—”
“Pittsburgh was ten years ago,” says Gavril. “That’s an eternity, cousin. You wallow in Pittsburgh, but you need to forget. You need distraction—if you want, I can let you be the stand-in while I film those two girls. I’ll film you in a threesome—”
“How’s my aunt doing?” I ask him.
“I’m serious, Dominic,” he says. “You need to clear your mind. Have some fun with life. It’s not too late to live—”
“I can’t,” I tell him. “I can’t—”
“Anyway, your aunt is good,” he says. “She spends all her time in her studio making wood-block prints—she’s very happy, but she worries about you. I showed her a picture from the other night and she said you look like a bear ate you. A bear, Dominic. She wants you to take a vacation, spend some time in Domažlice, out in the country. Relax a little. She misses her nephew—”
“I’ll visit,” I tell him. �
��Maybe going out to the country for a while is a good idea. Get away from everything—”
“Cuts off his fucking hand and no one gives a shit. Barns and horses, man. I want barns and horses next time. My Anthropologie concept is to channel Robert Frost. Barns, horses—”
“When are you free for dinner?” I ask him.
“I’ll hit you up,” he says in English. “My schedule’s a bit harsh this week. I’ll take you to Primanti’s for a sandwich—”
“Not there—”
“Keep your network open—”
“Out, out,” I tell him, leaving.
In the living room, Twiggy’s faring better against Tyson, landing combination punches—making tweety birds flit over Tyson’s eyes. When she sees me, she breaks off from the game.
“Can I talk with you?” she says.
She pulls me aside and asks if I’m using.
“No, nothing much,” I tell her. “Just some brown sugar, nothing hard—”
“You like uppers, then?”
“Just to help me concentrate sometimes,” I tell her.
“I want to give you something,” she says. She opens her purse, a gold tube hardly big enough to carry lipstick and car keys, and fishes out a heart-shaped pill wrapped in a plastic baggie.
“What is this?”
“A valentine,” she says, slipping it between my lips. “Let it kick in and then take the brown—”
I bite down—the pill tastes like cherries. Twiggy friends me, pushes her contact info into my address book.
“If you like it, I can get you more,” she says. “If you ever want to talk Plath sometime, or dig into Sexton—”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 2