Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  I watch her a heartbeat too long after she returns to her game, her jersey dress rising with every punch, and my Adware fills with pop-ups and redirected streams to escort services and live companions, to cam girls in lingerie who coo they want to meet me. Whatever she just gave me kicks in. I hurry from the apartment, illegally opaque sex ads blotting my sight and I almost tumble down the stairs, the advertisements showing girls so realistic in the streams I stand aside on the landing to let them pass, but they’re just images, mirages, all just light. “I don’t want any, I don’t want them,” but the ads are better at knowing what I want than I am and ranks of girls march for my approval, all slight variations of Twiggy, blonde hundreds in the apartment lobby until I’m out on the street and they fill the sidewalk, lockstepping in unison, like a mirror image of a mirror, a thousand Twiggies receding into space everywhere I look.

  —

  There’s a KFC in Dupont Circle, a two-tier restaurant. Crowds in lines, the place is swamped. Menu apps hijack my attention with flashing extracrispy breasts and thighs. Original, Cajun, Buffalo! Relax—the last thing I need is for some plainclothes KFC cop to think I’m jumpy and call for a drug sniffer. A two-piece extracrispy box from the menu kiosk and a restroom token from the cashier. They have semiprivate stalls here, on the second floor—I leave the chicken and hit the restroom. Someone’s washing his hands. A few stalls are in use. I lock myself in the far stall and peel apart the packet of brown sugar, swallow the pill. My tongue’s filmy with the aftertaste—chalky, bitter. JESUS CHRIST SAVED MY SOUL knifed into the door. Someone’s drawn Colonel Sanders shooting rainbows from his massive cock. A tightness in my eyes. Combined with the valentine Twiggy slipped me, the burn hits my nerves like a current—like everything I see is etched in light. The stall and the toilet pulse. Colonel Sanders looks real—absurdly real, textured, with volume, his hair like a spool of cotton, his rainbows shimmering as the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen. Infinite streams of flushing toilets and washing hands. I wander from the stalls, wander from the KFC—I’m in Dupont Circle, in the street—picking pebbles from the crosswalks. I concentrate on the City.

  Pittsburgh.

  I concentrate on Three Rivers Net and the Archive app swims into focus, the icon an image of the golden triangle cradled by its rivers. I load the City-Archive and my vision blacks out, replaced by the gold and black crest of an eagle-stamped shield topped by castle parapets.

  Log in.

  “John Dominic Blaxton,” I tell it, struggling to enunciate. Allow auto fill-ins, “yes.” Remember password, “yes.” I seem to remember traffic in Dupont Circle and the noise of horns and screaming. Someone asking if I’m all right—of course I’m all right—and when they try to help me out of the street, through the crosswalk, to safety on the sidewalk, I shrug them off and panic. I may have fallen to the concrete. There are other sounds, other voices, the noise of Dupont Circle as the City-Archive crest fades, as DC fades, as the City surrounds me, western Pennsylvania in summer twilight as real as any dream.

  376, the Parkway from the airport—roads the gray of moondust, the surrounding hills dense with trees grown dark in the gathering dusk. The Parkway was like this at the end—congested lanes too narrow for the volume of traffic. The glare of onrushing headlights, taillights like lines of rubies. I’m here. I remember. Shopping malls and gas stations and restaurants illuminate the peaks of the shadowy hills. I’ve shopped in these malls. I’ve eaten in these chains. Beneath the rusted Norfolk and Western trestle, the road rises and finally cuts in lowering arcs, descending, gutting deeper through the hills until the tunnel. The tunnel, a square of burnished light cut into the mountainside. And through—a concrete blur of fluorescent light and ceramic tiles, the reverb whoosh of engines, wind, and when the tunnel ends the City bursts around me in riotous blooms of glass and steel. I plunge through the skyline. The light of skyscrapers floats on skeins of interstate bonded by golden bridges, a ghost image of the City reflecting in the black mirror of the rivers, my God, my God, I remember, it’s everything I want, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, it’s everything I want to remember.

  —

  I’m here.

  —

  I’m here:

  “Pay when you leave—”

  The bus driver, an older black man sipping from a thermos. Port Authority sweater-vest and slacks. I almost want to touch him, to touch his arm to feel him, to see how real he feels, but I sit toward the rear, thankful to smell the layering of body odor and stale air, the vinyl seats. This was the 54C—South Side to Oakland. There are others on this bus, others visiting the Archive—we’re different from the illusions, somehow lighter. We all look at one another, wondering what we’ve lost.

  The driver takes us along Carson and several of us disembark to walk among the lights and people, to remember what it felt like to be on the South Side on a Saturday night. There are more people in the Archive than usual today, because of the ten-year anniversary—survivors enveloping themselves in these memories. The bars teem with faces basking in the bluish glow of a Steelers game on the flat screens. Reruns, but they can still cheer as if the games were new, as if they didn’t already know who lost. The crowds are thick on Carson, just as they had once been, but I stay on board the bus to look at the streets scrolling past, to see the places I’d known, places I could walk into and still see everyone I once knew as if nothing had happened, as if they were still alive, still here. Nakama, Piper’s Pub, Fat Head’s. Near 17th the bus stops and more people climb on. Real people, other survivors. We look at one another, wondering.

  I ride the 54C loop farther eastward, between the brackets of the rivers, until the edge of Shadyside. I walk to Ellsworth Avenue down streets of mansions and tended lawns—these are houses of the dead, everyone who lived here is dead. Tree shade, a row of cars idling up ahead at the light at Negley—and just beyond the intersection, a sign for Uni-Mart. I used to buy milk there. Overpriced cereal’s on the shelves, and instant coffee, and Twinkies, Slim Jims. Antacid and aspirin behind the counter. They used to sell Playboy magazine there, and Penthouse—long after you couldn’t easily find actual magazines, but Uni-Mart sold them on a wire rack along with fashion magazines and Us Weekly and magazines with pictures of girls and trucks, all shrink-wrapped. I’d love to look at those. I’d love to wander the aisles, to smell the ammonia-clean of the bathrooms and the hot dogs juicing on their rollers and watch a Slushie gush bright cherry red into a waxy paper cup—but not now, not now.

  The Georgian Apartment with its black iron gates. This is where we lived. Layering, the scent of mown lawns, of car exhaust, of fried food from the restaurants a few blocks away on Walnut. I’m here. Layering, every tree marked with a SmartTag: American Elm, White Poplar, special highlights on a Cutleaf Weeping Birch, and along the ground, Lily, Tulip, every flower—with links to Wikipedia, JSTOR, the Phipps botanical database. Moving SmartTags on insects, an annotated anthill with journal references about fifteen feet away.

  I’m here—

  On Ellsworth, the ginkgos have shed their leaves, carpeting the sidewalk with a vomit-sour sludge of crushed berries. I run through the Georgian’s courtyard, stone benches line the walk and columns flank the double front doors. Layering, the scent of the fuchsia peonies overflowing the Grecian planters. The apartment lobby’s tiled black and white, with brass mailboxes for the tenants and a carved mantel over an ornamental fireplace. It’s all so real. My reflection’s in the mirror above the fireplace but I can’t stomach to look. The paisley carpet on the central staircase is threadbare and stinks of cigarette smoke. The stairs and floorboards creak. Fire doors and ill-lit hallways. An Exit light at the far end of the hall, a window with gauzy curtains. I’m here. Room 208.

  I’m here—

  Just outside the room door, a section of the apartment wall’s been repainted as a SmartTag, scrolling through faces of 208’s previous tenants—the pictures pulled from dri
ver’s licenses and student IDs, the census, or linked through cached Facebook profiles to the names on the leases.

  Blaxton, John Dominic and Theresa Marie—

  The SmartTag vanishes, loading my profile. I step into the foyer of my old apartment. The walls are cream and the floors are a gleaming blonde hardwood. The kitchen is a galley, the bathroom small—cracked tiles and a sink with separate handles for hot and cold. The radiators cough and clank. I take my coat off, my shoes. We didn’t have much furniture, but what we had is here—the seafoam Ikea couch in front of the bookshelves, a set of wooden Ikea chairs we’d painted red. The bookshelves sag with stacked poetry books and poetry manuscripts sent to me to consider, books and manuscripts I never read, never will read. Railroad tracks cut through the busway gully about fifty yards from the building. We’d hated the trains when we first moved in, but grew accustomed to the swaying iron lullaby as they rushed near our windows each night. I miss them, Oh God, how I miss them. Our bedroom is spare—a futon with pillows and comforters, the sheets tangled like we’d left them. A set of dresser drawers bought cheap in the children’s section of Target. A television with a DVD player. I undress. I lie in bed with her, holding her, waiting for the trains to sing us to sleep. I breathe in the scent of her hair. Night falls.

  11, 17—

  “Dominic—and I’m here because I’ve had problems with Adware, that sort of thing. I’m a survivor of Pittsburgh. I tweak to enhance immersion, so I’m here for substance abuse, too, but that’s considered a secondary on my paperwork—”

  “Hello, Dominic,” they all say.

  The leader sits beneath the clock. Sickly green walls. A chalkboard: What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.—Ralph Waldo Emerson. The others slouch on folding chairs in a semicircle staring at me, fluorescent tubes carving their faces in white and shadow. A few twitch for a fix—cigarette packs and lighters already in their sweaty hands.

  “Dominic, you have the floor—feel free to speak your mind. Tell us about your grieving. What are you struggling with? You don’t have to stand—”

  “Brown sugar, mainly. I’ve also done MDPV, Adderall, Dexedrine and LSD, but they don’t work as well, sometimes they kink the immersion with paranoia—”

  I’ve casually become an expert of stimulants, the paraphernalia of attaining highs vivid enough to make the streams real, and I hate myself for it—I hate how easily I recite the litany of shit I’ve used and how quickly I can catalog their range of effects. I was never like this, I was never like this before—Theresa wouldn’t recognize the man I’ve become.

  “I had an episode the other day,” I tell them. “Heroin in my system from a pill called a valentine when I dropped brown sugar at a KFC and lost control. I can’t even remember—the police picked me up wandering Dupont Circle. I’d stopped up traffic—a public nuisance, my fifth disturbing the peace charge. They arrested me and checked me into an Urgent Care clinic. They cleaned my blood. Dialysis with dopamine stims and a pack upgrade to the Adware that’s reconditioned my cravings—”

  “Involuntary Assistance,” they call it: two dozen beds, male nurses with heavy hands used to subduing violent patients. Nylon straps, buckled down. The patient next to me retched crystallized blood—Christ. They laced me with tubes, plugged me into the machine. I gave up, stopped struggling. Intravenous fluids coursed through me. I didn’t feel the dialysis, but heard the whir, chug, whoosh of the machine cleaning my blood and rushing it back to my heart. I wondered where I was—The hospital. Did something happen to me?—savoring the last wisps of Theresa and Pittsburgh as Twiggy’s heroin valentine was filtered from my body. The Adware downloads completed and my personality numbed—fucked everything up, all my account settings. The nurses flashed visuals of drugs and measured my responses, tinkered with my Adware until I fell within the normal range. My addiction was cured.

  “A clean bill of health?” asks the leader.

  “A clean bill of health, but I was convicted on a drug abuse felony because of the heroin and sentenced to eight years of prison, but the sentence was waived in exchange for a correctional rehabilitation program. I lost my job—”

  “What happened?” asks the leader.

  “My boss’s hand was forced because of the felony charge,” I tell them. “But I think he was losing patience anyway. He voiced and told me that my employment status had changed, that I would no longer be working for him. I tried to argue—”

  “And now you’re here with us, a grief support group for men affected by Pittsburgh-related PTSD—”

  “The Correctional Health Board mandates I change treatment providers and go through a year’s worth of correctional health counseling before my case will be reevaluated. The clinics are overcrowded so I was enrolled in outpatient therapy—”

  “I hope we’ll be able to help you make progress toward your goals,” says the leader.

  “I never had headaches like I do now,” I tell him. “I can’t focus anymore—”

  “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 wa
s 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.