Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “You can’t bring yourself to it?”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” he says. “She’s somehow vanishing from the City. Deleted. Someone’s deleting all her files—the public files and even my own private files. The job’s been thorough. The librarians—I’ve tried the librarians at the Library of Congress, and they’ve been sympathetic but haven’t been very helpful. They have too much work to do, building the City, maintaining it. I’ve filed police reports—but the police don’t have the resources. Besides, they don’t prioritize this as a missing persons case or anything of the sort but rather a data mismanagement claim or at worst cybervandalism or a hacking charge. Digital graffiti, that sort of thing, if they even want to entertain the notion that something like this is in their jurisdiction. I’ve searched on my own, but she’s vanishing. I have photographs—I know she exists. Existed—”

  “Have you tried the Kucenic Group or one of the other research firms? They’re set up for work like this—”

  “I trust Timothy about you,” he says. “When I talked with Kucenic, he wanted to transfer me to a sales rep, someone who handles accounts. He rattled off the names of awards and bragged about his U.S. News & World Report ranking, but when I asked if the person assigned to my case would be as skilled as you, he told me that he has a capable staff that can handle any query. He went on to tell me that your drug habit ruins you as a worker—”

  “I’m clean,” I tell him.

  “Good—”

  “But it’s not difficult work. This is the type of research grad students are doing all over the country, that librarians are doing—”

  “The cream rises to the top, Dominic. I don’t want ‘capable staff.’ I don’t want salesmen, I don’t want account representatives, and I certainly don’t want graduate students. I want someone with your skills, someone working for me. Someone with discretion—”

  I scan the photograph of Albion, save the image to my Adware. Maybe the caffeine’s strafing my nerves but I feel sick and want to run from here, to hole up in my apartment and powder myself into oblivion, but something Timothy said snags my thoughts—you don’t want to die.

  “You want me to find your daughter? Recover the files?”

  “I want you to restore her to the Archive,” he says. “I want you to track down who is doing this to me, to my family, so that I can prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, or at least protect us from similar future threats. I want you to find out who has deleted her so that I can have my daughter back. Please. I’ve already lost her once—”

  “I’ll help you—”

  —

  Qualia Coffee on my way home. Checking e-mail: Gavril’s written several times—all marked “high importance,” of course. Attachments of photos from fashion houses he wants me to caption—Anthropologie, House of Fetherston, Tom Ford—and his friends’ artist statements to translate into colloquial English, the usual odd jobs he lets me do. I mark them all as unread.

  I ping Kucenic and when he doesn’t answer, I text him: Met with Waverly. Hard sell. What’s this all about?

  A new message from Waverly’s secretary pops up as I’m pouring creamer into my coffee—he’s set up a per diem for direct deposit and negotiated with Kucenic so I can retain access to my archival security codes. I respond with my checking account number and PIN and within seconds the first deposit’s made—a rate substantially higher than Kucenic ever offered. Another file hits my in-box—a brief dossier about Albion.

  Kucenic texts back: I’m sorry, Dominic. Please don’t contact me—

  The heat’s off in my apartment again. Kucenic’s reply stings, but I try to understand—all the trouble I’ve caused him. Getting colder, so I wrap up in my comforter and watch a doc called A Round of Fiddles about Objectivist poetry but my mind wanders. Waverly’s daughter, Albion. By evening, another storm front’s dusting DC with snow and I shut off my lights and watch the encroaching winter—the weather here’s an odd mix of extremes, like Pittsburgh once. Warm enough in the afternoon to walk without a jacket yet snowing by nightfall. What would Gavril make of that photograph of Albion? What would he make of the clothes she wore—would he have recognized the gown? Maybe the whole production was something local to Pittsburgh, something amateurish. Scanning the dossier: Albion was twenty-four when she died, just shy of graduating from the fashion design program at the Art Institute. Images of her designs: tweeds and plaids, a prep fantasia. Other images of her: I’ve never seen a woman in real life who looks like these photographs, and I wonder how much of this imagery is false—camera tricks to make her seem tall, postproduction effects on her green eyes, coloring to make her hair that particular shade of blood red?

  “Theresa Marie Blaxton—”

  I say her name out loud, using her name the way Flagellants would have lashed themselves to remember the Passion of Christ.

  “Theresa Marie Blaxton—”

  I may be the only one on earth who remembers her, who remembers to speak her name.

  11, 25—

  Paperwork for Simka to sign, to transfer my care to Timothy. Visiting him, this morning, I actually wear a suit—to impress him, I think, even though it’s been years since I’ve worn this suit and the fit isn’t quite right anymore. Out of style now, or just too tight over my waist and rear, the jacket shoulders pinched, the collar like a stranglehold. Up the central stairwell to where his secretary, a cousin of his, a plump woman with a thatch of cranberry-red curls and heavy blue eye shadow, buzzes me into the reception room.

  “Domi!” she says, “I don’t recall having an appointment for you today. Here, have a brownie—”

  “It’s just a social call,” I try to explain, but take a brownie anyway. And another.

  Nervous. Twenty minutes or so, drinking a complimentary Keurig. Simka escorts a patient from his office, a teenage boy—fourteen, maybe fifteen—studded with a Mohawk of pins and pierced with chains through his face. They’re talking about woodworking, Simka going on about his Zen theory of the lathe. He has the boy working on a project, a chair it sounds like.

  “Excellent, excellent,” says Simka, “but remember, too, that you had trouble making picture frames at first, but now—”

  Simka gives the boy his full attention—he asks about something the boy was to have read, The Woodworker’s Guide, Amazon portals linking Add to cart, but when the boy fesses up that he hasn’t yet read the chapters, Simka smiles and nods and says, “Next time, next time—”

  Simka’s secretary mentions that I’ve been waiting. He’s surprised to see me, saying, “I didn’t recognize you in the suit!” He shakes my hand and asks how I’ve been. He tells me I look suave, stroking his mustache and grinning, asking if the suit’s new, complimenting the fabric. I tell him the last time I wore this suit was when I eulogized my wife.

  “Well, you look good,” he says.

  He invites me into his office—the familiar room—and I take my usual sofa seat. Simka doesn’t sit in his usual seat, though, a leather recliner near the sofa, but rather wheels around the ergonomic chair from behind his desk. There’s a potted ficus, but otherwise the room’s bare. Comfortable, though. The furniture’s oversize leather—I’ve been so tired recently I feel I could curl up on the sofa and sleep. He asks how I am and I answer. He offers me more coffee. He asks about Timothy and I tell him everything’s fine. Awkward gaps stud the pleasantries until I realize I’m hesitant, that I’ve been waiting for him to pick up his notebook and pen, the usual signal that our session has started. I’m not his patient anymore—

  “I just brought some paperwork for you to sign,” I tell him.

  “Oh, yes,” he says, and I hand the sheets over. “You know, you didn’t have to hand deliver these forms—”

  He takes them to his desk, flattens out the creases I’ve made in them and reads them over. Everything’s standard, I’ve been told—but Simka is thorough. He removes an i
nk pen from a small box he keeps on his desk, shakes it twice, then signs in his looping official script. One page and the next. The third. He looks over what he’s done—ending an almost eight-year relationship with a few swipes of his pen.

  “Since you’re here, though, I wanted to show you something,” he says, pulling a file from his desk. “When you transferred to Dr. Reynolds, I went through your old paperwork to pass along anything relevant and found some drawings you made. Do you remember these?”

  He folds open several sheets of sketch pad paper—of course I remember these drawings, but haven’t thought of them in years. Drawings I’d made during our first sessions together, when I was defensive, cautious to talk with Simka about anything personal. I’d been sent to mandatory counseling by the Employee Assistance Program when the depression and drugs began to affect my work—my case was slotted to Simka. At first, our sessions were largely silent on my part, businesslike—Simka asking questions about the nature of my work, my work environment, wondering if I got along with my coworkers, with my boss, fishing for reasons why I might be having so much trouble. I rarely answered, or was vague. One afternoon several sets of crayons and a few pads of newsprint were spread out on an activity table in his office.

  “I didn’t bring these for you,” I remember him telling me when I noticed the art supplies. “I run an art therapy group for teenagers. After-school stuff—”

  I remember I told him that my wife used to do some art therapy as a volunteer at a place called the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. It was the first time I’d mentioned Theresa to him.

  “We’ve been making memory maps,” Simka explained. “You draw the house you grew up in and write in everything you can remember about it, every detail. You’d be surprised how much you remember when you’re filling in a memory map, the specificity of the details. The kids never have enough room to write everything they want, so we journal, too—”

  “What’s the point of all this?” I think I asked him.

  “It helps you remember,” said Simka. “It helps you to understand yourself. The memory maps help people understand what is important to them, what they’re passionate about—it helps them remember significant signposts that they may have ignored, it helps them recover. Then you start drawing in the neighborhood you grew up in, sometimes on a separate sheet of paper. Everything you remember—”

  I don’t remember how, exactly, he coaxed me into picking up a crayon to draw—I may have even suggested it, or maybe I just started drawing—but that’s how we spent our sessions for quite some time. Here’s the house in Bloomfield where I grew up, a brick three-bedroom row house, the building almost a hundred fifty years old when I’d lived there, my handwriting on the map impossible to read now, but I remember describing the crab apple tree in the back lot; the plank of wood my father had nailed between the branches to serve as a little bench up there; the shells of locusts left on the bark of the cherry tree; my dog, Bozworth—a German shepherd. Here’s my drawing of Bozworth—noodles of black and brown crayon, hardly recognizable as a dog if I hadn’t labeled him in pencil. I used to walk him down by the tracks and we’d stand aside on the gravel slopes to watch trains trundle by. Fourteen years old when we put him down. Simka hadn’t even known I was from Pittsburgh until I drew the rivers.

  “I do remember these,” I tell him. Here’s one of Phipps Conservatory, where Theresa worked in the education department—I tried to draw in the walkways through the gardens, the vanilla bean trees, the butterfly forest and the café where we used to meet. Another map, labeled The Georgian—Room 208. Our shelves filled with vinyl records and books, our cupboards filled with exotic ingredients for Theresa’s cooking. Boxes of poetry manuscripts people had sent for my fledgling poetry line, Confluence Press, all unread when they burned. A few programming books, when I was studying coding to make Confluence Press viable as an e-book enterprise. Here’s the second bedroom, converted into Theresa’s office. I opened up to Simka through these drawings, and eventually I could talk freely without them. Simka had helped me immensely those early years—I used to collect things, back then. Hoard things. I used to buy crates full of old newspapers—anything printed from before the bomb. Simka helped me realize I couldn’t hold on to the past in that way, that I indulged in unhealthy obsessions that were bankrupting me and contributing to the squalor I lived in. “Let go,” he’d told me. He stabilized me.

  “You can keep these drawings,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ll keep them tucked away in your file—”

  “You should keep them,” I tell him.

  Simka smiles. He carefully folds up the drawings and returns them to the file folder.

  “And how are you handling your dreams?” he asks. “The last time we spoke, you were having some difficulty sleeping. You were thinking deeply about the young woman—Hannah, I believe her name was. Do you still think about Hannah?”

  Horrified by the notion that I may have abandoned her, but for some reason I don’t want to tell Simka the truth—that I think about Hannah whenever I try to sleep, that I see her body and sometimes imagine her voice, so I say, “I stay busier now than I used to. Kucenic has her case now, he’ll take care of her. I don’t have much time to think about the past—”

  “Well, then. Here’s your paperwork,” he says. “Good luck. I’m very proud of how far you’ve come. I know that it’s been hard for you recently. I should have realized that you might have needed some extra attention right now, and I’m sorry I failed you in that regard. The ten-year anniversary. I should have anticipated how hard this would be for you—”

  “I’m healthy,” I tell him. “All’s well that ends well—”

  “That’s fine, very fine,” says Simka, but tells me recovery rarely happens in one gulp, and that it’s a fine idea to still journal—that I’m still suffering from depression and anxiety, even if I’m feeling better and have been distracted by some exciting new changes.

  “I’m still writing,” I tell him, and show him this notebook. He flips through, his Adware overlaying my poor handwriting with Verdana typeface. He reads a page. “Good,” he says, “good detail. Consider using some of the Progoff prompts . . .” I remember an early session when I showed him my poetry, the poetry I used to write. He’d read them attentively, twice over, three times over, and had said, “These are beautiful.”

  “So, now we’re talking purely as friends,” he says. “Addiction and recovery from depression are difficult. There isn’t a quick fix—even complete dialysis and Adware reconditioning don’t treat the underlying causes of your addiction. You’ll have to work at this, Dominic. As they say, ‘You’re gonna carry that weight—’”

  “Timothy told me a very similar thing but said you’d disagree. At any rate, I feel like maybe I can become happy again—”

  “Hm,” he says. “Just so you know—indulge me, here, Dominic: you are still eligible for further substance abuse treatment through the District system. Dr. Reynolds pursued your case file once the Correctional Health Board determined you’d have to switch out of my care. I’m not sure why he pursued you, Dominic—but it makes me wonder if he has a predetermined treatment schedule in mind. If you find that your current therapy isn’t helping you meet your goals, and if you decide to sign up for further substance abuse treatment, Dr. Reynolds wouldn’t even have to know. There are confidentiality requirements if you apply directly to the Correctional Health Board. Keep that in mind, anyway. Once the novelty of switching treatment methods fades, you may search out substances again to bring clarity. Old habits die hard—”

  “You know, Dr. Simka, bringing up substance abuse clinics with me is counterproductive. I’m beyond that. I’m with Timothy now—”

  “I can’t argue with success,” he says.

  We’re interrupted—his secretary doesn’t buzz but knocks discreetly, poking her colorful head into the office to announce his next appointment’s ready in the reception room. Si
mka shakes my hand and asks me to dinner, to talk further when we have more time, in a different setting, over cognac, but I’m noncommittal.

  —

  Timothy finds me as I’m leaving Simka’s office. He pulls over in the Fiat, rolls down his window.

  “Nothing you’re doing is more important,” he yells to me. “Come on with me. Get in—”

  The lingering cigarette stink of the interior, the lack of legroom. Timothy inches through a throng of pedestrians crowding the boulevard, laying on the horn, and peels away once he’s clear.

  “How did you find me here?”

  “You mentioned you’d be over this way,” he says. “Kalorama, at Dr. Simka’s office. I figured I’d take a chance, try to spot you—”

  Again the exhilaration of potential death in wreckage as Timothy drives—he cuts off a garbage truck at the intersection, running a stop sign he claims never used to be there. He’s wearing a suit and tie, a wool overcoat. He’s a slight man but flabby, and when he smiles his face blossoms into double chins.

  “I have meetings today,” he says. “Actually, you’re on the docket. I’m recommending to the board that they withdraw you from group therapy. Waverly will be your sponsor, if that’s all right with you?”

  “That’s great news,” I tell him. “Absolutely. I have the paperwork you needed from Simka—”

  “I’ll take over your case as a private therapist, because there are treatment requirements we have to keep up with. Red tape. I’ll keep the talk therapy to a minimum, though, so we don’t waste your time. I will hold you to staying clean, however. This isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card—”

  “I understand.”

  Timothy folds into traffic. I ask him where he’s taking me.