Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “A clinic Waverly uses from time to time. He has a gift for you, a sort of welcome to the company gift—”

  “The company?” I ask. “Focal Networks? Is that who I’ll be working for?”

  “You’ve been doing some research about him, I take it? You won’t be working for Focal Networks, not officially, but you’ll have some of their perks—”

  “What is it, exactly, that Waverly does?”

  “Psychology applied to business,” says Timothy. “Algorithms. Think of it like this: You see two advertisements. You pick one to pay attention to. Waverly figured out why you pick one and not the other—he can predict it. He can predict which images hold your attention in the streams, which ones you’ll remember. His work is mostly academic theory. I’ve tried reading his papers, but they’re all math—”

  “So . . . Marketing?”

  “Marketing consultancy, maybe, but you don’t quite understand. His company goes beyond marketing. Marketing is irrelevant once you hire Waverly—”

  “Then why all this shit in the Adware? If he’s figured it out—”

  Timothy laughs. “All that shit in the Adware is Waverly figuring it out. He’s programming you,” he says. “Every time you look or click or fantasize, you give him the key—”

  A private Panda Electronics clinic in Chevy Chase. The showroom fills with spots for Panda Electronics, hallucinations of Chinese girls wearing cosplay lingerie and panda bear ears, cuddling with panda bear cubs, offering deals on personal devices. The clinician is dressed in Ralph Lauren, a polo shirt and white slacks—simple, but she’s a stunner, black hair and pale, high cheekbones and vivid violet eyes. A plastic surgeon must have installed her Adware because the scarring cresting her forehead resembles the veins of a leaf rather than the haphazard gridding most people have. Her profile’s set to public—Agatha Kramer, a biocommunications major at Georgetown, a cheerleader for the Redskins, vids of her in mustard and yellow spandex, doing high kicks on the sidelines. Her profile pic’s one of Gavril’s “Street Fashion” series—so she’d been one of his impromptu models for the blog. She smiles as we approach.

  “Mr. Waverly?” she says.

  “Yes, the Waverly appointment,” says Timothy. “This is Dominic. He’ll be yours this afternoon.”

  Mannequins line the wall displaying the latest Adware—implants, SmartMed fashion, URL codes for upgrades and free app downloads. Timothy points out a mannequin with demo wiring—the iLux is beautiful, a net of gold wires set on a bioinorganic plate that rests on the skull, wire points that will grow naturally with the brain.

  “This is what Waverly picked for you,” says Timothy. “I hope you like it—it’s already bought and paid for—”

  “You can’t be serious,” I say. “The iLux? That’s too much—”

  “Think of it as a show of support for the good work you’ll do,” says Timothy. “One of the perks I mentioned. Think of the iLux as your company car—”

  I sign in, fill out the consent forms—in prouder days I may have balked at a gift like this, wondering at the quid pro quo, but now I accept iLux like I’d accept air to breathe. Agatha asks if I’m ready and leads us down sterile halls into a rear room. A dentist’s chair. I relax my weight into it, Agatha lowering the seat cushion and reclining me backward until I’m looking up at her, the ceiling lights like bright saucers in my eyes, the smell of her breath mints and makeup wafting down to me. She drapes a paper bib over me, tucking it into my shirt collar.

  “Please turn off password protect for the transfer,” she says, and when I do, an alert surfaces about our mutual friend—Gavril. Agatha smiles, friends me. “You know Gav?” she says and I tell her he’s my cousin.

  “He’s amazing,” she says. “I’m such an obsessive about his work. This one time he actually stopped me on the sidewalk and asked to take my picture—I almost died. The girl I was with couldn’t believe it—”

  “He’s a good guy,” I tell her.

  Timothy sits on the couch, settling in with paperwork on his tablet. Agatha shaves what stubble is left on my head, then preps me with an alcohol rub and applies a local anesthetic. As my scalp numbs it feels like my consciousness lifts several inches above my body, that I’m still aware of my legs and arms, but everything feels below me, down on the chair.

  “Are you comfortable?” Agatha says.

  “Very much, yes, thank you,” I tell her.

  “Can you feel this?”

  “What?”

  “Any pressure of any kind?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Good—”

  She leaves the room for a moment, wheeling in the surgeon arm when she returns—it’s chrome with a multipronged hand that she positions over my head. She flips a switch—glaring light—and lowers goggles over her eyes.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  “I’m ready—”

  Her profile vids blink out as she cuts my current Adware. Unplugged. I feel pressure now—or imagine I can, hearing the quiet rotors of the surgeon arm operate. I feel the wick and whir when the arm slits me open and feel the liquid rush like a distant tickle and the towels Agatha holds against my neck to catch blood. Timothy’s watching the procedure, interested. Grinding, a spritz of something cold—an ice water bath or a chemosuture. The surgeon arm spools out the old Adware from my brain like winding spaghetti onto a fork, the old wires slipping out easily with only minor tugs and nudges, pinching a bit. Nothing to cause pain. It’s an odd sensation but not entirely unpleasant. Agatha makes a comment and laughs, but I miss what she’s said over the sound of the machine.

  Agatha changes out my paper bib and dabs up more blood. The arm’s swiveled to a different needle, perforating my skull—I understand how this works, what’s happening. Jostling from the pressure and soon the arm begins stitching in the iLux, Agatha feeding the surgeon arm the gold netting like threading bullets into a machine gun. The surgeon arm replaces my scalp and sutures the wound with its heat needle—new scars from the operation, grids of scar tissue cutting across the scars already up there. The Adware boots. I lose my vision. The blindness is temporary but disconcerting—this total blindness is always disconcerting. I feel the surgeon arm swipe out the old retinal lenses and replace them with the Meopta lenses.

  Timothy says, “Looks good.”

  Agatha’s moving—a sink turns on. She’s talking, removing each tool from the surgeon arm—click, click. My hearing diminishes, but soon iLux appears in gold cursive on a field of black. The Adware welcomes me and begins transferring my account settings, using Focal Networks as the default for hosting information. When the progress bar fills, I open my eyes.

  “How do you like it?” says Agatha.

  Definition higher than reality—I understand what that pitch means, now—yes. The world was low-res and fuzzy before, like I’d been viewing the world through Vaseline goggles until now, everything suddenly so clear. Agatha’s face—glistening lips, wisps of hair, long mascara-thick lashes.

  “I love it,” I tell her. “This is incredible—”

  The world is designed—orderly apps, housed in spherical graphics. The augs are accessible but unobtrusive: date, time, weather, GPS mapping, social networking. Agatha’s profile populates my vision—her cheer vids spooling in half-light, but when my thought shifts to one it becomes opaque. The retinal cam is already autostoring imagery of Agatha, placing her in my address book, autodictating where and when we’d met, autocopying pics and vids from her profile that had caught my attention in the split second I’d scanned through them. FaceRank interprets my vitals, tracks changes in my baseline, places her near the top of recent looks, just below my memory of Twiggy. When I look at Timothy, the Adware captures his face but autocell populates info because he lacks a profile, the iLux interacting smoothly with my thoughts before they’ve even become my conscious thoughts.

  Timothy signs that I’
ve been successfully discharged and that he’s taking me home. He lifts my arm around his shoulder and helps me from the clinic—it’s difficult to walk, like my numbed consciousness floats a foot or so in front of me. Wide steps, unsure of where my foot will land and constantly surprised at the suddenness of pavement. Timothy eases me into the Fiat. He tells me to close my eyes so I don’t get motion sickness and vomit in his car. I close my eyes. He turns corners tightly, my body swaying in the passenger seat—I’m clutching the seat belt harness for support, nauseous from the heightened sense perception.

  “Go ahead and try to sleep,” he tells me. “You don’t need to stay awake—”

  I try to relax, consider sleep, but instead of sleep I load the City—the load time’s negligible, the processing speed of the iLux incredible. The Parkway East, the iLux defaulting to the highest resolution, rendering the City indistinguishable from reality, through the tunnel—

  A rain-murky evening. The Starbucks at the corner of Craig and Forbes, a bare-breasted mermaid logo on glass. People drift through the café, once captured inadvertently on security cameras or retinal cams, their profiles pulled from cloud storage, archived in the City because of the Right to Remember Act and used to populate these places, even these minor corners of the City. Ghosts living their scant bit of electronic existence in a perpetual loop, ordering coffee forever, sitting at café tables forever, repeating the same conversations forever, trying to hurry home through the rain but ending up back in line for coffee. They seem to look at me, interact with me. I watch them through the rain-streaked windows holding umbrellas, their skin absurdly white in the failing light, like deep-sea fish swimming through the depths. They’ll disappear from existence as soon as they’re out of my view, until someone else is here to see them. Students from the Catholic schools and Carnegie Mellon and Chatham wait in line—the sound of steam in milk, of shouted orders, May I call?—every table filled, faces illuminated in the pale blue of laptop glow. Hannah Massey is here—she’s here, waiting in line to order a drink. Archived here from when she was still alive.

  “Hannah,” I say, and she turns her head as if she’s heard me.

  “Earl Grey,” she says.

  I watch her leave Starbucks, tea in hand. I watch her cross the intersection in the rain. The moment she’s gone, she seems like a dream, like maybe I hadn’t seen her here at all. Across the street, the Carnegie Museum is shrouded in fog, graced with iron-black statues of angels that always reminded me of the angels of history sent to transcribe the end of time. What did these angels see when the end of time finally arrived? Were they burned? Maybe they melted or maybe survived, iron corpses ready for excavation. Everything’s re-created here—every detail. Corporate Starbucks feeds trademarked Sense details to the City—the trademarked smell of Komodo Dragon Blend. The trademarked taste and mouthfeel of an iced pumpkin scone.

  I was working on a poem, I remember, waiting for Theresa.

  What would our lives have been like? Never sure, but I try to be realistic with my regrets, memories like these affording me a window, I think, to my life as it was never lived. Theresa meeting me, wearing a rather expensive maternity dress she picked up from Nordstrom the week before—a Maggy London crepe de chine with indigo and gold. She looked stunning. I remember her carrying the weight of our child like someone burdened with secret good news. Reservations at the Union Grill up the street. We met friends of hers that night, Jake and Bex from the Arts Council—I remember feeling hopelessly out of my depth, unable to contribute to the conversation, really, beyond a dirty joke here and there and some talk about a poet I’d been reading that no one else had heard of. Impressed with Theresa—how quick she was, how she carried the conversation. I remember she chatted about sustainable horticulture and a set of adult classes she’d received grant funding to offer at the Conservatory—a community garden project she was eager to start in East Liberty, a greening initiative. We left that evening with plans to attend a young professionals networking happy hour the following week—and I assume this is what our lives may have been like, mundanely glamorous, new dresses from Nordstrom to attend fund-raising parties and cocktail hours, meeting new people important to Theresa’s work. I would have finished my Ph.D., I imagine. I would have gotten Confluence Press off the ground. Who knows? It would have been fun, though. Our lives together would have been fun. We walk to our car, parked a few blocks away near the Greek Orthodox church—drenched by the rain, but laughing. All the buses that pass by are filled with ghosts.

  Timothy drops me at my apartment.

  “How can I see Waverly? I want to thank him—”

  “Soon,” he says. “He’s actually having a little get-together in a few months, if you can make it—”

  “I’m free,” I tell him. “I’m always free—”

  I undress upstairs, learning my new system: the iLux suite from Panda with Meopta retinal lenses. The old SIM transferred over. Global Connect on Waverly’s account—no more hunting hot spots. My skull’s more valuable now, like it’s been gold-dipped and diamond-studded—horror stories of thugs breaking heads, stripping expensive tech, I’d make a much better victim now. The pain’s a residual ache—a discomfort, really—through my shoulders, behind my eyes, a chemical itch across my scalp.

  Concentrate on Albion to dull the discomfort. The dossier Waverly’s secretary had forwarded me is titled Albion—but it’s just a thin profile listing her Pittsburgh addresses, the make of her car, the names of a few friends. An insubstantial résumé—he hasn’t even included samples of her design work, no portfolio. No places of employment listed, no personal details—no suggestions of where I might find her, where she spent time when she was alive. Wouldn’t Waverly know more than this? Attachments of a few other images, candid photographs unlike the glamour shot Waverly initially showed me, but the effect is still the same—Albion’s beauty is unreal, like a Pre-Raphaelite stunner even when she’s just lounging on a sofa or posing on the overlook of Mount Washington, the city skyline framed behind her. I run her name through the obvious databases—the Post-Gazette Archive, the Tribune-Review Online, the U.S. Census Historical Register and the Bureau of Labor Statistics—but the name “Waverly, Albion O’Hara” results in zero hits. I want to find her.

  There is a certain pleasure I take in this work—the speed it takes to find my query, the forethought needed to cover every angle. Naked and bundled under comforters, my ceiling gridded with coupons and logos, Café de Coral, Ben’s Chili Bowl, Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot, the streams flash President Meecham’s beach body, spring break wet T-shirt sex, the Madonna Centennial, a new slate of Japanese hard-core torture games—but the streams dissipate as I slip back through the heart of the City.

  Polish Hill. The Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. Hillsides coppered with autumn leaves and crosshatched by dream-twisted narrow streets, alleyways, forks and switchbacks, the Immaculate Heart’s green domes and cream brick facade surrounded by ramshackle row houses faded, sagging, worn. Gooski’s is nearby, flashing neon Duquesne Pilsener ads in grime-streaked windows. Albion lived here at the end—down on Dobson, 3138, third floor. Layering, the soaked-clothes damp of drizzle and wind. Polish Hill was one of the artist enclaves by the end, artists too poor to afford the gentrified properties down in Lawrenceville so they moved up the hill, buying cheap properties no longer needed by the dying last remnants of the neighborhood’s original stock, generations of Pittsburgh families with Old Europe still in their blood. Art spaces, open studios, cheap bar after cheap bar.

  Albion’s building is a corner property, boarded windows tagged with stenciled graffiti of lingerie models who have the heads of pigs. The door’s password protected, its green paint flecked and scraped revealing rotten original wood and rusted hinges. Rainwater puddles at my shoes. Override with the Archive code and I’m in—so Waverly’s right, Kucenic left my old codes active. A dank lobby. Piles of unopened mail scattered on the stairs and window ledges.
Tags hover in the foreground and I scroll through the tenants that had lived here before the end—there aren’t many, but Albion’s not listed among them. The stairs are bowed, the walls blue with several coats of rancid paint that sweats and glistens in what little light there is. I’m out of breath climbing the two flights of stairs. Dates of Albion’s lease—her door’s also password protected, but before I can enter the override code, I hear the dead bolts falling away, the chains, and a young woman opens the door, an Asian woman. She looks as if she’s readying herself for a night out, her mantis-green dress unzipped at the back. She’s holding the front of her dress to her breasts, barely concealing herself, her shoulders bare. She’s lovely, and I stammer for something to say. She looks at me as if she were expecting someone else.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, without thinking.

  “John Dominic Blaxton,” she says, recognition dawning over her. “Focal Networks—”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She smiles—her profile’s blank. “You live in the public housing in Columbia Heights. Room R-17. Washington, DC—a temporary residence, previously of Pittsburgh and Virginia. Husband of Theresa Marie Blaxton. No children—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You aren’t welcome here,” she says, shutting the door. I enter the archival override code and the door opens, what should have been Albion’s door, but the space is empty now—a small apartment, just a one bedroom, with one corner converted for use as a kitchen. The floor is unfinished hardwood. The walls are a generic cream, even the light fixtures are painted over. There’s no furniture here. There’s no woman. There’s nothing here.

  “Hello?” My voice echoes in the empty room.

  12, 14—

  “Was this a dream?” asks Timothy.

  “Parts of it were a dream, but I’m not sure what was real—”

  Timothy’s office is cluttered, unlike Simka’s—stacked papers overflowing from plastic bins, bookshelves piled with true crime paperbacks and sets of leather-bound reference works, the DSM-IX in multiple volumes, dictionaries, thesauruses. His desk is clean, only a blotter, a pen and a leather-bound Bible. The chairs are mid-last-century, set around his desk as if for a meeting.