Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “Would you like some coffee? A drink?”

  “I’d love some coffee—”

  “I worry talk therapy will be counterproductive,” says Timothy. “When I look at the improvement you’ve made in this short amount of time—with a support system, supervised immersion, no drugs—it’s inspiring. Dominic, I don’t want you to identify yourself as someone who’s sick, as someone who needs to talk to a therapist. That sort of self-identification can often create problems. That’s not who you can become. Dominic, you’re healthy—”

  An identity issue, he tells me. If I think that I’m sick, I will be sick. If I think I’m well, I will become well. Timothy believes in positive thinking—that physical health follows the belief of physical health, that the power of the spirit can heal the body. He tiptoes around calling his system the “power of prayer” but he quotes studies and clinical trials stating that God helps recovery much more effectively than medication. What is your identity? he asks. Do you want to be ill? Or do you want to be healthy? Who are you?

  “How did you start working in the Archive?” he asks. “Were you always interested in this kind of work?”

  “I was still thinking of pursuing my graduate studies after Pittsburgh,” I tell him. “Everyone was very accepting of survivors—it was easy to transfer programs. I chose the University of Virginia, moved to Charlottesville. I’d been studying Klimt and Schnitzler and Freud—”

  “You aren’t a graduate student now?”

  “No. Not anymore—”

  “Why give it up?”

  “Why?” I wonder. “Truthfully, I was already giving up on that sort of work years before. I think I know the exact moment I gave up—in my second year of classes at Carnegie Mellon, I presented a paper about Lacan. The shifting nature of desire. I showed projections of Egon Schiele’s work, some of the more pornographic stuff, and theorized in front of the class about female masturbation. I was beginning to think of myself as a sort of intellectual provocateur of the department—”

  “You’re cringing,” says Timothy.

  “I’m still embarrassed,” I tell him, “even after all these years, I’m still embarrassed. I used to wear a bowler hat, if you can believe that. So, there was a woman in class with me, she—I remember she used to be a ballerina, a real, professional dancer, but gave it up for French theory. After my presentation about Lacan, I was cutting across campus and she called out to me. I remember what she was wearing—this gingham dress. She told me how excited she was that I had talked about Schiele, that Schiele was one of her favorite artists. She said our areas of research were strikingly similar and she wanted to talk with me more about it. She invited me to dinner at her apartment. She said she was an excellent cook and told me that she had invested in a catalogue raisonné of Schiele with giclée reproductions of his work, but she didn’t know anyone else who might appreciate it. I was—actually, I was terrified of her. I’d always been intimidated in classes with her because she seemed to understand all the readings we were assigned. I didn’t think I could legitimately spend more than five minutes talking to her without exposing myself as a fraud. I didn’t know much about Lacan other than a few essays I’d read. Derrida was incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t figure out Bourdieu. I mispronounced all their names. I’d never bothered to read Foucault. She’d left the top few buttons of her dress undone so you could see the edge of her bra—this black, lacy thing. Imagining her apartment, imagining all the dog-eared paperbacks of theory and philosophy I knew she must have read, imagining sitting next to her looking at Schiele, the book spread open across her legs, scared me. I felt like she was playing a very adult game with me. She was very attractive, very intimidating. After that afternoon I felt like a poseur, studying Freud and Schnitzler. Schiele, for Christ’s sake. I never took her up on her offer. I stopped wearing my bowler—”

  “And this was before Theresa?”

  “Oh, yes—Theresa wouldn’t have . . . not if I was wearing a bowler hat. By the time I met Theresa I’d already given that up. I’d already talked to my adviser about switching to 20th-Century American Modernism. Wallace Stevens. T. S. Eliot. I was more interested in an MFA in creative writing, to be honest—I thought I might transfer departments. I’d already started Confluence Press. A contemporary poetry series. That was always my real passion, to publish other people’s poetry—to curate a line of poetry books. I started taking classes in the computer science department, figuring out some coding so I could theoretically maximize e-content for the poetry press. I’ve tried to write poetry since. It’s odd to me—if I read a line by, say, Philip Larkin, I’ll be struck by how beautiful the line is, how perfect or how true. But if I write that line—that same line—just seeing it in my own handwriting sickens me and I’m overwhelmed by the depthless stupidity of the words. I don’t write poetry anymore—”

  “Weakness,” says Timothy.

  “Maybe,” I admit. “I was a disappointment to everyone at Virginia once I showed up. I didn’t go to classes. I didn’t research. I just spent my time buying used books at Oakley’s and Daedalus—just absolutely hoarding books and newspapers, burying myself in my apartment. I was—suicidal isn’t the right word. I was taking this class about the Decameron and was failing—the professor noticed I was in a tailspin, I guess. She invited me out for coffee and I told her how unhappy I was. She thought I might be able to use more structure than a graduate student life provided—maybe work for a few years, then come back to the program. I told her that sounded fine but I didn’t know what to do with my life. Her cousin owned a research group in DC and she thought what little I’d picked up about coding would make me a perfect fit with that kind of work. She got me an interview. It turns out her cousin wasn’t hiring, but he knew a guy who was. An entry-level job with the Kucenic Group—”

  “And under Simka’s care for drug abuse?”

  “My boss, Kucenic, placed me in the Employee Assistance Program and that program connected me with Dr. Simka—”

  “The entry-level job was an archival assistant?”

  “It provided enough of a salary, and my cousin Gavril helps me quite a bit. Blog writing, copy, blurbs, that sort of thing. It’s not much of a living, but it’s all I need—”

  “Have you ever had this dream before?” he says.

  “No—”

  “What parts are you sure were a dream?” he asks.

  “The dimensions of the apartment,” I tell him. “The interior was too large—”

  “Tell me about the interior of the apartment,” he says.

  I tell him. I’m on Dobson, in Polish Hill. It’s grown dim—twilight in the late afternoon. House windows burn orange and the bells of the Immaculate Heart are ringing. Timothy’s interested now.

  “Did you intend to visit Albion’s apartment?”

  “Yes—yes, I did. I’d gone to look for her—”

  Lucid, at first. The shallow sleep Adware exploits for deep-penetration product placement. I’d bookmarked the entrance to Albion’s apartment building the first time I was there so that whenever I enter the City I’m loitering here, waiting for her. The green door, rotten around the edges. Windows boarded, spray-painted with the stenciled graffiti of lingerie models with the heads of swine. The pigs’ heads are goofy, grinning and slobbering, with razor blade teeth—the lingerie they wear is made for fetishists, eighteenth-century frills in the lace. I try the door to the apartment building and find it’s unlocked. The foyer, the unopened mail on the windowsills. Paint-flecked walls and the hardwood moaning as I climb upstairs—this is when the lucid dreaming stops and I fall into deeper sleep, I think, my attention drifting, the scene shifting, but not asleep heavily enough to engage the automatic offs. Upstairs to the third-floor landing, to her apartment. Is this when I woke? I’m not sure—I may have still been asleep. I scroll through past residents looking for her name, but Albion isn’t among them. This is typical. I type in the
dates she’d lived there. The door opens. I step inside.

  “You sound like you’ve been to her apartment before,” says Timothy.

  “Many times—I’ve been trying to find her for Waverly,” I tell him. “But one of two things has always happened when I visit Albion’s apartment. Most often, the apartment is empty—just an empty space, just a place holder. I can walk through the rooms, but I might as well be studying a blueprint of the space. Every so often, though, a woman will open the door—a young woman, younger than I am, Asian. She seems to know who I am—she rattles off my name, information about me—but that could just be the AI pinging my profile. She’s always polite, but always tells me that I’m not welcome and always shuts the door before I can slip past her inside. The apartment changes. But that’s the nature of the City—the City changes. The bones of the City are facts but the flesh is memory, mutable. And with iLux, or any of the newer suites, the City pulls from memory and imagination and fills in with details that were never, strictly speaking, true. It makes an archivist’s job much more difficult—trying to find the truth through all that muck of fantasy. But this time, once I typed in the dates and opened the door, the apartment is different again. It’s decorated. Sparse, just a few pieces of furniture—but it’s furnished, lived in. I’d never seen the apartment like this. The furniture’s mismatched, all secondhand pieces, repainted. The walls are hung with paintings—large canvases, like Rothko color-fields the shade of bruises—and sketches of fashion designs. Bolts of fabric and dyes and a sewing machine. A lavender dress pinned to a mannequin—”

  “Albion’s apartment,” Timothy says.

  “It must be Albion’s apartment. I’m assuming that whoever deleted Albion is substituting information to make it harder to track—”

  “Was she there?” asks Timothy.

  “Albion? No, she wasn’t there. That same woman was there. That young woman. She always seems like she’s readying herself for a party. She welcomed me in this time—”

  Examining herself in the mirror in the living room. Inky hair bundled high, held in place by two sticks. The woman’s tall—almost as tall as I am, I realize. She applies her makeup. I watch her darken her lips to the color of wine. She’s pale. She wears high heels—black, patent leather heels that reflect the faint apartment light. The dress catches my eye, something Gavril would be interested in—a damask print, black on a green the color of pale emeralds. She walks across the living room, her dress unzipped in the back so I see her white skin and the black strap of her bra. She enters the bedroom but returns a moment later, adjusting a pearl earring.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Zhou,” she says. “Who are you?”

  I tell her I’m looking for Albion, and when she turns from the mirror I see a reflection of red—for just a moment, a flash of red hair in the mirror.

  “Oh, of course,” she says, “John Dominic Blaxton, of Pittsburgh, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Temporary residences.” She returns to her own reflection. I search the apartment—the kitchen, her bedroom. In the bathroom I find curly red hairs on the porcelain of the bathtub and know I’m in the right place.

  “Were you still dreaming?” asks Timothy.

  “I don’t think so although I don’t know—”

  “Is that why you mentioned the woman from your class? The woman who liked Schiele? You described what she wore, earlier—you were detailed when you told me about her, about her undergarments. You mentioned specifically that you could see the edge of her bra. Were you dreaming and pulling details from your memory through the iLux?”

  “No—I don’t think so, though maybe the woman in the apartment made me remember the woman from my class.” I think I was awake when I saw Zhou, when we spoke, but think I’m dreaming as I explore her rooms. A hallway I hadn’t noticed branches out from the main room, a corridor—it’s narrow, with half-opened doors leading to other rooms, unfinished rooms. It dawns on me that the rooms are repeating, that I’m wandering through previous incarnations of the finished room. I come to another bathroom, but the red hairs are no longer on the porcelain.

  “Go on,” says Timothy.

  “The corridor continues and this is when I believe I was dreaming, because the episode has the hallmarks of a dream—I’m frustrated, lost, and can’t remember how I get back to the living room, to Zhou. Another corridor, and I see him—”

  “Who?” says Timothy.

  “This—man, I don’t know who. I’ve never seen him before, I don’t recognize him. I figure I’m dreaming or that the barriers between Albion’s apartment are blurring with another person’s private account, that maybe this man is a previous tenant of the apartment—another survivor come back to visit his space, or just another recording inserted from the cloud. I figure I’m interrupting something private.

  “‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  “But he just looks at me, almost as if he’s not quite sure I’m even there with him—”

  “What did he look like?” asks Timothy.

  “Sitting in a wingback chair, the upholstery striped like a piece of hard candy, a cup of coffee near him on a low table. He wears slacks and a blazer over a T-shirt. The T-shirt says Mook.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifties, maybe early sixties. Or maybe late forties, but tired. I remember his eyes the most clearly—sad eyes, like his face was drooping. Like Droopy Dog? Do you remember that old cartoon Droopy Dog?”

  “What else about him?” asks Timothy.

  I tell him that I remember the color gray. Undefined. I don’t remember the man clearly. Gray, drooping, rumpled, sad—but arrogant in a way. I don’t like him. He sips his coffee, considering me. I apologize again, saying something about visiting a friend, that I’m lost here. He doesn’t move or speak with me, but I turn around to leave and he’s vanished. I’m sure I’m awake, now—but he’s gone so I figure he was part of the dream. I return to Zhou.

  “How did you return to her? You were lost—”

  “The program was like a Möbius strip—”

  I turned away from the man in the Mook shirt and saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, and when I went through the door I reentered her apartment. This is a loop. Now I understand—things have changed since first entering her apartment. Zhou is dressing for a party. I watch her. I hear the shower running—there’s no one else in the apartment. I can no longer find that corridor with several doors—no, now there’s just the short hallway that leads to her bedroom. I open the bathroom door and find Zhou in the shower. I watch her through the fogged curtain. She seems pleased when she notices me watching her, and lets me watch, rubbing soap over her breasts and dousing herself with shampoo. She asks if I want to join her, but I ignore the question and she laughs. Zhou dries herself and walks nude to her bedroom and there I watch her dress in an elaborate set of lingerie. She steps into the green dress that she doesn’t bother to zip. She makes her way to the living room mirror—this is where I’d first seen her, applying makeup in the mirror. There—the flash of red, Albion’s hair, flickers in the reflection and disappears. Here’s where it loops: She goes to her bedroom, returns adjusting the pearl earring, but once her earrings are on, she takes them off. Zhou unzips her dress and lets the fabric slide from her body. I watch her reach up and unlatch the front clasp of her bra. Very beautiful, the kinds of perfection women’s bodies have in dreams, uncanny and vivid. She undresses and makes her way to the bathroom, starts the shower and steps in once the water’s warm, lathering herself. I tell Timothy that I watched the cycle several times that afternoon, and that’s how I realize the loop is without variation.

  “Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”

  “Waverly
may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”

  He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.

  12, 27—

  Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.

  Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.