Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs. 1% finished . . . 2% . . .

  Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a No results found message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.

  Zero doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.

  I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of the lease, but again come up with nothing.

  I ease the parameters further—search only “Accelerant” in the entire City-Archive and the results hit every Honda dealership, every model year, every truckload of new makes, every used Accelerant, every advertisement, every Accelerant parallel parked on every street, every car in every driveway, too many hits even to consider, but still nothing in the particular blind spot where I’m trying to see.

  Pepsi helps me think, so do Ho Hos—I uncap a fresh two-liter and open a new box, take a five-minute break before immersing again. Think. The Archive’s still Java based, so I set the parameters to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but I don’t search for the Accelerant—rather, I search for a “TimelineException,” the telltale error in the code that means that something’s not historically accurate, that someone’s been tampering. I run the search, expecting to find a few hundred or even a few thousand hits, but the search locks up my iLux with an untraceable mess of TimelineException results—nearing a million exceptions before I kill the process. Christ—

  Scanning the error report—whoever’s erasing Albion’s car intentionally mangled the code, it looks like, must have deleted or swapped out or tampered with just about every car archived near her apartment to crash searches with errors. I’ve seen similar with insurance scams—but whoever’s deleted Albion is especially thorough. There’s nothing I can use to track this mess. I can’t help but admire the work.

  Think through the methodology—a reflection of red hair in the moment Zhou turns from the mirror. Nothing traceable in and of itself, but that leftover reflection is at least one slip—maybe the work isn’t quite as seamless as it seems.

  Real-time hours loitering outside of Lili Café on the corner of Dobson and Hancock, the same building as Albion’s apartment, watching cars, or rather watching the reflections of cars in the café’s picture windows. When a car passes on Dobson, I note the make/model, then note the car’s reflection on a separate spreadsheet—sometimes only registering a blur of color. The cars that pass rarely match their reflections and I’m hopeful I’ll catch a trace of Albion’s Accelerant reflected in the window glass. Dull work, but something to slog through, a start. I recognize the barista archived here—Sandy, I think her name was—petite, with a cloche hat and black-framed glasses. She was a screen printer, I remember, her neon and pastel posters for Pittsburgh bands and the Steel City Derby Demons decorate the café. Theresa used to work with her—booked her to teach art workshops with the high schools, making prints using plant materials. She steams milk, pours leaf shapes onto the skim of lattes. Her customers are vaguely familiar to me, too, some of their faces—people I might have seen around. Another car passes and I note its reflection. Scanning over four days’ worth of footage until a silver Nissan Altima passes but casts a reflection of a green hatchback Accelerant on the café window and I know I have her.

  Time-stamp the reflection, bookmark it.

  I run another Facecrawler, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but instead of searching for Albion’s Accelerant, I search for this substitute car, the ’53 Altima sedan. Ready to kill the process if I hit the same flood of errors, but the hack’s slipped up: whoever deleted Albion’s car used the Altima as a universal substitution, probably with something as simple as Find and Replace All. The Facecrawler brings manageable results—I pin the results to a map of Polish Hill and the pins cluster around two locations like a trail of bread crumbs: Albion’s apartment on Dobson and the underground parking garage of another nearby apartment, a high-rise just a few blocks away tagged the Pulawski Inn. I save my search, reset the Archive to a date when the Altima should be parked at the Pulawski Inn, and walk to try and find the car.

  Every floor of the Pulawski Inn is quartered into lofts, every loft expansive with picture windows and sliding glass doors that lead to slim balconies. The lobby’s the color of champagne, with wingback chairs and couches candy-striped in pale gold. A mahogany table centers the room, topped with a vase of orchids. The building manager receives visitors at a front reception desk. She’s reading Camus—her brunette hair matches the mahogany table, her skirt and blouse match the walls. She smiles when I approach, says, “How may I help you?” but when I ask if she’s ever heard the name Albion, she searches through her database of recorded conversations and says, “No results found—”

  “Can you tell me how to get to the parking garage?”

  “The elevator’s just off the lobby,” she says, pointing my way.

  I take the elevator to P1 and pace the narrow lanes of the garage, scanning cars, cross-checking with the results of my Facecrawler, and find the Altima parked in a row of spaces reserved for guests. I save the image, but everything about the car’s been wiped—no license plate, no VIN, no garbage or stuff in the backseat or the floors, nothing but a generic sculpt of a Nissan, probably ripped from a dealer stream, nothing unique to Albion.

  I loiter by the car, hoping for Albion to come. Waiting, disoriented by the odd angles of the garage sculpted from fish-eye security cam footage, I focus on the elevator and bookmark the moment when the doors slide apart. Zhou. A navy peacoat, her hair tucked down inside her collar. She wears a white knit dress, her legs luminous in the elevator light. She’s with a blonde, another stunner—taller than Zhou by a few inches, in tailored blue jeans and a crimson paisley halter that shows off her shoulders and neck, her hair in a loose braid that hangs well past her belt. The blonde’s features are pure Scandinavian, with sharp cheekbones and almond-shaped blue eyes. Her left shoulder to elbow is inked with a tattoo sleeve—a complex pattern of red roses and calla lilies. She lingers with Zhou in the elevator, laughing at some remark Zhou’s made, their fingertips touching, and before Zhou leaves, the blonde reaches beneath the collar of Zhou’s coat and untucks her hair. I follow Zhou from the elevator to the Nissan, but the moment she steps inside the Nissan she disappears, a red spot hovering in her place to let me know a TimelineException has occurred.

  Follow the blonde. We ride together to the tenth floor and although the blonde and the elevator are illusory, I can smell the floral scent of her shampoo, the fabric of her clothes. I touch her arm and feel her muscles and skin—she responds to my touch. Someone’s sculpted her here—her specifically, layering in her scents and reactions. She doesn’t have the generic flesh feel that others have in the Archive. At my touch, she leans close and parts her lips, expecting me to
kiss her, it seems, but I keep to myself and she eventually resets, watching the ascending floor numbers. Someone programmed this scene to relive intimate moments with her. When the doors open, I follow her. The hallway is the same champagne color as the lobby with wall sconces that emit a pale glow. She unlocks her door, Room 1001, steps inside and closes the door behind her. When I try to follow, the door is locked.

  “Override,” I say and a keypad hovers in the wall. I enter my access code and the door swings open, but the room’s been replaced with a generic sculpt, nothing but the model floor plan for this type of room, generic furniture and generic decor, nothing else, nothing of the blonde.

  I return to the lobby. The building manager tips a cup of water into the vase of orchids. I ask her for the name of the woman who lives in Room 1001, and after a quick search she responds, “Peyton Hannover—”

  I note the name.

  Checking the results of my image search for the pig’s head graffiti—nothing conclusive, but an interesting string of hits that’s surely the inspiration for the image: an etching and aquatint from 1879 called Pornokrates, by a Belgian artist Félicien Rops, of a woman nude except for stockings, opera gloves and a blindfold. She’s walking a pig on a leash. I find a hi-res version of the image and save it along with the graffiti on Albion’s apartment. Not sure what this all is supposed to mean—

  12, 29—

  The old houses here in Polish Hill feel like they’re sinking into mud or sluggishly collapsing downhill toward the riverbeds. Row houses with wood siding, the siding unpainted or the paint long since peeled away, the wood blanched silvery gray but gone to rot near the foundation and gutters. The gate in the chain-link’s padlocked but the fence is waist level so I climb it. Mud-swamped stamps of yards studded with dog shit and toys, the porch a slab of concrete that’s cracked apart. I’ve been working in the end unit. The screen door hangs on loose hinges.

  I open the front door. I step inside.

  The hallway’s dim from a mass of dead flies and gnats never cleaned from the fixture glass. “You’re in Steelers Country” in needlepoint, framed. Hardwood, the tap-scratch of claws and the wet suck-breath of a large dog. It turns the corner and I yelp—embarrassed by the start of terror at yellowish eyes and teeth the color of buttermilk, but it’s all so real, the guttural apparition of a pit bull pushing against my legs and nosing into my crotch, sniffing. The dog’s all muscle, its social profile glowing: Oscar, beloved of the Stanleys. I touch his ears, rub the folds of his velvety head. I know he’s not real—it’s not real—but iLux pulls memories to fill out the gaps of the sculpt, the smell of wet dog and the feel of dog’s slobber and moist nose. Hot breath and smooth tongue. “Okay, boy, it’s okay,” trying to push the bulk away from my knees.

  Oscar doesn’t follow up the stairs. He watches me and sneezes a rope of snot that he shakes from his face. Carpeted stairs, a length of pipe for the rail. The Sacred Heart of Christ hangs on the landing. Other pictures clutter the upstairs hallway, of the owners of this house, Edith and Jayden Stanley, their friends and family, all dead—dumpy women with dull hair in scrunchies and wiry earnest-eyed men, baggy T-shirts and Steelers jerseys, nurses’ scrubs and bright white sneakers.

  There’s an attic entrance in the hallway, a trapdoor in the ceiling. I pull the leather strap and lower the ladder. A single bulb lights the attic, low wattage. Hot up here—stifling. Boxes, Christmas decorations. Windows bracket the room, one looking over the street out front and down to the torn shingles of the porch roof, the other looking over the fenced-in backyard, the coiled dog chain in the grass and the kiddie pool filled with an inch or two of rainwater. Beyond the backyard, the broad face of the Pulawski Inn rises over the neighboring rooftops. The mustard-yellow bricks darken to ochre in the rain. There’s a folding chair already set up near this window. I sit. I watch.

  Three windows from the top, on the eastern corner—Room 1001. Auto zoom ×3, ×9—scanning the windows, looping fast-forward and reverse in time. Peyton Hannover was a student at Chatham University, studying literature, and a part-time model in local commercials: Pirates season tickets, Mattress World, Shop ’n Save. I’ve watched Peyton Hannover’s commercials and have watched her dine with friends, have watched her walk alone through Frick Park and have watched her die—waiting in line at a CVS in North Oakland to buy a bottle of chocolate milk, squinting at the blinding flash before her skin caught fire and turned to ash, blown apart in the same scouring wind that blew apart the CVS as easily as if it were made of newsprint.

  I watch her now, on a Thursday evening in late July, as she prepares dinner in her kitchen—a dinner I’ve watched her prepare several times now: slicing strawberries for the salad and scooping chicken from the bag of marinade. I’m able to watch her now, as she lays out each chicken strip in a skillet and waves smoke away from the alarm, because for ten months before the end, Jayden Stanley ran a Canon HD webcam with 27× optical zoom pointed toward her windows. He’d filmed her from his attic, recording to a password-protected 10-terabyte pay account from JunkTrunk that the Right to Remember Act rendered accessible using my archival override codes. He had filmed Peyton Hannover as she undressed after classes and on weekend mornings as she ate grapefruit and drank coffee in her pajamas on her balcony. He filmed her in spandex, practicing yoga in her living room. He filmed her having wine with friends and filmed long hours of her empty apartment while she was out. He filmed her through the picture windows that must have been appealing to her at the time she signed her lease, affording sweeping vistas of Polish Hill and the downtown skyline beyond. The view from the Stanleys’ attic window to Peyton’s apartment is unobstructed: I can see her apartment’s exposed brick interior walls from here, a poster of polychrome Warhol flowers, everything. I can see it all clearly. I’ve reviewed all ten months of Stanley’s footage, most nights watching Peyton doing nothing more interesting than watching HGTV or America’s Next Top Model—but there is one evening that interests me, this Thursday in late July.

  For most of the evening, Stanley’s filmed the wrong room—hours of useless footage of Peyton’s darkening bedroom, polygon shards of sunset receding from the wall above her bed. He must have checked his camera at 7:42 because the frame adjusts. Peyton in the kitchen cutting strawberries and rinsing lettuce. She’s wearing spandex shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, one shoulder exposed. Plastic basins and metal tubs line the short hallway leading to the bathroom—but Stanley’s zoomed in too close, cutting off the view of the rest of the loft. I imagine Stanley hurrying here, maybe his wife calling him down from the attic, maybe Oscar moaning to be let outside, adjusting the video to capture Peyton in the kitchen, but keeping him from adjusting the shot the way he would have liked—but I’m guessing. Almost twenty minutes filming these washbasins. Albion steps into view nearing eight o’clock, carrying bolts of fabric. Her crimson hair’s lifted in a tight bun twisted together with pencils. Her skin is cameo white—I’d call her swanlike but that might sound like I’m falling in love with her. She’s not wearing much in Stanley’s video—a sports bra, spandex shorts, tennis shoes. She’s athletic despite her height, handling the bolts of fabric without goosey awkwardness. Maybe she’d once played volleyball. Or tennis. I watch as Albion measures and cuts the fabric and as she submerges lengths of cloth into each tub.

  I imagine now they’re eating dinner together, but the table is out of view. I watch the basins. Peyton returns to the kitchen sink after nine. Albion returns to the frame nearing nine thirty. She kneels, pulls cloth from the tubs—it’s dyed a rich violet. She hangs the fabric dripping from a makeshift line, dye raining over painter’s plastic. Her hands and forearms are purple, like she’s been strangling grapes for wine. I watch her. Peyton crosses into view—briefly. Albion laughs. A few minutes later, Albion yawns and stretches, raising her arms above her head, cracking her shoulders. I finish out the view of her. This trace ends when the fabric is hung and she carries the basins into Peyton’s b
athroom. That’s the last I see of her. I’ve looked forward in time, but Stanley misses filming when Albion takes down her fabric, misses the rest of the cleanup, or any other time Albion may have visited Peyton—or the footage may have already been deleted. I loop back. I sit in the folding chair in Stanley’s attic, watching out the attic window to the apartment building and wait for Albion. Peyton’s slicing strawberries and scooping chicken from the marinade. Albion enters the frame, carrying bolts of fabric. I watch her.

  1, 8—

  The graffiti on Albion’s apartment doesn’t stem from Pornokrates, like I’d first thought—but appropriates an image from an Agent Provocateur printbook called Manor House, one of those limited-run narrative catalogs fashion houses distribute to investors each season. I found a Manor House reproduction on kink.torrent: the copy’s shit quality, but I can tell what the image is—three women, two on leashes. The auteur of the printbook, a photographer named Coudescue, must have used Pornokrates as inspiration for his image—I pinged Gav with an attached thumbnail, wondering if he knew the work. He responded that I could see it in person whenever I could make it out to his place.

  The printbook I’m hunting is several seasons old already, but Gavril collects this stuff: photography monographs, printbooks, catalogs, file folders stuffed with printouts of fashionporn editorials that have caught his eye over the years. Everything’s kept in a walk-in closet he calls his “reading room”—the only place Gavril separates from the ongoing party filling out the rest of his apartment. A cushioned folding chair’s crammed in there and an end table with a green-shaded lamp. A notebook. He’s nailed boards on every wall for shelves and has catalogs stacked three deep and in teetering stalagmite stacks on the floor. He’s excited to show off his collection, “the true art of our age,” he says, lighting a joint as he explains everything to me, running his palm over the stubble of his head like a baby discovering bristles, saying, “There’s no reason our age shouldn’t be defined by fashion imagists like La Havre, Coudescue, Smithson—”