Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  The Archive lists Peyton Hannover as arriving in Pittsburgh from a place called Darwin, Minnesota—population 308. Peyton’s parents are still alive in retirement in Florida. They’ve set up a VR memorial at remembrance.pit—Peyton their youngest daughter of five, but I’ve only spent a few minutes with her childhood pictures displayed at the memorial, videos of her first Halloween, pictures of a knockout at prom too perfect for the meathead kid in a tux who grapples with her corsage. I consider contacting her parents, to ask if Peyton ever mentioned a woman named Albion, but I’m too closely acquainted with loss to bother whatever memories they’ve let heal over. Leave well enough alone.

  Peyton’s first appearance in the Archive is as a freshman at Chatham University. Cutoff jean shorts and steel-toed boots, a Chatham hoodie. She’s at the 61C Café, outside on the patio surrounded by blooming sunflowers, reading a Penguin Classics edition of Jane Eyre, oblivious to the attention her legs attract when middle-aged men sit with their coffee at nearby tables. When she speaks, you hear Minnesota in her voice. An eighteen-year-old shaking off small-town dust in what must have seemed like a big city. I track her: parties most weekends, girls on ratty couches sipping from red Solo cups, basements smoky and crowded with scruffy men holding cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Peyton’s like an orchid in a vegetable patch, smoking cigarettes in holders, occasionally sporting a monocle, aggressively flirting up other girls who don’t seem to quite know what to do with her. She led a wild life at first, destructive—sloppy drunk and sick at parties, passed out by the early morning, striking out with straight girls so letting random guys take her to bed. She laughs everything off—but spends most of her time alone, friendless until she gathers with people to party.

  Tracking her life, I find Peyton in Schenley Plaza, at a WYEP summer music festival. She’s with a group of her acquaintances, sharing a blanket spread on the lawn. Peyton’s begun to grow her hair out by now, no longer the T. S. Eliot slick but a wavy blonde—it makes her look younger, somehow. She’s also started the tattoo that will eventually sleeve her arm, just a few flowers, lilies and roses, near her shoulder. We’ve gathered together at the concert, too, other survivors. I see their faces in the crowd—somehow lighter than the others. We notice one another and sometimes smile, but more often than not we simply ignore each other, knowing that the more we acknowledge one another, the more we ruin the illusion that these summer nights might never have ended. I take off my shoes and feel the grass on my feet. Donora’s headlining and Peyton’s enjoying herself, laughing, but by the time moths swarm the park lights, she’s moved away from her friends. I follow her and find Albion sitting alone on one of the benches edging the park. Her hair’s tucked beneath a knit beret. She wears a linen skirt and a suede jacket. She’s older than Peyton by a few years, but they’re comfortable together. Peyton slips her arm beneath Albion’s suede coat, and the intimacy—like Peyton’s fingers touching Zhou’s in the elevator—flusters me, races in my blood. They’re ignoring the concert, ignoring Peyton’s friends. By the time the concert ends I’ve seen the two women kiss, a short kiss but unmistakable that they’re lovers, discreet, but nevertheless drawing attention from the men around them, men with their families, playing with their children in the lawn but unable to keep their eyes away from two women kissing. Peyton and Albion leave together and I try to follow, but the footage runs out and I’m looped back into the crowd.

  1, 19—

  I’ve only seen two traces of Albion, once dying fabric in Peyton’s apartment, once kissing Peyton in the park. Hours might pass without thinking of Albion, but then the thought of her overwhelms me, at first just a recollection of what I’d seen but growing into a compulsive urge to see again, and again, the pull stronger than any drug I’ve used—I load and reload those traces of Albion and watch her, memorizing everything about her, every detail, perfect, so perfect. I watch until my mind’s like a worn rag and my eyes so strained they feel like they’re still open even when they’re closed. The rest of Albion’s life is a hole I’m filling in by the edges, like I’m figuring out the shape of an object by studying the shadow it casts. Obsessive about the research—my life’s become Albion. I reload the stream of Albion kissing Peyton in the park—

  Never stray far from Peyton, because Peyton leads me to Albion—as Peyton reads Camille Paglia at an outdoor table at Panera, yoga classes at the Athletic and Fitness Center, cutting across Chatham’s campus to a class on Blake and British Symbolism. Occasionally, I find Peyton with Zhou and know that Albion’s been replaced in these moments—Zhou’s a forgery, so when I come across her in the Archive, I study her, trying to understand the original: Peyton’s quicker with a laugh than Zhou, Zhou much more serious, sober. At the Carnegie Museum of Art, Zhou stands back to study paintings, she’ll point something out to Peyton, give a quick rundown of the artist’s life or talk about materials. Zhou is Albion, I remind myself. They stand in front of a John Currin painting of two nude women, their bodies in illusory angles, awkwardly posed. Zhou’s mentioning that Currin spent time in Pittsburgh and Peyton listens but she mugs a bit, she poses like the women in the painting. She causes a scene until Zhou laughs along with her. Peyton’s in complete control of her effect on men—Zhou’s much more reticent, almost like she wishes for invisibility. Peyton draws her out, forces Zhou to pose along with her, gets one of the security guards to snap their picture in front of the painting.

  I find an early reference to Raven + Honeybear as a participant in a couture show, a joint fund-raiser for Gwen’s Girls and Dress for Success Pittsburgh. The models are listed, “Peyton” by first name only. The Gwen’s Girls website is still cached, with a dozen untagged pictures of the fund-raiser on their Pinterest board, some showing Albion. If anything, Albion outstrips the models, her hair in crimson cascades, wearing a tweed three-piece suit I’m assuming is of her own design. Albion’s in the background of another image, suit jacket unbuttoned, hands in pockets, casually leaning against a column watching the catwalk—reserved, just as I’ve come to know her through Zhou. There’s a series of pictures showing designers’ studios—they’re all untagged, but I recognize Albion’s tweed and plaid designs in one of the images, the successive picture an exterior of a brick building that looks a lot like a Lawrenceville row house storefront. I run a Facecrawler match on the building and, sure enough, it pins a location: just off Butler Street in Lawrenceville, on 37th, but the location tag’s been corrupted. Someone’s been tampering with this place.

  I follow Peyton as she leaves her shift at Coca Café and walks the few blocks to 37th—scant footage as she makes her way down side streets from Butler, but I pick her up again at the row house, a decrepit building bordered by a gravel lot, wild brush and weeds delineating one property from the next. Peyton must have been filming this footage herself—a POV shot taken with retinal cams as she types the key code and enters. The interior’s been redone—hardwood laminate flooring, an office and showroom on the first floor, decorated by a bird and bear mural, Raven + Honeybear in gothic script. This is Albion’s studio. The workroom’s upstairs, the second floor a loft-style space with picture windows and exposed ceiling beams. I find Zhou sitting at a sewing machine, working a pair of trousers. She smiles as Peyton enters the room.

  “This is what you’ll be wearing,” she says.

  Sifting through footage of the studio—there isn’t much, most days either already deleted or simply not filmed. I search the Archive’s timeline and find random hours of Zhou working at a sewing machine, or working with clothes pinned on cloth dummies, but finally come across an untagged series of events that haven’t been tampered with. Rather than Zhou, I find Albion documenting the preparation for a show, maybe with a flip cam on a tripod. She wears a sweatshirt and yoga pants, a Steelers knit hat. The footage is time-stamped September twenty-ninth before the end, at nearly three in the morning—Albion marks fabric before she sews. Peyton stands on a pedestal wearing a pink floor-length skirt like a spill of roses.
Her breasts are uncovered, her corset top laid out on the worktable. An unusually heavy rainfall freezes into soft flakes that drift down outside the studio windows. I remember this snow, actually, waking up startled to see everything coated in thick, wet white. Three inches overnight. I remember Theresa and I walked to breakfast at Crêpes Parisiennes that morning, wondering if the snowfall was a fluke or an early start to winter. It would warm up again, though—by later that afternoon, in fact, the weather warmed and the snow melted. We’d have less than ten more days together. But tonight, while Theresa and I would have been sleeping as the rain froze and the snow dropped softly, Peyton stands on a pedestal bathed in the glare of studio lights while Albion brings her the corset.

  Looking out the window at the snow, I notice a man standing outside in the lot—he’s wearing a wool overcoat, black or charcoal gray. His hair is white. He’s watching me as I watch him, snowfall accumulating on his shoulders and the top of his head, but it’s too dark to see his face. When I turn back to the two women, Albion has been replaced by Zhou. Outside, the man has disappeared—footprints in the snow lead to the building. He’s coming. I try to disengage from the City, but the system’s locked. I’m paralyzed. My Adware net security’s flashing red with warnings, alerting me to impending system failures but I can’t escape.

  The studio door opens and he enters, shaking snow from his shoes and removing his coat.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I’m Legion,” he says. I recognize him, the man in the wingback chair I’d seen in Albion’s apartment who wore a Mook T-shirt. I should be able to push my way past, but he has me in his complete control—I can’t move.

  “Dominic, isn’t it?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, isn’t that right?”

  “Are you working for Waverly?”

  Mook smiles.

  “I figured you were another of Mr. Waverly’s junkies,” he says. “Disappointing—”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, of 5437 Ellsworth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Visual Theory at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia, recently an Archival Assistant for the Kucenic Group. Drug abuse problems. Constant rewiring for Adware upgrades. A dull life, but you were in love. You spend an awful lot of time immersing to visit a woman named Theresa Marie Blaxton. Your wife—”

  “Don’t say her name. You don’t ever say her name—”

  “I’m correct, aren’t I? You log more hours reliving the same bits of memory than anyone I think I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Most people visit the Archive for quick visits, to relive some happiness or indulge in a past normalcy or visit loved ones on birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths. Most people like the convenience of paying their respects once or twice a year, but you’re different. This is an obsession you have. Over and over again, you have dinner with your wife at the Spice Island Tea House so you can hear her announce her second pregnancy, what a shame about the first—”

  “Don’t you ever fucking talk about her,” I scream but my voice mutes when Mook whispers, “quiet.”

  “I watched your wife die the other day because I was curious about her,” he says, “curious about what, exactly, you saw in her—have you ever watched your wife die? What was she, eight months pregnant? Nine? She was in Shadyside, window-shopping—all those cameras in Shadyside, her death is very well reconstructed. You don’t visit her death often, though, do you? Too painful, I assume? There’s a window of T-shirts at a store called Kards Unlimited. Obscene, dumb T-shirts. Your wife was reading obscene T-shirts when she died. I wonder if the baby kicked when the bomb went off. I wonder if it knew it would never be born. Mr. Blaxton, what was it? Boy or girl?”

  He allows me to move and scream and so I shake him, but touching him is like touching a sack of sand—he’s heavy, too heavy to be real and I realize he’s not real, we’re not real, of course we’re not here, there is no here.

  “Your child would have been a girl,” says Mook. “I know about you. You’re easy to track. Your drug habits, your stints in and out of hospitals, therapy. All that paperwork. Your death is very well documented, just like your wife’s—only your death is much slower and is dragging out over years. You’re a simple man, Mr. Blaxton. No mysteries to you. That very simplicity is why I’m giving you a second chance that I might not usually give—”

  I’m too bewildered by what’s happening to quite understand his threat. I try to ping his socials, to find out his name, but his profile display is nothing more than a grinning pig’s head with a lolling tongue that repeatedly speaks the word Mook in a Porky Pig singsong.

  “Are you the one who’s deleting her?” I ask.

  “I think I understand your motivation here,” he says. “You’re acting here because you’ve had some trouble with the legal system and you’re looking for a clean record, some gainful employment. On top of that, you’re emotionally compromised because of this business with your wife. I pity you, actually. I’m not unfair, Dominic, but I have an agreement in place that I need to honor above all my other considerations. Nevertheless, I think we can come to an understanding. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  “Quit looking for this woman you know as Albion. Stop immediately. Find other ways to make a living. Terminate your employment with Waverly, let this go. Otherwise, I’ll take action against you—”

  “What action?”

  “Look at this young woman—Peyton Hannover, this bright young thing,” he says, guiding my attention to Peyton as she lifts her hair for Zhou to fit her for the corset top of the gown. In an instant, Peyton’s image corrupts and her body scrambles, her mouth ruptures outward, her teeth and gums splayed in flowering wet rows that sink through her neck to her chest, her face sinks, nipple-eyed, her body hunches, patches of blonde hair sprout in tufts, her genitals open and spill like water to the floor. A layer of dissonance—a spoiled body. I try to withstand this, to look at Peyton, to prove Mook’s threats are meaningless, but I can’t endure. I flinch away.

  Mook says, “Imagine your wife—”

  “Oh God,” I say, his words pounding me like a hammer striking meat. “Please don’t do that. Please—”

  “It’s okay to look,” he says, and when I look again, Peyton’s been deleted, the space she occupied replaced by a smudge, like Vaseline swiped over the air.

  “There’s a program I have access to called the Reissner-Nordström worm—do you know what that is?”

  “No—”

  “It’s a modified Facecrawler,” he says. “In the time it takes your heart to beat, I can desecrate every memory, every instance of your wife in this City. I can corrupt your presence here so that not even your iLux can access the moments you cherish with your wife. I run the worm, and she’s gone. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “Yes. I understand—”

  “Ask yourself: Is losing your wife a second time worth your loyalty to Waverly? I’m guessing not—”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’re not listening,” he says. “If I perceive that you haven’t let this matter with Albion drop we will take action against you. I will, Mr. Blaxton. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “I’m through. Through—”

  “I think you know your way out,” he says.

  Vertigo as I’m shoved from this location, the Archive a blur but re-forming—I’m in the parking lot, looking up to Albion’s lit studio windows. The snow’s sticking now, falling in soft flakes that crunch beneath my footfalls as I run, squalls kicking up that blow blinding veils of snow from the branches of pines. Home—home to Room 208, the Georgian. I take off my wet clothes in the foyer. I find her asleep and crawl into bed beside her. Theresa. I put my arm around her and press close, feeling the simulated warmth of her body, the simulated ri
se and fall of her chest, trying to hold her, to keep from losing what I’ve already lost.

  2, 1—

  Whenever you visit this place, there are others here—too many survivors in mourning to get a sense of what we actually used to be like here. Katz Plaza, it used to be called—centered by a Louise Bourgeois fountain and benches shaped like laconic, watchful eyes. We come here to view the end. We stand like we’re in a gallery, ringing the plaza. We know it will happen at thirty-seven past the hour, and as the time nears we watch for him—there, the truck pulling up on 7th, the man climbing down from the cab holding a steel suitcase. Some of us begin to cry, but most of us have seen this before, many times before. We can’t stop him, we can’t rewrite history even as we pass through it, so we simply watch: the man kneeling in the center of the plaza, raising his arms in some sort of prayer. Some of us think we hear the name Allah. We watch the man unlatch his suitcase. The man pauses, and we wonder, millions of us have wondered if in that pause he was reconsidering, if he might have turned back. We watch as the man opens the suitcase. Light—

  —

  She loved walking here. On Walnut Street, in Shadyside. She loved window-shopping here—the Apple Store, Williams-Sonoma, Kawaii, e.b. Pepper—but her favorite place was an upscale general store called Kards Unlimited. Theresa died there—wearing blue jeans tucked into riding boots, an oatmeal-colored cardigan draped over her pregnant belly. I’ve stood with her outside of Kards Unlimited’s picture window as she sipped an iced mocha from Starbucks, looking at the T-shirts on display. My Other Ride Has a Flux Capacitor. Llamacorn. The Folding Chair Parking Authority. A Clockwork Orange. I’ve watched her many times looking at these shirts, and have come to believe that at the end, at the very moment the world ended for her, she was reading a Mr. Rogers T-shirt, It’s a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood. The sky burns. Cameras record. Theresa squints. Her hair catches fire at the tips, then flashes like a diadem across her head. She dies too quickly, I believe, to have felt any pain. I’d always assumed that our child simply perished in the womb, but now Mook’s taunt thorns in my mind, and as I watch Theresa cocooned in fire, I imagine that our child may have known, may have kicked and squirmed as her mother died around her, may have understood and suffered.