Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  Simka finds another drawing and spreads it open on the table. The drawing’s a reimagining of a Rossetti, of a woman brushing her crimson hair.

  “Albion—”

  “Reynolds struggled with violence and depression,” says Simka. “Survivor’s guilt, after Pittsburgh. He was addicted to pornography, hard-core stuff. Violent. He and his therapist talked about this problem extensively. The treatments ended abruptly—the final report says that Timothy called his therapist from the hospital. He says he was born again—”

  “He tore out his own Adware,” I tell him. “He told me all about it—”

  “Almost killed himself,” says Simka.

  Simka lets me leaf through the other drawings in the file, there are several here—all extraordinarily realistic, made with colored pencils or charcoal. Simka paces his shop, cleaning up odds and ends, keeping his hands busy, obviously troubled that he’s breaching his oath of patient privacy. Timothy’s old doctor had arranged these drawings in groups: several of the Christ House, several of Albion. The third group grows startlingly brutal. A woman chained by her wrists in a dungeon. Two women handcuffed in bed. A woman drowning in what looks like bog water, surrounded by swamp grass. Another of a woman buried in river mud.

  “Jesus—”

  It’s her, oh Christ, it’s her—

  “What is it?” asks Simka.

  Nine Mile Run drawn accurately. A woman’s body half buried in river mud, abandoned down a steep slope from the jogging path that worms through the park. The river’s drawn in like a black ribbon. Staring at this drawing, the scene recurs to me—kneeling in the cold mud, seeing the white flesh and the grime-darkened hair. Hard rain must have rinsed away the shallow burial, or the river rose, exposing her body—tugged by currents, the face of the woman I’ve been tracking, drawn here.

  “This is Hannah Massey,” I tell him. “This is the crime scene. This is the body, it—”

  “Are you sure?” asks Simka. “Are you absolutely sure? I’ll call the police—”

  “No, no, that’s not the best for this,” I tell him. “I’ll get in touch with Kucenic. There are protocols to follow for something like this. Jesus. The regular police don’t care about crimes preserved in the City-Archive, and will only muck it up. Kucenic will know what to do—”

  I tell Simka I need to think. He says he’s planning on staying up, combing through the minutiae of Timothy’s files to see what else he can uncover, if he can find any information that can help me. Nearing one in the morning, we return to the house through his wife’s garden. Simka makes up the guest bedroom for me, two comforters, in case I get cold.

  “It’s a drafty house,” he says. “We can talk more in the morning—”

  I climb into bed, the cooling grip of crisp sheets. My mind races. Staring into darkness, listening to the unfamiliar pops of the settling house. Autoconnect to Norwegianwood, Simka’s Wi-Fi. Thinking—

  Maybe Waverly never intended me to find Albion—

  Maybe there is no Albion, maybe there never was—

  Albion the name of Waverly’s sailboat, nothing more—

  Waverly and Timothy, father and son, bringing me into the fold because I found the body of Hannah Massey. Maybe they brought me in because they want to keep me under tabs, figure out how much I know, what to do with me—

  Tangle me up in the fiction of Albion, keep me distracted—

  A sickening certainty of comprehension, but some things don’t click: Albion exists, of course she does, because Timothy drew these pictures of her for his old doctor, years ago. And why would Waverly, a man like Waverly, need to go through all the bother of having me search for Albion just so he can keep tabs on me? He could hire someone to follow me, or . . . or something could be arranged—I wouldn’t be missed for long. Quivering with the thought, the panic in my nerves breaking down my disbelief—I don’t believe Waverly will have me killed, or Timothy, or try not to believe, but those drawings of women’s bodies are like confessions and the possibility of death grows around me like ice.

  I ping Kucenic that I need to see him. Messages wait from Timothy in my in-box, vague warnings about my treatment—he seems to know I’m with Simka right now. Kucenic doesn’t respond so I ping him again.

  Two a.m. I register for a chat session at the World News Catalog’s twenty-four-hour reference desk. An e-librarian joins me, some AI interface with a Hello Kitty avatar.

  How may I help you?

  I request a search in the hard archive of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for the name Timothy Billingsley—the results are immediate. Timothy’s face. Thinner years ago, with a scruffy beard hiding his thin lips, but the eyes are his. I read. Domestic disturbances, arrests. I ask the AI to run a face match without limiting the news source and the bot returns hits from the Times-Picayune—under the name Timothy Filt, arrested for the murder of his wife, a woman named Rhonda Jackson from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was found in her apartment, her head caved in from the strike of an aluminum baseball bat. He’d been pulled over for a broken taillight and connected with the crime. Blood in the car, a DNA match. Scheduled for the death sentence but never executed—political influence and an eventual pardon from the governor of Louisiana.

  Filt became Billingsley. He surfaces in Georgia on another domestic violence report, now married to a woman named Lydia Holland. Lydia—she’s the woman Timothy told me about, the woman he’d cheated on, his wife during the end. They lived in Pittsburgh but must have moved there from Georgia—Timothy told me he and his wife were traveling through the South when Pittsburgh ended. I request a search for the name “Lydia Billingsley.” Only one hit—as a volunteer at a Rotary pancake breakfast in Greensburg, PA. Timothy told me that he and his wife had divorced, so I search for her maiden name, “Lydia Holland”—the name appears in the Times-Picayune in the February issue, four months after the end of Pittsburgh. Her body was found bound and gagged, submerged in the Honey Island Swamp. A fisherman found her, didn’t know what he’d found at first. Her face was cut up and bloated in the water, a slash across the neck so deep she was nearly decapitated. Her hands had been removed.

  A message hits my in-box and the chime in Simka’s silent guest room startles me from bed. I sit up, my account glowing in the darkness. From someone named Vivian Knightley, with the subject line: Aubade. I open it—You wanted to read my poetry, so here’s something. I hope you aren’t full of shit that you’re interested because I don’t show these to everyone. Love, Twigs—

  She’s sent me a manuscript, the length of a chapbook—thirty pages or so. The aubade that starts the collection is just one line:

  I reached for you this morning but you were gone.

  —

  I can’t stay here. I schedule a cab and spend the next fifteen minutes leaning over the guest room toilet, staring at my reflection in the water, concentrating to hold down the vomit my nerves are sputtering up. Did Timothy kill Hannah, I wonder, or did he just know where she was discarded? The house is silent—Simka must have finally gone to sleep. I move out to Simka’s front stoop in the numbing early morning chill, watching my breath billow out, shaking my legs to keep warm. When the cab pulls up, I hurry over so the driver won’t honk and pierce the predawn skin of silence. I tell the driver Kucenic’s address. I think of Hannah’s body filthy from silt. I think of Albion—but thinking of Albion is like staring at something for so long that it begins to disappear.

  2, 4—

  Kucenic lives on G, just off Barracks Row on 8th, in a Federalist row house that cost him a couple million, easy, despite the street parking and the odd stone-paved patch that serves as his front lawn. Dawn’s breaking, but the streetlights are still on.

  I press the doorbell and chimes ring through the quiet house. “Kucenic?” I pound on the door. “It’s Dominic—”

  His Explorer’s parked out front, one tire on the curb. Although the curtain
s are drawn, I look through a slit and find his usual living room mess from the night before: Chinese takeout boxes, half-finished two liters of Mountain Dew—Kucenic’s typical cuisine for late nights of coding.

  “Kucenic, open up. It’s Dominic. Kucenic—”

  The whispering hum of accumulating traffic circulates on nearby, busier streets.

  “Kucenic, open up the goddamn door—”

  I hear him shuffling around inside, now. The dead bolts fall away and Kucenic opens up. He’s wearing what he must have worn since yesterday, blue jeans and wrinkled flannel, his cigarette-ash hair a wild puff of bed head. His thumb and forefinger smooth his beard from his lips—a nervous tic he has when he’s thinking, when he’s not quite sure how to respond to a pointed question.

  “Dominic,” he says.

  “I’ve turned off my connection—”

  “Come in. Come on in. I’ll make us some coffee—”

  The Kucenic Group operates from this house—meetings in the living room, staffers lounging on the couches or recliners, eating cheese curls and Coke while Kucenic writes on the whiteboard. I’ve actually never been here without the rest of the group—the place is strangely empty, the only real sound the click and hum of servers lining the front hallway, caged in cherry-red storage lockers. Kucenic leads to the kitchen, struggling with a pronounced limp.

  “Coffee,” he says, and the coffeepot purrs to life. “Do you want any of this pecan roll?”

  “Tell me about #14502,” I tell him. “Hannah Massey, that State Farm insurance dispute I was working on when you let me go. Who’s working it now?”

  “No one’s working it,” says Kucenic. “That case doesn’t exist anymore—”

  “Bullshit,” I tell him.

  “Check with State Farm if you have to,” he says. “Their bid skips from 14501 to 503—”

  “You can’t just fucking ignore this,” I tell him. “That girl was murdered, you son of a bitch. When you fired me, I trusted you to follow through with her. I fucking trusted you. She deserves better than this—”

  “Dominic, I have a lot to lose,” he says, diminished, cowed, his usually elfin eyes now like a coward’s pleading eyes. He turns from me, cuts a slice of the pecan roll, heats it in the microwave.

  “You tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I tell him.

  We eat at the meeting table, the paperwork of open cases spread haphazardly around the room, notes in red marker on the whiteboard—historical notes about Pittsburgh, timelines. Working on the Union Trust building collapse, it looks like, framed animated printouts of the building on sheets of e-paper are spread across the table.

  “What did Waverly tell you when he first asked about me?”

  “You mentioned that name earlier. You pinged me, said you’d met with a man named Waverly. You said there was a hard sell. I never met with anyone by that name—”

  “Theodore Waverly—”

  “Jesus, Dominic, do you know who that is?”

  “He said he talked with you, interviewed you as a reference check. He said you told him about my drug habits, my work habits. He said he was checking background to hire me for a freelance job—”

  “Dominic, I never met him—”

  “Tell me what you know about Hannah Massey—”

  “Only what you’d presented to me. When you found her body in the Archive, I reported the case to State Farm and the FBI. An agent from the field office contacted me, said they’d been in touch with State Farm—I’ve worked with this agent before, many times. I explained we were still researching the case as part of a claim, but that we’d present any relevant information to them. This is all strictly paperwork for the FBI, low priority—a bot actually does the work for them, it’s just a formality. No one expects the FBI to follow up or bring charges to anyone over something in the Pittsburgh City-Archive. This kind of interaction is just a checklist we go through—”

  “So what’s different about her case?”

  “This was shortly after your—incident,” he says. “You had that meltdown in Dupont Circle and I had to let you go. You were a repeat offender and this was a felony, I had to. I reported your termination to the Employee Assistance Program and was told that you would be taken care of, that your case would be handled by the Correctional Health Board—”

  Kucenic’s tearing a napkin into confetti. He rubs his knee and so I ask him to tell me about his limp.

  “Dominic, you’re in some serious trouble—we both are. These cops showed up shortly after I terminated you—they just knocked on my door one night, around eight or eight thirty, told me that they had to talk to me about you,” he says. “There were three of them, District soldiers—I never saw their faces. Those black masks, the armor. Their badges were blacked out so I couldn’t ping their profiles or badge numbers. I figured they wanted to talk to me about your arrest, maybe your background, have me sign some more paperwork—”

  “But they wanted to know about Hannah Massey—”

  “They wanted to know everything about our involvement with that case,” says Kucenic. “Who researched her? Who saw the files? How you found the body, where you were looking, why you were looking there, what you were working on. They took all the files related to that case, corrupted my copies with a worm. They wanted to know everything about you. Were you a good worker, how involved were you with the firm, everything—”

  “And you told them?”

  “I told them what they wanted to know, of course I did, but they knew everything already, Dominic. They made it clear to me that case #14502 no longer existed—that it would be erased, and that I shouldn’t work on anything even remotely associated with it, that I would be monetarily compensated for the loss of workload. They told me they’d take care of communicating with State Farm, that no questions would be asked. They said they appreciated my cooperation, and that if I continued to cooperate I would be safe. That’s what they said, that I would ‘be safe.’ They said that you might try to contact me, but that I was not to respond—”

  “You’re with me now,” I tell him.

  “I’m going to report this the moment you leave,” he says. “I’m going to call the District police and tell them that you’ve been here—what else can I do? You just showed up—”

  “Did they hurt you? I asked about your leg—”

  “A parting gift,” says Kucenic. “I shook their hands, told them I would cooperate. I followed them to the door—and that’s when one of them turned back to me. He pulled his nightstick and punched me with it, here in my chest. The hit knocked me over, and the man struck me twice in the knee—”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  “It’s all right, Dominic,” he says. “Just—you don’t know what you’re involved in. Just do what they want you to do, whatever they tell you. Just get clear of this thing—”

  2, 5—

  I want to see Hannah again—

  Paths through Nine Mile Run—someone documented all this and re-created it here, every footpath and every bridge over every muddy creek, the trees and the undersides of leaves. Plenty of JSTOR footage fills in the gaps where people never filmed, acres of this area important to environmental scientists studying the long-term effects of brownfields. Theresa and I walked here in autumn, late autumn arcing toward winter, just a few weeks following our miscarriage. We never fought, like some couples we knew, some of our friends slipping into skirmishes following a few drinks or harried days of work. We only had a few significant fights in all the years we knew each other, most of them about nothing, nothing at all, but I hurt her once here in these woods and I’m unable to walk here now without reliving the pain I caused her. Theresa loved this park—the other city parks were beautiful, but too manicured for joggers and families with strollers. Nine Mile Run remained untended in spots, spots where she could wander off-trail and find flowers growing in patches of su
nlight. Despite the countless other strolls we’d taken through these paths, my memories wander back to this single afternoon and the shame of hurting her. Layering, the trickle of nearby water. Layering, birdsong. Layering, cool shade and the smell of soil. Wind in the leaves. I remember Theresa wearing a cardigan the color of tree bark, her hair the color of the golden leaves dying on their boughs. We’re holding hands, her fingers cold. She was distracted, looking over her shoulder into the woods and the shadows gathering there.

  “Maybe—I don’t know, maybe there’s a silver lining to losing her,” I remember saying. “Maybe we’re better off without having kids. All the hassle—”

  She slumps instead of screams, collapsing to the trail like her lungs have been pulled from her.

  “I’m sorry,” I think I remember saying, stammering something, trying to comfort her but failing. I still don’t know why I said those words, and every time I think of them my chest tightens in nauseous self-recrimination. A jogger runs past without stopping and I wait until he’s long past and disappeared from view before speaking again. “Are you all right?” I ask her.

  She stays on her knees, her head bowed into her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” until the light fails and the damp seeps like dead fingers through her clothes and she lets me help her to her feet and walk with her.

  We walk here now, in patches of late afternoon sun, to the creek to watch the dying light lie like scattered diamonds on the surface of the water. We were alone that evening, coming to terms with our loss, with a miscarriage just like the thousands of other miscarriages that occur every day, every year, but ours so unlike the others because it was our daughter, our child that never was.