Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “Theresa,” I say, and Zhou turns to me like she recognizes that name.

  “Where did you go?” she says, speaking words I remember Theresa speaking.

  “Picked up some milk so we can have cereal tomorrow—”

  Theresa’s things are still here. Her container gardens on the windowsills. Framed Audubon prints of mourning doves and flamingos. The book she was reading is facedown on the coffee table—Zoya, Danielle Steel.

  “Theresa—”

  “Come to bed,” she says.

  I open the refrigerator door to put away the milk and squint into the harsh white light. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness when I come back to bed and for a moment I see Zhou as Theresa, Theresa’s body lit by the moonlight, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, Zhou’s body returns and Zhou’s face fades in. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, trying to remember Theresa here, trying to force my memory of Theresa back into this place. Zhou sleeps with me just like Theresa would have slept with me, her body nestled into mine, her legs crossed over mine.

  “Theresa,” I say, but Zhou answers, “Yes—”

  I wake.

  Gavril’s moved me to the bathroom, stretched me out in the tub, propped my head up with pillows. Cottony, my mouth—I’ve vomited down the front of my clothes. Face aching like someone’s punched me. I stand—shaky. He’s left a clean T-shirt for me, a yellow jersey—Washington Redskins, est. 1937. iLux lights to the jersey augs and Agatha, the Redskins cheerleader who implanted my iLux, flashes in the bathroom with me, a cheer routine from her vids, spandex high kicks disappearing through the bathroom ceiling. “Off, off,” I tell it, wincing at the stadium lights and reverbed crowd noise. She flickers out. Splitting goddamn headache. I splash water in my face. Whispers of bruises have formed under my eyes and blood’s dried on my nostrils. The apartment’s emptied out, Gavril’s party paused for the time being. Gavril’s in the living room, watching soccer. He turns when he hears me.

  “Christ,” he says. “Šípková Ruženka, I thought you were going to fucking die—”

  “I didn’t—”

  I sit with him, head pounding but dull. I grab a handful of Fritos from the bowl but just hold them, stomach flopping at the thought of actually eating one.

  “You started screaming in the kitchen—the girls got scared,” he says. “You were, like, slamming your face against the wall. Freaking the fuck out. Fucking blood everywhere—”

  “Gavril, I’m all right—”

  “I voiced your doctor friend, Simka—Once you started snapping out of it, I voiced back and told him not to bother coming and so he cussed me out for a half hour because he says I enable you. He still wants to take a look at you, but I never told him where I live—”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your place so quiet—”

  “A few girls are coming around for work a little later,” he says. “Crash here as long as you want. I don’t think you should terrorize the streets in the shape you’re in—”

  “I’ll just collect my head a bit,” I tell him. Gavril gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge and hands them to me, telling me to drink both. Even the thought of swallowing Gatorade is enough to make me gag—but I sip and let the liquid slip over my tongue.

  “Drink up,” he says. “Hydration. I mean it, brother—”

  “Gavril, I have some things I need to tell you—”

  “Say anything—”

  “That job for Waverly’s gone sour,” I tell him. “The woman I was tracking. Everything’s fucked up—”

  I tell him about Mook, about the Christ House in Pittsburgh where I followed Timothy and Hannah Massey. I tell him about Timothy’s drawings of dead women and the cops that assaulted Kucenic. I tell him that they’ve taken Theresa from me.

  He’s stunned by everything I’m mixed up in. He rubs both hands over his bristly head and the shag of his beard stubble, pacing the room.

  “You’re in serious shit,” he says.

  “Listen to me, Gavril, this is important: I’ve put together a collection of evidence linking Dr. Timothy Reynolds to the death of Hannah Massey. If anything happens to me, you need to get it out to the streams—”

  We set up an anonymous drop box using faked contacts, encrypt it with a mirror site, share the password—easy to trace documents I put into the drop box, but impossible to trace who retrieves them. I copy the files about Hannah’s murder. Gavril pulls a bottle of Sorokin vodka from the freezer and pours himself a glass. He offers some for me and laughs when I recoil at the idea of liquor.

  “Sorokin will resurrect you, no matter how dead you feel,” he says.

  “I should be dead already,” I tell him. “They’re going to fucking kill me, Gavril, because I found that fucking body but it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fucking fault—”

  “You won’t die,” he says, “we can figure this out, figure out what to do—”

  “I already know what to do. I need to recover Theresa so she can live on in the Archive. I need to help Hannah—”

  My Adware’s a different region code than the soccer broadcast on Gavril’s Praha stream, so the play-by-play’s like excited gibberish. He finishes the first glass of vodka before pouring himself a second.

  “Dominic, you know I love you,” he says, “but you piss me off sometimes. You’re thinking about that dead girl, thinking about your wife. You’re obsessed, Dominic. You’ve always been fucking obsessed with grief. Let them go, Domi. Let them go, steer clear of this. We’ll lay low until these people forget about you—”

  “I can’t just let her disappear—”

  “Is that all you can fucking think of right now? That’s what all this shit boils down to?” Gavril’s eyes swim with a sudden buzz from slugging down his vodka. “Theresa’s dead, but you have a life to live. I’m here for you. You have a family. We have lives to live, with you—”

  “I know,” I tell him. “I know—”

  “No, you don’t fucking know,” he says. I’ve never seen him quite like this, fraying at the edges. He pours himself more Sorokin and his hand shakes, splashing vodka on the table. “You almost fucking died in my kitchen,” he says. “From a fucking overdose. And now you fucking tell me you’re mixed up in this bullshit? What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”

  “That’s enough,” I tell him.

  “And now you’re dragging me into it,” he says. “Giving me files about a dead girl that might get me killed and all this fucking means for you is that you can’t mope about your dead fucking wife or some dead fucking girl you don’t even know—”

  “Fuck you—”

  “No, fuck you, Dominic. Fuck you. That shit was ten years ago. Enough. Open your fucking eyes. You can work for me, you know that. Anytime you want, I’ll set you up with a plum job, working with beautiful women all day, every day. But what do you do? Get involved with these fucking people because they promise they’ll let you live in the fucking past—”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I tell him.

  “Go to the fucking cops,” he says. “It’s not more complicated—”

  “I already told you why I can’t go to the cops. I told you what those cops did to Kucenic—”

  “All the cops? They’re working with all the fucking cops?”

  “Gav—”

  He grabs me by the shirt and I hear fabric rip, setting off all the jersey’s augs—the Redskins cheer squad splays through the room like a crimson and yellow Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of legs and breasts and smiling teeth and flowing hair and shimmering golden pom-poms.

  “I don’t want anything to fucking happen to you,” he screams.

  “At least give me a different shirt before you kick my ass—”

  “Shit,” says Gav, laughing.

  He gives me a cardigan that covers up the jersey augs. He tells me h
e knows people who can hit the streams with my evidence if it comes to that, people in the tabloids who trade in true crime and the gruesome deaths of young women, but we both know this gambit of threatening to go public with the scant evidence we have is only short-term protection, that it escalates the situation rather than tamps it down.

  “You need to find Mook,” says Gavril.

  “Fuck him. Mook took Theresa from me—”

  “Think rationally,” says Gavril. “Think: from everything you’ve told me, he’s not working with Timothy or Waverly. He might know how to protect you, how to hide from them—or at least he might have a few ideas to fuck them over. ‘I know hate and ice is great,’ or something like that—whatever Frost said. Right? Right?”

  “That’s right,” I tell him.

  “If you can track him down—what’s the word—it’s, um, rošáda, um, in chess—”

  iLux catching up, the translation apps presenting options: “‘Castling,’” I tell him.

  “That’s right,” he says. “Better attack options through defensive movement. Castling—”

  “And if I find Mook, I can also get Theresa back—”

  Gavril cracks his knuckles, collects himself with a deep breath. “Maybe that, too,” he says.

  Gavril asks for details about what I’ve told him—he wants me to rehash everything for him. He wants to know about Zhou. He asks me whether Zhou is always the same when I encounter her, or if she’s different each time. Different hairstyles, different clothes? He wants to know if I’m able to add up all the hours I’ve experienced with her, specifically “unique hours,” he calls them, where she does or says things differently from the last time I’d encountered her—different gestures, different scenes.

  “I can’t even guess,” I tell him. “She’s always different. She’s not just a cardboard stand-in, if that’s what you’re asking—”

  “Quick scenes?” he asks.

  “Hundreds of hours, but I’ve already tried tracking her. There’s nothing in the exception reports—”

  “She’s a stream girl,” says Gavril. “Either a model or someone’s program. If we can find out who she is, we can track Zhou to Mook—”

  “I already ran a Facecrawler on Zhou and I’m telling you there’s nothing—or, there’s really too much. Someone ghosted her, probably Mook—”

  “I don’t know what that means—”

  “Someone, let’s say Mook, compromised the data points that facial recognition software would use to match her face to other images of her face. Made the sign point to an incorrect referent. Mook basically made her invisible to third-party software. No exact matches so Facecrawler starts pulling results for approximate facial matches, Asian women—billions of hits. I guess I could just start sifting through the results—”

  “No, no—you don’t understand what I’m telling you,” says Gavril. “This woman, Zhou, is the kind of woman I work with all the time. She’s either a fully realized simulation or she’s an actress. If she’s a sim, think of all the hours to program her—not just what she looks like but all those little unique things she does. If she’s an actress, think of the hours to film her. My guess is that she’s an actress—but either way, a professional’s involved. This bullshit you’re caught up in is someone’s full-time job, even if it’s under the table. It won’t be impossible to track her down. Show her to me—”

  I show him. He downloads Three Rivers Net and the City-Archive app and we synch, Gavril’s soccer match receding to a point of light as western Pennsylvania coalesces and we plunge through the mountainside into the tunnel. He tells me that he’s dreamt about this tunnel, this entranceway into Pittsburgh from the airport, that it reminds him of winter flights and snow-covered midnights, of childhood Christmases spent far from home visiting his cousin and aunts and uncles in America. I want to ask him what he remembers about those Christmases at my grandmother’s house, the midnight masses at Prince of Peace, the Pittsburgh Slovak Folk Ensemble dancing in the church basement, girls in white knee-highs and burgundy dresses, their hair in braids, their thighs flashing. Gav and I couldn’t understand a word each other was saying back then, but we didn’t need words—all we needed to know about each other was that we both wanted to melt away in those beautiful girls but were both too shy to talk with them. I want to ask him if he remembers his first year visiting, when we each unwrapped Optimus Prime, huddled together beneath my grandma’s dinner table, but the tunnel ends and the City unfolds around us, the streets and rivers and bridges like a dazzling crosshatch of light.

  I take him home.

  The paisley carpet, the gauzy curtains at the far end of the apartment hallway. An Exit light flickers above the fire doors. Room 208. Gavril had met Theresa, only once—we vacationed in Prague for a week with Gavril as our guide. I expect him to seem dazed or dismayed when I unlock the apartment door and find Zhou greeting us instead of Theresa, but Gavril only looks her over and says, “Her, right?”

  Odd seeing him here, in my living room. Gavril pulls Zhou aside and asks her to take a seat on the couch. She’s wearing my wife’s plaid pajama pants and Donora T-shirt and I feel protective of her, in a way, but as she takes a seat, doing what Gavril asks her to do, the environment snaps from the gauzy sentimentality of my personal memories—with Gavril here, I can see the apartment as a built environment, an illusion, nothing more.

  “Serial number?” he says, but Zhou looks at me and asks, “Who is this man?”

  Gavril lifts Zhou’s T-shirt above her abdomen and checks a spot on the underside of her right breast, checking her like a doctor might check for lumps. He lets her T-shirt fall and touches her near her collarbone.

  “What’s your serial number?” he asks again and Zhou says, “Please—”

  “A woman, not a sim,” says Gavril. “Sims are registered, trademarked. Even pirated sims have telltale signs of the engines they’ve cribbed—little codes or abraded markings beneath the breast area where the serial numbers are required to go, or on the collarbone—up here. There’s nothing like that on Zhou—”

  “So she doesn’t have markings—”

  “The people who create sims, the good ones, spend more of their budgets outthinking software pirates than they do in creating the sims in the first place,” he says. “It’s difficult to get rid of a bar code—”

  “There are workarounds. Or custom—”

  “Maybe . . . but do you realize how much fucking money it would take to create a sim this lifelike running on a custom engine?” he says. “Not only the work involved but the red tape, the laws. We’re talking megacorporation money, or state-sponsored money, if even then—but it’s not just a question of money. Look at Zhou—look at how she interacts with the environment, with us. She’s so perfect—so realistic. No one creates stuff this realistic, that’s why human models still have work—”

  “Waverly has significant resources, maybe Mook does, too—”

  “You aren’t listening,” says Gavril.

  “We’re assuming Mook is the one inserting Zhou into the Archive, but it might be Waverly,” I tell him. “Waverly could have access to a lifelike, custom sim if he needed one—”

  “I know who Waverly is, and he’s rich as fuck, but let me give you some context. A few years ago I was brought in as a consultant for PepsiCo after they’d fucked up their marketing—their idea was this whole virtual worlds component to their branding, so you could drink a Pepsi and enter this PepsiLand of the mind. They wanted the place populated with gorgeous women, of course, so they hired programmers to create sims. They wanted women created from scratch—they thought it would give them more control, more branding opportunities. The campaign was a disaster, though—we’re talking a marketing directive from a major corporation with a team of top-flight programmers and all the women they created looked like—like gum. Fake. They brought me in and the first thing I did was recommend they s
crap the sims and vid real women but the suits wouldn’t let go of their brainchild so they stuck to their guns and the whole thing crumbled. Look at Zhou, though. She’s perfect—there’s nothing fake about her. Your Zhou’s a model or an actress working somewhere, you can be sure of that. Let me see more of her—”

  At the Spice Island Tea House, Zhou’s revealing that the doctor ran an advanced amino test and told her we’re going to have a daughter. Gavril checks the tags of her clothes. “Bullshit H&M,” he announces, noting what she’s wearing and requesting a catalog match through the Adware. Coming home from Uni-Mart, in the sweltering night when Theresa and I sat in the wind of the box fans, Gavril looks over Zhou’s clothing, and in Albion’s apartment Gavril watches Zhou in her loop, infinitely preparing for her party, adjusting her earring as she crosses the room. Gavril follows her from the shower to the bedroom, observing her as she dresses and undresses.

  “Something called Dollhouse Bettie,” he says, after inspecting the lace of her lingerie.

  He examines her mantis-green dress, first checking for a tag, then tapping into the copyright and Consumer Protection Act information, strings of serial numbers he seems able to read.

  “House of Fetherston,” he says, after helping Zhou zip up the back of her dress, then helping her undress as the loop repeats. “Look here, at the stitching. And this embroidery around the hem. That’s fucking trademarked—”

  Gavril’s seen enough. I take him to the 61C Café in Squirrel Hill, an old haunt, finding a table in the courtyard on a summer night, the courtyard edged with sunflowers, strings of lights suspended above us. Gavril multitasks a patch in the Archive so he can stream the end of his soccer match, Dukla Praha scoring just as we’re settling in, making this one a rout. He tells me he knows people who work with House of Fetherston, that he’s already seen their newest collection but doesn’t recognize Zhou’s particular pieces. He wonders if they’re prototypes or scrapped designs, or simply haven’t been released yet.