Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “I shouldn’t be long—”

  There’s a kiosk in the lobby, but no attendant and everything’s off-line anyway. A bank of elevators with scratched metal doors and buttons with broken lights. I don’t really know what I’m doing here, I don’t really have a plan—I’m nervous . . . nervous to see Mook—a bit manic, toe-tapping to Bruce Hornsby and the Range over the speakers, “Mandolin Rain.” I lean on the elevator wall and force myself to breathe, to breathe, to regain myself. He’ll recognize me, I realize, but I won’t recognize him—I’ve only seen his avatar, assuming the droopy-old-man bit is an avatar. What the hell was I thinking by coming here? I should have handled this differently. When the elevator doors slide open, I pause in the second-floor hallway, figuring out what I’ll say to him—but my mind’s gone blank. Tell him Kelly sent me here? Twin vases filled with fabric flowers arranged in front of a smudged mirror. I’m moving without quite realizing that I’m moving—first the wrong way, down the wrong hallway, the unit numbers increasing, so I swing the other way and count down until I find 2173, a corner suite. A white door with gold numbers. The door’s already inched open.

  “Hello?” I say, knocking, nudging it farther open. Odd odor from the room, rancid metallic. “Hello? I need to talk with you—”

  No answer, so I slip inside. The fetid metal stink’s dizzying, but it’s not the smell that overwhelms me—I scream when I see him, the dead man half flopped on the sofa, his toes dangling to the carpet, blood on the ceiling and walls in sloppy looping arcs like someone’s sprayed the wall with blood from a hose. I fall. Backward, against a television and knock it from the stand. Screaming. Or I must have wanted to scream, but the stink of blood fills my mouth like a filmy coating when I scream so I choke it off. Mook—here he was, the legs in trousers, the head scalped, the face wearing a veil of blood, the crown of his hair a few feet away on one of the throw pillows as if he’d sat up from a nap and left it there. My Adware’s flashing a red strobe, attempting to call 911 but I keep overriding the emergency settings, the software scanning nearby buildings for an AED, flashing directional vids for performing CPR, overlaying the dead body with bright white medical graphics, pointing out exactly where I should lay my hands and push. Chest compressions, breathing. Check for breath. I shut it off, shut everything off. I shut the door and set the chain and dead bolts and slump quivering to the carpet, thinking.

  Ping Kelly, the police? No, no—keep quiet. I’ve never seen a corpse before, not in reality, not like this. Ten or fifteen minutes or more before regaining some sense, before my breathing evens, even though my heart’s still pounding like a rabbit’s heart. This was his studio—this suite, every piece of furniture cleared out except a sofa and the television. There’s a kitchen, a bedroom off the main hall. The rest of the space is white, blood-spattered now, with an array of cameras that have been toppled over and broken apart. There’s a green screen setup and a white stage, the stage set with buckets and clotheslines and fabric that’s been dyed purple hanging to dry—my God, replacing the trace of Albion in Peyton’s apartment, that first trace I’d found. Opening the window, I feel like I’ll get drunk on the fresh air—I throw up on the balcony and spend another few minutes with dry heaves before I bring myself to look again at the body. Whoever did this had attacked his face—the face is zebra striped in blood and cuts, like he’d been hacked at with a flurry of crisscrossed razor blade swipes. The neck was gashed open and dug out, the head nearly decapitated. So much blood, Christ, so much blood, the comforters sopped like wet paper towels, the carpet squishy. His hands are cut off at the wrists. Sawed off, but the hands are still folded on his lap. Like Twiggy’s body—Timothy did this. I try to avoid the blood but it’s already on me—my pants, my shoes. The top of Mook’s head has been removed—the top of the skull’s been cut open and the brains scooped out. The brain is smeared across the armrest, at least I think this is the brain—the Adware gone. The eyes have been cut apart, the retinal lenses sliced out.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. The presence of mind to use the clean bath towels to wipe off as best I can, to wipe off the bottom of my shoes and my hands, and everything in the room I’ve touched, hoping the police, when they find the body, won’t be able to trace me here. Wiping down the walls, inadvertently smearing Mook’s blood. Just stop, just stop. I drop the towels in the tub. Rinse the blood I’ve already stepped in off the soles of my shoes and leave them near the door. The blood on the carpet seeps through my socks, sticky cold, but I keep my shoes off so I won’t leave bloody shoe prints through the halls when I leave. I’ve been here almost twenty minutes already—too long. Concentrate, damn it. Theresa. I’m here to find Theresa or information about Hannah Massey, or Timothy, or Waverly. Information would have been in Mook’s Adware, if anywhere, but the Adware’s gone. I try the bedroom. Clothes in the bureau, a desk scattered with papers and a computer but the computer’s been smashed open and gutted. I look over the papers—bills, drawings, things I can’t understand. There’s nothing I can find here about Theresa or Hannah Massey, nothing about Timothy or Waverly, nothing. I’m shaking—I need to get out of here. Back in the main room I fear Mook’s body might breathe and stand up on its own. I stare at it almost willing the dead to stay dead. There’s nothing here, nothing.

  That’s not quite true—

  A series of framed watercolors hangs over the sofa—six of them, of uniform size and barnwood framing, on cream paper, maybe two feet on a side. The paintings are finely drafted but raw, a mixture of ink, charcoal and watercolor, all depicting facets of the same house—the house down in Greenfield with the words of Christ painted on the broad side. The house of Waverly’s wife, of Timothy. Thinking of Timothy’s memory maps that Simka showed me, the draftsmanship—are these paintings Timothy’s? No, the style’s too different. The artwork emits despair and ruin, each drawing a skewed, cubist detail of the architecture—of a wrecked cornice, a sagging overhang, a window frame without a window, a rotting cellar door. The whitewash words of Christ fold in on themselves in the collapse, unreadable if I didn’t already know what they said: Except a man be born again. These are drawings of a ghost, made by a ghost. I push the couch with Mook’s body a few feet from the wall so I can sidle near and pull down the paintings. Too heavy to carry a stack of six framed pieces, so I slide the artwork from the frames, hands shaking, smudging bloody thumbprints on the first two pieces until I’m more careful and pull the rest out clean. I roll the pieces together and tuck the tube into my suit jacket. Fingerprints on the framing glass? I wipe them down and leave the frames in the tub with the bloody towels. I put on my shoes, feeling Mook’s blood on my feet like I’ve been walking on water.

  The AutoCab’s where I asked it to stay and I tell it to drive, suffering another bout of dry heaves, the image of the man’s body recurring.

  “Destination?”

  “Drive. Just drive—”

  “Destination?”

  It’s not a warm day but I’m sweating. The hovering flash billboards advertise luxury watches but the rubies in their faces look like spots of blood. “Shit.” I can’t think. “Just—take me back to my hotel, where you picked me up. I don’t know the address—”

  The AutoCab pulls from the building. I left the windows open—up there. Fuck, fuck. Thinking of ways they can track me—vomit on the balcony, shoe prints in the blood—the AutoCab’s route is saved, they can tell I was dropped off and picked up from the building if they check the AutoCab records. They must have security cameras. I must have left fingerprints, or hairs, or something—they’ll find those. Did I wipe off the window that I opened? Did I wipe off the handle I’d used to open it? No. Did I wipe off the door handle? No—No. I should ping the police, tell them everything. Ping Kelly. I’m innocent. Innocent in this, I should—

  “Drop me off over here—”

  A few blocks from my hotel. A Payless shoes—I buy a pair of Adidas for cheap, pay with a retinal scan. My old shoes and socks in
the Payless bag and thrown out in an alley dumpster. Think. It dawns on me: three District soldiers approached Kucenic, intimidated him. Three District soldiers stopped me at a checkpoint shortly after I quit Waverly—they downloaded something, I remember. Some quick thing I accepted. Fuck. There’s a Cricket Wireless storefront across the street—the place smells like marijuana smoke and Burger King. The clerk’s a few minutes slow to wander from the back room. He seems surprised to see me waiting at the counter.

  “I need you to tell me—how I can fix—I think there’s someone listening in on my thoughts, following me around through my Adware—”

  “Come into the back,” he says. “You’re either paranoid or hacked. Either way, happens all the time—”

  While the clerk’s running a malware scan, he cleans his tools with an alcohol-dipped cotton swab. He whistles as he applies the local anesthetic, tells me my brain’s loaded with spyware, tells me not to worry—he’ll take care of it. He cuts open my head. He digs out my receiver, replaces it. He tells me I might have some performance issues because the Cricket parts are Euro imports, nowhere near the quality of the Chinese iLux gear—but the iLux processors will still work and without the malware everything will speed up anyway. I switch connection plans, picking up a Cricket pay-as-I-go.

  “You’re a new man,” he tells me, bandaging my head. He writes out a prescription for medicinal cannabis for the postanesthetic pain. “Brand-new—”

  A quick trip to Walgreen’s for Tylenol and Advil and a pack of THC cigarettes. At the hotel I shower twice, the water scalding my fresh scalp wounds. I ball up my bloody clothes in the paper bag from City Lights and pitch it in a dumpster outside. The Cricket clerk’s done a shitty job and when the anesthetic starts wearing off my skull feels like a plague of fire ants—I check beneath the bandage and my scalp’s puckered with his careless incisions. Fuck, it burns. Swallow the pills and light up and start to numb—numb for hours as I watch TV, waiting for the police to charge in, thinking they might do it like cops in the streams, with a battering ram to splinter the door and SWAT agents rolling me to the ground, tasing me. Voter ID laws passed twenty years ago—I remember registering my fingerprints and DNA with the government when I renewed my voter registration card. Was it constitutional for the police to check the voter ID rolls without cause? I think there might have been a court case—

  Television’s no good, so I pay for sat-connect to lose myself in the streams. Cricket appears in block green font, iLux in gold cursive, Holiday Inn in retro-1950s lettering. Shitty offers and add-ons before I reach the streams. Mook’s body whenever I close my eyes and a barren sickness at reliving his zebra-slashed face. Prime-time listings—Chance in Hell’s on tonight, the season finale. I hit the vending machine for a dinner of cherry Pop-Tarts, Ho Hos and Pepsi. Walking the hotel hallways, I feel the dead body’s somehow still present with me—like it’s a black spider I’ve seen slip from view behind the furniture but know is still there. It’s there, across the city, but it’s there. Gwendolyn Tucker on Chance in Hell, two-time CMA performer of the year, eighteenth birthday announced on the Grass on the Field blog. Eating the crusts of the Pop-Tarts first, then the middle, streaming Gwendolyn Tucker as she fucks her “Regular Joe,” a roofer from Tennessee. Recaps of how the Regular Joe entered the Chance in Hell lottery on a whim while buying hot dogs and coffee at an Exxon, of how he survived the initial Internet and text message voting, and the elimination challenges, Jesus Christ, I’ve dealt with images of the dead for so long I thought I’d be numb to something like this, but I’ve never seen a ruined corpse so close, never had to smell something like the tang of all that blood. Camera crews highlight the Regular Joe’s hometown, a hardscrabble cluster of trailers and ratty ranch houses, and show him working his job, hammering shingles with a crew of guys, rolling from house to house in his Ford F-250 Super Duty. A Republican, a good American. He’s married, his wife’s a spitfire brunette—Chance in Hell shows her laughing, uncomfortable. “I feel sick about it in a way,” she says, “knowing my husband will be having sex with Gwendolyn Tucker and all, but this is Chance in Hell so I’m real proud of him and Lord knows we could use the money and I’m such a huge fan of her anyway.” Everything’s confused when I try to sleep, Mook’s body and crime scene images of Twiggy—Timothy’s here, Timothy’s here—headless and handless, of Hannah Massey lying reposed in river mud. Take it as a matter of faith that nothing exists and maybe never has. I wake up screaming—

  Dr. Reynolds,

  The moment you contact me, or the moment you contact my friends or family, I will release all evidence in the Pittsburgh City-Archive linking you to the death of Hannah Massey. If you leave me alone, Hannah will stay buried—

  —JDB

  3, 18—

  Simka would call it PTSD. The past week and a half holed up in my hotel room, thinking every cleaning lady that pounds my door is Timothy pounding my door—thinking every car in the lot outside my window is Timothy’s car, every headlight flash is Timothy’s headlights. I spend hours peering through a slit in the curtains, taking notes about the cars pulling into the lot, parking, leaving, trying to figure which one might be his, if any. No one to turn to. A police cruiser circles through every afternoon at 3:30—it’s some schedule, some patrol routine, but I break out in cottony-mouthed panic that they’ve tracked me here. Two in the morning, three, I want to confess to the murder, confess that I murdered Mook just to end this waiting, end seeing Mook whenever I try to sleep, fitful sleep, the blood scent of his room stinking up my room when all this place really smells like is pizza boxes and coffee. I finally let the cleaning service take care of things—the room smelled fresh for about a half an hour after they left but that blood scent’s seeped into everything again. It’s all in my mind, an hallucination of blood, that’s all, that’s all.

  I spend most nights talking with Simka, but all we talk about is the past—I haven’t told him that whoever killed Mook will kill me, too—Timothy—that I’m waiting for my death sentence in a Holiday Inn.

  I talk with Gavril. Zhou’s been staying with him—Kelly—he’s sent pics of the two of them in London, bouncing around like tourists in love at Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye. I tell him I’ve tried to ping Kelly, to explain what’s happened, but she won’t respond.

  “She thinks you killed him,” he says. “I told her that’s ridiculous, but she’s scared—”

  “I didn’t kill him. Tell her I didn’t kill him—”

  Despite Gav’s swagger I know he’s terrified. He tells me he’s already been in touch with some producer friends of his, a stringer for TMZ and another at CNN, who are interested in the footage of the murder.

  “I’ve teased the story—high-profile businessmen, college girl sex, murder, cover-up. I told them it’s breaking fucking news about one of the richest men in America. You give the word, the story hits the streams—”

  Gavril’s reviewed what I’d sent him about Hannah Massey—and now the weight of her murder bears down on him, too, I can tell, like he’s carrying a bit of radiation close to his heart. Gavril’s world is beauty and fluff and light, or should be—but he’s feeling the threat against him now, knowing that he’s been drawn into this mess because of me, because of his association with Kelly.

  “Maybe you should come out here,” he says. “Maybe we can hide out for a while. I have contacts in Brazil, maybe we could head down to São Paolo together, wait this out on the beach—”

  “I don’t think I can wait this out,” I tell him. “Timothy’s been waiting this out for a decade at least—I can’t last like that. You can’t. Gavril, you can’t just disappear—”

  “Fuck that, brother. I’ll transfer you cash and you can buy a ticket to Heathrow. You could be here by tomorrow. We could take the train to Prague, wait at my mother’s farm—”

  “I shouldn’t have mixed you up in this,” I tell him. “Christ, I’m so sorry. I didn’
t know what was going on—”

  “I think I’m falling in love with her,” he says long after midnight.

  “Kelly?”

  “I think once we’re finished with the shoot tomorrow, I’ll try the Lady Chatterley thing with her. Out in the fields—”

  “Christ, Gav. You’re supposed to be channeling Robert Frost—”

  “This business can be cruel to the ones we love—”

  When his voice ends, the early hour silence is oppressive so I turn on the TV and classical music on KDFC and stream and piece together the traces I’ve saved of Albion. Albion. Every night I wait for Mook’s body and Hannah Massey’s body and Twiggy’s body. I close my eyes—and it’s like they’re lying in bed with me, these ghosts.

  Waverly once asked me to track a ghost for him. Albion. I unroll the paintings of the Christ House and spread them out on the sofa—scan them and search the universal image cache. There are hits, but only low-res matches on San Francisco art blogs, unmarked and unlabeled. E-mail the bloggers through contact pages, inquiring about these images.

  I pick up a magnifying glass at Walgreens and spend hours studying each painting—obsessively detailed, the wood grain’s drawn on every board, veins drawn in on every leaf of weeds. Are these Mook’s? No signatures—the style’s much different from Mook’s usual work, more like a cubist version of Andrew Wyeth than the graffiti agitprop he’s known for. Timothy? I saw Timothy’s memory maps in Simka’s office, and even though they were good, they weren’t this detailed, this perfect. I may have found a partial fingerprint in the charcoal dust of the drawing of the front porch. Studies of a single house. Fetishizing the house. Only one of the six paintings seems to be an interior view, a view of a window with hints of trees, a faint representation of a fleur-de-lis, partially erased, the planks of an unfinished hardwood floor, but the point of view of the painting is torqued, disorienting.