Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  I grab a can of beer from a leaking kiddie pool filled with ice. I stay to the sides of the crowd. I make my way to Albion’s fascicle—this one unstitched, the six pages displayed in a line, hung with pins. A portrait of the blonde—Peyton—and despite the suffocating crowd, the inadvertent knocks and nudges in the congested room, the changes in music and the greater pitch of conversation as the party deepens, everything might as well be silent as I stare at the artwork and realize that what I’m looking at isn’t the fetishized limbs of a young woman, but an entire portrait broken into six planes as if I’m looking at the reflection of a nude in six shattered mirrors, or reading her body in six chapters. Only two of the six show her face, her head arched rearward in a limp frenzy, her expression like The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and I realize that her entire body, obscured though it is in Albion’s cubist disjunctions, would echo The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa without the impish angel, without the touch of God. An attendant places orange sticker dots next to each painting, denoting that they’d sold. Two other artists show their work—cuttings along one wall of urban scenes, the other a set of phrases, Dispositif, or Panopticon, painted in black Times New Roman on white paper, simple things.

  She’s here.

  I miss when she comes in, but notice the tone of the room shifts, when everyone present despite their fashion and cultured posing seems suddenly dim and wan, suddenly insignificant. I see her over the heads of others, her hair dyed raven black. Her friends flock to her, and watching her hug women she knows is like watching the bride embrace her bridesmaids. She wears a white dress tied at the waist with a black ribbon, but her shoulders, her elegant neck, the length of her arms are almost paler than the white lace. Her skirt has two large pockets, each pocket filled with a bouquet of daisies. I shrink against the wall—irrelevant now that she’s here, all my troubles and all my desires suddenly the concern of a minor character that’s barely made the page. The first thing Albion does is find the other two artists in the exhibit with her, two men who look like schoolchildren meeting a woman for the first time when she gives each a bouquet and congratulates them on their work. Taller than the others here, she leans over to hear them talk, her body swanlike. She laughs easily.

  Admirers cluster around her most of the evening. She drifts from one group to the next, people congratulating her on her work. I overhear them asking her to explain the woman, but she talks about technique and style instead, avoiding mention of who this woman is. I hear people calling her “Darwyn,” a few, who must be closer friends, call her “Dar.” A few hours pass, the crowd’s thinned out but Albion remains. I wait until she’s alone, a break in her conversations, when she’s in line for the drink table.

  I wait in line behind her. She wears her hair up, like a wave of silk. She’s near enough I could touch her—feel her here in the world with me, no longer an illusion. The shape of her neck flows into her shoulders in a perfect line, like she’s been carved from marble. Is she real? Am I hallucinating now? A scatter of freckles flecks her shoulders, near her collar. Wisps of hair on her neck grow a chestnut red. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “Raven and Honeybear—”

  She flinches from me like I’ve struck her.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, as if I might be able to take it back, approach her in some other way—but it’s too late. I feel myself blushing and shiver with sweat. There’s so much I want to say to her, but all I can say is, “I’m sorry—”

  She recovers, like someone falsifying dignity after a public humiliation.

  “That was a long time ago,” she says, her voice touched by an accent—West Virginia, maybe, or rural Pennsylvania.

  “Albion?” I say.

  “Are you the one who killed him?” she says, losing her composure. A cry escapes from her, almost like a guttural, barking laugh, an ugly sound that the crashing music can’t cover. A friend asks if she’s all right. She clenches her jaw. She’s trembling, her skin grown somehow paler, losing more color except for scarlet blotches on her cheeks and neck. She wipes at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “I’m okay,” she says, “I’m all right—”

  “No,” I tell her, “it wasn’t me—”

  “Then what do you want from me?!” she says. “I’ve done nothing to you—”

  “My wife,” I tell her. “I want my wife back. I want her back—”

  The words temper her hysteria. She’s staring at me with bloodshot eyes, nearly panting, trying to figure out who I am, what I mean, why I’m here, why she’s been discovered.

  “I’m sorry?” she says.

  “You took her from me. Mook took her from me. I want her back—”

  Trembling, now, my voice cracking, I also start to cry—heavy sobs. Telling this woman that I no longer have my wife is somehow like admitting for the first time that I lost Theresa ten years ago, that I’ve been alone for all these years. I’ve never felt Theresa’s absence so acutely, I’ve never admitted to myself that even if I found her now, there’s nothing left to find.

  Someone asks her, “Do you want me to call the police?”

  “No,” she says. “We’re all right. We’re all right here—”

  “Please,” I tell her.

  Albion gazes around the room, at the artwork and the people surrounding her—bewildered, it seems, but more like someone emerging from a pleasant dream into a harsh morning, knowing that all the pleasing illusions surrounding her are on the cusp of fading, trying to take them all in, to absorb them, before she wakes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says to the two other artists, to her friends, who’ve gathered around us like we’re actors playing a scene. “I’m mortified for interrupting your show, please forgive me. I’m so sorry about all of this. This gentleman and I have some things to discuss—”

  She leads me to a quieter corner of the room, the others warily watching us. She studies my face inquisitively—it’s unnerving, like I’m being dissected.

  “Don’t I know you?” she says. “I think I recognize you, but you were different then. Didn’t you—you were a poet, weren’t you? I think I’ve seen you at readings—”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I think, maybe—”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dominic—”

  “You’re full name,” she says. “Tell me—”

  “John Dominic Blaxton,” I say. “I was married to a woman named Theresa—”

  “Theresa,” she says, testing the name, weighing the sound of it. “I don’t remember a Theresa, but I remember you. You look different than you used to, but I can see you now. I was at a reading once, at ModernFormations Gallery in Garfield. Twelve years ago, at least—isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” I tell her. “A small-press festival. I was Confluence Press. The New Yinzer was there, Copacetic Comics, Autumn House—”

  Saying these names to someone who remembers them is like remembering how to speak a coded language invented as a child.

  “Caketrain,” she says, “City of Asylum—”

  “I remember standing onstage, the other poets on couches behind me, looking out across the audience but I couldn’t see any faces because of the stage lights so I looked down at the sheets of typed poetry I brought with me, and was surprised to see my hands were shaking—”

  “I loved your work that night,” she says. “I bought two of your books—”

  “The Stations of the Cross? The blue one?”

  “That one, and another one,” she says. “You’d brought a chapbook with you, of love poems. Those were my favorites—”

  I’d forgotten about that chapbook, something I made to sell along with The Stations of the Cross when I gave readings, little love note sketches I’d given to Theresa over the years and collected together.

  “You wouldn’t happen to still have those, would you?” I ask her.

  “Everything was lost,” she sa
ys.

  We’ve drifted farther away from the others and are standing beneath a white sheet of paper with black words that say fucking in a car at 85mph running into a brick wall.

  “I don’t remember you from that night,” I tell her. “But I know you were there—I saw you in the Archive, but I wasn’t sure if I saw you. I thought I would have remembered meeting you before—”

  “There were a lot of other people there that night,” she says.

  The gallery’s filling in again as people drift through from other parties. Albion suggests we take a couple of drinks and head outside for fresh air. She gives assurances to her friends that she’ll be all right, that I’m an old friend. She promises she’ll voice them, to check in later. The evening’s grown cold and I offer her my jacket. She turns me down at first, but later accepts to keep from shivering. The front windows of the Glass Dome gallery have fogged over, the people inside like specters through the glass. We walk a few blocks in silence until she sits on the front steps of an antique store that has closed, lost in the shadows of the awning. I join her. Laughing people passing by don’t notice us—it feels like we’re invisible, here.

  “Tell me about your wife,” she says.

  “Theresa Marie,” I tell her. “Mook deleted everything about her, just like he deleted you. He warned me off from looking for you in the City, but he killed her anyway. I need you to bring her back—”

  “I can’t bring her back,” she says. “I can’t. Maybe he could have—”

  I lean into the shadows, watching my breath billow out from my lungs like it’s my soul that’s escaping. The familiar depression settles over me, blacker and deeper than I’d ever felt it before—I want Theresa, I want her back, I want to kiss her, I want to hear her talk to me, I just want to see her again. Albion lets me regain my composure. She’s patient. I imagine swallowing the steel of a gun barrel, aiming into the roof of my mouth.

  “Did he send you here?” she asks.

  “Waverly?”

  “Is that who sent you? I was thinking it would be Timothy—”

  “Timothy, too,” I tell her.

  “Is he here, then? Is he the one who killed my friend?”

  “I don’t know—”

  She nods. She’s considering who I am.

  “Are you working for him? Are you going to tell him where I am?”

  I explain everything. I tell her that I’d started for Waverly thinking I was searching for his daughter but kept looking only because I thought she and Mook could protect me from Timothy, help me disappear. I tell her I was hoping she could recover my wife.

  “Are you hungry?” she says.

  “Yeah, I actually am,” I admit. “I only had an omelet earlier—”

  “I’m starving,” she says. “All I’ve had was a salad for lunch. Do you like Thai?”

  We leave the antique store stoop, emerging from beneath the awning. Albion sees a few friends heading to the show. They ask if she’s coming along and Albion smiles, a brokenhearted smile. “I’ll be along,” she says.

  We walk together. “You don’t mind if I keep your jacket on?” she asks. “You won’t be too cold?”

  “It’s not too cold,” I tell her, but she says she’s freezing. She knows a place called Thaiphoon that’s too busy to get a table, so we place takeout orders and she offers her apartment, just around the corner. She says we’ll be able to talk there. We wait at the counter, thinking of things to say—organizing our thoughts. I pay for our food, and once we’re outside I ask if she made her own clothes and she says that she did.

  “You probably know a lot about me,” she says.

  “Not a lot, no,” I tell her. “Some—”

  “Sherrod told me about you,” she says. “I wouldn’t say he was worried, but he said you might be able to find me. He said you worked in the City-Archive, that you knew how to research and could see through his methods. He figured you might—”

  “You have to believe me that I didn’t know he would be killed. I never knew what was happening, what is happening—”

  Her building’s run-down. Floral wallpaper in the elevator, peeling along the seams, exposing the brown metal beneath. We ride in silence, listening to the mechanics and pulleys until we drift to a stop and the doors screech apart. She unlocks the dead bolts to her room and leads me in, flicking on the light switch as we pass through the main hall. Her apartment is a loft, a lot of space but there’s not much furnishing other than twin sofas and a coffee table. Most of the space is set up as a studio, outsized canvases propped up against the brick walls, rolls and bolts of fabric, two sewing machines, oversize art books bowing shelves homemade from boards and bricks. She has a drafting table near the window with pens and ink and brushes in ceramic mugs, and several pads of paper.

  “Is this where you make your fascicles?” I ask.

  “Over there, yeah,” she says.

  “The canvases?”

  “I bought those a while ago, thinking I might try something different,” she says. “I haven’t, yet—”

  A lace curtain’s thumbtacked to the doorframe that leads to the kitchen. She says, “I’ll make tea, if you’d like—”

  “That sounds perfect—”

  I follow her into the kitchen, asking where she keeps her plates. I work around her, dishing out our Thai food while she fills her kettle with tap water and lights the stove.

  “Earl Grey?” she asks.

  I take our plates to the main room and set them on her coffee table. She’s hung one of those cheap We will never forget souvenir clocks of downtown Pittsburgh. The water of the three rivers, through some trick, looks like it’s rippling—it’s the only reference to Pittsburgh I can find. It’s already after ten. Albion brings in the tea on a tray and sets it next to the food.

  “You should have started eating,” she says. “It’ll get cold—”

  She pours each cup—she’s been crying again, in the kitchen. She puts on music, Etta James, and we eat largely in silence, listening to the music. Her radiators cough and sputter and eventually heat the room. She asks about DC. I ask about San Francisco and she says it’s a paradise that has seen better times. I tell her DC’s much the same, except it was never a paradise. After dinner I wash our dishes while she makes a pot of coffee. She sets out a box of lemon cookies she’s had in her cupboard and pours me a cup, setting out sugar and milk. I indulge in both. I take a sip of coffee.

  “I’ve found some information about Timothy that has put my friends and family in jeopardy,” I tell her. “I don’t know who they are, really, or what their connections are to you—but I know that Timothy and Waverly are dangerous—”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I need you to help me,” I tell her. “That’s why I’ve found you. I need you to tell me about him, so I can put together a case, put together some protection from him—”

  “You can’t protect yourself from them,” she says. “Nothing I can say will protect you—”

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  She speaks:

  5, 3 IBID.—

  “My name was Emily Perkins,” she says.

  “What about ‘Albion’?”

  “Dr. Waverly is influenced by William Blake. There’s this poem called Visions of the Daughters of Albion. I believe he named a sailboat after that poem,” she says. “He ran a house in Pittsburgh that took in lost girls and once you agreed to stay on, you adopted a new name to signify the beginning of your new life. He suggested I take the name Albion—”

  “Down in Greenfield?” I ask. “The house with the words painted on the side?”

  “We were affiliated with the King of Kings parish, but all the financial support came from Waverly. Mrs. Waverly ran the house—”

  Talking like this dredges up heartache for Albion, I can tell—she brings her coffee to her mouth but holds it there,
shivering without sipping.

  “How young were you?”

  “Young,” she says. “I never knew my parents. Foster homes all my life—eventually Mrs. Waverly took me in. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I was homeless—I did pills back then and meth, this was with a bunch of kids I fell in with, we’d take drives down into Washington County and West Virginia to these old houses we’d squat in for weeks just blown out of our minds, sometimes in old barns or just camping out in the woods. I was picked up for drug possession and pled guilty but was still a minor so was referred to child services. I lived in a halfway house but started cutting myself—they said I was a suicide risk. I turned eighteen and was moved to a different facility, part of Western Psych. I was recommended to psychological services and that’s when I met Timothy—”

  “He was your doctor?”

  “We’d have these sessions once a week. The first time I met with him, he just looked at me—he has those blue eyes. It was like he was sizing me up, forming a whole opinion of me in just those few seconds. I told him I didn’t try to kill myself, that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I just cut into my arms, and he smiled and said, ‘It’s all in the past now, it’s in the past,’ and I felt forgiven. Just hearing those words—

  “Two years in detention like that, but seeing Timothy once a week and then three times a week when he started prepping me for a GED. He shared an office and whenever we’d meet he’d tell one of his colleagues before closing the door.