“Theresa Marie,” she said, and I remember that hearing her name was like hearing a rare and sacred word, but all I could come up with was, “Aren’t you Elvis Presley’s daughter?”
“Itching like a gal on a fuzzy tree,” she said, “but I think that was Lisa Marie—”
We talked—about statues of horses in Washington, DC, for some reason, I don’t remember why, some sort of small talk, but we talked. What one hoof lifted from the ground meant, what two hooves lifted meant—I think I asked her what four hooves meant and she said “Pegasus.”
Partitioned Conference Room B is set up with folding chairs when Albion and I visit here, a dry-erase board in the center of the room. We watch John Dominic Blaxton, and Albion says that I was cute back then, that no wonder Theresa fell for me, but I don’t like seeing myself—skinny and young, full of unearned confidence. I see in that young face a total ignorance of everything that will happen and I both admire and hate him for it. The others filter into the class and take their chairs for the session, just like I remember they did—but Theresa never comes into the room and I watch myself speaking to no one.
“Please, let’s go,” I tell Albion.
I remember standing outside in the thickening slush waiting for my bus after the conference, nearly heaving with excitement like my lungs were bursting into sparks and might leap from my chest singing. I wanted desperately to somehow keep talking with her, so I tapped out an e-mail on my cell, saying how great it was to meet her, how I would love to keep talking about WordPress with her, and accidentally hit Reply All and so for the next few days heard from just about everyone from the conference except her. People trying to set up a follow-up meeting about WordPress, even the WordPress lecturer wanted us all to meet at the Panera in Shadyside. I figured I’d embarrassed her, or that she was politely unresponsive because she had a boyfriend, or just wasn’t interested, or genuinely thought I was interested in WordPress, but after three days she responded: Drinks? When are you free?
Albion and I go there now—to Cappy’s over on Walnut, only a block away from the apartment where Theresa and I would live in Shadyside. I look for Theresa here, Adware pulling memories of this place, but she’s nowhere—instead, Albion and I sit at the same table Theresa and I shared, near the front windows, watching the increasing snowfall and the snow-laden shoppers on Walnut Street. Theresa and I talked for over three hours that night. She was a botanist, working for Phipps Conservatory. I told her about my Ph.D. program and my poetry. She loved music and talked about bands she loved—the Broken Fences, Joy Ike, Life in Bed, Meeting of Important People, Shade—bands I’d never heard of become suddenly important to me. We said good night and I offered to see her home, to ride the bus with her to the South Side where she lived, but she refused the offer so I waited with her at the bus stop, shoulders piling with snow, until the 54C appeared through the mist. She boarded and I watched her in the lit interior of the bus—her hair covered in wet flakes of snow. She waved as the bus pulled away and I walked home—the city quiet, everything shrouded in a profound white silence. I was so happy that night—an ecstatic contentment in that silence, a feeling like I’d come home, like I’d discovered where home was. I remember singing “Maria” from West Side Story at the top of my lungs, but not knowing the words and replacing “Maria” with “Theresa.” A few minutes later she texted and told me that she had fun, and asked if I was free that weekend. Yes, I answered, yes. I texted her for a playlist and she wrote back in an hour with a list of bands and tracks—my homework. I spent the next several days memorizing everything I could, every band, learning to love what she loved.
Albion and I are there now, at the bus stop watching the 54C pull up through the snow, its wheels leaving muddy tracks, the driver asking if we need a ride, but the bus feels like a ferry for the dead and we refuse. Albion and I walk through the snow together holding hands. She says she misses the winter, living in California so long. She sometimes forgets how beautiful it was. We walk through the serene Shadyside streets to Ellsworth Avenue, to the apartment I shared with Theresa, through the courtyard to the lobby, shaking snow from our shoes and the shoulders of our coats. We walk to Room 208—I’m here. Theresa, I’m here. Albion kisses me, a slow, tender kiss, our lips cold but warming. The kiss is perfect but doesn’t exist in the real world, it only exists here and I understand that, I understand the gift she has given me. I open the door to Room 208 but in Theresa’s place we see Zhou. This is the first time that Albion has seen what Zhou is in my memories, that Zhou is here where Theresa should have been, and she begs my forgiveness and I tell her that it’s all right, it’s all right—
Albion’s taken me on her bus. We ride together and I brace her against me as we enter the perpetual twilight of the tunnel. I watch the old lady in front of us clicking her tongue at the child in front of her. I find Stewart, that first voice of her hope, a handsome man in a Pirates ball cap—he must have only been in his thirties, about my age, his kids that he wanted so much to see again must have only been toddlers. Albion points out every person on the bus and tells me what she’s been able to find out about their lives. She points out Jacob, the singer, an overweight black man with ashen hair, and hopes that he’s forgiven her for leaving through that thin path in the stones, leaving him behind. She points out Tabitha, the woman who tore out her own eyes—she’s dressed in nurse’s scrubs and reads Joel Osteen. We brace for the explosion, for the bus to wreck, but I only experience the initial concussion of the end because that’s when the footage stops and we’re left in total darkness with the Archive asking us in floating bronze text if we’d like to visit somewhere else. Sometimes Albion and I ride that bus several times in a row, looping back to the moment when she boarded and riding until we die, until I finally say, “That’s enough, Albion, that’s enough,” and we retreat together to somewhere else, usually to Kelly’s Bar in East Liberty to sit in a shadowy corner booth on the vinyl seats, listening to rockabilly on the jukebox, drinking cocktails and eating baked mac and cheese, trying to forget together what we desperately want to remember.
Kelly’s in East Liberty has become important to us, a bar neither one of us had visited often when we were both in Pittsburgh but perfect for us to discover together now.
“Tell me about Mook,” I ask her, one night over drinks in our usual booth. “Sherrod, I mean—”
“Sherrod was troubled,” she says. “I feel sad when I think of him—”
I ask how they met and she tells me they met at Denny’s. “I was out with friends from Fetherston,” she says. “We went out and ended up at Denny’s in the Mission—two or three in the morning. The waiter, this guy, he was hitting on us, kind of flirting with the entire table, when one of the cooks came from the back. Baggy jean shorts, a 49ers jersey, a white apron. He was short—only five feet tall, maybe, or maybe a touch over—and deformed, in a way. Hunched. He walked with a limp, though I think the limp was an affectation—once I knew him a little I realized that sometimes he forgot to limp. Cauliflower ears, this wet mouth that sort of hung open. Squinty eyes. He smelled like grease and cigarette smoke but he sits right in our booth, right with us, and asks if we were interested in an orgy. My friends laughed at first, some of them, but I didn’t—not my type of humor. I remember he noticed I wasn’t laughing and he just glared at me until I acknowledged him. Unnerving. ‘I have access to a hot tub,’ he said, and I think he called me Red.
“I can’t remember what I said to him, something dismissive, and so he started telling me everything about my previous life—he knew my real name, knew about Pittsburgh, knew parts of my past that no one had the right to know. He knew about Peyton. He told me obscene things about myself. My friends didn’t know what was going on, thank God, but they could pick up that things had taken a turn. We left right away—I was mortified. I didn’t even know what the Archive was at the time, but once I figured it out, I realized that my past life was living itself again and again and ag
ain. I wanted it erased. I went back to Denny’s the next afternoon, found Sherrod at the start of his shift. I went back to the kitchen and screamed at him, just—I really broke down. All those cooks looking at me. He realized he’d crossed a boundary when he dredged up those things, that he wasn’t being cute or clever but had overstepped. He was contrite. For all his tone-deaf bluster, he’s actually principled. He’s sensitive. I can’t quite call him a gentleman . . . but he said he could help me and I accepted. I didn’t know who he was until much later, I didn’t know about his art—”
We never talk about how he died.
We take walks in the afternoons, sometimes, back around the garage and the pines into Albion’s garden, sometimes taking longer walks through the neighborhood, but Albion feels conspicuous—passing our neighbors on their front porches, women Albion’s age already three or four kids deep into families, old women and old men on lawn chairs in front yards smoking cigarettes, young girls circling bikes on the street or the teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops—it’s obvious that Albion doesn’t belong here. Besides, I think most of our neighbors are keen enough to spot a woman in trouble. After our walks, Albion will disappear into her room or lose herself in a charcoal drawing and I’ll head outside to the front porch and voice Gavril—we usually talk at least every other day. After dinner one night, sitting out on the porch, Gavril asks about my psychiatrist.
“Timothy? What about him?”
“No, the other one. The one you had before—”
“Simka?”
“You didn’t hear about him? He was stripped of his credentials—it was in the Post,” he says. “He can’t practice anymore. Some scandal—”
“What scandal? What are you talking about?”
“Selling painkillers to kids,” says Gavril. “You haven’t heard about this? Three or four girls accused him of trading sex for oxy. They were on the same tennis team, came forward together. The whole thing broke open—”
“No. No, that didn’t happen—”
“It’s all over the Post,” says Gavril and I tell him I have to go, to read about what’s happened. I scan DC Local feeds and find something on the Washington Post blog, allegations that Simka sold painkiller medications to teenagers, some of his patients. Cock Doc Writes Oral Prescriptions—cached streams show vids of his arrest, District cops leading him from his office in cuffs, carrying away boxes marked “evidence.” I try to ping Simka, but no answer. I write him an e-mail asking what happened. Details are sketchy—a follow-up post explains Simka’s painkillers led to the deaths of three young women who’d gone missing after nights on the DC club scene, surveillance footage of coke and liquor and pills, overdosing on Simka’s narcotics before disappearing. Some of the victims are underage, but hacks have posted pictures anyway, prep-school blondes in burgundy blazers and plaid skirts, photographs of them in tennis whites. Bullshit. He sold to anarcho club kids who sold on campuses, a drug ring centered on Simka’s office. I can’t believe this. Simka’s lawyer, state-appointed, maintains his innocence, but in the interim the state board has stripped him of his license and has incarcerated him. When Simka finally responds, it’s through e-mail: I don’t regret helping you.
I tell Albion while she’s painting and she hugs me, holds me until I stop shaking. She asks if I need anything, if I need to go to DC.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know what good it would do—”
My other e-mails go unanswered, and when I reach out to his family I receive a form e-mail from an unknown sender, signed by their lawyer, requesting not to be contacted. Restless sleep, obsessing over Simka—at night when I’m thinking of him, he’s so present it’s like he’s here with me, like I can smell his aftershave and coffee breath or reach out into the dark of my room and touch his hairy arm, convince myself he’s right here with me, chuckling about some joke he’d heard, ready to dispel my gloominess by asking about the Beatles.
Albion wakes me early, says I was shouting—having nightmares. Over grapefruit, she asks if I want to go camping and we drive to the wildlife refuge. She checks the park guides for different trails to explore, but we’ve hiked them all. We rent a fifteen-dollar site to pitch our tent and stow our gear and walk familiar, light trails. I bring bottles of water, hummus and pita and a bottle of wine. We hold hands as we hike like friends who might someday discover they’re lovers. We take naps in the afternoon and hike again before dinner, coming back to the campsite to cook mushroom burgers and fry potatoes and drink our second bottle of wine.
We stay up around the fire and Albion asks if everything’s all right.
“No,” I tell her. “Everything’s not all right . . .”
“Tell me,” she says.
“His family doesn’t answer—they don’t want my attention. They don’t respond to me, and I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him since that first night. There’s nothing I can do for him—”
“Simka?”
“He’s married, he has a family,” I tell her. “Simka was one of the best people I’ve ever known—compassionate. There’s no way he’s involved in something like this—”
“You think he’s innocent?”
“I know he’s innocent,” I tell her. “I don’t believe he was selling drugs to kids, not after everything he’s done for me. About my own problems. I don’t believe it. They’re ruining him, his entire family—”
“Sometimes people disappoint us,” she says.
“Enough of that,” I tell her. “Enough. He has two sons who no longer have a father. We’re not just going to keep ignoring the obvious—”
“What’s obvious?” she asks.
Is she going to make me say this? “Someone’s doing this to him,” I tell her. “Someone’s fucking up his life, probably because of what he knows about me. Maybe they lost us and they’re trying to provoke me, to flush me out—”
“Waverly?” she asks, her voice tentative, breathy, like she has trouble forming the word.
“You tell me—”
Albion doesn’t answer and I don’t care if I’ve somehow hurt her, and after a few moments she leaves the fire, dissolving into the outer darkness of the woods. Bruised anger catches in my throat that she’s run away, but I’m more upset at how abstruse she is, at the lines she’s drawn around herself, withholding even when others are suffering. Simka—fuck. That furniture he’d made and his house cradled by the creek and the woods, roughhousing with his sons—gone, gone, and I want to scream but I sit staring at the fire, impotent and cold.
I hear Albion’s tread in the woods and when she comes back into the ring of firelight, she sits next to me instead of across from me. She puts her hand on my knee and leaves it there for a moment before pulling a marshmallow from our pack. She skewers it on a stick, lights it on fire. She holds it up to watch the glowing cube before puffing it out. The air’s filled with the scent of caramelized sugar and Albion holds out the marshmallow until I eat it.
“Dominic, I can help you,” she says.
“Help me? Or help Simka?”
“I don’t know if we’ll be able to help Simka,” she says, “but there’s something I can show you that we might be able to use—”
“Use how? What do you mean?”
“I’ve kept things hidden for far too long,” she says. “I was mistaken, Dominic. I want to face this, I want to help end this suffering—”
Something’s different about her, something opening—a complex comfort grown between us, present in a way that I hadn’t yet felt, less diffuse and fragile, like we’d been describing a relationship to each other these past few months but suddenly find ourselves together in one.
“In a day or so we have to go on a hike. It will be harder than the hikes we’ve been taking recently,” she says. “You should rest up, rest your feet. I’ll need to buy some gear we don’t have—I might need to drive for it, maybe as far as Clevela
nd. I’ll go tomorrow morning, but I shouldn’t be gone more than a day—”
We share a tent together. We’re in separate sleeping bags but she reaches for my hand and holds my arm around her. My body feels like liquid fire holding her and I pull her close but we never kiss. Instead, I let my face rest against her hair like I’m lost in a veil of flowers. It’s rained in the night. I wake up earlier than Albion and watch her sleep. I slip from our tent. Gray light hangs throughout the forest. I hear a tread and stop—a tawny deer twenty or thirty yards from me looks up. He’s unconcerned, and lopes away through the fog.
—
Three days pass, we wake in the darkness before dawn.
“Good morning,” she whispers.
Adware at half-light, the dashboard clock flips to 3:47 a.m. Albion’s sitting on the edge of my bed, silhouetted by the hallway light. “Are you awake?” she says.
“I’m awake—”
“Coffee’s brewing, and I’ll make some eggs.”
Albion’s only packing prewrapped food for our trip—protein bars, dehydrated meals, enough for a few days if needed, even though we’re planning on being home by tomorrow afternoon. We’ve divvied up the weight of our gear, but she says my main job is to lug water—we can’t stint ourselves on water, she says—so my frame pack will carry the bulk of our supply plus a ClearSip purifier. I load the Outback while Albion brews a second pot of coffee and fills two thermoses. When she joins me, she hands me a bouquet of flowers cut from our yard—dahlias, it looks like, deep violets, bundled with sprigs of yellow and miniature sunflowers.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 26