Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Thomas Sweterlitsch

  “Here,” says Albion.

  I may have missed this place on my own—the Christ House vanished except its outline, cinder blocks and brick and slabs of foundation, but even the outline’s obscured by grasses and the wild growth of weeds. I load the Archive to gain my bearings and the Christ House appears translucent—the charcoal gray wooden siding, the words of Christ slathered in whitewash, Except a man be born again. The last time I saw this place, Mook made the house appear as if it were burning, but even now without the fire the house seems ignited by some inner blaze—something burning cold and black, inexhaustible. I click away the Archive, but now even the field seems damned by what once stood here—the grass seems oily, ill, and the remaining bricks and cinder seem like they’d be corpse-cold to the touch. I walk the perimeter, the house easy to trace.

  “Watch your footing,” says Albion.

  After a thicket of overgrowth, the earth drops away into a concrete pit, maybe an exposed section of the house’s basement. I’m glad Albion warned me—someone could easily misstep here, the plunge at least ten feet to concrete. The pit was once a series of small rooms, it looks like. Coal rooms? Root cellars? They’re connected by a hallway that still tunnels underneath the main body of the house—I could scuttle down, I think, and still enter the original basement. I once walked that basement, in the Archive, I walked through the darkness, feeling my way along the dank walls and heard the sound of breathing. They kept people down here.

  Albion’s removed her gas mask and taken down her hood—her hair’s vivid red in this storm light, blown about, the weeds are lush and gaudy green. She’s standing over in what would have been the house, tracing rooms in her memory.

  “Over here is where we sat for prayer meetings,” she says. “Bible study. There used to be a fireplace about here—you can still see the chimney base, those bricks. We set out folding chairs in a semicircle around the fire, but Peyton and I always took a love seat over about here. Whenever Peyton came to these things—”

  “She didn’t live here with you?” I ask.

  “Peyton was a critical thinker,” she says. “She didn’t like this place, she hated being here. After Bible study, when we were alone, she’d look over my notes and tear apart whatever Waverly had told us. She only came here because of me, whenever she needed to help me—”

  Albion crosses the grass to the other side of the house and points out a slab of stone.

  “The stairs were here,” she says. “There were two bedrooms downstairs, built as additions out back. We had the second floor divided into six bedrooms, with another two rooms in the attic. It was a big house. Kitty had the master bedroom to herself, but we doubled up in the other rooms, sometimes three to a room. My bedroom was on the second floor, second to the right—”

  Albion paces forward, trying to figure the location of her bedroom, one story above the grass.

  “About here. Sometimes Peyton stayed with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone—”

  “Peyton protected you—”

  “We were able to endure things together that we might not have been able to endure apart,” she says. “She couldn’t protect me but she never abandoned me—”

  “We can leave,” I tell her. “You don’t need to put yourself through this—”

  “I haven’t shown you yet,” she says.

  Albion leads me around to the exposed section of basement, to a place where a minor cave-in has created a series of earthen steps.

  “I can’t go down there with you,” she says.

  I scramble down into one of the chambers—a minuscule room, only about six feet to a side, if that. There’s a concrete slab—maybe a bench, or maybe it was supposed to be a bed. Jesus. I find my footing along what would have been the connecting hallway to a doorway veiled by wisteria—through the flowers, a hole leads underground. I glance back at Albion—she’s watching from the edge of the precipice. She helped bring people here, she and Peyton—whatever else happened in their lives, they recruited women to come here, they helped fill these cells. By the end of the city they lived in their own apartments, playing dress-up with each other and modeling, pursuing fashion design and art, Raven + Honeybear while women suffered here. This is hell. I’m walking into hell.

  I pull aside the flowers and vines, plunge through the hole into the dark of the basement. This place smells like soil and rot, the sweet rancidity of things that grow in death. I have the flashlight—click it on, sweep it over the room. This place is preserved. A worktable with tools. Hammer, lathe. Circular blades hung on pegboard. A washing machine, a dryer. Sooty floors and sweeps of ash that must have blown in through the weeds. Above me, the ceiling boards moan and crack with every gust of wind like a cave-in is imminent—run, I should run from here—but whatever Albion wants me to see is down here somewhere. Other cells sprout off this main section of the basement, hidden behind wooden doors. One of the doors is painted with a stencil of a woman walking two other women on leashes like they’re dogs. There.

  The door’s stuck, but jerks open once I pull with my weight. Musty, cold. Another concrete slab for a bench or bed. There are bones in the corner. There are human bones lying intertwined in the corner. Two skulls, like whoever these people were held each other as they died—or maybe the bodies were just stacked here, somewhere out of the way. Losing myself, feeling the need to vomit—but what pours from me is a scream, a harrowing, sorrowful scream. I collapse to the bench, and when I do, a stream launches in my Adware. The stream’s swift, sweeping past anti-malware and firewalls. Mook. This is one of Mook’s geocached installations—the stream triggered when my Adware synced with the right coordinates. This basement, this cell, this bench.

  My eyes fill with recorded memory: I’m still here in this basement room, but someone flicks on a light and Timothy and Waverly are here, bathed in greasy orange from a naked bulb. There are others here, too, three others—one of them, the youngest, is just a teenager, lanky and pale with feminine eyes and long black hair. Rory. This must be Rory, the one I pushed into the path of traffic, but he’s so young here—a camo Pussy Hounds jersey and boots worn without laces. I’ve never seen the other two, but they must be Waverly’s brother, Gregor, and the other son, Cormac—Cormac’s the one Albion said was a family man, the one she remembered showed pictures of his daughters—he’s broad shouldered with a barrel belly, midtwenties here or probably older, his sloping chin covered in a reddish scruff of beard. Gregor Waverly stands apart from the others, his posture stiff, like he’s wearing a brace or some sort of body cast, arms hanging limp at his sides. His natural expression’s a horrific pout, the purple underside of his thick lower lip curling outward and down. His hair’s bone white, close-cropped, his ears like meaty, ragged flaps.

  Timothy grips me by my hair, forcing me to stay close to him—all that crimson hair spilling over my shoulders, he’s looped it around his wrists and holds me by it. Albion—this is Albion’s memory, recorded through her eyes.

  “You don’t have to suffer,” says Waverly.

  Timothy pushes me farther into the cell and I see her: Hannah Massey. She’s imprisoned here. Gaunt, naked—only a specter of the young woman I’d tracked through the Archive, case #14502. She’s kneeling on the bench, gazing up through the ceiling at—what? Is she praying? Her eyes are like dead eyes, distant. Her ribs and breasts are striated violet with bruises. Rory and Cormac, the brothers, pull her from the corner and stretch her out between them. I realize, now: by leading me here, Albion is showing me how Hannah Massey will die.

  The men take turns with her, Waverly first. Rory and his brother. Gregor. I scream—or is it Albion who screams? My innards turn to water and I slump, my legs buckle. Hannah doesn’t struggle—she’s endured this before and endures this now like her body’s already dead. Her head falls to the side and she looks through me. When our eyes meet, her eyes tremble. “Please,” she says, “please, please, please—”

/>   I want to help her, but can’t because Albion can’t help her. All Albion offers are her screams, and so I scream.

  “Why are you screaming?” says Waverly. “Albion, why are you screaming? What is causing this fear in you?”

  “You’ll kill her,” Albion says—I say.

  “And what if she were to die?” says Waverly. “Look at her—all of you, look at her. What do you see? You see a body—but what is a body? A body is flesh. A body is not the spirit. Don’t weep for this woman’s body. When you look at her, remember that you’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy. What you see is not her spirit—her spirit is immortal. You can’t see her spirit. When you see her, see the beasts you’ve seen dead on the side of the road. Roadkill, that’s all she is. Remember, there is a God above God—”

  Timothy’s young here, thinner—I recognize him from the newspaper photographs I’d researched, when he went by Timothy Billingsley or Timothy Filt. His beard’s just a stringy strip outlining his chin, his arms reedy, his paunch a soft sag.

  “You can save her,” says Timothy to me—to Albion. “I’ll forfeit my turn with her if you take her place—”

  Albion’s hyperventilating. Hannah turns away. Albion says nothing.

  I think of Twiggy. I think of Timothy’s wives. I think of Albion and Peyton. I think of the farm in Alabama and these basement cells, of the countless, faceless others as Timothy takes his place between Hannah’s knees. He strips off his clothes and the two bodies are absurdly white in the dim cellar room. He takes his turn with Hannah, or tries to take her. His movements aren’t the bludgeoning of the other men but a frantic, vicious scrabble until he yells, “I can’t, I can’t,” and strikes her in the stomach. Hannah groans, doubles up, but Cormac and Rory pry her legs apart and brace her between them. Timothy’s father hands him a chisel from the basement workbench. Timothy doesn’t finish until he stabs Hannah through her breasts, his arm pumping, gashing quickly, pulverizing her. Timothy moans at the eruption of Hannah’s blood. He’s whimpering, spent.

  Albion’s memory ends, resets to the beginning.

  Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ, please, oh Jesus, please.

  It’s the closest I’ve come to prayer.

  I don’t know how long I stay hidden in this darkness, but I exhaust myself crying, hoping for comfort in this utter black but finding none. I reload the stream and record everything I witness. I send the file to Gavril’s drop site with a message: Do not open or view. Save for me, please.

  Deep twilight when I emerge from the basement. The rain’s cleared out for the time being—the stars are thicker here, without the pollution of city light. I climb from the pit, walk the perimeter of the house, around farther back to lush weeds. Albion’s sleeping on a bed of grass. No—she’s not sleeping. Her eyes are flickering, almost like she’s dreaming—but she’s not dreaming, she’s not asleep. I lay with her, load the Archive, find her.

  It’s daylight where she is, in the garden of the Christ House. The Christ House casts a shadow across the lawn, but the garden is bathed in sunlight—archived sunlight from some distant past. The brightness of this place offends me—it’s too warm here, like the world is sick with fever. Albion’s tending to sprigs of calla lilies. She’s wearing a sundress pattered like a painting by Rousseau.

  “I never want to come back to this place,” she says.

  “I won’t ever ask you to,” I tell her.

  “I used to work in this garden every morning,” she says. “This was my bliss—being out here. Calla lilies for Peyton because Peyton once mentioned she liked them—they remind me of her. I learned to cook because of this garden. I’d grow food out here and cook for the girls in the house. There’s rosemary and pansies, fennel and columbine and rue—”

  “How many died here?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know, Dominic—”

  “But there were more, weren’t there? Jesus Christ—”

  “I brought them,” she says, “I helped bring those girls here, I brought them here, I brought those girls—”

  I watch as her emotion boils, as every humiliation and shame she thought she’d buried rises in her, as the horror and guilt at what she’d done brims in her eyes. When she cries, her sobs seem like pleas for forgiveness, but I can’t absolve her, nothing can. “I can’t get rid of it,” she says. “I can’t—”

  I hold her, try to comfort her. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I tell her, knowing it never will be. I cradle her head to my shoulder, but when my hands touch her hair I realize that’s where Timothy’s hands were—the comfort I want to give curdles, I don’t know how to comfort her or whether I even should. The garden’s gorgeous here, full of garish flowers that thrive in the sweltering heat.

  “Timothy used to tell me the only reason I was alive was because he loved me,” she says.

  “What could you have done,” I ask, not really a question.

  The stream was visceral, and the complicated residue it’s leaving feels like a sinkhole in my stomach. I look at Albion, now, in her sundress standing among blooming flowers in her absurd garden, archived here, and just as I hate her for recruiting girls, for playing at glamour to bring girls to Waverly, I remember the burning grip of Timothy’s fists in her hair and can’t blame her for what happened here, I can’t, I can’t. Now that I’ve seen how Hannah Massey died, I’m not sure what I can do with the information. Anyone piecing together what had happened at this house so many years ago would figure out Albion’s involvement and might not be as forgiving as I want to be.

  “That stream will be here forever,” I tell her, “or at least until every satellite fails and falls. Eventually someone will come through here, eventually someone will see—”

  “I asked Sherrod to delete everything, every moment I appeared in the Archive, but when he came across Hannah, he refused—he wondered if I was using him to bury her. We argued but came to an understanding, and when he came through here to buy the house for me in New Castle, he made his way to this place, installed this stream. He said he created this space so no one would forget what happened here—he called it a memorial. He didn’t want the house to simply vanish, he didn’t want it to be buried over in a mound of zeolite and disappear, rebuilt as something new in a city with amnesia. He wanted anyone drawn to this place to know what happened here—”

  “But you’re implicated—”

  “I kept quiet when others were suffering,” she says.

  We close the Archive, step into the night wind and find our way back to our campsite by moonlight, sweeping our flashlights over the broken road to spot our footing. We climb the mud hill to our tent. We eat protein bars around a campfire and find that the coffee we brought with us in the thermoses is still warm. We undress from our rain gear and our Tyvek and slip together into the tent—the only living creatures in miles of dead lands, the desolate moon bathing everything in silver. We stay up late, remembering Pittsburgh together, recalling the patterns of streets we’d known like we’re plotting a map between us—discovering where our courses may have overlapped.

  “I want life,” she says.

  We immerse together. The Spice Island Tea House in winter—and although Zhou is sitting at the table Theresa sits at in my memories, Albion and I stay. We choose a table far enough away so we can’t hear Zhou’s voice endlessly circulating the words my wife is supposed to say. Layering, the scent of basil, the scent of curry.

  Albion and I linger over chai. I tell her, “Tonight—the one we’re reliving here at this restaurant—was the happiest night of my entire life. Theresa and I tried for years for another chance to have a child, but couldn’t—but tonight, Theresa told me that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a daughter, and I knew everything would be all right for us. I’ve never been happier. After this night the future just opened wide—”

  Snow’s on the ground when we leave the restaurant
and strings of lights hang in the barren trees. We walk from Oakland to Shadyside, through the college campuses and Craig Street, the restaurants and cafés and bookstores populated with ghosts, forever frozen in their past lives. I bring Albion back to the apartment, to the Georgian. When we’re in the lobby, she kisses me.

  We make our way upstairs, through the paisley-carpeted hallway, to Room 208. I don’t engage the room through my own account, because I don’t want to see anything other than Albion tonight—I don’t want Zhou, I don’t want memories of my previous life. I want Albion. An empty blueprint of rooms with generic furniture. We leave the lights off—I lead Albion into the bedroom where we kiss again.

  “Let me help you remember,” she says.

  I untie her dress and she unbuttons my shirt and we lie together. None of this is real, but it is real—there are consequences here, even if we don’t speak them. Albion is beautiful, certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but what I’m seeing isn’t her, it isn’t really her, and when I hold her or kiss her breasts, what I’m feeling is the closest the iLux and imagination can convince me that I’m feeling. This isn’t Albion, even though I’m with her here—it’s all so close, but it’s all just a beautiful lie.

  Albion pauses. She separates from me, leaving a gap between us.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so, so sorry—”

  “I can’t do this,” she says. “I’m just not ready to be with someone, not yet—”

  She lets me hold her. We listen as a train rushes past the window and she says, “I don’t hear trains much anymore,” but it’s just the sound of the wind battering our tent as we wake.

  —

  Dominic—

  Two thirty in the morning when I wake from a dream of Theresa. Fine rain taps the mud around us. I’m sweating in my sleeping bag. Wide awake, concentrating to recapture details of my dream, but the only thing I remember clearly is Theresa speaking my name. I’m uncomfortable, fidgety. Albion sleeps beside me. I hear her even breathing. I slip from our tent.