Tomorrow and Tomorrow

2, 25—

Five hours in flight, nine hundred passengers staring into cells or screens embedded in the seats in front of them, in-flight streams prohibited: an entire season of Whipped and Creamed, a showing of Jules and Peasley Blarf in Cairo. Rank circulated air—mucosal breath, dirty diapers and thawed airplane meals, stale socks and the pungency of feet from people who’d kicked off their shoes. Garbage in the aisles, the crew too short-staffed to care—pushing drink carts through, serving splashes of liquor in cups of ice. Dawn, my face pressed to the window as the San Francisco sprawl cuts beige and concrete black against the blue ocean. The fractal coast becomes mundane the lower we descend. The sprawl comes into focus—strip malls, traffic-glutted highways, housing developments. The runway appears beneath us. The wing flaps adjust and rattle the cabin. Seat belts on, electronic devices off. Screaming kids, a cloud of body funk. The plane thumps as wheels hit concrete. A smattering of applause when the Adware blinks on and most of us reboot, autoconnecting with SF.net. We taxi, nearly everyone standing, anxious to leave, heads bent awkwardly beneath the overhead bins. People pulling jackets and luggage from beneath their seats, elbows forcing position in the aisle, a chemical waft from the bathrooms—urinal cake and diarrhea and disinfectant. It’s been a while since I’ve flown. The stewardesses tell me to enjoy my stay.

Hannah.

Twiggy.

Albion.

Shuttle buses to the terminal, Delta security performing a first ID scan on the way in, sponsored hotels showering us with cheap rates. BayCrawler recommends an economy room in the Bayview–Hunters Point Holiday Inn, a Daily Deal. I go ahead and book, the terms and conditions scrolling in half-light. Accept, Accept—Accept all. Hours in lines twisting through cordons, everyone sitting on their suitcases, eyes glazed watching streams. Adware kicks in a flickering jangle, competing currency exchange rates for foreign travelers, taxicabs, yellow cabs, that old woman Paris in gold leggings begging me to switch my booking to Hilton, Days Inn with cheaper rooms and HBO blinking in the overlays, Holiday Inn blasting reminders that my reservation is nonrefundable, women in towels offer spa services and city tours. You’ll find a happy ending in San Francisco!

Gavril’s contact is an agent at Nirvana Modeling named C.Q. I ping him but he doesn’t respond. I ping again with a friend request and Gavril’s attachments, but still no response. I text: Dominic, a friend of Gavril’s. Looking for a model you might work with. Did Gavril get in touch with you?

Armored National Guardsmen with submachine guns slung over their shoulders stalk the security line. German shepherds tethered on leashes sniff each of us, sniff our bags—I leave my backpack on the floor and the dogs surround it, running their noses along the seams. Praying they don’t sniff out residue, but sober enough to have left my brown sugar back in DC. Another ID checkpoint—soldiers with handheld bar code readers scan my passport and retinas. Robotic voices chime: “Never leave your bag unattended. Remain with your luggage at all times. Never leave your bag unattended. Remain with your luggage at all times—”

A young woman ahead in line answers questions. She struggles with English, but a TSA supervisor, white-haired, pockmarked, finally stamps her passport and waves her through to the scanner. Strict policies arriving or departing for flights—we’ve been through this before, all of us, when we boarded the plane, but TSA makes us go through these security points again and again. I watch her hike up her shirt a few inches and slide her belt from her blue jeans. She unbuckles and removes each boot and places everything in a plastic bin. She speaks French, I can hear her now, but she doesn’t understand anything the customs agents are telling her—translation apps struggling to keep up in the anemic Wi-Fi. The screener, a slight man in blue vest and gray slacks, holds his arms out to his side, each hand capped by a blue latex glove. The French woman understands now and imitates him—holds her arms outstretched. The man frisks her, running his hands along the back of her thighs and up over her like a bored lover, patting the interior of her thighs, cupping her genitals. The woman’s embarrassed, but complies—she stands still while the man fondles the undersides of her breasts and runs his fingers along the underwire of her bra, what else can she do?—and when the customs agents instruct her to step through the body scan, I look with the other men to the crowdsourcing security screens placed where we all can see. We’re curious—and there she is, like an etching in green, layers of her, her skin and underwear, demure, the fabric of her clothes. The buttons of her jeans and the underwire of her bra display pale green, almost white, her Adware displays like a lace doily sitting on her brain. The screeners have poker faces, playing their part of professionalism, but as I watch the screening, Adware girls overlay my sight, offering to bounce me to pay sites full of leaked airport scans—porn stars, celebrities, amateurs, perfect tens all scanned for national security, all leaked to the streams.

Passport stamped, I’m frisked and asked through into the scanner. My body is projected in green on the black glass—the travelers can see, but I wonder if anyone bothers to look.

Acid jazz over electronica—an unrecognized ringtone. Check profile: Colvin Quinn, Nirvana Modeling, editor. Add to address book? Yes—and Colvin’s profile fills my vision as I sit on a bench to put my shoes back on. He’s texted: Gavril’s friend? You’re the one looking for a model?

Cao-Xing Lee. Gavril said you know her?

Yeah, Gavril’s question—that’s Kelly, he writes. Real name’s Cao-Xing, but she goes by Kelly. She’s one of mine, yeah. Are you booking her, or what? You can book her through the agency.

I need to talk to her.

What do you have in mind? She’s an actor, does some print work. Terrible at celebrity impersonations, but she’ll work private functions if you’re paying her.

I just need to talk to her.

If you book her, it goes through the agency. No freelance bullshit. But I can set up a meeting, as a favor to Gavril. She has a shoot on the first. You can visit her on set. Sound good?

Perfect—

I’ll send you details—

Leaving the airport, I’m warned I’m leaving a secure green zone and have to “accept” before the warnings will blink out. Yellow cabs line the curb—BayCrawler displays user reviews of the drivers, the drivers standing curbside shouting at us, trying to convince us the one-star reviews are false, were posted by bitter, jet-lagged people, that they’d cut rates for a fare. Criminal record pop-ups halo most of them. The driverless AutoCabs are parked together, but BayCrawler flashes a scare piece about drug cartels tracking tourists in driverless cabs, forcing them off the road and murdering them for their luggage and cash. Too many warnings of pricing scams. I queue for the commuter train, downloading SF.net’s top free travel apps and augs while I’m waiting. The commuter train’s a maglev bullet cutting through suburban slums, empty station to empty station—storefronts blur, abandoned strip malls, cars stalled out and feathered in tickets, whole sections of outer communities burned, the wood char left to rot in the paradisiacal sun. I lose Wi-Fi until we’re closer to the city center, office towers and skyscrapers coming into crystalline view. An autoconnection to City.SF.gov—a ping from a Nirvana Modeling intern waiting in my in-box, the subject line: Kelly. I download a press packet and scan through publicity shots along with tomorrow’s shooting schedule. Unmistakably Zhou. Video clips from Our Town, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Gem of the Ocean. She’s not a bad actress, but most of her credits are from liquor commercials—a nude Kelly dripping with red syrup for Absolut Strawberry, in a minikilt for Dewar’s. A fashion shoot tomorrow—the Nirvana Modeling intern gives the address and mentions that Kelly’s been told to expect me.

We skirt the city center and enter Hunters Point. Retinal scans for fares, the station scrawled with Meech-HAM graffiti and swastikas—a graphic Meecham death’s-head with hair like a corona of blonde fire. The neighborhood’s shit, but the Holiday Inn looks passable and I check in through the kiosk, gathering the key cards that pop from the slots. I reset the dead bolts once I’m in my room—the economy-size little more than a closet with a sofa and toilet. Jet lag’s catching up with me—but I wander out to find a grocer on the next block for a few apples and Greek yogurt, a two-liter of Pepsi and a box of Ho Hos. Men loiter on the corners here, in oversize T-shirts and baggy jeans. Someone shouts out to me, asking for money. “A quick loan,” he says. I keep my head down. I lock myself into my room. Ho Ho after Ho Ho, watching the flat screen bolted to the wall—I’ve tried the streams, but the Holiday Inn router is spotty, blinking in and out. I try to visit the City, to visit the empty spaces, but the connection’s lost.

Paying for a few minutes of sat-connect, I call Simka.

“Dominic, where are you? Are you okay?”

I open my room curtains and look out over the third-floor view of Hunters Point so that he can see what I’m seeing, an empty apartment tenement slashed with graffiti and lewd tags meant to implant viruses in unprotected Adware. There are fires somewhere distant—three columns of dark smoke mar the horizon.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Paradise,” I tell him. “I’m all right—”

“Your call says San Francisco. Dominic, are you really in San Francisco?”

“I landed a little while ago,” I tell him. “I’m feeling ill, Simka. I’m feeling so bad right now. I don’t know what to do—”

“You’ll be fine, Dominic. Remember to breathe. In and out, in and out—”

“I’ve gotten mixed up in something,” I tell him, not sure how much to say.

“I’m worried about you,” he tells me. “What’s going on? I haven’t heard from you since we talked about Timothy. I can call the police if you’re in trouble, Dominic. Tell me—”

Hearing his voice is like a balm on wounds I didn’t quite realize I have—lonely, I realize. “I’m realizing how fucked up I’ve been,” I tell him. “After Pittsburgh, once winter came, they used to run these PSAs about radioactive snow, do you remember? Those commercials used to stick in my mind—I’d dream about them—that person walking through snowfall. Everything serene, snow piling on trees, over lawns, on houses, before we realize that all the snow is poisoned with radiation. They’d list these symptoms. Tell us about Caesium-137. That’s what my depression’s like, Simka—I can’t really quite explain it, I guess. When the depression settles over me, it’s like I’m walking through that radioactive snow, that no matter how fast I run or try to cover myself, the snow will keep falling until I’m buried under—”

“I remember those commercials,” he says.

“I’ll forward my hotel information, in case something comes up, some emergency—”

“Of course,” says Simka. “Dominic? You’re not alone, do you understand that? Whatever you’re going through, I’m here for you, I’m with you. If you’re in trouble, come here. You have a home with me—”

My sat-connect runs out and I decline approval for another session. Cramped, here, in this cheap hotel—claustrophobic. I crack open the window, I want to take a walk, clear my head—just like Simka always suggested, that exercise might lift my spirits—but I can hear the braying of dogs outside and people shouting nearby. I read a paperback I brought with me, Ed Steck’s The Necro-luminosity of Pink Mist, drinking Pepsi with hotel ice until my eyes droop closed and I sleep, dreaming of greenish drifts of ice, poisoned snow. I sleep through until morning.

3, 1—

Adverts scroll the bathroom mirror, shimmering through shower steam: Popeyes Fried Chicken, Grand China Buffet, accept the ten-dollar surcharge to book a cab through the mirror, using the touch screen as I brush my teeth—these things never work and I have to push twice, wondering if I’ve paid twice. Wharf Central, Bay Company, Anchorage coupons grid the ceiling and walls, skewing into pixelated distortion whenever the Wi-Fi hiccups. Local streams: cop killer guts four, VoyeurTube catches spy vids in J.Crew changing rooms. Gavril’s lent me a Caraceni suit for my meetings—he told me I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I showed up anywhere dressed like I usually dress and told me to know the brand in case anyone asks. Caraceni. I feel fake, wearing this thing—but the fit’s nice, it feels nice. He told me to leave the top buttons of my shirt unbuttoned, but I can’t pull off that look, exposing the upper triangle of my pasty chest, the scrawls of hair, so I button up to my neck. The coupon grids shift: Redwood National Park bike tours, lodging, collagen ass implants turn your sag bag into a beautiful bubble. Coffee at the House of Bagels vending kiosk in the hotel lobby. I wait for my cab outside—the weather’s gorgeous.

The cab’s an AutoCab tricked out for tourists—driverless, its silky voice crackles through the speakers.

“Destination?”

“Fort Point,” I tell it, checking the shooting schedule I have for Zhou.

“Destination?”

“Fort. Point.”

“Calculating,” it says, synching with my profile before sliding into traffic. “Welcome to San Francisco—”

The topography of this place is sun-blanched ruinporn, an economic gutting—city block after city block of housing projects, slapdash QuickCrete construction jobs, acres of storage container housing sites stacked in corrugated sheet metal towers. Apartment building units with window slits. Beige patches of dead grass. A car’s been pushed to the center of a playground and set on fire, the smoke and gushing flames like the oil fires they streamed from Iran and Iraq following the Israeli War. iLux catches my position, pushes notifications through the streams—warns me travel delays are likely.

“What’s causing the delay?”

The cab searches, broadcasts relevant headlines:… this morning, an explosion on a Muni bus… Several dozen feared dead… Thirty-six reported dead, twenty-one wounded, the death toll expected to climb…

“Jesus Christ—”

“Travel delays are likely,” says the taxi.

I pin the news report to a city map, overlay with the cab’s route to Fort Point—it looks like we’ll be passing the scene. Stuck in traffic, the air gritty, or maybe just soured by the chemical stink of the car fire we passed. Headlines swim in my eyes: a pipe-bomb explosion on the Double Rock route, the wreckage gumming up traffic for miles. Gang-related, crowdsourced news feeds, Cartel dispute, I go ahead and set up a user account with AutoCab while we’re inching along, buying a week-block fare instead of paying by the meter. We reach the first police barricade and I can see the bombed-out bus ahead on our right. Cops direct us through their pylons—the scene’s grisly despite the extinguished fires, the skeletal remains of a double-long bus, blown-out windows, bodies lined up on the sidewalk wrapped in sheets, some of the bodies’ social profiles still lit, rapidly updating profile statuses despite being dead. Ambulances and fire trucks are on scene, but the paramedics stand around with a couple of SWAT officers—everyone’s laughing now that there’s no one left to try to save.

The taxi threads into a single lane. Three white cops with shaved heads and Ray-Bans hold a black teenager to the ground, his wrists zip-tied, an arsenal of automatic weapons spread along the sidewalk, baggies of cocaine and bricks of brown sugar on the hood of a Camry. Labels hover over each gun: AK-47, FN SCAR Mk 17, M72 LAW. The Adware’s augged the cops: Espozito, Stewart, Klein, badge numbers and service history, real-time charges as they’re levied against the kid. Already the comment fields are blowing up, CitizenWatch, SFAnti, 4thState, SFLibertarian, complaining of racially motivated violence, tagging each cop with civil disobedience accusations and filing citizen review complaints—the cops’ records display in the Adware, every complaint, every charge processed, every official review. Crowds have gathered, watching disinterestedly.

“Every measure will be taken to provide for your security,” the taxi says. “I’ve calculated a safe route—”

A few blocks past, the traffic picks up speed—emptied storefronts, boarded-over windows, abandoned cars tagged with phrases: Slinks all the fcuk and 187 $-T and God si Love. We pass through an intersection and the city improves, like I’ve entered into a different city entirely, SmartTags on the businesses, coupons offering free samples of eggnog lattes at Fourbarrel Coffee, Einstein Bros. bagels, BOGO deals at Burberry and the Gap. The street narrows like we’re driving through a canyon of gold, Bulgari and Louis Vuitton and Gucci, women wearing little more than string bikinis with max socials broadcasting their availability. I squint up into brilliant blue sky where a gorgeous face smiles, a model for Bovary’s saying, “Everything you’ve always wanted.” The Golden Gate Bridge looms ahead just like the innumerable pictures I’ve seen of it, the red spires and swooping cables vivid in the sun, almost unreal how crisp it seems. The cab pulls through Fort Point security checkpoints into a turnaround.

“Enjoy your afternoon,” says the taxi. “Find your happy ending in San Fran Cisco!”

A sloping hillside, a copse of pines. The ocean spray scent of the bay. Cars are double-parked in the lots, joggers and dog walkers crowd the sunlit paths that lead downhill to the fort at the base of the bridge. The fort comes into view, a sort of squat-box brick building tucked beneath one of the bridge’s behemoth arches, and NPS.Gov/Fort Point pop-ups bubble up toward points of interest in the masonry and link to articles about the Fort: Castillo de San Joaquin, 1865, the CSS Shenandoah, blinking for donations to fund preservation efforts and future expansion of the museum. Wandering the interior of the fort’s like wandering catacombs—stone corridors and arches, the roar of the ocean and the cries of gulls reverberating across the repeating architecture, blending into a deafening echo that robs the place of any beauty. Signs guide me downstairs, to underground halls that have been roped off for the fashion shoot. A production assistant waits on a folding chair. Once she sees me, she explains that I’ve entered a restricted area.

“I’m here to see Cao-Xing,” I tell her. “I think she knows I’m coming,” but the production assistant’s face doesn’t brighten until I say, “Kelly Lee—”

“Sure,” she says, scanning my profile against her list. “Dominic? John Dominic? Go ahead and follow along the hallway here. They’re in the middle of the shoot, so hang back until they break. Kelly’s down there already—”

The air of these corridors is stale and the bricks are cold. The outer sounds of ocean and gulls and tourists have been suffocated, the only echo in the corridors is the sound of my footfalls and what I imagine to be the beating of my heart reverberating off the bricks. I’m nervous—to see her, like meeting someone I’ve known intimately from a distance. Will I even recognize her? I walk until I hear the whispering shutter whir of cameras and hushed voices. The corridor curves and I come to the shoot—they’ve set up in a cell, studio lights aimed at the curved ceiling push unnerving shadows across the walls. Massive chains hang from bolts in the stone and lay coiled. Only a half a dozen or so work the shoot—adjusting lights, stationed at a makeup table they’ve set up inside a pop-up tent, working a computer rig almost identical to Gavril’s back home. The photographer’s on his knees, a young kid, searching for angles. Zhou’s here—Kelly—modeling with two women, the three of them painted gold, nude except for a lace of gold chains, their bodies detailed with finely drawn gold-leaf lines. Their eyes are brushed black with smoke-colored paint. They lie in the dust and in the chains, intertwined with each other, watching the photographer scurry before them like they’re demons interrupted from ancient sleep. The women open their mouths as if to swallow him, the interior of their mouths and their teeth dyed crimson.

“Break. Let’s pick up again in fifteen—”

One of the assistants switches on a trio of portable heaters, another offers the women sips of water through a straw. The photographer’s editing his images on the monitor. He’s criticizing aspects of the lighting, claiming the scene won’t render when they sculpt this environment for the streams. I make my way to Zhou.

“Excuse me—Kelly?”

She smiles. “Yes?”

An odd sensation, talking to her—I’m so used to seeing her as a stand-in for Albion that I wonder if Albion’s here, or has been here, that if Kelly turns away quickly enough I might see a flash of hair that matches the crimson of her mouth, like there’s another, truer, world covered over by the one we’re in.

“I’m—um,” I say, swallowing. “Excuse me, I’m—my name’s John Dominic Blaxton—”

“Oh, Mr. Blaxton,” she says, “I’m Kelly Lee—I’d shake your hand, but my fingers are caked with this stuff. Four hours this morning in the makeup chair to get this applied—”

She holds up her hands so I can see they’re gold. The other two models have fallen into a conversation about sushi while a makeup assistant sprays metallic paint to smooth out their sheen.

“That’s all right,” I tell her, our Adware updating friend statuses and synching connections—the closest we have is through Nirvana Modeling’s link to Gavril and once Kelly notices I have friend status with him, she says, “You’re actually friends with Gavril? Oh my God, I flag his blog on my Lucy account. He does amazing work—”

The photographer says, “Start wrapping it up—”

“How can I help you, Mr. Blaxton?” says Kelly. “Nirvana probably forwarded you my portfolio, but I have other work samples to send if you’d like to see more—”

Everything about her is familiar from the City, but only familiar in the way a dream of an unfamiliar place can seem familiar.

“I have reason to believe you can help me find a man named Mook—”

“Mook?” she says.

“You’ve worked with him—”

“Look,” she says, “I really don’t have time for this—”

Her body’s gone stiff, her demeanor sour.

“The man has taken everything from me,” I tell her, trying to keep calm.

“If you want to book me for work, go through the agency,” she says. “I only work through the agency—”

“I can pay you for your time,” I tell her. “I don’t have much, but I’ll give you everything I have if you can help me. I need to talk with him—”

“I really can’t get involved in something like this,” she says. “I thought you’d be interested in my professional work. I’d be happy to send you my portfolio, if that would help. If you want to book me, go through the agency—”

“Please stand to the side,” says the photographer and I back out from the ring of light.

“We’re really going to need you to leave,” says one of the assistants.

“Just call the cops. He’s trespassing at this point—”

“I don’t want any trouble,” I tell them. “I can get you in touch with Gavril. Kelly—what do you want? I know he’s working on Anthropologie right now, I know that. I just need to know about this man. Please, I can set it up for you—”

“Talk to me after,” she says. “I don’t want to fuck up the job I already have—”

“Fine, sure,” I say. “I’ll—after the shoot. I’ll wait outside—”

I back out of the cell. There’s a burst of laughter from the models—about me, I suppose, to cut the tension. I’m washed over with a wave of shame and hate and cold sweat. I’ve fucked it up—Theresa, I’ve fucked it up. Ascending from the fort the aura of the shoot disappears and once I’m in the bland sun, buffeted by wind rushing in from the bay, I feel like I’d left the chamber of a goddess but fumbled my chance for grace. Three hours waiting on a park bench beside a two-hundred-year-old cannon. The Fort Point information pop-ups ping me so often I almost miss Kelly’s ping when it comes. She asks if I’m still around and tells me to meet her. She flags herself and I follow hovering arrows in the Adware, pointing my way to her.

The moment you see me, she texts, disable your connection—

I find her sitting on a park bench. She’s still painted gold, the lines of gold leaf flashing in the sun, but she wears a red wool coat. A few tourists ask to take her picture and she smiles hesitantly but lets them. I disable my connection.

“I’m sorry about the scene I was causing,” I tell her. “Back there—”

She stands from the park bench. Nearly as tall as I am, but thin. She lights a cigarette and asks me to walk with her toward the water. We don’t talk, and I’m aware of the attention she elicits from the crowds we pass—she must be used to being noticed, anyway, but painted gold she looks like an alien among a lesser race of beings. Most don’t stare, not obviously—though I do spot a few people baldly ogling her, probably recording her with their retinal cams. There are pay streams, things like Candid Candies and Real Girls, full of vids just like these would be, of women unknowingly filmed and served up in the Adware for men in their privacy to swallow whole. At the water, Kelly takes another drag on her cigarette while I gape at the Golden Gate Bridge above us, stretching to distant hills, wondering at its immensity and trying to imagine how men in a different century than my own had constructed this thing, let alone dreamed it.

“Mook’s not his name,” she says.

“I don’t know his name. I don’t know anything about him—”

“That’s good. We’ll call him Mook, then. The work I do for Mook is all private stuff, off the books,” she says. “If my agency knew about it, they’d drop me and I can’t afford that. They own my image. The stuff for Mook is a different deal—”

“I understand,” I tell her. “I shouldn’t have barged in like that. I should have told you up front what I needed—”

“It’s all right,” she says. “If you would have told me up front, I would have told you to go fuck yourself. We’re here together now, though. And if you’re hooked up with Gavril, in some way, if that’s true, then you’re legit—”

“He’s my cousin,” I tell her. “I’m not in the industry—”

“I don’t want to talk with you here,” she says. “I don’t want anyone from the shoot starting rumors about who you are. I want them to forget the word Mook and forget about this afternoon. I’m serious—if word gets around that I’m working jobs outside the agency, my career is fucked. I only have a few years before I’m replaced by younger girls, so I need to float all the work I can. I can’t fuck this up—”

“I didn’t mean any trouble,” I tell her. She takes a final drag before tamping out the cigarette and saving the rest for later.

“Fuck it,” she says. “Here’s what you can do for me. Get out of here. Tell my agent that you met with me and liked what you saw, that I was agreeable and have the perfect look, that you’re interested in hiring me but will get back to him—”

“I can do that—”

“As for you and me,” she says, “book me with Gavril. Have Gavril present my agency with a contract. If I’m going to risk my work with Mook, I’ll need something better to take its place—Gavril will give me that. If the contract comes through, I’ll ping you and let you take me out to dinner. We can talk then, okay? I’ll ping you—”

I don’t want to watch her leave—I want to believe I’ll see her again, that I’ll learn everything from her, so I look out over the water, watching waves crash against the buffers, watching kids run from the white sea spray, laughing. In the AutoCab I leave a message with an administrative assistant at Nirvana, relaying what Kelly had told me to say—that I liked what I saw, that I was interested, that I’d be in touch. I try to call Gavril but he doesn’t answer, so I write him an e-mail with everything that’s happened.

Chicken McNuggets for dinner, watching an old Battlestar Galactica marathon on TV when I pay for a few minutes of sat-connect to check my accounts.

Gavril’s responded to my e-mail: Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired—

3, 7—

Kelly has a few things to take care of first. She says she wants to meet in Jackson Square, so I head over in that direction early, to wait in City Lights. Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations, carved into the sidewalk. Ferlinghetti. Chessboard floors and room after room of books on wooden shelves—rare, places like these. Coming here’s like a pilgrimage. Posters of glowering geniuses ring the walls, Ginsberg among them, wild-eyed and ink-stained—Ginsberg, whose work I once memorized and chanted at 2 and 3 a.m. on empty Pittsburgh streets. I was a teenager then, loving the feel of his words in my mouth, loving the shock and lucidity of his imagery. It’s been too long since I’ve felt like that—I pick up a copy of Howl and Other Poems. They stock titles here the streams never promote, titles never on bestseller lists and never with the full weight of marketing departments hyping them on daytime talk shows or blurbing them through bookseller apps—European novelists, dissident writers, established writers I’d lost track of in the past decade, like J. Constantine, Picard, Lucille Hash, all with new volumes, a new edition of the collected works of Bob Dylan and Grace K.’s new translation of Beowulf. I pick these up, buy an armload of books—gouging my Visa for thousands more than this trip is already costing me, but worth it to buy this paper, to hold the weight of these books in my arms. The cashier wonders if I’ve depleted their poetry section and I laugh. “Maybe I have,” I tell her, “maybe—”

Kelly pings, There in fifteen—

A few blocks to the restaurant so I walk, cradling my paper bag of books in both hands so the bottom won’t rip, sweaty and wheezing when I reach her. Kelly’s waiting on the sidewalk, wearing a baby-doll dress she once wore to impersonate Albion in the Archive, elegant in a cloche hat and all that creamy lace.

“I’ve already taken care of the wait,” she says. “I know one of the cooks and he’s saved us a quieter table where we can talk. There’s a coat check room—”

“I’ve got it,” I tell her, readjusting the sack in my arms. “Books—”

“Gavril voiced earlier,” she says. “I was flustered at first, hearing his voice—I admit I thought you were full of shit about Gavril, and I was surprised to actually talk with him. We came to an understanding. He says he’s going to change my life with the work he’s giving me. He says he’ll use me for Anthropologie, fly me out to London with him, but he made it clear that everything depends on how much I can help you. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do for you, but I’ll tell you about my work with Mook, if that’s what you’re interested in. You don’t understand how big of a break this is for me. You should have heard my agent when the contract came through. I’m yours tonight, Dominic. Anything you need is yours—”

“Good,” I tell her. “Let’s start with the food—”

The restaurant’s called Ambergris, a seafood place—intimate booths and smoked glass lit by candlelight. Kelly leads me through. The dress doesn’t cover much of her legs, her patent leather heels add inches to her height and her socials flash her modeling work, flicking vids of runway shows and behind-the-scenes clips of lingerie shoots. I feel everyone’s eyes on us as we pass. Our booth is set off from the others, private—the kind of table that might usually get bad service, but perfect for us tonight. I shove my books beside me. The smell of curry, of citrus, smoked fish. Zhou across the table’s disorienting—Kelly. I have to remind myself that this is Kelly, that her name’s Kelly, that she’s not an illusion in the Adware. She orders rum for us both once we’ve settled in.

“To getting what we want,” she says for a toast. We click glasses and I take the shot, the dark rum vanilla smooth and warming.

“I fell into some trouble back east,” I tell her. “I got mixed up with some powerful men but I have reason to believe that Mook can protect me from them. I have other reasons to find him, too. He took something very valuable from me—”

“Mook rhymes with book,” she says. “Not fluke—”

“You said that ‘Mook’ isn’t his name—what is his name? What’s Mook?”

“Are you a gamer?”

We’re interrupted by a soft swell of music from the tabletop touch menu, a gentle, impatient, reminder—I order mahimahi and Kelly a salad with sushi. Another round of rum.

“Mook finds political allegories in the video games he plays,” she says. “You’ve played first-person shooters, haven’t you? At least know what they are? You’re given a point of view and you murder everything in sight. All those nameless, faceless waves of enemies you murder are called mooks in gamer parlance. He’s adopted the notion of mooks for his theories about the state. He believes that one day the mooks will kill their killers—”

“He’s a communist, then? Mooks are the proletariat, is that it?”

“Anarchy,” she says. “Actually, he’d bristle at any label you applied to his pet theories, but he’s enthralled by the communist mythology, despite himself. He believes in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the dissolution of the state. When you hear him talk about this stuff, you’d think he’s telling you about the End Times—”

“Who is he?”

“A terrorist,” she says. “An artist. I really don’t see how he can help protect you, though—”

“Tell me about an image he uses of a woman walking two other women like they’re dogs. He pulled it from an Agent Provocateur printbook—”

“Oh, sure, he calls that one The Dog Walker. He once told me that image is personal to him, that it’s meant to rub pepper into the eyes of his enemies,” she says. “He articulates his political thought through imagery. He’s underground, off the grid—He once told me that Blum & Poe offered to sign him, offered to make him rich, but he turned them down because he’s against the capitalist ethos. Death’s-Heads, Dog Walkers, Blood Diamonds. He tags everything—some people tear down walls and billboards to collect his stuff. I was at a party following a shoot and the guy, this producer, had the side of a Corvette Mook tagged hanging in his living room. The side of an entire red Corvette just because it was painted with a Meecham death’s-head—”

“Graffiti on walls? Mook’s tech savvy. I’m surprised he sticks with paint for his art—”

“He doesn’t. He started with paint, but he didn’t get famous until the geocached installations—”

“Explain those to me—”

“Short films that will only download and play when someone’s Adware hits the exact coordinates he’s established. About a year ago, he set up an installation in front of City Hall—when you reach the last step leading to the building, the exact correct spot along the stairs, a stream downloads to your Adware, whether you consent or not—it’s a pornographic stream of then mayor Costa fooling around with two underage girls, snorting cocaine off their asses. It hijacks your vision until the film ends. The installations can’t be removed because they’re broadcast from satellites he’s hacked. Understand?”

“And he has these installations all around the city?”

“All around the country. There are fans of his who try to track them down, catalog them—but Mook says only about twenty-five percent of his installations have been discovered so far.”

“Are they all antigovernment?”

“Not all of them,” she says. “Most are love letters to Meecham. He’s obsessed with President Meecham. You should hear him—he sounds like an American flag–bleeding capitalist patriot in one breath, but in the next he’ll curse the mere notion of government and calls capitalists the scum of the earth. He once showed me this painting he made called The Worker’s Paradise but it was only this weird portrait of Meecham painted all in gold. He hates government but loves Meecham. He says truth lies in contradictions, so he expresses his belief system through images because images contain contradictions without becoming contradictions—”

“He once implied there are others he’s working with. He said he was Legion. Does that mean anything to you?”

“There are others, but I wouldn’t know what he’s referring to. Sometimes he’s grandiose—”

“How about a woman named Albion Waverly? Have you ever met her?”

“I know the name Albion,” she says. “I thought Albion was just the name he called me—”

“What’s the job?”

“Strange things,” she says. “I don’t quite understand the specifics. He has a suite over at the Brocklebank he uses for a studio. He’s fitted out the place like a soundstage. VR cams, sculpting engines. He has a Hasselblad with 3-D and tactile capture, a shoulder mount. I’ve worked on plenty of shoots and VR work, but I’ve never seen anything like his studio—all top-of-the-line gear. He’s heavy into the equipment he uses. When I show up for our meetings, he has clothes already picked out for me, gorgeous clothes, and has instructions for me to follow—”

“Like the clothes you’re wearing now. They must be from one of your sessions with Mook,” I tell her. “I recognize it—”

“House of Fetherston,” she says. “I couldn’t afford this otherwise. He tells me what to wear, what to do. He shows me vids of women and has me re-create them frame by frame, sometimes it’s like a dance. He’s making a series of short films. Usually I’m re-creating vids of a woman he calls his collaborator. He pings her, sometimes, during our sessions—”

“Albion,” I tell her.

“He’s careful not to say her name—”

“What does he ask you to do?”

“Lie fully dressed on the bed. Bend my legs a certain way. Sit in a certain position while reading. Fix my lipstick while looking in the mirror, adjust my hair. Prepare a salad—no, cut the lettuce like this. Greet people as if I’m in a boutique or a gallery. Smile, shake hands—”

“Ride in an elevator, flirting with another woman—”

“The blonde,” she says. “You know all this work? If I perform an action slightly off, I have to do another take until he’s satisfied—”

Our food arrives, elegantly plated—minimalist. Kelly picks up a quivering piece of sushi and bites into the pink flesh, closing her eyes to savor the taste. I fork off a bite of my mahimahi and realize my dinner’s already a quarter gone.

“How did you get involved with him?” I ask her.

Her real love is acting, she tells me—it always has been. She tells me about her business partner, another actress. “We’ve already performed Mamet’s Boston Marriage,” she tells me, “and Genet’s The Maids. Our most recent work was a staging of Bergman’s Persona set during World War II, but spare. I played an actress, Hui Zhong, a survivor of the Rape of Nanking, who’s interred at a mental hospital in Lijiang. My partner Tía played the nurse, Miao Tian.

“Mook approached me one night after a performance. He complimented my acting—gushed, really. He asked if I had regular work and asked if I would work for him—some acting, some VR sculpting. He didn’t introduce himself or tell me what I’d be doing, but he flashed the kind of money he was willing to pay—”

“Can you introduce me to him? I need to talk with him—”

“I figured you’d want to meet him,” she says. “Listen, I don’t know who you think he is—Mook’s just a weird guy. He’s very talented, maybe a genius, but he’s just a lonely pervert who trumps himself up in the streams. People who’ve heard of him want to take him seriously as an artist, but he avoids that scene. I’ll sell him out in exchange for Gavril, but I don’t want him to get in real trouble over this—”

“Mook took my wife from me—”

Expedient not to tell her about the body of Hannah Massey, but I mention Timothy and Waverly and tell her what Mook’s been doing to them. I tell her a little about Albion. I tell her about Zhou—Kelly seems shocked to hear this, like she truly didn’t know what her work with Mook amounted to. I tell her why she’s important, that Zhou’s the only thing I have left of my wife.

“Fuck it,” she says. “I didn’t know what Mook was doing. I don’t know why he ruined the image of your wife. I’m so sorry—”

I pay our bill and accompany her home—she lives close, so we walk. Kelly’s profile’s a mood display, astrology charts synched with a real-time map of the night sky. She’s haloed in diamond stars and animated illustrations of constellations. We weave through cliques of club kids and drag queens, side streets like carnivals, but I’m the odd one in my Caraceni suit, clutching and struggling with the weight of my paper sack of books. We walk through a pop-up market, a row of booths—Kelly stops at a street vendor selling homemade perfumes. She spritzes her wrists, sandalwood vanilla on one wrist, lilac on the other. She holds her wrists to me and tells me to breathe.

“Lilac,” I tell her.

“Do you want to experience one of Mook’s installations?” she asks. “You’re near one, actually. There’s one near here he calls The Apotheosis of American Innocence, or something like that—”

Kelly leads down a cross street, mostly residential—until we reach a parklet, nothing more than a few trees and a single bench, some places to chain bicycles. She points out a dogwood tree.

“You should use this tree as your marker,” she says.

“How does this work?”

“Put your back against the tree, then walk forward in a straight line toward the street—”

I do what she says. One step away from the edge of the parklet, my Adware’s commandeered by sat-connect—my anti-malware blinks but is useless and soon my vision’s hijacked by a vision of Eleanor Meecham, long before she was president, back when she was a model for American Eagle Outfitters, just fourteen or fifteen. She’s not wearing anything, but drapes herself with an American flag like a robe. She walks through honey fields of wheat. I can almost taste the fresh air. Her hair matches the fields, the sunshine glows golden on her skin. The mountains ringing the horizon seem lavender. The installation is a perfect moment of serenity, but only lasts thirty seconds before I’m plunged back into the San Francisco night.

“Sometimes they’re beautiful,” says Kelly.

We reach her apartment and she says she’ll ping me once she hears from Mook about their next appointment, that I can meet him if I show up in her place.

“I’m expecting to hear from him tonight—”

I wait to see her safely inside before leaving. Alone on her front curb—like dreams I’ve had of finding myself alone on city streets I know should be crowded. By the time a cab answers my call I’m as hungry as if I’d never eaten, the mahimahi feeling like little more than an appetizer.

“Destination?” it asks as I buckle in.

“How about some barbecue,” I tell it. “Maybe just sort by user reviews, I don’t have a specific place in mind. Take me to the highest rated—”

Back in my hotel room, Memphis Minnie ribs from a Styrofoam tray and a slice of chocolate cake in a plastic cup. I flip through the books I bought, but don’t want to stain the pages with barbecue sauce fingerprints so I loop Kelly’s commercials from her portfolio, aroused by liquor spots where she’s dripping with strawberry sauce and vodka. I scroll through her production credits, looking to link to her version of Persona—instead I find her version of Genet’s The Maids, and watch her in her mistress’s clothes, playing out the roles of domination and submission with her sister maid, the women tiptoeing toward sex and blood. Watching the women onstage, bathed in the blood of their masters, the actresses kiss each other and I think of Kelly’s wrists spritzed with lilac perfume—I could have kissed her wrists, delicate wrists. Theresa. I’ve undressed and lay huddled beneath the blankets, the room lights off but the coupon grids on the ceiling and walls bathing everything in an artificial multicolored glow. I don’t know if the coupons are real, if they’re really lighting my room, or if the coupons exist only in my Adware and the light I see is nothing but an illusion. I check the sat-connect rates and even though they’re peak right now, I accept—

Schenley Park where we walked together. Winter in Pittsburgh. Snow sits heavy on the canopy of branches and sifts down in sudden, gentle gusts. Panther Hollow Trail, creek beds dried out leaving black rivulets of mud skimmed with ice, snowfall on the stone bridges. Adjust the tabs to summer and watch the ice melt to flowing water, watch the trees thicken with dark leaves, the paths obscured by shadow. This is loss. There was never a funeral for Theresa, for anyone—just the mass cremation.

We’d lose ourselves in those long walks through the park following our meetings with Dr. Perkins and Dr. Carroll, discussing options—Lupron, Clomid, Serophene. Remembering how difficult it had been to conceive. In the summer, at home, we’d escape the swelter of our second-floor unit by walking through Shadyside until 2 a.m. or later. These were the nights she’d dream of our lost child. She wondered whether something was wrong with her—afraid to use fertility drugs because she worried about God, oddly fatalist those nights and terrified about bleeding. We’d come home in sheens of sweat and strip naked and sit on our couch drinking ice water while the box fans propped in our windows churned the humid air.

I go there now—

Through the foyer—but it’s Kelly waiting for me in our living room, the box fans pushing moist air around the room. Zhou. I wake in my hotel room in the middle of the night with a leaden ache through my chest that I wish I could grab with both hands and pull from myself.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I pray, but I don’t know who or what I’m praying to—nothing answers my prayer, nothing ever will.

Nearing 3 a.m., Kelly pings: Brocklebank, Room 2173; shoot scheduled for 3 p.m. the day after tomorrow. Gavril called. I’m off to London, a red-eye. Ciao!

3, 9—

The victim of urban renewal, it looks like, Nob Hill looped off from the rest of the city by a ring of sheer one-way streets called the Downtown Connector—box stores lying dormant, storefronts choked off and vacant. The city’s done well retrofitting nineteenth-century architecture instead of tearing it down, but everything’s dingy and boarded up. Poor whites meander the streets, obese women in spandex herd groups of kids on leashes to dollar stores and men clutter the liquor stores and QuickCash. The AutoCab announces we’ve arrived at the Brocklebank, but the building looks nothing like the pictures online. A famous building, once—Wiki pop-ups flash Technicolor vid snippets of century-old films that were shot here, but the building’s changed, the stonework facade’s been effaced, updated with smooth white weather barrier that’s already cracked and streaked with filth. Hovering billboards advertise Pussy squirts and cum lovin’, Adult Books and More. I ask the cab to wait for me in the turnaround.

“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—

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.

I pull the comforters over my head, carving a small tunnel through the blankets for fresh air. I load the City—the pay-as-you-go’s much slower than the iLux contract-plan, so the Fort Pitt tunnel buffers and the City skyline breaks apart in a digitized blur, buffering, before the stream catches up and the City resolves. Greenfield loads, the Run, Saline Street to the vacant lot near Big Jim’s restaurant—I’m outside in winter, seeing my breath. I skirt the vacant lot and approach the Christ House from a side street, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. The house is smoke-charred from the fire, some sort of special effect still lingering here.

The porch smells like damp soot, the front door burned black. I use Kucenic’s override codes and brace myself for another bomb blast of heat, but it never comes—just a yawning, moist smell of rot as I step inside. The house is spare. Cold. No furniture in the living room, only soot streaks and blackened ceiling beams. There’s a fireplace in the corner that had been converted to an altar, a burned wooden crucifix intact except for the missing arms of Christ. A dining room, a cut-glass chandelier melted black. I kick through ash as I walk. A kitchen without appliances, just plugs and hookups, gas lines protruding from the floor. Between the dining room and kitchen, a stairway descends to the basement. The smell that rises is dank, but that’s just my imagination feeding this place, just impressions in the iLux—I flick the light switch, but it doesn’t work. Everything is darkness. Running the length of the wall is a pipe meant to be a railing. I hold on and descend the stairs, following through into impenetrable basement darkness until my foot touches concrete. I inch ahead—water running somewhere, a trickle sound somewhere nearby. My foot touches something and I reach out—porcelain. Wet porcelain, a leaking toilet at the bottom of the stairs. I feel along the wall, concrete blocks furry with mold. I find a utility sink and a drain. I hear sounds—breathing—from somewhere in the dark.

“Albion?”

The breathing’s coming from a root cellar, but when I open the door, the room is empty. The sound of breathing is silenced. I close the door and hear the breathing again. Whoever’s here in this basement room hasn’t been archived—just her breathing.

The rooms on the second floor haven’t been burned—bedrooms up here, the fleur-de-lis wallpaper I recognize from the watercolor is faded and peeled but intact. I find Albion in the second bedroom on the right. She and Peyton Hannover lie together in a queen-size bed, their bodies gaunt and white, naked together, wrists tied with twine to the bedposts, their ankles blistered and rubbed raw from twine binding their feet together. I work to untie their wrists, but this is not real, they’re not real, and just as I untie the knots, the Archive resets and the rope is retied.

Footsteps in the hallway—Timothy. His face is much younger than the face I know—gaunt, bearded. He unbuttons his shirt and undresses, he slides naked between the women, but the moment he touches them, their heads transmogrify into pigs’ heads. Maybe that’s why Mook was here, maybe that’s why this house is burned—maybe Mook mangled these archival scenes so no one could relive them. I look at Peyton’s and Albion’s eyes, and despite their pig faces, their eyes are still women’s eyes, terrified, wounded. Timothy gropes them, but they just stare—Albion at the ceiling, Peyton at the far wall. Timothy groans, barking almost as he licks their breasts, biting their nipples and caressing them. He kisses between Albion’s legs, then thrusts into her, using his hand on Peyton. The two women turn their eyes toward each other, almost willing each other to endure Timothy’s assault. Peyton whimpers. Jesus—what am I seeing? This is preserved in the Archive—which means Timothy must have filmed himself doing this. Albion clenches her teeth to keep from crying out. I kneel beside her and look up to the ceiling where she looks. I arch my head back just as she arches her head back, and I see out the window above the bed that she can see out of—the point of view is torqued, but I can see hints of trees. The watercolor of the interior depicts this view—the paintings of the house were made by Albion.

Albion disappearing from the Archive means she was alive when Timothy and Waverly thought she had died with Pittsburgh. Who is she? Waverly claimed she was his daughter—

Albion is Mook’s client—Albion hiring Mook to delete her from the Archive, to delete scenes like this from being eternally relived—

Waverly hiring me to distract me from Hannah Massey—

Waverly hiring me to find Albion and Mook—

Tie up their loose ends—

Albion, Peyton. The explicit violence of Timothy rutting women with pigs’ heads—I can’t figure out what I’ve seen. Albion and Peyton were lovers, but here they are with Timothy. Think through: Timothy’s history of abuse, of murder. Is Albion Timothy’s wife? Peyton? That doesn’t make much sense—but they’re his victims, like Hannah Massey was his victim, maybe, like other women he’s killed or tried to kill, or wanted to. Peyton’s documented as dying in the blast, but Albion—maybe she escaped from him somehow. Maybe she escaped, but Timothy thought she was dead until she hired Mook to delete her. Maybe the act of her disappearing was enough to signal she’d never disappeared. I need to find her—

I voice House of Fetherston studios, but no one’s ever heard of Albion Waverly. I explain to the receptionist that I’m looking for someone who works there, who’d have access to clothes that haven’t officially been released—I describe what Albion looks like. I’m bounced around, office to office—soon, someone asks who I am. I try to explain why I’m calling, who I’m looking for, but she says they’ve given too much of their time already and disconnect. I search the San Francisco white pages but no Albion Waverly—no hits for Albion at all.

Track the artwork: a Google search is useless—too many art galleries in the greater San Francisco metro region. Thousands of red flags pinned to Street View when I search “San Francisco AND art gallery.” I get a sense of which neighborhoods might have the most galleries—Lower Haight, gentrified parts of Hayes Valley, maybe around Haight-Ashbury, the Mission District, maybe the Castro. Two of the six paintings have smears or spots of Mook’s blood, so I leave them rolled in the hotel but I bring the other four paintings with me. I try art galleries almost at random, taking an AutoCab to a neighborhood and just walking wherever GPS points me. Some galleries are of obvious no help, dark holes foul with body odor and antagonistic scenesters on the streams that can’t be bothered to even acknowledge my presence. Other galleries are more professional, try to be helpful. Refurbished spaces with white walls and paintings hung with price sheets available. Chic young women who don’t recognize the paintings I brought with me, can’t identify the artist but show me other work about “the Pittsburgh theme,” as they call it, artists with no true discernible connection to the city, using the end of Pittsburgh as a metaphor for whatever pet cause they want to indulge in—governmental control, military culture, religious intolerance, capitalism, the spiritual death of the modern age—or using the Burn as nothing more than a pretext for depicting bodies and cities in flames, faux-visionary apocalypses. Artist Statements written entirely with mock-theoretical buzzwords, incomprehensible, about the deconstruction and defamiliarization of Place, the ambiguity of Identity, the Monologism of History, the Society of the Spectacle, the Articulation of Desire. Of artists co-opting our sorrow, of how artists “respond” to the oblivion of a city, as if their “response” was somehow profound or even necessary. No one I ask can identify the paintings I’ve brought to them.

4, 10—

I change hotels to an EconoLodge a few blocks away from where I’d been staying. There’s hardly any staff here, only a maintenance guy in charge of the sweepers that troll room to room. I check in under the name Wallace Stevens—no questions asked.

Mook’s death hit SF.net two and a half weeks after I’d found his body and the story goes viral—crime scene photographs stream for tabloids, blog posts memorialize the death of a rising street art star, Blum & Poe reports the price of Mook tags salvaged from billboards and mailboxes ballooning four hundred percent even though most people had never heard of “Mook” until now. User commentaries theorize Mook’s death was a CIA assassination. Zebra-striped face and hollowed-out eyes. Maxing out credit cards with my hotel room rate and AutoCab fares—I didn’t expect to stay in San Francisco this long. Whole Foods for groceries but I spend the days canvassing galleries. KRON4’s been reporting on Mook’s murder every evening newscast—the killers were caught on video, but their identity’s unknown. Plenty of HD footage of three men in police SWAT uniforms, their faces hidden by black visors. They seemed to know where every security camera in the Brocklebank was located. Their visors loom close to each lens before the cameras go dark—deactivating security camera to security camera all the way to Mook’s room. The news reports that these police officers are imposters and not members of the San Francisco PD, warns of imposter cops at traffic stops. The San Francisco People’s Org advertises their PD ID app to identify legitimate members of the SFPD by badge number and career profile. I download the app. The streams report the motive appears to have been simple robbery—the victim’s Adware was stolen, the Adware more than likely already hacked and wiped and impossible to trace.

SFMOMA praises Mook in press releases, announces a retrospective to be held in the spring of next year. The streams tell us he was a visionary artist, a genius of the modern age, but the general public yawns—nothing but a juvenile-minded vandal and the sale of his artwork should reimburse property owners he’d victimized. His name was Sherrod Faulkner but he’d gone by Mook since he was a teenager in Wichita. He moved to the West Coast to attend Harvey Mudd, majoring in VR environments and game design, but dropped out. He drifted to San Francisco and worked as the dayshift manager at a Denny’s on the corner of Mission and 4th for over fifteen years. I took myself to breakfast at his Denny’s a few days ago and ordered big but didn’t eat much. I asked my waitress about him, saying I was an old friend from school and was sorry to hear what had happened. She said, “Sherrod doesn’t work here anymore—”

The streams pull apart his life. His work as Mook is encrypted, hidden, but his IP addresses as “Sherrod Faulkner” and his search histories are hacked and broadcast. Right-wing and Fourth Amendment websites and a taste for hard-core porn—a thing for redheads, erotica, decadent art—links to the e-texts of Ayn Rand and Julian Assange, user accounts with the Anarchist Loose Collective and a fan club member of the band Eat Christ. Some of his personal papers were hacked and published—fanfic written in the form of epic poetry imagining graphic sexual encounters between John Galt and President Meecham, about their child slipping from her like a bolt of lightning. The tabloids uncover his family back in Kansas, upper-middle-class parents and a sister in Chicago. His father makes a statement about the death of his son, begging the news streams to let them mourn in private, to respect their privacy. Mook’s avatar as Sherrod Faulkner was a picture of Alfred E. Neuman that will chortle, “What, me worry?” in archived comment streams and chat rooms until the world goes dark.

Iced coffee at a Starbucks in the Mission, late afternoon. The baristas recognize me for being in here so much these past few days, taking breaks here in between art gallery inquiries—they tell me “see you tomorrow” when I slurp the last of my venti and trash the cup. Already four thirty in the afternoon, most places will be closed by the time I get there, but I have time to swing by a gallery called Cell. The front room’s a lounge with worn-in couches, a few paintings hanging on the walls of dollhouses inhabited by foxes. The attendant’s neon-pink bob’s like a pom-pom floating above her PVC bodysuit. Her lips are painted oxblood, and silver studs bullet her eyebrows and tongue. She tells me they’re closing in ten minutes but I show her the paintings anyway. She recognizes the images. When she brings out a portfolio from the flat files, I know I have her. The attendant slides out a stack of ink and watercolors, the paintings hand-stitched together in groups of six, each leaf separated from the one below by a sheet of acetate.

“She calls these her fascicles,” the attendant explains.

The attendant handles the paintings like she’s handling sheets of gold leaf. Images of gray wood, rotten, of architectural details out of context, several of the house’s front door, porch columns, the words of Christ painted in whitewash but folded in on themselves, a coal chute, the interior of stairs, hardwood floors, cracked paint, stripped light fixtures in inks and charcoal, the bed where Timothy kept her, several of the bed. Only a few paintings show the house beyond these few details. One painting’s of the root cellar door—and looking at the image I can almost hear the sound of breathing I’d heard in the Archive behind that door.

“Who did these?” I ask.

“A local artist,” says the attendant. “Dar Harris. She was part of one of our group shows two years ago—”

“Dar Harris?”

“Darwyn Harris,” she says. “She’s Pittsburgh—or had friends there. She works in fashion. One of the big houses, I think. Fetherston, maybe—”

Darwyn—that was Peyton’s hometown. Darwin, Minnesota.

“What’s she like?” I ask. “Who is she?”

“You notice when she walks into the room, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says.

“I’ve been searching every gallery in San Francisco, but no one’s heard of her—”

“It depends on who you’ve been asking. Dar keeps to a certain scene—she only participates in group shows with people she knows well. I approached her once about having a solo here, but she seemed uncomfortable with the idea. I let it drop—”

“Why?” I ask. “Her work’s incredible—”

“She keeps to herself,” she says. “She’s not a recluse, but I don’t know. I don’t think she wants too much publicity. I remember she refused to be photographed for the promotion we did for this group show, which is fine except she looks like a model. Would have brought more people to the gallery if they knew what the artist looked like. I don’t get it, but I respect the decision—”

“You know her well?”

“Well enough,” she says. “She sells each fascicle as a whole, but I see you have two separate works there. They should be kept together—”

“I have the others. I bought them already separated—”

“Where did you buy them?”

“From eBay,” I tell her. She’s interested in who was selling, but I beg off, vaguely worried that these paintings may have been reported stolen and she might be fishing for information. I tell her I’ll come back the next day, to look over the collection. A Spicy Chicken meal at Wendy’s before sat-connect at my hotel, scouring the streams for mentions of Darwyn Harris—she’s easy enough to find now that I have her name. She has a Facebook page, without a profile pic. Her About is brief, without a mention of Pittsburgh. Scroll through her site’s slideshow—image after image of the same ruined house, each bound together in fascicles of six. There’s another series of paintings as well, as obsessively detailed as her renderings of the house, but these are paintings of a blonde, the tone not unlike Wyeth’s Helga images if shattered and reformed by Picasso or Braque—the same muted colors she uses for the house, but lighter, hay-colored blonde, the cream of pale skin, darker hair in curly tufts and the pink of lips and nipples and interior folds, the blue of her eyes. I look at slideshows of several of the fascicles before I realize the woman she’s painting is Peyton. House and blonde. Some fascicles feature the woman and the architecture echoing each other, but most of her small books keep to their own unified themes.

Listings under Events. Group shows throughout the winter, into spring—she’s busy even if she’s trying to stay relatively anonymous. I check the dates—in a few weeks, for the “First Friday” Mission art crawl, a show opens called Paper Covers Rock, all works on paper at a space called the Glass Dome.

I talk with Gavril late into the night. He asks when I’ll be through with this and I tell him I don’t know. “Soon, maybe—”

“I would love to see San Francisco,” he says. “I’ve always thought I would like to see the Redwoods. Drive a car through a hollowed-out tree trunk—”

5, 3—

An art crawl tonight, openings at thirty-three venues throughout the Mission, places like Artists’ Television Access, Project Artaud, the kind of grant-funded spaces Theresa and I used to visit during crawls back in Pittsburgh, the Xchange, Intersection for the Arts, the Mission Cultural Center and the Glass Dome—free downloads with walking tours, exhibition highlights, artist bios, the most hyped show a display of Day of the Dead masks made by the Latino Art League. I eat an omelet for dinner at a café called Kahlo and buy fresh-cut fries doused with vinegar and ketchup from a street vendor on Dolores. Mexican folk buskers and exhibitions of salsa dancing in the closed-off streets—gallery assistants cut among the crowds passing out handbills for after parties. The streets and sidewalks are already carpeted with their handbills and postcards, most augged with Day of the Dead death’s-heads, ornately painted skulls with crimson eyes and flashing grins that float illusory in 3-D and break apart as I step through them. Hesitant among the crowds, trying to figure my move—a gnawing doubt in my guts that I shouldn’t meet Albion at all, that I should let her be, let this all drop and run, but knowing Timothy and Waverly won’t ever let me disappear, knowing that Hannah Massey will disappear forever. A drag queen procession’s just getting started, a Tina Turner mash-up Sousa march—the pageant queen’s dressed like Meecham, a Stars and Stripes ball gown and a pig skull mask.

The Glass Dome’s street-front windows are lettered Paper Covers Rock: New San Francisco Works on Paper. Electro house emanates from inside, vintage Deadmau5, a riot vibe fueling the dance party erupting in the streets. I shoulder my way through the crowd at the door—an acute claustrophobia hits me, like instead of a narrow space crowded for an exhibition I’m in a cave packed tight with bodies. The Glass Dome’s a tapered space, like a hallway without doors—it reminds me of Pittsburgh galleries: reclaimed buildings left raw with exposed tubing and knotty braids of wiring. Pittsburgh was ringed with dead mill towns, ghost towns almost, ripe for art collectives and nonprofits to rent on the cheap, whole neighborhoods that would have died out and disappeared except for artists that wanted to rent a sense of authenticity and grit.

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 says.

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.

“There was only once he locked the door and after he did, he just sat there like he was deciding something. He said, ‘Emily, what I’m about to tell you could get me fired. I could lose my job—my entire career. But I need to say this, and my need to say this is greater than my need for employment. I want to tell you about Jesus Christ—’

“I forget what I did—rolled my eyes, maybe, I don’t remember. All I remember is Timothy grabbing my neck and squeezing. I couldn’t even scream. I felt the edges of my vision blacken and he must have seen my face turning because he let go and let me breathe, but he was gasping for breath harder than I was. It took him a minute or two before he calmed down and apologized.

“‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.

“He told me he still struggles, but he knows that his soul is pure, that we all have pure souls that are untouched no matter how much we’ve abused our own bodies. He told me that despite my own failings—how I cut myself, the drugs—that Christ could save me as well, that I could transcend my limitations because the body is corrupt but the soul is pure. He told me that we’re born into sin, that our bodies trap us in sin, but to never forget that our souls reflect the true God—

“He presented a Bible to me, a printed Bible with a blue leather cover that had my name embossed in gold. He told me to read the Gospels. He pointed them out to me. He told me to pay attention to the words printed in red. This was part of the new curriculum, he told me. He unlocked the door and told me that he’d see me the day after tomorrow.

“I could have said something to the guard who escorted me back to my room. I could have told one of the nurses at dinner or check-in what he’d done to me, but I didn’t. I was terrified. I was terrified that whoever I told would ignore me or wouldn’t believe me and that it would get back to him. I kept quiet.

“That night I read the Gospels out of fear but felt a change—I felt what I believed was the grace of Jesus touching my life—at least that’s what I thought it was, because the feeling was so glorious. I’m far away from that time now, but when I first read Matthew and Mark, and when I read the account of the baptism of Christ in Luke, I felt my life—felt like my chest just melted, like I’d been made of ice but some incredible warmth had broken through. I fell to the floor of my cell and knelt at the side of my bed, not knowing how to pray so I just said the words, ‘Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me,’ repeating His name in a hysteria, and with every word I felt His love overwhelm me. I was converted, that night. I felt protected by a power beyond myself. I reread the Gospels, then began in Genesis and when I next saw Timothy I confronted him about what had happened and told him that I’d report him if he ever touched me again, but his entire demeanor had changed. He smiled and laughed like he, too, was lit with an inner light at seeing me saved. At the end of our session we held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer.

“On his recommendation I was released from the facility and he placed me at Mrs. Waverly’s house. He thought that I might like living there in a community of faith. He introduced me to Mrs. Waverly, who we called Kitty—

“I realize, now. Kitty was the leader of the house but Waverly controled everything. He gave sermons about evangelism. He told stories about mission trips to Haiti and showed slides of past groups of girls in dusty villages. The people living at Kitty’s house were young, mostly college girls, girls who’d moved to Pittsburgh from other cities and other countries, lonely girls brought together because they were searching for fellowship. We were encouraged to socialize with one another, to recruit more people to our congregation but to limit our contact with people who weren’t interested in our faith. We took long hikes and trips to Ohiopyle. I was in love with it all, with the community. Eventually I adopted the name Albion and Timothy called me his sister in Christ—

“It was a Saturday afternoon when Timothy and Waverly visited me in the upstairs room. We prayed together, and Timothy explained what would happen. I still remember how calm his tone of voice was. Waverly crawled into bed and lay there while I went through with it. He kissed me like he was drinking me but fucked me like I wasn’t there at all. I wish I could tell you why I went along with it—but there is no why, that house was my life back then, my entire life. Even now I’m disgusted and relive that afternoon and wish I’d somehow taken control, had somehow done something, run screaming or refused or something, but I didn’t. I went through with it. Timothy took his turn and that was the first time he touched me since trying to choke me back in the center—he took me like I disgusted him. Afterward they prayed over me, these men. To heal me. The diseases in me. Asked God to be lenient with me.

“They visited every Saturday afternoon, and before they started they called me especially beloved, like the disciple ‘loved by Christ,’ but afterward I had to endure their prayers on my behalf and Timothy waiting for Waverly to leave so he could finish. Waverly was quick, but Timothy was violent and some nights I couldn’t help him finish until he hit me. He said he could get me Percocet—he never failed to bring pills and I don’t know if you’ve ever used Percocet but those sessions became the trigger for pills. After, he’d send Kitty into the room with me, to sleep in my bed with me, to make sure nothing happened while I was using. She’d spoon me and hold me like I was her child, sometimes stroke my hair or cry with me. I remember she smelled like ointment and hair spray and I could feel the abrasive skin of her legs touching mine as she curled her toes up close to me. But she would talk to me, whispering to me while we lay together. I learned from Kitty that Timothy had another family, that he was married. He was married again even before that. He had some sort of troubles in his past—”

“When did you move to the apartment in Polish Hill?” I ask her. “That’s where I first started looking for you—”

“Timothy broke my arm,” she says. “Dr. Waverly asked me to move out of the house because of it. He rented that apartment for me, paid for my classes at the Art Institute. Timothy still visited me—there was a café downstairs from the apartment and we’d have coffee, just talking. He apologized for what had happened. He told me he needed to clear up a few things about his life. He stayed late at my apartment almost every night and I let him. He would berate me if I was late coming home or if I was supposed to see any of my other friends—”

“Peyton?” I ask.

“She was the reason he broke my arm. He didn’t like how close we were, said I was trying to make a mockery of him—”

“What happened?”

“There was a morning I didn’t have classes and Timothy made breakfast and told me that he wanted to marry me. He said he was going away for a little while, that he was taking a road trip down south with his wife and that he would return to me a stronger and better man, a free man. We would live together through Christ when he returned, he said. I asked where he was going, but he wouldn’t tell me. All he said was ‘far.’ ‘A week or two, that’s all,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll be back for you—’”

“You’re Timothy’s wife?” I ask her.

“The world ended first—”

5, 4—

“I died that day,” she says.

“I died with everyone I knew and loved.

“I was downtown. I had a fashion photography class that morning, working with lighting. The weather was beautiful like a spring day even though it was October, and standing on the corner of the Boulevard of the Allies, I remember thinking that Timothy had left, that there wasn’t anything I needed to rush home to, no one expecting me, and wanting to go to the Galleria, to the South Hills—to some of the boutiques in Mount Lebanon, anywhere but just home to my apartment, anywhere. I was interested in vintage looks at the time and Mount Lebanon had a location of Avalon that I didn’t get to as often as the Squirrel Hill store. A beautiful afternoon, do you remember? I could spend all afternoon just walking, if I wanted to—

“I had a quick lunch at the Bluebird Kitchen. I remember figuring out which bus to take because I hadn’t made the trip all that often and wasn’t familiar with the route. I remember catching the bus and remember the bus was crowded that day. It was almost too crowded, and I remember second-guessing whether I should even go. I was fearful of what Timothy would think if he found out I didn’t come straight home after class—but I’d already paid my fare and had already worked my way through the crowded bus aisle, threading among people’s legs and backpacks and shoulders until I found a free space to stand. Holding the nylon strap, swaying with every turn. I remember everything, every detail of that bus ride. We inched corner to corner through downtown, more passengers boarding, crowding me farther toward the back. The faces of the passengers are seared into my memory. I have dreams about them—even now I dream I’m still on the bus with them. At the time I remember wondering why so many of them weren’t at work—I remember wondering where they were going. I’ve ridden that bus in the Archive. I feel a desperate need to see those people again, to visit them, to remember them—and they’re there, perfectly preserved because of the bus’s security camera. I see myself among them and wonder why, wonder who they were and what their lives had been before they boarded the bus that afternoon.

“We left downtown—no more stops until the far side of the tunnel. An old woman in front of me was clicking her tongue for a child in front of her. Most people kept to themselves, looking out the windows or into the streams or at their cell phones. I remember riding across the Liberty Bridge, the Monongahela flowing beneath us like a ribbon of mud, the downtown skyline receding behind me. I remember Mount Washington looming like a great and expanding shadow. I remember plunging into the Liberty Tunnel, the smooth tube of concrete cutting through the mountain. The sunlight is cut off, replaced by an unnatural fluorescent glow. The taillights of cars are exceptionally bright. The sound is odd—a reverberation of wind and engines, like a cocoon of sound. The smell is motor oil and stale air. It’s twilight here. It will always be twilight here.

“This is when the world ends. This is when a man opens his suitcase. I remember falling. The mountain heaving. The bus flipped over. The metal screamed. The tunnel had collapsed and the sudden stop was padded by bodies. A jumble of bodies in the aisles, in the seats, finding my face pressed against window glass, my neck bent. So many people died right then—most of us were dead. I don’t know minutes from hours. The terrible pressure. The dark. Movement against my shin—someone else was alive, but the movement stopped. Blood rushing to my head, the pain intolerable. Screams in the darkness. Moaning—like animals moaning, panicked, not like the sounds people make.

“A few who were alive turned on their cell phones and held them out like flashlights. There was room for some of us to move, a few of us who were unhurt, who started picking through the dead. I remember panicking then—it was the only moment I panicked, understanding that I was buried in dead people. I screamed but my screams sounded distant, like I was under water and listening to someone else scream. I remember hands grabbing my legs and pulling me free. I remember screaming until a man’s face appeared in the bluish-white glow of a cell phone and calmed me. This man’s name was Stewart—I can still see Stewart’s face hovering in blue light when I close my eyes. He asked if I was hurt and when I said I was, he asked how bad and where. I told him I thought my leg was broken and his response was, ‘Then you can still help us—’

“We separated the living from the dead. Working in the dark for what must have been hours, reaching out and touching a cold hand, cold faces. Only eight of us lived. We worked until we could no longer hear the voices and didn’t dare to speak until the distant cries from people we couldn’t reach fell silent. The bus was crumpled in a way that left enough room to huddle together near the steering wheel. The glow of cell phones—faces so covered with blood that I couldn’t see who these people were. Stewart told us to turn out the lights, to conserve the batteries, but in the dark the dead crawled around us so we kept the lights on. Someone had a radio, but all we could hear was static. An increasing stink of gasoline. A woman named Tabitha screamed for God to kill her. She dug out her eyes and chewed on her tongue. We watched her bleed to death in the faint glow of our cell phones. The batteries on the cell phones ran out one by one and we lost our lights. Another man, Jacob, began to sing—a rich baritone voice that was like a thread in the dark. We were left with nothing but our voices. I heard Stewart—he was rummaging through what backpacks and bags he could reach, trying to gather together whatever we could eat or drink. He divvied what we had, rationed it out to us. He tried to convince us all to go to the bathroom in the same corner—in a shallow pocket you could crawl to on your belly between two bodies, but no one listened to him and soon our little space was fouled. Stewart was certain that someone was digging through the rocks to find us and we’d listen and hear slides and shifts in the stones and convince ourselves that help was coming, that if we could just hold on we would be rescued. He begged us to be intelligent, to conserve our energy, to conserve our water. He talked about his daughters and his wife and tried to get us all talking about who was waiting for us, to give us all hope. At some point we stopped hearing Stewart’s voice.

“Time dissolves. I’d sleep and I’d wake up but I don’t know for how long or how often. I’d stop hearing someone’s voice or someone’s breathing and I’d think they died only to hear them say something or hear them shift and know they were still alive. There were six of us, after Stewart and Tabitha. We hung on by playing games—word association games. I wondered where the old woman who clicked her tongue was, or the mother and her child—they would have been right near me in the crash and so maybe they were alive, too—and I’d scream and start pulling at the bodies around me, trying to dig through to them, thinking someone else might still be alive, but the others would say, ‘What do you think of when I say the word sunshine?’ And I’d say, ‘a park,’ or ‘the ocean,’ and then I would have to say, ‘Jacob, what do you think about when I say the word ocean?’ and Jacob would answer until we were telling each other about the beach and we weren’t buried alive at all but were in the sun, or in a park having a picnic, or swimming in the ocean.

“It was only later—long after we’d eaten through our sack lunches and drank through all the water and bottles of pop and thermoses of coffee, long after we grew thin and agonized from hunger and after burning thirst made us desperate—that we gave up hope of a rescue and began tearing at the bus walls with small bursts of our failing energy, listening to the shifting of concrete and stone, hoping we would die in a sudden rush of weight. Instead, a path opened. One of us, a woman named Elizabeth, felt a slight breeze that she thought was one of the dead men breathing, but when she reached out her hand through one of the broken bus windows, she found that her arm could fit through the unexpected gap in the stone. She climbed out the bus window. When she spoke her voice was distant and we thought it was a trick of our ears, but she said there was enough room to crawl. Too narrow for a few of us to fit through—they tried and plugged the hole, wriggling back into the bus, but I was thin, I was one of the ones who could push through the broken window, slicing open my breasts and my abdomen and my thigh on a shard of glass. Once I crawled through, the narrow path opened wider. There were only three of us who could fit through—Elizabeth ahead of us, and a man named Steven in front of me. I was the last. I remember hearing the others screaming after us when we left them. They cursed us. They damned us. They begged us to come back, to stay with them. Pitch-black rock, scraped and bruised, gouged by rebar in the shattered concrete, bleeding. I remember crawling, what seemed like hours of work to only move an inch or two inches. I remember thinking that one of the people we’d left behind would catch up with me, that I would feel their hands grab my foot and pull me back, but no one touched me and eventually their voices faded. We crawled like worms through the earth.

“Elizabeth led us, picking our path. We slept several times. We found a car that had been buried, the windshield broken in. Steven found a bottle of Mountain Dew in the cup holder and we drank—the sweetest I’ve ever tasted. We slept together near that car, but Elizabeth woke us and picked a new path. Eventually I felt heat rising and felt that the stones were becoming smooth. A sharp, noxious odor of soot and char. I heard Elizabeth scream—a sound that in the dark was like the voice of horror but I now know as the sound of joy. I saw daylight. From the mountain down across the lake of fire where the city had once been, fields of fire and black tumbles, a landscape of ash. Loosely standing skeletal husks that were once skyscrapers, a leveled landscape. We didn’t understand. We crawled down the mountainside, keeping ourselves from tumbling by holding on to the roots of trees. We made our way down to the river and drank the poisoned water. We ate the poisoned mud on the banks. We slept huddled together on the shore.

“We lived like this for three days, but it rained on the fourth and we stretched our faces upward gasping for the water. The rain tempered the fires and turned everything sodden. Others who’d lived came out of their shelters for the rainwater, small hovels or miraculous buildings that hadn’t collapsed. We met a man named Ezra who brought us with him back to his shelter. It was only a matter of time before someone came to pick us up, he told us. They knew we were there—there were drones zipping about the place, filming the survivors, so they knew we were still alive. He was living in the basement of a building in the South Side. There were vending machines with food and bottles of water and more water he’d saved from the toilets. He gave us all something to eat—bags of peanuts and animal crackers. Ezra told us about the bomb. We listened to the radio. I realized that everyone I knew had died. I realized that the destruction was so swift and terrible that whoever I had once been could have died with the rest of what I had known. I felt like a dragonfly that had been trapped in amber and suddenly freed. I was new—

“Ezra planned our way from the city, packing up as much as we could carry—four of us shouldering the load would give us a better chance at surviving, he figured, but it never came to that. We heard the sound of helicopters. Men in protective clothing airlifted us to a hospital in Ohio. We were kept in separate rooms, but I know that Steven died from radiation poisoning. I don’t know if Elizabeth died or not. I was in the hospital for nearly a year, a sickness so overwhelming that I figured each day might be my last, but I lived. I lived—”

5, 4 IBID.—

Dawn by the time we say good night. She shuts her door as I leave, soft enough I hear the click and dragging sway of her chain lock and the heavy fall of the bolts. Crimson hallway carpet the color of pomegranates, early morning light the color of wool. The scent of her apartment lingers in my clothes—coffee, oil paints, container orchids and soil. Leaving her feels like a mistake, somehow, a critical lapse now that I’ve found her—but last night Albion said if we hesitate here we both will die.

“Why? Who’ll kill us?” I asked. “Who are they? The men who killed Mook—”

Just after 3 a.m. when she brewed a second carafe of coffee. We sat facing each other on her couch, where we’d been all evening. Albion tugged on her earlobe—a little nervous tic when she’s thinking.

“I really wasn’t sure who they were until you found me, but now I’m certain,” she said. “Waverly’s brother, Gregor, and his sons. Rory and Cormac. Rory was just a teenager when I knew him. Cormac was older. He was married—I remember he liked showing us pictures of his two little girls. The brothers used to come up to the house during hunting season for weeks at a time and Waverly’s brother would stay for even longer stretches. There’s something odd about him, the brother—I don’t know if he can take care of himself fully. Sometimes he goes catatonic for hours at a time. They’re from Birmingham, in Alabama—”

“Timothy mentioned Alabama,” I said. “The first time I met him he told me a story about driving through Alabama and passing roadkill in the middle of the night. Miles of roadkill. He said he was with his wife—”

“If Timothy brought a woman to Alabama, then she’s dead,” said Albion. “He took her to his uncle’s farm—”

“Jesus,” I said—already assuming that Timothy had killed his wife, but the blunt image of his uncle’s farm still jolted me. Barns and sheds, maybe—decapitations and hands cleaved away, imagining what might be hidden in those fields. “Lydia Billingsley,” I said. “Timothy’s wife was named Lydia Billingsley. Her body was found in Louisiana. There are other women, too. Actually, I wanted to ask you about a specific young woman Timothy had a relationship with—”

“I’m sorry, Dominic,” she said. “I can’t help you with that—”

“Anything you know will help me. Anything you can tell me. I understand talking about Timothy will be difficult—I don’t want to take that for granted, but I believe he may have killed the young woman I’ve been researching—”

“Let her go,” said Albion.

“What?”

“Let her go,” she said. “The dead deserve their rest—”

My feet feel hammered flat from the walking I’ve done, blisters like water balloons between my toes. Starbucks for coffee and oatmeal—a window seat where I watch the traffic gather and clot as morning thickens into the rush hour commute. Click through offers for a free latte if I fill out a customer satisfaction questionnaire, but all I can think of is Albion and Waverly’s family and the desire to disappear. I need to think. Redraw my lines of inquiry into the death of Hannah Massey. Hourly forecasts, cloudless and radiant. Albion told me to let the dead rest and in the moment I assumed she meant Hannah Massey, but realize now she may have been referring to herself. I wick headlines from my line of sight—there’s a gas station across the way and sunlight glinting off windshields and chrome distracts me.

I notice the error message first—

Red text and a faint notification ping: identification failure.

The SFPD app I’ve left running in the background keys on a police officer at the pumps across the street but fails to identify him; 3× zoom, 9×—he’s wearing SWAT armor, without a helmet, an oily slick of hair and porcelain-fine features; 12× zoom—thin lips, like Timothy’s, and smallish eyes. I store his image. The app locks onto his badge number but again fails identification, reporting invalid as checked against the existing roll.

Call 911 for immediate confirmation?

What would happen if I called the cops on him? The car he’s filling is a San Francisco PD cruiser—steel cages over the fenders and slim-profile lights along the roof. Worst-case scenario: Waverly has police cooperation, they track my 911 call, flush me out, find Albion.

“Dismiss,” I tell it.

Fuck. I schedule an AutoCab pickup and receive a ping just a few minutes later when a cab pulls into the Starbucks lot. I nestle into the rear seat and decline when the cab prompts me to load my personal account.

“Cash,” I tell it, scrambling in my wallet for enough to cover the fare. I tell the cab the hotel address and decline options for a scenic route or self-guided city tour. A last glimpse through the rear window as the gas station recedes into the distance: he’s still at the pumps.

Call Albion.

Her avatar’s an image of a sparrow.

“Dominic?”

“You have to leave—you have to get out of your apartment right away. I’m in a cab right now on my way back to my hotel and I saw him, one of the men who killed Mook. I think it was one of them—”

“Slow down,” she says. “Tell me what’s happening—”

“There’s a Starbucks near your apartment, with a gas station across the street. A Shell, I think. I think I saw one of the men who killed Mook. Only one of them—dressed like a cop. I don’t know where the other two are. He’s right by your apartment, he might be coming for you. You have to leave. Now—”

“Dominic, are you safe?” she says.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “I don’t think he saw me—”

“Go back to your hotel and wait there,” she says. “Call me when you get there. Be ready to leave. Lock the doors. Don’t open for anyone, do you understand?”

“You need to leave,” I tell her.

“I will,” she says. “What hotel are you staying in?”

I forward her the hotel’s address and she disconnects.

“Can I interest you in discount events at Candlestick Park?” says the cab.

“Cancel,” I tell it, but the voice drones on, BOGO deals and spa retreats for the women in my life, cycling through its litany of offers. I scan out the rear window and spot the police cruiser, a lane over and two cars behind. We turn the corner onto Oakdale Avenue, an open stretch of smooth concrete glaring in the harsh sun. Wide lanes lined by pastel houses and apartment buildings on either side, like art deco dyed for Easter. Trees dot each block, leafy puffs on thin trunks. The police cruiser’s immediately behind us, now, drawing closer. A siren squawk. It flashes its lights.

“Don’t pull over, for Christ’s sake, keep going,” but the cab says, “You are instructed to prepare your driver’s license and valid state ID. You are instructed to place your hands on the headrest in front of you—”

I try the door but the safety locks are engaged. Fuck, fuck. Squealing breaks as the cab pulls over through the bike lane to the curb.

“Cab, what’s the badge number and name of the officer who’s pulled us over?”

“Working… Working… Your patience is appreciated…”

“Cab, call 911. There’s an emergency. Call 911—”

“Great news!” says the cab. “The police are already on the scene!”

“Son of a bitch—”

The cruiser pulls behind us, about two car lengths away. There’s still only one officer, the one I saw at the pumps.

Call Albion—but she’s not answering.

“No, no, no—”

Oakdale Avenue’s streaming with traffic, cars flashing past too fast to flag someone down from the backseat of the cab, although I try—but even cars that rubberneck are just blurs of color sweeping past. He could shoot me here—locked in the cab, he could shoot my brains all over the backseat. The officer waits for a slight gap in traffic before he steps from the cruiser. He makes his way toward me along the edge of the street.

“Call 911. Unlock the fucking doors. I want to talk to a fucking human. I want to speak with my account representative—”

“Holding…”

The cab’s front windows slide down. The officer leans in the driver’s side. Moussed strands of hair have come undone from the rest of his slick. He’s pale. His lips are bloodless. He’s chewing, or maybe just grinding his teeth, and for a moment I let myself wonder if he’s as nervous as I am.

“Are you John Blaxton?” he says, his voice silky with a southern accent, a little higher than I would have guessed.

“What do you want?”

“I think you and I have some things to discuss, don’t you?”

He’s not nervous at all—all that chewing must be some sort of restraint, or the anticipation of shredding me with his teeth.

“I don’t have anything to discuss with you,” I tell him, my life dwindling to a series of limited moves before an endgame. “I was working for a man named Timothy Reynolds,” I tell him. “If you need to discuss me or my work, you can talk with him—”

“Get out of the car, John,” he says, reaching inside the cab to override the locks. I know I’ll die, but even so I obey him, simply obey him—shifting my bulk across the backseat, conjuring enough nerve to spring from the opposite side of the cab, to put the car between us and break for the pastel houses, but I’m already jelly-kneed and know I couldn’t run. He could instruct me to fall to my knees so execution would be easier and I would obey, I would obey him—every clench of self-preservation already gone craven, paralyzed. Out of the car, I realize how tall he is—taller than me—wiry and athletic. He rests one hand on the handle of his nightstick.

“What do you want from me?” I ask him.

“Walk with me to the car,” he says. “Ride in back. I’ll be your chauffeur—”

The man’s hands are white, white like they’ve never felt the sun, with long fingers and distorted knuckles that look more like bony protuberances than proper knuckles—one hand rests on the nightstick, but he’s holding the other to his chest, drumming little rhythms against the smooth metal of his badge.

“What’s your name?” I ask him.

Along the edge of the street, not on the sidewalk. An intersection’s up ahead, but the traffic streaming past is heedless, the posted limit’s forty-five but these cars are blowing past that. I can smell the man’s aftershave or cologne—despite the breeze I can smell him and I wonder if this is what Mook smelled when he died.

“Did you kill Hannah Massey?” I ask him.

This draws a reaction—a puckish sneer like he’d cracked the vault of something sacred and defiled what he’d found. A little over 280 the last I weighed myself, but that was years ago when I was slimmer—I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds or more. Almost without thinking, certainly without considering many outcomes, I step into him—pushing with both hands and shouldering, leveraging my weight into a headlong thrust. He keeps his balance, but stumbles several feet into the nearest lane. I can’t tell the make of the car—but I’m sure the driver never sees this man suddenly in the street. Driving into the glare of the sun. There isn’t a shriek of breaks or even tires squealing away in a tight swerve, only the plastic crunch of the car striking him, the fender cutting him at the knees and plowing through his leg and hip. The man pinwheels onto the hood, back bouncing against the front windshield and buckling the safety glass. His body flips away from the car and straddles the center lane. The car slides to a stop. Other cars stop. Distant horns. Someone screams. The man isn’t dead—I can’t tell how injured he is, but he isn’t dead. He’s already on his hands and knees, spitting blood and vomiting. I run.

Across four lanes, through the intersection—between houses, cutting across lawns, odd artificial patches of neon grass. I slip to my knees. I collapse. Facedown in the cool grass. What have I done? God, I killed him, I tried to kill him. Sirens, approaching sirens. Fear paralyzed, winded: the man’s body buckling the windshield, all that blood splashing from his mouth. Fuck, fuck. One knee at a time. I stand. I stand and run. Onto another street, a cross street. Sides stitched, cramping, so I walk as fast as I can, stitches of pain coursing through my chest, my arms. A bus approaching. Is this a heart attack? I lift my arm at the corner and the bus pulls over, the door folds open.

“Hey, mister—Are you okay?”

I collapse into a front seat, searching my pockets for bills to pay the fare—the bus already pulling away from the stop, turning a corner. The air-conditioning’s like a frigid suffocation. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t know where I am, where I’m going—focal points on my Adware disoriented, useless. Two bills to pay the meter. A police car screams past in the opposite direction. A woman across from me holds her groceries to her chest like she thinks I’ll steal them. I’m trying to catch my breath.

“Are you all right?” says the driver. “Do you need a doctor or something?”

“I’m good,” I tell him. “Just a few blocks. I’m okay—”

They must think I’m having an aneurysm—fat drops of sweat roll off my face. I settle in, slump, I tried to kill him, headlines scroll but I’m too agitated to read, TMZ’s going viral with a vid of a girl who’s lit herself on fire—suicide-dare.com. The girl douses herself with lighter fluid like she’s at a wet T-shirt contest; she lights a match. The video’s playing out, millions of hits—she ignites in a blue flash, then runs screaming around her bedroom, bouncing against the walls, burning alive. Someone’s overlaid 8-bit Nintendo music over the vid and it’s like she’s writhing to the music. #SuicideDare trends in the global feeds. Coupons for Dunkin’ Donuts, coupons for McDonald’s. I try to call Albion again, but she’s still not answering.

I don’t know where I am. I hop off the bus after twenty minutes and request an AutoCab pickup. It’s a different cab from the one I’d had before so I have to decline the chorus of offers as I ride. Apartments and strip malls, gas stations and traffic. I ask the cab to pull over across the street from my hotel and approach around back—no police cars, nothing unusual. I keep the lights off in my room, calling Albion while I pack, rolling up my Steelers hoodie and sweats, changing into my Adidas. I pack up my new books and Albion’s artwork.

She calls.

“Dominic? Where are you?”

“At my hotel. Are you all right? I’ve been calling you—”

“Look for a green Prius. It’s light green, almost silver—”

I find her in the lot, idling near the entrance. The backseat and rear hatch of the Prius are filled with suitcases and garbage bags stuffed full. She must have been packing when I tried to call, taking whatever she could gather in just a couple of trips, leaving everything else behind. She rolls down the window and says, “Get in—”

Awkward, my suitcase between my legs, my knees splayed out so I have to cringe to the side in order for Albion to shift gears—she drives fast, rolling through stop signs and pushing intersections, rarely stopping. Her posture’s prim, her hands kept at 10 and 2—she leans forward, scanning the traffic for spaces to slip through, aggressive. I hold my hand to the dash and see my fingers still shaking—I can’t quite calm down.

“I tried to kill one of them,” I tell her. “I pushed him—he was hit by a car. I can’t believe, I, almost I—”

“Who was it?” she asks. “What did he look like?”

“A young guy,” I tell her, flashing the image I captured. “He looked like a stoat. Pale—”

“Rory,” she says. “Did you kill him? Is he dead?”

“No, I don’t think so—”

Albion cries as we cross the Golden Gate Bridge—a self-controlled sobbing that amounts to little more than tears in rivulets down her otherwise stoic face. Hallucinatory women float like angels in the Adware, singing daily deals and half off admission to tourist traps. Auto-Toll with Adware registration but Albion waits in line to pay with cash, paranoid our connection might have been hacked. I stare out over the bay, at the white flecks of sailboats and gulls against the expanse of impossibly blue water, the phantom weight of the man’s body against my palms as if I’m still pushing him—He’s not dead, I tell myself, it’s all right, he’s not dead. I haven’t killed anybody.

“We wasted too much time,” says Albion, panic edging her voice. “We should have left hours ago. We should have left the moment you found me—”

She has a checklist for disappearance—her first few steps scripted years in advance. Up 101, distant folds of mountains and grass verges and overpasses, medians lined with skinny pines. She pulls over at a McDonald’s in Novato, one she’d picked out because the parking lot’s hidden from view of the road, transferring her checking and savings into a floating account. She stops again just outside of Santa Rosa at a place called Good Stuff Auto and trades her Prius for a used Outback and five thousand in cash—she’s bilked on the deal, but adamant that the Outback is featureless, no GPS, no OnStar, Adware hookups only to the stereo, no other account access. She signs her papers using a Washington state ID that lists her name as Rose Callahan. The salesman knows the ID’s bullshit, but he’s happy to deal—even helping us repack our luggage in the new car before counting out a hundred crisp fifty-dollar bills. We grab burritos from a roadside grill before backtracking south down 101.

“Now tell me who you are,” she says. “I need to know why you’re here, how you found me—”

“I told you last night—”

“Do better than what you told me—”

“Are you taking me back to San Francisco?” I ask her. “We’re heading south—”

“We’ll pick up I-80 toward Nevada. There’s a town called Elko,” she says. “We’ll figure out what our next steps are from there, but I need to know more about you before I decide what to do—”

By four o’clock, the afternoon’s turning syrupy, hours of driving already behind us. She pulls over at a rest stop so we can stretch our legs, use the restrooms. Pepsi and cheddar cheese Combos from the vending machine.

“I’ve been keeping a journal,” I tell her when she’s back at the car. “It’s the best I can offer to tell you about myself, why I found you, how I’m involved in all this—I’ll let you read it. It will tell you everything—”

“Go ahead and start,” she says. “Read it while I drive—”

I read from the beginning, “‘Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud,’” but Albion stops me after only a few pages, once I’ve read about my session with Simka, when I told him the name of the body I’d found.

“I knew her,” she says. “I remember Hannah—”

Albion’s connection to Hannah, or their potential connection, never occurred to me until now—beyond their separate relationships to Timothy, to Waverly. Albion always sliding away from me toward her disappearance, Hannah Massey always emerging, someone I’m excavating. Thinking of them together unsettles me.

“Did you know her well?”

“Not very well,” she says, speaking to the miles of highway in front of us more than she’s speaking to me. “Waverly was interested in her. He was a lecturer from time to time—he said it kept his mind elastic to be around so many intelligent young people, that it helped keep his work fresh for his company, Focal Networks. I remember when he told us about Hannah—there were about eight of us eating together that night. We’d just said prayers when Waverly said something about finding a flower growing in a barren field. Anyway, he was enthusiastic about a student in one of his classes, and asked me to get to know her, me and Peyton—”

“Is that how it worked? Did you recruit women to live at the house?”

“Recruit might not be the right word,” she says, “and Hannah never lived with us. We introduced ourselves, spent time with her. She was an actress and was interested in modeling, so there was a natural connection with me and Peyton. She was impressed by Waverly, impressed by us. She came to the house for prayer group, sometimes, but never lived there—”

“Do you know how she died?” I ask, but the question closes her off. I know I’ve bungled something, though I’m not exactly sure what—maybe the bluntness of the question, maybe scratching at a wound she thought had healed years ago. After a few minutes, I say, “Albion, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry. I didn’t mean to sound so callous or direct about someone you knew. I don’t mean any disrespect to her—”

“It’s all right,” she says, but turns on the radio and eventually the oldies ease us.

We arrive in Elko late and check into the Shilo Inn, a stretch of white motel with the feeling of an emptied swimming pool. Once we drop our bags, she takes me to a sports bar called Matties and tells me to bring my journal. After midnight. We sit in a corner booth far from the windows, scanning the front door whenever someone new drifts in. Terrified and anxious about the faces we might recognize. She asks me to start my journal again from the beginning. She listens carefully, stopping me every so often to clarify something I’d written or to ask me to fill in details about my life. I read until two, when Matties is closing and we retreat to our rooms at the Shilo.

A few days in Elko. We spend most of it at Matties or wandering slow laps around the Elko Junction Shopping Center, lost in conversation or sitting for hours in the food court while I read my journal to her, only retreating to our hotel rooms once everything’s closed and the streetlights blink yellow. I read to her about Theresa, and Albion supposes she may have known her—that she once took a class on container gardening at Phipps. “The teacher was kind of quirky,” she says. “Longish hair, blonde? I liked her. I remember she liked to tell jokes—”

Matties lets us linger for hours—we’re picking at chocolate cake and sharing a pot of coffee when I read her my description of how we met, the moment I first saw her in the gallery in her white dress, her pockets filled with flowers. I close the journal, set it aside, finish the cake.

“There’s a house in New Castle,” she says.

“New Castle, Pennsylvania? Is that where you’re heading? Near Pittsburgh?”

“We’ll be safe there,” she says. “Sherrod helped me buy it anonymously a few years ago. It’s meant to be a safe house, someplace to hide. It could work for a little while—”

“When they killed him, they took his Adware,” I remind her. “They’ll know what he knew—”

“Sherrod was careful,” she says and I want to say, Not careful enough, but let the obvious slip past.

We leave Elko the next morning, sharing the drive to New Castle—we eat Bob Evans or IHOP for every breakfast, pushing through the days and staying at whatever Express hotel we come to when we’re each too tired to drive. Albion loops audiobooks through her Adware to the stereo—she prefers centuries-old books, Longfellow and the like, Tennyson and Shakespeare. We make it through Jane Eyre twice. We listen to old French music as the evenings descend—acoustic jazz and folk, Carla Bruni and Boris Vian. When she’s asleep I shut down my Adware and just listen to the radio, country twang through most of the country, or stations filled with evangelism, but I listen to that promise of God’s love because even those preachers’ voices are easier to take than the silence, when all the death I’ve been hounding coalesces and hangs in my thoughts like butchered meat.

Night by the time we drive through Ohio, the landscape changing to something as forgotten but familiar as my mother’s voice—flatlands giving way to the warp of fields and the hills that will become the mountains of what was once Pittsburgh. We cross into Pennsylvania. We reach New Castle late—I pull in the driveway and cut the engine, the sudden lack of sound and movement dragging Albion from her reverie. I switch off the headlights and we sit looking at the place—the aluminum siding, a dead crab apple tree in the front lawn, untended bushes close against the front porch. No electricity and no heat, so we bring flashlights and set up camp in the living room. Albion paces the hallways. I hear her footsteps on the hardwood, hear her footfalls creaking upstairs across the ceiling, hear her coming back down the rickety stairs. She screams, but by the time I run to her she’s already laughing—she trains her flashlight to the kitchen wall just above the electric stove, illuminating a smiling pig’s face that had been spray-painted there some time ago, loopy eyes and a lolling mouth, the words Welcome home! scrawled in a speech balloon.