Tomorrow and Tomorrow

MID-SEPTEMBER—

Beige walls and a television stuck on Riot—Japanese horror shows and loops of backyard accidents ending in horrific injury—smashed groins, face-plants. I saw a water-skier’s legs chopped apart by a motorboat. I saw a guy decapitated when he flipped over the handlebars of his Quad. Whipped and Creamed marathons play late every night.

The highlight of each day comes around ten when Brianna, one of the nurses, wheels the breakfast cart onto our floor. “Morning,” she hollers to every room, her phlegmy cackle reverberating through the halls as she makes her rounds. She’s missing her bottom front teeth and lets her dentures dangle from her mouth when she asks, “Hotcakes or omelet, honey?” I learned early on that hotcakes are the only viable option, the omelets rubbery and so banana yellow they seem to taste like Yellow No. 5. Brianna likes Riot TV, so she sits for a few minutes beside my bed under the pretense of helping me with my breakfast—she unpeels the foil lids from the coffee and orange juice, something I’m grateful for because I can’t manage with my hands the way they are, and cuts apart the hotcakes and sausage links. She’s riveted by Riot and laughs great belly laughs whenever someone’s hurt—cheerleaders landing on their necks, kids’ teeth broken by pogo sticks—actually crying because she’s laughing so hard.

On my second day awake, Brianna told me I’d been lying here for five days already.

“Where’s here?” I asked her.

“Saint Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Youngstown. Do you know where Youngstown is?”

“Ohio—”

“And I thought you’d say heaven—”

I’ve been in this hospital for a little over five weeks. I’m in the uninsured wing, with street people and drug addicts and howling lunatics housed three or four to a room, the kind of clinic I floated through not long ago when I was hooked on brown sugar. Compared to the others here, though, I’m in comfort: one of the administrators told me I was in a private room because my bill’s already been paid in cash—mystifying, though Timothy did say he’d take care of my medical expenses. When the administrator asked for my name and social security number, I told her I couldn’t remember, a response that must be somewhat typical here because of the way she breezed through the rest of the form without cross-examining me.

“Will you give us permission to run a face scan or DNA match against the national database?”

“Not if I don’t have to—”

“Most people don’t,” she said. “I’ll just write unidentified, uninsured, male, on the forms—”

“That’s accurate,” I told her.

At midnight the channel flips to infomercials selling bulk discount gemstones and I think of Albion, usually remembering her standing above me on that pile of bricks, her hair loose in the wind. I can no longer remember the color of Albion’s eyes, but when I think of them, they’re the gray of storm-wracked skies.

When I finally drift to sleep, I dream of Hannah.

The doctors keep me updated—there’s a trio, one in Boston, the other two in Mumbai, faces on HD screens mounted on a roving turret. A doctor rolls into my room every other day or so, but since the turret webcam’s loose on its mounting, the doctors rarely face me when one of them speaks.

“Whoever healed you may have saved your life, but they didn’t do you any favors,” says Dr. Aadesh.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“Bones not set properly. Ligaments in your knee aren’t healing correctly. You’ve lost your right eye, something that may have been avoided if you were brought to the hospital sooner. Severe radiation exposure, near lethal, you were lucky there was enough blood supply for the transfusion—”

The doctor reads through my litany of injuries, asking how I feel about each one—the Re-Growth splints in eight of my fingers, the splint and cast for my obliterated knee and the compound fracture of my right shin. Chemosutures for the knife wounds on my face, shoulders, hands and chest. The sensor in my glass right eye wired to my visual cortex. I’m supposed to wear specialty glasses, now—thick lenses in bulky black frames meant to assist my left eye in tracking the same focal points as the sensor in my right.

“Very good,” says Aadesh. “Dr. Hardy will check on you the day after tomorrow. Do you have any questions for me?”

“I do have a question,” I tell him. “I think the glasses might need an adjustment on the prescription—they wear out my good eye. I have to take them off every so often or I get headaches—”

“I apologize,” says Aadesh, “I can see you clearly through the monitor, but I can’t hear you. Can you try to adjust the volume? Or, no, I’m seeing here the volume is set at high. The audio must be out. Please go ahead and submit your question to the on-call nurse and she’ll contact our company directly—”

The turret spins in place, roves from the room—I hear it progressing down the hallway, like someone’s driving a remote-controlled car out there.

Brianna’s got to be closer to seventy than sixty, but her hair’s smoothed and dyed a bright blonde and her eyes are young. She leans in when she’s talking, touches your arm.

“You don’t have Adware,” I mention one morning while we’re watching Riot.

“What do I need that for?” she asks. “My kids’ kids have that. I saw this man at a fair, had magnets inside his fingers, actually under the skin so he could just touch a piece of metal and hold it. Said he kept erasing his credit cards. Shivers, honey. Look at you, with that fake eye plugged into your brain. I don’t need that shit inside my body—”

“You could watch Riot all you want,” I tell her. “You could sit back and make it seem like you’re right there with them—”

“We’re watching the follies of man,” she says. “Why would I want to be closer than I am now? Besides, I got better stuff to do, like teaching you to piss for yourself—”

When I can stand with crutches, Brianna walks with me down the hallway to the toilet near the nurses’ station and waits out in the hall until she hears the flush. She walks me back and sees me back into bed.

“Rehab,” she says. “Keep walking, you’ll be all right—”

Toward the end of the fifth week, I’m scheduled at the attending doctor’s offices on the first floor. I crutch myself down, even managing the stairs between floors 3 and 4 where the elevator’s out. The attending doctor’s taciturn, uninterested in small talk—I’m just one of several people who’ll pass through her office that day. She examines my body using a checklist of injuries sustained—hand-scanner X-rays, cold rollers over my chest. She’s especially concerned about the knife wounds and my right eye. I do a sight test for her, trying to read smallish letters from across the room, failing miserably—they all look like the letter D to me, or maybe E. She sends my glasses off to the lab downstairs for a better prescription and at the end of our appointment signs my papers.

“You’ll be discharged this afternoon,” she says.

The hospital administrators present me with a hoodie and sweatpants from the gift shop, recompense for the blood-soiled clothes the doctors had to cut from me when I was first brought to the ER. The sweatshirt says St. Elizabeth’s, Youngstown, Ohio—only an XL, but once I put it on I’m swimming in it and realize just how much weight I’ve lost in the weeks since I’ve been here.

Brianna brings in two bags along with my lunch—my backpack from the zone and a duffel bag I’ve never seen before.

“I sprung these for you,” she says. “Ain’t looked inside, ain’t nothing missing—”

My last lunch at St. Elizabeth’s is a soy burger with limp fries and an aluminum can of Pepsi. My fingers never healed correctly, just like Dr. Aadesh said, all five fingers on my left hand reset in a twisted, knotty mess. Difficult to pop the tab on the Pepsi, I can’t get a grip even with my right hand and I don’t have as much strength as I should, but I manage.

“I’ve worked here for forty years, just about, and I’ve seen bodies wash up, all kinds of people wash up here. No one knows who they are or where they’ve been, but I ain’t never seen nothing like you,” Brianna says.

“What’s that mean?” I ask her.

“You know how you came here? Someone called 911 and said where you were, didn’t leave a name. Took a medevac out to find you, and there you were: half dead in the middle of Pittsburgh, for God’s sake, with these two bags and an envelope full of cash. Cash, mind you. Nobody told me how much cash, and I hear about most of everything around here, but it must have been enough, if you’ve been here this long. Never nothing like it before, in forty years. But you can’t remember none of that, can you? You can’t even remember your name, you can’t remember nothing—”

“I remember a few things,” I tell her.

“I know you do, honey. But don’t worry, we ain’t snitches here. Nobody here will say we saw you, once you get from here. We never saw you, all right?”

Once Brianna leaves, I look in the duffel and find stacks of bills—twenties and hundreds, there must be thousands of dollars in here. In a manila envelope, there’s an Iowa driver’s license and a passport with my picture but the name Glen Bower, the birthplace Dubuque, Iowa. No notes, no instructions.

My journal’s still in the backpack, that’s the main thing—otherwise there are just water bottles and a flashlight, nothing important. My dosimeter’s in there, black as death. I dump the gear and stuff the duffel into the backpack so the money’s easier to carry. I leave a stack of hundreds in an envelope marked Brianna, I don’t know how much—a few thousand, at least.

I catch a cab out front of the hospital and tell the driver I need to go to a store, a Target or a Walmart, whatever’s nearby. Youngstown’s been cleaned up since I’d last been here about fifteen years ago, maybe all that money from the presence of PEZ Zeolite. Downtown’s a mini arts district with small shops and flower baskets hanging from the streetlamps. Just past downtown, an old mill’s been redeveloped, anchored by a Target and a Dick’s Sporting Goods. The cab waits as I buy a pay-as-you-go smartphone under the name of Glen Bower—the registration’s valid. I take the cab out to an EconoLodge on the interstate, pay for a room in cash. I sleep for several hours, order a pizza for delivery and watch TV while I eat. I set up the cell and call Gavril once I have my connection, using Translator to speak with him in pidgin Czech.

“Dominic? Oh, God,” he says. “Oh, thank God, Dominic—”

I tell him what’s happened. I tell him I’m all right. I tell him I don’t know what to do. He asks whether I’m able to buy a ticket to London, if he needs to come to get me or if I can meet him there.

“I think I can make it on my own,” I tell him.

10, 21—

October twenty-first—

Eleven years since the end—

Gavril met me at Heathrow—I’d bought a one-way ticket from Youngstown-Warren to London with cash, a purchase that ruffled the TSA screeners. The ersatz passport left in the duffel bag of cash worked well enough, though—scanned in Youngstown-Warren, Cleveland and Atlanta, then again at customs in London without a hitch. Flocks of baggage-laden travelers sprinted through Heathrow’s labyrinthine corridors to make their connections, but I stayed well to the edges to let them pass, taking my time, strolling those ramps and walkways gingerly with my cane. Gavril didn’t recognize me at first, I’m so much skinnier now and the injury to my eye skews my face, but when he heard my voice at baggage claim he hugged me and cried, refusing to let me go even as other passengers scrambled around us. Kelly was with him—I’d been nervous to see her, thinking of Zhou, but she’d cut her hair into a platinum bristle of pixie spikes, looking nothing like the version of herself in the Archive.

Six days catching up with Gavril and Kelly in their Chelsea flat before he purchased three tickets from Heathrow to the Václav Havel airport in Prague, and rented a private car to Domažlice to his mother’s farm. We arrived at dusk, the floods illuminating the unpainted plank wood of my aunt’s barn, the house lights lit, the surrounding fields red-gold furrowed with black. My aunt waited for us on the front porch in an ink- and paint-stained smock, her hair a springy bush of graying corkscrews. She hugged me and cried, just like Gav, then fed us dish after dish she’d made throughout the day, pork chops and cabbage, potatoes and spinach and apple strudel. Kelly picked at her food, but Gav and I ate like we’d been starved in exile, finishing with coffee and then cognac out on the front porch, watching night coalesce over the fields. The back den was made up as a guest room for me, with a foldout sofa bed and a small desk. I slept, comfortable and feeling safe, my body releasing the shock of the past several months—I slept through two full days, only blearily emerging to use the bathroom before crawling back underneath the covers, curling back into bed. By the time I woke up, Gavril and Kelly had already returned to London.

The doctors here in Domažlice tell me I’ll limp for life without further surgeries, but even then there aren’t guarantees. I take walks every other day, usually around the perimeter of the fields, to build strength and get used to my limp and the dull ache of my weight.

My aunt takes breaks from her work usually by the time I finish up one of my longer walks, so I’ll often hitch a ride with her into town, a twenty-five-minute drive through the countryside before the narrow flagstone streets of Domažlice. The buildings here sit in long rows tight against the edges of the streets, ancient architecture from the twentieth or nineteenth centuries, maybe earlier, each facade painted a different pastel shade—pinks, yellows, light greens, blues—that make the town radiate cheeriness even as the weather turns bleaker toward winter. My aunt tends to park on Námestí Míru to run her errands, checking in on artist friends for tea or the owner of the gallery she works with. I make my way over to Petr Bocan for a pilsner, sitting under the yellow awnings when I can or moving inside if it’s too cold. The place is a sports bar, and even though I’m not interested in soccer, I find the background noise helps me turn inward—I’m exotic here, an American, but no one cares as long as there’s a game on. Once my belly feels warm, I make my way over to the Bozen public library to check out one of their tablets and access the streams. I try to keep up with Simka, to follow what’s happening to him. I’ve gathered what information there is about his arrest and trial—but there’s nothing much, nothing truly substantial. When she’s finished with her errands, my aunt finds me in the library—sometimes we’ll swing back to Petr Bocan’s for pork chops, or we’ll just head home where I help her cook.

I keep a filing cabinet for all the printouts I’ve made at the library—cached streams about Simka’s case, commentaries from DC legal analysts. I bought a whiteboard just like Kucenic’s that I’ve filled with starting points, suppositions about what might have happened, how I can prove that Waverly framed Simka, but I can’t figure it out—there’s nothing, no leads. Without Adware, I’ve taken to writing Simka letters, actual letters, addressing them care of his prison—I don’t know if he receives them or not. I never write a return address, I never specify who I am and am careful to leave out details of my life. I write about my recovery, mostly, that I use a cane when I walk, that my hand never healed correctly.

After one of my walks around the field, I pour myself coffee and cook up toast and a scrambled egg. My aunt joins me, splits her grapefruit with me, and asks if I’d like to go out to the studio with her.

“You want to see?” she asks, her English much better than Gav’s.

“I’d love to,” I tell her.

My aunt’s converted the barn into a print shop—nothing too fancy, just drywall and space heaters, a raised floor in case there’s ever a leak, fluorescent tubes like a lattice of light suspended from the roof slats. She opens the wide double doors for fresh air, but even so the place smells like ink and astringent chemicals, old wood and wet hay. Gavril used this barn as his studio when he was making art, and some of his things are still here, stashed in the corner—televisions, speaker parts, old computers still in their boxes. The rest of the barn is taken up with my aunt’s printing equipment—several presses of different sizes, cabinets filled with a rainbow of ink.

“Over here,” she says, leading me to her worktable—a massive wood slab with benches suitable for a mead hall. She’s a wood-block printer primarily, and her worktable’s covered with carving tools and wood panels for different steps of the layered printing process. Her work is fanciful, hyperdetailed, lush—mostly children’s book illustrations. She’s working on a series for a new Czech translation of the Brothers Grimm.

“I’ll use you as a model for the good prince,” she says. “He loses his eyes in the brambles, no? So I’ll model him after you, put your troubles with your eye to some good use—”

“All right, but my modeling work doesn’t come cheap—”

“I know, I know,” she says. “Strudel. More strudel—”

She’s especially interested in showing me a press she calls her “jobber,” a cast-iron old thing that looks like an overgrown typewriter.

“Letterpress,” she says. “For your poetry. You can work when I work—”

My aunt hands me two keys on a ring, the smaller key for the type-case drawers, the larger for the cabinet stocked with her expensive paper. “Here,” she says, pulling a drawer from the type case and setting it on a secondary worktable near the jobber—the drawer’s filled with metal blocks, each bearing a letter in a different font, capitals and lowercases.

“Easy,” she says, showing me how to fit each letter into the composing stick, how to tie off the galley. She spells out John Dominic Blaxton lives here, then shows me how to ink the letters and run it through the press.

“For your door,” she says, handing me the print. “Now you try. Something simple for first one—”

I rummage through the typefaces, picking out metal blocks—difficult with my hands the way they are, but my aunt helps. The heft of letters in my palm is comforting, somehow, like language become sculptural, tangible. I’m drawn to a blocky Cloister Black font, picking out uppercase letters. I’m not sure what I’m trying to spell until I collect the first two letters, M-O, then find the others, O-K.

MOOK.

“What’s mook?” my aunt asks once we’ve finished the print, that single black word in the middle of a bone-white page.

“I’m not sure,” I tell her.

I have trouble sleeping, so I spend the dead hours sitting on the front porch bundled in a quilt, staring into midnight and drinking brandy and milk, probably drinking too much, but I can’t relax until I’ve nudged myself into a dull buzz. I think about Mook. What he must have thought when I started finding those traces, tracking Albion like I was following a thread through a labyrinth, unraveling all the work he’d done to hide her. He knew about the Christ House. He knew about Timothy and Waverly and he knew about Hannah’s murder, maybe of other murders. He was recruited into this terror just like I was, and didn’t know what to do when he peeled away the surface story and found Waverly’s legacy of dead women, just like I don’t know what to do now—so he made that monument in Pittsburgh, the geocached installation of Hannah’s death because he couldn’t turn away from the evil he’d uncovered but he was too afraid to expose it, was too invested in helping Albion disappear, maybe he loved her. Will I just let this pass? For all his threats, for his deletion of Theresa, Mook was probably terrified of me—he probably thought I was one of them, one with Waverly. I hate him for what he did to me, for what he did to Theresa, I hate him—but I understand, too. I finish my brandy and milk and pour another finger from the bottle and wish Mook was here with me to help me think this through. I wish he was still alive.

Monuments to the dead—

The next time my aunt drives to Domažlice I check out a library tablet and log into my old e-mail account—someone’s been through my in-box, it looks like, some recent messages have been opened, others deleted. Risky to log in like this, in case Waverly’s monitoring the account, so I make it quick—sifting through old message folders until I find the poetry manuscript Twiggy once sent to me. I print out the thirty-five pages of her work.

My aunt works early in the morning, but I don’t make it into the studio until the afternoon. I bring her a fresh thermos of coffee. She pauses in her work to help me get started with the jobber and answers my questions, gives me advice about printing technique. I only make small edits to Twiggy’s manuscript, fixing typos or correcting obvious mistakes, then design each page for the letterpress by stacking every letter in the composing stick until I form her words. I begin my printing. I start with the first poem of hers that I read:

My plan is to produce a limited-edition chapbook, no more than a hundred copies of her work. I’m slow at this, but I find the process calming—assembling the text, inking the letters. It takes me a full day to create two pages, sometimes a few days for a longer page of text. I pull each sheet and hang them to dry on lines that crisscross the barn, the studio starting to resemble a ship with sails unfurled.

11, 11—

Gavril and Kelly have flown in for the week. My aunt showers him with kisses. “Ma, Ma,” he says, wiping wet smudges from his cheeks and forehead.

My aunt’s warm with Kelly, but formal—still measuring each other, I suppose. They can’t quite connect, is all—Kelly a little too urban sophisticate, my aunt a hayseed hippie. They do their best bonding over food, Kelly a health-food obsessive and my aunt a champion of the farm-to-fork movement—they’re making plans for a trip into Prague, to try a raw-food tapas bar a friend of my aunt’s opened a few months ago.

I pull my cousin aside. “Gav, I need to talk with you—”

“Sure,” he says. “Can we go for a walk?”

I use the translator app on my cell, holding it to my ear whenever Gavril talks—regaling me with tales of London nightlife, his contract negotiations with Vogue. He waxes rhapsodic over his love for Kelly. “I want to marry her,” he says. “Think of the cute little Gavrils we could make—”

The dropping temperature’s affecting my leg, cramping me up quicker than usual. We walk the driveway, turn left along the edge of the road. When we reach the forsythia, an unkempt riot of browning leaves and branches, Gavril says, “I think I still have some Playboys buried in Tupperware over here. We can try to find them—”

Gavril digs around beneath the bush for ten minutes at least before he starts worrying that his mother might have found his Playboys and thrown out the issues.

“It’s all right if she did,” I tell him. “You’re a grown man—”

“Hm,” he says, resuming his search, using a stick to poke deeper into the frigid clay. “Maybe I’ll come back in the summer when it’s not so hard to dig—”

“Listen, Gav, I have something I need to ask you—”

He stops digging, wipes his hands on his coat. “Sure, Domi. Anything—”

“You said you have some people who’d be interested in that stuff I sent you? The footage about the young woman who was killed?”

“Absolutely,” he tells me. “Mika Bronstein, he’s a producer for Buy, Fuck, Sell America at CNN. He was very interested—still is. In fact, he texted me about a week ago saying I’m an asshole for teasing him with celebrity gossip, then holding out—”

“I want you to release it,” I tell him, not sure if this is the right thing to do even as I’m asking.

“Why?” he asks, scraping at the dirt again for his Playboys. “All of this bullshit is finally behind you. Why do anything? Leave well enough alone. Let it go—”

“I’ve been drinking too much,” I tell him. “I can’t sleep because I think of her—”

“The redhead?”

“No. The woman I found,” I tell him. “I wake up in the middle of the night and think her body’s on the floor beside my bed. Just down there, and I’m paralyzed thinking about her, not even questioning why her body would be there, just certain, absolutely certain, that if I looked over the edge of my bed I’d see her covered in ants—”

“You sound like you need another Simka in your life—”

“I want justice for her,” I tell him.

After dinner, we linger around the kitchen table with beer and wine, hunks of my aunt’s honey-wheat brown bread and sharp cheese. It’s started to snow—icy flurries that clatter against the kitchen windows. We talk until well past midnight, my aunt still awake in the other room, working on her cross-stitch, listening to Emil Viklický’s piano cover of “A Love Supreme.” Kelly’s gone to bed hours ago, and soon Gavril says he’s heading upstairs to join her.

“One last thing,” I say as he’s rinsing out our glasses in the sink. “When you release that footage, I need you to tell your producer friend that you received it from a man called Mook—”

11, 19—

CNN International breaks the story, but within a few minutes other networks have picked up the footage—I’m watching on my aunt’s television, drinking milk and brandy. BBC Europe, CT24 from Prague, Sky News, Al Jazeera—nearly every channel I flip through shows uncensored video of the murder stream, of Waverly screaming that Hannah’s no more holy than roadkill, of Timothy stabbing her twenty-four times. American officials say the evidence is being authenticated, that President Meecham has been briefed and is evaluating the situation. Waverly’s file photo flashes on-screen. Hannah on a constant loop, zoom shots of Hannah’s genitals, her breasts—zoom shots of her dying face, talking heads discussing whether or not her face expresses orgasm, whether or not her rape and murder were on some level consensual. A remix set to hip-hop of Waverly’s autotuned voice, singing, “You’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy.” Numb with shock that Hannah’s murder is going viral, that I did this to her. Hannah’s life’s exposed—pictures and vids from high school boyfriends, intimate after-prom footage sold to the streams, big paydays for Hannah Massey sex tapes, producers begging on-air for newsworthy footage. Naked. Sex tapes. Homemade. Beach vacations, headshots, ex-boyfriend spy cam footage. Interviews with Hannah’s extended family in Ohio, the same people who’d filed the insurance claim I’d investigated—they’ve already signed off for Hannah to appear on Crime Scene Superstar, already thrilled to see she’s scoring high in the pre-rankings, already discussing what they’ll do with the prize money if she wins.

I swig the rest of the bottle of brandy, then stumble outside in the vast lawn, the alcohol lifting me but I collapse. A light snow. The grass is frozen, prickly. I can smell the earth and wonder how many millions of worms writhe just below the surface, wriggling toward the sky to feast on me if I should die. I lie facedown for hours—What have I done to you? What have I done? Beyond shivering, beyond freezing. My aunt finds me unresponsive but awake—I remember staring into the white sky. What have I done to you? I don’t remember my aunt moving me inside, submerging me in a warm bath. I don’t remember the EMT’s visiting me, I don’t remember anything.

12, 12—

Gav calls.

“Turn on the television,” he says.

Eleven at night, drunk on rum—I turn on the living room television to reruns of Takeshi’s Castle Revival, Japanese women running an obstacle course, their voices dubbed over in Czech. Snow’s fallen heavily the past few days, shrouding the fields. My aunt’s in the barn, the barn lights the only brightness for miles and miles.

“What am I looking for?” I ask Gav, but flip through the news channels and see what he’s guiding me to: “Breaking News. Shootout in Alabama.”

“I’m going to ping my mom,” he says. “Someone should be there with you—”

Helicopter shots of a sprawling farmhouse and acres of fields. Two barns, one of them on fire. A dead body’s in the yard.

“Authorities have ID’d the victim as Cormac Waverly, 36, an Alabama state trooper. At this time, Cormac Waverly is believed to have been one of the assailants in the Theodore Waverly death stream—”

“Dominic, are you all right?” my aunt asks, hurrying inside—she thinks I may have had another episode, a drunken fit or something. She’s relieved to find me sitting on the edge of the couch, even if I do have a drink in my hand. I set the drink down.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “They found him, it looks like. Waverly. There’s a shootout—”

She takes off her hat and gloves and after a few minutes leaves to brew us tea—a strong Earl Grey that reminds me of Albion, of our first night together. I wonder if she’s there in Alabama.

Cycling the same helicopter shots: circling the compound, black smoke churning from one of the barns, the body sprawled in the lawn just outside the house. The farm is Gregor Waverly’s. Diagrams of the compound, illustrations of the barn fire. The fire started earlier in the day, during the first wave of the assault, when members of Birmingham SWAT established a perimeter. There was an exchange of gunfire. A grenade explosion ignited the barn.

Nearing one thirty in the morning, my aunt makes Cream of Wheat with brown sugar and butter and brews a pot of coffee. The networks recycle the Hannah Massey footage, flashing Waverly’s capsule bio. Footage detailing Waverly’s relationship with President Meecham, extending far back to her earliest days in politics. Talking heads fill in the narrative of the morning’s events—an FBI task force working with private researching firm the Kucenic Group built a case against Theodore Waverly and the Waverly family of Birmingham, Alabama, following the release of the Hannah Massey murder stream.

The Kucenic Group—my old boss appears on television, his white hair and beard growing in wild tangles and braids, looking much more like an avenging prophet than the leader of a private research firm.

“We recognized initial footage as evidence linked to an unsolved case related to the Pittsburgh City-Archive and pursued this lead jointly with representatives of the FBI—”

I wonder what changed—what gave Kucenic courage enough after he’d already abandoned me, after he was so willing to let Hannah Massey slip through the cracks? Maybe the FBI recognized the footage of Hannah’s body, maybe they traced it back to his case file and demanded answers. Maybe the FBI showed up at his door with a bigger stick than Waverly.

Phalanxes of Birmingham SWAT and the FBI assault team snake toward the house, advancing on foot behind armored trucks, eventually moving single file behind men holding steel shields. An explosion rips through the rear section of the house, a fireball that plumes toward the news helicopter covering the siege. Within minutes it’s reported that one member of the Birmingham SWAT was injured in the explosion, an apparent gas leak in the house ignited by gunfire. A few minutes pass and the networks confirm a second death—a man identified as Gregor Waverly, his body recovered. Images of Gregor as a younger man, posed arm in arm with his brother.

Fire trucks and ambulances on scene. The FBI assault team streams into the house. Within minutes they emerge with two men in custody, Rory Waverly and Theodore Waverly, though Rory is reportedly in critical condition resulting from gunshot wounds. Thirty minutes after the arrests, the governor of Alabama holds a press conference, thanking the joint work of the agencies involved. During questions from the press, he confirms that Rory Waverly has died as a result of gunshot wounds sustained in the siege.

SUMMER—

Every so often Hannah Massey intrudes on my dreams—I follow the slope down to the riverbed and find Hannah still alive, her body still in the river, half buried in silt. I wonder if I’ll be able to save her, if I can just reach her in time, but in every iteration of this dream the river current kicks up swiftly and carries Hannah away.

“Wake up,” says my aunt, “it’s just a dream—”

I’m fragile now, somehow—I realize that. Physically, I’m fragile and still become exhausted easily. The limping, the difficulty with my hands. Even simple things are still frustratingly challenging for me. The blindness in my right eye has broadened despite further laser surgeries—even on the brightest days there’s a haze that hangs over everything I see. I have trouble sustaining my concentration, even when I’m researching Simka’s case. One afternoon I realize I haven’t made headway for weeks—I realize I’m letting Simka slip through the cracks, so I write to Kucenic—an appeal to continue unraveling Waverly. I describe Simka to him, describe how I believe Waverly was behind the accusations that sent Simka to prison. I figure that Kucenic won’t receive my letter for weeks, or maybe months, as he’s adjusting to his newfound fame—his stream appearances commenting on high-profile cases—but I know that despite the wait, Kucenic is the best hope for Simka. Kucenic will put two and two together, I’m certain. He’ll realize that I’m the only one who can possibly know so many connective details about these cases, but I keep my name out of the letter. I sign as Mook.

General solitude, dedication to poetry. My aunt made an ultimatum—that I stop drinking or move out. She said she’d give me three weeks to make up my mind, but I told her I no longer needed alcohol or drugs, that something had broken inside of me and healed. I resurrected the name Confluence Press for my chapbooks and attend small-press festivals and art fairs, my aunt helping me with the business end of things even though my only sales goal is to break even. After Twiggy’s chapbook, I solicited a Ukrainian poet I’ve long admired for a chapbook and again a poet from Mississippi who’d won the National Book Award a few years ago. I just received confirmation from Adelmo Salomar that I can reprint Ouroboros as a limited-edition chapbook for the fourth book in my line. His letter is postmarked from Chile—I’ve framed it and hung it near my workstation. Everyone I meet is enthusiastic about my craft. I keep my chapbooks to limited runs and have received some positive reviews, even a mention in Poetry magazine in an article about Fine Press books. The attention is appreciated—but I’ve already heard from poets I knew marginally a decade ago, people wondering about John Dominic Blaxton and how I knew him.

“An old friend,” is all I have to say.

I wake one morning to news that the FBI arrested Dr. Timothy Waverly, living in a cabin outside of Tacoma, Washington, under the name of Timothy Filt. He was spotted buying groceries at a Target—facial recognition cameras matched his features despite a beard and the knit hat he wore pulled down almost to his eyes. Traffic cameras tracked his route as he drove, intersection to intersection, until a Washington state police drone locked onto his car and followed him for the hour-and-a-half drive to his cabin. Considered armed and dangerous, the Tacoma PD SWAT team led by FBI agents from the Seattle field office stormed the cabin and arrested him—there was no need for the show of force. Timothy was unarmed and surrendered peacefully.

The FBI releases a statement saying it had been determined that a woman had been staying with Timothy Waverly, the last person of interest wanted for questioning about the murder of Hannah Massey and information relating to more than thirty cases of missing or murdered women connected with the Waverly family, both in Pennsylvania and Alabama. The woman’s name is Darwyn Harris, from the San Francisco Bay area. The FBI release pictures—old images of Albion that Timothy must have had with him from before the bombing of Pittsburgh. She looks so young.

SPRING FASHION WEEK—

I don’t have the stomach to watch these things, never have—but when Gavril calls to tell me that President Meecham wears a gown from House of Fetherston for the executions I tune in to see the spectacle, the irony of it all. My aunt’s streaming a presentation of the Vanek plays by Václav Havel in the living room, so I lie in bed with a glass of warm milk, watching on the smaller flat screen bolted to the wall above my bookcase.

“A crimson gown with an ivory neck ruff that halos her head,” says Gavril. “Very Elizabethan. Her hair in plaits streaming over her shoulders like ribbons. She wears a black lace blindfold—”

“I’m watching,” I tell Gavril. “I can see her—”

America’s Queen, they call her, and she looks like a painting of ancient royalty, Elizabeth I, or maybe the Queen of Hearts. President Meecham carries out the executions in the Rose Garden, the genetically modified roses blooming into gargantuan flowers—reds, pinks, whites. Meecham will be on hand for the start of the Fashion Week runway shows in New York, flying from Washington following the garden party. The prisoners are led in, nine as always, wearing black robes. They are forced to their knees.

“Madam Speaker, the President of the United States—”

Meecham reviews each prisoner, each one charged with a crime symbolizing the ever-present threats to the country and to her presidency. A man convicted of pipe-bombing a food court in Minneapolis, killing thirteen and wounding scores of others. A woman convicted of leaking NSA secrets to the streams, endangering American sovereignty abroad. Timothy and Waverly are among the nine, each charged with multiple counts of murder in two states. I may not have recognized them without the captioning—Timothy’s head is shaved, his scarring like white worms on his scalp, and Waverly’s hair is different, too, shorter, all those cottony locks shorn down to a white bristle. Meecham walks the line of prisoners, inspecting them. She doesn’t pause or give special attention to Waverly or his son, merely glances at them like she glances at the other prisoners—hasty, disdainful. She offers each prisoner a chance to recant, to swear their fealty to the flag.

“I should go,” I tell Gavril.

“Call me later, if you need to talk,” he says.

Meecham pauses in front of Waverly and offers him his chance to plead for leniency. I figure Waverly would have cause to beg Meecham to spare his life, considering his history with her—he once told me that he’d created Meecham, that he was responsible for her—but after Meecham finishes her speech and asks if there are mitigating reasons why she should look on his case with mercy, Waverly doesn’t speak. He simply stares at Meecham—or rather, he seems to stare through her, like he’s concentrating on something beyond her, beyond these proceedings. When his lips finally do move, the commentators suggest he’s reciting the 23rd Psalm.

Timothy doesn’t speak either when Meecham offers him leniency, although I want him to—I want him to confess here publicly, to recant everything, to break down and weep and beg, to ask Meecham for compassion, to give himself over to her mercy. He doesn’t speak, but he’s not stoic either, not like his father—his eyes well with tears and his face reflects anguish as he forces himself to keep from crying. Timothy wanted me to believe that he was working toward grace. Is this what grace looks like? All that pain—

Black hoods over their heads. Meecham signs each execution warrant with a silver pen.

I turn off the television, head to the barn and work at the press until dawn.

The last mention I hear of Albion, maybe the last mention I’ll ever hear, was on the BBC, a brief mention buried amid a flurry of other, more pressing news. A Canadian border patrol agent came forward to report he had spotted Darwyn Harris crossing from Washington State into Canada several days prior—that she had used a passport and ID under the name Albion Waverly and had been driving a Volkswagen Rabbit. “Her passport didn’t catch on the Do Not Cross list, so I let her through,” said the agent. “Our facial ID software was off-line for a few hours that afternoon, she must have known. I didn’t recognize her until later, when I was flipping through some paperwork.” Collaborating with Canadian authorities, the FBI determined that she had most likely purchased another car with cash just outside Vancouver. The segment about Albion ended and the BBC turned to continuing coverage of Nina Penrose, Page 3 girl and winner of last year’s Miss Universe pageant, and her upcoming appearance on the British version of Chance in Hell.

I wonder what name Albion’s using now—

I’ve contemplated new Adware, something simple, to retrace our steps through the City, to search for her—sometimes I imagine I’ll find her if I just spend enough time in places that were important to us, maybe in our booth at Kelly’s in East Liberty, or maybe if I ride her bus as it plunges into the tunnel just before the end of the world. She’s sure to haunt those places eventually—but I realize I’m a ghost to her now, a link to a past she wants to efface. I think of her as I take my walks around the fields. I remember her. I’ve never been to Canada, but I imagine Albion with new hair, new clothes, behind the wheel of a car bought used just outside Vancouver. I imagine her driving on interstates, heading farther and farther north, as far north as she can go. I imagine that the roads she travels are beautiful, studded with mountains and lush with evergreens. I imagine that as the roads thin and the forests darken she feels safe, finally safe. I imagine a single road cutting through all those miles and miles of forest, all that infinite forest, a single road that someone could drive for hours, for days, and never see another human face.