Tomorrow and Tomorrow (15 page)

“Forget me already?”

Hearing her voice—Twiggy. “I didn’t recognize you, not with the hair color,” I tell her. “Twiggy, isn’t it? Gavril’s friend, right?”

“That Twiggy’s just a stage name,” she says.

“Your valentine landed me in a heap of trouble. It was heroin, for Christ’s sake. A felony charge. I lost my job. You should have warned me what it was—”

“What’s that you’re drinking?”

“I don’t even know anymore,” I tell her. “Brandy, I think—”

She raises her glass to me. “Kentucky bourbon for me, straight. Cheers, Gavril’s cousin. Life’s on the up-and-up and I want someone to celebrate with. Come over here and sit by me—”

I take the far edge of the couch and she smiles at my hesitancy, extending her feet so her toes touch my slacks.

“What happened to the American Apparel sponsorship?” I ask. “There aren’t commercials blaring from you.”

“That’s Mr. Waverly,” she says. “He pays for commercial-free living. What are you doing here, anyway? I wouldn’t have taken you for a big baller. Shopping for birds, like everyone else? You look like shit, by the way—”

“I think it’s a mistake that I’m here at all,” I tell her. “I came with a friend, I guess to stream the federal executions. I usually stream this thing with Gavril, because it kicks off Fashion Week—”

“Executions? You think that’s why they’re all here?”

“Why else would they be here?”

“Pussy,” she says.

“Christ,” I tell her, and finish off my brandy.

“I love how bashful you are,” she says. “Look, you’re blushing—”

“It’s just the drink—”

“I won’t need American Apparel soon, anyway,” she says. “I’m having a series of brilliant fucking breaks that’s lighting up my career. You ever have a run of luck like that? What is it Plath says? ‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.’ I fucking am, that’s what my heart’s screaming right now—”

“Someone hire you for another ad campaign?”

“I’m Theo Waverly’s favorite girl,” she says. “Steady work until I’m too fucking old, that’s what that means. His company placed me with American Apparel, placed me with Gav. His request for the red hair, do you like it?”

“It resonates—”

“He has me up to an eighty-three percent click-through rate in the streams, that’s pretty fucking unbelievable. Chanel and Dior already contacted his company about me. Everything’s happening so fast—”

“I thought you were interested in poetry,” I tell her. “You texted me a while ago, asking for poetry recommendations—”

“Just because a girl gets looked at doesn’t mean she can’t think,” she says. “I finished that Adelmo Salomar book you recommended to me, by the way. I’ve never been much for Surrealism or automatic writing, all that stuff. I’m much more interested in the ‘Confessional School,’ all that Surrealism rings heavily of bullshit—”

“Salomar was writing about the Chilean Revolution—those poets had to invent ways to write around the censors, so they readapted Surrealism. ‘Tonight I write the voice of a serpent devoured by a thousand doves.’ Liberation Theology—”

“Well, anyway, poetry’s immortal, but beauty’s devoured by a thousand doves,” she says. “Plenty of time to study Chilean Surrealism once no one wants me to wear their clothes anymore—”

“I’d actually like to read some of your poetry,” I tell her, but before she answers, Waverly finds his way into the room with a bottle of wine.

“There you are,” he says. “Timothy was afraid you’d gotten lost—”

“Not yet,” I tell him.

“Why don’t you run along back to the party,” he tells Twiggy.

She swallows the rest of her bourbon and leaves the glass on the end table. “Makes me shivery,” she says.

“Dominic, let’s freshen up your glass back at the office,” he suggests. “We’ll finish up our business for the night so we can relax and enjoy ourselves—”

“Mr. Waverly, I actually have something I need to discuss with you about my employment—”

“Over drinks,” he says. “Not here—”

Waverly’s office is in a lower tier, through another frosted glass hallway, down a flight of stairs. A techie’s paradise—VR cams, an editing suite, a Bride 3120 stack with a fifty-two-inch monitor on the desk, a rat’s nest of ports and Adware jacks, sets of Adware like a tangle of mesh and a workbench with a soldering iron and motherboards and spools of wires and cable. One wall’s covered with built-in shelves stacked with books, leather-bound classics—Hesse, Blake—some Baudrillard, Schopenhauer, and yellowed paperback technical manuals, manila folders of printouts. A few framed photographs are propped up among the books—some shots of the Pittsburgh skyline, more of Waverly sailing on
The
Daughter of
Albion
, another of the woman I take for his wife, sitting on the lawn of the Frick near a rosebush in bloom. One of the photographs is a group portrait, Waverly with other suits—they’re clustered around a young Meecham, a radiant blonde electric with her pageant-trained smile.

“You’ve met her?” I ask.

“I know Eleanor very well. Let’s see—that must have been taken fifteen years ago or so,” he says. “We were at a campaign event in Canton, Ohio—at the McKinley Grand Hotel. This was during her first presidential bid—”

“You were with her from the beginning of her career, then?”

“She was just a stray before I adopted her,” he says. “I’m sorry, that sounds harsh, but Eleanor wasn’t realizing her full potential. She was shallow, but we saw potential in her. She was articulate—we knew that from the pageants—intelligent when she wanted to be. Compassionate. Much of politics is simply manipulating broad symbols. Here was a beauty queen who grew up not far from Pittsburgh, conservative politically, a Christian. She was what the country needed at the time. Still does—”

“Timothy says you’ve figured out how people will behave, can manipulate the outcome of their free will—”

“I see no reason why Eleanor Meecham would ever lose an election,” he says. “The ammendment passed with enthusiasm, and the votes are there—”

Another photograph. “I recognize this picture,” I tell him, of a view of a house in Greenfield, in Pittsburgh, a part of the neighborhood that cuts toward the river called the Run. A clapboard Victorian huddled with other houses in the shadow of the 376 overpass, worn out and unpainted, odd because of a whitewash cross and a Bible quote slathered in white paint on the broad side of the house:
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.
“We used to call this the Christ House—”

Waverly sits at his desk, tinkering with wires that have been pulled from a miniature motherboard—in his slumped posture, I think I see what he may have looked like as a young boy, lonely, I’m guessing, or maybe I’m reading too much into what an old man looks like when drunk.

“It’s a church,” says Waverly, “or was. You remember that house? I guess with the lettering, it doesn’t surprise me it’s somewhat infamous. Tact and lying low were never that congregation’s strong suit. My wife’s congregation. Speaking in tongues, that sort of thing. An old farmhouse. Most of the rooms were used as a Christian women’s shelter. That was my great-great-grandfather’s first house in America. My family came from nothing. My great-great-grandfather came to Pittsburgh for the mills, and eventually my father owned the mills—Pittsburgh, Birmingham. I bought back that house, and when Kitty asked for a place to start her shelter, a place for her congregation to meet, I signed it over.”

“You don’t have any pictures of your daughter—”

“No,” he says. “I don’t. I don’t display any pictures of my children here. They all passed away in Pittsburgh, all three. I prefer to keep my past and present separate, private—”

I find another photograph of Meecham—taken shortly after Pittsburgh, during what must have been a tour of one of the FEMA camps in West Virginia they set up for people like me, the refugees and homeless.

“I was in a bar in Weirton when she was elected,” I tell Waverly. “Did you take this picture of her at the FEMA camp?”

Waverly nods. All the liquor’s gone to my head and I’m feeling loosely emotional, feeling my words sliding through my usual restraint: “I want you to know that we believed in her back then, when we had nothing left—I voted for her. She came from western Pennsylvania, she was one of us, and when the networks projected her as the winner, I remember I was crying like everyone else in that bar with me. I was—thinking, stupidly thinking, that her election would somehow bring everything back, that everything would turn out all right. She described the Kingdom of Heaven and told us that the dead were held in the palm of God’s hand, all that bullshit—that they had found peace, telling us the world continues because the love of God continues—”

“I think those words were meant more for the rest of the nation, Dominic, people who hadn’t gone through what we’d gone through, but who were still scared, who wanted comfort. I don’t think the consolation was ever meant for us—”

“I need to talk with you about our arrangement, Mr. Waverly. There’s just—”

“More money? We can make arrangements with my secretary. Timothy’s informed me about the excellent work you’ve been doing—”

“There was a man who confronted me in the City-Archive. He threatened me. He threatened to take my wife from me if I still worked for you, and I—”

“Who?” asks Waverly. “What man? What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his name—he says it’s Legion, so it might not be a man at all, it might be a collective—”

“That man’s threats are meaningless. I’ve had others in the Archive before you, Dominic, who’ve encountered this man. He’s a paper tiger. If you can ID him, I’ll pay you triple—”

“I can’t risk losing her—”

“What are you saying, Dominic?”

“I appreciate what you’ve done for me,” I tell him. “But I can’t risk losing Theresa—I’ll return to rehab, Mr. Waverly. I’ll return the iLux—”

“I’m disappointed,” he says. “Stay for the party, of course, and I’ll still transfer what I owe you for the work you’ve done. I’m very disappointed. You, in fact—you were working out well for me—”

“There are plenty of people who do this kind of research,” I tell him. “You could poach an actual librarian from the Archive with the money you’re paying me. It doesn’t have to be me—”

“Take a few days to think things over,” he says. “I understand what you’re telling me, that you feel threatened. I can protect you, of course—”

“You couldn’t protect Albion—”

The guests gather in the Caraway room, the Caraway a basement-level game room with amphitheater-style seating. The heads of antlered stags decorate the walls. Streaming, the Caraway room’s become a replica of the Capitol Building interior, live feeds of senators and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Supreme Court justices integrated seamlessly among us. The nine federal prisoners wear black robes that echo the robes of the justices. They’re shackled and on their knees.

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

Meecham walks among us in her Porta gown like a Valkyrie, something shimmering. Some senators cheer—they actually cheer and kneel to her, reaching out to touch her as she passes in the aisle. A petal-pink lace blindfold matches her gown and gloves, an approximation of blind justice, I suppose. She pauses before each prisoner, studying each body like a consumer pricing meat. She offers each prisoner a chance to recant, to swear their allegiance to the United States—but no one speaks. I’m not on the political fringe, but even I can’t stomach these executions—the pronouncements and prayer, the humiliation masked as honor, Meecham placing the black hood over each prisoner. They’ll be presented one by one and she’ll sign their execution warrants with a silver pen. They’ll be shot point-blank in the temple. Their bodies will be draped in black flags. There will be torrents of pornography derived from these executions, there always has been—of classic Meecham sex vids spliced with death shots and the prisoners bleeding out. I don’t want to be part of this, to hear her speech to the Senate, using the memory of the dead as justification for these public killings.

“Seen enough?”

Timothy’s found me. His jaw’s clenched like he’s keeping himself from screaming through sheer physical effort. I’ve never seen him lose composure like this—his eyes bloodshot, brimming with tears. He smiles for my benefit but the effect is horrific, and for a brief, terrible moment I think he will lean over and bite me.

“I have—I have seen enough,” I tell him. “I’m ready to go—”

The weather’s turned. Timothy’s venting his aggression, speeding the hairpin turns on the slick woodland roads, the Fiat’s windshield augs flashing snow caution and marking his triple-digit speed in red. I lean back, swimming drunk and letting myself believe that it would be all right to die if Timothy skids on ice and we wrap around a snow-laden tree. Believing it would be for the best . . .

“Mr. Waverly tells me that you’re quitting,” he says, breaking what felt like an interminable silence. I’d been thinking of Albion and Twiggy and staring at the dark blur of pines.

“Your treatment schedule is under review,” says Timothy. “I don’t believe you’re making the progress that I’d hoped you would. I may have made a mistake about you, and may have to recommend a more intense schedule to retrieve you—group therapy, work restrictions. I don’t think it’s out of the question that a stay at the psychiatric institute might be very good for your recovery. The Correctional Health Board may even find it necessary to intervene—”

“Don’t do this,” I tell him, understanding the threat implicit in what he’s saying, knowing full well he could snare me in bureaucracy if he chooses to. “I’m not quitting my treatment, Dr. Reynolds, and I’m grateful for the special care you’ve given me, but I just can’t continue with Waverly—”

“You have no idea how important your work is—”

“Why ‘Albion’?” I ask him. “Mr. Waverly named his boat
The Daughter of Albion
. He named his own daughter Albion—”

Timothy says, “There’s a common misconception about Christ—”

I don’t like this turn, I don’t want this conversation, but I don’t know how to stop it, either—the snow’s fallen heavy, the roads white except for a smear of tire tracks, but Timothy drives heedless. A real sense that I might die settles over me, a lightness of being, a surrendering of control. All I say is, “Slow down—”