Tomorrow and Tomorrow (36 page)

DOMAŽLICE

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.

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.