“I’ll just complete the group sessions, Dr. Reynolds. I really don’t want to get involved with any of this. No offense, I can tell you feel strongly—”
“Waverly,” says Timothy. “The man who was waiting for me in the hospital was a man named Waverly. He had a business proposal for me—a partnership. He needed my expertise for the work he was involved in and I believe he’ll need your expertise as well. Not everyone gets an opportunity to meet a man like him, but you came along at the right moment, Dominic. Dumb luck, in a way. If you work with Waverly, you won’t need to worry about Correctional Health Board regulations or completing therapy; you won’t need to worry about your arrest records, the felony charge, about money, your future employment status. He can release you from all these restraints, freeing you to take care of your own health, find your own change, pursue your own happiness. Waverly’s an influential man, Dominic. I think he can help you—”
“Let’s leave this stuff about happiness and change on the table for a moment. This man Waverly can clear my felony charge?” I ask him. “Is that what you’re telling me? Get me out of therapy, offer me work?”
“I just want you to meet him,” says Timothy.
Timothy offers a ride home, but I need to be alone. I need time to clear my thoughts—to Google Waverly, if nothing else. I take the bus. Empty at this hour, the rear seat’s vacant so I stretch out, unwelcoming to anyone who might board and find their way back here. Scan for signals—the bus’s router’s exceptional, Metro.net a stronger signal than the citywide Wi-Fi, so I switch connections even though it’s only good for a half-hour slot. New Hampshire to M, hoodie pulled low to block the city lights and the flash of passing ads. Waverly + DC nets hits—Theodore Waverly, Ph.D., head of something called Focal Networks, a consultancy firm it looks like. Adware marketing. His client list includes multinationals, the Chinese government, the European Union, the United States. A press-release bio’s repeated on every site he’s mentioned: a survivor of Pittsburgh, chair of the Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon, work in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology for DARPA. Developer of something called precognitive bypass communication. Deep roots in DC—an adviser to the Republican Party, a donor to the Washington Ballet, the DC symphony. He sits on the Kennedy Center board of trustees. Not much personal information, nothing specific—not even a picture of the man.
Timothy mentioned happiness—that he wants me to pursue my own happiness. I can’t fathom what happiness might mean anymore—it seems like luxury to someone whose life feels like a lead-lined discomfort, something that Timothy in his Christ buoyancy doesn’t seem to understand. I don’t seek out happiness, just pockets of alleviation—a drowning man sipping at bubbles of air. I load Three Rivers Net, the City translucent against the bus like a tissue paper overlay, thinner without brown sugar but I close my eyes and see more clearly: the stretch of Parkway through the hillside as the Archive loads. Happiness was Theresa. The City opens around me, the layers of architecture, the lines of rivers, steel bridges and curving brick streets that twist like tendrils of dreams.
I’m here—
Room 208.
The Georgian.
Gauzy curtains, paisley carpets, cream walls stained the color of tea from years of previous tenants’ cigarette smoke. Our apartment. I’m here—scrolling through the faces of past residents until I come to us: Blaxton, John Dominic and Theresa Marie. I can unlock the dead bolts with a key. I can feel the polished wood of the front door. We had one of my aunt’s wood-block prints of the White Rabbit in the foyer that’s re-created here—quirky decor once but grossly appropriate now, the illustration receiving me as I make my way through the longish, claustrophobic front hallway, falling back into everything I’ve lost.
Theresa. In this first glimpse of her, she’s edged with light—sculpted from a video when my retinal lenses were new, before I knew how to use them properly or understood the settings and light filters.
Theresa, Theresa, oh my God, Theresa—
I kiss her, but the moment I touch her, she’s no longer her—she becomes the VR sculpt I’d commissioned, nothing more. I remember Theresa too specifically for the cheap RealPlay engine I’m using—specifically what her skin felt like or the feathery feel of her hair or how she breathed or the tickling shivers when she placed kisses on my ears. If I’d had more money, the designers could have filled out the illusion using sense impressions from my memories, but all I could afford was to choose something from their catalog of ready-mades, scrolling through mannequin figures in their studio until I settled on the body model closest to my wife. Touching this body is close to my wife, but it’s not my wife—it’s not quite her—it’s as close as fantasizing about my wife while holding another, similar, woman. I step back and look at the woman I’ve been kissing and Theresa returns to focus. She’s standing in the foyer, hazed by a corona of overexposed light. It’s her, it’s her—
“Is this the camera?” she says, noticing the new lenses in my eyes, but the scene shifts—our first Christmas in the apartment, the tree in our living room, the glow of Christmas lights reflecting from the hardwood floors and casting us in a white dim. When I kiss her, I feel the warmth of her body. Holding her, I can smell her hair, or an approximation of her hair, the licensed scent of the Aveeno shampoo she used, the approximation of her body. Wrapping paper crinkling as I crumple it into balls for the trash bag. Ornaments ring as I touch the fir boughs. The creak of the hardwood as I step. She’s opening my gift, a set of Nina Simone vinyl—she’s excited, I remember, and says she’s wanted them, that she almost bought this set just the other day. She plays the first record and fills our apartment with “Lilac Wine.”
We have dinner at the Spice Island Tea House in midwinter. Snow blankets Oakland and strings of holiday lights still illuminate the barren trees. The darkness of the restaurant interior is pierced with candlelight. Glasses of Thai iced tea. Samosas and vegetable rolls on small plates. She’s wearing her beige skirt and leather boots, a violet cardigan over a halter top embroidered with calla lilies. Layering, the wax and flame. Layering, the smell of basil curry. Candlelight reflects in her eyes.
I have something to tell you, she will say.
“I have something to tell you,” she says.
“No wine?”
“I love you,” she says. “I’m glad we’re here tonight—”
I was at the doctor’s today, she will tell me. I thought I had the flu—
“I thought I had the flu this morning,” she says.
As it turns out, she ran some blood work, she will say.
“And, Dominic, we’re going to have a little girl,” she says. “She ran the advanced amino test and we’re going to have a little girl—”
“Oh, my wonderful, dear God—”
Home through snowfall—the car parked, stepping through slush. Thrilling in my belly, wrapping my mind around having a daughter—another chance at having a daughter, trying not to remember the earlier disappointment of unexpected blood. We’d been trying to conceive since the miscarriage—something was wrong, we’d thought, sure there was something wrong with us, that we wouldn’t be able to have biological children, but now—a daughter. My daughter. Theresa already describing outfits she’d seen at Tots and Tweeds, already letting herself remember again the Strawberry Shortcake bike still in her parents’ basement. We’re genuinely happy—in the Archive, at least, we’re happy—but I remember we were trying hard to be happy, trying to push away whatever apprehension had bred in us, trying not to acknowledge that a second miscarriage was entirely possible, trying instead to re-create the innocent excitement we’d felt the first time around. Layering, ice water from snow soaking through my shoes. Layering, tires and wet asphalt. Window lights in upstairs rooms. In our bedroom, her body softer, even softer somehow, and Theresa removes her cardigan and unties her halter and I’m holding her, kissing her shoulder, please don’t let it end, but it ends. It always ends.