My half hour of Metro.net expires. The wet click of autoconnection to DC’s Wi-Fi, but it’s too spotty to reload the City. A message from Timothy’s home phone blinks in my peripheral—he’s set up a meeting with Waverly.
“I’ll be there,” I respond. “Tell him I’ll be there—”
Others have boarded the bus since I’ve been under, commuters heading home after long shifts, I guess, or students late from the library, standing in the aisles—giving me a wide berth. I respond to Twiggy’s text asking me for poetry recommendations by suggesting she track down a copy of Ouroboros by Adelmo Salomar—one of my favorite writers, a Chilean poet. Passing near Fur Nightclub, police have cordoned off New York Avenue. Everyone on the bus rubbernecks the scene. Club kids huddle near the police cruisers, mascara running in smears from their eyes and blackening their lips. What’s happened? I search Washington City Paper for news, but the streams blare promos for the next episode of Chance in Hell, season 4, and Candid, Homemade Personals of middle-aged women masturbating into webcams. Gazing out the window at a heavily armed cop talking to a boy with eyebrow studs and lip piercings. The club kid’s girlfriend wears fishnets and a denim G-string, her hair in wild shocks of blue tube-thick dreads that quiver in the wind. What’s going on? The boy’s profile lights long enough for me to scroll his Twitter feed, @MimiStarchild—Body in the bathroom, it says. Joanna, it says. Found her, it says. A twitpic of the mess: the victim stripped, the remnants of her dress binding her ankles. Blonde, but her face is ruined. She’d been bent over the toilet, hands tied to the pipes, breasts down in the water. “Jesus Christ,” I say, and close out Twitter, but the Washington Post feed’s already picked up the story, knocking Chance in Hell from the top DC trends: Joanna Kriz, a student at George Mason, found dead in Fur. Pics of her flood the streams, discovered by tabloid Facecrawlers that hacked private accounts. A gorgeous girl—a student of architecture. Jesus Christ. The Post feed displays 3-D renderings of her school assignments, buildings she’d designed, architectural models. Pictures flash of her high school graduation and with her family at Thanksgiving, but I’m watching her life unspool, and now I’m watching sexts she’d sent to boyfriends, found by the Facecrawlers, nude selfies posing in front of mirrors, drunk tongue-kissing a girlfriend while a crowd cheers her—within minutes the feeds are only interested in Joanna Kriz if she’s fucking or mutilated, they’ve reduced her to the essence of what the viewing public will click on and trend. I ring the bell and leave the bus, the feeds saturated with Joanna Kriz. Hail a cab, slump in the backseat—I just want to go home. Within minutes the murdered girl’s family signs with Crime Scene Superstar, grieving but ready for their opportunity to share their daughter’s beauty with the world and collect royalties. #Kriz trends in the feeds, critiques of the dead woman’s body—face too horsey but nice tits—rating her fuckability based on crime scene photographs. I reach my apartment, out of the range of the public Wi-Fi. Everything in my apartment is silence and the only thing I can do to fill it is cry.
11, 21—
The District of Columbia in late November—a golden afternoon, another round of sleet predicted for tonight. Sunlight dapples the Potomac, tourists swarm the National Mall. We share an outdoor table at the Café du Parc, at the Willard InterContinental. Everything’s burnished crimson and copper in the autumn light—stone surfaces of government buildings, cherry-red double-decker tour buses, what leaves remain in Pershing Park. Clusters of tourists chase guides waving neon pennants—desperate to see the White House through the wrought iron gates, the house set back on the chemically lush lawn, the alabaster columns and the world-famous gardens that obscure the views, the tropical fauna engineered to live even through winter, so flower-swollen it’s as if the air itself had ruptured into blossoms. They’ve come to imagine they’re closer to President Meecham here. They’ve come to imagine her life in those distant rooms—to maybe even catch a glimpse of her, or at least view the landscape she views as if the land itself is already a relic or somehow infused with her. Meecham shimmers through everything here—every tourist advert, every set of “White House China” sold from souvenir stands, every police shield, strip club pop-up, every fashionporn ad for DC couture—a mass hallucination, an ineffable vision, as if the northern lights had been captured bodily. “America’s Queen,” they call her, and they come to her like supplicants at Lourdes, carrying signs and posters depicting Meecham as the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, seven knives piercing her porn-perfect breasts.
Waverly smokes. Blue eyes, disconcertingly blue—the color of Windex or antifreeze. A white sweep of hair. He’s like a publicity photo of a poet—stentorian, craggy and wrinkled, pausing in the conversation to savor his cigarette, or to gaze over the throng of tourists while he collects his thoughts. I’m bedraggled beside him in my hoodie and sweats. He’s wearing a suit, an Anderson & Sheppard that my Adware informs me is from Savile Row, London. Every other table is filled, I notice, except the ones contiguous to ours—like he’s arranged a buffer of empty plates around us, a bubble of relative quiet and privacy.
“New York,” says Waverly, when the conversation comes around to where he had been when Pittsburgh ceased to exist. “A fund-raiser at the Museum of Modern Art. You know, I swap stories with survivors all the time and love trumping them by saying I was staring at Guernica when it happened. I remember everyone in the gallery falling silent for a few moments—Pittsburgh must have sounded as distant to them as West Virginia or Alabama—until the notion hit that Manhattan might be the next to go. There was an unseemly panic—”
Adware overlays our table with adverts—Travelocity gnomes pitching Manhattan, Wheeling, Birmingham. Animated George Washingtons hawk cheap tickets to symphonies in the National Cathedral. I ignore them, try to concentrate on Waverly, but the George Washingtons morph into slutty Marthas in white wigs and low-cut gowns with powdered white breasts jiggling for my attention, seating charts nestled in their cleavage, buy, buy.
“I understand you work with an outfit called the Kucenic Group?” he says.
“I do. Or did—”
“Research, I take it? Insurance claims, that sort of thing? An impossible thicket of litigation—”
“Everything’s contested,” I tell him.
“You’d think it would be easier, having the City-Archive at your disposal—”
“It could be easier. Governments used to have the authority to issue mass death certificates,” I tell him, the patois of my job flowing mechanically, “but a case called State Farm v. the State of Pennsylvania changed all that. Since the Archive exists, the insurance companies argued they should be given the chance to verify every individual insurance claim, every property damage claim, everything. The checking takes years, slows down the payouts—”