“Have you ever had this dream before?” he says.
“No—”
“What parts are you sure were a dream?” he asks.
“The dimensions of the apartment,” I tell him. “The interior was too large—”
“Tell me about the interior of the apartment,” he says.
I tell him. I’m on Dobson, in Polish Hill. It’s grown dim—twilight in the late afternoon. House windows burn orange and the bells of the Immaculate Heart are ringing. Timothy’s interested now.
“Did you intend to visit Albion’s apartment?”
“Yes—yes, I did. I’d gone to look for her—”
Lucid, at first. The shallow sleep Adware exploits for deep-penetration product placement. I’d bookmarked the entrance to Albion’s apartment building the first time I was there so that whenever I enter the City I’m loitering here, waiting for her. The green door, rotten around the edges. Windows boarded, spray-painted with the stenciled graffiti of lingerie models with the heads of swine. The pigs’ heads are goofy, grinning and slobbering, with razor blade teeth—the lingerie they wear is made for fetishists, eighteenth-century frills in the lace. I try the door to the apartment building and find it’s unlocked. The foyer, the unopened mail on the windowsills. Paint-flecked walls and the hardwood moaning as I climb upstairs—this is when the lucid dreaming stops and I fall into deeper sleep, I think, my attention drifting, the scene shifting, but not asleep heavily enough to engage the automatic offs. Upstairs to the third-floor landing, to her apartment. Is this when I woke? I’m not sure—I may have still been asleep. I scroll through past residents looking for her name, but Albion isn’t among them. This is typical. I type in the dates she’d lived there. The door opens. I step inside.
“You sound like you’ve been to her apartment before,” says Timothy.
“Many times—I’ve been trying to find her for Waverly,” I tell him. “But one of two things has always happened when I visit Albion’s apartment. Most often, the apartment is empty—just an empty space, just a place holder. I can walk through the rooms, but I might as well be studying a blueprint of the space. Every so often, though, a woman will open the door—a young woman, younger than I am, Asian. She seems to know who I am—she rattles off my name, information about me—but that could just be the AI pinging my profile. She’s always polite, but always tells me that I’m not welcome and always shuts the door before I can slip past her inside. The apartment changes. But that’s the nature of the City—the City changes. The bones of the City are facts but the flesh is memory, mutable. And with iLux, or any of the newer suites, the City pulls from memory and imagination and fills in with details that were never, strictly speaking, true. It makes an archivist’s job much more difficult—trying to find the truth through all that muck of fantasy. But this time, once I typed in the dates and opened the door, the apartment is different again. It’s decorated. Sparse, just a few pieces of furniture—but it’s furnished, lived in. I’d never seen the apartment like this. The furniture’s mismatched, all secondhand pieces, repainted. The walls are hung with paintings—large canvases, like Rothko color-fields the shade of bruises—and sketches of fashion designs. Bolts of fabric and dyes and a sewing machine. A lavender dress pinned to a mannequin—”
“Albion’s apartment,” Timothy says.
“It must be Albion’s apartment. I’m assuming that whoever deleted Albion is substituting information to make it harder to track—”
“Was she there?” asks Timothy.
“Albion? No, she wasn’t there. That same woman was there. That young woman. She always seems like she’s readying herself for a party. She welcomed me in this time—”
Examining herself in the mirror in the living room. Inky hair bundled high, held in place by two sticks. The woman’s tall—almost as tall as I am, I realize. She applies her makeup. I watch her darken her lips to the color of wine. She’s pale. She wears high heels—black, patent leather heels that reflect the faint apartment light. The dress catches my eye, something Gavril would be interested in—a damask print, black on a green the color of pale emeralds. She walks across the living room, her dress unzipped in the back so I see her white skin and the black strap of her bra. She enters the bedroom but returns a moment later, adjusting a pearl earring.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Zhou,” she says. “Who are you?”
I tell her I’m looking for Albion, and when she turns from the mirror I see a reflection of red—for just a moment, a flash of red hair in the mirror.
“Oh, of course,” she says, “John Dominic Blaxton, of Pittsburgh, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Temporary residences.” She returns to her own reflection. I search the apartment—the kitchen, her bedroom. In the bathroom I find curly red hairs on the porcelain of the bathtub and know I’m in the right place.
“Were you still dreaming?” asks Timothy.
“I don’t think so although I don’t know—”
“Is that why you mentioned the woman from your class? The woman who liked Schiele? You described what she wore, earlier—you were detailed when you told me about her, about her undergarments. You mentioned specifically that you could see the edge of her bra. Were you dreaming and pulling details from your memory through the iLux?”
“No—I don’t think so, though maybe the woman in the apartment made me remember the woman from my class.” I think I was awake when I saw Zhou, when we spoke, but think I’m dreaming as I explore her rooms. A hallway I hadn’t noticed branches out from the main room, a corridor—it’s narrow, with half-opened doors leading to other rooms, unfinished rooms. It dawns on me that the rooms are repeating, that I’m wandering through previous incarnations of the finished room. I come to another bathroom, but the red hairs are no longer on the porcelain.
“Go on,” says Timothy.
“The corridor continues and this is when I believe I was dreaming, because the episode has the hallmarks of a dream—I’m frustrated, lost, and can’t remember how I get back to the living room, to Zhou. Another corridor, and I see him—”
“Who?” says Timothy.
“This—man, I don’t know who. I’ve never seen him before, I don’t recognize him. I figure I’m dreaming or that the barriers between Albion’s apartment are blurring with another person’s private account, that maybe this man is a previous tenant of the apartment—another survivor come back to visit his space, or just another recording inserted from the cloud. I figure I’m interrupting something private.
“‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
“But he just looks at me, almost as if he’s not quite sure I’m even there with him—”
“What did he look like?” asks Timothy.
“Sitting in a wingback chair, the upholstery striped like a piece of hard candy, a cup of coffee near him on a low table. He wears slacks and a blazer over a T-shirt. The T-shirt says Mook.”
“How old?”
“Fifties, maybe early sixties. Or maybe late forties, but tired. I remember his eyes the most clearly—sad eyes, like his face was drooping. Like Droopy Dog? Do you remember that old cartoon Droopy Dog?”
“What else about him?” asks Timothy.
I tell him that I remember the color gray. Undefined. I don’t remember the man clearly. Gray, drooping, rumpled, sad—but arrogant in a way. I don’t like him. He sips his coffee, considering me. I apologize again, saying something about visiting a friend, that I’m lost here. He doesn’t move or speak with me, but I turn around to leave and he’s vanished. I’m sure I’m awake, now—but he’s gone so I figure he was part of the dream. I return to Zhou.