“How did you return to her? You were lost—”
“The program was like a Möbius strip—”
I turned away from the man in the Mook shirt and saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, and when I went through the door I reentered her apartment. This is a loop. Now I understand—things have changed since first entering her apartment. Zhou is dressing for a party. I watch her. I hear the shower running—there’s no one else in the apartment. I can no longer find that corridor with several doors—no, now there’s just the short hallway that leads to her bedroom. I open the bathroom door and find Zhou in the shower. I watch her through the fogged curtain. She seems pleased when she notices me watching her, and lets me watch, rubbing soap over her breasts and dousing herself with shampoo. She asks if I want to join her, but I ignore the question and she laughs. Zhou dries herself and walks nude to her bedroom and there I watch her dress in an elaborate set of lingerie. She steps into the green dress that she doesn’t bother to zip. She makes her way to the living room mirror—this is where I’d first seen her, applying makeup in the mirror. There—the flash of red, Albion’s hair, flickers in the reflection and disappears. Here’s where it loops: She goes to her bedroom, returns adjusting the pearl earring, but once her earrings are on, she takes them off. Zhou unzips her dress and lets the fabric slide from her body. I watch her reach up and unlatch the front clasp of her bra. Very beautiful, the kinds of perfection women’s bodies have in dreams, uncanny and vivid. She undresses and makes her way to the bathroom, starts the shower and steps in once the water’s warm, lathering herself. I tell Timothy that I watched the cycle several times that afternoon, and that’s how I realize the loop is without variation.
“Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”
“Waverly may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.
“Sure,” I say.
“And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”
He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.
12, 27—
Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.
Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.
Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs. 1% finished… 2%…
Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a No results found message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.
Zero doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.
I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of the lease, but again come up with nothing.
I ease the parameters further—search only “Accelerant” in the entire City-Archive and the results hit every Honda dealership, every model year, every truckload of new makes, every used Accelerant, every advertisement, every Accelerant parallel parked on every street, every car in every driveway, too many hits even to consider, but still nothing in the particular blind spot where I’m trying to see.
Pepsi helps me think, so do Ho Hos—I uncap a fresh two-liter and open a new box, take a five-minute break before immersing again. Think. The Archive’s still Java based, so I set the parameters to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, but I don’t search for the Accelerant—rather, I search for a “TimelineException,” the telltale error in the code that means that something’s not historically accurate, that someone’s been tampering. I run the search, expecting to find a few hundred or even a few thousand hits, but the search locks up my iLux with an untraceable mess of TimelineException results—nearing a million exceptions before I kill the process. Christ—
Scanning the error report—whoever’s erasing Albion’s car intentionally mangled the code, it looks like, must have deleted or swapped out or tampered with just about every car archived near her apartment to crash searches with errors. I’ve seen similar with insurance scams—but whoever’s deleted Albion is especially thorough. There’s nothing I can use to track this mess. I can’t help but admire the work.
Think through the methodology—a reflection of red hair in the moment Zhou turns from the mirror. Nothing traceable in and of itself, but that leftover reflection is at least one slip—maybe the work isn’t quite as seamless as it seems.
Real-time hours loitering outside of Lili Café on the corner of Dobson and Hancock, the same building as Albion’s apartment, watching cars, or rather watching the reflections of cars in the café’s picture windows. When a car passes on Dobson, I note the make/model, then note the car’s reflection on a separate spreadsheet—sometimes only registering a blur of color. The cars that pass rarely match their reflections and I’m hopeful I’ll catch a trace of Albion’s Accelerant reflected in the window glass. Dull work, but something to slog through, a start. I recognize the barista archived here—Sandy, I think her name was—petite, with a cloche hat and black-framed glasses. She was a screen printer, I remember, her neon and pastel posters for Pittsburgh bands and the Steel City Derby Demons decorate the café. Theresa used to work with her—booked her to teach art workshops with the high schools, making prints using plant materials. She steams milk, pours leaf shapes onto the skim of lattes. Her customers are vaguely familiar to me, too, some of their faces—people I might have seen around. Another car passes and I note its reflection. Scanning over four days’ worth of footage until a silver Nissan Altima passes but casts a reflection of a green hatchback Accelerant on the café window and I know I have her.