“I found her body,” I told him, thinking of spring rains sluicing away her shallow burial. “No one else would have—”
“Look, Dominic,” he said, “if you’re going to work in this field, you have to understand the bigger picture. You can’t just hole up in the research, block out every other consideration. You have to understand that when I meet with State Farm, their reps will be excited by what you’ve found, the work you’re doing, but their first question will be Why haven’t you told us how she died? That information means money to them—they care about the money, not the girl. You have to think like they think if you want to be effective in this line of work—”
“They don’t care who killed her, just that she was killed,” I said. “Isn’t that right? You want me to ignore what happened to her? I can’t do that, Kucenic. For the past few weeks, whenever I close my eyes I see her—”
“All these images aren’t real,” he told me. “You immerse into the Archive and if you’re not careful, you forget that it isn’t real. You spend so much time watching people die, it can affect you. It’s okay if you can’t keep up right now, if you can’t work like this—”
“What do you mean, ‘forget that it isn’t real?’ It was all real—”
“Log some hours,” he said. “Work through this. I’ll need an update by this afternoon—”
“Fine, fine,” I told him, but skipped work that afternoon anyway. I immersed at the Mount Pleasant Library, accessing their public Wi-Fi from a wingback chair in the gov docs room that’s hidden from the reference desk librarians. Private back there, no one to bother me. Brown sugar comes in blister packs—taupe heptagons—cut for use as a study aid. I dry swallowed the pill. I closed my eyes when the sweetness hit and my breaths grew deeper. I loaded the City. I was with my wife then. For a solid ten hours, at least, I was with her. The librarians kicked me out at closing so I slept the night in their parking lot, half hidden by a hedgerow. Still connected when I woke, but the City had timed out—the morning feeds blaring Cash Amateurs and looped promos for season 4 of Chance in Hell and the Voyeur Cam pay streams and Real Swingers of DC and groupons if I opinioned who was hotter between last week’s murdered Fur girls on Crime Scene Superstar, blonde versus redhead, dead teen bodies displayed in crime scene streams, Look here to vote, look here—
Dr. Simka has diagnosed me with major depressive disorder, substance abuse disorder and secondary traumatization. He’s prescribed Zoloft and suggests I should exercise more, that jogging through Rock Creek Park when the weather’s nicer or training for the National Half Marathon will cleanse toxins from my bloodstream. He says I’m putting on weight and it worries him.
“Maybe we should try to lose some weight together,” I’ve told him, but he just pats his belly and laughs.
Simka’s offices are over in Kalorama, near 21st and Florida, in the building with the bright red door. He’s filled his waiting room with furniture that he’s made—black cherry Mission-style chairs, a magazine table, a matching bookshelf filled with his early editions of Lacan. After our biweekly hour I feel I’ve pawned damaged goods to him, that my case is certain to hurt his success rate. I mention this to him while he’s signing my EAP paperwork, but he just smiles and nods and strokes his bushy mustache and says, “You don’t need style points to win—”
I’ve learned to trust Dr. Simka. I talk with him about Theresa, about my memories. We discuss the amount of time I spend in the Pittsburgh Archive visiting her. We try to set limits, boundaries—we try to set goals. Simka doesn’t believe in VR therapy, preferring face-to-face contact with his patients, so I relax on his cushy leather couch and have conversations with him—about anything, anything at all, whatever’s on my mind, whatever thoughts I’m trying to exorcise. I talk with him about my work for Kucenic, about the archival research I’m assigned—the information’s confidential, but I unburden myself to Simka. I told him about RFI #14502, the woman whose body I found.
“There was a dispute,” I told him. “The policyholder’s beneficiary—her sister, in Akron—filed life insurance claims for the woman and her three children, but State Farm contested the claims to avoid part of the payout, contending that only two of the woman’s children could be verified as dying as a direct result of the bomb—”
“So, your firm was contacted to confirm their deaths,” said Simka.
“Kucenic won the case in a batch bid and assigned it as part of my caseload,” I told him. “We were contracted to find evidence to bolster State Farm’s dispute, or if we found that all three children did die in the blast, to provide recommendations for a settlement—”
“Either way, you’re searching for a dead child,” said Simka.
“I found the first death easily enough,” I told him. “A boy at Harrison Middle School. Plenty of security cameras in the school, plenty of footage to reconstruct his life. I made sure I was with him in the classroom as he died, marking when the white light streamed through the windows, marking when he burned. The second child was only a few months old. Another boy. I logged several hours in the house with the policyholder, the mother. She spent almost every afternoon watching The Price Is Right while her boy cried in the bassinet. Sometimes I picked up the boy to try and soothe him, I don’t know why—I knew it didn’t matter, that the boy was long since dead, that the crying was just a webcam recording re-created there. I just held him, sang to him until he calmed, but the moment I put him down the Archive reset and he was back in his bassinet crying. He was crying in his crib when he died. Each child earned a separate report—”
“And the third?” asked Simka.
“Hannah,” I told him. “Nineteen years old. She’d been tampered with in the Archive, huge chunks of her life deleted. State Farm keyed in on the deletions when their researchers first examined the claim, which is why they put it up for bid, but they couldn’t track her—”
“And you could?” asked Simka.
“I can be obsessive about the research, is all,” I told him. “State Farm doesn’t have the manpower. When something’s been deleted from the Archive, it generates an exception report because the code falters. If you isolate time frames you can print thousands of pages of exception reports and slog through them, try to stitch back what’s happened. Clever hacks replace whatever they’ve deleted or changed in the Archive with something else, something similar—if you’re careful, you can delete something and insert a forgery without generating an error message at all. Whoever deleted Hannah, though, wasn’t skilled or very careful—I could reconstruct her life by following the exception messages, reading the code; it just took time. I imagine it’s like following a boar after it crashes through the underbrush—”
“Where did you find her?” asked Simka.
“I found her body in the river, half buried in mud over in this reclaimed slag site called Nine Mile Run. Academic footage of the watershed taken by Carnegie Mellon’s Environmental Science department. Her body had been buried there, but the rain washed away the mud that had covered her. Whoever deleted her didn’t think to delete JSTOR footage or didn’t know it existed as part of the Archive. By the time I found her body, she was swollen. Hard to even recognize—”
“You seem particularly upset over her death. You deal with this type of work on a regular basis—”