“Shit, brother. I don’t know. Ten or eleven years? The higher-end lines put out high-fucking-quality printbooks. There’s a collector’s market for these. I unloaded a spare copy of La Havre’s Gucci a few months ago and bought dinner for a month. The one you want isn’t worth as much, but don’t bend the corners—”
The catalog isn’t anything special as far as I can tell, a rambling narrative of a blonde and a redhead seduced by everyone they meet during a weekend at a country manor—stable boys, kitchen staff, the mistress of the house. Timothy described this to me—this might be the very scenario he said he streamed when he was going through his depression, before he tore out his Adware. Maybe this is a companion book to the stream he was obsessed with. Soft-core de Sade, every page slickly produced and shot like a fairy tale, the porcelain-skinned girls ravaged in various states of undress, the lingerie different for each scene. Page 136, I say, “Oh, shit, there it is—”
“What? What is it?” says Gavril.
The house mistress nude in stockings, opera gloves and a blindfold, the girls on hands and knees tethered by leashes. I scan and save the image, letting my thoughts clack against each other. “I keep seeing this picture,” I tell him. “There’s an image made from this picture, only with pigs’ heads on the two girls. It’s painted on Albion’s apartment—”
“Who’s Albion?” he asks. “Domi, are you seeing someone? Zkurvysyn—”
“I’m tracking someone named Albion in the Archive. She was a model, you might know her—”
I flash him the picture of Albion to see if he can place her, but Gavril says whoever she is, she’s strictly small-market amateur. “A nice shot,” he says, “she’s a good-looking girl, and could have modeling work easily,” but says that for her to even blip on the professional databases she would have to be a careerist—really work to promote herself. “There are all sorts of do-it-yourself bullshit sites you might find her on,” he says, “but it would take a lifetime scrolling through homemade glamour shots made by every deluded high school girl who thinks she has a shot at fame in the streams—”
“She died in Pittsburgh—”
“Oh shit,” he says. “Shit, I’m sorry. Let me think a minute. Well, even if she’d been pro or semipro, the networks didn’t exist then like they do now. This picture was a small-market campaign, otherwise you’d have found a reference to it—the people who are into fashion history are fanatical. So this is a one-shot. Something indie, something local. No chance you’d find her through this picture—not with current resources. No chance. The image isn’t even signed. There’s no augment to it. Nothing to reference. Tell me about the pigs—”
I tell him I’ll catch him up over dinner. He wants to take me to Primanti’s. I suggest somewhere else, maybe that Thai place he’d found, but he insists. He drives. He finds the Beach Boys on the radio and sings along, fucking up the words, and I laugh.
He parks in downtown Silver Spring and we walk to Primanti’s, a gaudy Pittsburgh-themed restaurant next to an indoor amusement park. The smell of grease and alcohol waft from the restaurant, the outdoor tables full of people drinking East End Brewing, gorging on French fry–laden cheesesteaks. A souvenir shop almost as large as the restaurant fronts the place, loaded with key rings, postcards of Pittsburgh in spinning racks, magnets, porcelain beer steins. There’s a wall here called the Pittsburgh Wall where people have written the names of the deceased—I think it was meant to be like the Vietnam Memorial, a sober monument to the dead, but the wall’s a thick tangle of Sharpie ink and pocketknife engravings, utterly illegible. I wrote Theresa’s name here years ago, but it’s been long since buried over. Even now there are people scrawling more names while they wait for tables—most people just write their own names now. How many of us are true survivors? There were only a hundred or so people documented to have actually survived the bomb—people protected from the blast by odd flukes of coincidence, people who dug out of the rubble and were eventually saved by rescue crews. And there are many more people like me, saved through a quirk of scheduling that took us out of town for the afternoon—I don’t know how many people are true survivors, but I’ve read that the survivors of Pittsburgh are like splinters of the True Cross, that if you were to gather us all together, you’d have three or four times the amount of the peak population of the entire city. Adware flashing to the “Pennsylvania Polka” begs me to buy limited-edition We Will Never Forget clocks of the Golden Triangle beneath a waving American Flag, porcelain Hummel Steelers babies or commemorative Barbie Pittsburgh Girls, in Penguins jerseys or miniskirts made from Terrible Towels. We’re seated in a wooden bench beneath a picture of Franco and the Immaculate Reception. The waitress asks, “What’re yinz havin’?” Gavril likes hops but I go for a chocolate stout.
“So, who’s this Albion?” he asks.
“I’m working for a man named Waverly,” I tell him. “Private work. Albion’s his daughter. I’m searching for her in the Archive. I have iLux now—”
“How’d you come across that?”
“A perk,” I tell him. “You ever heard of a company called Focal Networks?”
“Of course I have,” he says. “Wait, is that the Waverly you’re working for? Theodore Waverly?”
“Where have you heard of him?”
“Jesus fuck, Dom, he practically invented Adware. He invented how we use Adware, at any rate. NPR talks about him. That Focal Networks is a think tank for the Republican Party. They write policy for Meecham—”
“Shit—”
“Shit’s right, cousin. Big shit—”
“I’m not involved in any of that,” I tell him. “Like I told you earlier, I’m just tracking Albion—”
“That’s an odd name,” he says. “Beautiful, but odd—”
“She’s been erased from the City-Archive. I checked the Pittsburgh Project, the Department of Labor and Statistics, cached Google and Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, and ran wildcard and hashtag searches using InfoQuest and Three Rivers Net. Nothing. E-mails to the librarians at the Map Institute and the Steel City Memorials here and Johnstown and a formal letter to the City of Pittsburgh Citizen and Corporation hard Archive in Virginia—”
Our cheesesteaks arrive and Gavril asks why a man like Theodore Waverly would want me for the job—he wonders why out of so many programmers and researchers in the workforce, a man as rich as Waverly would bother to pull me out of a rehabilitation program to handle something like this.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask him.
“Dominic, don’t take it the wrong way—it’s a real question,” he says. “Theodore Waverly could hire Kucenic’s entire firm, if he wanted to. He could probably call in a favor from the NSA, you know? But he chose you, you of all people, my cousin Domi. It doesn’t make any sense—”
“He talked with Kucenic, but Kucenic told him that I was the best researcher,” I tell him. “Cream rises to the top. Now, listen to this: when I first started searching for Albion, I ran a Facecrawler on her picture, and the Facecrawler yields almost thirty thousand hits—but they’re all hits with less than two percent probability, so I figure it’s a wash—”
“Cream rises to the top? Bullshit rises—”
“Listen: I scanned through the results, and sure enough, Facecrawler found redheads, that’s all—not a single definite match for Albion. Well, one of the hits hovered around a seven percent probability, so I checked it out. It was this fuzzy, dim image captured in a dark corner of this place in Pittsburgh called the ModernFormations Gallery, at a poetry reading. The face I was looking for was totally obscured, so I couldn’t tell whether or not it was Albion, but, Gav, I was one of the readers that night. I was onstage, waiting my turn to read. I saw myself—”