I find an early reference to Raven + Honeybear as a participant in a couture show, a joint fund-raiser for Gwen’s Girls and Dress for Success Pittsburgh. The models are listed, “Peyton” by first name only. The Gwen’s Girls website is still cached, with a dozen untagged pictures of the fund-raiser on their Pinterest board, some showing Albion. If anything, Albion outstrips the models, her hair in crimson cascades, wearing a tweed three-piece suit I’m assuming is of her own design. Albion’s in the background of another image, suit jacket unbuttoned, hands in pockets, casually leaning against a column watching the catwalk—reserved, just as I’ve come to know her through Zhou. There’s a series of pictures showing designers’ studios—they’re all untagged, but I recognize Albion’s tweed and plaid designs in one of the images, the successive picture an exterior of a brick building that looks a lot like a Lawrenceville row house storefront. I run a Facecrawler match on the building and, sure enough, it pins a location: just off Butler Street in Lawrenceville, on 37th, but the location tag’s been corrupted. Someone’s been tampering with this place.
I follow Peyton as she leaves her shift at Coca Café and walks the few blocks to 37th—scant footage as she makes her way down side streets from Butler, but I pick her up again at the row house, a decrepit building bordered by a gravel lot, wild brush and weeds delineating one property from the next. Peyton must have been filming this footage herself—a POV shot taken with retinal cams as she types the key code and enters. The interior’s been redone—hardwood laminate flooring, an office and showroom on the first floor, decorated by a bird and bear mural, Raven + Honeybear in gothic script. This is Albion’s studio. The workroom’s upstairs, the second floor a loft-style space with picture windows and exposed ceiling beams. I find Zhou sitting at a sewing machine, working a pair of trousers. She smiles as Peyton enters the room.
“This is what you’ll be wearing,” she says.
Sifting through footage of the studio—there isn’t much, most days either already deleted or simply not filmed. I search the Archive’s timeline and find random hours of Zhou working at a sewing machine, or working with clothes pinned on cloth dummies, but finally come across an untagged series of events that haven’t been tampered with. Rather than Zhou, I find Albion documenting the preparation for a show, maybe with a flip cam on a tripod. She wears a sweatshirt and yoga pants, a Steelers knit hat. The footage is time-stamped September twenty-ninth before the end, at nearly three in the morning—Albion marks fabric before she sews. Peyton stands on a pedestal wearing a pink floor-length skirt like a spill of roses. Her breasts are uncovered, her corset top laid out on the worktable. An unusually heavy rainfall freezes into soft flakes that drift down outside the studio windows. I remember this snow, actually, waking up startled to see everything coated in thick, wet white. Three inches overnight. I remember Theresa and I walked to breakfast at Crêpes Parisiennes that morning, wondering if the snowfall was a fluke or an early start to winter. It would warm up again, though—by later that afternoon, in fact, the weather warmed and the snow melted. We’d have less than ten more days together. But tonight, while Theresa and I would have been sleeping as the rain froze and the snow dropped softly, Peyton stands on a pedestal bathed in the glare of studio lights while Albion brings her the corset.
Looking out the window at the snow, I notice a man standing outside in the lot—he’s wearing a wool overcoat, black or charcoal gray. His hair is white. He’s watching me as I watch him, snowfall accumulating on his shoulders and the top of his head, but it’s too dark to see his face. When I turn back to the two women, Albion has been replaced by Zhou. Outside, the man has disappeared—footprints in the snow lead to the building. He’s coming. I try to disengage from the City, but the system’s locked. I’m paralyzed. My Adware net security’s flashing red with warnings, alerting me to impending system failures but I can’t escape.
The studio door opens and he enters, shaking snow from his shoes and removing his coat.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“I’m Legion,” he says. I recognize him, the man in the wingback chair I’d seen in Albion’s apartment who wore a Mook T-shirt. I should be able to push my way past, but he has me in his complete control—I can’t move.
“Dominic, isn’t it?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, isn’t that right?”
“Are you working for Waverly?”
Mook smiles.
“I figured you were another of Mr. Waverly’s junkies,” he says. “Disappointing—”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?” he says. “John Dominic Blaxton, of 5437 Ellsworth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. candidate in Literary and Visual Theory at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia, recently an Archival Assistant for the Kucenic Group. Drug abuse problems. Constant rewiring for Adware upgrades. A dull life, but you were in love. You spend an awful lot of time immersing to visit a woman named Theresa Marie Blaxton. Your wife—”
“Don’t say her name. You don’t ever say her name—”
“I’m correct, aren’t I? You log more hours reliving the same bits of memory than anyone I think I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Most people visit the Archive for quick visits, to relive some happiness or indulge in a past normalcy or visit loved ones on birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths. Most people like the convenience of paying their respects once or twice a year, but you’re different. This is an obsession you have. Over and over again, you have dinner with your wife at the Spice Island Tea House so you can hear her announce her second pregnancy, what a shame about the first—”
“Don’t you ever fucking talk about her,” I scream but my voice mutes when Mook whispers, “quiet.”
“I watched your wife die the other day because I was curious about her,” he says, “curious about what, exactly, you saw in her—have you ever watched your wife die? What was she, eight months pregnant? Nine? She was in Shadyside, window-shopping—all those cameras in Shadyside, her death is very well reconstructed. You don’t visit her death often, though, do you? Too painful, I assume? There’s a window of T-shirts at a store called Kards Unlimited. Obscene, dumb T-shirts. Your wife was reading obscene T-shirts when she died. I wonder if the baby kicked when the bomb went off. I wonder if it knew it would never be born. Mr. Blaxton, what was it? Boy or girl?”
He allows me to move and scream and so I shake him, but touching him is like touching a sack of sand—he’s heavy, too heavy to be real and I realize he’s not real, we’re not real, of course we’re not here, there is no here.
“Your child would have been a girl,” says Mook. “I know about you. You’re easy to track. Your drug habits, your stints in and out of hospitals, therapy. All that paperwork. Your death is very well documented, just like your wife’s—only your death is much slower and is dragging out over years. You’re a simple man, Mr. Blaxton. No mysteries to you. That very simplicity is why I’m giving you a second chance that I might not usually give—”
I’m too bewildered by what’s happening to quite understand his threat. I try to ping his socials, to find out his name, but his profile display is nothing more than a grinning pig’s head with a lolling tongue that repeatedly speaks the word Mook in a Porky Pig singsong.
“Are you the one who’s deleting her?” I ask.
“I think I understand your motivation here,” he says. “You’re acting here because you’ve had some trouble with the legal system and you’re looking for a clean record, some gainful employment. On top of that, you’re emotionally compromised because of this business with your wife. I pity you, actually. I’m not unfair, Dominic, but I have an agreement in place that I need to honor above all my other considerations. Nevertheless, I think we can come to an understanding. Are you listening?”