“Yes,” I tell him.
“Quit looking for this woman you know as Albion. Stop immediately. Find other ways to make a living. Terminate your employment with Waverly, let this go. Otherwise, I’ll take action against you—”
“What action?”
“Look at this young woman—Peyton Hannover, this bright young thing,” he says, guiding my attention to Peyton as she lifts her hair for Zhou to fit her for the corset top of the gown. In an instant, Peyton’s image corrupts and her body scrambles, her mouth ruptures outward, her teeth and gums splayed in flowering wet rows that sink through her neck to her chest, her face sinks, nipple-eyed, her body hunches, patches of blonde hair sprout in tufts, her genitals open and spill like water to the floor. A layer of dissonance—a spoiled body. I try to withstand this, to look at Peyton, to prove Mook’s threats are meaningless, but I can’t endure. I flinch away.
Mook says, “Imagine your wife—”
“Oh God,” I say, his words pounding me like a hammer striking meat. “Please don’t do that. Please—”
“It’s okay to look,” he says, and when I look again, Peyton’s been deleted, the space she occupied replaced by a smudge, like Vaseline swiped over the air.
“There’s a program I have access to called the Reissner-Nordström worm—do you know what that is?”
“No—”
“It’s a modified Facecrawler,” he says. “In the time it takes your heart to beat, I can desecrate every memory, every instance of your wife in this City. I can corrupt your presence here so that not even your iLux can access the moments you cherish with your wife. I run the worm, and she’s gone. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes. I understand—”
“Ask yourself: Is losing your wife a second time worth your loyalty to Waverly? I’m guessing not—”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You’re not listening,” he says. “If I perceive that you haven’t let this matter with Albion drop we will take action against you. I will, Mr. Blaxton. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m through. Through—”
“I think you know your way out,” he says.
Vertigo as I’m shoved from this location, the Archive a blur but re-forming—I’m in the parking lot, looking up to Albion’s lit studio windows. The snow’s sticking now, falling in soft flakes that crunch beneath my footfalls as I run, squalls kicking up that blow blinding veils of snow from the branches of pines. Home—home to Room 208, the Georgian. I take off my wet clothes in the foyer. I find her asleep and crawl into bed beside her. Theresa. I put my arm around her and press close, feeling the simulated warmth of her body, the simulated rise and fall of her chest, trying to hold her, to keep from losing what I’ve already lost.
2, 1—
Whenever you visit this place, there are others here—too many survivors in mourning to get a sense of what we actually used to be like here. Katz Plaza, it used to be called—centered by a Louise Bourgeois fountain and benches shaped like laconic, watchful eyes. We come here to view the end. We stand like we’re in a gallery, ringing the plaza. We know it will happen at thirty-seven past the hour, and as the time nears we watch for him—there, the truck pulling up on 7th, the man climbing down from the cab holding a steel suitcase. Some of us begin to cry, but most of us have seen this before, many times before. We can’t stop him, we can’t rewrite history even as we pass through it, so we simply watch: the man kneeling in the center of the plaza, raising his arms in some sort of prayer. Some of us think we hear the name Allah. We watch the man unlatch his suitcase. The man pauses, and we wonder, millions of us have wondered if in that pause he was reconsidering, if he might have turned back. We watch as the man opens the suitcase. Light—
She loved walking here. On Walnut Street, in Shadyside. She loved window-shopping here—the Apple Store, Williams-Sonoma, Kawaii, e.b. Pepper—but her favorite place was an upscale general store called Kards Unlimited. Theresa died there—wearing blue jeans tucked into riding boots, an oatmeal-colored cardigan draped over her pregnant belly. I’ve stood with her outside of Kards Unlimited’s picture window as she sipped an iced mocha from Starbucks, looking at the T-shirts on display. My Other Ride Has a Flux Capacitor. Llamacorn. The Folding Chair Parking Authority. A Clockwork Orange. I’ve watched her many times looking at these shirts, and have come to believe that at the end, at the very moment the world ended for her, she was reading a Mr. Rogers T-shirt, It’s a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood. The sky burns. Cameras record. Theresa squints. Her hair catches fire at the tips, then flashes like a diadem across her head. She dies too quickly, I believe, to have felt any pain. I’d always assumed that our child simply perished in the womb, but now Mook’s taunt thorns in my mind, and as I watch Theresa cocooned in fire, I imagine that our child may have known, may have kicked and squirmed as her mother died around her, may have understood and suffered.
Gossip heads and tabloids speculate on who she’ll wear, but Gavril’s already tipped me off that President Meecham’s tapped Alexander Porta this year, the Natalia Valevskaya protégé, and that tonight’s executions will feature at least seven full costume changes to coincide with the fall couture shows. I’ve scanned the League of Women Voters app—the U.S. Communist Party, the Greens, the Teas, the Army of God and the Mid-Atlantic Socialists aren’t even participating—show trials, they call them, a spectacle. Nine men will be executed tonight, federal criminals: alleged jihadists, traitors, multistate spree killers. I’ve accepted Timothy’s offer for a ride to Waverly’s for his viewing party. Standing in the rain, the streams exceptionally vivid in the overcast light—rioters in San Francisco are already burning city blocks in Hunters Point, rioters in Chicago are already burning police cars in Millennium Park. Timothy pulls up in the Fiat and tells me to get in before I catch pneumonia.
Timothy listens to light jazz, stuff like the Fontainebleau Quartet and Slim Vogodross. He asks how I’ve been and I tell him I’ve been busy searching for Albion, but I don’t mention Mook, nothing of the threat against my wife. I’m planning to tell Waverly myself, when we meet about his daughter—I’m planning to collect what I’m owed and quit. Timothy merges onto the Beltway and pushes the Fiat, weaving through congestion at eighty, eighty-five miles an hour until he takes an exit about forty-five minutes outside DC.
Virginia. An hour-and-a-half drive, Timothy exits the interstate and once off main roads, we drive through woods. Late afternoon, but the night falls heavy and gathers around the slim black trunks of trees. I’m tired, I haven’t shaved in days and my scruff’s grown thick down my neck, but it feels nice, like I’m half hidden and soft. The road narrows, begins to climb. Timothy’s dressed in a tuxedo and I’m nervous I’ll be conspicuously schlubby at the party—I wore what I thought would blend in, charcoal slacks and a flannel shirt, tucked in. A tweed jacket I’ve had for years. Timothy’s headlights illuminate the trees. He’s taking the turns close, driving breakneck through the rain. His windshield’s lit with night vision augments and I watch the pale green shapes of deer clustered at the edges of the woods, dozens if not hundreds of them. A miserable icy slush congeals on the windshield before the wipers push it away—if any of those deer bolt, I’ll die. I’d hit a deer once, years ago, and pulled over to the side of the road. Mine had been a doe, I’m fairly certain—it seemed small when I was near, but I don’t know how to tell much about deer. The middle of the night, in Westmoreland County. The deer moaned and whined—bleating, I guess you’d call it. I’d seen movies where calm men broke the neck or killed dying animals with one shot to ease their suffering, but I had no gun and I couldn’t bring myself to kill it, let alone touch it. The sight of my shoe prints in its blood froze me. I withdrew a pace and simply watched the doe die. When she was silent I said a prayer over her body and left. What else could I have done? My windshield was cracked and buckled inward where the deer’s spine must have ricocheted from me.