“You would have liked her,” I told him. “She was a psych major. An actress in a comedy troupe called Scotch ’n’ Soda. She was a head turner, vibrant—but I couldn’t even recognize her body when I found her in that footage. Only a few minutes of white in the mud, a partial of her back and her feet. I had to prove it was her through the exception reports—”
Nearly every death is contested, nearly every property damage claim. Billions and billions of dollars in lawsuits. My research is handled like a spreadsheet, but I told Simka those three children still troubled my sleep. Simka listened attentively—he always listens to what I have to say like he’s hearing essential news. I told him I replay those children’s deaths so often I can’t tell if I’m reliving their deaths in the Archive or if I’m just remembering what I’d seen. I ask him to help me stop remembering. He jots down notes on a yellow legal pad. He doesn’t interrupt me with too many questions. He lets me speak. When he does talk, he spends a lot of our time together asking about the Beatles—what certain lyrics mean.
“The Beatles dropped acid and ate psychotropics when they wrote,” I tell him, “so as a mental health professional, you’re in a better position to interpret their lyrics than I am—”
“True, true,” he says, “but I might miss literary aspects that you’re trained to find. You know, I picked up on a lot more of Baudelaire by talking with you than I did through the apps, so maybe between the two of us, we can make some sense of Abbey Road—”
He suggests I should keep a journal. Just write the date at the top of the page and continue from there. Just be free with it, it will help. He gave me an ultimatum—that I’d have to at least try journaling or he wouldn’t continue signing my EAP paperwork. I don’t believe the threat, but he actually bought me this notebook—real paper, I think—and presented it to me with a download called the Progoff Intensive Journal method. He says I should write in longhand, that it will help my concentration—that dictation apps don’t have the same calming effect as penmanship. Simka is holistic—he believes the building blocks to a healthy, productive lifestyle already exist within me but that I have to learn how to stack the blocks in a new way. He suggests I listen to classical music to improve my sustained concentration skills. Feeds and streams contribute to the fracturing of our consciousness, he says. Try John Adams and listen through—at least twenty minutes a stretch, without augments, without shuffle. He hums a tune the Adware eventually identifies as “Grand Pianola Music”—click to add to iTunes library.
I take my Zoloft every night, but every night I wake up dreaming of my wife. 4 a.m. 6 a.m. The clock radio plays HOT 99.5, crap pop, but I lie deadened and listen, wishing my bed were a sinkhole and that I’d somehow die. The clock radio plays into the afternoon before I bring myself to shut it off, before I bring myself to climb out of bed. I indulge in Pop-Tarts and Mrs. Fields. I’ve been eating Ho Hos. Gavril swung by late Friday afternoon to see how I was feeling and found me eating an entire box of Ho Hos for breakfast with coffee. “No wonder you’re sick all the time,” he said, his breath like espresso and cigarettes mixed up with those blueberry Coolsa strips he chews.
A few years ago, Simka ended a session by saying, “Dominic, a fish rots head first—”
He suggested I rediscover personal hygiene—that no matter how bad I feel, I was sure to feel worse if I didn’t shower. So, I shower—and that has helped. I shave every morning. Long strokes with the razor, over my neck and jaw, over my skull. It’s bruised up there—black splotches, violet. Labyrinthine ridges of Adware like a street map of a foreign city embossed on my skull. I look in the mirror and follow the lines of wires as if they might lead me somewhere—anywhere other than where I really am.
Simka says to find someplace comfortable to write. He’s described his home office to me, out in Maryland, with its oak desk and a picture window overlooking a woodland backyard. My apartment’s public housing, but there’s a fire-escape terrace with a view of the surrounding rooftops—air-conditioning units and service entries. It’s chilly out here. The neighboring terrace’s potted plants died weeks ago in the first frost but are still outside, brown and brittle. I sip my coffee and bundle in my robe and sweatpants, a gray hoodie and slipper-thick socks. The sunrise pinks the sky—beautiful. Quiet. Wi-Fi’s included in the lease, or should be, but the router’s been broken going on three years. I hear a wet click whenever my Adware tries to autoconnect—like a popping knuckle just behind my right ear—and have to dismiss the low-signal warnings again and again, even though I’ve asked never to be alerted. Every five minutes, click—the network connection icon in my peripheral spins and the low-signal warning pops up again like a floater in my line of sight. “Dismiss,” I tell it. Five minutes later, click. I can only take so much.
So, here it is: A Day in the Life. A chronicle for Dr. Simka.
Theresa. Theresa Marie.
Even writing her name feels like scratching a phantom limb.
I take the bus these days because I sold my Volkswagen for cash years ago. Seats are occupied, so I sit behind the driver, near a scratched glass poster looping commercials for Mifeprex and TANF and YouPorn. Closer to Dupont Circle my Adware autoconnects to wifi.dc.gov and the feeds tingle my skull—blacking out a few seconds before my vision reboots with a shitty display of augs and apps, freebies mostly, looming when I notice one, the others receding, my profile bundled with so many pop-ups and worms that my vision strobes while it loads. GPS info and route maps and Metro schedules hover midbus—real time supposedly, but the bus schedule’s off sync by a half hour or more and the map’s of a Silver Spring route that doesn’t even exist. The passenger across the aisle stares at the ceiling, giggling—he’s drooling down the front of his raincoat, utterly engrossed in the streams. He’s spamming indiscriminate friend requests, but my social networking’s locked so no one bothers me—I stare out the window and concentrate on the CNN Headline feed:
BUY AMERICA!!! FUCK AMERICA!!! SELL AMERICA!!!
The Buy, Fuck, Sell feed’s leading with a new leaked sex tape of President Meecham, the ten-year anniversary of Pittsburgh demoted to postjump news. PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT! MEECH’S PEACHES EXPOSED IN TEEN SEX SCANDAL!
Headaches from news torrents and commercials overloading my secondhand Adware, shit I picked up on Craigslist years ago from a U. of Maryland kid who’d already fried some of the wires without telling me. Hilfiger, Sergio Tacchini, Nokia, Puma. President Meecham from her days as Miss Teen Pennsylvania kneels in the aisle of the bus. Real footage, says CNN, not sim, not sculpt. She touches herself and the talking heads comment: Everywhere, Americans have been given the choice between Love and Filth, and they have uniformly chosen Filth. Al Jazeera America’s the only stream covering Pittsburgh as a lead, posting satellite imagery captured on that first sunny day after the end, of the scorched earth like a black harelip on the mouth of the Appalachian Mountains. Pull for a stop.
Gavril lives in Ivy City, a renovated loft on the corner of Fenwick and Okie—warehouses and abandoned tenements, a Starbucks on the corner, a Così. Gavril’s building’s slashed with graffiti and slathered with wheat-pasted handbills for Qafqa concerts long since past and photocopied pics of the Pittsburgh mushroom cloud and offers for sex with male models and cheap rates on love hotels. Spray-painted: One who is slain in the way of Allah is a martyr. BBC America loops the “Star-Spangled Banner” over aerial views of the way Pittsburgh was and the way it is now: radioactive weed growth and the black guts of buildings—but the stream interrupts and reloads, bothered by all the vandalized and nonlicensed Tags setting off my Adware’s net security. Are we any safer than we were ten years ago? I ring the buzzer.