Vibrancy of the drugs—Jesus Christ, it’s all so real. The Uni-Mart—aisles of Doritos and Ruffles and Fritos and Combos. The faces of the cashiers are immortal here, the boy with a neck tattoo taking my money and handing me rumpled, sweaty cash from the drawer. I thank him and stuff the bills into my pocket. Walking home with a gallon of milk in a plastic bag. Nearing midnight, insects swarm the streetlights. A midsummer swelter. Our apartment was never air-conditioned, but box fans beat in the open windows and make a comfortable-enough draft. I take my shirt off in the foyer, sweating in the dark midnight room. Theresa’s already asleep—I remember Theresa asleep, but when I go to her now, the body in our bed is Zhou’s.
“Theresa,” I say, and Zhou turns to me like she recognizes that name.
“Where did you go?” she says, speaking words I remember Theresa speaking.
“Picked up some milk so we can have cereal tomorrow—”
Theresa’s things are still here. Her container gardens on the windowsills. Framed Audubon prints of mourning doves and flamingos. The book she was reading is facedown on the coffee table—Zoya, Danielle Steel.
“Theresa—”
“Come to bed,” she says.
I open the refrigerator door to put away the milk and squint into the harsh white light. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness when I come back to bed and for a moment I see Zhou as Theresa, Theresa’s body lit by the moonlight, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, Zhou’s body returns and Zhou’s face fades in. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, trying to remember Theresa here, trying to force my memory of Theresa back into this place. Zhou sleeps with me just like Theresa would have slept with me, her body nestled into mine, her legs crossed over mine.
“Theresa,” I say, but Zhou answers, “Yes—”
I wake.
Gavril’s moved me to the bathroom, stretched me out in the tub, propped my head up with pillows. Cottony, my mouth—I’ve vomited down the front of my clothes. Face aching like someone’s punched me. I stand—shaky. He’s left a clean T-shirt for me, a yellow jersey—Washington Redskins, est. 1937. iLux lights to the jersey augs and Agatha, the Redskins cheerleader who implanted my iLux, flashes in the bathroom with me, a cheer routine from her vids, spandex high kicks disappearing through the bathroom ceiling. “Off, off,” I tell it, wincing at the stadium lights and reverbed crowd noise. She flickers out. Splitting goddamn headache. I splash water in my face. Whispers of bruises have formed under my eyes and blood’s dried on my nostrils. The apartment’s emptied out, Gavril’s party paused for the time being. Gavril’s in the living room, watching soccer. He turns when he hears me.
“Christ,” he says. “Šípková Ruženka, I thought you were going to fucking die—”
“I didn’t—”
I sit with him, head pounding but dull. I grab a handful of Fritos from the bowl but just hold them, stomach flopping at the thought of actually eating one.
“You started screaming in the kitchen—the girls got scared,” he says. “You were, like, slamming your face against the wall. Freaking the fuck out. Fucking blood everywhere—”
“Gavril, I’m all right—”
“I voiced your doctor friend, Simka—Once you started snapping out of it, I voiced back and told him not to bother coming and so he cussed me out for a half hour because he says I enable you. He still wants to take a look at you, but I never told him where I live—”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your place so quiet—”
“A few girls are coming around for work a little later,” he says. “Crash here as long as you want. I don’t think you should terrorize the streets in the shape you’re in—”
“I’ll just collect my head a bit,” I tell him. Gavril gets two bottles of Gatorade from the fridge and hands them to me, telling me to drink both. Even the thought of swallowing Gatorade is enough to make me gag—but I sip and let the liquid slip over my tongue.
“Drink up,” he says. “Hydration. I mean it, brother—”
“Gavril, I have some things I need to tell you—”
“Say anything—”
“That job for Waverly’s gone sour,” I tell him. “The woman I was tracking. Everything’s fucked up—”
I tell him about Mook, about the Christ House in Pittsburgh where I followed Timothy and Hannah Massey. I tell him about Timothy’s drawings of dead women and the cops that assaulted Kucenic. I tell him that they’ve taken Theresa from me.
He’s stunned by everything I’m mixed up in. He rubs both hands over his bristly head and the shag of his beard stubble, pacing the room.
“You’re in serious shit,” he says.
“Listen to me, Gavril, this is important: I’ve put together a collection of evidence linking Dr. Timothy Reynolds to the death of Hannah Massey. If anything happens to me, you need to get it out to the streams—”
We set up an anonymous drop box using faked contacts, encrypt it with a mirror site, share the password—easy to trace documents I put into the drop box, but impossible to trace who retrieves them. I copy the files about Hannah’s murder. Gavril pulls a bottle of Sorokin vodka from the freezer and pours himself a glass. He offers some for me and laughs when I recoil at the idea of liquor.
“Sorokin will resurrect you, no matter how dead you feel,” he says.
“I should be dead already,” I tell him. “They’re going to fucking kill me, Gavril, because I found that fucking body but it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fucking fault—”
“You won’t die,” he says, “we can figure this out, figure out what to do—”
“I already know what to do. I need to recover Theresa so she can live on in the Archive. I need to help Hannah—”
My Adware’s a different region code than the soccer broadcast on Gavril’s Praha stream, so the play-by-play’s like excited gibberish. He finishes the first glass of vodka before pouring himself a second.
“Dominic, you know I love you,” he says, “but you piss me off sometimes. You’re thinking about that dead girl, thinking about your wife. You’re obsessed, Dominic. You’ve always been fucking obsessed with grief. Let them go, Domi. Let them go, steer clear of this. We’ll lay low until these people forget about you—”
“I can’t just let her disappear—”
“Is that all you can fucking think of right now? That’s what all this shit boils down to?” Gavril’s eyes swim with a sudden buzz from slugging down his vodka. “Theresa’s dead, but you have a life to live. I’m here for you. You have a family. We have lives to live, with you—”
“I know,” I tell him. “I know—”
“No, you don’t fucking know,” he says. I’ve never seen him quite like this, fraying at the edges. He pours himself more Sorokin and his hand shakes, splashing vodka on the table. “You almost fucking died in my kitchen,” he says. “From a fucking overdose. And now you fucking tell me you’re mixed up in this bullshit? What the fuck have you been doing with your life?”
“That’s enough,” I tell him.
“And now you’re dragging me into it,” he says. “Giving me files about a dead girl that might get me killed and all this fucking means for you is that you can’t mope about your dead fucking wife or some dead fucking girl you don’t even know—”