“Waverly has significant resources, maybe Mook does, too—”
“You aren’t listening,” says Gavril.
“We’re assuming Mook is the one inserting Zhou into the Archive, but it might be Waverly,” I tell him. “Waverly could have access to a lifelike, custom sim if he needed one—”
“I know who Waverly is, and he’s rich as fuck, but let me give you some context. A few years ago I was brought in as a consultant for PepsiCo after they’d fucked up their marketing—their idea was this whole virtual worlds component to their branding, so you could drink a Pepsi and enter this PepsiLand of the mind. They wanted the place populated with gorgeous women, of course, so they hired programmers to create sims. They wanted women created from scratch—they thought it would give them more control, more branding opportunities. The campaign was a disaster, though—we’re talking a marketing directive from a major corporation with a team of top-flight programmers and all the women they created looked like—like gum. Fake. They brought me in and the first thing I did was recommend they scrap the sims and vid real women but the suits wouldn’t let go of their brainchild so they stuck to their guns and the whole thing crumbled. Look at Zhou, though. She’s perfect—there’s nothing fake about her. Your Zhou’s a model or an actress working somewhere, you can be sure of that. Let me see more of her—”
At the Spice Island Tea House, Zhou’s revealing that the doctor ran an advanced amino test and told her we’re going to have a daughter. Gavril checks the tags of her clothes. “Bullshit H&M,” he announces, noting what she’s wearing and requesting a catalog match through the Adware. Coming home from Uni-Mart, in the sweltering night when Theresa and I sat in the wind of the box fans, Gavril looks over Zhou’s clothing, and in Albion’s apartment Gavril watches Zhou in her loop, infinitely preparing for her party, adjusting her earring as she crosses the room. Gavril follows her from the shower to the bedroom, observing her as she dresses and undresses.
“Something called Dollhouse Bettie,” he says, after inspecting the lace of her lingerie.
He examines her mantis-green dress, first checking for a tag, then tapping into the copyright and Consumer Protection Act information, strings of serial numbers he seems able to read.
“House of Fetherston,” he says, after helping Zhou zip up the back of her dress, then helping her undress as the loop repeats. “Look here, at the stitching. And this embroidery around the hem. That’s fucking trademarked—”
Gavril’s seen enough. I take him to the 61C Café in Squirrel Hill, an old haunt, finding a table in the courtyard on a summer night, the courtyard edged with sunflowers, strings of lights suspended above us. Gavril multitasks a patch in the Archive so he can stream the end of his soccer match, Dukla Praha scoring just as we’re settling in, making this one a rout. He tells me he knows people who work with House of Fetherston, that he’s already seen their newest collection but doesn’t recognize Zhou’s particular pieces. He wonders if they’re prototypes or scrapped designs, or simply haven’t been released yet.
“I can find out,” he says.
iLux accessing my account blends my memories into this night—Zhou joins us, a tweed skirt and knee-high boots, a cardigan over a Phipps Conservatory T-shirt about the African Grape Tree that reads I’m Not Dead… I’m Dormant! She sits with us, dipping biscotti into her chai. Gavril studies her.
“She’s here because I’m remembering nights when Theresa and I sat here—”
“I understand,” says Gavril. “She’s welcome—”
“Mook could have done anything to Theresa,” I tell him. “He could have made her a horror show, or he could have deleted her and left all the gaps—but he’s inserted Zhou so that I can’t track him. Skillful insertions make it difficult to track—”
Gavril’s not listening. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says, continuing some conversation he was having with me only in his head. “I’m sure your wife was very stylish for someone from Pittsburgh—”
“I guess so—”
“But whenever you show me Zhou substituting for your wife, she’s wearing clothes like these, generic things, things she could buy from Target or H&M or wherever your wife shopped, clothes probably pulled directly from your memories and filled in by the Archive’s corporate sponsors for historical accuracy. When you show me Zhou substituting for Albion, however, she wears unique clothes. She’s wearing high fashion, very interesting pieces—”
“What does that tell you?” I ask him.
“Let me make a call,” he says.
2, 24—
Waiting at the gates, Dulles International. Gavril’s flight to London departed on time earlier this morning but my flight’s delayed because of weather, an unexpected squall that’s iced the wings. The passengers are glued to the feeds, waiting to be seated, streaming CNN.
Buy America! Fuck America! Sell America!
CNN cuts to rolling blackouts in Quebec, a Wisconsin teacher gangbanged by her eighth grade class, elderly men dying in Mississippi floods, NASCAR burns into trackside crowds.
Gavril invited me to drinks the other night. I told him I didn’t want to go out but he insisted—he rarely insists. He told me to meet him at the Wonderland Ballroom. Our table cluttered with beer bottles, cartoons on the label augs, buzzed and feeling snapped on a microdose of brown sugar. A chemical giddiness stripping back layers of depression—laughing at almost everything Gavril said, everything around me. Face-pinned club kids and their girls inked in augged tattoos, dolphins arcing from ocean sprays and fairies fluttering in glitter. Gavril said he wanted to get me plastered. I told him I was already plastered.
“More plastered,” he said.
A waiter arrived with a bottle of absinthe and set our table with glassware and sugar cubes.
“You’ll think I’m a fucking genius,” Gavril told me. “House of Fetherston’s headquartered in San Francisco. Dollhouse Bettie is a boutique line of lingerie also designed in San Francisco. So I called a friend of mine on the West Coast, an editor at Sick, this L.A. fashion zine. I told him about Zhou and Dollhouse Bettie and these outfits that looked like unreleased House of Fetherston designs. I sent him images of Zhou. He got back to me in an hour. Here, have a drink—”
Gavril held the bottle of absinthe to me—teardrop-shaped, the augged label interacting with my Adware, the branding Mucha-inspired, art nouveau swirls around a lesbian orgy. The women kissed, stroking one another, writhed—and there, in the middle of the group, her hair like black tendrils of ink intertwining with the stylized frame of the design, was Zhou.
“Shit,” I said. “Holy shit—”
“She’s an actress in San Francisco named Cao-Xing,” he said, pronouncing it Sow-Sing, saying, “she’s American, born in Kansas, moved out to San Francisco. Goes by Kelly Lee. Small-time gigs. She’s hardly appeared in anything, but she’s registered with a couple different agencies—”
Gavril lent me enough money for a ticket to San Francisco and a hotel, with plenty left over for an extended stay if it comes to that. He told me he’s flying to London early, to lie low until our situation settles down. There’s a crush at the gates—nearly six hours to work my way through the queue. Staring into the streams: another murder in DC, another woman, her head and hands cut from her body. She was found in a dumpster trashed outside the Fur Nightclub. Despite six DJs and a raucous party, no one saw a thing. A flight attendant scans my Adware, checks my flight pass. The Channel 4 stream says that despite the lack of fingerprints or dental records, District police have identified the victim from a DNA match using her blood—she was living in DC from Manchester, England, on a student visa for Georgetown. The woman’s name was Vivian Knightley. A part-time model to finance her studies, the streams flash American Apparel adverts of an ethereal blonde in a soccer jersey belted like a dress and knee-high tube socks—Twiggy.