I pull the comforters over my head, carving a small tunnel through the blankets for fresh air. I load the City—the pay-as-you-go’s much slower than the iLux contract-plan, so the Fort Pitt tunnel buffers and the City skyline breaks apart in a digitized blur, buffering, before the stream catches up and the City resolves. Greenfield loads, the Run, Saline Street to the vacant lot near Big Jim’s restaurant—I’m outside in winter, seeing my breath. I skirt the vacant lot and approach the Christ House from a side street, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. The house is smoke-charred from the fire, some sort of special effect still lingering here.
The porch smells like damp soot, the front door burned black. I use Kucenic’s override codes and brace myself for another bomb blast of heat, but it never comes—just a yawning, moist smell of rot as I step inside. The house is spare. Cold. No furniture in the living room, only soot streaks and blackened ceiling beams. There’s a fireplace in the corner that had been converted to an altar, a burned wooden crucifix intact except for the missing arms of Christ. A dining room, a cut-glass chandelier melted black. I kick through ash as I walk. A kitchen without appliances, just plugs and hookups, gas lines protruding from the floor. Between the dining room and kitchen, a stairway descends to the basement. The smell that rises is dank, but that’s just my imagination feeding this place, just impressions in the iLux—I flick the light switch, but it doesn’t work. Everything is darkness. Running the length of the wall is a pipe meant to be a railing. I hold on and descend the stairs, following through into impenetrable basement darkness until my foot touches concrete. I inch ahead—water running somewhere, a trickle sound somewhere nearby. My foot touches something and I reach out—porcelain. Wet porcelain, a leaking toilet at the bottom of the stairs. I feel along the wall, concrete blocks furry with mold. I find a utility sink and a drain. I hear sounds—breathing—from somewhere in the dark.
“Albion?”
The breathing’s coming from a root cellar, but when I open the door, the room is empty. The sound of breathing is silenced. I close the door and hear the breathing again. Whoever’s here in this basement room hasn’t been archived—just her breathing.
The rooms on the second floor haven’t been burned—bedrooms up here, the fleur-de-lis wallpaper I recognize from the watercolor is faded and peeled but intact. I find Albion in the second bedroom on the right. She and Peyton Hannover lie together in a queen-size bed, their bodies gaunt and white, naked together, wrists tied with twine to the bedposts, their ankles blistered and rubbed raw from twine binding their feet together. I work to untie their wrists, but this is not real, they’re not real, and just as I untie the knots, the Archive resets and the rope is retied.
Footsteps in the hallway—Timothy. His face is much younger than the face I know—gaunt, bearded. He unbuttons his shirt and undresses, he slides naked between the women, but the moment he touches them, their heads transmogrify into pigs’ heads. Maybe that’s why Mook was here, maybe that’s why this house is burned—maybe Mook mangled these archival scenes so no one could relive them. I look at Peyton’s and Albion’s eyes, and despite their pig faces, their eyes are still women’s eyes, terrified, wounded. Timothy gropes them, but they just stare—Albion at the ceiling, Peyton at the far wall. Timothy groans, barking almost as he licks their breasts, biting their nipples and caressing them. He kisses between Albion’s legs, then thrusts into her, using his hand on Peyton. The two women turn their eyes toward each other, almost willing each other to endure Timothy’s assault. Peyton whimpers. Jesus—what am I seeing? This is preserved in the Archive—which means Timothy must have filmed himself doing this. Albion clenches her teeth to keep from crying out. I kneel beside her and look up to the ceiling where she looks. I arch my head back just as she arches her head back, and I see out the window above the bed that she can see out of—the point of view is torqued, but I can see hints of trees. The watercolor of the interior depicts this view—the paintings of the house were made by Albion.
Albion disappearing from the Archive means she was alive when Timothy and Waverly thought she had died with Pittsburgh. Who is she? Waverly claimed she was his daughter—
Albion is Mook’s client—Albion hiring Mook to delete her from the Archive, to delete scenes like this from being eternally relived—
Waverly hiring me to distract me from Hannah Massey—
Waverly hiring me to find Albion and Mook—
Tie up their loose ends—
Albion, Peyton. The explicit violence of Timothy rutting women with pigs’ heads—I can’t figure out what I’ve seen. Albion and Peyton were lovers, but here they are with Timothy. Think through: Timothy’s history of abuse, of murder. Is Albion Timothy’s wife? Peyton? That doesn’t make much sense—but they’re his victims, like Hannah Massey was his victim, maybe, like other women he’s killed or tried to kill, or wanted to. Peyton’s documented as dying in the blast, but Albion—maybe she escaped from him somehow. Maybe she escaped, but Timothy thought she was dead until she hired Mook to delete her. Maybe the act of her disappearing was enough to signal she’d never disappeared. I need to find her—
I voice House of Fetherston studios, but no one’s ever heard of Albion Waverly. I explain to the receptionist that I’m looking for someone who works there, who’d have access to clothes that haven’t officially been released—I describe what Albion looks like. I’m bounced around, office to office—soon, someone asks who I am. I try to explain why I’m calling, who I’m looking for, but she says they’ve given too much of their time already and disconnect. I search the San Francisco white pages but no Albion Waverly—no hits for Albion at all.
Track the artwork: a Google search is useless—too many art galleries in the greater San Francisco metro region. Thousands of red flags pinned to Street View when I search “San Francisco AND art gallery.” I get a sense of which neighborhoods might have the most galleries—Lower Haight, gentrified parts of Hayes Valley, maybe around Haight-Ashbury, the Mission District, maybe the Castro. Two of the six paintings have smears or spots of Mook’s blood, so I leave them rolled in the hotel but I bring the other four paintings with me. I try art galleries almost at random, taking an AutoCab to a neighborhood and just walking wherever GPS points me. Some galleries are of obvious no help, dark holes foul with body odor and antagonistic scenesters on the streams that can’t be bothered to even acknowledge my presence. Other galleries are more professional, try to be helpful. Refurbished spaces with white walls and paintings hung with price sheets available. Chic young women who don’t recognize the paintings I brought with me, can’t identify the artist but show me other work about “the Pittsburgh theme,” as they call it, artists with no true discernible connection to the city, using the end of Pittsburgh as a metaphor for whatever pet cause they want to indulge in—governmental control, military culture, religious intolerance, capitalism, the spiritual death of the modern age—or using the Burn as nothing more than a pretext for depicting bodies and cities in flames, faux-visionary apocalypses. Artist Statements written entirely with mock-theoretical buzzwords, incomprehensible, about the deconstruction and defamiliarization of Place, the ambiguity of Identity, the Monologism of History, the Society of the Spectacle, the Articulation of Desire. Of artists co-opting our sorrow, of how artists “respond” to the oblivion of a city, as if their “response” was somehow profound or even necessary. No one I ask can identify the paintings I’ve brought to them.