“How’s my aunt doing?” I ask him.
“I’m serious, Dominic,” he says. “You need to clear your mind. Have some fun with life. It’s not too late to live—”
“I can’t,” I tell him. “I can’t—”
“Anyway, your aunt is good,” he says. “She spends all her time in her studio making wood-block prints—she’s very happy, but she worries about you. I showed her a picture from the other night and she said you look like a bear ate you. A bear, Dominic. She wants you to take a vacation, spend some time in Domažlice, out in the country. Relax a little. She misses her nephew—”
“I’ll visit,” I tell him. “Maybe going out to the country for a while is a good idea. Get away from everything—”
“Cuts off his fucking hand and no one gives a shit. Barns and horses, man. I want barns and horses next time. My Anthropologie concept is to channel Robert Frost. Barns, horses—”
“When are you free for dinner?” I ask him.
“I’ll hit you up,” he says in English. “My schedule’s a bit harsh this week. I’ll take you to Primanti’s for a sandwich—”
“Not there—”
“Keep your network open—”
“Out, out,” I tell him, leaving.
In the living room, Twiggy’s faring better against Tyson, landing combination punches—making tweety birds flit over Tyson’s eyes. When she sees me, she breaks off from the game.
“Can I talk with you?” she says.
She pulls me aside and asks if I’m using.
“No, nothing much,” I tell her. “Just some brown sugar, nothing hard—”
“You like uppers, then?”
“Just to help me concentrate sometimes,” I tell her.
“I want to give you something,” she says. She opens her purse, a gold tube hardly big enough to carry lipstick and car keys, and fishes out a heart-shaped pill wrapped in a plastic baggie.
“What is this?”
“A valentine,” she says, slipping it between my lips. “Let it kick in and then take the brown—”
I bite down—the pill tastes like cherries. Twiggy friends me, pushes her contact info into my address book.
“If you like it, I can get you more,” she says. “If you ever want to talk Plath sometime, or dig into Sexton—”
I watch her a heartbeat too long after she returns to her game, her jersey dress rising with every punch, and my Adware fills with pop-ups and redirected streams to escort services and live companions, to cam girls in lingerie who coo they want to meet me. Whatever she just gave me kicks in. I hurry from the apartment, illegally opaque sex ads blotting my sight and I almost tumble down the stairs, the advertisements showing girls so realistic in the streams I stand aside on the landing to let them pass, but they’re just images, mirages, all just light. “I don’t want any, I don’t want them,” but the ads are better at knowing what I want than I am and ranks of girls march for my approval, all slight variations of Twiggy, blonde hundreds in the apartment lobby until I’m out on the street and they fill the sidewalk, lockstepping in unison, like a mirror image of a mirror, a thousand Twiggies receding into space everywhere I look.
There’s a KFC in Dupont Circle, a two-tier restaurant. Crowds in lines, the place is swamped. Menu apps hijack my attention with flashing extracrispy breasts and thighs. Original, Cajun, Buffalo! Relax—the last thing I need is for some plainclothes KFC cop to think I’m jumpy and call for a drug sniffer. A two-piece extracrispy box from the menu kiosk and a restroom token from the cashier. They have semiprivate stalls here, on the second floor—I leave the chicken and hit the restroom. Someone’s washing his hands. A few stalls are in use. I lock myself in the far stall and peel apart the packet of brown sugar, swallow the pill. My tongue’s filmy with the aftertaste—chalky, bitter. JESUS CHRIST SAVED MY SOUL knifed into the door. Someone’s drawn Colonel Sanders shooting rainbows from his massive cock. A tightness in my eyes. Combined with the valentine Twiggy slipped me, the burn hits my nerves like a current—like everything I see is etched in light. The stall and the toilet pulse. Colonel Sanders looks real—absurdly real, textured, with volume, his hair like a spool of cotton, his rainbows shimmering as the most beautiful colors I’ve ever seen. Infinite streams of flushing toilets and washing hands. I wander from the stalls, wander from the KFC—I’m in Dupont Circle, in the street—picking pebbles from the crosswalks. I concentrate on the City.
Pittsburgh.
I concentrate on Three Rivers Net and the Archive app swims into focus, the icon an image of the golden triangle cradled by its rivers. I load the City-Archive and my vision blacks out, replaced by the gold and black crest of an eagle-stamped shield topped by castle parapets.
Log in.
“John Dominic Blaxton,” I tell it, struggling to enunciate. Allow auto fill-ins, “yes.” Remember password, “yes.” I seem to remember traffic in Dupont Circle and the noise of horns and screaming. Someone asking if I’m all right—of course I’m all right—and when they try to help me out of the street, through the crosswalk, to safety on the sidewalk, I shrug them off and panic. I may have fallen to the concrete. There are other sounds, other voices, the noise of Dupont Circle as the City-Archive crest fades, as DC fades, as the City surrounds me, western Pennsylvania in summer twilight as real as any dream.
376, the Parkway from the airport—roads the gray of moondust, the surrounding hills dense with trees grown dark in the gathering dusk. The Parkway was like this at the end—congested lanes too narrow for the volume of traffic. The glare of onrushing headlights, taillights like lines of rubies. I’m here. I remember. Shopping malls and gas stations and restaurants illuminate the peaks of the shadowy hills. I’ve shopped in these malls. I’ve eaten in these chains. Beneath the rusted Norfolk and Western trestle, the road rises and finally cuts in lowering arcs, descending, gutting deeper through the hills until the tunnel. The tunnel, a square of burnished light cut into the mountainside. And through—a concrete blur of fluorescent light and ceramic tiles, the reverb whoosh of engines, wind, and when the tunnel ends the City bursts around me in riotous blooms of glass and steel. I plunge through the skyline. The light of skyscrapers floats on skeins of interstate bonded by golden bridges, a ghost image of the City reflecting in the black mirror of the rivers, my God, my God, I remember, it’s everything I want, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted, it’s everything I want to remember.
I’m here.
I’m here:
“Pay when you leave—”
The bus driver, an older black man sipping from a thermos. Port Authority sweater-vest and slacks. I almost want to touch him, to touch his arm to feel him, to see how real he feels, but I sit toward the rear, thankful to smell the layering of body odor and stale air, the vinyl seats. This was the 54C—South Side to Oakland. There are others on this bus, others visiting the Archive—we’re different from the illusions, somehow lighter. We all look at one another, wondering what we’ve lost.
The driver takes us along Carson and several of us disembark to walk among the lights and people, to remember what it felt like to be on the South Side on a Saturday night. There are more people in the Archive than usual today, because of the ten-year anniversary—survivors enveloping themselves in these memories. The bars teem with faces basking in the bluish glow of a Steelers game on the flat screens. Reruns, but they can still cheer as if the games were new, as if they didn’t already know who lost. The crowds are thick on Carson, just as they had once been, but I stay on board the bus to look at the streets scrolling past, to see the places I’d known, places I could walk into and still see everyone I once knew as if nothing had happened, as if they were still alive, still here. Nakama, Piper’s Pub, Fat Head’s. Near 17th the bus stops and more people climb on. Real people, other survivors. We look at one another, wondering.