Partitioned Conference Room B is set up with folding chairs when Albion and I visit here, a dry-erase board in the center of the room. We watch John Dominic Blaxton, and Albion says that I was cute back then, that no wonder Theresa fell for me, but I don’t like seeing myself—skinny and young, full of unearned confidence. I see in that young face a total ignorance of everything that will happen and I both admire and hate him for it. The others filter into the class and take their chairs for the session, just like I remember they did—but Theresa never comes into the room and I watch myself speaking to no one.
“Please, let’s go,” I tell Albion.
I remember standing outside in the thickening slush waiting for my bus after the conference, nearly heaving with excitement like my lungs were bursting into sparks and might leap from my chest singing. I wanted desperately to somehow keep talking with her, so I tapped out an e-mail on my cell, saying how great it was to meet her, how I would love to keep talking about WordPress with her, and accidentally hit Reply All and so for the next few days heard from just about everyone from the conference except her. People trying to set up a follow-up meeting about WordPress, even the WordPress lecturer wanted us all to meet at the Panera in Shadyside. I figured I’d embarrassed her, or that she was politely unresponsive because she had a boyfriend, or just wasn’t interested, or genuinely thought I was interested in WordPress, but after three days she responded: Drinks? When are you free?
Albion and I go there now—to Cappy’s over on Walnut, only a block away from the apartment where Theresa and I would live in Shadyside. I look for Theresa here, Adware pulling memories of this place, but she’s nowhere—instead, Albion and I sit at the same table Theresa and I shared, near the front windows, watching the increasing snowfall and the snow-laden shoppers on Walnut Street. Theresa and I talked for over three hours that night. She was a botanist, working for Phipps Conservatory. I told her about my Ph.D. program and my poetry. She loved music and talked about bands she loved—the Broken Fences, Joy Ike, Life in Bed, Meeting of Important People, Shade—bands I’d never heard of become suddenly important to me. We said good night and I offered to see her home, to ride the bus with her to the South Side where she lived, but she refused the offer so I waited with her at the bus stop, shoulders piling with snow, until the 54C appeared through the mist. She boarded and I watched her in the lit interior of the bus—her hair covered in wet flakes of snow. She waved as the bus pulled away and I walked home—the city quiet, everything shrouded in a profound white silence. I was so happy that night—an ecstatic contentment in that silence, a feeling like I’d come home, like I’d discovered where home was. I remember singing “Maria” from West Side Story at the top of my lungs, but not knowing the words and replacing “Maria” with “Theresa.” A few minutes later she texted and told me that she had fun, and asked if I was free that weekend. Yes, I answered, yes. I texted her for a playlist and she wrote back in an hour with a list of bands and tracks—my homework. I spent the next several days memorizing everything I could, every band, learning to love what she loved.
Albion and I are there now, at the bus stop watching the 54C pull up through the snow, its wheels leaving muddy tracks, the driver asking if we need a ride, but the bus feels like a ferry for the dead and we refuse. Albion and I walk through the snow together holding hands. She says she misses the winter, living in California so long. She sometimes forgets how beautiful it was. We walk through the serene Shadyside streets to Ellsworth Avenue, to the apartment I shared with Theresa, through the courtyard to the lobby, shaking snow from our shoes and the shoulders of our coats. We walk to Room 208—I’m here. Theresa, I’m here. Albion kisses me, a slow, tender kiss, our lips cold but warming. The kiss is perfect but doesn’t exist in the real world, it only exists here and I understand that, I understand the gift she has given me. I open the door to Room 208 but in Theresa’s place we see Zhou. This is the first time that Albion has seen what Zhou is in my memories, that Zhou is here where Theresa should have been, and she begs my forgiveness and I tell her that it’s all right, it’s all right—
Albion’s taken me on her bus. We ride together and I brace her against me as we enter the perpetual twilight of the tunnel. I watch the old lady in front of us clicking her tongue at the child in front of her. I find Stewart, that first voice of her hope, a handsome man in a Pirates ball cap—he must have only been in his thirties, about my age, his kids that he wanted so much to see again must have only been toddlers. Albion points out every person on the bus and tells me what she’s been able to find out about their lives. She points out Jacob, the singer, an overweight black man with ashen hair, and hopes that he’s forgiven her for leaving through that thin path in the stones, leaving him behind. She points out Tabitha, the woman who tore out her own eyes—she’s dressed in nurse’s scrubs and reads Joel Osteen. We brace for the explosion, for the bus to wreck, but I only experience the initial concussion of the end because that’s when the footage stops and we’re left in total darkness with the Archive asking us in floating bronze text if we’d like to visit somewhere else. Sometimes Albion and I ride that bus several times in a row, looping back to the moment when she boarded and riding until we die, until I finally say, “That’s enough, Albion, that’s enough,” and we retreat together to somewhere else, usually to Kelly’s Bar in East Liberty to sit in a shadowy corner booth on the vinyl seats, listening to rockabilly on the jukebox, drinking cocktails and eating baked mac and cheese, trying to forget together what we desperately want to remember.
Kelly’s in East Liberty has become important to us, a bar neither one of us had visited often when we were both in Pittsburgh but perfect for us to discover together now.
“Tell me about Mook,” I ask her, one night over drinks in our usual booth. “Sherrod, I mean—”
“Sherrod was troubled,” she says. “I feel sad when I think of him—”
I ask how they met and she tells me they met at Denny’s. “I was out with friends from Fetherston,” she says. “We went out and ended up at Denny’s in the Mission—two or three in the morning. The waiter, this guy, he was hitting on us, kind of flirting with the entire table, when one of the cooks came from the back. Baggy jean shorts, a 49ers jersey, a white apron. He was short—only five feet tall, maybe, or maybe a touch over—and deformed, in a way. Hunched. He walked with a limp, though I think the limp was an affectation—once I knew him a little I realized that sometimes he forgot to limp. Cauliflower ears, this wet mouth that sort of hung open. Squinty eyes. He smelled like grease and cigarette smoke but he sits right in our booth, right with us, and asks if we were interested in an orgy. My friends laughed at first, some of them, but I didn’t—not my type of humor. I remember he noticed I wasn’t laughing and he just glared at me until I acknowledged him. Unnerving. ‘I have access to a hot tub,’ he said, and I think he called me Red.
“I can’t remember what I said to him, something dismissive, and so he started telling me everything about my previous life—he knew my real name, knew about Pittsburgh, knew parts of my past that no one had the right to know. He knew about Peyton. He told me obscene things about myself. My friends didn’t know what was going on, thank God, but they could pick up that things had taken a turn. We left right away—I was mortified. I didn’t even know what the Archive was at the time, but once I figured it out, I realized that my past life was living itself again and again and again. I wanted it erased. I went back to Denny’s the next afternoon, found Sherrod at the start of his shift. I went back to the kitchen and screamed at him, just—I really broke down. All those cooks looking at me. He realized he’d crossed a boundary when he dredged up those things, that he wasn’t being cute or clever but had overstepped. He was contrite. For all his tone-deaf bluster, he’s actually principled. He’s sensitive. I can’t quite call him a gentleman… but he said he could help me and I accepted. I didn’t know who he was until much later, I didn’t know about his art—”