I ping Albion: Went for a walk. I’ll be back by breakfast.
I remember a set of stairs at the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnel that hugged the sharp ascent of the Bluff, topping off at the Boulevard of the Allies—the stairs were concrete and steel, maybe shielded from the blast by the Bluff itself, and when I check on them now, shining my flashlight over the steel rails and cracked concrete, I’m relieved to find the stairs are relatively intact. The moon hangs like a silver smudge as I climb. Sweating by the time I reach the hilltop, but cold in the haze of rain—I’m sure I’ll get sick clambering around out here in the mist, maybe catch pneumonia. Feverish already, shivering. Scorched cars and the ruined faces of houses through what were once the streets of Uptown, splintered wood and sheet metal, tendrils of wire and rubble.
Burial mounds warp the earth of what was once Oakland—the radioactive scrap of museums, row houses, lecture halls, bulldozed and interred under heaps of chemical sand. Heavy machinery’s parked here, excavators and dump trucks—Oakland must be PEZ Zeolite’s focus right now. Layer in the Archive to gain my bearings and Phipps Conservatory shimmers in a distant field behind the burial mounds, the greenhouse like a Victorian dream of white steel and glass, gardens and lawns. This was Theresa’s, this was hers—I used to come here from campus to visit her in her office, we’d have lunch together in the café. There’s nothing here, now—nothing but the poisoned dunes. The air’s tanged with the stink of burning plastic.
I follow makeshift roads gouged from the ruins by PEZ Zeolite, threadlike stretches of slippery gravel vaguely milky and luminescent by moonlight. To Shadyside, to Walnut Street where she died. Layering the Archive over this place, boutiques and sidewalk sales, outdoor tables at cafés. Layering, the scent of roasting coffee, of baking bread. Layering, J.Crew and the Gap, United Colors of Benetton, Banana Republic. I find the store where she died, Kards Unlimited, layering in the T-shirts she was looking at, It’s a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood, but she’s not here, not here. Time-search the moment of the blast: light flares over the west and everything blackens, the bodies around me spark to flame, then shrivel to cores of ash, then vanish. In the moment of the blinding flash, Theresa’s reflection appears in the store’s window, just for a heartbeat I see her face. The buildings ignite and vanish. I’m left with ash.
A breath of ash.
This is not the Archive, this ash. On hands and knees—crawling through ash made muddy with rain. I grasp at handfuls of ash. This is Theresa. This is her body, my child’s body. This is all she’ll ever be, this ash, this is all I have left of her.
This ruination in the moonlight looks like shattered marble and lunar dust, broken statuary, shadows.
I reset the Archive to the moment just before her death, layer in Walnut Street and watch for Theresa’s split-second reflection in the moment of blinding light.
This time, however, following the flash and her fleeting reflection in the window, Theresa’s here with me as if she’d never been deleted, as if I haven’t lost her. She’s turned away from me, looking into other store windows. There is no fire, there is no ash. The sidewalks swarm with upscale shoppers living lives that were never given to them in life—they should have died, they should have all died in the fire, but there is no fire. Is this some trick of Mook’s? Some other geocached installation of Pittsburgh as if it hadn’t burned? The day is crystalline blue and crisply tinged with fall. Theresa is full-term, and women who pass her on the sidewalk stop and ask when she’s due, tell her she looks beautiful, a glow of health, wish her well. I want to see her, I want to hold her and feel the movements of our child. This can’t be happening—this never happened, this isn’t her. I follow her.
“Theresa?” I say, but she can’t hear me—she doesn’t turn toward me. She walks down Bellefonte, a side street running off Walnut that terminates at Ellsworth, our apartment. Layering, cool tree shade. Layering, a distant lawn mower and the scent of mown grass. This can’t be. This never existed—the bomb should have detonated five minutes ago, all these places should have burned—but we’re here, we’re here. Everything about this is wrong.
“Theresa?”
I run to her, place my hand on her shoulder. She turns to me but she is faceless, just a gray oval where her face should be, featureless, a blank avatar. I recoil. The images end—the Archive crashes, collapses into a point of light, then blinks away, day flips to true night, the desolation of the world as it is. She’s led me home.
Broken earth, the sky arcing toward dawn—sunrise still an hour or so away, but the horizon bleeds gray into the dome of black and the stars are dim. The Georgian Apartment still stands, much of it, anyway—the western-facing wing collapsed, either in the blast or in the years of dereliction following, but much of the far side of the building survived. The front stairs are nothing now, just a splay of mortar and brick, weeds and soil. I scramble across the front lawn, past where Grecian urns once spilled over with peonies, through the cracked front portal into the lobby. I’m here. The checkerboard tiles singed black, the brass mailboxes lying twisted across the floor. Shattered glass. Burned-out couches. Everything’s glistening from rainwater leaking through gaps in the roof— puddles and wet wood, pungent soot.
I run upstairs.
I’m here.
Theresa, I’m here.
Room 208.
I open our door—but there is no Room 208, not any longer. The rear of the Georgian’s collapsed, Room 208 nothing more than a few splintered floorboards and an expanse of air, a twenty-foot drop onto a slide of bricks below. I look out from the cliff that was once our home. There’s nothing left. Nothing.
I don’t know what I was hoping to find—
I should never have come here—
I drop the flowers, watch them fall.
“Mr. Blaxton?”
I turn from the emptiness. A man stands in the hallway wearing black fatigues and a gas mask.
“Are you John Dominic Blaxton?” he asks, his bass voice oddly muffled in his mouth, like he’s speaking through a side of raw beef. Another man stands a few feet behind him—a bear of a man, also in a gas mask. I’m going to die. I’m at their mercy, whatever mercy they’ll show me. Increasingly faint—this apartment will be the last thing I see.
“What do you want from me?” I ask him.
A third man has trailed us up the stairs, blocking any exit I’d hope to have. Rory, it has to be—he’s also wearing a gas mask. The one who’s speaking must be Gregor, Waverly’s brother.
“Waverly knew that once you saw your wife you’d come running here,” he says.
The bear, Cormac, unsheathes a nightstick and advances swiftly. I flinch, but he strikes me across the side of my head, the blast like a bright light of pain that explodes my ear and breaks my jaw. Ringing, but like I’m hearing underwater—my Adware’s music shuffles, Albion’s Boris Vian jazz sputtering from inside my head, skipping. Error—
A second strike, this one across my right knee—and I crumple, my leg broken forward. I see bone gore through my skin. My right shin and foot flop like they’re made of cloth, unattached, when a third strike lands across my face. Adware rebooting. iLux. Blood sprays from my mouth. Teeth. Two more strikes, one against each hand—bones snap, fingers shatter. I scream—
My Adware blacks out again, reboots a second time. iLux.
“I saw you,” I tell them. “What you did to her. I saw how you killed her—”