Tomorrow and Tomorrow (5 page)

“Dr. Simka’s recommendation went a long way in influencing the Correctional Health Board’s conclusion following your episode the other night,” says Timothy, “but I believe they fit you into an incorrect treatment program. I feel so strongly about this that I personally requested your case slotted to my group—I don’t know if you realize that. I want to oversee your treatment, so you aren’t pushed in a counterproductive direction. I don’t believe group therapy will help you. I don’t believe Zoloft is a responsible long-term solution. These methods are a foundation built on sand, meant to treat symptoms, not the underlying causes. Once we find the correct treatment for your depression, I believe your other lifestyle choices will change. You’ll become healthier. I believe we’ll be effective in your case—”

“Good news,” I say.

“You’re placating me now, but in ten years when you’re trim and happy you’ll remember this conversation. It is good news,” he says, smiling—genuinely smiling for the first time, I think, this entire evening.

Timothy drives a powder-blue Fiat, twenty years old at least, parked crooked and scraped along the passenger side. He stashes the cooler of urine samples in the trunk while I climb in, these European cars cramped and awkward for my height. My knees hit the dash. The top of my head touches the roof—I’d be crippled if we wreck, my face windshield-kissed and my knees shattered.

He pulls into traffic, cutting between cars. I brace myself, the feeds kicking in with traffic patterns and weather reports on the windshield display, a snow front rolling in with little to no predicted accumulation. An eruption of nightingales—a flock swarming outside the windshield despite the wintry night: Twiggy’s ringtone, it looks like. Her avatar’s a webcam selfie in black-rimmed glasses and an
All Things Considered
sweatshirt, her hair a feathery halo. Her face hovers, but I let her nightingales sing as we pass through Dupont Circle, every building facade a fashionporn billboard, every storefront a video from Unwerth and Testino and Gavril—paradise after paradise. Every storefront tempts me—it looks like there are parties behind the show windows, rooms filled with models in slinky skirts sipping martinis and laughing, but there aren’t parties in there, it’s all Adware marketing, illusions. Twiggy gives up—she sends a text, asking for poetry recommendations. Her profile blinks out and the nightingales fly away.

“My wife and I were visiting her family in Atlanta,” says Timothy, Rhett and Scarlett cartoons breaking through the pop-up filters to offer discount packages to the American South,
Gone with the Wind–
themed tours.

“You’re a survivor?” I ask him.

“I’m a survivor in the same sense that you are,” he says. “We left Atlanta late, passed through Birmingham around midnight, and the highway just tapered off. Country roads overgrown with trees. Pitch-black two-lane interstates. I’ve never seen such darkness—the headlights reached out but I couldn’t see. Just the center line when there was a center line and the trunks of trees and dumpy roadside gas stations, long closed. We thought we were lost. We looked for a hotel, but never found one. Lydia fell asleep and I just drove, thinking I could push through until morning. My eyes would close, would close a little longer. I felt like I was dissolving. I was—depressed, Dominic. I was so sick of life—I know you understand. Headlights approached and I could see them from a long way off and I’d imagine swerving into the oncoming lights, at the last moment just twitching the wheel toward them—but the headlights would rush past and once the taillights disappeared in the rearview we were alone again in that utter dark. I was cheating on Lydia—my wife. More than just cheating on her. I was a terrible husband, very selfish. We’d grown bored and I think we were blaming each other for what we were losing. Two in the morning, three. It was just after three in the morning when I noticed the road change. There was something coating the road—it took time to realize it was blood. The road was covered in blood. I saw a deer’s body in the headlights, and then another two or three bodies, and soon I saw dozens of deer. I must have shuddered or made a sound because Lydia woke up. Their carcasses were torn apart and spread over the asphalt. I don’t know what could have happened. I imagine a big rig in that vast black night tearing through a herd as they crossed, but I don’t really know what could have killed so many. The meat came into our headlights and we saw heads and hoofs and torsos, the road just blood and torn meat and fur. Bones. It took a solid minute to drive through, a solid minute before our headlights lit nothing but the blacktop road—a minute is a long time. I think I laughed once we were out of it and Lydia wondered if she’d been dreaming, but laughed too a little—wondering where in the hell we were. Alabama. We checked into the first respectable hotel we came to, around five in the morning—this was all the way in Tupelo, Mississippi, by that point. We slept. We woke up late in the afternoon. We heard the news about Pittsburgh—no one at the hotel thought to wake us up to tell us. No one from our families or friends knew where we were staying or how to reach us. Lydia just turned on the TV while I was in the shower and screamed—”

“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, never knowing what to say.

“We’ve all lost,” says Timothy, smiling without his eyes smiling. “That’s my enduring association with Pittsburgh—when people ask where I was, I see that hotel room shower and hear my wife screaming—”

“I hear ‘Pittsburgh’ and my mind flashes to that sports bar in Columbus. Ohio State Buckeyes—”

“God created us with the ability to move on from overwhelming grief,” he says. “Coping involves understanding our own innate worth, understanding that if we’re the ones surviving tragedy, death, divorce or change, then we’re the ones ultimately responsible for sorting our complex emotions in order to fulfill God’s plan for us—”

“Is that what you believe?” I ask him.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords for dinner—a café and bookstore, a haunt of students and the chic intelligentsia, young professionals, writers. I’ve been here before, several times. We’re seated among the books, at a corner table. We order pasta—butternut squash ravioli and parmesan cheese. Hungrier than I realized.

“Lydia and I—our marriage wasn’t strong enough,” says Timothy. “After Pittsburgh I confessed everything about Emily—”

“Emily must have been the woman you were seeing?”

“Emily was there for me when my wife wasn’t,” says Timothy. “She was a beautiful, bright young woman, but she had self-esteem problems and before I fully realized what I was doing, I was taking advantage of her. We met through the clinic. I’m not proud. I still miss her. Of all the people I lost that day, I still think of Emily the most—I wish things had been different. I’m telling you this because I understand how you’re suffering—”

“Letting go’s difficult,” I say.

“Well. It is difficult,” says Timothy. “Lydia and I tried to work through it, but never stood a chance. Healthier for both of us, I think, when we separated. I moved out here to work in the psychology department at Georgetown—I was listless. I bought into a full suite of Adware—top-of-the-line stuff, at least for back then. I used to come home from campus and lie down on the basement couch and lose myself streaming the Victoria’s Secret catalog, that sort of thing—the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue. Agent Provocateur vids. Soft stuff, promotional kink—there was a scenario where two girls went to a country manor wearing nothing but lingerie. I streamed it so often that even now I could close my eyes and lead you through that manor house room by room, telling you everything that happened to those two girls. I didn’t do anything else with my life—I didn’t go out to eat, I didn’t have any friends, I’d just eat cereal or SpaghettiOs for dinner and stream this stuff. I’d spend entire days searching for perfect faces in the streams, trying to find the perfect model, the perfect scenario, and I’d snap from the Adware dehydrated and aching, my eyes bloodshot—”

The waitress delivers the check and Timothy pays for both of us.

“I was once like you,” he says, “drugs to realize the streams, my brain hardwired to pornography, secretly photographing girls in my classes with my retinal cams, girls I’d see on campus. I sank very low, Dominic—you wouldn’t believe what I was capable of. Think of the worst type of man—that was the man I
was.
I need you to know it’s possible for a man to change. Do you believe that a man can change, Dominic?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“A man can
change—”

“The scales fall from our eyes, is that it?”

“I’d spend twenty, twenty-one hours a day streaming pornography, but I bottomed out—I blacked out in Georgetown Cupcake, of all places. I just collapsed. I woke up in the back of an ambulance, hooked up to an IV. Familiar?”

I nodded that it was familiar, yes, “Numerous occasions,” I tell him. “But you pulled through—”

“I didn’t pull through. I was saved, Dominic—”

“Saved?” I ask him.

“I experienced grace—”

“Look, I appreciate your interest in me, I do, but I’m not religious. I’m not looking to be saved. I don’t think I’m interested in this pitch—”

“I know better than to evangelize to my patients,” he says. “This is about finding the light within you that has gone out and flipping the switch so it comes back on—”

“Responsible immersion techniques, that sort of thing? How you get along with the streams?”

“Matthew 18:9,” says Timothy. “‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.’”

“I don’t understand—”

“I plucked it out, Dominic. I cut at my scalp with an X-Acto knife and pulled out the wiring. You can peel it right off the skull plate and just yank it out of your brain. I was in the hospital for three months recovering, but I was saved. Corneal laser surgery for the damage pulling out the lenses, but I was saved. Even if I would have lost my sight or lost my life at that moment, I would have gained my soul. When I recovered, he was there waiting for me—”

I glance at him and notice now that the scar tissue showing through his thinning hair is different from the usual Adware scars, not the grid ridges most people have, but an ill-healed white tangle.

“You’ve got to be kidding me if you think I’ll tear out my Adware—”

Timothy laughs. “My story—my
personal
story—is that I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and my faith in Christ gave me the strength to overcome my addictions. I don’t know what your personal story will be, Dominic. I’m hoping to help shepherd you to that crisis of change, and I’m hoping that you’ll come through that crisis a new man. I have a proposal for you—”

“I’ll just complete the group sessions, Dr. Reynolds. I really don’t want to get involved with any of this. No offense, I can tell you feel strongly—”

“Waverly,” says Timothy. “The man who was waiting for me in the hospital was a man named Waverly. He had a business proposal for me—a partnership. He needed my expertise for the work he was involved in and I believe he’ll need your expertise as well. Not everyone gets an opportunity to meet a man like him, but you came along at the right moment, Dominic. Dumb luck, in a way. If you work with Waverly, you won’t need to worry about Correctional Health Board regulations or completing therapy; you won’t need to worry about your arrest records, the felony charge, about money, your future employment status. He can release you from all these restraints, freeing you to take care of your own health, find your own change, pursue your own happiness. Waverly’s an influential man, Dominic. I think he can help you—”

“Let’s leave this stuff about happiness and change on the table for a moment. This man Waverly can clear my felony charge?” I ask him. “Is that what you’re telling me? Get me out of therapy, offer me work?”

“I just want you to meet him,” says Timothy.

—

Timothy offers a ride home, but I need to be alone. I need time to clear my thoughts—to Google Waverly, if nothing else. I take the bus. Empty at this hour, the rear seat’s vacant so I stretch out, unwelcoming to anyone who might board and find their way back here. Scan for signals—the bus’s router’s exceptional, Metro.net a stronger signal than the citywide Wi-Fi, so I switch connections even though it’s only good for a half-hour slot. New Hampshire to M, hoodie pulled low to block the city lights and the flash of passing ads.
Waverly + DC
nets hits—Theodore Waverly, Ph.D., head of something called Focal Networks, a consultancy firm it looks like. Adware marketing. His client list includes multinationals, the Chinese government, the European Union, the United States. A press-release bio’s repeated on every site he’s mentioned: a survivor of Pittsburgh, chair of the Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon, work in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology for DARPA. Developer of something called precognitive bypass communication. Deep roots in DC—an adviser to the Republican Party, a donor to the Washington Ballet, the DC symphony. He sits on the Kennedy Center board of trustees. Not much personal information, nothing specific—not even a picture of the man.

Timothy mentioned
happiness
—that he wants me to pursue my own
happiness
. I can’t fathom what
happiness
might mean anymore—it seems like luxury to someone whose life feels like a lead-lined discomfort, something that Timothy in his Christ buoyancy doesn’t seem to understand. I don’t seek out happiness, just pockets of alleviation—a drowning man sipping at bubbles of air. I load Three Rivers Net, the City translucent against the bus like a tissue paper overlay, thinner without brown sugar but I close my eyes and see more clearly: the stretch of Parkway through the hillside as the Archive loads. Happiness was Theresa. The City opens around me, the layers of architecture, the lines of rivers, steel bridges and curving brick streets that twist like tendrils of dreams.

I’m here—

Room 208.

The Georgian.

Gauzy curtains, paisley carpets, cream walls stained the color of tea from years of previous tenants’ cigarette smoke. Our apartment. I’m here—scrolling through the faces of past residents until I come to us:
Blaxton, John Dominic and Theresa Marie
. I can unlock the dead bolts with a key. I can feel the polished wood of the front door. We had one of my aunt’s wood-block prints of the White Rabbit in the foyer that’s re-created here—quirky decor once but grossly appropriate now, the illustration receiving me as I make my way through the longish, claustrophobic front hallway, falling back into everything I’ve lost.