Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 3

You guys weren't curious about why Dirk expressed interest in the machine?

Sure, I guess we were for a day or so, but other stuff came up, or we got distracted by the day-to-day bulls.h.i.t of being kids. Nick got busted for smoking pot behind the art building. The princ.i.p.al pulled me aside and basically told me to stop hanging out with him. Said I would sully my reputation by a.s.sociating with a kid like Nick. I told him that Nick was brilliant and if he couldn't see that it meant he wasn't doing that great a job as an education administrator. [Laughs]. That didn't fly so well.

You mentioned girls. I'm wondering if you could talk about your and Nick's girlfriends at this time.

So we're on to s.e.x, okay. I went through quite a few girlfriends. I can't remember a lot of their names. I know that's bad. It was typical high school stuff. Leaving notes in lockers, slow dancing, finding remote places to make out. It's the make-out sessions I remember most. Spending literally an hour with your face pressed up against a girl's, that warm delta in her jeans. Her hair. They wore it long in those days, my G.o.d, I'd live in those ringlets and strands. The girls I was most attracted to weren't the designated popular girls but the smart ones who should have known better. They wore thick woolly sweaters you could just slide your hand under. Whenever I rode in the car with my dad, he'd try to start conversations by asking what I was thinking, and invariably I was thinking about s.e.x. The way you think about s.e.x before you've even had it, the unanswered hormonal question of it.

And Nick's s.e.xual activities in high school?

Like I said, he trolled the lower echelons of the socioeconomic strata. Had girlfriends in Poulsbo, off the island. None of the rich, pretty girls wanted anything to do with him. He attracted girls who had self-esteem issues. He obsessed over them and despised them. Treated them really poorly. I got on him about this a couple times. While I worshipped female pulchritude, I think he found the whole act of s.e.x degrading. There was this one girl Laura who he f.u.c.ked with psychologically, over and over. Just ground her down emotionally, backing her into these arguments about the nature of reality while she was high. f.u.c.ked-up stuff. We argued about girls a lot. I'm tired of talking about this. Let's move on to something else.

Do you want to talk about the mud slide?

Okay.

Go ahead.

All right. Our house, I think I mentioned, was built against a pretty steep embankment. During the winter of my junior year of high school, we got twenty straight days of rain. Being hardy Pacific Northwesterners, we didn't think anything of it. One Friday night I was in my folks' VW van with a girl named Carrie Powers. I'd been seeing her for a month or so. We had gone out to a movie in Poulsbo and were driving home. She, or I, I can't remember, suggested that we find a remote road and pull over. We found a place and lay down a blanket in the back of the van and f.u.c.ked hard for what must have been about two hours. That incredible, young f.u.c.king when you've finally figured out how to really f.u.c.k and no one's preventing you from f.u.c.king. The rain was coming down on the windows in sheets. It was beautiful. At some point one of us looked at a watch and realized we were way past our curfews. But it was totally worth it. I dropped her off a block from her house and drove home in the rain, my d.i.c.k sore. I remember I was listening to an R.E.M. alb.u.m, a song about being Superman. I sang along with the music on full blast, just elated after an epic screw. Then I came to my road and saw a lot of flashing lights. My first thought was that it would be strange for there to be a fire with so much rain. I pulled over and looked for my house but couldn't see it and for a second I thought maybe I was turned around. I kept looking for my house in the flashing lights but there was just this empty spot where it used to be. Then I noticed the mud. A big slick of it running down the embankment, across the road, across the beach, into Puget Sound. The mud slide had completely wiped out my house. And with it my family. I stood in the rain with the firemen and the cops, calling out for my mom and dad, my sister. Their bodies were recovered from the sound two days later.

What happened in the days immediately after that event?

I don't remember. I a.s.sume the whole social services side of things went into motion. There were counselors and the Child Protective Services. I met with people. Police. Lawyers. The thing I hated most was the way people wanted to be a part of my mourning. Moms of other kids came up to me in downtown Winslow, asked how I was doing, whether I needed anything, tried to buy me lunch. I suspected they were getting off on my tragedy. They were elated at the opportunity to show their concern. The reaction of the adult world to my circ.u.mstances appeared overly scripted to me. They spoke of "healing" and "closure" and used all this other bulls.h.i.t terminology. For a while I stayed in a motel on the island and had these visitors constantly coming by to bring me f.u.c.king ca.s.seroles. I couldn't stand it.

After the motel where did you stay?

I had only a year until I was supposed to go to college so it didn't make much sense for me to go live with aunts and uncles I barely knew in Chicago. Everyone agreed it would be best if I stayed and graduated from Bainbridge High. So what I needed was a sort of foster home situation. That's where the limits of the island's generosity became apparent. No one came forward to offer me a place to live. Except Nick's mom, Star.

You moved in with them.

Well the beauty of it was that I had the VW van. I parked it on their lawn. Or the muddy patch that was supposed to be their lawn. They'd covered parts of the yard with slabs of plywood so you could walk from the shack to the outhouse without sinking. I slept in the van, ate in the shack, and used the outhouse. I got into a bunch of colleges but decided to go to UW. I was really worried about money even though my inheritance was in the seven figures, plus the life insurance payments. I was a parentless millionaire living in a VW van, s.h.i.tting in an outhouse, and meditating with my best friend's mom in their shack, burning Nag Champa incense. I cried all the time, as you can imagine. But I learned to control the valves of my grief, making conscious decisions as to when I'd let myself cry. And Nick took care of me, too. He had been through this kind of grief before and had endured the disingenuous condolences of strangers. He helped just by keeping me to my routines, banging on the van in the morning so I'd get ready for school. He must have been grieving pretty hard, too, since he'd been so close to my family. The mud slide changed the game. Nick started to clean up his act, quit smoking pot and took a sort of vow of celibacy for a while. We started listening to these bands from Washington, D.C., called . . . I'm trying to remember the genre.

Punk?

It was an offshoot of punk. Straight edge. Yeah. It was this movement that evolved in the eighties, a sort of monastic offspring of punk rock that swore off drugs and alcohol. The real hard-core adherents swore off s.e.x. The idea was that punk up to that time had railed against control and authority, especially governmental authority. By being straight edge, you attempted to cut out all the external forces that might control you. The band we got into in a big way was Minor Threat. Nick and I spent a lot of time in the woods talking about this philosophy, reading the fanzines. We realized that to break free of societal control you had to control yourself and exercise extreme discipline. I looked ahead to UW and started to get this dull ache in my gut. I had sort of arbitrarily decided to go into premed. But every night I spent under the spell of Star's Kwakiutl folk tales and herbal remedies, the more I began to see the whole university system as a sham. I started to hate my own conformity. How I'd learned to play the game of school without actually learning anything. How I could charm anyone. In retrospect I think I decided to withdraw my application because college reminded me too much of my parents. I decided I'd travel instead. Then, one afternoon while Nick and Star were away, in town or something, I don't know where, I did something I'd been wanting to do ever since that first birthday party visit. I broke into Nick's dad's shed.

Ah . . .

It didn't take me long to find the key to the padlock. It was where you'd expect it, in a random drawer in the kitchen. I pushed the key into the rusty lock and pulled open the door. Lots of cobwebs. Light coming through translucent windows. The place was about fifteen feet square. Along one wall were carefully arranged tools: saws, hammers, nothing that required electricity. The deal with Nick's dad was he had intended to build them a house using only tools that existed in the nineteenth century, or some such hippie s.h.i.t like that. There was still a half-finished chair sitting there just as Nick's dad had left it the day before he died. A coffee cup with the coffee long evaporated. On the other side of the room stretched a bench, piled with papers. Some of them had become moldy and illegible. There were big sheets of paper tacked up all over the walls and tucked into cardboard tubes, too. Blueprints. Pictures of buildings. Cross sections of sewers and electrical systems and subways. Yellow legal pads filled with tiny, uniform engineering scrawl, three-ring binders with all sorts of tabs separating the sections. What was this even about? I looked closer, at the names of streets and parks and monuments. It was New York City. I became so enrapt in the schematics that I didn't hear Star and Nick until they were standing in the doorway. Their shadows fell on me. I asked them what this was, what it meant. Nick was silent, sort of frozen. Then Star spoke, calmly but with her voice carrying a weight that terrified me. She said, "Lock up when you're done." Then she walked away. What the h.e.l.l was I supposed to think of that?

What did Nick do?

He joined me and started looking over the blueprints and notes. None of it made any sense to either of us. Especially when we started noticing there were maps of Bainbridge in there as well, with street names we didn't recognize. Lexington Avenue. Bleecker Street. In the notes we found several references to the "New York Alki" project. I'd taken Washington state history and knew what this meant. When the first white settlers came to the region in the nineteenth century, they debated what to call their settlement. They had big aspirations for their little frontier outpost but were really b.u.mmed out by all the mud and rain. To cheer themselves up they considered naming the place "New York Alki." Alki was a Chinook word for "by and by." Meaning, "someday." "New York Alki" meant that someday this place would be as big and vibrant as New York City. But cooler heads prevailed and decided that naming their city after New York, itself named after old York, was r.e.t.a.r.ded. So they named the city after Chief Sealth and called it a day.

We figured that Nick's dad had latched on to this little piece of history, too, and had decided to create a game out of it. A hobby. We convinced ourselves of this even though the notes seemed more intense than what a hobbyist would have come up with. Who would have dreamed up such a crazy idea in the first place, anyway? Who would have thought it possible to create a life-size replica of Manhattan in Puget Sound?

ABBY FOGG.

Ever since childhood, Abby Fogg had wondered why she was herself instead of somebody else. She'd lie on her bedroom floor staring at the circle within a circle within a circle of the ceiling light fixture, freaking herself out with the fact that she was Abby Fogg. And while this Abby Fogg acc.u.mulated thoughts and memories, went to college, fell in love with archival films and a man named Rocco Petrone, the suspicion persisted that there'd been some mistake, that somehow Abby Fogg had been dropped into the wrong body. Since the age of five or six, Abby had suspected she'd been born in the wrong era, aching as she watched the grain of early-twentieth-century footage. But the previous century wouldn't have her, with its artists' salons and movie palaces and celebrity s.e.x tapes. Nope. Abby'd been born into this era yet to be named, in the years that followed that dark period known as the Age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t.

Nowadays Abby rose early to make breakfast and spy on her neighbours from the Vancouver condo she shared with Rocco. Even though the place had a view of Granville Island, she preferred to sit in her undies in the dining nook, where she could read the news and glance through horizontal blinds angled at the precise diagonality to allow her a view into a condo across the courtyard and three stories down. The occupants of this condo were about the same age as Abby and Rocco, maybe a little older, not yet sinking into their thirties. The couple bore the same demographic characteristics as Abby's parents: she Asian, him sorta Latinoish Caucasian. The woman usually rose first, around 6:30 a.m., mounted a green fit ball in her panties and tank top, drank coffee from an ugly brown mug, caught up on email. The guy rose about half an hour later, shirtless, a landing strip of chest hair marking his sternum. He shuffled into the living/work s.p.a.ce scratching himself through plaid pajama bottoms, planted a kiss on his girlfriend's neck, and performed a few push-ups and stomach crunches on the rug. The woman worked at home, doing something design-related. The man left around 8:30 for a job that didn't require him to wear a tie but sometimes he wore a collared shirt and a sport coat with jeans. Abby suspected these were days in which the man met with clients, whoever they might be.

This morning Abby watched the couple while periodically glancing at job listings on her laptop. An English m.u.f.fin sat half-eaten on a Fiestaware saucer beside a gla.s.s residued with grapefruit juice. She punched "archivist" and "data retrieval" and "digital forensics" into the engine.

Across the alley three stories down the young woman sprang from her fit ball to answer the phone. She retrieved the phone from a kitchen counter Abby couldn't see, then walked back to the computer desk, inspecting the fronds of a nonnative perennial while she spoke. She was still in her underwear. Abby squinted to read her lips but the woman was too far away. The lips looked like a little pulsating blob of ochre in a milky female face.

At no point in their three years together had Abby confided to Rocco that she suspected she was supposed to be somebody else, mostly because he appeared to love her as she was. She doubted he ever woke up with the odd feeling that he lived in the wrong body and wrong time. He appeared devoid of insecurities, particularly when expressing ostensible insecurities, as if he knew he was supposed to have them and felt compelled to share fake ones lest he appear as confident and well-adjusted as he truly was.

The woman had a snazzier computer than Abby's. She collected expensive art books. Sometimes the couple used chopsticks to eat things that weren't j.a.panese.

Rocco entered the living s.p.a.ce. Like the man across the alley, he tended to be lax about shaving. His broad face went through several test expressions.

"You forgot to make coffee again?" Rocco said.

"Sorry."

"That's okay, I wanted tea."

"You have a test today?"

"I have a test today."

Behind her Rocco a.s.sembled the apparatus for turning dried leaves into flavored water. Three stories down, the young woman was off the phone, leaning over her fit ball to finish another email before she darted to the bedroom to presumably shower and get dressed. Abby wished the couple's bedroom blinds were open. She wanted to see them doin' it. Or at least nekkid. Every time she looked away, to her computer or to the clock on the wall, she wondered if this might be the moment the woman was surrept.i.tiously flashing a breast, or the man was taking his p.e.n.i.s out of his pj's to pluck an irritating bit of lint from the tip. She wanted to break into their apartment, run her hands over the surfaces they took for granted, smell their disgusting toothbrushes. It terrified her, this voyeurism, but it was a candy-coated feeling, something she could sneak when Rocco wasn't looking.

Watching people.

Watching people who might not even be people at all.

Rocco said, "Some guy called for you last night when you were out. I got his name and number." He thumbed the Post-it note to Abby's forehead.

Abby peeled it off. "I don't know anyone named Dirk Bickle," she said, "Pickle?"

"He said it was about a job. You want tea, right?"

"What kind of job?"

"Okay, let me tell you how the conversation went. Me: h.e.l.lo? Guy on phone: Is Abby Fogg available? Me: No, may I ask who's calling? Guy on phone: My name is Dirk Bickle. I'm calling with regard to a job opening. Me: Sure, let me get your number. Guy on phone: My number is, etc., etc. Thanks, good-bye."

"You're making Darjeeling, right?"

"I'm making the kind with the frog on the box."

"I hate that kind."

Gently mocking: "Who do you think you are, Ms. Fogg? Telling me what kind of tea to make?"

"I hate the frog tea."

"That's why I made the Darjeeling." He set the cup before her. "I know your likes and dislikes better than you do."

"Like that's an accomplishment."

"You hate olives, you dream in black and white. I'm the world's most esteemed authority on Abby Fogg."

"I know you, too."

"You have no idea who I am."

"Is this Rocco Petrone guy not a Bionet dork? Does he not obsess over cycling and artisa.n.a.l lagers?"

"You could be describing anyone."

"Does he not like it when I put my finger up his-"

"I really wanted coffee."

"Aren't you late for school?"

"It's Thursday, right?"

"It's Friday."

"Merde."

Rocco stumbled through the condo slapping on clothing, quickly kissed Abby half on the lips and grabbed his bike helmet on the way out. Somehow this was the same dude who knew his way around the human brain like a motherf.u.c.ker.

"You're right," Abby said when he was gone. "I have no idea who you are."

Abby poked digits into a keypad. Dirk Bickle answered on the first ring. A dog's bark echoed in the background. They arranged to meet on Granville Island later that morning.

She pa.s.sed through the steeled angles of Vancouver, clouds of falafel smoke and deep-fried exhaust. Near the pier a couple bike cops knelt on the sidewalk getting a Bionet reading from a pa.s.sed-out homeless guy. He'd soon find himself in a detox center downtown where he would get wrung out like a dishcloth, be given a vitamin-rich meal, and suffer through some boilerplate therapyish remonstrations delivered by a bored staffer. The next day he'd get dumped back onto the concrete grid where he'd hit up a dealer for a decryption code to illegally download painkillers. A newman nanny maneuvered a double-wide stroller around the p.r.o.ne addict. A billboard featured a man's head, his hair all Einsteined-out, word-bubbling the message, "Holy s.h.i.t! Telepathy! For Real!" A seagull bashed its beak into some spilled popcorn. At the pier Abby hopped onto a water taxi and five minutes later stepped onto Granville Island, a maze of art galleries and fruit stands. Cafe Lumiere was at the end of a twisty walkway between a toy store and an herbalist. Abby ordered her usual and pulled a chair up next to a framed photograph of a smug-looking Georges Melies.

An old man sat down across from her. Black jacket, white dress shirt, no tie, hair spiky white, tanned face drooping down at the corners a bit. He removed his sungla.s.ses and placed them in his pocket. An old guy. Obviously a FUS survivor.

"Hi, Abby. I'm Dirk. Thanks for meeting me. This is one of your haunts?"

"My early-films club meets here."

"Before my time, even. I read your paper on the restoration of Edison kinetoscopes. I won't even attempt an intelligent comment. It went right over my head. I'm curious why you're not working in Hollywood."

"I'm staying in Vancouver until my boyfriend finishes grad school."

"Rocco, is it? Guy I talked to? Studying to be a Bionet engineer?"

"Yes."

"You want to know why I've contacted you. Here it is. I represent a client, another FUS survivor who lives in Victoria in this grand old hotel. Kylee Asparagus. She's been holed up there for over a century and has acc.u.mulated a big old archive. Books, periodicals, digital content going back to the late twentieth century. A lot of it beyond repair."

"You'd be surprised," Abby said.

"Well, so right, that's why I wanted to get in touch with you, Abby. The organization I represent has been interested in these archives for some time but Ms. Asparagus keeps turning down our offers for a full audit. Until last week, when a water pipe burst and destroyed a lot of her records. Her people cleaned it up as best they could but there are certain pieces of digital content in states that may or may not be salvageable. USB drives, DVDs, diskettes, videoca.s.sette tape. We need you to a.s.sess the damage, write a report, and take the steps necessary to save what can be saved."

"I'm going to need a team. I know some people-"

Bickle shook his head. "You're going to have to fly solo. Kylee Asparagus won't have a team crawling over her property."

"Why are you interested in these archives? How will I know what kinds of content to prioritize?"

"Before the FUS I worked for an organization called the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. We thought of ourselves as an incubator for geniuses. I was one of the scouts who travelled around the country looking for youngsters who fit our profile, who exhibited potential to become innovative business leaders, artists, scientists. In the early 1990s I identified a boy living outside Seattle named Nick Fedderly. I recruited him and he joined the academy. His best friend was this guy named Luke Piper. At some point Luke was interviewed and we have reason to believe there's a copy of it in Ms. Asparagus's archives."

"You want me to find the interview while I'm sorting through the mess."

"We're prepared to pay off your student loans."

"Why is this interview so important?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Who conducted the interview?"

"We honestly don't know."

"Who's 'we'?"

"I still represent Mr. Kirkpatrick."

"What if I don't find the interview?"

"We'll pay you the same amount for trying. Oh, and by the way, their names are Steve and Winnie. He's twenty-nine, she's twenty-seven. He's a consultant for a company that specializes in stealth-brand penetration. She's a designer, as you've probably guessed from the kind of work she does on the computer. They've been together three years, moved in just before you and Rocco moved to the apartment across the street. She's half-j.a.panese, half-Korean. He's Russian, British, French, Spanish. They met at a professional event, a conference. They both love sushi and Cajun food. His favorite author is Peter Ng, hers is Yasutaka Tsutsui. At home they listen to late-twentieth-century jazz and world music. They typically make love about three times a week. She's on a Bionet fertility plan. He's color-blind, wears contact lenses to correct it. When they go to movies they prefer lighter comedies. They're saving up for a trip to Italy. I can go on like this for a long time if you want."

"You've been spying on me."

"How is this information about your neighbours about you?" Bickle said. "I understand people like you, Abby. I know what it means to desire another person's life. Don't be embarra.s.sed. Your interests are why we approached you. I think you've got enough information to make a decision. Call me when you've thought it over."

Bickle stood and stretched, then disappeared into a Native art shop. Abby checked her wrist for her pulse. Seemed high and what the Chinese doctor she consulted would have called "slippery." She left her coffee unfinished and let her body go through its routine of visiting her favourite shop, the one that sold old music and movies on formats only geeks like her bothered with anymore.

All her student loans, paid off!

That night Abby watched an episode of Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin. She hated herself for liking it, and prided herself on recognizing that she hated it. This was the opening episode to the second season, the establishing sequences padded with expository dialogue. A quick flash of credits then a fade-in to reveal two women reviewing a contract in the back of a limousine. One woman wore a powder-blue pantsuit and matching lipstick, blonde hair a hive held aloft with chopsticks, permanent eyeliner tattooed onto the ridges of her eyelids. This was Henrietta Stoner, agent for Third Eye Communications. (n.o.body on the show ever explained what Third Eye actually did. Some minor character in season two, episode three, opined that the organization "made stuff happen metaphysically," whatever that was supposed to mean.) Henrietta penned an X next to each line Stella was to sign. Stella Artaud wore a tiredly s.e.xist anime getup: dog collar, black push-up bra, latex skirt, stiletto boots. Both of her arms up to the elbows were covered in tattooed reproductions of Gustave Dore's woodcuts from the ill.u.s.trated Inferno, souls in torment in the inner ring of the seventh circle. A close-up of Stella's pen leaving her signature on the contract, ink seeping from glossy to matte black.

Henrietta. "When you arrive there will likely be some rough suffocation play. Just pretend you can't breathe. The client may knock you around a bit. You need to make sure to react appropriately, crying out, gasping. It's important that you approximate, as closely as you can, a typical human response to consensual sadism."

"I'm a professional."

"Intercourse may occur at this point. You should do what you can to prevent him from ejaculating. He will want to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e later, into your dead body or dismembered head or neck cavity."

Stella initialed the line.

Henrietta. "At this point he may want to start dismembering you. Most likely this will begin with the fingers and toes, and move on up the extremities. You are expected to react with appropriate terror and beg for your life."