Tomorrow and Tomorrow (16 page)

“When I talk with people who are suffering,” says Timothy, “they often tell me that they’re comforted because Christ associated Himself with sinners. Prostitutes and taxmen. Drinkers. The thief who was crucified with Him. My patients often tell me that they’re comforted because no matter how depraved their lives, no matter what damage they’ve done to themselves or others, Christ will still save them.
Christ will still save them.
They think they will somehow transcend the world, somehow continue sinning but find a spiritual perfection when the time comes because they believe their soul is pure so it doesn’t matter if their body is corrupt. I tell them that Christ doesn’t accept us as sinners. We might be sinners when Christ calls us, but
He doesn’t accept us as sinners
. He demands that we abandon our lives to follow Him, to become like Him. That doesn’t mean turning our backs to the world—it means just the opposite. He demanded the twelve abandon their lives in order so they might fully embrace the incarnation. He
demands
this of us—”

“It can be difficult to change—”

In the light of the windshield augs Timothy’s eyes bore through me like I’m no longer a man in need of professional assistance or even personal grace, but more like I’m something already lost. I can’t bear the weight of his eyes. I lose myself watching the snowfall. This must be what it feels like to be caught in the tide—wading deep water and feeling suddenly tugged, my feet pulled from beneath me. Whatever I’m involved in, I realize, goes beyond therapy and paperwork and work permits. Timothy drives faster in our silence. Headlights approach, at first just pinpricks of light but growing into the elaborate quad headlights of a rig—how easy it would be, I think, for Timothy to flick his wrist, to swallow us in those lights, and I wonder if he’s contemplating how sometimes it feels easier to die than to live. I close my eyes, preparing.

BUY AMERICA! FUCK AMERICA! SELL AMERICA!

This is CNN.

A police checkpoint on Connecticut—queue with the others, waiting my turn through the scanner.
Nip-Slip for Ri-Ri with upskirt dessert
,
traffic’s backed up for blocks,
click here
,
District cops leading drug sniffers car to car, random inspections, pulling some drivers out for the scan, bypassing others.
Raw feed of a New York woman pushed in front of subway, click here.
I ping Simka:
Checkpoint, I’ll be late.
The usual paranoia that I’m carrying brown sugar or some other shit so I check my pockets, but I’m clean—I’m clean.

Simka pings:
I’ll pick you up, stay by the checkpoint—

The District cops wear opaque visors and train their weapons on us, but we’re all complying, no need for intimidation here. There are three of them, enough to keep the peace. One of them waves me through the scanner archway. Yellow lights flip to green. I’m pulled aside—arms extended and feet spread shoulder width while another cop passes the wand over me. They perform an Adware sweep and my anti-malware catches, but I click
allow
to get this over with. Yellow lights flip to green. Stand against the brick wall while another cop snaps my photograph. My e-signature states that my identity matches the image. I’m free to go—

Simka picks me up in his Smart City Coupé. He shakes my hand and pats my shoulder.

“Cut your connection,” he says.

There’s a pock on the back of my head where the skull begins its slow eggshell slope toward my neck—an off
switch. I push it and my Adware shuts down, the augmented reality blinking off, leaving me with a sudden, startling blurriness of vision without the retinal lenses.

“We can talk,” I tell him.

Simka keeps to the right lane on the Beltway, his cruise control set a shade under the speed limit as other cars flash past.

“When you contacted me, you said you’re having some problems with Dr. Reynolds?” he asks.

“You think he might listen through my Adware?”

“Possible,” says Simka. “Some psychiatrists use that trick to eavesdrop on their patients’ habits. Now, tell me: What’s going on?”

“Timothy threatened me,” I tell him. “He threatened my recovery schedule, he threatened me with incarceration at the health institute—”

“For what?” he says.

“Because I quit a job I was working. Because I quit helping this man Waverly with the Archive. I quit—”

“And he threatened you? That’s bad, Dominic. No, no—that’s illegal. I can write to some colleagues of mine—”

Simka lives out near Chevy Chase, on a solitary lane that borders Rock Creek, in a type of house common in Maryland: an oblong box, two-toned with brick along the bottom and white siding around the top. I was here once before, for a Christmas party he hosted, back when I was healthier—I was the only patient he invited. I met his family, his wife and twin sons. His boys were just babies the last time I saw them, but now they’re kids—brutal in their youth, toys and the debris of toys scattered throughout the living room, but still polite when I enter with their father. They don’t recognize me, of course, but they tell me their names and shake my hand before running off to another room, shaking the house with their wrestling. Simka’s wife Regina’s a few years younger than he is, her curly hair still jet-black—she hugs me like I’m a long-lost son, remembering my name, and begs me to sit at the kitchen table for something to drink. She takes my coat and brings me root beer.

We eat dinner together. I haven’t eaten so well in quite some time, the boys wearing Redskins avatars, filling in whatever gaps and silences exist among the adults with chatter about the play-offs. Regina’s made Wiener schnitzel, caloric information displaying in the
Good Eats
app, her recipe displayed in
Recipe Swap
.
Dutch apple pie and coffee following dinner. Simka shows me off to his boys like I’m someone successful, like my education makes me someone important. His boys ask questions about
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
that I’m able to answer, and it feels good—great, actually. I tell them the whitewash scene is a founding document of American-style capitalism, and they look at me, befuddled. Simka tells them it’s just a clever trick, a funny story. He asks me to spend the night—a comfortable bed, away from my anxieties.

“Sure,” I tell him, “I have nowhere to be—”

We drink cognac in his office, his desk windows facing a woodland backyard, chatting for an hour or so while we drink, deliberately avoiding the topic at hand, wondering what the novel by a man named Lear was. He explains, “If you spell his name l-e-e-r, then it would be a dirty story about a dirty man, Dominic. But Freud would be interested in the pun, even if you do spell his name like the king—”

I’m left alone to freshen up while Simka and his wife put the boys to bed.

“Put your coat on,” he tells me when he comes back downstairs. He leads me outside through the mudroom door, down a path of pavers through his wife’s garden. He’s holding a lantern ahead of us, we walk in silence down a grassy slope into the woods and around to a barn he’s renovated as his woodshop. He flicks on the lights—rows of fluorescent tubes—and tells me to come inside. He uses a long match to light a black woodstove in the center of the room.

“I could use electric heat,” he says, “but I have so many scraps and besides I like the smell of smoke—”

I sit at one of the bench seats at the massive table near the stove. Simka’s brought a thermos of coffee.

“We can talk freely here,” he says. “I feel like my woodworking helps me with clearing my mind—like Zen, in a way. When I converted this barn into my shop, I insulated it with rolls of firewall. I didn’t want to be interrupted with pop-ups out here. This is a quiet zone. It’s peaceful—”

The furniture he’s made is elegant, really. I’ve seen the furniture in his waiting room, back at his office in the city, but his shop here is like a showroom. Bureaus and dining room sets, chairs and tables, all in a Craftsman style. Visible wooden joints and beautifully stained. Simka pours me a cup of coffee from the thermos before pouring his own cup. It is quiet, here—I realize I can hear the distant murmur of Rock Creek. It’s a sound I haven’t heard for years, the sound of water dribbling through a creek bed—probably not since I was a kid, hiking with my parents in Ohiopyle.

“Something went wrong between you and Dr. Reynolds,” he says. “You mentioned he threatened you—”

“Timothy’s too close to a man named Waverly,” I explain. “It’s almost like the only reason Timothy was interested in my case was to recruit me for this work helping to track Waverly’s daughter Albion in the Archive—”

“Theodore Waverly is Dr. Reynolds’s father,” he tells me, the connection between the two men slithering down my spine. Registering my shock, Simka says, “I’ve been doing some research for you. You called the other day on my landline—I thought it odd until I realized you were probably trying to keep our meeting private. I have a friend, a very close friend, on the Correctional Health Board. I asked him about Dr. Reynolds. I had to convince him—”

I open up to Simka freely, speaking comfortably to him, an old friend. Simka jots notes on a yellow legal pad, as is his custom when listening to me speak. I tell him about Albion, about Mook. I rehash Timothy’s threats against me.

“Dr. Reynolds has his own troubles,” says Simka. “I don’t know why he wanted your case specifically. Maybe it was because he had you in mind for Waverly, I don’t know. My hands were tied when you were arrested in Dupont Circle that night—the Correctional Health Board demanded changes because of the felony drug charge. I tried to keep you under my care, but Dr. Reynolds lobbied hard to have you transferred to him. I don’t know why—”

“What troubles?” I ask him.

Simka opens the folder he’d brought with him. “Dr. Timothy Reynolds’s file,” he says. “It’s relatively common for people in my field to undergo therapy once we start practicing, as sort of professional oversight to make sure we’re not adversely affected by the work we’re doing. Timothy and I both saw the same doctor for a number of years. This file represents the information our doctor kept about their sessions together—”

“How did you get his file?”

“Like I said, I called in favors from some influential doctors,” says Simka. “The doctor that Timothy and I both saw is a mentor of mine, a very old friend. I explained the severity of the situation—”

“You don’t need to discuss any of this with me,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to feel you have to, if you’ll get in trouble—”

“Sharing patient information goes against everything I believe in as a doctor,” says Simka. “But I’m worried—”

“What’s going on, Dr. Simka?”

“Reynolds is not his real last name,” says Simka. “When these files start, he goes by the name Timothy Billingsley. Before that he was Timothy Waverly. He has a history of spousal abuse, he’s been in and out of legal trouble—”

“Spousal abuse? Did he hit his wife? Timothy told me he wasn’t a very good husband, but I never thought—”

Simka leafs through the contents of Timothy’s file before saying, “I want you to look at these—”

He unfolds sheets of newsprint—drawings, the same type of memory maps I made with Simka, but these drawings are exceptional. The first several are of the Christ House, the house Waverly had donated to his wife’s congregation—that home for women. Timothy as Waverly’s son, living in that Christ House, his mother running the place. All of Timothy’s Christian bullshit starts coming into focus.

Simka finds another drawing and spreads it open on the table. The drawing’s a reimagining of a Rossetti, of a woman brushing her crimson hair.

“Albion—”

“Reynolds struggled with violence and depression,” says Simka. “Survivor’s guilt, after Pittsburgh. He was addicted to pornography, hard-core stuff. Violent. He and his therapist talked about this problem extensively. The treatments ended abruptly—the final report says that Timothy called his therapist from the hospital. He says he was born again—”

“He tore out his own Adware,” I tell him. “He told me all about it—”

“Almost killed himself,” says Simka.

Simka lets me leaf through the other drawings in the file, there are several here—all extraordinarily realistic, made with colored pencils or charcoal. Simka paces his shop, cleaning up odds and ends, keeping his hands busy, obviously troubled that he’s breaching his oath of patient privacy. Timothy’s old doctor had arranged these drawings in groups: several of the Christ House, several of Albion. The third group grows startlingly brutal. A woman chained by her wrists in a dungeon. Two women handcuffed in bed. A woman drowning in what looks like bog water, surrounded by swamp grass. Another of a woman buried in river mud.

“Jesus—”

It’s her, oh Christ, it’s her—

“What is it?” asks Simka.

Nine Mile Run drawn accurately. A woman’s body half buried in river mud, abandoned down a steep slope from the jogging path that worms through the park. The river’s drawn in like a black ribbon. Staring at this drawing, the scene recurs to me—kneeling in the cold mud, seeing the white flesh and the grime-darkened hair. Hard rain must have rinsed away the shallow burial, or the river rose, exposing her body—tugged by currents, the face of the woman I’ve been tracking, drawn here.

“This is Hannah Massey,” I tell him. “This is the crime scene. This is the body, it—”

“Are you sure?” asks Simka. “Are you absolutely sure? I’ll call the police—”

“No, no, that’s not the best for this,” I tell him. “I’ll get in touch with Kucenic. There are protocols to follow for something like this. Jesus. The regular police don’t care about crimes preserved in the City-Archive, and will only muck it up. Kucenic will know what to do—”

I tell Simka I need to think. He says he’s planning on staying up, combing through the minutiae of Timothy’s files to see what else he can uncover, if he can find any information that can help me. Nearing one in the morning, we return to the house through his wife’s garden. Simka makes up the guest bedroom for me, two comforters, in case I get cold.

“It’s a drafty house,” he says. “We can talk more in the morning—”