Tomorrow and Tomorrow Read Free Page A

have to dismiss the low-signal warnings again and again, even though I’ve asked never to be alerted. Every five minutes, click—the network connection icon in my peripheral spins and the low-signal warning pops up again like a floater in my line of sight. “Dismiss,” I tell it. Five minutes later, click. I can only take so much.
    So, here it is: A Day in the Life. A chronicle for Dr. Simka.
    Theresa. Theresa Marie.
    Even writing her name feels like scratching a phantom limb.
    —
    I take the bus these days because I sold my Volkswagen for cash years ago. Seats are occupied, so I sit behind the driver, near a scratched glass poster looping commercials for Mifeprex and TANF and YouPorn. Closer to Dupont Circle my Adware autoconnects to wifi.dc.gov and the feeds tingle my skull—blacking out a few seconds before my vision reboots with a shitty display of augs and apps, freebies mostly, looming when I notice one, the others receding, my profile bundled with so many pop-ups and worms that my vision strobes while it loads. GPS info and route maps and Metro schedules hover midbus—real time supposedly, but the bus schedule’s off sync by a half hour or more and the map’s of a Silver Spring route that doesn’t even exist. The passenger across the aisle stares at the ceiling, giggling—he’s drooling down the front of his raincoat, utterly engrossed in the streams. He’s spamming indiscriminate friend requests, but my social networking’s locked so no one bothers me—I stare out the window and concentrate on the CNN Headline feed:
    BUY AMERICA!!! FUCK AMERICA!!! SELL AMERICA!!!
    The
Buy, Fuck, Sell
feed’s leading with a new leaked sex tape of President Meecham, the ten-year anniversary of Pittsburgh demoted to postjump news.
PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT! MEECH’S PEACHES EXPOSED IN TEEN SEX SCANDAL!
    Headaches from news torrents and commercials overloading my secondhand Adware, shit I picked up on Craigslist years ago from a U. of Maryland kid who’d already fried some of the wires without telling me. Hilfiger, Sergio Tacchini, Nokia, Puma. President Meecham from her days as Miss Teen Pennsylvania kneels in the aisle of the bus.
Real
footage,
says CNN,
not sim, not sculpt.
She touches herself and the talking heads comment:
Everywhere, Americans have been
given the choice between Love and Filth, and they have
uniformly chosen Filth.
Al Jazeera America’s the only stream covering Pittsburgh as a lead, posting satellite imagery captured on that first sunny day after the end, of the scorched earth like a black harelip on the mouth of the Appalachian Mountains. Pull for a stop.
    Gavril lives in Ivy City, a renovated loft on the corner of Fenwick and Okie—warehouses and abandoned tenements, a Starbucks on the corner, a Così. Gavril’s building’s slashed with graffiti and slathered with wheat-pasted handbills for Qafqa concerts long since past and photocopied pics of the Pittsburgh mushroom cloud and offers for sex with male models and cheap rates on love hotels. Spray-painted:
One who is slain in the way of Allah is a martyr.
BBC America loops the “Star-Spangled Banner” over aerial views of the way Pittsburgh was and the way it is now: radioactive weed growth and the black guts of buildings—but the stream interrupts and reloads, bothered by all the vandalized and nonlicensed Tags setting off my Adware’s net security.
Are we any safer than we were ten years ago?
I ring the buzzer.
    “Kdo je to?”
    “It’s Dominic—”
    “Moment, please—”
    Every time I’m here, the place is filled with girlfriends and bumming students, poets I’ve met around, politicians scoring cocaine, models passed out on the couches, editors, business associates of some sort waiting aimlessly, actors fixing sandwiches for themselves in the kitchen—who knows who all these people are, but the place is like a social lounge and there’s never anywhere to sit. Cousin Gav—my mother’s sister’s son. He grew