Blueprints of the Afterlife

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 hell 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 bummed 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 retarded. 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 accumulated 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 sex 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 Fucked Up Shit.

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 space 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 muffin sat half-eaten on a Fiestaware saucer beside a glass 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 Japanese.

Rocco entered the living space. 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 assembled 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 surreptitiously flashing a breast, or the man was taking his penis 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: Hello? 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.”