Blueprints of the Afterlife

logical explanation to me.”

“She hates what I stand for. She thinks of me as the enemy.”

“You’ve got political differences.”

“We’re repugnant to her. Says American Christians like us caused the FUS. She blames me for Waitimu’s… The last thing she said was she never wanted to talk to me again. I don’t know how everything went south so quickly between us.”

“She wants you to be her dad again, man. She’s trying to fix things. You’ve got to meet her halfway. What else are you going to do? Stew in your bad memories?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Well it isn’t. You need to get your ass to Seattle and see that grandson.”

“She said I killed Waitimu.”

“You wouldn’t be so hung up on that point if part of you didn’t agree.”

Skinner blinked at the ceiling. “Oh God.”

“You can’t fix what happened to your boy. But you can fix what happened with Roon.”

“Fuck, Carl.”

Carl consulted a Bionet monitor. “You’ve napped enough to move a little. Don’t even tell me you’re not hungry. Come on. I’ll feed you.”

After the great fire of 1889, when Seattle laid new streets atop the ruins of Pioneer Square, the ground levels of hotels, brothels, and dry-goods merchants became the underground. Post-FUS, a third layer arose, preserving Pioneer Square under a dome. In this district it was always night, lit with yellowish streetlights, real trees supplanted by facsimile trees of concrete and latex. Far overhead snaked the pipes of new water systems and bundled cables bearing energy and data. Walking the cobbles of Jackson Street, Chiho sensed that the neighborhood had been stashed in a vast warehouse, preserved for later extraction or to be simply forgotten. A few Seattleites chose to live down here away from the sun and rain, lured by cheap rents in charming, renovated brick buildings, tolerant of the bachelorette parties drunkenly boob-flashing their way through a dozen bars. It made Skinner claustrophobic. Chiho said she’d never live in a place that hid from what little sun shone weakly in the sky. Add this to the list of the many things they didn’t understand about Roon.

Roon and Dot’s condo took up half a floor of a building at First and Main. Roon claimed it was an easy commute to Bainbridge, and good for Dot, who had skin-related issues with UV rays. They’d lived here together for fifteen years. Approaching the building Skinner struggled to recall the few Christmases they’d spent here, when artificial snow issued from nozzles overhead, covering the streets in fluffy, nucleating proteins while Dickensian carolers roamed about singing pre-FUS hymns of charity and brotherhood. He’d stood at a window of the condo, watching the holiday display with a cup of nog, finding the whole experience a poignant simulation of a holiday spirit he’d never actually felt.

The elevator took them to Roon and Dot’s place, opening onto their foyer. Through the frosted glass door came soft bumps of music.

“Be nice,” Chiho said.

“Don’t immediately start crying,” Skinner said.

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

Dot let them in, grinning, hugging. Hard to tell how much of it was a pantomime of a greeting and how much was real. She stood barefoot, in a tank top and jeans, tattoos of Gustave Dore’s woodcuts from Purgatorio wrapped around her forearms. She wore chunky black-framed glasses and her hair was in pigtails.

“Come, come,” Dot said. “Roon is putting the little one down for his nap.”

“Shoes on? Off?” Chiho asked.

“Off?” Dot shrugged.

They removed their shoes. Inside was like a glossy spread in a magazine. Skinner didn’t recognize a single author on the spines of the books on the cases that wrapped the walls. He thought maybe he should sit, but didn’t know which piece of sitting-related furniture to select. Chiho effusively complimented the place as if she’d never set foot in here before. Dot gestured to a couch and rattled off a list of five beverages. Skinner didn’t catch any of them. “Water?” he asked.

Dot asked about their trip. “How was the coast? Did you stop to see the aircraft carrier? How were Hiroko and Carl? Tell me all about it.”

Now having a few places to start a conversation, Chiho focused on their visit to Hearst Castle, describing in great detail the decor and amenities. Dot nodded and interjected questions at the right intervals, keeping her mother-in-law going. They drank their waters and Skinner said, “The aircraft carrier is still beached. Craziest-looking thing.” And that was the end of that anecdote.

Just as the conversation came to a bloated moment of silence, their daughter emerged from the baby’s bedroom, uneasily smiled, then said, “Mom? Dad?”

“Come here, you,” Skinner said, embracing his daughter. “Come here, my sweet.”

Chiho kept her promise to not immediately start in with the waterworks. Instead she beamed and said, “Well, look at you. Look at you.”

“Little Waitimu just went down for a nap but he’s a light napper and should be up again soon,” Roon said.

“I’m sorry, who?” Skinner said.

“We named him after Waitimu,” Roon said.

“Oh, your son,” Skinner said. “That’s good. A good name.”

“Well!” Chiho said. “You two must have your hands full—”

“Which one of you carried him?” Skinner asked.

Roon said, “I did. I was the pregnant one.”

Here Chiho steeled herself and came close to breaking her deal with her husband. She’d spent the whole drive from Portland worrying about this. To not have been with her daughter when she was carrying a child, oh, God. She swallowed and forced her lips into a quivering smile. “That’s so wonderful, Roon.”

“How’s work?” Skinner asked, the question both wildly off-topic and providing some relief.

“Work is beyond crazy,” Dot said. “We’re both on the island most days.”

“We’ve been working with the newmans on Wall Street,” Roon said. “There’s an on-site day care Waitimu goes to and I can get down there a couple times a day to feed him. You should come over with us and see how it’s coming. I can get you visitor passes.”

“Sorry, I can’t get over that you named him Waitimu. I’m cool with it, it’s—I just didn’t expect it,” Skinner said.

Dot and Roon exchanged an uneasy expression. Skinner mistook it for having made them uncomfortable. “I don’t mean I think it’s bad you did it, not at all. It honors your brother, obviously.” He looked around the room for something to divert his attention. “Say, are those blueprints?”

On a drafting table lay several bound volumes of plans for New York Alki. Roon preferred to work with actual paper; the task of re-creating a city as it appeared in the distant past would seem to require such an affectation. They pulled open the first volume. “Yeah, they’re facsimiles of the Marc Fedderly blueprints. Amazingly, he did these all by hand.”

Skinner leaned in to get a better look. A map of Bainbridge Island on the left page, a map of Manhattan on the right.

“So even though Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size, there are some major geographical differences they’ve had to contend with. First is the coastline. While the landmass is roughly the same, the surface area of the coasts are wildly different, right? Owing to the irregularity of Bainbridge’s coast. But no one has ever figured out a way to accurately measure how long a coast is. Do you measure at high tide? Low tide? A coast is constantly in flux, expanding, contracting. The water’s edge never stays in one place. And topographically it’s wildly different, too. All those hills. So regrading and reshaping the coast were the major challenges during phase one.”

Skinner listened, nodded, reflected on the fact that this wasn’t really a conversation about civil-engineering