head against the backseat and cracked open the window. Outside, an endless scroll of bodegas and nail salons and cheap clothing stores unfurled. After a moment, my phone buzzed in my purse and I pulled it out to see, with a little jolt, a text from Josh: “Did you work on this?”
I clicked on the link he’d included: a Sir feature on a secretive Silicon Valley lab that claimed its user-friendly CAD program would revolutionize—nay, democratize—design.
“Someone on my team did,” I wrote. “Why?”
A thumbs-up. Then: “People were talking about it at the office today.”
“Nice. I think it’s kinda bullshit, tho. All hype like when the Segway debuted.”
A split second after hitting send, I realized he was too young to remember the Segway hoopla: mounting excitement over an invention that promised to transform transportation and then—splat.
After a few more blocks, I tried again: “How’s work otherwise?”
He didn’t reply. Didn’t even cue up the little bubble that meant he was typing. With a rinse of embarrassment, I turned off the screen and slipped the phone back into my bag.
* * *
At home, I stared at my laptop for a moment before giving in and searching through old news for Calhoun’s death sentence. It’d been sold to a developer and torn down in early 2017. The Google News search had brought up other stories, too, and I remembered why the space we’d adored had always had a sinister vibe to outsiders: the confusing junctions, exposed pipes, scuffed-up walls and wood, and eternal carpet of beer bottles and cigarette butts. I clicked on a story from 2012: EXPLOSION ROCKS BUSHWICK APARTMENT BUILDING. Anthony Stiles had been refurbishing the lofts one by one to justify a massive rent hike, and some idiot contractors had coated the floor in sealant and left it unattended to saturate. When the vapor reached the pilot light of the unit’s stove, kaboom. No one had died, but someone on the street had been hurt when the windows blew out.
Anthony had died before Calhoun was sold, and apartment and condo listings from the shiny new development sprinkled the internet. Most included a photo of the entryway as I’d seen it, white walls and green glass.
I thought again of Mrs. Iredale, bloodless and storm-eyed, standing with Edie right on that same patch of sidewalk. Ten years ago, on a Friday evening, she’d traveled all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie that her childhood home had been foreclosed and that they’d no longer be paying her grad-school tuition. Edie’s classes were surely about to start, far too late to apply for financial aid. That must have been disconcerting, destabilizing for Edie. And instead of reaching out to any of us, she’d contacted Lloyd for comfort.
Lloyd. My fact-checker light blinked on: Mrs. Iredale had dropped something verifiable, the kind of fact that—were it in a magazine story—I’d need to confirm before the issue could go to press. “He was photographing a concert that night,” she’d said, back when I was still trying to figure out who the fuck Roy was, “and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”
It didn’t take long to find the album archived on an event photography site: the band Man Man at Webster Hall, dozens of shots of the hairy musicians adorned in colorful hats and thick cloaks of sweat. There were photos of the after-party, too, cigarettes and whiskey drinks and cool, overexposed moments of candor. Lloyd had a photo credit on each one and the time stamps put him at the show at Edie’s time of death.
Of course, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t in a single one.
I made a valiant but doomed attempt to find audience members’ photos of that very show, in case Lloyd was visible onstage, but it was just too long ago, a time when files were organized and tagged so haphazardly. Instagram didn’t exist; Twitter didn’t let you post images. Fuck. I pressed my knuckles into my temples, fighting down a headache, then returned to the keyboard and searched hard for Lloyd himself.
Lloyd Kohler—not an especially common name, but after 2010, the man became a goddamn digital ghost. No website, no number, no email, not even a city. Just a smattering of forgotten photos, saturated and archaic, credited to him and hosted on other companies’ sites. Maybe he’d wiped his digital identity clean, like Tessa was always telling me to do—technological and informed and afraid of everything the government had on us. Or maybe he was just an