McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  “Funny you should, uh, suggest it,” I said. “Because I have been assigned to write a history of Albertine, and that’s why I got in contact with Cassandra, in the first place. . . .”

  Everyone looked at her. Faint traces of confusion.

  Have I described her well enough? In the half-light, she too was a goddess, even though I figure addicts always shine in low lighting. In the emergency lighting of Eddie’s lair, Cassandra was the doomed forecaster, like her name implied. She was the whisperer of syllables in a tricky meter. She was the possibility of possibilities. I knew that desire for me must have been a thing that was slumbering for a really long time, it was just desire for desire, but now it was ungainly. I felt some stirring of possible futures with Cassandra, didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I was guilty of treating women like ideas in my search for Albertine. In fact, I knew so little about her, that it was only just then that I thought about the fact that she was Asian too. From China, or maybe her parents or grandparents were from Hong Kong, or Taiwan. Because now she swept back her black and maroon hair, and I could see her face. Her expression was kind of sad.

  They all laughed. The bike messengers. I was the object of hilarity.

  “Cassandra,” they said. “That’s a good one. What’s that, like some Chinese name?”

  “You did good, girl. You’re a first-class bitch, Albertine, and so it’s time for a treat, if you want.”

  A broadcaster’s voice. Like Eddie had managed to hire network talent to make his announcements.

  “Wait,” I said, “her name is . . .”

  And then I got it. They named it after her.

  “You named the drug after her?”

  “Not necessarily,” the broadcasting voice said. “Might have named her after the drug. We can’t really remember the sequence. And the thing is there are memories going either way.”

  “She doesn’t look like an Albertine to me.”

  “The fuck you know, canary,” the broadcaster said, and suddenly I heard Eddie in there, heard his attitude. Canary. A reporter’s nickname.

  Cassandra was encircled by bike messengers, and hefted up to a platform in the midst of the Rube Goldberg devices. Her rags were removed from her body by certain automated machines, prosthetic digits, and she was laid out like a sacrificial victim, which I guess is what she was, one knee bent, like in classical sculpture, one arm was laid out above her head. No woman is more poignant than the woman about to be sacrificed, but even this remark makes me more like Eddie, less like a lover.

  “Your pleasure?” a bike messenger called out.

  “Slave Owner, please,” said Cassandra.

  “Good choice. Four horsepower, fifteen volts, 350 rpms.”

  I covered my ears with my hands, and except for the glimpse of the steel bar that was meant to raise her ankles over her head, I saw no more—for the simple reason that I didn’t want to have to remember.

  The bike messengers of the Cortez cartel had a different idea for me. I was led down a corridor, to the shooting gallery. I was finally going to get my taste.

  The guy holding my arms said, “Thing is all employees got to submit to a mnemonic background check. . . .”

  A week or so before, I’d read a pamphlet by a specialist in medicinal applications of Albertine. There’s always a guy like this, right, a Dr. Feelgood, an apologist. He was on the Upper West Side, and his suggestion was that, when getting high, one should always look carefully around a room and eliminate bad energies. Set and setting, in fact, was just as important here as with drugs in the hallucinogenic family:

  If there’s any scientific validity at all to the theories of C.G. Jung and his followers, there’s genuine cause for worry when taking the drug known as Albertine.

  The reason for this is quite simply Jung’s concept known as the collective unconsciousness. What do we mean when we invoke this theory? We mean that under certain extraordinary circumstances it is possible that memory, properly thought of as the exclusive domain of an Albertine effect, can occasionally collide with other areas of brain function. As Jung supposed, we each harbor a register of the simulacra that is part of being human. This fantasy register, it is said, can be a repository for symbolisms that are true across cultural and national lines. What kinds of images are these? Some of them are good, useful images, such as the representation of the divine: Christ as the Lamb of God, Buddha under the bodhi tree, Ganesh, with his many arms. Each of these is a useful area for meditation. However, images of the demonic are also collective, as with depictions of witches. The terrors of hell, in fact, have had a long collective history. Now it appears that certain modern phantasms— the CIA operative, the transnational terrorist—are also both “real” and collective.

  Therefore, we can suggest that casual users of Albertine make sure to observe some rules for their excursions. It’s important to know a little about whom you have with you at the time of ingestion. It’s important to know a little bit about their own circumstances. To put it another way, people you trust are a crucial part of any prolonged Albertine experience.

  I suggest five easy steps to a rewarding experience with your memories: 1) Find a comfortable place, 2) Bring along a friend or loved one, 3) Use the drug after good meals or rewarding sexual experiences, so that you won’t waste all your time on the re-creation of these things, 4) Keep a photo album at hand, in case you want to draw your attention back to less harmful recollections, 5) Avoid horror films, heavy metal music, or anything with occult imagery.

  The advice of the good doctor was ringing in my ears. No matter what happened to my city, no matter how many incarnations of boom and bust it went through, the go-go times, the Municipal Assistance Corporation, didn’t seem to matter, shooting galleries persisted in the Hot Zone and elsewhere. The exposed beams, the crumbling walls, the complete lack of electricity, the absence of heat, windows shattered, bodies lying around on mattresses. If it was important to know or trust the people with whom I was going to use, I was in some deep shit. Who wouldn’t dread coming here to this place of unwashed men, of human waste and dead bodies?

  In the shadows, there was a guy with a stool and a metal folding table. I was motioned forward, as an old hippie collapsed onto the floor. Probably remembering the best night of sleep he ever had.

  Behind me, operatives in the Cortez syndicate made sure that my step was sturdy.

  “Give me your hand,” the Albertine provider said. In a kind of doomed murmur.

  I looked at my hand. Laid it out on that cheap table, site of a hundred violent games of poker.

  “Don’t mind we kinda stay close?” said one of the goons. He used the chokehold. Another guy held my hand. This would be the gentle description. If they were worried about my getting away, they shouldn’t have, because I was a reporter. But that wasn’t the motive, it dawned on me. They were hoping to come along for the ride, if possible, to see what they needed to know about their collaborator, if that’s what I was going to be. The historian of the Empire.

  “You don’t honestly think you’re going to be able to see what I see, do you?” I said. “There’s just no way that works according to physics.”

  The needle went in between the tendons on the top of my right hand. Blood washed back into the syringe. A bead pearling at my knuckle.

  “First time, yo?” someone said.

  “For sure,” I said.

  “Goes better if you’re thinking about what you want to know. Chiming. Thinking of bells, bells from a church, that’s what you do, things get chiming, the pictures get chiming. Because if you think of stuff you don’t want to know, then, bang—”

  Like I said, what I wanted to know first when I finally got dosed on Albertine was how I did on this assignment. I mean, if you could see the future, which seemed like horseshit, if that was really possible, then I wanted to know how my story turned out. Which I guess makes me a real writer, because a reporter is someone who doesn’t care about his own well-being when the story is coming due, he
just cares about the story, about getting it done. I just wanted to get the story done, I wanted to get it into the magazine. I wanted to be more than just another guy who survived the blast. So that was the memory where I was bound. But that doesn’t describe the beginning at all. One second I was listening to the guy tell me about chiming, next moment there was a world beside the world in which I lived, a world behind the world, and maybe even a sequence of them lined up one behind the other, where crucial narratives were happening. Suddenly the splinter hanging off the two-by-four next to the table seemed to have a world-famous history, where dragonflies frolicked in the limbs of an ancient redwood. And maybe this was the prize promised first by Albertine, that all things would have meaning. Suddenly there was discrimination to events, not all this disjunctive shit, like a million people getting incinerated for no good reason. Instead: discrimination, meaning, value. The solarizing thing again, and I could hear the voices of the people in the room, but like I was paralyzed, I was experiencing language as material, not as words, but as something sludgy like molasses, language was molasses. Like life had been EQ’d badly, and all was high-end distortion, and then there was a tiling effect, and the grinning toothless face of the guy who’d just shot me up was divided into zones, like he was a painting from the Modernist chapter of art history, and zones were sort of rearranged, so he was a literal blockhead, and then I heard this music, like the whole history of sounds from my life had become a tunnel under the present, and I could hear voices, and I could hear songs, I could pluck one out, like I could pluck out some jazz from the 1950s, here’s a guy banging on the eighty-eights, stride style, and when I plucked it out of the tunnel I could hear the things beside it, a concert that I had to go to in junior high, school auditorium, where some guys in robes demonstrated some Buddhist overtone singing, they were sitting on an oriental carpet, you know the mysteries of the world always had to have an oriental carpet involved, we were all supposed to be mystical and wearing robes and shit, and beside me there was the voice of my friend Dave Wakabayashi, who whispered, “Man, we could be listening to the game,” because there was a day game that day, right. What team? And who was pitching? And then the sound of Mandarin, which was exactly like a song to me, because of all the kinds of intonation that were involved in it, all those words that had the same sound but different intonations.

  And after that accretion of songs, a flood of the smells from my life, barely had time to say some of them aloud, while my stool was tipping backward, in the shooting gallery, my stool was tipping backward, and the back of my head was connecting with some hard surface, citronella, cardamom, smell of melting vinyl, smell of a pack of Polaroid film, five kinds of perfume, smell of my grandfather dying, meat loaf prepared from a box, freshly cut lawns, the West Indian Day Parade in New York City, which is the smell of curried goat, ozone right before a storm, diesel exhaust, the smell of just having fucked someone for the first time, the shock of it, more perfumes, a dog that just rolled in something, city streets in July, fresh basil, chocolate chip cookies, ailanthus trees, and just when I was getting dizzy from all the smells, and right about the moment at which I heard the guys from Eddie’s team, in their mellifluous slang, saying Take his damn money, which they definitely were going to do now, because I could tell that my arms were thrown wide to the world, give me the world, give me your laser light show and your perfect memories, doesn’t matter what they are, rinse me in your sanitorium of memories, for I am ready as I have never been, all of my short life. All was rehearsal for this moment as observer of what has come before, my longing was for perception, for the torrents of the senses, the tastes, the languor of skin on skin. I was made for this trip, it felt good, it felt preposterously good, and I noticed absently that my cock was hard, actually, I’m a little embarrassed to say it now, but I realized in that moment that mastery of the past, even when drug-induced, was as sexy as the vanquishing of loneliness, which is really what men in the city fuck against. Think about it, the burden of isolation that’s upon us all day and night, and think about how that diminishes in the carnival of sex. It’s the same on the Teen, it’s the same with chiming, and I was actually a little worried that I might come like that lying on the floor of their shooting gallery, with this guy standing over me, reaching into my hip pocket where there used to be a wallet, but there was no wallet now, just a couple of twenties to get me out of trouble, if it came to that. He wanted them and he took them. I wanted to yell Get the fuck off me, but I could feel the blobs of drool detaching from the corner of my mouth, and I knew I could say nothing, I could say only Yes, yes, yes. And when that seemed like that was the lesson of Albertine, bitch goddess, when I thought, Well, this must be what you get for your twenty-five bucks, you get to see the light show of lost time, just then I got up off the floor and walked into the lobby of the tits-and-lit magazine that had hired me, except that they hadn’t hired me, I guess, not like I believed. The matter was still up in the air, and I was in the line with a lot of people claiming to be writers, people with their plagiarized clip files, though why anyone would want to pretend to be a writer is beyond me. I was hoping, since I was the genuine article, that I might actually get the call. Out came this girl with blue hair, past the receptionist robot at the desk out front, saying my name, Kevin Lee, like it somehow magically rhymed with bored, and I got up, walked past all those people. I realized, yes, that I was going to get the assignment, because I was the guy who had actually written something, I was the genuine article, and maybe fate had it in store for me that I’d get out of the armory where I shared a cardboard box with a computer programmer from Islamabad who despite the unfortunate fact of his nationality in the current global climate was a good guy.

  The girl had blue hair! The girl had blue hair! And she looked sort of like Serena, that babe with whom I once skipped school to drink in Boston Commons, and there I was again, like never before, with Serena, slurring the words a little bit when I told her she was the first person who ever took the time to have a real conversation with me. First white chick. Because, I told Serena, people looked at an Asian kid in school they assumed he was a math and science geek, oh he’s definitely smarter than everyone else, that’s what I told her, such a sweet memory. Well, it was sweet anyway up until she told me that she already had a boyfriend, some college dude, why hadn’t she told me before, didn’t I deserve to be told, didn’t I have some feelings too? No, probably I was an inscrutable kid from the East. Right? She didn’t tell me because I was Chinese.

  And I was in a bad spot, in a drug dealer’s shooting gallery, probably going to be in really deep shit because if I didn’t write something for the cartel about the history of Albertine, I was probably a dead Chinese kid, but I didn’t care, because I believed I was drunk in the Boston Commons, and I was reciting poetry, for a girl with green eyes who would actually go on to be an actress in commercials, There’s a certain slant of light/Winter afternoons/That oppresses like the heft/Of cathedral tunes. I could recite every poem I had ever memorized. It was amazing. Serena’s face frozen in a kind of convulsive laughter, You are some crazy bastard, Kevin Lee. It was all good, it was all blessed, the trip. But then she said that thing about her boyfriend again, some would-be filmmaker.

  And I was back in the office with Tara, girl with the blue hair. “Jesus, Lee, what happened? You don’t look so good. Why didn’t you call me? When I gave you the assignment, I assumed you were a professional, right? Because there are a lot of other people who would have jumped at the chance to write this piece.” Glimpse of myself in the reflection of her office window. The city smoldering out the window, the whole empty city, myself superimposed over it. I looked like I hadn’t eaten in two weeks. The part of my face that actually grew a beard had one of those beards that looked like a Vietnamese guy in a rice paddy. My eyes were sunken and red. I had the bruises under my eyes. Whatever viscous gunk was still irrigating my dry mouth had hardened at the corners into a crust. I had nothing to say. Nothing to do but hand over the note
s. Twenty-nine thousand words. Tara paged through the beginning with an exasperated sigh. “What the fuck do you think we’re going to do with this, Kevin? We’re a fucking porn magazine? Remember?” As in dreams, I could feel the inability to do anything. I just watched the events glide by. From this quicksand of the future. I could see Tara with the blue pencil to match her blue hair receding in the reflection in the window.

  And then there were a dozen more futures, each as unpleasant. Breaking into the bedroom of Bertrand, the administrator of the armory, stealing his beaker full of Teen, which he kept in his luxury fridge—he was the only guy in the entire armory who got to have a refrigerator—being discovered in the process of stealing his drugs by a woman who’d just recently gone out of her way to ask me where my family was, why I was living here alone. Seeing her face in the light from the fridge, the only light in the room. She was wearing army fatigues, the uniform of the future, everyone in army fatigues, everyone on high alert. And then I jumped a few rich people up in Park Slope, an affluent neighborhood that wasn’t obliterated in the blast, I was wearing a warm-up suit, I was jumping some guy carrying groceries, and suddenly I was awake, with my face in my hands.

  The guys at the folding table were laughing.

  I wiped my leaking nose on my wrists. Stood up, weak-kneed.

  “Good time?” said the administerer of poisons. “You need the boost; everybody needs it afterward. Don’t worry yourself. You need the boost. To smooth it out.”

  He handed me a pill.

  One of the security experts said to another: “Just the usual shit, man, names of cheap-ass girls kiss his ass when he was just a little Chinese boy eating his mommy’s moo goo gai pan. Some shit.”

  That was it? That was what I was to them? Bunch of sentimental memories? The predictable twenty-five-dollar memories that coursed through here every day? What were they looking for? Later, I knew. They were looking for evidence that I had dropped off files with government agencies, or that I had tipped off rival gangs. Or they were looking to see if I’d had contact with Addict Number One. They were looking to see what I had put together, what I knew, where my researches had taken me, how much of the web of Albertine was already living in me, and therefore how much of it was available to you.