McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  “Okay chump,” bike messenger said to me, “free to go.”

  The door opened, and down a corridor I went, wearing hand-cuffs, back the way I’d come, like I could unlearn what I had learned—that I had the taste for the drug, and that the past was woefully lost. I’d been addicted by the drug overlord of my city, and now I was standing on his assembly-line floor again, though now Cassandra, or whoever she was, was missing, and the voice of the Cortez television announcer rang out, observing the following on the terms of my new employment: “We want you to learn the origin of Albertine, we want you to write down this origin, and all the rest of the history of Albertine, from its earliest days to the present time, and we don’t want you to use any fancy language or waste any time, we just want you to write it down. And because what you’re going to do is valuable to us, we are prepared to make it worth your while. We’re going to give you plenty of our product as a memory aid, and we will give you a generous per diem. You’ll dress like a man, you’ll consider yourself a representative of Eddie Cortez, you’ll avoid disrespectful persons and institutions. Remember, it’s important for you to write and not worry about anything else. You fashion the sentences, you make them sing, we’ll look after the rest.”

  “Sounds cool,” I said, “especially since I’m already doing that for someone else.”

  “No, you aren’t doing it for somebody else; you are doing it for us. Nobody else exists. The skin magazine doesn’t exist, your friends don’t exist. Your family doesn’t exist. We exist.”

  I could feel how weak my legs were. I could feel the sweat trickling down the small of my back, soaking through my T-shirt. I was just hanging on. Because that’s what my family did, they hung on. My grandfather, he left behind his country, never gave it another thought. My father, you never saw the guy sweat. My mother, she was on a plane that had to make an emergency landing once, she didn’t even give it a second thought, as far as I could tell. Representatives of the Cortez cartel were tracking me on a monitor somewhere, or on some sequence of handheld computers, watching me, and they were broadcasting their messages to staff people who could be trusted. Who knew how many other people in the Eddie Cortez operation were being treated the way I was being treated today? Bring this guy into the fold, conquer him, if not, neutralize him, leave him out in the rubble of some building somewhere. It was an operation staffed by guys who all had guns, stun guns and cattle prods, real guns with bullets that could make an Abstract Expressionist painting out of a guy like me, and I was trying to get the fuck out of there, before I was dead, and I could barely think of anything else. Now they were taking me down this long hall, and it wasn’t the corridor I was in before, because the building had all these layers, and it was hard to know where you were, relative to where you had been before, or maybe this is just the way I felt because of what the voice on the loudspeaker said next.

  “Be sure to be vigilant about forgetting.”

  Which reminds me to remind you of the diachronous theory of Albertine abuse, which of course recognizes the forgetting as a social phenomenon coincident, big-time, with a certain pattern of Albertine penetration into the population. The manifestation of forgetting is easy to explain, see, because it has to do with bolstering the infrastructure of memory elsewhere. Like anyone who’s a drinker knows, you borrow courage when you’re drinking, and you lose it someplace else. Addiction is about credit. That amazing thing you said at the bar last night, that thing you would never say in person to anyone, it’s a onetime occurrence, because tomorrow, in the light of dawn, when you are separated from your wallet and your money, when your girlfriend hates you, then you’ll be unable to say that courageous thing again, because you are wrung out and lying on a mattress without sheets. You borrowed that courage, and it’s gone.

  So the thing with Albertine was that at night, under its influence, you remembered. Tonight the past was glorious and indelible—Serena in the park with the rum and the bittersweet revelation of her boyfriend—tonight was the beauty of almost being in love, which was a great beauty, but tomorrow, your memory was full of holes. Not a blackout, more like a brownout. You could remember that you once knew things, but they were indistinct now, and the understanding of them just flew out the window. It was like the early part of jet lag, or thorazine. Why did I come into this room? I was going to get something. Suddenly you had no idea, you stood looking at the pile of clothes in front of the dresser, clothes that were fascinating colors, that old pair of jeans, very interesting. Look at that color. It’s so blue. Maybe you needed to do something, but you didn’t, and you realized that things were going on in your body, and they were inexplicable to you. You were really thirsty. Maybe you ought to have had some juice, but on the way to the bottle of water on the table, you forgot.

  The history of Albertine became a history of forgetting. A geometrically increasing history of forgetfulness. Men in charge of its distribution, by reason of the fact that they started using it for organizational reasons, to increase market share, they were as forgetful as the hard-core users, who after a while couldn’t remember their own addresses, except occasionally, and who were therefore on the street, asking strangers, Do you know my name? Do you happen to know where I live? The history of the drug, requested by Cortez, was therefore important. How else to plan for the future? If the research and development team at Cortez Enterprises didn’t forget how to read, then, as long as they had a hard copy of the history, everything was cool. I would write the story; they’d lock it away somewhere.

  Before I had a chance to agree or disagree, I was going down in the industrial elevator, alone, and it was like being shat out the ass of the smelting factory. It was dawn with the light coming up under the lip of that relentless cloud. Dawn, the only time these days there was any glimmer on the horizon, before the debris clouds massed again. But, listen, I have to come clean on something. I missed Cassandra. That’s what I was feeling. She’d sold me out to Eddie Cortez, made me his vassal, like she was his vassal. Trust and fealty, these words were just memories. So was Cassandra, just a memory. A lost person. Who’d reassured me for a few minutes. Who’d have sold out anyone for more drugs and a few minutes on a postindustrial sexual machine. Was I right that there was something there? For an Albertine second, the slowest second on the clock. Seemed like she was the threshold to some partially forgotten narrative, some inchoate past, some incomplete sign, like light coming in through window blinds. Boy, I was stupid, getting sentimental about the Asian mistress of a drug kingpin.

  Daylight seemed serious, practical. It was the first time I could remember being out in the daylight since I started compiling these notes. On the way back to the armory, I waited on the line up the block for the one pay phone that still worked. Usually there were fifty or sixty people out front. All of them simmering with rage, because the connection was sketchy, the phone disconnected, and everyone listened to the other callers, listened to the conversations. Imagine the sound of the virtual automaton’s computerized warmth, We’re sorry, the parties you are contacting are unable to accept the call. Who was sorry exactly? The robot? A guy holding the receiver shouted, “I need to know the name of that prescription! I’m not a well man!” Then the disconnection. A woman begged her husband to take her back. Disconnection. And a kid who has lost his parents, trying to locate his grandparents. Disconnection. The phone booth had that multitude of sad stories hidden spinning around it.

  Soon it was my turn, and my father got on. Man of few words.

  “We told you not to call here anymore,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I haven’t called in . . .”

  I tried to put it all together. How long? Measuring time had become almost impossible. There was nothing to do but make a stab at it.

  “ . . . three weeks.”

  “We can’t give you anything more. Our own savings are nearly exhausted. You need to start thinking about how you’re going to get out of the jam you’re in witho
ut calling us every time it gets worse. It’s you who is making it worse. Understand? Think about what you’re doing!”

  I could see the people behind me in the pay phone line leaning in toward the bad news, excited to get a few tidbits. Their own bad scrapes were not nearly as bad.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve told you before,” he said. “Don’t raise your voice with me.”

  His own voice defeated, brittle.

  “Put Mom on the line!”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Let me talk to Mom!”

  Then some more nonsense about how I had caused my mother unending sorrow, that it was her nature only to sacrifice, but I had squandered this generosity, had stamped up and down on it with my callousness, my American callousness, as if my family had not overcome innumerable obstacles to get me where I was. I made the selflessness of my heritage seem like a deluded joke. I had dishonored him, etc. etc., by my shameful activities, etc. etc. It was as good as if I had died during the blast.

  A bona fide patriarchal dressing-down, of a sort that I thought I had left behind long ago. I was watching the faces of the people in the line behind me, and their faces were reflecting my own face. Incredulity. Confusion.

  “Dad, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Listen to me.”

  “You can’t call here every day with your preposterous lies. Your imagined webs of conspiracy. We won’t have it. We are exhausted. Your mother cannot get out of bed, and I am up at all hours frantic with worry about you. How are we supposed to live? Get some help!”

  I smiled a befuddled smile for my audience, I replaced the receiver. In midstream. Of course, I hadn’t called my parents recently, hadn’t called them the day before, or the week before, or the week before that. Hadn’t called them often at all. My crime, in fact, was that because of shame about where I lived and what I was doing I didn’t really call anyone anymore. So what explained the circumstance?

  I looked at the next guy in line. A melancholy African-American man, with a fringe of gray hair and eyeglasses patched with some duct tape. It was beginning to rain, of course, and I saw an obsidian blob splatter the surface of his glasses.

  “I guess I just called them,” I said. “I mean, I guess I forgot that I called them.”

  He pushed past me.

  To forget was threatening now. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a forgetter. A forgetter meant just the one thing. A forgetter had abscesses in his arm, or a forgetter had sold off the last of his possessions and was trying to sell them a second time, because he had forgotten that the apartment was already empty. The highest respect, the most admiration was accorded those with perfect recall— that was part of the diachronous theory, or if it wasn’t yet, I predicted it would soon be part of that theory. Geeks with perfect recall would get up in public settings, with a circle of folding chairs around them, and then, in front of an amazed audience, these geeks would remember the perfect textures of things, Ah yes, the running mates of the losers in of the last eight presidential elections, let me see. And the names of their wives. And weather on election day. Massive fraud would be perpetrated in certain cases, where these perfect-recall geeks would, it turned out, have needle tracks, just like the rest of us. Ohmygod! They were doping, and they would be escorted out into the street, in shame, where again rain was beginning to fall.

  Which is why when I got back to the armory, and found the package on my bed, I felt that pornographic thrill. I could manage an eyedropper as good as the next guy, right? I’d work up to the needles. What else was there to hang around for? No one was waiting for me. Maybe I could get back to the night before, when I was talking to Cassandra. I said this little preliminary prayer, May this roll of the dice be the one in which I remember love, or teen sex, or that time when I had a lot of money from a summer job and I was barbecuing out in the back of the subdivision, and everybody was drinking beer and having a good time.

  But, no, I would become a junky in a supply closet, and I would use a lantern I’d looted from a camping equipment store after the blast. I held the eyedropper above me, and the droplet of intoxicant was lingering there, and I was the oyster that was going to envelop it and make it my secret. The drop in the dropper was like the black rain of NYC which was like the money shot in a porn film which was like the tears from the Balkan statuary of the Virgin in the naïf style. The lantern shone up from underneath my supply closet shelves, and there was that rush of perfumes that I’ve already described, which meant that it was all beginning again; I was lucky for the perfumes I’ve known, other guys just know paperwork, but I’ve known the smell of people right before being naked with them, what an honor. All junkies are lapsed idealists, falling away from things as they were. I was a murderer of time. I’d taken the hours of my life out back of the armory and shoved them in the wood chipper or buried them in a swamp or bricked them up in the basement. But this thought was overwhelmed by the personal scent of a fashion student who lived near us when I was in California. It was on me like a new atmosphere. Along with the sheets of fog rolling in over the Bay.

  It was all a fine movie. At least until something really horrible occurred to me, a bummer of a thought. How could it be? Thinking about that Serena, again, see, in the Boston Commons, drinking rum, remembering that she actually had Cherry Coke, not the soft drink once known as the Real Thing, to which I said, “Cherry Coke, girl, that’s not Coke, because no Coke product that occurs, historically, after the advent of the New Coke—held by some to have been a reaction to sugar prices in Latin American countries—no Coke that occurs after that time is a legitimate Coke. Get it? The only Coke product that is genuine with respect to the rum and Cokes you’re proposing to drink here is Mexican Coke, which you can still get in bottles, and which still features some actual cane sugar.” An impressive speech, a flirtatious speech, but somewhere in the middle of remembering it—and who knew how many hours had passed now, who knew how many days—this thought I’m speaking about occurred to me:

  Serena’s boyfriend, the guy she was seeing beside me, or instead of me, was Addict Number One.

  Years before, I mean. Way before he was the actual Addict Number One. Because we were in high school then, and Addict Number One wasn’t killed yet, or hadn’t vanished. Not in this version of the story. He was a college guy, and he wanted to make movies, went to NYU, lived downtown, wore a lot of black, just like Addict Number One. And he could tell you a lot about certain recordings that hard-core bands from Minneapolis made in the eighties, and he had a lot of opinions about architecture and politics and sitcoms and maybe bagels, I don’t know. I could feel that it was true. It was a hunch, but it was a really good hunch. There was an intersection in the story where there hadn’t been one before, and the intersection involved me, or at least tangentially it involved me. Before I was an observer, but now I was coming to see that there was no observing Albertine. Because Albertine was looking back into you. The thought was so unsettling that I was actually shaking with terror about it, but I was too high to stop remembering.

  Serena said, “You won’t have any idea whether this is Coke or Cherry Coke after the first half a cup. I could put varnish in here, you wouldn’t know.” She smiled and now I felt myself drunk just with the particulars of her smile. It was a humble, lopsided smile, and she was wearing those patched blue jeans, and she pulled off her green Dartmouth sweatshirt, to reveal a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the T-shirt advertising a particular girl deejay, and I could see the lower part of her belly underneath the T-shirt. The slope of her breasts. I mean, her smile promised things that never came to be, you know? While I was taking it in, turning over the irrefutable fact of her smile and a tiny series of beautiful lines, like parentheses, at the corners of her fantastic mouth, Serena began to fade. “Don’t go,” I said, “there’s some stuff we need to cover,” but it was like those cries in a dream, the cries that just wake you up. They don’t actually bring help. They just wake you. I could see her f
ading, and in her stead, I saw a bunch of bare trees from some November trip to the malls of Jersey. Autumn.

  I seized the eyedropper, which, because it had just been sitting on my roach-infested mattress while I was busy remembering, now seemed to have black specks all over the tip of it, and maybe there were some kinds of bugs crawling around on there, I don’t know. I held back my eyelids. I was aching in my eye sockets.

  The plan was to summon her back, to call her name in the old psychoanalytic way, you know. Names count for something. Strong feelings count for something. And such a beautiful name anyhow, right? Serena, like some ocean of calm lapping against the fucked-up landscape. I would ask her. If I could map the weird voyages of my younger self, that Asian kid trying to declare himself to a Yankee girl through really abstract complicated poetry, If all time is eternally present,/All time is unredeemable./What might have been is an abstraction.

  Because if it was really true that Cassandra had somehow willed me to see what she knew about Eddie Cortez, just because she wanted me to see it, even if telling me the truth about Eddie was somehow a danger to her position as his mistress, then it was true that love and affection were important orienting forces in the Albertine epidemic. Like Eddie, who chased Addict Number One through the dingy recesses of his brain simply in the breadth of his malice and greed. Maybe the rememberer, in the intoxication of remembering, was always ultimately tempted to reach out the hand, and maybe this rememberer could do so, if his passion was strong enough. How else to look at it? What else did I have to go on? Because a hundred thousand Albertine addicts couldn’t be wrong. Because they were all chasing the promise of some lost, glittering, perfect moment of love. Because some of them must have reached that Elysian destination in their floods of memory and forgetfulness. Because I sure loved Serena, because she had a lopsided smile, because she had nails called lycanthrope, because love is good when you have nothing, and I had nothing, except bike messengers watching my every move.