McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Instead of access to Serena, though, I got stuck in this fucked-up loop where all I could remember is a bunch of really horrible songs from my childhood. In particular, “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” a song that definitely had not aged very well. Sounds tinny, like the sampling rate is bad somehow, you know, those early sampling rates on digital music, really tinny. And here’s that little synthesizer loop that’s supposed to sound like the Beatles during their sitar phase, girl backup singers, the attempt to make the glamorous leading man sound as though he didn’t prefer boys, fine, really, but why pretend, man, knock yourself out. Seven hours, at least, passed in which I went over the minutiae of “Shake Your Bon-Bon.” The utterly computerized sound of it, the vestiges of humanness in its barren musical palette, as if the singer dude couldn’t be bothered to repeat the opening hook himself, no way, it’d sound better if they just looped it on ProTools, and then the old-fashioned organ, which was a simulated organ, etc., and the relationship between the congas and the guitars, okay, and what about that Latin middle section? Demographically perfect! So twentieth century! I didn’t want to think about the trombone solo at the end of “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” buried in the back, that sultry trombone solo, but I did think about it, about the singer’s Caribbean origins oozing out at the edges of the composition, and his homosexuality. Went on this way for a while, including a complete recollection of a remix that I think I only heard one time in my entire life, which was in some ways the superior version, because the more artificial the better, like when they take out all the rests between the vocal lines, so that the song has effectively become impossible to sing. Nowhere to take a breath. Was anyone on earth thinking about the singer in question, these days after the blast? I bet no one at all was thinking of him, except for certain stalkers from Yonkers or Port Chester. Where was he exactly? Had he managed to find refuge in a completely pink hotel in South Beach before the blast? And were his memories of showbiz dominance so great that the big new export market for Albertine was seducing him now like everyone else? Was South Beach falling into the vortex of memory, like New York before it?

  Just when it seemed like I would never cast my eyes on Serena again, just when it seemed like it was all Ricky Martin from now on, she was a vision before me, you know, a thing of ether, a residuum, like lavender, like coffee regular. The odd thing was I got used to remembering that one portion of our time together. I forgot what came later. I forgot that just because she had this boyfriend, this college dude with short eyes, this college man who chased after teens, didn’t mean that I stopped talking to her altogether, because the attachments you have then, when you’re a kid, at least back before the trouble in the world began, these friendships are the one sustaining thing. I could see myself in some institutional corridor, high school passageway, and there she was, golden in the light of grimy shatterproof windows, as if women and light were as close as lungs and air. I was slumped by a locker. Serena came across the corridor, across speckled linoleum tiles, and it was like I had never looked at those tiles before, because she was wearing a certain sweatshop-manufactured brand of sneakers, and so I saw the linoleum, because the linoleum was improved by her and her sneakers.

  “You okay?”

  No. I was hyperventilating. Like I did back then. Anything could set me off. College entrance examinations, these caused me to hyperventilate, any dip in my grades. And I didn’t tell anyone about it. Only my mother knew. I was an Asian kid and I was supposed to be incredibly smart. I was supposed to have calculus right at my fingertips, and I was supposed to know C++ and Visual Basic and Java and every other fucking computer language, and this all made me hyperventilate.

  I said, “Tell me the name of the guy you’re seeing. I just want to know his name. It’s only fair.”

  “You really want to talk about this again?”

  “Tell me once.”

  Battalions of teens slithered past, wearing their headphones and their MP3 players all playing the same moronic dirge of niche-marketed neo-grunge shit.

  “Paley,” she said. “First name, Irving, which I guess is a really weird name. He doesn’t seem like an Irving to me. Is that enough?”

  God sure put the big curse on Chinese kids, because when the raven of fate flew across their hearts, they just couldn’t show it. We were supposed to be shut up in our hearts, because to do otherwise was not part of the collective plan, or maybe that was just how I felt about it. I felt like my heart was an overfilled water balloon, and I was hyperventilating.

  “Kevin,” she said, “you have to do something about the panic thing. They have drugs for it. You know?”

  Do you know how much I think about you? I wanted to say. Do you want to know how you are preserved for all of human history? Because I have written you down, I have gotten down the way you pull your sweater sleeves over your hands, I have gotten down the way your eyeliner smudges. I have preserved the roll-out on the heels of your expensive sneakers, which you don’t replace often enough. I know about you and nectarines, I know you like them better than anything else, and I know that you aren’t happy first thing in the morning, not without a lot of coffee, and that you think your shoulders are fat, but that’s ridiculous. All this is written down. And the times you yelled at your younger sister on the bus, I wrote down the entire exchange, and I don’t want anything for it at all. I don’t want you to feel that there’s any obligation attached, except that you made me want to use writing for preservation, which is so great, because then I started preserving other things, like all the conversations I heard out in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, and I started describing the Charles River, rowboats on the Charles, I have written all of this down too, I have written it all down because of you.

  This was enough! This was enough to redeem my sorry ass, because suddenly all the moments were one, this moment and that, lined up like the ducks on some Coney Island shooting game, chiming together, and I said, “Serena, I only got a second here, so listen up, I don’t know any other way to put it, so just listen carefully. Something really horrible is going to happen to your friend Paley, so you have to tell him to stay out of Tompkins Square Park, no matter what, tell him never to go to Tompkins Square Park, tell him it’s a reliable bet, and that maybe he should do his graduate work at USC or something. I’m telling you this because I just know it, so do it for me. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but do like I say.”

  At which point, I was shaken rudely awake. Oh, come on. It was a time-travel moment. It was a memory-inside-a-memory moment, except that it might have been actually happening. I just wasn’t sure. One of the bike messengers from Cortez Enterprises smacked me in the face. In my supply closet. I’d have been happy to talk, you know, but I was too high, and as so many accounts have suggested in the Albertine literature, trying to talk when you are high is like having all the radio stations on your radio playing at the same time. I could just make out the nasty sound of his voice, in the midst of a recollected lecture from my dad on the best way to bet on blackjack. Lee, you are not attending to your duties. Not true, no way, I tried to say, I’m a devoted employee, just got back here an hour ago, and I’m doing some more researches, and I’m finding out some very interesting things.

  “You haven’t produced shit,” said the bike messenger. “We need to see some work. You need to be e-mailing us some attachments, Mr. Lee, and so far we haven’t seen anything.”

  “Totally incorrect,” I said. “I’ve been taking some notes. Somewhere around here. There are all kinds of notes.”

  There was the digital recorder, for example. But the batteries were dead.

  “This conversation isn’t going very well,” replied the bike messenger. “We have also heard that you have been moving product given to you as part of our agreement.”

  “There’s just no way!”

  “Don’t make us have to remind you about the specifics of your responsibilities.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “I’m smarter than that.”

  Now the bike messen
ger flung open the door that led out of my supply closet. Like I had forgotten there was a world out there. And standing out in the hall was Tara from the tits-and-lit magazine, except she looked really disheveled, like she didn’t want to be seen by anyone else, and I said, “Tara, what are you doing here? I thought I had at least another couple weeks—”

  “You said you had the dropper. I don’t know anything about all this. I gave you the money, so can I please just have the drugs? Then I’ll get the fuck out of here.”

  I made some desperate pleas to the Cortez employee, looking at him looking at Tara, while Tara stood and watched. I stalled, demanded to know if there was a way for me to be sure that these guys, the bike messenger, and Tara weren’t just figments of some future event that I was now “remembering,” according to that theory about Albertine.

  “Did you or did you not assign me an article about Albertine?”

  Tara said, “Just set me up and let me get out of here.”

  And then Bertrand, the guy who doled out the habitable spaces in the armory, he got into the act too. Standing in the doorway, covered in grime, like he’d just come from his job at a filling station, except that as far as I knew it was just that Bertrand was an addict and had given up on personal hygiene, he gazed at me with a make-believe compassion.

  “Kevin, listen, we’ve given you chances. We’ve looked the other way. We’ve been understanding for months. We’ve made excuses for you. We pulled you out of the gutter when you were passed out there. But people living here at the armory are afraid to walk by your apartment now. They’re just afraid of what’s going to happen. So where does that leave us?”

  And even Bob, my early source, was standing behind Bertrand, hands on his hips. Trying to push past the throng of accusers, to get to me.

  This was a moment when thinking carefully was more important than hallucinating. But because of the extremely dangerous amount of Albertine that was already overwhelming both my liver and my cerebral activity, reality just wasn’t a station that I could tune very well. What I mean is, I went down under again. Right in front of all those people.

  Soon I was hanging out on some sun porch in a subdivision in Massachusetts. All the houses, in whichever direction I turned, looked exactly the same. I bet they had electrical fireplaces in every room. It was like CAD had come through with a backhoe, bulldozed the whole region into uniformity. I could remember each tiny difference, each sign that some person, some family, had lived here for more than ten minutes. Serena’s folks had a jack-o’-lantern on the porch. And over there was a guy with one arm mowing the common areas. That intoxicating smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of yellow jackets trying to get in through the screen.

  Serena was reiterating that I had said something really scary to her at school today, and she needed to know if I’d said what I had said because of the panic thing. Were my symptoms causing me to say these crazy things, and if so, wouldn’t it be better if I told someone what was happening, instead of carrying it around by myself? She knew, she said, about really serious mental illnesses, she knew about these things and she wanted me to know that I would still be her friend, her special friend, even if I had one of those mental illnesses, so I was not to worry about it. And now would I please try to explain?

  “Listen, I know what I said, and there’s no reason you should believe me,” I tried, “but the fact is that the only reason I can explain to you about the future is because I’m in the future. And in the future I know how much you mean to me. In the future, this four months that we’re close, they keep coming back around, again and again, like that day we were in the Boston Commons. It keeps coming back around. I could tell you all this stuff about the future, about New York City and how it gets bombed into rubble, about drugs, about the epidemic that’s coming, I could tell you how strung out I’m going to get. But that’s not the point. Somehow you’re the point. Serena, you’re the trompe l’oeil in the triptych of the future, and that’s because you know that guy. Paley. So you have to believe me, even though I probably wouldn’t believe me, if I were you. Still, the thing is, you have to tell him what I’ve told you. Maybe none of this will happen, this stuff, I sure hope not. Maybe it will all turn out different, just because I’m telling you. But we can’t plan on that. What we have to plan on is your telling Paley that he’s in danger.”

  “Actually, Kevin, what I think we need to do is talk to your mom.”

  The jack-o’-lantern on the porch, of course. It was autumn, which was bad news, which meant I was on the comedown, and badly in need of a boost, and the whole scene was swirling away into an electromagnetic dwindling of stories. Serena was gone, and suddenly instead of being back in my room at the armory, where, suspended in a lost present, I was about to be evicted from my supply closet, I was back doing my job, the job of journalist, and what a relief. I had no idea what day it was. I had no idea if I was remembering the past or the future, or if I happened to be in the present. Albertine had messed with all that. I was confused. So was the guy I was interviewing, who happened to be the epidemiologist with the theory about the Albertine crisis, the one I told you about earlier, except that he was no epidemiologist at all. That was just his cover story. Actually, he was the anthropologist, Ernst Wentworth, and we were in his office in Brooklyn College, which wasn’t really an office anymore, because there were about thirty thousand homeless people living on the campus of the college. At night there were vigilante raids in which the Arabic people living on one quad would be driven off the campus, out onto the streets of the Hot Zone, where stray gunshots from Eddie Cortez’s crew took out at least two or three a night. It was trench warfare. No one was getting educated at Brooklyn College, and Wentworth was crowded into a single room with a half dozen other desks and twice as many file cabinets pushed against the windows.

  He was having trouble following the thread of the interview. Me too. I couldn’t remember if I had already asked certain questions:

  Q: Check. Check. Check. Uh, okay, do you know anything about the origin of Albertine?

  A: No one knows the origin actually. The most compelling theory, which is getting quite a bit of attention these days, is that Albertine has no origin. The physicists at the college have suggested the possibility that Albertine owes her proliferation to a recent intense shower of interstellar dark matter. The effect of this dark matter is such that time, right now, has become completely porous, completely randomized. Certain subatomic constituent particles are colliding with certain others. This would suggest that Albertine is a side effect of a space-time difficulty, a quantum indeterminacy, rather than a cause herself, and since she is not a cause, she has no origin, no specific beginning that we know of. She just tends to appear, on a statistical basis.

  Q: Given that this is a possibility, why are Albertine’s effects only visible in New York City?

  A: The more provocative question would be, according to quantum indeterminacy, does New York City actually exist? At least, if you take the hypothesis of theoretical physics to its logical conclusion. This would be a brain-in-the-vat hypothesis. NYC as an illusion purveyed by a malevolent scientist. Except that the malevolent scientist here is Albertine herself. She leads us to believe in a certain New York City, a New York City with postapocalyptic, posttraumatic dimensions and obsessions. And yet perhaps this collective hallucination is merely a way to rationalize what is taking place: that it is now almost impossible to exist in linear time at all.

  Q: So maybe in Kansas City, they have similar hallucinations. Kansas City is the center of some galloping drug epidemic. And the same thing in Tampa or Reno or Harrisburg?

  A: Could be. Something like that. (Pause.) Can I borrow some of your—?

  Q: There’s only a little left. But, sure, get a buzz on. (Getting serious.) Have you attempted a catalogue of types of Albertine experiences?

  A: Well, sociopaths seem to have a really bad time with the drug. We know that. And it’s a startling fact, really. Since much of the distribution network
is controlled by sociopaths. But at most dosage thresholds, sociopaths have stunted Albertine experiences. They’ll remember their Driver Ed exam for hours on end. By sociopaths, I’m referring especially to individuals with poor intrapsychic bonding, poor social skills. Individuals who lack for compassion. It would be hard to imagine them taking much pleasure in Albertine. On the other hand, at the top end of the spectrum are the ambiguous experiences of which you are no doubt aware. People who claim to remember future events, people who claim to remember other people’s memories, people who claim to have interacted with their memories. And so forth. At first we believed that these experiences, which characterized many of the people here conducting our studies—myself included—were only occurring, if that’s the right word, among the enlightened. That is, we believed that ahistorical remembering was an aspect of wish fulfillment among the healthiest and most engaged personalities. But then we learned that malice, hatred, and murderous rage could be just as effective at creating these episodes. In either case, we became convinced that the frequency of these reports merited our attention. If true, the fact of ahistorical remembering would have to suggest that the fabric of time is not woven together as consistently as we once thought. We tried at first to analyze whether these logically impossible experiences were “true” on a factual level, but now we are more interested in whether or not they are repeatable, visible to more than one person, etc.

  Q: Does your catalogue of experiences shed any light on Albertine’s origin?

  A: One compelling theory that’s making the rounds among guys in the sciences here at the college is that Albertine has infinite origins. That she appeared in the environment all at once, at different locations, synchronously, according to some kind of philosophical or metaphysical randomness generator. There’s no other perfect way to describe the effect. According to this view, the disorder she causes is so intense that her origin is concealed in an effacement of the moment of her origin, because to have a single origin violates the parameters of non-linearity. Didn’t we already do this part about the origin?