McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Q: Shit. I guess you’re right. Okay, hang on. (Regroups.) Do you, do you think it’s possible to manipulate the origin of Albertine, to actually control the drug, so as to alter a specific narrative? Like, say, the rise of the Albertine crime syndicate?

  A: Sure, persons of my acquaintance have done plenty of that. At least on an experimental basis. We have had no choice. But I’m not at liberty to go into that today.

  Q: Let’s go back to the issue of what to do about the epidemic. Do you have a specific policy formulation?

  A: I did have some good ideas about that. (Ponders.) Okay, wait just a second. I’m going to look through my papers on the subject here. (Riffles mounds on desk.) I’m forgetting so much these days. Okay, my observation is that Albertine finds her allure in the fact that the human memory is, by its nature, imperfect. Every day, in every way, we are experiencing regret over the fact that we can conjure up some minimal part of the past, but not as much as we’d like. This imperfection of memory is built into the human animal, and as long as it’s an issue, the Albertine syndicates will be able to exploit it. Strategies for containment have to come from another direction, therefore. Which is to say that the only thing that could conceivably help in the long run would be to make distribution of the drug extremely widespread. We should make sure everybody has it.

  Q: How would that help?

  A: Since Albertine has forgetfulness as a long-term side effect, it’s possible that we could actually make everyone forget that Albertine exists. It would have to be concerted, you understand. But let me make an analogy. At a certain point in heroin addiction, you no longer feel the effects of the opiate; you only service the withdrawal. A similar effect could take place here. At a certain point, everyone would be trying to avoid the forgetting, because they can’t work effectively, they can’t even remember where work is, and yet soon this forgetting would begin to invade even the drug experience, so that what you remember grows dimmer, because you are beginning to accelerate plaque buildup, and other anatomical effects. With enough of this forgetting everyone would forget that they were addicts, forget that they needed the drug to remember, forget that memory was imperfect, and then we would be back to some kind of lowest common denominator of civic psychology. Damaged, but equal.

  Q: How would you go about doing this?

  (Ernst Wentworth gives the interviewer the once-over in a way he had not done before.)

  A: We’re going to put it in the water supply.

  Q: Hasn’t that been tried already?

  A: What do you mean?

  Q: I think someone told me that an attack on the water supply was recently thwarted.

  A: Are you serious?

  Q: Well, unless someone was using disinformation—

  A: (Wentworth shouts.) Guys, you recording all of this?

  The room was bugged, of course, and on this signal a bunch of academics rushed into Wentworth’s office, blindfolded me, and carried me out. I didn’t struggle. When I was freed, I was in the Brooklyn College Astronomy Lab. It was Ernst Wentworth who gently removed my blindfold.

  “You understand we have no choice but to take every precaution. Just a couple of days ago, Claude Jannings, from the linguistics department, watched his wife disappear in front of him. She was there, in the kitchen, talking about the dearth of political writings pertaining to the Albertine epidemic, and then she was gone, just absolutely gone. As if someone were listening to the conversation the whole time. Apparently, her remarks about Albertine, and inchoate plans to write on the subject, were enough to make her a target.”

  My eyes became accustomed to the dim light of the astronomy lab. The interior was all concrete, functional, except for the platform where you could get up and take a gander at the heavens. Around me, there was a circle of guys in tweed jackets and cardigan sweaters. A couple of bow ties. Khaki slacks.

  “Wow, it’s Kevin Lee! Right here in our lab!” Some good-natured chortling.

  Huh?

  Wentworth ventured further explanations. “We’ve developed a hierarchy for marking events, so we don’t forget later. Whenever one of us goes out in public, we bring along a poster or sign indicating the date and time. That way, if we travel backwards on Albertine in search of particular events, we aren’t thrown off or beguiled by unimportant days. And we bring clothing of various colors, red for an alert, green for an all-clear. It’s a conspiracy of order, you understand, and that’s a particularly revolutionary conspiracy right now. What we’ve additionally found, by cataloguing memories—and we have guys who are medicated twenty-four hours a day thinking about all this—is that there are certain people who turn up over and over. We refer to people who are present at large numbers of essential Albertine nodal points as memory catalysts. Eduardo Cortez, for example, is a memory catalyst, and not in a good way. And there are some other very odd examples I could give you. A talk-show host from ten or fifteen years ago seems to turn up quite a bit, perhaps just because his name is so memorable, Regis Philbin. You’d be surprised how close to the inner workings of the Albertine epidemic is Regis Philbin. When we’re around Philbin, we are always wearing red. We don’t know what he means yet, but we’re working on it. And then there’s you.”

  “Me?”

  One doctoral candidate, standing by the base of the telescope, nonchalant, spoke up. “If we had baseball cards of the players in the Albertine epidemic, you’d be collectible. You’d be the power hitting shortstop.”

  “We have a theory,” Wentworth said. “And the theory is that you’re important because you’re a writer.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not even a very good writer. I’m barely published.”

  Wentworth waved his plump hands.

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve been trying to find out for a while who originally came up with your assignment. It wasn’t your editor there. That we know. She’s just another addict. It was someone above her, and if we can find out who it is, we think we’ll be close to finding a spot where the Frost Communications holding company connects to Cortez Enterprises. Somewhere up the chain, you were being groomed for this moment. Unless you are simply some kind of emblem for Albertine. That’s possible, too, of course.”

  Wentworth smiled, so that his tobacco-stained teeth shone forth in the gloomy light. “Additionally, you’re a hero from the thick, roiling juices of the New York City melting pot. And that is very satisfying to us. Do you want to see? We know so much about you that it’s almost embarrassing. We even know what you like to eat, and what kind of toothpaste you use. Don’t worry, we won’t make a big stink about it.”

  Later, of course, the constituency of the Brooklyn Resistance was a matter of much speculation. There were women there too, with mournful expressions, like they had come along with the Resistance, though they had grave doubts about its masculine power structure. Women in modest skirts or slightly unflattering pantsuits, like Jesse Simons, the Deconstructionist, who argued that doping the water supply was embracing the nomadic sign system of Albertine, which of course represented not some empirical astrophysical event, but, rather, a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability caused by American Imperialism. And there were a couple of African-Americanists, wearing hints of kinte cloth with their tweeds and corduroys. They argued for intervention in the economic imperatives that led to drug dealing among the inner city poor. And there was the great post-colonialist writer Jean-Pierre Al-Sadir. He argued that the route to victory over civic chaos was infiltration of the Albertine cartels. However, Al-Sadir, because of his Algerian passport, had been mentioned as part of the conspiracy that detonated the New York City blast. Still, here he was, fighting with the patriots, if that’s what they were. It was a testament to the desperation of the moment that none of these academic stars would normally have agreed on anything, you know? I mean, these people hated each other. If you’d gone to a faculty meeting at Columbia three years ago, you would have seen Al-Sadir call Simons an arrogant narcissist in front of a college president. That kind of thing. Bu
t infighting was forgotten for now, as the Resistance began plotting its strategies. Even when I was hanging around with them, there would be the occasional argument about the semiotics of wearing red, or about whether time as a system was inherently phallogocentric, such that its present adumbrated shape was preferable, as a representation of labial or vaginal narrative space.

  “So you guys probably have one of those dials, on a machine, where we can go directly to a particular year and day and hour and second, right?”

  “Fat chance,” Wentworth said. “In fact, we have a room next door with a lot of cots in it—”

  “A shooting gallery?”

  “Just so. And we employ a lot of teaching assistants, keep them comfortable and intoxicated for a long time and see what happens. Whatever you might think, what we have here is a lot of affection for one another, so a lot of stories go around like lightning, a lot of conjecture, a lot of despair, a lot of elation, a lot of plans. You know? We see ourselves as junkies for history. Of which yours is one integral piece. Let’s go have a look, shall we?”

  It would be great if I could report that the shooting gallery of the Resistance was significantly better than the Cortez shooting gallery, but, really, the only difference was that these guys sterilized the needles after each use and swabbed their track marks. No abscesses in this crowd. Otherwise, it was only marginally more inviting. Some of the most important academics of my time were lying on cots, drooling, fighting their way through the cultural noise of fifty years—television programming, billboards, pornography, newspaper advertisements—in order to get back to the origin of Albertine, bitch goddess, in order to untangle the mess she’d made. The other important difference here was that these guys were synthesizing their own batches of the stuff, instead of buying it on the street, and when a bunch of chemists and biologists get into mixing up a drug, that drug chimes, let me tell you. They explained the chemical derivation to me, too. Which looks kinda like this:

  Apparently, the effect had to do with increasing oxygenated blood flow to neurotransmitters, thereby increasing electrical impulses. It wasn’t that hard to do at all. Miraculous that no one had done it before now. The only physiognomic problem with Albertine was her tendency to burn out the cells, like in diseases of senescence. Albertine was sort of the neurochemical equivalent of steroid abuse.

  I was lucky. Jesse Simons volunteered to be the prefect for my trip, and she and Wentworth stood awkwardly in the center of the room, as a grad student from the Renaissance Studies department pulled the rubber tie around my arm. It was the sweetest thing, tying off again. I didn’t care anymore about writing, I only cared about the part where I stunned myself with Albertine. I was dreaming of being ravished by her, overwhelmed by her instruction, where perception was a maelstrom of time past, present, and future. The eons were neon, they were like the old Times Square, first time you ever saw it, first time you felt the rush of its hundreds of thousands of images, and I don’t mean the Disney version, I mean the version with hookers and street violence and raving crack fiends. Albertine was like a soup of NYC neon. She was a catalogue of demonic euphonies. I felt the rubber cord unsnap, heard a sigh beside me, felt Jesse’s arms around me, and the soft middle of sedentary Ernst Wentworth. Then we were rolling and tumbling in the thick of Albertine’s forest. I was back in the armory, and there were a bunch of bike messengers leading me out, and I was screaming to Tara, and to Bertrand, and to Bob, Save my notes, save my notes, and the bike messengers were beating on me and I could feel the panic, in my chest, I could feel it, and I said, Where are you taking me? I passed a little circle of residents of the armory, carrying home their government rations of mac and cheese, not a hair on the head of any of them, all the carcinogenic residents of the armory, all of them with appointments for chemo later in the week, and they were all wearing red. I heard a voice, like in voice-over, We’re sorry that you are going to have to see this. It was better when you had forgotten all about it. And the bike messengers took me on a tour of Brooklyn in their jeeps, up and down the empty streets of my borough, kicking my ass the whole way, until my lips were split and bleeding, until my blackened eyes were swollen shut. We came to a halt down on the waterfront, on the piers. They dumped me out of the jeep while it was still moving, and my last pair of jeans was shredded from all the broken glass and rubble. My knees and hips were gashed. But the syndicate wasn’t through with me yet; some more of Cortez’s flunkies took me inside a factory, a creepy institutional place, where they manufactured the drug.

  Here it was. The Albertine sweatshop. There weren’t many buildings left in downtown Brooklyn, you know, because it was within the event horizon of the dirty bomb, a lot of the stuff on the waterfront was rubble. But this building was still here somehow, which implied that Eddie Cortez was subjecting his production staff to radioactive hazards. That was the least of it, of course, because most of the staff was probably high. Maybe that was the one job benefit.

  “What are we doing here?” I said to the goons leading me in past the surveillance gate, and in through a front hall that looked remarkably like the reception area of the tits-and-lit magazine that assigned my Albertine story in the first place. There was even one of those remote-control reception robots, just like at the magazine offices.

  “Your questions will be answered in due course.”

  “Really? Because I have a big backlog—”

  “Don’t get smart, we will make it hurt, dig?”

  More corridors, linkages of impossible interiors, then into an office. We were waved through without hesitation. The women and men in the typing pool with expressions of abject terror on their faces. Guys in red sweaters in every room, red neckties, matching socks. We passed a troika of potted ferns, and I was congratulating Eddie, silently, for using his ill-gotten profits for quality-of-life office accessories like potted palms, when I noticed an administrative assistant I recognized.

  Deanna. Remember her? If you don’t, you should lay off the sauce, gentle reader, because she was the character who told me about the plot to poison the water supply. The character who later became a hooker down by the Gowanus Canal. Have to say, considering the state of most of the people in the boroughs, Deanna was looking really great. I mean, she must have had some reconstructive dentistry, because back when I interviewed her, she had fewer teeth than fingers. Now she had on a slinky silk blouse, and what looked from this angle like a miniskirt. She still had long sleeves, of course. We recognized one another at the same moment, with a kind of disgust. I saw her eyes widen; I saw her glance quickly around herself. To make sure no one noticed. Was she working for Eddie now? Was she another employee drafted into the harem?

  Then in the kind of frozen moment that can only happen in an era of completely subjective time, I began to understand that there was a commotion beginning around me, a commotion that had to do, I think, with Jesse Simons and Ernst Wentworth, who had remained so silent during the prior hour of torture and kidnapping that I had forgotten they were orbiting around me at all. They knew, I’d learned, what I knew; they saw what I saw. And I heard Jesse say to Ernst, No, I have to do it, she’s a woman, I don’t want to hear about any guys shooting any women. And Jesse Simons strode out of my memory, giving me a mournful glance on the way. Jesse, turns out, was carrying an enormous pistol, with a silencer on the end, and as soon as she was on the scene, I could see the Cortez guys also moving into position, with their submachine guns, there was a lot of yelling, someone was yelling Get him out of here, get him out of here, as if by removing me from the room, it would take Deanna of the picture, out of the story. I hung onto a desk. They beat on me with the butt ends of submachine guns, and I looked up just in time to see Deanna, whatever her surname was, if she even had a surname, disappear, at the muffled hiss and report of the silencer. The spot where Deanna had been sitting was emptied, and a plastic tape dispenser that she’d been holding in her hand was suspended briefly in midair. It fell to the wall-to-wall with a muffled thud. The men and women i
n the typing pool sent up a scream, many hands fluttered to gaping mouths. And that was when Cortez’s people opened fire on the room. Cleaning out as many witnesses as they could get. As with Jesse and Ernst, who didn’t want to leave Deanna alive to inform on their plan, Cortez didn’t want any mnemonic jockeys recalling the scene. As if the solution to the disorder of time was the elimination of all possible perceivers of time. I want to allow a dignified space into the story where the Cortez typing pool was massacred, so if I move on with the facts, don’t think that I don’t know that all those people had families. Because I know.

  Someone got hold of my feet, because I tried to make a quick escape myself, and they were swearing at me, dragging me down the corridor toward some blank, faceless office cubicle, where I too would be killed. Meanwhile, Ernst Wentworth, like the angelic presence that he was, again had the job of explanation: “Deanna knew about the trip to the water supply, for which we’re embarking now, with many thanks to you for helping us to close the loophole. You were the only person who knew the identity of this informer. Jesse is sticking with you for the last few minutes, because there’s one more thing you have to learn before you’re done, and then, Kevin, you’re a free man, with a load of forgetting in your future. I hope you write comic books or start a rock-and-roll band in your garage. And I hope you do it all somewhere far away from here.”

  Then the office door opened in.