That’s what Albertine was whispering in his ear.
Large-scale drug dealing, it’s sort of like beta testing. There are unscrupulous people around. Nobody knows how a chemical is going to behave until the guinea pigs have lined up. FDA thinks they know, when they rubber-stamp some compound that makes you grow back the hair you lost during chemotherapy. But they know nothing. Try giving your drug to a hundred and fifty thousand disenfranchised members of the new middle-class poor in a recently devastated American city. Do it every day for almost a year. Allow people to mix in randomly their favorite inert substances.
There were lots of stories. Lots of different experiences. Lots of fibs, exaggerations, innuendos, rumors. Example: not only did Albertine cause bad memories as frequently as good memories — this was the lore — but she also allowed you to remember the future. This is what Tara told me when she assigned me the 2,500 words. “Find out if it’s true. Find out if we can get to the future on it.”
“What would you do with it?”
“None of your business,” she said, and then, like she was covering her tracks, “I’d see if I was ever going to get a promotion.”
Well, here’s another example. The story of Deanna, whose name I’m changing for her protection: “I was going to church after the blast, you know, because I was kind of feeling like God should be doing something about all the heartache. I mean, maybe that’s simpleminded or something. I don’t care. I was in church, and it was a beautiful place; any church still standing was a beautiful place when you had those horrible clouds overhead all the time and everybody getting sick. The fact of the matter is, while I was there in church, during what should have been a really calm time, instead of thinking that the Gospels were good news, I was having a vision. I don’t know what else to call it. It was like in the movies, when the movie goes into some kind of flashback, except in this vision I saw myself driving home from church, and I saw a car pulling ahead of me out onto the road by the reservoir, and I had this feeling that the car pulling out toward the reservoir, which was a twenty-year-old model of one of those minivans, was some kind of bad omen, you know? So I went to my priest and I told him what I thought, that this car had some bad intention, at least in my mind’s eye, you know. I could see it; I could see that Jesus was telling me this, better watch out at the reservoir. Some potion was going to be emptied into the reservoir. I could see it, I have seen it. The guys doing it, they were emptying jugs in and they definitely had mustaches. They were probably from some desert country. The priest took me to the bishop, and I repeated everything I knew, about the Lord and what he had told me, and so I had an audience with the archbishop. The archbishop said, ‘You have to tell me if Jesus really told you this. Did Jesus tell you personally? Is this a genuine message from the Christ?’ In this office with a lot of dusty books on the dusty shelves. You could tell that they were all really hungry to be in the room with the word of the Christ, and who wouldn’t feel that way? Everybody is desperate, right? But then one of them says, ‘Roll up your sleeves, please.’”
Deanna was shown the door. Because of the needle tracks. Now she’s working down by the Gowanus Expressway.
The archbishop did give the tip to the authorities, however, just to be on the safe side, and the authorities did stop a Ford Explorer on the way to the reservoir in Katonah. And Deanna’s story was just one along these lines. Many Albertine users began reporting “memories” of things that were yet to happen. Outcomes of elections, declines in various international stocks, the intensity of the upcoming hurricane season. The dealers, whether skeptical or believing on this point, saw big profits in mythology. Because garbage heads and gamblers often live right next door to one another, know what I mean? One vice is like another. Soon there were those scraggly guys that you used to see at the track. These guys were all looking to cop Albertine from the man in Red Hook or East New York, and they were sitting like autistics in a room with Sheetrock torn from the walls, no electricity, no running water, people pissing themselves, refusing food, and they were in search of the name of the greyhound that was going to take the next race. Maybe they could bet the trifecta? Teeth were falling out of the heads of these bettors, and their hair was falling out, because they believed if they just hung on long enough, they would get the vision.
Now, that’s marketing.
Logically speaking, there were some issues with a belief system like this. On Albertine, the visions of the past were mixed up with the alleged future, of course. And sometimes these were nightmarish visions. You had to know where to cast your gaze. There was no particular targeting of receptors. The drug wasn’t advanced. It was like using a lawnmower to harvest wildflowers. I shook one girl awake, Cassandra, down in the Hot Zone in Bed-Stuy. I knew Cassandra was a bullshit name, the kind of name you’d tell a reporter. It was a still night, coming on toward December, bitter cold, because the debris cloud had really fucked with global warming, and I was walking around dictating into a digital recorder, okay? The streets were uninhabited. I mean, take a city from eight million down to four and a half million, suddenly everything seems kind of empty. And this is a pedestrian town anyhow. Now more than ever. I was on my way to interview an epidemiologist who claimed that while on Albertine he’d had a memory of the proper way to eradicate the drug. He’d tell me only if I would remunerate him. And maybe Tara would reimburse me, because I had run through most of the few hundred dollars I had in cash before my bank was wiped off the map. I’d already sold blood and volunteered for a dream lab.
But on the way to the epidemiologist, I saw this girl nodding out on a swing, an old wooden swing, the kind that usually gets stolen in the projects. Over by a middle school in the Hot Zone. I picked up her arm; she didn’t even seem to notice at first. I turned it over. Like I couldn’t tell from the rings under the eyes, those black bruises that said, This one has remembered too much. I checked her arms anyway. Covered with lesions.