We were going over the bridge, the Kosciusko, where there was only foot traffic these days. Down Metropolitan Ave., from Queens to Brooklyn, over by where the tanks used to be. Not far from the cemetery. You know what you might have seen there, right? Used to be the skyline; you used to see it there every day, caught in traffic, listening to the all-news format. Maybe you got bored of the skyline rising above you, maybe it was like a movie backdrop, there it was again; you’d seen it so many times that it meant nothing, skyscrapers like teeth on the insipid grin of enterprise, cemetery and skyscrapers, nice combination. The greatest city in the world? Once my city was the greatest, but this was not the view anymore, on the night that I walked across the bridge with Cassandra. No more view, right? Because there were the debris clouds, and there was the caustic rain that fell on all the neighborhoods, a rain that made everybody sick afterward, a rain that made people choke and puke. People wore gas masks on the Kosciusko. Gas masks were the cut-rate fashion statement. South of Citicorp Center, whose tampon applicator summit had been blown clean off, there was nothing. Get it? You could see all the way to Jersey during the day. If the wind was blowing right. Edgewater. You could see the occasional lights of Edgewater, NJ. There was no Manhattan to see, and there was no electricity in Manhattan where the buildings remained. The generator plant downtown had been obliterated. Emergency lights, not much else.
People just turned their backs on Manhattan. They forgot about that island, which was the center of nothing, except maybe the center of society ladies with radiation burns crowding the trauma units at the remaining hospitals. Manhattan was just landfill now. And there are no surprises in a landfill. Unless you’re a seagull.
Outer boroughs, that was where the action was. Like this place where we were going. It’d been a smelting plant, and the police cars were lined up around it; the cops were all around it like they were the blue border of imagination. It was a ghost factory, and I dictated these impressions because the digital recorder was still recording. When I played back my notes, there was a section of the playback that was nothing but a sequence of words about autumn: soaping windows, World Series, school supplies, yellow jackets, presidential elections, hurricane season. Who was I trying to kid? I was pretending I was writing a story about Albertine. I was writing nothing.
Cassandra was mumbling: “They were fine-tuning some interrogation aids, or they had made a chemical error with some antidepressants or with ECT technologies, or they saw it in the movies and just duplicated the effects. They figured out how to do it with electrodes, or they figured out how to prompt certain kinds of memories, and then they thought perhaps they could coerce certain kinds of testimony with electrodes. They could torture certain foreign nationals, force confessions from these people, and the confessions would be freely signed because the memories would be true. Who’s going to argue with a memory?”
“How do you know all of this?”
We stood in front of a loading-dock elevator, and the cops were frozen around us, hands on holsters — cops out front, nervous cops, cops waiting on the loading dock, cops everywhere — and the shadows in the elevator shaft danced because the elevator was coming for us. The elevator was the only light.
“I can see,” Cassandra said.
“In the big sense?”
The only time she smiled in the brief period I knew her, when I was up close enough to see her lesions. People were so busy firing chemicals into their bodies, so busy trying to live in the past, that their cancers were blossoming. Or they stopped worrying about whether the syringe was dirty. And they stopped going to the clinics or the emergency rooms. They let themselves vanish out of the world, as if by doing so they could get closer to some point of origin: your mom on your fourth birthday, smiling, holding out her hands, Darling, it’s your birthday!
She said, “Think biochemistry,” and she had the eyedropper out again. “Think quantum mechanics. What would happen if you could harness some of the electrical charges in the brain by bombarding it with certain kinds of free particles?”
Her eyes were hopelessly bloodshot. She had a mean case of pinkeye. And her pupils were dilated.
“And because it’s all about electrical charges, it’s all about power, right? And about who has the power.”
I was holding her hand, don’t know why. Trying to stop her from dribbling more of that shit into her eye. I wasn’t under any particular illusion about what was happening. I was lonely. Why hadn’t I gone back up to Massachusetts? Why hadn’t I called my cousins across town to see if they were okay? I was hustling. I knew things, but I didn’t know when to stop researching and when to get down to work. There was always another trapdoor in the history of Albertine, another theory to chase down, some epidemiologist with a new slant. Some street addict who would tell you things, if you paid.
I knew, for example, that a certain Eduardo Cortez had consolidated himself as a kingpin of the Albertine trade, at least in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that he occasionally drove his confederates around in military convoy. Everyone claimed to have seen the convoy, Jeeps and Hummers. Certain other dealers in the affected neighborhoods, like Mnemonic X in Fort Greene, the 911 Gang in Long Island City, a bunch of them had been neutralized, as the language goes. I knew all of this, and still I walked into the ghost factory in Greenpoint like I was somebody, not an Asian kid sent by a soft-core porn mag, who rode up in the elevator with a girl whose skin looked like a relief map, a prostitute in a neighborhood where almost everyone was a prostitute. As Fox, Bob’s dealer, told me before he disappeared, You’d be amazed what a woman will do for a dealer.
“When Cortez tied off, you know, everything changed,” Cassandra said. It was one of those elevators that took forever. She’d been thinking what I was thinking before I even got to saying it. Her lips were cracked; her teeth were bad. She had once been brilliant, I could tell, or maybe that’s just how I wanted it to be. Maybe she’d been brilliant; maybe she’d been at a university once. But now we used different words of praise for those we admired: shrewd, tough. And the most elevated term of respect: alive. Cortez was Dominican, alive, and thus he was part of the foul-is-fair demographics of Albertine. He was from nowhere, raised up in a badly depressed economy. Cortez had been a bike messenger and then a delivery truck driver, and some of his associates insisted that his business was still about message delivery. We just trying to run a business.
I’d seen the very site of Cortez’s modest childhood and current residence recently; took me almost ten hours to get there, which tells you nothing. It’s a big mistake to measure space in time, after all. Because times change. Still, Cortez had the longest subway ride of anyone in the drug trade. If he wanted to go look after his operatives in Brooklyn, he had to get all the way from northern Manhattan to Brooklyn, and most of those lines didn’t run anymore. Under the circumstances, a military convoy was just a good investment.
Washington Heights. Up north. Kids playing stickball in the street using old-fashioned boom microphones for bats. There were gangsters with earpieces on stoops up and down the block. What were the memories of these people like? Did they drop, as the addicts put it? Did they use? And what were Cortez’s memories like? Memories of middleweight prizefighting at the gym up the block? Maybe. Some drinking with the boys. Some whoring around with the streetwalkers on Upper Broadway. Assignations with Catholic girls in the neighborhood? Cortez had a bad speech impediment, everybody said. Would Albertine make it so that he, in memory, could get as far back as the time before speech acquisition, to the sweet days before the neighborhood kids made fun of him for the way he talked? Could he teach his earlier self better how to say the s of American English? To speak with authority? One tipster provided by my magazine had offered sinister opinions about the appearance of Cortez, this Cortez of the assumed name. This tipster, whispering into a rare land line, had offered the theory that the culture of Albertine itself changed when Cortez appeared, just as did the culture of the continent when the original Cortez, great explorer, bearer of a shipload of smallpox, arrived. This was, of course, a variation on the so-called diachronous theory of abuse patterns that had turned up in the medical journals recently.