There were traditional kinds of memories before the appearance of Albertine, namely identity builders, according to these medical theorists. Like that guy at Brooklyn College, the government anthropologist of Albertine, Ernst Wentworth, PhD. Even repressed memory syndrome, in his way of thinking, is an identity builder, because in repressed memory syndrome you learn ultimately to empower yourself, in that you are identifying past abusers and understanding the ramifications of their misdeeds. Empowerment is the kind of terminology Wentworth used. A repetition of stressful memories is, according to his writing, an attempt by an identity to arrive at a solution to stress. Even a calamity, the collapse of a bridge, when remembered by one who has plunged into an icy river, is an identity builder, in that it reassures the remembering subject. The here and now puts him in the position of being alive all over again, no matter how painful it is to be alive. The Wentworth identity-building theory was the prevailing theory of memory studies, up until Albertine.
Since Albertine arrived on the scene after the blast, theorists eventually needed to consider the blast in all early Albertine phenomena. Figures, right? One night I felt that I’d started to understand these theories in a dramatic way, in my heart, or what was left of it, instead of in my head. I was at the armory, where I slept in a closet, really — used to be a supply closet, and there were still some supplies in there, some rug-cleaning solvents, some spot removers, extra towels. You never know when you might need this stuff. Anyway, the halls outside the supply closet echoed; you could hear every whisper in the halls of the armory, formerly an area for the storage of munitions. You could hear people coming and going. It wasn’t and isn’t a great place to live, when you consider that I used to have a studio in the East Village. But compared to living in the great hall itself, where mostly people tried to erect cubicles for themselves, cubicles made out of cardboard or canvas or Sheetrock, the supply closet was not so bad. The privilege of doling out closets had fallen to an Albertine addict called Bertrand, and when I fixed up Bertrand with Fox and a few other dealers, I got bumped up to the supply closet right away. Any moths came after my remaining shirts and sweaters, I had all the insecticide I’d need.
This night I’m describing, I had a breakthrough of dialectical reasoning: I was hearing the blast. You know the conventional wisdom about combat veterans, loud noises suggesting the sharp crack of submachine gun fire, all that? I thought just the opposite. That certain silences re-created the blast, because there’s something about fission, you know, it’s soundless in a way, it suggests soundlessness, it’s a violence contained in the opposite of violence, big effects from preposterously small changes. Say you were one of the four million who survived, you were far enough away that the blast, heat, and radiation could do their damage before the sound reached you, wherever you were. So it follows that the sound of the explosion would be best summoned up in no sound at all. The pauses in the haggard steps of the insomniacs of the armory walking past the door to my closet, this sound was the structured absence in what all our memories were seeking to suppress or otherwise avoid: the truth of the blast.
I’m not a philosopher. But my guess was that eventually people would start remembering the blast. You know? How could it be otherwise? I’m not saying I’m the person who came up with the idea; maybe the government mole did. Maybe Ernst Wentworth did. I’m saying, I guess, that all memories verged on being memories of the blast, like footsteps in the echoing corridor outside my supply closet. Memories were like downpours of black raindrops. All noises were examples of the possibility of the noise of the blast, which was the limit of all possibilities of sound, and thus a limit on all possibilities of memory. For a lot of people, the blast was so traumatic they couldn’t even remember where they were at the time, and I’m one of those people, I’m afraid, in case you were wondering. I know I was heading out to Jersey for a software convention in the New Brunswick area. At least, that’s what I think I was doing. But I don’t know how I got back. When I came to, Manhattan was gone.
People began to have memories of the blast while high. And people began to die of certain memories on the drug. Makes perfect sense. And this is part of the diachronous theory of abuse patterns that I was talking about before. First, Conrad Dixon, a former academic himself, was found dead in his apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, no visible sign of death, except that he’d just been seen scamming a bunch of dealers in Crown Heights. Was the death by reason of poisonous additives in the drug cocktail? That’d be a pretty good theory if he were the only person who died this way, but all at once a lot of people started dying, and it was my contention, anyhow, that they were remembering the blast. There were the bad memories in an ordinary fit of Albertine remembering, and then there was the memory of this moment of all moments, a sense of the number of people eliminated in the carnage, a sense of the kind of motive of the guy or guys, men or women, who managed to smuggle the dirty uranium device into town and then have it delivered, et cetera. An innocent thing when Conrad Dixon, or the others like him, first did what they did. In the early curve of the epidemic, everybody used Albertine alone because memories are most often experienced alone. And the recitation of them, well, it was just pretty dulclass="underline" Oh, let me tell you about the time I was in Los Angeles and I saw such and such a starlet at the table next to me, or about the time I broke my arm trying to white-water raft. Or whatever your pathetic memory is. It’s all the same, the brimming eyes of your daughter when she was a toddler and fell and got a bump on her head, I don’t give a fuck, because I know what happened with Conrad Dixon, which is that he put the needle in his arm and then he was back in Midtown and looking down at the lower part of the island where he had spent his entire youth. A good thing, sure, that Conrad, that day, had to take that programmer’s certification test up at Columbia, because instead of becoming a faint shadow on the side of some building on Union Square, he could see the entire neighborhood that he had worked in subsumed into perfect light, and he could feel the nausea rising in him, and he could see the cloud’s outstretched arms, and all the information in him was wiped aside, he was a vacuum of facts, a memory vacuum, and again and again he could see the light, feel the incineration, and he knew something about radiation that he hadn’t known before, about the surface of the stars. He knew that he was sick, knew that again he was going to have to live through the first few days, when everyone was suffering, their insides liquefying. Don’t make me walk you through it — the point is that Albertine gave back the blast, when Conrad had hoped never to experience it again. Conrad was so stuck in the loop of this recollection that he could do nothing else but die, because that was the end of the blast — whether in actual space or on the recollected plane, whether in the past or the present or the future, whether in ideas or reality — the blast was about death.