What’s this have to do with Eduardo Cortez? Well, it has to do with the fact that Cortez’s play for control of the Albertine cartel came exactly at the moment of highest density of deaths from Albertine overdose or drug interaction. I refer you back again to the diachronous theory of abuse patterns. See what I mean? The big question is how did Cortez, just by showing up, affect the way Albertine was used? The mixture of the chemical, if it’s even a chemical, certainly didn’t change all that much — had not changed during the course of the twelve months that it grew into a street epidemic. Can we attribute the differences in abuse patterns to any other factors? Why is it Cortez who seemed to be responsible for the blast’s intruding into everybody’s memory?
My notes for the magazine are all about my disbelief, my uncertainty. But I was holding Cassandra’s hand, prostitute in rags, woman with the skeletal body, while she was using the eyedropper, and I know this might seem like a hopeful gesture. Like some good could come of it all. I heard her sigh. The cage of the elevator, at a crawl, passed a red emergency light on the wall of the shaft. Hookers are always erotic about nonerotic things. Time, for example. The elsewhere of time was all over her, like she was coming to memories of a time before prostitution, and this was somehow really alluring. I was holding her hand. I was disoriented. I checked my watch. I mean I checked what day it was. I had been assigned to the Albertine story two weeks ago, according to my Rolex knockoff — which had miraculously survived the electromagnetic pulse — but I could swear that it had been just two days before that I’d been hanging out in the offices of the soft-core porn mag, the offices with the bulletproof glass and the robot receptionist out front. When had I last been back to the supply closet to sleep? When had I last eaten? Wasn’t it the night just passed, the evening with the footsteps in the corridor and the revelation about the silence of the blast? I was holding Cassandra’s hand because she had a tenuous link to the facts of Albertine and this seemed like the last chance to master the story, to get it down somehow, instead of being consumed by it.
This is my scoop, then. The scoop is that suddenly I saw what she was seeing.
Cassandra said, “Watch this.”
Pay close attention. I saw a close-up, in my head I saw it, like from some Web movie — a guy’s arm, a man’s arm, an arm covered with scars, almost furry it was so hairy, and then a hand pulling tight a belt around a biceps, jamming in a needle, depressing the plunger, a grunt of initial discomfort. Then the voice of the guy, thick accent, maybe a Dominican accent, announcing his threat: “I’m going back to the Lower East Side and I’m going to cap the motherfucker, see if I don’t.” Definite speech impediment. A problem with sibilance. You know? Then this guy, this dude, was looking over at Cassandra — she was in the scene, not in the elevator, where we were at least theoretically standing, but with Eduardo Cortez. She was his consort. He was taking her hand, there was a connection of hands, a circular movement of hands, and then Cassandra and I were on a street, and I saw Cortez in Tompkins Square Park, which doesn’t exist anymore, of course, and it was clear that he was searching out a particular white guy, and now, coming through the crowd, here was the guy, looked like an educated man, if you know what I mean, one of those East Village art-slumming dudes. Cortez was searching out this guy, who was kinda grungy, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, and it was all preordained, and now Cortez had found him.
Lights associated with the thrall of Cassandra’s recollection, phantom lights, auras. The particulars were like a migraine. Things were solarized; there were solar flares around the street lamps. We were bustling in and around the homeless army of Tompkins Square. I could hear my own panicky breathing. I was in a park that didn’t exist anymore, and I was seeing Cortez, and I was seeing this guy, this white guy — he had that look where one side of his face, the right side, was different from the other side, so that on the right side he seemed to be melancholy and placid, whereas on the left there was the faintest resemblance to a smirk at all times. The left side was all contorted, and maybe there were scars there, some kind of slasher’s jagged line running from the corner of his mouth to his ear, and Cassandra, I guess, was saying, “Let’s not do this, okay? Eduardo? Please? Eduardo? We can fix the problem another way.” Except that at the same moment she was saying to me, somehow outside of this memory I have of these events, she was saying, “Do you understand what you’re seeing?”
I said, “He’s going to—”
“—Kill the guy.”
“And that guy is?”
“Addict Number One.”
“Who?”
“That guy is the first user,” she said. “The very first one.”
“And why is he important?”
Cassandra said, “For the sake of control. You don’t get it, do you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Addict Number One is being killed in a memory.”
Something coursed in me like a flash flood. A real perception, maybe, or just the blunt feelings of sympathetic drug abuse. When I tried to figure out the enormity of what Cassandra was telling me, I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand the implications, couldn’t understand why she would tell me what she was telling me, because to talk was to die, as far as I could tell, because Fox was dead, Bob was dead, the Mnemonic X boys had been completely wiped out, probably fifty guys, all disappeared, same day, same time, reporters from my old paper were dead. Chasing the story of Albertine was to chase time itself, and time guarded its secrets.
“How’s that possible? That’s not possible! How are you going to kill someone in a memory? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Right. It doesn’t make any sense, but it happened. And it could happen again.”
“But a memory isn’t a place. It’s nowhere but in someone’s head. There’s not a movie running somewhere. You can’t jump up into the screen and start messing with the action.”
“How do you know? Just watch and you’ll see.”
I was thinking, see, about the diachronous theory. The pattern of abuse and dispersal of Albertine was widest and most threatening at the instant of the murder of Addict Number One, I was guessing, which was about to be revealed as a murder — the first and only murder, I hoped, that I ever needed to witness, because even if he was a smirking guy, someone unliked or ridiculed, even if he was just a drug addict, whatever, Addict Number One was a prodigious rememberer. As the first full-scale Albertine addict, I learned later, he had catalogued loads of memories, for example, light in the West Village, which in July is perfect at sunset on odd-numbered streets in the teens and twenties. It was true. Addict Number One had learned this. If you stood on certain corners and looked west in summer, at dusk, you would see that the city of New York had sunsets that would have animated the great landscape painters. Or how about the perfect bagel? Addict Number One had sampled many of the fresh bagels of the city of New York, and he compiled notes about the best bagels, which were found at a place on University and Thirteenth Street. They were large, soft, and warm. Addict Number One devoted pages to the taste of the bagel as it went into your mouth.