Sadly, instead of illuminating the life of Addict Number One, it’s my job now to describe the pattern of the dispersal of his brains. The pattern that was exactly like the pattern of dispersal of radioactive material in lower Manhattan. Cortez held the revolver to the head of Addict Number One, whose expression of complete misunderstanding and disbelief was heartrending, enough so to prove that he had no idea what his murder meant, and Cortez pulled the trigger of the revolver, and Addict Number One fell over like he had never once been a living thing. Fucking punk-ass junkie, Cortez intoned. Were the baroque memories of Addict Number One now part of all that tissue splattered on the dog run in Tompkins Square? Was that a memory splashed on that retriever there, gunking up its fur, an electrical impulse, a bit of energy, withering in a pool of gore in a city park? I saw it because Cortez saw it, and Cortez gave the memory to Cassandra, who gave it to me: corpus callosum and basal ganglia on the dogs, on the lawn, and screaming women, the homeless army drawn up near, gazing, silent, as Addict Number One, slain by a drug dealer in memory only, weltered, gasping. His memories slain with him.
It was like this. Even though the memory was just a memory, its effect was real. As real as if it were all happening now. This is like saying that nine-tenths of the universe is invisible, I know. But just bear with me. Cortez’s accomplishment was that, according to Cassandra, he’d learned from informers that Addict Number One was once a real person, with a real past (went to NYU, and his name was Paley, and he wanted to make movies), after which he’d located a picture of Addict Number One by reading an obituary from the time after Addict Number One was already dead.
Must have been pretty tempting to try to fabricate a memory about Addict Number One. Oh yeah, I saw him on the Christopher Street pier that time. Or I saw him on my way to Hunts Point to visit my grandma. Cortez may have tried this, perhaps a dozen times, skin-popping Albertine in an unfurnished room in East Harlem, vainly attempting to put a bullet in the head of an imagined encounter with Addict Number One, but no. Cortez had to go through every face in every crowd, all the remembered crowds of which he had ever been a part, every face passed on Broadway, every prone body on the Bowery, every body in the stands of Yankee Stadium. He shot more, spent most of the money from his bike messenger job on this jones for narrative, and then one day he was certain.
He was killing roaches in his empty apartment when suddenly he knew. He was prying up a floorboard to look for roaches and he knew. As certainly as he knew the grid of his city. He’d walked by Addict Number One one day, when he was sixteen, in Tompkins Square. Far from his own neighborhood. On his way to a game of handball. He’d walked by him, he knew it. Not someone else, but him, Addict Number One. Guy looked like a faggot, the way Cortez told Cassandra later. All white guys looked like faggots as far as he was concerned, and he’d just as soon kill the punk-ass motherfucker for looking like a faggot as for any other reason, although there were plenty of other reasons. Main thing was that if he could figure out a way to kill Addict Number One in his memory, then a whole sequence of events would fail, like when Addict Number One hooked up with certain black guys in his neighborhood who had been fronting heroin up until that time and gave to them the correct chemical compound of Albertine, the secrets of the raw materials needed for the manufacture, the apparatus. If Cortez killed his ass, this future would not turn out to be the real future. If Cortez killed his ass, then Cortez would control the syndicate.
It would take even more time and money, more time doping, a solid six months, in fact, in his room, going through that whole sequence of his life, like that time with his neighbor, he told Cassandra. Over and over again, Eduardo had to deal with that drunken fuck neighbor, not even gonna say his name, Cortez would say to Cassandra, fighting off that memory when the guy, Eduardo’s alleged uncle, in the rubble of an abandoned building, exposed himself to little Eduardo, his droopy uncut penis, fucking guy couldn’t get hard no more, looked like a gizzard, and the uncle drunkenly pronounced that he was lonelier than any man had ever been, didn’t belong in this country, couldn’t go back to the island nation of his birth, no reason for a man to be as lonely as this man, no reason for this surfeit of loneliness, every day in every way, and would Eduardo make him feel comfortable for just this one day, treat him like a loving man this one time, because he was so lonely, had an aching in his heart that nothing could still, wouldn’t ask again, he swore, and took Eduardo, just a little compadre, just a wisp, couldn’t even lift an aluminum baseball bat, couldn’t lift a finger against the alleged uncle, took Eduardo for his goddess—you are my priestess, you are my goddess—and now Eduardo vowed that he would never suffer before any man the way he had with the uncle.
The syringe, the eyedropper, the concentric rings of the past. Again and again the uncle would attempt to seduce him. He was willing to go through that, a thousand times if he had to, until he had the gun on his person, in the waistband of his warm-up suit, and he was ready. He was sixteen, with fresh tattoos, and he’d been to mass that morning and he had a gun, and he was going to play handball, and he saw this white faggot in the dog run, and he just walked up to him like they never met. Though in truth it was like Eduardo Cortez knew him inside and out, and Eduardo wanted to make something out of himself, his life that was so lost up until then, where he was just a bike messenger, and the desperadoes of his neighborhood were all going to be working for him, and if they made one wrong move, he’d throw them off a fucking bridge, whatever bridges is still up, and if they touched the little girls in his neighborhood, that was another crime, for which he would exact a very high price, a mortal price, and the first priority, the long-term business plan was that Eduardo Cortez would be the guy that would make profits from memories, even if his own memories were bad. That was just how it was going to go, and I saw all this with Cassandra, that Cortez had managed by sheer brute force to murder a memory, splatter a memory like it was nothing at all.
One minute Addict Number One was wandering in the East Village, years before he was an addict, years before there even was an Albertine to cop, and he was thinking about how he was going to get funding for his digital-video project, and then, right in front of a bunch of dog walkers, the guy disappeared. This is the story, from the point of view of those who were not in on the cascading of memories. It’s one of the really great examples of public delusion when you read it in the online police records, like I did.
Witnesses insist that the victim, first referred to as Caucasian John Doe, later identified as Irving Paley of 433 East 9th St, was present on the scene, along with a Hispanic man in his teens, and then, abruptly, no longer present. “It’s as if he just vanished,” remarked one witness. Others concur. No body located thereafter. Apartment also completely emptied, possibly by assailant.