Good thing those records were stored on a server in Queens. Since One Police Plaza is dust.
The guys in the smelting plant were all wearing uniforms. They were the uniforms of bike messengers, as if the entire story somehow turned on bike messengers. Bike messenger as conveyor of meaning. There were these courtiers in the empire of Eduardo Cortez, and the lowest echelon was the beat cop, a phalanx of whom encircled the building, sending news of anyone in the neighborhood into command central by radio. And then there were the centurions of the empire, the guys in the bike messenger uniforms, wearing the crash helmets of bike messengers. All done up in Lycra, like this was some kind of superhero garb. When the elevator door swung back, it was clear that we had definitely penetrated to the inner sanctum of Eduardo Cortez, as if by merely thinking. And this inner sanctum was inexplicable, comic, and deadly. Sure, it was possible that I had now been researching for two weeks and no longer needed food or sleep in order to do it. Sure, maybe I was just doing a really great job, and, since I was an honest guy who seemed cool and nonthreatening, maybe I was allowed into places that the stereotypical Albertine abuser would not ordinarily be allowed. But it seemed unlikely. This was evidently one of the fabled five mansions of Cortez, among which he shuttled, depending on his whim, like a despot from the coca-producing latitudes.
“Eddie,” Cassandra sang out into the low lighting of the smelting-plant floor, “I brought him like you said.”
Which one was Eddie? The room was outfitted with gigantic machines, suspension devices, ramrods, pistons thundering, wheels turning, like some fabulous Rube Goldberg future, and there was no center to it, no throne, no black leather sofa with a leopard print quilt thrown over it, and none of the bike messengers in the room looked like the Cortez of my memory, the Cortez of Tompkins Square Park, on his way to play handball. Perhaps he’d had himself altered by a cosmetic surgeon with a drug problem and a large debt. In fact, in scanning the faces of the dozens of bike messengers in the room, it seemed that they all looked similar, all of European extraction, all harried, with brown hair on the verge of going gray, all with blue eyes, a little bit paunchy. Were they robots? Were they street toughs from the bad neighborhoods? They were, it turned out, the surgically altered army of Eddie Cortez foot soldiers, who made it possible for him to be in so many places at so many times, in all the fabled five mansions. Eddie was a condition of the economy now, not a particular person.
At the remark from Cassandra, several of the bike messengers gathered in the center of the room. Maybe they were all modified comfort robots, so that Eddie could use them professionally during the day and fuck them later at night. One of them finally asked, with a blank expression, “His writing any good?”
Cassandra turned to me. “They want to know if you’re a good writer.”
“Uh, sure,” I said, answering to the room. “Sure. I guess. Uh, are you wanting me to write something? What do you have in mind exactly?”
More huddling. No amount of time was too lengthy, in terms of negotiation, and this was probably because time was no longer all that important to Cortez and the empire. All time present was now sucked up into the riptide of the past. Furthermore, since it was now possible that Eddie could disappear at any moment, like Addict Number One had, when someone else figured out his technique for dealing with the past, he had apparently deliberately moved to ensure an eternal boring instant where everybody looked the same and where nothing particularly happened. Events, any kind of events, were dangerous. Eddie’s fabled five mansions featured a languid, fixed now. He took his time. He changed his appearance frequently, as well as the appearance of all those around him. That way he could control memories. So his days were apparently taken up with dye jobs, false beards, colored contact lenses, with shopping for items relating to disguise and imposture and disfigurement.
A bike messenger goon addressed me directly on the subject of writing about Albertine.
“Funny you should, uh, suggest it,” I said. “Because I have been assigned to write a history, and that’s why I got in contact with Cassandra in the first place. . ”
Everyone looked at her. Faint traces of confusion.
Have I described her well enough? In the half light, she was a goddess, even though I figure addicts always shine in low lighting. In the emergency lighting of Eddie’s lair, Cassandra was the doomed forecaster, as her name implied. She was the whisperer of syllables in a tricky meter. She was the possibility of possibilities. I knew that desire for me must have been a thing that was slumbering for a really long time. It was just desire for desire, but now it was ungainly. I felt some stirring of possible futures with Cassandra, didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I was guilty of treating women like ideas in my search for Albertine. In fact, I knew so little about her that it was only just then that I thought about the fact that she was Asian too. From China, or maybe her parents or grandparents were from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Because now she swept back her black and maroon hair, and I could see her face. Her expression, which was kind of sad.
They all laughed. The bike messengers. I was the object of hilarity.
“Cassandra,” they said. “That’s a good one. What’s that, like some Chinese name?”
“You did good, girl. You’re a first-class bitch, Albertine, and so it’s time for a treat, if you want.”
A broadcaster’s voice. Like Eddie had managed to hire network talent to make his announcements.
“Wait,” I said. “Her name is. . ”
And then I got it. They named it after her.
“You named the drug after her?”
“Not necessarily,” the broadcasting voice said. “Might have named her after the drug. We can’t really remember the sequence. And the thing is, there are memories either way.”
“She doesn’t look like an Albertine to me.”
“The fuck you know, canary,” the broadcaster said, and suddenly I heard Eddie in there, heard his attitude. Canary. A reporter’s nickname.
Cassandra was encircled by bike messengers and hefted up to a platform in the midst of the Rube Goldberg devices. Her rags were removed from her body by certain automated machines, prosthetic digits, and she was laid out like a sacrificial victim, which I guess is what she was, one knee bent, like in classical sculpture, one arm was stretched above her head. No woman is more poignant than the woman about to be sacrificed, but even this remark makes me more like Eddie, less like a lover.
“Your pleasure?” a bike messenger called out.
“Slave Owner, please,” said Cassandra.
“Good choice. Four horsepower, fifteen volts, three hundred fifty rpm.”
I covered my ears with my hands, and except for the glimpse of the steel bar that was meant to raise her ankles over her head, I saw no more — for the simple reason that I didn’t want to have to remember.
The bike messengers of the Cortez cartel had a different idea for me. I was led down a corridor to the shooting gallery. I was finally going to get my taste.
The guy holding my arms said, “Thing is, all employees got to submit to a mnemonic background check. . ”
A week or so before, I’d read a pamphlet by a specialist in medicinal applications of Albertine. There’s always a guy like this, right, a Dr. Feelgood, an apologist. He was on the Upper West Side, and his suggestion was that when getting high, one should always look carefully around the room and eliminate bad energies. Set and setting, in fact, were just as important with Albertine as with drugs in the hallucinogenic family: