“Okay, chump,” a bike messenger said to me. “Free to go.”
The door opened, and down a corridor I went, wearing handcuffs, back the way I’d come, like I could unlearn what I had learned — that I had the taste for the drug, and that the past, except for the part I saw while high, was woefully lost. I’d been addicted by the drug overlord of my city, and I was standing on his assembly-line floor again, though now Cassandra, or whoever she was, was missing, and the voice of the Cortez television announcer rang out, observing the following on the terms of my new employment: “We want you to learn the origin of Albertine, we want you to write down this origin and all the rest of the history of Albertine, from its earliest days to the present time, and we don’t want you to use any fancy language or waste any time, we just want you to write it down. And because what you’re going to do is valuable to us, we are prepared to make it worth your while. We’re going to give you plenty of our product as a memory aid, and we will give you a generous per diem. You’ll dress like a man, you’ll consider yourself a representative of Eddie Cortez, you’ll avoid disrespectful persons and institutions. Remember, it’s important for you to write and not worry about anything else. You fashion the sentences, you make them sound like how regular people talk, we’ll look after the rest.”
“Sounds cool,” I said. “Especially since I’m already doing that for someone else.”
“No, you aren’t doing it for somebody else, you are doing it for us. Nobody else exists. The skin magazine doesn’t exist, your friends don’t exist. Your family doesn’t exist. We exist.”
I could feel how weak my legs were. I could feel the sweat trickling down the small of my back, soaking through my T-shirt. I was just hanging on. Because that’s what my family did, they hung on. My grandfather, he left behind his country. My father, you never saw the guy sweat. My mother, she was on a plane that had to make an emergency landing once; she didn’t even give it a second thought, as far as I could tell. Representatives of the Cortez cartel were tracking me on a monitor somewhere, or on some sequence of handheld computers, watching me, and they were broadcasting their messages to staff people who could be trusted.
Who knew how many other people in the Eddie Cortez operation were being treated the way I was being treated today? Bring this guy into the fold, conquer him, if not, neutralize him, leave him out in the rubble of some building somewhere. It was an operation staffed by guys who all had guns, stun guns, and cattle prods, real guns with bullets that could make an abstract expressionist painting out of a guy like me, and I was trying to get the fuck out of there before I was dead, and I could barely think of anything else. Now they were taking me down this long hall, and it wasn’t the corridor I was in before, because the building had all these layers, and it was hard to know where you were, relative to where you had been before, or maybe this is just the way I felt because of what the voice on the loudspeaker said next.
Remember to be vigilant about forgetting.
Which reminds me to remind you of the diachronous theory of Albertine abuse patterns, which of course recognizes the forgetting as a social phenomenon coincident, big-time, with a certain pattern of Albertine penetration into the population. The manifestation of forgetting is easy to explain, see, because it has to do with bolstering the infrastructure of memory elsewhere. Like anyone who’s a drinker knows, you borrow courage when you’re drinking; you are emboldened for the night but depleted in the morning. Addiction is about credit. That amazing thing you said at the bar last night, that thing you would never say in person to anyone, it’s a one-time occurrence because tomorrow, in the light of dawn, when you are separated from your wallet and your money, when your girlfriend hates you, you’ll be unable to say that courageous thing again because you are wrung out and lying on a mattress without sheets. You borrowed that courage, and it’s gone.
So the thing with Albertine was that at night, under its influence, you remembered. Tonight the past was glorious and indelible — Serena in the park with the rum and the bittersweet revelation of her boyfriend — tonight was the beauty of almost being in love, which was a great beauty, but tomorrow your memory was full of holes. Not a blackout, more like a brownout. You could remember that you once knew things, but they were indistinct now, and the understanding of them just flew out the window. It was like the early part of jet lag, or Thorazine. Why did I come into this room? I was going to get something. Suddenly you had no idea, you stood looking at the pile of clothes in front of the dresser, clothes that were fascinating colors, that old pair of jeans, very interesting. Look at that color. It’s so blue. Maybe you needed to do something, but you didn’t, and you realized that things were going on in your body, and they were inexplicable to you. You were really thirsty. Maybe you ought to have had some juice, but on the way to the bottle of water on the table, you forgot.
The history of Albertine became a history of forgetting. A geometrically increasing history of forgetfulness. The men in charge of its distribution, by reason of the fact that they started using it for organizational reasons, to increase market share, they were as forgetful as the hardcore users, who after a while couldn’t remember their own addresses, except occasionally, and who were therefore on the street, asking strangers, Do you know my name? Do you happen to know where I live? The history of the drug, requested by Cortez, was therefore important. How else to plan for the future? If the research and development team at Cortez enterprises didn’t forget how to read, then, as long as they had a hard copy of the history, everything was cool. I would write the story; they’d lock it away somewhere.
Before I had a chance to agree or disagree, I was going down in the industrial elevator, alone, and it was like being shat out the ass of the smelting plant. It was dawn, with the light coming up under the lip of that relentless cloud. Dawn, the only time these days there was any glimmer on the horizon, before the debris clouds massed again. But listen, I have to come clean on something. I missed Cassandra. That’s what I was feeling. She’d sold me out to Eddie Cortez, made me his vassal, like she was his vassal. Trust and fealty, these words were just memories. So was Cassandra, just a memory. A lost person. Who’d reassured me for a few minutes. Who’d have sold out anyone for more drugs and a few minutes on an industrial sex machine. Was I right that there was something there? For an Albertine second, the slowest second on the clock, it seemed that she was the threshold to some partially forgotten narrative, some inchoate past, some incomplete sign, like light coming in through window blinds. Boy, I was stupid, getting sentimental about the mistress of a drug kingpin.
Daylight seemed serious, practical. It was the first time I could remember being out in the daylight since I started compiling these notes. On the way back to the armory, I waited on the line up the block for the one pay phone that still worked. Usually there were fifty or sixty people out front. All of them simmering with rage because the connection was sketchy, the phone often disconnected, and everyone listened to the other callers, to the conversations. Imagine the sound of the virtual automaton’s computerized warmth: We’re sorry, the parties you are contacting are unable to accept the call. Who was sorry exactly? The robot? Guy holding the receiver shouted, “I need to know the name of that prescription! I’m not a well man!” Then the disconnection. A woman begged her husband to take her back. Disconnection. And a kid who had lost his parents, trying to locate his grandparents. Disconnection. The phone booth offered that multitude of sad stories.