Soon it was my turn, and my father got on, man of few words.
“We told you not to call here anymore,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I haven’t called in. . ”
I tried to put it all together. How long? Measuring time had become sort of impossible. There was nothing to do but make a stab at it.
“. . three weeks.”
“We can’t give you anything more. Our own savings are nearly exhausted. You need to start thinking about how you’re going to get out of the jam you’re in without calling us every time it gets worse. It’s you who is making it worse. Understand? Think about what you’re doing!”
I could see the people behind me in the pay phone line leaning in toward the bad news, excited to get a few tidbits. Their own scrapes were not nearly as bad.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve told you before,” he said. “Don’t raise your voice with me.”
His own voice defeated, brittle.
“Put Mom on the line!”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let me talk to Mom!”
Then some more nonsense about how I had caused my mother unending sorrow, that it was her nature only to sacrifice, but I had squandered this generosity, had stamped up and down on it with my callousness, my American callousness, as if my family had not overcome innumerable obstacles to get me where I was. I made the selflessness of my heritage seem like a deluded joke. I had dishonored him by my shameful activities, et cetera, et cetera. It was as bad as if I had died during the blast.
A bona fide patriarchal dressing-down, of a sort I thought I had left behind long ago. I was watching the faces of the people in the line behind me, and their faces were reflecting my own. Incredulity. Confusion.
“Dad, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Listen to me.”
“You can’t call here every day with your preposterous lies. Your imagined webs of conspiracy. We won’t have it. We are exhausted. Your mother cannot get out of bed, and I am up at all hours frantic with worry about you. How are we supposed to live? Get some help!”
I smiled a befuddled smile for my audience, and I replaced the receiver. In midstream. Of course I hadn’t called my parents recently, hadn’t called them the day before, or the week before, or the week before that. Hadn’t called them often at all. My crime, in fact, was that because of shame about where I lived and what I was doing, I didn’t really call anyone anymore.
I looked at the next guy in line. A melancholy African American man, with a fringe of gray hair and eyeglasses patched with some duct tape. It was beginning to rain, of course, and I saw a blob of obsidian ooze splatter the surface of his glasses.
“I guess I just called them,” I said. “I mean, I guess I forgot that I called them.”
He pushed past me.
To forget was threatening now. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a forgetter. A forgetter meant just the one thing. A forgetter had abscesses in his arms, or a forgetter had sold off the last of his possessions and was trying to sell them a second time because he had forgotten that the apartment was already empty. The highest respect, the most admiration, was accorded those with perfect recall—that was part of the diachronous theory, or if it wasn’t yet, I predicted it would soon be part of that theory. Geeks with perfect recall would get up in public settings, with a circle of folding chairs around them, and then, in front of an amazed audience, these geeks would remember the perfect textures of things: Ah yes, the running mates of the losers in the last eight presidential elections, let me see. And the names of their wives. And the weather on Election Day. Massive fraud would be perpetrated in certain cases, where these perfect-recall geeks would, it turned out, have needle tracks, just like the rest of us. Ohmygod! They were doping, and they would be escorted out into the street, in shame, where again rain was beginning to fall.
Which is why when I got back to the armory and found the package on my bed, I felt that pornographic thrill. I could manage an eyedropper as good as the next guy, right? I’d work up to the needles. What else was there to hang around for? No one was waiting for me. Maybe I could get back to the night before, when I was talking to Cassandra. I said this little preliminary prayer, May this roll of the dice be the one in which I remember love, or teen sex, or that time when I had a lot of money from a summer job and I was barbecuing out in the back of our unit, and everybody was drinking beer and having a good time.
I would become a junkie in a supply closet, and I would use a lantern I’d looted from a camping-equipment store after the blast. I held the eyedropper above me, and the droplet of intoxicant was lingering there, and I was the oyster that was going to envelop it and make it my secret. The drop in the dropper was like the black rain of NYC, which was like the money shot in a porn film, which was like the tears from the Balkan statuary of the Virgin in the naïf style. The lantern shone up from underneath my supply closet shelves, and there was that rush of perfumes that I’ve already described, which meant that it was all beginning again. I was lucky for the perfumes I’ve known; other guys just know paperwork, but I’ve known the smell of people right before being naked with them, what an honor. All junkies are lapsed idealists, falling away from things as they were. I was a murderer of time. I’d taken the hours of my life out back of the armory and shoved them in the wood chipper or buried them in a swamp or bricked them up in the basement. But this thought was overwhelmed by the personal scent of a fashion student who lived near us when I was in California. It was on me like a new atmosphere. Along with the sheets of fog rolling in over the bay.
It was all a fine movie. At least until something really horrible occurred to me, a bummer of a thought. How could it be? Thinking about Serena, again, see, on the Boston Common, drinking rum, remembering that she actually had Cherry Coke, not the soft drink once known as the Real Thing, to which I said, “Cherry Coke, girl, that’s not Coke, because no Coke product that occurs, historically, after the advent of the New Coke — held by some to have been a reaction to sugar prices in Latin American countries — no Coke that occurs after that time is a legitimate Coke. Get it? The only Coke product that is genuine with respect to the rum and Cokes you’re proposing to drink here is Mexican Coke, which you can still get in bottles and which still features some actual cane sugar.” An impressive speech, a flirtatious speech, but somewhere in the middle of remembering it — and who knew how many hours had passed now, who knew how many days — this thought I mentioned occurred to me:
Serena’s boyfriend, the guy she was seeing besides me, or instead of me, was Addict Number One.
Years before, I mean. Way before he was the actual Addict Number One. Because we were in high school then, and Addict Number One hadn’t been killed yet, or hadn’t vanished. Not in this version of the story. He was a college guy, and he wanted to make movies, went to NYU, lived downtown, wore a lot of black, just like Addict Number One. And he could tell you a lot about certain recordings that hard-core bands from Minneapolis made in the eighties, and he had a lot of opinions about architecture and politics and sitcoms and maybe bagels, I don’t know. I could feel that it was true. It was a hunch, but it was a really good hunch. There was an intersection in the story, a convergence, where there hadn’t been one before, and the intersection involved me, or at least tangentially it involved me. Before, I was an observer, but now I was coming to see that there was no observing Albertine. Because Albertine was looking back into you. The thought was so unsettling that I was actually shaking with terror about it, but I was too high to stop remembering.