Serena said, “You won’t have any idea whether this is Coke or Cherry Coke after the first half a cup. I could put varnish in here, you wouldn’t know.” She smiled, and now I felt myself drunk just with the particulars of her smile. It was a humble, lopsided smile, and she was wearing those patched blue jeans, and she pulled off her green Dartmouth sweatshirt, to reveal a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the T-shirt advertising a particular girl deejay, and I could see the lower part of her belly underneath the T-shirt. And there was the slope of her breasts. Her smile promised things that never came to be, you know? While I was taking it in, turning over the irrefutable fact of her smile and the tiny series of beautiful lines, like parentheses, at the corners of her fantastic mouth, Serena began to fade. “Don’t go,” I said. “There’s some stuff we need to cover,” but it was like those cries in a dream, the cries that just wake you up. They don’t actually bring help. They just wake you. I could see her fading, and in her stead, I saw a bunch of bare trees from some November trip to the malls of Jersey. Autumn.
I seized the eyedropper, which, because it had been sitting on my roach-infested mattress while I was busy remembering, now seemed to have black specks all over the tip of it, and maybe there was some kind of bug crawling around on there, I don’t know. I held back my eyelids. I was aching in my eye sockets.
The plan was to summon her back, to call her name in the old psychoanalytic way, you know. Names count for something. Strong feelings count for something. And such a beautiful name anyhow, right? Serena, like some ocean of calm lapping against the fucked-up landscape. I would ask her. That is, I would ask if I were able to map the weird voyages of my younger self, that Asian kid trying to declare himself to a Yankee girl through really abstract, complicated poetry.
Because if it was really true that Cassandra had somehow willed me to see what she knew about Eddie Cortez, just because she wanted me to see it, even if telling me the truth about Eddie was somehow a danger to her position as his mistress, then it was true that love and the other passions were important orienting forces in the Albertine epidemic. Like Eddie, who chased Addict Number One through the dingy recesses of his brain simply in the breadth of his malice and greed. Maybe the rememberer, in the intoxication of remembering, was always ultimately tempted to reach out the hand, and maybe this rememberer could do so, if his passion was strong enough. How else to look at it? What else did I have to go on? Because a hundred thousand Albertine addicts couldn’t be wrong. Because they were all chasing the promise of some lost, glittering, perfect moment of love. Because some of them must have reached that elysian destination in their flash floods of memory and forgetfulness. Because I sure loved Serena, because she had a lopsided smile, because she had nails called lycanthrope, because love is good when you have nothing, and I had nothing, except bike messengers watching my every move.
I didn’t remember Serena, though. All I could remember was a bunch of really horrible songs from my childhood. In particular, “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” a song that definitely had not aged very well. Sounds tinny, like the sampling rate is bad somehow — you know, those early sampling rates on digital music, really tinny. And here’s that little synthesizer loop that’s supposed to sound like the Beatles during their sitar phase, girl backup singers, the attempt to make the glamorous leading man sound as though he didn’t prefer boys — fine, really, but why pretend, suck and fuck, man, knock yourself out. Seven hours, at least, passed in which I went over the minutiae of “Shake Your Bon-Bon.” The utterly computerized sound of it, the vestiges of humanness in its barren musical palette, as if the singer dude couldn’t be bothered to repeat the opening hook himself, no way, it’d sound better if they just looped it on Pro Tools, and then the old-fashioned organ, which was a simulated organ, et cetera, and the relationship between the congas and the guitars, okay, and what about that Latin middle section! Demographically perfect! So twentieth century! I didn’t want to think about the trombone solo at the end of “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” buried in the back, that sultry trombone solo, but I did think about it, about the singer’s Caribbean origins oozing out at the edges of the composition, and his homosexuality. Went on this way for a while, including a complete recollection of a remix that I think I heard only one time in my entire life, which was in some ways the superior version, because the more artificial the better, like when they take out all the rests between the vocal lines, so that the song has effectively become impossible to sing. Nowhere to take a breath. Was anyone on earth thinking about the singer in question, these days after the blast? I bet no one at all was thinking of him, except for certain stalkers from Yonkers or Port Chester. Where was he exactly? Had he managed to find refuge in a hotel in South Beach before the blast? And were his memories of showbiz dominance so great that the big new out-of-state market for Albertine was seducing him now like everyone else? Was South Beach falling into the vortex of memory like New York before it?
Just when it seemed that I would never cast my eyes on Serena again, just when it seemed that it was all Ricky Martin from now on, she was a vision before me, you know, a thing of ether, a residuum, like lavender, like coffee regular. The odd thing was I got so used to remembering that one portion of our time together that I forgot what came later. I forgot that just because she had this boyfriend, this college dude with short eyes, this college man who chased after teens, didn’t mean that I stopped talking to her altogether, because the attachments you have then, when you’re a kid, at least back before the trouble in the world began, these friendships are the one sustaining thing. I could see myself in some institutional corridor, high school passageway, and there she was, golden in the light of grimy shatterproof windows, as if women and light were as close as lungs and air. I was slumped by a locker. Serena came across the corridor, across speckled linoleum tiles, and it seemed I had never looked at those tiles before, because she was wearing a certain sweatshop-manufactured brand of sneakers, and so I saw the linoleum, because the linoleum was improved by her and her sneakers.
“You okay?”
No. I was hyperventilating. Like I did back then. Anything could set me off. College entrance examinations, these caused me to hyperventilate, any dip in my grades. And I didn’t tell anyone about it. Only my mother knew. I was an Asian kid and I was supposed to be incredibly smart. I was supposed to have calculus right at my fingertips, and I was supposed to know C++ and Visual Basic and Java and every other fucking computer language, and all this made me hyperventilate.