I said, “Tell me the name of the guy you’re seeing. I just want to know his name. It’s only fair.”
“You really want to talk about this again?”
“Tell me once.”
Battalions of teens slithered past, wearing their headphones and their MP3 players, all playing the same moronic dirge of niche-marketed neogrunge shit.
“Paley,” she said. “First name Irving, which I guess is a really weird name. He doesn’t seem like an Irving to me. Is that enough?”
God sure put the big curse on Chinese kids, because when the raven of fate flew across their hearts, they just couldn’t show it. We were supposed to be shut up in our hearts because to be otherwise was not part of the collective plan, or maybe that was just how I felt about it. I felt like my heart was an overfilled water balloon, and I was hyperventilating.
“Kevin,” she said, “you have to do something about the panic thing. They have drugs for it. You know?”
Do you know how much I think about you? I wanted to say. Do you want to know how you are preserved for all of human history? Because I have written you down, I have got down the way you pull your sweater sleeves over your hands, I have got down the way your eyeliner smudges. I have preserved the rollout on the heels of your expensive sneakers, which you don’t replace often enough. I know about you and nectarines, I know you like them better than anything else, and I know that you aren’t happy first thing in the morning, not without a lot of coffee, and that you think your shoulders are fat, but that’s ridiculous. All this is written down. And the times you yelled at your younger sister on the bus, I wrote down the entire exchange, and I don’t want anything for it at all. I don’t want you to feel that there’s any obligation attached, except that you made me want to use writing for preservation, which is so great, because then I started preserving other things, like all the conversations I heard out in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, and I started describing the Charles River, racing shells on the Charles, I have written all of this down too, I have written it all down because of you.
This was enough! This was enough to redeem my sorry ass, because suddenly all the moments were one, this moment and that, lined up like the ducks in some Coney Island shooting game, chiming together, and I said, “Serena, I’ve only got a second here, so listen up, I don’t know any other way to put it, so just listen carefully. Something really horrible is going to happen to your friend Paley, so you have to tell him to stay out of Tompkins Square Park, no matter what, tell him never to go to Tompkins Square Park, tell him it’s a reliable bet and that maybe he should do his graduate work at USC or something. I’m telling you this because I just know it, so do it for me. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but do like I say.”
At which point I was shaken rudely awake. Oh, come on. It was a time-travel moment. It was a memory-inside-a-memory moment, except that it might have been actually happening. I just wasn’t sure. One of the bike messengers from Cortez Enterprises smacked me in the face. In my supply closet. I’d have been happy to talk, you know, but I was too high, and as so many accounts in the Albertine literature have suggested, trying to talk when you are high is like having all the radio stations on your radio playing at the same time. I could just make out the nasty sound of his voice in the midst of a recollected lecture from my dad on the best way to bet on blackjack. Lee, you are not attending to your duties. Not true, I tried to say, I’m a devoted employee, just got back here an hour ago, and I’m doing some more researches, and I’m finding out some very interesting things, there is a lot of stuff going on, I’m learning more and more.
“You haven’t produced shit,” said the bike messenger. “We need to see some results. You need to be e-mailing us some attachments, Mr. Lee, and so far we haven’t seen anything.”
“Just so incorrect,” I said.
And my father said, Never take the insurance bet; it’s just not a good bet.
“I’ve been taking some notes. Somewhere around here. There are all kinds of notes.”
There was the digital recorder, for example, but the batteries were dead.
“This conversation isn’t going very well,” replied the bike messenger. “We have also heard that you have been moving product given to you as part of our agreement.”
“There’s just no way!”
“Don’t make us have to remind you about the specifics of your responsibilities.”
“Give me a break,” I said. “I’m smarter than that.”
Now the bike messenger flung open the door that led out beyond my supply closet. As if I had forgotten there was a world out there. And standing out in the hall was Tara from the tits and lit magazine, except she looked really disheveled, like she didn’t want to be seen by anyone else in the hallway, and I said, “Tara, what are you doing here? I thought I had at least another couple weeks—”
“Look, you said you had the dropper; I don’t know anything about all this. I gave you the money, so can I please just have the drugs? Then I’ll get the fuck out of here.”
I made some desperate pleas to the Cortez employee, looking at him looking at Tara, and Tara stood and watched. I stalled, demanded to know if there was a way for me to be sure that these guys, the bike messenger and Tara, weren’t just figments of some future event that I was now “remembering,” according to that theory about Albertine.
“Did you or did you not assign me an article about Albertine?”
Tara said, “Just set me up and let me get out of here.”
And then Bertrand, the guy who doled out the habitable spaces in the armory, he got into the act too. Standing in the doorway, covered in grime, like he’d just come from his job at a filling station, except that as far as I knew it was just that Bertrand was an addict and had given up on personal hygiene. He gazed at me with make-believe compassion.
“Kevin, listen, we’ve given you chances. We’ve looked the other way. We’ve been understanding for months. We’ve made excuses for you. We pulled you out of the gutter when you were passed out there. But people living here at the armory are afraid to walk by your apartment now. They’re just afraid of what’s going to happen. So where does that leave us?”
Even Bob, my early source of information, was standing behind Bertrand, his hands on his hips. Trying to push past the throng of accusers, to get to me.
This was a moment when thinking carefully was more important than hallucinating. But because of the extremely dangerous amount of Albertine that was already overwhelming both my liver and my cerebral activity, reality just wasn’t a station that I could tune. What I mean is, I went down under again. Right in front of all those people.
Soon I was hanging out on some sunporch in a subdivision in Massachusetts. All the houses, in whichever direction I turned, looked exactly the same. I bet they had electric fireplaces in every room. It was like CAD had come through with a backhoe, bulldozed the whole region into uniformity. I could remember each tiny difference, each sign that some person, some family, had lived here for more than ten minutes. Serena’s folks had a jack-o’-lantern on the porch. And over there was a guy with one arm mowing the common areas. That intoxicating smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of yellow jackets trying to get in through the screen.
Serena was reiterating that I had said something really scary to her at school today, and she needed to know if I’d said what I had said because of the panic thing. Were my symptoms causing me to say these crazy things, and if so, wouldn’t it be better if I told someone what was happening instead of carrying it around by myself? She knew, she said, about really dangerous mental illnesses, she knew about these things and she wanted me to know that I would still be her friend, her special friend, even if I had one of those mental illnesses; so I was not to worry about it. And now would I please try to explain.