“Listen, I know what I said, and there’s no reason you should believe me,” I tried, “but the fact is that the only reason I can explain to you about the future is because I’m in the future. And in the future I know how much you mean to me. In the future, this four months that we’re close, it keeps coming back around, again and again, like that day we were on Boston Common. It keeps coming back around. I could tell you all this stuff about the future, about New York City and how it gets bombed into rubble, about drugs, the epidemic that’s coming, I could tell you how strung out I’m going to get. But that’s not the point. Somehow you’re the point. Serena, you’re the trompe l’oeil in the triptych of the future, and that’s because you know that guy. Paley. So you have to believe me, even though I probably wouldn’t believe me if I were you. Still, the thing is, you have to tell him what I’ve told you. Maybe none of this will happen, this stuff; I sure hope not. Maybe it will all turn out different, just because I’m telling you. But we can’t plan on that. What we have to plan on is your telling Paley that he’s in danger.”
“Actually, Kevin, what I think we need to do is talk to your mom.”
The jack-o’-lantern on the porch, of course. It was autumn, which was bad news, which meant I was on the come down and in need of a boost, and the whole scene was swirling away into an electromagnetic dwindling of stories. Serena was gone, and suddenly instead of being back in my room at the armory, where, suspended in a lost present, I was about to be evicted from my supply closet, I was back doing my job, the job of journalist, and what a relief. I had no idea what day it was. I had no idea if I was remembering the past or the future, or if I happened to be in the present. Albertine had messed with all that. I was confused. So was the guy I was interviewing, who happened to be the epidemiologist with the theory about the Albertine crisis, the one I told you about earlier, except that he was no epidemiologist at all. That was just his cover story. Actually, he was the anthropologist Ernst Wentworth, and we were in his office at Brooklyn College, which wasn’t really an office anymore, because there were about thirty thousand homeless people living on campus. At night there were vigilante raids in which the Arabic people living on one quad would be driven off the campus, out onto the streets of the Hot Zone, where stray gunshots from Eddie Cortez’s crew took out at least two or three a night. It was trench war. No one was getting educated at Brooklyn College, and Wentworth was crowded into a single room with a half dozen other desks and twice as many file cabinets pushed against the windows.
He was having trouble following the interview. Me too. I couldn’t remember if I had already asked certain questions:
Q: Check. Check. Check. Uh, okay, do you know anything about the origin of Albertine?
A: No one knows the origin, actually. The most compelling theory, which is getting quite a bit of attention these days, is that Albertine
has
no origin. The physicists at the college have suggested the possibility that Albertine owes her proliferation to a recent intense shower of interstellar dark matter. The effect of this dark matter is such that time, right now, has become completely porous, completely randomized. Certain subatomic constituent particles are colliding with certain others. This would suggest that Albertine is a side effect of a space-time difficulty, a quantum indeterminacy, rather than a cause herself, and since she is not a cause, she has no origin, no specific beginning that we know of. She just
tends to appear
, on a statistical basis.
Q: Given that this is a possibility, why are Albertine’s effects only visible in New York City?
A: The more provocative question would be, according to quantum indeterminacy, does New York City actually exist? At least, if you take the hypothesis of theoretical physics to its logical conclusion. This would be a brain-in-the-vat hypothesis. NYC as an illusion purveyed by a malevolent scientist. Except that the malevolent scientist here is Albertine herself. She leads us to believe in a certain New York City, a New York City with post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic dimensions and obsessions. And yet perhaps this collective hallucination is merely a way to rationalize what is taking place: that it is now almost impossible to exist in linear time at all.
Q: So maybe in Kansas City they have similar hallucinations. Kansas City is the center of some galloping drug epidemic. And the same thing in Tampa or Reno or Harrisburg?
A: Could be. Something like that.
(Pause.)
Can I borrow some of your—?
Q: There’s only a little left. But, sure, get a buzz on. (Getting serious.) Have you attempted a catalogue of types of Albertine experiences?
A: Well, sociopaths seem to have a really bad time with the drug. We know that. And it’s a startling fact, really. Since much of the distribution network is controlled by sociopaths. But at most dosage thresholds, sociopaths have stunted Albertine experiences. They’ll remember their driver ed exam for hours on end. By
sociopaths
, I’m referring especially to individuals with poor intrapsychic bonding, poor social skills. Individuals who lack for compassion. It would be hard to imagine them taking much pleasure in Albertine. On the other hand, at the top end of the spectrum are the ambiguous experiences of which you are no doubt aware. People who claim to remember future events, people who claim to remember other people’s memories, people who claim to have interacted with their memories. And so forth. At first we believed that these experiences, which characterized many of the people here conducting our studies — myself included — were only occurring, if that’s the right word, among the enlightened. That is, we believed that
ahistorical remembering
was an aspect of wish fulfillment among the healthiest and most engaged personalities. But then we learned that malice, hatred, and murderous rage could be just as effective at creating these episodes. In either case, we became convinced that the frequency of these reports merited our attention. If true, the fact of
ahistorical remembering
would have to suggest that the fabric of time is not woven together as consistently as we once thought. We tried at first to analyze whether these logically impossible experiences were “true” on a factual level, but now we are more interested in whether they are repeatable, visible to more than one person, et cetera.
Q: Does your catalogue of experiences shed any light on Albertine’s origin?
A: One compelling theory that’s making the rounds among guys in the sciences here at the college is that Albertine has infinite origins. That she appeared in the environment all at once, at different locations, synchronously, according to some kind of philosophical or metaphysical randomness generator. There’s no other perfect way to describe the effect. According to this view, the disorder she causes is so intense that her origin is concealed in an effacement of the moment of her origin, because to have a single origin violates the parameters of nonlinearity. Didn’t we already
do
this part about the origin?
Q: Shit. I guess you’re right. Okay, hang on. (Regroups.) Do you, do you think it’s possible to manipulate the origin of Albertine, to actually control the drug so as to alter a specific narrative? Like, say, the rise of the Albertine crime syndicate?