A: Sure, persons of my acquaintance have done plenty of that. At least on an experimental basis. We have had no choice. But I’m not at liberty to go into that today.
Q: Let’s go back to the issue of what to do about the epidemic. Do you have a specific policy recommendation?
A: I did have some good ideas about that.
(Ponders.)
Okay, wait just a second. I’m going to look through my papers on the subject here.
(Riffles mounds on desk.)
I’m forgetting so much these days. Okay, my observation is that Albertine finds her
allure
in the fact that the human memory is, by its nature, imperfect. Every day, in every way, we are experiencing regret over the fact that we can conjure up some minimal part of the past, but not as much as we’d like. This imperfection of memory is built into the human animal, and as long as it’s an issue, the Albertine syndicates will be able to exploit it. Strategies for containment have to come from another direction, therefore. Which is to say that the only thing that could conceivably help in the long run would be to make distribution of the drug extremely widespread. We should make sure everybody has it.
Q: How would that help?
A: Since Albertine has forgetfulness as a long-term side effect, it’s possible that we could actually make everyone
forget that Albertine exists
It would have to be concerted, you understand. But let me make an analogy. At a certain point in heroin addiction, you no longer feel the effects of the opiate, you only service the withdrawal. A similar effect could take place here. At a certain point, everyone would be trying to avoid the forgetting because they can’t work effectively, they can’t even remember where
work is,
and yet soon this forgetting would begin to invade even the drug experience, so that what you remember grows dimmer because you are beginning to accelerate plaque buildup and other anatomical effects. With enough of this forgetting, everyone would forget that they were addicts, forget that they needed the drug to remember, forget that memory was imperfect, and then we would be back to some kind of lowest common denominator of civic psychology. Damaged but equal.
Q: How would you go about doing this?
(Ernst Wentworth gives the interviewer the once-over in a way he has not done before.)
A: We’re going to put it in the water supply.
Q: Hasn’t that been tried already?
A: What do you mean?
Q: I think someone told me that an attack on the water supply was recently thwarted.
A: Are you serious?
Q: Well, unless someone was using disinformation—
Wentworth shouts:
A: Guys, you recording all of this?
The room was bugged, of course, and on this signal a bunch of academics rushed into Wentworth’s office, blindfolded me, and carried me out. I didn’t struggle. When I was freed, I was in the Brooklyn College astronomy lab. It was Ernst Wentworth who gently removed my blindfold.
“You understand we have no choice but to take every precaution. Just a couple of days ago, Claude Jannings, from the linguistics department, watched his wife disappear in front of him. She was there, in the kitchen, talking about the dearth of political writings pertaining to the Albertine epidemic, and then she was gone, just absolutely gone. As if someone were listening to the conversation the whole time. Apparently, her remarks about Albertine and inchoate plans to write on the subject were enough to make her a target.”
My eyes became accustomed to the dim light of the astronomy lab. The interior was all concrete, functional, except for the platform where you could get up and take a gander at the heavens. Around me, there was a circle of guys in tweed jackets and cardigan sweaters. I saw a couple of bow ties. Khaki slacks.
“Wow, it’s Kevin Lee! Right here in our lab!” Some good-natured chortling.
Huh?
Wentworth ventured some further explanations. “We’ve developed a technique for marking events so we don’t forget later. Whenever one of us goes out in public, we bring along a poster or sign indicating the date and time. That way, if we travel backward on Albertine in search of particular events, we aren’t thrown off or beguiled by unimportant days. And we bring clothing of various colors, red for an alert, green for an all clear. It’s a conspiracy of order, you understand, and that’s a particularly revolutionary conspiracy right now. What we’ve additionally found, by cataloguing memories — and we have guys who are medicated twenty-four hours a day thinking about all this — is that there are certain people who turn up over and over. We refer to people who are present at large numbers of essential Albertine nodal points as memory catalysts. Eduardo Cortez, for example, is a memory catalyst, and not in a good way. And there are some other very odd examples I could give you. A talk show host from ten or fifteen years ago seems to turn up quite a bit, perhaps just because his name is so memorable, Regis Philbin. You’d be surprised how close to the entire inner workings of the Albertine epidemic is Regis Philbin. When we’re around Philbin, we are always wearing red. We don’t know what he means yet, but we’re working on it. And then there’s you.”
“Me?”
One doctoral candidate, standing by the base of the telescope, nonchalant, spoke up. “If we had baseball cards of the players in the Albertine epidemic, you’d be collectible. You’d be the power-hitting shortstop.”
“We have a theory,” Wentworth said. “And the theory is that you’re important because you’re a writer.”
“Yeah, but I’m not even a very good writer. I’m barely published.”
Wentworth waved his plump hands.
“Doesn’t matter. We’ve been trying to find out for a while who originally came up with your assignment. It wasn’t your editor, Tara. That we know. She’s just another addict. It was someone above her, and if we can find out who it is, we think we’ll be close to finding a spot where the Frost Communications holding company connects to Cortez Enterprises. Somewhere up the chain, you were being groomed for this moment. Unless you are simply some kind of emblem for Albertine. That’s possible too, of course.”
Wentworth smiled, so that his tobacco pipe — stained teeth showed forth in the gloomy light. “Additionally, you’re a hero from the thick, roiling juices of the New York City melting pot. And that is very satisfying to us. You want to see? We know so much about you that it’s almost embarrassing. We even know what you like to eat and what kind of toothpaste you use. Don’t worry, we won’t put it on a billboard.”
Later, of course, the constituency of the Brooklyn Resistance was a matter of much speculation. There were women there too, with mournful expressions, as though they had come along with the Resistance though they had grave doubts about its masculine power structure. Women in modest skirts or slightly unflattering pantsuits, like Jesse Simons, the deconstructionist, who argued that doping the water supply was embracing the nomadic sign system of Albertine, which of course represented not some empirical astrophysical event but rather a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability caused by American imperialism. And there were a couple of African Americanists, wearing hints of kinte cloth with their tweeds and corduroys. They argued for intervention in the economic imperatives that led to drug dealing among the inner-city poor. And there was the great postcolonialist writer Jean-Pierre Al-Sadir. He argued that the route to victory over civic chaos was infiltration of the Albertine cartels. However, Al-Sadir, because of his Algerian passport, had been mentioned as part of the conspiracy that detonated the New York City blast. Still, here he was, fighting with the patriots, if that’s what they were. It was a testament to the desperation of the moment that none of these academic stars would normally have agreed on anything, you know? I mean, these people hated one another. If you’d gone to a faculty meeting at Columbia three years ago, you would have seen Al-Sadir call Simons an arrogant narcissist in front of a college president. That kind of thing. But infighting was forgotten for now, as the Resistance began plotting its strategies. Even when I was hanging around with them, there would be the occasional argument about the semiotics of wearing red, or about whether time as a system was inherently phallogocentric, such that its present adumbrated shape was preferable as a representation of labial or vaginal narrative space.