Someone got hold of my feet — when I tried to make a quick escape myself — and they were swearing at me, dragging me down the corridor toward some blank, faceless office, where I too would be killed. Meanwhile, Ernst Wentworth, like the angelic presence that he was, had the job of explanation: “Deanna knew about the trip to the water supply on which we’re embarking now, with many thanks to you for helping us to close the loophole. You were the only person who knew the identity of this informer. Jesse is sticking with you for the last few minutes because there’s one more thing you have to learn before you’re done, and then, Kevin, you’re a free man, with a load of forgetting in your future. I hope you write comic books or start a rock-and-roll band in your garage. And I hope you do it all somewhere far away from here.”
Then the office door opened in.
I guess you already knew that Cassandra was sitting there. Wearing really high-end corporate gear from Italian designers who had managed to stay out of the international backlash against the American export market. Cortez Enterprises was about to have its limited public offering, I learned later, using a brokerage subsidiary that they owned themselves. So they had tarted up the office to impress some analysts. Cassandra was beautiful in a way I probably can’t describe, because beauty, ultimately, is outside of language. Though it may have something to do with memory. She was wearing a red bow.
One of Cortez’s goons, unless it was Eddie himself, said, “Kevin, I guess you don’t really remember your own mother?”
“My mother? What the hell are you talking about?”
Cassandra had cleaned up a lot since I last saw her. Which I was starting to recognize might have been four months ago. It was hard to tell. Still, she was my age, more or less, maybe a few years younger, so how was she supposed to be my mother?
One thing I’ll say for Cassandra, she had the kind of compassionate expression a mother should have had. “Are you all right?”
But the goons interfered with this tender moment.
“Okay, shoot ’em up.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m already high, I’m already in somebody’s memory, I don’t even know if it’s my own memory anymore, so you’re getting me high inside a memory; that’s a memory inside a memory, right? When do we come back out to the present, to the part where I’m just a kid trying to make his way?”
“Shut that motherfucker up.”
Cassandra volunteered her arm, so I volunteered mine, covered with scars now, so much that they couldn’t find a vein.
“Do him in the neck.”
So they did. Without asking nicely.
I swirled into the rapture of the deep, far from all the shit that had accumulated since I first started researching the subject of Albertine. You know, my very first memory is of my grandfather, the Chinese immigrant patriarch, after his open-heart surgery. I was maybe three and a half years old. I never believed those memories. I never used to believe memory before an age when a kid could understand time. What comes before it? The rapture of the deep is what comes before. Before the scaffolding of time. Memories cartwheeling around in the empty heavens. Anyway, there he was on the stretcher in the living room, where he lived with us, doped on morphine. Doped for a good month, anyway. I can remember the implacable smile on his face: I’m suffering now, but I came here for you, so you wouldn’t have to suffer. So now go and do something. Make my sacrifices into your day at the beach. It lingered in my consciousness for a moment. From there the howling winds of recollection touched down on my abortive swimming lessons, then a summer on the Cape, walking on the seashore, up through childhood, from one associative leap to the next, all memories with beaches in them, then all memories with singing in them, memories featuring varieties of pie, like this was the very last mainline I was going to have, like they were going to make a biopic about my short life from this footage scrolling through my brain. Everything was roses. I was the smartest kid in my elementary school class, I was the class president. I was a shortstop player. Everything was roses. Until Serena showed up. Serena, who was exactly contemporary with that nameless dread creeping into my daily life. I was the only Asian kid my parents had ever known who panicked; Asians just didn’t panic, or they didn’t fucking talk about it, man, that was for sure, like that afternoon when I was supposed to take some government-ordered placement exam and I was in the bathroom puking, my father standing outside the door, telling me, in the severest language, that I was a disgrace. What was I going to do, drop out of society? Go work in a dry cleaner’s? Recite poetry to the customers while I was doing alterations? Did I think my grandfather had come from Shanghai, et cetera, et cetera, on a boat that almost sank, et cetera, et cetera, so that I could. . et cetera, et cetera, and then the sound of my mother’s voice telling him to lay off, my mother the microbiologist, or epidemiologist, why couldn’t I remember my mother’s job, she was never home, actually, she was always working. Come on. I called out to the Cortez flunkies, Hey, you guys, give me another shot, because nothing is chiming, I am telling you there is not a chime left in the belfry. I was still pressing a wet rag against the wound in my neck when a guy slapped me on the back of the head and told me to shut the fuck up, and then I was again on the Ferris wheel of it all, but I could see my father’s tassled loafers, and that’s when Jesse Simons was talking to me again, suddenly I was recognizing her voice.
“Kevin, this is the end of the story, where you’re going now, because your mother is about to lay her hand on yours, across the desk, Kevin, and that will be the signal that I have to let go. Here’s what happens. This next ten minutes of your life enables us to dose the reservoir before Eddie Cortez finds out. We have just eliminated the person who informs on the plot to dose the reservoir, and so we are free to go back in time, by virtue of our collective affection for the city, to augment the water supply. And you know what this means, Kevin, it means that Eddie won’t have time to drop the bomb, Kevin. The bomb. Because we believe Eddie Cortez drops the bomb, to try to keep us from dosing the reservoir, and he drops it on lower Manhattan because that’s where you live in the fall of 2008. We believe that Eddie Cortez, not a highly trained sleeper cell of foreign nationals, detonates the uranium bomb, to ensure the dominance of Cortez Enterprises and to wipe out a number of key Resistance players living in the East Village at that historical juncture. So take your time in the next few minutes, because this gives us the element of surprise we need. Jean-Pierre Al-Sadir is driving a minivan up what’s left of the interstate. And I believe he’s playing Duke Ellington on the CD player because he wants to hear something really great before his memory is wiped clean. You’re the hero of the story, Kevin. And we’re all really sorry we couldn’t tell you earlier, and we’re sorry you had to learn this way. But we want you to know this. We want you to know that all the traumatic events of the last few months, these were things we knew you could withstand. Like few others. You’re the kid who made the story for us. We’re proud. We wish you were our son. And in a way you are now. If that’s any help at all. When you get to Manhattan, after talking to your mother, if it’s still gone, that’ll be the sign. Manhattan in ruins. Your ferry driver will be wearing green. That’ll mean that Eddie doesn’t need to go back in time to try to find you. That’ll mean that Eddie has given up trying to control the past in order to control the present. Well, unless by poisoning the reservoir we eliminate the future in which Eddie comes up with the idea of detonating the blast, in which case Manhattan will still be standing and this entire present, with the drug epidemic and the Brooklyn Resistance, will be nonactualizing. And it’s also possible that the forgetting will have set in somewhere along the line, we aren’t sure where yet, and that you may have forgotten certain important parts of the story. You may have forgotten that Manhattan was ever a city by the time you get home tonight. You might have forgotten all of this, all this rotten stuff, this loneliness, even this speech I’m giving you now. In fact, we have tried to pinpoint forgetting, Kevin; we have targeted it in such a way as to wipe clean your own memories of the blast. Because you actually had a pretty rotten time that day. You saw some awful things. So if you have forgotten, we believe you are the first locally targeted forgetter. However, if in the future, during this forgetting, you want to remember this or other events from your life, we have a suggestion for the future, Kevin: just play back your audio recordings.”