This is where my mom stole into my memory of the past. My mom was so beautiful. Every time I saw her. Even when she was Cassandra, on the swing in Brooklyn. So beautiful that I couldn’t even see the lines of time carved into her. Here in memory she’s young again, she’s perfect, young and brilliant, lit in the color of a fading silver halide print. My mom looks Kodak to me, always will, and she leads me out of the bathroom, away from my dad, and she explains that Serena telephoned her, and her syllables are carefully measured like on a metronome. It’s not nearly as bad as it seems. If I could redo the color balance in this past, I would make it more ultramarine, because everything’s too yellow, my mother taking me into the living room, where my grandfather once slept off his open-heart surgery. She sits me down. And she makes her diagnosis. She says, I have been doing a lot of research into your chemical problem. And I have talked to a lot of professional friends on the subject. When you have a spare hour or so, later in the week, then we’re going in to talk to some of them. But in the meantime, I want you to try something for me.
So here it was. In a stoppered beaker.
Just give this a try. I think it’ll be more interesting than that stuff you and your friends have been smoking.
Mom, I said. Do you think I should?
I’m your mom.
What is it?
Lithium, some SSRIs, and a memory enhancer we’re trying out, in an aspartame sauce. It’s supposed to sharpen cognition. Might help with those tests.
Just like in the laboratory sequences, you know, from those black-and-white movies of yore. I drank up. And the thing was, I aced that exam. That’s what I had forgotten. And I gave some to Serena, and she gave it to her boyfriend, Paley. We called it Albertine because it sounded like aspartame. Or so I was remembering. I gave it to the others. We all did well on our tests. Just three kids from the subdivisions fucking up the entire future of the human race, in pursuit of kicks and decent board scores.
I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to look across the desk at Cassandra, who may or may not have been my mother, may or may not have been the chief chemist for the Cortez syndicate, may or may not have been an informer for the Resistance, may or may not have been a young woman, may or may not have been home in Newton, refusing to come to the phone, may or may not have been an older Chinese woman with those sad eyes. I didn’t want to hear her voice, from across the room, rationalizing, “Let time show why I’ve done what I’ve done.” I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know the plans the Cortez operatives had for me, Addict Zero, didn’t want to know why I was being put through this exercise — so that they could break me on the rack of information, or because they still wanted me to write down whatever it was that they wanted me to write down. I didn’t want to know, finally, which memory was inside of which memory, didn’t want to know if there was a truth on top of these other truths. In a few minutes’ time, the water supply would be boiling with the stuff, eight weeks back. The cops at the reservoirs would be facedown in pools of blood, and the taps in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx would be running bluer than usual, and there would be dancing in the streets, as though all this stuff I’m telling you hadn’t happened at all. I mean, assuming the sweet forgetting didn’t come like the instantaneous wave of radiation after the blast. Assuming I didn’t forget all of this, how I got where I got, what I’d once known, the order in which I knew it, the cast of characters, my own name, the denouement.
What’s memory? Memory’s the groove. It’s the all-stars laying down their groove, and it’s you dancing, chasing the desperations of the heart, chasing something that’s so gone, so ephemeral you know it only by its traces, how a certain plucked guitar string summons the thundering centuries, how a taste of fresh cherries calls up the indolent romancers on antebellum porches, all these stories of the past rolling around in you. Memory is the groove, the lie, the story you never get right, the better place. Memory is the bitch, the shame factory, the curse, and the consolation. And that’s where my journalistic exposé breaks down.
But I can offer a few last tidbits. If you’re wondering what the future looks like, if you’re one of the citizens from the past, wondering, let me tell you what it’s like. First thing I’ll tell you, gentle reader, is that the Brooklyn Bridge is gone, probably the most beautiful structure ever built according to the madness of New Yorkers. Brooklyn Bridge is gone, or at least the half of it on the New York side is gone. The section on the Brooklyn side goes out as far as the first set of pillars, and after that it just crumbles away. Like the arms of Venus de Milo. It’s a suggestion of an idealized relationship between parts of a city, a suggestion, not an actual relationship. And maybe that’s why intrepid lovers go there now, lovers with thyroid cancer go up there at night, because it’s finally a time in New York City history when you can see the night sky. That is, if the wind’s blowing toward Jersey. They go up there, the lovers, they jump the police barriers, they walk out on that boardwalk, the part that’s still remaining, they look across the East River, they make their protestations of loyalty, I don’t really have much time, so there’s a few things I want to say to you. I’ll go even further. Because this instant is endless for me, and that’s why I’m dictating these notes. What I do is, I find the ferryman on the Brooklyn side, out in Bay Ridge, old Irish guy, I pay my fresh coin to the Irish ferryman with the green windbreaker, pet his rottweiler. I say, I got some business over there, and the guy says, No can do, pal, and I point at it and I say, Business, and he says, No one has business there, but I do, I tell him, and I will make it worth your while, and he says, There’s nothing over there, but in the end he accepts the offer, and then we are out upon the water, where the currents are stiff and the waves treacherous, as if nature wants to wash this experiment of a city out into the sea, as if nature wants to clean the wound, flush the leftover uranium, the rubble, the human particulate. We’re on the water, and right there is where the statue used to be, we’ll get the new one from France before too long, and that’s where New York Plaza used to be on the tip there. I tell the ferryman to take me farther up the coast; I want to know every rock and piling, every remaining I beam, I want to know it all, so we go past the footprint of South Street Seaport, and here are the things that we lost that I might have seen from here: the Municipal Building with its spires, City Hall, the World Financial Center, the New York Stock Exchange — where did all those bond traders go, what are they doing now, are they in Montclair or Greenwich? — and then it’s Chinatown, bombed almost to China, bombed down to the bedrock, edged by Canal Street, which is again a canal, as it was way back when, and Little Italy is gone, those mobster hangouts are all gone, they’re all working on the Jersey side now, trying to corner the Albertine market there, and Soho is gone, the former CBGB, New York University is gone, Zeckendorf Towers gone, Union Square Park is gone, the building where Andy Warhol’s factory once was, what used to be Max’s Kansas City, and the Empire State Building is gone, which, when it fell sideways, crushed a huge chunk of lower Fifth Avenue, all the way to the Flatiron District, the area formerly known as the Ladies Mile; the flower district is gone, the Fashion Institute of Technology; in fact, about the only thing they say is still somewhat intact, like the Acropolis in Athens, is the public library, but I can’t see it from here. The bridges are blown out, the tram at Fifty-ninth Street gone, and as we pull alongside a section of the island where I’m guessing Stuyvesant Village used to be, I say, Ferryman, put me down here, pull your rowboat with its two-horsepower lawn mower engine alongside, because I’m going in, I’m going down to Tompkins Square, man, I’m going backward, through that neighborhood of immigrants. So now I step on the easternmost part of the island, same place the Italians stepped, same place the Irish stepped, same place the Puerto Ricans stepped, and I’m going in there now, because as long as it’s rubble I don’t care how hot it is, I’m going in, it’s like a desert of glass, landfill burned into glass, and I can hear the voices, even though it’s been a while now, all those voices layered over one another, in their hundred and fifty languages, can’t hear anything distinct about what they are saying, except that they are saying, Hey, time for us to be heard.