Right Livelihoods
We were going over the bridge, the Kosciusko, where there was only foot traffic these days. Down Metropolitan Ave., from Queens to Brooklyn, over by where the tanks used to be. Not far from the cemetery. You know what you might have seen there, right? Used to be the skyline; you used to see it there every day, caught in traffic, listening to the all-news format. Maybe you got bored of the skyline rising above you, maybe it was like a movie backdrop, there it was again; you’d seen it so many times that it meant nothing, skyscrapers like teeth on the insipid grin of enterprise, cemetery and skyscrapers, nice combination. The greatest city in the world? Once my city was the greatest, but this was not the view anymore, on the night that I walked across the bridge with Cassandra. No more view, right? Because there were the debris clouds, and there was the caustic rain that fell on all the neighborhoods, a rain that made everybody sick afterward, a rain that made people choke and puke. People wore gas masks on the Kosciusko. Gas masks were the cut-rate fashion statement. South of Citicorp Center, whose tampon applicator summit had been blown clean off, there was nothing. Get it? You could see all the way to Jersey during the day. If the wind was blowing right. Edgewater. You could see the occasional lights of Edgewater, NJ. There was no Manhattan to see, and there was no electricity in Manhattan where the buildings remained. The generator plant downtown had been obliterated. Emergency lights, not much else.
People just turned their backs on Manhattan. They forgot about that island, which was the center of nothing, except maybe the center of society ladies with radiation burns crowding the trauma units at the remaining hospitals. Manhattan was just landfill now. And there are no surprises in a landfill. Unless you’re a seagull.
Outer boroughs, that was where the action was. Like this place where we were going. It’d been a smelting plant, and the police cars were lined up around it; the cops were all around it like they were the blue border of imagination. It was a ghost factory, and I dictated these impressions because the digital recorder was still recording. When I played back my notes, there was a section of the playback that was nothing but a sequence of words about autumn: soaping windows, World Series, school supplies, yellow jackets, presidential elections, hurricane season. Who was I trying to kid? I was pretending I was writing a story about Albertine. I was writing nothing.
Cassandra was mumbling: “They were fine-tuning some interrogation aids, or they had made a chemical error with some antidepressants or with ECT technologies, or they saw it in the movies and just duplicated the effects. They figured out how to do it with electrodes, or they figured out how to prompt certain kinds of memories, and then they thought perhaps they could coerce certain kinds of testimony with electrodes. They could torture certain foreign nationals, force confessions from these people, and the confessions would be freely signed because the memories would be true. Who’s going to argue with a memory?”
“How do you know all of this?”
We stood in front of a loading-dock elevator, and the cops were frozen around us, hands on holsters—cops out front, nervous cops, cops waiting on the loading dock, cops everywhere—and the shadows in the elevator shaft danced because the elevator was coming for us. The elevator was the only light.
“I can see,” Cassandra said.
“In the big sense?”
The only time she smiled in the brief period I knew her, when I was up close enough to see her lesions. People were so busy firing chemicals into their bodies, so busy trying to live in the past, that their cancers were blossoming. Or they stopped worrying about whether the syringe was dirty. And they stopped going to the clinics or the emergency rooms. They let themselves vanish out of the world, as if by doing so they could get closer to some point of origin: your mom on your fourth birthday, smiling, holding out her hands, Darling, it’s your birthday!
She said, “Think biochemistry,” and she had the eyedropper out again. “Think quantum mechanics. What would happen if you could harness some of the electrical charges in the brain by bombarding it with certain kinds of free particles?”
Her eyes were hopelessly bloodshot. She had a mean case of pinkeye. And her pupils were dilated.
“And because it’s all about electrical charges, it’s all about power, right? And about who has the power.”
I was holding her hand, don’t know why. Trying to stop her from dribbling more of that shit into her eye. I wasn’t under any particular illusion about what was happening. I was lonely. Why hadn’t I gone back up to Massachusetts? Why hadn’t I called my cousins across town to see if they were okay? I was hustling. I knew things, but I didn’t know when to stop researching and when to get down to work. There was always another trapdoor in the history of Albertine, another theory to chase down, some epidemiologist with a new slant. Some street addict who would tell you things, if you paid.
I knew, for example, that a certain Eduardo Cortez had consolidated himself as a kingpin of the Albertine trade, at least in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that he occasionally drove his confederates around in military convoy. Everyone claimed to have seen the convoy, Jeeps and Hummers. Certain other dealers in the affected neighborhoods, like Mnemonic X in Fort Greene, the 911 Gang in Long Island City, a bunch of them had been neutralized, as the language goes. I knew all of this, and still I walked into the ghost factory in Greenpoint like I was somebody, not an Asian kid sent by a soft-core porn mag, who rode up in the elevator with a girl whose skin looked like a relief map, a prostitute in a neighborhood where almost everyone was a prostitute. As Fox, Bob’s dealer, told me before he disappeared, You’d be amazed what a woman will do for a dealer.
“When Cortez tied off, you know, everything changed,” Cassandra said. It was one of those elevators that took forever. She’d been thinking what I was thinking before I even got to saying it. Her lips were cracked; her teeth were bad. She had once been brilliant, I could tell, or maybe that’s just how I wanted it to be. Maybe she’d been brilliant; maybe she’d been at a university once. But now we used different words of praise for those we admired: shrewd, tough. And the most elevated term of respect: alive. Cortez was Dominican, alive, and thus he was part of the foul-is-fair demographics of Albertine. He was from nowhere, raised up in a badly depressed economy. Cortez had been a bike messenger and then a delivery truck driver, and some of his associates insisted that his business was still about message delivery. We just trying to run a business.
I’d seen the very site of Cortez’s modest childhood and current residence recently; took me almost ten hours to get there, which tells you nothing. It’s a big mistake to measure space in time, after all. Because times change. Still, Cortez had the longest subway ride of anyone in the drug trade. If he wanted to go look after his operatives in Brooklyn, he had to get all the way from northern Manhattan to Brooklyn, and most of those lines didn’t run anymore. Under the circumstances, a military convoy was just a good investment.
Washington Heights. Up north. Kids playing stickball in the street using old-fashioned boom microphones for bats. There were gangsters with earpieces on stoops up and down the block. What were the memories of these people like? Did they drop, as the addicts put it? Did they use? And what were Cortez’s memories like? Memories of middleweight prizefighting at the gym up the block? Maybe. Some drinking with the boys. Some whoring around with the streetwalkers on Upper Broadway. Assignations with Catholic girls in the neighborhood? Cortez had a bad speech impediment, everybody said. Would Albertine make it so that he, in memory, could get as far back as the time before speech acquisition, to the sweet days before the neighborhood kids made fun of him for the way he talked? Could he teach his earlier self better how to say the s of American English? To speak with authority? One tipster provided by my magazine had offered sinister opinions about the appearance of Cortez, this Cortez of the assumed name. This tipster, whispering into a rare land line, had offered the theory that the culture of Albertine itself changed when Cortez appeared, just as did the culture of the continent when the original Cortez, great explor
er, bearer of a shipload of smallpox, arrived. This was, of course, a variation on the so-called diachronous theory of abuse patterns that had turned up in the medical journals recently.
There were traditional kinds of memories before the appearance of Albertine, namely identity builders, according to these medical theorists. Like that guy at Brooklyn College, the government anthropologist of Albertine, Ernst Wentworth, PhD. Even repressed memory syndrome, in his way of thinking, is an identity builder, because in repressed memory syndrome you learn ultimately to empower yourself, in that you are identifying past abusers and understanding the ramifications of their misdeeds. Empowerment is the kind of terminology Wentworth used. A repetition of stressful memories is, according to his writing, an attempt by an identity to arrive at a solution to stress. Even a calamity, the collapse of a bridge, when remembered by one who has plunged into an icy river, is an identity builder, in that it reassures the remembering subject. The here and now puts him in the position of being alive all over again, no matter how painful it is to be alive. The Wentworth identity-building theory was the prevailing theory of memory studies, up until Albertine.
Since Albertine arrived on the scene after the blast, theorists eventually needed to consider the blast in all early Albertine phenomena. Figures, right? One night I felt that I’d started to understand these theories in a dramatic way, in my heart, or what was left of it, instead of in my head. I was at the armory, where I slept in a closet, really—used to be a supply closet, and there were still some supplies in there, some rug-cleaning solvents, some spot removers, extra towels. You never know when you might need this stuff. Anyway, the halls outside the supply closet echoed; you could hear every whisper in the halls of the armory, formerly an area for the storage of munitions. You could hear people coming and going. It wasn’t and isn’t a great place to live, when you consider that I used to have a studio in the East Village. But compared to living in the great hall itself, where mostly people tried to erect cubicles for themselves, cubicles made out of cardboard or canvas or Sheetrock, the supply closet was not so bad. The privilege of doling out closets had fallen to an Albertine addict called Bertrand, and when I fixed up Bertrand with Fox and a few other dealers, I got bumped up to the supply closet right away. Any moths came after my remaining shirts and sweaters, I had all the insecticide I’d need.
This night I’m describing, I had a breakthrough of dialectical reasoning: I was hearing the blast. You know the conventional wisdom about combat veterans, loud noises suggesting the sharp crack of submachine gun fire, all that? I thought just the opposite. That certain silences re-created the blast, because there’s something about fission, you know, it’s soundless in a way, it suggests soundlessness, it’s a violence contained in the opposite of violence, big effects from preposterously small changes. Say you were one of the four million who survived, you were far enough away that the blast, heat, and radiation could do their damage before the sound reached you, wherever you were. So it follows that the sound of the explosion would be best summoned up in no sound at all. The pauses in the haggard steps of the insomniacs of the armory walking past the door to my closet, this sound was the structured absence in what all our memories were seeking to suppress or otherwise avoid: the truth of the blast.
I’m not a philosopher. But my guess was that eventually people would start remembering the blast. You know? How could it be otherwise? I’m not saying I’m the person who came up with the idea; maybe the government mole did. Maybe Ernst Wentworth did. I’m saying, I guess, that all memories verged on being memories of the blast, like footsteps in the echoing corridor outside my supply closet. Memories were like downpours of black raindrops. All noises were examples of the possibility of the noise of the blast, which was the limit of all possibilities of sound, and thus a limit on all possibilities of memory. For a lot of people, the blast was so traumatic they couldn’t even remember where they were at the time, and I’m one of those people, I’m afraid, in case you were wondering. I know I was heading out to Jersey for a software convention in the New Brunswick area. At least, that’s what I think I was doing. But I don’t know how I got back. When I came to, Manhattan was gone.
People began to have memories of the blast while high. And people began to die of certain memories on the drug. Makes perfect sense. And this is part of the diachronous theory of abuse patterns that I was talking about before. First, Conrad Dixon, a former academic himself, was found dead in his apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, no visible sign of death, except that he’d just been seen scamming a bunch of dealers in Crown Heights. Was the death by reason of poisonous additives in the drug cocktail? That’d be a pretty good theory if he were the only person who died this way, but all at once a lot of people started dying, and it was my contention, anyhow, that they were remembering the blast. There were the bad memories in an ordinary fit of Albertine remembering, and then there was the memory of this moment of all moments, a sense of the number of people eliminated in the carnage, a sense of the kind of motive of the guy or guys, men or women, who managed to smuggle the dirty uranium device into town and then have it delivered, et cetera. An innocent thing when Conrad Dixon, or the others like him, first did what they did. In the early curve of the epidemic, everybody used Albertine alone because memories are most often experienced alone. And the recitation of them, well, it was just pretty dull: Oh, let me tell you about the time I was in Los Angeles and I saw such and such a starlet at the table next to me, or about the time I broke my arm trying to white-water raft. Or whatever your pathetic memory is. It’s all the same, the brimming eyes of your daughter when she was a toddler and fell and got a bump on her head, I don’t give a fuck, because I know what happened with Conrad Dixon, which is that he put the needle in his arm and then he was back in Midtown and looking down at the lower part of the island where he had spent his entire youth. A good thing, sure, that Conrad, that day, had to take that programmer’s certification test up at Columbia, because instead of becoming a faint shadow on the side of some building on Union Square, he could see the entire neighborhood that he had worked in subsumed into perfect light, and he could feel the nausea rising in him, and he could see the cloud’s outstretched arms, and all the information in him was wiped aside, he was a vacuum of facts, a memory vacuum, and again and again he could see the light, feel the incineration, and he knew something about radiation that he hadn’t known before, about the surface of the stars. He knew that he was sick, knew that again he was going to have to live through the first few days, when everyone was suffering, their insides liquefying. Don’t make me walk you through it—the point is that Albertine gave back the blast, when Conrad had hoped never to experience it again. Conrad was so stuck in the loop of this recollection that he could do nothing else but die, because that was the end of the blast—whether in actual space or on the recollected plane, whether in the past or the present or the future, whether in ideas or reality—the blast was about death.
What’s this have to do with Eduardo Cortez? Well, it has to do with the fact that Cortez’s play for control of the Albertine cartel came exactly at the moment of highest density of deaths from Albertine overdose or drug interaction. I refer you back again to the diachronous theory of abuse patterns. See what I mean? The big question is how did Cortez, just by showing up, affect the way Albertine was used? The mixture of the chemical, if it’s even a chemical, certainly didn’t change all that much—had not changed during the course of the twelve months that it grew into a street epidemic. Can we attribute the differences in abuse patterns to any other factors? Why is it Cortez who seemed to be responsible for the blast’s intruding into everybody’s memory?
My notes for the magazine are all about my disbelief, my uncertainty. But I was holding Cassandra’s hand, prostitute in rags, woman with the skeletal body, while she was using the eyedropper, and I know this might seem like a hopeful gesture. Like some good could come of it all. I heard her sigh. The cage of the elevator, at a crawl, passed a red e
mergency light on the wall of the shaft. Hookers are always erotic about nonerotic things. Time, for example. The elsewhere of time was all over her, like she was coming to memories of a time before prostitution, and this was somehow really alluring. I was holding her hand. I was disoriented. I checked my watch. I mean I checked what day it was. I had been assigned to the Albertine story two weeks ago, according to my Rolex knockoff—which had miraculously survived the electromagnetic pulse—but I could swear that it had been just two days before that I’d been hanging out in the offices of the soft-core porn mag, the offices with the bulletproof glass and the robot receptionist out front. When had I last been back to the supply closet to sleep? When had I last eaten? Wasn’t it the night just passed, the evening with the footsteps in the corridor and the revelation about the silence of the blast? I was holding Cassandra’s hand because she had a tenuous link to the facts of Albertine and this seemed like the last chance to master the story, to get it down somehow, instead of being consumed by it.
This is my scoop, then. The scoop is that suddenly I saw what she was seeing.
Cassandra said, “Watch this.”
Pay close attention. I saw a close-up, in my head I saw it, like from some Web movie—a guy’s arm, a man’s arm, an arm covered with scars, almost furry it was so hairy, and then a hand pulling tight a belt around a biceps, jamming in a needle, depressing the plunger, a grunt of initial discomfort. Then the voice of the guy, thick accent, maybe a Dominican accent, announcing his threat: “I’m going back to the Lower East Side and I’m going to cap the motherfucker, see if I don’t.” Definite speech impediment. A problem with sibilance. You know? Then this guy, this dude, was looking over at Cassandra—she was in the scene, not in the elevator, where we were at least theoretically standing, but with Eduardo Cortez. She was his consort. He was taking her hand, there was a connection of hands, a circular movement of hands, and then Cassandra and I were on a street, and I saw Cortez in Tompkins Square Park, which doesn’t exist anymore, of course, and it was clear that he was searching out a particular white guy, and now, coming through the crowd, here was the guy, looked like an educated man, if you know what I mean, one of those East Village art-slumming dudes. Cortez was searching out this guy, who was kinda grungy, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, and it was all preordained, and now Cortez had found him.