Lights associated with the thrall of Cassandra’s recollection, phantom lights, auras. The particulars were like a migraine. Things were solarized; there were solar flares around the street lamps. We were bustling in and around the homeless army of Tompkins Square. I could hear my own panicky breathing. I was in a park that didn’t exist anymore, and I was seeing Cortez, and I was seeing this guy, this white guy—he had that look where one side of his face, the right side, was different from the other side, so that on the right side he seemed to be melancholy and placid, whereas on the left there was the faintest resemblance to a smirk at all times. The left side was all contorted, and maybe there were scars there, some kind of slasher’s jagged line running from the corner of his mouth to his ear, and Cassandra, I guess, was saying, “Let’s not do this, okay? Eduardo? Please? Eduardo? We can fix the problem another way.” Except that at the same moment she was saying to me, somehow outside of this memory I have of these events, she was saying, “Do you understand what you’re seeing?”
I said, “He’s going to—”
“—Kill the guy.”
“And that guy is?”
“Addict Number One.”
“Who?”
“That guy is the first user,” she said. “The very first one.”
“And why is he important?”
Cassandra said, “For the sake of control. You don’t get it, do you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Addict Number One is being killed in a memory.”
Something coursed in me like a flash flood. A real perception, maybe, or just the blunt feelings of sympathetic drug abuse. When I tried to figure out the enormity of what Cassandra was telling me, I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand the implications, couldn’t understand why she would tell me what she was telling me, because to talk was to die, as far as I could tell, because Fox was dead, Bob was dead, the Mnemonic X boys had been completely wiped out, probably fifty guys, all disappeared, same day, same time, reporters from my old paper were dead. Chasing the story of Albertine was to chase time itself, and time guarded its secrets.
“How’s that possible? That’s not possible! How are you going to kill someone in a memory? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Right. It doesn’t make any sense, but it happened. And it could happen again.”
“But a memory isn’t a place. It’s nowhere but in someone’s head. There’s not a movie running somewhere. You can’t jump up into the screen and start messing with the action.”
“How do you know? Just watch and you’ll see.”
I was thinking, see, about the diachronous theory. The pattern of abuse and dispersal of Albertine was widest and most threatening at the instant of the murder of Addict Number One, I was guessing, which was about to be revealed as a murder—the first and only murder, I hoped, that I ever needed to witness, because even if he was a smirking guy, someone unliked or ridiculed, even if he was just a drug addict, whatever, Addict Number One was a prodigious rememberer. As the first full-scale Albertine addict, I learned later, he had catalogued loads of memories, for example, light in the West Village, which in July is perfect at sunset on odd-numbered streets in the teens and twenties. It was true. Addict Number One had learned this. If you stood on certain corners and looked west in summer, at dusk, you would see that the city of New York had sunsets that would have animated the great landscape painters. Or how about the perfect bagel? Addict Number One had sampled many of the fresh bagels of the city of New York, and he compiled notes about the best bagels, which were found at a place on University and Thirteenth Street. They were large, soft, and warm. Addict Number One devoted pages to the taste of the bagel as it went into your mouth.
Sadly, instead of illuminating the life of Addict Number One, it’s my job now to describe the pattern of the dispersal of his brains. The pattern that was exactly like the pattern of dispersal of radioactive material in lower Manhattan. Cortez held the revolver to the head of Addict Number One, whose expression of complete misunderstanding and disbelief was heartrending, enough so to prove that he had no idea what his murder meant, and Cortez pulled the trigger of the revolver, and Addict Number One fell over like he had never once been a living thing. Fucking punk-ass junkie, Cortez intoned. Were the baroque memories of Addict Number One now part of all that tissue splattered on the dog run in Tompkins Square? Was that a memory splashed on that retriever there, gunking up its fur, an electrical impulse, a bit of energy, withering in a pool of gore in a city park? I saw it because Cortez saw it, and Cortez gave the memory to Cassandra, who gave it to me: corpus callosum and basal ganglia on the dogs, on the lawn, and screaming women, the homeless army drawn up near, gazing, silent, as Addict Number One, slain by a drug dealer in memory only, weltered, gasping. His memories slain with him.
It was like this. Even though the memory was just a memory, its effect was real. As real as if it were all happening now. This is like saying that nine-tenths of the universe is invisible, I know. But just bear with me. Cortez’s accomplishment was that, according to Cassandra, he’d learned from informers that Addict Number One was once a real person, with a real past (went to NYU, and his name was Paley, and he wanted to make movies), after which he’d located a picture of Addict Number One by reading an obituary from the time after Addict Number One was already dead.
Must have been pretty tempting to try to fabricate a memory about Addict Number One. Oh yeah, I saw him on the Christopher Street pier that time. Or I saw him on my way to Hunts Point to visit my grandma. Cortez may have tried this, perhaps a dozen times, skin-popping Albertine in an unfurnished room in East Harlem, vainly attempting to put a bullet in the head of an imagined encounter with Addict Number One, but no. Cortez had to go through every face in every crowd, all the remembered crowds of which he had ever been a part, every face passed on Broadway, every prone body on the Bowery, every body in the stands of Yankee Stadium. He shot more, spent most of the money from his bike messenger job on this jones for narrative, and then one day he was certain.
He was killing roaches in his empty apartment when suddenly he knew. He was prying up a floorboard to look for roaches and he knew. As certainly as he knew the grid of his city. He’d walked by Addict Number One one day, when he was sixteen, in Tompkins Square. Far from his own neighborhood. On his way to a game of handball. He’d walked by him, he knew it. Not someone else, but him, Addict Number One. Guy looked like a faggot, the way Cortez told Cassandra later. All white guys looked like faggots as far as he was concerned, and he’d just as soon kill the punk-ass motherfucker for looking like a faggot as for any other reason, although there were plenty of other reasons. Main thing was that if he could figure out a way to kill Addict Number One in his memory, then a whole sequence of events would fail, like when Addict Number One hooked up with certain black guys in his neighborhood who had been fronting heroin up until that time and gave to them the correct chemical compound of Albertine, the secrets of the raw materials needed for the manufacture, the apparatus. If Cortez killed his ass, this future would not turn out to be the real future. If Cortez killed his ass, then Cortez would control the syndicate.
It would take even more time and money, more time doping, a solid six months, in fact, in his room, going through that whole sequence of his life, like that time with his neighbor, he told Cassandra. Over and over again, Eduardo had to deal with that drunken fuck neighbor, not even gonna say his name, Cortez would say to Cassandra, fighting off that memory when the guy, Eduardo’s alleged uncle, in the rubble of an abandoned building, exposed himself to little Eduardo, his droopy uncut penis, fucking guy couldn’t get hard no more, looked like a gizzard, and the uncle drunkenly pronounced that he was lonelier than any man had ever been, didn’t belong in this country, couldn’t go back to the island nation of his birth, no reason for a man to be as lonely as this man, no reason for this surfeit of loneliness, every day in every way, and would Eduardo make him feel comfortable for just this one day, treat him like a loving man this
one time, because he was so lonely, had an aching in his heart that nothing could still, wouldn’t ask again, he swore, and took Eduardo, just a little compadre, just a wisp, couldn’t even lift an aluminum baseball bat, couldn’t lift a finger against the alleged uncle, took Eduardo for his goddess—you are my priestess, you are my goddess—and now Eduardo vowed that he would never suffer before any man the way he had with the uncle.
The syringe, the eyedropper, the concentric rings of the past. Again and again the uncle would attempt to seduce him. He was willing to go through that, a thousand times if he had to, until he had the gun on his person, in the waistband of his warm-up suit, and he was ready. He was sixteen, with fresh tattoos, and he’d been to mass that morning and he had a gun, and he was going to play handball, and he saw this white faggot in the dog run, and he just walked up to him like they never met. Though in truth it was like Eduardo Cortez knew him inside and out, and Eduardo wanted to make something out of himself, his life that was so lost up until then, where he was just a bike messenger, and the desperadoes of his neighborhood were all going to be working for him, and if they made one wrong move, he’d throw them off a fucking bridge, whatever bridges is still up, and if they touched the little girls in his neighborhood, that was another crime, for which he would exact a very high price, a mortal price, and the first priority, the long-term business plan was that Eduardo Cortez would be the guy that would make profits from memories, even if his own memories were bad. That was just how it was going to go, and I saw all this with Cassandra, that Cortez had managed by sheer brute force to murder a memory, splatter a memory like it was nothing at all.
One minute Addict Number One was wandering in the East Village, years before he was an addict, years before there even was an Albertine to cop, and he was thinking about how he was going to get funding for his digital-video project, and then, right in front of a bunch of dog walkers, the guy disappeared. This is the story, from the point of view of those who were not in on the cascading of memories. It’s one of the really great examples of public delusion when you read it in the online police records, like I did.
Witnesses insist that the victim, first referred to as Caucasian John Doe, later identified as Irving Paley of 433 East 9th St, was present on the scene, along with a Hispanic man in his teens, and then, abruptly, no longer present. “It’s as if he just vanished,” remarked one witness. Others concur. No body located thereafter. Apartment also completely emptied, possibly by assailant.
Good thing those records were stored on a server in Queens. Since One Police Plaza is dust.
The guys in the smelting plant were all wearing uniforms. They were the uniforms of bike messengers, as if the entire story somehow turned on bike messengers. Bike messenger as conveyor of meaning. There were these courtiers in the empire of Eduardo Cortez, and the lowest echelon was the beat cop, a phalanx of whom encircled the building, sending news of anyone in the neighborhood into command central by radio. And then there were the centurions of the empire, the guys in the bike messenger uniforms, wearing the crash helmets of bike messengers. All done up in Lycra, like this was some kind of superhero garb. When the elevator door swung back, it was clear that we had definitely penetrated to the inner sanctum of Eduardo Cortez, as if by merely thinking. And this inner sanctum was inexplicable, comic, and deadly. Sure, it was possible that I had now been researching for two weeks and no longer needed food or sleep in order to do it. Sure, maybe I was just doing a really great job, and, since I was an honest guy who seemed cool and nonthreatening, maybe I was allowed into places that the stereotypical Albertine abuser would not ordinarily be allowed. But it seemed unlikely. This was evidently one of the fabled five mansions of Cortez, among which he shuttled, depending on his whim, like a despot from the coca-producing latitudes.
“Eddie,” Cassandra sang out into the low lighting of the smelting-plant floor, “I brought him like you said.”
Which one was Eddie? The room was outfitted with gigantic machines, suspension devices, ramrods, pistons thundering, wheels turning, like some fabulous Rube Goldberg future, and there was no center to it, no throne, no black leather sofa with a leopard print quilt thrown over it, and none of the bike messengers in the room looked like the Cortez of my memory, the Cortez of Tompkins Square Park, on his way to play handball. Perhaps he’d had himself altered by a cosmetic surgeon with a drug problem and a large debt. In fact, in scanning the faces of the dozens of bike messengers in the room, it seemed that they all looked similar, all of European extraction, all harried, with brown hair on the verge of going gray, all with blue eyes, a little bit paunchy. Were they robots? Were they street toughs from the bad neighborhoods? They were, it turned out, the surgically altered army of Eddie Cortez foot soldiers, who made it possible for him to be in so many places at so many times, in all the fabled five mansions. Eddie was a condition of the economy now, not a particular person.
At the remark from Cassandra, several of the bike messengers gathered in the center of the room. Maybe they were all modified comfort robots, so that Eddie could use them professionally during the day and fuck them later at night. One of them finally asked, with a blank expression, “His writing any good?”
Cassandra turned to me. “They want to know if you’re a good writer.”
“Uh, sure,” I said, answering to the room. “Sure. I guess. Uh, are you wanting me to write something? What do you have in mind exactly?”
More huddling. No amount of time was too lengthy, in terms of negotiation, and this was probably because time was no longer all that important to Cortez and the empire. All time present was now sucked up into the riptide of the past. Furthermore, since it was now possible that Eddie could disappear at any moment, like Addict Number One had, when someone else figured out his technique for dealing with the past, he had apparently deliberately moved to ensure an eternal boring instant where everybody looked the same and where nothing particularly happened. Events, any kind of events, were dangerous. Eddie’s fabled five mansions featured a languid, fixed now. He took his time. He changed his appearance frequently, as well as the appearance of all those around him. That way he could control memories. So his days were apparently taken up with dye jobs, false beards, colored contact lenses, with shopping for items relating to disguise and imposture and disfigurement.
A bike messenger goon addressed me directly on the subject of writing about Albertine.
“Funny you should, uh, suggest it,” I said. “Because I have been assigned to write a history, and that’s why I got in contact with Cassandra in the first place . . . .”
Everyone looked at her. Faint traces of confusion.
Have I described her well enough? In the half light, she was a goddess, even though I figure addicts always shine in low lighting. In the emergency lighting of Eddie’s lair, Cassandra was the doomed forecaster, as her name implied. She was the whisperer of syllables in a tricky meter. She was the possibility of possibilities. I knew that desire for me must have been a thing that was slumbering for a really long time. It was just desire for desire, but now it was ungainly. I felt some stirring of possible futures with Cassandra, didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I was guilty of treating women like ideas in my search for Albertine. In fact, I knew so little about her that it was only just then that I thought about the fact that she was Asian too. From China, or maybe her parents or grandparents were from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Because now she swept back her black and maroon hair, and I could see her face. Her expression, which was kind of sad.
They all laughed. The bike messengers. I was the object of hilarity.
“Cassandra,” they said. “That’s a good one. What’s that, like some Chinese name?”
“You did good, girl. You’re a first-class bitch, Albertine, and so it’s time for a treat, if you want.”
A broadcaster’s voice. Like Eddie had managed to hire network talent to make his announcements.
“Wait,” I said. “Her name is . . . ”
And then I got
it. They named it after her.
“You named the drug after her?”
“Not necessarily,” the broadcasting voice said. “Might have named her after the drug. We can’t really remember the sequence. And the thing is, there are memories either way.”
“She doesn’t look like an Albertine to me.”
“The fuck you know, canary,” the broadcaster said, and suddenly I heard Eddie in there, heard his attitude. Canary. A reporter’s nickname.
Cassandra was encircled by bike messengers and hefted up to a platform in the midst of the Rube Goldberg devices. Her rags were removed from her body by certain automated machines, prosthetic digits, and she was laid out like a sacrificial victim, which I guess is what she was, one knee bent, like in classical sculpture, one arm was stretched above her head. No woman is more poignant than the woman about to be sacrificed, but even this remark makes me more like Eddie, less like a lover.