Right Livelihoods

by Rick Moody

  Street name for the buzz of a lifetime. Bitch goddess of the overwhelming past. Albertine. Rapids in the river of time. Take just a little into your bloodstream and any memory you’ve ever had is available to you all over again. That and more. Not a memory like you’ve experienced it before, not a little tremor in some presque vu register of your helter-skelter consciousness: Oh yeah, I remember when I ate peanut butter and jelly with Serena on Boston Common and drank rum out of paper cups. No, the actual event itself, completely renewed, playing in front of you as though you were experiencing it for the first time. There’s Serena in blue jeans with patches on the knees, the green Dartmouth sweatshirt that goes with her eyes, drinking the rum a little too fast and spitting out some of it, picking her teeth with her deep red nails, a shade called lycanthrope, and there’s the taste of super-chunky peanut butter in the sandwiches, stale pretzel rods. Here you are, the two of you, walking around that part of the garden with all those willows. She lets slip your hand because your palms are moist: the smell of a city park at the moment when a September shower dampens the pavement, car exhaust, a mist hanging in the air at dusk, the sound of kids fighting over the rules of softball, a homeless dude scamming you for a sip of your rum.

  Get the idea?

  It almost goes without saying that Albertine appeared in a certain socioeconomic sector not long after the blast. When you’re used to living a comfortable middle-class life, when you’re used to going to the organic farmers’ market on the weekend, maybe a couple of dinners out at that new Indian place, you’re bound to become very uncomfortable when fifty square blocks of your city suddenly look like a NASA photo of Mars. You’re bound to look for some relief when you’re camped in a school gymnasium pouring condensed milk over government-issued cornflakes. Under the circumstances, you’re going to prize your memories, right? So you’ll skin-pop some Albertine, or you’ll use the eyedropper, hold open your lid, and go searching back through the halcyon days. Afternoons in the stadium, those stadium lights on the grass, the first roar of the crowd. Or how about your first concert? Or your first kiss?

  Only going to cost you twenty-five bucks.

  I’m Kevin Lee. Chinese American, third generation, which doesn’t mean my dad worked in a delicatessen to get me into MIT. It means my father was an IT venture capitalist and my mother was a microbiologist. I grew up in Newton, Mass., but I also lived in northern California for a while. I came to New York City to go to Fordham, dropped out, and started writing about the sciences for one of the alternative weeklies. It was a start. But the offices of the newspaper, all of its owners, a large percentage of its shareholders, and nine-tenths of its reporting staff were incinerated. Not like I need to bring all of that up again. If you want to assume anything, assume that all silences from now on have some grief in them.

  One problem with Albertine was that the memories she screened were not all good, naturally. Albertine didn’t guarantee good memories. In fact, Albertine guaranteed at least a portion of pretty awful memories. One guy I interviewed, early on when I was chasing the story, he spoke about having only memories about jealousy. He got a bad batch, probably too many additives, and all he could see in his mind’s eye were these intense moments of jealousy. He was even weeping when we spoke. On the come down. I’d taken him out to an all-night diner. Where Atlantic Avenue meets up with Conduit. Know that part of the city? A beautiful, a neglected part. Ought to have been a chill in the early-autumn night. Air force jets were landing at the airport in those days. The guy, we’ll say his name is Bob, he was telling me about the morning he called a friend, Nina, to meet her for a business breakfast. In the middle of the call Nina told him that his wife, Maura, had become her lover. He remembered everything about this call, the exact wording of the revelation. Bob, Maura has been attracted to me since as far back as your wedding. He remembered the excruciating pauses. He could overhear the rustling of bedclothes. All these things he could picture, just as though they were happening, and even the things he imagined during the phone call, which took place seventeen years ago. What Nina had done to Maura in bed, what dildo they used. It was seventeen years later on Atlantic and Conduit, and Maura had been vaporized, or that’s what Bob said: “Jesus, Maura is dead and I never told her what was great about our years together, and I’ll never have that chance now.” He was inconsolable, but I kept asking questions. Because I’m a reporter. I put it together that he’d spent fifty bucks on two doses of Albertine. Six months after the thyroid removal, here he was. Bob was just hoping to have one sugary memory—of swimming in the pond in Danbury, the swimming hole with the rope swing. Remember that day? And all he could remember was that his wife had slept with his college friend, and that his brother took the girl he dreamed about in high school. Like jealousy was the only color in his life. Like the atmosphere was three parts jealousy, one part oxygen.

  That’s what Albertine was whispering in his ear.

  Large-scale drug dealing, it’s sort of like beta testing. There are unscrupulous people around. Nobody knows how a chemical is going to behave until the guinea pigs have lined up. FDA thinks they know, when they rubber-stamp some compound that makes you grow back the hair you lost during chemotherapy. But they know nothing. Try giving your drug to a hundred and fifty thousand disenfranchised members of the new middle-class poor in a recently devastated American city. Do it every day for almost a year. Allow people to mix in randomly their favorite inert substances.

  There were lots of stories. Lots of different experiences. Lots of fibs, exaggerations, innuendos, rumors. Example: not only did Albertine cause bad memories as frequently as good memories—this was the lore—but she also allowed you to remember the future. This is what Tara told me when she assigned me the 2,500 words. “Find out if it’s true. Find out if we can get to the future on it.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  “None of your business,” she said, and then, like she was covering her tracks, “I’d see if I was ever going to get a promotion.”

  Well, here’s another example. The story of Deanna, whose name I’m changing for her protection: “I was going to church after the blast, you know, because I was kind of feeling like God should be doing something about all the heartache. I mean, maybe that’s simpleminded or something. I don’t care. I was in church, and it was a beautiful place; any church still standing was a beautiful place when you had those horrible clouds overhead all the time and everybody getting sick. The fact of the matter is, while I was there in church, during what should have been a really calm time, instead of thinking that the Gospels were good news, I was having a vision. I don’t know what else to call it. It was like in the movies, when the movie goes into some kind of flashback, except in this vision I saw myself driving home from church, and I saw a car pulling ahead of me out onto the road by the reservoir, and I had this feeling that the car pulling out toward the reservoir, which was a twenty-year-old model of one of those minivans, was some kind of bad omen, you know? So I went to my priest and I told him what I thought, that this car had some bad intention, at least in my mind’s eye, you know. I could see it; I could see that Jesus was telling me this, better watch out at the reservoir. Some potion was going to be emptied into the reservoir. I could see it, I have seen it. The guys doing it, they were emptying jugs in and they definitely had mustaches. They were probably from some desert country. The priest took me to the bishop, and I repeated everything I knew, about the Lord and what he had told me, and so I had an audience with the archbishop. The archbishop said, ‘You have to tell me if Jesus really told you this. Did Jesus tell you personally? Is this a genuine message from the Christ?’ In this office with a lot of dusty books on the dusty shelves. You could tell that they were all really hungry to be in the room with the word of the Christ, and who wouldn’t feel that way? Everybody is desperate, right? But then one of them says, ‘Roll up your sleeves, please.’”

  Deanna was shown the door. Because of the needle tracks. Now she’s working down by the Go
wanus Expressway.

  The archbishop did give the tip to the authorities, however, just to be on the safe side, and the authorities did stop a Ford Explorer on the way to the reservoir in Katonah. And Deanna’s story was just one along these lines. Many Albertine users began reporting “memories” of things that were yet to happen. Outcomes of elections, declines in various international stocks, the intensity of the upcoming hurricane season. The dealers, whether skeptical or believing on this point, saw big profits in mythology. Because garbage heads and gamblers often live right next door to one another, know what I mean? One vice is like another. Soon there were those scraggly guys that you used to see at the track. These guys were all looking to cop Albertine from the man in Red Hook or East New York, and they were sitting like autistics in a room with Sheetrock torn from the walls, no electricity, no running water, people pissing themselves, refusing food, and they were in search of the name of the greyhound that was going to take the next race. Maybe they could bet the trifecta? Teeth were falling out of the heads of these bettors, and their hair was falling out, because they believed if they just hung on long enough, they would get the vision.

  Now, that’s marketing.

  Logically speaking, there were some issues with a belief system like this. On Albertine, the visions of the past were mixed up with the alleged future, of course. And sometimes these were nightmarish visions. You had to know where to cast your gaze. There was no particular targeting of receptors. The drug wasn’t advanced. It was like using a lawnmower to harvest wildflowers. I shook one girl awake, Cassandra, down in the Hot Zone in Bed-Stuy. I knew Cassandra was a bullshit name, the kind of name you’d tell a reporter. It was a still night, coming on toward December, bitter cold, because the debris cloud had really fucked with global warming, and I was walking around dictating into a digital recorder, okay? The streets were uninhabited. I mean, take a city from eight million down to four and a half million, suddenly everything seems kind of empty. And this is a pedestrian town anyhow. Now more than ever. I was on my way to interview an epidemiologist who claimed that while on Albertine he’d had a memory of the proper way to eradicate the drug. He’d tell me only if I would remunerate him. And maybe Tara would reimburse me, because I had run through most of the few hundred dollars I had in cash before my bank was wiped off the map. I’d already sold blood and volunteered for a dream lab.

  But on the way to the epidemiologist, I saw this girl nodding out on a swing, an old wooden swing, the kind that usually gets stolen in the projects. Over by a middle school in the Hot Zone. I picked up her arm; she didn’t even seem to notice at first. I turned it over. Like I couldn’t tell from the rings under the eyes, those black bruises that said, This one has remembered too much. I checked her arms anyway. Covered with lesions.

  I said, “Hey, I’m doing a story for one of those tits and lit mags. About Albertine. Wondering if I can ask you a few questions.”

  Her voice was frail at first, almost as if it were the first voice ever used:

  “Ask me any question. I’m like the oracle at Delphi, boyfriend.”

  Sort of a dark-haired girl, and she sort of reminded me of Serena. Wearing this red scarf on her head. A surge from her voice, like I’d heard it before, like maybe I was almost verging on something from the past. I figured I’d try out Cassandra, see what kind of a fact-gathering resource she could be, see where it led. It beat watching the Hasidim in Crown Heights fighting with the West Indians. Man, I’d had enough with the Hasidim and the Baptists and their rants about end-times. The problem was that Albertine, bitch goddess, kept giving conflicting reports about which end-times we were going to get.

  “What’s my name?” I asked.

  “Your name is Kevin Lee. You’re from Massachusetts.”

  “Okay, uh, what am I writing about?”

  “You’re writing about Albertine, and you’re in way over your head. And the batteries on your recording device are going to run out soon.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Are we going to kiss?”

  A reality-testing question, get it?

  No inflection at all, Cassandra said: “Sure. We are. But not now. Later.”

  “What do you know about the origins of Albertine?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Are you high now?”

  Which was like asking if she’d ever seen rain.

  “Are you high enough to see the origins from where you are sitting?”

  “I’d have to be there to have a memory of it.”

  “What have you heard?” I asked.

  “Everybody’s heard something.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You aren’t listening. Everybody knows.”

  “Then tell me,” I said.

  “You have to be inside. Take the drug, then you’ll be inside.”

  Up at the corner, a blue-and-white sedan—NYPD—as rare as a white tiger in this neighborhood. The police were advance men for the drug cartels. They had no peacetime responsibility, except they made sure that the trade proceeded without any interference. For this New York’s Finest got a cut, a portion of which they tithed back to the city. So the syndicate was subsidizing the City of New York, the way I saw it. Subsidizing the rebuilding, subsidizing the government, so that government would have buildings, underground bunkers, treatment centers, whole departments devoted to Albertine, to her care and protection.

  Fox, a small-time dealer and friend of Bob, one of my sources, was the first person I could find who’d float these conspiratorial theories. Right before he disappeared. And he wasn’t the only one who disappeared among the people I came to know. Bob stopped returning my calls too. Not that it amounted to much, a disappearance here and there. Our city was outside of history now, beyond surveillance. People disappeared.

  “I don’t, like, buy the conspiracy angle,” I said to Cassandra. “Been there, done that.”

  Her eyes fluttered, as if she were fighting off an invasion of butterflies.

  “Well, actually . . . ,” she said.

  “Government isn’t competent enough for conspiracy. Government is a bunch of guys in a subbasement somewhere in Englewood, waiting for some war to blow over. Guys hoping they won’t have to see what everyone out on the street has seen.”

  I helped her from the swing. She was thin, like a greyhound, and just as distracted. The chains on the swing clattered as she dismounted.

  It wasn’t that hard to be at the center of the Albertine story, see, because there was no center. Everywhere, people were either selling the drug or using the drug, and if they were using the drug, they were in its thrall, which was the thrall of memory. You could see them lying around everywhere. In all public places. Albertine expanded to fill any container. If you thought she was confined to Red Hook, it seemed for a while that she was only in Red Hook. But then if you looked in Astoria, she was in Astoria too. As if it were the act of observing that somehow turned her up. More you looked, more you saw. A city whose citizens, when outdoors, seemed preoccupied or vacant. If inside, almost paralytic. I couldn’t tell you how many times in that first week of reporting I happened to gaze into a ground-floor window and see people staring at television screens that were turned off.

  So I went on with the theories:

  “People think the government has the juice to launch conspiracies. But if they were competent enough for that kind of subterfuge, then they’d be competent enough to track some guy who brings a suitcase detonator into the country across the Canadian border and has the uranium delivered to him by messenger. Some messenger on a bike! They’d be competent enough to prevent a third of Manhattan getting blown up! Or they’d be able to infiltrate the cartels. Or they’d be able to repair all of this civic destruction. So are we going to kiss now?”

  “Later,” she said.

  I was thinking that maybe this conversation had come to an end, that there was no important subtext to the conversation, that Cassandra was just another deep-fried intelligence locked away in t
he past, and that maybe I should have gone on my way to pay off the epidemiologist who had the new angle. But then she was sneaking me a little bit of insider information; she said, “Brookhaven.”

  Meaning what? Meaning the laboratory?

  Of course, the Brookhaven theory, like the MIT theory, like the Palo Alto Research Center theory or the Jet Propulsion Lab theory. These rumors about Albertine just weren’t all that compelling, because everyone had heard them, but for some reason I had this uncanny sense of recognition at the name of the government facility on Long Island. Then she said that we should together go see the man.

  “I don’t know exactly about the beginning, the origin,” Cassandra said, “but I’ve been with someone who does. He’ll be there. Where we’re going.”

  “What are you seeing right now?”

  “Autumn,” she whispered.

  It was a coming-down thing. The imagery of Albertine began to move toward the ephemeral, the passing away, leaves mulching, pumpkin seeds, first frost. Was there some neurotransmitter designated as the seat of memory that necessarily had autumn written into it? A chromosome that contained a sensitivity to fall? When I was a kid there were a couple years we lived in northern California, a charmed place, you know, during the tech boom. Those words seem quaint. Like saying whore with a heart of gold. I couldn’t forget northern California, couldn’t forget the redwoods, the seals, the rugged beaches, the austere Pacific, and when I heard the words tech boom, I knew what memory I would have if I took the drug, which was the memory of the first autumn that I didn’t get to see the seasons change. In northern California, watching the mist creep into the bay, watching the Golden Gate engulfed, watching that city disappear. In northern California, I waited till evening, then I’d go over to the used-book stores in town, because there was always someone in the used-book stores who was from Back East. So this would be my memory, a memory of reading, of stealing time from time itself, of years passing while I was reading, hanging out in a patched armchair in a used-book store in northern California and, later on, back in Mass. Maybe I was remembering this memory or maybe I was constructing it.