Right Livelihoods

by Rick Moody

  Just when it seemed that I would never cast my eyes on Serena again, just when it seemed that it was all Ricky Martin from now on, she was a vision before me, you know, a thing of ether, a residuum, like lavender, like coffee regular. The odd thing was I got so used to remembering that one portion of our time together that I forgot what came later. I forgot that just because she had this boyfriend, this college dude with short eyes, this college man who chased after teens, didn’t mean that I stopped talking to her altogether, because the attachments you have then, when you’re a kid, at least back before the trouble in the world began, these friendships are the one sustaining thing. I could see myself in some institutional corridor, high school passageway, and there she was, golden in the light of grimy shatterproof windows, as if women and light were as close as lungs and air. I was slumped by a locker. Serena came across the corridor, across speckled linoleum tiles, and it seemed I had never looked at those tiles before, because she was wearing a certain sweatshop-manufactured brand of sneakers, and so I saw the linoleum, because the linoleum was improved by her and her sneakers.

  “You okay?”

  No. I was hyperventilating. Like I did back then. Anything could set me off. College entrance examinations, these caused me to hyperventilate, any dip in my grades. And I didn’t tell anyone about it. Only my mother knew. I was an Asian kid and I was supposed to be incredibly smart. I was supposed to have calculus right at my fingertips, and I was supposed to know C++ and Visual Basic and Java and every other fucking computer language, and all this made me hyperventilate.

  I said, “Tell me the name of the guy you’re seeing. I just want to know his name. It’s only fair.”

  “You really want to talk about this again?”

  “Tell me once.”

  Battalions of teens slithered past, wearing their headphones and their MP3 players, all playing the same moronic dirge of niche-marketed neogrunge shit.

  “Paley,” she said. “First name Irving, which I guess is a really weird name. He doesn’t seem like an Irving to me. Is that enough?”

  God sure put the big curse on Chinese kids, because when the raven of fate flew across their hearts, they just couldn’t show it. We were supposed to be shut up in our hearts because to be otherwise was not part of the collective plan, or maybe that was just how I felt about it. I felt like my heart was an overfilled water balloon, and I was hyperventilating.

  “Kevin,” she said, “you have to do something about the panic thing. They have drugs for it. You know?”

  Do you know how much I think about you? I wanted to say. Do you want to know how you are preserved for all of human history? Because I have written you down, I have got down the way you pull your sweater sleeves over your hands, I have got down the way your eyeliner smudges. I have preserved the rollout on the heels of your expensive sneakers, which you don’t replace often enough. I know about you and nectarines, I know you like them better than anything else, and I know that you aren’t happy first thing in the morning, not without a lot of coffee, and that you think your shoulders are fat, but that’s ridiculous. All this is written down. And the times you yelled at your younger sister on the bus, I wrote down the entire exchange, and I don’t want anything for it at all. I don’t want you to feel that there’s any obligation attached, except that you made me want to use writing for preservation, which is so great, because then I started preserving other things, like all the conversations I heard out in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, and I started describing the Charles River, racing shells on the Charles, I have written all of this down too, I have written it all down because of you.

  This was enough! This was enough to redeem my sorry ass, because suddenly all the moments were one, this moment and that, lined up like the ducks in some Coney Island shooting game, chiming together, and I said, “Serena, I’ve only got a second here, so listen up, I don’t know any other way to put it, so just listen carefully. Something really horrible is going to happen to your friend Paley, so you have to tell him to stay out of Tompkins Square Park, no matter what, tell him never to go to Tompkins Square Park, tell him it’s a reliable bet and that maybe he should do his graduate work at USC or something. I’m telling you this because I just know it, so do it for me. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but do like I say.”

  At which point I was shaken rudely awake. Oh, come on. It was a time-travel moment. It was a memory-inside-a-memory moment, except that it might have been actually happening. I just wasn’t sure. One of the bike messengers from Cortez Enterprises smacked me in the face. In my supply closet. I’d have been happy to talk, you know, but I was too high, and as so many accounts in the Albertine literature have suggested, trying to talk when you are high is like having all the radio stations on your radio playing at the same time. I could just make out the nasty sound of his voice in the midst of a recollected lecture from my dad on the best way to bet on blackjack. Lee, you are not attending to your duties. Not true, I tried to say, I’m a devoted employee, just got back here an hour ago, and I’m doing some more researches, and I’m finding out some very interesting things, there is a lot of stuff going on, I’m learning more and more.

  “You haven’t produced shit,” said the bike messenger. “We need to see some results. You need to be e-mailing us some attachments, Mr. Lee, and so far we haven’t seen anything.”

  “Just so incorrect,” I said.

  And my father said, Never take the insurance bet; it’s just not a good bet.

  “I’ve been taking some notes. Somewhere around here. There are all kinds of notes.”

  There was the digital recorder, for example, but the batteries were dead.

  “This conversation isn’t going very well,” replied the bike messenger. “We have also heard that you have been moving product given to you as part of our agreement.”

  “There’s just no way!”

  “Don’t make us have to remind you about the specifics of your responsibilities.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “I’m smarter than that.”

  Now the bike messenger flung open the door that led out beyond my supply closet. As if I had forgotten there was a world out there. And standing out in the hall was Tara from the tits and lit magazine, except she looked really disheveled, like she didn’t want to be seen by anyone else in the hallway, and I said, “Tara, what are you doing here? I thought I had at least another couple weeks—”

  “Look, you said you had the dropper; I don’t know anything about all this. I gave you the money, so can I please just have the drugs? Then I’ll get the fuck out of here.”

  I made some desperate pleas to the Cortez employee, looking at him looking at Tara, and Tara stood and watched. I stalled, demanded to know if there was a way for me to be sure that these guys, the bike messenger and Tara, weren’t just figments of some future event that I was now “remembering,” according to that theory about Albertine.

  “Did you or did you not assign me an article about Albertine?”

  Tara said, “Just set me up and let me get out of here.”

  And then Bertrand, the guy who doled out the habitable spaces in the armory, he got into the act too. Standing in the doorway, covered in grime, like he’d just come from his job at a filling station, except that as far as I knew it was just that Bertrand was an addict and had given up on personal hygiene. He gazed at me with make-believe compassion.

  “Kevin, listen, we’ve given you chances. We’ve looked the other way. We’ve been understanding for months. We’ve made excuses for you. We pulled you out of the gutter when you were passed out there. But people living here at the armory are afraid to walk by your apartment now. They’re just afraid of what’s going to happen. So where does that leave us?”

  Even Bob, my early source of information, was standing behind Bertrand, his hands on his hips. Trying to push past the throng of accusers, to get to me.

  This was a moment when thinking carefully was more important than hallucinating. But because of the extremely danger
ous amount of Albertine that was already overwhelming both my liver and my cerebral activity, reality just wasn’t a station that I could tune. What I mean is, I went down under again. Right in front of all those people.

  Soon I was hanging out on some sunporch in a subdivision in Massachusetts. All the houses, in whichever direction I turned, looked exactly the same. I bet they had electric fireplaces in every room. It was like CAD had come through with a backhoe, bulldozed the whole region into uniformity. I could remember each tiny difference, each sign that some person, some family, had lived here for more than ten minutes. Serena’s folks had a jack-o’-lantern on the porch. And over there was a guy with one arm mowing the common areas. That intoxicating smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of yellow jackets trying to get in through the screen.

  Serena was reiterating that I had said something really scary to her at school today, and she needed to know if I’d said what I had said because of the panic thing. Were my symptoms causing me to say these crazy things, and if so, wouldn’t it be better if I told someone what was happening instead of carrying it around by myself? She knew, she said, about really dangerous mental illnesses, she knew about these things and she wanted me to know that I would still be her friend, her special friend, even if I had one of those mental illnesses; so I was not to worry about it. And now would I please try to explain.

  “Listen, I know what I said, and there’s no reason you should believe me,” I tried, “but the fact is that the only reason I can explain to you about the future is because I’m in the future. And in the future I know how much you mean to me. In the future, this four months that we’re close, it keeps coming back around, again and again, like that day we were on Boston Common. It keeps coming back around. I could tell you all this stuff about the future, about New York City and how it gets bombed into rubble, about drugs, the epidemic that’s coming, I could tell you how strung out I’m going to get. But that’s not the point. Somehow you’re the point. Serena, you’re the trompe l’oeil in the triptych of the future, and that’s because you know that guy. Paley. So you have to believe me, even though I probably wouldn’t believe me if I were you. Still, the thing is, you have to tell him what I’ve told you. Maybe none of this will happen, this stuff; I sure hope not. Maybe it will all turn out different, just because I’m telling you. But we can’t plan on that. What we have to plan on is your telling Paley that he’s in danger.”

  “Actually, Kevin, what I think we need to do is talk to your mom.”

  The jack-o’-lantern on the porch, of course. It was autumn, which was bad news, which meant I was on the come down and in need of a boost, and the whole scene was swirling away into an electromagnetic dwindling of stories. Serena was gone, and suddenly instead of being back in my room at the armory, where, suspended in a lost present, I was about to be evicted from my supply closet, I was back doing my job, the job of journalist, and what a relief. I had no idea what day it was. I had no idea if I was remembering the past or the future, or if I happened to be in the present. Albertine had messed with all that. I was confused. So was the guy I was interviewing, who happened to be the epidemiologist with the theory about the Albertine crisis, the one I told you about earlier, except that he was no epidemiologist at all. That was just his cover story. Actually, he was the anthropologist Ernst Wentworth, and we were in his office at Brooklyn College, which wasn’t really an office anymore, because there were about thirty thousand homeless people living on campus. At night there were vigilante raids in which the Arabic people living on one quad would be driven off the campus, out onto the streets of the Hot Zone, where stray gunshots from Eddie Cortez’s crew took out at least two or three a night. It was trench war. No one was getting educated at Brooklyn College, and Wentworth was crowded into a single room with a half dozen other desks and twice as many file cabinets pushed against the windows.

  He was having trouble following the interview. Me too. I couldn’t remember if I had already asked certain questions:

  Q: Check. Check. Check. Uh, okay, do you know anything about the origin of Albertine?

  A: No one knows the origin, actually. The most compelling theory, which is getting quite a bit of attention these days, is that Albertine has no origin. The physicists at the college have suggested the possibility that Albertine owes her proliferation to a recent intense shower of interstellar dark matter. The effect of this dark matter is such that time, right now, has become completely porous, completely randomized. Certain subatomic constituent particles are colliding with certain others. This would suggest that Albertine is a side effect of a space-time difficulty, a quantum indeterminacy, rather than a cause herself, and since she is not a cause, she has no origin, no specific beginning that we know of. She just tends to appear, on a statistical basis.

  Q: Given that this is a possibility, why are Albertine’s effects only visible in New York City?

  A: The more provocative question would be, according to quantum indeterminacy, does New York City actually exist? At least, if you take the hypothesis of theoretical physics to its logical conclusion. This would be a brain-in-the-vat hypothesis. NYC as an illusion purveyed by a malevolent scientist. Except that the malevolent scientist here is Albertine herself. She leads us to believe in a certain New York City, a New York City with post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic dimensions and obsessions. And yet perhaps this collective hallucination is merely a way to rationalize what is taking place: that it is now almost impossible to exist in linear time at all.

  Q: So maybe in Kansas City they have similar hallucinations. Kansas City is the center of some galloping drug epidemic. And the same thing in Tampa or Reno or Harrisburg?

  A: Could be. Something like that. (Pause.) Can I borrow some of your—?

  Q: There’s only a little left. But, sure, get a buzz on. (Getting serious.) Have you attempted a catalogue of types of Albertine experiences?

  A: Well, sociopaths seem to have a really bad time with the drug. We know that. And it’s a startling fact, really. Since much of the distribution network is controlled by sociopaths. But at most dosage thresholds, sociopaths have stunted Albertine experiences. They’ll remember their driver ed exam for hours on end. By sociopaths, I’m referring especially to individuals with poor intrapsychic bonding, poor social skills. Individuals who lack for compassion. It would be hard to imagine them taking much pleasure in Albertine. On the other hand, at the top end of the spectrum are the ambiguous experiences of which you are no doubt aware. People who claim to remember future events, people who claim to remember other people’s memories, people who claim to have interacted with their memories. And so forth. At first we believed that these experiences, which characterized many of the people here conducting our studies—myself included—were only occurring, if that’s the right word, among the enlightened. That is, we believed that ahistorical remembering was an aspect of wish fulfillment among the healthiest and most engaged personalities. But then we learned that malice, hatred, and murderous rage could be just as effective at creating these episodes. In either case, we became convinced that the frequency of these reports merited our attention. If true, the fact of ahistorical remembering would have to suggest that the fabric of time is not woven together as consistently as we once thought. We tried at first to analyze whether these logically impossible experiences were “true” on a factual level, but now we are more interested in whether they are repeatable, visible to more than one person, et cetera.

  Q: Does your catalogue of experiences shed any light on Albertine’s origin?

  A: One compelling theory that’s making the rounds among guys in the sciences here at the college is that Albertine has infinite origins. That she appeared in the environment all at once, at different locations, synchronously, according to some kind of philosophical or metaphysical randomness generator. There’s no other perfect way to describe the effect. According to this view, the disorder she causes is so intense that her origin is concealed in an effacement of the moment of her origin, because to
have a single origin violates the parameters of nonlinearity. Didn’t we already do this part about the origin?

  Q: Shit. I guess you’re right. Okay, hang on. (Regroups.) Do you, do you think it’s possible to manipulate the origin of Albertine, to actually control the drug so as to alter a specific narrative? Like, say, the rise of the Albertine crime syndicate?

  A: Sure, persons of my acquaintance have done plenty of that. At least on an experimental basis. We have had no choice. But I’m not at liberty to go into that today.

  Q: Let’s go back to the issue of what to do about the epidemic. Do you have a specific policy recommendation?

  A: I did have some good ideas about that. (Ponders.) Okay, wait just a second. I’m going to look through my papers on the subject here. (Riffles mounds on desk.) I’m forgetting so much these days. Okay, my observation is that Albertine finds her allure in the fact that the human memory is, by its nature, imperfect. Every day, in every way, we are experiencing regret over the fact that we can conjure up some minimal part of the past, but not as much as we’d like. This imperfection of memory is built into the human animal, and as long as it’s an issue, the Albertine syndicates will be able to exploit it. Strategies for containment have to come from another direction, therefore. Which is to say that the only thing that could conceivably help in the long run would be to make distribution of the drug extremely widespread. We should make sure everybody has it.

  Q: How would that help?

  A: Since Albertine has forgetfulness as a long-term side effect, it’s possible that we could actually make everyone forget that Albertine exists. It would have to be concerted, you understand. But let me make an analogy. At a certain point in heroin addiction, you no longer feel the effects of the opiate, you only service the withdrawal. A similar effect could take place here. At a certain point, everyone would be trying to avoid the forgetting because they can’t work effectively, they can’t even remember where work is, and yet soon this forgetting would begin to invade even the drug experience, so that what you remember grows dimmer because you are beginning to accelerate plaque buildup and other anatomical effects. With enough of this forgetting, everyone would forget that they were addicts, forget that they needed the drug to remember, forget that memory was imperfect, and then we would be back to some kind of lowest common denominator of civic psychology. Damaged but equal.