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So we were all glad to see the last of her. It didn’t mean she wasn’t missed. It was hard to go back to how we’d been before; there was a space left where she’d been and nothing else would fit inside it. Ferhid continued to set her plate at the table for four days after she’d gone.

The night of her departure I went again to Tu-api’s tomb. The silhouette of the ruined ziggurat shone in the moonlight. There was the hum of bugs; a dog barked sleepily in the distance; my footsteps thudded in the dust. The wind was cool and carried the smell of cooked chicken. My relief was enormous. The only reason I’d thought of murdering Miss Whitfield was that she was an annoying woman who often talked about murder. There was nothing supernatural at work here; it was all perfectly normal and everyone had felt the same.

The moon had risen, round as an opened rose. I walked away from it into the perfect stillness of the tomb. I owed Tu-api an apology. How could I ever have thought, even for a minute, that she would curse me? I asked her for forgiveness. It was the first time I’d spoken to her aloud.

She was not the only one listening. Mallick had apparently told Patwin his suspicions regarding me and Miss Whitfield, and Patwin, being more discerning and trained to read puzzles far older and more mysterious than I, came upon the truth of it. He’d followed me and when I spoke, he responded. “What’s this about?” he asked, and what could I possibly say?

“I took a picture of her face.”

“You didn’t. You can’t be coming here anymore at night by yourself.” Patwin stepped toward me. “You can’t be thinking this way.” He took me by the arm. “Come back with me.”

I allowed him to lead me over the moonlit dust to the expedition house, our footsteps padding softly. As we went he analyzed the errors in my thinking. I was guilty of romanticism, of individualism. I was guilty of ancestor worship. I had entertained the superstition of an ancient, powerful curse. I wasn’t even bourgeois; I had barely made it to primitive.

Then he put me to bed as tenderly as if he were my own mother. He sat beside me for a while, pretending nothing was wrong, just the way my mother would have pretended. “You need a girlfriend,” he suggested. “It’s too bad Miss Whitfield has gone. It’s too bad Miss Jackson is already—spoken for.”

I agreed with everything. I agreed that my infatuation with Tu-api was at an end. I agreed that, circumstances being different, I would have considered Miss Jackson or even, God forbid, Miss Whitfield. I agreed that when the weather grew too hot and we all went to our separate homes for the summer, I would put serious effort into finding a girlfriend who was alive. I agreed that love could be usefully examined with the tool of Marxist analysis. I handed over the photograph and watched Patwin tear it up, both of us pretending there was someplace he could put those pieces where they wouldn’t last forever.

Albertine, solace of a city in ruins.

Any memory you wanted, anytime you wanted it. All for the low, low price of-history itself.

The Albertine Notes

By RICK MOODY

The first time I got high all I did was make sure these notes came out all right. I mean, I wanted the girl at the magazine to offer me work again, and that was going to happen only if the story sparkled. There wasn’t much work then because of the explosion. The girl at the magazine was saying, “Look, you don’t have to like the assignment, just do the assignment. If you don’t want it there are people lined up behind you.” And she wasn’t kidding. There really were people lined up. Out in reception. An AI receptionist, in a makeshift lobby, in a building on Staten Island, the least-affected precinct of the beleaguered City of New York. Writers spilling into the foyer, shouting at the robot receptionist. All eager to show off their clips.

The editor was called Tara. She had turquoise hair. She looked like a girl I knew when I was younger. Where was that girl now? Back in the go-go days you could