McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [181]
Street name for the buzz of a lifetime. Bitch goddess of the overwhelming past. Albertine. Rapids in the river of time. Skin pop a little bit, or take up the celebrated Albertine eyedropper, 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 in Boston Commons 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 knee, the green Dartmouth sweatshirt that goes with her eyes, drinking the rum a little too fast and spitting up some of it, picking her teeth with her deep red nails, 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 Commons 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 looks like NASA photos 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 turf, 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 the 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 need to assume anything, assume that all silences from now on have 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 of jealousy. He got a bad batch, probably too many additives, and all he could see in his mind’s eye were these moments of intense jealousy. He was even weeping when we spoke. On the comedown. I’d taken him out