• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 522 0

to an all-night diner. Where Atlantic Avenue meets up with Conduit. Know that part of the city? A beautiful part of the city, 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 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 like 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 was vaporized, or that’s what Bob said, “Jesus, Maura is dead and I never told her I regretted all of that, I never told her what was great about the 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 liked in high school. Like jealousy was the single color of 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 it knows, like when it rubber-stamps some compound that makes you grow back hair you lost during chemotherapy. But the feds 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, innuendoes, rumors. Example: not only did Albertine cause bad memories as frequently as good memories—this is the lore—but she also allowed you to remember the future. This is what Tara told me when she assigned me the 2500 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 one example. The story of Deanna, whose name I’m also changing for her own 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. 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