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Her voice frail at first, almost as if it was 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 said.

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

“Okay, uh, what am I writing about?”

“You’re writing about Albertine, and you’re way in over your head already. 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 need to have been there to have a memory of it.”

“What have you heard about it?” I said.

“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 the white tiger in this neighborhood. The police were advance men for the cartels. They had no peacetime responsibility any longer, except that they made sure 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. 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 buy the conspiracy angle,” I said to Cassandra. “Been there, done that.”

Her eyes fluttered like she was 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 the 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, 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 is 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 like she was only in Red Hook. But then if you looked in Astoria, she was in Astoria too. As if it were the activity of observing that somehow turned her up. More you looked, more you saw. A city whose citizens, when outdoors, looked preoccupied, or vacant. If inside, almost paralytic. I couldn’t