McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [186]
People just turned their backs on Manhattan. They forgot about that island, which was the center of nothing, except maybe the center of society ladies with radiation burns crowding the trauma units at the remaining hospitals. Manhattan was just landfill now. And there are no surprises in a landfill. Unless you’re a seagull.
Outer boroughs, that was where the action was. Like this place we were going. It’d been a smelting plant, and the police cars were lined up around it, the cops were all around it like they were the blue border of imagination. It was a ghost factory, and I dictated these impressions, because the digital recorder was still recording. When I played back my notes, there was a section of the playback that was nothing but a sequence of words about autumn, soaping windows, World Series, school supplies, yellow jackets, presidential elections, hurricane season. Who was I trying to kid? I was pretending I was writing a story about Albertine. I was writing nothing.
Cassandra was mumbling: “They were fine-tuning some interrogation aids, or they had made a chemical error with some antidepressants. Or they made progress with ECT therapies, or they saw it in the movies and just duplicated the effects. They figured out how to do it with electrodes, or they figured out how to prompt certain kinds of memories, and then they thought perhaps they could coerce certain kinds of testimony with electrodes. They could torture certain foreign nationals, force confessions from these people, and the confession would be freely signed, because the memories would be true. Who’s going to argue with a memory?”
“How do you know all of this?”
We stood in front of a loading dock elevator, and the cops were frozen around us, hands on holsters, cops out front, nervous cops, cops everywhere, and the shadows in the elevator shaft danced, because the elevator was coming for us. The elevator was the only light.
“I can see,” Cassandra said.
“In the big sense?”
It was the only time she smiled in the brief period when I knew her. When I was up close enough to see her lesions. People were so busy firing chemicals into their bodies, so busy in the past that they didn’t notice. Their cancers were blossoming. They stopped worrying about whether the syringe was dirty or not. And they stopped going to the clinics or the emergency rooms. They let themselves vanish out of the world, like by doing so they could get closer to some point of origin: your mom on your fourth birthday, smiling, holding out her hands, Darling, it’s your birthday!
She said, “Think biochemistry,” and she had the eyedropper out again. “Think quantum mechanics. What would happen if you could harness some of the electrical charges in the brain by bombarding it with certain kinds of free particles?” Her eyes were hopelessly blood-shot. She had a mean case of pink eye. And her pupils were dilated.
“And because it’s all about electrical charges, it’s all about power, right? And about who has the power.”
I was holding her hand, don’t know why. Trying to stop her from dribbling more of that shit in her eye. I wasn’t under any particular illusion about what was happening. I was lonely. Why hadn’t I gone back up to Massachusetts? Why hadn’t I called my cousins across town to see if they were okay? I was hustling. I knew things, but I didn’t know when to stop researching and when to get down to work. There was always another trapdoor in the history of Albertine, another theory to chase down, some epidemiologist with a new slant. Some street addict, who will tell you things, if you pay.
I knew, for example, that a certain Eduardo Cortez had consolidated