McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [188]
Since Albertine arrived on the scene after the blast, theorists eventually needed to consider the blast in all early Albertine phenomena. Figures, right? One night I felt like I started to understand these theories in a dramatic way, in my heart, or what was left of it. I was at the armory, where I slept in a closet, really—used to be a supply closet, and there were still some supplies in there, some rug-cleaning solvents, some spot removers, extra towels. You never know when you might need this stuff. Anyway, the halls outside the supply closet echo; you could hear every whisper, in the halls of the armory. You could hear people coming and going. It wasn’t and isn’t a great place to live, when you consider that I used to have a studio in the East Village. But compared to living in the great hall itself, where mostly people tried to erect cubicles for themselves, cubicles made out of cardboard or canvas or Sheetrock, the supply closet was not so bad. The process of doling out closets had fallen to an Albertine addict called Bertrand, and when I fixed up Bertrand with Fox and a few other dealers, I got bumped up to the supply closet right away. When moths came after my remaining shirts and sweaters, I had all the insecticide I’d need.
This night I’m describing, I had a breakthrough of dialectical reasoning: I was hearing the blast. You know the conventional wisdom about combat veterans, loud noises suggesting the sharp crack of submachine-gun fire, all that? I thought just the opposite. That certain silences re-created the blast, because there’s something about fission, you know it’s soundless in a way, it suggests soundlessness, it’s a violence contained in the opposite of violence, big effects from preposterously small changes. Say you were one of the four million who survived, you were far enough away that the blast, heat, and radiation could do their damage before the sound reached you, wherever you were. So it follows that the sound of the explosion would be best summoned up in no sound at all. The pauses in the haggard steps of the insomniacs of the armory walking past the door to my closet, this sound was the structured absence in what all our memories were seeking to suppress or otherwise avoid: the truth of the blast.
I’m not a philosopher. But my guess was that eventually people would start remembering the blast. You know? How could it be otherwise? I’m not saying I’m the person who came up with the idea; maybe the government mole did. Maybe Ernst Wentworth did. I’m saying, I guess, that all memories verged on being memories of the blast, like footsteps in the echoing corridor outside my supply closet. Memories were like downpours of black raindrops. All noises were examples of the possibility of the noise of the blast, which is the limit of all possibilities of sound, and thus a limit on all possibilities of memory. For a lot of people, the blast was so traumatic they couldn’t even remember where they were that day, and I’m one of those people, in case you were wondering. I know I was heading out to Jersey for a software convention in the New Brunswick area. At least, that’s what I think I was doing. But I don’t know how I got back. When I came to, Manhattan was gone.
People began to have memories of the blast while high. And people began to die of certain memories on the drug. Makes perfect sense. And this is part of the diachronous theory of abuse patterns that I was just talking about. First, Conrad