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By Root 643 0

of the shaft. Hookers were always erotic about nonerotic things. Time, for example. The elsewhere of time amok was all over her, like she was coming to memories of a time before prostitution. I was holding her hand. I was disoriented. I checked my watch. I mean I checked what day it was. I had been assigned to the Albertine story for two weeks, according to my Rolex knockoff—which had miraculously survived the electromagnetic pulse—but I could swear that it had just been two days before that I’d been hanging out in the offices of the soft-core porn mag, the offices with the bulletproof glass and the robot receptionist out front. When had I last been back to the supply closet to sleep? When had I last eaten? Wasn’t it last night, the evening with the footsteps in the corridor, and the revelation about the blast? I was holding Cassandra’s hand, because she had this tenuous link to the facts of Albertine, and this seemed like the last chance to master the story, to get it down somehow, instead of being consumed by it.

This is my scoop then. The scoop is that, suddenly, I saw what she was seeing.

Cassandra said, “Watch this.”

Pay close attention. I saw a close-up, in my head I saw it, like from some Web movie, a guy’s arm, a man’s arm, an arm covered with scars, almost furry, it was so hairy, and then a hand pulling tight a belt around a bicep, jamming in a needle, depressing the plunger, a grunt of initial discomfort. Then the voice of the guy, thick accent, maybe a Puerto Rican accent, announcing his threats, “I’m going back to the Lower East Side, and I’m going to cap the motherfucker, see if I don’t.” Definite speech impediment. A problem with sibilance. Then this guy, this dude was looking over at Cassandra, she was in the scene, not in the stairwell, where we were at least theoretically standing, but she was someway associated with Eduardo Cortez. She was his consort. He was taking her hand, there was a connection of hands, a circular movement of hands, and then we were on a street, and I saw Cortez, in Tompkins Square Park, which doesn’t exist anymore, of course, and it was clear that he was searching out a particular white guy, and now, coming through the crowd, here was the guy, looked like an educated man, if you know what I mean, one of those East Village art slumming dudes. Cortez was searching out this guy, kinda grungy, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, and it was all preordained, and now Cortez had found him.

Lights associated with the thrall of Cassandra’s recollection, phantom lights, auras. The particulars were like a migraine. Things were solarized, there were solar flares around the streetlamps. We were bustling in and around the homeless army of Tompkins Square. I could hear my own panicky breathing. I was in a park that didn’t exist anymore, and I was seeing Cortez, and I was seeing this guy, this white guy, he had that look where one side of his face, the right side, was different from the other side, so that on the right side, he seemed to be melancholy and placid, whereas on the left side of the face, there was the faintest smirk at all times. The left side was contorted and maybe there were scars there, some kind of slasher’s jagged line running from the corner of his mouth to his ear, as if his face too were divided in certain ways, as if his face were a product of erosion, and Cassandra, I guess, was saying, “Let’s not do this, okay? Eduardo? Please? Eduardo? We can fix the problem another way.” Except that at the same moment what she was saying to me, somehow outside of memory, outside of the memory belonging to someone else, she was saying, “Do you understand what you’re seeing?”

I said, “He’s going to—”

“—Kill the guy.”

“And that guy is?”

“Addict Number One.”

“Who?”

“That guy is the first user,” she said. “The very first one.”

“And why is he important?”

Cassandra said, “For the sake of control. You don’t get it, do you?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Addict Number One is being killed in a memory.”

Something coursed in me like a flash flood. A real perception, maybe, or just the blunt feelings