McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [210]
Later, of course, the constituency of the Brooklyn Resistance was a matter of much speculation. There were women there too, with mournful expressions, like they had come along with the Resistance, though they had grave doubts about its masculine power structure. Women in modest skirts or slightly unflattering pantsuits, like Jesse Simons, the Deconstructionist, who argued that doping the water supply was embracing the nomadic sign system of Albertine, which of course represented not some empirical astrophysical event, but, rather, a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability caused by American Imperialism. And there were a couple of African-Americanists, wearing hints of kinte cloth with their tweeds and corduroys. They argued for intervention in the economic imperatives that led to drug dealing among the inner city poor. And there was the great post-colonialist writer Jean-Pierre Al-Sadir. He argued that the route to victory over civic chaos was infiltration of the Albertine cartels. However, Al-Sadir, because of his Algerian passport, had been mentioned as part of the conspiracy that detonated the New York City blast. Still, here he was, fighting with the patriots, if that’s what they were. It was a testament to the desperation of the moment that none of these academic stars would normally have agreed on anything, you know? I mean, these people hated each other. If you’d gone to a faculty meeting at Columbia three years ago, you would have seen Al-Sadir call Simons an arrogant narcissist in front of a college president. That kind of thing. But infighting was forgotten for now, as the Resistance began plotting its strategies. Even when I was hanging around with them, there would be the occasional argument about the semiotics of wearing red, or about whether time as a system was inherently phallogocentric, such that its present adumbrated shape was preferable, as a representation of labial or vaginal narrative space.
“So you guys probably have one of those dials, on a machine, where we can go directly to a particular year and day and hour and second, right?”
“Fat chance,” Wentworth said. “In fact, we have a room next door with a lot of cots in it—”
“A shooting gallery?”
“Just so. And we employ a lot of teaching assistants, keep them comfortable and intoxicated for a long time and see what happens. Whatever you might think, what we have here is a lot of affection for one another, so a lot of stories go around like lightning, a lot of conjecture, a lot of despair, a lot of elation, a lot of plans. You know? We see ourselves as junkies for history. Of which yours is one integral piece. Let’s go have a look, shall we?”
It would be great if I could report that the shooting gallery of the Resistance was significantly better than the Cortez shooting gallery, but, really, the only difference was that these guys sterilized the needles after each use and swabbed their track marks. No abscesses in this crowd. Otherwise, it was only marginally more inviting. Some of the most important academics of my time were lying on cots, drooling, fighting their way through the cultural noise of fifty years—television programming, billboards, pornography, newspaper advertisements—in order to get back to the origin of Albertine, bitch goddess, in order to untangle the mess she’d made. The other important difference here was that these guys were synthesizing their own batches of the stuff, instead of buying it on the street, and when a bunch of chemists and biologists get into mixing up a drug, that drug chimes, let me tell you. They explained the chemical derivation to me, too. Which looks kinda like this:
Apparently, the effect had to do with increasing oxygenated blood flow to neurotransmitters, thereby increasing electrical impulses. It wasn’t that hard to do at all. Miraculous