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By Root 691 0

me, always will, and she leads me out of the bathroom, away from my dad, and she explains that Serena telephoned her, and her syllables are carefully measured like on a metronome. It’s not nearly as bad as it seems. If I could redo the color balance in this past, I would make it more ultramarine, because everything’s too yellow: my mother taking me into the living room, where my grandfather once slept off his open-heart surgery. She sits me down. And she makes her diagnosis. She says, I have been doing a lot of research into your chemical problem. And I have talked to a lot of professional friends on the subject. When you have a spare hour or so, later in the week, then we’re going in to talk to some of them. But in the meantime, I want you to try something for me.

So here it was. In a stoppered beaker.

“Just give this a try for me. I think it’ll be more interesting than that stuff you and your friends have been smoking.”

“Mom,” I said. “Do you think I should?”

“I’m your mom.”

“What is it?”

“Lithium, some SSRIs, and a memory enhancer we’re trying out, in solution. It’s supposed to sharpen cognition. Might help with those tests. In an Aspartame sauce.”

Just like in the laboratory sequences, you know, from those black-and-white movies of yore. I drank up. And the fact is, I aced that exam. That’s what I had forgotten. And I gave some to Serena, and she gave it to her boyfriend, Paley. We called it Albertine, because it sounded like Aspartame. Or so I was remembering. I gave it to the others. We all did well on our tests. Just three kids from the subdivisions fucking up the entire future of the human race, in pursuit of kicks and decent board scores.

I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to look across the desk at Cassandra, who may or may not have been my mother, may or may not have been the chief chemist for the Cortez syndicate, may or may not have been an informer for the Resistance, may or may not have been a young woman, may or may not have been home in Newton, refusing to come to the phone, may or may not have been an older Chinese woman with those sad eyes. I didn’t want to hear her voice, from across the room, rationalizing, “Let time show why I’ve done what I’ve done.” I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know the plans the Cortez operatives had for me, Addict Zero, didn’t want to know why I was being put through this exercise—so that they could break me on the rack of information, or because they still wanted me to write down whatever it was that they wanted me to write down. I didn’t want to know, finally, which memory was inside of which memory, didn’t want to know if there was a truth on top of these other truths. In a few minutes’ time, the water supply would be boiling with the stuff, eight weeks back. The cops at the reservoirs would be facedown in pools of blood, and the taps in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx would be running bluer than usual, and there would be dancing in the streets, as though all this stuff I’m telling you hadn’t happened at all. I mean, assuming the sweet forgetting didn’t come like the instantaneous wave of radiation after the blast. Assuming I didn’t forget all of this, how I got where I got, what I’d once known, the order in which I knew it, the cast of characters, my own name, the denouement.

What’s memory? Memory’s the groove. It’s the all-stars laying down their groove, and it’s you dancing, chasing the desperations of the heart, chasing something that’s so gone, so ephemeral you know it only by its traces, how a certain plucked guitar string summons the thundering centuries, how a taste of fresh cherries calls up the indolent romancers on antebellum porches, all these stories rolling. Memory is the groove, the lie, the story you never get right, the better place. Memory is the bitch, the shame factory, the curse and the consolation. And that’s where my journalistic exposé breaks down.

But I can offer a few last tidbits. If you’re wondering what the future looks like, if you’re one of the citizens from the past, wondering,