Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

Behind me, operatives in the Cortez syndicate made sure that my step was sturdy.

“Give me your hand,” the Albertine provider said in a kind of doomed murmur.

I looked at my hand. On that cheap table, no doubt the site of a hundred violent games of poker.

“Don’t mind we kinda stay close?” said one of the goons. He used the choke hold. Another guy held my hand. This would be the gentle description. If they were worried about my getting away, they shouldn’t have worried, because I was a reporter. But that wasn’t the motive, it dawned on me. They were hoping to come along for the ride, if possible, to see what they needed to know about their collaborator, if that’s what I was going to be. The historian of the empire.

“You don’t honestly think you’re going to be able to see what I see, do you?” I said. “There’s just no way that works according to physics.”

The needle went in between the tendons on the top of my right hand. Blood washed back into the syringe. A bead pearling at my knuckle.

“First time, yo?” someone said.

“For sure,” I said.

“Goes better if you’re thinking about what you want to know. Chiming. Thinking of bells, bells from a church, that’s what you need to think about, things get chiming, the pictures get chiming. Because if you think of stuff you don’t want to know, then bang —”

Like I said, what I wanted to know first when I finally got dosed on Albertine was how I would do on this assignment. I mean, if you could see the future, which seemed like horseshit, but if that was really possible, then I wanted to know how my story turned out. Which I guess makes me a real writer, because a writer is someone who doesn’t care about his own well-being when the story is coming due, he just cares about the story, about getting it done. I wanted to get the story done; I wanted to get it into the magazine. I wanted to be more than another guy who survived the blast. So that was the memory I wanted to live through on Albertine. But that doesn’t describe the beginning of the trip at all. One second I was listening to the guy tell me about chiming, next moment there was a world beside the world in which I lived, a world behind the world, and maybe even a sequence of them lined up one behind the other, where crucial narratives were happening. The splinter hanging off the two-by-four next to the table seemed to have a world-famous history, where dragonflies frolicked in the limbs of an ancient redwood. And maybe this was the prize promised first by Albertine, that all things would have meaning. Suddenly there was discrimination to events, not all this disjunctive shit, like millions of people getting incinerated for no good reason. Instead: discrimination, meaning, value. The solarizing thing again, and I could hear the voices of the people in the room, but as if I were paralyzed, I was experiencing language as material, not as words but as something sludgy like molasses. Language was molasses. Life had been EQ’d badly, and all was high-end distortion, and then there was a tiling effect, and the grinning, toothless face of the guy who’d just shot me up was divided into zones, as if he were a painting from the modernist chapter of art history, and zones were sort of rearranged so he was a literal blockhead, and then I heard this music, as if the whole history of sounds from my life had become a tunnel under the present, and I could hear voices, and I could hear songs. I could pluck one out of the air, like I could pluck out some jazz from the 1950s — here’s a guy banging on the eighty-eights, stride style — and when I selected it from the tunnel of memories, I could hear the things beside it, a concert that I had to go to in junior high, in the school auditorium, where some guys in robes demonstrated some Buddhist overtone singing. They were sitting on an oriental carpet — you know the mysteries of the world always had to have an oriental carpet involved — and we were all supposed to be mystical and wearing robes and shit, and beside me there was the voice of my friend Dave Wakabayashi, who whispered, “Man, we could be listening to the game,” because there was a day game that day, right? What team? And who was pitching? And then the sound of Mandarin, which was exactly like a song to me, because of all the kinds of intonation that were involved in it, all those words that had the same sound but different intonations.

And after that accretion of songs, a flood of the smells from my life, barely had time to say some of them aloud, while my stool was tipping backward, in the shooting gallery, my stool was tipping backward, and the back of my head was connecting with some hard surface, citronella, cardamom, smell of melting vinyl, smell of a pack of Polaroid film, five kinds of perfume, smell of my grandfather dying, meat loaf prepared from a box, freshly cut lawns, the West Indian Day parade in New York City, which is the smell of curried goat, ozone right before a storm, diesel exhaust, the smell of having fucked someone for the first time, the shock of it, more perfumes, a dog that just rolled in something, city streets in July, fresh basil , chocolate-chip cookies, ailanthus trees, and just when I was getting dizzy from all the smells, and right about the moment at which I heard the guys from Eddie’s team, in their mellifluous slang, saying Take his damn money, which they definitely were going to do now, because I could tell that my arms were thrown wide to the world, give me the world, give me your laser light show and your perfect memories, doesn’t matter what they are, rinse me in your planetarium of memories, for I am ready as I have never been, all of my short life. All was rehearsal for this moment as observer of what has come before; my longing is for perception, for the torrents of the senses, the tastes, the languor of skin on skin. I was made for this trip, it felt good, it felt preposterously good, and I noticed absently that my cock was hard; actually, I’m a little embarrassed to say it now, but I realized in that moment that mastery of the past, even when drug induced, was as sexy as the vanquishing of loneliness, which is really what men in the city fuck against. Think about it, the burden of isolation that’s upon us all day and night, and think about how that diminishes in the carnival of sex. It’s the same on the Teen (the latest street abbreviation of the name of the drug), it’s the same with chiming, and I was actually a little worried that I might come like that, lying on the floor of their shooting gallery with this guy standing over me, reaching into my hip pocket where there used to be a wallet, but there was no wallet now, just a couple of twenties to get me out of trouble, if it came to that. He wanted them and he took them. I wanted to yell Get the fuck off me, but I could feel the blobs of drool at the corners of my mouth, and I knew I could say nothing, I could say only yes, yes, yes. And when it seemed like that was the lesson of Albertine, bitch goddess — when I thought, well, this must be what you get for your twenty-five bucks, you get to see the light show of lost time— and then I got up off the floor and walked into the lobby of the tits and lit magazine that had hired me, except that they hadn’t hired me, I guess, not like I believed. The matter was still up in the air, and I was in the line with a lot of people claiming to be writers, people with their plagiarized clip files, though why anyone would want to pretend to be a writer is beyond me. I was hoping, since I was the genuine article, that I might actually get the call. Out came this girl with blue hair, past the receptionist robot at the desk out front, saying my name, Kevin Lee, like it somehow magically rhymed with bored, and I got up, walked past all those people. I realized, yes, that I was going to get the assignment, because I was the guy who had actually written something. I was the genuine article, and maybe fate had it in store for me that I’d get out of the armory where I shared a cardboard box with a computer programmer from Islamabad who, despite the unfortunate fact of his nationality in the current political climate, was a good guy.