Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

The girl had blue hair! The girl had blue hair! And she looked sort of like Serena, that babe with whom I once skipped school to drink on Boston Common, and there I was again, like never before, with Serena, slurring the words a little bit when I told her she was the first person who ever took the time to have a real conversation with me. First white chick. Because, I told Serena, people looked at an Asian kid in school, they assumed he was a math and science geek; oh, he’s definitely smarter than everyone else , that’s what I told her, such a sweet memory. Well, it was sweet up until she told me that she already had a boyfriend, some college dude. Why hadn’t she told me before, didn’t I deserve to be told, didn’t I have some feelings too? No, probably I was an inscrutable kid from the East. Right? She didn’t tell me because I was Chinese.

And I was in a bad spot, in a drug dealer’s shooting gallery, probably going to be in really big trouble because if I didn’t write something for the cartel about the history of Albertine, which was what they seemed to want, I was probably a dead Chinese kid, but I didn’t care, because I believed I was drunk on the Boston Common, and I was reciting poetry for a beauty who would actually go on to be an actress in commercials, There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons—/ That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes . I could recite every poem I’d ever memorized. It was amazing. Serena’s face frozen in a kind of convulsive laughter, You are some crazy bastard, Kevin Lee. It was all good, it was all blessed, the trip. But then she said that thing about her boyfriend again, some would-be filmmaker.

And I was back in the office with Tara, girl with the blue hair. “Jesus, Lee, what happened? You don’t look so good. Why didn’t you call me? When I gave you the assignment, I assumed you were a professional, right? Because there are a lot of other people who would have jumped at the chance to write this piece.” Glimpse of myself in the reflection of her office window. The city smoldering out the window, the whole empty city, myself superimposed over it. I looked like I hadn’t eaten in two weeks. The part of my face that actually grew a beard had one of those stringy insubstantial beards. My eyes were sunken and red. I had the bruises under my eyes. Whatever viscous gunk was still irrigating my dry mouth had hardened at the corners into a crust. I had nothing to say. Nothing to do but hand over the notes. Twenty-nine thousand words. Tara paged through the beginning with an exasperated sigh. “What the fuck do you think we’re going to do with this, Kevin? We’re a fucking porn magazine? Remember?” As in dreams, I could feel the inability to do anything. I just watched the events glide by. From this quicksand of the future. I could see Tara with the blue pencil to match her blue hair receding in the reflection in the window.

And then there were a dozen more futures, each as unpleasant as what I’d already seen. Breaking into the room of Bertrand, the administrator of the armory, stealing his beaker full of Teen, which he kept in his luxury fridge — he was the only guy in the entire armory who got to have a refrigerator — and being discovered in the process of stealing his drugs by a woman who’d just recently gone out of her way to ask me where my family was, why I was living here alone. Seeing her face in the light from the fridge, the only light in the room. She was wearing army fatigues, the uniform of the future, everyone in army fatigues, everyone on high alert. And then I jumped a few rich people up in Park Slope, an affluent neighborhood that wasn’t obliterated in the blast; I was wearing a warm-up suit, I was jumping some guy carrying groceries, and suddenly I was awake, with my face in my hands.

The guys at the folding table were laughing.

I wiped my leaking nose on my wrists. Stood up on unsteady knees.

“Good time?” said the administerer of poisons. “You need the boost; everybody needs it afterwards. Don’t worry yourself. You need the boost. To smooth it out.”

He handed me a pill.

One of the security experts said to another: “Just the usual shit, man. Names of cheap-ass girls kiss his ass when he was just a little Chinese boy eating his mommy’s moo goo gai pan . Same shit.”

That was it? That was what I was to them? A bunch of sentimental memories? The predictable twenty-five-dollar memories that coursed through here every day? What were they looking for? Later, I knew. They were looking for evidence that I had dropped off files with government agencies or that I had tipped off rival gangs. And they were looking to see if I’d had contact with Addict Number One. They were looking to see what I had put together, what I knew, where my researches had taken me, how much the dark story of Albertine was already living in me, and therefore how much of it was available to you.

“Okay, chump ,” a bike messenger said to me. “Free to go.”

The door opened, and down a corridor I went, wearing handcuffs, back the way I’d come, like I could unlearn what I had learned — that I had the taste for the drug, and that the past, except for the part I saw while high, was woefully lost. I’d been addicted by the drug overlord of my city, and I was standing on his assembly-line floor again, though now Cassandra, or whoever she was, was missing, and the voice of the Cortez television announcer rang out, observing the following on the terms of my new employment: “We want you to learn the origin of Albertine, we want you to write down this origin and all the rest of the history of Albertine, from its earliest days to the present time, and we don’t want you to use any fancy language or waste any time, we just want you to write it down. And because what you’re going to do is valuable to us, we are prepared to make it worth your while. We’re going to give you plenty of our product as a memory aid, and we will give you a generous per diem. You’ll dress like a man, you’ll consider yourself a representative of Eddie Cortez, you’ll avoid disrespectful persons and institutions. Remember, it’s important for you to write and not worry about anything else. You fashion the sentences, you make them sound like how regular people talk, we’ll look after the rest.”

“Sounds cool,” I said. “Especially since I’m already doing that for someone else.”

“No, you aren’t doing it for somebody else, you are doing it for us. Nobody else exists. The skin magazine doesn’t exist, your friends don’t exist. Your family doesn’t exist. We exist.”

I could feel how weak my legs were. I could feel the sweat trickling down the small of my back, soaking through my T-shirt. I was just hanging on. Because that’s what my family did, they hung on. My grandfather, he left behind his country. My father, you never saw the guy sweat. My mother, she was on a plane that had to make an emergency landing once; she didn’t even give it a second thought, as far as I could tell. Representatives of the Cortez cartel were tracking me on a monitor somewhere, or on some sequence of handheld computers, watching me, and they were broadcasting their messages to staff people who could be trusted.

Who knew how many other people in the Eddie Cortez operation were being treated the way I was being treated today? Bring this guy into the fold, conquer him, if not, neutralize him, leave him out in the rubble of some building somewhere. It was an operation staffed by guys who all had guns, stun guns, and cattle prods, real guns with bullets that could make an abstract expressionist painting out of a guy like me, and I was trying to get the fuck out of there before I was dead, and I could barely think of anything else. Now they were taking me down this long hall, and it wasn’t the corridor I was in before, because the building had all these layers, and it was hard to know where you were, relative to where you had been before, or maybe this is just the way I felt because of what the voice on the loudspeaker said next.