Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

He pushed past me.

To forget was threatening now. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a forgetter. A forgetter meant just the one thing. A forgetter had abscesses in his arms, or a forgetter had sold off the last of his possessions and was trying to sell them a second time because he had forgotten that the apartment was already empty. The highest respect, the most admiration, was accorded those with perfect recall —that was part of the diachronous theory, or if it wasn’t yet, I predicted it would soon be part of that theory. Geeks with perfect recall would get up in public settings, with a circle of folding chairs around them, and then, in front of an amazed audience, these geeks would remember the perfect textures of things: Ah yes, the running mates of the losers in the last eight presidential elections, let me see. And the names of their wives. And the weather on Election Day. Massive fraud would be perpetrated in certain cases, where these perfect-recall geeks would, it turned out, have needle tracks, just like the rest of us. Ohmygod! They were doping, and they would be escorted out into the street, in shame, where again rain was beginning to fall.

Which is why when I got back to the armory and found the package on my bed, I felt that pornographic thrill. I could manage an eyedropper as good as the next guy, right? I’d work up to the needles. What else was there to hang around for? No one was waiting for me. Maybe I could get back to the night before, when I was talking to Cassandra. I said this little preliminary prayer, May this roll of the dice be the one in which I remember love, or teen sex, or that time when I had a lot of money from a summer job and I was barbecuing out in the back of our unit, and everybody was drinking beer and having a good time.

I would become a junkie in a supply closet, and I would use a lantern I’d looted from a camping-equipment store after the blast. I held the eyedropper above me, and the droplet of intoxicant was lingering there, and I was the oyster that was going to envelop it and make it my secret. The drop in the dropper was like the black rain of NYC, which was like the money shot in a porn film, which was like the tears from the Balkan statuary of the Virgin in the naïf style. The lantern shone up from underneath my supply closet shelves, and there was that rush of perfumes that I’ve already described, which meant that it was all beginning again. I was lucky for the perfumes I’ve known; other guys just know paperwork, but I’ve known the smell of people right before being naked with them, what an honor. All junkies are lapsed idealists, falling away from things as they were. I was a murderer of time. I’d taken the hours of my life out back of the armory and shoved them in the wood chipper or buried them in a swamp or bricked them up in the basement. But this thought was overwhelmed by the personal scent of a fashion student who lived near us when I was in California. It was on me like a new atmosphere. Along with the sheets of fog rolling in over the bay.

It was all a fine movie. At least until something really horrible occurred to me, a bummer of a thought. How could it be? Thinking about Serena, again, see, on the Boston Common, drinking rum, remembering that she actually had Cherry Coke, not the soft drink once known as the Real Thing, to which I said, “Cherry Coke, girl, that’s not Coke, because no Coke product that occurs, historically, after the advent of the New Coke — held by some to have been a reaction to sugar prices in Latin American countries — no Coke that occurs after that time is a legitimate Coke. Get it? The only Coke product that is genuine with respect to the rum and Cokes you’re proposing to drink here is Mexican Coke, which you can still get in bottles and which still features some actual cane sugar.” An impressive speech, a flirtatious speech, but somewhere in the middle of remembering it — and who knew how many hours had passed now, who knew how many days — this thought I mentioned occurred to me:

Serena’s boyfriend, the guy she was seeing besides me, or instead of me, was Addict Number One .

Years before, I mean. Way before he was the actual Addict Number One. Because we were in high school then, and Addict Number One hadn’t been killed yet, or hadn’t vanished. Not in this version of the story. He was a college guy, and he wanted to make movies, went to NYU, lived downtown, wore a lot of black, just like Addict Number One. And he could tell you a lot about certain recordings that hard-core bands from Minneapolis made in the eighties, and he had a lot of opinions about architecture and politics and sitcoms and maybe bagels, I don’t know. I could feel that it was true. It was a hunch, but it was a really good hunch. There was an intersection in the story, a convergence, where there hadn’t been one before, and the intersection involved me, or at least tangentially it involved me. Before, I was an observer, but now I was coming to see that there was no observing Albertine. Because Albertine was looking back into you. The thought was so unsettling that I was actually shaking with terror about it, but I was too high to stop remembering.

Serena said, “You won’t have any idea whether this is Coke or Cherry Coke after the first half a cup. I could put varnish in here, you wouldn’t know.” She smiled, and now I felt myself drunk just with the particulars of her smile. It was a humble, lopsided smile, and she was wearing those patched blue jeans, and she pulled off her green Dartmouth sweatshirt, to reveal a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the T-shirt advertising a particular girl deejay, and I could see the lower part of her belly underneath the T-shirt. And there was the slope of her breasts. Her smile promised things that never came to be, you know? While I was taking it in, turning over the irrefutable fact of her smile and the tiny series of beautiful lines, like parentheses, at the corners of her fantastic mouth, Serena began to fade. “Don’t go,” I said. “There’s some stuff we need to cover,” but it was like those cries in a dream, the cries that just wake you up. They don’t actually bring help. They just wake you. I could see her fading, and in her stead, I saw a bunch of bare trees from some November trip to the malls of Jersey. Autumn .

I seized the eyedropper, which, because it had been sitting on my roach-infested mattress while I was busy remembering, now seemed to have black specks all over the tip of it, and maybe there was some kind of bug crawling around on there, I don’t know. I held back my eyelids. I was aching in my eye sockets.

The plan was to summon her back, to call her name in the old psychoanalytic way, you know. Names count for something. Strong feelings count for something. And such a beautiful name anyhow, right? Serena, like some ocean of calm lapping against the fucked-up landscape. I would ask her. That is, I would ask if I were able to map the weird voyages of my younger self, that Asian kid trying to declare himself to a Yankee girl through really abstract, complicated poetry.

Because if it was really true that Cassandra had somehow willed me to see what she knew about Eddie Cortez, just because she wanted me to see it, even if telling me the truth about Eddie was somehow a danger to her position as his mistress, then it was true that love and the other passions were important orienting forces in the Albertine epidemic. Like Eddie, who chased Addict Number One through the dingy recesses of his brain simply in the breadth of his malice and greed. Maybe the rememberer, in the intoxication of remembering, was always ultimately tempted to reach out the hand, and maybe this rememberer could do so, if his passion was strong enough. How else to look at it? What else did I have to go on? Because a hundred thousand Albertine addicts couldn’t be wrong. Because they were all chasing the promise of some lost, glittering, perfect moment of love. Because some of them must have reached that elysian destination in their flash floods of memory and forgetfulness. Because I sure loved Serena, because she had a lopsided smile, because she had nails called lycanthrope, because love is good when you have nothing, and I had nothing, except bike messengers watching my every move.