I’m posting this for Grecia because she couldn’t get online. Lee
Grecia Huesca
“What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it” –Mark Twain
“The Albertine Notes” is a tale of delirium and time travel induced by a crack-like drug epidemic in New York a year after a dirty bomb was dropped killing half of the city’s population. The citizens that survive the blast are trying to cope with the catastrophic event by going back into their memory archives trying to relive better times. But the more the go back in time, the less they remember the present, and the more the past, the present, and the future become all in the same.
The concept of time is central to story. The drug, Albertine, takes people back into their memories and allows them to relive the experience as if they were there again. It is a form of time travel into the past. The main dealer discovers that he has enough will power, the user can change the past through the memory. If the past is being changed, then maybe this is why people cannot understand the present when they come back, because it is a different present then the one they left.
The confusing part about reliving a memory so vividly is that maybe what one thinks it’s the future is actually the present, or the past, which means that no one can understand time in a linear fashion. Linear time does not exist because it is always changing. The past is being changed and therefore the present and future is being changed. The everything can be changed if people keep going back and changing things from an earlier time than another person. This manipulation of time is expressed in the lives of the people. The addicts are like other junkies, wasting away waiting for that next high that will take them back to that amazing moment.
Deana is a prophet, much like John The Revelator. She claims to have a vision of bearded men pouring jugs of poison into the city’s water supply. She claims that Jesus sent this message to her, and no one believes her because she is high. This makes a statement about modern prophets. We think of them as crazy, as drug addicts with nothing better to do then put up signs warning us about the end of the world. It made me think about what would today’s society classify as a prophet? What would the masses need in order to convince us that someone can see the future?
John The Revelator would have a hard time convincing me about his visions of the end of the world. I don’t believe it now that I look at it as a part of history; him approaching me today would most likely make me run away from him. Kevin’s perception of time in the tale is similar to John’s perception of time in his vision. They both see the past and the present and the future and go back to the “present”. The present for John is more concrete because he is out of the vision while Kevin still lives in the time warp created by Albertine and its users.
Cassandra is like a prophet herself, and when we first meet her, Kevin compares her to Eve when he says that “Her voice was frail at first, almost as if it were the first voice ever used.” (pg.143) After that, she knows a lot of things about Kevin because she has seen future conversations with him during her highs. She understands his importance in the big picture that is Albertine. She is also a catalyst for his importance because she gives him his first high. Before that, she also allows him to experience a memory by simply touching her.
People begin to disappear when others manipulate the memories and erase them from history. Kevin says “Our city was outside of history now, beyond surveillance.” (pg. 145) The problem with the drug and the manipulation of time is that people are changing the drug before understanding what the dangers. A user can allow another person, even a sober person, tap into his memories when he is high. Tapping into another’s memories is a form of surveillance. Memories are not only a way to see what people’s thoughts and past activities are, they are also a way to manipulate them and to change the course of their existence. There is nothing more private than thoughts, and this memories are very private. The users are not capable of controlling what they remember, which makes the drug scary, but those that learn to manipulate it have too much power.
Power is the ultimate struggle in the story. Power over the drug, power over time. But the ending of the story is very confusing. Eddy must have power over the drug so that he can drop the bomb in New York City, but without the bomb people do not become hooked onto the drug in the first place. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This point in the plot still has me very confused, and I can’t seem to make light of it. Neither event could happen without the other but how did one happen in the first place?
