It seems funny now, pathetic almost—and maybe only technology can achieve this comic revenge on our memories—but when we had an artist coming in and needed to make a dossier on them, to give to interviewers and advertisers and so on, we would go down to a little library in the basement and pull out a four-volume encyclopedia called The Biography of Rock. Everything in Aimee’s entry, major or minor, I already knew—Bendigo-born, allergic to walnuts—excepting one detail: her favorite color was green. I made my notes, by hand, collated all relevant requests, stood in the copy room by a noisy fax machine and slowly fed the documents into it, thinking of someone in New York—a dream city to me—waiting by a similar contraption as my document came through to them, at the exact same time I sent it, which felt so very modern in the doing of it, a triumph over distance and time. And then of course to meet her I would need new clothes, perhaps new hair, a fresh way of speaking and walking, a whole new attitude to life. What to wear? The only place I ever shopped back then was Camden Market, and from inside that warren of Doc Martens and hippy shawls I was very pleased to draw out a huge pair of bright green cargo pants of a silky parachute material, a close-fitting green crop top—which had, as an added bonus, The Low End Theory album cover art on the front of it picked out in black, green and red glitter—and a pair of space-age Air Jordans, also green. I finished with a fake nose ring. Nostalgic and futuristic, hip-hop and indie, rrriot girl and violent femme. Women often believe clothes will solve a problem, one way or another, but by the Tuesday before she was due to arrive I understood nothing I wore was going to help me, I was too nervous, couldn’t work or concentrate on anything. I sat in front of my giant gray monitor listening to the whirr of the modem, anticipating Thursday and typing, in my distraction, Tracey’s full name into the little white box, over and over again. It’s what I did at work when I was bored or anxious though it never really relieved either condition. I had done it many times by then, firing up Netscape, waiting for our interminably slow dial-up, and always finding the same three little islands of information: Tracey’s Equity listing, her personal web page, and a chat room she frequented, under the alias Truthteller_LeGon. The Equity listing was static, it never changed. It mentioned her stint the previous year in the chorus of Guys and Dolls, but no other shows were ever added, no fresh news appeared. Her page changed all the time. Sometimes I would check it twice in a day and find the song different or that the exploding pink firework graphic had been replaced by flashing rainbow hearts. It was on this page, a month earlier, that she had mentioned the chat room, with a hyperlinked note—Sometimes truth is hard to hear!!!—and this single reference was all I’d needed: the door was open and I began to wander through it a few times a week. I don’t think anyone else who followed that link—no one but me—would have known that the “truth teller” in that bizarre conversation was Tracey herself. But then no one, as far as I could see, was reading her page anyway. There was a sad, austere purity to this: the songs she chose no one heard, the words she wrote—banal aphorisms, usually (“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long but It Bends toward Justice”)—no one but me ever read. Only in that chat room did she seem to be in the world, though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other. From what I could tell she spent a frightening amount of time in there, especially late at night, and by now I’d read through all her threads, both current and archived, until I was able to follow the logic of it all—better to say I was no longer shocked by it—and could trace and appreciate the line of argument. I became less inclined to tell my colleagues stories about my crazy ex-friend Tracey, her surreal chat-room adventures, her apocalyptic obsessions. I hadn’t forgiven her—or forgotten—but using her in this way became somehow distasteful to me.
One of the oddest things about it was the fact that the man whose spell she appeared to be under, the guru himself, had once been a breakfast-TV reporter, had worked in the very building I sat in now, and when we were kids I can remember often sitting with Tracey, watching him, bowls of cereal in our laps, waiting for his boring grown-up show to be over and for our Saturday-morning cartoons to begin. Once, during my first winter break from university, I went to buy some textbooks in a chain bookshop on the Finchley Road, and while wandering around the film section saw him in person, presenting one of his books in a far-off corner of that mammoth shop. He sat at a plain white desk, dressed all in white, with his prematurely white head of hair, facing a sizable audience. Two girls who worked there stood near me and from behind shelving they peeked out at the peculiar gathering. They were laughing at him. But I was struck not so much by what he was saying as by the odd composition of his audience. There were a few middle-aged white women, dressed in their cozily patterned Christmas jumpers, looking no different from the housewives who would have liked him ten years earlier, but by far the greater part of his crowd was young black men, of about my own age, holding well-worn copies of his books on their knee and listening with an absolute focus and determination to an elaborate conspiracy theory. For the world was run by lizards in human form: the Rockefellers were lizards, and the Kennedys, and almost everybody at Goldman Sachs, and William Hearst had been a lizard, and Ronald Reagan and Napoleon—it was a global lizard plot. Eventually the shop-girls tired of their sniggering and wandered off. I stayed till the end, deeply troubled by what I’d seen, not knowing what to make of it. Only later, when I started reading Tracey’s threads—which were, if you could put aside their insane first premise, striking in their detail and perverse erudition, linking many diverse historical periods and political ideas and facts, combining them all into a sort of theory of everything, which even in its comic wrongness required a certain depth of study and a persistent attention—yes, only then did I feel that I better understood why all those serious-looking young men had gathered in the bookshop that day. It became possible to read between the lines. Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?
“Er, what the fuck is that?”
I turned round in my swivel chair and found Zoe at my shoulder, examining a flashing graphic of a lizard wearing, on top of his lizard head, the Crown Jewels. I minimized the page.
“Album graphics. Bad.”
“Listen, Thursday morning—you’re on, they’ve confirmed. Are you ready? Got everything you need?”
“Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”
“Oh, I know it will be. But if you need some Dutch courage,” said Zoe, tapping her nose, “let me know.”