That made Ginger very nervous, and when they began again, she went on the attack right away. But sumo was about mass staying put, so defense was always king, and queen too, and it didn’t take long for Diane to slip to the side, go deep again, wedge under, and shove off the bottom and catch Ginger right in the midriff and carry her out, Ginger just clearing the circle before Diane did, by about a foot Gen judged, the left foot, and the cameras confirmed it. Match to Diane. Both of them stood and shook hands, first with each other and then with Gen, and Gen was pleased to see they were happy to have her there. Indeed everyone there loved having a policewoman, the famous submarine inspector, there in a private bathhouse reffing the action. Just like up in the air! If things were going well.
Last of ebb, and daylight waning,
Scented sea-cool landward making, smells of sedge and salt incoming,
With many a half-caught voice sent up from the eddies,
Many a muffled confession—many a sob and whisper’d word,
As of speakers far or hid.
—Walt Whitman
f) Mutt and Jeff
Jeff? Are you okay?”
“I’m not okay. How could I be okay, we’re in prison. We got ourselves lost in a prison of our own devise. Meaning me, I mean. I’m so sorry I got you mixed up with this Mutt. I’m really sorry. I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about that. Eat your breakfast here.”
“Is it morning, do you think?”
“It’s pancakes. Just eat it.”
“I can’t eat right now. I’m sick to my stomach. I’m nauseous.”
“But you didn’t eat anything yesterday either. Or the day before, if I’m not mistaken. Aren’t you hungry? You should be hungry.”
“I’m hungry but I’m sick so I’m not hungry. I can’t eat right now.”
“Well, drink something then. Here, just a little water. I’m going to mix a little maple syrup into this water, see? It’ll taste good and it’ll go down easy.”
“Don’t, you’ll make me sick.”
“No I won’t, just try it, you’ll see. You need the sugar in you. You’re getting weak. I mean here you are apologizing. It’s a bad sign. It’s not like you.”
Jeff shakes his head. Pale bearded face on a stained pillow, flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth. “I got you into this. I should have asked you what you thought before I did anything.”
“Yes you should. But now that is neither here nor there. Now you need to drink something, then eat something. You need to stay strong so we can get through this thing. So, better you retain your convictions right now. Because I need you.”
Jeff sips some water, maybe a tablespoon of it. Some of it drips down into his beard. Mutt wipes his chin with a napkin. “More,” Mutt says. “Drink more. When you’re hydrated you’ll feel hungry.”
Jeff nods, sips more. Mutt is spooning water into his mouth. After this works for a while, he dips the spoon into the little waxed box of maple syrup and feeds Jeff some of that. Jeff chokes a little, nods, sits up, and takes in several more spoonfuls of maple syrup. “That’s good,” he says. “Now more water.”
He sits up in his bed, leans his head and shoulders against the wall. He eats a few tiny bites of pancake dipped in maple syrup, chokes a little, shakes his head at the offer of more. Mutt shifts back to water. After a while Jeff holds a glass of water on his stomach, raises it to sip by himself.
“I can feel the water behind this wall,” he says. “I can feel it move, or maybe I’m hearing it. I wonder what that’s about. I guess sound is strange underwater. It carries farther, or has more force or something.”
“I don’t know. How about some more pancakes?”
“No. Quit it. You’re hectoring me.”
“I see you must be feeling better.”
“Did Hector hector people? I somehow think he’s getting a bad rap with this word. Someone comes and lays siege to his city, tries to kill everyone in it. He organizes and leads the resistance to that, gets killed and his body dragged around by the heels, and his name becomes the verb for harassing someone? How is that fair?”
“Harassing someone to do the right thing,” Mutt suggests.
“Nevertheless. He’s been screwed. Pander deserved what he got, but Hector no. And how come the real jerks got away there? How come you don’t pull an achilles when you stalk off in a snit? Prima donnas, we call them, but prima donnas were Boy Scouts compared to him. Or how about You ajaxed that one. I definitely ajaxed that tap I tried, sorry again about that, but okay I’ll defer the sorries until later. Fucking ajaxed it big-time. Or fucking Zeus. Someone flies into a narcissistic rage, do we say he’s zeussing out? No we don’t. No ulyssesizing a situation. No agamemnonning.”
“You’re a pretty great cassandra,” Mutt mentions.
“See, I knew you read more than The R Handbook.”
“Not really. It’s just stuff you pick up by reading crap in the cloud.”
Now Jeff’s rant sinks to a hoarse whisper. He’s fading in and out, it looks like. “Crap in the Cloud. A novel of celestial sewage. I coulda written that one myself. Been down so long it looks like up to me. What I should have done is hold my horses and wait until something could’ve done some good. I definitely screwed that up, and I’m sorry. I’ll apologize later. I hope you know I only did it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Here we are in this beautiful world, if we’re not dead and in limbo, and they were ripping our heads off. Pretending there were shortages and terrorists and pitting us against each other while they took ninety-nine percent of everything. Immiserate the same people who keep you alive. Which god or idiot did that in Homer? None of them. They’re worse than the worst gods in Homer. That’s what they’re doing, Mutt. I can’t stand it.”
“I know.”
“Because it’s bad!”
“I know. Don’t worry about it right now, though. You have to conserve your energy right now. Don’t enumerate the crimes of the ruling class, please. I know them already. You need to save your strength. Are you hungry?”
“I’m sick. Sick of those bastards ripping us off. Tooling to Davos to tell each other how great they are, how much good they’re doing. Fucking fuckwad hypocrites and bastards. And they get away with it!”
“Jeff, stop now. Stop. You’re wasting your energy on this, you’re preaching to the choir on this. I agree already, so there’s no point in saying it all over again. The world is fucked up, agreed. The rich are stupid assholes, agreed. But you need to stop saying so.”
“I can’t.”
“I know. But you have to. Just this time. Save it for later.”
“I can’t. I try but I can’t. Fucking …”
Happily Jeff falls asleep. Mutt tries to tuck a last spoonful of maple water in the corner of his mouth, then wipes his chin again and pulls the blanket up over his chest.
He sits on the chair by the bed, rocking back and forth a little. Finally he takes one of the plates from the serving tray and cleans it until it is a smooth round white circle of ceramic. On this he writes using one of the little packets of strawberry jam,
My friend is sick. He needs a doctor right now.
The skyscrapers seem like tall gravestones.
—José M. Irizarry Rodríguez
There are ghosts in New York. Someday I’ll be one of them.
said Fred Goodman
g) Stefan and Roberto
Stefan and Roberto were glad to see the old man settled into the Met tower’s farm. It seemed like a better place for him than his moldering squat, especially now that that building was on its last tilt into the tide. He himself didn’t agree and was frantic to get his stuff back, especially the maps. This they could well understand, and they spent the next couple of days boating over to the old wreck and venturing in trepidatiously to recover them. Once those were back in Mr. Hexter’s hands, he was so grateful he asked them to go back for more stuff. Turned out he cherished quite a few things that would be inconvenient if not impossible to
move on their boat, like the map cabinet. But there were some items on his list that they could move, so they risked more trips over there. Each one exposed them to a possible bust by the water police, who supposedly wanted people to stay out of the collapse zone, but Mr. Hexter promised he would bail them out if they got busted—buy them a new boat, claim to be their teacher, adopt them, whatever it took. He didn’t seem to understand that there were situations where he wouldn’t be able to help them.
To support the cover story that he was their teacher, he gave them a little wristpad that had some audiobooks on it (like a million), and a moldy book copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by a Mark Twain. He told them to listen to the book while looking at the pages, and that would teach them to read, as long as they learned their ABCs, so that the words on the page were not just funny shapes, but marks for sounds. He swore the method would work, so the boys tried it while in their boat under the dock at night, looking at the pages by flashlight for as long as they could stand it while listening to the words, which lit up as they were being said, after which they gave up and just listened ahead in the story. An interesting story, hokey but fun. They too had been hungry and stolen food; they too had been threatened and once or twice trapped and abused by adults. It was strange to be hearing a story about that stuff. The next night they would shift backward in the audio and find the page where they had stopped reading, and look for a time while listening again. Fairly quickly they began to see what the old man meant. It was a pretty simple system, although the spelling was often strangely wrong. They got to know Huck’s story well, and enjoyed discussing it as they cross-stitched their way forward. Wild times on the Mississippi. Similar in many ways to life on the Hudson. Meanwhile by day they were boating across town once a day to recover Mr. Hexter’s books (heavy), clothes (moldy), and rubber boots (stinky).
Vlade knew now that they slept in their boat under his dock, and he often gave them food, also a free charge for their boat’s battery, so they could gurgle over to the wreck rather than row, always taking canals not cordoned off by the water police. Everyone said the three remaining towers there would also fall. They had to stay south of that whole neighborhood for as long as they could, then cut up to it.
Then one day they burbled up to the building and found that it had slumped even farther to the side.
“Man. It’s like Pap’s houseboat in the Mississippi.”
“I don’t think that was his houseboat,” said Roberto. “I think Jim and Huck just found him in it.”
“Only Jim found him. He told Huck about it later.”
“Yeah I know.”
“But why was Pap there if it wasn’t his?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think we’ve been told. Maybe later in the story.”
“Maybe. Meanwhile, we got a problem here. We got to tell the old man the place is too dangerous.”
“But is it? I think we should take a look and see.”
“What do you mean? You can see it from here!”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Come on. Don’t be like that Tom Sawyer.”
“What a jerk! I’m not like that fool.”
“Well then don’t be.”
With some of his possessions around him, the hotello had come to resemble Hexter’s old quarters, being a maze of boxes and books in piles.
“Bless you boys,” he said that night. “I’ll pay you when I can. Maybe you can help me move this stuff back when I move back, and I’ll pay you twice. Meanwhile, I suppose you might want to be getting back to your excavation in the Bronx?”
“Exactly, we were thinking that ourselves.”
So the next day they dashed into the Met’s kitchen and snatched a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven, Vlade looking the other way, as he did all the time now. They were definitely eating more regularly these days. Vlade did the same thing for the bacino’s cats. Then they were out in the chill of a fine November day, weaving a route north past drowned buildings and aquaculture pens and over the Turtle Bay oyster beds.
Crossing the Harlem River under the RFK Bridge and then the old rail bridge, the monster that people said would last a thousand years, they cut up over the east part of Ward Island to their spot in the south Bronx. They found their little marker buoy and cheered. Once moored to it they prepped the diving bell and dropped it over the side. Roberto clawed into his wetsuit and Stefan helped him get the diving gear on. All was good when Stefan said, “I still don’t see how we’re going to dig down far enough.”
“We’ll just keep at it,” Roberto said. “I can put the mud on the east side of the hole, and between digs the tides will move it upstream and down, but not back into the hole. So each time it’ll get deeper, until we hit the Hussar.”
Stefan shook his head. “I hope so,” he said. “But look, since we can’t do it in one go, you’ve gotta come up when I tell you.”
“Yep. Three tugs on the air hose, and up we go.”
Roberto hopped over the side and Stefan lifted the bell over the side and onto him. He could just see Roberto under the clear plastic, rocking the bell to the side to let a little air out from under it. A fart of bubbles burst the surface, and then Roberto and the bell were drifting to the bottom. High tide again, so quite a ways down there, which worried Stefan. He watched his friend disappear into the murk and began to monitor the oxygen tank. It was the only thing he could do to stay occupied, so he watched the dial until he saw it move, then looked around to make sure no one was approaching while they were doing their business. The sun was out, low in the south and blazing a strip of mirrored light across the slack river, which was otherwise a dark handsome blue. There were some barges in a line midchannel, but nothing smaller was anywhere near them.
Then a cat’s-paw spun across the water and struck, scoring the water with a twirl of teeny wavelets. Their boat swung around until the rope tied to the top of the diving bell was taut over the side, and the air hose likewise. Suddenly Stefan saw that the oxygen tube was taut but the rope was slack. He tugged on the rope and cried out involuntarily when it gave. There was no resistance; the rope was no longer tied to the bell! He pulled up to make sure, and it came up all the way, its end curled in the way plastic rope curled when it came untied after being tied for a long time. It made no sense, but there it was. Roberto was down there and there was no way to pull him back up. “Oh no!” Stefan shouted.
The air hose extended under the edge of the bell, its end curving up into the cone of trapped air. Stefan tugged on it three times, then shouted down it, though he knew it wasn’t going to convey the sound of his voice to the bottom. For now Roberto had air, but when the gas bottle ran out (and the spare bottle too, there under the thwart) there would still be no way to raise the bell. Possibly Roberto could push up one edge of it, duck under the side and swim up to the surface. Yes, that might work, if he could do it. If he knew that he should do it. Again Stefan shouted Roberto’s name, again he tugged three times on the tube, but now gently, as he was scared of pulling it out from under the edge down there. The bell was heavy, heavier than its cone of trapped air could lift, and the water would be pushing down on it, a high tide’s worth of water. Very likely he would not be able to lift the bell from below enough to slip out from under it.
The wind was blowing Stefan upstream hard enough that the oxygen tube was stretching flat over the side of the boat. The flow of gas could get cut off, or the tube pulled out. Stefan started the motor and hummed back to the buoy, reached over the side and grabbed it. Hanging on to it, he rested elbows on the side, breathing hard, shaking even though the sun was out; he was terrified.
He tapped their wristpad and called Vlade.
Vlade picked up, thank God, and Stefan quickly explained the situation to him.
“A diving bell?” Vlade repeated, catching the essence of the problem. “Why?”
“No time for that,” Stefan pleaded, “we’ll tell you later, but can you come and help pull him up? He’s only got about an hour??
?s air in the air tank, and then I’ll have to change tanks, and I’ve only got one spare.”
“You can’t tell him to swim up?”
“No, and I don’t think he can push the bell up by himself from below! We usually pull it up, whoever’s in the boat. Even using a crank it’s hard.”
“How deep is he?”
“About twenty-five feet.”
“You kids!” Vlade said sharply. “I can’t believe you.”
“But can you come help please?”
“Where are you again?”
Stefan told him.
Again Vlade was incredulous. “What the fuck!” he said. “Why?”
“Just come help and we’ll tell you,” Stefan promised. He was sitting now, head over the side looking down into the opaque water, seeing nothing, feeling like he was going to throw up. “Please hurry!”
In January 1925, when New York City passed under a total eclipse of the sun, people said it looked like a city risen from the bottom of the sea.
h) Vlade
Vlade hustled up the stairs to the boathouse dock thinking about what he might need. Just deep enough to want scuba; he was no great free diver. What he needed most was a fast boat, and right as he reached the dock he saw Franklin Garr waiting there for Su to drop his little hydrofoil out of the rafters where Vlade had stashed it. He was looking impatient as always.
“Hey,” Vlade said, “I need your boat.”
“Say what?”
“Sorry, but those kids Roberto and Stefan are in trouble up in the south Bronx.”
“Not them again!”
“Yes, and one of them could drown if I don’t get there real fast to pull him out of the drink. You’ve got the fastest boat here by a long shot, so how about we trade for today, or you come with me.”