“Ah for fuck’s sake,” Garr said, looking suddenly ferocious.
Vlade shrugged, wondering how he would do it if he had to grab this guy’s boat from him. This was already a real-world version of a nightmare he had suffered all too many times in the last fifteen years, dreams in which the chance to save Marko stood there before him, only to be blocked by various crazy obstacles. So he was sick with fear, and ready to just slug the guy and go, and possibly this was apparent on his face, because the man cursed again but added, “I’ll come too. Where are they again?”
“South Bronx just east of the bridges.”
“What the fuck?”
“They didn’t say. Thanks for this, I’ve got my stuff right here.”
“What are you going to do?” Garr asked as they got in his speedster.
“I’ll dive to their diving bell and tie their rope back onto it.”
“A diving bell? Really?”
“That’s what Stefan said. It’s stupid.”
“Crazy stupid.”
“Well, that’s them. But we can’t let them drown.” As he said this his throat clenched so hard he had to look away.
“I guess,” Garr said, and got them going east on Twenty-sixth. The canal was crowded this time of day, but he was good at dodging through the crowd, and for once he had an excuse to do it, so he shot the boat over wakes and through gaps between barges and kayaks and vapos and rowboats and gondolas, gaps smaller than Vlade would have dared to attempt. The work of an obvious scofflaw, a Brooklyn dodger, but today usefully so.
Out in the East River he shoved his throttle forward and the little hydrofoil did its thing and rose up onto its foils and flew. Wind ripped past them over the clear bubble at the front of the cockpit. Vlade marveled at the speed with which the UN building shot past on their left. Then they were past Roosevelt Island’s drowned brick piles on their right, into the broad confluence that was Hell Gate, whooshing over it as if in a low-flying plane. They were going about sixty or seventy miles an hour, great news given the need. Despite himself Vlade was impressed, and almost feeling a tiny glow of relief through the knot in his stomach. Although he was also rediscovering what someone had once explained to him, that part of being post-traumatic was an inability to clear your head once you were triggered. You simply flashed back to the trauma and it was all just like then, all over again.
Onshore, in the broken rusty reef that was the submerged part of the south Bronx, a little gray zodiac was floating. The boys’ boat for sure, with one of them standing in it, desperately waving his arms overhead.
“Looks like our guys,” Garr remarked, and slowed enough for the boat to drop back into the water with a swan-chested splash. Even then it was a quick ride through the shallows, white wings to each side and Garr standing tall, looking forward to see if he was headed at anything dangerous. Ordinarily Vlade would have thought it much too fast, but given the circumstances he was happy the man was reckless. As long as he didn’t run aground on something. Vlade held his breath as they crossed over some dark spots in the blue, but they passed safely. He didn’t know if the foils on this craft slid up or not. Some did, some didn’t. Something to ask about later. He still wasn’t sure what to make of this young finance guy, a very dismissive and self-regarding fellow, or so it seemed. But good at piloting his little speedboat.
They pulled up next to Stefan, still standing in the zodiac, looking relieved. He balanced against their wake’s rocking and pointed down.
“He’s there!”
“How far down?” Vlade asked.
“On the bottom.”
“How far is that?”
“At high tide it’s twenty-eight feet.”
Vlade sighed. They were just past high tide. He had already struggled into his wetsuit, and now he shrugged on his smallest tank and vest and got the hose and mask and regulator and computer all arranged right, then lastly placed the mask carefully onto the suit’s hood. Gloves on, rope in hand.
“Okay, going down,” he told them, to keep to protocol. “Keep the tether on me loose. I’ll want to be able to move around.”
He slipped off the boat and felt the chill of the water at one remove. As always, at first it was a relief from his own heat, trapped by the wetsuit. He had been about to break into a sweat. Now it was cool, and soon it would be cold, but not right against his skin, more a hard coolness sucking at him from outside.
The river was dark even a foot deep, as usual in the drowned shallows of the boroughs. His headlamp illuminated nothing but estuarine particulates of various kinds—seaweed, dirt, little creatures, detritus. Top of the tide. Down below he saw the gleam of something.
He had the rope from the boys’ zodiac in hand, and with it he swam down to the top of the gleam. Eyebolt at the top of what appeared to be a clear plastic bell, the bell dense and thick enough that it reflected his light, making it hard to see what was inside it. Presumably Roberto, so he knocked three times on the side of it, then tied the rope on, three loops, after which he tugged hard. Then back to the surface, where he trod water and pulled his mask up.
“Did you see him?” Stefan asked anxiously. “Did you tie off?”
“Rope’s tied to the bell! Pull it up a bit and I’ll get him out from under it.”
Stefan and Garr hauled up on the rope. At first it obviously resisted them, so much that Vlade was amazed the boys had been able to pull each other up alone. There was a hand reel screwed onto the thwart, but it was little and it would take an effort to crank it. Then the two in the boat got it going, and Vlade put his face mask back in position and dove again, to help Roberto out from under the bell’s edge and into the boat. A good idea, as when he poked his head under the side of the bell and looked up into the pocket of captured air, the boy seemed stunned and only semiconscious. He was hanging on to a strap Velcroed to the inside of the bell, and his eyes were bugging out of his face, and his mouth was pursed into a tight little knot. He was ready to hold his breath and was not going to breathe until well into the open air, good man. He was still that conscious. Vlade nodded at him, pointed up, and hauled him down into the water, under the bell’s edge, and up to the surface. Then he shoved him up from below while the other two dragged him over the side and into the zodiac, which had a smaller cockpit than Garr’s speedster but was lower in the water.
Vlade crawled up over the side of the zodiac, never an easy move, but soon enough he flopped over the fat rubber tube into the cockpit. Roberto lay next to him on the bottom, wet, muddy, his face a brown tinged with blue. Shivering. Lips and nose whitish with cold or anoxia, or both. Vlade pulled off his own face mask and unclipped from his tank and got out of his gear. Then he sat beside Roberto and held his blue little hand. Very cold.
“Have you got any hot water in your boat?” he asked Garr.
“I have a flash heater,” Garr said.
“Jump up and draw us a bowl of the hottest water you have,” Vlade said. “We need to warm this kid up.” He put his face down to Roberto’s and said, “Roberto, what the hell? You could have died down there!” And suddenly his throat closed up again and he couldn’t say more. He looked away hot-eyed, tried to pull himself together. He hadn’t had the old feeling stab him as hard as this for many a year. It was just like his nightmares, even just like the original event itself. But now, here and now, if he could get this boy warmed up …
Roberto was shivering too hard to answer, but he nodded. He was shivering so hard his skinny body bounced off the bottom of the boat.
“Have you got a towel?” Vlade asked Stefan.
Stefan nodded and got it from a locker under the thwart. Vlade took it from him and began to dry Roberto’s head off, at the same time roughing him up a little to get his circulation going faster. “Let’s get this wetsuit off him.” Although maybe it would help heat him, maybe it would be warmer with it on than off. Vlade tried to clear his mind enough to recall standard practice in the city. They couldn’t warm his extremities too fast, he knew that, that w
as very dangerous, as it might drive cold blood to his heart and cause it to fail. In general they had to go slowly, but one way or another it was certainly necessary to warm him.
“Did the oxygen keep flowing to you the whole time?” Vlade asked Roberto.
Roberto shook his head, then with difficulty said, “The bell edge squished it. I lifted the bell. Tried to.”
“Good man. I think you’re going to be all right here.” No sense in bawling the kid out now; fear was probably chilling his extremities along with everything else. “Let’s get some of this hot water Mr. Garr has here onto your chest.”
Garr stepped over the gunwales into the zodiac’s cockpit with minimal spillage from the bowl in his hands, and Vlade took the bowl and scooped water out with his hand, scalding his fingers more with the contrast of temperatures than the water’s actual heat, and dripped some of it onto Roberto’s chest. Heat would diffuse through the wetsuit, a good thing. Vlade was past the moment of his flashback now, back in the present moment with this kid, who was going to be all right.
“Slowly,” Vlade said, and had Stefan continue to dry Roberto’s hair with the towel. Quickly the water cooled to a point where he could put the boy’s hands in the bowl. Roberto kept shivering, with occasional spasms of extra shuddering, but shivering was good; there was a point where you got too cold to shiver, very hard to come back from. But the kid wasn’t there; he was shivering like mad. Stefan finished drying his head off. They got him out of the wetsuit, then toweled down, then dressed: pants, shirt, and baggy coat on, and another dry towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Okay,” Vlade said after a while. To Garr he said, “How about you tow us back home.”
Franklin nodded once. “I can’t believe I’m towing you guys home again,” he said to Stefan and Roberto.
“Thanks,” the boys said weakly.
“What should we do with their diving bell?” Franklin asked Vlade.
“Cut it loose. We can get it later.”
As Garr was in his cockpit piloting them, Vlade sat back and got himself between Roberto and the wind.
“All right,” he said. “What the fuck was that about?”
Roberto gulped. “We were just out looking for some treasure.”
Vlade shook his head. “Come on. No bullshit.”
“It’s true!” both boys exclaimed.
They looked at each other for a second.
“It’s the Hussar,” Roberto said. “It’s the HMS Hussar.”
“Ah come on,” Vlade said. “That old chestnut?”
The boys were amazed. “You know about it?”
“Everyone knows about it. British treasure ship, hit a rock and went down in Hell Gate. Every water rat in the history of New York has gone diving for it. Now it’s you guys’s turn.”
“But we found it! We really did!”
“Right.”
Stefan said, “We did because Mr. Hexter knows. He studied the maps and the records.”
“I’m sure. And what did you boys find down there?”
“We borrowed a metal detector that can specify for gold thirty feet down, and we took it to where Mr. Hexter said the ship had to be, and we got a big signal.”
“A really big signal!”
“I’m sure. And then you started digging underwater?”
“That’s right.”
“Under your diving bell?”
“That’s right.”
“But how is that supposed to work? That’s landfill there, right? Part of the Bronx.”
“Yeah that’s right. That’s where it was.”
“So the Hussar sank in the river and then the south Bronx got extended over it, is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly.”
“So how were you going to dig through that landfill under a tiny diving bell? Where were you going to put the dirt you dug up?”
“That’s what I said,” Stefan said after a silence.
“I had a plan,” Roberto muttered miserably.
“I’m sure,” Vlade said. He tousled Roberto’s turban. “Tell you what, I’ll keep this news to myself, and we’ll have a little conference with your old man of the maps when we get back and you get properly dried and warmed and fed. Sound good?”
“Thanks, Vlade.”
Private money and public (or state) money work together and to the same end. Their actions have been absolutely complementary during the crisis, aimed at safeguarding the markets for which they are ready to sacrifice society, social cohesion, and democracy.
claimed Maurizio Lazzarato
The author of this book is to be commended for her zeal in tracking down much behind-the-scenes material never before published … Not that the Pushcart War was a small war. However, it was confined to the streets of one city, and it lasted only four months. During those four months, of course, the fate of one of the great cities of the world hung in the balance.
Jean Merrill, The Pushcart War
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.
i) that citizen
Recall, if your powers of retention will allow it, that after the Second Pulse, as the twenty-second century began its surreal and majestic existence, sea level had risen to about fifty feet higher than it had been early in the twentieth century. This remarkable rise had been bad for people—most of them. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.
This remarkable wealth distribution was just a result of the logical progression of the ordinary workings of capitalism, following its overarching operating principle of capital accumulation at the highest rate of return. Capturing that highest rate of return was an interesting process, which became directly relevant to what happened in the postpulse years. Because the areas where the highest rate of return can be obtained move around the world as time passes, following differences in development and currency exchange rates. The highest rate of return comes during periods of rapid development, but not just any area can be rapidly developed; there needs to be a preliminary infrastructure, and hot money, and a fairly stable and somewhat educated populace, ambitious for themselves and willing to sacrifice for their children by working hard for low wages. With these conditions in place, investment capital can descend like a skyvillage on an orchard, and that region then experiences rapid growth, and the rate of return for global investors is high. But as with everything, the logistic curve rules; rates of profit drop as workers expect higher wages and benefits, and the local market saturates as everyone gets the basic necessities. So at that point capital moves on to the next geocultural opportunity, flying somewhere else. The people in that newly abandoned region are left to cope with their new rust belt status, abandoned as they are to fates ranging from touristic simulacrum to Chernobylic calm. Local intellectuals discover bioregionalism and proclaim the virtues of getting by with what can be made in that watershed, which turns out to be not much, especially when all the young people move somewhere else, following the skyvillages of liquid capital.
So it goes, region to region, opportunity to opportunity. The march of progress! Sustainable development! Always there is an encouraging motto to mark the remorseless migration of capital from an ex–highest rate of return to the next primed site. And indeed, development of capital gets sustained.
So in that process—call it globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the Anthropocene, the water boarding, what have you—the Second Pulse became just an unusually clear signal that it was time for capital to move on. Rate of return on all coastlines having been definitively hosed, capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid down the path of least resistance, or up it, or sideways—it doesn’t matter, money being so slippery and antigravitational, with no restraints on capital flight or any other such impediment that the feeble remnant nation-state system might have
thought to apply, if it had not already been bought and now owned by that very same capital saying bye-bye to the new backwater.
So first you get off the coastlines, because they are a mess and an emergency rescue operation. Poor old governments exist to deal with situations like that. Capital goes immediately to Denver. Although Denver being Denver, snoozefest beyond compare, a fair bit of New York’s capital just shifted uptown, where Manhattan Island still protruded from the sea with a sufficient margin. That was important locally, but globally speaking, capital went to Denver, Beijing, Moscow, Chicago, et cetera; just as the list of drowned cities could go on forever, such that certain awesome writers fond of lists would have already inflicted this amazing list of coastal cities on the reader, but for now please just consult a map or globe and make it yourself—yet another great list could be made of all the wonderful inland cities that were untouched by sea level rise, even if located on lakes or rivers, as they so often were. So capital had lots of better rates of return to flow to, indeed almost anywhere that was not on the drowned coastlines would do. Places competed in abasing themselves to get some of what could be called refugee capital, though really it was just the imperial move to the summer palace, as always.
This is not to say things didn’t get weirder after the Second Pulse, because they did. The flood caused an unprecedented loss of assets and a cessation of trade, stimulating a substantial recession, or let’s say a pretty big little depression. As always in moments like this, which keep happening every generation to everyone’s immense surprise, the big private banks and investment firms went to the big central banks, meaning the governments of the world, and demanded to be saved from the impacts of the floods on their activities. The governments, being long since subsidiaries of the banks anyway, caved again, and bailed out the banks one hundred cents on the dollar, incurring public debt so huge that it could not be paid off in the remaining lifetime of the universe. Oh dear, what a quandary. Ten years after the end of the Second Pulse it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly the wrestling match had always been professional wrestling and completely staged start to finish, but in any case it looked to be over.