There was a line at the marina entry almost a dozen boats long, so I pulled up next to the cliffside that rose so steeply out of the river along this part of the island, to wait for the line to clear. The old Henry Hudson Parkway had been submerged by the river long ago, and the hack they had made in the hillside to hold that Robert Moses intervention was now underwater even at low tide, and home to a narrow long salt marsh, a flowing yellow-green surface carpeting the foot of the hillside, which was covered with brush and ferns and small trees, and studded with the island’s bossy gneiss outcroppings protruding out of the greenery.
I hummed slowly into the grass edging the salt marsh and turned upstream. Felt the bug’s starboard hydrofoil touch the bottom. It was near high tide. A quiet estuarine corner of the city, a little thoreautheater, cool in the shade of a passing cloud.
The grass of the marsh was almost entirely submerged at this point of the tide. Some kind of fluid eelgrass, flowing horizontally this way and that, pushed first downstream by the river’s flow, then upstream in the repeated slosh of boat wakes. The many grass stalks flowed in parallel, like hair underwater in a bathtub. Each green stalk had yellow chips crosshatching it, and as the flat mass angelhaired back and forth in the waves there was a lovely, mesmerizing sparkle of gold in the green. Back and forth the flowing grass flexed, sparkly and fluid. Back and forth, green and gold, back and forth, flow flow flow. Really very pretty.
And in that moment, watching this motion, just passing the time in a little contemplation of the river’s verge, waiting for the boats to clear the marina entry, I experienced a vision. A satori; an epiphany; and if you had told me flames were shooting out of the top of my head at that moment, I would not have been surprised to hear it. The biblically boggled ones had only been accurately describing the feel of when such an idea lances you. Luckily there was no one there to hear me speaking in tongues, or to interrupt my thought and cause me to forget the whole thing. No, I had it; I thought it through; I felt it. I wasn’t going to forget it. I watched the grass flow back and forth in the stream, fixing the thought with the mesmerizing image over the side of the bug. Really quite beautiful.
“Hey thanks!” I said to the dockmaster as he waved me into the marina. “I just had an idea!”
“Congratulations.”
I strode up the enormous broad stairs to the plaza that surrounded the Cloistermunster, the biggest tower in the cluster of four great supertowers that launched out of the hilltop. The Munster was built in the shape of a Bareiss column, meaning the bottom and top of the building were both semicircular, but with the semicircles oriented 180 degrees to each other. This configuration made all the exterior surfaces of the building curve very gracefully. The other towers of the cluster were also Bareiss columns, but with two for each tower, stacked vertically such that their midpoints formed matching semicircles. This arrangement doubled down on the lovely long curves rising up to puncture the sky. I crossed the plaza with my head canted back like a tourist, enjoying the architectural sublime, which at this point in my Day of the Idea was gilding the lily, but in a good way. Everything seemed vast.
Inside the Munster I took the sequence of ear-popping express elevators to floor 301, the top floor, where Hector Ramirez had his office, if that was the word for a room that occupied an entire floor of a building that big. A loft? It was a single semicircular space about the size of Block Island, glass-walled on all sides.
“Franklin Garr.”
“Maestro. Thanks for seeing me.”
“My pleasure, youth.”
He had not spoiled the impact of his perch with much in the way of furniture. Around the elevator core there were some chest-high cubicles, and some desks outside those, but beyond that lay an open space that extended to curving window walls to the south, flat glass to the north, the glass in every direction so clean it was hard to be sure it was even there. One saw the world.
To the south, the rest of uptown was a forest of superscrapers only a bit shorter than the Cloister cluster, each displaying its particular gehryglory. To the left of these towers lay the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, all three boroughs now bays studded with buildings, with Brooklyn Heights the first real land to be seen that way, topped by its own line of superscrapers. It was only from this distance one could see how tall the new towers really were, which was really very tall. Meanwhile water gleamed everywhere, filled with drowned buildings and bridges, ships and ships’ wakes.
Same to the right, but the Hudson was a cleaner, broader sweep of water than the East River and its shallows: a great blue searoad, crowded with watercraft but clean of ruined rooftops, with only the George Washington and Verrazano bridges crossing the great bay. Hoboken formed another dragonback horizon, cutting off the view of the immense bay filling the Meadowlands, punctuated at its south end by the fat towers topping Staten Island. To the north lay the north, a haze cut by the great river. The north was the place to get away to, but no one wanted to go. If you were really going to leave the city you would go up, and in fact above this office I knew Hector’s airship was tethered, a small skyvillage of the Twenty-one Balloons type. He could leave for heaven any time he wanted, and occasionally he did.
Now he seemed to be happy to see me. And I was definitely happy to see him. Boss, teacher, mentor, advisor: I had had several of each of these through the years, but Hector had been the first who combined all these roles, and so had become the most important of any of them. I had interned for him when I was too young to know how lucky I was, right out of Harvard’s lame business school, and he had taught me many things, but most usefully the art of swaps on social policy bonds. I had been working out evolutions of those lessons ever since, and now they were going to be crucial to surviving the intertidal meltdown.
“Push is coming to shove,” I said, pointing down the length of the aquatropolis. Midtown blocked our view of downtown, but he knew what I meant, and the immense sweep of the Hudson stood well for the coming fate of lower Manhattan. It was going to look like that.
“I thought recovery tech was getting stronger,” Hector said, to show that he knew what I was referring to.
“It is,” I granted, “but not fast enough. Mother Ocean can’t be beat. And it’s turning out to be toughest to fight her in the intertidal. Tide after tide, wave after wave—nothing can stand against that, not over the long haul.”
“So it’s made sense to short it,” he noted.
“Yes. As we know. But I’ve been thinking about what comes after.”
“Retreat to higher ground?” He gestured around him.
“Sure. Path of least resistance. Off to Denver. But some places will be different, and this is going to be one of them. It’s the myth of the place. People just won’t stop coming. It doesn’t matter that it’s a fatal shore. They want it.”
He was nodding. He had come here from Venezuela, he had told me, feeling the pull himself. Water rat, dime in his pocket, now here. “And so?”
“So, there’s a combination of new techs that add up to what you might call eelgrass housing. Some of it comes from aquaculture. Basically, you stop trying to resist. You flex with the currents, you rise and fall on the tides. You take graphene’s strength, and newglue’s stickiness, and fauxfascia’s flexibility. You put bollards in the bedrock, however deep that is, and anchor them to bands of fascia cord that would stretch with the tides and would always be long enough to reach the surface, where you attach a floating platform. You make the platform the size of your ordinary Manhattan block.”
“So it would be like living on a dock, or a houseboat.”
“Yes. And some of it can lie underwater, like in the hull of a ship. Then you link all the platforms, so that they move together in the tides, like eelgrass. Side bumpers where necessary, like boats have where their sides hit a dock. Eventually you’d have a floating mat of these platforms, a whole neighborhood of them.”
“You couldn’t go very high.”
“I’m not so sure. The graphenated composit
es are really light. That’s what has us up here so high. Anyway, it could go at least as high as it was before in that part of town.”
He nodded. “Can it be done?”
“All the tech is already available. And pretty soon all the stock down there is going to fall in the drink.”
He was nodding still. “Go long, my son. Go long.”
“I am. I will.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Leverage. I want an angel.”
He laughed. “All right. I’ve been wondering what would come next in this town. It sounds very exciting. Count me in.”
So that was good. Really good. And I was still thinking hard about it as I put the bug back out in the river and let it drift downstream back to midtown. The problem that remained, in the here and now, was that I worked on derivatives in a hedge fund, and not in an architectural firm designing the next iteration of intertidal design. I couldn’t do that work from my position.
But I could fund it.
That meant finding people to fund. Of course this resembled what I was already doing every day, because finding something to fund was very similar to finding a good bet. Even though WaterPrice didn’t have much of a VC element in its portfolio, arguably it should; and finding the long to follow the coming short was wise for anyone. It was kind of like what I was trying to do with Jojo.
That got me wondering if I could let her know what I was up to, or even ask her for help with it—whatever might impress her more. If that was what this was all for. Which it was. At least primarily. But then it might be a case of the sooner the better, and asking for help a sign of mature vulnerability. I had the feeling she would like it, and I was impatient to tell her about it too.
So when the bug had drifted down to midtown I put in at Pier 57 and went to the bar where we had first met. It was a Friday again, just before sunset; and again there she was, regular as clockwork. What was with that? There was the same group, John and Evgenia and Ray and Amanda, and they all greeted me in a friendly way, Jojo too, as if nothing had transpired between us. Then again, Amanda and I were that way with each other, so it couldn’t be said that it was all that unusual for Jojo to be acting like this, cool and friendly, uninvolved. Dang.
Well, I got a drink from Inky, who was asking me questions about this very problem with his eyes, but I just rolled mine, to indicate all was less than well and I would tell him about it later, then went back to the gang. On the railing at sunset in December, air chilly, the river sliding brassily over itself in its ebbing hurry down to the Narrows. House band inside playing space blues, trying to soundtrack the view. The gang’s talk was the same, and again I was mystified: these people, my crowd, had a tendency to be crass jerks, and yet Jojo had been all happy-happy with them the day I met her, and now too. We both fit right in; so what did that mean? I had a cold thought: maybe she had claimed I lacked the altruism she liked in a man, just to give her a decent cover story for something more fundamental than … well, more fundamental than fundamental philosophies of life. That didn’t quite compute, but then again, I didn’t know. Probably it would in fact be easier to accept that she didn’t like my values than my smell, or my style of lovemaking. Which in fact she had seemed to like. Well it was just very confusing.
I tried to ignore that whirlpool in my brain and my gut, and eventually stood by her side, and there we were.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said. “Interesting. I was talking with my old teacher from Munstrosity about trying to do something with all the fixes that people have been inventing to keep real estate from going under. You know, some kind of venture capital thing, sort of like what you were talking about before.”
She regarded me with some curiosity, and I tried to take hope from that, and not get distracted by the crystalline brown shatter of her eyes, the gorgeous eyes of the person I had fallen for so hard. Which was nearly impossible, and I couldn’t help gulping a little under her gaze.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.
“Well, it occurred to me that since the intertidal doesn’t have bedrock under it, you can never build anything there you can trust will hold.”
“So you let them go.”
“No, in fact I was talking with Hector about anchoring what you might call floating neighborhoods there. Connect little townshiplike blocks to the bedrock no matter how far down it is, and then you wouldn’t be fighting the tides so much.”
“Ah,” she said, looking surprised. “Good idea!”
“I think maybe so.”
“Good idea,” she said again, then frowned a little. “So you’re interested in venture capital now?”
“Well, I was just thinking. There does have to be something to go long on after the short. You were right about that.”
“It’s true. Well, that’s interesting. Good for you.”
So. A little bit of hope there, attached to a bedrock emotion, deep under the waves: the emotion being how much I wanted her. Attach a line to that bedrock, float a little buoy of hope. Come back later and see what else might be attachable. She seemed not unfriendly. Not amused at my sudden interest in real estate. Not anything obviously negative. Maybe even friendly; maybe even approving. Thinking things over. A little smile in her eyes. One time a photographer had said to me, Smile with your eyes only. I hadn’t gotten what he meant. Maybe now I was seeing it. Maybe. The way she was looking at me … well, I couldn’t tell. To be honest, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, not at all.
When Radio City was first opened they dosed its air with ozone with the idea that this would make people happier. The developer, Samuel Rothafel, had wanted it to be laughing gas, but he couldn’t get the city to approve it.
Robin Hood Asset Management began by analyzing twenty of the most successful hedge funds and creating an algorithm that combined all their most successful strategies, then offering its services to micro-investments from the precariat, and going from there to their now-famous success.
The old Waldorf Astoria, demolished to make way for the Empire State Building, was dumped in the Atlantic five miles off Sandy Hook.
We lingered in New York till the city felt so homelike that it seemed wrong to leave it. And further, the more one studied it, the more grotesquely bad it grew.
—Rudyard Kipling, 1892
h) Mutt and Jeff
Jeff, are you awake?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“It sounds like you are. That’s good.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re still in that room. You’ve been sick.”
“What room?”
“A shipping container somewhere. Where someone is keeping us. Maybe underwater, sometimes it sounds like we’re underwater.”
“If you’re underwater you can never get clear. The market will never come back to where it was, so you’re sunk for good. Might as well default and walk away.”
“I would if I could, but we’re locked in down here.”
“I remember now. How you doing?”
“What?”
“I said, how are you doing?”
“Me? I’m fine, fine. Actually I haven’t been feeling too good, but nowhere near as bad as you. You were pretty sick there.”
“I still feel like shit.”
“Yeah, sorry to hear, but at least you’re talking. For a while there you weren’t able to talk. That was scary.”
“What happened?”
“What happened? Oh—to you. I wrote some notes on our plates and sent them out when they got picked up out of the door slot. Then your food started to come with some pills that I got you to take. Then once I slept really hard, and I think that was because they knocked us out and came in here. Or took you out. I don’t know, but when I woke up again you were sleeping more easily. And now here we are.”
“I feel like shit.”
“But you’re talking.”
“But I don’t want to talk.”
Mutt doesn’t know what to say to this. He sits by his friend’s bed, reaches over and holds Jeff’s hand. “It’s better when you talk. It’s good for you.”
“Not really.” Jeff eyes his friend. “You talk. I’m tired of talking. I can’t talk anymore.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it. Tell me a story.”
“Who me? I don’t know any stories. You tell stories, not me.”
“Not anymore. Tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Not true. Tell me how we met. I’ve forgotten that, it’s been so long. First thing I remember it feels like we had been together forever. I don’t recall before.”
“Well, you were younger than me then. I do remember that, yeah. I had been at Adirondack for a year or two at that point, and I was thinking of quitting. The work was boring. Then I was in their cafeteria at lunch one day and there you were at the end of a table, by yourself, reading your pad while you ate. I went over and sat across from you, I don’t know why, and introduced myself. You looked interesting. You said you were in systems, but as we talked I could tell you were into coding too. I remember I asked where the rest of your team was, and you said they had already gotten sick of you and your ideas, so there you were. I said I liked ideas, which was true at that time. That was how it started. Then we were asked to try encrypting their dark pool divers. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. We had a good time.”
“I’ll remember later maybe.”
“I hope so. We had a good time at work, and then I don’t know how it happened, somehow I found out that you didn’t have a regular place to live, you were sleeping in your car.”
“Mobile home.”
“Yes, that’s what you called it. A very small mobile home. So I was looking for a new place myself, so we moved in to that place in Hoboken, remember?”