“‘How do you know where you’re going in this fog?’ I asked him, because he was looking back at me. He smiled a little smile under his mustache; it was the only time I saw any expression on his face. ‘Oh I know,’ he said. ‘I know this river by now, I can say that. Moony night or pouring rain or fog as thick as the thoughts in my head. I can hear where I am. I can feel the bay’s bottom, feel it like my bed under me at night. This harbor is my Pacific now. I have finally fitted myself to my circumstances.’
“Then some kind of wave hit us from behind. I felt the wave raise me, and then saw it raise him up and let him down. I looked around, and I think I said, ‘What was that?’ and I couldn’t see anything in the fog. But the water was slick under us, and more waves kept coming and lifting me up, then dropping me back. He stopped rowing and my zodiac bumped into the back of his rowboat, and he leaned toward me and whispered to me, ‘It’s that which is after thee, son! I see the line around thee!’ So I turned to look behind again, but I didn’t see anything, and then when I turned back around to look at him, there wasn’t anything there either. He wasn’t there, his rowboat wasn’t there. He was just gone.”
“What happened to him?” Roberto asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why I say he must have been a ghost, because he disappeared like that. That was the first indication I had that he wasn’t real. I was pretty close to West Street by then, as I found out by puttering around a little. I was pretty freaked out, I can tell you. And even more so later, when I read that a couple of boats of dead guys were found out in the river the next day, drifting around. Killed by knives. I think that’s what he was telling me about. That’s what he rowed me away from in the fog. I was going to get killed when that deal went down, but he rowed me away.”
“Yikes,” Stefan said.
“But what did he mean about the line being around you?” Roberto asked.
“Ah, well!” Now Mr. Hexter stopped walking, to catch his breath and answer this. He was all caught up in his tale. “In Moby-Dick there’s a chapter called ‘The Line,’ maybe the greatest chapter of all. That’s where Melville describes what it was like when the whalers were rowing after whales to catch them, with the harpoonist standing up in the bow, and something like a dozen or eighteen guys all rowing as hard as they could, like a crew team. There was a line coiled in a big tub in the middle of the boat, with its end tied to the end of the harpoon, and when the harpoonist throws the harpoon into the whale and it sticks, the whale dives for the bottom and the line runs out of the tub really fast. But to keep it from tangling or breaking at that sudden first pull, they have a whole bunch of the line hung around the boat on poles, so that the line can be yanked out real fast with the harpoon when the whale is hit and makes its dive. So as the guys are rowing as hard as they can, and bouncing around all over the waves and all, this line is draped all over in between them, waiting to get yanked down and away by the whale. So if you were to accidentally get an arm or your head caught in it as it ran out, bang! Over you would go and down to the bottom with the whale.”
“You’re kidding,” Stefan said. “That’s how they did it?”
“It is. But then, right when Melville finishes describing this insane setup, he says, ‘But why say more?’ and points out that it’s no different from the situation that anyone is in at any time! The reader reading Moby-Dick by his living room fire, Melville says, is in the exact same situation as those poor sailors rowing their boat after the whale! Because the line is always there!”
“Kind of depressing,” Roberto pointed out.
“It is!” And yet Mr. Hexter laughed. He tilted his head up and hooted, standing out there on the ice in the sun.
Finally he pulled up on the rope they were hauling their iceboat with, and said, “See, here’s the line again. But on that night, Melville helped me dodge it. And I alone escaped to tell the tale.”
Today the sky is so blue it burns.
said Joe Brainard
I went to Coney Island with Jean Cocteau one night. It was as if we had arrived at Constantinople.
marveled Cecil Beaton
c) Mutt and Jeff
Mutt and Jeff sit with Charlotte at their railing, sipping wine from the white coffee cups. “So is it weird being back in the world?” she asks.
“It was weird before.”
They regard the nighttime water-floored city. The antique filigree of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cablework articulates the new superscrapers on Brooklyn Heights, all lit like liqueur bottles. The harbor looks vast in the winter light, big plates of ice floating orangely in the black murk of twilight. Short days still.
“Arguably we’re saner now than we were before,” Mutt says.
Jeff shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be saying much, but even so it isn’t true. I’m off my nut now. I want things now.”
“You did before,” Mutt protests.
Charlotte says, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”
Jeff actually smiles at this, pleasing Mutt greatly.
“Delmore Schwartz!” Jeff says.
“It’s actually Yeats,” Charlotte explains. “Schwartz was quoting Yeats.”
“No way!”
“It’s true. I learned that the hard way. Someone said it was Yeats and I corrected them, I told them it was Delmore Schwartz, and then they corrected me, and they turned out to be right.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what I said. It wasn’t someone I wanted to be corrected by.”
“Do you mean your ex, chair of the Federal Reserve?”
Charlotte raises her eyebrows. “Bull’s-eye.”
“I’m surprised he knew that.”
“I was too. But he’s full of surprises.”
They look down at the sheet of black water, studded with dim white icebergs, also buildings both lit and dark. The immensity of New York harbor at night, awesome, sublime. The black starry bay.
“Everyone’s full of surprises,” Mutt says. “Did you hear Amelia Black’s broadcast after her polar bears got nuked?”
“Of course,” says Jeff. “Everybody did, right?”
“It’s got like a hundred million views now,” Charlotte confirms.
“Everybody, like I said.”
“There’s nine billion people on this planet,” Mutt points out, “so actually that’s about one out of every ninety people, if I got my decimal point right.”
“That’s everybody,” Charlotte says. “Very big saturation, anyway.”
“So what did you think?” Mutt inquires of her.
Charlotte shrugs. “She’s a ditz. She can barely string two thoughts together.”
“Ah come on—”
“Meaning I love her. Obviously.”
“Not that obvious.”
“Well, I do. Especially after she said all those nice things about the Householders’ Union right in the middle of saving that crashing skyvillage. That broadcast has gotten a lot of views too. That was bizarre, actually, her saying that then. I do think she has a little trouble with, I don’t know what. Sequential thinking.”
Jeff says, “We’re all like her.”
Charlotte and Mutt don’t get this.
Jeff explains: “She wants things to go right. She’s mad that they’re not going right. She’d like to kill the people hurting her family. How are we any different?”
“We have a plan?” Charlotte suggests.
“But do we? You’ve got this building, and the intertidal community, the Lame Ass and all the other co-ops, but now that things are going well, it’ll all get bought up again. Wherever there’s a commons there’s enclosure. And enclosure always wins. So of course she wants to kill. I’m totally with her. Put ’em against a wall. Fucking liquidation of the rentier.”
“Euthanasia of the rentier,” Charlotte corrects. “Keynes.”
“Okay whatever.”
“You are sounding pretty mad.”
“But you should have seen him before,” Mutt insists. “I’m telling you, he??
?s a lot calmer now.”
“No I’m not.”
“Maybe a little vengeful,” Charlotte says.
Jeff throws his hands in the air, like, What. “I want justice!”
“It sounds like you want revenge.”
Jeff’s laugh is more like arrrrrgh. He is seizing his hair with both hands. “At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs. So yeah, I want both. Justice is the feather in the arrow, revenge is the tip of the arrowhead.”
“The rentier class is not going to go down easily,” says Charlotte.
“Of course not. But look, once you’re cutting them apart, you tell them that they each get to keep five million. Not more, but not less. Most of them will do a cost-benefit analysis and realize that dying for a bigger number is not worth it. They’ll take their five million and slink away.”
Charlotte considers this. “The golden parachuting of the rentier.”
“Sure, why not? Although I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation.”
“It’s pretty mellow, as far as revenge goes.”
“Velvet glove. Minimize the trauma drama.”
“I always like that.” She sips her wine. “It would be interesting to hear what Franklin might say about that. About how we could finance it.”
“Why him?” Jeff asks.
“Because I like him. A very nice young man.”
Jeff shakes his head at her like he’s regarding a true miracle of stupidity.
Mutt, thinking to divert Jeff’s no doubt withering critique of their young financier, says, “Have you ever noticed that our building is a kind of actor network that can do things? We got the cloud star, the lawyer, the building expert, the building itself, the police detective, the money man … add the getaway driver and it’s a fucking heist movie!”
“So who are we?” Jeff says.
“We are the wise old geezers, Jeffrey.”
“But that’s Gordon Hexter,” Jeff points out. “No, we’re the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes.”
“Lame-ass jokes,” says Mutt. “I like that.”
“Me too.”
“But isn’t it a little weird that we have all the right players here to change the world?”
Charlotte shakes her head. “Confirmation bias. That or else representation error. I’m forgetting the name, shit. It’s the one where you think what you see is all of what’s going on. A very elementary cognitive error.”
“Ease of representation,” Jeff says. “It’s an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.”
“That’s right, that’s the one.”
Mutt acknowledges this, but says, “On the other hand, we do have quite a crew here.”
Charlotte says, “Everybody does. There are two thousand people living in this building, and you only know twenty of them, and I only know a couple hundred, and so we think they’re the important ones. But how likely is that? It’s just ease of representation. And every building in lower Manhattan is the same, and they’re part of the mutual aid society, and those are everywhere now, all over the drowned world. Probably every intertidal building in the world is just like us. For sure everyone I meet in my job is.”
“So it’s mistaking the particular for the general?” Mutt says.
“Something like that. And there’s something like two hundred major coastal cities, all just as drowned as New York. Like a billion people. And we’re all wet, we’re all in the precariat, we’re all pissed off at Denver and at the rich assholes still parading around. We all want justice and revenge.”
“Which is one thing,” Jeff reminds her.
“Okay whatever. We want justice-revenge.”
“Jusvenge,” Mutt tries. “Rejustenge. It doesn’t seem to combine.”
“Let’s leave it at justice,” Charlotte suggests. “We all want justice.”
“We demand justice,” Jeff says. “We don’t have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.”
“And conditions are ripe, is that what you’re saying?”
“Very ripe. People are pissed off. They’re scared for their kids. That’s the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth’s law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn’t have to get all bloody and lead to a thugocracy of violent revolutionaries. It can work. And conditions are ripe.”
“So how does a thing like that start?” Charlotte wonders.
“Any kind of thing. Some kind of disaster, big or small.”
“Okay, good. I always like rooting for disaster to strike.”
“Everybody does!”
Jeff cackles along with Charlotte. She refills their cups. Mutt feels a smile stretching his face in an almost forgotten way. He clicks ceramic cups with Jeff. “It’s good to see you happy again, my friend.”
“I’m not happy. I’m furious. I’m fucking furious.”
“Exactly.”
In a storm the Flatiron appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of new America still in the making.
said Alfred Steiglitz
d) Vlade
Vlade’s wristpad beeped and said, “So how’s it going with our gold?”
“Hi Idelba. Well, they’re figuring it out.”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked to Charlotte about it, and she convinced us to ask Inspector Gen what we should do.”
“You asked a policeman?”
“A policewoman. Yes.”
Long pause over the radio phone. Vlade waited her out. That always worked with Idelba; he had about fifty times more patience than she did.
“And what did she say?”
“She said melt it down and sell the gold and put it in the bank, and don’t tell anyone where we got it.”
“Well good for her! I was worried you would turn it over. I’ve dealt with salvage before, and it never goes well. So how long is that going to take? When do Thabo and I get our cut?”
“I’m not sure.” Vlade took a deep breath, then gave it a try: “Why don’t you come on over and we’ll talk about it with the gang here.”
“Like when?”
“Let me check on that. And listen, when you come, can you bring that vacuum you drug up the gold with? I want it to see if I can apply it to a problem I’m having with the building here.”
He explained his plan.
“I guess so,” she said.
“Thanks Idelba. I’ll get back to you on when the group can meet.”
Gathering the treasure consortium was hard, mainly because Charlotte was part of it now, in an advisory role, and she was mostly away, and busy even when she was home. But she carved out an hour at the end of one of her long days, and Idelba agreed to come in her tug and anchor between the tower and the North building.
Vlade was still finding leaks appearing below the low tide mark on the building, small but worrisome. Actually infuriating. Of course one could play drone versus drone, and he did that, but it wasn’t working. It seemed possible that going old school with Idelba might accomplish what he wanted. And it gave him an excuse to see her again.
So Idelba showed up in her tug, which was of a size that allowed it to just fit through most of the canals of lower Manhattan. Nervously Vlade welcomed her to the Met and showed her around. It was the first time she had visited, so he gave her the grand tour, starting below the waterline, including the rooms that had been broached. Boathouse, dining hall and commons, some representative apartments occupied by people he knew well, everything from the solo closets to the big group places, occupying half a floor and accommodating a hundred people dorm-style; then up to the farm, then above that to the cupola and the blimp mast. Then back down to the animal floor, pigs
chickens goats, very smelly, and right under that the farm again, to get the views of the city through the loggia’s open arches.
Idelba seemed impressed, which pleased Vlade. Their history stood between them like a third person, but he still had his feelings; that would never change. What it was like for her, he had no idea. There was so much they had never talked about. Just the thought of trying to scared him.
“It’s a beauty,” she said. “I always like seeing it from the rivers. It stands out quite a bit, considering there are so many taller buildings.”
“It’s true. It’s in a bit of a gap. And the gold top marks it.”
“So what’s with these leaks you’re finding?”
“I think someone’s trying to scare us. That’s why I’m hoping to suck up some evidence.”
“Worth a try.”
“Thanks for helping.”
“Just another service from your new partner.”
“What do you mean?” Vlade was startled by this word.
“I mean let’s go talk to your chairperson.”
Vlade gave Charlotte a call, and as it turned out she was still in the building. After a while she joined them.
“This is Idelba,” Vlade said to Charlotte. “She and her crew helped us recover that gold from the Hussar.”
“We were married too,” Idelba said, not knowing that Vlade had told Charlotte about it. “Just to help you understand why I would help such a creature as Vlade.”
“Funny,” Charlotte said, “I was just talking to my ex the other day.”
“The city is like that.”
Charlotte nodded. “So what’s up?”
“I want to know what’s happening with the gold, when I’ll get my share.”
Charlotte said, “We’re still trying to figure out how best to maximize its value. That isn’t real obvious.”
“I can imagine, but I want in on that too. Without me and Thabo, no gold for you, and we were promised fifteen percent of the take, and it’s been two months. And in the winter we can’t work as much, so we’re not getting paid as much. Times are tight.”