“For why?” Vlade said.
“To get some kind of leverage over them!”
Snorts from all four of them.
“All right,” I said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when Roberto here goes out there and drowns. In your last moment I want you thinking, Damn, I should have listened to that Franklin guy.”
“Not gonna happen,” Roberto affirmed.
“What will you be thinking?” Stefan asked.
“Not gonna happen,” Roberto grimly insisted.
“Lose the so-called diving bell,” I suggested, giving up on them. I went to the door. “Find a new hobby.”
“In lower Manhattan?” Roberto said. “What would that be exactly?”
“Build drones. Sail. Grow oysters. Climb skyscrapers. Look for marine mammals in the harbor, I just saw some beavers today. Whatever! Anything that keeps you on the surface. And we should probably lock some home detention ankle bracelets on you guys so we can tell where you’ve gone. Or find your bodies.”
“No way,” the boys said in chorus.
“Way,” Charlotte said, transfixing them with her look. It was like sticking pins in butterflies. Even Roberto quailed. “You live here now,” Charlotte reminded them. “In residence begins responsibilities.”
“We can still go out and do stuff,” Stefan explained to Roberto. “We’ll still have our boat.”
Roberto looked at the floor. “Yes to losing the diving bell,” he said. “No to no fucking ankle bracelets. I’ll light out for the territory if you try that shit.”
“Deal,” Charlotte said.
“Let’s go get that bell,” Vlade suggested heavily to the boys. “I don’t like you fooling with that thing. I had colleagues drown at work, and they were good at diving. And you’re not good at it. And—I knew people like you who drowned too. It’s bad when it happens, for the people left behind.”
Something in his voice caught the boys’ attention. Charlotte reached out and put a hand to his arm. He shook his head, a black expression taking him far away. After a while the boys followed Vlade out into the boathouse looking chastened, maybe even thoughtful.
I went upstairs with Charlotte. She looked tired and walked with a slight limp. On the common floor she glanced at me. “Dinner?”
“I already bought a sandwich,” I said, “but I’ll eat it with you.”
“That’s fine. Tell me how things are going.”
She filled a plate in the dining room line, and we sat down in the din and the crowds jamming the long parallel tables filling the room. Hundreds of voices, hundreds of lives; it was exactly like being alone together, but louder. While we ate I told her about the view from the top of the Cloister cluster, and how Hector Ramirez had agreed to join the funding for my plan for redeveloping part of the intertidal. Then I described the plan in brief.
“Very nice,” she said. “You’ll need city approvals, but given the state of those neighborhoods, you should be able to get them.”
“Maybe you can help us figure out who to talk to.”
“Sure. I can put you in touch with some old friends.”
“They work in your building?”
“Yes, either there or at the mayor’s office.”
“You worked at the mayor’s office?”
“Once upon a time.”
I must have been giving her a look, because suddenly she waved a hand. “Yes, I began in Tammany Hall.”
“I heard you interned for Machiavelli,” I said.
She laughed. She did have some white hairs salting the black. “That’s what you’ll need now. Do you think these raft apartments could be put in one at a time, as infill, rather than knocking down a whole neighborhood?”
“Yeah sure. They’re modular. It would be more expensive.”
“Even so. Ever since Robert Moses, knocking down whole neighborhoods has been frowned upon.”
“This could be piecemeal. But everything scales in this kind of project. Maybe we could tell them about Peter Cooper Village.”
“Good idea. Or Roosevelt Island.”
“Whatever seems nicest.”
“Of course. But precedents. That this kind of thing has been done before.” She poked around in the remains of her salad. “So how does this match up with what we were talking about before, of popping the intertidal housing bubble?”
“That’s where we short. This is where we go long.”
“And you still think a householders’ strike could cause a crash.”
“Yes. But look, if you were to do that, you would want to have a government in place that was ready for it. Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You would gather all the big banks and investment firms. They’ll be panicked but they’ll also be saying, give us all the money we’ve lost or the whole economy crashes. They’ll demand it. But this time the feds have to say, Yeah sure, we’ll save your ass, we’ll reboot finance with a giant infusion of public money, but now we own you. You’re now working for the people, meaning the government. Then you make them start making loans again. They become like arms of a federal octopus. Credit unions. At that point finance is back in action, but its profits go to the public. They work for us, we invest in what seems good. Whatever happens, the results are ours.”
“Including the disasters?”
“We already own those! So why not? Why not take the good as well as the bad?”
Charlotte leaned over and clinked her glass of water to mine. “Okay,” she said. “I like it. And since the current head of the Federal Reserve is my ex-husband, I see a little edge there. I can talk it over with him.”
“Don’t warn him,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I meant.
“No?” she said, seeing my uncertainty.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
She had a quick smile. “We can figure that out later. I mean, they do have to know about it. It should be a well-known plan, maybe. We can talk it over. I want to hire you. Better yet, I want you to volunteer your services. And run for the executive board of the co-op.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “No. Much too busy. And I’m not even a co-op member.”
“Buy in. We’ll cut you a deal.”
“I would deserve it, if I were to be so foolish as to be on the board. But I have to admit, I’ve been thinking of buying in. Maybe you’ve talked me into paying full price.”
“Even so you should be on the board.”
“It would be a busman’s holiday.”
“You don’t run anything in your job! You’re just a gambler! You play poker!”
I made an unhappy face. “I was thinking it was more. You said you liked my plan.”
“The building project, yes. The analysis, yes. I like those. The gambling, no.”
“It’s trading. It’s creating market value.”
“Please, you’re going to make me sick. You’re going to make me throw up.”
“Get over to the compost bin then, because that’s the way the world works.”
“But I hate it.”
“It doesn’t care that you hate it. As you have surely noticed by now.”
A quick wince of a laugh. “Yes, I’ve noticed. At my advanced age. Which is now clonking me on the head, actually. I’ve got to go get some sleep. But listen, I like these plans of yours.” She stood, picked up her plate, patted me on the head with her free hand as if I were a golden retriever. “You are a very nice young man.”
“And you are a very nice old woman,” I said before I could stop my mouth.
She smiled cheerfully. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to condescend. You are a fucking piece of work, how’s that.” She walked to the elevator door grinning. When she got in the elevator she was still smiling.
I stared at the closed elevator door, feeling puzzled. Pleased. At what, I didn’t know.
“Relationships in New York are about detachment,” she said.
&
nbsp; —Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City
It is the bank that controls the whole system.
—Deleuze and Guattari
g) Charlotte
Charlotte found herself actually pleased to be giving her ex Larry a call to ask for another coffee date. Given everything that had happened lately, it was sure to be interesting. So she pinged him in the cloud, wondered to him if he had time for another et cetera.
He wrote back to say he’d tell his people to look for a time, and an hour later wrote again to say he could do it at the end of the following week, coffee at the sunset hour again, but could they do it in Brooklyn Heights because he had to be there for a thing. She wrote back and said fine, and then he wrote back again and suggested they tack an early dinner onto afternoon coffee, he knew a place on top of one of the Brooklyn Heights towers, unpretentious, open-air, he had a reservation, blah blah. She wrote back to say fine.
As it happened, on the day of their date the East River was still frozen over, but it was predicted to break up soon. Midharbor was a clutter of ice plates headed down to the jam at the Narrows, where they were grinding their way out on the ebb tides, then floating back in on the flood tides, and freezing from time to time in whatever configuration they happened to be in. This had gone on throughout the short days of beastly February, but now March was lambing in.
On the appointed day, Charlotte got in one of the cable cars running up thick steel lines from the East Village to the Brooklyn Bridge’s western tower. When that rising car had carried her over the water to the tower, she got out and walked across the old bridge with the rest of the well-bundled New Yorkers crossing the river. The river ice just below them was patterned like a jigsaw puzzle, and only broke open to black water past Governors Island. The wind whistled in the cat’s cradle of wires overhead in its aleatoric aeolia, surely the greatest music ever heard—if not the music of the spheres, then surely by definition the music of the cylinders.
It was cold waiting in the line for another cable car, this one running from the bridge’s east tower over to Brooklyn Heights. Definitely time to deploy icebreakers and get the vapos back in action, everyone in the line agreed, with their noses white, their lips blue, their teeth chattering. Brooklyn Transit Authority was going to get slapped with a class-action suit, someone remarked, assuming any of them survived to sue. If you or any of your loved ones has died from freezing on the Brooklyn Bridge, call this number.
The Bridge to Heights zipline was long, so by the time she was walking in the shadows of the superscrapers she was a little late. She hurried the last part of the way, and arrived out of breath at the building Larry had suggested. And there he was at the door too, so that was good, though it meant he got to see her huffing and puffing, red-cheeked, nose running, hair wild. Oh well. His grin was the same old grin, friendly as ever, with just that touch of sardonic mockery to worry her.
The elevator took forever, even ascending like a rocket. Once it decanted them onto the rooftop restaurant, glass-walled with heaters glowing over the tables, they settled at a corner overlooking the river, with a view down and across to the massed wall of old skyscrapers at the southern tip of Manhattan. It was one of the great views of the city, and Charlotte suspected Larry had chosen it with her in mind, thinking it would please her, which it did. They shoved the little table against the glass and sat next to each other so they could both enjoy the view. Wall Street’s wall of monsters looked like swimmers on polar dip day, clustered knee deep in the ice. Over near the kitchen a string quartet was quietly eerieing something out of Ligeti.
The oysters were from a bed right under their building, they were told, grown inside filter boxes. Icy-cold vodka was a drink Charlotte despised, but it helped wash down the even weirder oyster flavor. She could pretend sophistication, but why bother; Larry knew she would only be pretending. So after two oysters she shifted to retsina and fried calamari, more to her taste as well as her style. He stuck with the oysters and manfully finished them off.
Over their meal, which consisted of Cobb salads for both of them, way better than anything the Met’s kitchen could assemble, Charlotte tacked her way to the point of this meeting.
“So, Larry—if this intertidal real estate bubble pops on your watch, do you have a plan?”
He made his eyes go round, his way of saying he was not really surprised but could pretend to be if that would please her. “What makes you think it’s a bubble?”
“The prices going up while the buildings are falling apart. It’s the end of the line for a lot of wet buildings.”
He gestured across the dirty craquelure of the East River. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
“Those are the skyscrapers, Larry. They’re footed in bedrock. The buildings to the north of them aren’t anywhere near as strong, but that’s where people live.”
“Even so, the indicators aren’t there.”
“The indicators are financial rather than physical. People cook those figures to make it look okay. They play the rubrics involved, but the reality in the water is completely different.”
“You think so.”
“I do. Don’t you?”
He squinted. “I see a little spread between the Case-Shiller and the IPPI. Might be a sign of what you’re saying.”
“And the rating agencies are still kissing ass, so you won’t get any warning there. They never saw a bubble they didn’t triple-A.”
“Now that’s true,” Larry admitted with a little frown. “Can’t seem to get them to behave.”
“It’s called conflict of interest. They’re still getting paid by the people they’re rating, so they give the results they’re paid to give. That will never change.”
“I suppose not.” He regarded her curiously. “You’ve been looking into this, I see.”
“Yes. So what will you do when it happens? Who will you be? Edson? Bernanke? Herbert Hoover?”
“Have to play it by ear, I guess.”
“But that’s a terrible idea. People freak out, you’re in the hot seat, then you start thinking about it?”
“It’s always worked before,” Larry quipped. But his eyes were watching her more closely.
She said, “After the First Pulse, Edson just tried to hunker down and wait it out, and we got the lost sixties, the famines, and the big crash after the Second Pulse. In the 2008 collapse, Bernanke had studied the Great Depression and knew he couldn’t just hunker down. He threw money into the breach and they crawled back from the brink. It was only a recession rather than a crash.”
Larry was nodding.
“And remember, one of the things they did then was nationalize GM. They let Lehman Brothers go down without saving it, and then watched the whole financial world follow it down, and they realized they couldn’t do that with the real economy, so they nationalized GM, took it over, got it back on its feet, sold it back to its shareholders later, and pretty much came out even. Right?”
Larry kept nodding. He was watching her closer than ever.
“So look,” Charlotte said, and leaned toward him. “When the bubble pops, nationalize the banks.”
“Yikes,” Larry said. He put the vertical line between his eyebrows that indicated how worried he would be, if he were worried. “What do you mean?”
“When this bubble pops, they’ll all be hung out there again, and the bigger they are, the more leveraged they’ll be. And they’re all interconnected. And after the Second Pulse, the reforms that got pushed through made the banks keep some skin in the game, so they can’t securitize their housing loans the way they used to. So when the bubble pops this time, no one will know what paper is still good, and they’ll all panic and stop lending, and we’ll all be in free fall. You know that. It’s a fragile system, based on mutual trust that it’s sane, and as soon as that fiction breaks down, everyone sees it’s crazy and no one can trust anyone. They’ll run screaming to you begging for help. You’ll be the only thing between them and the biggest depression since the last one.”
Now Larry was watching her so intently that he forgot to put on any fake expressions. Charlotte saw that and almost laughed, but instead she kept her focus and pounced:
“So then you go to the president and explain that once again the American taxpayer has to bail out these fucking idiots, to the tune of maybe twenty trillion dollars this time. She won’t like that news, right?”
“Right.”
“She might not just go catatonic, like Bush did with Bernanke, but she will freak out, and she’ll want you to have a plan. So that’s when you tell her to nationalize the biggest banks and investment firms. Bail them out by buying them out. At that point the American people are in control of global finance. In the cosmic battle between people and your oligarchy over there”—gesturing at Wall Street and the superscrapers uptown—“the people will have unexpectedly gained the upper hand. You can print money, restore confidence, crank the handle and get things going again, and after that, the ridiculous profits from finance will belong to the people. Also you can aim finance at solving people’s real problems. Congress can reform the financial system based on laws you write for them to pass, and you can quantitatively ease the American taxpayer instead of the banks. Print money and give it out to the bank of Mr. and Miz Taxpayer. It will be the biggest judo flip of power since the French Revolution!”
Larry shook his head, trying for one of his old expressions, this one meant to express faked admiration for Charlotte, an expression she remembered very well. “You are still such a dreamer!” he exclaimed.
“Not at all! It’s a plan, a practical plan.”
“It’s like you’re a communist or something.”
“Yeah yeah, Red Charlotte.”
“Charlotte Corday, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know, didn’t she kill one of the revolutionary leaders?”
“Marat, right? But for being a backslider, if I recall? For not being revolutionary enough?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s have it that way. You’ll stab me in the bath if I don’t hold the line.”
“If you don’t save the world when the chance comes. Don’t just put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall like all the other times. They’ll just fuck things up again, as soon as they can. Because they are greedy idiots. There’s not an idea in their heads except to line their pockets and head for Denver.”