He nodded. “Or take back the intertidal,” he suggested. “Buy your SuperVenice out from under you.”
Charlotte had to admit it: her ex was smart. “Well, that too.”
“I was wondering why you were all of a sudden interested in finance, having never been so before. Like not even a little.”
“It’s true. That offer on our building is looking more and more like a hostile takeover bid. They came back with a second offer last week, offering twice as much as last time! And I asked around lower Manhattan, and we’re not the only ones it’s happening to. We can’t tell who it is, because they’re using brokers, but for sure it’s happening. Gentrification, enclosure, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, I realized that it can’t be fought by any one building or any one aid association. It’s a global problem. So if there’s to be any chance of fighting it, it’s got to be at the macro level.”
“So to save your building from a hostile takeover, you suggest I overthrow the world economic order.”
“Yes. But let’s call it saving the world from another Great Depression. Or shifting the noose from our necks to the parasites’ necks.”
“Hard,” Larry noted.
“Hard, because it’s politics. And finance has bought a lot of the politicians and a lot of the laws. So it’s getting harder. But when the next crash comes, you could help to change that. It’s an inflection moment. You’ll go down in history as the first chair of the Fed with any balls.”
“Volcker was pretty good.”
“He had brains. I said balls. All Volcker’s best ideas came after he was out of office and couldn’t enact them. They were afterthoughts. He was like Greenspan, almost. Oh my God, I made such a mistake thinking Ayn Rand had all the answers! Except Volcker had some ideas.”
“Maybe so.”
“So try some forethought for once.”
“I usually try to.”
“So there you are. Do it this time. These are the times that try men’s souls.”
“Okay okay. No Tom Paine, please. Charlotte Corday is already bad enough. I see the knife there in your handbag. You can stop caressing it.”
She had to laugh. She reached up and gave his upper arm a quick squeeze. Time to lay off. She didn’t want to add that she also had a plan to pop the bubble on Larry’s watch. He was already freaked out enough, both at what she was saying and that it was her saying it. She was aware that he could have tripped her up at any point with technical questions, that he was allowing her to talk at the level of history and political economy rather than economics per se. He too was interested at that level, and interested that she was now paying enough attention to these issues that what he did was important to her. That had never been true before. They hadn’t had a conversation like this one in—well, never. This was a first.
Now it couldn’t go much further without her foundering on her own ignorance. What did it mean to nationalize the banks? He would know, she didn’t. But happily, at that very moment a huge cracking noise, like a first clean crack of thunder, announced that the ice in the East River below them was breaking up.
Everyone in the restaurant rushed to the west and north windows and cried out at the sight: white ice cracking apart and heaving up in immense jagged plates, then splashing back down into black water and rushing south toward Governors Island and the Narrows. Why all at once? Why now? A neap tide had hit its flood height and turned, someone said, a few hours earlier, and the current was now ebbing hard, the water dropping from under the ice. This was how it happened; this was how it had happened two years ago, and five, and eight. And back in the Ice Age. Spring was springing, right before their eyes; looking around at the flushed faces Charlotte saw that it was an erotic and even a sexual high, a March madness indeed. The string quartet had changed gears and was now ripping something ferocious from Shostakovich. Lips were red, eyes shining, voices thrilling with the energy of the breakup. Springtime equaled sex. Down on the river black water leaped out from under the white verge and tossed giant white plates end over end. Never had the East River looked so much like a torrent.
Larry had the same look as the others, his pale freckled Ivy League skin flushed as if he had been embarrassed or run a race. It wasn’t for her, or for the river; he was thinking about her plan. It was mixing in his mind with the awesome sight of the breakup, the rearing ice plates rolling in black water like the rush of history itself. He was feeling how it would feel to be part of that, to be riding that chaos. She reached up and briefly pinched his cheek. She had used to lick his ear when he was coming and he would go wild. That guy was still in there; he liked to feel good.
“That’s right buster,” she muttered, feeling her own cheeks burn, and sat back down. She glanced up at him, a bit abashed at herself, at the sight below, at her forwardness with him, at the strength of her sudden memories, breaking out like the black torrent.
“Think it over,” she said. “Be ready for it. Get all your ducks in a row.”
“Among those ducks would be members of Congress I could count on,” he remarked as he sat down. He was smiling his little smile. “Dessert?”
“Yes,” she said uneasily. “Dessert and cognac.”
“Indeed.”
New York’s big avenues are not oriented exactly north and south but are angled twenty-nine degrees to the east of north. This means the east-west streets are actually angled northwest to southeast. This explains why the so-called Manhattanhenge days, when sunsets align with the streets and pour down them out of the west, turning the canals to fire, occur not on the equinoxes but rather around May 28 and July 12.
A storm that swept down from the Arctic in 1932 brought Arctic birds called dovekies and dashed many of them against the skyscrapers. Thousands were found all over the city dead, bodies draped on telephone wires, in streets, lakes, and lawns.
—Federal Writers Project, 1938
h) the citizen redux
If the Earth’s atmosphere were compressed to the density of water, it would form a coating on the Earth about thirty feet thick. As it is, it extends some eleven miles into the sky and then gets very diffuse above that, shifting from the troposphere to the stratosphere. As far as human year-round habitation, that habitable zone reaches up some fifteen thousand feet, so say three miles; above that people tend to die. So think about a layer of cellophane wrapping a basketball, and then remember that you’re still thinking too thick, when it comes to the atmosphere and the Earth.
Meanwhile it’s air, quite tenuous compared to water, and easy to move around over the surface of the Earth, as the Earth spins like a top in its circling of the sun. One spin a day (which is what a day is, duh) gets you a surface speed at the equator of about a thousand miles an hour, so really the wonder is that the air remains as still as it does, but inertia, drag, et cetera, means that usually the jet streams top out at around a hundred miles an hour, pouring mostly eastward, in patterns not unlike water coming out of the end of a hose left on the ground, in other words chaotic patterns, but clustered around strange attractors so that there are in fact patterns. But it’s light stuff, air, and though it moves somewhat like ocean currents as it flows around the Earth, its motion is wilder.
This has always been true, but when you add heat to the system everything has more energy, and so it behaves like it did before, but even more so. So weather has always been wild and full of anomalies, but after the rise in global temperatures following the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by humanity’s industrial civilization, weather got even wilder. For a long time, there was 0.6 watt per square meter more energy coming in to Earth than was leaving, and this cooked things, and the pot began to boil. Note that this new extra energy doesn’t disallow cold events just because the average is hotter; the increase in energy increases also the violence of the whirlpools of air that form, and a big enough whirlpool whirls the air itself away from its center, making a low-pressure area, and the land under that absence of air can become stupendously cold. So: s
tormy weather of all kinds, including hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, lightning storms, blizzards, droughts, heat spells, downpours, cold fronts, high-pressure ridges, and so on. You get the picture.
So, in the twenty-second century, all over the world people were taking shots of extreme weather that wrecked whatever they had built, including the crops they were growing and the soil they grew it in. At sea level, raised to its current height just forty years before, the tenuous brittle fragile rebuilding efforts of humanity and all other living species were particularly vulnerable to superstorms in the new categories established, sometimes called class 7, or force 11, or motherfucker supreme. In the tropics a lot of construction had been dubious to begin with, and with the added storm intensities, and the ramshackle nature of the postpulse reconstruction, new weather events could simply smash coastal cities to smithereens. Confer Manila 2128, Jakarta 2134, Honolulu 2137. These were extremely sobering examples of the death and destruction now possible when an overwhelming storm hit an underwhelming infrastructure.
New York, it has to be said, compared to most coastal cities of the world, has an infrastructure like a brick shithouse. It is set in rock, and built of steel and various composites so strong that the rock is often the first thing to break. But rock does break, and not all the city is equally built to code. Lot of ad hockery in the various recovery and renovations made in the submerged zone and the intertidal. So it is not invulnerable. No human construct is.
Then recall also, if your retention still allows such a feat after so many dense pages, the peculiar geography of the Bight of New York relative to the Atlantic and the globe entire. Hurricanes, more violent than ever before, swirl up from the Caribbean, or really the horse latitudes, and as they move north at a medium speed, they spin counterclockwise when seen from space, such that the winds in the leading edge of the storm are pushing westward, and can be extraordinarily fast and powerful. Then recall the topography of the Bight, also the way that New York is an archipelago of islands in an estuary, with the Narrows connecting the estuary to the Atlantic at the bend point of the Bight, with a back door also on the east side of the estuary where Long Island Sound connects to the East River by way of Hell Gate.
What it adds up to is a recipe for a storm surge, yes indeed. A monster hurricane shoves a great deal of the Atlantic north and east into the Bight, New Jersey banks all that slug of water through the Narrows, and more gets shoved hard east along Long Island Sound until it floods through Hell Gate into the East River. Meanwhile the Hudson never stops draining a rather immense watershed, pouring its own flow down from the north, a flow that can max as high as two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. Thus a moment in a hurricane comes when water is coming into the bay from three directions, and there is nowhere for it to go but up. If by chance all this happens in a neap tide, it even gets a tug from the moon, such that upward becomes in effect the path of least resistance. So up the water goes. Storm surge of 2046’s Hurricane Alfred, eighteen feet, big disaster. Hurricane Sandy in 2012, storm surge of twelve feet, big disaster. Storm surge for the unnamed hurricane of 1893, thirty feet. Utter wreckation.
And now, recall, and this you should be capable of as it is the overriding omnipresent fact of life on Earth today, that sea level is already fifty feet higher than it was pre-pulse. Add a storm surge to this pre-existing condition, and what do you get?
You’ll only find out when it happens.
Ninety-six premature babies were brought to the Infant Incubator Company building at the 1939 World’s Fair to live their first few weeks there.
Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its sufferings but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate? For whom are psalms sung and mass said, if not for such worthies as these?
—Thoreau
i) Stefan and Roberto
The late-spring days got longer and the rooftops burst all green. Every living thing budded and the turbid water smelled like shit, the intertidal oozing goo and reeking at low tide, its slimy mud stippled by oyster beds and old dock pilings. The great bay was so crowded with boats that the traffic lanes for big ships were well defined by the absence of little boats in them. Sun blazed off water from the half hour after dawn to the half hour before sunset, and close to shore the dark blue of the rivers turned black with silt or yellow with runoff, or prismatic with leaking gas and oil. The humidity was so great that the air grew visible, a fetid white mist weighing on the city, and the idea that just a couple months before the bay had been ice and the air like liquid nitrogen seemed incredible. Climate in the city, always notorious, a scandal, had in the twenty-second century gone nova; now the luminous miasmatic summers ranged from subtropical to supertropical, and the mosquitoes were bloodthirsty and disease-laden. The concrete chess tables grew as hot to the touch as ovens. People stayed indoors, or if they had to go out, stumbled or boated around stunned and appalled, feeling there must be a fire somewhere nearby. No one could quite believe that this city of dreams could veer so melodramatically, like a skyvillage flitting from pole to equator to pole in a matter of weeks. People begged for a blizzard.
Stefan and Roberto didn’t care. They were on a mission to locate Herman Melville’s grave, and maybe haul the gravestone back to the Madison Square bacino and mount it as a dock piling on the Met dock, at its northeast corner closest to where Melville had lived. That was their plan and they were sticking to it. Mr. Hexter had told them that the gravestone was big, possibly a four-foot-by-four-foot slab of granite, certain to weigh hundreds of pounds, but they weren’t going to let that stop them. They had borrowed a dock dolly when no one was looking, and their boat rode very high on the water. If worse came to worst, they could figure out the transport issues after they located it.
So this was in the nature of a reconnaissance, and they were happy motoring across the shallows of the Bronx, on the hunt again, dodging nasty roof reefs and blobs of black glop floating on the surface with the seaweed. The drowned Bronx was almost as extensive as the drowned parts of Brooklyn and Queens, which was saying a lot. Its current shoreline slurped many blocks north of where it had used to be, and old creek ravines and even a substantial river valley had refilled, splitting the borough with a couple north-south bays, the west one running right up to Yonkers, drowning the old Van Cortlandt Park and sloshing at high tide up and over Woodlawn Cemetery.
But not over Melville! Nautical writer though he had been, his grave still stood on dry land, many graves in from the high tide line. Mr. Hexter had determined this with his maps and assured them it had to be true. At first they were disappointed it wasn’t under water, but as they had given over their diving bell to Vlade, they became reconciled and decided it was a good thing. It would be their first terrestrial project.
Now they beached their boat on a wrack-lined slope of bushes, tied it off on a dead tree trunk, and walked east over the brush and litter of the abandoned cemetery to where one of Mr. Hexter’s folded maps had an X on it. After some hunting around they concluded that there were few things weirder than an abandoned graveyard, in this case half brushy meadow and half dank forest, filled with downed branches and trash and row upon row of gravestones, like a miniaturized model of uptown, with the occasional larger monument looming here and there. From time to time they stopped to read some of the longer inscriptions, but then they came on one memorializing one George Spencer Millet, 1894–1909, whose inscription read:
Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building.
“Oh man,” Roberto said. “And in our building! That is terrible.”
“It’s like something you would do,” Stefan noted.
“No way! I’d just let them kiss me, shit. He was an idiot.”
After that they decided to quit reading inscriptions. They moved on, feeling the heavy stare of all those semi
legible names and lives. There weren’t any cemeteries in lower Manhattan, and they found being in one less fun than they had expected.
But then they came on Melville. His was indeed a hefty gravestone, with a scroll carved on it. About four feet tall and almost that wide, and a foot or more thick. To each side of the carved scroll were carved leaves on vines, and Melville’s name was at the bottom, and therefore almost obscured by mud. It was a dismal place. His wife’s stone stood next to his, and on the other side were other family members, including his son Malcolm, who had died young.
“It’s big,” Stefan said.
“We should take it back to his neighborhood,” Roberto insisted. “No one comes here anymore, you can see that. He’s completely forgotten here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think it’s illegal?”
“I think it’s not nice. His body is here, his wife’s body, all that. People might come here looking for him and think he got vandalized.”
“Well … shit.”
“Maybe we could find someone else whose grave is underwater now.”
“Someone else who lived near us? And whose ghost Mr. Hexter saw?”
“No. It would have to be some other someone else. Or maybe we could make memorial signs to put on the buildings around the marina, or on the dock pilings. Or a map, Mr. Hexter would love that. All that stuff he’s told us about, Melville, baseball, the Statue of Liberty’s hand, all that.”
“We live in a great neighborhood.”
“It’s true.”
“But I want to pull something out of the drink! Or the forest. Something we’ve saved.”