This turned out to be ugly work. There were bodies floating in the canals; that was their first priority, and a gruesome unhappy one it was. Bloat and stink were setting in. People of all apparent ages had been killed, either drowned or hit by flying debris, it looked like. Then also animal bodies, less gruesome because of their fur, less unhappy because they were animals.
Navigation had to be reestablished, first in the avenues and big cross-canals, then the east-west regular canals. For quite a few of them clearing a passage wasn’t possible in the short term, as buildings had fallen across them. But the police had to sort out what was possible and what wasn’t, and establish detours, and talk it all over with the MTAs.
She was in charge of one big cruiser for the whole of the fifth day after the storm, patrolling Chelsea and the West Village, picking up refugees and clearing debris, and now, depressingly, keeping out looters, when she came on a low fast motorboat with an odd look, at Seventh and Thirtieth. She ordered them to stop by yelling at them with the bullhorn on the cruiser bridge, and brought her crew to high alert when she saw how the people on the boat were armed, and seemed to be considering whether to obey her or not.
Then they did stop, and she boarded them with her people covering her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
The captain of the boat, or the man in charge, patted his pad and showed her their papers. A private security firm, RNA, which stood for Rapid Noncompliance Abatement. “We’ve been hired to patrol the neighborhood here.”
“By who?”
“The neighborhood association.”
“Which one?”
“Chelsea Town House Association.”
Gen shook her head. “There is no such association.”
“There is now.”
“No. There isn’t. Who are you working for?”
“The Chelsea Town House Association.”
“Give me your ID and your working papers.”
The man hesitated and Gen gestured to her team, and four more officers leaped over the sides of the boat, holstered guns prominently displayed. Tasers, but still. They were armed. The men on the RNA boat were also armed.
Everyone stood there looking serious. Gen, the only woman on the boat, also the person in charge, kept a straight face, kept it professional and polite. Polite but firm. Maybe more firm than polite.
She sat down with the man and slowly put him through his ID paces. His security firm, Rapid Noncompliance Abatement, had apparently been hired by a neighborhood group that called itself the Chelsea Town House Association. They occupied the buildings on the Twenty-eighth block and were worried because so many buildings around them had been wrecked by the storm. They might have become an association very recently. They needed to protect their investment.
“Investment,” Gen repeated. She tapped around on her pad, looking for links and tapping a note to Olmstead and asking him to do the same. She was finding nothing when Olmstead got back to her: RNA is owned by Escher Security. Both do work for Morningside.
“We’re private investment security,” the man explained when Gen looked up at him.
“You sure are.”
“We’re on your side. We help you out.”
“Maybe so,” Gen said. “But we’re in an unusual situation here, and we don’t want any militia-type actions. We’ve got enough trouble. We’re going to want to talk to the people who hired you, so just give me their contact info and we’ll go from there. And this area is off-limits right now.”
“What is this, martial law?”
“This is New York, and we’re the New York Police Department. Ordinary law still holds.”
She took photos of all their documentation and got back on the police cruiser, thinking hard.
She gave Sergeant Olmstead a call. “Hey Sean, thanks for that. How did you find that connection between RNA and Escher so fast?”
“I’ve been looking into Escher pretty closely. They’re definitely Morningside’s security, and they clone subsidiaries to work on various Morningside projects. So RNA is one of those. The guy you talked to on that boat is actually on the Escher personnel list.”
“I see.”
“So, you know who else used to work for Escher? Three of the people now working at the Met tower for Vlade Marovich. Su Chen, Manuel Perez, and Emily Evans. They all worked for Escher, and they all left that off their résumés when they applied for the jobs at the Met. They all said they worked for one of the more distant clones. Out the arms of the octopus, you know.”
“Okay!” Gen said. “Maybe you’ve found the infiltration that made it possible for them to disable the cameras when they snatched Mutt and Jeff.”
“I think so.”
“And Morningside has worked with our lovely mayor?”
“Right. And also with Angel Falls, that’s the Cloisters guy, Hector Ramirez. Morningside is a really big octopus, and so is Ramirez. And I can’t get into either of their files. I’ve been trying, but the cloning makes it hard. In fact it looks to me like Morningside taught the octopus method to Escher. Heck, Escher may be just one of the arms of the Morningside octopus, probably. Just closer to the body.”
“Okay. Keep detaching the suckers on those arms. Look in particular for who made the offer on the Met.”
What a ruin it will make!
exclaimed H. G. Wells on first seeing the Manhattan skyline
c) Franklin
So I’m thinking, I’ve got the smallest boat in Manhattan and I’m the one going out after the biggest storm of all time to hunt down two crazy kids with a death wish? Really?
But it wasn’t just Vlade asking me in his heavy Slavic-mafia way, gravid or even morbid with the responsibility for all the creatures in his ark, including yea the littlest and most stupid among them. It was also Charlotte. And the way she put it was galling but ultimately effective:
“It will give you something to do,” she said. “The stock market is closed.”
“The stock market,” I scoffed. “As if that matters.”
“Yeah, well what are you going to do on a day like this? Trade bonds? It’s a holiday, Frank my boy. Go out and have some fun. Should be very exciting for your little speedboat. Things get too tough out there you can turn it into a submarine or a miniblimp, right? And besides those kids may need help. Very exciting for you.”
“Yeah right.”
But then she just gave me a look, with her little smile, and flicked me away like a mosquito. “I have to get to work,” she said. “Let me know how you do out there.”
I made a heavily impositioned sigh and went to my room to get my heavy-weather gear, great stuff from Eastern Mountain Sports. Vlade pulled my bug down from the rafters and glowered me out the door. I was pleased to get out, of course, and didn’t want Charlotte to think I was unwilling to help.
And in fact the day was a stunner. Blustery day under clouds like tall galleons crashing onshore under full sail, the canals all cappuccino with foam, the East River a chaos of blue and brown chop, lined by spume and wakes. I ran up the northward fast lane in the East River, or where it had used to be, the buoys having been mostly torn away. There was much less traffic on the river than usual, and I pushed to full speed and the bug lifted onto its foils and we flew. There was enough chop to make it a challenge, I definitely didn’t want to get launched into the air and come down hard enough to purl like a surfer on a longboard, tipping the boat into an ass-over-teakettle capsizing. Worth taking some trouble to avoid that one, so I throttled down a bit past Roosevelt Reef and under the big east-side bridges. Not record time by any means, but soon I was taking a left up the Harlem River, where I goosed back down into the flood and hummed along like an ordinary citizen.
On my left, the drowned part of uptown was looking bad. Of course it never looked good, sitting under the great spine of towers from Washington Heights to the Cloister cluster, Harlem a bedraggled bay with some islanded towers sticking out of it, the shallows occupied with old buildings tipped t
his way and that, and now seriously pummeled by the storm. Possibly if they knocked it all down and replaced it with raft blocks, as in my development plan, it could become a decent adjunct to the Cloister cluster. Yes, it was Robert Moses time in Harlem.
And maybe everywhere. The Bronx looked even worse than Harlem. It had never looked good, of course, and the hurricane had swept over Manhattan and struck it right in its sorry cratered face, shoving big breakers far up into the waterways and valleys no doubt, where they had pounded for three days. Now with the storm surge receded, it looked like a tsunami had rolled in and out, but not all the way out. Utter estuarine devastation.
I poked up the long narrow bay filling the Van Cortlandt parkway, west of the Bronx River channel. This was the easiest water route to get to Woodlawn Cemetery, where the boys had supposedly been headed. Uprooted trees looked like dead bodies on the land; floating trees looked like dead bodies in the water. The Bronx? No thonx! The sad borough was big, dead, killed.
I nosed around in narrow flooded streets that somehow did not rise (or sink) to the level of canals, letting off my air horn from time to time in case the boys were still tucked into a shelter somewhere and didn’t see me. I didn’t see why they would do that on a nice day like this, but I tried it anyway. There were a lot of buildings still standing enough to have served as shelter for them, big concrete boxes with broken roofs. Indeed as the day wore on, it became clear from the sheer size of the borough that looking for any one pair of boys was a futile gesture. Pointless, and yet something that someone had to do. Someone; not necessarily me. There were so many ways that the storm could have killed them that I wondered if we would ever know. Drowned, most likely, of course, that being their specialty. Or crushed, second most likely. Bold but stupid. They would have made good traders someday, but oh well. You have to survive your crazy youth to be able to deliver on the promise inherent in that craziness.
A call came to my wrist from Charlotte. “Hey, Frankie boy. They turned up back at the Met.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Well, that’s good news. I was never going to find them up here.”
“Especially with them not being there.”
“Right, but even if they had been. This is one big fucking wreck of a place.”
“Always true.”
“Should I pick you up on my way home, do my Boy Scout good deed for the day, help old lady cross street?”
“No, I’ve got to deal with some shit here. Some really shitty shit.”
“Okay, good luck.”
And I backed the bug out of a particularly nasty canal, more or less coated with the floating bodies of little furry creatures drowned in the flood, sad to see, but not as sad as it would have been if our two rebels without a cause had been there among them. And small mammals are usually very reproductive—ineradicable, really—so I saluted the musky stinky dead as I turned, and got myself back down the flooded streets to the narrow bay and then the Harlem River. There I shoved the throttle forward and flew down the flood like a bird, a shearwater to be specific, skimming the waves back toward home. Glorious flight!
Back at the Met I joined the small crowd in the dining hall surrounding the boys, who were stuffing themselves as if they had the proverbial hollow leg. They looked up at me like raccoons peering out of a dumpster, and I had a sudden vision of them belly-up in the Bronx with their furry brothers and sisters.
“What the fuck!” I said. “Where were you guys?”
“Glad to see you too,” Roberto mumbled through a mouthful of something.
Stefan swallowed and said, “Thanks for looking for us, Mr. Garr. We were up in the Bronx.”
“We knew that,” I said. “Or we thought we did. How about you carry your wristpad with you from now on?”
They both nodded as they continued to eat.
I stared at them. They looked starved but otherwise fine. Thoroughly untraumatized. I had to laugh.
“You must have found a place to hide,” I said.
Stefan swallowed again and drank deeply from a glass of water. “We couldn’t get back to Manhattan because the waves got too big, so we went into the Bronx to those buildings up the creek, and there was an empty warehouse that looked solid and had an open door on its north side that we could get the boat in. Then it was just a matter of waiting it out. It was really loud and windy. And the water rose right up to the attic in this place.”
“Windows broke,” Roberto added between chews. “Lots of windows.”
“Yeah and a lot of them broke outward!” Stefan said. “Some on the south side broke inward, but on the north side they mostly broke outward!”
“Like in a tornado,” Mr. Hexter said. He was sitting next to the boys watching them like a mother cat. “The wind puts a vacuum drag on them and sucks them right out of there.”
The boys nodded. “That happened,” Stefan confirmed. “But there was an inner set of rooms in this warehouse attic, so we just waited in there.”
“Didn’t you get cold?”
“Not too cold. There was some insulation under the roof, and some paper left in file cabinets. We made like a giant bed of paper, and stuck ourselves in it from the side.”
“Didn’t you get thirsty?” I asked.
“We did. We drank some of the river water there.”
“No way! Didn’t you get sick?”
“Not yet.”
“Didn’t you get hungry?” Hexter asked.
They both nodded, mouths again full. By way of further answer Roberto pointed at his cheek. When he swallowed again, he said, “We actually thought if we should try to kill and eat some muskrats that were in there with us.”
“Muskrats?”
“I think so. Either muskrats or really wet weasels. Like long skinny otters?”
“There were a lot of rats and insects too,” Stefan added after swallowing. “Snakes, frogs, spiders, you name it. It was really creepy.”
“In that there were lots of things creeping,” Roberto clarified. “But the muskrats were the ones that got our attention.”
Hexter said, “There’s lots of muskrats around the bay. Or they could have been minxes. There’s otters too.”
“Not otters,” Roberto said. “Whatever they were, there was a group of them, a family or something. Five big ones and four small ones. They swam into the warehouse and then they were in the rooms down the hall, mostly. They checked us out. All the other littler things stayed away from them. And from us. Arm’s length anyway.”
“Actually the muskrats were wondering if they could eat us,” Stefan said. “We were wondering if we could catch and eat one of them, and they were wondering the same thing about us!”
The two boys laughed. “It was pretty funny,” Roberto confirmed. “They weren’t very big, but there were more of them than us. So we yelled at them.”
“They squeaked at us.”
“Yeah they did, but they ran away too.”
“Well, they flinched. They didn’t run very far. They were still thinking it over. But we picked up some plumber’s wrenches we found and threatened them.”
“But we decided not to kill one and eat it. We didn’t want to piss the others off. They have really sharp teeth.”
“Yeah they do. If they had all gone for us at once it could have been bad. They could have took us, probably.”
Stefan nodded. “That’s why we yelled. We screamed at them so loud I hurt my voice. My throat was raw.”
“Mine too.”
I looked at them telling their story, thinking these boys could definitely grow up to become traders. Some days, when I have to convince some asshole to pay me what they owe, I have ended up with my throat raw from screaming over the phone. If you get a reputation for being a soft creditor it can incent other borrowers to default strategically, so you need to be able to scream sometimes to good effect. “Good job, boys,” I said. “And your boat was okay?”
“Yeah, we had it down in the big main room of this
warehouse. It got squished up against the ceiling at high water, there was so much water it was unbelievable, but then it just stayed stuck up there until the water went down. That was some high tide!”
“Storm surge,” Hexter said. “They’re saying twenty-one feet above the highest high tide we’ve ever had.”
“Any more cake?” Roberto inquired.
We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us.
—Virginia Woolf, 1940
d) the city smartass again
Acouple centuries ago there was a famous cartoon, published in one of the New York newspapers or magazines that combined to make the city such a fountain of literary excellence, ranging from Melville and Whitman to—well, in any case, this cartoon consisted of a map of the city looking west, with a foreshortened perspective such that the rest of the United States was as wide as two Manhattan blocks, and the Pacific Ocean no wider than the Hudson. A funny representation of New York’s self-absorption, and it’s interesting how easy it is to fall down that same hole whenever talking about the city: where else matters? It’s the center of the world, the capital of blah blah.
True. Maybe too true. And hopefully the concept of ease of representation will have impinged on the reader’s consciousness to the point of reminding you that this focus on New York is not to say that it was the only place that mattered in the year 2142, but only to say that it was like all the cities in the world, and interesting as such, as a type, as well as for its peculiarities as an archipelago in an estuary debouching into a bight, featuring a lot of very tall buildings.
So, while there is no need to describe the situation in other coastal cities like watery Miami, or paranoidly poldered London and Washington, D.C., or swampy Bangkok, or nearly abandoned Buenos Aires, not to mention all the inland snoozefests called out when one says the single dread word Denver, it is important to place New York in the context of everywhere else, the latter regarded, as in the famous cartoon, as a single category: everywhere else. Because from now on in this tale, as really all along, the story of New York only begins to make sense if the global is taken into account to balance the local. If New York is the capital of capital, which it isn’t, but if you pretend it is to help you think the totality, you see the relation; what happens to a capital city is influenced, inflected, maybe determined, maybe overdetermined, by what happens elsewhere in its empire. The periphery infects the core, the provinces invade the imperial center, the network tugs the knot at its center tight, so tight that it becomes a Gordian knot and can only be cut in two.