So: Hurricane Fyodor unleashed its wrath on New York and the immediate vicinity. A local catastrophe for sure, but for the rest of the world, a fascinating bit of news, an entertaining telenovela and a chance to exercise some delicious and mostly justifiable Schadenfreude. Few feel any huge affection for New York, that most desired but least beloved of cities, and no one in the history of the world has ever said Oh how I pity New York, or Oh what a pitiful city New York is. Never said, never thought. So the emotional, historical, and physical effects of the hurricane’s devastation were almost entirely local. The state and federal government sent in emergency relief to deal with the immediate problems following the storm, it being their jobs to do so, and for those not actually caught physically in the melodrama, it was quickly forgotten and people moved on to the next episode in the great parade of events. Two months later Beijing was buried in forty feet of loess dust sweeping down on winds from the northwest: did you hear? Can you imagine? Worse than water by far! Want to hear all about it?
No. Ease of representation: what strikes us most strongly seems more widespread than it really is. So back to New York, which is after all where baseball was invented. In the larger world of global capital, which is what New York is supposed to be the capital of, there were some real repercussions to this local event. Smashing New York was like dropping a boulder in a dark pool, and the ripples spread around the world like seismic waves, jiggling sensitive instruments everywhere in the moneysphere, which was now coextensive with the biosphere itself. Intersecting waves and derivative effects led to two distinctly visible results, which in their turn exacerbated each other: one, capital again took flight from New York, figuring it would be a decade at least before the city recovered from the devastation, and during that time the rate of return would be higher in Denver, meaning of course anywhere. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx once rhapsodized, and all that is liquid decamps to Denver. Then, two, housing price indexes all pegged downward a few points, with the IPPI naturally leading the drop, as being the specific index describing the zone just thrashed. Other indexes, including the Case-Shiller, also dropped, not as much as the IPPI, but significantly. The point here is that the indexes not only dropped, but diverged a bit as they did. That meant there was a spread there to bet on, one way or another, depending on which index one felt was likeliest to be right, or to correct first.
These two developments might not sound like the hugest trees in the forest to fall, not earth-shattering enough to jiggle money seismographs worldwide, pretty much business as usual, in fact. But it’s funny how things sometimes shift like flocking birds. And the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it’s another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes. How could this be? Is this another case of convergent evolution, or isomorphic identity, or cloning, or simply an astonishing Jungian synchronicity, in other words a coincidence? Probably just a coincidence, sure. But be that as it may, bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit. A big enough glitch in their growth and they break their own logic, by depriving themselves of the margin needed to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment, and so on forever. If the system isn’t spiraling up, it stalls, and then, rather than spiraling down at the same rate of change, it drops like a punctured blimp, like a broken helicopter, like, as the phrase in finance has it, a refrigerator falling out of the sky.
As for instance.
When people objected to one of Robert Moses’s many redevelopment plans, this one requiring the demolition of the beloved old aquarium at Battery Park, Moses suggested the aquarium fish be dumped into the sea. Or made into a chowder.
Later, apropos another contested project, he said, “I wonder sometimes if people deserve the Hudson.”
e) Charlotte
Charlotte went back to work, not knowing what else to do, and figuring that the Householders’ Union office was going to be inundated with new internal refugees. Franklin had gone off to hunt for Stefan and Roberto, looking so worried that she had been tempted to accompany him, but it wouldn’t have helped, and she wanted to do something helpful.
At the office it was indeed a complete mess, with a great number of bedraggled people filling all the halls and all the rooms, though it made no sense as any kind of refuge. But any port in a storm, and possibly many of the people there felt that in the wake of the hurricane their immigrant and/or refugee status might somehow have changed for the better. Charlotte wasn’t sure that wasn’t true; they were part of a very large crowd now. Might be cause for some kind of class-action action.
First she helped sort out the crowd, handing out queue numbers and forms and asking people why they were there, and if they could leave and come back later, and so on. Most of them were not yet members of the union, and many of them had no papers at all. After a while she got tired of it and joined a group taking a police cruiser up to Central Park, because she wanted to see it.
Once in the park she wandered around feeling sick. The devastation was so complete it was hard to believe. It felt like she was dreaming, stuck in one of those jagged nightmares in which a montage of terrible unrealities etch themselves one after another on the eyeball of the helpless dreamer. Where there had been trees there were now people, so that the park looked both bigger and lower, like a giant piece of prairie expanding out of the space where the park had used to be. All the people gave it the look of a sepia Hooverville photo, or some earthquake-shattered favela.
She walked around in a kind of dazed exploration. The crowd extended out of the park into the streets. Her various walking routes from years past were all gone. Giant root balls stood up from the edges of gaping holes in the ground, facing south together like sunflowers. Broken branches everywhere exposed the inner flesh of trees, blond and grainy, like limbs of different kind of flesh. Every once in a while she stopped and sat down on the ground, feeling melodramatic, like she was acting out an emotion in a theater exercise, but she had to do it, her knees were buckling under her; it was a real thing, this old expression “her knees grew weak.” How strange that these old clichés had their origins in real physical reactions, common to all. She wept a few times, and saw around her in the crowd faces that had wept recently, or were at that moment crying, quite often with the person involved seemingly unaware of the tears streaming down their faces. Ah my town my town, when again will I see you? Most of the downed trees were decades old, some of them hundreds of years old. It would be many years, or decades maybe, before the park would look anything like itself again.
And the people. They were organized already into circles and groups, many into small bands of twenty or so, but there were quintets and couples and isolatoes too. Families, groups of friends, people from the same destroyed building. Thousands of them altogether, sitting on the ground or on concrete benches or on boxes, or the knobs of ancient stone sticking up out of the ground, the bones of the island offering seating now to its inhabitants. Lines of Walt Whitman’s glanced off her mind half-remembered, something about the streaming of faces across the Brooklyn Bridge, the suffering of the soldiers in the Civil War. The sense of Americans in trouble together.
She tapped her wristpad like she was trying to break it, and called the mayor. Who actually answered. “What?”
“Where are you?”
“At City Hall.”
“What are you doing about this?”
Short pause to indicate amazement. “I’m working! What do you want?”
“I want you to open up the uptown towers.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. More than half the apartments uptown are empty because they’re owned by rich people from somewhere else. Declare an emergency and use all those rooms as refugee centers. Eminent-domain th
em.”
“I already declared an emergency, and so did the president. She’s almost here. As for eminent domain, I can’t do that.”
“Yes you can. Declare an emergency, exercise executive privilege or whatever—”
“None of that is real. Get real, Charlotte.”
“—martial law! Or at least contact every single owner and ask them for the use of their place. Tell them it’s needed, their place and their agreement. Talk them into it. As many as you can.”
Silence on the other end.
Finally the mayor’s voice said, “There’s way more people in need than there are places like that. All it would accomplish is more capital flight out of here. We’d lose even more people than we already have.”
“Good riddance! Come on, Galina. Show some guts. This is your moment. Your city needs you, you have to come through for it. Now or never.”
“I’ll think about it. I’m busy Charlotte, I have to go. Thanks for your concern.” And the line went dead.
“Fuck you!” Charlotte shouted at her wrist. “Fuck you, you fucking coward!”
People were looking at her. She glared back at them. “The mayor of this city is a tool,” she told them.
They shrugged. The mayor was of no interest to them.
Charlotte gritted her teeth. No doubt these people were right. Push comes to shove, politicians were useless. Best bet was the army, the National Guard, the bureaucracies. Emergency services, emergency room doctors and nurses. Police and firefighters. Those were the people who would help, the ones you hoped to see show up. Not the politicians.
She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn’t they?
Looking around the crowd in the broken park, she couldn’t be sure. People were gathered in groups. It was a kind of organization. They were doing the best they could with what they had.
But after every crisis of the last century, Charlotte thought, or maybe forever, capital had tightened the noose around the neck of labor. Simple as that: crisis capitalism, shoving the boot on the neck harder at every opportunity. Tightening the noose. It had been proved, it was a studied phenomenon. To anyone looking at history, it was impossible to deny. It was the pattern. The fight against the tightening noose had never managed to find the leverage to escape it. It had a Chinese finger-trap quality to it: fight it and you justified the heavy response, the prison camps instead of hospitals.
Finally Charlotte gave up thinking and began wandering the park again, stopping to talk to people huddled around the various smoky fires, which existed more for cooking than warmth, or just to be doing something. She stopped at group after group and told them she was a city employee working for the Householders’ Union, and that shelters were going to be opening up uptown. Over and over she said this.
Finally, exhausted, disgusted, she made her way back south to the intertidal and waited in the line on a dock for a water taxi to take her back down to the Met and home. It was a long wait; the line was long, and there weren’t very many water taxis out yet. She got hungry. She sat on the dock with the rest of the people in line. They were New Yorkers and not inclined to talk to strangers, which she appreciated.
At a certain point she tapped her wrist again and called up Ramona.
“Hey Ramona, Charlotte here. Listen, do you think your group might still be interested in me running for the Twelfth District seat?”
Ramona laughed. “I know we would. But listen, you’re aware that Estaban is backing her candidate pretty actively?”
“Fuck Estaban. She’s who I want to run against.”
“Well, we can definitely give you that.”
“Okay. I’ll come to the next meeting and we’ll talk it over. Tell people I want to do it.”
“That’s great news. She’s pissing you off, eh?”
“I’ve just been in Central Park.”
“Ah yeah.”
“I told her to open uptown for the refugees here.”
“Ah yeah. Good luck with that.”
“I know. But it’s something to run on.”
“I think so! Come on down and we’ll talk more.”
By the time she got back to the Met she could barely walk. She made her way to the dining room and realized she was going to have to take the stairs up to her room, and couldn’t face it. A forty-story walk-up, great.
She collapsed on one of the chairs and looked around. Her fellow citizens. Their little city-state, their commune. At least they weren’t being bombarded by their own government. Not yet anyway. The Paris Commune had lasted seventy-one days. Then years of reprisals had followed, till all the communards were dead or imprisoned. Couldn’t have a government of, by, and for the people, oh no. Kill them all instead.
When the Russian revolution of 1917 had lasted seventy-two days, Lenin went out into the street and danced a little dance. They had lasted longer than the Commune, he said. In the event they lasted seventy-two years. But so much had gone wrong.
Franklin Garr walked into the room, headed for the food line.
“Hey Frankie!” Charlotte said. “You’re just the man I wanted to see.”
He looked surprised. “What’s up, old gal? You look wasted.”
“I am wasted. Can you get me a glass of wine?”
“You bet. I was hunting one myself, actually.”
“It’s that time.”
“That’s for sure. You heard the boys showed up?”
“I’m the one who told you, remember? That was the good news for the day.”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Good news though. I thought the little fuckers had done themselves in at last.”
“They probably barely noticed. What’s a hurricane to them?”
“No, they noticed. They almost got eaten by muskrats.”
“Say what?”
“They had a Mexican standoff with a herd of muskrats.”
“I don’t think it’s a herd.”
“No, probably not. A flock of muskrats, a murder of muskrats …”
“A murder of crows.”
“That’s right. A what, a drenching of muskrats? A sucking of muskrats?”
“A bedraggle of muskrats.”
“Nice.”
“That’s what the people in Central Park were. A bedraggle of refugees. Here, get that wine.”
He nodded and went off and came back and sat on the floor beside her chair. They toasted the boys and tossed down some of the Flatiron’s horrible pinot noir.
“So listen,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to pull the trigger on this crash you outlined. Will this hurricane pop the bubble you were talking about?”
He waggled a hand. “I’ve been looking at that. Thing is, it’s a global market, and a lot of people don’t want it to pop, because they haven’t shorted it. So they’ll hold on against shocks like this. So I’m not really sure. I don’t think this is enough to do it. Of course the local index will be impacted. But the global bubble, no.”
“Well, but if you wanted to pop it? As in, by way of that householders’ strike you were talking about that time? Would this be a good time for that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the groundwork is laid that would make it work. Although I’ve done my part, I’ll tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve monetized the boys’ gold. Vlade melted it and I sold it, in increments, in various dark pools. It all got snapped up by the Indian government, it looks like to me. They’re the last goldbugs left, they really like it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe it’s because Indians like their bling so much.”
“Frankolino, spare me your horrible cultural theories. What did you do with the money?”
“I leveraged it a bit and bought a lot of put options
on the IPPI.”
“Meaning?”
“I shorted the IPPI and went long on Case-Shiller, and now this hurricane has made me right. We can sell and make a killing for the boys.”
“That’s nice, but I want to pop the bubble! I want to crash the system!”
He shook his head dubiously. “Really? Are you sure you’re ready?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be. And it’s the right moment to strike. People are mad. And if we don’t do it now, they’ll just pull the noose tighter. More austerity to pay for the reconstruction, the poor will get poorer, the rich will move elsewhere.”
He sighed. “So you want to reverse a ten-thousand-year trend, you’re saying.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is like proverb one in Bartlett’s quotations. It’s the first verse of Genesis.”
“Right. Yes. Let’s reverse that.”
He began to think hard, and indicated this fact with a face that made her smile: cross-eyed, mouth pursed, forehead wrinkled vertically between the eyebrows. It reminded her of Larry, but this guy was funnier. “The spread in the indexes is a sign the markets are a bit freaked out,” he said. “There’s been a drop in all of them already, so, it wouldn’t be the best time to make the most money out of it. But on the other hand, things are shaky.”