“So it could work.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I think it would work at any time, if enough people joined a payment default.”
“Call it the strike.”
He shrugged. “Call it the Jubilee!”
She laughed. She took a big sip of her wine. “I can’t believe you can make me laugh after a day like this,” she confessed.
“Cheap drunk,” he noted.
“True. So you think it would work?”
“I just don’t know. I think it might be confusing if it happened now. People defaulting might lose whatever insurance money they were going to get, if they had some coming because of this storm. So I don’t know about the timing of it. You know—you give the financial system a heart attack right after a disaster—I don’t know, it’s a little counterintuitive. I mean who’s going to pay the insurance for rebuilding?”
“I guess government. They usually do. But let’s figure that out later.”
He looked at her with exaggerated amazement. He was a man who really looked at you when he looked. Like you were a marvel. “Well okay then! Roll the dice! Do you have all your ducks in a row with your Fed ex?”
“Fed ex?”
“Your ex who runs the Fed. I think your nickname for him should be Fed Ex, don’t you?”
“Yes, I like that.” She nodded. “He’s as primed as I can make him.”
“And your Householders’ Union?”
“It’s big enough that we can use it as a vanguard party for a mass action. And people who want some cover can join it the same moment they default.”
“A lot of people will want to have that kind of cover. Something to join, so it’s a political position, not just being in default.”
“We only need fifteen percent of the population, right?”
“That’s the theory. But more would be better.”
“Okay, but maybe we’ll get more.”
He pondered it, still regarding her with a bemused look. “Well, we’re pretty well shorted. So if you do it and it works, we won’t make the max possible, but we’ll still make a lot.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“I think the more likely possibility is that it’ll work too well.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it could crash the whole system. And if that happens, who will be left to pay me my swaps?”
“Surely it won’t be that bad.”
“We’ll find out.”
Charlotte looked at him, trying to figure out how serious he was. Very difficult. He enjoyed taking risks. So here was a big risk, a political risk. So for the most part he looked pleased. His worried expression was a put-on, or so it seemed to her. Hedging was gambling on volatility. So he was enjoying this.
“There’ll always be a bailout,” she said. “The speculators are too big to fail, too interconnected to fail. So the people in Central Park tonight are fucked, no matter how it plays out.”
He nodded. “So you’re saying we’ll get paid one way or another.”
“Or we won’t get paid no matter what. Unless we change things.”
He sighed. “I don’t know how I got caught up helping you. You are such a revolutionary.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Yes!” He stared at her hard. Then he grinned. He even started to laugh.
“What?” she demanded.
“It’s just I finally get what revolution means. It’s maximum volatility with no hedging. And it’s insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you’re going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It’s totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal.”
“I’m not sure that’s its main illegality,” Charlotte said.
“Joking.”
“So we’ll do it and see what happens.”
“Well, I still think you should wait, and have it more prepped than you do. Maybe wait until the storm stuff is a bit past, so that it doesn’t just get confused with an incapacity to pay. I mean you do want it to look like a choice, to make it clear that it’s a conscious strike.”
“Hmm,” Charlotte said. “That’s true.”
“You need time for the full prep anyway, right? So for now, maybe just enjoy the idea that it’s coming.” He held up his glass, now almost drained, and she raised hers and they toasted again. “To revolution!”
“To revolution.”
They polished off the wine.
He grinned again. “Part of a decent prep would be you accepting that draft and running for Congress.”
“I already did.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Well, that’s fair. Heck, we need more wine to toast that. I guess it’s a case of you break it you bought it. Crash the system and you have to build the next one. We’ll all insist on it.”
“Fuck,” Charlotte complained. “Go get more wine. Fuck fuck fuck.”
“That’s my line!” He laughed at her again. Tired as she was, still she liked it that she could make him laugh. Smartass youth that he was.
Starting in 1952, Macy’s security team set a dozen Doberman pinschers loose in the store every night at closing time, to sniff out shoplifters and thieves. They let this procedure be known, and the dogs never caught anyone.
Anger was the real zeitgeist in New York. Everyone was angry.
noted Kate Schmitz
Manhattan Island, with deep rivers all around it, seems an almost ideal scene for a great city revolution.
observed Mencken
f) Inspector Gen
Gen worked overtime day after day. She couldn’t remember if it had ever been like this before or not. Every waking moment given to the work. Everyone on the force doing the same. The storm was over, the world’s interest had gone away; the National Guard had come for a few days and then gone away; the people in Central Park didn’t go away. Food and sanitation were becoming huge problems, followed closely by violent person-on-person crime, also drug overdoses. The usual bad inputs creating the usual bad outputs, in other words. Utterly predictable, but now out in the open field of Central Park where everyone could see it. Feel it blowing up in their faces. It was not a sustainable situation, and yet there was no obvious next step, and meanwhile the impasse was something everyone could see and feel, something they were living moment to moment, day to day.
Then on the night of July 7, 2142, a huge bonfire on the Onassis lawn illuminated an enormous gathering, basically everyone in the park plus more, and somehow this turned into a riot. It happened under a full moon; no one saw the origins of it, but fighting spread through the park. The cops on hand put out the call for backup and crowd control. Some of them said it looked like gang-on-gang violence, but when Gen got there, coming up on a packed police cruiser, she couldn’t see anything resembling sides; it was just a scramble, knots of people roaming the park, roaring, setting fires with brands from the big bonfire, throwing burning brands, and fighting other groups. She got the sense that most of the real damage consisted of people falling down and getting trampled underfoot by the crowd. Most of the shouts and screams came from ground level; when she noticed that, she felt a jolt of fear and called headquarters.
“We need major medical, quick as possible, Central Park, Onassis Meadow. And there’s a crowd headed north from there, looks like.”
“We know,” said Chief Quinn Taller, an acquaintance of Gen’s. “Up Broadway, Amsterdam, and St. Nick.”
“They’re headed uptown?” Gen said.
“Looks like it.”
“Have we got reinforcements coming?”
“The National Guard has been ordered by the governor to come back, but we don’t know how long they’ll take to get here. They were slow last time.”
Gen took a deep breath. “Have you called in all the off-duties?”
“Yes I have.”
“What about the fire departments?”
“I don’t think that’s happened yet.”
/>
“You should call up fire right away.”
“Are there fires?”
“There are going to be fires. And we might need their hoses for people too.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I’ll pass the word along.”
Gen got off. She had stopped to talk, and the other cops had gone ahead. Now she hurried north after them, pausing to break up fights if it looked like she could, using her height and uniform and the darkness to support a fairly brutal approach, knocking aggressors down with her nightstick and then handcuffing that person with plastic quickcuffs, and ordering the people around to leave the scene. Nightstick in one hand, hand on pistol in holster, ready to shout if she had to. Putting her size and copness to work. People were generally happy to run off into the night. On she moved north, trying not to see fights that looked serious enough to be beyond her capacity to stop. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at her and she dodged it and continued north at speed. She needed backup, it had to be teamwork now or it was nothing. And there before her was a team of six cops, not the same ones she had come with, looked like beat cops, gathered together for safety. “Okay if I join you?”
“Shit yeah, what is this?”
“Riot, I don’t know why. There was a bonfire on the meadow, I heard.”
“Yeah but still. They’re burning in their heads.”
“I heard there was more of that bad shit out there, wonder if that’s it.”
“But it’s everyone.”
“True. Let’s get north, try to get ahead of the crowd. There’ll be more of us up there.”
“You think we can hold the line up there?”
“Not sure, but the island is awful narrow there, it might work. We need fire and the guard though.”
They moved up together. Gen was relieved to be with other cops. They cut through the crowds, calling for calm, asking for people to disperse, to go to their homes or their camps, wherever, just disperse. Head south. One of their little platoon had a mini-bullhorn, and she took the lead vocally, with the rest deploying flashlights, trying to blind people who looked aggressive. “Go home!” she shouted over and over. “Go home!”
“We are home!” someone yelled back.
It would be so easy to get shot on a night like this. One had to hope the idea wasn’t occurring to anyone of bad intention near them. All of them were on point like a patrol in enemy territory, and the shouting around them reinforced the feeling. Lot of ill will tonight. People were fed up. Moments came when no one liked NYPD. Moments like these.
They got to St. Nick Park and were hurrying up the shore path at the high tide mark, still a shambles of wrack from the storm surge, when a branch hurtled out of the dark and struck the cop right next to Gen on the head. A helmet would have made it so much less disastrous, but the guy went down and then they were holding his scalp to his skull and trying to stem the bleeding, which as usual with a head wound was prodigious. Black blood, as always at night. Always the same shock when a flashlight beam turned it from black to red. He was still conscious, seemed like it was more a cut than a blow, but they needed to stop the bleeding. First aid in the dark, Gen working the downed cop, the rest bulling around ordering dispersal, angry but lacking any way to take it out appropriately. Settle in around the downed one, radio for help, shout through the bullhorn at people to go south, to go home, to go away. Roar of crowd pouring north around them, ignoring them. Nothing to be done until a medevac arrived, after which they could hustle north again one fewer, that much more anxious and on point.
The medevac came in two police vans, so they got in one and caught a short ride up to Morningside Heights, siren screaming all the way. Quieter in the back of the van than it would have been outside it, but still noisy enough that it was hard to talk.
They got out at the first of the superscrapers, at 120th. There were a lot of cops there, and whoever was in charge tried to get them to form a line from river to river; the landfilled area behind them was the narrowest part of the whole island.
But not narrow enough; the crowd heading north was huge, and unhinged, and there were only police on hand, no National Guard or firemen, or army. They had to give way. The crowd was intent on the towers.
The police on hand collapsed into groups that stood there like subway turnstiles, letting the crowd pass and thus avoiding a bloodbath which might very likely have seen them on the bloody end of things. No one had seen anything like this, and no one with a sense of the overall situation seemed in charge. There weren’t many protocols for moments this out of control, except Don’t get killed or kill people just to stop them moving somewhere, now the standard first rule in every cop’s education. In the chaos and noise the reasons for it were becoming obvious.
Electric power seemed to have gone out up here, and Gen wondered if that had started the riot. The only illumination was the full moon, which made things look pale and somehow very strange—finally she got it that all the shadows were pointed in the same direction, making it look like the whole island had been tilted. The group of cops Gen was part of tried to figure out what to do next, but it was too loud to talk, too loud to think. So now they were in effect one clump in a tide of clumps, pulled north with the rest, not even trying to reason with the mob around them, just pulled by the flow. Faces white-eyed, openmouthed. People who didn’t appear to speak English or any other language. The noise incredible, a hair-raising roar punctuated by shrieks, but the noise wasn’t what was causing the furor, because no one was listening anyway. Something had seized them up. On the plus side, being in police uniform now didn’t appear to put them in any particular danger; this wasn’t about them, and they were all part of a general movement, a human storm surge, drawn on by some lunatic tractor beam.
Then Gen saw it clearly, and maybe everyone did: it was all about the towers. The Cloister cluster was still far to the north, but there were many other stupendous superscrapers in Morningside Heights, and the crowd was now coursing among them, surrounding them.
Gen’s ad hoc platoon stumbled with the crowd itself into the great plaza south of Amsterdam and 133rd, where the first big cluster of towers shot up to their impossible height, scoring a moony gray sky, looking like space elevators. By day they were plum, emerald, charcoal, bronze. Tonight the lights that usually turned them all into giant liqueur bottles were absent, and in the moonlight they were a purplish velvet black, possibly an effect of their photovoltaics.
Police were regrouping under them, on the far side of a big plaza, in larger numbers than ever. This time it seemed possible they could hold the line. The crowd, though angry, was mostly unarmed. Possibly the cops there could link arms and take the brunt of the charge and hope the crowd would stall against them. And indeed vans were pulling into a line across the plaza, and there were helmets and shields and vests being passed out, also nightsticks and tear gas and face masks. Almost every cop on hand had just enough experience to struggle into this gear, and when they had done that they moved to the front of the line. Not much talking going on among them, it was clear what they had to do. Therefore a bad moment. Not an NYPD moment, at least in the living experience of any cop there. Surreal: they had left the real.
Gen had just gotten a vest and helmet on when she heard shots ring out. They pinged her inside with the usual adrenaline shock, and she could see it was the same for the others around her. The shots had come from behind them, however; from the towers themselves, or rather the mezzanine of the terraces below the towers. The plaza footing the towers consisted of a sequence of giant terraces, like broad low stairs sized proportionately to the towers themselves. There were people up there on the highest terrace in full riot gear, but also with rifles—assault rifles, by the sound of it. Clips were now going off in staccato blaaps, followed by screaming and shouting. The inhuman roar redoubled. Moonlight illuminated the scene with black-on-gray clarity: the crowd was pressing in on them at the same time it was pulling back. Gen spoke into her wrist fiercely: “
We need more support! There’s private security here who have opened fire on the crowd!”
“Say again?”
“Private tower security is now firing on the crowd, and we’re caught in the middle here! We need the National Guard here now. Where’s the fucking backup?”
A rhetorical question at this point. The National Guard was elsewhere. Gen walked over and joined a group of about ten police officers in vests who were headed up the broad steps toward the security forces on the highest terrace. They walked together up the steps, straight at the business end of assault rifles, but they were in uniform, and the assault rifles were still pointed over their heads, or even at the sky, it seemed. But some of the guns pointed up were still firing, scoring their eyeballs with spurts of orange flame, and there were many crisscrossing red laser lines as scopes redlined targets among the stars. Warning shots, maybe, or shots into the crowd to the south. Gen pulled her pistol from its holster, feeling her skin go hot all over as she did so. She held up the shield she had gotten from the riot vans in her other hand, and marched slowly together up the steps with the front group of officers, all of them shouting, “Police! Police! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” From random shouts like that they quickly followed the loudest among them into a coordinated shout, a shouted chant: “Police! Police! Police! Police!” It felt good to shout it like that.
They came to the middle terrace. Nowhere else left to go; the security team loomed just above them on the next terrace up, rifles still pointed over their heads, and down at them too. A horrid frozen moment. Many of their shields and vests were now red-dotted: yes, laser scopes. Some of their helmets and foreheads were red-dotted. They stopped where they were and kept chanting Police, police, police, police.
Nobody moved. The incredible noise was still behind them, but on the steps it seemed a little quieter—no one shooting, now, and the cops continuing to chant, but in almost conversational tones. Bring it on down.