Gen figured she might be the senior officer there, and in any case no one else was doing it, so she walked forward from out of the other cops, pistol extended down to the side. “New York Police Department,” she announced calmly, flatly. “You’re on camera now and you are not police. Point those rifles down right now or you’ll end up in jail. Who’s in charge here? Who are you?”
A man bulled through his people to her. He looked familiar to her, and he seemed to recognize Gen as well.
“What the fuck were you doing shooting off those guns?” Gen said to him.
“We’re defending private property here. Since you can’t seem to do it.”
Gen waited a beat, then slowly stepped toward the man. She didn’t stop until she was too close. At that point she was looking down on him. She still had her pistol pointed down at the ground, but it wasn’t that far off his feet. The man’s people stirred behind him. Some shifted their rifles, aiming them away off to the sides or lifting their barrels up, but there were still red laser dots on her vest. She felt like a fucking Christmas tree, a target in a pistol range. No one knew what to do.
“Stand down and get inside your buildings,” Gen said to the man, staring hard at him. “We’re on camera now. All of you are obliged to obey police orders to keep your security licenses.”
No one moved.
“You were the first people to fire guns tonight,” Gen told the man. “That’s already bad, but you’re only going to make it worse if you don’t do what I say. It will be interfering with police during a riot. Pretty soon it will be resisting arrest. The New York Police Department doesn’t like people shooting at it, and the courts don’t either. We’re the ones who police this town. No one else. So get inside. Now. You can defend the rooms in there, if it comes to that. This here is public space.”
“This plaza is private property,” the man said. “Our job is to defend it.”
“It’s public space. Get inside. You’re under arrest now. Don’t make things any worse than you already have, or your employers will not be happy with you. You’ve already cost them millions of dollars in legal fees. The worse you make it now, the worse it’s going to be for you later.”
The man hesitated.
Gen said, “Come on, inside. I’m coming in with you to find out more about what happened to set this all off. You can show me what your cameras got, if anything. Come on.”
She took another step toward the man. Now she was definitely too close. With her police boots on she was six foot four, and now she was helmeted, pistol in hand, a look that could freeze blood. A big scary black woman cop, mad as hell and calm as heaven. Shield in her other hand. Ready to knock the man back with it if needed. He could see she would do it. Another step forward. She wasn’t going to stop when she got to the man, she made that clear. He was about to be in her space, and she had the momentum. There was a water sumo move she was contemplating, a quick shove with the shield, that would knock him on his ass. Staring him right in the eye. It occurred to her there must be blood all over her from the cop with the cut scalp. She was the white male criminal’s worst nightmare, or maybe his dream hero, or both at once. She was trying to hypnotize him now, boring into him with Big Mama Calm. Authority figure. Bloody priestess of this night’s full-moon panic. He wanted to have a way out. Push had come to shove.
The man turned his head. “Inside,” he said.
Once inside, Gen stuck to the man and asked him to sit down in the lobby with her. She was beat and asked for water. Someone brought her a plastic bottle of it and she stared at it curiously. Lobby couches in backless ovals. Big lobby, luxurious, a place to talk and drink. Felt good to get off her feet. Her hands were indeed covered with blood. A good look for what she had to do now.
“Thanks for cooperating,” she said to the man, and gestured at the divan nearest her. “Sit down and tell me what happened.”
The man stayed standing. Six two, bulked, square head, little mouth, black hair. Grim resolve. Gen suddenly recalled where she had seen him before. “You were down in Chelsea last week,” she told him. “On a boat with some employees, working for the Chelsea Town House Association or some such nonsense.”
He was looking worried now, as well he might. He seemed like he barely remembered her from the encounter on the boat, if at all, but he did look like he was puzzled by her. And it also looked like he was considering his options, not as this tower’s security head, but as an individual who could get sued or go to jail. Who had perhaps made mistakes, after being ordered to do an illegal and impossible thing, by bosses who did not care about him. Best options for himself, he was now considering. Having decided not to fight the police while on camera. Which made sense. Now other hard choices, between other bad options, were going to start making sense. It was a time for asking questions.
“Did your people follow orders when they fired?”
“Yes. They were ordered to fire in the air, warning shots only.”
“You got that order recorded?”
“Yes.”
“Your order?”
After a hesitation: “Yes.” It having been recorded.
“Was there incoming?”
“Yes.”
“Like what, rocks?”
“We heard shots too. Those will be recorded too.”
“Incoming shots?”
“We thought so. We saw muzzle blasts aimed our way.”
“That must have been bad. But you were shooting over the crowd.”
“Yes.”
Gen nodded. “That will help. So, who employs you again? Employs you and your people here?”
“RNA. Rapid Noncompliance Abatement.”
“Not rapid enough. And do you know who hired RNA?”
“Someone here in these buildings, we presume.”
“Because this was what you were tasked to defend.”
“Right.”
“Any other information as to who in the building hired RNA?”
“No.”
Now Gen shook her head. She stared at the man, held his gaze. “Usually people know something. They have an idea. Usually they don’t put themselves out there for just any asshole paying for them.”
“Usually.”
“So you’re saying you have no idea who you are working for.”
“I work for Rapid Noncompliance Abatement.”
“Who’s your supervisor there? And where is this person right now?”
“It’s Eric Escher. And I don’t know.”
Gen snorted. “He is going to hang you out to dry. You know that, don’t you?”
“Part of the deal.”
“Spare me, please.” Gen stood back up, looked down at the man. “Spare me your mercenary code, shooting at civilians on a night when you have assault rifles and they have sticks and stones and Fourth of July sparklers. You are fucked now. If you tell me who Escher is working for, I’ll put in a good word for you when you go to trial. Because that’s what’s coming.”
The man looked back at her, more angry than scared.
Gen sighed. “They must pay you a lot. Come out in a few years’ time, you might have some money. Or they might drop you outright, ever thought of that? Ever thought that time is worth more than money? You won’t like doing time. And that’s what you’re facing. Shooting at cops? The courts don’t like that. It’s a felony. So your time could be serious. Severe. But you might still dodge that, play your cards right here. I’m the chief police inspector for lower Manhattan, and I’m the senior officer at the scene here, so I’ll be listened to on this. And I need to know who set you out there tonight.”
She waited, boring in with her gaze. The uncanny: the rule of law as personified by a big black woman. Now that was uncanny. Also the most obvious and natural thing in the world. And inescapable. Inexorable. Extradition treaties with everywhere. She settled in and waited, feeling patience flooding her coterminously with her exhaustion, right down to her sore feet.
His frown turned to irritation. “Like I sa
id, we’re working for the people who own this building,” he said.
“So that would be?”
“The building’s managed by Morningside Realty.”
“But they’re just the broker. Who’s the owner? The mayor? Hector Ramirez? Henry Vinson?”
Always nice to see that look of surprise on people’s faces. Five minutes ago this guy had been thinking Gen was just a local cop. Now corrections and connections were going off in his head. Maybe he was recalling better the encounter with Gen on the boat downtown. She was citywide. She knew he had been working in lower Manhattan. A mutual process of discovery, here, that they both had larger briefs going in this town. And might therefore meet again, perhaps in a judicial venue.
Gen gestured at the couches, sat back down. This time the man sat down across from her.
“Not Vinson,” he said. “His partner from before.”
Now it was Gen’s turn to be surprised. “You mean Larry Jackman?”
The man nodded once, looking her in the eye. He was past his amazement. Aware he had shot through the Narrows now and been carried out into deep waters. Might need Gen as a pseudo-ally, somehow, somewhere. He had had his people stand down; he had answered questions when asked. No one had gotten killed out there by his people, hopefully. There was that to be said in his favor, such as it was. And it was not inconsiderable either. She nodded encouragingly, meaning to indicate that he could actually get out of this free of consequences.
The man said, with careful precision, “He put this building and some other assets in a blind trust when he started working for the government. He only communicates with Escher through third parties now. But we’ve been his security team all along.”
Gen was beginning to think that this night might not have been a complete fucking disaster after all, when the sound of gunfire erupted outside.
Everyone in the room was suddenly back on point. Gen surveyed the lobby, the little militia she was in here with.
“I’m gonna say we pass on that,” she said firmly. “We’re all staying in here. Whatever’s going on out there can resolve without us.”
“Really?” the man said.
“Really. Tell you what. Defend the building. From inside.”
“Defend it from who?”
Gen shrugged. “Whatever.” She took a look at her wristpad, it having beeped. “Ah,” she said. “Actually, it’s the National Guard.”
There is, in its enormity, a disproportion of effort. Too much energy, too much money. The fabulous machinery of skyscrapers, telephones, the press, all of that is used to produce wind and to chain men to a hard destiny.
said Le Corbusier
In July 1931 a judge who was judging twenty-two hobos arrested for sleeping in Central Park gave them each two dollars and sent them back to sleep in the park. At that time there were shacks all over the park, all furnished with chairs and beds, seventeen of them with chimneys.
DeKalb Avenue was filled with celebrants; cars were surrounded and trapped as if in a flood. A large black policeman waded into the street, gamely trying to get everyone to disperse so traffic could get through, when suddenly someone lunged at him and hugged him. The crowd converged on him—suddenly everyone was hugging him, a massive pileup of love. He started laughing.
—Tim Kreider, election night 2008, Brooklyn
g) Amelia
The next day, July 8, 2142, Amelia Black floated down the Hudson River Valley toward home.
She had had a relatively good storm. Her tendency toward accident, as much innate as acquired, or thrust upon her, had thankfully spared her anything worse than being out on a flight when a hurricane was arriving. That had been stupid, sure, but she hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t realized, et cetera. Once Vlade had alerted her to the situation, she and Frans had done the right things, all with her broadcasting the adventure to her audience in the cloud, which grew by the minute as people heard what she had gotten herself into this time. Amelia Errorheart has done it again, Amelia Errhard is in big trouble, Amelia Blank is blanking again, Amelia Airhead might not be able to read a map, ha ha, et cetera.
But from the moment Vlade had alerted her to the danger, she had flown the Assisted Migration north as fast as it would go, and although this top speed was only fifty miles an hour in still air, with a growing tailwind pushing her it had been enough to get her to the little town of Hudson, New York, which she called Hudson on the Hudson, where she was allowed to tie off on one of the blimp masts at the Marina Abramovic Institute, named after one of her heroes and role models. Once the airship was tied to that mast, its intense flailing became a natural piece of performance art, and at first Amelia had resolved to stay in the gondola through the hurricane—tie herself into a chair and get tossed around like a bull rider, like Marina herself doing one of her variously dangerous and awesome performances; she would be riding the storm! as she put it to her fans. But even with the spirit of their founder hovering over the institute and encouraging Amelia to go for it, the actual curators of the place had insisted that given the forecast, in this instance discretion was the better part of value, as they liked having Amelia there but didn’t want her getting thrashed to death witnessed by millions in the cloud. Marina would have done it, they conceded, but insurance prices being what they were, not to mention boards of directors, donors, and the laws against endangering children and the mentally incapacitated, it was probably best that she not commit suicide by hurricane.
“I am fully mentally capacitated,” Amelia objected.
“We’re not sure the fabric of your blimp will sustain one-hundred-sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Please don’t abuse our hospitality.”
“It’s an airship by the way.”
So, Amelia had with some difficulty gotten out of the gondola without getting crushed under it, and after that watched Frans ride out the storm, narrating the spectacle from inside the institute. Ironically, at the height of the storm the institute had had all its north windows sucked out in a single moment of extreme vacuum pull, so everyone inside had had to retreat, with a lot of shouting and even screaming, to the basement, while Frans and the Assisted Migration had negotiated the onslaughts with only a certain amount of deformative streamlining, being tied down by eight stout lines to eight strong anchoring points, also tied stoutly to a stout mast; Frans had worked hard to counteract the bouncing of the Assisted Migration by way of thousands of exquisitely timed counterthrusts from the airship’s various propellers. The airship still hit the ground repeatedly and then shot up and strained against the anchor lines, but both the smashes into the ground and the jerks against the anchor lines were constantly mitigated by Frans’s microbursting on the props, finessing the impacts with impressive panache. So Amelia would have been safer in the gondola than in any building whatsoever, another testament to the Assisted Migration, also to the principle of flexibility, of soft power and adaptation, so superior to rigidity and hard power, as she pointed out while narrating the admittedly still very dramatic images of the Assisted Migration shimmying like a shape-shifter under the storm’s wicked slaps. “If only wind were colored so you could see it,” she gushed at one point. “I wonder if we could set off some colored flares, or create a fog of some sort upwind of this place? It would be fantastic to be able to see the wind.”
This was agreed to be a good idea for some other storm. Wind as an aleatory art: it would be good. As it was, the invisible substance tore at the world with such force that it became somehow visible, or at least extremely present, as the abrupt defenestration of the institute made clear with a palpable punctuation. Such cracks, such roaring, such screams of dismay! It was good material.
But then again so much of the storm was good in that regard. Amelia and her hosts weren’t the only people in trouble, nor among those in the worst trouble. So she stayed in the cloud narrating the storm but did not score exceptionally high viewing numbers, as the competition out there was intense. It was somewhat of a lost opportunity, but then again she was going
to survive, as was the Assisted Migration and Frans. Or so it seemed, until a shard of a newly shattered window flew into the airship and cut open several of its ballonets. After that the wind had its way with what remained. Pop goes the weasel!
So Frans was deflated and thrashed on the ground like a big carpet, and there were repairs to be made before Amelia could return to the air, but eventually it got done by the ground crew of a nearby airfield, happy to get the famous cloud star back in the air (and themselves briefly in the cloud with her). That done, she flew back down to the city at about the thousand-foot level, always excellent in terms of angle and prospect.
What she saw along the way astounded her. The lower stretch of the Hudson Valley was stripped of its leaves; it almost looked like midwinter, except so many trees had been knocked to the ground, or, if still standing, were extending their amputated limbs to the sky. It was much more noticeable than the damage to buildings, which was mostly a matter of missing windows or torn roofs. That was bad, the reconstruction was going to take months, she could see; but the flattened trees would take years to regrow. And of course the animals that lived in the forest would be similarly stricken.
“Wow,” Amelia said to her viewers. “This is bad.” Her voice-over on this day did not constitute her most eloquent performance. After a while, feeling overwhelmed, she mostly let Frans mention where they were and left it at that.
As she came closer to the city, the Cloister cluster reared up over the horizon long before anything else, a copse of spikes poking the sky. “Well, the towers survived.” She floated down the middle of the fjord, and when she was offshore from the uptown towers she slowed a bit, so that they and the Hoboken towers were both displayed to greatest effect, looming well over her cruising altitude to each side. At that point the Hudson looked somewhat like the flooded floor of a shattered roofless room. It was creepy.
Finally she veered in toward the city to have a look down into Central Park. She was shocked like everyone else by the devastation. It was a tent city now, punctuated by hundreds of downed trees, the holes left by their roots giving it the look of a cemetery where all the dead had burst out and run off, leaving their open graves behind. People like ants everywhere, the lost ones of the city huddling there, mostly out of an instinct to huddle, it seemed to Amelia. Then she saw that there were people gathered on the plazas of Morningside Heights, around the black marks of dead bonfires. There were lines of people too, regular enough to suggest they were military. Army in the streets. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The whole city was a mess.