Third time’s a charm. Or fourth. Whichever. Past results being no guarantee of future performance.
PART EIGHT
THE COMEDY OF THE COMMONS
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.
said Picasso
a) Mutt and Jeff
I don’t like to see you wielding a hammer. It scares me.”
“You are easily scared. Why, what?”
“You are not a hammer kind of guy. I’m not sure who you will injure first, me or you.”
“Come on. It’s not a complex skill. It’s like typing. It’s like typing with a big thing that whaps the keyboard for you. In fact I’m thinking I may start typing with a hammer.”
“With two hammers, one for each hand.”
“Two for each hand, like a xylophone player. I will type like Lionel Hampton playing the xylophone.”
“Wasn’t it a vibraphone?”
“Not sure. Hand me that bag of nails.”
Mutt hands over the bag and contemplates his partner hefting hammer and nails. With the farm floor’s tall arches so hugely open to the air, it looks like Bartleby the scrivener has exchanged his quill for a riveting gun from the heroic age of high-rise construction. Although currently they are assembling long planter boxes. Eventually they will trundle hods of soil to these boxes rather than hods of cement. Otherwise they’re like Rosie the Riveter. Rosen the Riveter. Roosevelt the Riveter, maybe that’s where they got the name Rosie, sure.
“Or you could type with your forehead, like archy the cockroach,” Mutt says.
“Toujours gai, my friend. I would enjoy that.”
“It was mehitabel the cat who said toujours gai.”
“I know that. I’m the one who made you read that book.”
“I somewhat liked it, I have to admit.”
“I find that very encouraging.”
“It was funny to see how little New York changes through the centuries.”
“So true. If you disregard it being underwater and storm-racked.”
“As of course one should. Character remains despite one’s circumstances. As mehitabel always said.”
It’s a sunny day, some clouds over Jersey. Vlade appears out of the service elevator, pushing a wheelbarrow of black dirt. Idelba has been using her gear to salvage some of their farm’s soil from its resting place on the bottom of the canal between the Met and the North building. A few more people unknown to Mutt and Jeff follow with more wheelbarrows.
Jeff says, “Here, this box is ready.”
Vlade helps his team fill the new box with soil. “Idelba says she can pull up some good mud to mix with our compost. We should be okay for soil.”
“You’ll need seeds,” Mutt points out.
“Sure, but the seed bank is ready to provide. They want us to try out some new hybrids they’ve got. And some new heirlooms.”
“New heirlooms?”
“They rustled them up somewhere. The call has gone out. Anyway, we’ll be okay. Back in business in time to get a late-fall crop, anyway.”
“What about our hotello?”
“What, isn’t that up yet? You can put that up in an hour. That’s the point of those things. It’s in the storage closet back of the elevators.”
“We didn’t know where it was,” Mutt confesses.
“Sorry, I should have told you. Where are you staying now?”
“Nowhere.”
“In the common room.”
“Oh hell, let’s get you up here. I need you here to serve as night watchmen. And you need your place.”
Vlade is as good as his word, so when the current load of dirt is shoveled into the new planter boxes, he goes to the storage room and pulls out what looks like an oversized suitcase. This, along with a trunk containing all their bathroom fixtures, is their hotello, packed to move. All its parts are off the shelf, modular, easy to assemble. Plastic everything, including the air mattresses on cots, the walls that look like thick opaque shower curtains, because they are; the chem toilet; the light fixtures that are LED strings, and often strung on the structural elements, which resemble PVC tubing, now spangled as with Christmas lights. Festive in the dark.
Vlade takes a look around and declares the place rebuilt. It has indeed taken an hour.
“It seems kind of breezy up here now,” Jeff remarks to him.
“It was always breezy up here.”
“But now I’m noticing it more. After the hurricane, I guess.”
“Sure,” says Vlade. “We feel it now.”
“What are you going to do about that, by the way? I mean next time there’s a big storm. In terms of protecting this floor.”
“I don’t know. I’m still thinking it over. I think the whole city is, in terms of windows and how to deal. I don’t know if there’s any great solution, if we’re going to get storms like that one. I’m hoping that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s gonna take years to rebuild.”
Mutt and Jeff nod.
“Meanwhile, if you don’t like living out here anymore, you should get on the list for a regular bed inside. Or maybe you can take Charlotte’s room.”
“Her so-called room has walls thinner than ours.”
“Well you might be able to be her room sitter if you want, if she wins this election and has to go to D.C.”
“Would she really do that?”
“I imagine she’d commute as much as possible, but I don’t know. If you’re in Congress, don’t you have to be there sometimes?”
Mutt and Jeff shrug.
“I can’t believe she wants to do it,” Mutt says.
“I don’t think she does. She’s just mad right now.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Jeff pontificates.
“We can be her finance ministers without portfolio.”
“I want a portfolio.”
“Then you’d have to go with her to D.C.”
“Okay, not. But I always wanted a portfolio.”
“Well, she is going to need some finance advice. Because the shit is hitting the fan.”
“It’s working,” Jeff says. “I knew it would. It’s like that Franklin says, the only problem is if it works so well it wipes out civilization. Aside from that it’s working fine.”
“Banks must be freaking.”
“Totally. The line between cash and not-cash has abruptly moved. Like only cash in hand is cash now. Because people are definitely not paying their rents and mortgages.”
“And student loans?” Mutt inquires.
“They never paid those. So now there’s nothing at the bottom of the house of cards. The dominoes are falling.”
“The falling dominoes are knocking over the house of cards?”
“Exactly. The whole shithouse is coming down.”
“Good. And look, meanwhile we have our little home back!”
“I know. It’s good.” Jeff stands in the open doorway of it, looking south at Wall Street. “If only everyone realized all you need is a hotello.”
Mutt moves past him and stops by the south railing. “The view helps.”
“It does. It’s a nice view.”
“I love this city.”
“It’s not bad. Especially from the thirtieth floor. Here, I’m going to build another planter box.”
“Watch your thumbs.” Mutt regards Jeff moving slabs of wood into position on a long worktable. “You’re a carpenter now, my friend. Have you noticed that we’ve gone from being coders to being farmers? It’s like one of those dreadful back-to-the-land fantasies you kept giving me. Everyone goes Amish and all’s right with the world. Unreadable horseshit, I’m sorry to say.”
Jeff snorts as he lines up two slabs. “Hold this sucker in place while I nail it.”
“No way.”
Jeff shrugs and tries to do it himself. “The idiocy of village life, isn’t that what Marx called it? The idiocy of rural life? Something like that.”
“And here we are.”
“Co
me on, I need a hand here. And we’re at Twenty-third and Madison in New York City, on the thirtieth floor of a grand old skyscraper, so it’s not as rural as you’re saying.”
“And you like hammering nails.”
“I do,” Jeff admits. “It’s like hitting the head of your worst enemy, over and over. And you drive them right into a fucking block of wood! You can feel them go! It’s very satisfying. So get over here and help hold this piece in place.”
“We call it a vise, my friend. Two vises and you’re set.”
“Two vises don’t make a virtue. Come hold this!”
“Hold it yourself! Practice your William Morris craft skills, your Emersonian self-reliance!”
“Fuck self-reliance. Emerson was a fool.”
“You’re the one who made me read him,” objects Mutt.
“He’s a holy fool, and you should read him. But he couldn’t string two thoughts together if his life depended on it. He’s the greatest fortune cookie writer in American literature.” Jeff snorts with amusement. “Self-reliance my ass. We’re fucking monkeys. It’s always about teamwork.”
“That would make three very good fortune cookie fortunes. Maybe we could start a company.”
“Teamwork, baby. You do the work and I’ll join the team. Come hold this slab of wood here!”
“All right already. But then you owe me.”
“A dime.”
“A dollar.”
“A call option on ten zillion dollars.”
“Deal.”
In this situation, what one can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the future produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning.
—Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia
b) Stefan and Roberto
It took about a week for Stefan and Roberto to eat their way back to weight, and after that Roberto got restless and began to plot their next move. Whatever this project turned out to be, it was going to be complicated by the fact that now they had about a dozen adults in the Met paying attention to them and bringing up the foster parent thing, the guardian thing, the paper thing, the gold thing, trying to make them “wards of the co-op,” as Charlotte put it at one point when they refused all supervision. Neither of them liked any of these ideas, and they agreed it was getting dangerous to speak openly to anyone but Mr. Hexter, who had his own ideas about what they should do, and described himself as being, in relation to them, avuncular, meaning “unclelike” in Latin. Seemed to them that it must be a cool language to have a specific word for being unclelike, as uncles were nothing as far as they could tell. They were happy to let him take on the role on that basis.
He was still trying to teach them to read. It wasn’t much harder than understanding his maps. Maps were great; they were pictures of places from a bird’s-eye view, easy to comprehend. Mr. Hexter wanted Amelia Black to give them a ride so that they would be able to see how much the land looked like the map of it when you were up at the bird’s level. They were agreeable to that, in fact it sounded great. But even without that, the principle of maps was obvious and they got it. And it had been the same with written words, which were like pictures of the spoken words, in that each letter was the picture of one or two sounds, and once you had memorized those, you could sound out any word and know what you were reading. That too had been easy. It had turned out to be way easier than they had thought it was going to be. It would have been even easier if English spelling were less stupid, but whatever.
“I wonder if all of school would have been this easy?” Stefan said.
“You can still find out,” Mr. Hexter said. “But I don’t recommend it. You guys are too quick for school. You might die of boredom and get in trouble, and you’re already in enough trouble as it is.”
“What do you mean, we’re not in trouble.”
But it was true that Franklin and Vlade and Charlotte had melted their gold coins and were taking care of the money the gold had been bought for. And Franklin in particular was insistent that from now on when they went out to do things, they had to take their wristpad with them, always, no exceptions.
“In fact,” he said, “I think that idea of locking ankle beepers on you like they do with people under house arrest is a good idea. I bet Inspector Gen would bring home a couple for us. That way you wouldn’t accidentally forget and go out and get yourself killed without us knowing how you did it.”
“No to that,” Roberto said. “We are free citizens of the republic!”
“You have no idea whether you are or not. No birth certificates, right? No last names, for God’s sake. In fact, Roberto, how did you get any name at all, being orphaned at birth and self-raised from out of a lobster trap?”
Roberto got his stubborn look. “I am Roberto New York, of the house of New York. The dockmaster called me little robber, so I figured my name was Robber, and then later a guy told me about Roberto Clemente. So I decided I was Roberto.”
“And you were how old at this point?”
“I was three years old.”
Franklin shook his head. “Remarkable. And you, Stefan?”
“I am Stefan Melville de Madison.”
“You’re wards of the building. Or maybe Lame Ass. Charlotte made that your legal status. So if you want to go out, at least take that wristpad.”
“All right already,” Stefan conceded. “We can always zap it later,” he explained to Roberto, forestalling Roberto’s expostulations.
“For now, I’ll go out with them,” Mr. Hexter said. “We’re going to go out and see how things are looking since the storm.”
“We’re going to go muskrat hunting!”
Franklin nodded at this. “Good. Mr. Hexter will be your electronic bracelet.”
“I am indeed powerfully attached to my friends,” the old man said, shaking his head as if it were a bad habit.
“Besides, what about our gold,” Roberto demanded. “Here you are trying to lock us down and you’re keeping our own gold away from us.”
“No no,” Franklin said. “Your gold is yours. What’s left of it anyway. We’ve got it in Vlade’s safe so you don’t make a big necklace out of it and then go swimming while you’re wearing it. It’s doing fine. More than fine. You know that. The Indian central bank loves you. And I used some of what they paid you to short housing, so now you are rich. By the time I’m done you’ll be about fifty times richer than you were with the gold. The only remaining question is whether anyone will be left standing to pay you.”
“Cool.”
“I want a gold doubloon to pierce and put around my neck on a necklace.”
“I think they’re guineas, and haven’t you heard those stories of guys getting beheaded by thieves going after their gold necklaces?”
“No.” The boys looked a little thoughtful at this. “Does that really happen?”
“Sure, this is New York, remember?”
“Okay, well, I still want one of the coins, for in my pocket.”
“That seems fair. As long as you’re wristpadded, so we can recover your body.”
“Deal.”
Then it was back to singing a b c d e f g, h i j k et cetera. At this point they sang it whenever they wanted to drive Mr. Hexter to something more interesting than reading.
Today, with Franklin Garr off to join the Cloisterclusterfuck, as he called it, they used the song to convince Mr. H to agree to a cruise around the city.
Their boat was no worse for wear, and they puttered about the canals of the neighborhood checking things out. The hurricane had ripped off all the leaves, so the terraces and rooftops looked bare, and many a canal was still clogged with debris. But they were able to get through most of them, and city crews were out in force working on the cleanup. There was a da
nk vegetable jungly smell in the air, and many people on the water were wearing white face masks. Mr. Hexter snorted at this. “Little do they know they’re depriving themselves of needed nutrients and helpful microbiome teammates.”
They found that the most common arboreal survivors of the wind’s onslaught had been potted trees, which had presumably been knocked on their sides and remained prone through the storm, and now only had to be lifted upright to restore some green to the scene. They looked battered but unbowed; they were like the city itself, Mr. Hexter declared.
Up in the intertidal things were truly squalid. Around Fiftieth the high water mark of the storm surge was obvious, an irregular wall of junk steaming in the criminal humidity. Mr. Hexter said it looked like the barricades of Les Miserables: windows intact in their frames, shutters, chairs, boat hulls, trash cans, pallets, boxes, cans, and many branches, or even trees entire, roots and all. This long barrier reef complicated getting from lower Manhattan onto dry land, and it was interesting to see the city workers concentrate on certain avenue canals to establish functioning floater docks: Tenth, Sixth, Fifth, Lex.
Everywhere people were out and about, either looking for things or just living their summer lives. Refugee residents, hanging out all ragged. It was like everyone had been turned into Huck and Pap, or like the whole city had turned into the Street of Fundy on a fast ebb.
“Why didn’t they take over the uptown towers?” Stefan asked the old man.
“They tried and it didn’t work.”
“So what?” Roberto said. “That was only one night! What if they kept trying every day?”
“It doesn’t occur to them.”
“Why not?”
“They call it hegemony.”
“Not another word!”
Hexter laughed at that. “Yes another word. The war of words! Greek in this case, I think.”
“Hedge money? Like Franklin Garr?”
“No, he-ge-mony. Means, hmm … means the agreement of people to being dominated, without guns having to be pointed in your face all the time. Even if you’re treated badly. You just go along with it.”