“But that’s stupid.”
“Well, we’re social animals, I guess you’d have to say.”
“So we’re all stupid, you’re saying. We’re like—”
“We’re like zombies!”
Hexter laughed. “That’s how I always used to think of it. Did you ever see Vampires Versus Zombies? No, you didn’t. A very great movie. The vampires fly around sucking the blood of working people. That’s the best blood to suck. When the workers are drained they turn into zombies, so the vampires fly somewhere else and drop in on a new population, leaving behind the zombies, who stagger around dead at that point.”
“So that would be their he-ge-mony,” Roberto said carefully.
“You are so good. So yeah, more and more people get their blood sucked and turn into zombies, and then when they’re almost all zombies—”
“All but one!”
“All but two.”
“Right, you two. But then the zombies decide it’s time to revolt.”
“About time!”
“Better late than never.”
“Exactly. So the zombies all slouch off toward the vampire castle, determined to invade. But they’re very slow. At first the vampires just laugh. But there’s no new blood for them to suck either, so the vampires are slowing down too. Eventually the whole movie is in slow motion, it’s hilarious. The zombies keep falling apart when they hit somebody, and the vampires can only bite. They’re pretty weak on both sides. As usual the scene goes on too long. But finally the zombies just kind of crush the vampires under the weight of their detached limbs. The end.”
“I want to see that.”
“Me too!”
“Me too,” Hexter said.
As they motored about they kept an eye peeled for wildlife, muskrats in particular, but anything would do. Hexter said, “The Indians figured that bears were the big brothers of beavers, and beavers were the big brothers of muskrats. The bigger ones protected the littler ones, I guess. Or the bigger ones never ate the littler ones.”
“What about otters?”
“Oh no, otters are vicious killers. Playful but vicious.”
“It’s hard to understand how they could kill anything, their mouths are so small.”
“It’s a matter of attitude, I guess. Hey look, there’s a nest up on that cornice. Peregrine falcon, it looks like. They’re so cool.”
“They drop like rocks!”
“Like arrows shot down. I know. So, this is as close to a swamp as we’ve got now, this part of the intertidal at Fifty-fifth and Madison. That’s because it was a swamp, back before the city was here. This was the Kill of Schepmoes, I think. I call it the Two Stooges Swamp. Now it’s kind of come back. You see those willows and alders growing right out of the ground. And the old spring is back to springing.”
“No way.”
“Way. It never stopped. It drains the southeast corner of Central Park. It’s the old watershed, coming back. Which is what gives the beavers in Central Park their chance. Same up at the northeast end of the park. The beavers chew down the alder and willows—”
“With their teeth!”
“That’s right, they are way tougher than vampires, dentally speaking. They chew down entire trees, and weave the trees and branches together until they have a beaver dam, which raises the water some, and slows it down. Then they can build beaver lodges, where you swim up under them to get inside, and when you go high enough inside them it’s dry.”
“That’s very cool.”
“It is. And it also makes homes for muskrats, who move into abandoned beaver lodges, or make their own using old beaver cuttings, mostly. So along with beaver, you get all the kinds of animals and plants that used to live on this island, because the beaver dams anchor that whole community. They get you ponds and swamps, and frogs and aquatic plants and some freshwater fish, and so on. That’s what Eric Sanderson taught us. One of the great New Yorkers. He’s the one who started the Mannahatta Project.”
“Hey look, is that a muskrat there?”
Roberto killed the motor and they drifted with the slow flushing of water in this part of the intertidal. Under the mass of junk at Park and Fifty-fourth, the water was perturbed by small corrugated wakes. “That’s their sign,” Mr. Hexter whispered. “The multiple wakes are from their whiskers. They can kind of smell the water, or feel it, with their whiskers. Ondathra, the Indians here called them. Like a Japanese movie monster. Or musquash. You can smell them, they’re pretty musky. I think this family is rebuilding its push-up. It’s like a beaver lodge but smaller. It sits over the entry to their burrow.”
“But what can they burrow into there?”
“Holes in abandoned buildings.”
“Like the ones we saw in the Bronx!”
“That’s right. They make underwater entrances, but the burrow is aboveground. That’s where they sleep and the moms have their babies and all.”
“Its tail is like a snake!”
“Kind of like. Now see, if you had a camera and a good lens, you could take pictures of these guys and add them to the Mannahatta Project.”
“Inventing atom bombs?”
“Yes. It’s a good group, you guys should join it. You need some kind of project. I say to you what I said before—after finding the Hussar, it’s only downhill for you guys to keep hunting sunken treasure.”
“But what about Melville? He lived right next door to us!”
“That’s true, and it would be nice to put a plaque up or something. Maybe we could talk to the city about doing blue oval plaques, like in England. We would have Melville, and Teddy Roosevelt, and Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and all kinds of other people. But taking his gravestone from dry land to tideland is probably a bad idea. Really, doing anything underwater at this point is probably a bad idea.”
The boys didn’t like to hear this, but of all the adults in their lives, Mr. Hexter was the one who never told them what to do.
“They’d make you full members of Mannahatta right away. You’d have animals to look for every time you went out. And a lot of the aquaculture pens hate muskrats, because they eat fish if they can get into the cages. So you could go into the business of live-trapping muskrats and moving them away.”
“That might be fun,” Stefan guessed.
“You’ve got to do something,” Mr. Hexter pointed out. “Now that you are men of leisure. It’s a horrible fate to be rich, or so I’ve heard. You have to figure out something useful and entertaining to do, and it isn’t easy.”
“We could map the city!” Stefan suggested.
“I love that idea. But I have to admit, they can make pretty good maps with drones these days, or even from space. Kind of takes the fun out of it, maybe.”
“So what should we do?”
“I think helping animals sounds good,” Hexter said. “Helping animals or helping people. That’s the usual solution anyway. That or making things. Maybe you could beautify the city, make artworks out of some of this detritus from the storm. That could be fun. A Goldsworthy on every corner. Or you could go after the rats. Central Park has tons of them. They used to keep lions in the menagerie there, and the rats would come into the lions’ cage and eat all the lions’ food, and the lions couldn’t do a thing about it or they would get chewed to death.”
“Yay for the rats!”
“Maybe so. One time they killed two hundred thousand rats in Central Park in a single weekend. A week later the rats were back. I suppose you could become rat catchers.”
Roberto wasn’t satisfied. “I want to do something big,” he said.
afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and everbody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and everbody was for peace and the cooperative commonwealth and the Russian revolution and we talked about red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns
and we had several drinks and wels
h rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed
—John Dos Passos, USA
Wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession.
supposed Francis Spufford
c) Charlotte
Charlotte was running for Congress without wasting too much time on it. “Yes,” she would admit at evening meetings, or to her wristpad while commuting to work, “Yes I’m running, and it’s a pain in the ass, but someone has to. Our much unloved Democratic Party has betrayed us yet again with the mayor’s craven response to the hurricane, she’s not even saying the right things this time, and she’s doing the wrong things as always. I know I haven’t played the game, I haven’t climbed the ladder that the party requires of people to make sure they are fully housebroken before they go down and join the clusterfuck in the capital. But that lack on my part is now an advantage, because that career track is part of what has made the Democratic Party so weak. But I’m a Democrat for lack of anything better, and I intend to speak out of the people’s side of our party’s two-sided mouth, and shut the other side that speaks for Denver. That’s why I’m running. My platform is similar to the left wing of the party’s current platform, you can check out the particulars if you like, the Rad Dems, but know that mainly I’m going down there to speak for intertidal people everywhere, and to speak against the global oligarchy every single day. I’m not taking campaign money from anyone and I don’t have any of my own, so I’m mostly doing this in the cloud, like now. Vote for me if you want, and if not, you get what you deserve.”
Many variations on that theme. She didn’t bother with making nice, and she didn’t show up for any number of supposedly crucial events. She did her job at the Householders’ Union, helping people who couldn’t even vote. She spoke to certain cloud personages, and to friends in certain groups around town. It would be an experiment. Similar campaigns had worked before.
Meanwhile autumn in New York played out in ways that helped her. The Householders’ Union’s wildcat noncompliance strike was famous and going strong; not paying rents and mortgages and calling that a political act was proving to be very popular. Markets were holding on by the skin of their teeth, loudly proclaiming everything was fine, but people now spoke of rent using the economists’ definition of the word, as any taking of money with no productive economic work created. Taking a cut, corruption, rent-seeking, these were suddenly used as synonyms. The householders’ strike even looked like a logical response to the bashing of the city by Mother Nature and the clueless intransigence of the absent rich in their empty uptown towers. Strike, therefore! and watch the house of cards fall. Everything that happened seemed to play to her campaign message. The plutocracy hid offshore behind its algorithms, the private security mercenaries continued to play Snidely Whiplash to the NYPD’s Dudley Do-Right. The National Guard stood there in Morningside Heights and tried to have it both ways. Everyone kept playing their parts as if things hadn’t changed, as she never lost an opportunity to point out. Maybe she too was playing her part, but she had been dealt a great hand this time, it seemed to her. And if not, they would get what they deserved, all of them.
“I don’t care!” she kept saying. “Vote for me if you want, and if not, fine. It would save me an enormous hassle to lose this. I’m only doing it because someone has to, some poor public-service bureaucrat schmuck, I can’t believe it’s me but I got talked into it. I’m sorry I’m such a sucker, but my mom read books to me and I guess that did it. I believed the stories. I still do. And I’m a hard worker, having nothing better to do with my time. So vote for me, so I don’t feel like more of an idiot than I already do.”
Her poll numbers trended upward, and this gave her the confidence to start speaking more explicitly about the left wing of the Democratic Party, a burgeoning national movement, and how they intended to usurp the business chickenshits among them once and for all, and see if government could go back to being the people’s company. “Look, finance is blowing up again, another of their gambling bubbles has popped and they are right now going to Congress demanding another taxpayer bailout like they always do. Give us all the money we blew, they’re saying, or we’ll blow up the world. They hope to get paid again before November, when a new Congress might do something different. Which we will, if you elect enough of us Rad Dems. We’ll act in congress in Congress, there’s candidates like me everywhere, and this time we’ll save the economy for us, not for the rich. That’s what’s scaring them now, the fact that a real plan has reared its ugly head, and it’s called this: nationalize the banks. Make that whole giant leech on the real economy into a credit union, and squeeze all that blood money we’ve lost back into us.”
She stopped herself before the image of squeezing a leech to get your blood back into you got too vivid. She could definitely get creative in a bad way when she was on a roll. Have a glass of wine, close her eyes and let it rip. Too angry to care anymore. And her numbers were trending up, so it seemed to be working, which made her even more creative. This was how it was going to work, if it was going to work at all. She even started attending campaign events. But a lot of it was just her talking to her wrist and broadcasting it to whoever. Talking to the city like a crazy person on a soapbox in the park. Dangerous, sure. But so was caution. And because of the Householders’ Union, she had standing.
Also Amelia put out a photo of herself and a leopard under the banner ALL THE GREAT MAMMALS ARE VOTING FOR CHARLOTTE. Leopard sitting on its haunches like a dog, Amelia standing right next to it, both of them unclothed and unrepentantly beautiful. Out on some Africa plain backed by a turquoise sky. Same calm look from both as they stared into the camera. “Okay,” Charlotte said. “I love you.”
Meanwhile, in her real job, in the real world, the union had shifted its focus from immigrants to refugees, or whatever you might call the quarter or so of the city’s residents now needing help. They ranged from legal citizens of the intertidal to undocumented squatters who had never been on anyone’s radar up to this point, but whatever their legal status, they had been rendered homeless by the storm and were now occupying Central Park, or parts of uptown, or any semisubmerged dwelling that hadn’t completely melted. The rough guess was that there were about a million of them, maybe two, and quite a large percentage of those were hoping to survive this incident without actually going above the radar and getting entered into the city’s systems, or even counted. This was a huge problem for the bureaucracy charged with keeping the refugees alive and free of disease.
On the other hand, one development helping the city’s effort was that the usual influx of immigrants from elsewhere appeared to be sharply down. It made sense; people didn’t usually make great efforts to smuggle themselves into a disaster area. Those who did often had bad intentions, so now it felt morally defensible to deny entry to anyone newly trying to come to the city. A system almost Chinese in its style was spontaneously generating in the mayor’s office to deal with residency permits, and it was ugly, and probably unconstitutional, but for the moment a small help. They already had enough people with problems, the city was saying. Come back later. Go away now.
Of course there were still some coming in under the radar, as always. Some of these no doubt were criminals hoping to predate on refugees, and police were doing what they could to maintain order, even as they were also struggling to exert control over the private security armies working all over the island and harbor. That struggle was veering right to the edge of a little civil war. When the National Guard joined the NYPD in this struggle it was a big help, a big moment. Charlotte paused to wonder what it meant when a police state was aspirational, a staving off of a worse fate, but then she went back to work. Every day there was more to do.
What this meant for Charlotte was a constant stream of clients beseeching help to find housing, as their old accommodations had been damaged or wrecked. Housing relocation; this was w
hat she had done before the storm, so in a way it was just life as usual, amped a thousandfold. Life as emergency: it wasn’t her style, or maybe it was, but it couldn’t be maintained at this pace; she had already been maxed out before. So now there was nothing for it but to bear down and take life minute by minute, day after day. Do what she could with what she had at that moment. The days flew by.
With infrastructure and housing stock as thrashed as it was, many city departments were coming to the HU to get help in organizing the refugee efforts. This gave Charlotte some leverage within the city system and also provided an indirect way to critique the mayor and her people. Many city bureaucrats were now working around the mayor’s office to get to people who would really help them. Charlotte was one node in that alternate system, and without criticizing the mayor outright, she was happy to see a kind of dual power alternative networking below the level of the mayor’s office, which was still focusing most of its efforts on burnishing the mayor’s image, as always. Aside from that ceaseless effort her whole team was useless, and people started telling them so, or ignoring them altogether. And word of this got around.
“Who cares what the figurehead on the ship looks like when there’s leaks under the waterline?” Charlotte said in one of her wrist messages to the public. “Just speaking for myself, as a candidate for the congressional office that the mayor hopes to fill with one of her useless flunkies.”
Back at the Met, late every evening, she would scavenge a meal and put her feet up somewhere in the crowds of the dining hall. More satisfying than her daily grind, or the campaign hammer-and-tongs, was working with Franklin Garr on his redevelopment project. At this point it had contracted down to eight blocks in Chelsea, as a kind of pilot project. Franklin’s investment group (which included the Met gold gang) had secured provisional property rights, as good as could be gotten for the intertidal, plus demolition permits, building permits, and the funding to build. The funding was a combination of their monetized gold, federal and nonprofit grants, angel investors, venture capital, and ordinary loans, achieved before the paralysis of the liquidity crisis and credit crunch, which was growing worse by the day. A construction team had been assembled, he said; this was no easy feat, given how busy contractors were now. Workers in the building trades from Boston to Atlanta were streaming in to New York to reconstruct the city, but there still weren’t enough of them, so the main coup for Franklin had been the assembling of the construction team itself. “How did you get them to agree to do it?” she asked him.