She got home just in time to change and eat a bite in the dining room before the weekly executive board meeting. Bit of a busman’s holiday, this board. From city to building: the difference in scale made for somewhat different problems, but not that different. Well, she had volunteered for the board at a time when they were being sued and needed help. And even though it resembled her day job, it was interesting. As was her job, most of the time. She just needed some blood sugar and it would all be fine.
Actually a bit difficult to get that, as the food trays were almost empty when she got there. She had to scrounge scraps from the corners of trays and the bottoms of bowls, might as well just put her face in the salad bowl and slurp like a dog, as those two boys ahead of her in line were doing. Damn, they were licking the bowls clean! Best be on time to dinner, as everyone knew; a long line formed in the half hour before opening. Residents were always present and accounted for when it came time for the important stuff, meaning no one would be at the executive board meeting. They really should try to whittle their population down to full capacity, she had made mistakes in that regard. A tendency to take people in was a professional habit but a mistake when performed out of context. Too many mouths to feed, dining hall jammed, very loud, people sitting on the floor against the walls with trays on their laps, glasses on the floor beside them. She did that herself, getting down awkwardly, wearily, knowing it was going to be tough to stand back up. One reason she wore pants in the evenings.
Then up to the thirtieth floor, where they kept a room from which to run the building. She was only a little late, which would have been fine if she weren’t the chair again. The others were sitting around talking about the two missing men. She sat and they all looked at her.
“What?” she said.
“We’re thinking that we shouldn’t let anyone live on the farm floors anymore,” Dana told her. The others were looking at her as if she was going to object, probably because she had argued to let the two men live there.
“Because?” she said, mostly to play to their expectations.
“There isn’t the security on the farm that there is in a room, as we saw,” said Mariolino. He was board secretary this year.
Charlotte shrugged. “I have no problem with putting the farm out-of- bounds. It was just a stopgap measure.”
The others were relieved to hear her say this. There were five of them there now that Alexandra had arrived, and they ran down the items listed on the schedule. Complaint about noise, priority in the boathouse, desire for a bigger freight elevator (Vlade rolling his eyes at this, mentioning size of elevator shaft, wondering if a taller elevator car would satisfy the complainer), dispute over the dues/work credit formula as applied to someone who thought cleaning the hallway on their floor was work deserving of a work credit. Relations with the LMMAS, pronounced “lemmas” or “lame ass,” depending on mood, the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society, which was the biggest of many downtown cooperative ventures and associations, a kind of umbrella for all the rest of the organizations in the drowned zone. Exchange rates between the dollar and the Lame Ass blocknecklace currency were so divergent between official and unofficial rates that LMMAS had proposed they do away with the official rate and just let it float. Had to try to keep the wet currency as strong as possible, if it was to succeed at all. And they needed it. So: currency policy. Just another building issue.
On it went like that, as they ran their little city-state. Apartment 428 was empty because of the death of Margaret Baker, no heirs who wanted to move in, they lived in Denver and wanted to sell. Marge’s contract with the co-op was rock solid, Charlotte knew this because she had helped write it, and so the Denver family was going to have to sell to the co-op for one hundred percent of Marge’s buy-in. Very fair. The co-op had a reserve fund dedicated to reacquisitions, so it seemed like it would be okay.
But then Dana said, “If we bought it from them and then rented it to nonmembers, we could make the buyout price in about ten months and then go on raking it in from there.”
“Ten months?” Charlotte asked.
Alexandra and the others nodded. Rents in lower Manhattan were shooting up. People were enjoying the SuperVenice, and that was causing housing prices to rise. Intertidal aeration, they said it was called.
“Aeration,” Charlotte said in the way Vlade would say mildew. “Don’t they just mean inflation, or speculation? I thought the Second Pulse had spared us all that.”
Not forever, she was told. Canal life was looking exciting. Hassles of daily life not evident to tourists, or to people so rich they could buy their way out of the hassles.
“One of the rich people who wants to buy in here is Amelia Black,” Vlade mentioned. “Her room and a parking share on the blimp mast. She said it would be a bit of a stretch for her, which surprised me, but she said she wanted a place in New York, and she likes it here.”
“Would she work the co-op?” Charlotte asked, feeling skeptical. “Isn’t she away a lot?”
“She said she would work the co-op. I’m sure she’d pitch in, she’s that kind of person.”
“But wouldn’t she be away a lot?”
“Sure, that’s her job. But if we have a member who works the co-op when they’re here, being away a lot is not the worst thing, from my point of view. Less stress on the building, less water-power-sewage. More food left for others.”
Charlotte nodded. Vlade thought the building’s thoughts, and she valued that. “The membership board can work that out with her,” she said.
“Membership sent her to us with a yes recommendation.”
“Okay then. Let her buy in, if they say so.”
“I’ll tell her,” Vlade said.
“Where is she now?”
“The Arctic. She’s going to fly some polar bears to the South Pole.”
“Really?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“I don’t know about this one. She sounds like trouble to me. But the membership committee has spoken.”
They moved on to other business, running down the schedule as fast as they could. All of them had been on the board long enough not to want to prolong a meeting. Vlade wanted his cathodic protection systems replaced on every steel beam in the building, and a new sewage processor to better capture and process their shit into fertilizer for the farm’s soil, and more say on the bacino’s aquaculture board. He also wanted an upgrade in their electrical connection to the local power substation. The building’s photovoltaic paint generated most of the electricity they needed, but there was a lot of back-and-forth electrically between them and the substation, and an upgrade would help. These were the main items on his wish list, he said in conclusion.
The last item on the schedule had been added by Dana at the last minute, he said: there was an offer to buy the building.
“What?” Charlotte said, startled. “Who?”
“We don’t know. They’re going through Morningside Realty and prefer to remain anonymous.”
“But why?” Charlotte exclaimed.
“They don’t say.” Dana looked down at his notes. “Emmerich guessed it’s a company from the Cloister cluster, but that may just be because Morningside has its offices up there. They’re offering us about twice what the building was last assessed at. Four billion dollars. If we took it, we’d all be rich.”
“Fuck that,” Charlotte said.
Silence in the room.
“We probably have to bring it to a vote,” Mariolino said.
Vlade was scowling. “You have to?”
“Let’s research it first,” Charlotte said.
They got up and briefly mingled near the window, mulling things over. Coffee for some, wine for others. Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn’t work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee. “I’m going to go to bed,” she said grumpily.
When she got to her room, which was act
ually just a bed and desk in one of the dorm rooms, separated from the rest of her roommates by soundquilts, she found a message from Gen Octaviasdottir on her screen. She tapped and Gen picked up.
“Hi, it’s Charlotte. What’s up?”
“Getting back to you about those missing persons in the building.”
“Find anything?”
“Not much, but there are some things I can tell you about.”
“Breakfast tomorrow?”
“Sure, let’s.”
Maybe a mistake to put something else on her calendar and in her head right before bedtime, with an Irish coffee in her no less. It was quite possible her brain would ramp back up and begin a spin cycle on this stuff, jazzing wearily through another night of insomniac pseudo-slumber, in and out until the light of dawn relieved her of the pretense of sleep. But in the event she crashed and slept well.
I love all men who dive.
said Herman Melville
h) Stefan and Roberto
The sun rose under a high ceiling of frilly pearl-colored clouds. Autumn in New York. Two boys pulled a small inflatable boat from under the dock floating off the Met’s North building. The weight of the boat’s battery-powered motor depressed it sternward, and the taller of the two boys sat in the bow to counterbalance that. The shorter one handled the tiller and throttle, piloting them through the canals of the city. East into the glare of the sun off the water. Rising tide near its height, the morning air briny with the tang of floating seaweed. They passed the big oyster bed at the Skyline Marina and emerged into the East River, then hugged the shore and headed north, staying out of the lanes of traffic marked by buoys on the water. By nine they had gotten past Turtle Bay and up to Ninetieth and were ready to cross the East River. Stefan looked up- and downstream; nothing big coming either way. Roberto pushed the throttle forward and their little prop under the stern lifted Stefan a few inches as they surged across the river.
“I wish we had a speedboat, that would be so cool.”
“Meanwhile slow down, I see our bell.”
“Good man.”
Roberto slowed while Stefan put on a long rubber glove. Leaning over, he reached into the water and grabbed a loop of nylon rope and slipped it off their underwater buoy, which was anchored on the shallows that had once been the south end of Ward Island. He pulled up hard. The other end was tied to an eye at the tip of a large cone of clear plastic that was edged on its open end by a ring of iron, which kept that end pointed down. When he had hauled it near the surface they both pulled it up onto the bow, then sat on the fat round sides of the boat, peering into the bell to see if anything had changed. All looked good, and Roberto crawled under the edge of it to stick their new gear to Velcro strips on its inside wall.
“Looking good,” he said as he crawled out from under it. “Let’s get it to Mr. Hexter’s site.”
They hummed up the west shores of Hell Gate and then over the shallows of the south Bronx. After a bit of tacking around and drifting, Stefan, consulting the GPS on their salvaged wristpad, announced they were over the spot they wanted. “Yes!” Roberto cried, and tossed one of their improvised underwater buoys overboard: two cinder blocks tied to a stolen nylon rope, the other end of rope tied to a buoy such that it would stay just under the surface even at low tide. X marks the spot. They tied the boat’s bowline to the line floating up from the buoy and sat there feeling hopeful. The tide would begin falling soon, but for now the river was still. Time to get to work.
Roberto was their diver, because their wetsuit was too small for Stefan to get into. All their gear had been scavenged in variously ambiguous circumstances, so they could not be too particular about anything. When Roberto was all zipped in, gloved and face-masked, they lifted the cone over the side with its open end down, getting it onto the water as flatly as possible, so that as it dropped slowly into the turbid water, they saw that a good amount of air had been trapped under it. The cone was just heavier than the air it had caught, so now it was a diving bell.
Roberto grabbed the end of the air hose and took their flashlight in the other hand, and with a deep breath he slipped over the side of the boat into the water. He swam down and got under the rim of the bell, then rose into the air trapped under the bell. Stefan could just barely make him out. Then he swam under the edge and back up to the surface.
“All good?” Stefan inquired.
“All good. Go ahead and let me down.”
“Okay. I’ll tug on the air hose three times when the oxygen is running out. You have to come up then. I’ll pull the bell up on you if you don’t.”
“I know.”
Roberto dove under the bell again. Stefan let the nylon rope out hand over hand, allowing the bell to gently sink into the river with Roberto under it. They had only tried this a couple of times, and it still felt a little freaky. When the rope went loose Stefan knew the bell was on the bottom, presumably next to or even on the cinder blocks marking their site. Their wristpad’s GPS showed that the boat was still on the right spot. He dialed the knob on their oxygen bottle to low flow, a liter a minute. Pretty soon that air would fill the bell, and he would see bubbles breaking the surface around the boat. The oxygen cylinder was one they had taken from a neighbor of Mr. Hexter’s, an old woman who needed to breathe with one all the time and so had a lot of them around in her room. Stefan had clipped together two sets of her air hoses, making thirty feet of tubing, and Roberto was now seventeen feet under the surface, so all was well in that regard.
Stefan couldn’t see much of Roberto, and even the bell was just a kind of glow in the dark water, lit by Roberto’s flashlight. But Roberto was now standing on an old asphalt surface of what once had been a parking lot, just behind the old riverfront in the south end of the Bronx. With the aid of his light he would be able to see quite well under the bell.
Stefan tugged once on the oxygen tube. All good?
A tug came back. All good.
Down there Roberto would be deploying their metal detector, after detaching it from the inner wall of the bell. This detector was a Golfier Maximus, liberated from the effects of another neighbor of Mr. Hexter’s, a canal diver who had recently died and appeared to have no family. Roberto would use this detector to scan the ancient submerged asphalt and see if it detected anything under Mr. Hexter’s spot.
And indeed, down under the diving bell, Roberto turned on the detector, set it for gold, and jumped when the detector immediately started beeping—his head clonked against the side of the diving bell, and he shouted uselessly up to Stefan. He picked up the end of the air hose and shrieked into it. “We found it! We found it! We found it!” His heart was pounding like crazy.
He moved the detector around the perimeter of the bell. The pinging was fastest near one edge, he thought it might be north. The beeping got faster rather than louder as the detector was moved closer to its target metal; it started loud in the first place. Roberto’s heart rate was accelerating in time with the beeps, and he began to hyperventilate a little, muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” He detached a can of red spray paint they had Velcroed to the inside of the bell and sprayed the wet asphalt under his feet, watched the paint bubble and spread over the pebbly old asphalt. It might not stick very well, but it might. Some of it should stay there for later.
Time passed for Stefan up in the boat. In the slight breeze he was getting a little cold. One of the great things about this hunt was that the spot they were investigating had been a parking lot built on landfill, which meant that for centuries people would not have thought to look there for a sunken ship, nor, if it had occurred to them, would they have had an easy time looking. Not until the Second Pulse had returned this area to a state of nature, if that was the right way to say it, had it become possible again to hunt for a shipwreck here. Which if found could be dug up in secret, under water all the while and no one the wiser. Marine archaeology was cool that way. And so it was that one of the greatest sunken treasures of all time might possibly be loca
ted at last.
But for now it seemed to him that Roberto had been down there a long time. The little oxygen bottle’s gauge was showing that it was nearly empty. Stefan tugged on the oxygen tube three times.
Down below, Roberto saw this but ignored it. He put his cold foot on the tube so it wouldn’t pull out under the edge of the bell. Then he tugged once: all good.
Stefan tugged back three times, harder than before. Low battery power, low oxygen, and the tide was now ebbing, so that he had to begin running the boat against the slap of the flow, gauging the tension in the bell rope against that of the buoy line and the oxygen line. None of them could get too taut, especially not the oxygen line.
He tugged three times again, harder still. Roberto could be hard to convince even when you were talking to him.
“Damn it, I’m pulling you,” Stefan announced loudly down at the bell. Yelled it, really. They had a hand reel screwed to their plywood thwart, and now he looped the bell rope over the reel and began to turn hard on the crank, pulling the bell and therefore Roberto up from the bottom.
Down below Roberto hurried to tack the paint can and metal detector against the inside of the bell before it rose over him. Already the water had rushed under its edge and slapped him up to the knees. Time to take a deep breath and slip under the edge and swim up to the surface, but the tools had to be secured first.
Stefan kept on cranking, knowing this was the only way to get Roberto to give up and surface. When he hit the surface he would start cursing viciously as soon as he could catch his breath, although his voice was too high to make the curses very impressive. Pretty soon Stefan could see the top of the bell, and right after that Roberto burst onto the surface of the water, blowing out air, and then started in, not with curses but with triumphant whoops, “Yes! Yes!” followed by “I found it! We found it! The detector! It went off! We found it!” Then some violent hacking as he swallowed some river water.