“You stayed up here alone for seven years?” Hexter said.
Amelia nodded, feeling herself blush.
“Why?” Roberto asked.
She shrugged and blushed more. “I was never really sure. I wanted to get away. I guess I didn’t really like people. Some bad things had happened, and I just wanted to get away. So I did, and then I started doing the assisted migration stuff, and I found I could talk to people from up here, in ways that made them seem okay. I got used to talking to people again from doing it up here in the cloud, and then one time I came through New York, and the mooring at the Met was available, and I met with Vlade, up in the cupola, and I liked him. I felt comfortable around him. So then it went on from there.”
The guys contemplated this story.
“Does Vlade know the part he played in reeling you in?” Mr. Hexter asked.
“No, I don’t think so. He knows we’re friends. But people—I don’t know. They think I’m more normal than I really am. They don’t really see me.”
“We see you,” Roberto declared.
“Yes, you do.”
They talked about animals she had seen. She had a list somewhere, she said, but she didn’t want to get into that. “Let’s look for new ones now.”
They floated over the city. It was in every direction a great sheet of water, with some giant sticklebacked sea serpents eeling around the bay: Manhattan, Hoboken, Brooklyn Heights, Staten Island. Land lay in the distance everywhere, green and flat, except to the south, where the Atlantic gleamed like a dull old mirror.
“Look,” the old man said as he peered through one of the telescopes. “I think I see a pod of porpoises. Or could they be orcas, do you think?”
“I don’t think orcas come in the harbor,” Amelia said.
“But they look so big!”
“They do, don’t they. But we’re pretty low. Maybe they’re river dolphins, I know some were introduced here from China to try to keep them from going extinct.”
Cetacean backs in the water, smooth and supple, hard to figure because of their black-and-white striping. About twenty of them, rising to the surface and blowing like whales.
“Mr. Hexter, I think they’re Melville’s whales! They’ve come to get him!”
“Good idea,” Hexter said, smiling.
As they hummed north over the Hudson they could see that the waterline of the Jersey shore was still a bit icy.
“Shores like that are where we’ll have the best chance to see beaver or muskrat homes,” Hexter said, peering through his telescope. “Scan the shore there.”
The boys did that for a while, then looked through the telescopes down at the city. The docks were mostly back, centipeding Manhattan’s shores. The uptown towers flared emerald, lemon, turquoise, indigo. “Where’s your marsh?” Amelia asked.
“There by that skinny tall building,” Roberto said.
“Oh that skinny tall building!”
“Sorry. The purple one. Right east of it. It used to be a creek there, called Mother David’s Valley. It should make a good salt marsh, with maybe a couple of Mr. Garr’s raft buildings on it to study it and take care of it.”
“I’m glad you’re doing that. But don’t you have to be an adult to own property?”
“I don’t know. Anyway we’re a holding company.”
“I thought you were an institute,” Mr. Hexter said.
“You’re in it too! That’s right. The Institute for Manhattan Animal Studies.”
“I thought it was the Institute of Stefan and Roberto,” Hexter said.
“That’s just what you call it. I wanted to call it the Institute for Homeless Animals, but I got outvoted.”
“That’s because animals always have homes,” Stefan explained again.
“So is it true that these towers are mostly occupied now?” Amelia asked, diverting them from what looked to be an ongoing dispute.
“I heard that they are,” Mr. Hexter said. “The new absentee tax is pretty persuasive. Between that and the capital assets taxes, they’re either being occupied or sold to people who will occupy them. And I think a new city law requires low-income housing in all of them. Even the mayor is jumping on that bandwagon. I read that one floor of the Cloister cluster can be turned into rooms that house six hundred people.”
“How do they add plumbing for that many?”
“That must be all those exterior pipes.”
“They look silly.”
“I like them. There was something dreadful about those towers, their line was too clean. Better to add a little texture. More New York.”
“More sewage!”
“Exactly my point.”
“I like the clean lines,” Amelia said. “New York has always had clean lines.”
From their height, the people crowding the uptown sidewalks and plazas were the size of small ants. Theirs was a plentiful species.
“Can there really be enough apartments for all those people?” Amelia asked.
Hexter shook his head. “A lot of them come in for the day, just like always.”
“But a lot of them must live there too.”
“Sure. Packed in like sardines, as they say. Like clams in a clam bed.”
“I wonder why. I mean, it’s good for the animals that people want to do it, but why? Why do people want it?”
“It’s exciting, right?”
Amelia shook her head. “I can never get it.”
“You still like your blimp.”
“It’s true. You can see why.”
“It’s very nice. Are you headed out soon on another trip?”
“I think so. The Householders’ Union is asking me to make some kind of world tour. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to more trouble.”
“Angry landlords taking potshots at you?”
“Well yeah! I’m getting a lot of hate mail. I don’t like it. I wish I’d just stuck to animals, sometimes. It was easier then. I mean there was hate mail then too, but mostly from people who don’t like assisted migration, or animals, so I just ignored them. But now it’s people who, I don’t know.”
“It’s just landlords and their lackeys,” Hexter said. “Ignore them too. You’re doing great. You’re making a difference.”
Amelia asked Frans to head south just offshore from Manhattan, and they regarded the city in silence as they turned and floated by it.
Mr. Hexter pointed down at Morningside Heights. “It’s strange,” he said. “Down there is where the big riot last year happened, right? The battle for the towers. But it was also the crux of the battle for New York, during the Revolutionary War. The United States could have died before it was born, right down there, if it weren’t for that one.”
“What happened?” Roberto asked.
“It was early in the revolution. Washington’s army was being chased all over the bay by the British, who had lots of Hessian mercenaries in about a hundred warships. The Americans were nothing but farmers with fowling guns and rowboats. So wherever the British landed, the Americans had to run away. First from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Then when the Brits followed them to Brooklyn, the whole American army rowed across the East River one night in a fog. But then they were down in the Battery, where the town was in those days, and the British crossed the East River at midtown. They could have marched across the island and cut the Americans off and forced them to surrender, but their general Howe was extremely slow. He was so slow that people have wondered if he was trying to lose, so the Tories would be embarrassed back in Parliament, because he was a Whig. Anyway the Americans took advantage of this syrup-head and snuck up Broadway one night, past the Brits who were camped around the UN building, and they reconvened up here at the north end of the island.”
“They snuck up Broadway?”
“It was just a country lane. They even lost it and snuck through the woods. It was a dark night and it was all forest then. So anyway the Americans made it up to here and then the British followed them north. This time they had the A
mericans caught at the north end of the island, and they marched up here to crush them, but as they were attacking their buglers blew a fox hunting call, and that made some of the Americans mad. A group of riflemen from Marblehead Massachusetts stood their ground right down there, and started to shoot back. It was first time Americans had stood up to the Brits since Bunker Hill, and they fought them to a draw during the course of a long and bloody day. Right down there!”
“Cool,” Roberto said. “So then they won?”
“No, they lost! I mean they were still going to get crushed, it was just a holding action for a day. So they slipped off the island again. They rowed over to Jersey and got away, and the British held Manhattan for the rest of the war. Remember the Headquarters map, remember the Hussar? All that happened after this battle we lost.”
“So what the hell?” Roberto said. “How did we win the revolution if we kept losing all the battles and running away?”
“That was the story of the war,” Mr. Hexter said. “The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them again somewhere else. There were a couple American victories along the way, but mostly not. Mostly the British won, but even so they eventually wore down, and in the end the Americans surrounded them and kicked them out. The Brits were going to run out of food, so they left.”
He stared down at Morningside Heights, thinking it over. “I wonder if it’s always like that, you know? This battle for the towers, the fight we’re having now over money. All this that we’re seeing. You just keep losing until you win.”
“I don’t get it,” said Roberto.
“Me neither,” Mr. Hexter admitted. “I guess the idea is that since you’re the ones who live here, you just wear them down. Something like that. It’s like a Pyrrhic victory in reverse. I guess you could call it a Pyrrhic defeat. I never thought about the losers of a Pyrrhic victory before. I mean those people are really the winners, right? They lose, then they say to each other, Hey we just lost a Pyrrhic victory! Congratulations!”
Roberto supposed it might be better just to win outright.
Then they were past the Lincoln Towers, and floating over the big roofs of the Javits Center, and finally over the intertidal, where the new platform rafts were now floating in place, each the size of a city block. A stretch of tiny black gondolas tied to a line of tall poles seemed to suggest that the westernmost platform was to serve as a kind of San Marco Square, facing the Hudson. All the blocks were clearly going to have farms on their roofs. Very New York, Mr. Hexter remarked, these little farms. He had once had a friend who gardened in her apartment using thimbles and toothpaste tube caps for pots, toothpicks for tools, an eyedropper for watering. She had grown individual blades of grass.
“Isn’t that where you used to live?” Amelia inquired, pointing down.
“Yes, right there. Thirty-first and Seventh, see it? It’s all gone now. It was right in the middle of this redevelopment.”
“So do you want to move back there when they’ve fixed it up?”
“Oh no. That was just where I washed up when I lost my place before. It wasn’t very nice. In fact it was a shithole. If it weren’t for these boys I would have died there. So now I’ll go wherever they go!” He laughed at them. “You’re always stuck with the people you save. You might as well learn that one now. I won’t burden you too long anyway, and you’ll have learned the lesson.”
“We like having you around,” Stefan ventured.
“What about you guys?” Amelia asked. “Will you move up to your salt marsh?”
“Don’t know,” Roberto said uneasily. “Charlotte wants us to house-sit her room while she’s in Washington. But it’s too small for two people, and she’ll be back a lot, so we don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe get on the list for a different room at the Met. I don’t want to move uptown. And I don’t want to be off the water.”
“Me neither,” Stefan said.
“Well good,” Amelia said. “We’ll all be neighbors for a while more. So hey, do you guys want to go with me on a trip? Around the world in eighty days?”
Stefan and Roberto and Mr. Hexter looked at each other.
“Yes,” they said.
The city is a built dream, a vision incarnated. What makes it grow is its image of itself.
—Peter Conrad
The place where all the aspirations of the world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge.
—H. L. Mencken
But why say more?
—Herman Melville
g) the citizen
Popped bubble, liquidity freeze, credit crunch, big finance going down like the KT asteroid, making desperate appeals for a government bailout: it was like the revival of some bad old Broadway musical. Book goes like this: finance says to government, Pay us or the economy dies. Congress, assuming its paymasters on Wall Street know what they’re talking about, because it concerns the incomprehensible mysteries of finance, agrees to fork it over. Standard practice, precedent well established, and since government debt is already gigantic, just a case of more. Of course it means no new or old public programs will be affordable, and will require that austerity measures be tightened yet further, which will hamstring government completely, but this is just a matter of balancing the nation’s checkbook and simple common sense.
Same as always! But a new Congress arrived in January 2143, riding a wave of feeling that this crash should be different. Plans were in the air, hot words were in the air. Thus in February 2143, Federal Reserve chair Lawrence Jackman and the secretary of the treasury, both of course veterans of Wall Street, met with the big banks and investment firms, all massively overleveraged, all crashing, and they outlined a bailout offer amounting to four trillion dollars, to be given on condition that the recipients issue shares to the Treasury equivalent in value to whatever aid they accepted. The rescues being necessarily so large, Treasury would then become their majority shareholder and take over accordingly. Earlier shareholders would be given haircuts; debt holders would become equity holders. Depositors would be protected in full. Future profits would go to the U.S. Treasury in proportion to the shares it held. If at some point the recipients of aid wanted to buy back Treasury’s shares, the deals could be reevaluated.
In other words, as a condition of bailout: nationalization.
Oh, the tortured shrieks of outraged dismay. Goldman Sachs refused the deal; Treasury promptly declared it insolvent and arranged a last-minute fire sale of it to Bank of America, just as it had arranged the sale of Merrill Lynch a century before. After that, Treasury and the Fed offered any other company refusing their help good luck in their bankruptcy proceedings.
A lot of capital flight might have been occurring at this point, but the central banks of the European Union, Japan, Indonesia, India, and Brazil were also making salvation-by-nationalization offers to their own distressed finance industries. It wasn’t clear that being nationalized by any of these other countries would be a better deal for fleeing capital—if there was even any capital left to flee, given the tendency of “paper to vapor” in such moments of panic. Meanwhile China’s central bank officials politely observed that state intervention in private finance was often quite useful. They had achieved mostly good results with it over the last three or four thousand years, and they suggested that possibly state control of the economy was better than the reverse situation. March would see in the Year of the Rabbit, and rabbits of course are very productive!
Finally Citibank took the deal offered by Treasury and Fed, and in rapid order all the other banks and investment firms also took the deal. Finance was now for the most part a privately operated public utility.
Encouraged by this victory of state over finance, Congress became a little giddy and in short order passed a so-called Piketty tax, a progressive tax levied not just on incomes but on capital assets. Asset tax
levels ranged from zero for assets less than ten million dollars to twenty percent on assets of one billion or more. To prevent capital from fleeing to tax havens, a capital flight penalty was also made law, with a top rate set at the famous Eisenhower-era ninety-one percent. Capital flight stopped, the law held, and nation-states everywhere felt even more empowered. Among the changes they quickly enacted at the WTO were tight currency controls, increased labor support, and environmental protections. The neoliberal global order was thus overturned right in its own wheelhouse.
These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded. They were only the most prominent of many good ideas to be proposed, and please feel free to add your own favorites, as certainly everyone else did in this moment of we-the-peopleism. And as all this political enthusiasm and success caused a sharp rise in consumer confidence indexes, now a major influence on all market behavior, ironically enough, bull markets appeared all over the planet. This was intensely reassuring to a certain crowd, and given everything else that was happening, it was a group definitely in need of reassurance. That making people secure and prosperous would be a good thing for the economy was a really pleasant surprise to them. Who knew?
Note that this flurry of social and legal change did not happen because of Representative Charlotte Armstrong of the Twelfth District of the State of New York, also known as “Red Charlotte,” admirable woman and congressperson though she was. Nor was it because of her ex, Lawrence Jackman, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank during the months of the crisis, nor because of the president herself, much praised and excoriated though she was for her course of bold and persistent experimentation in the pursuit of happiness during a time of crisis. Nor was it due to any other single individual. Remember: ease of representation. It’s always more than what you see, bigger than what you know.