“Oh my God!” Quickly Stefan helped him over the rounded side of the boat, then hauled up the bell while Roberto started pulling himself out of the wetsuit. “You really did? It went off for gold?”
“It definitely did. It went really fast, really fast. I shouted up the air hose to tell you, couldn’t you hear?”
“No. I don’t think air hoses transmit voices very far.”
Roberto laughed. “I was screaming atcha. It was great. I marked the spot with the spray can, I don’t know if that will work, but we’ve got the buoy there too, and the GPS. Mr. Hexter is going to freak.”
Freed of the wetsuit, standing in the wind in his wet shorts, he shut his eyes and Stefan sprayed him with a water bottle liberally dosed with bleach, and then Roberto toweled off his face. The harbor’s water was often nasty and could give you a rash, or worse. When Roberto was dried and dressed, he helped Stefan haul the diving bell onto the bow, and then they cast off from their underwater buoy and began to motor downstream, chattering all the while.
“We’re going to run out of battery,” Stefan said. Luckily the ebb tide would help them get downstream. “Hope we don’t float right out the Narrows.”
“Whatever,” Roberto said. Although floating out the Narrows would be bad. Their battery was a piece of crap, though better than the previous one. Roberto looked around the East River to check for traffic: crowded, as usual. If they were caught drifting in a traffic lane they could get arrested and their boat impounded. The water police and other people in authority would find out they had no adults responsible for them—no papers—nothing. The various people around Madison Square whom they associated with were not fully aware of their situation, at least not formally, and they might not appreciate being asked for help if Stefan and Roberto were to name them as responsible parties. No, they had to avoid getting stopped.
“If we can row over to the city we can find a plug-in and recharge.”
“Maybe.”
“And hey, we found it!”
Stefan nodded. He met Roberto’s eye and grinned. They hooted, slapped hands. They rowed to their first underwater buoy and tied the diving bell’s rope to it and let it down sideways, without any air trapped under it. It would wait down there for their next visit.
Then they drifted south to where Hell Gate became the East River. Stefan spotted a break in the river traffic, gunned their motor, and made as quick a crossing of the traffic lanes as he could, burning most of the rest of their battery’s juice. No police drones seemed to be hovering over them. The dragonback of superscrapers studding Washington Heights had a million windows facing them, but no one would be looking. Surveillance cameras of various kinds would have recorded their crossing, but they weren’t any different from any other craft on the water. No, the main problem now was simply getting home on a hard ebb tide.
“So we found it,” Stefan said. “The HMS Hussar. Incredible.”
“Totally in-fucking-credible.”
“How deep do you think it is under the street?”
“I don’t know, but the detector was beeping like crazy!”
“Still, it must be down there quite a ways.”
“Yeah I know. We’ll need a pick and a shovel, for sure. We can take turns digging. It could be ten feet deep, maybe more.”
“Ten feet is a lot.”
“I know, but we can do it. We’ll just keep digging.”
“That’s right.”
Then their motor lost all power. Immediately they got their paddles out and started paddling, working together to keep the boat headed toward the shallows of east Manhattan. But the ebb tide was strengthening, carrying them down the East River, which as everyone said was not really a river but rather a tidal race connecting two bays. And now it was racing. Already they were approaching the Queensboro Bridge. The East River got nasty under it when the ebb was strong—a broad muscular rapids, not whitewater exactly, but a hard flashing scoop of a drop, impossible to paddle in.
They rode the flow down, bounced onward. Below that the flow eddied toward the city. “Hey, here’s some kind of a roof reef coming. Let’s see if we can catch it with our paddles and take a rest.”
They tried poking the top of some sunken building, but with the ebb running so hard their paddles only briefly scraped the top of it, and then they were sideways to the current, trying to row around to keep the bow upstream. It wasn’t easy. And the current was still strengthening.
This had happened to them before when they were eight or nine, one of their first misadventures on the water. A trauma in fact, well remembered. Now they paddled desperately, coordinating their strokes as best they could. Roberto was a little faster under conditions like this.
“Together,” Stefan reminded him.
“Go faster!”
“Pull through better.”
Nothing worked. They spun like a coracle as the current got stronger. For a while it looked like they might be able to pop into one of the last canals before passing the end of Manhattan, but the current was just too strong: they missed it.
Now it was a matter of hoping they could run aground on Governors Island and wait out the tide. There was a salvage landfill there that they had enjoyed scavenging in from time to time, but staying there through a tide was a bit of a grim prospect, they would end up cold and starving. Actually it wasn’t even certain they could angle over to it. Again they paddled hard, trying to do that.
Then, even though they were out of all the traffic lanes, a little motor hydrofoil came flying downstream right at them. It didn’t veer, it didn’t slow down, it was going to run them over. Possibly it was high enough off the water that it would pass right over them, but then again its foils extended down like scythes, perfectly capable of slicing them in half, not just their boat but their persons.
“Hey!” they shouted, pulling harder than ever. It wasn’t going to work. They weren’t going to be able to get out of its way, it even seemed to be turning in just the curve that would intercept them and run them down. Stephan stood and stuck his paddle directly up in the air and screamed.
Just as it was about to hit them, the hydrofoil abruptly turned to the side and dropped off its foils into the water, with a huge splash that drenched them utterly, and swamped their boat too.
Even with their cockpit completely full the boat’s rubber tube sides were so big it would not sink, but now it lay very low in the water and would be nearly impossible to paddle. They would have to bail it out first to get anywhere.
“Hey!” Roberto shouted furiously at the zoomer. “You almost killed us!”
“You swamped us,” Stefan shouted in turn, pointing down. They were both standing knee deep in their cockpit, soaked and getting cold fast. “Help!”
“What the hell are you doing out here?” the pilot of the zoomer said sharply. Possibly he was angry that they had scared him.
“We ran out of battery power!” Roberto said. “We were paddling. We weren’t in any shipping lanes. What are you doing out here?”
The man shrugged, saw they would not founder, and sat down as if to push his throttle forward again.
“Hey, give us a tow!” Roberto shouted furiously.
The man acted as if he hadn’t heard them.
“Hey don’t you live at the Met on Madison Square?” Stefan called suddenly.
Now the man looked back at them. Clearly he had been about to leave them out here, and now he couldn’t, because they would report him. As if they couldn’t have just remembered his boat’s number, which was right there over them, A6492, but whatever, he was now heaving a deep sigh, then rooting around in his own cockpit. Eventually he threw a rope’s end down to them.
“Come on, tie off on your bow cleat. I’ll tow you home.”
“Thanks, mister,” Roberto said. “Since you almost killed us, we’ll call it even.”
“Give me a break, kid. You shouldn’t be out here, I bet your parents don’t know you’re out here.”
“That’s why we’ll
call it even,” Roberto said. “You run us over, we’re freezing our asses off, you give us a tow, we don’t tell the cops you were speeding in the harbor, Mr. A6492.”
“Deal,” the man said. “Deal at par.”
PART TWO
EXPERT OVERCONFIDENCE
Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.
Overall, the transfer of risk from the banking sector to nonbanking sectors, including the household sector, appears to have enhanced the resiliency and stability of the financial system—mainly by widely dispersing financial risks, including throughout the household sector. In case of widespread failure of the household sector to manage complex investment risks, or if households suffer severe losses across the board due to sustained market downturns, there could be a political backlash demanding government support as an “insurer of last resort.” There could also be a demand for the re-regulation of the financial industry. Thus, the legal and reputation risks facing the financial services industry would increase.
—International Monetary Fund, 2002 clueless? prescient? both?
a) Franklin
So I nearly killed these two little squeakers who were out fucking around in a rubber motor dinghy on the East River, just south of the Battery. They were maybe eight or twelve years old, hard to tell because they had the runtish look of kids underfed in their toddler years, like those tribes they thought were pygmies until they fed them properly in toddlerhood and turned out they were taller than the Dutch. These kids had not been included in that experiment. They could barely reach the water with their paddles and the ebb was running full tilt; they were basically drifting out to sea. So they were lucky I almost ran them down, alarming though it was; there’s a narrow blind spot straight ahead when I’m zooming in the zoomer, but it only extends fifty meters or so, so I don’t know how I missed seeing them. Distracted, I guess, as I often am. Ultimately it was no harm no foul, or little harm little foul, as I had to haul them back into the city, because they knew where I lived. They were denizens of my neighborhood, unfortunately, a little cagey about where exactly they resided, but they appeared to know the super of my building. So I towed them back, and countered the smaller and browner one’s continuous criticism by informing them I had saved them from death at sea and would tell their responsible parties about it if they didn’t keep quiet. This gave them pause, and we got back to Madison Square in a little pact of mutual assured damage, with both sides to walk without complaint.
However, this was the very Friday I was due to pick up Jojo Bernal dockside at Pier 57, so I had to get up to my room and quick shower-shave-change, so I tied the zoomer off on the dock of the Met’s North building, paid the squeakers to look after it for me, ran to the elevators and then my apartment, made the change, trying for casual but sharp, and got back down and took off toward the west side, exchanging final ritual curses with the littler pipsqueak.
Jojo was standing on the edge of the dock looking up the Hudson, in a crowd of people all reading their wrists. Again, hair gleaming with sunset; regal posture; relaxed; athletic. I felt a little atrial fib and tried to glide up to the dock with an extra bit of grace, although truth to tell, water is so forgiving a medium that it takes something more challenging than a dock approach to show off any style in steering. Still I made a nice approach and touch, and she stepped onboard as neat as could be, her short skirt showing off her thighs and revealing quads like river-smoothed boulders, also a concavity between quad and ham that testified to a lot of leg work.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I managed. Then: “Welcome to the zoomer.”
She laughed. “That’s its name?”
“No. The name it had when I bought it was the Jesus Bug. So I call it the zoomer. Among other names.”
I got us out on the river and headed south. The late sun lit her face, and I saw that her eyes were indeed a mélange of different browns, mahogany and teak and a brown almost black, all flecked and rayed and blobbed around the pupils. I said, “When I was a kid we had a cat that our family just called the cat, and that seems to have become a habit. I like nicknames or what-have-yous.”
“What-have-yous indeed. So you call this the zoomer, and also?”
“Oh, well. The skimmer, the bug, the buggy, the buggette. Like that.”
“Diminutives.”
“Yes, I like those. Like the zoomer can be the zoominski. Or like Joanna can be Jojo.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That was my sister who did that. She’s like you, she does that.”
“Do you prefer Joanna?”
“No, I’m easy. My friends call me Jojo, but people at work call me Joanna, and I like that. It’s a way of saying I’m a pro, or something.”
“I can see that.”
“What about you? Isn’t there anyone who shortens Franklin to Frank? I would think that would be a natural.”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“I guess I think there are enough Franks already. And my mom was very insistent about it too. That impressed me. And I liked Ben Franklin.”
“A penny saved is a penny earned.”
I had to laugh. “Not the Franklin saying I quote the most. Not my operating principle.”
“No? Highly leveraged, are we?”
“No more so than anyone else. In fact I need to find out some new investments, I’m kind of clogged up.” But this sounded like bragging, so I added, “Not that that can’t change in a minute, of course.”
“So you are leveraged.”
“Well everyone’s leveraged, right? More loans than assets?”
“If you’re doing it right,” she said, looking thoughtful.
“So you might as well take some risks?” I suggested, wondering what she was thinking about.
“Or at least some options,” she said, then shook her head as if wanting to change the subject.
“Shall we zoom a little?” I asked. “When we get clear of traffic?”
“I’d love to. It looks like magic when you see one of these lift off. How does it work again?”
I explained the adjustable foils that caused the zoominski to plane up once you got to a certain speed; this was always easy to do with anyone who had ever stuck a hand out the window of a moving car and tilted it in the wind and felt it shoving their whole arm up or down. She nodded at that, and I watched the sunset light her face, and I began to feel happy, because she looked happy. We were out on the river and she was enjoying herself. She liked to feel the wind on her face. My chest filled with some kind of fearful joy, and I thought: I like this woman. It scared me a little.
I said, “What do you want to do for dinner? We can cut over to Dumbo, there’s a place there with a roof patio looking at the city, or I can anchor us to a buoy on Governors Island and grill you some steaks, I’ve got everything we need here with us.”
“Let’s do that,” she said. “If you don’t mind cooking?”
“I enjoy it,” I said.
“So can we zoom there?”
“Oh yeah.”
We zoomed. I kept one eye ahead to make sure nothing snuck into the blind spot. The other eye I kept on her, watching her feel the wind with her face as she took in the view.
“You like zooming,” I said.
“How could I not? It’s kind of surreal, because most of the time I’m on the water I’m sailing, or just taking the vapos, and this isn’t anything like either of those.”
“You sail?”
“Yes, there’s a group of us share a little catamaran over at Skyline Marina.”
“Cats are the zoomers of sailboats. In fact some of them have foils.”
“I know. Ours isn’t one of those, but it is great. I love it. We’ll have to go out in it sometime.”
“I’d enjoy that,” I said sincerely. “I could be your ballast, on the upwind hull like they do.”
“Yes. The outrider.”
Around the tip of Battery Park I droppe
d the bug back on the water and we hummed in a leisurely way over to the Governors Island reef, where a little flotilla of boats was tied off on buoys. The various buildings on the sunken part of the island had been removed to make sure they didn’t turn into hull-rippers at low tide, and after the demolition a great number of oyster beds and fish pens had been laid down, plus the anchors for a little open-water marina of sorts, a tie-off for overnights or evening trysts like this. I had once saved a guy from dying in the third tranche of a bad intertidal mortgage bond, and he had repaid me with the right to tie to his buoy here. One intertidal for another.
So we hummed up to it and Jojo tied off at the bow, looking glorious as she did so. The bug swung around on the ebb tide and we were looking at the Battery Park end of Manhattan, majestic in the pynchonpoetry of twilight on the water. The other boats bobbed at anchor, all empty, a ghost fleet. I liked the place and had taken dates out there before, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about as this one plopped down beside me on the cushioned seat of the bug’s cockpit.
“Okay, dinner,” I said, and opened the dwarfish door to the bug’s little cabin, very nice but just barely head high. I’d stocked the refrigerator, and now I got a bottle of zinfandel from the rack next to it and uncorked it and passed it out to her along with a couple of glasses, then took my boat barbecue out of its cabinet and lifted it up to its brackets on the stern thwart. Stack mini charcoal briquettes in it, deploy a lighter like a long-barreled gun, and all of a sudden we had a little fire, great look, classic smell, all smartly out over the water to avoid the kind of mishap that has sent many a pleasure boat flaming to the bottom.
“I love these,” she said, and again my heart bounced. I knocked the half-burned briquettes around into a flatness, with one corner of the grill left cooler. I oiled the grill and dropped it in position, and then as it was heating up I ducked in the cabin and put potatoes into the microwave, got the plate of filet mignon medallions out of the fridge, took them out into the dusk and put the meat on the grill, where it sizzled nicely. Jojo’s limbs glowed in the dark. As I moved back and forth across the cockpit cooking, she watched me with an amused expression that I couldn’t read. I never can, maybe no one ever can, but amused is better than bored, that I knew, and the knowledge made me a little goofy. She seemed happy to go along with that.