And it happens.
The Axiom Group rises on a pile of weaker corps as civilization declines. We survive the transition from currency to hard goods. We sell weapons to the government to fight its own citizens, raking in millions of tons of refined materials, components, and Carbtein, and by the time Old Gov’s outer damage meets its inner rot and the whole ancient edifice collapses, we find ourselves conveniently positioned to replace it.
Who, me? we say with Lucille Ball innocence. Well, if you insist . . .
It’s an oddly quiet moment when it happens. A decade or two earlier, one ill-considered comment from a politician could make the whole world explode, headline news and internet uproar, but on the night the United States winks out of existence, no one is talking about it. Few people even know about it. The internet remains a nationwide error message, killed long ago with the flick of a switch to keep it safe from cyberterrorism. The airwaves are silent but for the local chatter of short-range walkies, and everything else is buried under BABL’s blanket of interference. Even Fed FM seems to be taking the night off, asleep in a sea of static. The only national news being broadcast at 2:48 AM on this particular Tuesday is the garbled spasms of Fed TV, which is trying to tell us something important but still can’t bring itself to speak plainly.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” shouts a wolf in an old black-and-white cartoon, “and I’ll blow your house down!”
A vintage photo of Confederate soldiers. The White House. Pigs herded into pens. Flashes of sickly green static.
A news anchor looks up from his desk, sees the camera, opens his mouth—
A shaky handheld shot of the Pentagon in flames. Sausages on a grill. The anchor again: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we have terrible—”
Blue static. Red static. An army of graffiti-covered tanks rolling into Washington, DC.
“Sorry, we’re having some—”
Helicopter footage of an unfathomably large mob surrounding the burning Pentagon, thousands if not millions of people swarming against its walls.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid—”
The camera falls off its tripod. Screams, loud noises, boots rushing toward the lens.
The screen goes dark. My apartment goes dark. All my lavish furnishings disappear. The screen remains black for five minutes, then the clock strikes 3:00 AM and Old Glory fades in, waving proudly while the music swells and images of delicious food scroll past. The LOTUS Feed has resumed its regular programming.
My walkie beeps. I pick it up.
“It happened,” Mr. Atvist says.
“Are we positioned?”
“We’re the most electable candidate, but it still won’t be easy. A lot of other groups are going to want in.”
I watch colorful images flash randomly across the screen, the Feed now lacking what little curation it ever had. It will veer and roll like a plane with a dead pilot until the station someday loses power.
“We’ve been quiet,” Mr. Atvist says. “We’ve been discreet while we laid our foundation, and that’s good. Soft power has its place. But if we’re going to rebuild this country the way it ought to be, we’re going to have to get hard. Are you ready for that?”
I watch the TV. I don’t answer.
“I asked if you’re ready to get hard, kid. Wake up that secretary of yours if you need a fluffer.”
“What are you planning?” I’m startled by how weakly it comes out. A small, trembling sound that reminds me of a little boy hiding on a rooftop. I tell myself it’s just late. I’m just tired. Exhausted and rubbed raw by a punishing regimen of indulgence. Two company women snore in my bed, the stench of smoke and body fluids mingling into rancid perfume. One of them is my assistant. The other I don’t recognize. They are painkillers that I take to ease my doubt. They affirm my choices with the prize of their bodies, writhing in my big bed in my big apartment where I get to watch the end of America in utmost safety and comfort. This is the top, is it not? How can my path be wrong if it led me to the top?
“Be in the conference room in an hour,” Atvist says. “We’ll raise a toast to America and discuss how to cook its carcass.”
The walkie feels heavy in my hand. I drop it and stare at the flickering madness on the TV. I feel a strange urge to cry, but I strangle it.
“You okay?”
My assistant is sitting at the edge of the bed, watching me.
I get up and step into my slacks, throw on my silver shirt.
“Are you sure you want to go?”
“Have to.”
“I thought you always do what you want.”
I shoot her a dangerous look and she goes quiet. I button my shirt and reach for my red tie.
Outside, ninety floors below my huge windows, the city writhes in its fever, the streets crackling with panic, gunshots and fires. But all I see is Freedom Tower gleaming in the moonlight. Sinopec Tower blinking down at me in mockery.
There are buildings taller than ours. This is not the top.
• • •
In the musty shadows of my basement, a madman is muttering the story of his life. He slumps in a corner, his once expensive clothes filthy and tattered, his red tie darkened to brown, a discarded wretch telling tales of improbable glory. This is where I want him. Chained to the floor, starved and impotent. I won’t kill him. I won’t even silence him. I will keep him here and listen until I know all his secrets, all his strengths and weaknesses, and he will never control me again.
I open my eyes to the pale light of my latest prison. Julie sleeps next to me but not close, curled into a ball with a buffer of cool air between us. Our lives have become so burdened with fear, our love feels like a luxury we can’t afford. Even here in this cell with nothing to do but wait, we keep pushing it away. But I refuse to believe it’s gone. I catch it gleaming in the cracks between moments. A quick look. A kiss in a crashing plane. Somehow, in the midst of all this fire and death, we will find it again.
The elevator dings. Julie’s eyes snap open. She sees me watching her and appears puzzled by the faint smile on my face, but as always, there isn’t time to share my thoughts with her. The elevator opens and I don’t need to look away from her face to know who has stepped out. The panic in her eyes tells me everything.
“We’ll be okay,” I tell her, and I’m shocked by how level my voice is. I am not Dead anymore; I breathe and bleed and feel pain, but for some reason, I’m not afraid. I sidle close to her and touch her arm. “We’re stronger now. They don’t know how to hurt us.”
She looks at me and presses her lips together, stopping their tremble. She nods, and this simple gesture floods me with hope.
The cell door opens and we stand up to face them.
“Hello!” Yellow Tie chirps.
WE
THE BOY IS SITTING at a desk. He has been told the desk is a privilege reserved for high-potential individuals. It is the first time in either of his lives that someone has told him he has potential, but it fails to inspire him. He is in a room full of high-potential individuals, diverse in age, sex, and appearance, but all with a certain sameness. Whatever their natural skin tone, it has faded. Whatever their natural eye color, it has changed—most to gray, but a few with flecks of gold. It occurs to the boy that potential is a vague word. Poison has potential to kill. Flesh has potential to rot.
All of these high-potential individuals sit at desks like the boy’s, absorbing a bewildering array of inputs. Screens fill every corner, all playing different programs—sports, films, old news broadcasts with constant commercial breaks—and all at full volume, fighting for dominance with the pop song on the PA speakers, which is just the sound of women’s orgasms set to a thumping beat.
In the midst of this, two men stand at the front of the room, delivering what might be lectures of some kind, though the boy can pick out only a few snatches in the whirlwind of noise. Something about security from one of them, something about liberty from the other.
Most of the people
in this room glance wildly from screen to screen, speaker to speaker. A few stare straight ahead as drool pools on their parted lips. Two or three, like the boy, look around with lucidity in their eyes, frowning in concentration as they try to understand this strange assault. One of these suddenly screams and flings out her hand, knocking over her IV stand. The tube pops out of the bag. The syrupy pink cocktail squirts out onto the floor, and a man in a lab coat rushes to reconnect it.
The boy can feel the syrup in his own veins, interacting inscrutably with his lukewarm blood. He follows the tube from his arm to the bag, and then up to the ceiling where it joins all the others, dangling like jungle vines from a central hub, which feeds from a thick hose running out of the room. The boy wonders where it goes and what is in it. He wonders what these people want him to become.
The session pauses while the lab assistant struggles with the unruly student. In the stunning void of silence, the boy can hear the groans and howls of the less privileged individuals in nearby classrooms. Individuals too deep in the plague to operate in the world as people. These do not get desks. These do not get to watch television. These have lower potential, and will be Oriented for lower functions, according to the evident order of nature.
The door opens. A woman in a lab coat pushes two children inside. The boy stares at the children and they stare at him.
One of them smiles. A girl of about seven, her dusky skin barely touched by gray, her dark eyes flecked with gold like veins of ore promising a windfall.
She runs to the boy and hugs him and he remembers that her name is Joan.
Joan’s blond brother dances around the boy’s desk, touching the boy’s cheeks and laughing. “Found you, found you!” Alex says.
It is not the first time these children have found him. In a distant age, in a distant part of the world, they found him wandering deep in an airport basement and dragged him up to daylight. His friends, Joan and Alex. Two more good people.
The woman in the lab coat grabs them by their collars and drags them to their desks, shoves them down and jabs IV tubes into their arms. The session resumes. The storm of noise buffets their eyes and ears, but Joan and Alex seem to be ignoring it. They are distracted. They smile at the boy and he finds their joy infectious. He smiles back.
The pages on our Higher shelves rustle as they fill with new words. Simple sentences polished and gleaming.
I
HERE IT IS. The busy metropolis I’ve been waiting to see. No more quiet courtyards and hollow buildings and wind howling through ghostly streets. This is New York City. I watch it rush by through the SUV’s window, and the past and present overlap. Am I a prisoner, or is this just another commute? Another limo ride home after a long day at the Atvist Building? The sidewalks churn with pedestrians and the streets are packed with rush-hour traffic. There is energy and commerce, and when obscured by the window’s heavy tint, it almost looks like the old world. But when I roll the window down for an unfiltered view, discrepancies appear. Laundry flutters from high-rise windows, turning glittering business towers into Dickensian rookeries. Every park and square has been repurposed into some form of labor site: makeshift assembly lines and meat rendering stations, the occasional fenced holding area for hopeful immigrants. The lack of traffic noise seems strange—Where is the brass orchestra? That discordant symphony of horns?—until I notice that all the vehicles on the road are marked with the Axiom logo. Construction trucks and transport vans, moving in silent unanimity.
The window rolls up, dimming the harsh detail of the scene. Blue Tie catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “For optimal safety, windows should be kept up when driving through population areas. We experience difficulties with unsalaried employees.”
“Everyone has an opportunity to advance in this company,” Yellow Tie says, turning to smile at me over the seat, “with enough hard work and personal sacrifice.”
Black Tie says nothing. Black Tie stares at the side of Julie’s face, and she leans away from him as far as she can, almost ending up in my lap.
“You smell like shit,” she growls at him, then turns to the front seat to include the other two. “You smell like stale old-man shit covered up with air freshener. Where are you taking us?”
“432 Park Avenue is currently the tallest building in the western hemisphere,” Yellow Tie says with silky assurance. “With ninety floors of spacious condo units and every amenity you can imagine, it is truly the new standard of luxury living.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Julie shouts. “Do you even hear yourself?”
I am watching the river of people flowing by on each side of the street. Gaunt, exhausted faces, bodies either scrawny or obese, wrapped in tattered remnants of expensive clothes, logos obscured by rips and stains, all colors faded. Crude plywood patches cover the war-torn, quake-rattled buildings, repaired but not restored, storefronts fenced off and filled with obscure machines. The city buzzes like a factory, but where is the product? I see no abundance. No glow of hard-earned contentment on any of these faces. The factory’s product is more factories.
How did this happen? Not even the wretch in my basement wanted to live in a world like this. He wanted to feed on the fruits of society, not pave over the orchard. What was the moment that broke Axiom’s mind? I pry at my memories, but they refuse to open.
“Are you really going to take Park all the way there?” Julie says.
“It’s the most direct route,” Blue Tie says.
“The traffic is hell. Third is faster.”
Blue Tie glances at her in the mirror, then continues on Park. Julie sighs.
It gives me some small pleasure to remember that we’re both New Yorkers, for whatever that title is worth now. One bit of common ground in the vast gulf between her past and mine. I imagine her riding along to her father’s gigs downtown, sucking in the sights with her hungry young eyes, oh so eager to grow up. And later, visiting him at Fort Hamilton as the Borough Conflicts began to boil, a little less eager now. I see her at twelve years old, an image that comes to me with surprising detail: shorter, skinnier, with fewer scars on her soft cheeks, her tiny frame disappearing into baggy work clothes, walking alone over the Brooklyn Bridge while distant bomb smoke adds texture to the sunrise. The thought makes me smile until I remember that I was there too, perhaps looking down at her from some grim tower window, seeing just another pixel in the porn of my ambitions.
I want to cough up my past and spit it far away from me, but it catches in my throat. The only way to make it gone is to digest it.
“Here we are!” Yellow Tie announces as the SUV pulls to the curb.
“Three days later,” Julie says with a roll of her eyes.
“We appreciate your enthusiasm for today’s interview,” Yellow Tie says, opening our door. “We hope this means you’ve decided to collaborate.”
“Fuck you. You smell like cherry condoms full of rancid come.”
I snort. Yellow Tie frowns. However colorful Julie’s insults get, they remain disgustingly accurate.
I step out into a stiff wind that blows the pitchmen’s stench out of my nose—only to replace it with the city’s blanket aroma of trash and human waste. Black Tie ejects Julie with a shove and she stumbles; I catch her as best I can with my wrists bound in front of me. Both of us are cuffed but otherwise unrestrained. If we made a sudden sprint, we could probably get away, but the pitchmen’s clear lack of concern reveals the futility of this idea. Where would we go? How far would we get? The city itself is the prison.
My neck pops a few times before I find the top of 432 Park Avenue. The building is a perfectly symmetrical rectangle, its square windows rising in an unbroken sequence until they’re too small to see. But what makes my head spin is not the height; it’s the familiarity. The excited gibbering behind my basement door.
I lived here.
It was glorious, the wretch sighs. But more importantly, it was necessary. The people needed to see that someone was still in charge, still loo
king down on them from some unfathomable perch. It’s the mystery that maintains power, the weary assumption that it’s all beyond them. God is wise to hide in Heaven.
But something isn’t right. The lobby is oddly unkempt for a seat of divine power. Its white marble floors are smudged with boot tracks, furniture overturned, everything covered in dust. No doorman, no concierge, no sign of life whatsoever. I remember this building as a luxury fortress for the world’s few surviving power brokers, but now it’s as cold and quiet as any other ruin.
“This isn’t the tallest building,” Julie says as the pitchmen lead us into the elevator. “How are you going to run this country if you don’t even know New York’s skyline?”
“Its height was exceeded by Sinopec Tower,” Yellow Tie admits.
“Exactly. Nice dick but I’ve seen bigger.”
We surge upward. Square windows rush past the elevator’s clear walls, offering us a flickering zoetrope view of the city that becomes transparent as we pick up speed.
“You’ll notice Sinopec Tower is not visible at this time,” Blue Tie says.
Julie scans the skyline, frowning.
“After losing our downtown headquarters in the tragic Eight Six quake,” Yellow Tie says, “we felt it was important for brand confidence that we occupy the tallest buildings in the city. We were able to take Freedom Tower with minimal expense, but we had ongoing conflicts with the occupants of Sinopec Tower. We opted to eliminate the building, resolving two issues at once.”
“Efficient multitasking is crucial to staying on top in today’s competitive world,” Blue Tie says.
Julie stares at the empty space where that blue glass spire used to be. I feel a similar gap in my memories. In all their leaping back and forth through time, there is a barrier they never cross, and in the shadows beyond that barrier is where these things happened. Earthquakes, floods, and falling buildings. A mad scramble to the top after being laid low.
How did he do it?
The floor numbers keep rising. Fifty. Sixty. The higher we climb, the less real the city looks. People disappear. Buildings shrink into toys. Rooks on a bewildering chessboard.