“But what did he mean about the line being around you?” Roberto asked.
“Ah, well!” Now Mr. Hexter stopped walking, to catch his breath and answer this. He was all caught up in his tale. “In Moby-Dick there’s a chapter called ‘The Line,’ maybe the greatest chapter of all. That’s where Melville describes what it was like when the whalers were rowing after whales to catch them, with the harpoonist standing up in the bow, and something like a dozen or eighteen guys all rowing as hard as they could, like a crew team. There was a line coiled in a big tub in the middle of the boat, with its end tied to the end of the harpoon, and when the harpoonist throws the harpoon into the whale and it sticks, the whale dives for the bottom and the line runs out of the tub really fast. But to keep it from tangling or breaking at that sudden first pull, they have a whole bunch of the line hung around the boat on poles, so that the line can be yanked out real fast with the harpoon when the whale is hit and makes its dive. So as the guys are rowing as hard as they can, and bouncing around all over the waves and all, this line is draped all over in between them, waiting to get yanked down and away by the whale. So if you were to accidentally get an arm or your head caught in it as it ran out, bang! Over you would go and down to the bottom with the whale.”
“You’re kidding,” Stefan said. “That’s how they did it?”
“It is. But then, right when Melville finishes describing this insane setup, he says, ‘But why say more?’ and points out that it’s no different from the situation that anyone is in at any time! The reader reading Moby-Dick by his living room fire, Melville says, is in the exact same situation as those poor sailors rowing their boat after the whale! Because the line is always there!”
“Kind of depressing,” Roberto pointed out.
“It is!” And yet Mr. Hexter laughed. He tilted his head up and hooted, standing out there on the ice in the sun.
Finally he pulled up on the rope they were hauling their iceboat with, and said, “See, here’s the line again. But on that night, Melville helped me dodge it. And I alone escaped to tell the tale.”
Today the sky is so blue it burns.
said Joe Brainard
I went to Coney Island with Jean Cocteau one night. It was as if we had arrived at Constantinople.
marveled Cecil Beaton
c) Mutt and Jeff
Mutt and Jeff sit with Charlotte at their railing, sipping wine from the white coffee cups. “So is it weird being back in the world?” she asks.
“It was weird before.”
They regard the nighttime water-floored city. The antique filigree of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cablework articulates the new superscrapers on Brooklyn Heights, all lit like liqueur bottles. The harbor looks vast in the winter light, big plates of ice floating orangely in the black murk of twilight. Short days still.
“Arguably we’re saner now than we were before,” Mutt says.
Jeff shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be saying much, but even so it isn’t true. I’m off my nut now. I want things now.”
“You did before,” Mutt protests.
Charlotte says, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”
Jeff actually smiles at this, pleasing Mutt greatly.
“Delmore Schwartz!” Jeff says.
“It’s actually Yeats,” Charlotte explains. “Schwartz was quoting Yeats.”
“No way!”
“It’s true. I learned that the hard way. Someone said it was Yeats and I corrected them, I told them it was Delmore Schwartz, and then they corrected me, and they turned out to be right.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what I said. It wasn’t someone I wanted to be corrected by.”
“Do you mean your ex, chair of the Federal Reserve?”
Charlotte raises her eyebrows. “Bull’s-eye.”
“I’m surprised he knew that.”
“I was too. But he’s full of surprises.”
They look down at the sheet of black water, studded with dim white icebergs, also buildings both lit and dark. The immensity of New York harbor at night, awesome, sublime. The black starry bay.
“Everyone’s full of surprises,” Mutt says. “Did you hear Amelia Black’s broadcast after her polar bears got nuked?”
“Of course,” says Jeff. “Everybody did, right?”
“It’s got like a hundred million views now,” Charlotte confirms.
“Everybody, like I said.”
“There’s nine billion people on this planet,” Mutt points out, “so actually that’s about one out of every ninety people, if I got my decimal point right.”
“That’s everybody,” Charlotte says. “Very big saturation, anyway.”
“So what did you think?” Mutt inquires of her.
Charlotte shrugs. “She’s a ditz. She can barely string two thoughts together.”
“Ah come on—”
“Meaning I love her. Obviously.”
“Not that obvious.”
“Well, I do. Especially after she said all those nice things about the Householders’ Union right in the middle of saving that crashing skyvillage. That broadcast has gotten a lot of views too. That was bizarre, actually, her saying that then. I do think she has a little trouble with, I don’t know what. Sequential thinking.”
Jeff says, “We’re all like her.”
Charlotte and Mutt don’t get this.
Jeff explains: “She wants things to go right. She’s mad that they’re not going right. She’d like to kill the people hurting her family. How are we any different?”
“We have a plan?” Charlotte suggests.
“But do we? You’ve got this building, and the intertidal community, the Lame Ass and all the other co-ops, but now that things are going well, it’ll all get bought up again. Wherever there’s a commons there’s enclosure. And enclosure always wins. So of course she wants to kill. I’m totally with her. Put ’em against a wall. Fucking liquidation of the rentier.”
“Euthanasia of the rentier,” Charlotte corrects. “Keynes.”
“Okay whatever.”
“You are sounding pretty mad.”
“But you should have seen him before,” Mutt insists. “I’m telling you, he’s a lot calmer now.”
“No I’m not.”
“Maybe a little vengeful,” Charlotte says.
Jeff throws his hands in the air, like, What. “I want justice!”
“It sounds like you want revenge.”
Jeff’s laugh is more like arrrrrgh. He is seizing his hair with both hands. “At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs. So yeah, I want both. Justice is the feather in the arrow, revenge is the tip of the arrowhead.”
“The rentier class is not going to go down easily,” says Charlotte.
“Of course not. But look, once you’re cutting them apart, you tell them that they each get to keep five million. Not more, but not less. Most of them will do a cost-benefit analysis and realize that dying for a bigger number is not worth it. They’ll take their five million and slink away.”
Charlotte considers this. “The golden parachuting of the rentier.”
“Sure, why not? Although I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation.”
“It’s pretty mellow, as far as revenge goes.”