I thought it over as I regarded the adamantine side of her face. Jojo and me as the fucking Darwin and Wallace of Manhattan redevelopment? Both coming up with the same idea when faced with the same problem and the same tool kit of solutions? The octopus eye staring at the human eye? And which one was I?
But I had told her about it. I had shared the idea with her in the hope of impressing her with my desire to do real-world good, which had begun as an act performed for her, and now had gotten into me somehow. And yet now she was claiming it was her idea?
Well, shit. It was possible she had forgotten that conversation, or turned it into an exchange of remarks in which she had figured things out for herself. Even in my very bad mood I could see that this could have occurred. She had definitely been the first to mention she wanted to build something, rather than just trade; then I had tried to do the same, to impress her with our soulmatedness, to get back into her pants. So I had come up with what seemed to me now a pretty obvious solution to the problem, which maybe she had taken and reinvented after hearing me hint vaguely about it. While meanwhile I had forged ahead at speed. So now she was upset by that, and instead of establishing our soulmatedness I had grossly alienated her. Although really, since it had been my idea, her claiming it was her idea was her problem. Indeed an indication she was possibly a liar and an idea thief, the kind of shark that one ran into all the time in finance.
A shark whom I wanted so badly. Because even while I was glaring at her stubbornly nonresponsive profile, she looked wonderful.
Well, fuck fuck fuck. Oh the humanity.
There was an implication here, which kept rearing its ugly head as I thought it through, that I was being an idiot in this mess, and only now coming late to the obvious: that she had been just having a night out with me, a fun night without meaning, followed by a breakup and then a mean claim on my idea as hers. Making her somewhat awful. If I had it right, or even close. But even if I did, I couldn’t really take it on. I had just put together a really good deal; she had just called me a thief, a purloiner of intellectual property; I still wanted her. Meaning I was a fool. A fool getting angrier by the second.
So after rolling my eyes at Inky and downing a last concoction he had thrown together to ease my pain, I went out to the bug and took the Thirty-fourth canal in to Broadway, and then down Broadway in the late-afternoon boat parade, the traffic jam as aquatic Mardi Gras. Then east on Thirtieth to Madison, stopping at the dockdeli at Twenty-eighth and Madison to get a float-by Reuben sandwich, because I really didn’t want to go down to the dining hall that evening and eat the co-op’s virtuous mush of the day. After that I was humming blindly along when I nearly ran into that Stefan kid, in his same rubber dinghy, looking anxiously over the side as he held an air tube in his hand.
“God damn you guys,” I exclaimed as I reversed my motor to come to a rapid halt. “You are just trying to get drowned.”
“No!” he said, looking over the side. “At least I’m not.”
“Well, your buddy down there is an idiot. What are you doing this time?”
“This was 104 East Twenty-sixth street,” he said, pointing down.
“So?”
“This is where Herman Melville lived.”
“Moby-Dick?”
He was sadly impressed at my immense knowledge of American literature. “That’s right! He was a customs inspector on the docks down at West Street, and he lived right here.”
We were surrounded by the big buildings between NoMad and Rose Hill, block-sized stone-and-glass monsters, rising sheer from the canal to the first setbacks high overhead. Nothing less like the nineteenth century could be imagined, there were no little remnant buildings tucked between the monsters to give a glimpse back into the Holocene.
“Jesus, boy. Pull your buddy up by the air hose, I want to talk to him. He’s not under that diving bell of yours again, is he?”
“Well yeah, he is. We went up and got it.”
“That’s not okay,” I said, weirdly angry. “You’re in a heavily trafficked canal here, and your bud is not going to find anything of Herman Melville’s down there! So yank him up before he croaks!”
The boy looked chastened, but also a little comforted to have some support for his own evident feeling that this was a lunatic quest on his bud’s part. Roberto the Reckless. He tugged three times, which I supposed was the signal for the maniac to resurface.
“You don’t have any radio contact with him?”
“No.”
“Good God. Why don’t you just dive off the Empire State Building and get it over with.”
“Don’t they have a jumper screen up there?”
“Okay, so what you’re doing is more dangerous than jumping off the Empire State. Come on, get him up out of there.”
Stefan hauled up hard on their diving bell’s rope, happily still attached to it this time, and after a while the smaller one appeared from the murky surface of the canal, looking like an otter with a human face.
“Come on,” I snapped, “get your ass out of there. I’m going to tell your mom on you.”
“Don’t got a mom.”
“I know that. I’m going to tell Vlade.”
“So what.”
“I’m going to tell Charlotte.”
That got their attention. Mulishly Roberto pulled himself back on board their rubber boat, and as he shivered bluely I helped them haul up their pathetic diving bellette, then towed them around the corner into the bacino, then into the Met boathouse.
“Vlade, tie these idiots up, I almost killed them again, they were diving on Twenty-sixth right in the middle of the canal.”
“Not the middle!”
“Close enough, so I want to give them over to Charlotte and watch her spank their asses.”
“Sounds a little kinky to me,” Vlade said. “And Charlotte is out.”
“Keep them tied up till she gets back.”
“Boys,” Vlade said.
The drowned rats bared their teeth at me and retreated into Vlade’s office. I went upstairs and changed clothes, still fuming about Jojo. I was about to go out again when Charlotte pinged me and I remembered the boys. I pinged back that I would join them and headed on down.
When I got there I saw that the boys had dried off and were now sitting in front of Vlade’s screens looking like they were in the principal’s office hoping to get expelled. Charlotte had clearly tired out her eyes by rolling them too much, and was now staring at the ceiling pondering other matters. Vlade was working.
“You fucking juvenile delinquents!” I said as I walked in, just to wake everyone up.
“It’s not against the law to dive the canals,” Roberto protested. “People do it all the time!”
“City workers,” Charlotte said heavily.