She had sat with them in the holding tank at Immigration all afternoon. They were scared. They truly did not seem to know where or how they had crossed in, although that was absurd; and yet people were absurd, so who knew. Could be they had just kept moving, night after night, one step at a time, like blind people. But they had one cheap wristpad between them, so probably their actual course could be reconstructed from that, as she had suggested to them. But the case was not so serious that the immigration authorities had yet subpoenaed their wrist. Privacy laws fought immigration laws, with public safety tipping the scales such that caution almost always ruled. In reality every case was a test. She had explained all that to them and they had stared at her. For them to have any chance, she was going to have to be their representative in the court system. That was how it worked, most of the time. She had seen it a thousand times; this was her job. Formerly a city job, now some kind of public/private hybrid, a city agency or an NGO or something, there to help the renters, the paperless, the homeless, the water rats, the dispossessed. Calling it the Householders’ Union had been aspirational at best.
Just as she was finishing with them and packing to go home, the mayor’s assistant, Tanganyika John, came in to ask if Charlotte could come over and help the mayor deal with an issue, great in importance yet vague in detail. Charlotte was suspicious of this, as she was of John, a supercilious woman, slender and fashionable, whose only job was assisting the mayor, meaning she was one of the defensive ramparts that the mayor erected around herself as a matter of course. The mayor had several people on her staff doing similar stuff, useful only to her reputation, while the city gasped and heaved for life under her. But oh well! The tradition of an imperial mayor was very old in New York.
Charlotte agreed with as much politeness as she could muster and followed John down the hall and up the elevator to the mayor’s administrative palace on the penthouse floor. There three assistants just like John asked Charlotte to help the mayor write up a press release explaining why they had to impose immigration quotas for the good of the people already living in the city.
Charlotte immediately refused. “You’d be breaking federal law anyway,” she said. “They’re very jealous of their right to establish these laws. And my job is to represent the very people you’re trying to keep out.”
Oh no, not really, they were explaining mendaciously, when the mayor herself breezed in to make the same request. Galina Estaban, beautiful in appearance, smooth in manner, arrogant in attitude, stupid in action. Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity. In any case here Galina stood, vivid in the flesh, making the same request as if because it came from her Charlotte could not refuse, even though they had been enemies for almost ten years now. Galina seemed to think frenemy was a real thing and not just hypocrisy; then again since she was a hypocrite, maybe that made the term real for her. In any case Charlotte quickly disabused her of the notion that a personal request carried any weight. Galina responded with something about defending the borders of the great city they both loved, et cetera.
“Defending the borders isn’t possible when there are no borders,” Charlotte said.
Galina frowned, even pouted. Well, it had gotten her to the mayor’s office, this pouty cuteness in the face of resistance. Charlotte met it with a stony glare. Through the pretended amusement and tolerance that followed, Charlotte saw the glint in the eye that indicated this was yet another little jab in their long battle, a parry-riposte that would be added to all the rest. It was Galina who had dumped city immigrant services over the side. Public/private combine, worst of both worlds!
“We have to get a handle on this issue somehow,” Galina said, turning dark on a dime. “Pack people in too tight and there could be an explosion.”
“This is New York,” Charlotte said. “It’s a city of immigrants. You don’t get to pick how many.”
“We can influence the number,” Galina said.
“Only by being a thug and breaking the law.”
“Explaining why we need quotas is not being a thug.”
Charlotte shrugged and excused herself. “Don’t waste time on this,” she suggested as she left.
She stumped home on the skybridges, looking down at the busy canals. She had started walking to and from work after her excursion with Inspector Gen. Every day now she found irregular high lines of her own devise. The original High Line was underwater and in its third life as an oyster bed. The current array of skybridges ranged from boardwalks just above high tide to long catwalks at the fortieth and fiftieth floors. They were almost all clear plastic tubes, reinforced by graphenated composite meshes so light and strong that they could span four or five blocks. Before her walk with Inspector Gen, she had almost always taken the number four vaporetto to work and back, but the canals could be so jammed that often as she watched from a vapo she could see walkers on the boardwalks moving quite a bit faster than her. And presumably it would be better for her health, at least if her feet could handle it. Have to work up to a daily walk both ways; not sure if that would work, but trying it made her pay attention to herself in new ways. Skip that dessert and you don’t have to carry it home from work, thus you will hurt less! Pain as a spur to action; oh yes, certainly not the first time for that.
She got home just in time to change and eat a bite in the dining room before the weekly executive board meeting. Bit of a busman’s holiday, this board. From city to building: the difference in scale made for somewhat different problems, but not that different. Well, she had volunteered for the board at a time when they were being sued and needed help. And even though it resembled her day job, it was interesting. As was her job, most of the time. She just needed some blood sugar and it would all be fine.
Actually a bit difficult to get that, as the food trays were almost empty when she got there. She had to scrounge scraps from the corners of trays and the bottoms of bowls, might as well just put her face in the salad bowl and slurp like a dog, as those two boys ahead of her in line were doing. Damn, they were licking the bowls clean! Best be on time to dinner, as everyone knew; a long line formed in the half hour before opening. Residents were always present and accounted for when it came time for the important stuff, meaning no one would be at the executive board meeting. They really should try to whittle their population down to full capacity, she had made mistakes in that regard. A tendency to take people in was a professional habit but a mistake when performed out of context. Too many mouths to feed, dining hall jammed, very loud, people sitting on the floor against the walls with trays on their laps, glasses on the floor beside them. She did that herself, getting down awkwardly, wearily, knowing it was going to be tough to stand back up. One reason she wore pants in the evenings.
Then up to the thirtieth floor, where they kept a room from which to run the building. She was only a little late, which would have been fine if she weren’t the chair again. The others were sitting around talking about the two missing men. She sat and they all looked at her.
“What?” she said.
“We’re thinking that we shouldn’t let anyone live on the farm floors anymore,” Dana told her. The others were looking at her as if she was going to object, probably because she had argued to let the two men live there.
“Because?” she said, mostly to play to their expectations.
“There isn’t the security on the farm that there is in a room, as we saw,” said Mariolino. He was board secretary this year.