“I think so. Either muskrats or really wet weasels. Like long skinny otters?”
“There were a lot of rats and insects too,” Stefan added after swallowing. “Snakes, frogs, spiders, you name it. It was really creepy.”
“In that there were lots of things creeping,” Roberto clarified. “But the muskrats were the ones that got our attention.”
Hexter said, “There’s lots of muskrats around the bay. Or they could have been minxes. There’s otters too.”
“Not otters,” Roberto said. “Whatever they were, there was a group of them, a family or something. Five big ones and four small ones. They swam into the warehouse and then they were in the rooms down the hall, mostly. They checked us out. All the other littler things stayed away from them. And from us. Arm’s length anyway.”
“Actually the muskrats were wondering if they could eat us,” Stefan said. “We were wondering if we could catch and eat one of them, and they were wondering the same thing about us!”
The two boys laughed. “It was pretty funny,” Roberto confirmed. “They weren’t very big, but there were more of them than us. So we yelled at them.”
“They squeaked at us.”
“Yeah they did, but they ran away too.”
“Well, they flinched. They didn’t run very far. They were still thinking it over. But we picked up some plumber’s wrenches we found and threatened them.”
“But we decided not to kill one and eat it. We didn’t want to piss the others off. They have really sharp teeth.”
“Yeah they do. If they had all gone for us at once it could have been bad. They could have took us, probably.”
Stefan nodded. “That’s why we yelled. We screamed at them so loud I hurt my voice. My throat was raw.”
“Mine too.”
I looked at them telling their story, thinking these boys could definitely grow up to become traders. Some days, when I have to convince some asshole to pay me what they owe, I have ended up with my throat raw from screaming over the phone. If you get a reputation for being a soft creditor it can incent other borrowers to default strategically, so you need to be able to scream sometimes to good effect. “Good job, boys,” I said. “And your boat was okay?”
“Yeah, we had it down in the big main room of this warehouse. It got squished up against the ceiling at high water, there was so much water it was unbelievable, but then it just stayed stuck up there until the water went down. That was some high tide!”
“Storm surge,” Hexter said. “They’re saying twenty-one feet above the highest high tide we’ve ever had.”
“Any more cake?” Roberto inquired.
We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us.
—Virginia Woolf, 1940
d) the city smartass again
Acouple centuries ago there was a famous cartoon, published in one of the New York newspapers or magazines that combined to make the city such a fountain of literary excellence, ranging from Melville and Whitman to—well, in any case, this cartoon consisted of a map of the city looking west, with a foreshortened perspective such that the rest of the United States was as wide as two Manhattan blocks, and the Pacific Ocean no wider than the Hudson. A funny representation of New York’s self-absorption, and it’s interesting how easy it is to fall down that same hole whenever talking about the city: where else matters? It’s the center of the world, the capital of blah blah.
True. Maybe too true. And hopefully the concept of ease of representation will have impinged on the reader’s consciousness to the point of reminding you that this focus on New York is not to say that it was the only place that mattered in the year 2142, but only to say that it was like all the cities in the world, and interesting as such, as a type, as well as for its peculiarities as an archipelago in an estuary debouching into a bight, featuring a lot of very tall buildings.
So, while there is no need to describe the situation in other coastal cities like watery Miami, or paranoidly poldered London and Washington, D.C., or swampy Bangkok, or nearly abandoned Buenos Aires, not to mention all the inland snoozefests called out when one says the single dread word Denver, it is important to place New York in the context of everywhere else, the latter regarded, as in the famous cartoon, as a single category: everywhere else. Because from now on in this tale, as really all along, the story of New York only begins to make sense if the global is taken into account to balance the local. If New York is the capital of capital, which it isn’t, but if you pretend it is to help you think the totality, you see the relation; what happens to a capital city is influenced, inflected, maybe determined, maybe overdetermined, by what happens elsewhere in its empire. The periphery infects the core, the provinces invade the imperial center, the network tugs the knot at its center tight, so tight that it becomes a Gordian knot and can only be cut in two.