The coastlines naturally led the way in this rioting, being most stressed, but even in Denver significant percentages of the population joined the various householders’ unions and refused to pay rents of all kinds, mortgages and student loans especially. This form of resistance was expectedly popular. Purchase of nonessential consumer goods also dropped massively everywhere, crippling business growth by way of a perfectly legal fuck-you, which after all was merely a case of people not spending money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need. So, although there were only scattered mass demonstrations and occupations of city squares, and the results of the fiscal noncompliance were hard to see and report, there was a powerful sense of some underwater current in the global civilization now pulling it out into an unknown sea. History was happening. When that happens you can feel it.
The tug out to sea was naturally felt by the markets, as they are a sensitive instrument when it comes to noting volatility. One element that went into determining the IPPI was householder confidence, widely regarded as one of the fastest and most accurate indicators of housing price change. It had been considered impossible to rig or artificially shift householder confidence measures; polling five million households was standard practice now, and so reported levels of confidence were seen as indicators that could not be manipulated, being so much larger than any manipulation could be. They showed a real thing. But the Householders’ Union grew so big so fast that it influenced the behaviors of about twenty percent of all households, and the mood of a much greater percentage than that. So its calls for financial noncompliance could all by themselves torque the indexes. The IPPI numbers therefore fell sharply, and that dragged down the Case-Shiller numbers, and this caused the previous rapidly rising coastal housing price average to be regarded as a bubble, and that all by itself caused the bubble to burst, in a classic the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. That bubble’s popping caused all of its derivative bubbles to pop too, which caused all banks and investment firms to call in all their liquid assets and to stop loaning anything at all, even the standard interbank loans that kept the real economy going. Quickly, promptly in fact, one of the largest investment firms collapsed and declared bankruptcy, and the fiscal relationships between all the big financial firms were now so tight that all of the biggest private banks in the United States and Europe then dashed to their central banks to demand immediate relief and salvation, in the form of massive new infusions of money, to ease their panic and keep the entire system from crashing.
All this was reported; everyone around the world was watching it unfold. Finance had once again frozen, as confidence died and trust disappeared, and no one knew what paper out there was good anymore—no one knew what was money and what was dust. The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway.
Third time’s a charm. Or fourth. Whichever. Past results being no guarantee of future performance.
PART EIGHT
THE COMEDY OF THE COMMONS
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.
said Picasso
a) Mutt and Jeff
I don’t like to see you wielding a hammer. It scares me.”
“You are easily scared. Why, what?”
“You are not a hammer kind of guy. I’m not sure who you will injure first, me or you.”
“Come on. It’s not a complex skill. It’s like typing. It’s like typing with a big thing that whaps the keyboard for you. In fact I’m thinking I may start typing with a hammer.”
“With two hammers, one for each hand.”
“Two for each hand, like a xylophone player. I will type like Lionel Hampton playing the xylophone.”
“Wasn’t it a vibraphone?”
“Not sure. Hand me that bag of nails.”
Mutt hands over the bag and contemplates his partner hefting hammer and nails. With the farm floor’s tall arches so hugely open to the air, it looks like Bartleby the scrivener has exchanged his quill for a riveting gun from the heroic age of high-rise construction. Although currently they are assembling long planter boxes. Eventually they will trundle hods of soil to these boxes rather than hods of cement. Otherwise they’re like Rosie the Riveter. Rosen the Riveter. Roosevelt the Riveter, maybe that’s where they got the name Rosie, sure.
“Or you could type with your forehead, like archy the cockroach,” Mutt says.
“Toujours gai, my friend. I would enjoy that.”
“It was mehitabel the cat who said toujours gai.”
“I know that. I’m the one who made you read that book.”
“I somewhat liked it, I have to admit.”
“I find that very encouraging.”
“It was funny to see how little New York changes through the centuries.”
“So true. If you disregard it being underwater and storm-racked.”
“As of course one should. Character remains despite one’s circumstances. As mehitabel always said.”
It’s a sunny day, some clouds over Jersey. Vlade appears out of the service elevator, pushing a wheelbarrow of black dirt. Idelba has been using her gear to salvage some of their farm’s soil from its resting place on the bottom of the canal between the Met and the North building. A few more people unknown to Mutt and Jeff follow with more wheelbarrows.
Jeff says, “Here, this box is ready.”
Vlade helps his team fill the new box with soil. “Idelba says she can pull up some good mud to mix with our compost. We should be okay for soil.”
“You’ll need seeds,” Mutt points out.
“Sure, but the seed bank is ready to provide. They want us to try out some new hybrids they’ve got. And some new heirlooms.”
“New heirlooms?”
“They rustled them up somewhere. The call has gone out. Anyway, we’ll be okay. Back in business in time to get a late-fall crop, anyway.”
“What about our hotello?”
“What, isn’t that up yet? You can put that up in an hour. That’s the point of those things. It’s in the storage closet back of the elevators.”
“We didn’t know where it was,” Mutt confesses.
“Sorry, I should have told you. Where are you staying now?”
“Nowhere.”
“In the common room.”
“Oh hell, let’s get you up here. I need you here to serve as night watchmen. And you need your place.”
Vlade is as good as his word, so when the current load of dirt is shoveled into the new planter boxes, he goes to the storage room and pulls out what looks like an oversized suitcase. This, along with a trunk containing all their bathroom fixtures, is their hotello, packed to move. All its parts are off the shelf, modular, easy to assemble. Plastic everything, including the air mattresses on cots, the walls that look like thick opaque shower curtains, because they are; the chem toilet; the light fixtures that are LED strings, and often strung on the structural elements, which resemble PVC tubing, now spangled as with Christmas lights. Festive in the dark.
Vlade takes a look around and declares the place rebuilt. It has indeed taken an hour.
“It seems kind of breezy up here now,” Jeff remarks to him.
“It was always breezy up here.”
“But now I’m noticing it more. After the hurricane, I guess.”
“Sure,” says Vlade. “We feel it now.”
“What are you going to do about that, by the way? I mean next time there’s a big storm. In terms of protecting this floor.”
“I don’t know. I’m still thinking it over. I think the whole city is, in terms of windows and how to deal. I don’t know if there’s any great solution, if we’re going to get storms like that one. I’m hoping that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s gonna take years to rebuild.”