Meanwhile, in her real job, in the real world, the union had shifted its focus from immigrants to refugees, or whatever you might call the quarter or so of the city’s residents now needing help. They ranged from legal citizens of the intertidal to undocumented squatters who had never been on anyone’s radar up to this point, but whatever their legal status, they had been rendered homeless by the storm and were now occupying Central Park, or parts of uptown, or any semisubmerged dwelling that hadn’t completely melted. The rough guess was that there were about a million of them, maybe two, and quite a large percentage of those were hoping to survive this incident without actually going above the radar and getting entered into the city’s systems, or even counted. This was a huge problem for the bureaucracy charged with keeping the refugees alive and free of disease.
On the other hand, one development helping the city’s effort was that the usual influx of immigrants from elsewhere appeared to be sharply down. It made sense; people didn’t usually make great efforts to smuggle themselves into a disaster area. Those who did often had bad intentions, so now it felt morally defensible to deny entry to anyone newly trying to come to the city. A system almost Chinese in its style was spontaneously generating in the mayor’s office to deal with residency permits, and it was ugly, and probably unconstitutional, but for the moment a small help. They already had enough people with problems, the city was saying. Come back later. Go away now.
Of course there were still some coming in under the radar, as always. Some of these no doubt were criminals hoping to predate on refugees, and police were doing what they could to maintain order, even as they were also struggling to exert control over the private security armies working all over the island and harbor. That struggle was veering right to the edge of a little civil war. When the National Guard joined the NYPD in this struggle it was a big help, a big moment. Charlotte paused to wonder what it meant when a police state was aspirational, a staving off of a worse fate, but then she went back to work. Every day there was more to do.
What this meant for Charlotte was a constant stream of clients beseeching help to find housing, as their old accommodations had been damaged or wrecked. Housing relocation; this was what she had done before the storm, so in a way it was just life as usual, amped a thousandfold. Life as emergency: it wasn’t her style, or maybe it was, but it couldn’t be maintained at this pace; she had already been maxed out before. So now there was nothing for it but to bear down and take life minute by minute, day after day. Do what she could with what she had at that moment. The days flew by.
With infrastructure and housing stock as thrashed as it was, many city departments were coming to the HU to get help in organizing the refugee efforts. This gave Charlotte some leverage within the city system and also provided an indirect way to critique the mayor and her people. Many city bureaucrats were now working around the mayor’s office to get to people who would really help them. Charlotte was one node in that alternate system, and without criticizing the mayor outright, she was happy to see a kind of dual power alternative networking below the level of the mayor’s office, which was still focusing most of its efforts on burnishing the mayor’s image, as always. Aside from that ceaseless effort her whole team was useless, and people started telling them so, or ignoring them altogether. And word of this got around.
“Who cares what the figurehead on the ship looks like when there’s leaks under the waterline?” Charlotte said in one of her wrist messages to the public. “Just speaking for myself, as a candidate for the congressional office that the mayor hopes to fill with one of her useless flunkies.”
Back at the Met, late every evening, she would scavenge a meal and put her feet up somewhere in the crowds of the dining hall. More satisfying than her daily grind, or the campaign hammer-and-tongs, was working with Franklin Garr on his redevelopment project. At this point it had contracted down to eight blocks in Chelsea, as a kind of pilot project. Franklin’s investment group (which included the Met gold gang) had secured provisional property rights, as good as could be gotten for the intertidal, plus demolition permits, building permits, and the funding to build. The funding was a combination of their monetized gold, federal and nonprofit grants, angel investors, venture capital, and ordinary loans, achieved before the paralysis of the liquidity crisis and credit crunch, which was growing worse by the day. A construction team had been assembled, he said; this was no easy feat, given how busy contractors were now. Workers in the building trades from Boston to Atlanta were streaming in to New York to reconstruct the city, but there still weren’t enough of them, so the main coup for Franklin had been the assembling of the construction team itself. “How did you get them to agree to do it?” she asked him.
“We went to Miami. There are firms down there that have been doing this kind of stuff for years. Also we paid them double their usual rates.”
“Good for you. Hey—I can provide you with occupants.”
“Such a challenge! First get me more anchor cords and sleeves.”
These were what would connect the block rafts to bedrock. Bedrock in Franklin’s neighborhood turned out to be 160 feet below the canal bottom; this was bad, but not impossibly so. Another cost. The moving parts, or stretchy parts, that would extend between the deep bollards and the floating platforms were the crux of the problem, according to Franklin’s head contractor. Some of the new stretchtech came from biomimicry, tricks learned from kelp beds or limpets or human fascia, and it was wonderfully effective, but relatively new and rare, and therefore expensive.
And they had to accommodate the conventional buildings still surrounding their neighborhood. “Eventually the whole of lower Manhattan will move together like eelgrass. In the meantime, we’ll need clearances and leeways and bumpers.”
“What about the demolition?”
“It’s going well. Vlade’s friend Idelba is part of that team; she’s dredging the bottom to get things clear before they caisson it and drill to bedrock. She’s doing us a favor, because every dredge in this harbor is going full tilt right now, and she wants to get back to Coney Island. But this is a pretty small job by her standards, and she’s willing to fit it in.”
“Good to hear.”
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No, I mean I slurped up some of the dregs, but not really. Oh God, it’s ten already.”
“Let’s go out and grab a bite.”
“Okay.”
While gobbling down a quick meal in the deli occupying the prow of the Flatiron, Charlotte asked Franklin what he thought of the situation in finance.
Franklin waggled a hand as he swallowed and then said, “It’s all happening. They’re freaking out. All of them are leveraged out over the abyss, and their pole vaults are cracking. They’re still trying to stave it off, so it’s a bit slow-motion compared to some bubble pops, but the full-on crash is starting.”
“When though?”
“It depends on how long they try to pretend things are okay. The people most exposed are still running around looking for ways out, so they want things to look okay for as long as possible.”
“So maybe it’s time for me to go to my Fed Ex again?”
“If you think he needs encouraging.”
“I think he probably does.”
“Then you definitely should.”