“Right, Peter Cooper Village, extra high tide. Moon or something. Landfill just can’t hold a building upright over the long haul. So then …”
Jeff nods. “Yeah that’s right. We were trying to stay away from my cousin, which is why we were in such a shithole to begin with. Then over to the Flatiron where Jamie lived, and when they kicked us out, he told us about the Met tower possibility. He likes to bail out friends.”
“And we were coding for your cousin, that was definitely a mistake, and then gigging. Encryption and shortcuts, the yin and the yang. Greedy algorithms are us.”
“Right, but there was something else! I found something, or something was bothering me …”
Mutt nods. “You had a fix.”
“For the algorithm?”
Mutt shakes his head, looks at Jeff. “For everything.”
“Everything?”
“That’s right, everything. The world. The world system. Don’t you remember?”
Jeff’s eyes go round. “Ah, yeah! The sixteen fixes! I’ve been cooking those up for years! How could I forget?”
“Because we’re fucked up, that’s how. We were drugged.”
Jeff nods. “They got us! Someone got us!”
Mutt looks dubious. “Did they read your mind? Put a ray on us? I don’t think so.”
“Of course not. We must have tried something.”
“We?”
“Okay, I might have tried something. Possibly I gave us away.”
“That sounds familiar. I think it’s something that might have happened before. Our career has been long but checkered, as I recall quite well. All too well.”
“Yeah yeah, but this was something bigger.”
“Apparently so.”
Jeff stands, holds his head with both hands. Looks around. He walks over to a wall, runs his fingers over a tight seal in the shape of a door; there is no knob or keyhole inside this door-shaped line in the wall, although there is a rectangular line inside it, around waist height on Jeff, knee height on Mutt. “Uh-oh. This is a watertight seal, see what I mean?”
“I do. So what does that mean? We’re underwater?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeff puts his ear to the wall. “Listen, you can hear it gurgling.”
“Sure that isn’t your blood in your ear?”
“I don’t know. Come check and see what you think.”
Mutt stands, groans, looks around. The room is long, and would be square if seen in profile. In it are two single beds, a table, and a lamp, although their illumination seems to also come from the low-lit white ceiling, about eight feet over them. There is a little triangular bathroom wedged into the corner, in the style of cheap hotels everywhere. Toilet and sink and shower in there, running water hot and cold. Toilet flushes with a quick vacuum pull. In the ceiling there are two small air vents, both covered by heavy mesh. Mutt comes back out of the bathroom and walks up and down the length of the room, placing his heels right against his toes and counting his steps, lips pulsing in and out as he calculates.
“Twenty feet,” he says. “And about eight feet tall, right? And the same across.” He looks at Jeff. “That’s how big containers are. You know, like on container ships. Twenty feet long, eight wide, eight and a half feet tall.”
He puts his ear to the wall across from Jeff. “Oh yeah. There’s some kind of noise from the other side of the wall.”
“Told you. A watery noise, right? Like toilets flushing, or someone showering?”
“Or a river running.”
“What?”
“Listen to it. Like a river? Right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what a river sounds like, I mean, when you’re in it or whatever.”
The two men eye each other.
“So we’re …”
“I don’t know.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
The privatization of governmentality. The latter no longer handled solely by the state but rather by a body of non-state institutions (independent central banks, markets, rating agencies, pension funds, supranational institutions, etc.), of which state administrations, although not unimportant, are but one institution among others.
supposed Maurizio Lazzarato
c) that citizen
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the land at the southeast corner of Madison Square in the 1890s and built their headquarters there. Around the turn of the century the architect Napoleon LeBrun was hired to add a tower to this new building, which he decided to design based on the look of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The tower was completed in 1909 and at that point it was the tallest building on Earth, having overtopped the Flatiron Building on the southwest corner of Madison Square. The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away, and after that the Met Life tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks, telling the time to the four cardinal directions. The clock faces were so big their minute hands weighed half a ton each.
In the 1920s, Met Life bought the church to the north of the tower, knocked it down, and built their North building. It was intended to be a skyscraper 100 stories tall, well taller than the Empire State Building, which was also being planned at that time, but when the Great Depression struck the Met Life people canceled their plan and capped North at thirty-two stories. You can still see that it’s the base for something much bigger, it looks like a gigantic pedestal missing its statue. And it has thirty elevators inside it, all ready to take people up to those sixty-eight missing floors. Maybe once people get over the freak-out of the floods they’ll tack on the upper spire in graphenated composites, maybe put up three hundred more stories or whatnot. They did miss their bicentennial opportunity, but hey, what’s a century in New York real estate? Some scammer in the year 2230 will be ready with a tricentennial proposal for a superscraper addition. Anyway, now Madison Square is dominated by an enormous replica of Venice’s great campanile. Got to love that coincidence, which gives the bacino now filling the square the look of Italianosity that makes it one of the signature photo ops of the SuperVenice.