“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Keynes is timeless.”
Mutt shakes his head. “Decapitation of the oligarchy, isn’t that another term for it? Meaning the guillotine, right?”
“But just their money,” Jeff says. “We cut off their money. Their excess money. Everyone is left their last five million. Five million dollars, I mean that’s enough, right?”
“There’s never enough money.”
“That’s what people say, but it’s not true! After a while you’re buying marble toilet seats and flying your private plane to the moon trying to use your excess money, but really all it gets you is bodyguards and accountants and crazy children and sleepless nights and acid reflux! It’s too much, and too much is a curse! It’s a fucking Midas touch.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’d have to give it a try to see. I’d volunteer to try it and report back to you.”
“Everyone thinks that. But no one makes it work.”
“They do too. They give it away, do good works, eat well, exercise.”
“No way. They stress and go crazy. And their kids go even crazier. No, it’s doing them a favor!”
“Decapitation, the great favor! People lining up at the foot of that guillotine. Please, me first! Chop my neck right here!”
Jeff sighs. “I think after a while it would catch on. People would see the sense of it.”
“All these heads rolling on the ground, their faces looking at each other, Hey, this is great! What a good idea!”
“Food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s all you need.”
“We have those here,” Mutt points out.
Jeff heaves another sigh.
“It’s not all we need,” Mutt persists.
“All right already! It seemed like a good idea!”
“But you tipped your hand. And it was never going to hold. It was like spraying graffiti on the wall somewhere.”
Jeff nods. “Well … pretty scary graffiti, for whoever to do this to us.”
“I’ll grant you that. Actually I’m surprised we’re not dead.”
“No one killed Piketty. He had a very successful book tour if I’m not mistaken.”
“That’s because it was a hundred years ago, and it was a book. No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them. It’s laws people care about. And you were tweaking the laws. You wrote your graffiti right into the laws.”
“I tried,” Jeff says. “By God, I tried. So I wonder who noticed first. And how word got to whoever rounded us up.”
Mutt shakes his head. “We might have been rendered. I feel kind of chopped up, now that you mention it. We could be in Uruguay. At the bottom of the Plata or whatnot.”
Jeff frowns. “It doesn’t feel like government,” he says. “This room’s too nice.”
“You think? Nice?”
“Effective. Kind of plushly hermetic. Good tight seals. Waterproof, that’s not so easy. Food slot also waterproofed, food twice a day, it’s weird.”
“Navy does it all the time. We could be in a nuclear sub, stay underwater five years.”
“They stay under that long?”
“Five years and a day.”
“Nah,” Jeff says after a while. “I don’t think we’re moving.”
“No shit.”
We need not trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race on this globe will be destroyed at last, whether by fire or otherwise. It would be so easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north.
—Thoreau
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.
—Le Corbusier
Leaving fifty times not so beautiful.
c) Charlotte
Charlotte looked carefully at the woman Jojo as they sat across from each other at the long dining hall table. Tall, stylish, athletic, smart. Going out with Franklin Garr, and like him working in finance, meaning Charlotte didn’t exactly know what. But in general she knew. Making money from manipulating money. Early thirties. Charlotte didn’t like her.
But she suppressed this dislike, even internally, as people were always quick to sense such feelings. Keep an open mind, et cetera. Part of her job, and something she always wanted to do anyway, as personal improvement. She had a long way to go there, as she had a tendency to hate people on sight. Especially people in finance. But she liked Franklin Garr, strange but true, so maybe that would extend to this woman.
“So,” she said, “someone or some company has offered to buy this whole building. Do you know anything about that?”
“No, why should I. You don’t know who it is?”
“It’s coming through a broker, so no. But why would anyone want to do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t do real estate myself.”
“Isn’t that investment in Soho about real estate? Or when you do like mortgage bonds?”
“Yes, I suppose. But bonds are derivatives. They’re like trading in risk itself, rather than any particular commodity.”
“Buildings are commodities?”
“Everything that can be traded is a commodity.”
“Including risk.”
“Sure. Futures markets are all about risk.”
“So this offer on our building. Is there any way we can find out who’s making it?”
“I think their broker has to file with the city, right?”
“No. They can make the offer themselves, in effect. What about fighting it? What if we don’t want to sell?”
“Don’t sell. But this is a co-op, right? Are you sure people don’t want to sell?”
“It’s in their buy-in contract that they can’t sell their apartments.”
“Sure, but the building entire? Are they forbidden to want that?”
Charlotte stared at the woman. She had been right to hate her.
“Would you want to sell, if you lived here?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Depends on the price, I guess. And whether I could stay or not. That kind of thing.”
“Is this kind of offer what you call aerating?”
“I thought that meant pumping out submarine spaces and sealing them so they stay dry.”
“Yes, but I heard the term is also being used to describe the recapture of the intertidal by global capital. You aerate a place and suddenly it’s back in the system. It’s undrowned, I think they mean to suggest.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
Aeration was a term used all the time on the left side of the cloud where Charlotte tended to read commentary, but obviously this woman didn’t read there. “Even though you invest in the intertidal?”
“Right. What I do is usually called bailing out, or rehabilitation.”
“I see. But what if we do vote to fight against this offer to buy the building? Do you have any suggestions?”
“I think you just have to say no to them, and that would be it.”
Charlotte stared at her. “You really think that’s all it takes?”