“I can feel the water behind this wall,” he says. “I can feel it move, or maybe I’m hearing it. I wonder what that’s about. I guess sound is strange underwater. It carries farther, or has more force or something.”
“I don’t know. How about some more pancakes?”
“No. Quit it. You’re hectoring me.”
“I see you must be feeling better.”
“Did Hector hector people? I somehow think he’s getting a bad rap with this word. Someone comes and lays siege to his city, tries to kill everyone in it. He organizes and leads the resistance to that, gets killed and his body dragged around by the heels, and his name becomes the verb for harassing someone? How is that fair?”
“Harassing someone to do the right thing,” Mutt suggests.
“Nevertheless. He’s been screwed. Pander deserved what he got, but Hector no. And how come the real jerks got away there? How come you don’t pull an achilles when you stalk off in a snit? Prima donnas, we call them, but prima donnas were Boy Scouts compared to him. Or how about You ajaxed that one. I definitely ajaxed that tap I tried, sorry again about that, but okay I’ll defer the sorries until later. Fucking ajaxed it big-time. Or fucking Zeus. Someone flies into a narcissistic rage, do we say he’s zeussing out? No we don’t. No ulyssesizing a situation. No agamemnonning.”
“You’re a pretty great cassandra,” Mutt mentions.
“See, I knew you read more than The R Handbook.”
“Not really. It’s just stuff you pick up by reading crap in the cloud.”
Now Jeff’s rant sinks to a hoarse whisper. He’s fading in and out, it looks like. “Crap in the Cloud. A novel of celestial sewage. I coulda written that one myself. Been down so long it looks like up to me. What I should have done is hold my horses and wait until something could’ve done some good. I definitely screwed that up, and I’m sorry. I’ll apologize later. I hope you know I only did it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Here we are in this beautiful world, if we’re not dead and in limbo, and they were ripping our heads off. Pretending there were shortages and terrorists and pitting us against each other while they took ninety-nine percent of everything. Immiserate the same people who keep you alive. Which god or idiot did that in Homer? None of them. They’re worse than the worst gods in Homer. That’s what they’re doing, Mutt. I can’t stand it.”
“I know.”
“Because it’s bad!”
“I know. Don’t worry about it right now, though. You have to conserve your energy right now. Don’t enumerate the crimes of the ruling class, please. I know them already. You need to save your strength. Are you hungry?”
“I’m sick. Sick of those bastards ripping us off. Tooling to Davos to tell each other how great they are, how much good they’re doing. Fucking fuckwad hypocrites and bastards. And they get away with it!”
“Jeff, stop now. Stop. You’re wasting your energy on this, you’re preaching to the choir on this. I agree already, so there’s no point in saying it all over again. The world is fucked up, agreed. The rich are stupid assholes, agreed. But you need to stop saying so.”
“I can’t.”
“I know. But you have to. Just this time. Save it for later.”
“I can’t. I try but I can’t. Fucking …”
Happily Jeff falls asleep. Mutt tries to tuck a last spoonful of maple water in the corner of his mouth, then wipes his chin again and pulls the blanket up over his chest.
He sits on the chair by the bed, rocking back and forth a little. Finally he takes one of the plates from the serving tray and cleans it until it is a smooth round white circle of ceramic. On this he writes using one of the little packets of strawberry jam, My friend is sick. He needs a doctor right now.
The skyscrapers seem like tall gravestones.
—José M. Irizarry Rodríguez
There are ghosts in New York. Someday I’ll be one of them.
said Fred Goodman
g) Stefan and Roberto
Stefan and Roberto were glad to see the old man settled into the Met tower’s farm. It seemed like a better place for him than his moldering squat, especially now that that building was on its last tilt into the tide. He himself didn’t agree and was frantic to get his stuff back, especially the maps. This they could well understand, and they spent the next couple of days boating over to the old wreck and venturing in trepidatiously to recover them. Once those were back in Mr. Hexter’s hands, he was so grateful he asked them to go back for more stuff. Turned out he cherished quite a few things that would be inconvenient if not impossible to move on their boat, like the map cabinet. But there were some items on his list that they could move, so they risked more trips over there. Each one exposed them to a possible bust by the water police, who supposedly wanted people to stay out of the collapse zone, but Mr. Hexter promised he would bail them out if they got busted—buy them a new boat, claim to be their teacher, adopt them, whatever it took. He didn’t seem to understand that there were situations where he wouldn’t be able to help them.
To support the cover story that he was their teacher, he gave them a little wristpad that had some audiobooks on it (like a million), and a moldy book copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by a Mark Twain. He told them to listen to the book while looking at the pages, and that would teach them to read, as long as they learned their ABCs, so that the words on the page were not just funny shapes, but marks for sounds. He swore the method would work, so the boys tried it while in their boat under the dock at night, looking at the pages by flashlight for as long as they could stand it while listening to the words, which lit up as they were being said, after which they gave up and just listened ahead in the story. An interesting story, hokey but fun. They too had been hungry and stolen food; they too had been threatened and once or twice trapped and abused by adults. It was strange to be hearing a story about that stuff. The next night they would shift backward in the audio and find the page where they had stopped reading, and look for a time while listening again. Fairly quickly they began to see what the old man meant. It was a pretty simple system, although the spelling was often strangely wrong. They got to know Huck’s story well, and enjoyed discussing it as they cross-stitched their way forward. Wild times on the Mississippi. Similar in many ways to life on the Hudson. Meanwhile by day they were boating across town once a day to recover Mr. Hexter’s books (heavy), clothes (moldy), and rubber boots (stinky).
Vlade knew now that they slept in their boat under his dock, and he often gave them food, also a free charge for their boat’s battery, so they could gurgle over to the wreck rather than row, always taking canals not cordoned off by the water police. Everyone said the three remaining towers there would also fall. They had to stay south of that whole neighborhood for as long as they could, then cut up to it.
Then one day they burbled up to the building and found that it had slumped even farther to the side.
“Man. It’s like Pap’s houseboat in the Mississippi.”