Once out of the plane and then the airport, they could have been on Long Island. There was no feeling of floating, no movement of any kind. This always amazed Charlotte. Around her the neat little buildings made it look like a Dutch town.
Despite the elegant look of the buildings and streets, it was not hard to see the uneasiness in the eyes of the people housed in the township’s refugee dorms. It was a look Charlotte knew well, the look of her clients, here again staring at her. Needy looks, always trying to hook her into their stories, so that they were looks she had gotten good at deflecting. She couldn’t feel their desperation too directly or it would drive her mad, she had to keep a professional distance. And she could, but it took an effort; it was the thing that made her tired at the end of a day, or even an hour. Bone tired, and at some deep level, angry. Not at her clients, but at the system that made them so needy and so numerous.
So New Amsterdam was now ferrying a contingent from Kingston, Jamaica. None of them had papers, and they looked Hispanic, not Jamaican, and spoke in Spanish among themselves, but Kingston was where New Amsterdam had picked them up. The Caribbean was like that. Charlotte sat down at a table with them and listened to their stories one by one, creating primary refugee documentation. That would insinuate them into the records, and eventually would serve adequately for them, even if they had no originary paper. It was as if she were plucking them out of the sea itself. “Don’t forget to join the Householders’ Union,” she kept telling them. “That could be a big help.”
They were grateful for anything, and this too showed in their faces, and this too had to be ignored, as it was just another facet of their desperation. People didn’t like to feel grateful, because they didn’t like the need to feel grateful. So it was not a good feeling no matter which end of it you were on. One did good for others not for the others’ sake, nor for oneself, which would be a little sanctimonious, at best. This seemed to suggest that there was no reason at all to do good, and yet it did feel like an imperative. She did it for some kind of abstract notion, perhaps, an idea that this was part of making their time the early days of a better world. Something like that. Some crazy notion. She was crazy, she knew it; she was compensating probably for some lack or loss; she was finding a way to occupy her busy brain. It seemed like a right way to behave. It passed the time in a way more interesting than most ways she had tried. Something like that. But at the end of the day, even a day at sea, in the cool salt breeze and the sound of gulls crying, she was ready to pack it in.
But she couldn’t, not at the end of this day; she needed to fly back and get out of her office and get home. No time to walk, she would need to get on the vapo or even take a water taxi. Flying back in over the Brooklyn shallows to the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier anchored next to the UN building, Charlotte sat at the left-side window and marveled at the city in the late-afternoon light. Sun blazed off canals and made the rank-and-file forest of buildings look like rows of standing stones in some half-sunk Avalon. Black pillars drowned to the knees; it was a surreal sight, there was no coming to terms with it, it never ceased to look bizarre, even though she had lived in it all her life. What a fate. A somewhat glorious fate, and despite all, she stared down at the city with a little sense of wonder, even pride.
Down on the aircraft carrier. Walk down the ramp onto the dock and shift in the mass of people, taking little steps, onto a crowded vaporetto headed into the canals of the city. Grumble from dock to dock, reading reports while the crowds surged off and on, off and on. She got off at the dock next to her office and went in, thinking she should have just gone home.
Ramona and a group from the district’s Democratic Party office met her as she was leaving and asked to walk her out. Charlotte shrugged, almost saying I gave at the office, but biting back the words; she didn’t get why they were there. Out on the dock outside they asked her if she would run for Congress, for the Twelfth District seat, which covered the drowned parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and had been a controversial seat because of that, for many years representing more clams than people, and the people a bunch of squatters, communists, et cetera.
“No way!” Charlotte said, shocked. “What about the mayor’s candidate?”
Galina Estaban had anointed her assistant Tanganyika John to succeed the longtime congressman for the Twelfth, who was finally retiring. No one was very happy with this selection, but the party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time—school board, city council, state assembly—and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at the top would give you the party endorsement and its aid, and you were good to go. Had been that way for centuries. Outsiders did pop up to express various dissatisfactions, and occasionally some of them even overthrew the order of things and got elected, but then they were ostracized forever by the party and could get nothing done. They just wasted their time and whatever little money could be dredged up to support such quixotic tilts.
So, but these people asking her to run were from the party office, in fact they were its central committee, which made it a little different. Maybe a lot different. Estaban herself had come in as an outsider, which probably explained it. Come in as a star and disrupt the hierarchy, then become a power and anoint your own assistant to an unrelated post that was even more not yours to call than your own: not right. And Tanganyika John was a tool and a fool. Still, running against her would be a lost cause and a horrid waste of time.
Charlotte indicated this as quickly and politely as she could, then jumped on the vaporetto that mercifully gurgled into the dock headed down Park, just as Charlotte’s interlocutors were waxing eloquent with desperate pleadings.
“Think about it!” Ramona and the others begged loudly as the vapo surged off to its next stop, wringing their hands like starving mendicants.
“I will!” Charlotte lied cheerfully. It was annoying, but it pleased her too, just to think that here was something dumb she would not have to do, something that could be avoided with a simple No fucking way.
The vapo took a left at Twenty-third and deposited her at the dock in front of the Flatiron, and from there she took the elevator up to the skywalk level and walked west to Chopstick One, cursing it ritually as she crossed it from skybridge in to skybridge out, and then hurried over Twenty-third to home. She got to her room with just enough time to change shoes, chomp down an apple, wash her face, and get downstairs. She walked in as the board meeting was beginning.
She sat down feeling a little unsteady, as if she were still at sea, or in the air. The other board members regarded her curiously, so it must have shown, but she said nothing, explained nothing, just started the meeting with a quick, “Okay, let’s go.”