The Hudson on these stormy days is gray and all chopped by whitecaps trailing long lines of foam. It’ll stay that way until it freezes, the clouds low over such a charcoal sky that the white snowflakes stand out sharply overhead, then are visible tumbling sideways outside every window, also visible below as they fall onto the streets and instantly melt. Looking down from your apartment window over the hissing radiator, through the grillework of fire escapes, you see that the trash can lids are the first things to turn white, so for a while the alleys below are weirdly dotted with white squares and circles; then the snow chills the street surfaces enough to stick without melting, and everything flat quickly turns white. The city becomes a filigree of vertical blacks and horizontal whites all chopped and mixed together, a Bauhaus abstraction of itself, beautiful even if its citizens never look up to see it, having dressed so stupidly as to make every trip to the corner store a worst journey in the world, with that fatal doorstep result possible for the most foolish or unlucky.
Then after the storms, in the silver brilliance of late winter, the cold can freeze everything, and the canals and rivers become great white floors and the city is transformed into an ice carving of itself. This magical chilly time breaks up and all of a sudden it’s spring, all the black trees tippled green, the air clear and delicious as water. You drink the air, stare stunned at the greens; that can last as much as a week and then you are crushed by the stupendous summer with its miasmatic air, the canal water lukewarm and smelling like roadkill soup. This is what living halfway between the equator and the pole on the east side of a big continent will do: you get the widest possible variance in weather, crazy shit for day after day, and just as the cold is polar, the heat is tropical. Cholera festers in every swallow of water, gangrene in every scrape, the mosquitoes buzz like the teeny drones of some evil genius determined to wipe out the human race. You beg for winter to return but it won’t.
Days then when thunderheads solid as marble rise up until even the superscrapers look small, and the black anvil bottoms of these seventy-thousand-foot marvels dump raindrops fat as dinner plates, the canal surfaces shatter and leap, the air is cool for an hour and then everything steams up again and returns to the usual fetid asthmatic humidity, the ludicrous, criminal humidity, air so hot that asphalt melts and thermals bounce the whole city in rising layers like the air over a barbecue.
Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt—that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet—that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard-bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a WALK sign to turn green, will be pierced by that light and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and gorgeous.
I had to get used to it, but now that I have, nowhere do I feel freer than amid the crowds of New York. You can feel the anguish of solitude here, but not of being crushed.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
f) Inspector Gen
Gen sometimes wondered if the patterns she thought she saw caused her to send her people out and make the patterns come into existence. Maybe this was deduction versus induction again. It was so hard to tell which she was doing that she often got the definitions of the two words confused. Idea to evidence, evidence to idea—whatever. Sometimes Claire would come back from her night classes talking about the dialectic, and what she said sounded a bit like Gen’s thinking. But Claire also complained that one of the dialectical features of the dialectic was that it could never be pinned down by a definition but kept shifting from one to another. It was like a traffic light: when you were stopped it told you to go; when you were going it told you to slow down and stop, but only for a time, after which it told you to go again. And yet you were not supposed to have your destination guided by traffic lights at all, but range widely and try to catch things from the side. While also trying to get where you were going.
So Gen was baffled as she reflected on these matters while walking the skybridges of the drowned city from station to station, from problem to problem. Today she was trying a new way to solve the shortcutter’s problem from her office to the mayor’s residence and reception skyscraper at Columbus Circle. She ambled along in the clear tubes of the graphene spans, switching from knight’s moves to bishop’s moves as the 3-D grid allowed. A dialectical progress high over the canals of lower Manhattan, which on this morning looked gray and congealed under a low cloud ceiling. Early December, finally getting cold. At Eighth she dropped to the ground and continued up the crowded sidewalks of the avenue just north of the intertidal. Mayor Estaban was hosting some kind of ceremony for visiting mayors from inland cities, apparently, and Inspector Gen had decided to attend and wave the NYPD flag.
This crowd was not Gen’s crowd. She would much rather have been submarining with Ellie and her people, having a frank and open exchange of views with the usual gang of water rats and ignoring the various indiscretions in the corners. The politicians and bureaucrats inhabiting the top of the uptown hierarchy, on the other hand, made her feel defensive. They wearied her. And she knew also that many of them were much bigger criminals than her submarine acquaintances; in some cases she had the evidence of their corruption cached for use at an opportune moment. This was a version of the same judgment she made underwater, that the people in place were better than whoever might replace them. Or she was just waiting for a moment of maximum leverage. Always that waiting made her anxious, as she realized she was making judgment calls that weren’t hers to make. In effect she was herself becoming part of the bad system, the nepotism and corruption, by holding things off the record. But she did it all the time. If she felt that the person in question was doing little harm by being there, such that nailing them might degrade the situation in lower Manhattan, then she put it in her pocket and waited for a better time. It seemed the best way. And sometimes she caught signs in the files that it had been the NYPD way for a lot longer than she had been alive. NYPD, the great mediator. Because the law was a very human business, any way you looked at it.