But if you then think furthermore that the bankers and financiers of this world know more than you do—wrong again. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re traders. They grab a tiger by the tail and ride it wherever it goes, proclaiming that they are piloting a hydrofoil. Expert overconfidence. As they age out, a good percentage of them have made their pile, feel in their guts (literally) how burned out they are, and go away and do something else. Finance is not a lifelong vocation. Some small percentage of financiers turn into monster sages and are accounted wise men. But even they are not. The people hacking around in the jungle aren’t in a good position to see the terrain. And they’re not great thinkers anyway. HFM, the anonymous hedge fund manager who spilled Diary of a Very Bad Year, was a fluke, an intellectual working in a trade. When he understood, he left. Because there are very few ideas uptown. And even the great thinkers can’t learn it all; they are ignorant too, they bail on the details of the emergent situation, unknowable in any case, and after that they write or talk impressionistically. They are overimpressed by Nietszche, a very great philosopher but an erratic writer, veering between brilliance and nonsense sentence by sentence, giving cover for similar belletristic claptrap ever since. His imitators at their best end up sounding like Rimbaud, who quit writing at age nineteen. And no matter the pseudo-profundities of one’s prose style, it’s a system that can’t be known. It’s too big, too dark, too complex. You are lost in a prison of your own devise, in the labyrinth, submerged deeply in the dark pools—speaking of belletristic claptrap.
There are other dark pools in New York Bay, however. They lie under the eelgrass at the mouths of the city’s creeks, deeper than any algorithm can plumb. Because life is more than algorithmic, it’s a snarl of green fuses, an efflorescence of vitalisms. Nothing we devise is anything like as complex as the bay’s ecosystem. On the floors of the canals, the old sewer holes spew life from below. Up and down life floats, in and out with the tides. Salamanders and frogs and turtles proliferate among the fishes and eels, burrow in the mulm. Above them birds flock and nest in the concrete cliffs of the city, beneficiaries of the setback laws for skyscrapers that were in force between 1916 and 1985. Right whales swim into the upper bay to birth their babies. Minke whales, finbacks, humpbacks. Wolves and foxes skulk in the forests of the outer boroughs. Coyotes walk across the uptown plazas at 3 a.m., lords of the cosmos. They prey on the deer, always numerous everywhere, and avoid the skunks and porcupines, who stroll around scarcely molested by anyone. Bobcats and pumas hide like the wild cats they are, and the feral ex-domestic cats are infinite in number. The Canada lynx? I call it the Manhattan lynx. It feasts on New England cottontails, on snowshoe hares, muskrats and water rats. At the center of the estuarine network swims the mayor of the municipality, the beaver, busily building wetlands. Beavers are the real real estate developers. River otters, mink, fishers, weasels, raccoons: all these citizens inhabit the world the beavers made from their version of lumber. Around them swim harbor seals, harbor porpoises. A sperm whale sails through the Narrows like an ocean liner. Squirrels and bats. The American black bear.
They have all come back like the tide, like poetry—in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt:
Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.
Will Irwin: To the European these colossi seem either banal, meaningless, the sinister proof of a material civilization, or a startling new achievement in art. And I have often wondered whether it does not all depend upon the first glimpse; whether at the moment when he stampedes to the rail they appear as a jumble, like boxes piled on boxes, or fall into one of their super-compositions.
Pedestrian killed by a cornice falling off a building.
d) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen got a call from Vlade at around four that afternoon.
“Hey, we found those guys who were snatched from the farm.”
“Did you! Where were they?”
“Up in the Bronx. I was up there doing some salvage work when we saw a hot spot down in the Cypress subway station. So I went back with some of my old city sub friends and dived it, and got an SOS from people inside a container down there, and a police boat cracked it and pulled them out.”
“Really!” Gen said. “Where are they now?”
“At the police dock station at One Two Three. Can you meet them there?”
“Sure can. My pleasure. I’ve been worried about those guys.”
“Me too.”
“Good job.”
“Good luck, you mean. But we’ll take it, right?”
“You bet. After they’re checked out I’ll see if I can bring them home with me. Hey, do you think they can fit back in that hotello with the old man?”
“I can set up another one for Hexter, right next to theirs.”
“Sounds good. See you tonight.”
Gen made arrangements for a water launch and asked Sergeant Olmstead to come with her. She piloted the cruiser up to the police station at 123rd and Frederick Douglass, taking Madison most of the way north and using some police boat privilege to pop through the intersections.
At the station they found the two kidnap victims recovering in the infirmary. Two middle-aged men. They had already showered and were wearing issue civvies. One of them, Ralph Muttchopf—brown hair thinning on top, about six foot, hound-dog face, skinny except for a slight pot belly—sat in a chair drinking coffee, looking around with a wary expression. The other, Jeffrey Rosen—small, feral, triangular head covered with tight black curls—lay on an infirmary bed with an IV in his forearm. He was running his other hand through his hair and talking a mile a minute to the other people in the room.
Gen sat and inserted some questions into his nervous chatter. It quickly became clear they would not be able to do much to dispel the mystery of their disappearance. They had been knocked out by whoever grabbed them, probably some milk of amnesia involved, as they had no memories of the abduction. After that they had lived in their container, fed two meals a day, they guessed, through a Judas slot in their door. Rosen had gotten sick at some point and Muttchopf had left messages on their food trays telling their captors about this, and meals after that had included some pills which Jeff had taken. More memory confusion at this point suggested more milk of amnesia. They had never seen or heard anything of their captors.
“How long were we in there?” Jeff asked.
Gen consulted her pad. “Eighty-nine days.”
The two men regarded each other round-eyed. Finally Muttchopf shook his head.
“Felt like longer,” he said. “It felt like, I don’t know. A couple years.”
“I’m sure it did,” Gen said. “Listen, when you’re cleared medically here, can I give you a ride home? Everyone at the Met has been worried about you.”
“That would be good,” Jeff said.