Charlotte palmed her forehead. “But what does it mean? I mean, what could we do different?”
I raised a finger, enjoying my moment of one-eyedness among the blind. “You could pop the bubble on purpose, having arranged a different response to the crash that would follow.” I pointed the raised finger over my shoulder, at uptown. “If liquidity relies on a steady payment stream from ordinary people, which it does, then you could crash the system any time you wanted, by people stopping their payments. Mortgages, rents, utilities, student debt, health insurance. Stop paying, everyone at once. Call it Odious Debt Default Day, or a financial general strike, or get the pope to declare it the Jubilee, he can do that anytime he wants.”
“But wouldn’t people get in trouble?” Amelia inquired.
“There would be too many of them. You can’t put everyone in jail. So in that basic sense, people still have power. They have leverage because of all the leverage. I mean, you’re the head of the Householders’ Union, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, think about it. What do unions do?”
Now Charlotte was smiling at me again, eyes alight, really an intelligent and warm smile. “They strike.”
“Exactly.”
“I like this!” Amelia exclaimed. “I like this plan.”
“It could work,” the taller quant said. He looked at his friend. “What do you think? Does it meet with your approval?”
“Fuck yes,” the smaller one said. “I want to kill them all.”
“Me too!” Amelia said.
Charlotte laughed at them. She picked up her cup and held it toward me, and I lifted mine and we clinked them together. Both cups were empty.
“Another glass of wine?” she suggested.
“It’s terrible.”
“I take that as a yes?”
“Yes.”
Early in 1904, three of Coney Island’s elephants broke out of their enclosure and ran away. Gee, I wonder why! One was found the next day on Staten Island, and therefore must have swum across the Lower Bay, a distance of at least three miles. Did we know elephants could swim? Did this elephant know elephants could swim?
The other two were never seen again. It’s a pleasure to think of them skulking around in the scrawny forests of Long Island, living out their lives like pachydermous yetis. But elephants tend to stick together, so it’s more likely the other two took off swimming with the one that was found on Staten Island. Not such a pleasure, then, to imagine them out there together, dog-paddling soulfully west through the night, the weakest eventually slipping away with a subsonic good-bye, then the next weakest. Lost at sea. There are worse ways to go, as they knew. In the end the surviving one must have lumbered up onto the night beach and stood there alone, trembling, waiting for the sun.
g) Amelia
Amelia banged around New York for a few days, too angry and distracted to do anything. At first she liked Franklin from the building, a good-looking man, but he thought she was a simpleton, so then she didn’t like him. She saw a few friends and talked over projects with her producers, but nothing appealed to her, and everyone agreed that she was probably not going to do a very good job of hosting an entertaining program about assisted migration when the main thing she talked about now was capturing and jailing everyone in the Antarctic Defense League, or alternatively killing them dead.
“Amelia, you’ve got to stop with that,” Nicole said. “If you can’t stop feeling it, you at least have to stop saying it.”
“But my audience knows I say what I feel, that’s why they watch my show. And right now I am post-traumatic.”
“I know. So you have to stop feeling it.”
“But I feel what I feel.”
“Okay, I get that. So let’s get you feeling something else.”
So they went ice skating. A polar vortex had struck the area the week before, and it was still cold out. Very cold, in fact it felt much colder in Manhattan than it had on the Antarctic shore, that shore where her ursine brothers and sisters had been most foully murdered. It was so cold that the whole of New York harbor had frozen over. People were now driving trucks on the canals and over the Hudson to Hoboken, and even all the way out the Verrazano Narrows, as the sea surface was frozen about two miles out from there. From time to time the Hudson’s ice cracked, and big plates of it shoved up and tilted at the sky, looking just like the ice in dreadful Antarctica. She couldn’t shed those memories.
The canals of lower Manhattan were frozen so solid there was barely a crack in the ice, so it was as if the streets had come back, this time white, and slippery, and considerably higher than before, but in any case there to walk on, simple as that. Well, nothing was ever simple in the city; there were warm spots where machinery or some other source of heat remained down in the subways or sewers or utilidors of the undercity, and these plumes were warm enough to make the ice over them thin or, in a few well-known locations, not there at all. At these liquid pools in the general ice the harbor seals popped up for air, also the beavers and muskrats and other estuarine mammals, breathing while hoping not to get killed and eaten by predators, human or otherwise. Really the world was such a horrid place. It was so often kill or be killed. Eat some of your neighbors and then get eaten by others.
Nicole was acting weird, like Amelia was some kind of bomb that might go off. And any boyfriend she had ever had in New York had left town, or was too unhappy or unhappy-making to recontact. Really there was nothing to do.
And so there they were, ice skating. Actually it was kind of fun. In her childhood Amelia had learned to skate on ponds and rivers, so she could handle the canals’ rough patches, and skate backward, which was fun, and even twirl a little, although this was not so fun, as it reminded her of when her mom had made her do things for contests. Her mom had been a stage mom, and Amelia supposed she had to be grateful now that she was a performing artist, but she wasn’t. She did however like to ice skate.