He nodded. “Or take back the intertidal,” he suggested. “Buy your SuperVenice out from under you.”
Charlotte had to admit it: her ex was smart. “Well, that too.”
“I was wondering why you were all of a sudden interested in finance, having never been so before. Like not even a little.”
“It’s true. That offer on our building is looking more and more like a hostile takeover bid. They came back with a second offer last week, offering twice as much as last time! And I asked around lower Manhattan, and we’re not the only ones it’s happening to. We can’t tell who it is, because they’re using brokers, but for sure it’s happening. Gentrification, enclosure, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, I realized that it can’t be fought by any one building or any one aid association. It’s a global problem. So if there’s to be any chance of fighting it, it’s got to be at the macro level.”
“So to save your building from a hostile takeover, you suggest I overthrow the world economic order.”
“Yes. But let’s call it saving the world from another Great Depression. Or shifting the noose from our necks to the parasites’ necks.”
“Hard,” Larry noted.
“Hard, because it’s politics. And finance has bought a lot of the politicians and a lot of the laws. So it’s getting harder. But when the next crash comes, you could help to change that. It’s an inflection moment. You’ll go down in history as the first chair of the Fed with any balls.”
“Volcker was pretty good.”
“He had brains. I said balls. All Volcker’s best ideas came after he was out of office and couldn’t enact them. They were afterthoughts. He was like Greenspan, almost. Oh my God, I made such a mistake thinking Ayn Rand had all the answers! Except Volcker had some ideas.”
“Maybe so.”
“So try some forethought for once.”
“I usually try to.”
“So there you are. Do it this time. These are the times that try men’s souls.”
“Okay okay. No Tom Paine, please. Charlotte Corday is already bad enough. I see the knife there in your handbag. You can stop caressing it.”
She had to laugh. She reached up and gave his upper arm a quick squeeze. Time to lay off. She didn’t want to add that she also had a plan to pop the bubble on Larry’s watch. He was already freaked out enough, both at what she was saying and that it was her saying it. She was aware that he could have tripped her up at any point with technical questions, that he was allowing her to talk at the level of history and political economy rather than economics per se. He too was interested at that level, and interested that she was now paying enough attention to these issues that what he did was important to her. That had never been true before. They hadn’t had a conversation like this one in—well, never. This was a first.
Now it couldn’t go much further without her foundering on her own ignorance. What did it mean to nationalize the banks? He would know, she didn’t. But happily, at that very moment a huge cracking noise, like a first clean crack of thunder, announced that the ice in the East River below them was breaking up.
Everyone in the restaurant rushed to the west and north windows and cried out at the sight: white ice cracking apart and heaving up in immense jagged plates, then splashing back down into black water and rushing south toward Governors Island and the Narrows. Why all at once? Why now? A neap tide had hit its flood height and turned, someone said, a few hours earlier, and the current was now ebbing hard, the water dropping from under the ice. This was how it happened; this was how it had happened two years ago, and five, and eight. And back in the Ice Age. Spring was springing, right before their eyes; looking around at the flushed faces Charlotte saw that it was an erotic and even a sexual high, a March madness indeed. The string quartet had changed gears and was now ripping something ferocious from Shostakovich. Lips were red, eyes shining, voices thrilling with the energy of the breakup. Springtime equaled sex. Down on the river black water leaped out from under the white verge and tossed giant white plates end over end. Never had the East River looked so much like a torrent.
Larry had the same look as the others, his pale freckled Ivy League skin flushed as if he had been embarrassed or run a race. It wasn’t for her, or for the river; he was thinking about her plan. It was mixing in his mind with the awesome sight of the breakup, the rearing ice plates rolling in black water like the rush of history itself. He was feeling how it would feel to be part of that, to be riding that chaos. She reached up and briefly pinched his cheek. She had used to lick his ear when he was coming and he would go wild. That guy was still in there; he liked to feel good.
“That’s right buster,” she muttered, feeling her own cheeks burn, and sat back down. She glanced up at him, a bit abashed at herself, at the sight below, at her forwardness with him, at the strength of her sudden memories, breaking out like the black torrent.
“Think it over,” she said. “Be ready for it. Get all your ducks in a row.”
“Among those ducks would be members of Congress I could count on,” he remarked as he sat down. He was smiling his little smile. “Dessert?”
“Yes,” she said uneasily. “Dessert and cognac.”
“Indeed.”
New York’s big avenues are not oriented exactly north and south but are angled twenty-nine degrees to the east of north. This means the east-west streets are actually angled northwest to southeast. This explains why the so-called Manhattanhenge days, when sunsets align with the streets and pour down them out of the west, turning the canals to fire, occur not on the equinoxes but rather around May 28 and July 12.
A storm that swept down from the Arctic in 1932 brought Arctic birds called dovekies and dashed many of them against the skyscrapers. Thousands were found all over the city dead, bodies draped on telephone wires, in streets, lakes, and lawns.
h) the citizen redux
If the Earth’s atmosphere were compressed to the density of water, it would form a coating on the Earth about thirty feet thick. As it is, it extends some eleven miles into the sky and then gets very diffuse above that, shifting from the troposphere to the stratosphere. As far as human year-round habitation, that habitable zone reaches up some fifteen thousand feet, so say three miles; above that people tend to die. So think about a layer of cellophane wrapping a basketball, and then remember that you’re still thinking too thick, when it comes to the atmosphere and the Earth.
Meanwhile it’s air, quite tenuous compared to water, and easy to move around over the surface of the Earth, as the Earth spins like a top in its circling of the sun. One spin a day (which is what a day is, duh) gets you a surface speed at the equator of about a thousand miles an hour, so really the wonder is that the air remains as still as it does, but inertia, drag, et cetera, means that usually the jet streams top out at around a hundred miles an hour, pouring mostly eastward, in patterns not unlike water coming out of the end of a hose left on the ground, in other words chaotic patterns, but clustered around strange attractors so that there are in fact patterns. But it’s light stuff, air, and though it moves somewhat like ocean currents as it flows around the Earth, its motion is wilder.
This has always been true, but when you add heat to the system everything has more energy, and so it behaves like it did before, but even more so. So weather has always been wild and full of anomalies, but after the rise in global temperatures following the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by humanity’s industrial civilization, weather got even wilder. For a long time, there was 0.6 watt per square meter more energy coming in to Earth than was leaving, and this cooked things, and the pot began to boil. Note that this new extra energy doesn’t disallow cold events just because the average is hotter; the increase in energy increases also the violence of the whirlpools of air that form, and a big enough whirlpool whirls the air itself away from its center, making a low-pressure area, and the land under that absence of air can become stupendously cold. So: stormy weather of all kinds, including hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, lightning storms, blizzards, droughts, heat spells, downpours, cold fronts, high-pressure ridges, and so on. You get the picture.