Holly kept her voice admirably calm. “We lost friends in that.” She gestured to Kate and Liza. “Don’t talk about it like I somehow lost my nerve.”
“I think we need to stay joyous,” I interrupted. Everyone looked at me. In a room where I was the only white woman and had a background in corporate America, it always felt like I was one mistaken comment away from being run out of the room. “We need to keep offering the positive vision. We know we can make a better world. It’s still out there waiting.”
“… If you’ll just join us,” finished Liza. I really loved her in that moment. This unusual interjection of sincerity seemed to defuse Holly and Tavia.
“Oh Jackie, you sexy PR flak,” said Kate. “I think we hold serve right now. We’ll have a Republican Senate to fight no matter what, with my good friend Russ Mackowski in leadership. But we have to see how this clusterfuck election shakes out. We need to know who we’re dealing with first.”
“Because if it’s The Pastor…” Holly said darkly. She scratched at her legal pad with a dull pencil.
Leaving the offices late that night, back across the glittering water reflecting the city like a starscape, back to my disintegrating relationship with the only man I’d made any kind of true and vital love work, I thought of the stories I’d told myself. How secretly and deeply ashamed I’d been for so long.
On December 19, the Dow fell 2,212 points, the third-largest single-day loss in history and coming after a year of anemic growth. VR/AR glued to his face, sweating his conversations with Peter and the analysts, Fred barely noticed my comings and goings. Fred, more passive-aggressive than confrontational, would sleep in his office for days at a time. We’d delayed the wedding until the fall of ’37. Sex had dried up entirely, and I daydreamed with envy about Kate’s many beds. The markets recovered slightly by Christmas, but the squawking heads could not pinpoint who to blame: the unresolved election, the crisis in China, the crisis in India, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, the aftermath of California’s ARkSTORM, and of course the rabid behavior of the Eurozone’s new unofficial leadership. Jennifer Braden loudly blamed the Seventh Day protests for slowing the economy. They needed to be “put down with more firepower than Vic Love used on the Mall.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized that The Pastor couldn’t be certified soon enough, if only to deal with this instability using the domestic security force built over the last four years by President Love. Krugman, the decrepit gadfly at the Times, was beating the drum about something else, and Fred dismissed this idea with so much hostility that I worried there might be something to it.
Housing prices had plummeted 7.8 percent year over year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, the largest drop since the 2008 crisis, and this was after a 3.6 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2035 alone. Most of the metro areas where this was occurring were on the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast, particularly in and around Miami, where homes sat unsold, foreclosures had spiked, lending had tightened, and a full-scale abandonment of all homeowners policies by the hard-hit insurance industry was creeping outward like a cancer. Sound familiar? wrote Krugman. While poor minority neighborhoods turned to flooded ruins, the wealthiest Miamians scrambled for high ground, but now even those neighborhoods are experiencing untenable nuisance flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program has fallen nearly half a trillion dollars in debt despite Congress’s efforts to raise rates for at-risk properties. Rating agencies continue to downgrade the bonds of coastal cities and tax bases are collapsing, which then hamstrings much-needed repairs to the infrastructure needed to keep these cities dry. Much of this has been predictable, but that does not make it any less frightening.
On Christmas Eve, I got together with Erik and Allie in VR, the worlde a re-creation of our childhood home, now bulldozed into a field in distant Iowa. The computer-generated facsimile of our living room, built by Allie with Slapdish paintbox, had a number of missing details, including that the fireplace stone had not been brick. She had remembered to put in the banister where I’d found Mom.
Allie and Burt had rebuilt their home in St. Louis right back on the floodplain, but Allie assured us that the flooding had been once in a thousand years. I didn’t bother to explain to her the meaninglessness of that phrase. Erik was typically taciturn. He didn’t know what his own kids were up to because his ex-wife and her new husband had moved away two years earlier. “They got out while the getting was still good. They took a steep loss on the property, but at least they got something.” I asked if he was worried about his own home. “Worried? No reason to be worried. It’s already all over. Not literally underwater yet, but I owe about triple or quadruple what it’s worth, according to all the people trying to sell in the neighborhood.”
“But you don’t even live near the shore?” said Allie.
“Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s seeing what’s happening in Miami, and there isn’t one goddamn sucker left to put in an offer. Even on high ground.”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, without mentioning that I’d been basically paying his mortgage the past two years.
“Probably walk away if I can find a job somewhere else. Or live here till I drown. Depends a lot on how fast the water comes in.”
Fred and I went to his son’s Christmas party the next day. Fred Jr. always put me on edge. After spending a few years in a juvenile facility, now he was in his senior year at Brown as if nothing had ever happened. He resembled Fred in the eyes but was rounder in the face and carried himself with much more swagger. Nobody at the party was talking about anything other than the situation in the markets.
“It’s not 2007,” Freddy assured us. “Real estate’s in a slowdown for other reasons.”
“Such as?” someone asked.
“Regulation, as usual,” he said with confidence. He popped a carrot loaded with blue cheese into his mouth and talked as he crunched. “Tie the hands of homebuilders, homebuyers, and insurers, and this is the kind of mess you end up with.”
For New Year’s Eve, we attended an exclusive event at the Biltmore to raise money for Bangladeshi refugees, $20,000 a plate. This had been Fred’s Christmas gift to me, and I could feel him bending over backward, popping vertebrae to meet me in my new pursuits. “I understand why you left Tara,” he told me. “You spend your whole life getting ahead, and now you want to give a piece back.” But looking around the party, it was hard to take any of this seriously. The gilded edges of the hotel ballroom, the extravagant dresses, the crisp tuxedoes, the decadent meal. All the ostentation was in service of a twenty-minute holographic video displaying the plight of the Bangladeshis, just one of many peoples now forced into disease-stricken camps with no potable water, into the savagery of the Indian army, into a flotilla of makeshift boats in the hopes of reaching even more distant countries, no home, no peace, no rest, no justice anywhere on the horizon. And after it was over, they served dessert, Basque cheesecake with duck-egg crème brûlée.
Fred excused himself to find a scotch, and soon I grew bored with our table and followed. Slinking past dresses that cost tens of thousands of dollars in my own Lela Rose, I felt the ugly bifurcation of my life, trying to foment a revolution during the day and enjoying the splendor and privilege of my actual situation on nights and weekends. My dad once said to my mother, as bitterly as I’d ever heard him say anything, “Greed is a strange thing. You think it was made up by the Bible right until you see it.”
Handing over the Tara files to Moniza, I thought I’d cleansed myself—of ANøNosiki and CLK and asset management firms holding farmland and fresh water—but if anything, the feeling of grit on my skin grew worse. I found myself wishing I was in the Staten Island offices with Kate, Liza, Holly, and the rest.