In this situation, what one can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the future produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning.
b) Stefan and Roberto
It took about a week for Stefan and Roberto to eat their way back to weight, and after that Roberto got restless and began to plot their next move. Whatever this project turned out to be, it was going to be complicated by the fact that now they had about a dozen adults in the Met paying attention to them and bringing up the foster parent thing, the guardian thing, the paper thing, the gold thing, trying to make them “wards of the co-op,” as Charlotte put it at one point when they refused all supervision. Neither of them liked any of these ideas, and they agreed it was getting dangerous to speak openly to anyone but Mr. Hexter, who had his own ideas about what they should do, and described himself as being, in relation to them, avuncular, meaning “unclelike” in Latin. Seemed to them that it must be a cool language to have a specific word for being unclelike, as uncles were nothing as far as they could tell. They were happy to let him take on the role on that basis.
He was still trying to teach them to read. It wasn’t much harder than understanding his maps. Maps were great; they were pictures of places from a bird’s-eye view, easy to comprehend. Mr. Hexter wanted Amelia Black to give them a ride so that they would be able to see how much the land looked like the map of it when you were up at the bird’s level. They were agreeable to that, in fact it sounded great. But even without that, the principle of maps was obvious and they got it. And it had been the same with written words, which were like pictures of the spoken words, in that each letter was the picture of one or two sounds, and once you had memorized those, you could sound out any word and know what you were reading. That too had been easy. It had turned out to be way easier than they had thought it was going to be. It would have been even easier if English spelling were less stupid, but whatever.
“I wonder if all of school would have been this easy?” Stefan said.
“You can still find out,” Mr. Hexter said. “But I don’t recommend it. You guys are too quick for school. You might die of boredom and get in trouble, and you’re already in enough trouble as it is.”
“What do you mean, we’re not in trouble.”
But it was true that Franklin and Vlade and Charlotte had melted their gold coins and were taking care of the money the gold had been bought for. And Franklin in particular was insistent that from now on when they went out to do things, they had to take their wristpad with them, always, no exceptions.
“In fact,” he said, “I think that idea of locking ankle beepers on you like they do with people under house arrest is a good idea. I bet Inspector Gen would bring home a couple for us. That way you wouldn’t accidentally forget and go out and get yourself killed without us knowing how you did it.”
“No to that,” Roberto said. “We are free citizens of the republic!”
“You have no idea whether you are or not. No birth certificates, right? No last names, for God’s sake. In fact, Roberto, how did you get any name at all, being orphaned at birth and self-raised from out of a lobster trap?”
Roberto got his stubborn look. “I am Roberto New York, of the house of New York. The dockmaster called me little robber, so I figured my name was Robber, and then later a guy told me about Roberto Clemente. So I decided I was Roberto.”
“And you were how old at this point?”
“I was three years old.”
Franklin shook his head. “Remarkable. And you, Stefan?”
“I am Stefan Melville de Madison.”
“You’re wards of the building. Or maybe Lame Ass. Charlotte made that your legal status. So if you want to go out, at least take that wristpad.”
“All right already,” Stefan conceded. “We can always zap it later,” he explained to Roberto, forestalling Roberto’s expostulations.
“For now, I’ll go out with them,” Mr. Hexter said. “We’re going to go out and see how things are looking since the storm.”
“We’re going to go muskrat hunting!”
Franklin nodded at this. “Good. Mr. Hexter will be your electronic bracelet.”
“I am indeed powerfully attached to my friends,” the old man said, shaking his head as if it were a bad habit.
“Besides, what about our gold,” Roberto demanded. “Here you are trying to lock us down and you’re keeping our own gold away from us.”
“No no,” Franklin said. “Your gold is yours. What’s left of it anyway. We’ve got it in Vlade’s safe so you don’t make a big necklace out of it and then go swimming while you’re wearing it. It’s doing fine. More than fine. You know that. The Indian central bank loves you. And I used some of what they paid you to short housing, so now you are rich. By the time I’m done you’ll be about fifty times richer than you were with the gold. The only remaining question is whether anyone will be left standing to pay you.”
“Cool.”
“I want a gold doubloon to pierce and put around my neck on a necklace.”
“I think they’re guineas, and haven’t you heard those stories of guys getting beheaded by thieves going after their gold necklaces?”
“No.” The boys looked a little thoughtful at this. “Does that really happen?”
“Sure, this is New York, remember?”
“Okay, well, I still want one of the coins, for in my pocket.”
“That seems fair. As long as you’re wristpadded, so we can recover your body.”
“Deal.”
Then it was back to singing a b c d e f g, h i j k et cetera. At this point they sang it whenever they wanted to drive Mr. Hexter to something more interesting than reading.
Today, with Franklin Garr off to join the Cloisterclusterfuck, as he called it, they used the song to convince Mr. H to agree to a cruise around the city.
Their boat was no worse for wear, and they puttered about the canals of the neighborhood checking things out. The hurricane had ripped off all the leaves, so the terraces and rooftops looked bare, and many a canal was still clogged with debris. But they were able to get through most of them, and city crews were out in force working on the cleanup. There was a dank vegetable jungly smell in the air, and many people on the water were wearing white face masks. Mr. Hexter snorted at this. “Little do they know they’re depriving themselves of needed nutrients and helpful microbiome teammates.”
They found that the most common arboreal survivors of the wind’s onslaught had been potted trees, which had presumably been knocked on their sides and remained prone through the storm, and now only had to be lifted upright to restore some green to the scene. They looked battered but unbowed; they were like the city itself, Mr. Hexter declared.
Up in the intertidal things were truly squalid. Around Fiftieth the high water mark of the storm surge was obvious, an irregular wall of junk steaming in the criminal humidity. Mr. Hexter said it looked like the barricades of Les Miserables: windows intact in their frames, shutters, chairs, boat hulls, trash cans, pallets, boxes, cans, and many branches, or even trees entire, roots and all. This long barrier reef complicated getting from lower Manhattan onto dry land, and it was interesting to see the city workers concentrate on certain avenue canals to establish functioning floater docks: Tenth, Sixth, Fifth, Lex.