We talked over dinner, not just money and politics, but music and the city. She had been born and brought up in the Lincoln Towers, right on the Hudson. She listened to my stories of Oak Park, Illinois, and we ate seafood on pasta and drank a bottle of white wine. She watched me closely and yet I didn’t feel observed or judged. I tried to make it clear that trading had interested me as a puzzle to be solved, a story to be pulled together out of the data. I explained my theory of the screen and its multiple simultaneous genres, giving when taken altogether a glimpse into the global mind. A hive mind.
“Like history,” she said as I tried to describe it.
“Yes, but visible on a screen. History as it’s happening.”
“And quantified, so you can bet on it.”
“Yes, that’s right. History made into a betting game.”
“I guess it always is. But is that good?”
I shrugged. “I used to think so. I enjoyed it as such. But now I’m thinking it has to be more than just something to bet on. With this building project, it’s more, I don’t know…”
“Making history.”
“Maybe so. Making something, anyway.”
“Did you get what you wanted when you went up to see Ramirez?”
“Well, I bought him out. And he let me do it. I suppose that was because his security contractors had been breaking the law. I may have burned a bridge there, I don’t know. He said we’d be seeing each other again. I don’t know what to think of that.”
“They won’t go away,” she said, regarding me with a little smile.
Was I naïve? Did I still have things to learn? Was she regarding me fondly? Yes to all. I felt confused in so many ways. But that look: it made me smile. It shouldn’t have but it did. It was a fond look.
When we got up to return to the boat, I felt good. Full; a little tipsy. Listened to. And I too had listened. We walked back down the slipways arm in arm. I turned on the boat’s lights and showed her down into the cabin, showed her the two beds tucked into either side of the narrow space down the cabin’s middle. Her bags were on the guest bed, and she put them onto the shelf over the bed, dug around and pulled out a bathroom bag and some kind of clothing, I guessed it was her pajamas. She left them on her bed and we went back up to the cockpit and sat under a few stars, fuzzy in the salt air. I had scotch but left it down below; we didn’t need it. Heads back on the rail, shoulder to shoulder.
Okay, I liked her. And more than that, I wanted her. Did that mean I was falling for power? Was it really true, then, that power is sexy? I couldn’t really buy it, not even then and there, looking at her and feeling that she looked good. Power comes out of the end of a gun, Mao said very cogently, and the end of a gun is not sexy, not if you are a normal person who values your life and thinks of sex as fun and guns as sick and disgusting. No; power is not sexy. But Charlotte Armstrong was sexy.
So but what did that mean? Sixteen years older, holy shit. When I myself was sixty, and hopefully still thoroughly hale and hearty even at that admittedly elderly age, she would be seventy-six years old, ack. An inhuman number. If I got to a lucky seventy, she would be eighty-six and deeply, deeply ancient. Up and down the years, the discrepancy was like a Grand Canyon between us.
But now was now. And by the time we got to that future point, I figured either she would have seen through me and broken up with me, or I would have caught a cancer and died, or more likely she would die and leave me bereft and seeking consolation with some thirty-year-old. I would be like one of those horrible Margaret Mead–Robert Heinlein line marriages and first marry someone way too old for me, then someone way too young. It sounded awful, but what was I going to do? Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it’s catch-as-catch-can. And just thinking of her kicking ass in the nation’s dismal swamp was making me laugh. It was going to be funny.
“Come on,” I said after a long silence. “Let’s go below.”
“Why?”
“Why what? You know why. To have sex.”
“Sex,” she scoffed, as if she didn’t believe in it, or had forgotten what it was. But there was a sly little smile tugging up the corners of her mouth, and when I kissed her I learned very quickly that she knew perfectly well what sex was.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
f) Amelia
Over New York harbor, a calm spring day, year 2143. Cloudless, visibility forty miles.
Amelia took Stefan and Roberto and Mr. Hexter up in the Assisted Migration and ordered Frans to ascend to two thousand feet to have a good look at the bay. Mr. Hexter was excited to be getting to see the city from this marvelous vantage point and planned to take photos for some kind of mapping project he was contemplating. The boys were happy to come along and catch the view, see if any muskrats could be seen from the air.
“I see them all the time,” Amelia said. “You’ll love the telescopes Frans has on board.”
As they made their ascent the boys and Mr. Hexter toured the gondola, with Amelia explaining everything, including the claw marks made by her polar bears, which she could now point at with only a brief plunge into sadness. It was just one of the bad parts of the past. In her campaigns on behalf of animals and habitat corridors she had experienced many reversals, and witnessed a lot of suffering, and often death. Now, as she drew her hands down the scratch marks and showed how the bears must have fallen down the suddenly vertical hallways, she could put that foolish moment in context. Category: Amelia’s Dumb Moves, Extrication From. It was a big category. It was not that particular moment that had been the bad one.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said after the boys and Mr. Hexter had marveled.
They gathered in the glass-bottomed bow of the gondola and looked down at the city as they ate tofu burgers that Amelia had prepared on her kitchen stove.
“How many miles have you traveled in this thing?” Mr. Hexter asked.
“I think it’s a million now,” Amelia said.
She asked Frans, and the airship’s calm Germanic voice said, “We have traversed one million, two hundred thousand and eighteen miles together.”
Hexter whistled briefly. “That’s like fifty times around the world, if you were going around the equator. So it must have been more times than that.”
“I think so. I’ve lived up here for a long time. It’s kind of like my little skyvillage. A sky cottage, I guess you’d call it. There were some years when I didn’t come down at all.”
“Like the baron in the trees,” Hexter said.
“Who was that?”
“A young baron who climbed into the forest in Italy, and never came back to the ground again for his whole life. Supposedly.”
“Well, I did that too. For a few years.”