“And we were coding for your cousin, that was definitely a mistake, and then gigging. Encryption and shortcuts, the yin and the yang. Greedy algorithms are us.”
“Right, but there was something else! I found something, or something was bothering me…”
Mutt nods. “You had a fix.”
“For the algorithm?”
Mutt shakes his head, looks at Jeff. “For everything.”
“Everything?”
“That’s right, everything. The world. The world system. Don’t you remember?”
Jeff’s eyes go round. “Ah, yeah! The sixteen fixes! I’ve been cooking those up for years! How could I forget?”
“Because we’re fucked up, that’s how. We were drugged.”
Jeff nods. “They got us! Someone got us!”
Mutt looks dubious. “Did they read your mind? Put a ray on us? I don’t think so.”
“Of course not. We must have tried something.”
“We?”
“Okay, I might have tried something. Possibly I gave us away.”
“That sounds familiar. I think it’s something that might have happened before. Our career has been long but checkered, as I recall quite well. All too well.”
“Yeah yeah, but this was something bigger.”
“Apparently so.”
Jeff stands, holds his head with both hands. Looks around. He walks over to a wall, runs his fingers over a tight seal in the shape of a door; there is no knob or keyhole inside this door-shaped line in the wall, although there is a rectangular line inside it, around waist height on Jeff, knee height on Mutt. “Uh-oh. This is a watertight seal, see what I mean?”
“I do. So what does that mean? We’re underwater?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeff puts his ear to the wall. “Listen, you can hear it gurgling.”
“Sure that isn’t your blood in your ear?”
“I don’t know. Come check and see what you think.”
Mutt stands, groans, looks around. The room is long, and would be square if seen in profile. In it are two single beds, a table, and a lamp, although their illumination seems to also come from the low-lit white ceiling, about eight feet over them. There is a little triangular bathroom wedged into the corner, in the style of cheap hotels everywhere. Toilet and sink and shower in there, running water hot and cold. Toilet flushes with a quick vacuum pull. In the ceiling there are two small air vents, both covered by heavy mesh. Mutt comes back out of the bathroom and walks up and down the length of the room, placing his heels right against his toes and counting his steps, lips pulsing in and out as he calculates.
“Twenty feet,” he says. “And about eight feet tall, right? And the same across.” He looks at Jeff. “That’s how big containers are. You know, like on container ships. Twenty feet long, eight wide, eight and a half feet tall.”
He puts his ear to the wall across from Jeff. “Oh yeah. There’s some kind of noise from the other side of the wall.”
“Told you. A watery noise, right? Like toilets flushing, or someone showering?”
“Or a river running.”
“What?”
“Listen to it. Like a river? Right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what a river sounds like, I mean, when you’re in it or whatever.”
The two men eye each other.
“So we’re…”
“I don’t know.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.
The privatization of governmentality. The latter no longer handled solely by the state but rather by a body of non-state institutions (independent central banks, markets, rating agencies, pension funds, supranational institutions, etc.), of which state administrations, although not unimportant, are but one institution among others.
c) that citizen
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the land at the southeast corner of Madison Square in the 1890s and built their headquarters there. Around the turn of the century the architect Napoleon LeBrun was hired to add a tower to this new building, which he decided to design based on the look of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The tower was completed in 1909 and at that point it was the tallest building on Earth, having overtopped the Flatiron Building on the southwest corner of Madison Square. The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away, and after that the Met Life tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks, telling the time to the four cardinal directions. The clock faces were so big their minute hands weighed half a ton each.
In the 1920s, Met Life bought the church to the north of the tower, knocked it down, and built their North building. It was intended to be a skyscraper 100 stories tall, well taller than the Empire State Building, which was also being planned at that time, but when the Great Depression struck the Met Life people canceled their plan and capped North at thirty-two stories. You can still see that it’s the base for something much bigger, it looks like a gigantic pedestal missing its statue. And it has thirty elevators inside it, all ready to take people up to those sixty-eight missing floors. Maybe once people get over the freak-out of the floods they’ll tack on the upper spire in graphenated composites, maybe put up three hundred more stories or whatnot. They did miss their bicentennial opportunity, but hey, what’s a century in New York real estate? Some scammer in the year 2230 will be ready with a tricentennial proposal for a superscraper addition. Anyway, now Madison Square is dominated by an enormous replica of Venice’s great campanile. Got to love that coincidence, which gives the bacino now filling the square the look of Italianosity that makes it one of the signature photo ops of the SuperVenice.
Things like that keep happening to Madison Square. It began life as a swamp, created by a freshwater spring that for many years was tapped as an artesian fountain set right in front of the Met, with tin cups chained to the fountain for people to take a drink. The water jumped out of it in spurts said to be suggestive, as in ejaculative, but seems this was only yet another indication of the irrepressible dirty-mindedness of Victorian America. That stone fountain now resides somewhere out on Long Island.
Once the swamp was filled in, using dirt from the shaved-off hills nearby, it became a parade ground for a U.S. Army arsenal, also the intersection of the post road from Boston with Broadway. The parade ground kept getting smaller and smaller, and when the famous grid of east-west streets and north-south avenues was imposed on the landscape, the parade ground was reduced to the rectangle still there, about six acres in size: Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth, between Madison and Fifth, with Broadway angling in and adding another slice to the park.
Early on, the square was occupied on its north side by a big House of Refuge, a place to incarcerate juvenile delinquents. Later Franconi’s Hippodrome provided an interior space for spectacles of various kinds, including dog races and prizefights.
A Swiss family established the popular Delmonico’s on the west side, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel followed on the same site. Stanford White built the first Madison Square Garden on the north side, and crowds came to ride gondolas around in a system of artificial canals; this was before the Met campanile was built, so maybe LeBrun got the Venetian motif from White, who had already built a tower on top of his Gardens complex; for sixteen years the square boasted both these towers. White was shot dead by the jealous husband of a woman he was seeing, right in the Garden during a dinner show. When they tore his place down and built the new Madison Square Garden over at Forty-ninth and Eighth, the steel framing of the old one was saved, and it too remains somewhere on Long Island. Maybe.