Of course it was true that certain assumptions I had baked into the IPPI needed to stay true for it to stay accurate. One was that the intertidal zone was going to remain legally ambiguous, jarndycing through the courts at Zenoesque speed. Another was that not too many of these once-and-future-and-therefore-present properties fell over too fast. If the rate of melting into the drink did not go exponential, or nova—if it proceeded, even accelerating, at a measurable rate that could be turned into a number that plotted not too hockey-stickistically onto a graph, one could follow that trend line up or down and see other trends and hope to predict futures, and, yes, bet again on that, without the IPPI itself ever cratering even if the actual physical stock did.
Thus my index contained and then concealed some assumptions and analogies, some approximations and guesses. No one knew this better than I did, because I’m the one who made the choices when the quants laid out the choices for quantifying the various qualities involved. I just picked one! But this is what made it economics and not physics. Ultimately the IPPI allowed for people (including WaterPrice) to concoct derivative instruments that could be offered and bought; and these could then be bundled into larger bonds, and sold again. So people loved the index and its numbers, and did not examine its underlying logic too closely. New paper was valuable in itself, especially when rated high by the rating agencies, who had such usefully short memories, like everyone else in finance, when it came to their own absurdly terrible judgment, so the ratings still mattered as a rubber stamp of legitimacy, ridiculous though that was given their history as a service bought by the very people they were rating. So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense extremely subprime was not mentioned except as one aspect of the very lucrative risks involved.
A new bubble, you might say, and you would be right. But people are blind to a bubble they’re inside, they can’t see it. And that is very cool if you happen to have an angle of vision that allows you to see it. Scary, sure, but cool, because you can hedge by way of that knowledge. You can, in short, short it. You can, as I had found out by doing it, invent a bubblistic investment possibility more or less by accident, then sell it to people and watch it go long, knowing all the while that it is turning into a bubble; and all the while you can short it in preparation for the time that bubble pops.
Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.
So, for the previous six months, reading the stats from around the coastlines of the world and trying to calculate all the trends, reading the tea leaves, the engineering journals, everything, including urban folktales, I had come to believe that the moment was approaching when this bubble was going to pop. Some places, like good old Manhattan, had a huge influx of technological innovation and human capital and sheer money, and here we were going to uptake the intertidal and make the best of it. But most of the world was well off the leading edge in all these relevant areas, and as a result, their intertidal was melting faster than it was being renovated. It had been about fifty-five years since the Second Pulse began, forty since it let off, and all over the world buildings were giving up the ghost and slipping under for good. Small buildings, big buildings, skyscrapers—those last fell with a mighty splash, and the market flinched and shuddered in their wakes—very brief flinches, just enough to adjust the IPPI, play the resulting jostle, and angle a few more points into our account—and then the bubble continued to expand. But it seemed like a moment of extreme simultaneous global badness was coming, and more and more I was shorting the very bubble I myself had helped to start in the first place.
What could be more nerve-rackingly cool.
And I was going out with Jojo for Friday drinks, and then maybe a float on the river, high tide at midnight, on a night of full moon, perfect! Oh! Oh!
So I left work and hummed down to Eldorado Equity on Canal and Mercer. Turning onto Canal Canal, as the tourists loved to hear it called, I found it crowded with afternoon traffic as usual, motorboats of every kind jammed bow to stern and thwart to thwart, to the point where more boat than water was visible. You could have walked across the canal on boat decks without ever having to jump, and quite a few flower sellers and mere passersby were actually doing that.
Jojo was waiting on her building’s front dock, and I felt a little spike in the cardiograph. I kissed the dockside with the starboard side of the skater and said, “Hey there.”
“Hi,” she said after a brief glance at her wrist, but I was on time, and she nodded as if in acknowledgment of that. She was graceful stepping along the deck back to the cockpit; looking up at her from the wheel it seemed like her legs went on forever.
“I was thinking of the Reef Forty Oyster Bar?”
“Sounds good,” she said. “So, do you have any champagne on this fine craft?”
“Of course,” I said. “What are we celebrating?”
“Friday,” she replied. “But also I made a little angel investment in some housing in Montana that seems like it should do very well.”
“Good job!” I said. “I’m sure the people there will be very happy.”
“Well, indeed. Security will do that.”
“The champagne’s in the refrigerator,” I said, “unless you want to take the wheel here?”
“Sure.”
I ducked below and brought back up a split. “It’s all in splits, I’m afraid.”
“That’ll do. We’ll be to Forty pretty soon anyway.”
“True.”
We had both worked late as usual, and now with about a half hour of daylight left, I hummed the bug up West Broadway to Fourteenth and turned west. As we purred along the sun-waked canal in the stream of boat traffic, I popped the split of champagne.
“Very nice,” she said after taking a sip.
The late sun spangled off the choppy water, shifting myriad blobs of brilliant orange over a deep black undercoat, the reflected light lancing everywhere. Yet another SuperVenice moment, and we toasted it as I let the bug putter along at the speed of traffic. The sunlight off the water suffused Jojo’s face, it looked like we were on a stupendous stage in a play put on for the gods. Again that feeling of I knew not what rose in the back of my throat, as if my heart were swelling; I had to swallow hard, it was almost a kind of fear, that I could feel this attracted to someone. What if you could really know someone? What if you could really get along?
Then my pad played the first three notes of the “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and I growled and checked it before it occurred to me that I should just turn it off. But before I did I saw the notice: that Chelsea tower that had collapsed had killed scores of people, maybe hundreds.
“Oh no!” I said without time to stop myself.
“What?”
“It’s that building that went down in Chelsea. They’re finding bodies.”
“Oh no indeed.” She sipped her champagne. “Did your IPPI come back up yet?”
“Mostly.”
“Do you want to go look at the damage?”
I think I might have gaped for a second. I did want to go look, but then again I didn’t, because although it was important that I stay on top of intertidal developments and get out before the bubble popped, that pop wasn’t going to happen just because this tower had done a Margaret Hamilton. And I was headed to the Forty oyster bar to watch the sunset with Jojo Bernal, and I didn’t want her thinking that I wasn’t giving her my top priority at this moment.