“Yes, I suppose. But bonds are derivatives. They’re like trading in risk itself, rather than any particular commodity.”
“Buildings are commodities?”
“Everything that can be traded is a commodity.”
“Including risk.”
“Sure. Futures markets are all about risk.”
“So this offer on our building. Is there any way we can find out who’s making it?”
“I think their broker has to file with the city, right?”
“No. They can make the offer themselves, in effect. What about fighting it? What if we don’t want to sell?”
“Don’t sell. But this is a co-op, right? Are you sure people don’t want to sell?”
“It’s in their buy-in contract that they can’t sell their apartments.”
“Sure, but the building entire? Are they forbidden to want that?”
Charlotte stared at the woman. She had been right to hate her.
“Would you want to sell, if you lived here?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Depends on the price, I guess. And whether I could stay or not. That kind of thing.”
“Is this kind of offer what you call aerating?”
“I thought that meant pumping out submarine spaces and sealing them so they stay dry.”
“Yes, but I heard the term is also being used to describe the recapture of the intertidal by global capital. You aerate a place and suddenly it’s back in the system. It’s undrowned, I think they mean to suggest.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
Aeration was a term used all the time on the left side of the cloud where Charlotte tended to read commentary, but obviously this woman didn’t read there. “Even though you invest in the intertidal?”
“Right. What I do is usually called bailing out, or rehabilitation.”
“I see. But what if we do vote to fight against this offer to buy the building? Do you have any suggestions?”
“I think you just have to say no to them, and that would be it.”
Charlotte stared at her. “You really think that’s all it takes?”
Jojo shrugged gracefully, and seeing that Charlotte began to hate her in earnest. Either she was pretending to be ignorant or she was a fool, and she didn’t seem like a fool, so there it was: pretense. Charlotte didn’t like it when people pretended to believe things you knew they couldn’t really believe; it was just a brush-off, an arrogance shading toward contempt. By this gesture she was saying Charlotte wasn’t worth talking to.
Charlotte shrugged back, a crude mirroring. “You’ve never heard of the offer too good to refuse? You’ve never heard of a hostile takeover succeeding?”
Jojo’s eyes went a little round. “I have heard of them, of course. I don’t think an offer like this reaches that level. If you say no and they don’t go away, that’s when you should start worrying.”
Charlotte shook her head. “They’re interested, okay? That’s enough to worry about, you ask me.”
“I save my worrying for things farther along the worry pipeline. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”
“They’ve made an offer, I said. We have to reply.”
“You can’t just ignore it?”
“No. We have to reply. So the time is here. We have a situation.”
“Well, good luck with it,” Jojo said.
Charlotte was about to say something sharp when her pad played the first bars of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Charlotte tapped the pad.
“Excuse me Miz Armstrong, it’s Amelia Black, I live in the Met when I’m in New York? I was trying to reach Vlade but I couldn’t get him. Are you by any chance with him?”
“No, but I’m going to join him now, we’re putting a new guest into the hotello in the farm. What’s up?”
“Well, I’ve got kind of a situation here. I made a mistake, I guess you’d call it, and then it all happened so fast.”
“What?” Charlotte began walking toward the elevator, and for some reason Jojo came along.
“Well,” Amelia said, “basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they really have, but Frans is flying us, and the bears are on the bridge with him.”
“How does that work? Aren’t they eating him or something?”
“Frans is the autopilot, sorry. So far they’ve left him alone, but if they accidentally turn him off or tweak him, I worry that it could be bad.”
“Is the autopilot something a bear could change?”
“Well, he answers to verbal commands, so if they roar or whatever, something might happen.”
“Are they roaring?”
“Well, yeah. They kind of are. I think they’re getting hungry. And so am I,” she added miserably.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the tool closet.”
“Can you get to the pantry?”
“Not without going through, you know, bear country.”
“Hmm. Well, wait just a second, I’m almost to the farm and Vlade is there. Let’s see what he says about it.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Jojo raised her eyebrows when Charlotte looked at her, and said in a low voice, “Sorry, I just want to hear what happens here, if that’s okay. And check in with Franklin again.”
“Fine by me,” Charlotte said. The elevator doors opened on the farm floor and the two women hurried over to the southeast corner. Vlade and Franklin and the boys and their elderly friend were all gathered outside the hotello, seated on chairs and little gardening stools.
Charlotte interrupted them: “Vlade, can you help us a second here? I’ve got Amelia on the phone, and she’s in a situation on her blimp there, the polar bears have gotten loose.”
That got their attention instantly, and Vlade said loudly, “Amelia, is that true? Are you there?”
“Yes,” Amelia said unhappily.
“Tell me what happened.”
Amelia described the sequence of questionable moves that had gotten her locked in a closet on an airship filled with polar bears on the loose. Vlade shook his head as he listened.
“Well, Amelia,” he said when she finished. “I told you never to fly alone, it just isn’t safe.”
“I always fly alone.”
“That doesn’t make it safe.”
“It makes it dangerous,” Franklin opined. “That’s what her show is about.”
“I can hear that,” Amelia reminded them. “Who is that?”
“Franklin Garr here. I live on the thirty-sixth floor.”
“Oh hi, nice to meet you. But, you know, I don’t mean to contradict you or anything, but it isn’t all true what you said, and anyway it doesn’t help me now.”
“Sorry!” Franklin said. With an uneasy glance at Jojo, now standing beside him (which had pleased him greatly, Charlotte saw), he added, “Are you in touch with the autopilot? Can you fly the thing?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe try tilting the blimp as straight up as it will go, see if the bears fall back down into their room? Kind of a gravity assist?”
Vlade glanced at Franklin with a surprised look. “Worth a try,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything by it.”
“But I don’t know how well we’ll float when we’re vertical.”
“Just the same,” Franklin said confidently. “More or less. Same amount of helium, right? You could maybe even accelerate upward. You’d put a little downward force on the bears.”
Again Vlade agreed this was a good idea.
“Okay,” Amelia said. “I guess I’ll try it. Can you stay on the line?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear,” Charlotte said. “You’re like a radio play.”
“Don’t make fun of me! I’m hungry. And I have to go to the bathroom.”
“There’ll be a bucket in most tool closets,” Vlade said.