This was probably what Jojo was hoping to ameliorate with her value-added investing. It was hopeless, really; even if you managed to do it, it would make you a kind of topologically reversed Sisyphus, digging a hole that always refilled, pumping out basement after basement only to have them pop, often lethally; then back to it again. Aeration! Submarine real estate! A new market to finance, and then to leverage, so that the cycle could repeat at a larger scale, as the first law demanded. Always grow. This meant that once the island’s surface was filled to the max, you first shot up into the sky; then when that effort reached the limit of the material strengths of the time, you had to dive. After the basements and subways and tunnels were aerated, no doubt people would start carving caves deeper and deeper, extending an invisible calvinocity down into the lithosphere, excavating earthscrapers to match the skyscrapers, buildings right down to the center of the Earth. Geothermal heating available at no extra charge! Apartments in helclass="underline" and that was Manhattan.
Except not really. One could think pessimistically when boating about in the abandoned ruins of Chelsea, trying not to look back at the furtive faces in top-floor windows and yet seeing the misery there anyway. But it was easy to clear one’s head of these dreary visions; just turn the bug and hum out to the great river and throttle up to hydroplane speed, lift off and fly, fly upstream and away, away from the wounded city. Fly!
I did that. The broad Hudson sheeted under me, its internal movements coiling and fracturing the dark surface. And there it was, standing around me on both sides of the river: upper Manhattan and Hoboken, both of them studded with skyscrapers taller than anywhere else, the two sides of the river competing for dominance by prominence, right in a decade when the revolution in building materials had allowed the construction of skyscrapers three times taller than ever before. And it still pleased the rich to stash away a billion or three in a skypartment somewhere in New York, visit for a few days a year, enjoy the great city of the world. No way Denver was ever going to match the view I was looking at right now!
I let the bug down onto the water with a ducky splash and headed in to the long dock floating under the Cloister cluster. The great complex of supertowers, each well over three hundred stories tall, loomed overhead like the visible part of a space elevator; it truly looked as if they pierced the blue dome of the sky, that they disappeared up there without actually ending. This effect made the sky itself seem somehow lower than usual, like a turquoise-blue dome in some immense circus, held up by a four-pronged center pole.
There was a line at the marina entry almost a dozen boats long, so I pulled up next to the cliffside that rose so steeply out of the river along this part of the island, to wait for the line to clear. The old Henry Hudson Parkway had been submerged by the river long ago, and the hack they had made in the hillside to hold that Robert Moses intervention was now underwater even at low tide, and home to a narrow long salt marsh, a flowing yellow-green surface carpeting the foot of the hillside, which was covered with brush and ferns and small trees, and studded with the island’s bossy gneiss outcroppings protruding out of the greenery.
I hummed slowly into the grass edging the salt marsh and turned upstream. Felt the bug’s starboard hydrofoil touch the bottom. It was near high tide. A quiet estuarine corner of the city, a little thoreautheater, cool in the shade of a passing cloud.
The grass of the marsh was almost entirely submerged at this point of the tide. Some kind of fluid eelgrass, flowing horizontally this way and that, pushed first downstream by the river’s flow, then upstream in the repeated slosh of boat wakes. The many grass stalks flowed in parallel, like hair underwater in a bathtub. Each green stalk had yellow chips crosshatching it, and as the flat mass angelhaired back and forth in the waves there was a lovely, mesmerizing sparkle of gold in the green. Back and forth the flowing grass flexed, sparkly and fluid. Back and forth, green and gold, back and forth, flow flow flow. Really very pretty.
And in that moment, watching this motion, just passing the time in a little contemplation of the river’s verge, waiting for the boats to clear the marina entry, I experienced a vision. A satori; an epiphany; and if you had told me flames were shooting out of the top of my head at that moment, I would not have been surprised to hear it. The biblically boggled ones had only been accurately describing the feel of when such an idea lances you. Luckily there was no one there to hear me speaking in tongues, or to interrupt my thought and cause me to forget the whole thing. No, I had it; I thought it through; I felt it. I wasn’t going to forget it. I watched the grass flow back and forth in the stream, fixing the thought with the mesmerizing image over the side of the bug. Really quite beautiful.
“Hey thanks!” I said to the dockmaster as he waved me into the marina. “I just had an idea!”
“Congratulations.”
I strode up the enormous broad stairs to the plaza that surrounded the Cloistermunster, the biggest tower in the cluster of four great supertowers that launched out of the hilltop. The Munster was built in the shape of a Bareiss column, meaning the bottom and top of the building were both semicircular, but with the semicircles oriented 180 degrees to each other. This configuration made all the exterior surfaces of the building curve very gracefully. The other towers of the cluster were also Bareiss columns, but with two for each tower, stacked vertically such that their midpoints formed matching semicircles. This arrangement doubled down on the lovely long curves rising up to puncture the sky. I crossed the plaza with my head canted back like a tourist, enjoying the architectural sublime, which at this point in my Day of the Idea was gilding the lily, but in a good way. Everything seemed vast.
Inside the Munster I took the sequence of ear-popping express elevators to floor 301, the top floor, where Hector Ramirez had his office, if that was the word for a room that occupied an entire floor of a building that big. A loft? It was a single semicircular space about the size of Block Island, glass-walled on all sides.
“Franklin Garr.”
“Maestro. Thanks for seeing me.”
“My pleasure, youth.”
He had not spoiled the impact of his perch with much in the way of furniture. Around the elevator core there were some chest-high cubicles, and some desks outside those, but beyond that lay an open space that extended to curving window walls to the south, flat glass to the north, the glass in every direction so clean it was hard to be sure it was even there. One saw the world.
To the south, the rest of uptown was a forest of superscrapers only a bit shorter than the Cloister cluster, each displaying its particular gehryglory. To the left of these towers lay the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, all three boroughs now bays studded with buildings, with Brooklyn Heights the first real land to be seen that way, topped by its own line of superscrapers. It was only from this distance one could see how tall the new towers really were, which was really very tall. Meanwhile water gleamed everywhere, filled with drowned buildings and bridges, ships and ships’ wakes.