Today the sky is so blue it burns.
I went to Coney Island with Jean Cocteau one night. It was as if we had arrived at Constantinople.
c) Mutt and Jeff
Mutt and Jeff sit with Charlotte at their railing, sipping wine from the white coffee cups. “So is it weird being back in the world?” she asks.
“It was weird before.”
They regard the nighttime water-floored city. The antique filigree of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cablework articulates the new superscrapers on Brooklyn Heights, all lit like liqueur bottles. The harbor looks vast in the winter light, big plates of ice floating orangely in the black murk of twilight. Short days still.
“Arguably we’re saner now than we were before,” Mutt says.
Jeff shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be saying much, but even so it isn’t true. I’m off my nut now. I want things now.”
“You did before,” Mutt protests.
Charlotte says, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”
Jeff actually smiles at this, pleasing Mutt greatly.
“Delmore Schwartz!” Jeff says.
“It’s actually Yeats,” Charlotte explains. “Schwartz was quoting Yeats.”
“No way!”
“It’s true. I learned that the hard way. Someone said it was Yeats and I corrected them, I told them it was Delmore Schwartz, and then they corrected me, and they turned out to be right.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what I said. It wasn’t someone I wanted to be corrected by.”
“Do you mean your ex, chair of the Federal Reserve?”
Charlotte raises her eyebrows. “Bull’s-eye.”
“I’m surprised he knew that.”
“I was too. But he’s full of surprises.”
They look down at the sheet of black water, studded with dim white icebergs, also buildings both lit and dark. The immensity of New York harbor at night, awesome, sublime. The black starry bay.
“Everyone’s full of surprises,” Mutt says. “Did you hear Amelia Black’s broadcast after her polar bears got nuked?”
“Of course,” says Jeff. “Everybody did, right?”
“It’s got like a hundred million views now,” Charlotte confirms.
“Everybody, like I said.”
“There’s nine billion people on this planet,” Mutt points out, “so actually that’s about one out of every ninety people, if I got my decimal point right.”
“That’s everybody,” Charlotte says. “Very big saturation, anyway.”
“So what did you think?” Mutt inquires of her.
Charlotte shrugs. “She’s a ditz. She can barely string two thoughts together.”
“Ah come on—”
“Meaning I love her. Obviously.”
“Not that obvious.”
“Well, I do. Especially after she said all those nice things about the Householders’ Union right in the middle of saving that crashing skyvillage. That broadcast has gotten a lot of views too. That was bizarre, actually, her saying that then. I do think she has a little trouble with, I don’t know what. Sequential thinking.”
Jeff says, “We’re all like her.”
Charlotte and Mutt don’t get this.
Jeff explains: “She wants things to go right. She’s mad that they’re not going right. She’d like to kill the people hurting her family. How are we any different?”
“We have a plan?” Charlotte suggests.
“But do we? You’ve got this building, and the intertidal community, the Lame Ass and all the other co-ops, but now that things are going well, it’ll all get bought up again. Wherever there’s a commons there’s enclosure. And enclosure always wins. So of course she wants to kill. I’m totally with her. Put ’em against a wall. Fucking liquidation of the rentier.”
“Euthanasia of the rentier,” Charlotte corrects. “Keynes.”
“Okay whatever.”
“You are sounding pretty mad.”
“But you should have seen him before,” Mutt insists. “I’m telling you, he’s a lot calmer now.”
“No I’m not.”
“Maybe a little vengeful,” Charlotte says.
Jeff throws his hands in the air, like, What. “I want justice!”
“It sounds like you want revenge.”
Jeff’s laugh is more like arrrrrgh. He is seizing his hair with both hands. “At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs. So yeah, I want both. Justice is the feather in the arrow, revenge is the tip of the arrowhead.”
“The rentier class is not going to go down easily,” says Charlotte.
“Of course not. But look, once you’re cutting them apart, you tell them that they each get to keep five million. Not more, but not less. Most of them will do a cost-benefit analysis and realize that dying for a bigger number is not worth it. They’ll take their five million and slink away.”
Charlotte considers this. “The golden parachuting of the rentier.”
“Sure, why not? Although I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation.”
“It’s pretty mellow, as far as revenge goes.”
“Velvet glove. Minimize the trauma drama.”
“I always like that.” She sips her wine. “It would be interesting to hear what Franklin might say about that. About how we could finance it.”
“Why him?” Jeff asks.
“Because I like him. A very nice young man.”
Jeff shakes his head at her like he’s regarding a true miracle of stupidity.
Mutt, thinking to divert Jeff’s no doubt withering critique of their young financier, says, “Have you ever noticed that our building is a kind of actor network that can do things? We got the cloud star, the lawyer, the building expert, the building itself, the police detective, the money man… add the getaway driver and it’s a fucking heist movie!”
“So who are we?” Jeff says.
“We are the wise old geezers, Jeffrey.”
“But that’s Gordon Hexter,” Jeff points out. “No, we’re the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes.”
“Lame-ass jokes,” says Mutt. “I like that.”
“Me too.”
“But isn’t it a little weird that we have all the right players here to change the world?”
Charlotte shakes her head. “Confirmation bias. That or else representation error. I’m forgetting the name, shit. It’s the one where you think what you see is all of what’s going on. A very elementary cognitive error.”
“Ease of representation,” Jeff says. “It’s an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.”
“That’s right, that’s the one.”
Mutt acknowledges this, but says, “On the other hand, we do have quite a crew here.”
Charlotte says, “Everybody does. There are two thousand people living in this building, and you only know twenty of them, and I only know a couple hundred, and so we think they’re the important ones. But how likely is that? It’s just ease of representation. And every building in lower Manhattan is the same, and they’re part of the mutual aid society, and those are everywhere now, all over the drowned world. Probably every intertidal building in the world is just like us. For sure everyone I meet in my job is.”
“So it’s mistaking the particular for the general?” Mutt says.
“Something like that. And there’s something like two hundred major coastal cities, all just as drowned as New York. Like a billion people. And we’re all wet, we’re all in the precariat, we’re all pissed off at Denver and at the rich assholes still parading around. We all want justice and revenge.”