“Frank! Jesus! What’s going on up there? Keep it steady!”
“I’m on it. It’s the wind.”
“So compensate! The last thing we need is the freaking arm lying crushed at the freaking base of the statue like a dead freaking whale!”
There are cameras mounted on the crane, on the ground, and on the statue itself to monitor the arm as it rises, but the monitors don’t tell as clear a story as actually seeing the thing. Frank leans to the side, looking out of the huge glass windows of the sky crane, to see the arm twisting and torquing in the wind below. He adjusts the tension on the cables, like fiddling with a pair of venetian blinds, to get the torch and hand to take on a forty-five-degree angle. Now it rises with the torch slightly higher than the rest of the arm, and at this angle it catches the wind differently, rising more steadily. In a minute, it has risen past the height of the statue’s base. Now he pulls it in, the cable dolly bringing it closer to the statue.
Breed a bum to a bum, you get a bum. What goes for horse racing goes for humans as well. The loser’s parents are probably too stoned to even sign an unwind order. Sometimes these things can’t be left to the parents. Especially when those parents shoulda been unwound themselves before they started to breed. It’s good that they’re talking about mandatory unwinding of juvenile undesirables. If the law passes, maybe the problem will take care of itself. And if it doesn’t, I’ve got a cousin who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who could put me in touch with a parts pirate. Someone who’ll come in, take the kid, and be done with it. The thing is, I know I don’t have the guts to make the call.
“It’s looking pretty from down here. How’s it hanging, Frank?” And the foreman laughs. “How’s it hanging!” Probably didn’t even notice his own joke until after he said it.
“I could use a hand,” Frank tells him, and the foreman laughs some more. Frank increases the angle to eighty degrees. The torch is almost upright now as it dangles from multiple sets of cables on the massive crane.
Without her right arm, the statue’s been looking a bit like the Venus de Milo. Sullen and vaguely impotent. Not the vision of liberty the early immigrants saw before disembarking at nearby Ellis Island—but the original arm had to go. The copper shell and interior framework of the torch arm were simply too heavy and had grown too weak over the years. Rather than allowing the arm to succumb to metal fatigue in one storm or another, it was decided to replace the torch and arm with a lighter, sturdier alloy. Aluminum/titanium. Something like that. Only problem is that the replacement arm is silver-gray, not pale green. Supposedly, the brainiacs in the design office have a plan to paint it to match the rest of the statue, but that’s not Frank’s problem.
No, the snotbag dating my daughter is my problem. And my wife yells at me, like it’s my fault. Like I can do something about it.
“Ya shoulda never let her have so much freedom, Frank. And what if she gets pregnant? What then?”
What? She’ll stork it, that’s what. Learn her lesson the hard way. Or she’ll marry the imbecile. It’s all the stuff of nightmares.
“Easy now!” calls the foreman. “Just kiss it into place, Frank.”
Now he engages the laser guidance system and sits back. It’s out of his hands now. Like the docking of a spacecraft, it’s all computerized down to the millimeter with surgical precision. He watches on various screens as the arm docks into the notches cut into the copper folds of Miss Liberty’s gown, with a deep but gentle clank, and a vibration he can feel in his bones. Applause from the whole construction crew.
Now the assembly team takes over—a group of shipbuilders—because at this stage, fastening the arm is more like attaching the bow of a ship. There’ll be a week of welding, brazing, and molecular bonding to get the steel and copper to fuse to the new alloy. Again, not his problem. Tomorrow he’s back to work on a luxury high-rise on the Upper West Side. A regular sky jockey running a simple crane, lifting I beams to the eighty-eighth floor. Low profile, low stress.
Now if he can only get rid of his daughter’s imbecile boyfriend and lower the stress at home, he’ll be in business.
8 • Cam
Camus Comprix is a very happy young man. Yet not.
Camus is a highly driven young man. But he’s not certain he’s the one driving.
He sits alone on a balcony overlooking the ocean, high on a Molokai bluff, pondering his existence, which began a few short months ago. Prior to that he was part of ninety-nine other kids, although he suspects the number is greater. Ninety-nine is a nice alliterative number. Good for the media. Good for publicity. When it comes to Cam, his whole “life” is about public spin, and he’s yet to figure out why. Why is Proactive Citizenry putting so much money behind him? Why has the United States military “purchased” him like a piece of property? Valuable, yes, but property nonetheless. It used to bother him, but it doesn’t anymore. For some reason.
He loves being on Molokai—perhaps because it is the unloved sibling of the Hawaiian island chain. Once a leper colony, now just a curiosity, it’s the home of a huge compound owned and maintained by Proactive Citizenry. The cliffside mansion, Cam has learned, is only a part of the compound. Like everything else about the organization, its sphere of influence extends far beyond first impressions.
“You’re not eating, Cam,” Roberta says as she comes out to join him across the table. Roberta—his creator, or builder—whatever term one gives to the individual who conceived of you. Perhaps, then, it should be “mother,” though he’s loath to use the word.
“I was waiting for you.” He looks at the unappetizing appetizer before him. “And anyway, I have too few fans of foie gras in my internal community. I’ll wait for the prime rib.”
“Suit yourself.”
“If I could suture self, I wouldn’t have needed you.”
She gives him a weak Ha-ha roll of her eyes and begins to daintily manipulate the unpleasant-looking duck liver onto her crostini. As he recalls, to cultivate foie gras, ducks are force-fed until they’re morbidly obese, and their livers swell to near-exploding. Such wonderful tricks the human race has learned! Cam returns his gaze to the sea.
“General Bodeker is preparing quite the welcome for you at West Point next week.”
“No speeches I hope?”
“Only informal. Toasts at meet-and-greets. He’ll be out in a few days to brief you on the details.”
“Why can’t the military just tell people things?” Cam says. “Why must they brief?”
“I thought you, of all people, would appreciate linguistic formality.”
“Don’t you mean ‘you of many people’? It would be beyond hyperbolic to suggest I am made of all people.”
Cam’s impending West Point experience—his entire life, it seems—has been spelled out for him. He’ll be whisked through officer training, all the while posing for photo ops, and becoming the “Face of the Modern American Military,” whatever that means. He hated the idea at first, but he’s had a pronounced change of heart.
He must admit, the formal dress uniform looks great on him. It makes him look important. Part of something greater than himself. He imagines all the high-level people he’ll brush elbows with—not just as a novelty, but as a proud officer of the United States Marine Corps—for they said he could choose his branch, and he chose the Marines. He thinks of his glorious future, and he’s overjoyed. Yet not.