The Mere Future (3 page)
So, personally, Sophinisba impressed me. Though I didn’t completely register the precision of her quest.
Precision
, that word again. It reappears because truth was again involved.
After wondering together, Nadine and I went hand in hand to meet old Soph and talk to her, face to face. That’s how she spent her first month in office. Around-the-clock coffee and rugelach with each of her citizens. Mayor B asked questions and answered them, urging us all to take another bite. Women always have more power when they bring some food to the table. Lulled, Nadine and I basked in Sophinisba’s smile from under the brim of her silly, endearing hat. All her tricks were humanizing, made us relax, this lack of fashion sense. The ugly shoes. Dull hair.
Her first question was:
“What are you ladies thinking about?”
“Paint,” Nadine answered. “I work in front of a digital-squigital all day long, and long for something more tactile than screens.” She sighed, open-hearted, telling her long longing to her sympathetic government. “Sometimes I want to leave technology behind and return to the days of hands, materials, smells.”
“I see,” Sophinisba said, rugelach dust on her widening lap. “It’s more individual, is that it?”
“Oh you,” Nadine cooed. Swooning as though it was someone fuckable, charming, and needy, instead of an astute Mayor with a bad perm.
“I’m asking myself what a city is,” I said, following Nadine’s trusting example, and also scampering for attention. “I’ve lived in this one all my life and its meaning it still too big to grasp.”
“Maybe it’s unknowable,” Sophinisba wavered, allowing doubt to be a legitimate perk of human governance. “Do you love your city?”
“I love it.”
“Me too,” she sipped conspiratorially.
Yes, we both loved the same unknowable living mass of flesh, steel, disappointment, possibility, and that patch of sky whenever one looks up.
“Why, Ms Mayor?” Nadine was being openly flirtatious now, which was interesting to watch. “Why do you love it?”
“Because,” she said. “Here we are, fragile beauties in the same tender space. We are surrounded by magnificence and the capacity for great evil. We share this duality, in front of each other, with our weak enticing bodies. That’s what it is to live in a city. And to love it. There is one thing every human being needs, and I think we all know what that is.”
We nodded.
Not another sound clamored to be heard. We knew what word she was referring to. We knew what that one need was.
Satiated, we left and another wide-eyed neighbor took our place.
Nadine and I wrapped around each other, soft within ourselves as only the protected can be. This was new and great. Considering that most people have a very hard time thinking, it is advantageous for our common overlap known as
society
to be both smarter than the masses AND a force for personal serenity.
“Conformity is unavoidable,” Nadine whispered in my shell-pink ear, “so anyone who raises the standard to which most will conform, well, that chick is gesturing towards joy.”
Agreed. And what I loved most about Sophinisba was that her philosophical approach had a material application. She figured out morality and then made it real. And the reality of our common New Yorker vulnerability translated into the one word, the word so obvious that Sophinisba didn’t even need to utter it. That word was …
HOMES
Sophinisba knew, as all city dwellers come to understand, that nothing good can happen between fellow citizens—no program, no idea, no change, no hope, no chance—if people do not have a home.
“Everyone must have a home or else there is no nation,” she announced the next day. “It would be a joke.”
I felt the jangle of keys in my pocket and realized that soundtrack was the heartbeat of the healthy soul. Without homes there is nothing else we can do for each other that works. Once Sophinisba let that cat out of the bag, more changes got made. Pronto.
When the headlines started, they never stopped. In one month she built so much low-income housing that the real estate market crashed. People who had overpaid at least had a nice place to live for the rest of their lives, and the speculators got what they deserved. It just stopped making sense to buy something for any reason other than to live in it, and that was fine with me. Plus there was plenty of construction work to go around.
Nadine came home from work one night announcing that anyone who wanted an apartment could find one. And they weren’t these huge impersonal prison blocks, all the same putrid brick. No, every building was a different size. They had stores. They had backyards, and porches. They were different colors. Suddenly prices made sense. A six-floor walkup tenement with mice and no closets was no longer three thousand dollars a month. People were only willing to pay what it was really worth, and so that place rented for eighty-five bucks. A studio apartment with a kitchenette hovered between fifty and sixty dollars. And if you had a family of six and needed four bedrooms, then rents came up to two hundred.
The transformative consequence on New York City life was immediate and complete. The impossible burden was lifted from people’s skulls. They didn’t have to worry about being out on the street. Outside was no longer a threat of potential disaster. Now, folks who had been killing each other because of proximity could each move out and get their own place. People lived together because they wanted to see each other’s gorgeous faces in the morning. They wanted to continue the great conversation around-the-clock.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
Nadine and I looked each other up and down.
“We still belong together,” she said. “Even though we could each afford our own bathroom now, I want to share one with you.”
There was more joy and acknowledgement in my little life. And people with kids could finally make noise when they had sex, because their new apartments were large enough. No one had to devote their precious soul to gathering rent. They could go to the park or take a walk. Time was not money anymore. Time was just time. It was as if the streets opened up before us. The city was shared now, not partitioned. We could offer each other more. And so we looked at each other differently, with more compassion and interest. Home became more comfortable and therefore more important. People were not trapped in their apartments.
This is what happens when the pretending stops. When someone goes through life with their eyes wide open. And when that someone is allowed enough power to act on what they know. That’s it! That’s what we City Dwellers have achieved for ourselves! We’ve allowed someone to think and then we allowed them to carry out their revelation. We allowed things to get better. This made us love ourselves even more, and created more opportunity for even more change.
No one was that shocked when Sophinisba’s next step was to seal off four boroughs and declare us an Independent Protectorate. Staten Island was made a part of Texas. No one actually knew what an Independent Protectorate was, so it was exciting to be something new. And we didn’t care at all what the rest of the country thought. They’ve always resented us for our good looks, so no love lost there.
Her first act as an Independent Protector, on a Monday, was to institute a minimum annual wage of forty-five thousand dollars a year. That meant that every single person could go to the dentist, have a vacation, and save up for a dream. On Tuesday she established a maximum annual wage of 100 million dollars a year. The common wisdom on the street was that no one person needed more than a hundred million dollars a year, and for those who made more than the limit, the leftover went to prop up the rest.
From then on, when we stepped on the bus in the morning, each one of us paid proportionally. If women earned seventy-five percent of what men earned, we only paid seventy-five cents, while they paid a dollar. WOW. It was the dawning of Reality-Based Conditions. Each according to their ability, each according to their need. Life was filled with recognition. Finally.
Then, she banned all franchises.
Everyday on the way home from work, Nadine and I saw the world revolve. New Yorkers are fast; within a week, each shop in the city was the idea of a particular individual person and their friends. The shop owner could have it be any color and choose their own interior design or absence of it. The quality varied, the items were not pre-selected.
Starbucks
became a euphemism for
Tyrannosaurus
rex.
Consistency was no longer considered desirable. In fact, it became icky and weird. Prices were original and low, because of the sane rents. Get it?
Immediately, every single life was improved. It was spectacular. We all had homes. We all had commerce that resembled the strangeness of our individual organisms. Daily life in our beloved city was more personal, and so the Retrograde Party meteor of the Old Era came to an end with the Era itself.
Now, daily life was kind of a compulsion, one worthy of feelings high and low. Provisional periodic poverty is fine for the character, just not deprivation. Who needs it? For, despite the unavoidable complexities of love and loss, redefining how we think about Home and Store had tremendously improved our moral plight. Having better values and lower rents leaves the concerns of death and sex their justified place. They are no longer eclipsed by falsely imposed problems like lack of shelter and other unnecessary pain.
In the glow of this communal light, Nadine whispered into my neck.
“You know what’s worrying me?”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not you. It’s Sophinisba.”
“Yeah.” I smiled serenely at the mention of her name.
“I have a big question about her.”
“What is it?”
“How is Sophinisba paying for all of this?”
“Hmmmm?” I felt a nostalgic kind of unease.
“You’re not listening to me,” Nadine squealed.
Shocked at the accusation, I leapt from my deceived serenity with shame, pain, the desire to truly make amends, the courage to change. I looked her in those gorgeous eyes. I mustered every ounce of determination and conviction. I never wanted to be selfish, it wasn’t the real me. It was the disease talking. I truly loved, and that was the ideal that should guide my actions if I was ever to be a fully integrated human bean.
“Must be something in the private sector, I think,” I said, carefully.
Nadine smiled back, distractedly, and I hoped the transgression had healed. I was delusional. Nothing heals in one moment. It needs tending. Cutting corners festers the soul. And so the path to hell was laid. How could I know that this problem of my callous dismissal of financing would soon determine the future of my heart?
B
ACK AT
T
HE
Opium Restaurant, Harrison Bond was a very private man, and yet I knew so many things about him.
Before THE CHANGE, he was primarily known as the author of the novel of the year,
My Sperm
. John Updike, late chief critic for
The Brand New York
, had said that Bond was “one of the brightest young stars in the literary universe.” He used the word
panoply
. He said that Bond was “the new Cheever, the new Mailer, the new Pynchon, Roth, and J.D. Salinger. And, oh yeah …Toni Morrison.”
Bond had a quiet, troubled sadness. He wore an extra-large baseball cap on backward. He’d once had a pierced ear. He stayed in a chair and liked to read. He was bald, had gone to prep-school, was brave enough to have had adult braces. He dated actresses, even two at once. He suffered from depression and was rich. But sad. He felt put-upon, and yet bore the responsibility of his talent. He whined. He wielded power behind the scenes and everyone knew it. He was struggling with his alcoholism, and frequented
the rooms
on occasion, especially the AA meetings with other sad celebrities, and then they’d go out for coffee and try to keep hidden away from fans. He had written many articles for expensive magazines. One was on designer cell phones, one was on fennel. So, when he ordered three Bombay and tonics, I wondered if this was a product of his swollen liver or swollen bank account(s). Doesn’t all gin taste the same? Yet, being so private, I couldn’t ask him a thing, since his allure worked wonders.
Here is the opening paragraph of
My Sperm
by Harrison Bond:
Thompson Ward had a quiet, troubled sadness. He pushed back his baseball cap, scratched the scar where his pierce used to be, and knocked back another Bombay and tonic, swearing it would be the last one of the day.
I am not my sperm,
he thought. And then poured himself a double.
I had actually read the first two paragraphs of
My Sperm
. It was about a young, tall man who was found to be the last fertile man on earth. And yet, being private and somewhat sad, a bit of a drinker, he was not satisfied. He never knew if women actually liked him, even with his slightly monstrous seven-foot frame. Or if they just flattered him for his sperm. It was made into a movie, a television series, and finally a Broadway musical. Financially, Harrison Bond was set for life. People would always remember something about his literary wad, and he was guaranteed permanent aura. And yet, he was somewhat sad.
Now, because of the miraculous social shift achieved by Sophinisba and her folks, this depressed wealthy icon was forced to speak to me. It was odd, this obligation. What would happen?
“As you might know …” He cleared his throat. Harrison feared sounding like his father, the golf pro. He loathed his father, but secretly followed golf. He loathed any recognition of his own authority because it forced him to be benevolent, when, after all, he felt like crying and wanted someone to take care of him. “Do you know?”
“Know what?” I asked.
Already our dynamic was quite complex.
“Well, Miss Weigert, you do know that I am the new
Brand
editor, uhm ... I mean, the fiction editor of
The Brand New York
.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Oh.”
“I mean ...” I wanted him to like me. But why? “I don’t know who the old editor was either.”