The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Since de Rintelen Feigerman’s relationship to Shire Brandon was a very small part of his life, not to mention that Feigerman was all but blind, it took him a moment to respond. At the Jefferson Commonwealth Institute for Governmental Studies de Rintelen Feigerman was a member of the Board, on premises only at the bi-monthly meetings, an occasional conference and the Christmas party; in those surroundings he recognized the Goals and Strategies Committee chair, but not in the hot miasma of Foley Square during a bomb threat. Still, he managed to place the dim face. “Ah, yes, the Universal Town Meeting man,” he said, offering his hand. “How’s the project coming along?”

  Now, a proper answer to that would have required Brandon to report on at least a dozen aspects and ramifications of the matter. The Universal Town Meeting itself was complicated enough, and Brandon wasn’t at all sure that Feigerman knew what it was about, other than that it involved using the electronic media to get all the people of New York City talking together. The preliminary discussions with the radio and TV stations were another—actually, were twenty-two other—areas, for each station proposed its own ground rules. But, beyond that, it would be necessary to explain that none of it was coming along, just now, because of the fact that Brandon was stuck on a lengthy divorce trial, and that his private life was in a shambles. It was a tribute to Brandon’s organized mind that he managed to compress quite a lot of that into three or four sentences, with the help of a gesture toward the TV crews (exemplifying the way the electronic media could keep a community in touch with its million parts) and to the piles of garbage, as examples of the sort of problems UTM would be able to solve.

  It was a tribute to old man Feigerman’s powers of comprehension that he grasped at least enough of what Brandon was saying to ask the most pertinent question—although, as he had learned from long experience in having knotty problems brought to him, the most pertinent question didn’t necessarily require having heard any of the explanations. It was only:

  “What do you need to have happen to get the thing going again?”

  “Help from City Hall,” Brandon said promptly, and searched Feigerman’s face for a reaction. But you could never get one through those thick, distorting lenses. He went on, “The stations are only stalling—nobody wants to be the first to give away a whole night’s time. But they all know the FCC will give them brownie points for it. So if the Mayor would put in a word it might get them off the dime.”

  And then he realized that at least part of the reason he wasn’t getting a reaction was that the old man was in distress. The heat, the stench, the crowds—Mr. Feigerman was looking very pale.

  Mean-hearted, hostile New York—all the same, as soon as the nearest cop saw what was happening he went racing off for an ambulance man with oxygen, and the eight people squeezed onto a six-seat bench all got up so Mr. Feigerman could stretch out, and even backed away to give him room; and the black man with the Dunhill lighter took off his silk jacket to fan Mr. Feigerman with it…and by the time the policeman got back with the oxygen Mr. Feigerman was sitting up and his color was back, and a captain of police with a bullhorn was announcing from the steps that the bomb call had been a hoax.

  So everyone trooped back to what they had been doing. Mr. Feigerman got a second-reading approval of his environmental impact statement for the new apartments on the Queens side of the East River, Mrs. Madeleine Finster got her freedom from Mr. Finster, along with custody of their son and their house, and at least two of the city’s problems had been solved that day. To be sure, there were others. The garbage still mounted, the police were threatening blue flu if their new contract didn’t give them more money than the firemen and an uptown IRT express, stopped for a malfunctioning red light at 23d Street, was struck from behind by another train egged on by a malfunctioning green—eight dead, more than two hundred injured, and traffic so badly tied up that Shire Brandon had no hope of getting to the office even after his case was completed downtown.

  And then, when Brandon got home, his daughter Jo-Anne was crying desolately in the middle of the living room.

  Crying wasn’t a surprise. She had cried on and off for weeks, ever since the early-morning private garbage collector found her mother on the sidewalk. The two plainclothes cops who were with Brandon’s daughter, they were a surprise. Having accepted that they were there, and having observed that every book that had once been in the wall shelves was now tumbled on the floor, it was no surprise at all for Brandon to learn that while Jo-Anne was in school and he was performing his civic duty in the Municipal Building, their apartment had been burglarized.

  My name is Gwenna Anderson, but they call me Vanilla Fudge because I’m the only one of Dandy’s whores that’s white. When Dandy came up to me in the Port Authority Bus Terminal and said he’d give me a lift to wherever I was going, I knew where I was going. I was ready. I was fifteen years old, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know what a pimp was. There weren’t any pimps in the diner in North Carolina. Just the counterman. And the busboy and the short-order cooks and a couple of customers at night when business was slow, and if I’m still earning my living on my back at least it’s on a bed, not on those greasy duckboards in the kitchen. And my feet don’t hurt.

  The burglars hadn’t taken the beds at least, though they’d unmade them and ripped open two pillows to look for hidden money, so when Brandon woke up the bed at least was unchanged. Jo-Anne was standing in his doorway, holding his discharge certificate from the United States Army. “I was putting things away,” she said, “and I found this. I don’t know where it goes.”

  In order to remember that the apartment had been robbed, Brandon had to reason backward from what Jo-Anne had said. “Anywhere, honey,” he said, looking around. Yes, it wasn’t a dream; the stuff that had been pulled out of bureau drawers and thrown on the floor was all back—in one drawer or another—but his bedside TV was gone, and the empty box that had once held his cufflinks and wedding ring was standing on his night table. There wasn’t any Today Show to watch while they ate their breakfast, either, because that TV was gone, too, and so was his roll of postage stamps and Jo-Anne’s eighteen silver quarters hoarded since the currency change and her portable typewriter and even her china pig—contents, she thought, maybe as much as fifty dollars, because she’d been saving for skis. The super, Mr. Rozak, came in while they were eating to see how they were bearing up, and behind him one of the neighbors, that Mr. Becquerel from the fourth floor. Both seemed to think it was the Pins from across the street. The police didn’t seem to have any theory at all, or much hope of ever seeing any of the stolen property back. When Brandon finished shaving and came out of his room Jo-Anne was standing by the window, watching what the Pins were doing that day. “Don’t be late for school,” he said automatically, but as he came up beside her he saw that the morning’s performance was interesting. Their across-the-street neighbors were what was termed “Persons in Need of Supervision”—Pins, for short—which meant that they were graduates of a reformatory, a jail or an asylum. They were all young, all male, all black. It had been Brandon’s opinion that they weren’t really bad neighbors, not counting an unpredictable amount of noise at odd times, but they did do strange things. This morning’s noise was a yo-heave-ho sort of grunting and yelling as three or four of them were rocking somebody’s parked Chrysler Imperial back and forth. Whoever parked it had not bothered with the hand brake—or with the sign that said No Parking, Social Services Vehicles Only.

  “Honey,” he said, “I’d like to leave a little early this morning, because I want to pick up some stuff on 42d Street—”

  “I’m ready, Daddy,” she said. She punched the elevator button while he double-locked the door—the second lock had been installed at ten o’clock the night before, and he had explained to his daughter what “locking the barn door after the horse is stolen” meant.

  “Give you a lift to school,” he said, as he said every morning, and,

  “Thanks, Daddy,” she said, as she said every
morning, as though the issue had never been in doubt. When they got out to the sidewalk the Pins had got their prey out into the middle of the street. Unfortunately, the steering geometry had caused the car’s wheels to track themselves straight. Since no one could get in to turn the steering wheel, it could not be moved in any direction now except straight forward and straight back, and so the block was clogged with cars, most of them blowing their horns, and they had to walk to the corner to find a cab.

  Coming into the garment center the taxi inched along. Then, for three changes of the traffic light, it didn’t move at all, because a tractor-trailer trying to make a turn had blocked the intersection. “I’ll walk from here,” Brandon said through the wire mesh that was supposed to keep cabbies from being mugged and, who knew, perhaps sometimes did. He tipped the man a dollar. It was not enough to forestall the muttering of a hack driver abandoned by his passenger in a gridlock.

  Brandon was not actually in any hurry. The situation report he was going to pick up at the old McGraw-Hill Building on West 42d Street was going to fill up his morning, but before Brandon was willing to get to thinking about that there were a whole congeries of other things he had to think about.

  The problem with problems was in deciding which of them to tackle first. That was conventional wisdom, exemplified for Shire Brandon by Dr. Jessica Grai, the Director of Life Style Analysis, and his opposite number at the foundation. Given any request at all, Dr. Grai’s response was, “I have only one stack of priorities and there’s only one top to it—where does this go?” But in Brandon’s experience problems didn’t come in stacks. They came in concentric shells, like black holes in the universe. You not only couldn’t deal with the core problems, you couldn’t even see them after a while through the layers of others that had enveloped them, though they were still there and hurting. So, strolling up Eighth Avenue from the old green Art Deco building on West 42d Street, Brandon’s attention was used up in trying to remember what the core problems were. Outside of them all was the problem of getting ready for the afternoon Plans Committee. Just under that the burglary. Somewhere close to the outer layers the resolve to finish some of the interrupted conversations he had had with Jo-Anne: whether she should go to the pajama party at her friends’; why the Pins were the way they were; why, even when it was in the high eighties, it was right to refrain from air-conditioning, even though the noise of the air-conditioners was what made all the rest of the tenants in their building more tolerant of the Pins’ noise than they might have been; the gnawing worry that he might be impotent, because even the hot-pants hookers didn’t strike him as attractive…it was all jumbled together, roiling around inside the surface worries. But the core was not in doubt. It was the fact that Jo-Anne was upset, and the core of that was a quasar bright enough to shine through all the layers outside. It was tough times for a man when his wife went six stories airborne. It was even tougher for a ten-year-old girl, particularly when it was the ten-year-old who had been wakened first by the sirens and found that all that remained of Mommy was a note that said:

  I love you both, but all the lies are making me crazy. I have to get out of this situation.

  Love, Maude

  And, of course, when Brandon woke up to find his wife a suicide, the hardest thing to deal with was not the child’s hysteria but the undodgeable, but also unanswerable, question: “What ‘lies’ was she talking about, Daddy?”

  He had to answer her sometime—but not, please God, for a few more years.

  The Jefferson Commonwealth Building was a plagiarism from that pleasantest of office structures, the Rockefeller on East 42d Street. It was thirty stories tall, and the portion of it nearest the street was a garden. The street wall was three hundred vertical feet of glass. Behind the glass was a bower. There was a gently flowing stream, with pink-and-white and golden carp moving restlessly through it. There were ti-flowers from Hawaii, and a banyan; there was a grove of half a dozen banana and orange trees, and almost every week there were half a dozen tree-ripened oranges or a hand or two of firm green bananas for the secretaries to take home. Winter or summer, the little tropic paradise on Eighth Avenue stayed at seventy-eight degrees, and passersby, sweltering or frozen or drenched, would gaze enviously in at heaven. Only gaze. If you had no business with the Institute, you couldn’t pass the guard at the door.

  What Brandon wanted to do at that moment was get a cheese Danish from the coffee wagon and sit under the banyan tree, watching the carp chase his crumbs. He resisted the temptation. When you worked for a think-tank, you tried harder than in any Fortune 500 corporation to look like an alert, efficient executive. So he sent his secretary, Kim Hwa, for the coffee and Danish, and his research associate, Al Plugmann, off to Xerox the situation report, and received them both on his little lanai on the eighteenth floor.

  If Brandon could pull together a coherent list of recommendations for the Plans meeting, their report would be laid before the Advisory Commission—which in turn would bring it up at the Mayor’s Study Group, which might actually pass it on to the Mayor—the half-dozen electoral reform schemes that had formed Brandon’s doctoral dissertation, become a well reviewed (though infrequently read) university press book and thus been directly responsible for his appointment as Goals and Strategies Director for the Jefferson. They included:

  The Universal Town Meeting, which, through the use of electronic media and random-access interviewing of ordinary citizens, might achieve a decision-making assembly comparable to the New England town meetings or the old Greek agora—on a scale of tens of millions of people.

  The Five Per Cent Solution, by means of which individual citizens willing to pay a five per cent surcharge on their income taxes could direct that the whole of their taxes be directed to whichever function of government they thought most important.

  The Citizens’ Grand Jury, with the same statutory authority as those used in preparing criminal indictments, but with the authority to subpoena and question all the departments of government and quasi-governmental agencies, and to prepare recommendations for the Universal Town Meeting.

  The Cafeteria Municipal Budget, in which each citizen was given a stipulated amount of services free—and if he chose to take them in the form of parks and swimming pools rather than schools for his children or open-air concerts, could indicate his choices by having a “credit card” punched each time he used a service.

  There were others. Brandon had spent three years dreaming them up, while Maude and his veterans’ benefits supported them and Jo-Anne was learning to walk and talk and get along without diapers, and in some ways it had been the happiest time of his life. But only seven inventions had survived his dissertation advisor, and only four of those had got past the Advisory Commission of the Jefferson.

  All these social inventions—these crackbrained schemes, the first people he had applied to for a job had called them—had been fun to create, and they had achieved every goal he had hoped for them, as a starving, overage graduate student, except for one. No one in any kind of civil authority had ever shown any interest at all in putting any one of them into practice.

  But the Advisory Commission might start things going at last, if only he could put together a proper report. So Brandon made the effort, reading, making notes, dictating sections into Kim’s Stenorette. It wasn’t easy, for his mind did not want to think about public policy, only about private calamity. He found himself daydreaming, looking across the angle of the building to the other lanais, where people were working on a hundred jobs—many of them female people—quite a few of them dressed for the outdoors summer and the indoors tropics, in short skirts or even shorts; he marked where smooth thigh, pale or cocoa or coffee cream, disappeared under a typing table, and wished that he felt more interest in any of them…

  And was caught staring up the dress of a woman on the floor above by Simon Moberly, the ancient and honorable Director of the Institute. “What are you doing here?” the Director demanded, staring around the lanai in horror.


  “Why, it’s just more convenient. There are fewer interruptions—”

  “I don’t mean out here, I mean why are you here instead of down at City Hall? Didn’t you get my message? Saul Wassermann’s expecting you.”

  “Why—Why—Nobody told me,” said Brandon.

  “It was Mr. Feigerman who arranged it—said he’d spoken to you about it yesterday. Very intelligent of you to bring it up that way, though of course generally speaking communications with members of the Advisory Commission ought to be confined to proper channels—no,” cried the Director, recollecting himself, “there’s no time to talk about that. You’re due down there in forty minutes, Shire! And you certainly don’t want to keep Saul Wassermann waiting!”

  Certainly no one wanted to keep Saul Wassermann waiting. He was one of those through whom power flowed. It was Saul who programmed the Mayor, Saul who was the knob of the Mayor’s door and the hearing-aid in the Mayor’s ear, Saul who carried in his head the map of the maze you must solve to make the vast city political machine turn over. Touch base with the union heads. Get a money promise from the bankers. Placate the power brokers from the boroughs and the neighborhoods, especially the ones that were not sharing in this particular milking of the public cow. Find a city councilman to introduce the ordinance, explain it to the clerks and the legislative assistants, clear it with Albany if the state was involved, fill in the city’s congressmen so that Washington would throw up no roadblocks, persuade the civic associations and the taxpayers’ groups to endorse if possible, or at least to look the other way as this one went by—recruit; neutralize; horse-trade; coax…and then, if you were lucky, the gears would engage and the machine would turn, and out would come your new subway line, or park, or auditorium, or agency. Perhaps the machinery of government could function without people like Saul Wassermann. No one knew. The experiment had never been tried. In cities or nations, under dictators or mayors or kings, there was always the technician who knew where to find the levers of power. Sometimes he was camouflaged and mild, a Colonel House or a Harry Hopkins. Sometimes flamboyant: Haldeman, Rasputin, Talleyrand. Or Saul Wassermann.