The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  “It’s raining pretty hard now, Daddy,” said Jo-Anne. It occurred to Brandon that, considering his purpose in being with the child was to encourage her to talk out her feelings, he had been letting the conversation slide pretty badly. It hadn’t seemed to trouble the child. She was entertaining herself by looking around the unfamiliar surroundings. As the rain grew stronger it leaked through the seams in the roadway overhead, and water came down in sheets where the seams had worn thin. There were drainspouts, but mostly they were bone dry—plugged up since God knew when, with God knew what. The whole city was well overdue for repair and reconstruction, Brandon realized. You couldn’t blame Wassermann for wondering where the money was going to come from…

  He was doing it again. “What do you say, sweet?” he asked. “Want to try walking home in the rain?”

  “Oh, wow!” she cried, adventure on top of adventure. She immediately discovered reasons why it was not only a good idea but indispensable—the rain was too warm to do them any physical harm, everything they had on, both of them, could pop right in the washing machine, and most of all she had to get ready for the birthday party that Brandon had completely forgotten about that afternoon. They weren’t the only ones in the rain. There were joggers, ignoring anything that came between them and their therapy, splashing at every step. There were Hispanic kids on bicycles, doing figure-eights and curlicues on the nearly traffic-free street. One of them slid in the water and fell, leaping up immediately with a grin as though he had planned that trick all along, and Jo-Anne grinned happily back.

  But the rain was really intense. It filled Brandon’s eyes. Across the river he could no longer see the radio transmitter towers, and the boats slinking in to the landing at 23d Street, sails furled, caught in the storm, were only gray shadows. He wondered where the seaplanes went when the weather got bad—none were in sight. It was the sort of thing he would have liked to talk over with Jo-Anne, but what stopped him was that it wasn’t what he thought he ought to talk to her about. And yet, the real stuff—it was too hard! Ever since the suicide he had tried to be sensitive to every one of Jo-Anne’s moods, looking for the right one to spark the talk that would heal all wounds, expose all sores, make the child informed and happy—as if it were possible to be both at once! But the right mood never came. When Jo-Anne was happy, it was a shame to spoil her mood. When she was not, he was reluctant to make her feel worse.

  They paused at the corner of the avenue, smiling at each other through the downpour, as an extended family in front of them organized their forces to cross the street. There were four or five kids, including babies in strollers, and several grown-up women. Even the kids in the strollers had little umbrellas over their heads.

  Why, thought Brandon, affectionately regarding his daughter, she doesn’t seem upset at all, does she? Maybe the best thing to do is to butt out. Maybe she’ll come to ask questions in her own time, and maybe what I should do is leave her to do it. So maybe I shouldn’t press for a heavy daddy-kid talk that neither of us is really going to enjoy…

  Perhaps it was not good advice that Brandon gave himself, but it had one great advantage besides being easy to carry out. It did not add to his pain—at a time when pain had been pushed below the surface of his mind, most of the time, but was always known to be there and ready to boil out again at any moment.

  I wasn’t exactly the last man out of Ton Son Nhut airport, but I only missed it by about seventy-two hours. They kept me for a while in Waikiki, along with a couple thousand other late departures from the Nam, and it was like a honeymoon time. No bride, of course. Maude was still in San Francisco. She sounded funny when I phoned her from Honolulu, but I didn’t think much of it—after all, we hadn’t seen each other for a year and a half—until I got to Oakland. She was five months pregnant. It wasn’t easy to handle. I made a decision—I don’t know if it was the right one. I said we would move to New York and I would bring up the child as my own, and I did. I can’t say it didn’t bother me. What I didn’t realize was that, for ten years, it bothered Maude even more.

  Six times a day the mail boys made their rounds of the building. What they bore was not usually mail. It was interoffice memos, Xerox copies of policy statements, flagged issues of the three hundred periodicals the Institute subscribed to, each with a rubber-stamped distribution list so that, easily by the first of April, everybody would have had a chance to see the January issues. When Brandon heard his outer door open he called from the balcony, “Bring it out here, please.” And the bearer did, but it wasn’t the mail boy. It was the Director himself, smiling through his meringue of white beard.

  “I thought I’d better bring this in person,” he said, handing over the eighth or tenth Xeroxed revision of the afternoon’s Commission meeting agenda. That was all he said. He stood beaming, and from the tilt of his eyebrows and the lilt of his voice Brandon knew that there was some kind of good news on the agenda. It took him only a moment to find it:

  Item III-a. Dr. Brandon. Presentation of Universal Town Meeting Concept.

  “Why,” said Brandon, as much astonished as pleased, “that’s great! I thought the whole project was down the tube.”

  “Inelegant,” tittered the Director, “but not inexact. However, you’ve got a reprieve, Shire. Mr. Feigerman himself phoned and asked that we make time for it.”

  It was good news…but it caught Brandon unaware. “I haven’t prepared anything,” he said. The Director shrugged winsomely. “I mean, I don’t know what angle to take.”

  “Be brilliant,” the Director advised. “Think about the city as organism. Consider all its life processes. Survival, ingestion, elimination, reproduction—but listen to me,” he said, laughing at himself, “trying to tell you what to say! I’m sure you’ll be fine.” On that note he left. It was one of the Director’s least endearing traits that he allowed himself to speak only in allegory and innuendo, but expected from his subordinates blueprints.

  So Brandon spent the next ninety minutes on his lanai, working notes into shape for a presentation. He was keenly conscious of the clock. Even so, it was not until he became conscious of a disturbance far below that he realized he had actually finished the job. It wasn’t complete. It didn’t give all the details. But it was all he would be allowed to say under Item III-a anyway. He stood up and stretched. Down below, among the banana trees and the purling waters, the security guard was repelling an invasion of the caterer’s men, attempting an illicit shortcut with the food for the luncheon meeting, instead of going around the block to the service entrance. “Here goes,” said Brandon—to himself, or to the banana trees—and headed for the washroom to comb his hair for the show.

  When I die they won’t have to put up a tombstone, because my tombstones are all over the city. Office buildings, hotels, condos, trade centers; I don’t design them, but I build them. I don’t mean just that I hire the workers and buy the steel. You don’t build a skyscraper on the land you’ve acquired, you build it in the courtrooms and the city agencies, getting federal grants and municipal waivers, suing to reverse some Landmark Commission ruling, trading airspace for amenities—I’m good at that. I usually win, because I know what’s good for the city and besides I have a right. They owe me. They owe me because I paid my dues when my B-24 crashed and burned and my eyes have never been right since; they owe me because I never would have had the chance if I hadn’t married Paul Tisdale’s widowed daughter to start the firm. They owe me because I grew up in the slums with the good old Dutch name of de Rintelen Feigerman. So I had to learn to fight when I was five, and I haven’t stopped.

  “Hello, Mr. Feigerman,” said Brandon, coming into the dining hall.

  The old man looked up at him. “Yes?” He didn’t offer his hand and, considering the dim way he peered around the room, Brandon was far from sure he was recognized. He introduced himself, and got another, “Yes?”

  The old man wasn’t really that old, no more than middle sixties, but his thick glasses and slow, squinting stare made him
look worse than he was. Brandon made conversation—that was what you were supposed to do before the Advisory Commission luncheons, that was why they were luncheons, with drinks on the sideboard, instead of simple meetings. Feigerman’s responses were not hostile. They simply did not go beyond yes or no, and it made little difference what Brandon ventured. To the question whether Feigerman was fully recovered from his upset the day of the fake bomb, a declarative yes. To Brandon’s random observation that he had been looking across the East River at the place where Feigerman proposed to build East River East, an interrogative one. Only when Brandon asked if he could get Feigerman a drink did he get a shake of the head and then a whole sentence: “My wife’s the one you ought to be talking to.”

  But just then everyone was being seated, and the chance didn’t come. There were extra chairs around the table, and Brandon was far down from where the Feigermans sat, next to a young woman who at once wanted to know how the Cafeteria budget would affect the bargaining power of municipal employees.

  There were eleven members of the Advisory Commission, and for a wonder they were all present—more than all, because de Rintelen Feigerman had brought his wife; they were twenty-one at table. The woman on his right, Brandon discovered, was named Maggie Moscowitz, there as a stand-in for the Commission’s spokesman for organized labor, the President of the Transit Workers Union. “Contract bargaining,” she pointed out, “isn’t a privilege; it’s guaranteed by law. What happens if, say, a lot of people decide they don’t want to ride the subway and the revenues fall off? Is the city going to make up the difference? And out of what?”

  “That doesn’t change,” Brandon protested, pointing out that there was already a deficit on the transit system that had to be made up by tax money. “Anyway, the subway’s probably the last thing that would be hurt—it’s the libraries and museums that are going to need special protection.” She allowed him to tell her what the special protection provisions were, but all she said was, occasionally, to pass the salt.

  When she switched to Dr. Grai, on her other side, Brandon kept his eye on the Feigermans. Jocelyn Feigerman was, if anything, older than her husband, he decided. She was not a pretty woman, but she was a striking one—tall, ash-blonde, looking as self-assured and posed in person as she did on the posters of her with a child or a happy unwed mother that advertised her mission against abortion. She didn’t speak much, but when she did it was in a lecture-platform voice that carried easily down to the foot of the table. Brandon listened shamelessly, but none of it seemed to have to do with him. He applied himself to his meal.

  The lunch was far more elaborate than usual, chilled white wine and napkin-wrapped red added to the usual Cokes and coffee urn. The Director was going out of his way to make a good impression on the Commission. It would have helped to have a larger room. This one was definitely overcrowded, especially as Maynard Meckeridge, the banker, would not refrain from smoking his cigar and Jocelyn Feigerman had not only invited herself along with her husband, but had brought a dark, agile young man as a sort of secretary. Mrs. Feigerman kept her goff busy. It was “Hersch, more wine, please,” and, “Hersch, phone the airline and confirm my flight this afternoon,” and when poor Hersch was not running errands he was kept busy fanning Meckeridge’s cigar smoke away from his boss.

  The makeup of the Commission included someone in social services—Msgr. Bredy, doubling as the authority on religion—an international commodities broker, the representative of Halbfleisch Frères. Taxation and law was an attorney named Milt White; politics and entertainment subsumed in the single person of ex-Senator Sandstrom, who backed shows. No Embassy hostess ever sorted her place cards more carefully than the Institute had chosen its Commission. Besides the outside commissioners there were the three in-house resident geniuses, Brandon, Jessie Grai and the Director himself. Of course, the Commission was not the Institute’s only activity. At any given moment the Institute fielded at least a score of committees, commissions, task forces and study teams. They varied drastically in size, scope and function, but they all had one element in common. The Director was on all of them.

  “III-a” had seemed like a nice remote agenda item when Brandon glanced at it, but he had not fully realized that Item I was only Msgr. Bredy’s benediction and Item II took no more time than to propose a motion to dispense with the reading of the minutes, and so, while the drafted waitresses from the typing pool were still clearing away dishes, he was standing at the head of the table.

  Since it was de Rintelen Feigerman who had been responsible for putting the presentation on the agenda, Brandon spoke to Feigerman. It wasn’t satisfactory. Behind Feigerman’s thick, tinted glasses there were no eyes to be seen. “The Universal Town Meeting,” said Brandon, wondering whether Feigerman was looking at him—or even awake, “is a synthesis of sociology, communications theory and computer studies. What it promises to do is to make it possible for a city the size of New York, seven or eight million people, to participate in an interactive, two-way discussion of problem-solving in the same way that the New England town meetings did in the past. The UTM makes use of the redundant communications facilities available in the city: seven VHF and a large number of UHF television channels, approximately one hundred AM and FM radio stations—I beg your pardon?”

  Feigerman’s own interest, if any, was still not visible, but his wife had raised her hand. “I wondered, had you considered cable?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, but it could have only a limited usefulness—as you will see,” said Brandon, intending a small but hopefully inoffensive reproof. “Let me sketch a scenario that might actually be employed right now. As you know, the city has been having a series of confrontations with its unions, particularly in the uniformed services. There is a logical impossibility in agreeing to terms, in that the police want their pay scale to reflect the fact that they have the highest risk and occupational hazard of any service, and that the firemen want pay parity with the police; you can’t agree to both. Now, how do we solve this? We invite the entire city to take part. A major television channel provides a studio where, let us say, the City Council is gathered. Everyone can watch. At the same time, AM radio stations are assigned to provide simultaneous translation in Spanish, Japanese, Yiddish, Chinese, Italian and whatever other languages have a large enough constituency in the city to justify their use. Did you have another question, Mrs. Feigerman?”

  “Yes. How about a referendum on moral issues?”

  Brandon looked to the Director for help, but got only a resigned twinkle. “I’m not sure I understand, Mrs. Feigerman.”

  “In that case I’ll explain. As you know, I am active in the right-to-life movement. We feel there should be a constitutional amendment banning abortion, and we are quite sure that if the issue were properly presented a large majority of voters would agree with us. My question—in fact, the reason why I asked to be here today—is whether your procedure can help us.”

  The table had become very quiet. Even the banker had stopped puffing on his cigar, and the conscripted waitresses were standing by the door, waiting to see how Dr. Brandon would get himself out of this. Dr. Brandon was curious about that, too. Dr. Brandon had fairly hard-held political opinions, and they did not include sympathy with the anti-abortion forces; in Dr. Brandon’s view, they were made up of elderly troglodytes who didn’t want other people to have any fun. He said, “I actually haven’t considered it in that way, Mrs. Feigerman. It is a tool for mediation, not for persuasion.”

  “Exactly,” she said, nodding. “Mediation is what I’m talking about. Not brain-washing, if that’s what you’re thinking. A simple public airing of the pros and cons. If it will make you feel better, don’t think of it simply as a right-to-life proposition. There are many other moral issues that need a full and frank public discussion. Drugs. Street crime. The rights of victims. The concept of capital punishment, not to mention—”

  Whatever else Mrs. Feigerman was going to mention she didn’t mention,
because there was one other major issue that she had left out, but would not stay left out. It mentioned itself.

  The mention was a sudden sharp crack and grumbling roar, and then a crashing of fragile falling things amid a chorus of screams. Brandon, reprieved while leaning toward Mrs. Feigerman, turned just in time to see the great glass outside wall of the Institute Building separate itself into jigsaw shards and slip down out of sight. A pressure wave hit them, even inside the board room, making papers on the great pale conference table flutter and slide.

  Brandon was the first to the railing, staring down into the great atrium. The tropical plants that had never felt outside air were crushed under the fallen wall, and the carp pool was turning pink with someone’s blood. There was a crushed-icicle heap of shattered glass on the benches, and under it were human beings. Four of them that Brandon’s shocked eyes could see, and one of them still horribly, miraculously alive.