The bear has two strategies. Clothe itself in fur; dig into a cave in winter.
The same strategies were open to City-Bear, and Brandon knew where to find out about them. He pulled out the Feigerman & Tisdale report and studied it. Yes. His memory had been correct; the strategies were there. City-Bear could enclose itself, like the fur of an animal, in a thermally opaque coat—as Buckminster Fuller proposed, a great dome over the city. Or City-Bear could bury itself in a deep cave, where the worst winter winds could not follow. Below the ground the temperature is steady and bearable all year round—thus the art of “terratecture,” to take advantage of this free gift.
Not entirely free, Brandon discovered. Cities do not need only to be protected from outside heat. They generate heat of their own—from industry, from home heating, from their vehicles—and that was why New York City was generally a degree or two warmer than its neighbors in winter, and why landlocked interior cities like Saint Louis left the “footprint” of that extra warmth in altered precipitation patterns that could be measured for many miles downwind. Not all the city heat was from industry or space heating. Quite a lot, Brandon was astonished to learn, was from its human inhabitants. Each human being generates about thirty watts of heat energy, day in and day out; for a city of six million that is nearly two hundred thermal gigawatts, about like half a million electric space-heaters going all the time. All animals did that. That was one of the reasons animals got no bigger than they were. The blue whale was the largest animal who ever lived, but he lived in a sea of coolant fluid. Big land animals, with only air to carry away the heat they stoked inside themselves, had to develop radiators—fins, wings, the spikes of stegosaurus, the lolling tongue of a panting dog—to keep them alive, and even so no land mammal could match the size of those who lived in the sea. Bear the size of the blue whale would die of heat stroke, even at the North Pole…
Brandon realized his attention was wandering. This was not what the Director had meant him to do…probably wasn’t…well, you seldom could tell exactly what the Director meant you to do.
City as organism?
Why, yes. There was another sense. When an organism is in health its parts share the work of keeping it alive—so do a city’s; when an organism’s parts begin one by one to fail, it becomes ill—so does a city. But when the parts of the creature begin to fight against each other it does not matter which of them wins. Before long they all die. The name of the condition is cancer; and, in that sense, the Director’s insight was sound. There was a malignancy in the city, and if it could not be controlled or cured the life of the city was at an end.
Because my name is Millicent they called me “the Red Mill.” Not a put-down. Nobody did that to me twice, anyway. My parents came from Arizona and my grandparents were cowboys, and we know how to protect ourselves. It’s not just ourselves, it’s the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden that need protecting, and that’s what I’m good at. The Times Square bomb was mine. The locker bombs are mine. The letter bombs are mine. When my great-grandfather fought the railroads, he did it with a Colt .45 Peacemaker. They called it “the equalizer” because, although my grandfather was a little bit of a man, with one of those strapped to his belt he could stand up against the meanest, toughest yard bull the railroads could hire. Well, now we have a different kind of equalizer—plastic explosive and the Molotov cocktail—and I’m the one who makes them!
On the first of December the sanitmen began an East Side-West Side slowdown. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays they picked up the garbage east of Fifth Avenue, the other days of the week west; if the city didn’t get down to serious bargaining, they threatened, the East Side-West Side would soon be all around the town. The subway men called off a go-slow of their own, but not much was gained for the city’s woes because the bus drivers started a work to rule. This meant that no bus left the garages if its windshield wipers weren’t working and its lights were not all operational—whether it was ever used or not. It also meant that no bus driver allowed a passenger on or off unless he could get his bus in within the legally required eighteen inches of the curb, which on some runs meant never. The city expanded its vocabulary of diagnostic terms:
Blue flu. Police calling in sick because they didn’t—yet—want to go on strike.
Work to rule. Enforcement of every rule on the books, regardless of how impractical.
Gridlock. An insoluble traffic jam caused by vehicles getting stuck in intersections so that no movement in any direction is possible.
Deadlock. The situation produced when one set of non-negotiable demands conflicts with another, so that no resolution can be reached.
And the newest coinage of all:
Medlock. Spelled like “meddle,” pronounced like “needle,” it was the word for what happened when all the city unions went to arbitration and the mediators themselves struck to protest the work load.
Shire Brandon hadn’t gone to church since he was fourteen. When asked, he called himself a “secular humanist”—meaning that he believed in morality and a benign approach to his fellow humans, but rejected the notion of a supernatural God—but, considering the city’s problems, he could have wished for one. At the Institute’s Friday-evening depressurizing session, when everyone broke off work early and the top staffers joined the Director for a drink, he said as much. The Director beamed mistily. “I am reminded,” he said, peering over the top of his fluted glass of fino, “of a joke that went around during the Second World War. It had to do with the Allies invading Europe, but I think it could be adapted…yes. Here is the joke:
“There are two ways the city can solve its problems, a miraculous and supernatural way, and one that is relatively more probable. One way is that the Lord God shall appear over Herald Square and shower down loaves, fishes and manna in such quantities that everybody can pick up enough to sell to Philadelphia and get rich; that’s the probable way. The other way is the fantastically supernatural way, requiring a miracle to get it to happen, and that is that the city shall sit down and reach agreements within itself.”
Brandon usually laughed at the Director’s jokes, even when they were wooly-headed; but not at that one.
I was Hermann Gebtsen’s son Erich, a carpenter by trade. For twenty-six years I was working hard in America and earning a good wage, even in the War when it was not good to be a German. In 1929 there was a Crash. I was not harmed, for every week I put money in the bank. In 1931 the bank closed. I could not pay my rent, so the landlord locked my room and kept my tools. I could not look for work then. I found food the grocers had thrown out. To sleep I had made a room with cardboard boxes on the fire escape of a movie house. No one bothered me, for the movie house was out of business, too.
“Put your coat on, honey,” Brandon called to his daughter. “I’ll be ready in a minute.” And then to the telephone: “Well, certainly, Simon, I’ll be there for the meeting with Mr. Feigerman. Yes, I know the snow’s getting bad, but—What?” Jo-Anne, who already had her coat on, waited patiently for her father to finish. She knew it was the Director; her father was never so patient with any other caller, just as he was about to leave in the morning. Jo-Anne had met the Director twice, once at the previous year’s staff Christmas party, once at the summer picnic in Central Park. She had formed an image of him that was partly Wizard of Oz and partly Santa Claus; he was the one who gave out the mesh stockings of sticky hard candy and fragile, inappropriate toys; but he was also the one who caused her father to scowl and grimace at the telephone with the effort of keeping his voice calm and reasonable.
The phone had caught him just as he was about to leave. He was standing by the bookcase in his boots and fur-collared coat and Cossack hat; he didn’t seem to mind that he was sweating in the steam-heated apartment, but Jo-Anne was less comfortable than he. Boots, leggings, down zipper-jacket, lined hood—she was dressed for the Arctic, and nothing she had been able to say had convinced her father that if her mother had been there she would have had to wear less. She pull
ed the door to and fro; the squeak attracted her father’s attention and he nodded permission for her to go on ahead of him.
Even the vestibule was too warm for the bundled-up child. She pushed her way out onto the sidewalk, wondering why Mr. Rozak the super wasn’t standing inside to polish the doorknobs and remind the tenants that Christmas was coming.
Then she stopped and stood very still, because she saw why not. Mr. Rozak was standing at the edge of the sidewalk in his down vest, bare arms exposed, hatless; he must have been cold, but he wasn’t paying attention to that. His attention was concentrated across the street.
It was the Pins again, of course. It was the particular Pin Jo-Anne called the Smasher, because he liked to pick bottles out of the trash awaiting collection and toss them high into the air to crash into the middle of the street. He wasn’t crashing bottles this morning. It looked as though he were getting set to crash himself. He was sitting on a window ledge on the top story, swinging his legs and staring at the slow, fine snow as it came down. The air was cold and damp and the boy was wearing only cutoffs and a tee-shirt. He didn’t seem to notice.
The superintendent discovered Jo-Anne beside him and looked down, grinning. “What do you think of that guy, honey? The little ba—the guy,” he corrected himself, “wants to jump. Go ahead, I say! What a jerk!” The Pin had shifted his gaze and, noticing them, waved dreamily. He wore nothing on his feet. His bare toes flexed as though he were testing pool water before jumping in. And he was collecting an audience. A taxi-driver had stopped to look up, and behind him cars were beginning to collect; a couple of early morning dog-walkers were staring, and some schoolgirls on their way to the parochial school were calling to him. “Go on,” bawled Mr. Rozak, grinning. “Jump, why don’t you?” He wasn’t the only one egging the boy on. From another window of the Pin house, a floor down and two rooms away, one of the other inmates had stuck his head out to peer up. It was a violent verbal burst, but as usual Jo-Anne could make out only a couple of words:
“Mumble FUCKIN mumble mumble FUCKIN JUMP!”
But then the Pin-pusher came unhurriedly out of the house. He was a man about forty. There was easily two hundred and forty pounds of him, though he wasn’t very tall. In the moments when the Pins seemed about to come unstuck—roughly once a week—it was the Pin-pusher who kept the worst explosions from happening. He did now. “You, Malcolm!” he called clearly. “You get you ass inside now.”
And that was all there was to it, except that when Mr. Rozak turned, grinning, to Jo-Anne to complain that the show was over his face suddenly froze. “Oh, shit,” he groaned. “You’re the Brandon kid, aren’t you?”
When Brandon came out a minute later the Pins were back in their house, the dog-walkers had walked on, Rozak the super was busily shoveling snow in the alleyway and Jo-Anne stood silently waiting for him. He noticed that her expression was stiff and strained, but she did not seem to want to tell him why. “I’ve got to get a move on, honey, so—” He paused, mouth open, gazing reproachfully at the sky. “Good God, it’s really snowing!”
When my mother air-mailed herself out the window she was all sprawled out on the sidewalk and they did just like in the movies. They drew an outline all around her body before they let the ambulance take her away. I always thought they did that with chalk, but they used some kind of grease pencil and, even though Mr. Ruzik washed it away, I could still see it there for weeks. I tried to tell Daddy about it, but he didn’t want to hear. I wish he would talk to me more, because I know something’s wrong. My friend thinks I might be adopted, but I don’t think so. I think it might be even something worse.
Snowing it really was. The streets were slippery. Not very slippery yet, but then they didn’t have to be very anything to make the traffic tangles even worse ensnarled. As soon as Brandon got his daughter to her school he paid off the taxi and headed for the subway to save time.
It didn’t save time. The motorman hit a red signal just outside the 34th Street station. As the rule books ordered, he came to a full stop—and then, as the rule books also ordered (but no one in his right mind had ever bothered to comply), he proceeded to climb down from his cab and make a complete circuit of the train, all ten cars, resetting the brakes on every wheel by hand before starting up again; thus “work to rule” spelled out. Brandon arrived at the Institute to find the Director sitting pale and reproachful by his desk. He bent his head in the general direction of Brandon’s apologies, but it was like a Rodin marble doing it—the attitude was one of attention, but if there were thoughts going on in that stony brain they did not concern reasons for tardiness. “I had hoped,” said the Director to the air over the garden, “that you would be here in time to discuss funding with Mr. Feigerman. It did not go well, Shire. Mr. Feigerman feels that your program conflicts with F & T’s recommendations, as I told you on the phone. He was quite upset. Since he’s not entirely recovered from that terrible bombing I couldn’t ask him to wait.” He sighed. “Perhaps you would have been able to present your case better than I. If you had been here.”
“Director, the whole city’s tied up this morning—”
The marble head inclined again. “No final decision has been reached, of course. But next month, at the Annual Meeting—” he spread his hands. “I don’t think I’ll join you for coffee this morning, Shire. So much to do.”
So much to do for the Director, maybe, but what was there to do for Shire Brandon? Decoding the Director’s comments as best he could, it sounded very much as though his job was in trouble. The word “funding” had appeared in what the Director said, and that was a word of great significance to an academic who did not have tenure and whose job was secure for him only as long as the job itself continued to exist. What a crying shame, thought Brandon, taking the large view; what a pity that just now, when the city was convulsing itself in a more than usually tetanic paroxysm, the programs that could cure it were about to be terminated! And indeed the city was in bad shape. His secretary’s radio, going all day long, kept throwing up alarming items. Offices were closing early because of the storm. A storm warning had been changed by slow degrees to a blizzard alert, and something over ten inches was forecast for the next twenty-four hours. All the airports were still open, but there were thirty-minute delays at Kennedy and Newark, and an hour or more at LaGuardia. And if Washington and Wilmington were a guide to what New York had to expect as the center of the low plowed stubbornly up the Coast, it was going to be bad indeed—a tanker was in trouble off Hatteras, and at least five deaths had already been reported in Virginia and the Delmarva peninsula.
At four o’clock the word came through that the Director had ordered the office closed for the weekend and everyone was invited to get home before the worst of the storm hit. Brandon had no objection to complying. But as he was putting his desk in order the phone rang. “This is Jocelyn Feigerman,” said the commanding voice in his ear. “I wonder if you can come by to see me this afternoon. You sure it won’t take you out of your way? Good. In twenty minutes, then.”
It was only half a dozen blocks from the Institute to the old green steel and glass skyscraper that housed Feigerman & Tisdale in three large floors, but it took more than twenty minutes. At that, walking was faster than driving; there were long lines of cars inching along Eighth Avenue, trying to get into the Lincoln Tunnel, which for some reason was having unusual troubles. By the time Brandon got out of the elevator his shoe-tops had scooped up snow and slush from the streets and the muscles around his eyes were sore from squinting against the driving flakes. Jocelyn Feigerman offered him tea against the cold, and then was direct. “My husband,” she said, “tells me you were not able to meet him this morning.”
No obvious response occurred to Brandon except to say that he was sorry for being late—but the snow picky-ticking against the window explained that. He didn’t need to make a response, as it turned out. “I thought,” said Mrs. Feigerman, “that you would have had the sense to come and see me after our last meeting. Y
ou know that I’m interested in your project.”
The untenured academic pricked up his ears. The idealist compressed his jaw. Warring impulses inside Shire Brandon battled briefly, and then he shook his head. “Mrs. Feigerman,” he said, “the Universal Town Meeting is designed for exactly what we see going on in New York City right now—and in every other city in the world, and in most non-urban places, too. It is a way of getting the whole population of the area to consider its problems and to make whatever compromises and adjustments are necessary. That’s all it is.”
Jocelyn Feigerman frowned. “I don’t think you explained it very clearly,” she said. “I understood it to be a sort of referendum.”
He said patiently, “A referendum, Mrs. Feigerman, is a lot like a presidential election. By the time the question gets on the ballot it has been formalized and complicated, and half the voters don’t know what it’s about and most of the other half agree with part of it and disagree with another part and could go either way. There’s no chance to bargain in a referendum, Mrs. Feigerman, and that’s what UTM is all about. Bargaining.”
“You said it was a way of getting significant reforms accomplished, Mr. Brandon.”
“Yes! Right! In the manner of a New England town meeting, with tradeoffs of penalties and benefits. For worthwhile reforms.”
Mrs. Feigerman pursed her lips. “Would you look at that picture, Mr. Brandon?” she said, indicating a poster on the wall. It was two persons, Mrs. Feigerman herself and an angelic-faced little girl. Brandon had long since noticed its presence without looking at it very carefully; now he saw, with shock, that the little girl had no arms. “Her life, Mr. Brandon, is a worthwhile reform! And if your Universal Town Meeting can help save children like her from being murdered in the womb, then I want it done.”
The granite face thawed. “Now, Mr. Brandon,” she said, “tell me how we are going to go about getting your scheme adopted for the benefit of mine.”
The Years of the City Page 6