Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Eddie’s only gripe about the Phoenix had to do with the Electric Billboards, huge strobing grids of light suspended about three-quarters of the way to the top, which struck him as a defacement of historic property. There were four of them, each about twenty stories tall, one to a building side. The four featured ads jumped clockwise every fifteen minutes, so when the Coca-Cola trademark beamed westward, for example, you knew it was between a quarter and half past the hour. The ad presently facing west, however, was one Eddie couldn’t figure out, which only increased his irritation, like a joke he was too dumb to get. It resembled a page torn from a giant’s day-calendar, except there was no date, just a number, 997, picked out in red on a white background.

  “Don’t look so upset,” a voice said. “Nobody knows what the hell it means, not even Harry.”

  Eddie turned from the tower to face a woman about his height, plain-featured but with the sort of laugh crinkles around her eyes and mouth that betoken a person of general good humor. Her hair (also plain, an unremarkable shade of brown) was tied back in a lank ponytail; agewise she looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. A cigarette burned between the fingers of her right hand; held loosely in her left was one of the latest Marvel-D.C. graphic novellas, Joan of Arc Returns.

  Ordinarily Eddie would have asked about the comic book (he was a mail-order Spiderman fan himself), but he was in New York now and wanted to adopt a big-city attitude as soon as possible. So he pointed at the woman’s cigarette instead and said with what he hoped was a proper tone of urban rudeness: “You know you shouldn’t smoke those.”

  She responded by taking a puff, not in a nasty way—she didn’t breathe it in his face—but as if to say that he hadn’t suggested anything she hadn’t already considered long and hard on her own. “You’re right, I definitely shouldn’t,” she said, and added with a wink: “Don’t gawk too long. You don’t want to be late for work.”

  With that she stepped from the curb, raised a hand; a taxi swerved neatly around a double-parked delivery van and pulled up in front of her. Only after she’d gotten into the cab and taken off down the street did Eddie realize she’d been wearing a uniform like his.

  You don’t want to be late. . . . He checked the address on the form letter in his pocket and got walking, west towards the Hudson. The brick building housing the Zoological Bureau of the Department of Sewers was on Eleventh Avenue, across from the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Eddie arrived on time and presented himself at the registration desk, where a supervisor named Fatima Sigorski logged him in. “You’ll be in May Team 23,” she told him. “Your coworkers on the team are Joan Fine, Art Hartower, and Lenny Prohaska.” She pushed a pair of what looked like plastic dog tags across the desktop. “Make sure you wear these at all times when you’re working.”

  “What for?”

  “Information aid. In case you become eligible for early retirement in a way that makes you hard to identify.” She pointed down the hall at a half-open doorway. “That’s the briefing room. You’ll find Hartower and Prohaska in there. Hartower’s thin and balding, looks like a middle-aged I.R.S. flack. Prohaska looks the same, except he’s got his nose pierced with a zircon. He’s from California.”

  “And Miss Fine?”

  “She’ll be holed up in the toilet right about now.”

  “Oh.”

  The briefing room was laid out like one of the smaller theaters in a multiplex, red plastic chairs facing a tiny holographic screen. Eddie counted about thirty men and women, all in Department uniforms showing varying degrees of wear; he seemed to be the only newcomer. Hartower and Prohaska were standing beneath a framed blow-up of a very old photograph, sharing a copy of the day’s New York Times. The framed photo, which obviously occupied a position of honor on the wall, showed what appeared to be a wino levering himself up out of a manhole.

  Eddie went over and introduced himself to his new colleagues. Then he asked, with a cautious nod at the strange photo: “Who’s that?”

  “That,” Prohaska said, flaring his nostrils so that the zircon wiggled, “is Teddy May.”

  “The greatest human being ever to wade through the city’s effluvia,” added Hartower. “God bless him and rest him in peace.”

  “What’s wrong with his right eye?”

  “Job-related injury,” said Prohaska. “He cooked it crawling into a utility duct to fix a ruptured steam line while simultaneously fighting off two alligators with his bare hands . . .”

  “Alligators?” Eddie said.

  “. . . and then, having taken care of that, he went back topside where the temperature was negative nine degrees Fahrenheit (forty below, factoring in wind chill), this being winter. The transition from hot to cold paralyzed every muscle and nerve in his eyelid.”

  “Wait a minute,” Eddie said. “Alligators in the sewers? Wasn’t that just a story?”

  “What story?”

  “You know: the book by that guy who nobody was allowed to take his picture.”

  “Did you ever read the book by that guy who nobody was allowed to take his picture?”

  “Of course not. Nobody’s ever read that book. And anyway I don’t read books. But even up in the Hollow, everybody knows the story.”

  “Well,” said Hartower, “Teddy May lived it.”

  “And that’s what we do in the Zoological Bureau? Hunt ’gators?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Prohaska said. “Teddy May and his men finished off the last of them in the 1930s.”

  “True,” said Hartower, “you do still encounter the occasional Gavialis gangeticus cruising around under Little India and Little Pakistan, maybe even a once-in-a-blue-moon Crocodylus niloticus, but no alligators.”

  Fatima Sigorski entered the briefing room and clapped her hands for attention. “All right, everybody, let’s settle in.”

  “Stick with us,” Prohaska and Hartower said, steering Eddie towards a trio of seats at the back. A familiar woman with a ponytail slipped in as Fatima turned to shut the door; Eddie could smell the tobacco right off, even though this whole building was clearly designated as a nonsmoking environment.

  “Hey!” he said, pointing. “I know her. Who is she?”

  “That’s the other member of our team,” Hartower told him. “Joan Fine.” In a conspirator’s tone: “Formerly Joan Gant.”

  “Gant?”

  “Ex-wife of the billionaire,” said Prohaska. “She was the chief advertising executive over at Gant Industries, comptroller of public opinion. Once upon a time.”

  “Not only that,” added Hartower, “but she’s also the illegitimate test-tube daughter of Sister Ellen Fine, the renegade nun who led the Catholic Womanist Crusade back in the Oughts.”

  “Womanist Crusade?”

  “You know: the lesbian habit-burners who wanted the pope’s permission to be ordained and have babies.”

  “Oh,” said Eddie, who didn’t know, actually. “So if her ma was a queer nun and her husband was a billionaire, what’s she doing working in the sewers?”

  “Penance.”

  The sewer workers were all seated now; Fatima Sigorski clapped her hands once more for silence. “I have here the advance version of this month’s tactical report,” she began, holding up an Electric Clipboard. “As usual it’s a mix of good news and bad news. Some dedicated work on the part of our Brooklyn division has virtually stamped out the Serrasalmus nattereri infestation under Park Slope. On the minus side, last night some Cuban restaurant owner’s grandfather got zapped to death on the basement john by what sounds like an Electrophorus electricus. There were no actual witnesses and the police think it might be some kind of life insurance scam, so we’re going to wait for confirmation before taking any official action. Still, you probably want to bring a pair of rubber-soled thigh-highs if you go cruising under Spanish Harlem . . .”

  Joan Fine sat near the front, wishing she could smoke. But while Fatima Sigorski might turn a blind eye to the occasional cigarette sneaked in the women’s room, sh
e didn’t even allow gum chewing during assembly, so Joan’s only recourse for tension release was the rosary in her pocket, which she fretted with continuously while Fatima spoke. Joan’s mother had given it to her on the day of her first confession; and though what Joan had confessed had been a youthful disdain for Roman Catholic theology, she’d held on to the rosary, calling it a good luck keepsake. The beads were cheap acrylic, but the crucifix was true silver, wrought by a Reformed Carmelite sister who moonlighted as a master smithy. Christ’s silver crown of thorns had been painstakingly engraved with a laser stylus and when held up to a strong light would project the prayer of the Reverend Cabal of Catholic Womanists against the nearest wall, in pinprick letters of fire: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. God make us foolish for our struggle.

  Joan thought this would be an apt motto for the Department of Sewers’ Zoological Bureau as well. Which of course was why she’d taken the job.

  “Now, as for today’s special assignment: I’m afraid we have a definite confirmation on that new species I hinted about last Friday. Can I have the lights down, please?” The overhead lighting dimmed obediently. “The foot-age you’re about to see,” said Fatima, “was taken by May Team 67 right before the entire crew became unavoidably eligible for early retirement. Roll tape.”

  She stepped aside, and the projection screen flickered to light in three dimensions. The viewpoint was a fixed camera facing off the stern of one of the Department’s armored patrol barges. The barge was moving through one of the larger, canal-sized sewer tunnels, and it was immediately obvious that something was wrong: judging from the whitewater spume the barge was kicking up behind it, the pilot was either fighting one hell of a current or, more likely, running away from something at full throttle. As the barge swung hard around a bend, a series of shotgun blasts could be heard, and the booming percussion of big-caliber pistols: members of the doomed May Team emptying their weapons into the sludgy water. To no avail—for suddenly a massive form surged up out of the barge’s wake, toothy maw yawning wide like a razor-studded chasm. The viewers in the briefing room shrank back screaming in their seats as the monster leapt through the screen in flawless 3-D, but it never landed. Right at that point, probably a split second before the camera was smashed from its mount, the editor of the recording had thrown the sequence into a loop, so that the creature froze in place halfway out of the water, twisting back and forth as if to present itself for inspection.

  “Carcharodon carcharias,” Fatima Sigorski said, as the terrified sewer workers regained their composure. “Positive I.D. from our friends at the Bronx Zoo. We’re not sure yet how it got down there, but SHQ is theorizing that it’s a flushed pet. That, or another practical joke by those pecker-woods in the NYU Ichthyology Department.”

  The shocked voice of Eddie Wilder: “That’s a fucking great white shark!”

  Joan Fine looked around at the sound of his voice. Eddie had gotten halfway out of his chair and was paused there trembling, while Prohaska and Hartower, each having grabbed an elbow, tried to sit him back down. “Shut up!” Prohaska hissed frantically. “Shut up and behave, you want to get a demerit your first day out?” Joan smiled. Eddie would probably end by annoying her, but she couldn’t help liking someone still innocent enough to speak without tact or knowledge of euphemism.

  Fatima, however, did not appreciate the breach of usage.

  “It’s a Carcharodon carcharias,” she scolded, punching every hard consonant in the Latin. “An alternative-environment-adapted Carcharodon carcharias. I trust we’ll all remember that if we get within earshot of a media rep. There’s only one thing in the sewers with less than ten letters in its name, and it’s not ‘shark.’”

  “Sorry,” Eddie said. “Sorry, but it looks just like—”

  “Furthermore, SHQ is continuing its practice of assigning code referents to notable members of a given species. Though there’s no indication yet that we’ll be seeing more than one of them—I certainly hope we won’t—it’s been resolved that individual Carcharodon will be named after beer brands. This,” she indicated the still-twitching hologram, “is Meisterbrau. That’s the name I expect to hear you use if you talk about it over lunch—not Smiley, not Jaws, not Mack the Knife, but Meisterbrau. Is that clear?” Eddie nodded meekly.

  “Now our available information indicates that Meisterbrau has been feeding in the tunnel complex around the Times Square Interchange. All May Teams are to converge on that area carrying maximum armament. Team leaders remember to sign out for the weapons and get yourselves a Negro from the pool; also, methane and other toxics levels are high today, so be sure to top off your oxygen tanks. That’s all, people. Get to your barges, good luck, and be careful out there. And watch your language.“

  The Morning Schedule

  A polite disembodied voice spoke from Harry Gant’s wrist: “Quarter past eight, sir.”

  Gant pulled up his sleeve to reveal the face of Dick Tracy, sized to the dimensions of a quartz timepiece. Gant’s thumb brushed the slash of Tracy’s chin, and he said: “That you, Toby?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Gant. Ms. Domingo sent me. Time to come down, sir.”

  “What am I scheduled for this morning, Toby?”

  “You’re giving an address at the Gant Media & Technical School for Advanced Immigrant Teens at nine o’clock, sir. After which you’re holding a crisis-reduction meeting with the Department of Public Opinion concerning the pirate Philo Dufresne. And, of course, the Negro problem.”

  “Oh,” Gant said, “that. Toby?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Is there something special about today that I should remember? Not business; check my personal file.”

  “Yes sir.” On the 208th-floor terrace, the Automatic Servant scratched the side of its head with a dusky finger. Then it said: “You might be thinking of your wedding anniversary, Mr. Gant. That is to say, it would be your anniversary today, if you were still—”

  “Right,” Gant said, snapping his fingers. “Day before Halloween, funny I could even forget it.”

  “Former Ms. Gant,” Toby added, “also has a birthday coming up next month. Her forty-first. And you’ll be forty-three next week.”

  “Right, right. OK, Toby, you go tell Ms. Domingo I’ll be down shortly. Also tell her I’m going to want six Portable Televisions for media support at that school thing at nine. That’s all.”

  “Yes sir,” the Servant said, and was gone. Gant lingered in his eyrie another minute yet. Good old Joan, he thought, his memory of her tinged with mild regret but no ill will. The last he knew of his ex-wife she’d been working some blue-collar job and running a welfare shelter in the Bowery. A meager use of her talents. . . but he smiled just the same, for thinking of Joan made him think of the past in general, and thinking of the past in general made him think of himself, of the American-Dream-come-true storybook tale that was his life.

  Harry Dennis Gant, born in 1980 in the back seat of a broken-down Toyota parked at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. His mother a construction worker by trade, his father a schoolteacher, both of them jobless and homeless at the time of Harry’s nativity, the dying Toyota representing the last of their possessions. And yet from these humble beginnings—the twentieth-century equivalent, Harry Gant liked to think, of being born in a log cabin—look what he had made of himself in only forty-three years. Look at all he had wrought in the world, and his life not half finished yet, not half.

  Love of self and love of country lit a fire in the hearth of Harry Gant’s soul, warming him to the new day. He was glad to be alive; glad too to have such a wonderful gift—the gift of inspiration—to bestow on the Advanced Teens he would address an hour from now. With a reverent nod to the great city below, he lifted the trapdoor in the floor of the eyrie and started down the ladder.

  A Word about the Negro Problem

  The Negro problem bedeviling Gant Industries should not be confused with the African-American problem, which was simply that there weren’t any African-Ame
ricans anymore, or any black Africans either for that matter, at least not that you could invite over to your house for dinner. Back at the turn of the century a literal Black Plague, its origin and cause still completely unknown, had turned inner cities across the United States into overnight ghost towns, emptied Nigeria and three dozen other sub-Saharan nations, and sent the scant handfuls of survivors fleeing to an ever more remote series of hidden sanctuaries. Celebrated disaster chronicler Tad Winston Peller had written a book about it, the runaway bestseller They Say It Started in Idaho: Tales of the Black Pandemic of Twenty-Ought-Four. This popular work had served as the basic text for no less than seven miniseries, not to mention a weekly science-fiction drama, Dark Heart, Red Planet, about a family of jazz-loving astronauts who escape extinction by being on Mars at the time of the plague outbreak.

  But all of that is another story. The Negro problem had nothing to do with disease or cable television; it was solely a consumer-marketing phenomenon.

  The Self-Motivating Android—test-marketed by a Disney subsidiary in 2003 and mass-produced by the fledgling Gant Industries as the Gant Automatic Servant starting in 2007—achieved initial prominence as a cost-effective industrial labor substitute. The first Androids were only vaguely humanoid in appearance, intended to be functional rather than eye-pleasing, but Harry Gant, looking ahead to a time when his Servants would be affordable in the home as well as in mines and factories, insisted on a more aesthetic design. And so from 2010 on it became possible to purchase Automatic Servants in a wide selection of realistic skin tones and somatotypes. Gant, a great believer in offering variety to his customers, certainly didn’t ask his sales force to push any one particular model over another; he was as surprised as anyone when Configuration AS204—your Automatic Servant in basic black—began outselling all other versions combined by a margin of ten to one.