Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Peter Lugo Peller, a stringer for the New York Tribune whose great-great-grandson would find fame as disaster chronicler to a lost generation, became feverishly excited by the idea of this “Long Walk to Flatbush,” and managed to talk five other journalists and two photographers into accompanying him on the journey. They gathered at the Ashokan Dam in the Catskills on January 18th. A jeering group of tunnel diggers was also on hand, placing wagers on how quickly the marchers would give up; the smart money had it that they wouldn’t last ten miles.

  Just prior to the descent another journalist arrived, a skinny fellow outfitted in full mountain-climbing gear, with his hair tucked up under a coal miner’s helmet. He rushed over to the little clutch of newsmen and greeted Peter Lugo Peller with a firm double handshake.

  “Smuts of North Dakota,” the newcomer introduced himself. “From the Fargo Spectrum.”

  “Awfully long way from home, aren’t you?” one of the photographers asked.

  “We’re trying to be more cosmopolitan,” Smuts replied.

  They headed down, and Peter Lugo Peller, taking the lead, soon made two alarming discoveries: first, that the tunnel was not, as he had for some reason imagined, a straight level line from point A to point B, but rather an alpine track that plunged and soared hundreds of feet as it passed under rivers and other surface obstacles; and second, that it was already full of water. Enough water to drown you in spots, or at least ruin your footwear—and Peller had worn his best pair of shoes for the outing. After a quick conference the intrepid newsmen decided to continue the hike above ground, which they did for an entire day before quitting altogether.

  No one noticed that Smuts never came up out of the tunnel.

  On January 25th, two sandhogs at the High View Reservoir in Yonkers were the first to spot the damp, bruised, but extremely self-satisfied figure who clambered out of the bowels of the earth in a battered coal miner’s helmet. One of the sandhogs had won a silver dollar in a juggling contest the night before and was bouncing it on his palm, but paused at the sight of Smuts, who looked like nothing that belonged in the Reservoir.

  “Who are you?” the juggler said, in Italian. His companion, who spoke a passable English, translated: “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Just a lady out for a stroll,” Smuts replied. She lifted the helmet, releasing a long spill of brown hair, a gesture that eleven-year-old Hollywood had not yet had time to turn into a cliché. “On my way to Flatbush.”

  The juggler was thunderstruck; his companion, who had been born Maria but found life simpler in work shirt and trousers, allowed herself a guarded grin. Smuts winked at her in secret recognition, then jabbed a finger at the silver coin.

  “Hey,” she said, “gimme that.”

  Needing no translation of this imperative, the juggler closed his hand over the shiny prize. “Why should I?”

  “Because,” Smuts replied, addressing him in his own tongue, “I just earned it.”

  2023: Donkeys Lost in the Woods

  One hundred and nine years later, a woman named Lexa Thatcher sat in a loft in Brooklyn—New Bedford-Stuyvesant rather than Flatbush, but close enough—turning the same silver dollar over in her fingers. The coin had been handed down through five generations of mothers and daughters, and its faces were worn nearly smooth by now, but the audacious spirit that drove the Smuts/Hollings/Thatcher matrilineal line had not withered in the slightest. Lexa’s mother had sought her own adventure in North Africa, trekking alone across the Sahara from Timbuktu to Marrakech. East of Casablanca, in the foothills of the Middle Atlas, she had seduced and ravished a Bedouin used car salesman—or perhaps an entire dealership of them, she was never specific on that point—as a result of which Lexa’s hands holding the coin were richly bronzed, her heart and head sharp for the hard bargain.

  Lexa’s home office contained her desk, a computer with numerous peripheral devices (including a few available only to good friends of Morris Kazenstein), a folding bed, a collection of heart-shaped portraits, and, at the moment, the family television, which was portable and ambled from room to room when not in use. A pair of Electric Dung Beetles made regular rounds as well, seeking out and disposing of dust and dirt particles, in accordance with Lexa’s philosophy that the best form of housekeeping was a house that kept itself. Two large windows let in fresh air and light: New Bedford-Stuyvesant was climate controlled and never got colder than a balmy midsummer’s night.

  While Lexa put together a piece for the upcoming weekly edition of The Long Distance Call, her daughter Rabi argued with the TV. It was not a Gant Portable but an antique Sony Animan, a 19-inch screen perched on pistoning legs of oiled brass. Lexa had fitted it with a Personality Template Box—an expensive option but worth it in her opinion—to handle the thorny problem of parental guidance. Rabi was not specifically prohibited from watching any program, but whenever she turned on the set she was challenged by a computer-generated construct of the philosopher Socrates, who made her justify her channel selection.

  “My admirable Rabi,” Socrates hailed her today, “as always I am anxious to partake of your wisdom. Here it is one o’clock on a Monday afternoon, a time at which most seven year olds would be in school, and yet you sit at home . . .”

  “I have chicken pox,” Rabi said, holding up a spotty arm. “See?”

  “All the more reason I should want to be your pupil. Your illness prevents you from receiving the education your society has sacrificed to provide. Many in your situation would rest so as to recover more quickly, or read to keep up with their studies, or take advantage of the Sesame Street episode about to begin on Channel 13. But you, Rabi—no doubt following the most brilliant chain of reasoning—you have elected instead to view violent cartoons in which rabbits, coyotes, and roadrunners drop boulders on one another. If only you would share your logic with me, so that I might go out and extol your intelligence and virtue to other children in the Tri-State Area—”

  “You know what I was reading the other day?” Rabi interrupted him. “And all on my own, not even assigned in class? A book about Greek mythology, which is what they had for cartoons when you were seven. And you know what? This god named Cronus took a sickle and made his father impotent with it. Impotent. So is that better or worse than a coyote getting hit by a boulder?”

  Tuning out the debate with a pair of headphones, Lexa asked her computer to run a program called SumpPumpGraphics. “Working,” the computer replied, and on its main monitor drew comic strip images of the seven Democratic presidential candidates, seated as if for a debate of their own. When Lexa fed copies of their stump speeches into an optical scanner, dialogue balloons appeared above the seated figures, sized in proportion to the wordiness of the speeches. The largest balloon belonged to Preston Hackett, a dark horse opportunist who on separate occasions had claimed to be a native of eighteen different states, including Belgium, which had apparently been admitted to the Union when no one else was looking.

  “Ready cull feature,” Lexa said.

  “Cull feature ready. Average speech length at start is three thousand, six hundred, and seventeen words.”

  “Cull salutations, jokes, and needless historical anecdotes. Ditto quotations and statistics that don’t directly support a platform point. Cull platitudes and non sequiturs. Cull reiterations of obvious facts. Cull redundancies. Cull misleading statements and outright lies, but flag them for later.”

  “Working,” the computer said, and the dialogue balloons shrank drastically. “Culling completed. Average speech length is now two hundred and seven words.”

  “Cull and flag impossible promises. Also cull promises that fail a vagueness test.”

  “What is my threshold of acceptable vagueness?”

  “Let’s not be too stringent. Cull anything that rates below a four on the Thatcher Hem-Haw Scale.”

  “Loading THS parameters. Working.” The dialogue balloons became tiny dots. “Culling completed. Average speech length is now twenty-two words.”

&nbs
p; Lexa took a laser pen and pointed it at the cartoon figure that represented candidate Harmon Fox. Fox recited the bare bones version of his stump speech: “If elected, I will raise taxes against the rich, cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs, and plant one million trees.”

  Lexa shifted the light beam to candidate Nan Sheffield. “If elected,” Sheffield promised, “I will raise taxes against the rich, cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs, and plant two million trees.”

  A bidding war. Lexa tapped Preston Hackett next and was surprised to hear the shortest speech thus far: “If elected, I will raise taxes against the rich and cut military spending in favor of social welfare programs.”

  “Nothing about trees?” Lexa asked.

  “Candidate Hackett’s sole reference to trees,” the computer replied, “was that he had a plan to reforest the Great Plains. That statement did not survive culling.”

  “Stick it back in. Retrieve and reinsert.”

  “Done.”

  “Now open a page display for me, standard column widths. Insert the candidates’ culled speeches as a sidebar, leaving space for pen-and-ink caricatures. Working title for the article is ‘Donkeys Lost in the Woods.’”

  She typed for the next half hour. Lexa’s keyboard, a 1925 Remington-Rand manual typewriter, was the only part of the setup not state-of-the-art. She liked the weighty metal feel of the keys and the clack of the type bars hitting the empty platen; pressure switches in the carapace transferred her keystrokes to the computer processor. Inscribed below the Remington’s space bar in calligraphic brushstrokes of Liquid Paper was the motto: GOOD INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM IS A THING OF THE PAST.

  By the time she finished the piece, her daughter had demolished Socrates and was watching Bugs Bunny do the same thing to Elmer Fudd. Confident that Rabi’s moral fiber was in no immediate danger, Lexa transferred copies of her write-up to the Call’s main office in Manhattan and to Ellen Leeuwenhoek, her star photographer on assignment in Washington. Then she told the computer to rake the yard, a code phrase triggering a broad-based search for interesting news—the word interesting being defined by a continually evolving parameters file the size of a small dictionary.

  “First item,” the computer told her some thirty seconds later, over the simulated chatter of an old UPI teletype. “The comptroller of public opinion at Gant Industries has just announced the indefinite postponement of what she termed ‘our Antarctic conservation project’ due to ‘unchecked terrorist activity.’”

  “Has there been any official statement from Washington regarding the sinking of the icebreaker?”

  “The president and his staff have not yet made themselves available for comment. However, the queen of England, vacationing at an undisclosed location, has issued a press release commending Philo Dufresne for ‘foiling the dishonorable designs of those of Our American cousins who would seek to break treaty with Us.’ The British prime minister followed up immediately with the statement that, ‘Her Majesty’s words should not be interpreted to imply tolerance for hooliganism.’”

  “See if you can intercept any Electric Memos coming out of the White House, but be discreet about it. And let me know if the queen says anything else about Philo. Next item.”

  “Next item: a check of accessible police files reveals no new information regarding the death of Amberson Teaneck, or the possible involvement of a Gant Automatic Servant in that incident. Gant’s Public Opinion Department has made seven telephone calls to the precinct homicide division handling the investigation and another five to the police commissioner’s office, and sent multiple faxes warning against ‘careless speculation.’ As of this afternoon, no media source reporting on the murder has made any reference to a Gant Servant.”

  “Give me a hard copy of everything we already have on the case. And next item while I wait.”

  “Printing. Next item: Joan Fine was admitted to East River General Hospital this morning after being caught in an explosion in the New York City sewer system. Cost of damage to the sewers and adjacent building foundations is estimated at—-”

  “How is she?” Lexa interrupted.

  “Her treatment consisted of stitching and bandaging of the right leg and a course of antibiotics to guard against possible contagion. She is being held for observation, but her prognosis is excellent.”

  “What’s her room number?”

  “Room 413. Visiting hours are from nine A.M. to ten P.M.”

  “Contact the reception desk at the hospital and have them ready a visitor’s pass for me.”

  “Working,” the computer said. “My search has turned up other news items.”

  “Save them for a few minutes. I’ll call you from the car.”

  The Car God Would Drive If She Had a License

  Gathering the sheaf of printout in a manila folder, which she tucked into her purse, Lexa kissed Rabi goodbye and told her to be sure and take a nap at some point. “Your father’s due back tonight and you’ve got to not be dying of fever if you want to go with Toshiro and me to meet him.”

  “’Kay, Mom,” Rabi promised, and went back to her cartoons. In the guest bedroom, Lexa bestowed a more lingering goodbye kiss on the sleeping form of Toshiro Goodhead, this season’s star attraction at the West Village Chippendale’s. Then she went out, down three flights of curving stone steps to the street below.

  New Bedford-Stuyvesant was roughly one and a half square miles of Moroccan medina transplanted to King’s County. Lexa and an investment group of fellow muckrakers had decided some years back that if they were going to spend their lives pointing out the flaws in other people’s grand designs, they ought to undertake at least one grand design of their own. Urban renewal had seemed an obvious choice.

  The traditional medina style had been thoughtfully adapted to the alternative environment of modern Brooklyn. New Bedford-Stuyvesant’s streets were straighter and better lit than the labyrinthine alleyways that honeycombed old Marrakech and Fez, and wide enough to permit vehicular traffic, though combustion engines were strictly forbidden. Population density was far lower than in most North African cities, and a full third of the property had been reserved for parks and recreation; almost every rooftop boasted a garden. The buildings, while similar in profile—rectangular boxes, mostly, and none over five stories high—were dressed up in paint and tile murals of every description. The façade of Lexa’s co-op was a cross section of the ocean depths, complete with wildlife: manatees and walruses frolicking in the waves near the lip of the roof; dolphins, morays, and lithe scuba divers outside the windows of Lexa’s apartment on the fourth floor; and so on down to the blue-black deeps at street level, where lantern fish swam past the silver Hand of Fatima on the front door. Concealed beneath the bright colors and the cement and brick facing was a modernized plumbing system, with Catskill water, still safe to drink even in 2023, flowing from the bathroom taps—a feature that could not be fully appreciated unless you had once done the dysentery squat over a Kasbah pit toilet. By recycling whatever wastes they could, channeling New Bedford-Stuyvesant’s effluvia to collection tanks for use as fertilizer and fuel, neighborhood residents also limited their reliance on the Brooklyn sewer system, which in the era of the May Team made extremely good sense.

  And of course there was the dome. Buckminster Fuller had yet to establish a foothold in Rabat or Tangier, but New Bedford—Stuyvesant lay enclosed and protected beneath a geodesic bubble. Each triangular panel in the structure was a transparent solar collector, so that on long sunny days the dome generated enough electricity to run the climate-control center and satisfy up to forty percent of the neighborhood’s modest power needs. Overcast days were another matter, but even in dampest March it was far more energy efficient than any superskyscraper. Easier to get around in, too, and in Lexa’s opinion, prettier.

  Ethnically the neighborhood was a pot luck mix, kept that way in part by scaled rents that put the well-to-do next door to the hyper-impoverished. There were ragtag r
efugees of U.S. foreign policy in Syria and El Salvador living upstreet from deposed Bahraini and Qatari royals; wealthy Turks, Vietnamese, and Puerto Ricans haggling with Cambodian and Afghani peddlers in the Bed-Stuy souk. Anglos were relatively scarce: white liberals shied away from the neighborhood out of a belief that the many Arab residents would oppress women or Jews who lived near them, while white conservatives feared being kidnapped or blown up. They gave New Bedford—Stuyvesant a wide berth and bought condos in Richmond instead.

  With the exception of Lexa’s daughter Rabi—whom almost everyone mistook for an Australian—there were no black residents at all, not of African ancestry. Common wisdom held that no African-Americans remained anywhere east of the Mississippi, that the few survivors were living in fortified camps in the Rocky Mountains. Lexa knew more of the facts than that, but it was true that the most “African” face you were likely to see in New Bedford-Stuyvesant belonged to Bluey Kapirigi, an Australian aborigine who’d come to America to star in movies and miniseries. Bluey bore as close a resemblance to the late Rosa Parks as any Australoid could be expected to, and as often as twice a year would fly to Montgomery, Alabama, to be filmed refusing to give up her seat on the bus; this single role replayed again and again had earned her national acclaim, to the point that she had been invited to the White House and given the keys to the city by Montgomery’s mayor.

  A short hike through the souk brought Lexa to the Anti-Atlas Mosque, where she kept her car parked. The imam was sitting on the mosque’s front steps, having a late lunch; he raised a hand as Lexa approached.

  “Hey big man,” Lexa said, walking up.

  “Lexa,” he greeted her. “That guy was playing with your Bug again.”

  “When?”

  “Not ten minutes ago. I was up in the minaret dusting the Electric Muezzin. He ran when the car honked its horn.”

  “The same man as before?”