Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “I think so. Unless car thieves have all started wearing blue serge suits.”

  “Well thanks for the look out,” Lexa said. “I’ll ask Betsy if she got an I.D.”

  Betsy was Betsy Ross, a 2019 Special Edition Kazenstein Volkswagen Beetle. In her late twenties Lexa had patronized a women’s bar in the Village called the Betsy Ross Saloon, and a painting that hung over her favorite table had shown a winged Beetle chasing clouds above the Manhattan skyline; the painting’s title was The Car God Would Drive If She Had a License. Lexa had wanted her own Bug ever since and remained on the lookout for a mint-condition ’49. Morris’s version of the Beetle, however, came with a lot more toys.

  Lexa unplugged the charging cable and pressed her thumb against the fingerprint latch on the driver’s door. “I’ve been molested by swine,” Betsy said, as Lexa slid inside. Lexa had asked Morris to give the car a pleasant female persona, but he’d been reading a reissue of Revolution for the Hell of It that month, and so Betsy Ross was actually Abbie Hoffman in drag.

  “Faisal told me you had a visitor,” Lexa replied. “What did he do?”

  “Stuck a tracker under my rear bumper. You should have seen the son of a bitch jump when I laid on the horn.”

  “Did you get his picture?”

  “Honey, I got his SAT scores.” The glove compartment dropped open, and a color fax inside printed out a mug shot of a startled-looking blond man. “Ernest G. Vogelsang, Houston Community College class of ’19, Quantico class of ’21, presently working as a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Un-Un-American Activities Division. Looks like the feds have you pegged for an un-un-American.”

  “That’s nothing new. What about his SATs?”

  “340 math, 260 verbal. Guy must be a lousy guesser.”

  “Must be. Why do you suppose the feds hired him?”

  “I dunno,” said Betsy. “But you want to hear an amazing coincidence? The current head of the Un-Un-American Activities Division is also named Ernest Vogelsang. Senior.”

  “Hmm.”

  Lexa thumbed the starter; the engine came on like a soft whisper. This was the one thing she didn’t like about driving off batteries, no matter how environmentally conscious it might be: even cruising at the top speed of sixty miles an hour the Bug was too quiet, almost silent. Like driving a golf cart.

  “You know,” Betsy said, “if you took out my hit-and-run inhibitors I could save a lot of time by just backing over people like Vogelsang . . .”

  “That’s all right,” Lexa said. “I have enough trouble getting you registered every year as it is.”

  “So who the hell told you I wanted to be registered?”

  They drove out of the lot. The hush of the Bug’s operation continued to frustrate Lexa, but not for long. Betsy had a secret vice: canned electricity wasn’t the only thing she ran on. Leaving the dome of New Bedford -Stuyvesant and easing into the light traffic on the Atlantic Parkway, Lexa switched over to methanol, a home brew that burned hot and clean. The unmatchable thrum of internal combustion pulsed from fender to fender. Lexa stood on the accelerator; the speedometer jumped from fifty to eighty-five. The little Beetle shot past an Electric Winnebago and nearly blew it off the road.

  “Keep an eye out for radar traps,” Lexa said, and Betsy replied: “Now you’re talking.”

  2004 & 2023: Heaven’s Velodrome

  One reason Joan Fine didn’t put much faith in near-death experiences was that her mother had had one, and Sister Ellen Fine’s trip beyond the pale was so bizarre, in both its cause and its content, that it pretty much discredited the whole subject for her.

  The last sally of the Catholic Womanist Crusade was launched in the summer of ’04, just two months prior to the onset of the African Pandemic (a coincidence duly noted by disaster chronicler Tad Winston Peller, though he never did say what the connection was supposed to be). By that year the ranks of the Roman Catholic priesthood had dwindled to crisis levels worldwide, and though there were many reasons for the decline, the celibacy question was cited again and again as a prime factor. When a third Vatican Council was called in early June, rumors spread that the Church was finally planning to repeal the prohibition on clerical marriage. The Womanists were determined to crash the party.

  “You’re crazy, Mom,” Joan told her mother, not for the first time. “The College of Cardinals are a bunch of old virgins with bad tempers. It’s causing them physical pain to give even this little bit of ground, and what are you asking for? Not just married priests. Not even just female priests. Female priests who can get married, possibly to each other. Pregnant priests. Artificially inseminated dyke priests with attitude. The pope’s gonna have a stroke.”

  “Oh my daughter of little faith,” Sister Ellen replied, fighting to close her suitcase. “Going to Harvard has obviously made you one with the heathen.”

  “They excommunicated you, Mom. They aren’t even going to let you in.”

  “That excommunication is just politics.” Twin pops as the suitcase latches caught. “Look, I accept the fact that you want to play agnostic, but I still love this Church. And without us, it’ll be dead inside of fifty years. Irrelevancy will kill it. His Holiness doesn’t understand that, the Sacred College doesn’t understand that, but I understand it, so it becomes my obligation as a good Catholic to go communicate my understanding.” She lit a cigarette.

  “I’m proud of you, Mom,” Joan said. “Heathen or not, I don’t want you to think I’m not proud of you. But you do know they’re going to kill you, right?”

  The Womanists flew to Rome on a pair of chartered Lufthansa jumbo jets—Al Italia had refused to carry them—and snuck through passport control disguised as a company of German beer merchants on holiday. The next morning at dawn they assembled on the west bank of the Tiber to begin their march on the Vatican. For this special occasion they had set aside the ritual dress of their various orders in favor of a standard uniform, “storming habits” that combined a proud purple hue with a humble weave and modest cut. Advancing seven hundred strong up the Via della Conciliazione, a shining determination in their eyes and faces, the Womanists suggested a military procession of plum-feathered penguins.

  The Holy See had been alerted to their approach. The gates to the Vatican City remained open, but inside the Piazza San Pietro the Swiss Guard in their own flashy costumes of yellow, red, and blue had formed a defensive line, blocking the steps to St. Peter’s Basilica. No such confrontation being complete without an angry mob, a cast of some two thousand Roman citizens had been summoned from their beds to the Piazza, clustering at the north and south ends, where black-booted carabinieri made a show of holding them back. And around the obelisk in the Piazza’s center, the tabloid paparazzi swarmed, swaddled in white penitents’ sport jackets of Gucci and Armani, shutters clicking away.

  All of this was beamed back stateside by CNN, which had a blimp with gun cameras hovering over St. Peter’s. A lone Swiss Guardsman crawled out onto the Basilica’s roof to warn the blimp away, then tried to shoot it down with a sixteenth-century crossbow. Four thousand miles and six time zones to the west, Joan and Lexa sat up past midnight in the Betsy Ross Saloon, watching the drama unfold on the TV above the bar. As the nuns entered the Piazza, they spotted Sister Ellen Fine in the front rank, smoke trailing from a cigarette that she was too nervous to actually puff on.

  “They’re going to be massacred,” Joan said, herself smoking one Marlboro after another. She was terrified, angry too that her mother was risking her life for something that to Joan seemed trivial, and yet at the same time filled with admiration and a yearning to see justice done: the same yearning that would carry her through numerous crusades of her own, charged further by the hope that at the moment of truth, those who had abused power would come to their senses and back down. The pope will come out now, she thought, with open arms, and say “Enough is enough. We accept you. No need for violence. “Joan worried the beads of her rosary; Lexa took her hand.

  The nuns were almo
st to the steps of the Basilica when the bombardment began. At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Orthodox rabbis had thrown metal folding chairs at Jewish Womanists, but the mob of Romans stuck to more traditional ammunition: stones and masonry. Joan’s mother was struck down by a bust of the Emperor Nero that clocked her on the side of the head, fracturing her skull and permanently deafening one ear.

  “Didn’t hurt,” she insisted, speaking to Joan from her bed at home a week later. “Just this ringing, as though someone had struck a bell inside my head, and the next thing I knew I was riding a bicycle . . .”

  “A bicycle,” Joan said.

  “I was on the outside of the sky,” Sister Ellen said, “pedaling up the steepest slope you could imagine. I’d have lost all my wind except that I wasn’t breathing anymore, so I kept on, and an eternity later the sky leveled out. And there it was in the middle of a plain of stars, just like in stories: mother-of-pearl on the gates, streets inside paved with gold—”

  “Saint Peter minding the entrance?”

  “Oh yes. But he wasn’t what you’d expect. No flowing white beard, not at all. He was young, very much the outdoorsy type, muscular and sort of swarthy. . . .” She trailed off, sounding a little ashamed.

  “Poor Ellie,” said Sister Judith Calyx, a fellow Womanist (she’d escaped the Vatican riot unscathed, decking one of the Swiss Guardsmen and carrying Joan’s mother to safety; they never did get to see the pope). “Ellie saw Saint Peter and was inspired to an impure thought.”

  “He was beautiful,” Sister Ellen confessed. “Not my usual type, to say the least, but there’s no denying the sheer deliciousness of his appearance.”

  “Maybe,” Lexa Thatcher suggested, “it was just the power of his holiness you were feeling.”

  “I doubt it. My primary impression was that he had the most amazing ass of anyone I’d ever seen. I’ve never heard of the Holy Spirit manifesting itself in quite that fashion.

  “So I said hello to him, and he greeted me in return and asked me to please wait while he got my housing assignment. Didn’t use a computer or a telephone; he had a gigantic filing cabinet over by the gate, with combination locks on each file drawer and Roman numerals on each lock’s dial, which struck me as an odd detail to notice if I were just hallucinating the whole thing.” She glanced significantly at Joan, who clearly wasn’t buying a word of this. “Then, while Peter tried to remember whether it was XVII left or XVII right, I heard a huffing and puffing coming up from behind, and saw that a delegation of my Sisters in Purple had followed me. They’d conquered the slope on a twelve-seater tandem bike, though I could see from their red faces they’d have killed for a school bus.” She patted Sister Judith’s hand. “They stopped some distance away, as if they didn’t dare to come any closer, and gestured to me: ‘This way, the fight’s not over, what are you in such a hurry to quit for?’”

  “So you went back.”

  “In a minute I did. Though I have to admit that for an instant, caught midway between Peter’s backside and that rusty tandem full of sisters, I hesitated.” She grinned a very un-nunnish grin and turned to Joan. “And you, my heathen daughter, you think I dreamed the whole thing, don’t you?”

  “I love you, Mom,” Joan replied. “I respect you, I support you. But you’re a loon.”

  Hence Joan’s reluctance to credit near-death experiences. Hence a lot of other things about Joan, too.

  At any rate, as the paramedics winched her out of the sewers that Monday morning in 2023, Joan knew she wasn’t dead, or anywhere near it. Awake for part of the ride to East River General, she asked what her chances were. The young woman attending her in the back of the ambulance laughed and told her not to worry: she’d lost no limbs and suffered no internal injuries, though she’d need patching up where Meisterbrau had nuzzled her leg. Joan closed her eyes and slept the rest of the way to the hospital.

  And dreamed she was riding a bicycle on the outside of the sky.

  The incline was as bad as her mother had claimed, with the added difficulty that Joan still drew breath. By the time she reached the plain of stars on which the eternal city rested, she was too winded to speak. Huffing, wheezing, and wishing paradoxically for a cigarette, Joan coasted up to the pearly gates.

  Saint Peter was not on duty. Joan’s mother was, leaning against a file cabinet and twirling a huge ring of keys on one finger.

  “Well if it isn’t my heathen daughter,” she said. “Wasn’t expecting you up here today. A party of your coworkers just came through, but you weren’t on the list.”

  “Mom . . .,” Joan began, but broke off in a series of hacking coughs.

  “Still smoking? I am, too, but the good news is they don’t have cancer here. No cigarette tax, either. And when you go out to a restaurant, you can light up anywhere you like.”

  Bent forward over the handlebars, Joan could see a gold-paved street through the open gateway, not as shiny as she would have thought. The architecture was Swiss suburbia, row after row of white pine chalets. Joan couldn’t help wondering how they managed to house all the dead without skyscrapers. The tallest structure she could see, a stadium-like edifice at the top of a hill, had a banner that announced, BICYCLE RACES EVERY MONDAY AND THURSDAY.

  “Listen, Joan,” her mother said. “As long as you did drop by. . . I was nosing around in the Main Office the other day, and I saw some things you probably should know about. There’s going to be trouble in New York this week . . .”

  Three blocks down from heaven’s velodrome, an alligator shuffled out of a side street, chased by Eddie Wilder, Lenny Prohaska, Art Hartower, and a grime-covered old man who could only be Teddy May. The ’gator crossed to the middle of the intersection, nosed up a manhole cover that had been encrusted with precious stones, and tried to escape into the sewer. But Eddie Wilder pounced on it, seizing it by the tail.

  “. . . an earthquake, for one thing. Didn’t catch the Richter number. And something to do with Electric Negroes. Watch out for the Negroes, Joan. Are you listening to me?”

  “Mom,” Joan huffed, finally managing to straighten up. “Mom, what are you doing with Saint Peter’s keys?”

  “Oh, that. We had a bit of a shake-up after Judy and I arrived. Disagreements with the management. It could have turned ugly like that business in Rome, but in the end we worked out a peaceful compromise.” She lowered her voice and added: “The Virgin Mary took our side.”

  A Job Offer

  East River General was moored to a pier not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. Formerly a prison barge, it had been converted to a combination hospital ship and morgue during the ’04 Pandemic and now served as a catchtrap facility, handling patient and cadaver overflow from other sites around the city. Its living patrons were motivated to recover as quickly as possible: the East River, at least on its more polluted days, was a known fire hazard.

  Joan woke to the smell of filtered air and disinfectant; outside the barred window of her room, brown haze choked a bird in flight.

  “Dreaming?” Lexa asked, from a chair beside the bed.

  “Dreaming,” Joan agreed, groggy. She saw her leg wound had been tended while she chatted with her mother. “So what’s the damage?”

  “Minor. Your doctor wants to run a blood test later, but she thinks—”

  “The structural damage,” Joan said. “What did I do to the sewers?”

  “Well,” said Lexa, “unfortunately it wasn’t just a methane explosion. Seems the effluvia itself was in a combustible mood today.” She read from a printout Betsy Ross had produced for her: “Two building foundations undermined, one tunnel partially collapsed, an additional fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ‘cosmetic damage’—that’s what it says—and your patrol barge looks like you bought it at Picasso’s boat yard. Besides that, there are little patches of fire still floating around under the Island, and. . .” She nodded towards the window.

  “I lit the river? I lit the fucking river?”

  “The Hudson,” Lexa told her, “is also
reported to be smoldering. Not to be rude, Joan, but if you want to be a traditional martyr the idea is to get somebody else to burn you at the stake. Self-inflicted doesn’t count.”

  “I want a cigarette.”

  “Thought you might.” Lexa handed Joan a pack of Marlboro Filters, a matchbook, and a crumpled soda can for an ashtray. The flare of the match set off the room’s anti-carcinogen security system: a hologram of a peeved John Wayne appeared at the foot of the bed, shaking his finger.

  “Now ma’am,” Wayne chastised, “you know better than that. Hospital regulations absolutely forbid—”

  Lexa unplugged the smoke detector. Wayne evaporated in mid-sentence. “So . . .”

  “You know what?” Joan said. “A black woman saved my life this morning. A real one, I think, not Electric.”

  Lexa didn’t look surprised, but then she almost never did. “Interesting,” was all she said. “What makes you think she was human?”

  “Well for one thing, she was in the sewer, and I know for a fact she didn’t belong to the Department. And she was black, I mean really black. The darkest off-the-rack Servants are only medium brown.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Lexa said. She was scribbling something on the printout sheet. “You know why that is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. The Market Research branch of Public Opinion decided darker skin tones would scare children. So unless Harry’s built a custom model, dressed it up in a suit of armor, and lost it down a manhole, I don’t think this woman was running on batteries. One other thing: she had green eyes.”

  “Green?” said Lexa. “Who ever heard of a black African with green eyes?” On the printout she had written: FEDS MAY BE LISTENING. SIGNIFICANT OTHER #1 SAYS HI AND THANKS FOR THE LATEST CONTRIBUTION TO THE EARTH FUND. NEXT TIME I SEE HIS OLDEST DAUGHTER I’LL EXTEND YOUR GRATITUDE.

  “Good point,” Joan said, tapping ashes into the soda can. “Maybe I just imagined her. Wouldn’t be the first time someone hallucinated down in the shit.”