Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

“You didn’t see me,” she repeated. Then she stepped through the wall and disappeared.

  Maxwell became irrational.

  The Most Private Reading Room

  The New York Public Library wasn’t budgeted for secret passages, but that’s what happens when you hire an Irish design firm.

  When the Empire State Building went up in a ball of exploding 747 on Christmas night of ’06, its mooring-mast crown shot off like a rocket, impaling the underside of a CNN news blimp that just happened to be in position to cover the accident-in-progress. The blimp’s pilot hung on bravely, transmitting a continuous video signal to CNN Center in Atlanta as she urged her sinking craft north between the Fifth Avenue skyscrapers, hoping for an emergency landing in Central Park. At 42nd Street a microgale caused the gas bag to disintegrate completely, dropping pilot, gondola, and mooring mast from an altitude of six hundred feet; the gun cameras’ final transmission was a zoom-in close-up of a graffiti-smeared stone lion.

  There was talk of hiring the Japanese to rebuild the library. Mayor Waldo Twitty believed that Japan already had a secret controlling interest in his city, so that it only made sense to score as many brownie points with them as possible before they officially took over.

  “But wait a minute,” said the commissioner of libraries and family planning, as he studied the preliminary bid from Tokyo’s top architect. “Just tell me, when we’ve converted our available funds to yen to pay for this, how much will we have left to buy new books with?”

  The mayor’s accountant did some calculations. “Two dollars and fifty cents,” she said.

  “Two dollars and fifty cents!” the commissioner shouted. “Do you know what you can buy for two dollars and fifty cents? One quarter of a paperback, that’s what you can buy!”

  So they turned to a poorer country—the United States—to supply their architects instead. The Brooklyn firm of O’Donoghue, Killian & Snee offered to do the entire job, including construction, for a little under a fifth of the Tokyo price. Which would have been perfect, except that Josi O’Donoghue and Wirt Killian had spent their Irish childhoods playing in the hidden tunnels beneath Blarney Castle, and they for some reason thought the new Public Library needed a secret passage.

  “Why would it need that?” the commissioner asked them. “I don’t want to pay for that.”

  They told him that of course it was his decision and then put a secret passage in anyway. O’Donoghue mixed standard and metric measurements to create spaces that were invisible on the blueprint, while Killian oversaw the construction in such a way that not even the foreman caught on to the trick. When it was finished, only the canniest of librarians and patrons ever sensed that the interior dimensions of the new building didn’t quite add up; Maxwell, obsessed by his naked pictures, never had a clue.

  Morris Kazenstein, on the other hand, figured it out the third or fourth time he came in to borrow a book. Both of his parents had worked for the Shin Bet domestic security agency in Israel, so there was a family history of uncovering secrets. Amused, Morris told Philo what he had found, and Philo told his daughter Seraphina, and it was Seraphina Dufresne who now moved behind the walls of the Public Library, BRER Beaver perched on her shoulder, BRER Squirrel squirming in her pocket.

  The lamp in BRER Beaver’s hard hat lit the way. Just now Seraphina would have preferred a regular flashlight, the kind that couldn’t criticize. BRER Beaver was upset with her; or more accurately, the encounter with Maxwell had triggered a reprimand subprogram in the silicon walnut that was BRER Beaver’s brain.

  “Didn’t I warn you?” he said (the voice was Ralph Nader’s). He slapped his tail against her back for emphasis. “You have to be less conspicuous in public.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “I’m supposed to be carried in a bag. A standard Automatic Servant Utility Pouch. BRER Squirrel and I are sized just right for that.”

  “Oh,” said Seraphina, “and then I can be inconspicuous talking to a bag in public.”

  “You wear a nameplate. You wear a dress, that nice cotton one with the flowers that your father gave you.” BRER Beaver ticked off the admonitions on his paw. “You don’t open your mouth to speak, you subvocalize, and—”

  “And I put on brown contact lenses. And on top of that I wear fake glasses with a remote camera pick-up, so you can see even though you’re stuck in a bag. And maybe the next thing that happens is I throw the bag, the glasses, and the contacts out a window, because this is my home, and it’s ridiculous to have to go through all that just to walk around your own home.”

  “Anything less is unsafe,” BRER Beaver insisted.

  They had reached the entrance to the library’s Most Private Reading Room, which served as Seraphina’s apartment. She stopped just outside the door and tried to lose her temper, really lose it, like a normal person would at this point, but the best she could manage was severe irritation: “Don’t I usually listen to you outside the library? Didn’t I wear a survival suit in the sewers this morning?”

  “The answer to the first question, statistically, is no. And this morning I told you not to go into the sewers at all. It’s unsafe.”

  “Do you know what a pain you are?”

  “No.” He took the question literally, as he took everything. “I’m not designed for empathy. I’m designed for safety awareness.” He slapped his tail again. “Safety awareness and reading comprehension.”

  Reading comprehension. That was the hook, the thing that made BRER Beaver with his babysitter’s attitude a necessary evil. Seraphina couldn’t read. Not an unheard of state of affairs in 2023, but in her case the cause was biological. Some chromosome-mutilating contaminant in the Philadelphia air, perhaps, at U. Penn., where her mother had first coaxed her father out of his Amish frock coat, or maybe a bad hot dog at the reunion picnic where Seraphina was conceived some nine years later. Her hearing and speech were unimpaired, and her oral vocabulary was above average, but her brain lacked the synaptic architecture necessary to fit meaning to written words and phrases. Mosel Kazenstein, the Albuquerque-based neurologist who examined Seraphina in the desert when she was seven years old, diagnosed her as having Sorbonne’s dyslexia with pronounced cortical dysplasia.

  “What’s that mean?” Seraphina had asked him.

  “It means you can’t read,” Mosel replied. He punched buttons on the Portable CAT Scan he’d brought with him. “There’s a physical defect in your brain’s language center that keeps you from grasping certain types of abstract visual symbols, like letters and numbers.”

  “My dad doesn’t grasp adjectives very well.”

  “That sounds like a discipline problem,” said Mosel. “Your trouble is organic.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I’m afraid not. Resculpting the cerebral cortex is still tomorrow’s neurosurgery. But with a little ingenuity you can learn to work around your deficit. You might try Braille, for instance, which doesn’t use visual symbols, or some form of pictograph language that isn’t so abstract. And of course there are technological aids that can help you cope with conventional text when you have to.”

  “Technological aids?”

  Mosel jerked a thumb at his nephew Morris. “Gizmos,” he said.

  Hence BRER Beaver, who read signs and labels for her and found the library books she wanted with a facility no hand-held reading device could match; and BRER Squirrel, who helped get her out of trouble when she ignored BRER Beaver’s warnings about proper conduct. BRER stood for Batteries Required Electric Rodent, though it had taken Morris some effort to explain the concept of acronyms to her: “A sort of inventor’s poetry,” he finally said. Seraphina loved poetry.

  To enter the Most Private Reading Room you had to grip the doorknob in just the right way, another trick of O’Donoghue and Killian’s that Seraphina had down to a reflex. Inside, the floor was carpeted in smooth flagstones, so that if you stared only at your feet, or lay on the goose-down-and-wolf’s-pelt Blarney cot with your eyes closed, you
could pretend you really were in some mad monk’s study in an Irish castle. Looking up, though, you couldn’t help but see the window that made up one wall of the room, and right outside the window was Madagascar: the bloated trunk of a baobab tree, ten arm-spans around at its greatest girth, which completely blocked the view to and from the street. The tree was supposed to have been a Kerry willow, every bit as concealing, but a mix-up at the arboreal supply house had brought this temperate-zone—adapted baobab instead. By the time the mistake was discovered the baobab had already sunk its roots immovably deep beneath the library sidewalk, and now the Transit Authority had to send crews out with pruning chainsaws twice a month to keep the IRT subway tunnel cleared.

  Tough little tree. The only thing that would make it more perfectly African, Seraphina thought, would be a family of lemurs to climb in its stubby branches. But lemurs were extinct.

  She set BRER Beaver on the cot and let BRER Squirrel out of her pocket. From other pockets in her vest and pants she removed the books she’d collected before Maxwell’s advent; as she stacked these in a pile on the Most Private Reading Desk, the upper-right-hand drawer slid open of its own accord, and a spritely brown field mouse with bifocals hopped out onto the desktop.

  “Hello, BRER Vole,” Seraphina said.

  “Hello, Seraphina,” BRER Vole replied, nose twitching in anticipation as the stack of books grew higher. “Did we have a wonderful day?”

  “BRER Vole,” said Seraphina, “do I ever not have a wonderful day?”

  “Never,” BRER Vole said, which was absolutely true. The other half of Seraphina’s neurological birthright was an abnormally high level of serotonin in her brain, and a rogue hormone in her bloodstream—“organic Prozac,” Mosel Kazenstein called it—that further enhanced the serotonin’s effectiveness. This meant that not only was Seraphina dyslexic, half-orphaned, and one of the last surviving members of her race, but she was also biochemically incapable of despairing over any of these facts. A good anti-suicide survival trait, especially if she wound up spending the rest of her life disguised as an Electric Negro, but frustrating: to never be truly frustrated, to never know depression. To never get angry enough to hurt somebody.

  “I think about that,” she had confided once to Lexa. “As a game, I mean; that’s the trouble, it’s never serious. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for somebody like me to want to set fire to buildings? Learn Black English, dress up like a Masai warrior, and go around shooting white people? In a movie I’d probably do that. But the best I can manage in real life are practical jokes.”

  “You do pretty well with those,” Lexa told her. “Philo thinks you’re an extremist, and it’s not as if he’s speaking from the middle of the road.”

  “Well that’s the other thing that bothers me. I tell myself, ‘Seraphina, you’re brain damaged, it’s OK that you feel this way, or don’t feel this way.’ But what’s Dad’s excuse?”

  “You think sinking ships is a sign of complacency?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Trust me,” Lexa said, “your father is as angry as you’d like to be. But he doesn’t confuse anger with a right to multiply suffering indiscriminately.”

  “Well then, I won’t multiply suffering indiscriminately either,” Seraphina proclaimed. “I’ll just really really bug people.” Which she did, with some success; this past weekend she’d scored a major coup.

  “You really can’t keep this, you know,” BRER Beaver said now, indicating the painting on the Reading Room wall. “You have to return it.” The painting was Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The real one. Seraphina had snitched it from a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, over BRER Beaver’s most strenuous objections. The French government was calling for a strip search of the entire continent to get it back. “You can’t just go around stealing other people’s cultural treasures!”

  “Oh yes you can,” Seraphina said. “Statistically, you can. But don’t worry, I’m planning to return it.” She looked at Mona’s mouth, frozen in a smile for the past five hundred and twenty years, and thought: I know how that feels.

  “You’ve got something devious in mind,” BRER Beaver guessed. “Devious, and probably unsafe. What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. But first”—her face lit up, genuinely pleased at the prospect—“first, how about you telling me a story?”

  “A story?”

  “Yes. The one about my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. In the Civil War.”

  “Oh,” said BRER Beaver, “that.”

  The Blue and the Gray to the Rescue

  Kite was having a cigarette when she heard Maxwell shouting. Dumb luck, really, that she was out on the sidewalk to hear him; for while the Sharper Image at 41st and Fifth was as nicotine-free as every other shop in Manhattan, the management usually let her get away with sneaking a smoke, or any other violation of contemporary mores she cared to commit. She looked older than any two average senior citizens combined, she was missing her right arm, and the coat she wore had a military styling—equal parts blue and gray, fashioned from pieces of several real uniforms—that commanded respect, or at least respectful indifference. People under sixty tended to defer to her without thinking about it.

  But not this afternoon. She’d come into the Sharper Image to browse the latest artifacts of progress, one of her favorite pastimes. For Kite, who remembered an era (so she claimed) before television—not just Music Television, but television—before radio, before the Model T, before these United States became the United States . . . well, for her, merely to learn of the existence of such gadgetry as a refrigerated dog dish with subliminal obedience training tape ($269.95, plus federal and local sales tax) constituted high entertainment. Better than going to the movies, and cheaper, too.

  She’d set her tobacco pouch on top of a cryogenic storage unit for houseplants (“For those long vacations when you won’t be home to water the family fern”) and was rolling a butt one-handed when the floor manager tapped her on the shoulder.

  “That’s not an ashtray, ma’am,” the manager told her. “It’s a delicate piece of life-support equipment, and quite expensive.”

  Norman Lao, the tag on his shirt pocket said. Something in his features stirred a very old memory.

  “Lao,” Kite said. “Lao. Do you have any ancestors from Michigan, Lao?”

  “Smoking isn’t permitted in the store, ma’am,” Lao insisted. Kite offered him her most beatific grandmother smile.

  “No exceptions for a sweet old woman . . .”

  “No exceptions, ma’am.”

  “. . . and a combat veteran?” She raised her voice a little: “Union Army of the Potomac, 1861 to 1864. Also a brief tenure with the Standing Bear Cherokee Platoon of the Confederate Army. Just so you know.”

  Lao showed her the door.

  So she lit her cigarette outside and thought of the original Lao, Sub-Private Ting Lao of the 2nd Michigan, who one hundred and fifty-nine years ago had given her her nickname, and who, for what it was worth, had been a career smoker. But those days were long gone . . . now a traffic cop rode past on horseback, smelled Kite’s smoke, and wagged a finger. “Nasty, nasty habit,” he said.

  Over by the Public Library, a man began shouting. Unconcerned, the traffic cop stopped to write out a citation for an illegally parked minivan. The shouting man bellowed at the top of his lungs.

  “Oh, Maxwell,” Kite said, throwing her cigarette in the gutter. “What trouble are you in this time?”

  The sort of trouble that draws crowds and SWAT teams. Having obtained an Electric Carving Knife from somewhere—maybe the library was lending small appliances now, Kite didn’t know—Maxwell had climbed onto the back of one of the stone lions, jacked the Knife into the power pack in his Leg, and become a public nuisance. The carver was set on its lowest speed, a nearly silent hum, but Maxwell’s raging as he brandished it was sufficient to both attract spectators and keep them at a healthy distance.

  As Kite shouldered her way thro
ugh the onlookers, a squad car pulled up to the curb. A Negro in blue got out of the back seat. He was chubby and dimpled, a hint of the streetwise blended with a teddy bear’s sweetness; his I.D. badge identified him as Powell 617. The spectators cheered, eager to see some action. Powell returned their greeting with a chummy clenched-fist salute: “I’m with you, man!” The driver of the squad car pointed at Maxwell and said: “Go get him, boy!”

  Bad. Kite knew how Maxwell reacted to Negroes. But the way he was straddling the stone lion gave her an idea.

  Powell 617 assumed a look of grim empathy as he approached Maxwell. “Take it easy now, brother,” he counseled. “I know life can be a real motherfucker sometimes, but violence is not the way.” He held his hands out flat in a “stay cool” gesture; at the center of each of his palms was a flesh-toned metal disc, charged to a non-lethal voltage. Powell 617 was a walking stun rod. He used the word “motherfucker” over and over again, like a salve for Maxwell’s hostility, though Maxwell ignored him until he was nearly within arresting distance.

  “Show me the color of your eyes!” Maxwell said suddenly, flicking the Electric Carving Knife to full power.

  “Easy, bro—”

  The crowd parted; a roan gelding dressed in the livery of the NYPD Traffic Division galloped through. The one-armed woman in the horse’s saddle did her best to give a rebel yell as she charged, but she’d been with the Confederates for only a short time and was sixteen decades out of practice besides. She rode right up on the Electric Policeman, driving him back; Powell 617’s behavioral inhibitors prevented him from taking any action that might injure the horse, which was city property. He flailed his arms helplessly.

  “What’s this?” crowed Maxwell. “Cavalry? Where the hell’s my tank?”

  Kite, having no time to dither (the dismounted traffic cop was close behind her, unpleased), drew a black-powder Colt pistol from beneath her coat. There was a single report, and the Carving Knife’s blade broke in pieces. This seemed to sober Maxwell.