Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Lexa looked him in the eye, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well don’t worry,” said Walter. “This old war wagon can’t break the sound barrier, but it moves.” He reached down beside his seat to a line of throttle levers, and pushed all eight of Sweet Jane’s engines to full power. Jersey City slid out from beneath them and they were over New York Bay, easily outpacing the Staten Island Ferry as it wallowed towards Richmond. Passing south of the Statue of Liberty, Walter came left to a heading of one hundred and forty-three degrees.

  In the production studio, Dan hit the potpourri switch. Fourteen gun cameras mounted along the exterior of the gondola began trolling for money shots. Camera #2, in the foremost starboard position, focused in quickly on the Brooklyn shore just ahead. Camera #2 had been randomly assigned the style of freelance camerawoman Dee Dee Rule, who in 2014 had received a Rupert J. Murdoch Commemorative Citation for her eyewitness video of the drowning of a Bengali army encampment. Kings County was not India, of course; Brooklyn had no monsoon season, no flash floods, no tigers to maul the panicked soldiers as they tried to reach high ground. But it did have a few military-style tents—two medium and one extra-large—pitched on a seedy wharf where something bad might happen, and pacing miserably nearby a middle-aged Scoutmaster who looked as though something bad had already happened. Camera #2 tracked the Scoutmaster, zooming in tight on his unhappy face. He was talking to himself, mouthing two words over and over again. The first word was “complete”; the second was “failure.”

  Did You See That!

  Fugitive Scoutmaster Oscar Hill had gone to ground on a condemned wharf near the Bush Terminal docks. His four remaining charges huddled together in one of the tents, dissecting a seven-legged rat they’d found floating in an oil drum; Oscar stalked along the crumbling wharf, reflecting on his poor, sad, disappointing, awful, ruined life.

  It had not seemed wrong at first—in fact, had seemed altogether natural—to let Oblio’s disappearance go unreported. The girls had said nothing about it all that day, and camped in an auto wrecking yard Tuesday night, Oscar Hill had slept more peacefully than he had in ages. Not till halfway through breakfast Wednesday morning did Eagle Scout Melissa Plunkett suddenly think to inquire: “Hey, what happened to Oblio?” Oscar’s mouth went dry around a bite of campfire corn muffin, and he nearly choked; it took two long swigs from his canteen to get enough of a voice back to sputter: “Oblio went home early.”

  Oblio went home early. That might actually be true, and Melissa Plunkett seemed to accept it without question, but Oscar realized—gauging the height of the sun through the soot from a stack of burning tires—that he had let nearly eighteen hours go by without making sure. Even if Oblio had made it home safely, eighteen hours of inaction probably equaled felony negligence on Oscar’s part, not to mention a betrayal of the Scoutmaster’s Code. And if Oblio hadn’t made it home safely . . .

  The one good thing about urban survival camping was that you were never far from a pay phone. Oscar slipped away while his Scouts were breaking camp and dialed Oblio’s home number. Oblio’s mother answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Wattles,” said Oscar, in a child’s falsetto, “is Oblio there?”

  “Who is speaking, please?”

  “It’s Oblio’s little friend, Oscar Hill,” Oscar said, so intent on not sounding like himself that he gave his real name.

  “Oscar Hill?. . . Scoutmaster Hill? Why would you be calling here to speak to Oblio? Isn’t he still with you?”

  Another attack of dry-mouth. Oscar’s voice fell from falsetto to stuttering bass: “Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . .”

  “Scoutmaster Hill? Oblio is still with you, isn’t he?. . . Scoutmaster Hill? Speak to me! HAS SOMETHING HAPPENED TO MY BOY?”

  Oscar hung up. If he’d had a gun he would have done the honorable thing right then and there. Instead he returned to his troop, announced that they would be extending their camping trip another day, and led them on a forced march of many miles, across Bensonhurst to Fort Hamilton, following the Bay Ridge shore to the docks. The Scouts were surprised by the change in plan but didn’t complain; anything to get another day off from school. Oscar for his part had no real idea of where they were headed, or what they would do when they got there; he just wanted to get as far away from their original campsite as possible before Mrs. Wattles called the police. If there’d been a boat tied up at the wharf, he might have kept going.

  And now it was Thursday afternoon, and the girls’ parents would have had time to get worried and call the cops too, and Oscar Hill’s life was. . . well, it was over. Done. In his sacred capacity as leader and mentor to the young, He Had Failed. If ever there was a moment when Oscar would have liked to have a cliché come true, this was it: he wished the ground at his feet would just open up and swallow him whole.

  But speaking of holes in the earth . . . one of the wooden piers that jutted from the wharf had collapsed, revealing the black mouth of a sewer outflow that ran beneath the docks. Not much was flowing out of it right now, just a trickle of ordure that had pooled in a mound on the fallen timbers of the pier and trailed a muddy cloud into the surrounding water. Oscar glimpsed folds of red, white, and blue among the brown; curious, he peered closer, and was shocked to see a tattered and stained U.S. flag half-smothered in the filth.

  The obvious metaphor—an American icon in deep shit—was more than Oscar could stand, or ignore. A set of iron rungs had been bolted to the concrete face of the wharf beside the sewer outflow, and though they didn’t go all the way down to the waterline and the collapsed pier, Oscar thought that by standing on the lowest rung he’d be able to snag out the flag with a long stick. He noticed a splintered boat hook leaning against one of the wharf’s outbuildings, and hurried to get it.

  The rungs were badly pitted and corroded, but all were still firmly fixed in place, except for the secondmost rung from the bottom, which was missing entirely. Oscar had to stretch past the gap, a move that proved too stressful for his trousers: there was a burr of tearing fabric, and sudden cold ventilation on his buttocks. Steady on the bottom rung, Oscar craned his head around to assess the damage, and as he did so he heard two more sounds. The first was a soft drone of engines from overhead. Sweet Jane’s shadow fell across the wharf, but Oscar did not look up, because of the second sound.

  Music. A classical theme, issuing from the mouth of the sewer outflow. The familiar melody made Oscar think of the dinosaurs marching to extinction in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and as he listened more closely, he detected a slight scrabbling or pattering, as if something with very short arms and legs was dragging itself through the pipe.

  “Oblio?” he said, though he knew it couldn’t be. Clinging to the rungs one-handed, he leaned far out to the right, until his face was in front of the opening. He saw nothing but darkness within. “Hello?” he called, as the music swelled. “Is there somebody in there?. . .”

  In the production studio aboard Sweet Jane, Dan Rather jerked as though electrified.

  “My God,” he said. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” said Ellen Leeuwenhoek.

  May I Help You!

  “Oof!”

  Joan collided with the derelict just inside the entrance to the Grand Central terminal. She was taller than he was, and moving faster, and he would have gone sprawling if she hadn’t reached out to steady him. Many people would have let him fall rather than touch him—he stank like a sewer—but Joan gripped his upper arms firmly and looked him in the face, and that was how she recognized him.

  “Clayton?” she said. “Clayton Bryce?”

  His eyes were round as the eyes of a knowing calf about to be brained in an abattoir; upon hearing his name, he let out a mournful lowing and grabbed at the front of Joan’s jacket like a man clawing for purchase on the brink of an abyss. Ayn Rand in her Lamp shivered in disgust.

  “Stop that!” Ayn snapped. “Stop pawing her, you bum!”

  “Oh Clayton,” said Joan. He
was a mess: dressed in filthy rags, and made up to look as though he’d been living on the street for years, so that even his own parents might not have known him, or admitted to knowing him. His normally conservative hairline had been replaced by an unruly wig or weave of stringy brown locks, matted with dirt and worse. A mangy beard and moustache had been cemented to his face, and there were bare, heavily scabbed-over patches on his chin where he’d torn away skin trying to pull the whiskers off. His tongue had bloated to the size of a golf ball in his mouth, stifling his speech and making breathing difficult; his nose and eyes were puffed and runny; and his hands had swollen up too, big and pink, like boiled meat, so painful that it was all he could do to hold on to the battered tin cup of pencils that had become his only worldly possession.

  “Oh Clayton,” Joan repeated, putting a scenario together in her head, “what did you do, say something stupid and condescending about homeless people? To a stranger, maybe?”

  Clayton’s heart skipped a beat, and his expression changed, first to shock, then to a mixture of supplication, frenzy, and fear.

  “Hehhhhhpp!” Clayton brayed, beating feebly on Joan’s chest with his tin cup. “Hehhhhhpp!”

  “Help!” Ayn Rand cried. “Help! Police!”

  “May I help you?” a third voice said.

  The Pleasant Trip Squad, already trailing Clayton, had closed in around them, seven brown uniforms with shock prods and TASER guns. The speaker was a severe-looking Hispanic man whose badge identified him as Captain Hector Miércoles.

  “It’s all right,” Joan told him. “He’s with us.”

  “But who are you?” Captain Miércoles inquired. “Ticket holders?”

  “Just going to buy them,” Joan said. “We’re on our way to Atlantic City. First class.”

  “First-class tickets are very expensive,” the captain said. “Are you sure you can afford them?”

  Joan disengaged herself from Clayton and took out her wallet, careful not to expose the gun tucked into her waistband beneath her jacket. “Plastic,” she said, displaying her credit cards. “Six kinds, plus an ATM card.” She opened the billfold, fanning out the notes. “And cash. OK?”

  “You’re obviously a woman of means,” Captain Miércoles said, eyeing her worn sneakers. “But this man can’t sit in first class.” He wrinkled his nose at Clayton. “Even in economy coach, I’m afraid, he’d be an offense to the other passengers.”

  “Captain,” Kite spoke up, heading off Joan’s reply, “may I make a suggestion?”

  The captain met her gaze. “Please.”

  “The 12:59 to Atlantic City,” she said. “Does it have a smoking compartment?”

  The captain consulted a computer on his wrist. “Yes, it does. A halfcar, special today.”

  “We’ll sit in there, then,” Kite said. “Those people have no sense of smell left anyway.”

  “That should be acceptable,” Captain Miércoles relented. “But you’ll have to hurry; that train is already boarding.”

  “We’ll be gone so fast you won’t remember having talked to us,” Kite promised.

  “Very good.” The captain touched two fingers to the bill of his cap. “Have a pleasant and safe journey.”

  “Yeah,” Joan said. “Have a nice day.”

  Captain Miércoles paused, on the verge of turning away, and appeared to reconsider his decision to let them go. But just then his belt radio squawked, warning of some emergency elsewhere in the station; so the captain gave Joan a cautioning look and marched off. The other Trippers followed him.

  “Patience, Joan,” Kite said, when they were gone. “I expect we’ll be fighting soon enough as it is.”

  “He was being a prick,” Joan said.

  “He’s paid to be a prick,” Kite replied. “And that’s not an easy job, especially when it’s the only work you can get.”

  Clayton, meanwhile, had not taken his eyes off Joan’s wallet. As soon as the Pleasant Trip Squad were out of sight, he snatched at the notes in the billfold, ignoring the pain in his hands.

  “Thief!” Ayn Rand cried, but Joan let him take the money. She stared at the collar cinched around his neck. It was made of leather, unadorned except for two transparent bubbles, one beneath each ear, that had been packed with some sort of clay-like substance. The collar’s buckle, which rested heavily against Clayton’s Adam’s apple, looked like the feeder box on a change machine; it had a slot in the front just wide enough for the insertion of currency. Joan watched as Clayton shoved in the first of the bills he had taken from her. Some mechanism in the box chewed it into green confetti flakes, which sprinkled down onto Clayton’s chest; a meter above the feed slot clicked backwards from $492 to $472.

  “Somebody stop him!” Ayn cried, as Clayton sacrificed more bills. “He’s destroying money!”

  “Calm down, Ayn,” Joan said.

  “But don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s destroying money! Don’t you understand what that means?”

  “Ayn—”

  “Money is the fruit of man’s labor! Labor is the product of man’s thought! He’s destroying thought!”

  Soon there was no thought left, and the meter still had $319 on it. Clayton held out his hands for more, offering in exchange a pocketful of coins he had not yet been able to change for bills, but Joan’s wallet was empty, and Kite had little to give. “I’ve got a fiver and a few singles,” she said, “and you’re welcome to them if you want, but—”

  “If you want to waste money,” Ayn interjected, “why don’t you clean yourself up and get a job? Maybe the sweat of earning it would teach you the value of a dollar!”

  But Clayton gestured urgently at the clock above the board announcing train arrivals and departures; it was 12:51. He tapped his wrist, emphasizing the importance of the time. Then he balled his hands into fists, wincing as he did so, and held them up beside the two bubbles in his collar. “BRRRRRRRMM!” he roared, opening his hands. “BRRRRRRRMM!”

  “Boom?” Joan said.

  “Yech!” Clayton replied, nodding frantically. “Yech! Ack ick! Ah urr acha! Urr acha! Hehhp!”

  “He’s a madman!” Ayn Rand said. “Get away from him!”

  “Over there,” Kite said, tugging on Joan’s sleeve. Off to their left was a newsstand, the same newsstand where Maxwell had recently pilfered a rack of Erica Jong novels, and right beside it was an Automatic Teller Machine.

  “This is the second boarding call for Lightning Transit’s High Roller to Atlantic City,” the P.A. system announced. “Lightning Transit’s High Roller is now boarding on Track 7.”

  “That’s your train!” Ayn said. “You have to hurry!”

  But Joan had taken Clayton by the wrist and was pulling him towards the ATM.

  “What are you doing?” Ayn demanded.

  “Rescuing an imbecile.”

  “But why? Does this . . . this person represent a value to you?”

  “He’s an asshole,” Joan replied, to Clayton’s alarm.

  “Then why are you helping him?”

  “Empathy, Miss Rand,” said Kite. “This is America. We’re all assholes here.”

  MAY I HELP YOU? the Teller Machine asked. Joan inserted her ATM card, chose English as her preferred language, and tapped out her secret code: JOB 32 10. She told the machine to give her four hundred dollars. Clayton hunched over the withdrawal slot like a catcher awaiting the last pitch of the World Series.

  No money appeared. Instead the ATM screen went blank, and flashed a proverb:

  GIVE A MAN A FISH AND YOU’VE FED HIM FOR A DAY;

  TEACH A MAN TO FISH AND YOU’VE FED HIM FOR A LIFETIME

  GO FISH

  The message remained long enough for all of them to read it; then the screen blanked again, and returned to its original query—MAY I HELP YOU?—without returning Joan’s card.

  “Ficcchhh?” Clayton said, and something in him seemed to snap. “FICCCHHH?” With a howl he threw himself at the machine, kicking and pummeling.

  “This is
the third and final boarding call for Lightning Transit’s High Roller to Atlantic City,” the P.A. system declared. “Lightning Transit’s High Roller is now boarding on Track 7. All aboard!”

  “You’re going to miss your train!” Ayn wailed.

  “You’d better run for it, Joan,” Kite said.

  “Kite, we can’t just leave him—”

  “You go,” Kite told her. “I’ll save him; but what I have in mind is liable to bring the captain back, and we can’t afford to both be arrested. I’ll still try to make the train if I can.”

  “All right,” Joan said. “I’ll see if I can get them to hold it. But if you don’t make it, don’t wait around for the next one. Head back home, and start getting the word out. Call Lexa and call Harry—and maybe the cops, if you can think of a way to get them to listen. And watch your back.”

  “And you yours,” said Kite. “Good luck, Joan.”

  “You too,” Joan said. She ran off, carrying the Lamp.

  Clayton had collapsed over the ATM, in tears; Kite laid her hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Mr. Bryce,” she said. “I’m going to need you to stand behind me, to shield me from observers . . .”

  Too late: Kite was already being observed, though she wasn’t aware of it. An Electric Policeman peeped out at her from behind a shoeshine stand on the far side of the terminal entrance. It took note of Joan as she left, but made no move to follow her; it was focused on Kite, and especially on Clayton.

  It held a long metal baton in its hands, and it was not smiling.

  Too Busy Swimming

  A prehistoric wooden tugboat chugged stoically from the mouth of the Buttermilk Channel between Governor’s Island and South Brooklyn. Two men stood on the deck, sharing an illicit smoke and swapping dirty jokes. Suddenly one of them tugged excitedly at the sleeve of the other; a shark’s fin was knifing through the water to the south, coming straight towards them. They watched, fascinated, waiting for the shark to dive or turn aside, their fascination turning to fear when it did neither.