“Would it've stopped you?” I asked.
“Of course. I'm not into that petty shit.”
Back in the apartment, he settled on the couch and opened a beer and his ice cream. The complimentary wooden spoon broke on the first scoop, and when he tried to use it sans handle I offered to get a real one from the kitchen.
“While you're up, can you throw these in the fridge?” he asked, tossing me the remaining beers. “You can have one if you want.”
“How generous of you, but I've gotta pick up Elly.”
“Huh?”
“The girl I tutor. School's over soon.”
“So she goes to school all day? And you tutor her?”
“Yeah.”
“And you make enough from that to survive?”
“Right.”
“Including rent?”
“Well, rent's not an issue.”
“Yeah?”
“It's complicated.”
“No it's not. You're a charity case,” he said.
“Look, just don't trash the house while I'm gone. No parties.”
I texted Dimitri to warn him James was staying with us, and that I'd explain later. There were enough mutual grievances between them to spark an intergenerational blood feud. However, I was sure I could smooth things over, or at least buy James the few weeks he needed to get back on his feet.
I lit another cigarette and bounced off towards the subway to shield my young charge from a fallen world.
Le Flaneur
Cacophony on Wall Street
by Zoe Gomez
On the corner of Wall St. and Water, on a recent Tuesday, I met with Frederick Williams, New York City's Assistant Director of Watershed and Pump Infrastructure. Wearing the ill-fitting, charcoal suit civil servants are buried in, and a button on his lapel reading “What Pumps Up Must Pump Down,” he offered me a seat on the bench on which he was sitting.
At least, that's what I think he was doing, as I couldn't hear him over the incessant locomotion of the pumps lining Manhattan's southern tip. Frederick Williams is responsible for keeping them working, and they are responsible for keeping a julienned slice of New York—from the Brooklyn Bridge to Battery Park—above water and preventing a repeat of the summer of Southern Revenge, when the Hurricane triplets Davis, Jackson, and Lee caused New York to become Atlantis's half-sister for the better part of a decade.
The pumps are an architectural and engineering marvel. Working in concert, they displace roughly one-hundred and eighty trillion gallons of water every day (for comparison Lake Erie, the smallest of the great lakes, contains one-hundred twenty-five trillion gallons of water total). Standing at heights varying from several dozen stories to over a hundred, any tourist who's taken a scenic boat ride cannot help but be struck at how closely these metallic obelisks resemble some sort of space age Stonehenge, built this time in honor of the gods of global climate change.
Williams and I relocate to “Voyage à Versailles” a properly stuffy cafe across the park from City Hall. He tells me how, as a boy, he assembled a steam-powered pellet gun built with parts from his father's 3D printer so he could terrorize his older brother's emotional-security alpaca...
...
2. The Introduction of Elly
Elly, my pupil, was the younger sister of Ryan, a college friend and roommate who had failed out during the first semester of our senior year and joined the military rather than face down his father's wrath. He'd had a brief, illustrious career as an Army private before his helicopter was shot down in Oaxaca and he was captured. The insurgents held him for a year before bequeathing on him a grisly, on-camera execution. A casualty in Operation Empire for Liberty, the only one I'd ever known. And if the person who shot that RPG hadn't been as good a marksman (or woman), who knows what would've happened to me?
While Ryan was a living, breathing, captive his parents shuttled back and forth from Washington, D.C. twice a week to talk with lawyers, military officials, and more lawyers. His mother, Helen, tracked me down through one of his ancient social media profiles, called an office I'd interned at years ago, and from there pieced together a bread crumb trail leading her to the drug store where I worked as an assistant manager for the night shift. She approached me out of the blue late one evening and asked if I'd like to pick up some extra work babysitting. One thing led to another: the drug store's parent company went bankrupt in an ill-conceived student debt investment scheme, Elly's therapist deemed our socialization “therapeutic,” and by the time James reappeared in my life like an outbreak of herpes I'd completed my professional transition from retail to education.
I retrieved Elly from her Montessori-style school Monday through Friday. We'd get a snack then ride the subway home, where we tended to a strict curriculum designed to fill the gaps in her self-directed education. It was calibrated to her needs by a piece of proprietary software designed by the institution's headmistress, a child psychologist who peddled her snake oil to overzealous mothers during her numerous interviews on snobby culture sites. She was a personal friend of Helen's. I referred to her as “the Expert,” which cracked Elly up and made Helen smile and tell me to stop.
James's arrival had caused me to miss my usual train, and I was thirty minutes later than normal picking Elly up. She was sitting on the fanned stairs leading up to the school, her yellow bumblebee backpack tucked between her legs and her face obscured by curly black hair. Whatever she was reading on her tablet absorbed her completely, and she didn't notice me walk up.
The Expert was with her. When she saw me her face wrinkled as if I were preceded by a peasant stench. I think my existence offended her world view, as I scored zero of three for a nanny's proper race, gender, and primary language. I understood her feelings, if not her logic, as I returned every quanta of disgust in equal measure. Her frizzy gray hair, the black glasses with thin frames, the demure scarves, the Yin-Yang earrings: she had every progressive affectation, but she favored her newfangled ideas only for the authority they allowed her to wield over others, disguised all the while as being for the good of the children. She was an evolutionary triumph: a child-loathing, emotionally repressed schoolteacher adapted to an environment overpopulated by indulgent parents with guilty consciences and money to burn.
Her message was simple. Ignore me at your peril. Will those new cars you bought with the money saved by sending your child to a cheaper school seem worth it when she ends up at a state university?
“Hi Ells Bells,” I said. When she saw me she squealed, then ran down the stairs to give me a hug.
“Hello, Mr. Mukavetz,” the Expert said. Elly had left her backpack on the stairs and rushed back to get it.
“Hiya.”
“You're late.”
“I'm here now. Ma'am.”
“Elizabeth's education shouldn't suffer for your immaturity.” Elly stopped halfway down the stairs, looking at each of us in turn.
“Maybe we'll skip the ice cream. Hit the books straightaway,” I said, in my best attempt at biting my tongue. I wanted to tell her to shove it, I wasn't a member of her cult and half an hour wasted wouldn't elicit a lifetime ban from the ivies for this eight year old.
“What? Why?” Elly whined. She twisted up her face to cry, an attempt at manipulation requiring a level of chutzpah only a child could muster. I winked at her and she giggled.
“Very funny, Mr. Mukavetz. But being professional doesn't make you a monster.”
“Of course, Ma'am. We need to get going before Elly's education suffers any further. Say goodbye to your teacher.”
“Ms. Felkins will hear about this.”
We departed beneath the Expert's x-ray stare. Elly held my hand as we crossed the street; the city's a dangerous place. She chose for her afterschool treat, as always, Orange Orange, a frozen yogurt joint decorated with disorienting neon swirls that made me feel like I was trapped inside a psychedelic barber's pole. Elly liked it because her mother liked it and her mother liked it because they used zero calorie art
ificial sweeteners in everything. It was gross and probably carcinogenic, but who was I to interfere with a child's adoration of her parents?
The cashier greeted us with a familiar “hello.” Elly ordered a small cup with dehydrated blueberries and strawberries. I had water.
We sat at a bright red table with neon green chairs.
“Is the Expert mad at you?” Elly asked.
“You shouldn't call her that.”
“But you do.”
“Yeah, but she's not my teacher. No, she's not mad at me. She's just... she's concerned about your future. The Expert is much more responsible than me.”
Elly scowled as she considered this. Her mother called it her deep-thought look. A blueberry rolled down the frozen yogurt and caught on the cup's lip. She took it between her fingers and plopped it into her mouth. Then she asked, “What's responsible mean?”
“Mmm. It means... Well you see, a responsible person does what they're supposed to. They follow the rules—like your parents. An irresponsible person doesn't. So when I was late today I was breaking the rules. Instead of being responsible I was irresponsible.”
“So when Skittles pees on the rug he's being eeerie-sponsible?”
“Exactly.”
We continued this game while she ate. She'd ask what a word meant, I'd tell her, and she'd have to come up with an example. We went through “daring,” “tome,” and “slave driver,” in reference to the Expert. If I was lucky she might remember one; she'd asked about daring at least once before. But you had to start somewhere, even if it wasn't on the Expert's curriculum.
After picking off the toppings—and without having touched the yogurt—she was done. I threw it away, feeling some guilt over the waste of food and money. I reminded myself this was a pittance compared to what I spent on alcohol and tobacco, but for some reason that failed to improve my mood. Neither did the fact that I wasn't the one paying for it. I tracked my tutoring expenses and invoiced the Felkins' accountant at the end of every month.
On the subway, Elly told me about the book she'd been reading. It was called Volcanoes! She wanted to know what the name was for people who studied volcanoes. They were called geologists, I told her, and she said that's what she wanted to be when she grew up.
We emerged from the subway like a couple of Morlocks and turned onto the West Village block where Elly and her family lived. The street had escaped the worst ravages of the Panic, and strolling down it was like walking into the past. On either side, a row of dignified, four story brownstones, inside of which you could see the refined accoutrements of the city's professional class. Not the ostentatious displays of wealth of Liberty Bell looters, but the tasteful displays of culture amassed by doctors, software developers, and lawyers. People with money to spare, but not so much as to make them careless. The sidewalks were wide and well-kept, and they were lined with actual trees. Old elms—all but extinct in the rest of the city—with full, luscious branches, and not the starved toothpicks found everywhere else. This was my dream, and I'd promised myself I'd buy my way into happiness when I made my founder's million.
Even though these people had the safest occupations imaginable, every time Liberty Bell acquired a major corporation “For Sale” signs sprouted like dandelions on a fresh grave. One block over a string of houses had been demolished, replaced by the spare steel frame of a condo building under construction. The rot spread even into my fantasies.
Elly tugged on my hand. “Cliff?”
“Yeah Elly?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
Deep-thought look. She asked, “When I grow up I want to marry you.”
I laughed. “I thought you were going to marry your dad.”
“Ewwww. No way.”
“You're the one who said it.”
“That's 'cause I was little. I'm older now.”
“You'll have to ask your parents.”
We came to the Felkins' home, another brownstone affair. Inside, I helped Elly put away her shoes. Once they were off she ran to let Skittles, her adolescent Papillon, out of his cage.
Her post-school curriculum was stored on a remotely updated tablet stuck to a velcro pad on the refrigerator amongst assorted emergency telephone numbers—written on paper and held up by magnets—and Elly's numerous drawings of her family (and one of me, a flurry of orange lines and black circles). There was also a digital picture frame, loaded with thousands of images of the Felkins. It had broken, however, shortly after I began tutoring Elly, and was stuck showing a photograph of Ryan and his father from the year before he joined the military. They were standing on a dock and holding fishing poles. His father had on a life jacket; Ryan did not.
I saw this picture five times a week, marveling each time at how cleanly everything had moved on without him. In their lives there was no material difference between the silence following his enlistment and that of his disappearance. Six months after his death Helen had asked if I would like to stay in his room. As a sort adoptive big brother for Elly, I think. I'd turned down the offer without a second thought. It had been too generous, and besides I'd wanted to avoid the inevitable loss of liberty entailed by closer supervision, regardless of whatever promises were or were not made.
Today the Expert's software had arranged exercises in both French and Spanish for Elly, followed by a lesson on Renaissance-era painting and sculpture. Languages were a constant, but the art history was new. I tabbed through the schedule: over the next few weeks we would be studying various artistic movements, diverse in both time and geography. Two days were blocked out for neo-barbaric a-retinal videography. I groaned—I hated “Art,” anything created in the 21st century made my stomach drop.
My last encounter with that peculiar world was when I'd taken a girl to the Liberty Bell Museum of Modern Art to see their featured exhibit: a series of metal pipes oozing soap suds from their tops. It had been called “Puncturing Punctuated Equilibrium,” and was such an immense hit we'd barely been able to push through the entrance hall, packed as it was by a thicket of trendy art students with sketchbooks and charcoal pencils. The sight of them had boggled my mind, since I'd thought the whole point was that the thing had no static form. My date had been unimpressed with my reasoning, and I failed to lure her back to my place. I've never been able to escape my philistine roots.
Elly appeared in the kitchen entryway carrying Skittles's leash. The dog trotted behind her with a stupid, blank look on his face. I grabbed the leash—it was pink—from her and knelt down. The dog bellied towards me, tail wagging, and I lifted him into my lap. When I'd I put it on I patted him on the head and set him down. I grabbed a poop bag as we left.
He peed on the tree closest to the door, walked further down the street, and crapped. Elly congratulated him on a job well done and he barked. The more she told him what a good boy he was, how special he was, the louder and shriller he became. I put my hand into the biodegradable bag and scooped up his gift. American dog culture is absurd. You followed this animal around, fed it, cleaned its messes, until it became so attached to you that it ripped up the carpet when you left. Then you gave it pills. Our society engineered the most efficient affection machine it could, then overdid it. It's a raw deal for the dogs, who live comfortably and from whom nothing is expected except for their unconditional happiness when their owner comes home from work. The attention they lavish on their owners far exceeds what they receive in return (the dog will, after all, eventually die) and they are caught in a vicious cycle of half-requited love. I've never heard of a man who died for his dog. We are the inferior species and deserve only cats.
We took Skittles to a dog park. I let him off his leash and he dashed after Elly. The two played catch-me-if-you-can while I watched from a bench in the shade, next to an athletic black man with a shaved head. He had on dark sunglasses and a tight t-shirt with Japanese characters embroidered in powder-blue. His partner, a tall man with a heavy Eastern European accent, was playing with a Great Dane
and calling to “Ray” every few minutes. Ray looked familiar, and when they left a few minutes later I overheard a two women whispering about it while two dachshunds chased one another around their feet: he was a famous musician. His significant other was a basketball player.
Once Elly and Skittles slowed down I called them over so we could all head home. Skittles laid down and refused to budge once we left the park. I carried him until we hit the Felkin's block, where he squirmed loose and ran to their door. He barked at us until Elly let him in.
She went to get him a treat and I pulled up the lesson on her tablet. We sat at the dining room table. The set had been hand-crafted by some woman squatting in a warehouse upstate. I didn't see what made her furniture so great, but it had cost more than what I made in a year. Honest Abe had scooped her for sedition not long after the Felkins bought it, and it had surely appreciated in value several times over since then.
Skittles settled under Elly's chair, just beneath the arc of her swinging legs.
“Ready for some language exercises?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“French or Spanish?”
“Spanish.” I set the tablet flat on the table and we listened to the software-curated conversations. Each exercise consisted of a piece of audio and an incomplete transcription, which Elly filled in. She never saw whether her answers were correct; in the new pedagogy an algorithm judged her proficiency after each question and adjusted the next one to be in line with her ability. It was supposed to improve her language skills at a constant, incremental rate without causing her any stress.
“Exercise one-hundred and forty-seven,” the tablet said.
Elly readied her stylus. A toneless, feminine voice read the paragraph, paused for five seconds, then read it again. Elly began to write, but didn't finish before the next exercise began, and the screen changed while she was in the middle of writing a word. She might not know if her transcriptions were correct, but she did know she was missing over half the questions because she didn't have enough time.
The Merchants of Zion Page 2