The Municipalists

by Seth Fried

  But even though it only took one glance to know that South Bend’s new bus station was perfect, I still felt that something was missing, like some aspect of my earlier happiness at the agency hadn’t come back with me from Metropolis. That day in Indiana I imagined OWEN standing next to me in the station, taking in all my hard work. I was surprised when my own vision of him turned to me and said sharply, “Henry, is this how you’re spending your time?”

  That night, I took my team to a sports bar to celebrate a successful end to the project. Garrett had given me a wealth of new responsibilities and I now had a host of deferential young agents at my disposal. I was sitting at a table with a handful of them when across the room I noticed Helen Roth, the economist who had participated in my capture in the abandoned transit tunnels of Metropolis.

  Now she was sitting at a bar in Indiana nursing a nearly empty glass of beer. She’d chopped off her long braid and was wearing a cropped blond wig. She caught me staring and we locked eyes for a moment. As soon as she recognized me her face took on a desperate, hunted look. My first few weeks back in Suitland I had been worried that the agency might be targeted for retribution by one of Kirklin’s loose agents, but her reaction told me Kirklin’s people were all too busy trying to stay ahead of the FBI to be dangerous.

  As the bar grew crowded with locals, she kept her eyes on me, waiting to see what I was going to do. I excused myself from the table and headed toward the bar, where I ordered a drink for myself and asked the bartender to send another round to Roth along with a napkin on which I wrote, “Truce.”

  I returned to my table slowly, still leaning heavily on my cane. When I finally took my seat and looked back in her direction, I saw a full beer in front of her seat and a crumpled napkin. She was gone.

  At the table my agents talked among themselves over the noise of the bar while I sipped a glass of Scotch and watched a muted television on the wall that was turned to the news. They were still running stories on the attacks whenever they could, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw a picture of Kirklin’s face next to the quote, “I will be at war with our government as long as the government is at war with its own poor and disenfranchised citizens.” Soon after, the bartender found me and handed me a folded napkin. Inside Roth had written, “Iru al infero.”

  I had already forgotten what little Esperanto I had learned in Metropolis, so I took out my new agency phone and read the phrase into it. OWEN’s old animation popped up and announced proudly, “Esperanto: Go to hell.” His artificial intelligence had all been stripped down, so it must have been my imagination that OWEN looked a little pleased with Roth’s message.

  Garrett had taken my recommendation to have Klaus delete OWEN’s infected interface. But instead of rebooting it and rolling it out agency-wide, Klaus had opted instead to stick with the old OWEN-linked smartphones for the time being. Most of the other agents were still using their own privately purchased cell phones, but I found myself drawn to the old OWEN interface.

  Garrett confided that Klaus had been devastated by the order to delete the latest iteration of OWEN’s interface, since the process of socializing it had been such a lengthy and personal one. I suppose I knew how Klaus felt. I missed OWEN on nights like this, when I was doing my best to be sociable with my subordinates. Getting drinks after the completion of a project had been a custom I’d initiated and was, I knew, contrary to my reputation at the agency. For the first ten minutes or so, the agents in my command would ask me polite questions related to our assignment and we might even manage some general small talk about the town in which we found ourselves. But I still didn’t know anyone with whom it would have been appropriate or even desirable to spend an entire night drinking and talking. Hell, I would have liked to talk to Roth for a while. Forgetting everything that had happened in Metropolis, it would have been nice to spend an evening with a peer who was passionate about the world she lived in. Staring down at her note, all I could think was that I wasn’t aware of anyone on earth who was, for whatever reason, truly excited to know me.

  The only person who’d ever come close I’d betrayed. I told myself I’d done it because it was the right thing to do, but part of me suspected I’d just been worried that, if OWEN stuck around, his social and emotional intelligence would have eventually developed to the point where he would have understood that I wasn’t a person worth knowing. I had long before made the calculation in my most private self that there was less risk in relying on predetermined guidelines than in trying to blunder my way toward the mystery of people’s love.

  It was my understanding that OWEN’s old interface had been kept active for a while in some limited capacity so Klaus could conduct a host of final tests. He had only been shut down a few days before that night. Klaus had invited me, at OWEN’s request, to attend a small good-bye ceremony. Apparently they planned to watch The Magnificent Seven and have a few drinks. I was already in Indiana, so I declined.

  I caught one of my agents looking at me with concern and realized I had been staring off. I excused myself and left an expense card with one of them, telling them to enjoy themselves while keeping in mind we all had an early flight.

  At the hotel, I raided the minibar. Watching C-SPAN in a drunken haze, I found the napkin with Roth’s message in my pants pocket and, without knowing what I was doing, took out a pen and added beneath it what I could remember from Kirklin’s quote that I had seen on the news. I looked at my handwriting, meditating on Kirklin’s fall. My mind began making loose connections that I couldn’t quite follow and I told myself that if I could just figure out what had driven such a brilliant man with so many laudable ideals to commit such horrible acts, then I would be able to understand why it had been necessary to delete his virus and in doing so destroy OWEN.

  The next morning I woke with a headache and found that I had laid the napkin carefully on top of my travel bag. I examined it for a while in the faint early-morning light coming through the curtains, wondering what I had meant by it.

  * * *

  Back at headquarters later that morning, I cleared my schedule and ran a report. I found every project proposal I had ever submitted to Garrett and looked at which had been approved, which had been rejected, and the per capita income for the cities attached to each proposal.

  In my twelve years at the agency, I had submitted over 430 project proposals with an approval rate of 55 percent, just above average for someone in the field. When I compared the approvals and rejections to the per capita income for each target city, there was a positive correlation of 73 percent, meaning the wealthier the city was, the more likely it was to have a project approved. After spending the rest of the morning correcting the data to include the per capita income of the specific areas within each city that would have been affected by my proposals, there was a positive correlation of 98 percent.

  With my new responsibilities, I now had access to the agency’s administrative records. I was able to pull up most of the paperwork associated with my proposals, including the review notes that Garrett and his staff had circulated among themselves during the evaluation process. I didn’t have to look long before I started to see references like this one: “Area currently subject to freezing in accordance with the mayor’s office.” Elsewhere I saw that dozens of my proposals had been rejected with the entire review document containing the single word: “Freezing.”

  I put together a comprehensive report and scheduled a meeting with Garrett. He looked it over at his desk while I sat across from him. After a few minutes, he nodded and placed the report to one side. He rubbed his eyes before crossing his legs and leaning back in his chair.

  “This all seems pretty straightforward,” he said. “What’s your question?”

  “I want you to tell me what freezing is,” I said.

  “You’ve been here a long time now. You know what it is.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think I do.”

  He smiled q
uizzically at me for a moment, trying to decide whether I was joking or not. When I made no indication that I was, he continued in a tone that suggested he was surprised at the question but more than happy to answer it.

  “When you start working on a project you don’t just go to a city and start making unilateral changes, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Exactly, you build relationships with the city council, the mayor’s office, et cetera. If the head of a city’s DOT doesn’t trust you, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting them to let you do a thorough audit of their bus system. My office has to maintain the same sort of relationships and my staff takes those relationships into account when we’re considering projects for approval.”

  “What I’m wondering, sir, is why any of what you just described would amount to us not offering our services to the places that need them the most.”

  Garrett raised his eyebrows and then laughed as if he couldn’t believe that I of all people was wasting his time with this.

  “Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes for a moment as if to gather his thoughts. “Let’s say there’s a city with an economically depressed neighborhood. Poor people live there, because they can afford to live there and they can afford to live there because it’s less desirable. Who knows. It just is. Could be the school system, lack of commercial diversity, inadequate transportation, untended infrastructure. You and I both know that these factors are all connected in their own ways, so usually it’s all of the above. And from a distance the place looks like a barrel of fish to an ambitious public servant like yourself. But let’s say the mayor of the city allows you to take a crack at any one of the problems facing this neighborhood and you fix it, as I have all the confidence in the world that you would. What happens? In the long term you can hope that the change will be significant enough to transform the area into a happy and productive neighborhood. Maybe you make a big enough splash to get the yuppies on board and the place flips. But what happens in the short term after your big improvement? I’ll tell you: You’ve just made a place that poor people can afford to live in more attractive, meaning the number of poor people living there explodes. It’s Jevons’s paradox. More roads means more cars. More targeted programs for the poor means more poor people in that area. People move from other parts of the city, other parts of the state. What was once an economically depressed neighborhood is now a full-blown slum. Overcrowding causes the already underfunded school system to be overwhelmed. Whatever public transportation they might have becomes that much more insufficient. And to top it all off, everyone living in such close quarters with limited access to health care turns the whole neighborhood into one giant influenza-slash-tuberculosis-slash-you-name-it time bomb. And that’s just what happens on the ground. In the political sphere, the whole town just saw the poverty rate go through the roof and our friend the mayor, who let us work in the city because she or he is a friend of infrastructure, gets hung with it. Some populist moron will wave around the poverty stats and attach it to whatever boondoggle you decided was a good idea. And when that moron gets elected, all anyone with political hopes in that town will remember about the USMS for generations to come is that a once successful predecessor of theirs had a good career ruined because she or he was stupid enough to work with us. We never get to touch that city again and then we won’t be able to solve any of the larger infrastructure problems that affect everyone in that city, rich and poor alike. Henry, I pissed off Detroit six mayors ago, they still won’t take our calls.”

  “You made the right decision back then,” I said. “They didn’t need a rail system.”

  “Do you think the communities living there care that I know more about public transportation than Coleman Young? His administration may have made the wrong decisions, but that was still a time of optimism in Detroit. They were trying to build their way out of something and if I had just been willing to play ball, let them make their own mistakes, our agency could have been there afterward to guide them to more realistic solutions. I could have been gracious, but I fought them on it, and now I have to sit by and watch as a once great American city slowly turns itself into dust. So when I tell you that freezing development in certain areas is about maintaining our relationships, I think it’s fairly obvious that I’m describing a matter that is as central to our work as it is entirely uncontroversial.”

  His explanation had all the clean cause and effect of real logic—all policy was political, and trying to help the poor lost elections. But that would also mean that the work we did wasn’t changing anything, only amplifying what was already there. A despicable cruelty. An unfairness.

  “Henry, I try to work in as much of the good stuff as I can. Honestly.”

  I pointed to my report. “Two percent?”

  “Of your workload, sure. But we have thousands of agents, each with their own 2 percents. Over time this strategy does make our cities better for everyone.”

  “Possibly, sir, but one wonders,” I said.

  “Wonders what?”

  “How much more this agency could accomplish if you hadn’t abandoned all courage.”

  Garrett leaned forward and raised his voice. “If you want to work in a soup kitchen, be my guest. If you want to vacate your position so you can help old ladies cross the street, we’ll be here making sure there’s still something under your feet when you step off the curb. This is work for serious people who understand compromise.”

  I stood up to leave and when I reached the door, Garrett’s voice softened.

  “Be careful, Henry.”

  I paused there without turning to look back.

  “In what way should I be careful, sir?”

  “You’re sounding like Terry. When he was young. Learn to love the world you’re in, son. Trying to burn it down gets you life in a federal prison.”

  14 I left Garrett’s office that day without saying another word. Everything he described was all the more unsettling because the more I understood to look for it, the more I realized it wasn’t hidden, that it was apparent in every facet of our work. My inability to notice it had been a kind of childishness. And now that the agency was tainted in my eyes, I felt the irreconcilable anger of one who refuses to let go of his own innocence. I began storming out of meetings or shocking my colleagues by declaring that particular motions were classist and refusing to participate in a vote. Soon even my own staff were avoiding eye contact with me in the halls of headquarters and I would wander around like a ghost, limping forward with my cane and doing my best to look as if I thought I still belonged there.

  At night I sat in my apartment, filling up my recycling bin with empty bottles of Glenlivet and watching the news. Kirklin and Laury still dominated most of the coverage. Both had accepted full responsibility for the attacks, though Kirklin had the distinct legal disadvantage of not being a beloved public figure. At his trial, he gave frank, honest testimony and when it came to describing the ultimate purpose of his organization he spoke of the importance of encouraging what he called “beneficial poverty” and public policies that would find more value in nurturing the underprivileged than systematically destroying them. He went on for a while expressing opinions that made theoretical sense even if they were exceedingly radical. But to the untrained ears of the public and press alike, he sounded like the sort of madman that the McCarthy era had tried to warn us about. The image of Kirklin that was taken up on the late-night comedy shows was of a wild-eyed bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur. On The Steve Glover Show, Kirklin was portrayed in countless sketches as an evil maniac with the vocabulary of a graduate student and the mind of a child who would interrupt the show at inopportune moments to deliver one of his crazed monologues.

  Such depictions helped the public to laugh at the terrifying events in Metropolis, which was of course valuable in its own way. However, part of me wondered if these jokes weren’t also in the service of some deeper, more reactionary pur
pose, as if we were all doing our best to marginalize Kirklin because we were afraid that if we considered him seriously for even a moment we might have to face our worst fear: that despite his inexcusable actions he was perfectly sane. Though, his reputation to the contrary may have saved his life. After a highly publicized trial, he managed to escape the death penalty and was instead, as Garrett predicted, sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

  No one knew quite what to say on the subject of Sarah Laury. In the coverage, her expression at all times was that of a cold, sustained fury, a far cry from the smiling Olympic gold medalist and philanthropist. When it was first announced that she had been found in good health, the public celebration that might have resulted was immediately undercut by the fact that she was being held in connection to the attacks. After four months on trial she was involuntarily committed to a secure psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until it was determined that she was no longer a danger to herself and others.

  When the coverage became too much, I would flip around, looking for an old movie. One night The Magnificent Seven came on. I made it as far as the part where the villagers betray the gunmen to Calvera. As I sat there in the near dark of my apartment, my throat raw from too much Scotch, the sight of the villagers huddled together in the doorway like scared children filled me with a shame so intense I had to turn off the television.

  The next morning I called Human Resources to find out how one went about taking a day off. Once they walked me through it, I was able to wipe out whole weeks with the 183 days of personal and vacation time I had accrued from over a decade of uninterrupted service.