The Mere Future

by Sarah Schulman

  Her name was Frieda Berger. She had come from Romania ten years before. She was nice, friendly. Sad that my cousin had recently died. And later I thought—this is the importance of precise detail.

  You see, I could have gone through my entire life from my soft seat of comfort believing that A=Auschwitz, that prisoners were identified by their locale. And all my life I would have been wrong, and somewhat deluded, thinking that geography mattered, when actually these people were identified by function. Not knowing this information would have made me miss the whole thing. How dehumanization actually works. And in my armchair of generalized thinking, this other person’s life would have remained so fuzzy that its reality would have been unknowable to me, while I thought I knew it all. I wanted to change history in order to make me feel safer, and the lack of precision would have let me do it.

  I report this to you with hindsight.

  Now, as my own city is changing within me, every moment filled with telling detail, I know that I have to really pay attention. Now I live in the midst of a huge social transformation, and those can always go either way. Sometimes, come the Revolution, we all eat strawberries and cream. Sometimes, come the Revolution, we only eat strawberries and cream. What if you don’t like strawberries and cream? Sometimes, come the Revolution, we have to eat strawberries and cream.

  Nadine and I watched our new beloved Mayor, Sophinisba Breckinridge, rise to power. And then we watched the changes that followed. Until, one day, the changes actually affected us. This was that day.

  This very revolutionary strawberry and cream morning, I received a notice beckoning me to a meeting with one of America’s most powerful cultural arbiters: Harrison Bond.

  “Mister Harrison Bond requests a personal audience with you, as a consequence of the great social change that is currently underway.”

  I had been chosen, suddenly, somehow, to have the opportunity to meet with him and taste the schlag. Wow.

  That’s the new system, I thought with the grandiosity of recognition. The new system is working for me.

  I, a lowly copywriter with great secret dreams, had been selected by the New Order for individual attention. This was true Democracy, finally. Anyone can get inside the system now. It’s all random, as it should be.

  You see, it had finally been acknowledged that there was no relationship between merit and reward. That while on occasion people doing truly meaningful acts were given presents, it wasn’t because they deserved them. It was a coincidence. They got the presents because their fathers went to some college, or they had sex with an ugly casting director, or they made the person in power feel good about their own mediocrity—some coincidence like that. At the same time, it seems that the vast majority of truly valuable gestures—the kinds that expand understanding and create hope— were excluded from recognition. So, since those with experience, praise, and stature were found to have no merit, and the truly deserving were so alienated they couldn’t invest in any system, the only fair solution was to just open the floodgates and let everyone in. Hopefully, it would all sort itself out.

  Once the standards had changed, the doorways to opportunity were suddenly filled with feet. My big dawgs included. It was a grand chance, but I had to keep track of all the details in case I blew it. Then, at least, I would have a true story. To tell Nadine. And we could muse, dissect, and laugh. Regardless of the outcome, right? That’s love, isn’t it?—having someone willing to share the disappointment.

  At The Opium Restaurant on Avenue F, the moon recalled those of June and other months with transitional weather. It passed, hovered, came too close, and then recoiled. The citizens found this confusing: the seduction followed by withholding. But then, they each remembered the last woman they loved, and the moon’s ride suddenly felt familiar.

  Movement, unpredictability, seasonal containment, and public transformation without public transportation. A lunar borderline personality disorder. The shifting sky assured the existence of fate, divine order, external consequences while waiting endlessly for the broken-down bus.

  At the corner bus stop with no bus in sight, the doomed waiters glanced into The Opium out of boredom and hunger. But they had to be in another world, awaiting their ride. Later, perhaps, one of them could grab a stand-up hummus at Mamoun’s Falafel. But those not on the go, the most jejune of our clan, sit here and demurely lunch as I wait for the tall, quasi-presentable man.

  A spreading cloud darkens the restaurant’s front yard and then dazzles it. When the shade finally passes, only the shadow of my now-arrived companion looms brightly over the table. Mister Bond. Young man, not so young, whose fate has been sealed by his own physicality. This meal, a symbolic truce between two worlds, The Mediocre and The Small, was mandated by the sudden, shocking social advances of only one year before. It all stemmed from Sophinisba’s new decree, the Dissolving the Pretension That Has Come to Define Literature Act. It was the nine-hundredth campaign promise that she’d actually kept.

  My co-eater, Harrison Bond, had been an important figure in the dominant paradigm due to his persistently relative youth and persuasive lack of life experience. He practiced a kind of literature called “Modern Situations.” Each story involved a couple, a prosperous but banal location, and breezy journalistic sentences. The couple would have glib, ironic experiences. It was a conceit that diminished life, his power. But, in this pause between hope and ancient distrust, I poured us the wine. Chateau du Lait. It’s the post-raw years now, when this pour took place. Wine comes from Nebraska. Those abandoned crystal meth labs turned out to be good for something. Smoked mozzarella is made in Detroit in former automotive plants. Ford mozzarella or Chevrolet. The poor are still poor while the working class smokes mozzarella for their daily bread.

  As I watched Mister Bond silently chew, I began to reflect on the miracle of our changing collective life. Now, by the luck of the mighty pendulum, one less person goes hungry under our cherished new system because I hand over my lunch to a passing collection truck every other Thursday. We took a vote in Manhattan, each man, woman, and child. Would we rather that people go hungry OR would we each give up lunch once every fifteen days? We voted to share. And for that same reason, so that I can get my reasonable due, this tall fellow has to endure a lower stature than he always expected to enjoy. This new system was devised by a German Jew (Sophinisba’s mother’s maiden name was Rosenbaum).

  Life is only a shiver. The light through neighboring Coke bottles is a lonely sign of impure sensibility. Everything else on our plates is natural and home-grown. We can sit out in front and eat peacefully now that the homeless are no longer banging through our garbage cans. They’re busy eating my lunch.

  We waste in peace.

  Ah, social tranquility. Thanks to Sophinisba and her Retrocrat Party, things are a little more hopeful than they once were. So no dirty claws lift old rice from garbage cans to their own cracked lips. No rotten scraps interrupt our lovely meal. No resentment from faces other than our own. No one else’s hunger.

  3. NEW LIFE

  NADINE AND I both voted for Sophinisba. The other choices were: Milando Spenokovich on the Catholic Resumption Party, Jena Chelsea Gore III on the Celebutante with Education Party, Boo-Boo on the Party Party, and Eileen Myles on the Seniors for Seniority Party. Sophinisba won us over with her slogan:

  “Conceptualize Beyond Your Task”

  It swayed us.

  Usually, Nadine voted for the liberal guy, and I voted for any black person who was not conflicted about abortion rights. I figured that they would be the most reliable. And they were. But they never won. Yet we united politically around Sophinisba Breckinridge, who made us feel both safe and invigorated. She was a former social worker from the days when there used to be social services. That was quaint and endearing. She had never been beautiful, also reassuring. She had big, intelligent ideas, persuasive in their precision. And then, it happened. We went to sleep, and when we woke up, she was the mayor.

  Surprisingly, Sophinis
ba started to do everything that she had said she would do. This was unbelievable and difficult to grasp. All New Yorkers walked around stunned. Eyes opened, backs straight, flabbergasted. More people could fit into the subway because we were all so erect. And after the first week, the whole world started to notice. When you change New York, the universe burps. Someone had kept their word.

  I try to keep my word.

  If I say, “I’ll have that for you by Wednesday at three o’clock,” then I’ll have it for you by Wednesday at three o’clock. What always defeats me is when people promise Wednesday but really mean a year from April. Can’t they just say so in the first place? Should I second-guess that they’re lying, or just believe people and get hurt? The answer? Believe! I have to. I couldn’t live another day if I didn’t think that you would keep your word. Once said, it must be done. Life falls apart when we waste our precious dream time trying to diagnose in order to avoid being misled.

  So, personally, Sophinisba impressed me. Though I didn’t completely register the precision of her quest. Precision, that word again. It reappears because truth was again involved.

  After wondering together, Nadine and I went hand in hand to meet old Soph and talk to her, face to face. That’s how she spent her first month in office. Around-the-clock coffee and rugelach with each of her citizens. Mayor B asked questions and answered them, urging us all to take another bite. Women always have more power when they bring some food to the table. Lulled, Nadine and I basked in Sophinisba’s smile from under the brim of her silly, endearing hat. All her tricks were humanizing, made us relax, this lack of fashion sense. The ugly shoes. Dull hair.

  Her first question was:

  “What are you ladies thinking about?”

  “Paint,” Nadine answered. “I work in front of a digital-squigital all day long, and long for something more tactile than screens.” She sighed, open-hearted, telling her long longing to her sympathetic government. “Sometimes I want to leave technology behind and return to the days of hands, materials, smells.”

  “I see,” Sophinisba said, rugelach dust on her widening lap. “It’s more individual, is that it?”

  “Oh you,” Nadine cooed. Swooning as though it was someone fuckable, charming, and needy, instead of an astute Mayor with a bad perm.

  “I’m asking myself what a city is,” I said, following Nadine’s trusting example, and also scampering for attention. “I’ve lived in this one all my life and its meaning it still too big to grasp.”

  “Maybe it’s unknowable,” Sophinisba wavered, allowing doubt to be a legitimate perk of human governance. “Do you love your city?”

  “I love it.”

  “Me too,” she sipped conspiratorially.

  Yes, we both loved the same unknowable living mass of flesh, steel, disappointment, possibility, and that patch of sky whenever one looks up.

  “Why, Ms Mayor?” Nadine was being openly flirtatious now, which was interesting to watch. “Why do you love it?”

  “Because,” she said. “Here we are, fragile beauties in the same tender space. We are surrounded by magnificence and the capacity for great evil. We share this duality, in front of each other, with our weak enticing bodies. That’s what it is to live in a city. And to love it. There is one thing every human being needs, and I think we all know what that is.”

  We nodded.

  Not another sound clamored to be heard. We knew what word she was referring to. We knew what that one need was.

  Satiated, we left and another wide-eyed neighbor took our place.

  Nadine and I wrapped around each other, soft within ourselves as only the protected can be. This was new and great. Considering that most people have a very hard time thinking, it is advantageous for our common overlap known as society to be both smarter than the masses AND a force for personal serenity.

  “Conformity is unavoidable,” Nadine whispered in my shell-pink ear, “so anyone who raises the standard to which most will conform, well, that chick is gesturing towards joy.”

  Agreed. And what I loved most about Sophinisba was that her philosophical approach had a material application. She figured out morality and then made it real. And the reality of our common New Yorker vulnerability translated into the one word, the word so obvious that Sophinisba didn’t even need to utter it. That word was …

  HOMES

  Sophinisba knew, as all city dwellers come to understand, that nothing good can happen between fellow citizens—no program, no idea, no change, no hope, no chance—if people do not have a home.

  “Everyone must have a home or else there is no nation,” she announced the next day. “It would be a joke.”

  I felt the jangle of keys in my pocket and realized that soundtrack was the heartbeat of the healthy soul. Without homes there is nothing else we can do for each other that works. Once Sophinisba let that cat out of the bag, more changes got made. Pronto.

  When the headlines started, they never stopped. In one month she built so much low-income housing that the real estate market crashed. People who had overpaid at least had a nice place to live for the rest of their lives, and the speculators got what they deserved. It just stopped making sense to buy something for any reason other than to live in it, and that was fine with me. Plus there was plenty of construction work to go around.

  Nadine came home from work one night announcing that anyone who wanted an apartment could find one. And they weren’t these huge impersonal prison blocks, all the same putrid brick. No, every building was a different size. They had stores. They had backyards, and porches. They were different colors. Suddenly prices made sense. A six-floor walkup tenement with mice and no closets was no longer three thousand dollars a month. People were only willing to pay what it was really worth, and so that place rented for eighty-five bucks. A studio apartment with a kitchenette hovered between fifty and sixty dollars. And if you had a family of six and needed four bedrooms, then rents came up to two hundred.

  The transformative consequence on New York City life was immediate and complete. The impossible burden was lifted from people’s skulls. They didn’t have to worry about being out on the street. Outside was no longer a threat of potential disaster. Now, folks who had been killing each other because of proximity could each move out and get their own place. People lived together because they wanted to see each other’s gorgeous faces in the morning. They wanted to continue the great conversation around-the-clock.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  Nadine and I looked each other up and down.

  “We still belong together,” she said. “Even though we could each afford our own bathroom now, I want to share one with you.”

  There was more joy and acknowledgement in my little life. And people with kids could finally make noise when they had sex, because their new apartments were large enough. No one had to devote their precious soul to gathering rent. They could go to the park or take a walk. Time was not money anymore. Time was just time. It was as if the streets opened up before us. The city was shared now, not partitioned. We could offer each other more. And so we looked at each other differently, with more compassion and interest. Home became more comfortable and therefore more important. People were not trapped in their apartments.

  This is what happens when the pretending stops. When someone goes through life with their eyes wide open. And when that someone is allowed enough power to act on what they know. That’s it! That’s what we City Dwellers have achieved for ourselves! We’ve allowed someone to think and then we allowed them to carry out their revelation. We allowed things to get better. This made us love ourselves even more, and created more opportunity for even more change.

  No one was that shocked when Sophinisba’s next step was to seal off four boroughs and declare us an Independent Protectorate. Staten Island was made a part of Texas. No one actually knew what an Independent Protectorate was, so it was exciting to be something new. And we didn’t care at all what the rest of the country thought. They’ve always resent
ed us for our good looks, so no love lost there.

  Her first act as an Independent Protector, on a Monday, was to institute a minimum annual wage of forty-five thousand dollars a year. That meant that every single person could go to the dentist, have a vacation, and save up for a dream. On Tuesday she established a maximum annual wage of 100 million dollars a year. The common wisdom on the street was that no one person needed more than a hundred million dollars a year, and for those who made more than the limit, the leftover went to prop up the rest.

  From then on, when we stepped on the bus in the morning, each one of us paid proportionally. If women earned seventy-five percent of what men earned, we only paid seventy-five cents, while they paid a dollar. WOW. It was the dawning of Reality-Based Conditions. Each according to their ability, each according to their need. Life was filled with recognition. Finally.

  Then, she banned all franchises.

  Everyday on the way home from work, Nadine and I saw the world revolve. New Yorkers are fast; within a week, each shop in the city was the idea of a particular individual person and their friends. The shop owner could have it be any color and choose their own interior design or absence of it. The quality varied, the items were not pre-selected. Starbucks became a euphemism for Tyrannosaurus rex. Consistency was no longer considered desirable. In fact, it became icky and weird. Prices were original and low, because of the sane rents. Get it?

  Immediately, every single life was improved. It was spectacular. We all had homes. We all had commerce that resembled the strangeness of our individual organisms. Daily life in our beloved city was more personal, and so the Retrograde Party meteor of the Old Era came to an end with the Era itself.

  Now, daily life was kind of a compulsion, one worthy of feelings high and low. Provisional periodic poverty is fine for the character, just not deprivation. Who needs it? For, despite the unavoidable complexities of love and loss, redefining how we think about Home and Store had tremendously improved our moral plight. Having better values and lower rents leaves the concerns of death and sex their justified place. They are no longer eclipsed by falsely imposed problems like lack of shelter and other unnecessary pain.