by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER THREE
Minor Miracles
One hundred sixty kilometers south of Dutton on the wounded island of Manhattan, Joe Fflowers’ grandfather, one hundred-seven year old Joshua Fflowers, is tapping the treads of his wheelchair and thinking of flight. Before him, through the glass wall, a flurry of rare and precious snowflakes dance in the currents of the updrafts rising from the street one hundred thirty-eight stories below. Ever since he moved into the Airie almost seventy years before, Fflowers has been intrigued by the phenomenon of a rising snowfall. To the west, across the three kilometer-wide Hudson River, ragged vermillion clouds scud toward him as the source of their evanescent beauty, a dying sun, drifts toward the horizon. It is just minutes before the ancient’s favorite time of day. His gnarled bones, more claws than hands, tattoo the treads in anticipation of what’s to come as well as anger at the slow passage of the minutes.
Years blur by, and, still, minutes drag.
Fflowers nudges the wheelchair closer to the electricity-generating Secur-solar windows so that he better can see Fifth Avenue a half-kilometer below. After a long look into what once had been the world’s economic Grand Canyon, the trillionaire looks out at the thousand upon thousands of aquaphorous lights that give a blue-green glow down the spine of the island south all the way to the Houston Levee. As he waits for the minutes to pass, the old man recalls the first time he stepped onto what once was such a vibrant island.
May 21, 2010. His eighth month at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. An MIT PhD. micro-biologist and post-doc researcher at twenty-two. Dragged, along with Elena Howe, by the primary researchers, their mentors and bosses, Reiklein and Grammai, to meet Larktston, the magic money man, who was becoming interested in meta-mutancy. Spring fog and drizzle. Grid-locked streets. Muted headlights. Bleating horns. Shiny surfaces everywhere. A gauntlet of umbrella spokes as they hurried toward The Plaza after abandoning their marooned cab. Larkston meeting them in The Oak Room—beyond garrulous, maybe drunk. Pork chop hands squeezing shoulders and elbows, herding. Into the elevator. Up twenty floors. Larkston big in an airless room. Little things—red, black, green—on silver trays. Big slugs of alcohol in little glasses. Napkins, napkins and more napkins pressed upon him by a tiny waiter with a comical Hispanic accent. Larkston’s laugh, like his billions, growing exponentially. Ricocheting off the walls despite the floral rug and damask-covered couches. Grammai rolling his eyes, stuttering in alarm that a magic moment, so long schemed for, might pass without being seized. In her first of a thousand times, Elena into the breach. Fingers. Calming fingers stroking Larkston’s arm like a favorite horse’s mane. Soothing words. Her low whisper of a laugh taming Larkston’s bray. Grammai with the laptop. Reiklein, the breathy, hyper-kinetic zealot, interrupting Grammai, the Oppenheimer clone. Elena, touching, smiling, breathing, not begging, but rather imbuing the rich man with belief.
Then…the moment. The mutation. From interested observer to contractually-shackled benefactor. Handshakes. Back pats. More over-generous drinks. The just-shy-of-impolite retreat. Gamboling down Fifth. If over-weight, middle-aged genius can gambol. To the train. To the labs. To the ramparts.
The old man looks at his watch, a stem-wound gold-cased graduation gift from his ineffectual father, who himself had received it from his almost wealthy great-grandfather.
Only two minutes have gone by.
A snowflake as large and light as a dandelion seed bounds up, hits the window, rotates ninety degrees and melts away. The ancient Midas watches its rill slide toward earth. His fingers tap. He looks out toward the southern half of Manhattan. The island is so different from when he first came to live on it. Back then, it had felt as if the city were more alive at night than during the day. He loved to wander about looking at the lights and the magic they made of the night. While the streets of SoHo, Tribeca and West Heights were busy and even crowded during the day, they weren’t bustling, they weren’t kinetic with the edgy kind of energy that they had at night. He had come to the city and the city had changed. In part because of his efforts, but, he told himself, the vision before him would have been even more different without his efforts.
It was not just Manhattan. The world itself had changed. The world had gotten warmer and wetter and Manhattan, once capital to the world, now was dying. And, he had changed. He had gotten colder, drier, and…and…he was dying.
It was almost quitting time in the thousands of offices below him. A century before, a human wave of energy would have spilled out onto the streets. Like a broken dam. And that torrent would have plunged through the canyons and poured into the restaurants and bars, the bodegas and markets. What had been full during the day would empty and what had been empty would fill and overflow.
The city had been so alive…but, then, immutable, unstoppable metamorphosis. Like all cities, in all times. Like all of life.
Ice melted a half a world away and that newly released water found its way to Long Island Sound and the rivers that bordered both sides of the city. Tides had risen and then barriers to protect the city had risen and the waters had risen higher and the city had fought back but the waters rose again and, after awhile, the city had tired of the fight. The streets of southern Manhattan became canals. The ground floors of buildings were abandoned. Entrances were raised. Catwalk and elevated sidewalks hugged the facades of Wall Street for a time and, then, had been abandoned like a rotting ship. Like an old pensioner facing straitened circumstances, the city had retreated from what had been and cobbled together what could be. Over time, more and more people decided that it was easier to leave than absorb the changes. Two new, clean, well-lighted, sterile cities, nicknamed Newton and Screwton, had been birthed in the western hills of New Jersey. Newton—birthmother of the new in fashion, music and the vid-arts, the only visual art remaining. And Screwton, the ever cold, ever hungry succubus to Mammon. On this particular weather-mad March eve, the old man, now, finally, a realist, slips his noose and indulges both in nostalgia for a city, and a life once ten times as bright. His mind jumps with bright-hued, but scattered, memories, like a scrap-book unbound.
….Bursting through set after set of double doors with the desperate desire of a salmon on a fish ladder, through the final portal, then, sucking blue-black night air deep into his lungs while his eyes feasted on the star-pocked sky. A night heron’s pale moon shadow racing across concrete the color of old ivory. The tic-flicking exhaustion and brain-inflaming exhilaration of knowing they are close, so close to the biological switch they are trying to divine. A galvanic fear that they will miss the small turn that can take them through the maze. Moments later, knowing it is the perfect moment, Elena Howe, now wife, though not named Fflowers, licorice black shiny hair keeping time to the broken rhythm of the breeze, rushing up to offer perfect lips to Fflowers. Elena, a silver sylph brightening a lunar world. Hermes in disguise.
Fflowers emaciated fingers drift to his face. He touches the drought dry corners of his eyes before rubbing the ridges of his forehead.
The sky goes scarlet. Finally, six o’clock comes. Below him, a first thousand doors open. Workers in therma-jerkins of every color, kanga-paks cinched tightly across their chests, crowd the doorways. Two or three quick steps along the docks jutting from each floor of every building, a moment’s plummet, and then the flap of wings.
Thousands upon thousands, one hundred thousand, then two, then three hundred thousand winged humans begin their flights home. All those flights and freedoms, each and every one, a boon from his small band’s efforts almost eighty years before.
Human flight, now an old trick, but one still worth the wait for an old earth-bound man. A dying man.
For a few short moments, like the bats in Carlsbad Cavern, clouds of humans, their wings of every shape and color, fill the sky. Ten minutes later, the flock is gone, the city empty except for slow exodus of the wingless.
The old man rolls himself back from the glass wall, executes a slow turn and makes his way down a long hallway toward his nightly chore.
Joshua Fflowers wheels himself to the dining room, where a table that could, and a half-century before regularly did, seat thirty, is set for one. Although he is not hungry, when he is served, Joshua Fflowers eats. Despite the palette of colors on his plate—the sea-grass green of asparagus, an arterial red tomato sprinkled with chalk-white chevre, two seared lamb chops with golden edges—when those colors get inside his mouth, they turn to gray. The old man has ageusia, has had it nearly a half-century, since the year after Elena was lost. All food, whether crisp, crunchy, chewy or of a pudding softness, whether marinated in wine, bathed in infusions of basil or rosemary, or drowned in a puree of Scotch Bonnets, vinegar, molasses and milk, tastes like…gray…like nothing. Food as slurry. Food as duty. And, since his health has failed, he can not even eat what is on that brightly hued plate. That plate is just art, artifice and irony. His health is such that dinner comes from a bottle fitted with a tube. The centenarian’s twisted hands drag the bottle toward him. He lowers his lips and suckles whatever is in it that supposedly harms him least.
Oh, Romulus, such a meta-mutancy, the craving wolf into a craven lamb.
There are not many areas where Fflowers is, or ever was, dutiful, but this is one. He eats to sustain a life that passes both too fast and too slow. A life that, at midday, is much too short, and, alert and alone at three in the morning, much, much, much too long.
“Oh, Elena, what we could have wrought.”
The old head jerks up when he realizes that he has blurted out in anguish what he only had meant to think.
He swallows methodically, but thinks less so. He is dying and hopes for that relief. He is dying and begrudges that darkness. He has all of an old man’s wants—revenge, love, forgiveness, eternity.
He hopes he has just one more day with all this weighty age that has worn him down. He will dedicate the building tomorrow. Then, go off to his rejuvenation. If all goes well, in two weeks he might be eating from a plate. He might be walking. He might be happy. If all goes wrong, well, then, a bane is lifted and he is free.
