The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  She picked at the dinner before her and didn’t answer. He tried a different tack. “They’re going to send her to the skinner at Peekskill pretty soon, aren’t they? I mean, there’s no sense keeping her in the hospital any more.”

  “She said my name the other day,” Heidi observed.

  “Well, fine, but I talked to the doctors, too, and that’s as far as she’s likely to go. Honey? Shouldn’t we be thinking about alternatives?”

  She looked at him. “You mean cryonic suspension.”

  “Maybe. It’s not such a bad idea. There’s some hope that some day they could fix her up, you know, and then—”

  “And then I’d be dead, Jeff, and so would you, and I’d never see my sister any more.”

  Bratislaw sighed and began to gather up the dishes, while Heidi retreated to the bathroom. An hour later, getting into bed next to the motionless form with the covers over its head, Bratislaw said, “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you’re never going to be able to bring her back.”

  Heidi didn’t move or respond. Then, as he sighed and rolled over, she said without moving, “You’re right.” As he fell asleep he wondered why her answer had not been satisfying.

  Surprisingly, Ella Jennalec was a strong support to Bratislaw in his troubles, though not sexually. She never said their sexual relationship was over, or at least suspended pending the resolution of his family troubles, but it was. She simply did not invite him to her bedroom any more. There was intimacy, yes, but a different kind. When she invited him to stay for coffee her housekeeper was there, a waddling old woman from Kenya who admired Bratislaw’s brawn and fed him up accordingly when she could. Or there was Jennalec’s son, Michael, ten years old, bright-eyed and endlessly inventive. He had never seen a farm, and so plagued Bratislaw for stories about Wisconsin. They were more family for him than Heidi and (certainly) Lucy was. And there was that other intimacy, the political one, the one that was the core of Jennalec’s existence and became pretty much Bratislaw’s. As she let him closer and closer into the councils of power Bratislaw began to understand the significance of those strange errands to places outside her jurisdiction, involving trades and skills not under her reign. There was something brewing, and it was big. Intimacy did not extend to particulars, but there were a dozen unions involved, there was a timetable, there was going to be a decisive act—and the time was not far away.

  For a solid week Jennalec’s program took her to visit bridges—the George Washington, the Triborough, the East River spans first—and that was not surprising. All of them required special modification so that they could enter the vast dome when it was completed without destroying its geodesic integrity or producing the devastating turbulence he had seen in the wind-tunnel model. But what did the Verrazano-Narrows crossing have to do with it? Bratislaw didn’t know. Jennalec didn’t say. She left him at the base of one of the pylons while she went off on an errand to the working levels at the top. Heidi worked there—was there now, doing her job as a port controller; for a moment Bratislaw thought of dropping in on her unannounced. At one time it would have been a good idea. Now it didn’t seem that way. So he stood in the lee of the pylon, shivering in the wet, hard wind in spite of the fact that it was full summer, and waited for Jennalec to come down.

  She was scowling. “Your wife’s a pain in the ass, do you know that?” she announced.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Didn’t talk to her, if that’s what you mean—but she’s got the others scared. A regular whistle-blower, your wife! A big fan of UTMs.”

  Bratislaw was puzzled; Heidi was almost as much a do-gooder as her late sister—well, not quite late sister—but she had never mentioned any big feeling one way or another about the Universal Town Meetings. “I don’t get you,” he said.

  “None of your business,” said Jennalec sharply, pulling her sweater tighter around her. “Let’s get the hell out of this wind—damn! Who needs it now?”

  What she meant by that was none of his business, too, he found. But the things that she was willing to allow him in on were interesting enough, though scary. He had not realized how the kickbacks and payoffs mounted up, or what a network of union and public officials were involved in them, until he began adding up the lists of people Jennalec had surreptitiously visited. He was almost glad that Heidi wasn’t much interested in talking to him these days. He would have found it hard to keep her from doing the same sort of calculation as himself, and who knew what conclusions she might have come to?

  In other ways, the estrangement was nothing to be glad about at all. JFK Bratislaw was a healthy male in the prime of life who didn’t like masturbating. When both his wife and his employer canceled sex he missed it badly—within a couple of weeks, desperately. He wondered what the technician at the wind tunnel was doing, thought of calling her up, wondered if Ella Jennalec would mind—did nothing.

  The first upturn in his amative fortunes was when he came home almost on time one night and found the apartment full of cooking smells. Heidi was in good spirits. She made them both drinks while the microwave finished their baked bluefish and, responding to the look on his face, laughed. “You haven’t noticed anything special about this week?” she asked.

  He pursed his lips while he ran through his mental card file. Not Christmas and not Valentine’s Day. Not their anniversary—

  “Your birthday!” he exclaimed. “But that’s not until Sunday.”

  She grinned and shook her head. “That’s not what I mean, although there’s something I’d like from you. You really haven’t noticed?”

  “Noticed what?”

  “I haven’t thrown up for a week!” And, indeed, she had never looked better. Or, it seemed, felt better. All through dinner she talked, just like old times, long, complicated stories about the string of LNG barges that had been misidentified at first as garbage scows, and what might have happened if they’d been allowed to try to make the passage under the bridge in the thirty-knot wind, about her co-workers, about how well Lucy was doing at the skinner, about when she could feel the baby kick. She not only talked. She listened. She let Bratislaw talk about the job, and the trouble with the hold-downs on Morningside Heights, and the twelve kilometers of cable that had failed the stress tests and been rejected, and Ella Jennalec’s loathing for the Universal Town Meeting…“Well, sure she hates it,” Heidi commented. “It’s what keeps her from running the whole city.”

  “Aw, hell, Heidi! She’s got it made now, why would she want more?”

  “Everybody always wants more, Jeff, that’s what governments are all about. That’s what the UTM’s about, it’s what keeps the power brokers and the bribers from taking over. Not just unions. Contractors. Builders. Everybody who can make an extra buck by breaking the law, or forcing the government to let them do something they’re not supposed to. Lucy said—” She paused, then shook her head, smiling. “But let’s not argue tonight, honey. Come on, help me get the dishes in the machine.”

  And as soon as they had the dishes in the washer and the garbage sorted and stowed they went to bed, without discussion or delay. Heidi’s belly was beginning to plump out. At first Bratislaw found it disconcerting—but not incapacitating. Not even the first time. Much less the second and third. When at last they both had had enough they lay spoon-fashion, Bratislaw holding his wife in his arms, for a long time. Bratislaw was beginning to think Heidi had drifted off to sleep when she stirred and, without turning, said, “Honey? About Sunday…”

  Half asleep, Bratislaw was not to be caught out. He remembered what Sunday was. “You mean on your birthday. What would you like?”

  “Well—one thing, actually. Would you come up to see Lucy with me?”

  “I would love it,” said Bratislaw, and meant it at the time.

  On Sunday, though, he wasn’t so sure. The trip up the Hudson was fine enough because it was on an excursion boat all the way to Peekskill, up past the Palisades along the beautiful Hudson shore. The boat left from Battery
Park, and for the first few miles Bratislaw was able to explain to his wife just where the dome was going, looking like two humps on a camel, the tall igloo one down around lower Manhattan, the lower connecting bridge from Canal Street to the twenties, the big elongated one covering midtown and Central Park. It was only the middle passage that had been mostly covered with its hexagons of plastic so far. North and south was still only steelwork, with some of the tensed cables strung so that it looked like lacy spiderwebbing as they sailed past. The boat was full of families on excursion, aiming for Bear Mountain or Indian Point. Cheerful, a lot of kids, and quite a few very small ones that Bratislaw noticed his wife observing with tenderness. It wasn’t easy to fight their way into the boat’s dining room for lunch, but the hostess noticed Heidi’s thickening belly and eased them in early. The food wasn’t all that bad, and Heidi even allowed herself a bottle of beer with the cheese omelette. When they were up to the coffee she said, “I’ve got a present for you.”

  After four years Bratislaw knew his wife’s habits, but he protested, “It isn’t my birthday.”

  “If I can’t give you a present when I want to on my birthday, when can I? Hold still.” And she pulled a tinsel-wrapped package out of her bag, opened it and displayed a carved wooden amulet on a golden chain. “It’s the lover’s knot,” she said. “It keeps people who love each other together.”

  “I’ll never take it off,” said Bratislaw, touched. His wife nodded solemnly.

  “Except maybe in the shower,” she advised. “Jeff? It’s mostly to thank you for coming here with me. I do appreciate it.”

  “I’m glad to do it,” he said proudly. But half an hour later he wasn’t so sure. He had never been at the New York Peekskill Facility before—what they called “the uptown skinner.” As the taxi drove up the entrance road it was all green trees and flower beds, and if you noticed that the flowers were in ragged patterns and some of the borders were bare, well, that almost added to its rural charm. The buildings were pretty enough. Most of them were low-framed two-story garden apartments, with a pretty brick central building and people moving around the paths. It was only when you got close to the people that they became strange. On a wall by the entrance gate a skinny twenty-year-old man was snapping back and forth as though in an invisible rocking chair, thunk-thunk, like a metronome. A young man in a tank top and open fly approached them, smiling wordlessly to show no teeth at all. A terribly obese young girl, maybe fourteen years old, was lying on her belly in the middle of the path, unmoving; Bratislaw had to step over her to get by, and from her blubbery body in the warm sun, even in the open air of the Hudson River country, there arose a terribly unwashed stench. Heidi, who had been to the skinner before, watched her husband with concern. “Honey? There’s a coffee shop over there. Why don’t you go get a cup, and I’ll find Lucy and bring her there.”

  “Sure,” said Bratislaw gratefully, and accepted directions and an order to get for Lucy and Heidi. But the canteen was no better. He had had some sort of idea that it was off-limits to residents, except maybe Lucy, but the place was full of inmates. The boy with the open fly followed him in as he took his place in line, just behind a fifty-year-old woman with the unlined face of a teen-ager, who turned around to study him.

  “What’s your name?” she demanded; and when he told her, “What do you do? Who do you work for? What’s she like?” It was not at all clear to Bratislaw that she listened to the answers. It was as though she were a parrot, socialized into the questions of social conversation but without any particular interest in the other person’s part. He secured coffee for himself, iced tea and a Coke for Heidi and her sister and, as ordered, two large bags of corn chips. It was his fear that some of the inmates would sit down with him, and so he hurriedly propped the other chairs at the corner table he found. They didn’t, but the boy with the open fly sat at the next table, licking up a sundae as though it were an ice-cream cone, still grinning toothlessly and without speaking at Bratislaw.

  He wished desperately for his wife and sister-in-law to arrive, but when they did it was almost worse. He had not been prepared for seeing his sister-in-law in a football helmet with her name printed in large letters across the front, and painted again on the back of her police-academy tee-shirt. Pretty Lucy! Her face was as pretty as ever, and if anything her eyes were merrier and her expression more vivacious. The dedicated do-gooder look was gone from her face, and she didn’t explain to Bratislaw the ways in which he should be working his ass off to improve society. She hardly spoke at all. She listened as Heidi chattered on about the clothes she was buying for the baby and how nice it was to have some breeze after all the terrible heat, and had the thunderstorms been as bad here as they had in the city? When Lucy answered it was almost always either “yes” or “no,” like a binary bit in a solid-state computer. When she spoke it was only a word or two. “Friend,” she said, reaching out to touch the arm of the huge black girl, six-foot-three at least, who came around to clear off their table. “Molly,” Lucy announced, smiling prettily although the girl did not interrupt slamming cardboard plates into her trash bag to answer.

  Heidi rescued her iced tea just in time. “Molly is going to graduate soon,” she told Bratislaw. “Isn’t that true, Molly?” But the girl didn’t answer until she had finished mopping the table and was moving to the next, when she said over her shoulder, quite clearly and politely:

  “That’s true, Mrs. Bratislaw, and I’m really looking forward to it.”

  But Lucy was no longer listening. She had caught sight of the teen-ager with the open fly, now standing before them. He was exhibiting himself to the women, smiling proudly. Lucy jumped up. “Dan!” she cried furiously. “Teeth!” The boy’s smile faded. He put his penis back inside his shorts, pulled a set of artificial dentures out of his pocket, stuffed them into his mouth and morosely walked away.

  “Dan just hates to wear his teeth,” Heidi told Bratislaw conversationally, but he could hear the strain in her voice. The place was telling on her, too—and she had been coming up here three times a week for nearly two months!

  There was a boat back every hour, and the return tickets in Bratislaw’s pocket felt more and more precious; but he could not make himself take Heidi away. His mind was made up to pretend to be enjoying the visit—or at least to be generous and loving enough to want to prolong it. He was a victim of his own dissembling skill; twice Heidi asked him if he wanted to go and twice he lied. When Lucy suddenly stood up and said “Work time,” he was all ready to smile and make his farewells, but Heidi said hesitantly: “Honey? If you really don’t mind staying a while, I’d kind of like to see what Lucy’s doing. You know, she’s been promoted. She’s really coming along very well.”

  And how could he say no to that? It did not relieve his depression that the job Lucy had been promoted to turned out to be feeding and caring for the bedridden inmates, but he was surprised to find that Lucy took the lead as they left the canteen. Out the door, down a golden walk, turned right at one whose concrete was striped black and white; it was only when she came to the next intersection that she had to stop and think. She shrugged almost as she always had, smiled at her brother-in-law and said clearly, “Where’s the bedridden ward?” She had a sort of wrist-watch thing on, larger than looked sensible; from it a sweet, tiny voice whispered, “What color is the path, Lucy?”

  “Came off black and white. Got red, got yellow with kind of wavy lines, got green with white dots.”

  “Take the green with white dots, Lucy. Turn left at the mess hall.” And she was off again, her sister following, smiling gamely, her brother following and, last in line with no one to see his face, his expression sour. The bedridden wards! But there was a last-minute reprieve, because at the door of the low, cool building with its ominous smells coming from inside Lucy paused and shook her head.

  Heidi translated. “This is kind of women’s stuff, honey. Would you mind if you didn’t come in?”

  He was glad to accept the offer, and Lucy
said happily, “Tour tape.” That turned out to mean that if he chose to go to the administration building they would be glad to lend him a walking-tour tape machine for visitors, which would explain everything he wanted to know about the Peekskill Facility.

  Actually, it explained far more. Bratislaw got the cassette, all right, but then he dared the canteen long enough to get a container of coffee—there wasn’t anything stronger—and found a deserted section of the grounds to drink it in. It didn’t stay deserted long. The youth with the open fly passed by several times, waving happily each time; his teeth were out again, Bratislaw noted. The woman with the white hair and smooth, untroubled face came to stare at him for twenty minutes straight, and she had brought a friend along, an ancient black man in a wheelchair, who muttered to the woman unceasingly in a thick, gravelly voice. But they didn’t speak to Bratislaw, and he avoided eye contact, and eventually they went away.

  To be replaced by other members of this parade of freaks, of course. He was glad at last to put the plug in his ear, close his eyes and listen to the cordial voice of the recorded tour guide, telling him in what ways the Peekskill Facility served its residents.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy Bratislaw the Third was a humane man almost always, and a generous one by instinct, and certainly he was thoughtful toward his family when he remembered to be. He had lovable traits. Heidi loved him enough to want to have his child, and Heidi was an intelligent and perceptive woman. When he listened to the ways in which the Peekskill Facility practiced behavior modification and social facilitation, and the enumeration of the skills taught and employed graduates, he found it profoundly satisfying. How wonderful that handicapped people could be so helped. That worrisome smell from the far edge of the grounds, he was pleased to discover, was nothing more sinister than a henhouse where batteries of poultry were raised for eggs and slaughter. The bright things that looked like cocktail toothpicks in the farm plots were markers for the people who weeded and picked: bright plastic cucumbers and tomatoes and avocados showed which plants to spare, and when they were ready to pick. There were off-reservation work parties that served the communities of Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, picking up and sorting trash and reclaiming the valuable glass and metals and organics. The skinner did not, of course, come anywhere near paying for itself, but it provided the inmates with one-quarter of their food, and twenty percent of their own supervision—with one person in each group of fifty detailed to such tasks as inspecting the others for haircuts, for bathroom habits, for birth control. There were special competitions—spelling bees for the under-ninety IQs, board games for the under-seventies. The residents with salvageable coordination were taught to crochet lace or string bead necklaces; the clumsier, but educable, ones worked on the farm plots or in the recycling rooms, and the money they earned helped keep the “tuition” down. Even the terminally senile and the dying were aided in large part by other residents, specially trained—and that was where Bratislaw’s thoughts left the objective merits of the skinner and turned to what was left of his pretty, devoted, lively sister-in-law. Also his strong sister-in-law, strong in principle and, you had to say, physically strong, because not everybody would have survived so brutal and bone-crushing a beating, or should—