“My personal finances are in the news?”
“Look, Johanna. Get all your money out of the bank as soon as you can and convert it to something else.”
“Why?”
“Because the dollar’s going to fail.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. It’s right out of a textbook. Big debt. Creditors get nervous, start asking for their money back. We don’t have it. Dollar goes south. Creditors get more nervous. Some of them take their money and run. Dollar goes further south. Feedback loop. Pow.”
“You’re sure we’re not talking about my personal finances?”
“It’s the same idea. Get everything and get out. Becausethis hasn’t happened to America in a long time and I don’t know what’s going to happen. If we’re ready for it.”
Planets were aligning, the moon pulling closer, asteroids winging toward major cities, the bombs already falling. At last, it was in the street, signs plastered to boarded windows, lines outside government offices. A store on fire. Small wars between crowds and soldiers, then just crowds. Zeke Hezekiah watched accounts in American dollars shrivel and vanish within a month. How could it be otherwise? The water was rising over the wall, the bombs exploding, buildings tumbling, the dollar lying in the road, bent at dead angles, bleeding itself out.
He took the last plane from Paris to New York before the strikes started, and while the shadow of his airplane slipped over the spine of the Atlantic Ocean, the American dollar died. In Washington, in front of thousands of cameras, the chairman of the Federal Reserve tilted his head toward the ceiling, let the lenses of his glasses catch fire in the spotlights, and explained the situation in a way that only economists could understand. Then he controlled himself and said, “For the foreseeable future the dollar is no more, but we are all still here and must do what we can in the chaotic times that are sure to come.” He apologized, resigned, apologized again to the United States of America and to the world. As a man who treasured precision in a way that maddened all who knew him, this was how the chairman split the difference between what he thought people wanted to hear and what he was thinking. Were he speaking to his own people, an audience of rationalists gleaming with a lack of emotion, he would have said that this was a bad day for humans, but that history has seen many currencies come and go. We are not the first or the last. Everyone should relish the interesting times we live in, the changing of an epoch, the chance to start over. In the mountains, mere hours from where we stand, bears kill for food under trees pointing at the sky; off the coast of Chile, whales swim through coolwater; on the ocean floor, tectonic plates shift apart and the seam bleeds magma that boils seawater and scabs into stone. These things the death of the dollar can never touch.
Zeke’s plane dipped toward an airport the pilot almost couldn’t see, landed on the end of a darkened runway, far from the terminal. The airplane’s crew deployed the stairs meant for emergencies and ran off into a light rain while the passengers gathered around the plane’s wheels. Nobody knew how to open the luggage compartment. Someone from first class was trying to form a committee when three vans, license plates torn off, horns blaring, the words CHARLENE’S PEOPLE-MOVING MACHINES sprayed across the sides, raced from the terminal across the tarmac, pulled up to the aircraft. A large woman in the driver’s seat rolled down the window, throwing out a gigantic smile and a blast of old Wilson Pickett from the radio. Don’t let. The green grass fool ya.
“Hiya, everybody,” she said. “I’m Charlene Duchamp, and I’m here to make sure you get to your final destinations.”
“What’s going on?” Zeke said.
“All the stuff that happens when there’s no such thing as money all of a sudden, that’s what. Now are you planning on standing around on this runway for the next thirty years, or do you want a ride?”
“Our luggage—”
“—is being taken care of.” One of the other vans was parked under the plane, and two men in pink jumpsuits were slamming sledgehammers into the luggage compartment’s hatch.
“Relax,” Charlene said. “We’ve done this a dozen times already today, and we’re quick studies.” From the speakers, Wilson Pickett screamed as only he could.
At the terminal, Zeke Hezekiah traded two pairs of pants for a ride from Charlene into the city in the back of a pickup truck, the cab radio screeching about how the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken. All along the avenues, there were people withshopping carts full of canned goods, loaves of bread, jugs of water. A city getting ready to starve. But his place was as he had left it: a bed, a nightstand, a lamp, a phone. A Sufi rug, embroidered paths showing the mystic’s road to Allah, an ascent into dissolution; at least that was what the man who sold it to him had said. Zeke picked up the phone, wondered why it was still working. Who was running the system?
“Zeke!” Kuala Lumpur answered on the seventh ring; Zeke could smell the pot on the other end.
“Hello, darling.”
“Um. Are you in town?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave Monaco?”
“You should see Monaco, Kuala. You can’t pass a streetlight without a suicide hanging from it.” That was the thing about economies collapsing. The more you had, the more you lost. The pensions, the bonds, the savings accounts, the money put aside from decades of work, all gone in two days; the collapse was a tsunami, and all of us and the American dream had been on the beach, eyes closed, chairs angled at the sun, too close to the water to get away.
“But why did you come here? You could have at least gone somewhere warmer.”
“…”
“Oh. Oh, Zeke.”
“I thought …”
“…”
“…”
“I’m sorry you thought that,” Kuala Lumpur said.
“No, no. No. Don’t be sorry. You didn’t ask me to come.”
“…”
“It was stupid of me, really,” Zeke said, “assuming that just because the world as we know it was starting to come apart, that you’d decide you wanted somebody serious.”
“Oh, honey.”
“…”
“Please take care of yourself?” Kuala Lumpur said. “Please?”
Kuala Lumpur rubs her temples with a thumb and middle finger. She doesn’t tell Marco about this part of the conversation, what Zeke said to her, what she said back, but it blooms across her face, rises and falls in her lungs, agitates her fingers. Marco can see it all. This is why I can never do business, she thinks. I was born to mimic and to party. I’m useless for everything else.
“Where is he?” Marco says.
“In jail.”
“That’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, Marco, because the jail isn’t the jail anymore. The Aardvark runs it, like he runs the city, the slave trade, everything. He didn’t even have to charge Zeke with anything. Once he knew Zeke was in town, he just picked him up one day and threw him in a cell. Who was going to stop him? His face is on the goddamn money. That’s how much it’s not nothing.”
“How did he get so strong?” Marco says. “How did that happen?”
When the United States was still the United States, the Aardvark was the financier of the largest illicit trade network in the country, the vortex of a spiral of people, food, drugs, money by the billions, but only seventeen of his employees had ever seen him, or heard his rumbling, rambling voice. In port cities up and down both coasts, in the safe houses of El Paso, the flophouses of Nogales, in ice-driven lodges along the Canadian border, they’d heard of him, but debated his existence; the idea that one man could have so much, control so much, without the government knowing was too improbable. On the northern border of Guatemala, in the coca fields in Bolivia, the poppy fields in Afghanistan, they knew him by different names, hadn’t heard of him at all, cared only that the dollars came from New York and didn’t ask why. He was a major target for several law enforcement agencies for over ten years; most of the information on him suggested that he moved to a different co
untry every few months. There were rumors that he lived on a boat, a freighter tricked out to be a marbled mansion within, fed with the fruits of four continents, furnished with pieces from blackmailed Russian officials with palaces on the Black Sea, Syrian businessmen who disappeared whenever cars exploded in Damascus. These were all lies. The truth is that he never left Manhattan, lived on two floors of an office building in midtown that the elevators skipped unless he spoke his birth name, in his glottal voice, into the emergency phone. He lives in New York still, though it’s no longer secret, not after he knocked down a city block and built his tower. He’s given out floors to his vast extended family, which runs berserk from the twisting elevator shaft to the scratched windows; he lives by himself in its teetering peak. He controls most of New York by proxy, oversees a swath of Manhattan himself, from the southern end of the island up through the east side of Central Park, where squatters and homesteaders with small gardens and a few animals wage wars with clippers and axes against the rebelling vegetation. He makes speeches in Union Square, gesticulating from a podium while his voice booms from huge speakers. There can be no recovery without rules, he says. They are starting to call him the Emperor of New York; a man, you might say, with whom one does not fuck.
Yet fucked with him the Slick Six had, for years before the collapse, until Marco was incarcerated and the other five exiled themselves. By Zeke’s calculations, the Six siphoned almost 270 million dollars off of the Aardvark’s operations, on the California border, in a truck jouncing across Missouri, on a copper wire flashing transactions from bank to bank, leaving the Aardvark with empty crates, men and women shrugging shoulders, unbalanced numbers. It took the Aardvark sevenmonths of sifting through his enterprise to understand how much he was losing, nine more months of questions and torture to find out who was taking it. Jeannette Winderhoek, his first lieutenant and lawyer, pleaded with him not to pursue them, though she knew better.
“It’s not worth it,” Winderhoek said. “They’re mosquitoes.”
“Mosquitoes cause malaria,” the Aardvark said. “And Marco Oliveira is no mosquito.” A twinge in his voice, an echo of pining, for an errant son, a utopia lost.
So the Aardvark began his hunt for the Slick Six, kept it up for almost a decade and even now isn’t satisfied, though the Six are scattered or under his thumb, the money is gone, and the world is much changed. His third wife, a square woman with biceps like watermelons, is unsurprised. She knows how, in the earliest days, when the Aardvark was a local thug just developing a reputation, one of his associates, a man who went by the name of Bing Ling, lost four hundred dollars to him on a horse race, refused to pay, and ran off to Brazil. Fourteen years later, when the Aardvark’s operations leaked into Rio de Janeiro, one day the Aardvark made his driver take a long swerve off the highway and into a favela. He directed the driver as if following a scent, squinted out the window, barking commands, and stopped at last in front of a tire shop where Bing Ling, missing an arm and an eye, slumped sleeping in a wooden chair against the painted plaster wall. The Aardvark didn’t even wake him up before he shot him through the top of his head.
“Why isn’t Zeke dead yet?” Marco says.
“I don’t know,” Nerve says.
“I’m getting him out of there.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“And after that?”
“We go south, I guess. To Johanna. Then Dayneesha. Then … wherever Hideo and Carolyn are.”
“Will you say good-bye before you leave?”
“If I have time.”
Kuala Lumpur smiles and looks at the floor. “See you in a few years, Marco,” she says, but after he’s gone, she lingers at the door.
“Do you think they’ll be happy to see him?” Nerve says.
“Zeke will,” Kuala Lumpur says.
“What about the rest of them? You remember them after Marco was shipped out. Remember the things they said? The way they talked about him?”
“They had money then, Nerve,” Kuala Lumpur says. “Take it away, and what’s left?”
Marco built his house eleven years ago on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse, designing it to look like the top of a stairwell; a nine-by-nine floor, a door, a skylight, one angled wall sloping into the building’s roof. The house is now covered in soot and pigeon guano. Nine winters have eaten the lock; he cracks it with the palm of his hand. A colony of mice has occupied his sleeping mat, oppressing the insects that rode in on them. His two changes of clothes are brittle, ready to dissolve. But he smiles when he sees his weapons, the oil varnishing their blades, the cloth binding them behind glass cabinets. He thought they would be preserved for a month, maybe three, and in the first year of his sentence he imagined how the rust was killing them. By the second year he gave them up for dead, thought this would be a salvage operation. But they shine as though he left days ago, as though they survived across the months of frost and heat sustained by the faith that his hand would return. Marco takes them out one by one, wipes them down, holds them across his lap. It’s the reunion of parent and children.
He waits then until dark, sitting on the roof’s edge cross-legged as the city undulates beneath him, the tarred tops of buildings falling away down the hill to dive into the harbor, heaving up again into rising spikes that push through the cityof houseboats around them. The searchlight on the tower crackles on; other lights follow in patches, in Brooklyn, in Queens. The electric companies are gone; it’s all local now, and some are better at making light than others. The streets sprout homemade poles thick with bundled wires, pirates of power stations, riding the old grid, the arteries of a fossilized giant. Marco catches himself wondering about the water system, those underground canals that drain reservoirs a hundred miles upstate. Who’s running them now? Who will fix them when they break? In the years of the Slick Six, before his incarceration, Marco would have taken for granted that we’re all seconds from mayhem, nail bombs in backpacks, buses careening down hills without brakes, comets curling around the sun to intercept us. He made sure that he could carry everything that mattered to him. When the firestorm comes, he thought, I am ready to run. When the giant alien insects invade, I am prepared to resist. His imprisonment was easy: His cell was bigger than the places where he was used to sleeping. Being one boiler explosion away from drowning didn’t bother him: It was better than how he’d grown up, in slug-ridden barracks ripe with the butchering of enemies, the bouts of dengue, of Cha-gas’ disease, fights with amoebas and tapeworms for dominion of his stomach. But in the bucking and swaying of the prison ship, he began to change. His asceticism uncurled into dissatisfaction, and he began to want. Not things he could name, not yet, but he wanted, and so he started planning, where he would be, who he would see, in the first four months of his freedom, the next six, within two years. It was a good plan, and under the pink Malaysian sky, he entertained himself by chasing down its details. He would land in New York, call the Slick Six together. I’m free, the message would say. Come and join me. But now Zeke is in jail, Johanna and Dayneesha far away, Hideo and Carolyn vanished for years. This world is not made for plans, he thinks, and leaves it at that, or thinks he has. Were he a man who looked back, hemight draw out the irony that the person he once was—the child soldier, the assassin—would have been much more suited to the world as it is; that the person he is was better for the world that was. He might never have seen the inside of the Rosalita. He might turn that over in his head until he laughed or cried. But Marco is a man who does things, believes he can bang his past and future into any shape he wants to, through simple force of will.
He floats over the East River under a black hang glider, past the rusting stacks of the Domino sugar refinery, over the greasy water, the crowd of boats with their sails of salvaged tarps and half-broken solar panels creaking in the night breeze, the captains and merchants calling out what they’ve got in the plastic crates tied down on their deck: some near-soured milk, bottles of aspirin, a coil of telephone cord. T
hey’re looking for codeine, some lemons, a battery-powered radio. The hang glider wings between the darkened buildings, weaving through the shadows of the old projects and over the leaping span of the Manhattan Bridge, until Marco is passing over the tenements of Chinatown, and the windowless hulk of the city jail sketches its pitch corners in the sky, erasing the stars behind it. He spirals down onto the roof, disarms two guards without thinking much about it; but flitting downstairs into the cell blocks, melting into walls and ceilings whenever other guards drift by waving flashlight beams, Marco remembers why he did this kind of work, feels the old surge in his limbs, the lights going on in the primitive parts of his brain. I am a wolf; I am a ghost. He finds Zeke in three minutes, stands in front of his cell and shifts his foot on the floor just so, sending a vibration through the floor that wakes Zeke up in the reverse of the way a perfect drink puts you to sleep. Zeke’s eyes open with lazy purpose, and he does a languid roll in his bed to face the shadow of the man in the hall.
“I was thinking you’d find your way here,” Zeke says. “It’s the—”
Marco puts a finger to his own lips.
“—logical place to start,” Zeke finishes.
The cell door swings in. Zeke has no idea how Marco opened it, but is no longer impressed; Marco has performed too many stunts in front of him, spoiled him for all but miracles and blasphemies, the raising of the dead, cold fusion, a baby star burning on the surface of the Earth.
“How are you?” Marco says.
“Fine, fine. Can’t complain. How was prison?”
“Can’t complain.”
Each of them hears the other smile. They were always the closest to each other in the Slick Six, believed they’d found in each other a soul in kind, though they never talked about it; that would have ruined it.
“I thought you would be tanner,” Zeke says, “being on a boat for a few years and all.”
“You can’t see me. How do you know I’m not tan?”
“You don’t smell tan. People who are tan, they smell different. I think it’s the whiff of cooked flesh, like what a human pot roast would smell like.”
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 4
