Blackfish City(28)
A woman stood before him. Flickering, so that at first he thought she was a snow projection, but no—the projection was passing through her, a kraken now, dappling her body and then departing. Tall and beautiful, dark skin. Bald. Well into her fifties. Wearing clothes that were way too thin for the Qaanaaq cold. Like hospital robes. She stared at him. Smiling, maybe, but maybe not.
A shuttle bark disgorged passengers. They climbed up onto the Arm, passed between him and the woman, and when they were gone so was she.
A breaks vision? Fill shivered, licked his lips, tasted blood again. Resolved to bring the woman up, during his daily talk with Barron. Resolved not to. “Isn’t it funny?” he said, blundering into it, because if there was one skill glib gay boys learned it was how to ease archly into a fraught topic. “I realized I know almost nothing about you! Most of my friends can find their family histories in the cloud, but you—shareholder erasure! Our family name is a great big digital void. Which can’t have been cheap, by the way.”
Grandfather laughed. “So it’s an oral history project you’re working on.”
“Something like that. I know we’re from New York. How did we . . .”
“Get out? Strike it rich?”
“I have to assume that we were at least a little rich from the start.”
“Your father never wanted to know.” A scowl, at the past, at the grid they stood on. “When he was little, maybe. He wanted the fairy tale. The movie version. But as a grown-up? Ignorance is bliss.”
Fill blinked away the mention of his father, the tears that threatened to rise to the surface. “Is it that bad?”
“No one survived without getting their hands at least a little filthy. But I think you are strong enough for the truth. You’re stronger than he was.”
“I’m not,” Fill said, the notion so ridiculous he had to laugh. “I’ve never done a goddamn thing. Like, period.”
“You are. I’ve always seen it in you. The fact that it’s never been put to the test doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“That’s sweet of you to say,” Fill said, unconvinced. “And my father? You never saw it in him?”
“Your father was a good boy. But he was not strong.”
Images arrived unbidden. His father, departing for Heilongjiang Province to cover the Famine Migration. The camera equipment he let Fill inventory. “Mom always said he was brave. To go to those places. To take those pictures.”
“Your mother wouldn’t know strength if it kissed her on the cheek,” Grandfather said. “If you’ll pardon my saying so. Doing something dangerous and foolish is the opposite of strength.”
“What is strength?” Fill asked, feeling that they were close to it now, the Thing, the Secret, the story his father hadn’t wanted to know.
“I worked for a security firm. Buildings and events. Simple stuff: hire the guards and send them to the place that needed guarding. But these were insane times. The Real Estate Riots were in full swing—you’ve heard of them, surely? About to evolve into the Real Estate Wars. I believed that security was about more than muscle. I talked the owner of the company into creating a new division, letting me lead it. Headhunting some of the biggest names in New York public relations. Intelligence, I called it. Because security wasn’t about keeping bad guys out anymore—it was about keeping the bad guys from seizing what was yours. Squatter gangs, politicians susceptible to pressure, ready to use eminent domain to take property away and give it to the poor.”
Fill tried hard to keep his eyes from glazing over.
“My unit went into neighborhoods, put agents in masquerading as tenants, assessed the situation, identified fault lines. Divisions between people. Once you know how to whip people up, they’ll do all the work for you.”
“What kind of work?”
“My specialty was religion. Fundamentalists, mostly. There’s a lot of them—all sorts, though Christians were the easiest. Pretty soon we had dozens of contracts from all the biggest real estate developers. The manufacture and strategic deployment of mass idiocy, I told people. Practically put it on my business card.”
Business cards—Fill had heard of those.
“Manufacture an outrage. Provide a target. Identify the people whom people listen to, the pastors or the PTA moms, and pay a couple of them to make a stink. I mostly just copied what was happening in politics. When we went national, I acquired several groups that had run election campaigns.”
Grandfather paused, watching Fill’s face. Waiting for a response. Fill was fairly sure he’d missed something. Sea lions clapped the rotting wood of their piers.
“A lot of people died, Fill.”
“Ah.”
“Some scenes played out, in Harlem and the Lower East Side, that . . . well, let’s just say your father would have found quite a lot to photograph there. A smaller scale, but easily rivaling anything that came out of Calcutta. I regret it now, but what can you do? And you and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. All my work, all over North America—none of that could have happened without New York.”
Fill knew all about this. City Without a Map had taught him.
Remembered smoke blackens the sky. The shouts of long-dead citizens ring out in the street. Explosions: tanks firing on squatter strongholds; high-class cultural events bombed by tenant army activists.