The Fugitivities, стр. 7

without giving himself cause to question the possible reasons or portents. The school year was in its last few weeks, and because Jonah still needed to make his way to Red Hook and Octavio was in Manhattan, it was suggested that they meet at the crack of dawn in the Financial District, where they could catch a ferry taxi over to the Brooklyn waterfront. The trip over, Octavio said, would give him all the time he needed to explain himself, and Jonah would get to class on time.

That morning, Jonah got up in the blue darkness and left the apartment while Isaac was showering and took the train to downtown Manhattan. The Fulton Street station hadn’t reopened yet, so he got out one stop higher, grabbed coffee at the first Starbucks he saw, and headed down on foot. A good third of the district was still being excavated and repurposed. Construction workers cried out to one another over the chorus of chattering rock drills. Thunderous loads of concrete barreled into the tumbril of Mack trucks to be carted away. American flags were draped on machine pieces, decals adorning the countless work helmets of men whose booming Jersey voices seemed to hang and ring out longer in the dusty air. Forty stories above him floated the largest flag he’d ever seen, billowing out behind a crane operator, the long boom turning like a clock hand, sweeping across the brightening sky and over the massive hollow below.

Jonah crossed below City Hall in the shadow of the Woolworth Building, mostly east and south again, into the blue veins of New Amsterdam. He toyed with visions of the same streets in the first century of their existence, festooned at their ends with sail and riggings. The disembarked European tribes staking out street corners, scrabbling like dogs trained for the fight. The clank of continental commerce and the groan and shudder of titanic construction. Black dock workers signaling with their eyes and a nod of the head to the runaways not yet secure on the landing. Looking for agents on the path to the North. Those others had walked here, those persons whose cherished names and things had gone misremembered, unrecorded, or just overlooked, trapped in fine layers of archeological sediment, entire cities of the dead murmuring under the blab of the pave, like the African burial ground he had read about, discovered underneath a parking lot.

He imagined the perspective of someone who had worked in these environs for a living, maybe as a customs inspector. The comedy of summing up exhausted voyages, transoceanic in scope and plagued with a litany of troubles, all taken in under a looking glass, done up in fine penmanship, arranged for the benefit of the custom’s house master, who requires neat columns on the page.

One hundred and fifty years later, the commercial ocean recalibrated and danced about him. Somewhere above the sea-level streets, the diversity-trained, indefatigable, and ruthless agents of white-shoe firms huddled in their war rooms, ready to think outside the box, to dismantle and repackage the world at will. In the blink of an eye, a tinkering of margins could send spasms across the globe, tremors registered in cable-news crawl picked up and translated into sports analogies by the screaming bald guy on Mad Money, another indefatigable prognosticator in the wilderness of mirrors.

Jonah passed the lines at the Dunkin’ Donuts where black workers wearing hairnets took orders, looking tired of building someone else’s civilization. He watched Bangladeshis manning their outposts in the early traffic, poking at hot dogs under their blue umbrellas. The storefronts were already open for business: gadget shops with their galaxy of cellular components; luggage vendors; and shoe stores with loafers 20 percent off. Above them, in a tinted haze, rows of high office windows transecting the sky in every direction conveyed a degree of the gray mystery of the general enterprise, as if the whole system generated a sweat, a mist burning off a dark river down which one had already been sold, without the friction of a public auction, and better yet with one’s tacit consent, the human cargo happily surrendered, as though the end of all historical troubles and aspirations, centuries of subsistence, of slavery, of colonialism, of empire, of industrial totalitarianism, had contracted to the dim radiance of this null surface.

Jonah caught sight of Octavio ahead of him as he neared the water. He recognized the gait, the slim frame nimbly jaunting past some corporate art on the corner of Water Street, his presence made noirish by an orange-and-white Con Edison ventricle siphoning off steam that turned lavender, then green, in the traffic light. They went under FDR Drive and Jonah caught up just as they were turning on to the pier. Octavio swiveled and extended an arm in embrace without entirely arresting his motion, as though anticipating and absorbing the momentum of the encounter. They exchanged swift and somewhat severe greetings, before resuming the march down to the water. A foghorn sounded. At the far end of the dock, a water taxi was tying up. It was packed with business types all jockeying for positions at the exit. When the chain rope was pulled aside, they came pouring out in droves like extras from a Buster Keaton film. Octavio looked upon the scene with an enigmatic grin. When the commuters had disembarked, they made their leisurely way onboard.

The sun was hoisting itself over the deck of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They stood at the prow of the water taxi, the spray of the East River prickling Jonah’s shirt as his tie snaked in the snapping wind. The roar of the motor and the flapping gusts nearly covered their voices, so they ended up howling two feet away from each other, like floor traders caught in a five-hundred-point drop. Jonah had to concede the genius. He certainly wouldn’t do it on an everyday basis, but this was a hell of a way to commute to Red Hook for work. Octavio