The Merchants of Zion (21 page)

After the barbecue we'll kick off the really really free market. There is no swapping, or bartering, or selling here. This is the future: an alternative, gift based economy where people take what they need and leave behind what they don't. Late capitalism produces more in a day than we can consume in a lifetime, and we want to see all of that extra, perfectly good stuff put to good use instead of taking up space in landfills and contributing to global climate change.

Feel free to bring any vegan/vegetarian food like you, potluck style! Also, clothing and hygiene products are sorely needed. BRING DRUMS!

9. Chicago

I arrived at Penn Station on Monday just before seven, toting a red canvas suitcase my mother had given me for our final Christmas together. It was ragged and beat to shit, but until it disintegrated it was coming with me on every trip. Helen and Elly were running late, and I went outside and smoked my sole remaining cigarette. It would be my last one ever. Since I was going to be with Elly almost every waking moment for the next seven days, it seemed a good time to quit once and for all. Cold turkey, not the slow cutting back from one a day to one every other day to one a week that always ended with me drinking and smoking with strangers at a bar or concert. There would be no drinking this week—except on the fourth of July, which I was spending with a college friend pursuing his PhD in Chicago—and hence only a scant twenty-four hours to exacerbate my weak discipline and poor judgment.

I smoked it down until the smoldering paper burned my fingers. Before, I'd been feeling sluggish and sticky like a sack of tar, but the nicotine buzz had my brain juices flowing. Next: caffeine. I entered a nearby coffee shop, empty inside except for a large black woman behind the counter. I ordered a medium—as I insisted when asked if I meant tall. Her name was Beverly, according to the name tag hanging crooked off one breast, and her unpleasant demeanor proved immune to my winningest smile.

She gave me my coffee. A laminated sign reading “We pay rent too!” was taped to the serving counter, and Beverly muttered when I tipped her zero dollars and zero cents. I thanked her regardless—ignoring her blatant rudeness—and sat down at a counter looking out on the street. When I sipped my coffee my stomach grumbled; last night I'd eaten two cans of green beans for dinner. James had said he would buy groceries, but he wasn't returning from his business trip upstate until the afternoon and I hadn't wanted to buy food for him to plunder while I was gone. And the bodega on the corner had been closed.

I returned to the counter and bought a chocolate-chip cookie to stave off the hunger. Once again I tipped her zero dollars and zero cents. It was hard not to smirk; I felt bad for her, trapped in this sucky job that made her wake up before dawn to deal with assholes like me and, I was certain, assholes much worse. For all those reasons and more I didn't begrudge her the unpleasant demeanor, but I bristled at the injustice of her opprobrium. None of it was my fault, but that didn't prevent her from hating me for it. She was stuck on the level of simple antagonism between server and customer interfacing, but for me the absurdity of it all was too amusing; we were no more than two peasants hedged in by forces beyond our control, glaring at each other through gaps in the
bocage
.

The cookie was rock hard, and I broke it into pieces to dip into my coffee like biscotti. I doubted this place received fresh baked good every day; there was probably a freezer in the back with their yearly supply.

I'd seen dueling street vendors outside selling coffee for half what I'd paid, but I was on the precipice of a big trip—and I'd quit smoking—and deserved the indulgence.

Dedicated coffee shops had been another victim of the Panic, and could only be found in parts of the city as dinosauric as Midtown. During my first year of college there had been one on every block, and by the time I'd graduated it had swelled to two. I 'd had a favorite street corner where I could stand and see a dozen different shops at once. It had been coffee mania.

But all good things—things like subprime student loans, employee tranches, and space tourism—must come to an end, and the coffee bubble popped. One store shuttered after another, and with the single month's macchiato budget of a status obsessed ladder climber I could have transformed my kitchen into the laboratory of a chemist with a glass fetish.

Several trains must have arrived at the same time, as a torrent of people suddenly poured forth from the station entrance. Business men and women from Long Island, retail workers from New Jersey, and VP's from Connecticut flooded from the station. Several straggled inside the coffee shop. Beverly served them with the same contempt she'd shown me, which made me feel better. Between seven and seven fifteen, I counted a total of nine customers. The lines at the street vendors' carts threatened to stretch around the block.

A car stopped at the curb and Helen got out, holding Elly's hand and a pink, child-sized suitcase with the designer's logo patterned in burgundy. Elly was wearing pajamas and her yellow bumblebee backpack. She yawned and rubbed her eyes. Helen led her into the coffee shop.

Elly climbed onto a stool next to me. Helen went to order.

“You excited, Ells Bells?” I asked.

“You bet! It's gonna be an adventure.”

“I hope not. Did you bring anything to do on the train?”

“Yeah, look at the present Daddy gave me.” She unzipped her backpack and pulled out a sleek tablet. A Zephyr. “The Size of Perfection, the Weight of the Wind.” Their advertisements were all over. The thing was as thick as a credit card, flexible as a sheet of paper, and supposedly indestructible. It wasn't cheap.

“You know what else he did for me?”

“No, what?”

“He put all of 
Eponymals
 on it so I can watch them on the train. Every single one ever.”

“How thoughtful of him.” I hated that show.

“You can watch them with me too if you want. We can share,” she added.

“Did you get any new books?” She had: loaded on the tablet was the newest 
The Confectioner's Tales
—subtitled 
The Warlock in the Attic—
and two children's science books. One was about black holes, quasars, and other astronomical phenomena. The other was about human genetics.

“Did you know that Mr. Mendel discovered genes and for a hundred years nobody listened to him? That's not even fair.”

“No it's not.”

“But America finally did. The Soviet Union had really dumb ideas about it—” she paused as Helen placed a cup in front of her.

“Thank you Mommy. What is it?”

“Hot chocolate, dear. Be careful not to burn yourself.” Elly picked it up with both hands and set it down between small gulps.

“The barista is so unfriendly. I wonder what's wrong with her,” she said, sitting down on the other side of me. “How have you been?” she asked.

“I'm fine.” James, Ruth, Mary—my life had seen more upheaval in the past month than in the past two years. This vacation was an opportunity to put some distance between myself and them, to allow me to reflect on the situation objectively. “How're you?”

“Oh my God, trying to get this new site off the ground is killing me. We're having a launch party on Friday. I can't remember the last time I was this stressed. And Elly's been a handful; she's been talking non-stop. She's so excited about the trip.”

“Yeah I can tell,” I said, turning to Elly and winking. “We'll have a good time, won't we?”

“Mhm.”

“I bet you can't wait to see Gramps and Grams.”

“I can barely stand it.”

Helen handed me a cloth bag with a drawstring containing allergy medicine, children's painkillers, antibiotic ointment, eye drops, and more, and reminded me that Elly was to be in bed by nine-o'-clock every night at the latest—no matter what her grandparents might think. Also, she could have sweets, but not too many, as Helen had read an article linking even minor sugar consumption in children to increased risk of heart failure later in life. I would have to sleep on the couch since her grandparents only had one spare bedroom, which I assured her was no problem at all. Except for the Fourth of July, which I had off, I was to be at Elly's side every moment (“No chasing Chicago girls.”). She gave me a disposable phone pre-programmed with a list of numbers I was to call if anything went wrong (“I also emailed the numbers to you, and texted them, in case you lose the phone.”). On top of her number, Mr. Felkin's, and their house phone, I had both her grandparents' numbers, their home phone, two friends of hers in Chicago (“Do 
not
 hesitate to call them”), her work phone, Mr. Felkin's work phone, and the number for the local branch of her bank in case of financial problems—or any problems with the authorities in general.

Her level of preparation astounded me; I'd packed my suitcase in about fifteen minutes and texted Edward that I was visiting him on the fourth. Her organizational skills must be the root cause of her success, and I ruefully realized I'd never be able to ascend the way she had given the same circumstances—or even with those more forgiving. And yet here she was, placing her trust in me to take care of her kid.

We left the coffee shop and pushed our way through the morning rush. The train was waiting on the platform and at the far end the conductor—a middle-aged black woman—directed passengers to their respective cars.

“Did you see that I mailed you the tickets,” she asked?

“Yes,” I lied.

“Bye honey,” she said, swooping down to squeeze Elly. “Behave yourself. And don't give Cliff any trouble.”

“I won't Mommy.”

“You be careful too,” she said to me.

“I will Helen. I'll take care of Elly. Try not to worry about us too much.”

“Be sure to call every day and check in.”

“Of course.”

Helen watched us board the train. I brought up Elly's ticket on my phone so she could present it to the conductor—it felt like a suitable lesson in responsibility.

“I'm visiting Gramps and Grams,” Elly said.

“Are you excited?” the conductor asked, smiling warmly.

“Yeah!”

“If you're gonna visit them, I need that ticket dear.” The conductor stooped down and Elly showed it to her, though with a flicker of trepidation. Was it because the woman was black? I felt guilty at the thought, and doubted Elly was old enough to see the world in that way. It was, of course, because this woman—a stranger, after all—had descended from the troposphere of the adult world. And my mind jumped immediately to race. I should've been nicer to Beverly. Maybe she thought I'd acted that way because I was racist, that my badly suppressed smirk was an outward expression of inward prejudice. But if I'd been nicer it would've been phony on account of her being black and me being a white person sensitive to accusations of bigotry. The ideal situation would be for me to treat everyone with kindness and respect, so no one would confuse me being an asshole with me being racist. However, if she had been white would I actually have treated her the same way? After all, I saw Elly's response to the conductor through my own racialized lens—so maybe I was unconsciously racist and had no recourse. And those teenagers at the Cock-a-Doodle Chicken, who'd ended their shifts late because of Ruth and I...

“Sir?”

“Huh?”

“Your ticket.”

“Oh right, sorry.” I flashed a smile that I hoped said I was apologetic and not a guilty white supremacist.

I brought it up on my phone and she scanned it. “Backmost car, all the way to the right.”

* * *

Six hours later Elly was slumped against my arm while I watched the countryside pass by. Helen had booked us a sleeping car with a bunkbed and a small, dingy couch. Elly's Zephyr lay at her feet, next to the empty wrapper of a cereal bar plucked from a hemp bag Helen had filled with goodies for us country crossing carpetbaggers.

The train slowed and came to a stop. My ubiquitous companion, the toneless, feminine voice, spoke from a speaker in the top corner of the room: “We're experiencing a slight delay. We thank you for your patience.”

Thirty minutes later we hadn't moved an inch. We were parked outside a Pennsylvania farm, next to a field of corn aligned in neat rows. Their stalks were monstrous—eight feet tall at the end of June—but pink and purple speckled fungi burst from over half the unshucked ears.

Workers in drab gray clothes shuffled in between the rows. They carried bulky black backpacks, attached to which were long metal tubes with showerheads affixed at the end.

They were beneficiaries of Valley Forge, the most ambitious anti-homelessness and anti-poverty program in living memory. After the Panic, the once merely impoverished had been forced from their homes in droves. They'd swarmed the cities and the suburbs to panhandle, pick through trash, and get by in other, less savory ways.

In response, the government outlawed vagrancy. It had been framed as an issue of morality, that for a nation to allow homelessness in the twenty-first century was like a nation allowing slavery in the twentieth. The right to employment and housing was as basic as the right to a free press, and the state would protect those rights if the free market couldn't. The modern day Hoovervilles springing up around the country were dismantled, their residents relocated to flyover country and provided with jobs in complexes run by a variety of private contractors who slowly coalesced under the umbrella of Liberty Bell.

The policy had been a resounding success and a public relations coup. The working poor still needed for menial labor stayed behind, but the bums were shipped off—presumably to a better life. I'd seen the award-winning Common Sense story about some poor, gay teenager, abused by his parents and thrown on the street who, with the help of Valley Forge, was able to rejoin society with a new sense of self-sufficiency and valuable job skills. Even Robespierre and the other Jacobins begrudgingly admitted the program's virtues. And those homeless who couldn't be rehabilitated: the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the hopeless junkies? Out of sight, out of mind, vague rumors of pharmaceutical and surgical behavior modification notwithstanding.