is waif
THE CONSCIOUS WAIF
“2018 was shit. 2019 will be shit too,” I thought to myself as the Q train bumped along like an antebellum wagon naively bumbling west. I looked up at the face of girl whose knees had been pressed against mine for the last twenty minutes. I shouldn’t have taken the train. They were always packed these days. She was a greasy teenager in too much makeup who I imagined as some dead weight on the Oregon Trail. Trade the Kate Spade for a pioneer’s dress and her iPhone X for a thumb in her mouth. Trade her adolescent ennui for tuberculosis. She wouldn’t have lasted long. Neither would I, for that matter. Didn’t have the drive. No destiny to manifest.
I got off at the Canal St station, which had become a huge anti-septic Shake Shack in the last few months. An L train had hit Mayor Bill de Blasio in December during what was supposed to be an inspection of the Transborough Tunnel prior to the 2019 shutdown. Communication had been strained between the mayor’s office and Albany, so DeBlasio’s team was unaware that just an hour before the inspection was to take place, Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced L trains would “run consistently each day I’m alive” to an audience filled with confetti and various classes from the Albany public school district.
issue 08
“2019 truly would be shit. No one could handle the dampness. The unstoppable rain. The best we could do was make some money off of it.”
And so it was that the tunnel was not closed as supposed, but active and deadly. de Blasio did not die however, but was left in a coma out of which he would never return. Cuomo was arrested the next day, after protests rang out throughout the state. Flyers posted by a group that claimed to be affiliated with Antifa fluttered about downtown in a scene reminiscent to the debris from the fall of the twin towers. The posters were black and white with a photo of Cuomo smiling. His eyes had been blacked out. Red letters crossed the page: “ATTEMPTED MURDERER.” After the arrest and the coma, two new politicians took their seats in a landslide special election. They ran on one unprecedented ticket: Lewis and Brown. “Too long had the state and city been at odds,” they said. And so it was that the office of city and state were consolidated, with Kathryn Lewis running the former and Louis Brown the latter.
They had changed the city. The state too, for that matter. Lewis wore the pants so to speak, and the needs of New York City dictated the needs of the rest of the state. Tax cuts, homeless extermination, extraordinary building development, vertical parks.
There was a huge push to incorporate the new borough of Westchester after long island city residents had been displaced by massive tech industry rise in the area. At first there was pushback from citizens in rural upstate. That was until the subsidies came. It was common knowledge that Brown was at heart a puppet who spent two hundred days of the year in the Philippines with his wife Bustía developing the Asian wing of Shake Shack, of which he was the majority shareholder — hence Canal Street’s transformation into the largest version of this burger restaurant in the world. Beyond the jammed trains and wet socks, the leering children on the subway with dead eyes and USB lollipops in their mouths, the snarling whiffs of soaked garbage and rat fur, and the soon-to-be- exterminated panhandling majority that had risen to sunny California levels in the last year. The massive glass fast food establishment was the most unpleasant leg of my commute.
I held my nose and plugged my ears as I pushed my way through the rush-hour jam of burger eaters and financiers to reach the exit of the joint, trying not to smell the searing of lab-grown meat or hear the clicking of my inflatable stilettos against the linoleum floor.
Ducking under the arm of an overeager employee holding the doors open for me, I caught a glimpse my outfit in the glass: a 2017 season black two-piece suit over a brown turtleneck. The material was dense latex designed to look like leather, treated with a waterproof coat that gave off a sulfuric smell when I sat above the heater on the train. The left sleeve was torn from an eager subway car door, and the there were visible matte patches where the treatment had worn off. It had been designed to handle rain, but not the torrents that had become a daily occurrence since last spring. It had been designed for runways, but not for the concrete runways of Lower Manhattan: the sidewalks, warped from overuse dipping into the canal that Canal Street had become once again - part of a wet and disgusting cycle.
I couldn’t feel the rain. A self-inflicted blow-dry had left my hair in a static puff, which I was sure was wet, but the drops had yet to reach my scalp. Even still, I saw the canal being pelted with raindrops, tiny explosions rippling across the surface like some saturated blitzkrieg. This outfit wasn’t going to last in the downpour.
I pulled out my phone, shielding it with one had while swiping through tens of rideshare apps with the other. Taxis had all but disappeared since Lewis took office. The rains and her friendly outlook towards start-up culture had turned the Big Apple to a Silicon Orange: waxy, waterproof, profitable.
Competition between car services was ripe, but I was late so I just clicked the app with the most attractive icon and confirmed the $40 trip up the road. That’s how you sell a product. Three wet minutes later, a covered speedboat pulled up. I snuggled in next to the other commuters and pressed my nose against the cool window. 2019 truly would be shit. No one could handle the dampness. The unstoppable rain. The best we could do was make some money off of it.
The sea swelled in mid-April of last year, when twin ice caps, both poised for collapsed, disintegrated simultaneously as a 300 ton tanker sideswiped the larger of two glaciers. It was the Titanic in reverse: this time the ship had sunk the iceberg. The tanker itself had been filled with ice – sent from the northern edge of Greenland to collect the frozen commodity and deliver it to the American Eastern seaboard, where a hot, wet spring had just landed. At first tsunami warnings went out: Greenland, Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia. Big waves hit small towns. Arctic water swallowed the shores. We didn’t feel the effects in the south of Canada until a week later, when it was revealed that another ice sheet had been damaged in the glacial collapses and was now sliding into the sea with the alacrity of a man on fire. America shrunk in what felt like days. The edges of the country contracted, retreating shyly into itself. New York City dissolved as rain poured down Water st and Battery Park backed into the ocean. The bull on Wall Street drowned, only his horns poked up through the surface like bronze periscopes.
They said the rain was because of global warming. They said when it gets too hot the rain cycle accelerates and water that had been trapped in its solid state now filled the sea. That water quickly evaporates and descends in a biblical manner across swaths of the globe, including the corner of Canal and Hudson where I worked in a new high-rise
called The Shack, built to have a view of the Hudson, which now lapped against its rusted and barnacled sides. Some guys came to scrape the sides down once a month. Unemployment had dropped 1% since the rain – there was a lot of work to be done. I hurried into the building quickly dismissing the door attendant offering me my complementary breakfast burger.
“Sorry I’m running late.” I speed walked to the elevator hopping deftly over the little cracks where ivy had sprouted out between the foundation. The plants loved the rain. Grey New York was now green. I rode to the fiftieth floor thumbing through fabric samples I meant to look at last night. Instead I’d been face down in Shack Fries having fallen asleep watching a news segment on Cuomo’s life in prison. Sometimes, on these long elevator rides, I’d close my eyes and hear the sound of thundering rain inside my head and wonder if my kids will spend a dry day outside. The elevator doors opened. I’d much rather think about work than kids. I strode through the wide hallways of Fabutant, a fashion design consortium with both public and private ties, trying not to get distracted by sweat soaked interns who’d slept on the office floor because of flooding and L train maintenance. The walls rose high with fogged glass, and the pattered wood floor was littered with dead mallards left over from a company project.
A month ago, the head of the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs had approached out department (textiles) and made it clear that the rain would most likely continue for the next two millennia. With such a foregone forecast, the state thought it was in the people best interest to suspend the efforts to curb global warming and instead focus their energy on making this new water world a healthy and habitable environment. With a small grant, they left us to develop clothing designed to standup to the climate: waterproof, mildew-proof, comfortable, but most importantly: fashionable and marketable. Our leading prototype was a material dubbed Wikker. It was Chrome and insulated with pre-preened duck feathers. The oil harvested from the duck’s preen gland also coated the outside of the material, so as water cascaded over the down it, was wicked with a satisfying ease. The only downside of the project were the duck carcasses that amassed through continuous trials. The government had asked for the project to be kept quiet so all gland harvesting was done in house to avoid the risk of secrets spreading.
I opened the door of my office and was immediately hit by the dusty funk of mildew. I winced, spotting the source: My intern Lawson. His damp shirt was draped awkwardly over his skinny frame, like a body-shy kid who’d opted to keep his clothes on in the pool. His face was twisted in concentration as he wrestled an opulently colored mandarin duck into submission.
“Can’t you do that somewhere else?”
“Sorry, I didn’t think you’d be in this early.”
“I have an early meeting.”
“Sorry – do you mind –“
“Kill the duck outside please, Lawson. You smell horrible.”
“Yeah I tried to dry off on the bathroom, but the hand dryer–“
I gently pushed him out of the office and swiftly closed the door. I lit incense and relished in a breath free from the smell of underpaid staff and dead duck. The rain played in my head for a moment before two coworkers, Ian and Sarah, made their entrance: my meeting.
“What are you wearing?” Sarah blurted out. Both she and Ian were dressed in bone dry Wikker puff jackets, their chrome shine casting glints of rainbow under the fluorescent lights.
“I was trying to make the interns feel less uncomfortable.” I couldn’t remember if that was true or not.
“Oh well that’s.... nice.”
“Can we start?” asked Ian “I’d like to be done before ten. They’re unveiling a new outdoor park by my apartment. The mayor’s speaking, but also my dog hasn’t been outside in like a week. I’d love to bring her.”
“Fine,” I said, and launched into a poorly prepared presentation on the difference between Mallard and Mandarin preening oil. “Obviously the Mandarin is more attractive, but the Mallard is certainly more effective.”
“And how much would it cost to use the Mandarin feathers with the Mallard oil?” Sarah asked.
“A lot.”
“Well price is no object, someone is bound to buy. It’s Manhattan. We can use the runoff Mandarin oil to coat some of the lower cost items.”
At that point, Ian’s patience had worn off and he left with a curt apology. There was no point in Sarah sticking around, so we sat in silence until she got enough sense to get out of my office. I spent the rest of my day eyeing interns and looking at pricing models. I left at four because there was so little to do. I shouldn’t have come in at all today. As I left, I saw Lawson and a few other interns huddled around the staff kitchen (so generously provided to us by Shake Shack) draining the blood of a duck into the sink. A few feet away another group was prepping what looked like some sort of plum sauce. I guess they eat the ducks. I accidentally caught Lawson’s eyes and he smiled at me. I dipped my head and ducked into the elevator.
I didn’t take the subway home this time. Too much work. I called the $80 cab back to Park Slope. The boat sped a long the Hudson and rounded the curve of the island’s bottom. Right there at the edge of what was once Battery Park was a homeless camp – the last one in Manhattan. It was surrounded by a rusted sculpture garden. Tents were pressed up against each other. I recognized the Fabutant design: cheap material, faux duck leather. Nothing compared to the new Wikker, but this stuff was real bottom shelf. I watched one man with water pruned skin, peak his head out of a tent, then doggy paddle across a small river to a bank where a pack of cigarettes had been left to disintegrate. I was curious to see how he’d manage to light it in this weather but got distracted by an alert coming from the water taxi’s “inflight entertainment system”: Former Governor Andrew Cuomo had been stabbed to death in prison. The L train would shut down tomorrow.