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If you want to stop a man, don’t take everything from him.
You can’t stop a man who has nothing to lose.
When I was a kid—thirteen, fourteen, something like that, I remember my dad taking me into the city from upstate where I was born, to see the grand opening of the Infinity Line. People had already started calling it the “iLine” like some throwback to gadgets that were new when my dad was my age. The iLine did everything the PR said it would do—but I remember being excited to see the gleaming white and silver tubes, high above New York City, as we rode the glass elevator up along side the Tower Hub. It looked like something descended from heaven and promised to revolutionize transit by not only being green—but by being one-hundred-percent efficient. Something about the magnets, my dad had said.
Minutes later, because that’s how long it took to reach the top, my dad held my hand as we stepped out on the dedication platform. That’s when I first saw him…
Reginald Breit—the press called him the King of all Mass Transit. Or at least all the web pundits said that’s what they’d call him if the iLine was a success. They had no idea.
The King of all Mass Transit was handsome enough guy, but not too perfect. He was white, but in an ethnically vague way. He was likeable by more people that way. It’s as though his very genes had determined the path he’d take.
He wore a gray suit. His hair looked recently cut. His face clean-shaven. In my memory, everyone else on the elevated stage, at the far end of the dedication platform from where Dad and I had entered, was older, less attractive, not as well dressed and generally unattractive next to the smiling Reg Breit.
Years later, I’d look at photos on the web of the event and wonder just where my childhood mind was coming from back then—all of the other men and women on the stage with him were just as presentable as Breit himself. But as a boy, I was blown away.
I remember him talking—delivering some big speech. I was short—couldn’t hear and could only see between two shoulders in front of me if I craned my neck. I remember his fist in the air. I remember the last thing he said before his words were swallowed by the crowd’s excitement.
“Together, we will bring back New York City!”
I asked my father what he had meant.
“That man just changed the world!” Dad said, more enthusiastically than I’d ever seen him (to this day).
From that point on, I had trusted Breit as I trusted any authority figure. Years later, when I finished up journalism school and headed west to intern at an LA-based website, I saw the ripples in my own netstreams talking about how Breit was thinking about running for mayor of New York.
I smiled and thought, of course! He’s perfect!
He ended up not running that year, but he would before I moved back east fifteen years later. In fact, by the time I got back, he had been in office for nearly two terms.
I followed his career even after my first job as a cub reporter for that website had vanished underneath my feet. Even though I couldn’t find a job in LA thanks to the economy, news was in my blood. While I never saw myself moving back, you can’t ever really leave New York.
I laughed at the easy brilliance of Breit’s campaign slogan, written as though in response to a mispronunciation of his last name but ending up a description of his ideas for New York’s future: “Yes, It’s Breit.”
For his second term’s campaign, he went with “The Future is Still Breit.”
Of course, the few web pundits who didn’t like him tried to play off the slogan with comebacks like “Of course, the future is bright! It’s so damn dark now!” or “Anybody got a flashlight for right now?”
On the phone with Dad, I remember him saying something about how odd it was that Breit was running for a second term. The guy was a businessman—why was he in politics at all when he could make so much more money focusing on his own businesses.
“Maybe he just cares about New York,” I said. He laughed and countered, “Spoken like a true Left=Coaster!”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody does anything because they care—didn’t they teach you anything at reporter school?”
I smirked at his insinuation that I wasn’t cynical. “Dad, I have friends who live in the city and they say the guy’s done a good job.”
“Meh, you’re an Angeleno, how much can you know about it?”
“Dad, you’ve been living in Hokkaido for how long now? Besides, Mom hasn’t said anything bad about him.”
“Your mother was always too busy with her work to follow politics—hell, we all are.”
Dad was a novelist. He had time to follow news because it was part of his work, even though he was supposed to have retired to a condo in Japan.
“I’m telling you, Jim, a healthy dose of cynicism will help you’re writing, get you back on track.”
“Uh-huh.” He could hear the smirk in my voice and told me so. We changed the subject rather than get into a fight. Things were always good between me and dad so long as we didn’t talk about work or Mom.
I didn’t see why he felt the need to be as cynical as he claimed to be. New York’s economy had been on the rise again, just like Breit had promised all those years ago. Now it was happening directly under his leadership.
He had pushed for new, greener standards for the city, banning all internal-combustion engine-based vehicles on the island of Manhattan. He’d expanded Central Park by a block on either side and gotten the state legislature to pass funding for a desalination plant so the city wouldn’t have to bring in it’s water from upstate any more.
Some how he got funds to improve the levees against rising sea levels and was still directly involved in the management and technical upgrades of the iLine. He had even announced that the Infinity Line had become so efficient that it had been feeding surplus energy back into the grid for years.
“You have noticed your electric bills going down, haven’t you?” he asked at a campaign rally a few days before the election. In hindsight, that was pretty obviously contrived. If the iLine had been feeding power back into the grid, why hadn’t he announced that sooner?
It was the first chink in the armor I’d constructed around him when I was boy.
Needless to say, he won a second term by a landslide. The morning I woke up to the news, I remember asking my wife who his competitor had been. She couldn’t recall, either.
Two years later, we were on our way east. I hadn’t even thought of Breit much as I had become distracted with preparations for the move. I underwent a bit of a personal policy shift in those years—giving up on the hopes and dreams that brought me to California in the first place. My wife and I had decided that it was time to move east, for her career and for me to have a new start… at what, I wasn’t sure.
So the time was spent liquidating much of our personal belongings and trying to find a new home via the web. People talk about those VR walkthroughs, but it’s just not like being there. In the end, we decided to stay with the cousin of my wife’s who had offered us a place until we found our own.
Then, in a warm afternoon in July—the twenty-first—we were in the middle of packing when I felt my phone buzz in my back jeans pocket. I finished taping a box closed, placed the roll down, withdrew my phone and tapped the screen. The screen lit up and I could see a status update from Mom. “The Tower Hub…OMG, it’s been hit…”
I tapped the screen again and immediately accessed my news stream. “Honey?”
“What?” my wife called from the bed room.
“Check your stream,” I said, my stomach sinking as I saw the updates filling my phone’s display and then causing it to scroll to keep up with them. They all repeated the same thing, or variations thereof: “The Tower Hub’s been hit!”
“There’s all this smoke coming up! What happened??” one update asked.
“Does anyone have a pic yet? Some video?” another asked.
“Yeah, here’s a vid.” the update was hotlinked. I held my finger over the words without touching the screen.
“Jim! Oh my God!” Andrea, dashed in and hugged me as her phone fell onto the couch. On the display I could see the Tower Hub—the castle-like focal point of the iLine—the massive successor to the hundred-plus-year-old Grand Central Station… with smoke billowing from it…
I held up my phone and switched over to the wall-screen remote. I tapped it, causing the image of the disaster to appear on our 37-inch wall display. We watched in disbelief as I saw the same dedication platform I’d stood on with my father all those years ago enveloped in flames.
The Tower Hub is the center of the iLine. Shaped like a big “eight,” where the tracks crossed was where the Tower Hub jutted upward.
After that, we decided to put the move on hold for a few more months. Ande had gotten some work in LA and since I hadn’t gotten work anywhere, we hung didn’t move until the following spring.
While the city was paralyzed for several weeks while repairs to the iLine were rushed through, generally things went on as normal. International trade hadn’t stopped for more than a week and thanks to the loss of energy from the iLine, New Jersey and the state government both passed emergency legislation to keep electricity flowing through the island of Manhattan.
By the time we got there in May the Infinity Line looked like it hadn’t even missed a day since I stood on that dedication platform holding my father’s hand. The plane that had crashed into the tower hadn’t been hijacked by terrorists—its pilot had simply lost control. The pilot survived for eight months in a coma. The media covered it daily—no, hourly.
When he finally did pass, it was national news. He was somehow elevated to the level of a hero. This was probably because he, himself, had been a New Yorker.
Mayor Breit had said the fact that the pilot had been one of our own meant that he was all the more sad to have lost three-hundred-twenty-six of his citizens that day.
“Of course, I believe in miracles,” he said at a press conference in the days following the pilot’s death. “Thanks to the number of those lost in the disaster of 721 being as small as it is, I am reminded that in this city, miracles can and do happen. It’s with a heavy heart and this spirit in mind that I formally announce my candidacy for a third term of Mayor of New York City.”
I had just finished arranging my vintage set of dictionaries when I heard his words over the audio stream.
I stood there for a moment and played Breit’s words over in my mind until my own words rose from my throat: “A third term?”
End of Chapter 1
