Kim Robinson - New York 2140

The square was the first place in America where a nude statue was exhibited in public, a Diana. She was placed on top of Stanford White’s tower, so she was in fact 250 feet above the prying eyes of her appreciators, but still. They brought telescopes. Possibly the start of a lively New York tradition of boosted viewing of naked neighbors. Now she’s in a museum in Philadelphia. In those same years the Park Avenue Hotel bar featured one of the most eye-poppingly nude paintings of the Belle Epoque, bunch of hot nymphs about to use a worried-looking satyr; that painting now resides in a museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Madison Square was sex central in those years!

It was also in Madison Square that the first lit Christmas tree was erected for the public’s enjoyment. During World War II the Christmas trees were left dark, and the square was said to feel like it had reverted to primeval forest. It doesn’t take much in New York. The square was also the first place where an electric advertising sign was put up, advertising from the prow of the Flatiron some ocean resort, and later the New York Times, with its boast that it always included all the news that fit.

The Flatiron Building was the first flatiron-shaped skyscraper in the city, and the tallest building in the world for a year or two. It also created the windiest place in town at its north end, people said, and men liked to gather there to, yes, watch ladies’ dresses get tossed up like Marilyn Monroe’s over that subway grate. Two cops were assigned to patrol this lascivious intersection and chase men away. Definitely a piece of work, the Flatiron, a great shape for Alfred Stieglitz to photograph, almost as great a shape as Georgia O’Keeffe. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had their studio on the north side of the square.

And baseball was invented in Madison Square! So, okay: holy ground. Bethlehem get outta here!

The first French Impressionist show in America? Sure. The first gaslit streetlamps? You guessed it. The first electric streetlights? Ditto. These latter were at first “sun towers” with six thousand candlepower each, visible from sixteen miles away in the Orange Mountains. People had to wear sunglasses to stand under them without being blinded, and there were complaints that in their light human flesh looked distinctly dead. Edison himself had to be brought in to figure out how to dial them down.

The first bacino aquaculture pens in the city? Sure, right here, first pen being installed in 2121. Also the first multistory boathouse, installed in the old Met tower when they renovated it for residential after the First Pulse. A very popular idea, immediately imitated all over the drowned zone.

By now it’s clear that Madison Square has been the most amazing square in this amazing city, yes? A kind of magical omphalos of history, the place where all the ley lines of culture intersect or emanate from, making it a power spot beyond all power spots! But no. Not at all. In fact it’s a perfectly ordinary New York square, mediocre in all respects, with many of the other squares actually much more famous, and able to rack up similarly impressive lists of firsts, famous residents, and odd happenstances. Union Square, Washington Square, Tompkins Square, Battery Park, they are all bursting with famous though forgotten historical trivia. Aside from being the birthplace of baseball, admittedly a sacred event on a par with the Big Bang, Madison Square’s specialness is just the result of New York being that way everywhere. Stick your finger on your little tourist map and wherever it lands, amazing things will have happened. The ghosts will rise up through the manhole covers like steam on a cold morning, telling you their stories with the same boring maniacal ancient-mariner intensity that any New Yorker manifests if they start talking about history. Don’t get them started! Because a New Yorker interested in the history of New York is by definition a lunatic, going against the tide, swimming or rowing upstream against the press of his fellow citizens, all of whom don’t give a shit about this past stuff. So what? History is bunk, as the famous anti-Semite moron Henry Ford quipped, and although many New Yorkers would spit on Ford’s grave if they knew his story, they don’t. In this they are fellow spirits with the stupendous dimwit himself. Keep your eye on the ball, which is coming in from the future. Stay focused on either the scam that is or the scam to come, or you are toast, my friend, and the city will eat your lunch.

Gen Octaviasdottir usually woke at sunrise. Her apartment windows faced east from the twentieth floor, and she often got up in a blaze of light over Brooklyn, a magnesium glare off the clutter on the water. It always looked as if something glorious could happen.

In that sense every day was a little disappointment. Not much glory out there. But on this morning, as most of them, she was willing to try again. Hold the line! as a handwritten birthday card announced over her bathroom mirror, along with a few other messages and images left by her father for her mother: Carpe Diem/Carpe Noctum. Big Blue. A painting of a tiger couple. Another of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A photo of a statue of a pharaoh and his sister/wife, which Gen’s father had thought looked like him and Gen’s mom. As they almost did.

Gen kept meaning to take all these down, they were dusty, but she never got around to it. Her parents had had a good marriage, but Gen’s one youthful attempt had failed badly, and after that she had let the NYPD occupy her time. Following her father’s death she had taken care of her mother, until she too passed; and that was that. Here she was, another day. She wouldn’t have thought it would turn out this way.

Down to the dining room for breakfast with Charlotte Armstrong. Funny how you could live in a building for years and never meet someone just a floor away. Of course that was New York. Talk to one person and then the next, find out if they were someone you could talk to. It was one of the things she liked about her job. So many stories. Even if most of them included a crime. It was always possible she could make things better, for someone anyway. For the survivors. Anyway it was interesting. A set of puzzles.

She got to the dining hall at the same time Charlotte did, both right on time. They commented on this as they got in the line for bread and scramblies, then got their coffee and sat down. Charlotte took her coffee white. People came to look like their habits.

“So did your assistant find out anything about our missing guys?” Charlotte asked after they sat down. Not one for small talk.

Gen nodded and pulled out her pad. “He sent me some stuff. It’s kind of interesting, maybe,” she said, and tapped up the note from Olmstead. “They work in finance, as you said. They’re maybe what the industry calls quants, because they did coding and systems design.”

“They were mathematicians?”

“I’m told finance doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it’s more just advanced programming, maybe. Ralph Muttchopf did his graduate degree in computer science. Jeffrey Rosen had a degree in philosophy, and he worked as a congressional staffer for the Senate Finance Committee about fifteen years ago. So they weren’t the typical quants.”

“Or maybe they were, if it isn’t a pure math thing.”

“Right. Anyway, couple things about Rosen that my sergeant found—while he was working for Senate finance, he recused himself while they were investigating some kind of systemic insider trading, because a cousin of his was head of one of the Wall Street firms involved.”