UnDivided (Unwind Dystology 4)

“Yeah, I’m here. Are we ready?”

“Ready? We’ve been waiting here twiddling our thumbs. Start hoisting already!”

“Starting the hoist. Clear the area around the payload.”

“The arm’s clear. I’ll alert the media.”

Frank chuckles—because the foreman isn’t making a joke; he is literally alerting the media. They’re gathered around Liberty Island, cameras aimed upward at the statue, which is ensconced in construction scaffolding. It may be a momentous occasion to them, but to a crane operator, it’s just another job.

What the hell is my daughter thinking? How could she date such an obvious loser? She’s barely fourteen; what business does a fourteen-year-old from Queens have dating a sixteen-year-old delinquent from the Bronx?

“He’s got a good heart,” she tells me.

Fine. So rip it out and put it into another kid more deserving of her attention.

The cables go taut, and the new arm shifts on the barge, slowly, smoothly. This is not a job accomplished with cavalier speed. That’s the best way to wind up with snapped cables, dead coworkers, and lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. The arm begins to rise, as if being levitated by a magician. He mans the crane’s controls, feeling the cables attached to the massive unwieldy object as if they’re his own sinews and the crane itself is just an extension of his body.

The boyfriend is not too old to be unwound. Not yet. That freaking tool won’t be seventeen for at least a few months. And then if they repeal the Cap-17 law, there’s a whole year of potential unwinding tacked on to his miserable life. The problem is, the lowlife’s parents won’t do it. Of course they won’t! They’re probably druggies or worse. No supervision, no boundaries. If you don’t raise a kid right, it turns into a weed that’s gotta be torn out. The whole damn thing is their fault!

“Frank! Jesus! What’s going on up there? Keep it steady!”

“I’m on it. It’s the wind.”

“So compensate! The last thing we need is the freaking arm lying crushed at the freaking base of the statue like a dead freaking whale!”

There are cameras mounted on the crane, on the ground, and on the statue itself to monitor the arm as it rises, but the monitors don’t tell as clear a story as actually seeing the thing. Frank leans to the side, looking out of the huge glass windows of the sky crane, to see the arm twisting and torquing in the wind below. He adjusts the tension on the cables, like fiddling with a pair of venetian blinds, to get the torch and hand to take on a forty-five-degree angle. Now it rises with the torch slightly higher than the rest of the arm, and at this angle it catches the wind differently, rising more steadily. In a minute, it has risen past the height of the statue’s base. Now he pulls it in, the cable dolly bringing it closer to the statue.

Breed a bum to a bum, you get a bum. What goes for horse racing goes for humans as well. The loser’s parents are probably too stoned to even sign an unwind order. Sometimes these things can’t be left to the parents. Especially when those parents shoulda been unwound themselves before they started to breed. It’s good that they’re talking about mandatory unwinding of juvenile undesirables. If the law passes, maybe the problem will take care of itself. And if it doesn’t, I’ve got a cousin who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who could put me in touch with a parts pirate. Someone who’ll come in, take the kid, and be done with it. The thing is, I know I don’t have the guts to make the call.

“It’s looking pretty from down here. How’s it hanging, Frank?” And the foreman laughs. “How’s it hanging!” Probably didn’t even notice his own joke until after he said it.

“I could use a hand,” Frank tells him, and the foreman laughs some more. Frank increases the angle to eighty degrees. The torch is almost upright now as it dangles from multiple sets of cables on the massive crane.

Without her right arm, the statue’s been looking a bit like the Venus de Milo. Sullen and vaguely impotent. Not the vision of liberty the early immigrants saw before disembarking at nearby Ellis Island—but the original arm had to go. The copper shell and interior framework of the torch arm were simply too heavy and had grown too weak over the years. Rather than allowing the arm to succumb to metal fatigue in one storm or another, it was decided to replace the torch and arm with a lighter, sturdier alloy. Aluminum/titanium. Something like that. Only problem is that the replacement arm is silver-gray, not pale green. Supposedly, the brainiacs in the design office have a plan to paint it to match the rest of the statue, but that’s not Frank’s problem.

No, the snotbag dating my daughter is my problem. And my wife yells at me, like it’s my fault. Like I can do something about it.

“Ya shoulda never let her have so much freedom, Frank. And what if she gets pregnant? What then?”

What? She’ll stork it, that’s what. Learn her lesson the hard way. Or she’ll marry the imbecile. It’s all the stuff of nightmares.

“Easy now!” calls the foreman. “Just kiss it into place, Frank.”

Now he engages the laser guidance system and sits back. It’s out of his hands now. Like the docking of a spacecraft, it’s all computerized down to the millimeter with surgical precision. He watches on various screens as the arm docks into the notches cut into the copper folds of Miss Liberty’s gown, with a deep but gentle clank, and a vibration he can feel in his bones. Applause from the whole construction crew.

Now the assembly team takes over—a group of shipbuilders—because at this stage, fastening the arm is more like attaching the bow of a ship. There’ll be a week of welding, brazing, and molecular bonding to get the steel and copper to fuse to the new alloy. Again, not his problem. Tomorrow he’s back to work on a luxury high-rise on the Upper West Side. A regular sky jockey running a simple crane, lifting I beams to the eighty-eighth floor. Low profile, low stress.

Now if he can only get rid of his daughter’s imbecile boyfriend and lower the stress at home, he’ll be in business.

8 • Cam

Camus Comprix is a very happy young man. Yet not.

Camus is a highly driven young man. But he’s not certain he’s the one driving.

He sits alone on a balcony overlooking the ocean, high on a Molokai bluff, pondering his existence, which began a

few short months ago. Prior to that he was part of ninety-nine other kids, although he suspects the number is greater. Ninety-nine is a nice alliterative number. Good for the media. Good for publicity. When it comes to Cam, his whole “life” is about public spin, and he’s yet to figure out why. Why is Proactive Citizenry putting so much money behind him? Why has the United States military “purchased” him like a piece of property? Valuable, yes, but property nonetheless. It used to bother him, but it doesn’t anymore. For some reason.