The Ministry for the Future

47

He spent his days around Zurich. On the shores of the Zurichsee, mostly the eastern shore. Sometimes he would feel an urge to see women’s bodies, a useless and hopeless urge, but since it could be indulged in this city, he would go to Tiefenbrunnen park on the lakeshore, pay at the gate and go in and sit down by the water and try not to be too obvious as the topless women walked by him going in and out of the lake, Swiss women so stolidly Swiss in their voices, so gorgeous in their pale skin wet in the sun. It was a bit much, a bit too clear what he was up to, and he saw also the other single men sitting around “just by coincidence,” not looking at anyone and yet undoubtedly there to drink in the sight of so many women’s bodies, no, it was too obvious, too much in several different ways, and after a while he would leave and wander the streets of the neighborhood behind the lake. There was a house there that had been turned into a small art museum, apparently the house owner’s personal collection, now open to the public. Some of the greatest paintings he had ever seen were just hanging on the walls of an ordinary little house. Or walk up along the shore to the bridge that spanned the lake’s outlet, where the Limmat left the lake, always interesting to look at, that first dip and pour in the black sheet of water. Swans floated under the stone wall just east of this bridge, the wall dropping direct from park grass to lake surface, the swans hoping for children to throw bread crumbs down to them. Unearthly, incandescent white birds, floating on black water. Or over to the little park where the statue of Ganymede held his arm up against the distant Alps.

Other days he would walk the trails around the top of the Zuriberg, over to the cemetery where James Joyce was buried—a life-sized bronze statue of the writer, always ready for a silent conversation, sitting there reading his bronze book through round bronze spectacles which nicely emphasized his near-blindness, a bronze cigarette held on his bent bronze knee. The tall trees on the Zuriberg were mostly clear of underbrush, and one could leave the dusty trails through the trees and wander among them, looking for nothing. Distant views of the Alps, better from up here than down in the city. The peaks farthest south were snow-capped and looked completely vertical, like cardboard cut-out mountains at the back of a stage set. Then through the trees to the path circling the top of the hill, and onto one of the steep residential streets dropping into the city proper. Past his secret garden shed, down through houses with their tiny yards, often with statuary in them; a big naked concrete woman held a green looped hose over her extended arm, reminding him of the casual women at Tiefenbrunnen.

Or of Syrine. Syrine and her little girls Emna and Hiba. How he regretted all that, his inability to hold it together, to be there for them. He couldn’t think about it. Miserable at the thought of it. But he still couldn’t avoid obsessing about what hurt him. Something was broken in his head. He wanted to get better but it didn’t happen. He wanted to go back to working with refugees, though it would have to be at a different center, not the one where he had met them. That wouldn’t be a problem, there were many of them in the region, but when he tried one, he realized it was just reminding him of how badly he had fucked up with Syrine and the girls. Just another trigger. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same place, because they were all the same place really. Always the same place, always the same day.

So, down to the Utoquai schwimmbad, where you could rent a locker and suit up and step down into the lake itself, and go for a swim until you were too cold to think, too cold to feel. Then get out and shower and have a kafi fertig afterward, a drink that would indeed finish you, but in a good way.

And yet always he was hiding. Always he felt sick and broken. There was no way to ignore the surveillance cameras mounted almost everywhere. Not that Jacob Salzman was being looked for, apparently. Someone had posted a map of all the cameras in the city, supposedly, but there were newer cameras that were much smaller than the previous ones. The bigger ones were there to remind you that you were under surveillance, whereas the smaller ones were there to surveil. So it didn’t make much sense to avoid the bigger ones, because surely everyone was always surveiled all the time. Quite possibly every human alive had a team of little drones following them. That was the only hope, in a way, in terms of lying low: that there were too many people to follow, too much data. And good reason by now to feel that he was not presently flagged as being of interest. He had his ID and his legend, and unless what had happened to him in his youth made the authorities look for him again for some reason, he should be okay. And he had not been that person for many years. Six or seven years. No, nine.

So he wore hats, and sunglasses, and grew a beard; and sometimes put a mouthgard in his mouth when out, and wore different kinds of clothing. He tried to be four distinctly different people for the cameras, with the one that was really him the least often at large. See if the algorithms could sort that out; and given the eight billion people they were tracking, it seemed possible he could slide under the radar. In any case he had to walk around, had to get out into the city. He couldn’t hide in a room all day every day; he had tried that for a while, and it didn’t work. It had almost killed him.

One day he saw a notice on a message board announcing a meeting of the 2,000 Watt Society. He looked it up and decided to go to the meeting. It was held in the back room of a little Italian restaurant west of the Hauptbahnhof called Mamma Mia’s. By the time the meeting started, about fifty people had jammed into the room. They looked like any other Swiss people, perhaps a little more bohemian in style, but not much. The Swiss were extremely regular in their appearance, but then on consideration Frank realized that this was basically true everywhere.

The meeting began on time, of course, and it had a schedule that was gotten through briskly. Frank’s German was not up to the task, and this was Schwyzerdüütsch to boot, so he was completely lost and could only pretend to be comprehending, but no one seemed to notice. Their guttural looping sentences were calm, and they laughed pretty often. When they saw he was there, and that there were some other Ausländer there also, they summarized their proceedings in quick rough English. He liked the feel of the meeting, nothing dogmatic or virtuous about it, just people pursuing a project; something between a committee meeting and a party planning exercise. Like the local Swiss Alpine Club, no doubt, and in fact when he asked about that, he found that many there were in both clubs. Party planning—political parties—he wondered if the same word for both was the case in German also. Partei, yes. But birthday party? Maybe so. He wished he had brought along a translation earbud.

Back home he looked again at the society’s online information. Started in Basel and Zurich about forty years before. The idea was that the total global energy generated by people, when divided by the number of people on Earth, came to about 2,000 watts per person. So the people in the society had decided to live on that much energy and see how it felt.

The 2,000 watts were to cover food, transport, home heating, and home utilities. When Frank saw the breakdown, he realized that his lifestyle was already well within the limits prescribed by the society. That made him laugh.

Swiss citizens in general used about 5,000 watts. This was compared to 6,000 in the rest of western Europe. Chinese citizens about 1,500. 1,000 in India. 12,000 in the United States. His country, the great whale in this as in everything, slurping down the world.

In Switzerland, their current usage per person cost about 1,500 watts for one’s living space, including heat and hot water.

1,100 watts for food and “consumer discretionary.”

600 watts for electricity, which included power for a refrigerator.

500 watts for automobile travel.

250 watts for air travel.

150 watts for public transport (trains, trams, subways).

900 watts for public infrastructure (Frank wasn’t sure what that meant, but presumably in his case the cost of the library, the bahnhof, the sewer systems, and so on).

He considered the list for a while. The Swiss hoped to achieve the reduction from 5,000 watts per citizen to 2,000 mainly by swapping out their entire built infrastructure, to make it more energy efficient. They hoped that their economy would grow by 65 percent at the same time they were reducing their energy per person; and they wanted their people to live pretty much as they had before. No hair shirt, no saintly suffering. No Francis of Assisi mentality or behavior: this was Switzerland, not a monastery. Stolid burgher watch makers, cheese makers, made fun of by the rest of the world, or envied, or really both at once. In fact it was a bit mysterious how the Swiss had gotten so prosperous. Some still pointed to the deep past, including their mercenary soldiers and guards, their banks holding criminals’ money, and so on; but it had to be more than that. Chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering systems, all the minutiae of daily life that the rest of the world couldn’t be bothered to master—like Swiss watches in their day, but no one wore watches anymore, so they had moved on to something else. Manufacturing of almost anything was cheaper in China and India, so again, on to something else, or to the kinds of manufacturing that required exceptionally good quality control. On and on it went, with only 35 percent of their little country useful for agriculture, or even habitable by humans at all. It was strange.

And then there were the four language groups, the German speakers most numerous, then the French, then the Italians, then the Romantsch, who numbered only fifty thousand or so, and yet flourished in their little corner of the country. The Swiss were proud to assert that they had made Romantsch an official Swiss language in defiance of Hitler’s raving about Aryan supremacy, and as far as Frank could discover, there was some truth to this, even though the defiance had been rather indirect and symbolic, as the Swiss had also been allowing the German and Italian militaries free passage across Switzerland at the time. Still it was a nice gesture toward language diversity, right when national governments in France and other countries were crushing their local dialects. The Swiss had always slanted against the grain, always pushed against the received wisdom that tended to wash over the rest of Europe in waves of intellectual fashion, everything from details of fashion to participation in world wars.

So, fine; the Swiss were mysterious. But this 2,000 watt project was a good idea. Frank already had it covered, he used an almost Bangladeshi amount of energy per year. He lived in an apartment or a garden shed, he didn’t own a car and never rented one, he had stopped flying, he ate mostly vegetarian. There were websites on which one could calculate one’s energy burn quite closely, using electricity bills and estimates of mileage on various transport systems and grocery lists. These calculators had existed from the start of the century or before, but as far as Frank could tell, no one used them. It was like avoiding the scale when you were overweight. Who wanted such bad news?

Scrolling around as he thought about it, he ran across one essay that said the people of the world could still be divided into roughly three groups of wealth and consumption, measured by their transport methods. A third of the world traveled by car and jet, a third by train and bicycle; the final third was still on foot.

He thought about that for a while. He walked a lot, it was easy in Zurich, a form of entertainment. That was true in many cities, as far as he knew. There were a few that were unwalkable, like Los Angeles, for which planners had struggled to invent new names, like conurbation or agglomeration or megacity; but in most cities walking still worked, at least in their central districts and their various nodes. Anyway it was no great deprivation to get back on foot, if you lived in a city like Zurich.

Of course it was good to get out of town sometimes, see something different. That meant trains and trams, but the watts used could be calculated there too; the 2,000 Watt Society had provided its members with lots of graphs to estimate individual use. Watts per kilometer even. Apparently he didn’t travel much compared to most people. That felt right. If you were mentally ill your energy use inevitably dropped, because you couldn’t put it together to live a normal life. He had gone to ground, he was living in a hole like a badger. Hibernating maybe. Waiting for some kind of spring to come.

In any case, strictly regarding standard of living relative to energy use, he was doing well. He was a comfortable badger. And it was interesting to think about life as a consumption of energy, it was now part of his project, his self-medication. One therapist had questioned it once, as possibly some kind self-punishment, but he didn’t think so. He didn’t feel his various forms of self-medication as more or less virtuous. Self-reliance was always a delusion, he relied on other people as much as anyone, he knew that. But it was interesting to try to do more with less. At the very least, it passed the time. And it kept him off some of the cameras.

He started going down the hill to a refugee aid center in north Zurich, to help with the free dinners offered there two nights a week. No more fraternizing with the refugees, that had clearly been a mistake, something beyond his capacities. But he could at least work, put his shoulder to the wheel, help turn the world. The organizers of these particular evening dinners were mostly Swiss women, and the workers who assembled to help them were from various charitable or aid organizations, or school groups, or churches, or people who were working off some kind of school or legal trouble by doing community service. The organizers only wanted first names from helpers, and they didn’t ask questions. While he was there he helped set up tables and chairs and tablecloths, put out cutlery and cut donated cakes and pies into portions, and did a lot of kitchen and dining room clean-up. It was simple and calming, and there was time to sit or kneel by some of their guests and ask how they were doing, without getting involved in their lives beyond that. Some of the guests didn’t want to talk, especially in English; some appreciated the chance; it was easy to tell which was which.

The space for these meals was some kind of civic hall, as far as he could tell, near the first bridge over the Limmat downstream from the Hauptbahnhof bridge. There were mini parks at both ends of this bridge, to give Zurchers the no doubt satisfying spectacle of their tamed river flowing under them, through the gateway created by one of their massively over-engineered bridges. It was indeed pretty mesmerizing. Frank watched for a long time as the water purled over a drop downstream from the bridge, like some kind of cake batter flowing in a giant mixer. One of the set-up crew for the dinner called this area “Needle Park,” or so it seemed to Frank, as it had been said in Swiss German and he didn’t know if he had caught the words right. Apparently a drug dealers’ area back in the day, or even now, if Frank understood correctly. There was a needle dispensary nearby.

These days it was also a place where various refugees out of the camps for the day gathered before and after the free meals. Possibly something illicit was still being done in the two parks, he didn’t know. Pairs of police would walk across the bridge occasionally, and sometimes they would stop and talk to people, but there was never any sign that they were confronting crime, or causing guilty parties to run and reveal themselves. In general the feel around Swiss police officers on patrol was completely different from what Frank remembered from his childhood. At home the presence of police meant trouble; something was wrong, guns might be involved, the big uniformed men were faintly menacing. Here in Zurich, and elsewhere around Switzerland, the police had the same vibe as the tram conductors, and they often carried similar looking scanning boxes. They seldom carried weapons, and there were about as many women officers as men. It seemed like they usually worked in pairs, a woman and a man, patrolling together doing something like outdoor marriage counseling. They did approach people, they did ask questions; but here too they resembled tram conductors, because Zurich’s trams operated on the honor principle, and everyone bought tickets at kiosks or had annual passes, but conductors asking people to show their passes appeared on about one ride in every fifty. They wandered through the cars, and as people saw them they produced their tickets or their annual passes, and the conductors passed on with a nod. Very seldom were there freeriders, and many of these were tourists who had misunderstood the system.

Same in the park, or so it seemed. Legal? the passing police seemed to be asking just by their presence. Yes, legal. Genau, people would say in conversation with them, meaning exactly, a word the Swiss loved and used all the time, as in okay or sure or yeah right: exactly! and with a nod the police would pass on, the people too.

But as Frank spent more time in these two little Needle Parks, he began to see that there might be some people here functioning as nodes in some kind of refugee underground railroad. Groups of ten or a dozen people, looking like two or three families, would sit on a couple of benches, or on the grass if it was dry enough, and talk among themselves, looking around warily. They looked like they were from elsewhere; they weren’t Swiss. They could have been from the Middle East, or South Asia, or Africa, or South America. Then someone who usually looked echt Swiss would approach them, and speak in their language—Frank usually couldn’t hear well enough to tell more than the fact that it wasn’t German or English—and the group would get up and follow that person away. Given there were surveillance cameras mounted on the streetlight posts, it had to be obvious to the authorities watching, or to their algorithms, that something was going on here. And yet it went on day after day.

He couldn’t tell what it was. He couldn’t speak the languages. English was the world’s lingua franca, no doubt about it, and he heard a lot of that; but he couldn’t join in the project of finding ways to help get these people to a place of greater safety, so he kept his distance. Any kind of aid offered on the spot was inherently suspicious. Best to stay uninvolved, to pitch in with the free meals and leave it at that.

Still, he began to go to the meals wearing a hat with the Zurich cantonal shield on it, the blue and the white. Then he would walk around the two bridge parks with children’s down parkas stuffed in little bags, or little umbrellas collapsed on their stems into short squat cylinders, and if he saw foreign children shivering, he would approach the groups and say to the adults, “Für die Kinder, sehr warm,” and then quickly get away with a “Danke mille fois” said over his shoulder, this being the Zurchers’ own sweet mash-up of German and French, particular to their city. He would leave them his little bundles and often on cold evenings the adult women in the group would nod gratefully. Off Frank would go. Jelmoli sold these jackets and umbrellas for ten francs each, so it was an easy way to help a little. Switzerland was cold and raw on winter afternoons when the wind swept down the lake and through the town; crossing a bridge often felt colder to him than Antarctica had felt. It was like Glasgow in that regard. A chill raw wet wind was far colder on the skin than a dry stillness of far lower temperature. And some of these people were unprepared for that.

One time one of the refugees in the park on the eastern side of the bridge was sick, and fell, after perhaps fainting. A quick little crowd surrounded him, and Frank joined them to see what he could do, his heart racing. He saw none of them seemed to have mobile phones, or maybe they were afraid to use them, and so he went to the little phone box on the bridge end and punched the button for the local 911, then asked for help in German, giving the situation and then the address, which he assumed they already had. He felt a brief sense of accomplishment in saying all that in German, then stood at the edge of the group watching, feeling so sick he worried that he too would keel over. When the ambulance arrived with its weird European siren, most of the people surrounding the stricken man disappeared. The emergency medical people approached and then a pair of police, both women; more refugees disappeared, until it was only the stricken one and Frank. Frank gestured the police over. One of them held a scanner in front of the man’s face and clicked a photo and looked at the result. Possibly there would be an RFID embedded in the man’s skin too, there to be read by the scanner.

Then the policewoman with the scanner glanced at Frank and stood up straight, holding the scanner toward him, gesturing at him with her other hand.

The other policewoman said “Nei,” Swiss for Nein, and the one with the scanner returned to the stricken person. Frank nodded his appreciation to the one who had stopped her colleague, and when the emergency crew had the young man on a stretcher, Frank turned and walked away, shivering in the chill gray wind.

In the summers it was different. Some organization, maybe the Red Cross, maybe the Red Crescent, often set up a big open-sided tent in the western bridge park, and cooked food and gave out free meals. They were uninterested in finding out who they were serving, it was all anonymous on both sides of the table. It got hot and steamy on some days, which put Frank on edge, but he ignored that and did what he could to help. Set up, clean up. He didn’t serve food, and he tried not to look at the people eating. It was too hot, too familiar. He didn’t want to recognize what he was feeling, he looked around under the edge of the tent roof to see Zurich sights—the stone, the trees, the blue and white. Smell of bratwurst and beer. Red geraniums. Stolid medieval edge of the Rathaus, there upriver as far as he could see, visible through linden trees. Cold northern land, cool sober people, cool to the eye and the mind.

But not the people taking refuge here. The Fremdenkontrolle, the Stranger Control, a bureau of the police, estimated that there were now five million native Swiss and three million Ausländer within the borders. This ratio, one of the most extreme in the world, had caused membership in the various right-wing anti-immigrant parties in Switzerland to swell, and now they held a dozen or more seats in the Swiss legislature, led by the SVP, the Swiss People’s Party. There were about thirty political parties in Switzerland, and all the ruling coalitions in the federal government were formed by majorities created by alliances between the central parties; center-right, center-left, with the more radical parties on each side just barely earning seats. SVP had even held a majority for a while, then after the heat wave it had lost popularity. Now they did better in the cantonal governments, but these had had their power shifted over the years to Bern’s federal government—not entirely, but in national matters like this one, the federal government tended to get its way. The upshot seemed to be that there was a lot of pent-up anger in the anti-immigrant crowd, as they saw their country being “overrun,” with nothing they could do about it, at the political level anyway.

Maybe it was this way everywhere. Now, whenever Frank saw small groups of obvious Ausländer, people from the global south or even the Balkans, walking in areas of the city where they might get accosted, he would strike up a conversation with them in English and walk with them. He saw it help once or twice. Racists were confused by mixed-race situations, so a white man with these dark-skinned people gave them pause. If it were a dark-skinned man with a Swiss woman it might make them angry, even though this was a common sight; but a white man with people of color was different, and anyway it took some evaluation before any racist could decide to get angry, so that created some time, and if one walked fast, staying on lit streets, which in Zurich meant any street not an alley in the Niederdorf, it would be enough to keep from getting assaulted, except by some guttural comments hurled one’s way, comments designed not to be understood. So he walked with them when he could.

But then a day came when he saw a group of young Swiss men standing on the bridge looking at the big meal tent. Though it was hot, the air had gone dark; there were clouds building overhead, a thunderstorm was imminent. It would be a relief when it came. For now, it was getting hotter.

Big fat raindrops began to spatter the pavers outside the tent. All of a sudden they were in a downpour, and in that same moment the young Swiss men charged the tent throwing pavers and shouting. They were going for the servers as well as the guests, and people were screaming and going down, there was blood splashing from nowhere into reality, and seeing that, many among the refugees charged their assailants screaming with fury. Pavers gone, the Swiss thugs had nothing but their fists, but they too were enraged, and a donnybrook of punching and shoving and shouting erupted outside one edge of the tent. The Swiss who ran away were tackled or kicked in the back, the moves familiar and practiced from soccer pitches at their worst. The Swiss thugs then realized they had to retreat while still facing the refugee fighters, at least until they could get a clear route away. Some of them ran across a street right in front of a tram, which squealed down past them and gave them some cover for their retreat.

After that, wet people, screams, crying, blood on the ground and on the tabletops, which were now commandeered to lay injured people on something other than the cold wet ground. Police arrived, and clumps of quivering shouting people surrounded them to tell the tale of the outrage. The police teams went from person to person in the following hour, and Frank stayed, too upset by what he had seen to leave. He had to testify. But everyone the police interviewed they were also scanning, and when they were done talking to Frank, having done the same to him, they looked at each other. One of them was showing his scanner to his colleagues. These approached Frank and then surrounded him.

“Sorry,” one of them said to him in English. “There is a warrant out for your arrest. Please come with us.”