Have You Seen My Deranged Millionaire?

I'm a part-time Girl Friday for a deranged millionaire - trademark John Hodgman - a five-foot 90 lb ex CEO, ex ex ballerina from Verona, in art for business, in conversation for sport, she emotes in rollicking bursts, brainstorms between midnight and two am and has made a career trading money, influence and good ideas with business and cultural professionals.

She freezes at room temperature, relishes rejecting social ritual (Christmas and family dinner) as sentimental (va bene, va bene, above it… I get it) and thanks to her shamanism practice accept routine life guidance from her dead father; she's also swayed by scholarly lectures and George Clooney movies. Technically, she’s a millionaire in both dollars and euro. Together we work on culture project with high profile clients around the world. Sometimes I pick up her nutritional supplements and fix her computer.

We live in New York, she in Manhattan and I in Brooklyn. Following Hurricane Sandy’s brutal pass through the region, there's been a puckish reversal of the norm - my neighborhood is comfortable and safe and hers in Lower Manhattan is not.

I haven’t heard from her since the storm. She routinely emails me in excess of ten times a day so it's a fairly noticeable absence. My hope is that she made it from down to up town, to higher ground, above the most affected areas, etc. Maybe she jumped a plane to Italy before the airports closed.  

But with the uncertainty and because my imagination has a dramatic tinge of late - I'm seeing her floating in a landscape of unearthly darkness, isolation and imposed quiet, maybe its outer space, or somehow she caught a flight to Omaha that had to make an emergency landing somewhere in the great plains. This fantasy is much easier than reality because if she didn’t buy her way out of downtown before the surge, odds are she’s dead. I don’t want seem callous. I said it wasn’t easy.

There's solid subjective, unscientific evidence that the cognitive handicaps of the highest classes - different from those of the more modestly born - unless deliberately mitigated are, in general, and specifically in the case of my boss, extremely debilitating in situations of uncontrollable peril, like super hurricanes.

Deranged millionaires can’t live without electricity. They perish like vampires in the sun. I decline to justify this metaphor beyond the recent passing of Halloween... Downtown has been dark for days. From my roof the skyline looks broken and it's stranger on the ground.

I've seen pedestrians directing traffic at Delancey and Bowery, psychotically amicable tourists hailing cabs through thick mist as I weave across empty lanes on Canal for half a mile heading west surveying damage. I saw trees in: cars, store windows and intersections, and water bubbling out of grates and I imagined the vermin beneath in the foul saltwater brine above the flooded subway tracks. For connection, power, wifi or heating, I saw crowds outside hotels, Starbucks and churches everywhere. 

I haven’t seen the fire damage in Queens or been up to the top of darkened high rises. I've only seen videos of the damage to the Jersey Shore and they're heartbreaking. It’s a real place, The Shore, not just reality show. My dad’s family home in PA was flooded when he was a kid. One of the only surviving photos of him is from a summer vacation to the Jersey Shore. 

I've looked, but I still haven’t seen my deranged millionaire.

Whether you’re across the country or in an apartment above 42^nd street, where it’s nearly business as usual, this October surprise has affected physical and digital landscapes, public spaces, and internal landscapes. Kids who've spent this Halloween out of school, trapped indoors without power, will remember this year.

This is complex time of destruction and compassion in its face, both itself and something near its opposite like the way Alien is a perfectly beautiful horror movie or back when Ann Pasternak staged Waiting for Godot in New Orleans after Katrina. 

No one wants to make 9/11 or Katrina comparisons but they should (sensitively). There’s a lot to compare. This region is leaking pain, empathy and strength into the online environment in text, photos, sound and video – as surely as floods washed piers into the sea and fires added heat to the atmosphere. Local public radio has been inundated with stories of compassion, gratitude, fortitude, and resilience – the kind you can hear. 

If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing alright (aces!) but a great many other places and people aren’t, like my boss, who is currently floating in a starry void. This is a joke, obviously, one that isn't so different from the routine minor deflections, obfuscations and avoidances of normal life. I’m practiced at this. Let’s be honest, I work for my millionaire for a reason. My creativity, rationality and demand for efficiency complements her hyper competitive aggression and confidence.

Maybe this isn’t your tragedy. Or perhaps you’re focused on making the 2-3 hour commute to keep your job in a tough economy. Maybe you’re drinking all of the rubbing alcohol in the house or out volunteering at every free moment, donating money and blood and plasma and all of your humanness to make things better.

Or maybe you’re living through this without giving it a thought or a feeling. And that's sad. Because it’s real, physically, in the digital world and the memories and muscles of people struggling.

Devastation is an invitation to think and feel – something, anything – real things. For instance, I’ve used this time not only to consider the social staircase of cognitive handicaps and my enduring love for the X-Files (for measured pacing, respect for people and the paranormal, for asking questions thoughtfully and answering tentatively) but also to acknowledge that this may be the first time in over two years of working together that I’ve seen my boss as a person, vulnerable, in an imagined gravitationally anomalous rift with coruscating light, or trapped without electricity in her apartment.

There are a lot of bizarre hurdles to nontraditional employment, more complicated than tax forms and declaration of income. The whole thing is tedious and unwritten. It's been simpler to discount my boss as untouchable, bizarre, two-dimensional human-like woman but she's a person, whole and complete, whom I've chosen to work with.

It may be selfish but I don't think it's a bad idea to show respect for grave situation through sincere introspection. Wherever you are, I say go at a problem, have a tough conversation, read a book you’re afraid of, do something you’ve wanted to do for a while and write about it, act improper and see how you feel, take pause, because sticking our heads up in the clouds or down in the dirt is darn useful.

And, if while your head is up or down, you happen to see my deranged millionaire, please drop me a line.