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
