New York 2140

a) Franklin

So I nearly killed these two little squeakers who were out fucking around in a rubber motor dinghy on the East River, just south of the Battery. They were maybe eight or twelve years old, hard to tell because they had the runtish look of kids underfed in their toddler years, like those tribes they thought were pygmies until they fed them properly in toddlerhood and turned out they were taller than the Dutch. These kids had not been included in that experiment. They could barely reach the water with their paddles and the ebb was running full tilt; they were basically drifting out to sea. So they were lucky I almost ran them down, alarming though it was; there’s a narrow blind spot straight ahead when I’m zooming in the zoomer, but it only extends fifty meters or so, so I don’t know how I missed seeing them. Distracted, I guess, as I often am. Ultimately it was no harm no foul, or little harm little foul, as I had to haul them back into the city, because they knew where I lived. They were denizens of my neighborhood, unfortunately, a little cagey about where exactly they resided, but they appeared to know the super of my building. So I towed them back, and countered the smaller and browner one’s continuous criticism by informing them I had saved them from death at sea and would tell their responsible parties about it if they didn’t keep quiet. This gave them pause, and we got back to Madison Square in a little pact of mutual assured damage, with both sides to walk without complaint.

However, this was the very Friday I was due to pick up Jojo Bernal dockside at Pier 57, so I had to get up to my room and quick shower-shave-change, so I tied the zoomer off on the dock of the Met’s North building, paid the squeakers to look after it for me, ran to the elevators and then my apartment, made the change, trying for casual but sharp, and got back down and took off toward the west side, exchanging final ritual curses with the littler pipsqueak.

Jojo was standing on the edge of the dock looking up the Hudson, in a crowd of people all reading their wrists. Again, hair gleaming with sunset; regal posture; relaxed; athletic. I felt a little atrial fib and tried to glide up to the dock with an extra bit of grace, although truth to tell, water is so forgiving a medium that it takes something more challenging than a dock approach to show off any style in steering. Still I made a nice approach and touch, and she stepped onboard as neat as could be, her short skirt showing off her thighs and revealing quads like river-smoothed boulders, also a concavity between quad and ham that testified to a lot of leg work.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I managed. Then: “Welcome to the zoomer.”

She laughed. “That’s its name?”

“No. The name it had when I bought it was the Jesus Bug. So I call it the zoomer. Among other names.”

I got us out on the river and headed south. The late sun lit her face, and I saw that her eyes were indeed a mélange of different browns, mahogany and teak and a brown almost black, all flecked and rayed and blobbed around the pupils. I said, “When I was a kid we had a cat that our family just called the cat, and that seems to have become a habit. I like nicknames or what-have-yous.”

“What-have-yous indeed. So you call this the zoomer, and also?”

“Oh, well. The skimmer, the bug, the buggy, the buggette. Like that.”

“Diminutives.”

“Yes, I like those. Like the zoomer can be the zoominski. Or like Joanna can be Jojo.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That was my sister who did that. She’s like you, she does that.”

“Do you prefer Joanna?”

“No, I’m easy. My friends call me Jojo, but people at work call me Joanna, and I like that. It’s a way of saying I’m a pro, or something.”

“I can see that.”

“What about you? Isn’t there anyone who shortens Franklin to Frank? I would think that would be a natural.”

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

“I guess I think there are enough Franks already. And my mom was very insistent about it too. That impressed me. And I liked Ben Franklin.”

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

I had to laugh. “Not the Franklin saying I quote the most. Not my operating principle.”

“No? Highly leveraged, are we?”

“No more so than anyone else. In fact I need to find out some new investments, I’m kind of clogged up.” But this sounded like bragging, so I added, “Not that that can’t change in a minute, of course.”

“So you are leveraged.”

“Well everyone’s leveraged, right? More loans than assets?”

“If you’re doing it right,” she said, looking thoughtful.

“So you might as well take some risks?” I suggested, wondering what she was thinking about.

“Or at least some options,” she said, then shook her head as if wanting to change the subject.

“Shall we zoom a little?” I asked. “When we get clear of traffic?”

“I’d love to. It looks like magic when you see one of these lift off. How does it work again?”

I explained the adjustable foils that caused the zoominski to plane up once you got to a certain speed; this was always easy to do with anyone who had ever stuck a hand out the window of a moving car and tilted it in the wind and felt it shoving their whole arm up or down. She nodded at that, and I watched the sunset light her face, and I began to feel happy, because she looked happy. We were out on the river and she was enjoying herself. She liked to feel the wind on her face. My chest filled with some kind of fearful joy, and I thought: I like this woman. It scared me a little.

I said, “What do you want to do for dinner? We can cut over to Dumbo, there’s a place there with a roof patio looking at the city, or I can anchor us to a buoy on Governors Island and grill you some steaks, I’ve got everything we need here with us.”

“Let’s do that,” she said. “If you don’t mind cooking?”

“I enjoy it,” I said.

“So can we zoom there?”

“Oh yeah.”

We zoomed. I kept one eye ahead to make sure nothing snuck into the blind spot. The other eye I kept on her, watching her feel the wind with her face as she took in the view.

“You like zooming,” I said.

“How could I not? It’s kind of surreal, because most of the time I’m on the water I’m sailing, or just taking the vapos, and this isn’t anything like either of those.”

“You sail?”

“Yes, there’s a group of us share a little catamaran over at Skyline Marina.”

“Cats are the zoomers of sailboats. In fact some of them have foils.”

“I know. Ours isn’t one of those, but it is great. I love it. We’ll have to go out in it sometime.”

“I’d enjoy that,” I said sincerely. “I could be your ballast, on the upwind hull like they do.”

“Yes. The outrider.”

Around the tip of Battery Park I dropped the bug back on the water and we hummed in a leisurely way over to the Governors Island reef, where a little flotilla of boats was tied off on buoys. The various buildings on the sunken part of the island had been removed to make sure they didn’t turn into hull-rippers at low tide, and after the demolition a great number of oyster beds and fish pens had been laid down, plus the anchors for a little open-water marina of sorts, a tie-off for overnights or evening trysts like this. I had once saved a guy from dying in the third tranche of a bad intertidal mortgage bond, and he had repaid me with the right to tie to his buoy here. One intertidal for another.

So we hummed up to it and Jojo tied off at the bow, looking glorious as she did so. The bug swung around on the ebb tide and we were looking at the Battery Park end of Manhattan, majestic in the pynchonpoetry of twilight on the water. The other boats bobbed at anchor, all empty, a ghost fleet. I liked the place and had taken dates out there before, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about as this one plopped down beside me on the cushioned seat of the bug’s cockpit.

“Okay, dinner,” I said, and opened the dwarfish door to the bug’s little cabin, very nice but just barely head high. I’d stocked the refrigerator, and now I got a bottle of zinfandel from the rack next to it and uncorked it and passed it out to her along with a couple of glasses, then took my boat barbecue out of its cabinet and lifted it up to its brackets on the stern thwart. Stack mini charcoal briquettes in it, deploy a lighter like a long-barreled gun, and all of a sudden we had a little fire, great look, classic smell, all smartly out over the water to avoid the kind of mishap that has sent many a pleasure boat flaming to the bottom.

“I love these,” she said, and again my heart bounced. I knocked the half-burned briquettes around into a flatness, with one corner of the grill left cooler. I oiled the grill and dropped it in position, and then as it was heating up I ducked in the cabin and put potatoes into the microwave, got the plate of filet mignon medallions out of the fridge, took them out into the dusk and put the meat on the grill, where it sizzled nicely. Jojo’s limbs glowed in the dark. As I moved back and forth across the cockpit cooking, she watched me with an amused expression that I couldn’t read. I never can, maybe no one ever can, but amused is better than bored, that I knew, and the knowledge made me a little goofy. She seemed happy to go along with that.

After I had plated the meal and we were eating, she said, “Do you remember that bite in the CME we talked about that night we met? Did you ever see that again, or get a sense of what could have caused it?”

I shook my head, swallowed. “Never saw it again. I think it must have been a test.”

“But of what? Someone testing whether they could plug a syrup tap into the pipeline and divert a point their way?”

“Maybe. My quant friends think that happens all the time. Kind of an urban legend for them. Tap in for ten seconds and disappear with a lifetime stash.”

“Do you think that could happen?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a quant.”

“But I thought you were.”

“No. I mean I’d like to be, and I can follow quants when they talk to me, but I’m a trader mostly.”

“That’s not what Evie and Amanda say. They say you pretend not to be a quant so you can do things, but you really are.”

“I would if I could,” I said honestly. Why I was being this honest, I had no idea. Possibly I had an intuition that she might find that more amusing than pretended quantitude. I like to be amusing if I can.

“Say you could do it,” she said. “Would you?”

“What, tap a line? No.”

“Because it would be cheating?”

“Because I don’t need to. And yeah. I mean it is a game, right? So cheating would mean you’re lame at the game.”

“Not that much of a game, though. It’s just gambling.”

“But gambling smart. Figuring out trades that outsmart even the other smart traders. That’s the game. If you didn’t have that, it would just be, what, I don’t know. Data analysis? Desk job in front of a screen?”

“It is a desk job in front of a screen.”

“It’s a game. And besides the screen is interesting, don’t you think? All those different genres and temporalities, all running at once… it’s the best movie ever, live every day.”

“See, you are a quant!”

“But it isn’t math, it’s literature. Or like being a detective.”

She nodded, thinking it over. “Why haven’t you detectived this CME bite, then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. So much honesty! “Maybe I will.”

“I think you should.”

She shifted next to me on the cushion.

I registered this and said, kind of cluelessly, “Dessert? Postprandial?”

“What have you got?” she said.

“Whatever,” I said. “Actually the bar is mostly single malts right now.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Let’s try them all.”

It turned out that she had an alarmingly extensive knowledge of costly single malts, and like all sensible connoisseurs had come to the conclusion that it was not a matter of finding the best, but of creating maximum difference, sip to sip. She liked to dabble, as she put it.

And in more than just drinking alcohol. I came out of the cabin with a clutch of bottles in each hand and sat down somewhat abruptly beside her and she said, “Oh my God, it’s Bruichladdich Octomore 27,” and leaned in and kissed me on the mouth.

“You just had a sip of Laphroaig,” I said as I tried to catch my breath.

She laughed. “That’s right! A new game!”

I doubted it was new but was happy to play.

“Don’t drink too much,” she said at one point.

“Hummingbird sips,” I murmured, quoting my dad. I tried to illustrate by kissing her ear, and she hummed and reached out for me. Her dress was rucked up around her waist by this point, and like most women’s underwear hers was easy to push around. Lots of kissing left me gasping. “You’re going long on me,” she murmured, and straddled me and kissed me more.

“I am,” I said.

“And I’m having a little liquidity crisis,” she said.

“You are.”

“Oh. That’s good. Don’t strand those assets. Here, use your mouth.”

“I will.”

And so on. At one point I looked up and saw her body glowing whitely in the starry night, and she was watching me with that same amused expression as before. Then later still she put her head back on the thwart and looked at the stars, and said, “Oh! Oh!” After that she slid down to join me and we crashed around on the floor of the cockpit trying to make it all work, but mainly I was still hearing that oh oh, the sexiest thing I had ever heard in my life, electrifying beyond even my own orgasm, which was saying a lot.

Eventually we lay there tangled on the cockpit floor, looking at the stars. It was a warm night for autumn, but a little breeze cooled us. The few stars visible overhead were big and blurry. I was thinking, Oh shit—I like this gal. I want this gal. It was scary.

b) Mutt and Jeff

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Where are we?”

“I don’t know. Weren’t we…”

“We were talking about something.”

“We’re always talking about something.”

“Yes, but it was something important.”

“Hard to believe.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know, but meanwhile, where are we?”

“In some kind of room, right?”

“Yeah… come on. We live in our hotello, on the farm floor of the old Met Life tower. The old Edition hotel, used to be a very fine hotel. Remember? That’s right, right?”

“That’s right.” Jeff shakes his head hard, then holds it in his hands. “I feel all foggy.”

“Me too. Do you think we’ve been drugged?”

“Feels like it. Feels like after I had that tooth pulled in Tijuana.”

Mutt regards him. “Or remember after your colonoscopy? You couldn’t remember what happened.”

“No, I don’t remember that.”

“Exactly. Like that.”

“For you too? Now, I mean?”

“Yes. I forget what we were talking about right before this. Also, how we got here. Basically, what the fuck just happened.”

“Me too. What’s the last thing you remember? Let’s find that and see if we can work forward from it.”

“Well…” Mutt ponders. “We were living in our hotello, on the farm floor of the Met Life tower. Very breezy when out among the plants. A little noisy, great view. Right?”

“That’s right, there we were. Been there a couple months, right? Lost our previous room when it melted?”

“Right, Peter Cooper Village, extra high tide. Moon or something. Landfill just can’t hold a building upright over the long haul. So then…”

Jeff nods. “Yeah that’s right. We were trying to stay away from my cousin, which is why we were in such a shithole to begin with. Then over to the Flatiron where Jamie lived, and when they kicked us out, he told us about the Met tower possibility. He likes to bail out friends.”

“And we were coding for your cousin, that was definitely a mistake, and then gigging. Encryption and shortcuts, the yin and the yang. Greedy algorithms are us.”

“Right, but there was something else! I found something, or something was bothering me…”

Mutt nods. “You had a fix.”

“For the algorithm?”

Mutt shakes his head, looks at Jeff. “For everything.”

“Everything?”

“That’s right, everything. The world. The world system. Don’t you remember?”

Jeff’s eyes go round. “Ah, yeah! The sixteen fixes! I’ve been cooking those up for years! How could I forget?”

“Because we’re fucked up, that’s how. We were drugged.”

Jeff nods. “They got us! Someone got us!”

Mutt looks dubious. “Did they read your mind? Put a ray on us? I don’t think so.”

“Of course not. We must have tried something.”

“We?”

“Okay, I might have tried something. Possibly I gave us away.”

“That sounds familiar. I think it’s something that might have happened before. Our career has been long but checkered, as I recall quite well. All too well.”

“Yeah yeah, but this was something bigger.”

“Apparently so.”

Jeff stands, holds his head with both hands. Looks around. He walks over to a wall, runs his fingers over a tight seal in the shape of a door; there is no knob or keyhole inside this door-shaped line in the wall, although there is a rectangular line inside it, around waist height on Jeff, knee height on Mutt. “Uh-oh. This is a watertight seal, see what I mean?”

“I do. So what does that mean? We’re underwater?”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeff puts his ear to the wall. “Listen, you can hear it gurgling.”

“Sure that isn’t your blood in your ear?”

“I don’t know. Come check and see what you think.”

Mutt stands, groans, looks around. The room is long, and would be square if seen in profile. In it are two single beds, a table, and a lamp, although their illumination seems to also come from the low-lit white ceiling, about eight feet over them. There is a little triangular bathroom wedged into the corner, in the style of cheap hotels everywhere. Toilet and sink and shower in there, running water hot and cold. Toilet flushes with a quick vacuum pull. In the ceiling there are two small air vents, both covered by heavy mesh. Mutt comes back out of the bathroom and walks up and down the length of the room, placing his heels right against his toes and counting his steps, lips pulsing in and out as he calculates.

“Twenty feet,” he says. “And about eight feet tall, right? And the same across.” He looks at Jeff. “That’s how big containers are. You know, like on container ships. Twenty feet long, eight wide, eight and a half feet tall.”

He puts his ear to the wall across from Jeff. “Oh yeah. There’s some kind of noise from the other side of the wall.”

“Told you. A watery noise, right? Like toilets flushing, or someone showering?”

“Or a river running.”

“What?”

“Listen to it. Like a river? Right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what a river sounds like, I mean, when you’re in it or whatever.”

The two men eye each other.

“So we’re…”

“I don’t know.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

c) that citizen

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the land at the southeast corner of Madison Square in the 1890s and built their headquarters there. Around the turn of the century the architect Napoleon LeBrun was hired to add a tower to this new building, which he decided to design based on the look of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The tower was completed in 1909 and at that point it was the tallest building on Earth, having overtopped the Flatiron Building on the southwest corner of Madison Square. The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away, and after that the Met Life tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks, telling the time to the four cardinal directions. The clock faces were so big their minute hands weighed half a ton each.

In the 1920s, Met Life bought the church to the north of the tower, knocked it down, and built their North building. It was intended to be a skyscraper 100 stories tall, well taller than the Empire State Building, which was also being planned at that time, but when the Great Depression struck the Met Life people canceled their plan and capped North at thirty-two stories. You can still see that it’s the base for something much bigger, it looks like a gigantic pedestal missing its statue. And it has thirty elevators inside it, all ready to take people up to those sixty-eight missing floors. Maybe once people get over the freak-out of the floods they’ll tack on the upper spire in graphenated composites, maybe put up three hundred more stories or whatnot. They did miss their bicentennial opportunity, but hey, what’s a century in New York real estate? Some scammer in the year 2230 will be ready with a tricentennial proposal for a superscraper addition. Anyway, now Madison Square is dominated by an enormous replica of Venice’s great campanile. Got to love that coincidence, which gives the bacino now filling the square the look of Italianosity that makes it one of the signature photo ops of the SuperVenice.

Things like that keep happening to Madison Square. It began life as a swamp, created by a freshwater spring that for many years was tapped as an artesian fountain set right in front of the Met, with tin cups chained to the fountain for people to take a drink. The water jumped out of it in spurts said to be suggestive, as in ejaculative, but seems this was only yet another indication of the irrepressible dirty-mindedness of Victorian America. That stone fountain now resides somewhere out on Long Island.

Once the swamp was filled in, using dirt from the shaved-off hills nearby, it became a parade ground for a U.S. Army arsenal, also the intersection of the post road from Boston with Broadway. The parade ground kept getting smaller and smaller, and when the famous grid of east-west streets and north-south avenues was imposed on the landscape, the parade ground was reduced to the rectangle still there, about six acres in size: Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth, between Madison and Fifth, with Broadway angling in and adding another slice to the park.

Early on, the square was occupied on its north side by a big House of Refuge, a place to incarcerate juvenile delinquents. Later Franconi’s Hippodrome provided an interior space for spectacles of various kinds, including dog races and prizefights.

A Swiss family established the popular Delmonico’s on the west side, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel followed on the same site. Stanford White built the first Madison Square Garden on the north side, and crowds came to ride gondolas around in a system of artificial canals; this was before the Met campanile was built, so maybe LeBrun got the Venetian motif from White, who had already built a tower on top of his Gardens complex; for sixteen years the square boasted both these towers. White was shot dead by the jealous husband of a woman he was seeing, right in the Garden during a dinner show. When they tore his place down and built the new Madison Square Garden over at Forty-ninth and Eighth, the steel framing of the old one was saved, and it too remains somewhere on Long Island. Maybe.

Lots of memorial statues of worthy Americans once crowded the square, with one general’s statue also serving as his tomb. Arches were frequently erected over Park Avenue to celebrate American military success in one war or another. The police charged a gathering of leftist demonstrators in the square on May Day of 1919, but this victory over the forces of darkness did not get memorialized with an arch. Nor did the quelling of the riot that happened there when Lincoln’s 1864 draft announcement was most vehemently denounced. Arches were reserved for victories abroad, apparently.

Best of all, in terms of monuments, the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty spent six years in Madison Square, filling the north end of the park in a truly surrealist fashion, rising two or three times as high as the square’s trees. The photos of that stay are awesome, and if the square were not now a bacino fifteen feet deep in water and floored by aquaculture cages, it would make sense to advocate amputating the hand and torch from the old gal and bringing them back to stand in the square again. It’s not as if she needs the torch anymore, the welcome beacon to immigrants having been long since snuffed out. Probably there would be some pushback to that plan, but what a nice park ornament, you could even climb up into it and have a look around. Bright copper in those years.

Teddy Roosevelt was born a block away, had his childhood dance lessons on the square (he kicked the little girls, natch), and ran his 1912 presidential campaign from the Met tower itself; go Progressives! If the progressives now occupying the tower succeed in changing the world, does the Bull Moose get some credit? Most definitely. Though in fact he lost that election.

Edith Wharton was born on the square and later lived there. Herman Melville lived a block to the east and walked through the square every weekday on his way to work on the docks of West Street, including during all of the six years when the Statue of Liberty’s hand and torch stood there in the square. Did he pause before it from time to time to appreciate the weirdness of it, perhaps even considering it to be a sign of his own strangely amputated fate? You know he did. One day he took his four-year-old granddaughter there to play in the park, sat down on a bench, and was looking at that torch so intently that he forgot she was running around in the tulip beds and went back home without her. She found her way back on her own, just as the maid was shoving Melville out the door to go retrieve her. Yes, our man was a space cadet.

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.

d) Inspector Gen

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.”

“Which firm?”

“Adirondack.”

“No way. Really?”

“Yes, but why do you say that?”

“Was it Larry Jackman who was his cousin?”

“No, a Henry Vinson. He runs his own fund now, Alban Albany. But he was the CEO of Adirondack at the time of the Senate investigation. But why do you ask about Larry Jackman?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Because Jackman was the CFO at Adirondack. Also he’s my ex.”

“Ex-husband?”

“Yes.” Charlotte shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We were going to NYU at the time. We got married to see if that would help keep us together.”

“Good idea,” Gen said, and was relieved when Charlotte laughed.

“Yes,” Charlotte admitted, “always a good idea. Anyway, the marriage only lasted a couple of years, and after we broke up I didn’t see him for a long time. Then we crossed paths a few times, and now we’ve got each other’s contacts, and we get together for coffee every once in a while.”

“He’s something in government now, if I recall right?”

“Chairman of the Federal Reserve.”

“Wow,” Gen said.

Charlotte shrugged. “Anyway, he doesn’t talk about family much, so I just thought this Jeff Rosen might turn out to be one of his cousins.”

“Lots of people have lots of cousins.”

“Yeah. Both of Larry’s parents had lots of siblings. But go on—it was Vinson who Jeffrey Rosen is related to, you say. So why do you find this connection interesting?”

“It’s just a way in,” Gen said. “These guys are missing, and there’s been no trace of them physically or electronically. They haven’t used their cards or pinged the cloud, which is hard to do for long. That can mean bad things, of course. But also it leaves us without anything to look at. When that happens, we look at anything we can. This connection isn’t much, but the Senate investigation included Adirondack, and Rosen recused himself.”

“And Jackman now runs the Fed,” Charlotte added, looking a little grim. “I remember something about how he left Adirondack. The board of directors chose Vinson as the CEO over him, so pretty soon he left and started something on his own. He never said much about it to me, but I got the impression it was kind of a painful sequence.”

“Maybe so. My sergeant says it looks like Adirondack blew up. Then more recently, Rosen and Muttchopf did some contract work for Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, enough to get them tax forms for last year. So there’s another connection.”

“But it’s the same connection.”

“But twice. I’m not saying it means anything, but it gives us something to look at. Vinson has any number of colleagues and acquaintances, and so did Muttchopf and Rosen. And Adirondack is one of the world’s biggest investment firms. So there are more threads to follow. You see how it goes.”

“Sure.”

Gen watched her closely as she said, “Please don’t say anything about this to Larry Jackman.”

Would she understand that this request meant there might be lines of inquiry that led back to her?

She did. She followed the implications and blanked her features. “No, of course not,” she said. “I mean, we very seldom see each other, as I said.”

“Good. That means it won’t be hard.”

“Not at all.”

“So tell me again how the two guys came here?”

“They had a friend in the Flatiron Building, and they were camping out on its roof farm looking across the square at us, so when the Flatiron board told them to leave, they came over and asked if they could stay.”

“So they applied to the residency board?”

“They asked Vlade, and Vlade asked me, and I met with them and thought they were okay, so I asked the residency board to let them stay on a temp permit. I thought we could use their help analyzing the building’s reserve fund, which isn’t doing very well.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s been in the minutes.”

Gen shrugged. “I don’t usually read those.”

“I don’t think many people do.”

Gen thought it over. “Do you often intervene like that with the residents’ board?”

Now she would definitely know she was being questioned with purpose.

She nodded as if to acknowledge that, and said, “I do it from time to time, if I see a situation where I think I can help people and help the building. I think the board doesn’t like it, because we’re a little overfull. So they have enough going on with the regular waiting list. Plus special cases of their own.”

“But openings keep happening.”

“Sure. Hardly anyone actually moves out, but a lot of residents have been here for a long time, and there’s a certain mortality rate.”

“People are reliable that way.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why I’m here, actually. I moved in to take care of my mom after my dad died, and when she died, I inherited her co-op membership.”

“Ah. When was that?”

“Three years ago.”

“So maybe that’s why you’re a member of the co-op but don’t pay attention to the building’s business.”

Gen shrugged. “I thought you said hardly anyone did.”

“Well, the reserve finances are a little esoteric. But it’s a co-op, you know. So actually a lot of people keep their hand in the game one way or other.”

“I probably should,” Gen allowed.

Charlotte nodded at this, but then something else struck her: “Everyone’s going to know pretty soon about something that came up at the last board meeting. There’s been an offer made on the building.”

“Someone wants to buy the whole building?”

“That’s right.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know. They’re operating through a broker.”

Gen had a tendency to see patterns. No doubt it was an effect of her job, and she recognized that, but she couldn’t help herself. As here: someone disappears from a building, they have powerful relatives and colleagues, the building gets an offer. She couldn’t help wondering if there was a connection. “We can refuse the offer, right?”

“Sure, but we probably have to vote on it. Get an opinion from the membership, even a decision. And the offer is for about twice what the building is worth, so that will tempt a lot of people. It’s almost like a hostile takeover bid.”

“I hope it doesn’t happen,” Gen said. “I don’t want to move, and I bet not many residents here want to either. I mean, where would we go?”

Charlotte shrugged. “Some people think money can solve anything.”

Gen said, “How can you tell if their bid is twice what the building’s worth? How can anyone tell what anything is worth these days?”

“Comparisons to similar deals,” Charlotte said.

“Are deals like this going down?”

“Quite a few. I talk to people on the boards of other buildings, and Lemmas meets once a month, and a lot of people are reporting offers, even a couple of buyouts. I hate what it means.”

“What does it mean?”

“Well, I think that now that sea level appears to have stabilized, and people have gotten past the emergency years—well, that was a huge effort. That took a lot of wet equity.”

“The greatest generation,” Gen quoted.

“People like to think so.”

“Especially people of that generation.”

“Exactly. The comebackers, the water rats, the what-have-yous.”

“Our parents.”

“That’s right. And really, they did a lot. I don’t know about you, but the stories my mom used to tell, and her dad…”

Gen nodded. “I’m a fourth-generation cop, and keeping some kind of order through the floods was hard. They had to hold the line.”

“I’m sure. But now, you know, lower Manhattan is an interesting place. So people are talking investment opportunities and regentrification. New York is still New York. And uptown is a monster. And billionaires from everywhere like to park money here. If you do that you can drop in occasionally and have a night on the town.”

“It’s always been that way.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. In fact I hate it.”

Gen nodded as she regarded Charlotte. She was on the watch for any signs of dissembling, because Charlotte had connections with the missing men in more ways than one, so there was reason to be attentive. And she was a woman of strong opinions. Gen was beginning to see why her youthful marriage might have failed: a financier and a social worker walk into a bar…

But in fact Gen saw no signs of dissembling. On the contrary, Charlotte seemed very open and frank. Although it was true that being forthcoming in one area could be used to disguise withholding in other areas. So she wasn’t sure yet.

“So you’d like to stop this bid on the building?”

“Hell yes I would. Like I just said, I don’t like what it means. And I like this place. I don’t want to move.”

“I think that will be the majority opinion,” Gen said reassuringly. Then she shifted gears fast, a habit of hers; pop a surprise and see if it caused a startle: “What about our super? Could he be involved in this?”

“In the disappearance?” Definitely surprised. “Why would he be?”

“I don’t know. But he has access to the building’s security systems, and the cameras went out right when they went missing. I don’t think that could be a coincidence. So there’s that. Then also, if this hostile takeover bid wanted inside help, they might offer some people here a better deal if they took over.”

Charlotte was shaking her head through most of what Gen had said. “Vlade is this building. I don’t think he would react well to anyone trying to fuck with it in any way.”

“Well, okay. But money can make people think they’re helping when they aren’t, know what I mean?”

“I do. But he would see anything like that as a bribe, I think, and then people would be lucky to get away without getting thrown in the canal. No, Vlade loves this place, I know that.”

“He’s been here a long time?”

“Yes. He came here about fifteen years ago, after some bad stuff happened.”

“Meaning trouble with the law?”

“No. He was married, and their child died in an accident, and after that the marriage fell apart, and that’s about when we hired him.”

“You were on the board even then?”

“Yes,” Charlotte replied heavily. “Even then.”

“So you don’t think he could be involved with any of this.”

“That’s right.”

Now they were both done eating, coffees emptied, and they knew the urns would be empty too. Never enough coffee in the Met. And Gen could tell she had managed to irritate Charlotte more than once. She had done it on purpose, but enough was enough. For now, anyway.

“Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll keep looking for these guys. As for the building, I’ll start coming to the member meetings, and I’ll talk to the people in the building I know, about holding on to what we’ve got.”

This came down to just a few next-door neighbors, but she hoped just saying it would pour some oil on the waters.

“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “There’ll always be meetings.”

e) Vlade

“Mayday,” the Met said from Vlade’s wall monitor. He had chosen a woman’s voice for the building, and now he found himself sitting up in bed reaching for the light and then his clothes. “What’s up?” he asked. “Report.”

“Water in the sub-basement.”

“Shit.” He leaped up and threw on his Carhartts. “How much how fast, and where?”

“I have reported the first sensing of moisture. Speed of inflow not established. Room B201.”

“Okay, tell me the speed of inflow when you have one.”

“Will do.”

Vlade clumped downstairs to the sub-basement and the lights came on ahead of him as he moved. The sub-basement was not only below the waterline, it was below the rockline as well, as it had been cut into bedrock at the time of the building’s construction, in the first years of the twentieth century. Every part of the building but the tower had been replaced in 1999, when the foundation had been dug deeper still. No one then worried about waterproofing, and the bedrock had cracks in it, as all rock did. When the island had been dry land that hadn’t mattered, but now it did, as water from the canals seeped slowly but inexorably down cracks in the rock. The concrete cladding the walls of the sub-basement was therefore harder to seal than on the floors above, because you could get to the outsides of those higher parts of the wall, either by diving to them or by caissoning the canals. Access was all, and given the lack of access he could only seal the sub-basement on the inside surfaces of its walls. This was profoundly unsatisfactory, as it left the concrete of the walls and floor exposed to seep, and thus getting degraded in the usual ways: corrosion, melting, slumping, disintegration. But there was nothing to be done about it.

Because of this unsolvable problem he kept the sub-basement empty, its floor and walls entirely clear. Some people on the board complained that this was a waste of space, but he was adamant. He had to be able to see what was happening. It was one of the worst vulnerabilities in the whole building.

So when he hurried into room B201, he could see all of it immediately. A big bright space, looking wet everywhere because the lights reflected off the so-called diamond sheeting that covered every surface. It was actually a graphenated composite, but as it was transparent and shiny, Vlade like everyone else called it diamond. It was not quite as hard as diamond, but it was more flexible and could be applied as a spray. Really the new composites were simply wonderful when it came to strength, flexibility, weight, everything you wanted out of building materials. They made submarine living possible.

The floor was slightly knobbled to create better footing; the walls were smoother but brushed like brushed aluminum, precisely to reduce the glare of reflected light. What it meant was a glitter instead of a glare, a glitter as if everything were damp and sparkling with dew. It was enough to give him a little startle of dismay, even though it always looked this way.

That being the case, he had to search around to find the leak. The building had indeed reported the first sign of moisture; he only found it by deploying his humidity sensor wand. The damp spot was in the far corner, where the north wall, east wall, and floor met. Which was odd, as a point like that was precisely where the sheeting got sprayed thicker than usual. Still, this was where the wand was pinging. He sat down on the cool knobbled floor, brushed his hand over it. Yep, wet. He smelled the damp, got nothing. Took his flashlight from his tool belt and aimed the strongest beam at the corner. It took some moving of his head back and forth to find the right focus for his old eyes, but finally he spotted it: fracture. Microfracture.

But this made no sense. He whipped out his pocket lens, leaned over on his knees and held the flashlight at an angle, moved the lens in and out. Blurry big view of the blob of diamond spray that had congealed or dried or what-have-you in the corner. Fracture, yes. Welling water in the crack grew till the surface tension on it broke and it slid onto the floor, just as it would have at larger scales. But fuck if the hole didn’t look drilled.

He swabbed the corner clear, took a macro photo with his wristpad. The crack indeed looked round, like two little holes actually, the water welling up hemispherically like blood from two pinpricks. Clear blood. “Damn.”

He swabbed it again, then pasted over the corner with a dab of leakstopper. He wanted something more substantial for later, like a thick spray of sheeting, but for now this would have to do.

“Vlade,” the Met said in his earbud, “mayday. Water in the midbasement, southwest corner, room B104.”

“How much?”

“First detection of moisture. Speed of inflow undetermined.”

He hustled up the broad stairs and across the room surrounding the stairwell to room B104, favoring his bad left knee. The rooms on this floor were smaller than the ones on the floor below. He kept them equally empty against the walls, though their middles were filled with boxes in stacks he had organized himself. The floor was ordinary concrete, the walls diamond sheeted, as below. Here the outside of the building was in water even at low tide, as was true of the floor above it, the old ground floor. The one above that was intertidal. Right now it was high tide, so there would be a little more pressure on any submarine leaks, but for two leaks to spring at almost the same time struck Vlade as extremely suspicious, especially given the corner position and drilled look of the one below.

Again his humidity wand led him quickly to the leak, which was low on a wall. Here the wall was sheeted both inside and outside, so a leak made even less sense than the one below. This one looked like a crack rather than a pinprick. Like a stress fracture perhaps. Water oozed from the bottom of the crack, which was almost vertical. Beads of water, welling up and dripping down the wall.

“God damn it.”

He gooed the crack with another liberal dab of leakstopper, thought it over, then stomped around the elevator shaft to his room. He got out of his Carhartts and into his swim trunks, cursing all the while. The lower leak would necessarily have been drilled from the inside. He didn’t want to give any oral commands to the building about the security cameras, because the camera issue had not been resolved to his satisfaction yet, and the whole system could be compromised. So he would have to wait to check that until others were there to help and witness. First order of business was to inspect the outside of the building to see if the higher crack extended all the way through to the outside. If it did, that would be simpler than if it was a complex leak in which the interior crack was not matched by an exterior one. But either way was bad.

The wetsuits and dive tanks and gear were in the boathouse, in a storage room next to his office. People were getting out in their watercraft without undue stress, it seemed, and Su nodded nervously to him that all was well. “I’m going to take a quick dive,” Vlade told him, which caused Su to frown. Dives were never supposed to be solo, but Vlade did it all the time around the building, accompanied only by a little sub sled.

“I’ll keep the phone on,” Su said, to remind him, and Vlade nodded and began the somewhat arduous process of getting his wetsuit on. For building inspections he could use the smallest tank, and the headset was just a mask settling onto the hood like a snorkel mask. The seal was not completely hermetic but good enough for brief work near the surface, and he could scrub down afterward.

There were steps down into the water inside the boathouse. Only three were now exposed, which meant it was almost high tide. Down he went, feeling like the swamp thing from the eponymous movie, the scariest movie of all time in his opinion. Happily he was not dragging some poor rapidly aging maiden down with him. Nor even the sled, which was not needed for a dive like this.

The water was cold as always, even in the wetsuit, but he had been warming up so fast that it felt good to be cooled. Submerge, quick test of the gear, then out the boathouse door into the bacino, swimming horizontally. The wetsuit’s feet were just slightly webbed and finned, and that too felt good. Headlamp on, powerful beam, nevertheless mostly catching the particulates in the god-awful water of the city, as always. Actually the hundreds of millions of clams in the aquaculture cages all over the intertidal were doing yeoman work in filtering clean the water. Now he could usually see at least two or three meters, and sometimes more. Stay deep enough to not get knocked on the head by some boat’s keel or prop, but high enough not to run into the bacino’s aquaculture pens. The familiar weightlessness of neutral buoyancy, of horizontal underwater life. Lots of fish in the highest cages: salmon, sea trout, catfish, the sinuous schools of fishy bodies all turning together against the cage sides.

Swim around the northwest corner of the building, hovering over the old sidewalk like a ghost. Sidewalk, curb, street: always a little stab of the uncanny to see these signs of New York as it used to be. Twenty-fourth Street.

Around the corner, float to the spot on the wall outside room B104. GPS to be sure he was there. He put his face to the wall and inspected the diamond sheen inch by inch, running his gloved fingers over it too. Nothing super obvious… ah yes, right outside the inner crack, it seemed: an outer crack. What the fuck?

Vlade had spent ten years in the city’s water division, working on sewage lines, utilidors, subway tunnels, and aquafarms, mostly. So being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown, or indeed more ordinary, as he hardly ever went uptown. The surface overhead surged slightly back and forth like a breathing thing. Opalescent sheen to the east where the sun was rising between buildings. Wakes crisscrossing, slapping against the Met and North, rebounding and breaking against each other, bubbles coming into being and snapping out of existence. A glimpse of the sun now, shattering on the water when he looked east along Twenty-fourth. All normal; but still he found himself creeped out. Something was wrong.

Just to be sure, he swam to the building’s northeast corner and shined his headlamp at the juncture of building and sidewalk, looking five or six meters on both sides. This was always a weird sight, with the goo that sealed the juncture of building and ancient sidewalk looking like congealed gray lava, and the sidewalk itself diamond-sheeted, even to a certain extent the old street surface. This was the weak point for every building still upright in the shallows of lower Manhattan; you could only seal surfaces so far out from the building, and beyond that they were permeable. Indeed one of the projects of city services was to caisson and pump out every drowned street in the city, about two hundred miles of streets all told, and diamond sheet every surface up to above high tide, before letting the water back in. This could only ever be partly successful, as of course there was already water everywhere down there below street level, saturating the old concrete and asphalt and soil, so they would be sealing some of it in while keeping the rest out. It wasn’t clear to Vlade that this would be particularly useful. Closing the barn door after the horses had leaked, as far as Vlade and many other water rats were concerned, but the hydrologists had declared it would help the situation, and so slowly it got done. As if there weren’t more pressing chores on the list. But whatever. Looking at the edge of the sealant and sheeting and the beginning of bare street concrete, now a canal bottom, Vlade could feel in his gut why the hydrologists had wanted to try something. Anything.

Inspection complete, he swam slowly back into the boathouse and clomped dripping up the steps, this time reminding himself of the creature from the black lagoon.

When he was out of the wetsuit, and had sprayed down his face and neck with bleach, and washed that off and dried himself and gotten back in his civvies, he called his old friend Armando from Lame Ass’s submarine services. “Hey Mando, can you pop over and take a look at my building? I got a couple of leaks.” Mando agreed to schedule him in. “Thanks.”

He looked at the photos on his pad, then turned to his screens and called up the building’s leak records. Also, after some hesitation, the building’s security cameras.

Nothing obvious. But then again, after checking his log: there was nothing recorded on the basement cameras, even on days when people had definitely gone into those sub-basement rooms, as recorded in the logs.

Often after a dive he felt queasy, everyone did from time to time; they said it was nitrogen buildup, or anoxia, or the toxic water with all its organics and effluents and microflora and fauna and outright poisons, the whole chemical stew that made up the city’s estuarine flow, my God! It made you sick, that was just the way it was. But today he felt sicker than usual.

He called up Charlotte Armstrong. “Charlotte, where are you?”

“I’m walking to my office, I’m almost there. I walked the whole way.” She sounded pleased with herself.

“Good. Hey, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like someone is sabotaging our building.”

f) Amelia

Amelia’s airship the Assisted Migration was a Friedrichshafen Deluxe Midi, and she loved it. She had called the autopilot Colonel Blimp at first, but its voice was so friendly, helpful, and Germanic that she switched to calling it Frans. When she ran into trouble of one sort or another, which was the part of her programs that her viewers loved the most, especially if the trouble somehow lost her her clothes, she would say, “Oh, Frans, yikes, please do a three-sixty here and get us out of this!” and Frans would take over, executing the proper maneuver whatever it might be, while making a heavy joke, always almost the same joke, about how a 360-degree turn would only get you going the way you were already going. Everyone had heard it by now, so it was a running joke, or a flying joke as Frans called it, but also, in practical terms, part of a problem solved. Frans was smart. Of course he had to leave some decisions to her, being judgment calls outside his purview. But he was surprisingly ingenious, even in what you might have called this more human realm of executive function.

The blimp, actually a dirigible—if you acknowledged that an internal framework could be only semirigid or demirigid, made of aerogels and not much heavier than the gas in the ballonets—was forty meters long and had a capacious gondola, running along the underside of the airship like a fat keel. It had been built in Friedrichshafen right before the turn of the century and since then had flown many miles, in a career somewhat like those of the tramp steamers of the latter part of the nineteenth century. The keys to its durability were its flexibility and its lightness, and also the photovoltaic outer skin of the bag, which made the craft effectively autonomous in energy terms. Of course there was sun damage eventually, and supplies were needed on a regular basis, but often it was possible to restock without landing by meeting with skyvillages they passed. So, like the millions of other similar airships wandering the skies, they didn’t really ever have to come down. And like millions of other aircraft occupants, for many years Amelia had therefore not gone down. It had been a refuge she had needed. During those years there had seldom been a time when she couldn’t see other airships in the distance, but that was fine by her, even comforting, as it gave her the idea of other people without their actual presence, and made the atmosphere into a human space, an ever-shifting calvinocity. It looked as if after the coastlines had drowned, people had taken to the skies like dandelion seeds and recongregated in the clouds.

Although now she saw again that in the polar latitudes the skies were less occupied. Two hundred miles north of Quebec she spotted only a few aircraft, mostly big freighters at much higher altitudes, taking advantage of their absence of human crews to get up into the bottom of the jet stream and hurry to their next rendezvous.

As they approached Hudson Bay, Frans dove steeply, altering their pitch by pumping helium around in the ballonets and by tilting the flaps located behind the powerful turbines housed in two big cylinders attached to the sides of the craft. Together these actions shoved their nose down and sent them humming toward the ground.

The October nights were growing long up here, and the frozen landscape was a black whiteness to every horizon, with the icy gleam of a hundred lakes making it clear just how crushed and then flooded the Canadian shield had been by the great ice cap of the last ice age. It looked more like an archipelago than a continent. Near dawn, a glow of light on the horizon to the north marked the town they were visiting: Churchill, Manitoba. As they dropped over the town and headed for its airship field, they saw it was a desolate little knot of buildings, far enough down the western shore of Hudson Bay that it got no traffic from the busy Northwest Passage, except for an occasional cruise ship visiting in the hope of seeing whatever polar bears might remain.

Which were hardly any. This was mainly because the bears were now stuck on land every year from the breakup of the sea ice in the spring until it refroze in the fall, a disappearance that kept the bears away from the seals, which were their main source of food. That meant they were so hungry they never had triplets, nor hardly twins, and when they came through town to see if they could walk on the new sea ice yet, they also looked around to see if there was anything to eat in town. This pattern had existed for over a century, and the town’s Polar Bear Alert Program had long ago worked out a routine to deal with the October influx of bears headed for the newly frozen ice, tranquilizing ursine trespassers and blimping them in nets to a point downcoast where early ice and seals both tended to congregate. This year, rather than blimping all the trespassers out of town, the program officers had kept their holding tank full, with the idea that some of these jailed bears, the most obnoxious in the region, had self-selected to be the ones to get airlifted much farther south than usual.

After Frans attached to an airship mast at the edge of town and was pulled to the ground by a local crew, Amelia got out and greeted a clutch of locals. Actually it was very close to the total population of the town, she was told. Amelia shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for hosting her, filming all the while with a swarm of camera flies. After that she followed them across town to the holding tank.

“We’re approaching the polar bear jail in Churchill,” Amelia voice-overed unnecessarily as she filmed. Her team was not sending this out live, so she felt more relaxed than usual, but was also trying to be conscientious. “This jail and its animal control officers have saved literally thousands of polar bears from untimely death. Before the program was started, an average of twenty bears a year were shot dead to keep them from mauling people here in town. Now it’s a rare year when any bear has to be shot. When they get through a season with no bear deaths, a gigantic polar bear snowman is built to celebrate the achievement by the human citizens of the town.”

She filmed the pickup trucks that were going to convey her transpolar emigrants from the jail to the Assisted Migration. These were very hefty pickup trucks, with snow tires taller than she was. Polar bears did not hibernate, she was told, so during their trip south they would be confined to the big animal rooms at the stern end of the airship’s gondola, configured to make a single big enclosure. Apparently it had been decided that they would tolerate the voyage better if they were accommodated communally. Amelia’s producers had prepared the room in advance of departure and stocked the craft’s freezers and refrigerators with the seal steaks needed to feed them en route.

As the local program officers used a crane to hoist the drugged and netted bears into the pickup truck, then drove them over to the airship, Amelia filmed and spoke her voice-over, ad-libbing in the knowledge that later editing would change it all anyway. “Some people seem to not understand what a problem extinction is! Hard to imagine that, but it’s clearly true, because we haven’t been able to get everyone to agree that moving some polar bears back into a truly polar environment is their last chance for survival in the wild. Twenty bears are going to be transported eventually, that’s about ten percent of all the polar bears left in the wild. I’ll be taking six of them. So, if by doing that we help get them past this moment into a viable future, their genetic bottleneck from this century is going to be as skinny as a lifestraw, but it’s better than extinction, right? It’s either this or the end, so I say, load ’em up and ship ’em out!”

The bears, sedated and netted, looked disheveled and yellowy. The huge pickups backed up to the stern bay door of her airship’s gondola, where a little portable crane was wheeled up and used to lift one netted bear at a time onto a small forklift, which was dwarfed by its load but held the ground well enough to hum up the ramp into the animals’ room. During their trip the room would be kept at arctic temperatures, and everything a polar bear might want in autumn was on board. The trip south was scheduled to take two weeks, weather permitting.

Soon after the bears were on board they were ready for liftoff. Frans slung their hook and off they went, rising a bit slower than usual, being some five tons heavier.

A week later they ran into a tropical storm coming north from Trinidad and Tobago, and Amelia asked Frans to head for the west fringe of the storm’s circulation, which would give her viewers a dramatic edge-on view of what might become a hurricane, while also pushing them southward in its counterclockwise flow. The storm was now named Harold, which was Amelia’s younger brother’s name, so she started calling the storm Little Brother. As a totality it was moving north at about twenty kilometers an hour, but its western edge was whirlpooling such that its winds pushed southward at about two hundred kilometers an hour. “That gives us a net assist south of about a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour,” Amelia informed her future audience, “which is great, even if it only lasts for a few hours. Because the natives are getting a little restless, it seems to me.”

She said this with her usual moue of tolerant dismay, her raised eyebrows and bugged-out eyes giving her a Lucille Ball look, always good. The camera flies buzzing around her would add to the effect with their fish-eye lenses.

The bears were supposed to be entering into their winter mode, which was not hibernation but rather a state that made them kind of like zombie bears, as one of the program officers in Churchill had put it. But it sure didn’t sound like it to Amelia. From aft came subsonic, stomach-vibrating, vaguely leonine roars, and also barks suggestive of the Hound of the Baskervilles. “Unhappy polar bears?” she asked. “Are they looking out the windows at the storm? Are they hungry? They seem so upset!”

Then they were caught by the outer edge of Harold, and for almost ten minutes the noise of the wind was tremendous. They were buffeted hard, and whether the bears were still complaining was hard to tell, as it was too loud to hear anything, but Amelia’s stomach was still vibrating like a drumhead next to another drum getting hammered, so it seemed like they probably were. “Hold on, folks!” Amelia said loudly. “You know what this is like—the airship is going to be loud until it gets up to speed. Of course there’s hardly any resistance to us speeding up; it’s not like a ship on the ocean, which took me a while to understand, because up here we basically move with the wind, so the wind doesn’t fly by us, like it would a ship or even an airplane. If we shut down our turbines, we just get carried along with whatever wind there is. That’s why we can fly in hurricanes without danger, as long as we don’t try to go anywhere other than where it wants us to go. Just bob along like a cork on a stream, slow or fast, doesn’t matter to us. Right, Frans?”

Although this time it was pretty bumpy. There was turbulence as the whirlpool of wind interacted with the slower air around it; things would go better when they moved a bit farther into the hurricane, as Amelia explained, not for the first time. Even so, it would still stay a little bumpy; they were in clouds, and a cloud was like a diffuse lake, with some choppiness in it created by the variable distribution of water droplets, so that even when they were pulled to the ambient wind speed and were flowing in the flow, they were also deep in cloud, and the quick shuddering vibration and occasional dip or swing meant the sense of speed was still there, even though they couldn’t see anything. “This bumpiness is part of the laminar flow,” Amelia narrated. “The cloud itself is shimmying!”

Although maybe it was just the airship, flexing its aerogel frame. Amelia felt sure it was not usually this bumpy inside clouds, even hurricane clouds. They weren’t resisting the wind, weren’t trying to crab out of the storm; just riding the flow, with Frans trying to modulate the up-and-down of the clouds’ internal waves. And yet still they were rocking hard, irregularly, both up and down and side to side.

“I don’t know,” Amelia announced, “it doesn’t make sense, but I’m wondering if this rocking is being caused by the bears?”

It didn’t seem likely, but nothing else seemed more likely. Probably the bears weren’t throwing themselves from side to side in an organized manner; anyway, she hoped not. They weighed some eight hundred pounds each, so even without coordinating their motions, even just banging about, or perhaps fighting each other, throwing each other around like sumo wrestlers—yes, they would certainly have enough mass to rock the boat. The airship was only semirigid at best, and highly sensitive to internal shifts of weight. So, if they were carrying an enraged cargo… “Bears and bears and bears, oh my!”

She went back down the central hallway to take a look. There was a window in the hallway door to the animals’ half of the gondola, so she grabbed a hairclip camera and clipped it to her hair, and looked in to see how they were doing.

The first thing she saw was blood. “Oh no!” Red on the walls, some of it spattered drops, some of it claw marks. “Frans, what’s going on here!”

“All systems normal,” Frans reported.

“What do you mean! Take a look!”

“Look where?”

“In the bears’ room!”

Amelia went to the tool closet in the hall, opened it, and took a tranquilizer dart gun from the mounting on the back wall. Returning to the hall door and looking through the window, she saw nothing, so she unlocked the door and was immediately knocked back as the door burst open into her. Bloodied white giants ran past her like dogs, like immense albino Labrador retrievers, or big men in ill-fitting white fur coats running on all fours. She lay sprawled against the far wall, playing dead, and luckily did not catch any of the creatures’ attention. She shot one with a trank dart in the haunch as it ran forward along the hall toward the bridge, then when they were out of sight she scrambled to her feet and ran to the tool closet. She leaped in and pulled the door closed after her, twisted the handle latch into place on the inside, and right after that heard the door thumped hard on the outside. Great big paw whacking it! Whacking it hard!

Oh no! Locked in closet, at least three bears loose in the airship, possibly six; airship in hurricane. Somehow she had done it again.

“Frans?”

g) Stefan and Roberto

Stefan and Roberto had not found a chance to recharge the battery that powered their boat, so they walked on skybridges west and got on the Sixth vapo north to go see their friend Mr. Hexter. It was raining hard, the canal surfaces crazy with fat raindrop pocks and the splash sprinkles around the pocks, their little rings expanding out into bigger rings, all overlaid on boat wakes and the perpetual scalloping of a strong south wind: crazy gray water under a rolling gray sky, movement everywhere they looked. People waited on the docks under rain shelters if there were any, or stood under umbrellas or stoically out in the downpour. The boys stood in the bow with big plastic jackets on, getting wet. They didn’t care.

Low tide revealed the dark green bathtub ring on every building in this neighborhood. Eleven-foot tides, people said. The incoming flood tide was what the boys wanted to exploit on this day, by stopping on the way to Mr. Hexter’s at the Street of Fundy, meaning Sixth between Thirty-second and Central Park.

They left the vapo at the dock next to Ernesto’s deli on Thirty-first and borrowed a couple of Ernesto’s skimboards and wetsuits. From there they walked up the west Sixth boardwalk, which ran like a flat awning across building fronts, to the long triangular bacino where Sixth and Broadway met at Thirty-fourth, just north of the low tide line. This was the start of the Street of Fundy, yet another renaming of this section of Sixth, and much better than Avenue of the Americas, a cheesy politician’s name more suitable for Madison Avenue, or Denver. Now this stretch had a very appropriate name, because tides on the Street of Fundy were shocking at both flood and ebb.

This stretch of midtown was the widest part of the intertidal, a mess for the most part, but interesting, a zone of squatters and scammers and street people out to have some fun. People like Stefan and Roberto, who loved to join the skimboarders who congregated when the rising tide, coming up both Broadway and Sixth, combined to surge hard up the slight incline of Sixth, each advance of the white foam hissing north with startling rapidity, especially if pushed by a south wind. If you stood at Fortieth and looked south during the flood tide, you saw the bay’s edge sluice up the green slick in low waves, rolling over the mat of waxy seaweed leaves in rushes of white foam, reflooring the street a long way before the verge of foam stalled and sucked back, then crashed into the next incoming white surge, throwing up a little white wall that quickly collapsed and folded into the next onrush.

All that action meant that if you were riding the surge on a skimboard, as Stefan and Roberto soon were, you could cut around on the mini-breaks, shoot across the street from curb to curb, turn on a dime in the curbslush, or jump the curb and turn in doorways, sometimes even catching the rebound wave coming off buildings and jumping off the curb back into the street.

Stefan and Roberto joined the group with some whoops to announce their presence. The group’s objections were duly noted and rejected, and off they all went, skimming up block after block with the tide’s rise, jockeying for position on the surges, doing spinners if possible, curb turns, stepping off if necessary, even falling from time to time. Which could be painful, as the water was never deep enough to keep you from hitting asphalt, although even four inches could cushion the blow, especially if you trusted the water and pancaked on it.

Then also Sixth was flat enough across the top of the intertidal, especially between Thirty-seventh and Forty-first, that the last surges of a good flood tide could carry you in a single shot all the way up to the high tide mark, where the asphalt, though cracked and worn, returned to being mostly black rather than mostly green. The intertidal always tended to be green. Life! Life liked the intertidal.

It was fantastic to feel the resistance of water getting squished between your board and the street, a sensation that was perfectly tangible underfoot, so much so that you could shift your weight just a tiny bit, using the most exquisite precision, and cause the board to shoot forward over the water, keeping it from touching the street by margins ever so small; a tenth of an inch off the street and you were still frictionless! If you didn’t pearl the world was a whirl! And if you did bottom out you just ran off the board, turned and caught it before it barked your ankles, threw it ahead of you and ran and jumped on it again, nailing the landing just right to press straight down on the board, and off you went again!

It was also very cool, if you stuck around till the start of the ebb, to see the water run back down the street. You couldn’t ride it, that didn’t really work, though diehards always tried; but it was great just to sit there in the street, wasted and glowing in your wetsuit, and watch the water just run away, sucking down the street as if Mother Ocean had breathed in deep or was prepping some gnarly tsunami. Seemed at that moment like the whole world might dry out right before their eyes. But no, just the ordinary tidal suck, it would stabilize again down near Thirty-first, the low tide line, beyond which you had the true lower Manhattan, the submerged zone, their home waters. Their town.

Great fun all around! Afterward they pulled off Ernesto’s ratty old wetsuits and sprayed each other down first with bleach, then with some water drained through a jumbo lifestraw, after which they toweled off shivering and wincing at their cuts, which were almost sure to get a little infected. Then they thanked Ernesto as they returned his stuff, promising to make some deliveries for him later. Lot of verbosity with the other regular skimmers who stashed at Ernesto’s; there weren’t that many of them, because the falls could be just a little too brutal. So it was a tight group, one of the many small subcultures in this most clubbish of cities.

When they were dried and dressed and had wolfed down some day-old rolls Ernesto had knuckleballed at them, they walked west on plank-and-cinder-block sidewalks to Eighth, into the maze of drowned Chelsea.

Here almost every building that had not collapsed had been condemned, and rightfully so. When in spate the Hudson tended to run hard though this neighborhood, and the foundations here were not set on bedrock. Concrete turned out to be quite friable over the long haul, and while steel was stronger, it was usually set in concrete, so rusty or strong, it became irrelevant as its moorings crumbled. Once a state law had been passed condemning the whole neighborhood, Mr. Hexter had said, but naturally people had ignored the law and squatted here as much as anywhere else. It was just that the law was probably right.

So the neighborhood was quiet. They made their way on planks set on cinder blocks to a rude stoopdock, consisting of planks nailed on top of pallet-sized blocks of old Styrofoam, tied in front of a low brownstone on Twenty-ninth. There was no one in sight, which was weird to see. Without intending to they lowered their voices. All the buildings in sight had windows broken, and only some of those were boarded up; many were empty holes, generally a reliable sign of abandonment. There was not a single unbroken glass window to be seen. It was quiet enough that you could clearly hear the slop of waves against walls and the hiss of bubbles bursting, all filling the air with a susurrus that was strangely pleasant to hear, compared to the city’s usual honk and wail.

The two boys looked around to see if anyone was watching. Still no one. They ducked into the brownstone’s open door and made their way up a moldy battered staircase.

Fifth-floor walk-up. Floorboards creaking underfoot. Smell of mildew and mold and unemptied chamber pots. “Essence of New York,” Roberto noted as they shuffled down the dark hallway to the end door. They knocked on it using the old man’s code for his friends, and waited. Around them the building creaked and reeked.

The door opened and the wizened face of their friend peered up at them.

“Ah, gentlemen,” the man said. “Come in. Thanks for dropping by.”

They entered his apartment, which smelled less than the hallway but inevitably did smell. Quite a bit, actually. The old man had long since gotten used to it, they assumed. His room was very shabby, and crowded with books and boxes filled with clothing and crap, but it was orderly for all that. The piles of books were everywhere, often to head height or above it, but they all were foursquare piles, with the biggest books at the bottom, and all the spines facing out for easy reference. Several battery and oil lanterns perched on these stacks. Cabinets had drawers that they knew were full of rolled and folded maps, and the room was dominated by a big cubical map cabinet, chest high. A sink in the corner had a bulb of water draining down through a jumbo lifestraw into a bowl resting in the sink.

The old man knew where everything was and could go to anything he wanted without hesitation. He did sometimes ask them for help in moving books, to get to a large one at the bottom of a pile, but the boys were happy to oblige. The old man had more books than anyone they knew, more in fact than the total of all the other books they had ever seen. Stefan and Roberto didn’t like to talk about this, but neither of them could read. They therefore liked the maps most.

“Have a seat, gentlemen. Would you like some tea? What brings you here today?”

“We found it,” Roberto said.

The old man straightened up, looked at them. “Truly?”

“We think we did,” Stefan said. “There was a big hit on the metal detector, right at the GPS spot you gave us. Then we had to leave, but we marked the spot, and we’ll be able to find it again.”

“Wonderful,” the old man said. “The signal was strong?”

“It was pinging like crazy,” Roberto said. “And the detector was set for gold.”

“Right under the GPS spot?”

“Right under it.”

“Wonderful. Marvelous.”

“But the thing is, how deep could it be down?” Stefan asked. “How deep will we have to dig?”

The old man shrugged, frowned. His face made him look like a child with some kind of wasting disease. “How far down can the metal detector detect?”

“They say ten meters, but it depends on how much metal, and how wet the ground is, and things like that.”

He nodded. “Well, it could be that deep.” He limped over to his map cabinet and pulled out a folded map. “Here, look at this.”

They sat on each side of him. The map was a USGS topographical map from before the floods, of Manhattan and some of the surrounding harbor area. It had both elevation contour intervals and streets and buildings—a very crowded map, on which the old man had also drawn the original shorelines of the bay in green, and the current shorelines in red. And there in the south Bronx, inland from the shore as drawn by the USGS mapmakers, but underwater when considering both the red and the green lines, was a black X. Hexter tapped it with his forefinger, as always; the middle of the X was even a little worn.

“So, you know how I told you before,” he said, his usual preface. “I told you before, the HMS Hussar takes off from down near Battery Park where the British have their dock. November 23, 1780. One hundred fourteen feet long, thirty-four feet wide, sixth-rate twenty-eight-gun frigate, crew of about a hundred men. Maybe also seventy American prisoners of war. Captain Maurice Pole wants to go through Hell Gate and into Long Island Sound, even though his local pilot, a black slave named Mr. Swan, advises against it as being dangerous. They get most of the way through Hell Gate but run into Pot Rock, which is a rock shelf sticking out from Astoria. Captain Pole goes down to inspect and sees a giant hole at the bow of the ship, he comes up saying they have to ground the ship and get everyone to shore. The current is carrying them north, so they aim for either Port Morris on the Bronx shore, or North Brother Island, called Montressor’s Island at the time, but glug. Down they go. It all happens too fast and down goes the Hussar, in such shallow water that the masts are still sticking out into the air when it hits bottom. Most of the sailors get to shore alive in boats, although there was a rumor for a while that the seventy American prisoners all drowned, still chained belowdecks.”

“So that’s good, right?” Roberto asks.

“What, that seventy Americans drowned?”

“No, that it was shallow where it went down.”

“I knew you meant that. Yes, it’s good. But very soon afterward, the British got chains under the ship’s hull and dragged it around, trying to pull it back up. But it came apart and they never got the gold. Four million dollars of gold coins to pay British soldiers, in two wooden chests bound with iron hoops. Four million in 1780 terms. The coins would have been guineas or the like, so I don’t know why they always give the value in dollars, but anyway.”

“Lots of gold.”

“Oh yeah. By now that amount of gold would be worth a gazillion.”

“How much really?”

“I don’t know. I think a couple billion.”

“And in shallow water.”

“Right. But it’s murky, and the river moves fast in both directions. It’s only calm there at ebb and full tide, about an hour each, as you boys know. And they broke the ship trying to haul it up, so the ship was distributed up and down the riverbed, probably. Almost certainly. The gold chests probably didn’t move very far. There they are, down there still. But the river keeps changing its banks, ripping them down and building them up. And in the 1910s they filled in the Bronx shore in that area, made some new docks and a loading area behind them. It took me years in the libraries to find the surveying maps that the city workers made before and after that infill. Plus I found a map from the 1820s that showed where the British went when they came here and tried to pull the ship up. They knew where it was, and twice they tried to salvage it. For sure they were going for the gold. So I was able to put all that together and mark it, and later I figured out the GPS coordinates for the spot. And that’s what you went to. And there it was.”

The boys nodded.

“But how deep?” Roberto prompted, after Hexter seemed to be taking a little nap.

Hexter started upright and looked at the boys. “The ship was built in 1763 and had twenty-eight cannons. One of which they pulled up and put in Central Park, and only found out later it had a cannonball and gunpowder rusted inside it. They had to defuse it with a bomb squad! So anyway, sixth-raters like that had a single deck, not that high off the water. About ten feet. And the masts were still sticking out of the water, so that means it sank in something between fifteen and say forty feet, but the river isn’t that deep so close to shore, so say twenty feet. Then they filled in that part of the river, but only a few feet higher than high tide, no more than eight feet. And now sea level is said to be about fifty feet higher than back then, so, what, you’re hitting bottom at forty feet down?”

“More like twenty,” Stefan said.

“Okay, well, maybe the shore there was more built up than I thought. Anyway, the implication is that the chests will be thirty or forty feet below the current bottom.”

“But the metal detector detected it,” Stefan pointed out.

“That’s right. So that suggests it’s around thirty feet down.”

“So we can do it,” Roberto declared.

Stefan wasn’t so sure. “I mean, we can, if we go back enough times, but I don’t know if there’s room for that much dirt under our diving bell. In fact I know there isn’t.”

“We’ll have to circle the hole, move the dirt off in different directions,” Roberto said. “Or put it in buckets.”

Stefan nodded uncertainly. “It would be better if we could get scuba gear and dive with that. Our diving bell is too small.”

The old man regarded them, nodding in thought. “I might be able to—”

The room lurched hard to the side, tumbling the stacks of books all around. The boys shrugged them off, but the old man was knocked to the ground by a stack of atlases. They threw these off him and helped him back to his feet, then went digging for his glasses, him moaning all the while.

“What happened, what happened?”

“Look at the walls!” Stefan said, shocked. The room itself now tilted like one of the remaining stacks of books, and through one bookshelf and its books they could see daylight, and the next building over.

“We gotta get out of here!” Roberto told Mr. Hexter, pulling him upright.

“I need my glasses,” the old man cried. “I can’t see without them.”

“Okay but let’s hurry!”

The two boys crouched and threw books around carefully but swiftly until Roberto came upon the glasses; they were still intact.

Hexter put them on and looked around. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s the building, isn’t it.”

“Yeah it is. Let’s hurry and get out of here. We’ll help you down.”

Buildings in the drink collapsed all the time, it was a regular thing. The boys had tended to scoff at the bad stories told about such collapses, but now they were remembering how Vlade always called the intertidal the death zone. Don’t spend too much time in the death zone, he would say, explaining that that was what climbers called mountains above twenty thousand feet. As the boys spent lots of time in the intertidal and were now diving the river too, they tended to just agree with him and let it be, maybe considering themselves to be like climbers at altitude. Tough guys. But now they were holding the old man by the elbows and hurrying him along the sideways-tilted hall as best they could, then down the stairs, one step at a time, had to make sure he didn’t fall or else it would take even more time, sometimes placing his feet by grabbing his ankles and placing them. The stairwell was all knocked around, railings down, open cracks in walls showing the building next door. Smell of seaweed and the anoxic stink of released mud, worse than any chamber pot. There was a booming from outside, and any number of shouts and bangs and other sounds. Shafts of light cut through the hazy air of the stairwell at odd and alarming angles, and quite a few of the stairs gave underfoot. Clearly this old building could fall over any moment. The oozy stench filled the air, like the building’s guts or something.

When they got down to the canal-level doorway, now a parallelogram very ugly to see, they emerged onto the stoopdock to find that the canal outside was filled with brick and concrete rubble, wood beams, broken glass, crushed furniture, whatever. Apparently one of the twenty-story towers on the next block had collapsed, and the shock wave of air, or the wave of canal water, or the direct impact of building parts, or some combination of all these, had knocked over a lot of smaller buildings. Up and down the canal, buildings were tilted or tumbled. People were still emerging from them, gathering dazedly on stoops or piles of rubble. Some pulled at these piles; most just stood there looking around, stunned and blinking. The turbid canal water bubbled, and was disturbed by any number of small wakes: rats were swimming away. Mr. Hexter adjusted his glasses when he saw this, and said, “Fuck if it isn’t rats leaving a sinking ship! I never thought I’d see that.”

“Really?” Roberto said. “We see it all the time.”

Stefan rolled his eyes and suggested they get going somewhere.

Then Hexter’s own building groaned immensely behind them, and Stefan and Roberto picked up the old man by the elbows and moved him as fast as they could over the wreckage in the canal. They lifted him over impediments, huffing at his unexpected weight, and helped him through the watery sections, sometimes going thigh deep but always finding a way. Behind them the building was shrieking and groaning, and that gave them strength. When they got to the canal’s intersection with Eighth and looked back, they saw that Mr. Hexter’s building was still standing, if that was the word for it; it was tilted more heavily than when they had escaped from it, and had stopped tilting only because it was propped by the building next to it, crushing the neighbor but not completely collapsing it.

Hexter stood staring at it for a while. “Now it’s like I’m looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Never expected to do that either.”

The boys stood holding the old man by the arms.

“You okay?” Stefan asked him again.

“I suppose getting wet like this can’t be good for us.”

“We got a bottle of bleach in our boat, we’ll spray you down. Let’s catch the vapo down to Twenty-third. We gotta get out of here.”

Stefan said to Roberto, “We’re taking him to the Met?”

“What else can we do?”

They explained the plan to Mr. Hexter. He looked confused and unhappy.

“Come on,” Roberto said, “we’ll be fine.”

“My maps!” Hexter cried. “Did you get my maps?”

“No,” Roberto said. “But we have that GPS position in our pad.”

“But my maps!”

“We can come back and get them later.”

This didn’t comfort the old man. But there was nothing for it but to wait for the vaporetto and try to stay out of the rain, which luckily had reduced to a drizzle. They were about as wet as they could get anyway. From one area of the vapo dock they could see the immense pile of wreckage that marked the fallen tower; it appeared to have pancaked onto its lower floors and then tipped to the south, distributing the higher floors across two or three canals. People in boats had stopped right in the middle of Eighth to stare at the collapse, causing a big traffic jam. It was going to take a while for the vapo to make its way down to them. There were sirens in the distance, but there were always sirens in the distance; it wasn’t clear that these sirens were in response to the collapse. Presumably any number of people had been crushed and were lying dead in the wreckage of the tower, but none of them were visible.

“I hope we don’t turn into pillars of salt,” said Mr. Hexter.

h) Franklin

Jojo and I set up a chatbox on our screens, and we didn’t talk that much about business in it, although we did both follow some of the same feeds, because those were the feeds anyone needed in order to trade in coastal futures. Mostly it was just a way to stay in touch, and it gave me a glow to see it there in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. And sometimes we did discuss some movement of interest in the biz. Like she wrote,

So I worked on through that afternoon heavily distracted by our evening’s date and my vivid memory of her Oh oh, enough to make me look tumescently at the clock, wondering how this night would go and checking the tide and moon charts, and thinking of the river after dark, the melvillemood of the Narrows at night, mysterious in moonlight.

My IPPI’s New York number had indeed dipped briefly at the news of this building collapse in Chelsea, but now it had stabilized and was even inching back up. A sensitive instrument indeed. The index, and the derivatives we had concocted at WaterPrice to play on it, were all booming in a most gratifying way. Helping our success was the fact that the continuous panicked quantitative easing since the Second Pulse had put more money out there than there was good paper to buy, which in effect meant that investors were, not to put too fine a point on it, too rich. That meant new opportunities to invest needed to be invented, and so they were. Demand gets supplied.

And it wasn’t that hard to invent new derivatives, as we had found out, because the floods had indeed been a case of creative destruction, which of course is capitalism’s middle name. Am I saying that the floods, the worst catastrophe in human history, equivalent or greater to the twentieth century’s wars in their devastation, were actually good for capitalism? Yes, I am.

That said, the intertidal zone was turning out to be harder to deal with than the completely submerged zone, counterintuitive though that might seem to people from Denver, who might presume that the deeper you are drowned the deader you are. Not so. The intertidal, being neither fish nor fowl, alternating twice a day from wet to dry, created health and safety problems that were very often disastrous, even lethal. Worse yet, there were legal issues.

Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It’s crazy to read, like Roman futurology:

Most of Europe and the Americas still followed Roman law in this regard, and some early decisions in the wake of the First Pulse had ruled that the new intertidal zone was now public land. And by public they meant not government land exactly, but land belonging to “the unorganized public,” whatever that meant. As if the public is ever organized, but whatever, redundant or not, the intertidal was ruled to be owned (or un-owned) by the unorganized public. Lawyers immediately set to arguing about that, charging by the hour of course, and this vestige of Roman law in the modern world had ever since been mangling the affairs of everyone interested in working in—by which I mean investing in—the intertidal. Who owns it? No one! Or everyone! It was neither private property nor government property, and therefore, some legal theorists ventured, it was perhaps some kind of return of the commons. About which Roman law also had a lot to say, adding greatly to the hourly burden of legal opinionizing. But ultimately the commons was historically a matter of common law, as seemed appropriate, meaning mainly practice and habit, and that made it very ambiguous legally, so that the analogy of the intertidal to a commons was of little help to anyone interested in clarity, in particular financial clarity.

So how do you build anything in the intertidal, how do you salvage, restore, renew—how do you invest in a mangled ambiguous zone still suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous tide flow? If people claim to own wrecked buildings that they or their legal predecessors used to own, but they don’t own the land the buildings are on, what are those buildings worth?

That’s one of the things the IPPI did. It was a kind of specialized Case-Shiller index for intertidal assets. People loved having its number, which helped gauge investments of all kinds, including bets on the index’s performance itself.

Perhaps most importantly, it helped in calculating how much owners or ex-owners of intertidal properties had lost and could get compensated for, a number which Swiss Re, one of the giant re-insurance companies that insured all the other insurers, estimated to total worldwide at about 1,300 trillion dollars. That’s 1.3 quadrillion dollars, but I think 1,300 trillion sounds bigger. $1,300,000,000,000,000.

Well, but first of many firsts, in fact that’s far too low a valuation, if you are trying to accurately price what the coastlines of the world are truly worth to humankind. If you don’t heavily discount the future, which of course finance always does, the intertidal is worth about a zillion gazillion barillion dollars. Why say that? Because the future of humanity as a global civilization depends completely on its coastline presence, that’s why.

That being the case, the current wrecked zone also therefore represented an equal number of gazillion in losses. And yet no one knew who owned what, or on which side of the ledger any given asset resided. Were you in debt if you owned an asset stuck on a strand no one can own, or were you rich? Who knew?

My index knew.

And that was nice, because if the intertidal has any value at all, even if it’s only a zillion or two, then someone wants to own that. And other people want to leverage that value right out to the usual fifty times whatever it might be. Fifty zillion dollars in leveraged opportunities, if only someone could put a plausible number on it, or (which is really the same thing) allow people to bet on what a plausible number might be, thus creating the value.

That’s what my index did.

It was simple. Well, no, it wasn’t simple, it took all the quants at my disposal to work it up, and all my quantitudicity to comprehend even what I was asking the quants to quant, but the basic idea was simple—and it was mine. I made judgments concerning how the various pieces of the puzzle impacted each other and the total situation, and boiled it all into that single index number, and assured everyone that it was an accurate assessment of the situation. I listed for inspection all the elements that went into the assessment, and the basics of the calculation, which used classic Black-Scholes mechanisms for pricing derivatives, but beyond that, I did not give out the complete recipe of the algorithm, not even to WaterPrice. I did let it be known that for my baseline I began with the same starting point as Case-Shiller, so the two indexes could be better compared, and for sure the spread between them was one of the things people liked to bet on. Case-Shiller had designated an 1890s housing price average as their normative 100, and rated prices since then relative to that baseline. Shiller afterward often pointed out that despite all the ups and downs of history, when adjusted for inflation, housing prices had never strayed far from where they had been in 1890; even the biggest bubbles never took the index much over 140, and crashes seldom had gone below 95.

So the IPPI took housing prices, and simple sea level rise itself, and added to these two basics the following: an evaluation of improvements in intertidal construction techniques; an evaluation of the speed at which the existing stock was melting; a “change in extreme weather violence” factor derived from NOAA data; currency exchange rates; a rating of the legal status of the intertidal; and an amalgam of consumer confidence indexes, crucial here as everywhere else in the economy, although adding it to the IPPI was a new and controversial move on my part, as it was not a factor in the Case-Shiller. Using this mix of inputs, the IPPI said that in the years immediately after the Second Pulse, the submerged and intertidal’s worth had Case-Shillered down to very near zero, as was only right; it was a devastated time. But that was a retroactive evaluation, and in the year we introduced the index, 2136, we calculated the number to be 47. And it had been rising, unsteadily but inexorably, ever since. That was another key to its success, of course: a long-term bull market makes rich geniuses of everyone involved.

Yet another key was simply the name itself: Intertidal Property Pricing Index. Property, get it? The name itself asserted something that before had been questionable. It was still questionable, but all over this world property had already become somewhat liquefied; property now is just a claim on the yield. So the name was a coup. Very nice. Reassuring. Comforting.

So. Currently the global IPPI was at 104, the New York regional at 116, and both were still trending up faster than the noncoastal Case-Shiller, which was now at 135. And in the end it’s growth, relative value, and differential advantage that matters in determining how well you are doing. So yay for the IPPI!

As for the instruments used for trading on the IPPI, that was just a matter of packaging and offering bonds for sale that went both long and short on the index. We were by no means the only ones doing that; it was a popular investment, with the multiple variables involved making it a volatile high-risk, high-return market, attractive to people who wanted that. Every week there was a splash and crash, as we called it, and then a new method for aerating the submarine world would be announced, something we called a prize and rise. Meanwhile everyone had an opinion on how things were going and how they would go. And investors being so hungry for opportunities, the IPPI was performing well if judged simply by the number of bets being made on it; so well that it did even better, in the classic sort of bandwagon jumping that drives the markets and maybe our brains too: it was doing so well that it did better.

Of course it was true that certain assumptions I had baked into the IPPI needed to stay true for it to stay accurate. One was that the intertidal zone was going to remain legally ambiguous, jarndycing through the courts at Zenoesque speed. Another was that not too many of these once-and-future-and-therefore-present properties fell over too fast. If the rate of melting into the drink did not go exponential, or nova—if it proceeded, even accelerating, at a measurable rate that could be turned into a number that plotted not too hockey-stickistically onto a graph, one could follow that trend line up or down and see other trends and hope to predict futures, and, yes, bet again on that, without the IPPI itself ever cratering even if the actual physical stock did.

Thus my index contained and then concealed some assumptions and analogies, some approximations and guesses. No one knew this better than I did, because I’m the one who made the choices when the quants laid out the choices for quantifying the various qualities involved. I just picked one! But this is what made it economics and not physics. Ultimately the IPPI allowed for people (including WaterPrice) to concoct derivative instruments that could be offered and bought; and these could then be bundled into larger bonds, and sold again. So people loved the index and its numbers, and did not examine its underlying logic too closely. New paper was valuable in itself, especially when rated high by the rating agencies, who had such usefully short memories, like everyone else in finance, when it came to their own absurdly terrible judgment, so the ratings still mattered as a rubber stamp of legitimacy, ridiculous though that was given their history as a service bought by the very people they were rating. So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense extremely subprime was not mentioned except as one aspect of the very lucrative risks involved.

A new bubble, you might say, and you would be right. But people are blind to a bubble they’re inside, they can’t see it. And that is very cool if you happen to have an angle of vision that allows you to see it. Scary, sure, but cool, because you can hedge by way of that knowledge. You can, in short, short it. You can, as I had found out by doing it, invent a bubblistic investment possibility more or less by accident, then sell it to people and watch it go long, knowing all the while that it is turning into a bubble; and all the while you can short it in preparation for the time that bubble pops.

Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.

So, for the previous six months, reading the stats from around the coastlines of the world and trying to calculate all the trends, reading the tea leaves, the engineering journals, everything, including urban folktales, I had come to believe that the moment was approaching when this bubble was going to pop. Some places, like good old Manhattan, had a huge influx of technological innovation and human capital and sheer money, and here we were going to uptake the intertidal and make the best of it. But most of the world was well off the leading edge in all these relevant areas, and as a result, their intertidal was melting faster than it was being renovated. It had been about fifty-five years since the Second Pulse began, forty since it let off, and all over the world buildings were giving up the ghost and slipping under for good. Small buildings, big buildings, skyscrapers—those last fell with a mighty splash, and the market flinched and shuddered in their wakes—very brief flinches, just enough to adjust the IPPI, play the resulting jostle, and angle a few more points into our account—and then the bubble continued to expand. But it seemed like a moment of extreme simultaneous global badness was coming, and more and more I was shorting the very bubble I myself had helped to start in the first place.

What could be more nerve-rackingly cool.

And I was going out with Jojo for Friday drinks, and then maybe a float on the river, high tide at midnight, on a night of full moon, perfect! Oh! Oh!

So I left work and hummed down to Eldorado Equity on Canal and Mercer. Turning onto Canal Canal, as the tourists loved to hear it called, I found it crowded with afternoon traffic as usual, motorboats of every kind jammed bow to stern and thwart to thwart, to the point where more boat than water was visible. You could have walked across the canal on boat decks without ever having to jump, and quite a few flower sellers and mere passersby were actually doing that.

Jojo was waiting on her building’s front dock, and I felt a little spike in the cardiograph. I kissed the dockside with the starboard side of the skater and said, “Hey there.”

“Hi,” she said after a brief glance at her wrist, but I was on time, and she nodded as if in acknowledgment of that. She was graceful stepping along the deck back to the cockpit; looking up at her from the wheel it seemed like her legs went on forever.

“I was thinking of the Reef Forty Oyster Bar?”

“Sounds good,” she said. “So, do you have any champagne on this fine craft?”

“Of course,” I said. “What are we celebrating?”

“Friday,” she replied. “But also I made a little angel investment in some housing in Montana that seems like it should do very well.”

“Good job!” I said. “I’m sure the people there will be very happy.”

“Well, indeed. Security will do that.”

“The champagne’s in the refrigerator,” I said, “unless you want to take the wheel here?”

“Sure.”

I ducked below and brought back up a split. “It’s all in splits, I’m afraid.”

“That’ll do. We’ll be to Forty pretty soon anyway.”

“True.”

We had both worked late as usual, and now with about a half hour of daylight left, I hummed the bug up West Broadway to Fourteenth and turned west. As we purred along the sun-waked canal in the stream of boat traffic, I popped the split of champagne.

“Very nice,” she said after taking a sip.

The late sun spangled off the choppy water, shifting myriad blobs of brilliant orange over a deep black undercoat, the reflected light lancing everywhere. Yet another SuperVenice moment, and we toasted it as I let the bug putter along at the speed of traffic. The sunlight off the water suffused Jojo’s face, it looked like we were on a stupendous stage in a play put on for the gods. Again that feeling of I knew not what rose in the back of my throat, as if my heart were swelling; I had to swallow hard, it was almost a kind of fear, that I could feel this attracted to someone. What if you could really know someone? What if you could really get along?

Then my pad played the first three notes of the “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and I growled and checked it before it occurred to me that I should just turn it off. But before I did I saw the notice: that Chelsea tower that had collapsed had killed scores of people, maybe hundreds.

“Oh no!” I said without time to stop myself.

“What?”

“It’s that building that went down in Chelsea. They’re finding bodies.”

“Oh no indeed.” She sipped her champagne. “Did your IPPI come back up yet?”

“Mostly.”

“Do you want to go look at the damage?”

I think I might have gaped for a second. I did want to go look, but then again I didn’t, because although it was important that I stay on top of intertidal developments and get out before the bubble popped, that pop wasn’t going to happen just because this tower had done a Margaret Hamilton. And I was headed to the Forty oyster bar to watch the sunset with Jojo Bernal, and I didn’t want her thinking that I wasn’t giving her my top priority at this moment.

But in the midst of this cogitation she laughed at me. “Go ahead and go by,” she said. “It’s almost on the way.”

“True.”

“And if you think it might be a trigger event, you only have to push a button to get out, right? You’re prepped to move fast?”

“Nanoseconds,” I said, proudly if inaccurately, and turned the bug up West Broadway.

As we got up above Twenty-seventh it became a bit of a disadvantage to be in the bug, because its foils gave it a draft of almost five feet. Happily it was just a couple hours past high tide, which was all that allowed me to keep us headed uptown before I would have to cut west and out of the city.

As we got closer to the crash site, the ordinary ammoniac reek of a tidal flat was joined by another smell, maybe creosote, with notes of asbestos, cracked wood, smashed brick, crumbled concrete, twisted rusty steel, and the stale air of moldy rooms broken open to the day like rotten eggs. Yes, a fallen intertidal building. They have a characteristic smell.

I slowed down. The sunset poured its horizontal light over the scene, glazing the canals and buildings. A narrow bathtub ring marked all the buildings. Ah yes the intertidal, zone of uncertainty and doubt, space of risk and reward, the seashore that belonged to the unorganized public. Extension of the ocean, every building a grounded ship hoping not to break up.

But now one of them had. Not a monstrous skyscraper, just one of four twenty-story towers south of the old post office. Probably the use value and price of the other three had collapsed along with the one that had fallen, depending of course on if they could determine why it had happened. It was never easy to figure that out, making it a very good objective correlative for the market itself. Often crashes just happened, responding to invisible stresses. I said as much to Jojo and she grimaced and nodded.

We hummed slowly up Seventh, looking down the streets at the smash. No good would come from getting too close, as the canals around it were now dangerously reefed. This was obvious in the places where junk stuck up out of the water, and strongly suggested where swirls and ripples and little white potato patches roiled the black water as the tide ebbed south through the neighborhood. Other parts of the canals would look fine and nevertheless be hullrippers. So I looked by approaching the smash from several canals in turn, proceeding as far as I felt safe and then turning back.

The tower had obviously come down hard, pancaking maybe half its stories before spilling to the south and east. The shatter of its flat roof was tilted such that we could see all the water tanks and soil and greenery of the roof farm. Too much weight up there, probably, although that always was something that only became obvious in the aftermath. Emergency personnel were cautiously probing the wreckage from fireboats and police cruisers and the like, wearing the eye-popping yellows and oranges characteristic of disaster.

Many smaller buildings had been crushed by the debris from the tower, and beyond those many others were knocked aslant. Absent outer walls revealed rooms that were empty or furnished, but either way, pathetic.

“This whole neighborhood is wrecked!” Jojo said.

I could only nod.

“Lots of people must have died.”

“That’s what they said. Although it looks like a lot of the brownstones were empty.” I turned and motored us on toward Eighth. “Let me think this over at Reef Forty. I need a drink.”

“And some oysters.”

“Sure.”

I piloted the bug up Eighth, and as we passed Thirty-first I heard a shout.

“Hey mister! Hey mister!”

“Help!”

It was the two kids I had almost run down south of the Battery.

“Oh no,” I said, and kept the throttle forward.

“Wait! Help, help, help!”

This was bad. I would have ignored them and hummed on anyway, but Jojo was watching me with a startled expression, surprised no doubt that I would just motor on, ignoring such a direct appeal. And the boys were holding up an old man between them, an old man who looked shattered and was not even as tall as they were. As if he had been cut off at the knees. They were all soaked, with mud streaking one boy’s face.

I cut the motor. “Hey. What are you guys doing up here?”

“We got wrecked!”

“Mr. Hexter’s house got knocked over back there!”

“Aha.”

The taller one said, “Our wristpad got wet and stopped working, so we were walking to the vapo. Hey can we use your pad to make a call?”

“Or can you give us a ride?” the smaller and lippier one said.

The old man between them just stared over his shoulder at his neighborhood, looking bereft.

“Is your friend okay?” Jojo asked.

“I’m not okay,” the old man exclaimed, without looking at her. “I lost everything. I lost my maps.”

“What maps?” I asked.

“He had a collection,” the smaller boy said. “All kinds of maps of the United States and all over. But mostly New York. But now he needs to get to somewhere.”

“Are you hurt?” Jojo asked.

The old man didn’t reply.

“He’s beat,” the bigger boy said. “We’ve come a long way.”

I saw the look on Jojo’s face and said, “All right, get on board.”

They made a mess of my cockpit as well as my plans. I offered to take them back to the old man’s building, thinking that with the evening already so muddied I might as well go completely philanthropic, but all three of them shook their heads at once.

“We’ll try and go back later,” the smaller boy said. “For now we need to get Mr. Hexter to where he can dry out and all.”

“Where’s that?”

They shrugged. “Back at the Met, maybe? Vlade will know what to do.”

“You live in the Met on Madison Square?” Jojo asked, looking surprised.

“Around there,” the littler kid said, looking at her. “Hey, you live in the Flatiron, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You do?” I said.

“That’s right,” she said again.

“So we’re neighbors!” I said. “Did I know that?”

“I thought you did.”

By now I was confused and thinking hard, and I’m sure it showed. Possibly I had not mentioned where I lived; we had mostly spoken about work, and I hadn’t known where she lived. After our night out on the Governors Island anchorage I had dropped her off at her office at her request, assuming, I realized, that she lived in that building. And then I had boated home.

“So can I borrow your pad?” the littler kid asked Jojo. She nodded and held out her arm, and he tapped on it and then said, “Vlade, our pad got soaked, but can you let us dry off in your office maybe? We have a friend whose building got knocked over.”

“I wondered if you guys were over that way,” the super’s voice said from Jojo’s pad. “Where are you now?”

“We’re at Thirty-first and Eighth, but we got picked up by the guy with the zoomer who lives in your building.”

“Who’s that?”

The boys looked at us.

“Franklin Garr,” I said.

“Oh yeah, hi. I know who you are. So, can you bring them back to the building?”

I glanced at Jojo and then said to the pad, “We can bring them back. They have a friend with them who needs a little help, I’d say. His house got knocked around when that Chelsea tower fell down this afternoon.”

“Sorry to hear. Someone I know?”

“Mr. Hexter,” the littler kid said. “We were there visiting him when it happened.”

“Okay, well, come on over and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Sure,” I said. “See you there.”

So I headed the bug to Broadway and down the big canal through the early-evening traffic to the Met, feeling balked but putting a good face on it. It was a sorry replacement for what I had had in mind for the evening, but what can you do. Our rescuees dripped blackly onto the floor of the cockpit, and the boat rode low in the water, tilting heavily as I guided it through the dense evening traffic on the canals. The rule for small boats was three hulls, three people, but not this evening.

Finally I idled across the Madison Square bacino to the Met’s boathouse door and waited for the super to wave us in. No desire to piss him off with this menagerie aboard.

He poked his head out and nodded.

“Come on in. You boys looked like drowned rats.”

“We saw a bunch of rats swimming away!”

“This big building next to Mr. Hexter’s place melted, and the wave knocked us sideways!”

The super shook his head lugubriously, as was his way. “Roberto and Stefan, spreaders of chaos.”

They liked this. “Can you put Mr. Hexter in one of the temporaries?” one of them asked. “He needs to get warmed up and cleaned up. Get some food and rest, right, Mr. H?”

The old man nodded. He was still in a fog. It made sense; people squatting in the intertidal were usually at the end of their options.

The super was shaking his head. “We’re full, you know that. Charlotte’s the one to talk to about that.”

“As always,” the smaller boy said.

Jojo looked like she was kind of enjoying all this, but I couldn’t see why.

“She’ll be back in an hour or so,” the super said. “Meanwhile there’s the bathrooms off the dining room, he could clean up there. And I’ll see if Heloise can rustle up a place for him, if Charlotte says it’s okay.”

I hummed into the boathouse and everyone got off on the interior landing. The kids led their ancient friend up the stairs toward the dining hall, and I looked at Jojo.

“We could take off?” I suggested.

“Since we’re already here,” she said, “I’d like to go over to the Flatiron and change. Then maybe eat here? I’m kind of tired.”

“All right,” I said, feeling uneasy. She was definitely not in the same mood she had been in when I picked her up, and I wasn’t sure why. Something about the kids, the old man? Me? It was spooky. I wanted her to be like she had been last time. But there was nothing to do but go along and hope.

I let the super hang up my boat to get it out of the way, asking him to put it where I could get to it fast this evening, thinking that Jojo might still change her mind. The super just pursed his lips and got the bug into his crane’s sling without replying. I didn’t know what the other residents saw in him. If it were up to me he’d be fired yesterday. But it wasn’t up to me, because I couldn’t be bothered to waste time dealing with the building’s many boards and committees. I got enough of trading at work and was happy to just rent an apartment in a nice building overlooking a bacino I liked that was not too near where I worked, so I could get a zoom in on a daily basis. I could more than afford the non-co-op-members’ surcharge, even though this was shamelessly massive, a hit designed to gouge noncompliants like me. I sometimes hoped someone would challenge this dual price arrangement in court; it struck me as highly prejudicial and possibly illegal, but no one had done it so far, and it occurred to me as I waited for Jojo to come back from the Flatiron, fuming at the way the evening was going, that anyone who cared enough to waste their time challenging this rule would be too poor to rent in the building in the first place. They were price selecting for wealthy indifference from their nonmember rentals, a smart move, probably the plan of the board chairwoman, a notorious social justice warrior both at work and here at home, a control freak in the same class as the super, a woman who had been running the board and thus the building for I wasn’t sure how long, but far too long; she had been chair when I arrived. Naturally she and the super were buddy-buddy.

And lo and behold here she was herself, in conversation with the boys and the old man: Charlotte Armstrong, looking frazzled and intense, vivid and imposing. My day was complete. I followed them all into the dining room, keeping back so I didn’t have to join them any sooner than necessary. But then Jojo appeared at the common room entry, having walked over on the skybridges linking us to One Madison and then the Flatiron, or so I presumed. She headed for the boys before she even saw me, so there was no choice but to follow and join them.

I said hi, and the chairwoman was quite nice to me, in a way that Jojo noticed. I had to lift my eyebrows innocently and then admit that it was true, I had once again saved the wharf rats from a dismal fate.

“Shall we eat?” I asked, being ravenous, and some of us nodded, while others kept asking the now-homeless old man from Chelsea how he was feeling. Chairwoman Charlotte and Jojo followed me to the food windows in the dining hall, and I flashed my meat card to the clerk while listening to the two women talking. They were sounding fairly stiff and uncomfortable; city social worker and financier, not a great match. Around us in the line were many faces I knew and many I didn’t. Too many people lived in the building to actually get to know anybody, even if many faces became familiar.

The clerk zapped my meat card and I went to the tray of carnitas and filled a tortilla and rolled it. You had to work for any meat you ate in this dining hall; it was a way to create a lot of vegetarians and leave enough meat for the rest of us, because few could stomach, ha ha, raising a piglet to food age and then killing it, even with the super-humane zappers we have, essentially an instantaneous lights-out. Lots of people go anthropomorphic and decide it’s easier to eat fake meat or become vegetarian, or eat out when they want meat. I myself had found by direct experimentation that the unavoidable anthropomorphizing of the farm’s pigs had no restraining effect on my fatal hand, because if you think of a pig as a human it is a really ugly human and probably appreciates you putting it out of its misery. So I usually thought of them as the super, or my uncle, and enjoyed the taste of them later in the week, not a qualm as I chomped, as really I have done them nothing but favors, from farm to fork, from birth to mouth. They wouldn’t even have existed without me and the rest of the carnivores around me, and had had a great couple of years along the way, better than many humans in this city got.

“Eating meat again?” Jojo asked as we met at the salad bar.

“Yes I am.”

“Do you do the qualification thing on the meat floor of the farm here?”

“I do. It definitely makes it more real, more of a commitment. Kind of like being a trader, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Just joking.”

And of course it was quite stupid of me to joke about our biz given the way the evening was going, but all too often I can shoot before aiming, especially in the hours after a long day in front of the screen. I finish those sessions and my sense of discipline relaxes, and then odd things can come out of my mouth. On many evenings I’ve noticed that. So I reminded myself to be cool on this night, and followed Jojo back to our table, entranced again by the set of her shoulders, the fall of her hair. Damn those boys anyway.

We reconvened at a single table: the boys and their ancient friend; Jojo and Charlotte the chairperson; the super, whose name was Vlade, very apropos, Vlade the Impaler, face like a Ukrainian executioner; and me. It was just a couple too many people to be able to have a single conversation easily, not least because there were a few hundred more people in the big dining hall, and it was therefore noisy. Especially since a group in the corner was playing Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” by clacking a set of variously sized spoons and singing wordlessly. Still, everyone started by asking the old man how he was feeling, and Charlotte, hearing his story and squinting unhappily as she no doubt contemplated our building’s nonexistent or even negative vacancy rate, offered him a temporary place to stay, “until you can get back into your place or find something more suitable.”

“Can’t he just stay here?” the littler kid asked her.

Charlotte said, “We’re full right now, that’s the problem. And there’s a waiting list too. So all I can really do is offer one of the temporary spaces. Even those are full, and not that comfy over the long haul.”

“Better than nothing,” said the littler one. He was Roberto, I was learning. Either Roberto or Stefan.

“Is his own building a goner?” I asked, to show interest.

The old man winced. The taller of the two boys, this was probably Stefan, said, “It’s tilted like diagonal.”

The old man groaned at this. He was still shell-shocked.

“Can I get you a drink?” I asked him. Jojo didn’t seem to notice this, but Charlotte gave me a grateful look as I rose. I was certainly going to refill my own glass too. The old man nodded as I picked up his glass. “Red wine, thanks,” he said. He would learn to avoid the red if he stayed here more than a couple of days, but only by experiencing its mouth-puckering tannins directly, so I nodded and walked over to fill his glass, and refill mine with the vinho verde. Both were from the Flatiron’s small roof vineyard, which spilled picturesquely down both of its long sides, but their verde was so much finer than their roter gut. I came back with both hands full and asked, “Anyone else, while I’m up?” but they were listening to the old man describe his building’s meltdown and only shook their heads.

“The main thing is to get my maps,” he concluded, looking at the boys flanking him. “They’re in cabinets in my living room. I’ve got a copy of the Headquarters map, and a whole bunch of others. They can’t get wet, so the sooner the better.”

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Roberto told him, with a little headshake to his ancient friend that said Don’t talk about this now. I wondered what that could be about; possibly they didn’t want Vlade thinking about them going back to the intertidal. Indeed the super was frowning, but the taller boy saw this and said, “Come on, Vlade, we’re there every day.”

“It will have a completely different bottom now that building has melted,” he said.

“We know, we’ll be careful.”

They kept reassuring him and the old man. Meanwhile Charlotte and Jojo were getting acquainted. “And what do you do?” Jojo asked.

Charlotte frowned. “I work for the Householders’ Union.”

“So, doing the same thing you’re doing for Mr. Hexter here.”

“Pretty much. How about you?”

“I work at Eldorado Equity.”

“Hedge fund?”

“That’s right.”

Charlotte did not look impressed. She made a quick reappraisal of Jojo, then looked back at her plate. “Is that interesting?”

“I think so. I’ve been financing the rebuilding in Soho, it seems to be going really well. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your people have been housed there, it has a low-income element. And up until a year ago it was just a shell, like most of that neighborhood. It takes investment to bring a drowned neighborhood back out of the drink.”

“Indeed,” Charlotte said, squinting slightly. She seemed willing to entertain the notion, which made sense, considering her job. The city was always going to need more housing than it had, particularly in the submerged zone.

“Wait, I hear you sounding kind of positive about investment finance,” I said. “I need to get this on pad.”

Charlotte gave me a dirty look, but Jojo’s was even worse. I focused on the old man.

“You’re looking pretty tired,” I told him. “Would you like some help getting to your room?”

“We haven’t worked out where that is yet,” Charlotte said.

“So maybe we better?” I said.

She gave me a look that indicated she was not rolling her eyes only by dint of extreme muscular control.

I smiled. “The hotello in the farm?” I suggested.

“Isn’t that a crime scene?” Vlade asked.

Charlotte shook her head. “They’ve done what they need to there. Gen told us we could use it again. But does it stay warm in those?”

“My room was freezing,” the old man said. “I don’t care about that.”

“Okay then,” Charlotte said. “That would be easiest, for sure.”

The boys were looking at each other uneasily. Possibly they didn’t want to be tasked with being their friend’s roommates. Charlotte seemed unaware of their unease. Possibly they lived in or around this building without her knowing about it. Now was not the time to ask them. I was getting the feeling that nothing I could say at this table was going to go over well, and it seemed like my best option was to eat and run, with a good excuse, of course.

My plate was empty, and so was the old man’s. And he did look beat.

“I’ll help get you up there,” I said, standing up. “Come on, boys.” Their plates had been empty seconds after they sat down to them. “You can finish what you began.”

Vlade nodded at them and joined us as we headed toward the elevators, leaving the two women behind. I would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, but it was not to be; and if I had been present the conversation would not have been the same. So with a qualm I passed by Jojo and said, “See you later?”

She frowned. “I’m tired, I’ll probably just go home in a while.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll come back down when I’m done, see if you’re still here.”

“I’ll be up in a bit,” Charlotte said. “I want to see how things look up there.”

So the evening was screwed. And in fact it had been going badly most of the night, judging by Jojo’s face, and that was worrying me quite badly. Adjustments were going to have to be made, but which ones? And why?