New York 2140

a) Franklin

By the time I got back from rescuing the two little drowned rats with the building’s super, I was late to pick up Jojo. “God damn you guys,” I said as we gurgled into the boathouse, “you’ve made me late.”

“For a very important date,” Vlade added heavily.

“Thank you, Mr. Garr,” Roberto said. “You saved my life.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

“Gowan witcha, get outta here,” I said. “Scraminski. I’ll see you in dining and we’ll celebrate your survival then. I gotta get going.”

“Sure thing boss.”

I dumped them on the dock with their stuff and got back out to the river to get to the office as quickly as possible. In fact I wasn’t so late that I couldn’t duck in and see how things were going before picking up Jojo. Since I was already a little late, a little later wasn’t going to matter.

I paid the dockmaster at our building to give me a half hour and ran to the elevator. In my office the screens were on as always, and I sat down and started reading in a state of extreme interest. Because the thing about bubbles is that when they pop, they pop. The metaphor is extremely apt, because the speed of a bursting bubble is its salient aspect. There, and then not there. If you’ve got skin in the game when that happens, that skin is gone. Very important to get out before that happens.

So I did not want this particular bubble of submarine bonds playing off the IPPI to pop, as I didn’t quite have all my ducks in a row. Bubbles, skin, ducks, yes it was a morass of mixed metaphors, a veritable swamp one might say, adding another one to the ones already there, but this is what all the recomplications of the game have led to: it’s gotten so complex that it can’t be understood, so everyone resorts to stories from a simpler time. Part of my job was sorting through all the metaphors to see if I could grasp the real thing underneath them all, which was not exactly mathematical, thank God, but more a system, like a game. In the various inflows of information that my screens gave me, the system was revealed in parts (like jigsaw puzzle pieces, yes, but not) and that system in the end was not like anything but itself. A vast artificial intelligence, yes, but as to whether it was really intelligent, I think that too is another metaphor, like Gaia, or God. In fact no one is really home, so all the intelligence in this system, such as it was, was really in the people participating in it. Which meant there might not be very much intelligence there. And it was definitely massively fragmented. So, many fine or not-very-fine intelligences had in effect combined to make a team, but with no coherence and no way to get purchase on the situation. Schizophrenic but not crazy. Hive mind, but no mind. The stack, as in stacked emergent properties, but really stacked emergencies. Really best to think of it as a kind of game. Maybe. A game, or a system for gaming things.

Anyway, on this afternoon my screens showed things were fine. No crash in the last two hours. I would have thought the Chelsea wreck would have dragged the local IPPI down a little more. There had been a shiver, a shock wave resembling the little tsunami that had radiated from the collapsed building itself, but stop that; it was a drop of about 0.06 in the global IPPI, 2.1 in the New York regional. That was one indicator of how much New York still tended to stand for The City everywhere. But the Hong Kong exchange had taken in this news and damped the shudder, no doubt because buildings in Hong Kong were always melting and so they were used to it. So in less than a week the situation had gone through news of the collapse, negative reaction, and investment reuptake, and on it went without further fuss, trending upward as usual. I saw what it was: people didn’t want the bubble to burst. It would take far more than any one building or neighborhood, because too many people were still making money going long.

Just time for a sigh of relief, and a note to my friend Bao in Hong Kong to keep up the good work of giving me his take on trends there, and the closing of a couple of deals, and I could shut down and hustle over to Jojo’s office. At that point I was only forty-five minutes late, and only a little hyped up by all the day’s events.

“Sorry I’m late,” I began as I was allowed in and entered her office, and I could see by the look on her face that it was good I began that way. “Vlade requisitioned me as I was leaving the Met, we had to zip up to the Bronx and rescue those two little squeakers who saved the old man, it was their turn to be saved.” And I explained how they had managed to get Roberto stuck on the bottom of the south Bronx, with Stefan up in their boat holding his oxygen bottle and nothing else.

“Jesus,” Jojo said. “What were they doing up there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Fooling around like they do.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t read, then started shutting down her screens and gathering stuff into her bag. “Okay I’m ready. Where do you want to go?”

“How about back to the bar where we met?”

“Sounds good.”

In my skeeter, the locus now of such fond memories of our glorious date in the harbor, I felt the buzz of things going well, and in that excitement I described in some detail my relief at the fact that the submarine market had withstood the shock of the Chelsea building going under. “I’ve got to get my short-on as big as I can before the crash hits, or else I won’t be able to take full advantage of how much will be crashing, it’s amazing when you add it all up. Now that the IPPI is over a hundred it’s like a psychological tipping point, I think everyone is thinking it will start to soar.”

“Do you think your index is fooling them about that?” she asked, looking around at the other boats on the canal.

“What, like I’m spoofing or something?”

“No, just that it’s been going up no matter what happens.”

“Yeah, well, confidence is one of the variables being factored in, so it’s more like people just want it to be going up.”

“Don’t you want that too? I mean, wouldn’t that mean things were getting better for people living there?”

“Prices going up? I’m not so sure. But I am sure there’s a huge collapse coming in the housing stock itself. All the improvements in tech won’t be enough to make up for that.”

“But the index keeps going up.”

“Because people want it to go up.”

She sighed. “Indexes are strange.”

“They are. But people like complex situations reduced to a single number.”

“Something to bet on.”

“Or a way to try to track rates of inflation. I mean, the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index? What’s that for?”

She grimaced. “That’s to laugh at how rich you are. Check off the yacht, the fur coat, the jet, the lawyer, the shrink, the kid at Harvard, whatever else is on the list.”

“It’s definitely more fun to look at than the Misery Index,” I said. This was a simple index, as befitting its subject: inflation plus unemployment. “You could add quite a few more variables to that one too, I guess.” Such as personal bankruptcies, divorces, food bank visits, suicides… It didn’t seem like listing these variables was a good idea at this moment. “Or maybe the Gini index, maybe that’s a kind of cross between the Cost of Living Extremely Well Index and the Misery Index. Or you could go the other way and check the Happiness Index.”

“Indexes,” she said dismissively.

“Well hey,” I said, feeling defensive. “Don’t you use any?”

“I use the volatility indexes,” she admitted. “You kind of have to.”

I nodded. “That was one of the inspirations for the IPPI. I like the way it’s trying to describe the future with its number.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, because it collates all the rates that paper due in the next month are going to get. So it’s kind of a month out. I wanted to do the same for the intertidal.”

“Read the tea leaves, tell their fortune.”

“I guess?”

“While things keep falling apart.”

“Yeah, that’s the balance, both things are happening. So it’s hedge heaven. You have to play both sides.”

“But now you’re shorting it.”

“Yes, I think the long is too long, like I said. It’s a bubble. Of course in a way that’s good, as I said. More to collect when it pops. So I’m pushing that angle too, keep on buying put options.”

“So you are spoofing!”

“No, I really buy them. I do flip them sometimes, just to help keep it all going until I’m ready.”

“So you’re front-running.”

“No no. I don’t want to do that.”

“So it’s like those accidental spoofers. You really do think it’s going up. But I thought you said it wasn’t going to continue.”

“But people think it is. It’ll go up until it pops, so I want it to keep going up.”

“Until you’re ready.”

“You know what I mean. Everything in place. Meanwhile, it’s a case of the more the merrier.”

She laughed briefly. “You’d better watch out, though. If the crash is too big, there won’t be anyone left to make good on your shorts.”

“Well,” I said, startled. “That would mean everything. End-of-civilization kind of thing.”

“It’s happened before.”

“Has it?”

“Sure. The Great Depression, the First Pulse.”

“Right, but those were finance. End of a financial civilization.”

“That’s all it would take, in terms of you losing everyone who could pay you off.”

“But they keep coming back. The government bails them out.”

“But not the same people. New people. The old people having lost out.”

“I’ll try to dodge that fate.”

“I’m sure you will. Everyone does.”

She shook her head, smiling a little at me—at my optimism? my confidence? my naïveté? I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t used to that particular smile being aimed my way, and it made me a little uneasy, a little irritated.

We got to Pier 57 and I slipped the zoomer into one of the last slips in the marina, and we joined the crowd in the bar. Amanda was there with John and Ray, and they greeted us happily, Amanda with a start and then a knowing smile as she saw us come in together. It was nice to cause that start, as it’s never pleasant to be dropped. But we were friends and I smiled back, pleased to be paired with Jojo in the eyes of my friends. Inky was slinging it behind the bar and the clouds over Hoboken were going pink and gold above a brassy sun bronzing the river. High tide and high spirits.

After a drink we all retired to the rooftop restaurant and ate over the water in the twilight and then the dusk. A trio in the corner was playing Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata on pan pipes, red-faced and hyperventilating. It was warm for November, even a little sultry, and the steamers and mussels, pulled right out of the filtered cages underneath us, were tasty, as were Inky’s concoctions, which we had brought along with us to the table. The gang was having fun, but something felt different to me. Jojo was talking with Amanda on the other side of her from me, and of course Amanda was enjoying that; but they were not friends, and I felt a little coolness emanating from the J-woman that I could not show that I felt, not in front of the others. So I chatted with John about the events of the week, and we agreed that things were getting interesting with the new state attorney general taking over, said to be a real sheriff, though we both had our doubts. “They’re always just a touch second rate,” John said, to which I nodded. “You go from creation of value to destruction of value, you get a different kind of personality involved. It’s not as bad as the rating agencies, but still, it’s pretty bad.”

“But this guy used to be finance,” I said. “We’ll see if he turns out to be a little more savvy. Or savage.”

“Savvy and savage, that would be the scary combination.”

“True, but we’ve had some like that before. The caravan will move on.”

“True.”

Eventually all the courses had been eaten, the drinks drunk, and as before, Jojo and I were by far the soberest in the bunch. Overhead the stars blurred and swam, but it was because of a slight mist rising off the river, not anything internal to our mentalities. For the others it could have been a Van Gogh starry night, judging by their peals of laughter.

Paid the bill. Down the riverside walk to the marina, into the bug, out onto the river. Stars reflected in the sheeting black water under us. Oh my, oh my; my face was hot, my feet cold, my fingers tingling a little. In the underlight from cockpit and cabin door, Jojo looked like Ingrid Bergman. She had experienced a major orgasm at my touch, right out here; I felt the tingle of that memory, the start of a hard-on. “Want a drink?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Actually I’m feeling kind of beat tonight, I don’t know why. Would you mind if we just took a turn and headed on home pretty soon?”

“You don’t want to just drift out here? We could drift down past Governors Island and come up the other side.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You’re shorting me!” I blurted.

She looked at me as if I had just said something very stupid. Or as if she felt sorry for me. Suddenly I realized I didn’t know her well enough to have any idea what her look meant or what she was thinking.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to joke,” I said, again without intending to say it—without reviewing it in advance.

“I know,” she said, with a little tightening at the corners of her mouth. She was watching me closely. “Well,” she said, trying for lightness, “everyone hedges, right?”

“No!” I said. “Enough of that!”

She shrugged, as if to say If that’s what you want. “And so…?”

“So…” I didn’t know what to say. I had to say something. “But I like you!”

Again she shrugged, as if to say So what. And I realized I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was really like.

I turned the bug in toward shore. The few lit buildings ahead of us made the West Village look like a mouth that had lost most of its teeth.

“No, come on,” I said, again surprising myself. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

She shrugged yet again. I thought she wasn’t going to say more, and the pit of my stomach dropped down and clutched my scrotum tight, yanked my balls up into me. Then she said, “I don’t know—I guess it’s not really working for me. I mean you’re a nice guy, but you’re kind of old school, you know? Trade trade trade, a little bit of semiaccidental spoofing, hoping for a big short… like it’s all about money.”

I thought that over. “We’re in finance,” I pointed out. “It is all about money.”

“But the money can be about something. I mean, you can do things with money.”

“We work for hedge funds,” I reminded her. “We work so that people who are rich enough to afford it can hire people who will get them a larger rate of return than the average rate of return. That’s what we do.”

“Yes, but one of the ways you can get the alpha for them is to do venture capital and invest in good things. You can make a difference in people’s lives, make them better, and still get the alpha for the customers.”

“And your bonuses.”

“Yes, of course. But it isn’t just about bonuses. It’s investing in the real economy, in real work. Making things happen.”

“Is that what you do?” I asked.

She nodded in the darkness. Every hedge fund guarded its methods, so she was sworn to secrecy here. Any competitive advantage between funds came from a proprietary mix of strategies that were usually set by the founder of the fund, as the resident genius, and then by his closest advisors. That Eldorado went in for something as uncertain and illiquid as venture capital—that they had any at all in their mix—that was something she probably shouldn’t be talking about. But she had told me, basically in order to let me know why she had gone cool on our relationship. Which idea was still chilling me like a frost. I looked at her and realized that I wanted so bad for this one to work out. It wasn’t like it had been with Amanda and most of the others. Damn! I had done the stupid thing, I had gone with a gut feeling rather than a careful analysis. Again.

“Well, that’s interesting. I’m going to think about that,” I said. “And I hope you’ll have dinner with me again, from time to time anyway. Even just in the Met,” I added desperately, when she looked away from me, across the river. “I mean you live right next door. So, like instead of eating at home, maybe.”

“That would be nice,” she said. “Really, I only mean I want to slow down here a bit. I want to talk.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I want to talk too.”

But while I’m sleeping with you! I didn’t add. Lots of talk, after and even while making love, and showering together, and sleeping in the same bed! Talking all the while!

Well, but all these things were precisely what she had put on hold. Or, more likely, politely nixed for good.

If they were going to happen, I was going to have to figure her out. Figure out what would please her. It would be hard if I wasn’t seeing her. So as I steered the bug rather clumsily up into Twenty-third toward home, lost in my worry, missing obvious wake patterns and even other boats, feeling crushed, even resentful, even angry, I was still figuring out how to get along with her, how to go on, how to get her back. Damn. Damn me for a fool.

b) Charlotte

The day had arrived when the Met’s board was going to decide what to do about the offer to buy the building. Charlotte didn’t want to discuss it in a general meeting of all the co-op members, which she knew was wrong of her, but she didn’t. If it came to a general vote and the members voted to sell, her head would explode. She could feel the pressure and she didn’t like it. She would scream heavy abuse at them and then feel worse than ever. “People urge me to trust people, but I don’t,” she said to her colleague at work, Ramona, who nodded sympathetically.

“Why trust people?” Ramona said. “What does it get you?”

“Oh be quiet,” Charlotte said. Ramona liked to tweak her, and mostly she liked it too, but this was too scary. “I wonder if I could declare myself dictator of the building. Isn’t that how it worked back in the Greek city-states? A crisis from outside would come, things might fall apart, so someone would declare themself dictator and everyone would agree to let them guide the polis through the crisis.”

“Good idea!”

“Quit it.”

Then the day’s first appointment, a family from Baton Rouge, stood before her, and she got to work with them on their case. Americans were supposed to have citizens’ rights that made them impervious to the kind of discrimination that foreigners faced when moving into the city, but in practice this could fail. Lots of people were simply without papers or any cloud documentation; it was hard to believe until you met them by the hundreds and eventually the thousands, day after day for years. The cloud’s Very Bad Day in the aftermath of the Second Pulse had wiped out millions of people’s records, and no country had completely recovered from that, except for Iceland, which had not believed in the cloud and kept paper records of everything.

Today there was also going to be an influx of new refugees from New Amsterdam, the Dutch township. This floating city was one of the oldest of the townships, and like the rest of them it floated slowly around the world, a detached piece of the Netherlands, which had been so flooded by the Second Pulse that New Amsterdam equaled something like five percent of the home country’s remaining actual land. Like all the townships it was essentially a floating island, mainly self-sufficient, and directed by Holland’s government to wander the Earth helping intertidal peoples in whatever way possible, including relocating them to higher ground. Charlotte enjoyed visiting it when it jellyfished by New York, eddying outside the Verrazano Narrows in the big counterclockwise current that curled off the Gulf Stream. Townships couldn’t come too close to the Narrows because there was a danger of getting sucked in on an incoming tide and crashing into one shore or the other, or crashing into both and getting corked, but a flight out to them in a small plane often took less than half an hour in the air. So she took one of the flights from the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier and enjoyed the sudden view from the air: the city, the Narrows and its bridge, the open ocean. On the left as they headed out to sea she could see the drowned shallows of Coney Island, lined on its seaward edge by the barges that were dredging the sand of the old beach and moving it north to the new shoreline. Then over the blue plate of the ocean, and soon they descended to the startling green island floating ahead of them—a big island, big enough that its airport’s landing strips could land jets, not that there were many jets left. The city plane descended and rolled to a taxiing speed in about a third of the length of the runway.

Once out of the plane and then the airport, they could have been on Long Island. There was no feeling of floating, no movement of any kind. This always amazed Charlotte. Around her the neat little buildings made it look like a Dutch town.

Despite the elegant look of the buildings and streets, it was not hard to see the uneasiness in the eyes of the people housed in the township’s refugee dorms. It was a look Charlotte knew well, the look of her clients, here again staring at her. Needy looks, always trying to hook her into their stories, so that they were looks she had gotten good at deflecting. She couldn’t feel their desperation too directly or it would drive her mad, she had to keep a professional distance. And she could, but it took an effort; it was the thing that made her tired at the end of a day, or even an hour. Bone tired, and at some deep level, angry. Not at her clients, but at the system that made them so needy and so numerous.

So New Amsterdam was now ferrying a contingent from Kingston, Jamaica. None of them had papers, and they looked Hispanic, not Jamaican, and spoke in Spanish among themselves, but Kingston was where New Amsterdam had picked them up. The Caribbean was like that. Charlotte sat down at a table with them and listened to their stories one by one, creating primary refugee documentation. That would insinuate them into the records, and eventually would serve adequately for them, even if they had no originary paper. It was as if she were plucking them out of the sea itself. “Don’t forget to join the Householders’ Union,” she kept telling them. “That could be a big help.”

They were grateful for anything, and this too showed in their faces, and this too had to be ignored, as it was just another facet of their desperation. People didn’t like to feel grateful, because they didn’t like the need to feel grateful. So it was not a good feeling no matter which end of it you were on. One did good for others not for the others’ sake, nor for oneself, which would be a little sanctimonious, at best. This seemed to suggest that there was no reason at all to do good, and yet it did feel like an imperative. She did it for some kind of abstract notion, perhaps, an idea that this was part of making their time the early days of a better world. Something like that. Some crazy notion. She was crazy, she knew it; she was compensating probably for some lack or loss; she was finding a way to occupy her busy brain. It seemed like a right way to behave. It passed the time in a way more interesting than most ways she had tried. Something like that. But at the end of the day, even a day at sea, in the cool salt breeze and the sound of gulls crying, she was ready to pack it in.

But she couldn’t, not at the end of this day; she needed to fly back and get out of her office and get home. No time to walk, she would need to get on the vapo or even take a water taxi. Flying back in over the Brooklyn shallows to the Turtle Bay aircraft carrier anchored next to the UN building, Charlotte sat at the left-side window and marveled at the city in the late-afternoon light. Sun blazed off canals and made the rank-and-file forest of buildings look like rows of standing stones in some half-sunk Avalon. Black pillars drowned to the knees; it was a surreal sight, there was no coming to terms with it, it never ceased to look bizarre, even though she had lived in it all her life. What a fate. A somewhat glorious fate, and despite all, she stared down at the city with a little sense of wonder, even pride.

Down on the aircraft carrier. Walk down the ramp onto the dock and shift in the mass of people, taking little steps, onto a crowded vaporetto headed into the canals of the city. Grumble from dock to dock, reading reports while the crowds surged off and on, off and on. She got off at the dock next to her office and went in, thinking she should have just gone home.

Ramona and a group from the district’s Democratic Party office met her as she was leaving and asked to walk her out. Charlotte shrugged, almost saying I gave at the office, but biting back the words; she didn’t get why they were there. Out on the dock outside they asked her if she would run for Congress, for the Twelfth District seat, which covered the drowned parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and had been a controversial seat because of that, for many years representing more clams than people, and the people a bunch of squatters, communists, et cetera.

“No way!” Charlotte said, shocked. “What about the mayor’s candidate?”

Galina Estaban had anointed her assistant Tanganyika John to succeed the longtime congressman for the Twelfth, who was finally retiring. No one was very happy with this selection, but the party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time—school board, city council, state assembly—and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at the top would give you the party endorsement and its aid, and you were good to go. Had been that way for centuries. Outsiders did pop up to express various dissatisfactions, and occasionally some of them even overthrew the order of things and got elected, but then they were ostracized forever by the party and could get nothing done. They just wasted their time and whatever little money could be dredged up to support such quixotic tilts.

So, but these people asking her to run were from the party office, in fact they were its central committee, which made it a little different. Maybe a lot different. Estaban herself had come in as an outsider, which probably explained it. Come in as a star and disrupt the hierarchy, then become a power and anoint your own assistant to an unrelated post that was even more not yours to call than your own: not right. And Tanganyika John was a tool and a fool. Still, running against her would be a lost cause and a horrid waste of time.

Charlotte indicated this as quickly and politely as she could, then jumped on the vaporetto that mercifully gurgled into the dock headed down Park, just as Charlotte’s interlocutors were waxing eloquent with desperate pleadings.

“Think about it!” Ramona and the others begged loudly as the vapo surged off to its next stop, wringing their hands like starving mendicants.

“I will!” Charlotte lied cheerfully. It was annoying, but it pleased her too, just to think that here was something dumb she would not have to do, something that could be avoided with a simple No fucking way.

The vapo took a left at Twenty-third and deposited her at the dock in front of the Flatiron, and from there she took the elevator up to the skywalk level and walked west to Chopstick One, cursing it ritually as she crossed it from skybridge in to skybridge out, and then hurried over Twenty-third to home. She got to her room with just enough time to change shoes, chomp down an apple, wash her face, and get downstairs. She walked in as the board meeting was beginning.

She sat down feeling a little unsteady, as if she were still at sea, or in the air. The other board members regarded her curiously, so it must have shown, but she said nothing, explained nothing, just started the meeting with a quick, “Okay, let’s go.”

Item three came quick enough: “Okay, this offer on the building. What are we going to do?”

She stared at the others, and Dana, also a lawyer, said, “We’re obliged to answer them, legally, and just as a matter of doing due diligence.”

“I know.” Charlotte hated the phrase doing due diligence, but this was not the time to mention that. I do do-do on your dumb due diligence. No.

“So,” Dana continued, “the covenant requires we put any ownership question to a vote of the membership.”

Charlotte said, “I know. But I’m wondering if this is an ownership question.”

“What do you mean? They’re offering to buy us out.”

“What I’m saying is, is it a real offer? Or is it some kind of stalking horse that is being used to find out our valuation, or something like that.”

“How would that matter?”

“Well, if it’s just a test for a comparative valuation, we as a board could just turn it down outright, without putting it to a vote.”

“Really?”

“What do you mean, really?”

“I mean do you think we could determine it was a fake offer with enough certainty to bypass our obligation to put it to a membership vote?”

Charlotte thought it over.

While she did, Dana said, “It wouldn’t really do to turn the offer down as a board and see if they came back again, because if they did, we would be retroactively out of compliance.”

“Out of compliance with our co-op covenant, or with city law?”

“I’m not sure, but maybe both.”

“I’d like to know before we decide,” Charlotte said. “Maybe we can hold off on this again, poke around a little, study it a little, before we act either way.”

By now she was frowning, she could feel her face bunched. She wanted to refuse the offer so much it hurt; her guts twisted, and she could feel her temples begin to pound. But Dana was a good lawyer and a good person, and probably it was true that they had to conform to the guidelines, do everything legally, so that she didn’t accidentally give the enemy here, whoever they were, a hand up in the game. So Dana had to be listened to. “Listen, can we table this for tonight, do a little more research and then get back to it at our next meeting? Please?”

“I guess so,” Dana said. “Maybe we do need to know more before we decide. Can we talk to the people making the offer, find out what they have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Morningside won’t tell us who it is. That’s part of what I don’t like about it. I want to ask Morningside again to let us talk to the people making the offer.”

“Let’s do that, and table it for now. I move we table it.”

“Second,” Charlotte said.

They passed the motion and moved on.

So, the next morning Charlotte gritted her teeth and called her ex, Larry Jackman.

“Hey Charlotte,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Are you going to be in New York anytime soon?”

“I’m here today. What’s up?”

“I want to meet you for coffee and ask you some questions.”

This was something they had started doing a few years back, meeting from time to time for coffee, their chats usually having to do with city business, or old acquaintances in trouble who needed help, neither of them favorite topics of Larry’s, but he had always been agreeable, and after a while they had an established tradition of getting together. So after a short pause he said, “Always, sounds good. How about four twenty, at the pavilion in Central Park?”

This was one of their hangouts from the old days, so it was with a little lurch that Charlotte agreed.

Then it stuck at the bottom of her mind all day, like a burr in her sock, and yet even so she got lost in work and it was four before she noticed the time, and then she had to hurry. No way to walk twelve blocks uptown at high tide, when the first three blocks of it would be under shallow water, so she stepped onto an airboat taxi that then skidded up Fifth, over shallows, breakers, and seaweedy street, until turning and letting passengers off at the high tide slide, a floating pier now grounded in the middle of the street waiting for water. This quick if expensive run left her with just the fifteen-minute walk up into Central Park. She lumped along, wishing her hip didn’t hurt and that she had lost more weight than she had managed to. Walking was hard.

And yet she needed the walk to compose her mind. She was never quite comfortable meeting with Larry, there was too much history between them, and much of that history was bad. But on the other hand some of it, a lot of it, was good, even very good, if you could drill down to those layers of the past under the bad years. When they were young law students in love, almost all of it had been good; then came the years when they were married, and good and bad were so closely mixed that you couldn’t differentiate them, they were just the mix of those years, glorious and painful, and ultimately, in retrospect and even at the time, frustrating; for they had not been able to get along. They hadn’t seen eye to eye. No one does, but they couldn’t seem to agree on what they weren’t agreeing on. They hadn’t figured their relationship out, not even close. And then the good and bad had destranded, separated out, and suddenly they could see that there was a lot more bad than good. Or so it had seemed to Charlotte. Larry had said he was fine with a little discord, that she was being too demanding, but whether that was true or not, ultimately the whole thing had fallen apart. Neither of them had the feeling anymore, and by the time they separated, though there had been some very bitter angry moments, it seemed that mostly they both felt a sense of exhaustion and relief. That whole sorry era over; new incarnations for both of them; stay civil when they had to be in touch, which they didn’t, not having kids. After some years that had mellowed into a kind of rueful nostalgia, and later still, getting together over coffee satisfied a little itch of curiosity in Charlotte, an urge to see how Larry’s story had continued. Especially after he shifted into finance and rose in that world, and became, she assumed, both rich, while working for Adirondack, and powerful, being tapped to be chair of the Federal Reserve. At that point her curiosity outweighed her uneasiness when they got together.

Still, every time, as now, when the time came for them to meet, for him to be there in person across a table from her, she felt a qualm, a little twist of dread. How would she look to him, working as she did in the depths of a bureaucracy so marginal it had been demoted to public/private NGO status, doing the legal equivalent of social work? She didn’t like to be judged.

“You’re looking great,” he said as he sat down across from her.

“Thanks,” she said. “Your job must make you good at lying.”

“Ha ha,” he said. “Good at telling the truth. Telling the truth without people freaking out.”

“That’s what I meant. Which people, who would freak out at the truth?”

“The market.”

“The market is people?”

“Of course. And Congress too. Congress is people, and they freak out.”

“But they do that always, right? So if you’re always freaked out, I don’t know where you go from there.”

“They find ways. They have hyper-freak-outs. Sometimes they go around the bend and get completely calm. That’s what I’m always hoping for. And sometimes it happens. There are some good people in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle. It takes some time to figure out who is which.”

“What about the president?”

“She’s good. Pretty calm all the time. Smart. Has assembled a good team.”

“By definition, right?”

“Ha ha. Always good to get together with you and get cut down to size a little.”

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“Are you still a nonfat latte person?”

“Yes, I never change.”

“Not what I was implying.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Okay, I guess I feel like your coffee habits are pretty fixed, maybe I’m wrong.”

“These days I like half-and-half in an American coffee with a shot of espresso in it.”

“Whoa!”

“New theories, new stomach lining.”

“Surgery?”

“Yeah, I had that band put in? Not really. No, I’m feeling okay there now, I’m not sure what happened. Maybe the meditation is kicking in.”

“Medication?”

“Meditation. I told you last time, or the time before.”

“I forgot, sorry. What do you do?”

“It’s a kind of mindfulness meditation. I lie there in the tower’s farm and look at Brooklyn, and think about how many things there are that I can’t do anything about. After a while that becomes like the whole universe, and then I feel calmer.”

“I think I would fall asleep.”

“Usually I do, but that’s good too.”

“Still insomniac?”

“Now I think of it as spreading my sleep around. Sleep, meditation, wakefulness, it’s all getting to be the same for me.”

“Really?”

“No.”

He laughed politely. They sipped, looked around the park. It was the last part of autumn in New York, the leaves had all turned and many had fallen, but some oaks, sycamores, and tweaked elms planted a few decades before were paying off now with their last great globes of red or yellow. It was, as everyone said, one of the handsomest times of year in the city, the time of shortened afternoons and sudden chill, and a clear quality to the low light that made Manhattan like a dream city, stuffed with significance and drama. The only place to be. They had sat across from each other like this, here in various parts of Central Park, and elsewhere in the city, for almost thirty years now. Like giants plunged through the years, yes, and even though she was a bureaucrat and he was the head of the Fed, she knew all of a sudden that he considered them equals.

“So is the president really calm, do you think?”

“I think so. I think she’s in the strong line, you know. And as progressive as an American president can be.”

“Which isn’t very much.”

“No, but it matters when they are. I think she’s in the line of FDR and Johnson, and Eisenhower.”

“Those are all twentieth-century presidents. You might as well add Lincoln.”

“Well, I would, maybe, if it ever came up. If some kind of push came to shove. She wants that kind of opportunity, I think.”

“A civil war over slavery?”

“Well, whatever the current equivalent would be. I mean we do have some giant problems, as you know. And inequality is one of them, as you also know. So yeah, I think she would love to do something big.”

“Interesting.” Charlotte thought that over. “I guess if you were going to do something so stupid as to be president, you would want to go for something big.”

“I think so. The temptation is there. I mean, you wouldn’t do it thinking, Hey, now that I’m president I’ll play it safe, hope nothing happens. Would you?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte confessed. “It’s way outside my thought zone.”

“You never meditate by thinking, What would I do as president?”

“No. Definitely not. But you’re working for her. You have to think about that. A lot of us think the head of the Fed is one of the crucial jobs.”

He looked surprised. “I’m glad to think you might be one of them.”

“How could I not? You know me.”

“Well, yes. Sort of.”

“I think you do. Say we were concerned with justice, when we were young. I think that was true of us, don’t you?”

He nodded, watching her with a small smile. His idealistic ex, still at it. He sipped his coffee. “But then I got into finance.”

“But that was moving toward power, right? Toward economics, which is toward political economy, which is toward power, which is still ultimately working on justice. Or can be.”

“That’s what I was thinking at the time, I guess.”

“And I always saw that. I always gave you credit for that.”

He smiled again. “Thank you.”

“People get into finance for different reasons. Some of them do it just to make money, I’m sure, but you were never like that.”

“No, maybe not.”

“I mean now you’re a federal employee. So you’re making peanuts compared to what you could be.”

“True. But I don’t have to worry about money anymore either. So I’m not sure if I get any credit for that. You could say that at a certain point, power is more interesting than money. Once you’ve got enough money. You see that all the time.”

“I know. But whatever, here you are, chair of the Fed, it’s big.”

“It’s interesting, I’ll admit that. It’s maybe too big. I feel like I should be able to do more than I find I can actually do. It’s like the Fed kind of runs itself, or the market runs it, or the world, and I sit there thinking, Do something, Larry, change something, but what, or how—it isn’t obvious, that’s for sure. For one thing, the rest of the board and the regional boards have a lot of clout. It’s not a strongly executive system.”

“No?”

“Not as much as I’d like. I feel more advisory than anything else.”

Charlotte thought about that. “But advisory to the president, and to Congress.”

“True.”

“And if push came to shove, you know, like in a financial crisis, then sometimes your advice is what everyone is going to do.”

He laughed. “Guess I’ll just have to hope for a crisis!”

Charlotte laughed too. Suddenly they were having a little fun. “Those seem to come along every decade or so, so you have to be ready.”

“I guess.”

They talked about other things, such as old friends and acquaintances they had enjoyed in the years when they were a couple; each had kept in touch with one or two, and they shared their news.

That led naturally to Henry Vinson.

Actually not. It would never be quite natural for Charlotte to ask Larry about any of his acquaintances in finance, as she had never taken any interest in them, nor had Larry been inclined to share details of his interactions with them. Most of that part of his life had happened after they broke up. So she had had to consider how best to bring it up, but now she saw the way, which was to make it about him and his possible conflicts of interest, because then he would assume that she was just tweaking him with problems arising from his success. That would fit their usual pattern.

“Do you ever end up regulating your old partners?” she asked.

He did frown a little at this, it was so outside her usual realm of interest; but then he winced a little, as if becoming aware she was needling him again, as she had hoped he would conclude.

“I’m not head of the SEC,” he pointed out, by way of a parry.

“I know that, but the Fed sets the rates, and that determines a lot of everything else, right? So some of your old partners will be helped and others hurt by any decisions you make.”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s the nature of the job. Basically, everyone I ever worked with is going to be impacted.”

“So, Henry Vinson too? Didn’t you guys have a kind of rocky breakup?”

“Not really.”

Now he was regarding her with some suspicion. He had left Adirondack after Vinson had been made CEO by its board of directors. It had been in the nature of a contest or competition, he had once admitted to her, in that the board of directors could have chosen either of them to be the next CEO, but they chose Vinson. Larry had still been the CFO, but there was not really room for the loser of such a selection process to stay in the company, especially since Larry didn’t like many of the things Vinson was doing; he had therefore left and started his own hedge fund, done well, and then been appointed head of the Fed by their old law school classmate, now president. Vinson had also done well at Adirondack, and then with his own fund, Alban Albany, after he too had gone out on his own. So it could be regarded as a case of no harm no foul, or two winners. Just one of those things. As Larry was explaining again now.

“Still, it must be fun to tell him what to do?”

Larry laughed. “Actually he tells me what to do.”

“Really?”

“But of course. Repeatedly, all the time. He wants rates this way, he wants them that way.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“He can talk to me, anyone can. He’s free to talk to me and I’m free to ignore him.”

“So nothing’s changed.”

He laughed again. “True.”

“So is that how it works, with you now in government regulating them?”

“It’s just me in a different job. I don’t stay in touch, but no one ever does.”

“So it’s not the fox guarding the henhouse?”

“No, I hope not.” He frowned at this idea. “I think what everyone likes is for the Fed and Treasury to be staffed by people who know the ropes and speak the language. It helps just in being able to communicate.”

“But it’s not just a language, it’s a worldview.”

“I suppose.”

“So you don’t automatically support the banks over the people, if push ever comes to shove?”

“I hope not. I support the Federal Reserve.”

Charlotte nodded, trying to look like she believed it. Or that he hadn’t just answered her question by saying he would support the banks.

The late-afternoon light was bronzing the air of the park, giving all the autumn leaves and the air itself a yellowy luster. The ground was now in shadow. It was crisp but not cold.

“Want to walk around a bit?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, and got up. She would be able to show that she had become a stronger walker. Assuming he had ever noticed she had been having trouble with that, as probably he hadn’t. She pondered how to bring up Vinson again. Once they got up and going, headed north up the west side, she said, “It’s an odd little thing, but a cousin of Henry Vinson’s was living in my building as a temporary guest, and then he went missing. We have the police looking into it, and they were the ones who found this relationship to Vinson.”

“Cousin?”

“Family relationship? Child of a parent’s sibling?”

He tried to shove her and she dodged it. “It’s just one of the things they’ve been finding out,” she added.

“That is odd. I don’t know what to say.”

“I only mention it because we were talking about the old days, and that made me think of Vinson, and how I had heard about him in this other connection.”

“I see.”

Larry being Larry, he managed to make that sound like he saw more than Charlotte would like. They had fought a lot, back in the day; she was remembering that now. That stuff had happened; that was why they had divorced. The good times before that were hard to remember, but not that hard. As they walked around the park paths, she found their past was very present to her mind, all of it. She often imagined the past as an archaeological dig, with later events overlying and crushing the earlier ones, but in fact it wasn’t like that; really every moment of her past was present to her all at once, as in the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. So the good times stood right next to the bad times, alternating panel by panel, room by room, making for a garbled queasy stew of feelings. The past.

The upper halves of the superscrapers ringing the north end of the park caught the last of the day’s sunlight. Some windows facing southwest blinked gold, inlaid in immense glass curves of plum, cobalt, bronze, mallard green. The park’s advocates had had to fight ferociously to keep the park free of buildings; as dry land it was now ten times more valuable than it had been before. But it would take more than drowning lower Manhattan to make New Yorkers give up on Central Park. They had made one concession by filling in Onassis Pond, feeling that there was enough water in the city without it; but other than that, here it was, forested, autumnal, same as always, lying as if at the bottom of a steep-walled open-roofed rectangular room. It looked like they were ants.

Charlotte said something to this effect, and Larry shook his head and chuckled at her. “There you go again, always thinking we’re so small,” he said.

“I do not! I don’t know what you mean!”

“Ah well.” He waved it aside; it wasn’t worth trying to explain, the gesture said. Would only cause her to protest more, protest something obvious about herself. He didn’t want to get into it.

Annoyed, Charlotte said nothing. Suddenly the persistent sense of being ever so slightly condescended to coalesced in her. He was indulging her; he was a busy important man, making time for an old flame. A form of nostalgia for him: this was what lay there under the surface of his easy tolerance.

“We should do this more often,” Charlotte lied.

“For sure,” Larry lied back.

c) Vlade

Vlade now made a kind of cop’s round of the building every evening after dinner, checking all the security systems and visiting all the rooms lower than the high tide line. Also the top floors under the blimp mast, and while he was at it, anywhere he thought taking a look would be a good idea. Yes, he was nervous, he had to admit it, to himself if no one else. Something was going on, and with that offer on the building looking like a hostile takeover, the attacks might be pressure to accept. It wouldn’t be the first time in New York real estate, nor the thousandth. So he was nervous, and made his rounds with a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. That felt a little extreme, but he did it anyway.

A couple of nights after they had pulled Roberto out of the south Bronx, at the end of his tour of the building, Vlade got off the elevator at the farm and went out to the southeast corner to see how the old man was doing. No surprise to look in through the hotello’s flap door and find Stefan and Roberto there with him, seated on the floor around a pile of old maps.

“Come in,” Hexter said, and gestured to a chair.

Vlade sat. “Looks like the boys got some of your maps back.”

“Yes, all the important ones,” the old man said. “I’m so relieved. Look, here’s a Risse map, 1900. It won a prize at the World’s Fair in France. Risse was a French immigrant, and he took his map back to Paris and it was the sensation of the fair, people lined up to walk around it. It was ten feet on a side. The original was lost, but they made this smaller version to sell. It’s a kind of celebration of the five boroughs coming together. That happened in 1898, and then they commissioned Risse to do this. I love this map.”

“Beautiful,” Vlade commented. It had been much folded, but it did capture something of the gnarly density, the complexity, the sense of human depth crusting the bay. The man-hours that had gone into building it.

“Then here’s the Bollmann map, isn’t this a beauty? All the buildings!”

“Wow,” Vlade said. It was a bird’s-eye view of midtown, with each building drawn individually. “Oh no, he cuts it off right at Madison Square! See, there’s the edge of the Flatiron, but our building is cut off.”

“Not the very top of it, see? Right next to the letter G in the index grid, I think that’s the top of it. You can see the shape.”

Vlade laughed. “The map didn’t go any farther?”

“I guess it was just a midtown map, anyway this is all I’ve got.”

“What’s this colored one?”

“Colored indeed. It’s the Lusk Committee map, the so-called Red Scare map. Ethnic groups, see? Where they lived. Which was where all the horrible revolutionaries were supposed to come from.”

“What year was this?”

“1919.”

Vlade looked for their neighborhood. “I see we had, what is this color—Syrians, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. I didn’t know that.”

“Some neighborhoods are still the same, but most have changed.”

“That’s for sure. I wonder if you could do anything like this now.”

“I guess you could, using the census maybe. But I think it would mostly be a hodgepodge.”

“I’m not sure,” Vlade said. “I’d like to see. Meanwhile, these are great.”

“Thanks. I’m so happy to have them back.”

Vlade nodded. “Good. So look, that brings me to the little incident with the boys up in the Bronx. Why don’t you tell me about that too. Do you have a map that shows where the HMS Hussar went down?”

Hexter glanced quickly at the boys.

“We had to tell him,” Roberto said. “He pulled me out.”

The old man sighed. “There’s not one map,” he told Vlade. “There are maps of the time that helped me. The British Headquarters map is an incredible thing. The British held Manhattan through the Revolutionary War, and their ordnance people were the best cartographers on Earth at that time. They made the map for military purposes, but also just to pass the time, it looks like. It goes right down to individual boulders. The original is in London, but I copied it from a photo when I was a kid.”

“Show him that one, Mr. H!”

“Okay, let’s.”

The boys got out a large folder, like an artist’s folder, and pulled out a big square mass of paper, treating it like nitroglycerin. On the floor they unfolded two sheets of paper that together were about ten feet by five. And there was Manhattan Island, in some prelapsarian state of undress: a little crosshatching of village at the Battery, the rest of it a wilderness of hills and meadows, forests and swamps and creek beds, all drawn as if seen from above.

“Holy God,” Vlade said. He sat down beside it and traced it with a finger. The area Madison Square now occupied was marked as a swamp with a creek running east from it, debouching into an inlet on the East River. “It’s so beautiful.”

“It is,” Hexter said, smiling a little. “I made this copy when I was twelve.”

“I want to make a map like this for what’s here now,” Roberto declared.

“A big task,” Hexter noted. “But a good idea.”

“Okay,” Vlade said. “I love this thing. But back to the Hussar, please.”

Hexter nodded. “So, this map was finished the very year the Hussar went down. It doesn’t include the Bronx, but it does have part of Hell Gate. And luckily there’s another great map that has the whole harbor, the Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821. I’ve got a reproduction of it too, see, look at this.” He unfolded yet another map. “Beautiful, eh?”

“Very nice,” Vlade said. “Not quite the Headquarters map, but excellent detail.”

“I like the way the water has waves in it,” Stefan said.

“Me too,” said the old man. “And look, it shows where the shore was when the Hussar sank. It was different then. These islands north of Hell Gate were infilled to make Ward Island, and now it’s entirely underwater. But back then there was a Little Hell Gate, and a Bronks Creek. And this little island, called Sunken Meadow, was a tidal island. They marked all the marshes really well on this map, I think because they couldn’t build on them or even fill them in, not easily anyway. So, look. The Hussar hits Pot Rock, over here on the Brooklyn side, and the captain tries to get to Stony Point, near the south end of the Bronx, where there was a pier. But all the contemporary accounts say the ship didn’t make it, and sank with its masts still sticking up out of the water. Some accounts have people even wading to shore. That wouldn’t be true right off Stony Point, because the tides run hard between there and the Brothers Islands, and the channel is deep. Also, there just wasn’t time to get that far. The accounts have it going down in less than an hour. The flood tide current runs at about seven miles an hour here, so even if it was the fastest tide possible, they couldn’t have gotten as far as North Brothers Island, which is where Simon Lake was diving back in the 1930s. So I think the ship sank between these little rocks here, between Sunken Meadow island and Stony Point, where it was all landfilled later. So the whole time since it sank, people have been looking in the wrong place, except right at the start, when the ship’s masts were sticking out of the water. The Brits got cables under it in the 1820s, which is why everyone is pretty sure the gold was on board, or else they wouldn’t have bothered with it. The fact that they were allowed to dive the site so soon after the War of 1812 boggles my mind. But anyway, I found their account of the attempt in London’s naval archives, back when I was young, and they confirmed what I was thinking from the timing calculations. It sank right here.”

And he put his forefinger on the 1821 map, on an X he had penciled there.

“So how come the Brits didn’t recover the gold?” Vlade asked.

“The ship broke apart as they were pulling it up, and then they didn’t have the diving skills to get something as small as two wooden chests. That river is dark, and the currents are fast.”

Vlade nodded. “I spent ten years in it,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows at the boys, who were looking at him amazed. “Ten years as a city diver, boys,” he said. “That’s why I knew what you were up to.” He looked at Hexter: “So you told the boys about this.”

“I did, but I didn’t think they should do the diving! In fact I told them not to!”

The boys were suddenly very interested in the 1821 map.

“Boys?” Vlade said.

“Well,” Roberto said, “it was just a case of one thing leading to another, really. We had this great metal detector from a guy who died. So we thought we’d just go up there and look around with that, you know.”

Stefan said, “We took it to the bottom where Mr. Hexter had said the Hussar was, and got a ping.”

“It was great!” Roberto said.

“Where’d you get the diving bell?” Vlade asked.

“We made it,” Roberto said.

“It’s the top of a barge’s grain hopper,” Stefan explained. “We looked at the diving bells at the dive shop at the Skyline Marina, and they looked just like the plastic tops of the grain hoppers. We glued some barrel hoops around the bottom edge of it to weight it down more, although it was already heavy, and glued an eye to the top, and there it was.”

Vlade and Hexter gave each other a look. “You got to watch out for these guys,” Vlade said.

“I know.”

“So the diving bell worked fine, and there we were, getting a big hit on the metal detector. And this metal detector can tell what kind of metal it is! So it isn’t just some boiler or something down there. It’s gold.”

“Or some other metal heavier than iron.”

“The metal detector said gold. And it was in the right spot.”

“So we thought we could make several dives, and dig through the asphalt there, it was really soft, and maybe we could get down to it. We were going to show Mr. Hexter what we had found, and we figured he would be happy, and we could go from there.”

This was beginning to sound a little altruistical to Vlade. He gave the two boys a stern look.

“It wasn’t going to work, boys. Just from what I’ve heard here, the ship was on the bottom of the river. So say it’s twenty feet down, which is what you’d need to get the ship itself underwater. Then they fill in that part of the river, covering the wreck. That shore was then about ten feet above high tide. So what you’ve got now is about thirty or forty feet of landfill over your ship. No way were you going to shovel your way down thirty feet under a diving bell.”

“That’s what I said,” Stefan said.

“I think we could have,” Roberto insisted. “It’s just a matter of spreading the digging out over lots of dives. The ground under the asphalt has to be soft! I was making huge progress!”

The others stared at him.

“Really?” Vlade asked.

“Really! I swear to God!”

Vlade looked at Hexter, who shrugged. “They showed me the metal detector reading,” Hexter said. “If it was accurate, it was a big signal, and set for gold. So I can see why they wanted to try.”

Vlade sat looking at the map from 1821. Bronx yellow, Queens blue, Manhattan red, Brooklyn a yellowy orange. In 1821 there was no Madison Square yet, but Broadway crossed Park Avenue there already, and the creek and swamp were drained and gone. Some kind of parade ground was marked at the intersection, and a fort. The Met was still ninety years in the future. The great city, morphing through time. Astounding, really, that they had drawn this vision of it in 1821, when the existing city was almost entirely below Wall Street. Visionary cartography. It was more a plan than a map. People saw what they wanted to see. As here with the boys.

“Tell you what,” he said. “If you agree, I could go talk to my old friend Idelba about this.” He paused for a second or two, frightened at what he was proposing. He hadn’t seen her in sixteen years. “She runs a dredging barge out at Coney Island. They’re sucking the old beach’s sand off the bottom and moving it inland. She’s got some wicked underwater power there. I might be able to talk her into helping us out. I think we’d have to tell her the story to get her to agree to it, but I would trust her to keep it to herself. We went through some stuff that makes me sure we can trust her.” That was one way of putting it. “Then we could see if you’ve got anything down there without you drowning yourselves. What do you say?”

The boys and the old man looked at each other for a while, and then Roberto said, “Okay, sure. Let’s try it.”

Vlade decided to take the boys out to Coney Island on his own boat, even though the building’s boat was a bit faster, because he didn’t want this trip on the books. His boat, an eighteen-foot aluminum-hulled runabout with an electric overboard, had become somewhat of an afterthought for him, because he was always either in the Met or out doing Met business in the Metboat, but it was still there tucked in the rafters of the boathouse, and once he got it down it was a pleasure to see it again, and feel it under the tiller as they hummed out Twenty-third to the East River and headed south across Upper New York Bay. Once they were clear of the traffic channels he opened it up full throttle. The two wings of spray the boat threw to the side were modest, but the frills topping them were sparked with rainbow dots, and the mild bounce over the harbor chop gave them an extra sense of speed. Speedboat on the water! It was a very particular feel, and judging by the looks on the boys’ faces, they hadn’t often felt it.

And as always, passing through the Narrows was a thrill. Even with sea level fifty feet higher, the Verrazano Bridge still crossed the air so far above them that it was like something left over from Atlantis. It couldn’t help but make you think about the rest of the world. Vlade knew that world was out there, but he never went inland; he had never been more than five miles from the ocean in his life. To him this bay was everything, and the giant vestiges of the antediluvian world seemed magical, as from an age of gold.

After that, out to sea. The blue Atlantic! Swells rocked the boat, and Vlade had to slow down as he turned left to hug the shore, now marked by a white line of crashing breakers. For a half hour they ran southeast just offshore, until they passed Bath Beach, where Vlade headed the boat straight south to Sea Gate, the western end of Coney Island.

Then they were off Coney Island, really just a hammerhead peninsula at the south end of Brooklyn. A reef now, studded with ruins. They paralleled the old shore, humming east slowly, rocking on the incoming swells. Vlade wondered if the boys might be susceptible to seasickness, but they stood in the cockpit staring around, oblivious to the rocking, which Vlade himself found rather queasy-making.

Tide line ruins on Coney Island stuck out of the white jumble of broken waves, various stubs and blocks of wrecked buildings; they looked like gigantic pallets that had grounded here. One could watch a wave break against the first line of apartments and rooftops, then wash through them north into the scattered rooftops behind, breaking up and losing force, until some backwash slugged into the oncoming wave and turned it into a melee of loose white water a couple hundred yards broad, and extending for as far as they could see to the east. From here the coastline looked endless, though Vlade knew for a fact that Coney Island was only about four miles long. But far to the southeast one could see the whitewater at Breezy Point, marking the horizon and thus seeming many miles distant. It was an illusion but it still looked immense, as if it would take all day to motor to Breezy Point, as if they were coasting a vast land on a bigger planet. Ultimately, Vlade thought, you had to accept that the illusion was basically true: the world was huge. So maybe they were seeing it right after all.

The boys’ faces were round-eyed, awestruck. Vlade laughed to see them. “Great to be out here, right?”

They nodded.

“You ever been out here before?”

They shook their heads.

“And I thought I was local,” Vlade said. “Well, good. Here, see that barge and tug, about halfway down Coney Island? That’s where we’re going. That’s my friend Idelba doing her job.”

“Is she about halfway done with it?” Roberto asked.

“Good question. You’ll have to ask her.”

Vlade approached the barge. It was tall and long, accompanied by a tug that looked small in comparison, though the tug dwarfed Vlade’s boat as they drew alongside. There was a dock tied to the barge that Vlade could draw up to, and a crew of dockmen to grab their painter and tie them fast to dock cleats.

Vlade had called ahead, feeling more nervous than he had felt for many years, and sure enough, there was Idelba now, standing at the back of the group. She was a tall dark woman, Moroccan by birth, still rangy, still beautiful in a harsh frightening way. Vlade’s ex-wife, and the one person from his past he still thought about, the only one still alive anyway. The wildest, the smartest—the one he had loved and lost. His partner in disaster and death, his comrade in a nightmare for two. Nostalgia, the pain of the lost home. And the pain of what had happened.

Idelba led them up a metal staircase to a gap in the taffrail of the barge. From the top of the stairs they could look down into the hull of the barge and see that it was about a third full with a load of wet blond sand, a little mottled with seaweed and gray mud. Mostly it was pure wet sand. A giant tube, like a firefighter’s hose but ten times bigger around, and reinforced by internal hoops, was suspended from a crane at the far end of the barge over the open hull, and newly dredged sand, looking like wet cement, was pouring out of it into the barge. A big dull grinding roar mixed with a high whine came from the innards of the barge.

“We’re still dredging pure sand,” Idelba pointed out. “The barge is almost full. We’ll be taking this load up Ocean Parkway soon, drop the sand there at the new beach.”

“It seems like it could get a lot fuller,” Roberto said.

“True,” Idelba said. “If we were headed out to sea we could carry more, but as it is we go up canals to the high tide mark and dump it there as high as we can go, and then bulldozers will come and spread it at low tide. So we can’t ride too deep.”

“Where are you dumping it?” Vlade asked.

“Between Avenue J and Foster Avenue, these days. They tore out the ruins and bulldozed the ground. Half our sand will end up just below the low tide line, half just above. That’s the plan, anyway. Spread the sand out and hope to get some dunes at the high tide mark, and some sandbars just below the low tide mark. Those are important for catching the mulm and giving the ecosystem a chance to grow. It’s a big project, beach building. Moving sand is just part of it. In some ways it’s the easy part, although it isn’t that easy.”

“What if sea level rises again?” Stefan asked.

Idelba shrugged. “I guess they move the beach again. Or not. Meanwhile we have to act like we know what we’re doing, right?”

Vlade squinted at the sun. He had almost forgotten how Idelba said things.

“Can we go up with you and see the new beach?” Roberto asked.

“You can, but it might take too long for today. It will take a couple hours to get up Ocean Parkway, and then another couple to unload the sand. Maybe you could follow us there on your boat, then leave when you want.”

“I think we’ll have to do that some other time,” Vlade said, “or else we won’t get back to Manhattan by dinner. So, let’s tell you what we came out here for, and you can get on with your day and we can go back home.”

Idelba nodded. She had still not met Vlade’s eye, as far as he could tell. It was making him sad.

Roberto said, “You have to promise to keep this a secret.”

“Okay,” Idelba said. Now she glanced at Vlade. “I promise. And Vlade knows how well I keep my promises.”

Vlade laughed painfully at that, but when the boys looked alarmed, he said, “No, I’m just laughing because Idelba surprised me there. She’s good for it. She’ll keep our secret. That’s why I brought you to talk to her.”

“Okay then,” Roberto said. “Stefan and I are doing a little underwater archaeology in the Bronx, and we think we’ve found a, a find, that we want to dig up, but we’ve been working with just a diving bell, and we can’t do the excavation under it. We tried, but it won’t work.”

“They almost drowned,” Vlade added despite himself.

The boys nodded solemnly.

“A diving bell?” Idelba said. “Are you kidding me?”

“No, it’s really cool.”

“Really crazy, you mean. I’m amazed you’re still alive. Did you ever black out?”

“No.”

“Headaches?”

“Well, yeah. Some.”

“No lie. I used to do some of that shit too when I was your age, but I learned better when I blacked out. And I had headaches all the time. Probably lost a lot of brain cells. That’s probably why I hung out with Vlade here.”

The boys didn’t know what to make of this.

Idelba eyed them a while longer. “So it’s in the Bronx, you say?”

They nodded.

“It isn’t the Hussar, is it?”

“What!” Roberto protested. He glared at Vlade: “You told her!”

Vlade shook his head, and Idelba laughed her short harsh laugh.

“Come on, boys. No one digs up anything in the Bronx but the Hussar. You should know that. How did you decide where to dig?”

“We have this friend, an old man who studied it. He’s got a lot of maps and he’s done research in the archives.”

“He went to London.”

“That’s right, how did you know?”

“Because they all go to London. I grew up in Queens, remember?”

“Well, he went there and read the records in London, and saw the big map there and all. And he figured it out, and we went there in our boat and dove with a metal detector, a Golfier Maximus.”

“That’s a good one,” Idelba allowed.

“I didn’t know you were into this stuff,” Vlade observed.

“It was before we met.”

“When you were ten?”

“Pretty much. I played in the Queens intertidal, we did all that water rat stuff. We were the Muskrats. I nearly drowned three times. Have you guys nearly drowned yet?”

They nodded solemnly again. Vlade could see they were developing a crush on Idelba. He could relate, and was feeling sadder than ever.

“Just last week!” Roberto was explaining. “I was stuck under the bell, but Stefan got Vlade to come out and save me.”

“Good for Vlade.” A shadow passed over her face and for a second she wasn’t there with them, and Vlade knew where she was. She took a sharp breath in and said, “So you think you’ve found the Hussar.”

“Yeah, we got a giant hit.”

“A gold hit?”

“That’s right.”

“Interesting.” She regarded them, glanced again at Vlade. He couldn’t read her expression as she regarded the boys; it had been too long. “Well, I think you’re chasing a dream here, boys. But what the hell. We all do. Better than sitting around doing nothing. Now the truth is I don’t have the right equipment to help you just hanging around out here. Mainly your job is too small for my gear. We would suck your site to smithereens. What you need is like tweezers compared to this rig here, see what I mean?”

“Wow,” Stefan said.

“We get it,” Roberto said. “But you must have something for, I don’t know, detail work? Don’t you do any detail work?”

“No.”

“But you know what I mean?”

“I do. And yes, I can pull together what you need. You got the site buoyed?”

“Yes.”

“Underwater buoy?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Okay, I’ll put together a kit, and we’ll visit your site one of these days soon, and I’ll suck whatever you got out in a couple hours at the most. Suck it up and see what you got. It’ll be fun. Although you have to prepare yourself to be disappointed, understand? There’s been three hundred and whatever years of disappointment over this one, and it isn’t likely you’ll be the ones to end the streak. But we’ll suck it up and see what you got.”

“Wow,” Stefan said again. He and Roberto were both completely smitten. They were not going to remember not to be disappointed, Vlade could see. They would be crushed when they came up with nothing. But what could you do. Idelba gave him a look, a little reproving, but he could see she was thinking the same thing. You are setting these boys up for a fall, her look said, but what can you do. That’s what happens.

Yes, youth; and they were old. And when they were young they had suffered a blow, a blow so much more crushing than not finding your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that it was beyond what these boys could conceive. And beyond what they themselves had been able to handle. So… the boys were going to be okay. Everybody was going to be okay compared to Vlade and Idelba. The boys were even some kind of comfort, maybe, some kind of painful comfort. Something like that. Difficult for Vlade to know what Idelba was thinking; she was hard, and he was stunned just to see her again; he had no idea what he was feeling. It was like being slapped in the face. It was like that feeling of blasting out the Narrows into the Atlantic in a small boat, only bigger, stranger.

d) Amelia

Amelia, having retaken control of the Assisted Migration, spent the next day or two eating and calming down, with just one camera on, and very little commentary, most of it more suited to a cooking show than animal affairs. Her viewers were going to be happy to see she was okay, and they would empathize with her being a bit post-traumatic. Below her the South Atlantic pulsed to the horizon with a blue that reminded her of the Adriatic; it was a sort of cobalt infused with turquoise, quite a bit bluer than most ocean blues, and its glitter of reflected sunlight was behind her now, to the north. They were deep in the Southern Hemisphere, and to the south the blue was a darker blue, flecked only by whitecaps. She was already through the Roaring Forties, and had come into the Flying Fifties, and if she wanted to fly into the Weddell Sea, which she did, she was going to have to angle to the west and run the turboprops as hard as she could all the time, to get any westness in the Screaming Sixties. Here, below the tip of South Africa, down where only Patagonia broke up the ceaseless pour of water and wind ever eastward around the globe, there was a natural tendency for the airship to head east for Australia. Pushing against that caused it to tremble all the time. It felt like being in a ship down on those waves. Because there were waves of air too, and now they were tacking into them, as any craft on this Earth must often do.

She was still waiting for her support team to give her a final destination for the bears. There was some dispute between their geographers and their marine biologists as to where the bears would have the best chance. The eastern curve of the Antarctic peninsula, one candidate, had warmed faster, and lost a greater percentage of its ice, than almost anywhere on the continent, and its winter sea ice grew far out into the Weddell Sea every four-month-long night; and the Weddell Sea was well stocked with Weddell seals.

All this sounded plausible and right to Amelia, so she kept telling Frans to head that way. But there were competing arguments from others in the ecology group that wanted her to head to Princess Astrid Land, on the main body of the continent. Here there would be a steep sea coast, and the world’s largest colony of Weddell seals, plus an upwelling from the depths that made for a rich life zone, including many penguins. And it had such a good name.

A third faction of ecologists apparently thought they should deposit these bears on South Georgia, so Amelia kept the airship on course to pass within sight of that island as she headed south, just in case. This was a much warmer part of the world, not even actually polar, and with much less sea ice, so she judged that the scientists advocating that destination were going to lose the argument. If they were going to defy the natural order so much as to put polar bears in the Southern Hemisphere, it seemed to behoove them to at least put them in a truly polar region.

As the airship passed to the east of South Georgia, which took most of a day, Amelia found herself glad that she had not been directed to drop the polar bears there; the island was huge, steep, and green where it was not covered by snow and ice, or mantled in cloud that whipped over it in a blown cap that reminded her of the jet stream flying madly over the Himalayas. It looked ferocious, and very dissimilar to the western shore of Hudson Bay. Surely the Antarctic peninsula would make a better new home for her bears.

Who seemed to be settled down again, back in their quarters. Their breakout and subsequent fast, not to mention the upending of the airship, and what had sounded like some pretty hard falls, had perhaps subdued them and made them happier to accept their lot. Several of them had been repeat offenders in Churchill and had spent multiple stints in the bear jail there, so their current confinement was probably not in itself what had disturbed them, so much as the airship’s palpable sense of movement, certainly unsettling to any bear that had never flown before. Whatever explained their earlier restlessness, they were now pretty calm in their quarters, and almost all of them had crossed in front of the x-ray machine, and enough images of their skeletons had been assembled to reassure their doctors that there were no broken bones among them. All was well.

Two days after passing South Georgia, they were flying in toward the east side of the Antarctic peninsula. The sea was covered with broken plates of sea ice, and much taller chunks of glacial ice, often a creamy blue or green in color, rearing toward the sky in odd melted shapes. On both the sea ice and the horizontal parts of the icebergs lay scores, even hundreds of Weddell seals. Amelia brought the airship down for a closer look and better images for her show, and from that level they could see streaks of blood on the ice, placental blood for the most part; many of the female Weddell seals, looking like slugs laid out on a sheet of white paper, had recently given birth, and smaller offspring (but not that much smaller) were attached to them, nursing away. It was a peaceful and one might say bucolic scene.

“Wow, check it out,” Amelia said to her audience. “I suppose it’s a bit of a bummer for these seals, us introducing a predator they’ve never encountered before, but, you know, the bears are going to love it. And these seals are getting eaten all the time by orcas, and I think tiger sharks or something like that. Oh, sorry, leopard seals. Hmm, I wonder if the bears will be able to eat leopard seals too. That might be quite a showdown. I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be leaving behind the usual array of cameras, and it will be really interesting to see what happens. A new thing in history! Polar bears and penguins in the same environment! Kind of amazing, when you think about it.”

As the airship approached the coast, Amelia wondered aloud if they were going to be able to tell where sea ice ended and snow on land began; everything ahead looked white, except for some black cliffs farther inland. But as they hummed south and west, she saw it was going to be easy; there were black sea cliffs along part of the shore, and above them the snow was a different shade of white, creamier somehow, and rising steeply to black peaks inland. Offshore the sea ice was much broken, leaving lots of the lanes of black water that polar seafarers called leads. As they floated over these, Amelia looked down and squealed: there underneath them was a pod of orcas, just a bit blacker than the water itself, with white flashings on their sides, only visible when they arched slightly up and out of the water. A flotilla; possibly thirty of them. Oh, a pod.

“Dang!” Amelia said. “Hope we don’t fall in the water, ha ha! Not that I would want to anyway. Has anyone noticed how black that water is? I mean, look at it! The sky is blue, and I thought the color of the ocean was basically a reflection of the sky? But this water looks black. I mean, really black. I hope it’s coming across in the images, you’ll see what I mean. I wonder what explains that?”

Her studio people got on pretty quickly to say that it was hypothesized that the Antarctic ocean looked black because the bottom was very deep, even close inshore; also there were no minerals or organic material in it, so one was seeing very far into the water, down to where no sunlight penetrated. So one was seeing down to the blackness of the ocean depths!

“Oh my God that’s just soo trippy,” Amelia exclaimed. This was one of her signature exclamations, controversial back in the studio, as being either a cloying old-fashioned cliché or else an endearing Amelia-ism, but in any case Amelia couldn’t help it, it was just what she felt. Black ocean under blue skies! Sooo trippy! They weren’t in Kansas anymore. Which was another useful phrase. As they were very seldom in Kansas.

And indeed that was just the beginning of it. The closer they got to the peninsula itself, the bigger and wilder it appeared. The cliffs and exposed peaks were far blacker than the ocean, while the snow was painfully white, and lying on everything like a meringue. The foot of the cliff was coated with a white filigree that looked as if waves had broken there and then frozen instantly; apparently this was actually the result of many waves being dashed into the air, each adding a thin layer of water that then froze to what was already there. These arabesques were a grayer white than the smooth meringue coating the land above the cliffs. Inland, by some difficult-to-determine distance, maybe ten kilometers, black peaks thrust out of a white-and-blue surface, the snow there creamy white, the icefields blue and shattered in curving patterns of crevasses. These blue patches were the exposed parts of glaciers, ever more rare in this world, and yet here still vast in extent.

This was their destination, Amelia was told. She flew inland to get a better look at the black peaks, neck deep in ice. They looked like a line of degraded pyramids. There were horizontal striations of red rock in these black triangles, and the red rock had some holes in it. “The black rock is basalt, the red rock is dolerite,” Amelia repeated from her studio feed. She listened to them for a while longer and then said what they had said, but in her own words, this being her usual method. “These peaks are part of the Wegener Range, named after Alfred Wegener, the geologist who pointed out that South America fit into West Africa, which suggested some kind of continental drift must be happening. I always thought that when I was a girl. People laughed at him, but when tectonic plate theory came in he was vindicated. It was like, Duh! Trust your eyeballs, people! So I guess it sometimes pays to point out obvious things. I hope so, since I do it all the time, right? Although I don’t know if I’ll get a mountain range named after me.”

The land reared up before them like a black-and-white photo taken on some colder and spikier planet. “These peaks are about five thousand feet tall, and they’re only a few miles in from the coast. The hope is that our polar bears can use the caves in those dolerite layers. They’ll be at about the same latitude they were in Canada, so the seasonal light cycle should be about the same. And there are Argentineans and Chileans on this peninsula reintroducing the ancient beech forest on the newly exposed land. Mosses, lichens, trees, and insects. And of course the sea is absolutely chock-full of seals and fish and crabs and all. It’s a very rich biome, even though it doesn’t look like it. Which I mean, gosh, actually it looks completely barren! I don’t think I would do very well here! But you know. Polar bears are used to getting by in a polar environment. Pretty amazing really, when you consider that they’re mammals just like us. It doesn’t look possible that mammals could live down here, does it?”

Her techs reminded her that the Weddell seals were also mammals, which she had to admit was true. “Well, mammals can do almost anything, I guess that’s what I’m saying,” she added. “We are simply amazing. Let’s always remember that.”

Having looked at the potential winter dens from as close as the airship could come, Amelia turned back toward the coast. A little bit of katabatic wind pushed them along, and as they floated downslope the airship rocked and quivered. From behind her in the gondola came the muted low roars of bears in distress. “Just hold your horses!” Amelia called down the hall. “We’ll have you down in just a few minutes. And are you going to be surprised!”

Very quickly she was over the coastline, and with some shuddering she was able to turn up into the wind and then descend. This area looked promising; there was an open black lead in the sea ice, clogged with icebergs, then beyond that more sea ice and finally open water, black as obsidian. The sea ice was covered with Weddell seals, their pups, and their blood and pee and poop. Meanwhile the land rose from the sea ice not in cliffs but in lumpy hills, giving the bears places to hide, to dig dens, to sneak up on the seals, and to sleep. It all looked very promising, at least from a polar bear’s perspective. From a human perspective it looked like the iciest circle of hell.

She brought the airship down to the ice, fired anchors like crossbow bolts into the snow, and winched down on them until the gondola was resting on the snow. Now the time had come. She checked the camera array to reassure her techs, and then could not keep herself from gearing up and jumping down onto the snow. After two seconds of thinking it wasn’t so bad, the cold bit deep into her and she shouted at the shock of it. Her eyes were pouring tears, which were freezing on her cheeks.

“Amelia, you can’t be out there when the bears are released.”

“I know, I just wanted to get a shot of the outside.”

“We have drones getting those shots.”

“I just wanted to see what it felt like out here.”

“Okay, but go back inside so we can release the bears and get you back in the air. It isn’t good for the ship to be tied to the ground in a wind like this.”

It wasn’t that windy, she felt, although what wind there was easily cut through her clothes and rattled her bones. “Yikes it’s cold!” she cried, and then for the sake of her audience added, “Okay, okay, I’ll come in! But it’s very invigorating out here! The bears are going to love it!”

Then she climbed the steps back into the little antechamber of the gondola, like an airlock, and with some stumbling got back inside. It was insanely warm compared to outside. She cheered herself, and when she was back on the bridge she informed her crew up north and got to the windows on the side where the door to the bears’ enclosure would open.

“Okay I’m ready, let them out!”

“You are the one controlling the door, Amelia.”

“Oh yeah. Okay, here they go!”

And she pushed the double buttons that allowed the exterior door of the bears’ quarters to open. Between the wind pouring into the door and the bears pouring out, the ship got quite a shaking, and Amelia squealed. “There they are, how exciting! Welcome to Antarctica!”

The big white bears ambled away, foursquare and capable-looking, their fur slightly yellow against the snow, and riffling on the breeze, which they sniffed curiously as they trundled seaward. Not too far offshore, just beyond a narrow black lead, the sea ice was covered with a whole crowd of Weddell seals, with many moms lying around nursing their pups. They looked like giant slugs with cat faces. Alarming really. And yet they didn’t look alarmed by the bears, as why should they? For one thing the bears were now nearly invisible, such that Amelia only caught glimpses of them, like a crab made of black claws, or a pair of black eyes like the coal eyes of a snowman, glancing back her way and then winking out. For another thing the seals had never seen polar bears before and had no reason to suspect their existence.

“Yikes, I can’t even see them anymore. Oh my gosh, those seals are in trouble! Possibly there will have to be some population dynamics shakeout around here! But you know how that goes, fluctuations of predator and prey follow a pretty clean pattern. The number of predators swings up and down a quarter of a curve after their prey species, in the sine wave on the graph. And to tell the truth, I think there are millions of seals down here. The Antarctic coastal life zone seems to be doing well. Hopefully the polar bears will benefit from that, and join the other top predators down here in a happy harmony, a circle of life. For now, let’s get some altitude under this baby and see what we can see.”

She pushed the release button on the anchor bolts and they were freed by the explosives in their tips. Up flew the Assisted Migration, skewing on the wind, bounding up and down on itself and blowing quickly out to sea. She turned it into the wind and had a look below. White shore, black-and-white leads, white sea ice, black open water, all gleaming brassily in the low sun of midday. Hazy horizon, sky white above it, a milky blue overhead. The six bears were completely invisible.

Of course each of them was tagged with a radio transmitter and a few minicams, so Amelia’s viewers would get to see them live their lives on her show. They would join the many other animals she had moved into life zones better able to support them. Amelia’s Animals was a very popular spin-off site in the cloud. She was curious herself to see how they did.

She was headed home, and almost to the equator, when Nicole appeared on her screen, looking upset.

“What’s wrong?” Amelia asked.

“Have you got your bears’ feed on?”

“No, why?” She turned it on and got nothing. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure, but they all went out at once. And in some of them you could see what looked like an explosion. Here.”

She tapped away, and then Amelia was looking at the Antarctic peninsula and the sea ice: then there was a bright white light, and nothing more.

“Wait, what was that? What was that?”

“We’re not sure. But we’re getting reports that it was some kind of a… some kind of an explosion. In fact there’s feed coming from someone… the UN? The Bureau of Atomic Scientists?… maybe Israeli intelligence? Anyway, there’s also been a statement released to the cloud, claiming responsibility, from something called the Antarctic Defense League. Oh, that’s it. Some kind of small nuclear incident. Something like a small neutron bomb, they’re saying.”

“What?” Amelia cried. Without planning to she sat down hard on the floor of the bridge. “What the hell? They nuked my polar bears?”

“Maybe. Listen, we’re thinking you should head to the nearest city. This seems to be some new level of protest. If it’s one of the green purity groups, they may go after you too.”

“Fuck them!” Amelia shouted, and started to beat the table leg beside her, then to cry. “I can’t believe them!”

No response from Nicole, and Amelia suddenly realized they were still transmitting her response to her audience. She cursed again and killed the feed, over Nicole’s protest. Then she sat there and cried in earnest.

The next day Amelia stood in front of one of her cameras and turned it on. She had not slept that night, and sometime after the sun had come up, looking like an atomic bomb over the eastern horizon, she had decided she wanted to talk to her people. She had thought it over while eating breakfast, and finally felt she was ready. No contact with her studio; she didn’t want to talk to them.

“Look,” she said to the camera. “We’re in the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. We caused it. Fifty thousand species have gone extinct, and we’re in danger of losing most of the amphibians and the mammals, and all kinds of birds and fish and reptiles. Insects and plants are doing better only because they’re harder to kill off. Mainly it’s just a disaster, a fucking disaster.

“So we have to nurse the world back to health. We’re no good at it, but we have to do it. It will take longer than our lifetimes. But it’s the only way forward. So that’s what I do. I know my program is only a small part of the process. I know it’s only a silly cloud show. I know that. I even know that my own producers keep stringing me out in these little pseudo-emergencies they engineer because they think it adds to our ratings, and I go along with that because I think it might help, even though sometimes it scares me to death, and it’s embarrassing too. But to the extent it gets people thinking about these projects, it’s helping the cause. It’s part of the larger thing that we have to do. That’s how I think of it, and I would do anything to make it succeed. I would hang naked upside down above a bay of hungry sharks if that would help the cause, and you know I would because that was one of my most popular episodes. Maybe it’s stupid that it has to be that way, maybe I’m stupid for doing it, but what matters is getting people to pay attention, and then to act.

“So look. It’s messy now. There’s genetically modified food being grown organically. There’s European animals saving the situation in Japan. There are mixes of every possible kind going on. It’s a mongrel world. We’ve been mixing things up for thousands of years now, poisoning some creatures and feeding others, and moving everything around. Ever since humans left Africa we’ve been doing that. So when people start to get upset about this, when they begin to insist on the purity of some place or some time, it makes me crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s a mongrel world, and whatever moment they want to hold on to, that was just one moment. It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that’s the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I’ll kill you if you try to change anything.

“And you know what? I’ve met some of these people, because they come to meetings and they throw things at me. Eggs, tomatoes—rocks. They shout ugly hateful things. They write even worse things from their hidey-holes. I’ve watched them and listened to them. And they all have more money and time than they really need, and so they go crazy. And they think everyone else is wrong because they aren’t as pure as they are. They are crazy. And I hate them. I hate their self-righteousness about their so-called purity. I’ve seen in person how self-righteous they are. They are so self-righteous. I hate self-righteousness. I hate purity. There is no such thing as purity. It’s an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous. I hate those people, I do. If any of them are listening right now, then fuck you. I hate you.

“So now there’s a group claiming to be defending the purity of Antarctica. The last pure place, they call it. The world’s national park, they call it. Well, no. It’s none of those things. It’s the land at the South Pole, a little round continent in an odd position. It’s nice but it’s no more pure or sacred than anywhere else. Those are just ideas. It’s part of the world. There were beech forests there once, there were dinosaurs and ferns, there were fucking jungles there. There will be again someday. Meanwhile, if that island can serve as a home to keep the polar bears from going extinct, then that’s what it should be.

“So, yeah. I hate these fucking murderers. I hope they get caught and thrown in jail and forced to do landscape restoration for the rest of their lives. And if people decide it’s best, I’m going to take more polar bears south. And this time we’ll defend them. No one gets to drive the polar bears to extinction just because they’ve got some crazy idea of purity. It isn’t right. Purity my ass. The bears have priority over a creepy, stupid, asshole idea like that.”

e) a citizen

Winter comes barreling down from the Arctic and slams into New York and suddenly it looks like Warsaw or Moscow or Novosibirsk, the skyscrapers a portrait in socialist realism, grim and heroic, holding blackly upright against the storm, like pillars between the ground and the scudding low clouds. This curdled gray ceiling rolls south spitting snow, the needle sleet shooting down through slower snowflakes that swirl down and melt on your glasses no matter how low you pull your hat. If you have a hat; many New Yorkers don’t bother even in storms, they remain costumed as executives or baristas or USA casuals but always in costume, usually in black, acting their parts, the only concession to the storms being a long wool greatcoat or a leather jacket without insulation, with many a tough guy and gal still in blue jeans, that most useless pretense of clothing, bad at everything except striking that cigarette smoker’s pose which so many appear to value so much. Yes, New Yorkers more than most regard clothing as semiotics only, signaling toughness or disdain or elegance or seriousness or disregard, all achieving their particular New York look in defiance of the elements, the elements being just a dash between subway and building, and thus they not infrequently die in their doorways while trying to get their keys out of their pockets, yes, many a dead New Yorker’s body has emerged when the snowdrifts melt in spring looking startled and indignant as if to say What gives, how could this be?

Those who survive the storms despite their nitwit attire move about the city with their hands thrust deep in their pockets, because only the outdoor workers bother to wear gloves; they keep their bare heads down and hurry from building to building on the hunt for a quick Irish coffee to reanimate their fingers and heat up enough to stop the shivering and fuel a quick trek home. Would take a taxi if they ever took taxis, but they don’t of course, taxis are for tourists or the fucking executives or if you’ve made a dreadful scheduling mistake.

The Hudson on these stormy days is gray and all chopped by whitecaps trailing long lines of foam. It’ll stay that way until it freezes, the clouds low over such a charcoal sky that the white snowflakes stand out sharply overhead, then are visible tumbling sideways outside every window, also visible below as they fall onto the streets and instantly melt. Looking down from your apartment window over the hissing radiator, through the grillework of fire escapes, you see that the trash can lids are the first things to turn white, so for a while the alleys below are weirdly dotted with white squares and circles; then the snow chills the street surfaces enough to stick without melting, and everything flat quickly turns white. The city becomes a filigree of vertical blacks and horizontal whites all chopped and mixed together, a Bauhaus abstraction of itself, beautiful even if its citizens never look up to see it, having dressed so stupidly as to make every trip to the corner store a worst journey in the world, with that fatal doorstep result possible for the most foolish or unlucky.

Then after the storms, in the silver brilliance of late winter, the cold can freeze everything, and the canals and rivers become great white floors and the city is transformed into an ice carving of itself. This magical chilly time breaks up and all of a sudden it’s spring, all the black trees tippled green, the air clear and delicious as water. You drink the air, stare stunned at the greens; that can last as much as a week and then you are crushed by the stupendous summer with its miasmatic air, the canal water lukewarm and smelling like roadkill soup. This is what living halfway between the equator and the pole on the east side of a big continent will do: you get the widest possible variance in weather, crazy shit for day after day, and just as the cold is polar, the heat is tropical. Cholera festers in every swallow of water, gangrene in every scrape, the mosquitoes buzz like the teeny drones of some evil genius determined to wipe out the human race. You beg for winter to return but it won’t.

Days then when thunderheads solid as marble rise up until even the superscrapers look small, and the black anvil bottoms of these seventy-thousand-foot marvels dump raindrops fat as dinner plates, the canal surfaces shatter and leap, the air is cool for an hour and then everything steams up again and returns to the usual fetid asthmatic humidity, the ludicrous, criminal humidity, air so hot that asphalt melts and thermals bounce the whole city in rising layers like the air over a barbecue.

Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt—that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet—that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard-bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a WALK sign to turn green, will be pierced by that light and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and gorgeous.

f) Inspector Gen

Gen sometimes wondered if the patterns she thought she saw caused her to send her people out and make the patterns come into existence. Maybe this was deduction versus induction again. It was so hard to tell which she was doing that she often got the definitions of the two words confused. Idea to evidence, evidence to idea—whatever. Sometimes Claire would come back from her night classes talking about the dialectic, and what she said sounded a bit like Gen’s thinking. But Claire also complained that one of the dialectical features of the dialectic was that it could never be pinned down by a definition but kept shifting from one to another. It was like a traffic light: when you were stopped it told you to go; when you were going it told you to slow down and stop, but only for a time, after which it told you to go again. And yet you were not supposed to have your destination guided by traffic lights at all, but range widely and try to catch things from the side. While also trying to get where you were going.

So Gen was baffled as she reflected on these matters while walking the skybridges of the drowned city from station to station, from problem to problem. Today she was trying a new way to solve the shortcutter’s problem from her office to the mayor’s residence and reception skyscraper at Columbus Circle. She ambled along in the clear tubes of the graphene spans, switching from knight’s moves to bishop’s moves as the 3-D grid allowed. A dialectical progress high over the canals of lower Manhattan, which on this morning looked gray and congealed under a low cloud ceiling. Early December, finally getting cold. At Eighth she dropped to the ground and continued up the crowded sidewalks of the avenue just north of the intertidal. Mayor Estaban was hosting some kind of ceremony for visiting mayors from inland cities, apparently, and Inspector Gen had decided to attend and wave the NYPD flag.

This crowd was not Gen’s crowd. She would much rather have been submarining with Ellie and her people, having a frank and open exchange of views with the usual gang of water rats and ignoring the various indiscretions in the corners. The politicians and bureaucrats inhabiting the top of the uptown hierarchy, on the other hand, made her feel defensive. They wearied her. And she knew also that many of them were much bigger criminals than her submarine acquaintances; in some cases she had the evidence of their corruption cached for use at an opportune moment. This was a version of the same judgment she made underwater, that the people in place were better than whoever might replace them. Or she was just waiting for a moment of maximum leverage. Always that waiting made her anxious, as she realized she was making judgment calls that weren’t hers to make. In effect she was herself becoming part of the bad system, the nepotism and corruption, by holding things off the record. But she did it all the time. If she felt that the person in question was doing little harm by being there, such that nailing them might degrade the situation in lower Manhattan, then she put it in her pocket and waited for a better time. It seemed the best way. And sometimes she caught signs in the files that it had been the NYPD way for a lot longer than she had been alive. NYPD, the great mediator. Because the law was a very human business, any way you looked at it.

So here she was, one of the city’s most distinguished inspectors, famous downtown and in those parts of the cloud interested in police work. Pressing the flesh and being shown off by the mayor. She had never quite come to terms with this aspect of her job. Her coping method was basically to do film noir. Regard people tightly, keep a stone face. That manner, plus her height, six two in her thickest shoes, gave her what she needed to be able to hold her own. And sometimes, she was pleased to note, do even more than hold her own: she could intimidate. On occasion she could play that role pretty hard. Tall bulky severe black policewoman, Octaviasdottir indeed. On the other hand this was New York, where everyone played their part pretty hard, and many of them thought they too were in a noir movie, or so it seemed. New York noir, a classic style. Watch out babe.

The mayor had occupied almost all of a new tower at the north end of Columbus Circle, using her own money but making it the official mayor’s reception palace as well as her private residence. So now Gen clomped up the broad staircase to the mezzanine, moving slowly, like a beat cop with sore dogs. She lifted her chin at acquaintances, said “Hey” to the functionaries manning the entry and the refreshments table. Then she stood against the wall by the door, sipping bad coffee and staring into the middle distance as if about to fall asleep on her feet. She took this pose so far that she almost did fall asleep. When the mayor and her retinue swept in, Gen stayed put and watched the throng gather around them and then dissipate, allowing the mayor to make her rounds. Looked like Arne over there, head of Morningside Realty, a power in the party. Chatting with a group from the Cloister cluster. The people from Denver looked out of place.

Galina Estaban was as charismatic as ever. Already, at age forty-five, a retired cloud star and ex-governor of the state of New York. She reminded Gen of Amelia Black in some ways—in that easy assumption of fame. She was like Amelia’s Latina older sister, the one who had gotten good grades and even enjoyed studying. Five foot five, but heeled to get there; sweep of brown hair over radiant good looks, her beauty in a broad-faced Native American or mestizo mode. Eyes like lamps. A little smile you couldn’t quite believe was about you.

When she saw Gen she came immediately to her, as if on a tractor beam to her favorite person in the room, or even the most important person in the room. Gen almost smiled as she acknowledged that yes, Galina Estaban was the best ever at making people feel good. If you didn’t walk away, if you smiled and nodded in response to her operatic overture, you became complicit in her popularity. But in this case Gen knew it was all an act. Gen had nailed one of Estaban’s favorite aides taking kickbacks from an uptown developer, and really it was obvious from the proximities involved that Estaban had to have known about it. Galina hadn’t liked having to accept her aide’s hasty resignation and had retaliated with some hammering of Gen’s support at police headquarters, then some disabling blows at their cloud infrastructure, which was ugly revenge indeed; NYPD had been materially harmed. So now the two hated each other. But New York had to be an impressive place for Denver execs to visit, and appearances therefore had to be upheld, or else the cloud would fill with a fog of salacious speculation so thick that they wouldn’t be able to see to do their respective jobs. So they made nice.

“I didn’t know you would be here,” Estaban said.

“Your people told me to come.”

“Since when has that made a difference?”

“What do you mean? I always come when I’m called.”

Estaban laughed cheerfully at this. People would think they were amusing each other.

“I don’t think any of my people asked you to be here. Come on, why really?”

“Well, now that you mention it, I’m hearing about stuff happening in the intertidal. Unsolicited offers on buildings down there, combined with threats and some sabotage. And some messing with the local scene down there. So I thought I’d check to see if you or your people have heard anything about this. You usually have your finger on the pulse of the city, and people are getting anxious.”

The mayor turned to Tanganyika John, one of her minions, who had just hurried up to join them and run interference. “Any news about that, that you know of?”

John shrugged. “No.”

If they knew anything they wouldn’t say. Gen was used to stonewalling, from them and from everyone, and in other situations she might have undermined their stone wall a little, but this was not a time for that. Estaban extended a bubble of good cheer around her that it would be impolitic to pop, especially with all the people from Denver there in the room. Gen shrugged back at John, trying to indicate with her stare that she didn’t expect any minion help at any time.

“It may be only visible underwater,” she said. “Or in city stats. I’ll check with my people in real estate transfers and see if they’ve seen anything.”

“Good idea. Everything okay otherwise?”

“Not really. You know how it is. When real estate worries go up, people get stressed.”

“Meaning we’re all stressed all the time, right?”

“I guess.”

“This time is different, you’re saying.”

“It seems like something new is happening.”

Gen stared at the mayor. It was part of their conflict, each claiming to be closer to the real heartbeat of the city. Fighting over which of their angles of vision showed more. There was no way to win this, even if they had sat down and compared notes on it, which they would never do. A formal debate, with God impartially judging: not going to happen. So it was an attitude thing, not at all uncommon among New Yorkers: I know more than you do, I know the level below yours and above yours, I have the secret knowledge, the key to the city’s life. No one could ever really win at that, but no one could lose either, not if they hung tough.

Gen did that now, while hoping that Claire had some of her implants in the mayor’s office here watching the minions on hand. Some of these people she would like to have tracked after this reception, to see if her appearance might tip someone into making a move. Someone might feel impelled to go out and make a call, tip a contact, warn someone somewhere… She had to hope for such a move, or else it would just be a case of giving away her interest without any more result than causing involved parties to get more cautious. Well, that too might be trackable, one never knew. She had to put in a bid to start the game.

But there was one more thing to try. Olmstead had recently discovered a link between the mayor and Arne Bleich, the owner of Morningside Realty, who was right there across the room. “So you’re working with Arne Bleich on projects downtown?”

Estaban blinked, processing both the question and the fact that Gen had asked it at a reception like this one. She definitely didn’t like it. “You mean me personally?”

“Obviously.”

“No.” And now her smile was very definitely a fuck you. “Excuse me, I’ve got to say hi to all our visitors here, I have to mingle.”

“Of course. I’ll do the same.”

After that it was just a matter of staying visible for a while, looking politely ominous, then getting away unobtrusively. Claire’s team would be taking it from there. It wasn’t much different from visiting Ellie’s. Show up and give them a shock, see if any guilty fled where woman pursueth. She surveyed the minions herself, trying to gauge the room; they were very attuned to the mayor’s mood, and now they were a little freaked, and not looking Gen’s way. With a sudden onset of lethemlucidity Gen saw the power structure of the city with x-ray vision, all atremble with force fields like magnetic lines emanating from the gorgeous mayor. Gen had broken the glass over some kind of psychic alarm bell, and now it was ringing.

Eventually she left, and as it was late, she called a police cruiser to the floating tide dock at Eighth between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-seventh. When she got back to her apartment in the Met she changed clothes, went down to Vlade’s basement room, buzzed the door. No answer, so she walked up one flight of stairs to the boathouse office, and there he was. Gen had the impression he spent far more time here than in his room, which was basically just a place to sleep. Like her in that regard. This office was his living room.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Pretty well. I’m still nosing around the stuff that happened here. Anything new there?”

“I’m not sure. The generator wouldn’t start, and there was a clog in the sewage line. If there weren’t other things going on I wouldn’t think twice about it, but as it is, I don’t know.”

He looked up into the hung boats high in the boathouse, frowning somberly. Slab shoulders slumped, slab cheeks too. Apprehensive. Which made sense. Even if he had been somehow bought or otherwise won over by the people offering on the building, or the people messing with the building, if they weren’t the same, he could never count on them keeping their word to him when they took over. More typically new ownership would hire new management, in which case Vlade would be out of a job. That would represent disaster for him, it seemed to Gen. The building was his clothing and home, it was his skill, his skull. It would make better sense if he were perhaps doing things to make the building look worse to the people interested in buying it. But these little problems were not going to do that.

“So, most of these problems, you’ve seen them before?”

“Yeah, sure. All but those guys disappearing and the cameras not working when it happened. That is truly an odd one. And”—he frowned—“I haven’t seen a leak like the one I found either. That wasn’t an accident. So, you know. Seems like it might be a pattern.”

“Happens to me all the time. Listen, will you show me the records for all your employees, including their references when you hired them?”

“Yes. I’m curious myself.”

Gen put her pad on his desk and he transferred some files into it.

As he was finishing a young man looked in his doorway. Franklin Garr, a resident. “Hey can you get my zoomer down pronto please?”

Six foot one, dishwater blond, good-looking in a bland way, like a model in a cheap men’s clothing catalog. Eyebrows bunched as he drove home his request to Vlade. Smart, quick, nervy. Cocksure, but maybe a little rattled too.

“On its way,” Vlade said heavily, toggling his boathouse dashboard.

A little motorboat with hydrofoils descended out of the murk of the boathouse rafters, and the young man threw a “Thanks” over his shoulder as he rushed out to it.

“One of your favorite residents,” Gen guessed.

Vlade smiled. “He can be a jerk. Impatient youth, that’s for sure.”

After that, she could either go to the dining and commons, or to her apartment, or keep working. So she kept working. She hoofed over to the vapo dock next to the Flatiron and took the Fifth south down to the Washington Square bacino, where she knew that the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society was having its monthly. Lots of building supers would be there, and various obliged and interested parties from the buildings and organizations that altogether made Lame Ass a lively place.

They met on a big roof terrace that NYU provided for the meetings, a kind of cocktail hour before the evening meetings. Gen was a well-known figure and lots of friends and acquaintances came up to greet her; it had been a while since she had made one of the monthlies. She was friendly to all but kept an eye out for her particular friends, the supers and security experts she called her Bacino Irregulars. Clifford Sampson, an old friend of her father’s from the Woolworth building, Bao Li from the Chinatown security detail, Alejandra from the James Walker Bacino association: all these people were well-known to her, and with each of them she could give them a certain look and they would follow her aside ready to answer questions. She quickly ran through them: Any buildings getting sabotaged? Any unsolicited offers to buy communal buildings? Anything unusual or untoward in their employees, disappearing without quitting, messing around with security systems?

Yes, they all said. Yes, yes, yes. Right in my own basement. Fucking with my structural integrity. Cameras not seeing things. You should talk to Johann, you should talk to Luisa. In all of them a tight russrage at the ugly cynicism of whoever or whatever it was doing these things. Gentrification my ass. Fucking slimeballs just want what we got. We got the SuperVenice humming and they want to horn in. We’re going to have to hang together to keep what we’ve got. Time for your goddamn NYPD to show us which side they’re on.

I know, Gen kept saying. I know. NYPD is on New York’s side, you know that. Nobody on the force likes those uptown creeps. Uptown is uptown, downtown is downtown. Got to make sure there’s a balance kept. Rule of law. I need the Bacino Irregulars to jump into action, people.

This she said to a group of old friends, people who knew her from Mezzrow’s and Hoboken, the old guard, children of the hard years, after the Second Pulse had wrecked everything. People who were paid in food and blocknecklaces, people indentured to their buildings by money and love. They were gathered in a corner and happy at the little reunion she had convened. Drinking beer and swapping stories. The meetings later would be contentious as always. People complaining, arguing, shouting, calling for votes on this and that. The crazy messiness of intertidal life. For now they were a functioning in-group in that madness. There were probably twenty such meetings going on now all around Washington Square bacino, prepping for the more public meetings or just letting off steam among people they trusted.

“We’re all going to need the Bacino Irregulars,” she said to them. “I have a task force working on this now, and my own building, my folks’ building, is in the crosshairs with you. So start trolling and let me know what you find out.”

What’s the angle? they asked. The choke point, the place to look?

“See if Morningside Realty pops up,” she suggested. “They’re the broker for this offer on the Met tower. If they’re brokering more like that, I’d like to know. That might tug all the leads together. Also Pinscher Pinkerton. Keep an eye out for them, they’re trouble right now.”

She stayed for the meetings but quickly grew tired. There was a reason they called it Lame Ass. Lemmas, that was some kind of bread, also the name of their local currency, issued in blocknecklaces; but Lame Ass was usually how it went. Everybody had to have their say, no doubt this was right, but damn. How people went on. She could see why Vlade and Charlotte didn’t make many of these meetings. End of a long day, go over and help run the whole wet zone as a town hall meeting, Robert’s Rules of Order or whatnot: painful.

Then again, the alternative was worse. So the lawyerly and conscientious, the young or argumentative, or stubborn, kept meeting and making the effort. Hang together or hang separately: the great American realization. A Ben Franklin pun, young Franklin Garr had recently informed her with a look of amused pride.

She finally stood when the meeting was over, and lots of people grabbed hold of her, many of them strangers. They liked having her there. They were the same as the submariners; it was nice to have some manifestation of the force on hand and paying attention. Even if she had been falling asleep in her chair.

Now they needed her at the dance. “Ah God,” she protested. But they dragged her along, and a punk power band with a gaggle of vocalists was firing through Lou Reed’s “Heroin” like it was the national anthem, which down here maybe it was, and Gen wanted to object that the drug being celebrated was more likely to create a flow state than this supercharged nails-on-blackboard style they were indulging in, but what did she know really. They made her dance to it and she did, it was still just the jitterbug, shimmying with gusto, bouncing big men into the walls with her butt, ignoring her sore dogs. You could ignite a dance floor if you let the spirit come down. And God did they need it. Afterward someone gave her a ride home in a gondola. She would fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Just like she liked it.

g) Franklin

Well, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.

She lied to me. Or so I told myself. She told me she was a trader in a hedge fund, so we were doing the same job, had the same interests, shared common concerns and goals. So I fell for her, I most certainly did. And it wasn’t just because she was so good-looking, even though she was. It was because of her manner, her talk, and indeed those interests we shared. We were soul mates as well as bedmates or I should say cockpit mates, and the former made the latter out of this world. I’d never felt like that before. I was in love, yes. So fuck me. I had been a fool.

But I still wanted her.

The thing is, working for a hedge fund—that’s about making money no matter which way the market moves, no matter what happens. God declares Judgment Day, you’re hedged. Okay, you’d have to trust God to pay out as being the final source of value. But any conceivable scenario less apocalyptic than that, you’re covered and you’re going to make a profit, or at least you’re going to lose less than the rest of the players, which is the same as making a profit, because it’s all about differential advantage. If everyone’s losing and you’re losing less badly than the others, you’re winning. That’s hedging and that’s what hedge funds do. Jojo worked for one of the biggest hedge funds in New York, I worked for a big hedge fund, we were a match made in Black-Scholes heaven.

But not. Because in many hedge funds the effort to maximize profit had led to activities additional to trading per se, including venture capital. But venture capital makes liquid assets go illiquid, a cardinal sin in most finance. Liquidity is crucial, a fundamental value, it’s the hyphens in M-C-M’. Venture capital is therefore small potatoes in most hedge funds, and VC people usually end up talking about “value-added investing,” suggesting that they aim to bring in expertise that will help whomever they are investing to succeed at whatever they’re doing. This is mostly bullshit, a flimsy excuse for the outrageous illiquidity of their investments, but there’s no denying that a lot of them cherish the delusion.

And this, I feared, was the rabbit hole Jojo had dropped into. That she wanted to do more than make money, that she wanted to make some kind of value-added investment in the so-called real economy, was worrisome. Eldorado was almost certainly leveraged a hundred times beyond their assets on hand, so illiquidity made them vulnerable. VC was super-longing and thus dangerous, because there was no such thing as super-shorting to balance it. This suggested Jojo had gotten emotionally overinvested in a small part of her company’s business, which was dangerous in itself, and indicated that her eye had strayed, that she somehow wanted more than what finance could give her, while nevertheless staying in finance. So there was delusion and pretentiousness and aspiration and lack of focus there that I didn’t like to see.

But now, damned if I hadn’t gone super-long on Jojo herself, in essence making the same kind of mistake: lost liquidity, desire for equilibrium, dislike of volatility, attachment to a particular static situation, which even the Buddha warns against. And in that very dangerous situation, my intended partner in the mutual project of coupledom, which was also a kind of venturing of capital, had not hit the strike price. She had walked on her option. Actually these financial metaphors were making me sick, while also continuing to pop up in my head in a way I seemed unable to stop. No, just stop. I liked her, I wanted her. She didn’t want me. That was what it really was.

So, to get her back, I needed to do things that would make her like me. Put it like that. Just start from scratch, that’s all.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Well, clearly I had to keep being friendly. I had to pretend to Jojo that I was okay with us moving back to the level of a friendship of two people who lived in the same neighborhood and worked in the same industry, and saw each other in a group of mutual acquaintances after work. That was going to be tough, but I could do it.

Then beyond that, I needed to find a means to reverse the usual way of the world. Instead of financializing value, I need to add value to finance. That was at first beyond me to conceptualize. How could you add more value to finance, when finance existed to financialize value? In other words, how could it be about more than money, when money was the ultimate source of value itself?

A mystery. A koan to stymie one. Something I pondered almost continuously as the hours and days passed.

And I began to see it in a new way, as something like this: it had to mean something. Finance, or even just life: it had to mean something. And meaning had no price. It could not be priced. It was some kind of alternative form of value.

One of the ways I managed to make trading on the IPPI work so well for me was by keeping close track of the real intertidal. Of course I could only really do that in New York, as it took site visits to do it; but whatever was happening in New York was pretty similar to what was going on in the other great coastal cities of the world, in particular Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, London, Miami, and Jakarta. The same forces were at play in all these places, mainly aquatic stress, technological improvements, and legal issues. Whether the buildings were going to stand or collapse was one of the crucial questions, maybe the crucial question. It was a different story for each building, although big data sets could be gathered, and algorithms created to judge the risk pretty well in various categories. It was in individual cases where it got most speculative. As always, it was safest to generalize and play the percentages.

But to research this question in person, I could get in the Jesus bug and zip around New York harbor looking at actual buildings, see how they were doing, rate them against the algorithms that were predicting how they were supposed to do, and look for discrepancies that would allow me to play those spreads better than other traders. Real-world inputs to the models, thus getting a leg up on the competition, especially on the many traders who traded in coastal futures from Denver. Real-world inputs were an advantage; I was sure of this because I’d been doing it for four years, and it had worked.

What I was seeing, to the point of confirming it to my own satisfaction, was that the models for coastal property behavior, my own included, were simply wrong about certain categories of building, something I was hesitant even to think at first, in case I somehow lost the encryption on my own thoughts, for instance by blurting something after hours in a bar.

So, pondering all these things as I zipped around the waterways of the lunatic city, it seemed to me that I might already have a way to do value-added investing, by putting a little venture capital where it would serve a social good, thus encouraging Jojo to reconsider me in some fundamental human sense. I could perhaps identify buildings that were more likely to collapse than the models had them collapsing on average, and figure out ways to upgrade them, putting off their collapse long enough that they could serve as refugee dwellings or maker spaces. Housing of any kind was scarce, because too many people kept coming to New York and trying to live here, out of some kind of addiction, some compulsion to live like water rats when they could have done better elsewhere. Same as it ever was! Which meant there was need for some kind of Jane Jacobs–like housing reform. This was more than I could handle, but some improvements in the intertidal, that I could try. The intertidal was my specialty, so that was where I could start. Try to figure something out.

So I abandoned my screens one morning and went down to my sweet skimmer and hummed out of the building onto Twenty-third, and headed west to the Hudson. Time to go out and put my eyeball to reality.

The intertidal zone of lower midtown sloshed back and forth over an area with a lot of old landfill, and that double whammy had brought a lot of buildings down. Thirtieth to Canal was a wilderness of slumped, tilted, cracked, and collapsed blocks. A house built on sand cannot stand.

Nevertheless I saw the usual signs of squatting in the soggy ruins. Life there possibly resembled earlier centuries of cheap squalid tenement reality, moldier than ever, the occupants risking their lives by the hour. Same as ever, but wetter. But even in the worst neighborhoods there stood some islands of success, waterproofed and pumped out and made habitable again, in many cases better than ever, or so people claimed. The mutual aid societies were making something interesting, the so-called SuperVenice, fashionably hip, artistic, sexy, a new urban legend. Some people were happy to live on the water if it was conceptualized as Venetian, enduring the mold and hassle to live in a work of art. I liked it myself.

As always, each neighborhood was a little world, with a particular character. Some of them looked fine, others were bedraggled, still others abandoned. It wasn’t always clear why any given neighborhood should look the way it did. Things happened, a building held or fell down, its surroundings followed. Very contingent, very volatile, very high risk.

So on this day I hummed in very slowly to have a look at Mr. Hexter’s old neighborhood, south of the fallen tower. It was south of the Hudson Yards, I noticed, a small bay that had lost the railroad tracks that used to floor it, leaving the shallows there open to tidal tear so severe that it was said to be as deep there as in the middle of the river. Whether seepage from that hole in the side of the island had caused this tower to fall was unknown, but there it was, its broken upper half taking waves right in its broken windows. It looked like a crippled cruise ship on its last slide to the bottom.

A lot of other buildings were following it down. I was reminded of those photos of drunken forests in the Arctic, where melting permafrost had caused trees to tilt this way and that. Chelsea Houses, Penn South Houses, London Terrace Houses, they all canted drunkenly. Not the slightest bit inspiring, in terms of investment opportunities. Recovery techniques were improving all the time, but there is no point to waterproofing a house built on sand. The graphenated composites and diamond sheeting are strong but they can’t hold slumping concrete, they’re more like very strong plastic wrap; they need support to work, they’re mostly waterproofing.

As I purred along the narrow canals between Tenth and Eleventh I caught sight of the Great Intilt Quad, up near the shore of the Hudson. Here in the first rush of skybridge building a group of investors had suspended a mall about forty stories above the ground, in the middle of four skyscrapers that anchored the skybridges holding the mall in air. This had thrilled people until the weight of the mall had pulled the four towers abruptly inward, dropping the mall five stories at once and breaking everything in it before somehow the towers held. After that people had gotten a lot more careful, and now the Great Intilt Quad stood there like a bad Stonehenge, reminding people never to hang too much weight outside the plumb line of a skyscraper. They were only built to hold up their own weight, as many engineers pointed out.

All these drunken buildings: how long could they last? In the eternal battle of men against the sea, which antagonist was winning? The sea was always the same, while improvements were being made in humanity’s ramparts; but the sea was relentless. And it might rise yet again. A Third Pulse was not out of the question, although big masses of ice at risk of sliding were not currently being identified by the Antarctic surveys; this was a finding factored into the IPPI. Anyway, wherever sea level went in years to come, the intertidal was always going to be in trouble. Anyone who tried on a regular professional basis to fight the sea in any capacity whatsoever always admitted that the sea always won in the end, that its victory was merely a matter of time. Some of them could get quite philosophical about this in a depressive nihilist way. Nothing we do matters, we work like dogs and then we die, et cetera.

So a time was going to come when all the weaker buildings in the intertidal were going to need major repair—if that was even possible. If it wasn’t, they would have to be replaced—if that could even be done!

Meanwhile, people were living here. Signs of squatting were everywhere: broken windows replaced, laundry hanging from clotheslines, farms on rooftops. Especially by day it was obvious. At night they would turn off their lights and their buildings would look abandoned, perhaps here or there candlelit for their ghosts’ convenience. But by day it was easy to see. And of course it would always be that way. Manhattan never had enough places to live. And you couldn’t make rents high enough to keep people away, because they dodged the rents and squatted wherever they could. The drowned city had endless nooks and crannies, including of course diamond bubbles holding the tide out of aerated basements. People living like rats.

This was probably what Jojo was hoping to ameliorate with her value-added investing. It was hopeless, really; even if you managed to do it, it would make you a kind of topologically reversed Sisyphus, digging a hole that always refilled, pumping out basement after basement only to have them pop, often lethally; then back to it again. Aeration! Submarine real estate! A new market to finance, and then to leverage, so that the cycle could repeat at a larger scale, as the first law demanded. Always grow. This meant that once the island’s surface was filled to the max, you first shot up into the sky; then when that effort reached the limit of the material strengths of the time, you had to dive. After the basements and subways and tunnels were aerated, no doubt people would start carving caves deeper and deeper, extending an invisible calvinocity down into the lithosphere, excavating earthscrapers to match the skyscrapers, buildings right down to the center of the Earth. Geothermal heating available at no extra charge! Apartments in hell: and that was Manhattan.

Except not really. One could think pessimistically when boating about in the abandoned ruins of Chelsea, trying not to look back at the furtive faces in top-floor windows and yet seeing the misery there anyway. But it was easy to clear one’s head of these dreary visions; just turn the bug and hum out to the great river and throttle up to hydroplane speed, lift off and fly, fly upstream and away, away from the wounded city. Fly!

I did that. The broad Hudson sheeted under me, its internal movements coiling and fracturing the dark surface. And there it was, standing around me on both sides of the river: upper Manhattan and Hoboken, both of them studded with skyscrapers taller than anywhere else, the two sides of the river competing for dominance by prominence, right in a decade when the revolution in building materials had allowed the construction of skyscrapers three times taller than ever before. And it still pleased the rich to stash away a billion or three in a skypartment somewhere in New York, visit for a few days a year, enjoy the great city of the world. No way Denver was ever going to match the view I was looking at right now!

I let the bug down onto the water with a ducky splash and headed in to the long dock floating under the Cloister cluster. The great complex of supertowers, each well over three hundred stories tall, loomed overhead like the visible part of a space elevator; it truly looked as if they pierced the blue dome of the sky, that they disappeared up there without actually ending. This effect made the sky itself seem somehow lower than usual, like a turquoise-blue dome in some immense circus, held up by a four-pronged center pole.

There was a line at the marina entry almost a dozen boats long, so I pulled up next to the cliffside that rose so steeply out of the river along this part of the island, to wait for the line to clear. The old Henry Hudson Parkway had been submerged by the river long ago, and the hack they had made in the hillside to hold that Robert Moses intervention was now underwater even at low tide, and home to a narrow long salt marsh, a flowing yellow-green surface carpeting the foot of the hillside, which was covered with brush and ferns and small trees, and studded with the island’s bossy gneiss outcroppings protruding out of the greenery.

I hummed slowly into the grass edging the salt marsh and turned upstream. Felt the bug’s starboard hydrofoil touch the bottom. It was near high tide. A quiet estuarine corner of the city, a little thoreautheater, cool in the shade of a passing cloud.

The grass of the marsh was almost entirely submerged at this point of the tide. Some kind of fluid eelgrass, flowing horizontally this way and that, pushed first downstream by the river’s flow, then upstream in the repeated slosh of boat wakes. The many grass stalks flowed in parallel, like hair underwater in a bathtub. Each green stalk had yellow chips crosshatching it, and as the flat mass angelhaired back and forth in the waves there was a lovely, mesmerizing sparkle of gold in the green. Back and forth the flowing grass flexed, sparkly and fluid. Back and forth, green and gold, back and forth, flow flow flow. Really very pretty.

And in that moment, watching this motion, just passing the time in a little contemplation of the river’s verge, waiting for the boats to clear the marina entry, I experienced a vision. A satori; an epiphany; and if you had told me flames were shooting out of the top of my head at that moment, I would not have been surprised to hear it. The biblically boggled ones had only been accurately describing the feel of when such an idea lances you. Luckily there was no one there to hear me speaking in tongues, or to interrupt my thought and cause me to forget the whole thing. No, I had it; I thought it through; I felt it. I wasn’t going to forget it. I watched the grass flow back and forth in the stream, fixing the thought with the mesmerizing image over the side of the bug. Really quite beautiful.

“Hey thanks!” I said to the dockmaster as he waved me into the marina. “I just had an idea!”

“Congratulations.”

I strode up the enormous broad stairs to the plaza that surrounded the Cloistermunster, the biggest tower in the cluster of four great supertowers that launched out of the hilltop. The Munster was built in the shape of a Bareiss column, meaning the bottom and top of the building were both semicircular, but with the semicircles oriented 180 degrees to each other. This configuration made all the exterior surfaces of the building curve very gracefully. The other towers of the cluster were also Bareiss columns, but with two for each tower, stacked vertically such that their midpoints formed matching semicircles. This arrangement doubled down on the lovely long curves rising up to puncture the sky. I crossed the plaza with my head canted back like a tourist, enjoying the architectural sublime, which at this point in my Day of the Idea was gilding the lily, but in a good way. Everything seemed vast.

Inside the Munster I took the sequence of ear-popping express elevators to floor 301, the top floor, where Hector Ramirez had his office, if that was the word for a room that occupied an entire floor of a building that big. A loft? It was a single semicircular space about the size of Block Island, glass-walled on all sides.

“Franklin Garr.”

“Maestro. Thanks for seeing me.”

“My pleasure, youth.”

He had not spoiled the impact of his perch with much in the way of furniture. Around the elevator core there were some chest-high cubicles, and some desks outside those, but beyond that lay an open space that extended to curving window walls to the south, flat glass to the north, the glass in every direction so clean it was hard to be sure it was even there. One saw the world.

To the south, the rest of uptown was a forest of superscrapers only a bit shorter than the Cloister cluster, each displaying its particular gehryglory. To the left of these towers lay the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, all three boroughs now bays studded with buildings, with Brooklyn Heights the first real land to be seen that way, topped by its own line of superscrapers. It was only from this distance one could see how tall the new towers really were, which was really very tall. Meanwhile water gleamed everywhere, filled with drowned buildings and bridges, ships and ships’ wakes.

Same to the right, but the Hudson was a cleaner, broader sweep of water than the East River and its shallows: a great blue searoad, crowded with watercraft but clean of ruined rooftops, with only the George Washington and Verrazano bridges crossing the great bay. Hoboken formed another dragonback horizon, cutting off the view of the immense bay filling the Meadowlands, punctuated at its south end by the fat towers topping Staten Island. To the north lay the north, a haze cut by the great river. The north was the place to get away to, but no one wanted to go. If you were really going to leave the city you would go up, and in fact above this office I knew Hector’s airship was tethered, a small skyvillage of the Twenty-one Balloons type. He could leave for heaven any time he wanted, and occasionally he did.

Now he seemed to be happy to see me. And I was definitely happy to see him. Boss, teacher, mentor, advisor: I had had several of each of these through the years, but Hector had been the first who combined all these roles, and so had become the most important of any of them. I had interned for him when I was too young to know how lucky I was, right out of Harvard’s lame business school, and he had taught me many things, but most usefully the art of swaps on social policy bonds. I had been working out evolutions of those lessons ever since, and now they were going to be crucial to surviving the intertidal meltdown.

“Push is coming to shove,” I said, pointing down the length of the aquatropolis. Midtown blocked our view of downtown, but he knew what I meant, and the immense sweep of the Hudson stood well for the coming fate of lower Manhattan. It was going to look like that.

“I thought recovery tech was getting stronger,” Hector said, to show that he knew what I was referring to.

“It is,” I granted, “but not fast enough. Mother Ocean can’t be beat. And it’s turning out to be toughest to fight her in the intertidal. Tide after tide, wave after wave—nothing can stand against that, not over the long haul.”

“So it’s made sense to short it,” he noted.

“Yes. As we know. But I’ve been thinking about what comes after.”

“Retreat to higher ground?” He gestured around him.

“Sure. Path of least resistance. Off to Denver. But some places will be different, and this is going to be one of them. It’s the myth of the place. People just won’t stop coming. It doesn’t matter that it’s a fatal shore. They want it.”

He was nodding. He had come here from Venezuela, he had told me, feeling the pull himself. Water rat, dime in his pocket, now here. “And so?”

“So, there’s a combination of new techs that add up to what you might call eelgrass housing. Some of it comes from aquaculture. Basically, you stop trying to resist. You flex with the currents, you rise and fall on the tides. You take graphene’s strength, and newglue’s stickiness, and fauxfascia’s flexibility. You put bollards in the bedrock, however deep that is, and anchor them to bands of fascia cord that would stretch with the tides and would always be long enough to reach the surface, where you attach a floating platform. You make the platform the size of your ordinary Manhattan block.”

“So it would be like living on a dock, or a houseboat.”

“Yes. And some of it can lie underwater, like in the hull of a ship. Then you link all the platforms, so that they move together in the tides, like eelgrass. Side bumpers where necessary, like boats have where their sides hit a dock. Eventually you’d have a floating mat of these platforms, a whole neighborhood of them.”

“You couldn’t go very high.”

“I’m not so sure. The graphenated composites are really light. That’s what has us up here so high. Anyway, it could go at least as high as it was before in that part of town.”

He nodded. “Can it be done?”

“All the tech is already available. And pretty soon all the stock down there is going to fall in the drink.”

He was nodding still. “Go long, my son. Go long.”

“I am. I will.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“Leverage. I want an angel.”

He laughed. “All right. I’ve been wondering what would come next in this town. It sounds very exciting. Count me in.”

So that was good. Really good. And I was still thinking hard about it as I put the bug back out in the river and let it drift downstream back to midtown. The problem that remained, in the here and now, was that I worked on derivatives in a hedge fund, and not in an architectural firm designing the next iteration of intertidal design. I couldn’t do that work from my position.

But I could fund it.

That meant finding people to fund. Of course this resembled what I was already doing every day, because finding something to fund was very similar to finding a good bet. Even though WaterPrice didn’t have much of a VC element in its portfolio, arguably it should; and finding the long to follow the coming short was wise for anyone. It was kind of like what I was trying to do with Jojo.

That got me wondering if I could let her know what I was up to, or even ask her for help with it—whatever might impress her more. If that was what this was all for. Which it was. At least primarily. But then it might be a case of the sooner the better, and asking for help a sign of mature vulnerability. I had the feeling she would like it, and I was impatient to tell her about it too.

So when the bug had drifted down to midtown I put in at Pier 57 and went to the bar where we had first met. It was a Friday again, just before sunset; and again there she was, regular as clockwork. What was with that? There was the same group, John and Evgenia and Ray and Amanda, and they all greeted me in a friendly way, Jojo too, as if nothing had transpired between us. Then again, Amanda and I were that way with each other, so it couldn’t be said that it was all that unusual for Jojo to be acting like this, cool and friendly, uninvolved. Dang.

Well, I got a drink from Inky, who was asking me questions about this very problem with his eyes, but I just rolled mine, to indicate all was less than well and I would tell him about it later, then went back to the gang. On the railing at sunset in December, air chilly, the river sliding brassily over itself in its ebbing hurry down to the Narrows. House band inside playing space blues, trying to soundtrack the view. The gang’s talk was the same, and again I was mystified: these people, my crowd, had a tendency to be crass jerks, and yet Jojo had been all happy-happy with them the day I met her, and now too. We both fit right in; so what did that mean? I had a cold thought: maybe she had claimed I lacked the altruism she liked in a man, just to give her a decent cover story for something more fundamental than… well, more fundamental than fundamental philosophies of life. That didn’t quite compute, but then again, I didn’t know. Probably it would in fact be easier to accept that she didn’t like my values than my smell, or my style of lovemaking. Which in fact she had seemed to like. Well it was just very confusing.

I tried to ignore that whirlpool in my brain and my gut, and eventually stood by her side, and there we were.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“It was good,” I said. “Interesting. I was talking with my old teacher from Munstrosity about trying to do something with all the fixes that people have been inventing to keep real estate from going under. You know, some kind of venture capital thing, sort of like what you were talking about before.”

She regarded me with some curiosity, and I tried to take hope from that, and not get distracted by the crystalline brown shatter of her eyes, the gorgeous eyes of the person I had fallen for so hard. Which was nearly impossible, and I couldn’t help gulping a little under her gaze.

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

“Well, it occurred to me that since the intertidal doesn’t have bedrock under it, you can never build anything there you can trust will hold.”

“So you let them go.”

“No, in fact I was talking with Hector about anchoring what you might call floating neighborhoods there. Connect little townshiplike blocks to the bedrock no matter how far down it is, and then you wouldn’t be fighting the tides so much.”

“Ah,” she said, looking surprised. “Good idea!”

“I think maybe so.”

“Good idea,” she said again, then frowned a little. “So you’re interested in venture capital now?”

“Well, I was just thinking. There does have to be something to go long on after the short. You were right about that.”

“It’s true. Well, that’s interesting. Good for you.”

So. A little bit of hope there, attached to a bedrock emotion, deep under the waves: the emotion being how much I wanted her. Attach a line to that bedrock, float a little buoy of hope. Come back later and see what else might be attachable. She seemed not unfriendly. Not amused at my sudden interest in real estate. Not anything obviously negative. Maybe even friendly; maybe even approving. Thinking things over. A little smile in her eyes. One time a photographer had said to me, Smile with your eyes only. I hadn’t gotten what he meant. Maybe now I was seeing it. Maybe. The way she was looking at me… well, I couldn’t tell. To be honest, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, not at all.

h) Mutt and Jeff

“Jeff, are you awake?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“It sounds like you are. That’s good.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re still in that room. You’ve been sick.”

“What room?”

“A shipping container somewhere. Where someone is keeping us. Maybe underwater, sometimes it sounds like we’re underwater.”

“If you’re underwater you can never get clear. The market will never come back to where it was, so you’re sunk for good. Might as well default and walk away.”

“I would if I could, but we’re locked in down here.”

“I remember now. How you doing?”

“What?”

“I said, how are you doing?”

“Me? I’m fine, fine. Actually I haven’t been feeling too good, but nowhere near as bad as you. You were pretty sick there.”

“I still feel like shit.”

“Yeah, sorry to hear, but at least you’re talking. For a while there you weren’t able to talk. That was scary.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? Oh—to you. I wrote some notes on our plates and sent them out when they got picked up out of the door slot. Then your food started to come with some pills that I got you to take. Then once I slept really hard, and I think that was because they knocked us out and came in here. Or took you out. I don’t know, but when I woke up again you were sleeping more easily. And now here we are.”

“I feel like shit.”

“But you’re talking.”

“But I don’t want to talk.”

Mutt doesn’t know what to say to this. He sits by his friend’s bed, reaches over and holds Jeff’s hand. “It’s better when you talk. It’s good for you.”

“Not really.” Jeff eyes his friend. “You talk. I’m tired of talking. I can’t talk anymore.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. Tell me a story.”

“Who me? I don’t know any stories. You tell stories, not me.”

“Not anymore. Tell me about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Not true. Tell me how we met. I’ve forgotten that, it’s been so long. First thing I remember it feels like we had been together forever. I don’t recall before.”

“Well, you were younger than me then. I do remember that, yeah. I had been at Adirondack for a year or two at that point, and I was thinking of quitting. The work was boring. Then I was in their cafeteria at lunch one day and there you were at the end of a table, by yourself, reading your pad while you ate. I went over and sat across from you, I don’t know why, and introduced myself. You looked interesting. You said you were in systems, but as we talked I could tell you were into coding too. I remember I asked where the rest of your team was, and you said they had already gotten sick of you and your ideas, so there you were. I said I liked ideas, which was true at that time. That was how it started. Then we were asked to try encrypting their dark pool divers. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. We had a good time.”

“I’ll remember later maybe.”

“I hope so. We had a good time at work, and then I don’t know how it happened, somehow I found out that you didn’t have a regular place to live, you were sleeping in your car.”

“Mobile home.”

“Yes, that’s what you called it. A very small mobile home. So I was looking for a new place myself, so we moved in to that place in Hoboken, remember?”

“Sure, how could I forget?”

“Well, you forgot our first job, so who knows. Anyway there we were—”

“That’s how we know this place is underwater! Because that place was.”

“Maybe so. I mean, it was. Subsurface real estate was just starting in the Meadowlands, so there were some rents we could afford. So, that was when we started working on front-running that would work for us as well as for Vinson. By then he was off on his own. That was illegal—”

“He was always an asshole.”

“Yes, that too. So we felt like we were just gigging for him doing questionable shit. Presumably if the SEC had ever twigged it, we would have been the ones to take the fall. People at Alban would have disavowed all knowledge of our existence.”

“Of a mission all too possible.”

“Yes, it was easy. But then we found out that everyone else was already doing it, so we were a late entry into an arms race no one could win. There was no difference between front-running and ordinary trading. So we quit Alban before we got hung out to dry. Started gigging around. It got a little ragged then. We needed something different if we wanted an advantage.”

“Did we want an advantage?”

“I don’t know. All our clients did.”

“Not the same.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to work for them anymore.”

“I know. But that’s led to problems for us, as you know.”

“As in?”

“Well, food. Food and lodging. We need those, and they take money, and you have to work to make money.”

“I’m not saying don’t work. I’m saying, not for them.”

“Agreed, we already tried that.”

“We have to work for ourselves.”

“Well, that’s what they do too. I mean, we’d likely end up just like them.”

“For everybody then. Work for everybody.”

Mutt nods, looking pleased. He’s gotten his friend talking again. Possibly the pills have helped. Possibly the tide has turned, and they are past the deep ebb in his health.

“But how?” Mutt asks, nudging the tide.

But you can’t push the river. “How should I know? That’s what I tried, and look where it got us. I tried to just do it direct. But I’m the idea man and you’re the facilitator. Isn’t that how it usually worked with us? I would have a crazy idea and you would figure out how to implement it.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Sure you do. So look, I had some fixes. I tried to tap into the system and make the fixes directly. Maybe it was stupid. Okay, it was stupid. It got us here, I’m guessing, and they could always just change the fixes back again anyway. So it was never going to work. I guess I was a little crazy then.”

Mutt sighs.

“I know!” Jeff says. “But tell me how! Tell me how we could do it! Because we’re not the only ones who need these fixes. Everyone needs them.”

Mutt doesn’t know what to say, but on the other hand he has to say something, to keep Jeff going. So he says, “Jeff, these are laws you’re talking about here. They aren’t just fixes, they’re like new laws. So, laws are made by lawmakers. We elect them. But, you know, companies pay for their campaigns, so they say they’re going to work for us, but once in office they work for the companies. It’s been that way a long time. Of the companies, by tools, for the companies.”

“But what about the people?”

“You can either believe that voting lawmakers into office means they work for you, so you keep voting, or you can admit that doesn’t work, and quit voting. Which doesn’t work either.”

“So okay, that’s why I tried to jam the fixes in there as a hack!”

“I know.”

“Tell me how we can do it better!”

“I’m thinking. I guess I’d say, we have to try a onetime takeover of the existing legislative bodies, and pass a bunch of laws that put people back in charge.”

“Onetime takeover? Isn’t that like, revolution? Are you saying we need a revolution?”

“Well, no.”

“No? It sounds to me like yes.”

“But no. I mean—yes and no.”

“Thank you for that! Such clarity!”

“What I mean is, if you use the currently existing legal system to vote in a group of congresspeople who actually pass laws to put people back in charge of lawmaking, and they do it, and there’s a president who signs those laws, and a Supreme Court that allows they are legal, and an army that enforces them, then—I mean, is that a revolution?”

Jeff is silent for a long time. Finally he says, “Yes. It’s a revolution.”

“But it’s legal!”

“All the better, right?”

“Sure, granted.”

“But so then, how do you get that Congress and president elected?”

“Politics, I guess. You tell the better story, and run candidates who will do what you say.”

“They would have to be Democrats, because third parties always lose. They screw the party closest to them, that’s the American way.”

“Okay, even better. Already existing party. Just win.”

“So it’s just politics, you’re telling me.”

“I guess so.”

“Jeez no wonder I tried to hack the system! Because your solution totally sucks!”

“Well at least it’s legal. If it worked, it would work.”

“Thank you for that wisdom. I am wondering now if all the great wisdom is as tautological as that. I fear maybe so. But no. No, Muttnik. You need to think again. This solution of yours is no solution at all. I mean people have been trying it for three hundred years, whatever, and it has only gotten worse and worse.”

“There have been ups and downs. There has been progress.”

“And here we are.”

“Okay, granted. Here we are.”

“So come up with something new.”

“I’m trying!”

Again Jeff is silent. He’s had to exert himself to talk this much, it’s been more than he has in him to give, and now he’s looking exhausted. Weary to the bone. Sick to death of seeing what he is seeing in his vision of the world.

After a while Mutt says, “Jeff? Are you awake?”

After a while Jeff rouses. “Don’t know. I’m really tired.”

“Hungry?”

“Don’t know.”

“I have some crackers here.”

“No.” Long pause; possibly Jeff is weeping here. Weeping or sleeping, or both. Finally he rouses himself, makes an effort. “Tell me a story. I told you to tell me a story.”

“I thought I was.”

“Tell me a story I can believe.”

“That’s harder. But okay… Well, once upon a time, there was a country across the sea, where everyone tried their best to make a community that worked for everyone.”

“Utopia?”

“New York. Everyone was equal there. Men, women, children, and people you couldn’t say what they were. All the various skin tones, and wherever you came from before, it didn’t matter. In this new place you made it all new, and people were just people, meant to be equal, and to treat each other respectfully at all times. It was a good place. Everyone liked living there. And they saw that it was a beautiful place to begin with, incredible really, the harbor, and from east to west it was just one beautiful place after another, with animals and fish and birds in such profusion that sometimes when flocks of birds flew overhead they darkened the day. You couldn’t see the sun or the sky, it was so full of birds. When the fish came back up the rivers to spawn, you could walk across the streams on their backs. That kind of thing. The animals ran in the millions. There was a forest that covered everything. Lakes and rivers to die for. Mountains you couldn’t believe. It was a gift to have such a land given to you.”

“Why didn’t anyone live there before?” Jeff asks from out of his sleep.

“Well, that’s another story. Actually there were people there already, I have to say, but alas they didn’t have immunity to the diseases that the new people brought with them, so most of them died. But the survivors joined this community and taught the newcomers how to take care of the land so that it would stay healthy forever. That’s the story I’m telling you now. It took knowing every rock and plant and animal and fish and bird, that was the way they did it. You had to love the land the way you loved your mother, or in case you didn’t love your mother, the way you loved your child, or yourself. Because it was you anyway. It took knowing all the other parts of your self so well that nothing was misunderstood or exploited, and everything was treated respectfully. Every single element of this land, right down to the bedrock, was a citizen of the community they all made together, and they all had legal standing, and they all made a good living, and they all had everything it took for total well-being for everything. That’s what it was like. Hey, Jeff? Jeff? Well, the end, I guess.”

Because Jeff is now lying there peacefully snoring. The story has put him to sleep. A kind of lullaby, it has turned out to be. A tale for children.

And then, because Jeff is asleep and cannot see it, Mutt puts his face in his hands and cries.