Flood

45

June 2020

The AxysCorp chopper skimmed over the oily waters of Upper New York Bay, heading northeast toward Manhattan. The pilot banked the bird, and pointed out the Statue of Liberty. “Everybody wants to see the old lady,” he called back.

Lily leaned against Plexiglas. The day was dull, the sky a solid mass of slate cloud from which rain fell steadily, rattling on the bird’s hull. The gray of the sky was reflected in the gray of the sea, gray over gray.

And there was Liberty, tilted over by Hurricane Aaron two years ago but still standing on her submerged pedestal, surrounded by a turbulent sea. Lily didn’t imagine the grand old statue could keep standing much longer; one good storm would probably do the trick. But, according to Thandie Jones, the statue herself would survive indefinitely, submerged and buried in sediment. Even when the green patina on the lady’s copper sheeting thickened and turned to stone, her sculptor’s design would still be visible to whatever strange undersea visitors she might receive.

As the flooded cityscape glided beneath the chopper’s prow, Lily used Liberty as a reference point to get her bearings, trying to see how much had changed since she last flew in here over two years ago for Thandie’s science presentation. There was no sign of the barriers and levees hastily thrown up in those early panicky months; they were covered by the water. There was Brooklyn to her right and Jersey City to her left, the ground now entirely submerged, and only a few tall buildings protruded above the water. Grand-looking vessels lay at anchor around the shallow coasts, some the metallic gray of navy ships, but also yachts, brilliant white, floating like toys in a bathtub. The last refuge of New York’s super-rich, perhaps, lying at anchor above the wrecked city. And Manhattan was a reef, directly ahead of her, the tallest buildings thrusting out of the water like splinters of quartz.

The chopper ducked down into the Financial District, sweeping between the shoulders of battered, burned-out skyscrapers. It was like flying through a virtual-reality version of some great canyon system, simplified rectangular blocks and straight-line cliffs with the water lying in the rectilinear valleys below. The glassless windows of the buildings were dark, but there was activity on the water: powerboats raising wakes that lapped against the stained walls, and heavier, lumbering rafts. The water itself was littered with garbage, plastic scraps and bursting bin liners.

“Heading up Broadway,” the pilot called.“I’ll be setting you down at Union Square, or over it. Broadway and 14th Street. You know it?”

“I think so,” Lily said, dredging up memories of tourist excursions. “Was there a farmers’ market?”

“Yeah. Nice place, if kind of run down. That was how it was, anyhow.”

His voice was crisp in her headset. He had a New York accent but of a cultured sort; evidently he was a native. Lily wondered what he had done for a living before the flood, before he had come to do what everybody seemed to do nowadays, which was work for Nathan Lammockson. She asked, “You’re a New Yorker yourself?”

“I am, ma’am. Grew up in Gramercy, in fact. Nice place to live. My mother, she’s still alive, she’s been moved out to the Catskills. She’s talking about going to stay with her brother in his hunting lodge in West Virginia, up in the Appalachians. That’s pretty high, you know.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”

“Yeah, but AxysCorp says the hills are already full of woodsmen and survivalist types. You know, the kind of guys who loaded their pickups and set off as soon as the first raindrops started to fall. Mr. Lammockson says there have been more casualties in the US inflicted by gunshot wounds at illegal roadblocks than by the weather events themselves.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

And she wasn’t surprised to hear him quote Lammockson. As the global crisis had intensified Nathan Lammockson had taken to broadcasting regular speeches to his worldwide network of employees and business partners, a mix of pep talk, hard news and his peculiarly British homespun-capitalist philosophy. In an increasingly fragmented world it was as if Nathan Lammockson was left standing like the Statue of Liberty herself, alone but still bearing the torch of hope.

“So,” she said, “are you going to join your mother in the hills?”

The pilot snorted. He seemed surprised she’d asked. “No, ma’am. I’ll be staying as close to Mr. Lammockson as I can. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”