New York 2140

a) the citizen

Closing the barn door after the horses have escaped: of course. That’s what people do. In this case the horses in question happened to be the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, traditionally named Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. So the closing of the barn door was particularly emphatic.

Although naturally even this instinctive and useless reaction was contested, as many pointed out that it was indeed too late. Having torched the world, many argued, why not just go with the flow, ride the wave, enjoy the last efflorescence of civilization and stop even trying to fix things? This was called adaptation, and it was a popular philosophical position among certain cloud citizens and libertarians and academics in various disciplines, all tending to be young and childless or otherwise feeling that they somehow didn’t have skin in the game. It made them cool, it often got them tenure from like-minded intellectuals, and it was a very expedient cynicism all round, as one could behave as if things were still fun and exciting and the new normal. When certain scientists pointed out that actually a runaway greenhouse effect could have quite remarkable consequences, like the kind that Venus had experienced a few billion years before, so that the Four Horses already unleashed could exponentially swell and devour much of the biosphere, meaning the mass extinction event already initiated could possibly include among its victim species even one certain Homo sapiens oblivious, this was generally scoffed at by the sophisticates in question, who were too hip to imagine that expert overconfidence might refer to they themselves, as knowledgeable and coldly realistic as they felt themselves to be. People love to be cool.

Then the food panic of 2074 occurred and the resulting price jumps, hoarding, hunger, famine, and death gave everyone, and this time everyone, the sudden awareness that even food, that necessity that so many had assumed had been a problem solved or even whipped by the wonders of modern agriculture, was something that was made uncertain by the circumstances thrust on them by climate change among other anthropogenic hammerings on the planet. Average weight loss for adults worldwide through the late 2070s amounted to several kilos, less in the prosperous countries where it was sometimes welcomed as a diet that worked (at last), more in developing countries where the kilos were not there to be lost, except to death.

So this incident forced the governments of the world to refocus attention not just on agriculture, which they did posthaste, but also on land use more generally, meaning civilization’s technological base, meaning, as a first order of business, what got called rapid decarbonization. Which meant even some interference with market forces, oh my God! And so the closing of the barn door began in earnest, and the sophisticates advocating adaptation slid away and found other hip causes with which to demonstrate their brilliance.

At that point, as it turned out, despite the chaos and disorder engulfing the biosphere, there were a lot of interesting things to try to latch that barn door closed. Carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative technologies were all over the place waiting to be declared economical relative to the world-blasting carbon-burning technologies that had up to that point been determined by the market to be “less expensive.” Energy, transport, agriculture, construction: each of these heretofore carbon-positive activities proved to have clean replacements ready for deployment, and more were developed at a startling speed. Many of the improvements were based in materials science, although there was such consilience between the sciences and every other human discipline or field of endeavor that really it could be said that all the sciences, humanities, and arts contributed to the changes initiated in these years. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food panic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for a few years anyway, while the memories of hunger were fresh.

So energy systems were quickly installed: solar, of course, that ultimate source of earthly power, the efficiencies of translation of sunlight into electricity gaining every year; and wind power, sure, for the wind blows over the surface of this planet in fairly predictable ways. More predictable still are the tides and the ocean’s major currents, and with improvements in materials giving humanity at last machines that could withstand the perpetual bashing and corrosion of the salty sea, electricity-generating turbines and tide floats could be set offshore or even out in the vast deep to translate the movement of water into electricity. All these methods weren’t as explosively easy as burning fossil carbon, but they sufficed; and they provided a lot of employment, needed to install and maintain such big and various infrastructures. The idea that human labor was going to be rendered redundant began to be questioned: whose idea had that been anyway? No one was willing to step forward and own that one, it seemed. Just one of those lame old ideas of the silly old past, like phlogiston or ether. It hadn’t been respectable economists who had suggested it, of course not. More like phrenologists or theosophists, of course.

Transport was similar, as it relied on energy to move things around. The great diesel-burning container ships were broken up and reconfigured as containerclippers, smaller, slower, and there again, more labor-intensive. Oh my there was a real need for human labor again, how amazing! Although it was true that quite a few parts of operating a sailing ship could be automated. Same with freight airships, which had solar panels on their upper surfaces and were often entirely robotic. But the ships sailing the oceans of the world, made of graphenated composites very strong and light and also made of captured carbon dioxide, neatly enough, were usually occupied by people who seemed to enjoy the cruises, and the ships often served as floating schools, academies, factories, parties, or prison sentences. Sails were augmented by kite sails sent up far up into the atmosphere to catch stronger winds. This led to navigational hazards, accidents, adventures, indeed a whole new oceanic culture to replace the lost beach cultures, lost at least until the beaches were reestablished at the new higher coastlines; that too was a labor-intensive project.

New but old sea transport grew into the idea of the townships, again replacing the lost coastlines to a small extent; in the air, the carbon-neutral airships turned in some cases into skyvillages, and a large population slung their hooks and lived on clippers of the clouds. Civilization itself began to exhibit a kind of eastward preponderance of movement, following the jet streams; where the trade winds blew there was some countervailing action westward, but the drift of things was generally easterly. Many a cultural analyst wondered what this might mean, postulating some reversal in historical destiny given the earlier supposed western trend, et cetera, et cetera, and they were not deterred by those who observed it meant nothing except that the Earth rotated in the direction it did.

When it came to land use, effects were multiple. Carbon-burning cars having become a thing of the past, little electric cars took advantage of the world’s very extensive road systems, but these roads were now also occupied by train tracks and biking humans, and many were also taken out entirely, to create the habitat corridors reckoned necessary for the survival of the many, many endangered species coexisting on the planet with humans, other species now recognized as important to humanity’s own survival. Since people were tending to congregate in cities anyway, this process was encouraged, and an almost E. O. Wilsonian percentage of land was gradually almost emptied of humans and turned over to animals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and wild plants. Agriculture joined this effort and sky ag was invented, in which skyvillages came down and planted and harvested crops while scarcely even touching down. Cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, and other range animals became quite free range indeed, and turning them into food was a tricky business. In fact most meat for human consumption was now grown in vats, but done right, animal husbandry proved to be carbon negative too, so that didn’t go away.

Deacidifying the oceans? That wasn’t really possible, although there were attempts to frack the new basalt on the mid-Atlantic rift to capture carbonates, also attempts to in effect lime the oceans, also to build giant electrolysis baths and new algal life communities, and so on. Still the oceans were sick, as between a third and a half of the carbon burned in the carbon-burning years had ended up in the ocean and acidified it, making it difficult for many carbon-based creatures at the bottom of the food chain. And when the ocean is sick, humanity is sick. So this was another aspect of their era, and something to keep land agriculture itself at the front of the docket, because aquaculture (which had been one third of humanity’s food) was now a very active and complicated business, not just a matter of hauling fish out of the sea.

Construction? This used to release a lot of carbon, both in the creation of cement and in the operation of building machinery. Lots of explosive power needed for these jobs, and so to continue them biofuels were important; biofuel carbon was dragged out of the air, collected, burned back into the air, then dragged down again. It was a cycle that needed to stay neutral. Cement itself was mostly replaced by the various graphenated composites, in the so-called Anderson Trifecta, very elegant: carbon was sucked out of the air and turned into graphene, which was fixed into composites by 3-D printing and used in building materials, thus sequestering it and keeping it from returning to the atmosphere. So now even building infrastructure could be carbon negative (meaning more carbon removed from the atmosphere than added, for those of you wondering). How cool was that? Maybe so cool it would return the world to 280 parts per million of CO₂ in the atmosphere, maybe even start a little ice age; people shivered with anticipation at the thought, especially glaciologists.

But so expensive. Economists could not help but be dubious. Because prices were always right, because the market was always right, right? So these newfangled inventions, so highly touted by those neo-Malthusians still worried by the discredited Club of Rome limits-to-growth issues—could we really afford these things? Wouldn’t everything be better sorted out by the market?

Could we afford to survive? Well, this wasn’t really the way to frame the question, the economists said. It was more a matter of trusting that economics and the human spirit had solved all problems around the beginning of the modern era, or in the years of the neoliberal turn. Wasn’t it obvious? Just come to Davos and look at their equations, it all made sense! And the laws and the guns backing adherence to those laws all agreed. So hey, just continue down the chute and trust the experts on how things work!

So guess what: there was not consensus. Are you surprised? These interesting new technologies, adding up to what could be a carbon-negative civilization, were only one aspect of a much larger debate on how civilization should cope with the crises inherited from previous generations of expert stupidity. And the Four Horses were loose on the land, so this was not the sanest of world cultures ever to occupy the planet, no, not quite the sanest. Indeed it could be argued that as the stakes got higher, people got crazier. The tyranny of sunk costs, followed by an escalation of commitment; very common, common enough that it was economists who had named these actions, as they are names for economic behaviors. So yeah, double down and hope for the best! Or try to change course. And as both efforts tried to seize the rudder of the great ship of state, fights broke out on the quarterdeck! Oh dear, oh my. Read on, reader, if you dare! Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.

b) Stefan and Roberto

Roberto and Stefan loved it when the great harbor froze over. New York’s schizophrenic weather only made it happen for a week or so at a time, usually, but while the ice held they were in a different world. The previous year in a freeze they had tried to make an iceboat, and though it had not been a success, they had learned some things. Now they wanted to try again.

Mr. Hexter asked if he could come along. “I used to do the same thing when I was a boy, out of the North Cove yacht harbor.”

The boys looked at each other uncertainly, but Stefan said, “Sure, Mr. H. Maybe you can help us figure out how to attach the skates to the bottom.”

Hexter smiled. “We used to screw them to two-by-fours, as I recall, and nail those to the bottom of whatever we had. Let me see what you’ve got.”

So they walked right down the center of Twenty-third, along with hundreds of other people doing the same, and then when they hit the river they went down to the Bloomfield aquaculture dock, where the boys had chained their iceboat’s deck to a concrete bollard, with a box of tools and materials hidden under it.

“Where do you guys get all this stuff?” Hexter asked them as he pawed through it. “Some of this is pretty decent.”

“We scavenge,” Stefan said.

Hexter nodded uncertainly. It was almost plausible, for most of it. The city was full of junk. A trip to Governors Island or Bayonne Bay might do it.

The dockmaster, Edgardo, came by and welcomed the boys, distracting Mr. Hexter from this line of inquiry. And it turned out Edgardo knew Mr. H a little. They talked over old times for a bit, and the boys were interested to learn that Mr. Hexter had once kept a rowboat at this dock.

When Edgardo moved on, the old man inspected their skates. “They look serviceable.”

“But how do you attach them so you can steer?” Stefan asked.

“Only the front one has to move. That one has to have like a rudder.”

As he pawed through their materials and tools he said, “So how are you guys feeling about your treasure, eh? Are you okay with how it’s being handled?”

The boys shrugged. Roberto said, “It bugs me that it isn’t being put in a museum or something. I don’t think they should melt the coins down. They’ve got to be worth more as ancient coins, don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Hexter said. “I bet you’d like one or two yourselves, eh? You could punch a hole in one and make it into a necklace.”

The boys nodded thoughtfully, trying to imagine it. “That would be a blocknecklace for sure,” Roberto said. “What about you, Mr. Hexter? What do you think about it?”

“I’m not sure,” Hexter said. “I guess I think if we come out of it okay, like room and board forever, and a trust fund for you guys as adults, then I’ll be happy. You guys should see the world and all. Me, all I want is a new map cabinet. I mean beyond the necessities. Got to have the necessities, that’s for sure.”

“That’s why they call them that,” Stefan supposed.

While they talked this over they worked on the iceboat. The boys had obtained an aluminum mast with a mainsail on a boom, made to be stepped into a box at the bottom of a rowboat. So they made a footbox and nailed it in place under and a bit behind the front apex of their triangular deck, and cut a hole through the deck into it. The mast would stick through this hole into the footbox. Then they nailed a frame of two-by-sixes to the underside of the deck. Two ice-skate blades could then be screwed into the back corners of this frame, the blades facing permanently straight ahead. The one at the front of the triangle, the bow of their boat, they screwed to a circle of plywood; then they fit that circle inside a square frame nailed to the bottom of the deck just before the mast, under another hole in the deck that allowed a rudder post, screwed to the top of the circle of plywood, to stick up through the deck. The rudder post had a crossbar nailed to its top, and they tied lines to both ends of this crossbar, and ran these back on each side of the mast to the stern, where they tied them to cleats they screwed into the deck. Adjusting the lines would allow them to turn the front skate. With some two-by-four supports nailed in for their mast, they were good to go.

“Add a brake,” Mr. Hexter advised. “Just a hand brake. A two-by-four on a hinge, hanging off the stern. Something you can pull down onto the ice if you want to.” He pawed through their junk and held up an old brass door hinge.

“Will that work?” Roberto asked. “Just wood on ice, I mean?”

“Not very well, but anything is better than nothing, at least sometimes.”

They blew into their hands when they took their gloves off to work, and jumped around to create some heat. The sun, hanging in an opalescent smear over Staten Island, warmed them more than seemed likely, but it was still cold.

“What can we do for our next thing, Mr. Hexter?” Roberto asked as they worked. “We need something new, now that we’ve found the Hussar.”

“Well, there’s nothing like the Hussar.”

“But there must be something.”

Hexter nodded. “New York is infinite,” he allowed. “Let me think about that one… ah. Sure. Well, you know that Herman Melville lived in New York for most of his life.”

“Who’s he?”

“Herman Melville! Author of Moby-Dick!”

“Okay. That sounds like an interesting book.” Both of them guffawed. “Tell us more.”

“Boys, he wrote the great American novel, and when it was published it killed his career. People used it for toilet paper for a century or so, and for the rest of his life he had to find other jobs to support his family. He kept on scribbling, and they found all kinds of masterpieces stuck in shoe boxes after he died, but for the rest of his life he had to scrape to get by.”

“Like us!”

“That’s right. He was a water rat. But he scored a job as a customs inspector, working the docks just south of here. Herman Melville, customs inspector. That’s the title of my own lost masterpiece. But his lost masterpiece was a manuscript he called Isle of the Cross. It was about a woman who married a sailor who got her pregnant and then sailed off and married other girls in other ports, and this girl had to get by on her own after he left.”

“Like Melville after his readers left,” Stefan observed.

“Very good. That’s probably right. Anyway, his publishers rejected this book outright, and it’s been said Melville took it home and burned it in his fireplace.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was mad. But maybe he didn’t. That’s what Russ said happened, but other people said it was there in another shoe box. And the thing is, he lived on East Twenty-sixth, in a big town house just a block off Madison Square.”

“Our square?”

“That’s right. I tell you, that little bacino you live in has had an amazing life. It’s some kind of power spot.”

“A manuscript isn’t going to hold up underwater like gold,” Roberto pointed out.

“No. No, that lost novel is probably lost for good. It’s too bad. But anything from Melville’s house would be great to find. And it’s like the Hussar, in that you could dig around at the bottom of the canal where his house used to be, without anyone minding.”

“But that underwater digging turned out to be hard,” Stefan pointed out. “We needed Idelba and Thabo.”

“True. But we could probably get them again, if you found the right place. And finding the old address shouldn’t be hard, because we know right where it was. So, you know, if you could find anything, some wood, or something like Melville’s toothbrush cup, or a scrimshaw inkwell or something like that…”

“Great idea,” Roberto enthused.

Stefan looked unconvinced. “We left our diving bell up in the Bronx. After it almost killed you.”

“We could go back and get it.”

“Looks like we’ve about finished making this iceboat,” Mr. Hexter observed.

“Let’s give it a try!” Roberto cried.

There was a gusty north wind whistling down the Hudson, not too strong, not crushingly cold. So they lifted the craft down onto the ice just offshore, and got on its plywood deck, and shoved off with their shoes against the ice, while pulling the sail taut.

Immediately the wind filled the sail and Roberto wrapped the boom sheet once around a cleat they had screwed into the middle of the plywood. Stefan tugged on the two lines running up to the rudder post until the front skate pointed a little to the right, up into the wind, then wrapped those lines to their own cleats. At that point they were on a beam reach headed west, out across the mighty Hudson, scraping and screeching along.

A gust struck, and rather than tilting like a sailboat, the iceboat simply shot faster across the ice, a startling acceleration marked by louder scraping and a new hiss. Stefan and Roberto looked at each other round-eyed, and they might even have been nervous if Mr. Hexter had not been grinning a huge gap-toothed grin, a joyful smile the likes of which they had never seen on him. Clearly he was familiar with iceboating, and loved it. So Roberto kept the sail taut, and Stefan pulled the front skate a little more to the right, pointing them up into the wind a bit more, and they clatterswooshed across the mighty river, which from this vantage appeared like an immense ice lake, like one of the Great Lakes maybe. Or, given the giant towers of the city and Hoboken to each side, like an ice hockey rink for Titans. They hissed along like some kind of ice hydrofoil!

But the wind was cold out here, and they huddled down into their jackets and pulled their wool caps over their ears, their hands chilling despite their gloves. “Point right up into the wind!” Mr. Hexter shouted.

Stefan uncleated his lines and pulled hard on the right one, which made the boat curve to the right, upriver and upwind, until the sail fluttered hard, and they scratched over the ice to a halt, with only the flapping sail moving.

The wind still gusted by, throwing a mother-of-pearl sky south over them. The very hardest gusts scraped the whole boat backward a foot or two at a time.

“Amazing!” Roberto said.

“I forgot how cold iceboating is,” Mr. Hexter said, looking a little chastened. “Ours was more like a regular boat, so we had a cockpit we could get down into and get some protection. We’d always have a lot of blankets too, and thick gloves, and hot chocolate in a thermos.”

Roberto, white-lipped and already shivering a little, said, “I think we could borrow some gloves and blankets. I think Edgardo has some.”

“We should have thought of it before,” Stefan said.

“Let’s just sail back in,” Mr. Hexter said. “We aren’t that far out yet.”

To the boys it looked like they were already most of the way to Jersey, but Mr. Hexter shook his head and told them to look at the size of the boats on the Hoboken docks compared to the ones back in the city. The boys still couldn’t see it, but they were willing to take his word for it. Stefan pulled on his lines, twisting the front skate left to get them to turn the front back toward the city as they were being shoved backward. When they had slid until they were pointed toward Manhattan, Roberto pulled the sail taut, and the boat scraped a little sideways downwind, then began hissing and scronching toward the city. “Don’t let the boom hit you!” the old man cried, as with a sudden ferocious rush they accelerated. Roberto hauled with all his might on the sheet and cleated it down before he lost it, and Stefan lay down to stay under the boom, which was now angled over the right side of the boat instead of the left.

Loud clattery hiss, tremendous acceleration: they’d never felt anything like it. Astonishing speed. Even Franklin Garr’s zoomer couldn’t have beat it.

Then there came a loud snap from the bow and the deck dropped at the front. Quickly they ground to a halt, the three of them sliding down the plywood toward the ice.

“Uncleat the sail!” Mr. Hexter said to Roberto. “Loose the sail, quick.”

When Roberto got the sheet loose from the cleat, the sail was freed to flap downwind on the boom, which swung wildly back and forth. They regained their composure, stood and walked around on the ice. In some places it was translucent, even transparent. These patches were creepy, as below their ice the black water still clearly moved.

It turned out the front skate and its circular mounting had together broken away from the square framework, now split on both sides.

“Too much stress,” Hexter said. “And from a new direction.” He inspected the damage, shook his head. “Too bad. I don’t think we can fix it.”

“Oh no! What are we going to do?”

“Let’s walk it back in. Here, wrap those steering lines around the very front of the bow, and lift up on the lines, and we’ll walk it in on its back skates. It won’t be that heavy.”

They stood on the ice next to the boat and wrapped the lines in the way he had suggested. When they were done they could lift the bow enough to pull the boat along behind them. After a while they stopped and unstepped the mast and laid it and the sail and boom flat on the deck. After that, tromping back toward the city felt quite satisfying.

“This is cool,” Roberto said. “Usually when we mess up, we’re stuck.”

Mr. Hexter laughed. “It’s another reason to like iceboating. When you capsize in water, you can’t just walk home like this. I think we just have to figure out a stronger frame to put the front skate in. Maybe there’s an assemblage you could buy and just tack it in place. There must be iceboat makers all around this harbor by now, right?”

The boys agreed it must be so. “But we don’t have any money to pay for anything.”

“Yes you do! Give them a gold guinea, hey? See what kind of change they give you for that.”

It was still cold, so they tried to hurry the old man a little, but he was slowing from time to time to look around. The boys tried to be indulgent, but then he stopped outright and stood looking around. “What?” Roberto complained.

“This is the spot! This is the spot, right here!”

“What spot could be out here?” Stefan wondered.

“This is where I met Herman Melville! I can tell from the way our dock lines up with the Empire State Building.”

“So you knew this Melville guy?”

“No.” Hexter laughed. “No, I wish I had. I bet it would have been really interesting. But he was before my time.”

“So how is it you met him?”

“It was his ghost. I ran into him out here and talked to him. Very weird, to be sure. An uncanny encounter. He had a great accent, a bit like a New York accent, but kind of stiff. Maybe a little Dutch in it still. It was right out here, about where we’re standing. What a great coincidence. Maybe that’s why the boat broke here. Or why I was thinking about him earlier. Could be he’s out here still, tweaking my head.”

Stefan and Roberto stared at him.

He looked at them and smiled. “Come on, we’ll keep walking. You boys look cold. I’ll tell you about it as we go.”

“Good idea.”

So as they trudged over the ice, which was mostly white in this area, and crusted with low lines of compacted snow that Hexter called sastrugi, he told them the story.

“I was out here one night in a little rubber motorboat, kind of like yours, a zodiac we called them then.”

“We still do.”

“Good to know. So I was out here—”

“Why were you out here at night?”

“Well, that’s a long story, I’ll tell you that another time, but basically I was out here to receive some smuggled goods.”

“Cool! What’s that?”

“What’s smuggled goods, or what was I receiving?”

“What’s a smuggled good?” Stefan clarified, glancing at Roberto.

“Well, some things were not supposed to be brought into the country without being taxed. Or not at all. So if you snuck them in, that was smuggling.”

“And what were you receiving?” Roberto asked.

“Let’s talk about that part later,” the old man said. “For now, I want to get to the important part, which is that I’m out here in the dark, a moonless night, sea mist coming up off the water, really glad I had GPS to tell me where I was, because there would have been no way without it, because it was getting to be like a regular sea fog, what they call a pea soup fog, very thick. I did get a glimpse of the Empire State once or twice, because it was lit up then too, but nothing else was visible. I was just out there in a white blackness, or a black whiteness. And then out of the fog a man comes rowing. Pretty big wooden rowboat, single man in it. He had white hair cut close, and a long white beard that kind of came down in two points. Big barrel-chested old man. And rowing pretty hard in the fog, so he almost ran me down, because of course when you’re rowing you’re not looking the way you’re going. Although in his case, the moment I called out to him, he swung his boat around by rowing forward one way and backward the other. He turned on a dime, and then he was rowing at me stern forward, so he could look at me. He spun around as neat as you please. That was my first impression, that he was a really good rower. As of course made sense.”

“Why?”

“Roberto, shut up!”

“No, that’s a good one. He was good because he had rowed on a whaling ship when he was young, and they had to chase whales and spear them, and then pull their dead bodies back to the big ship by rowing them. I tell you, when you have a dead whale tied to the stern of your boat, you develop very little momentum with each stroke of the oars. So he got really good at rowing. And then after his writing career tanked, he had that job on the docks. Lot of rowing involved with that. Herman Melville, customs inspector. My favorite book about him, although admittedly I wrote it.”

“I thought you said you didn’t write it.”

“Roberto!”

“In those years he was said to be the only honest customs inspector in Manhattan. Which of course had to be incredibly dangerous.”

“How come?”

“Think about it. With all the others on the take, he was a danger to everyone. He was bad for smugglers, and bad for the other customs inspectors. It’s amazing he didn’t get shot and dumped in the river, and in fact he had all kinds of adventures in those years. The book is mostly a detective novel, I guess you’d say, or an adventure novel where it’s just one damn thing after another. Him foiling plots, people trying to kill him. Crazy old Confederates trying to stir up trouble. And a lot of that happened out on the river here. Sometimes he had to row out here, when ships got backed up and were anchored in the harbor waiting for a dock to open. Row all the way to Staten Island and back. He could catch smugglers by rowing them down. They’d be sailing and the wind would die a little, and he would row those criminals down. No, he was a champion oarsman!”

“So what happened when you met him out here? I mean you were smuggling too, right?”

“That’s true. Maybe that’s why he showed up! But in fact on that night he pulled his boat right next to mine, and leaned over and peered at me. He said, ‘Billy, is that you?’”

“Who’s—”

“Shut up!”

“I don’t know—I’m wondering now if he meant Billy Budd. But when I said no, he looked really startled, kind of scared, and he said, ‘Malcolm? Is that my Malcolm?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m Gordon. Gordon Hexter.’”

“Who’s Malcolm?”

“That was the name of his older son.”

“So then what?” Stefan insisted.

“He looked at my zodiac and said, ‘What’s this, a rubber boat?’ And I said yes, and he said, ‘Good idea!’ and then, ‘But what about your oars?’ I told him I had lost them overboard, and he frowned at me like he knew I was lying, because there were no oarlocks on my zodiac. And of course steamboats were already there in his time, and the Monitor and Merrimac. And he saw the motor at the back, and asked me what it was, and I said it was a fishing line reel. I should have just said it was a motor. But he just looked at me, and told me he would pull me in to shore, and I had to say okay, as it wouldn’t make sense to say no to him at that point. So he tied a line to my bow cleat and started rowing me in, so I missed my rendezvous out there. But I wasn’t thinking about that then.

“‘How do you know where you’re going in this fog?’ I asked him, because he was looking back at me. He smiled a little smile under his mustache; it was the only time I saw any expression on his face. ‘Oh I know,’ he said. ‘I know this river by now, I can say that. Moony night or pouring rain or fog as thick as the thoughts in my head. I can hear where I am. I can feel the bay’s bottom, feel it like my bed under me at night. This harbor is my Pacific now. I have finally fitted myself to my circumstances.’

“Then some kind of wave hit us from behind. I felt the wave raise me, and then saw it raise him up and let him down. I looked around, and I think I said, ‘What was that?’ and I couldn’t see anything in the fog. But the water was slick under us, and more waves kept coming and lifting me up, then dropping me back. He stopped rowing and my zodiac bumped into the back of his rowboat, and he leaned toward me and whispered to me, ‘It’s that which is after thee, son! I see the line around thee!’ So I turned to look behind again, but I didn’t see anything, and then when I turned back around to look at him, there wasn’t anything there either. He wasn’t there, his rowboat wasn’t there. He was just gone.”

“What happened to him?” Roberto asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I say he must have been a ghost, because he disappeared like that. That was the first indication I had that he wasn’t real. I was pretty close to West Street by then, as I found out by puttering around a little. I was pretty freaked out, I can tell you. And even more so later, when I read that a couple of boats of dead guys were found out in the river the next day, drifting around. Killed by knives. I think that’s what he was telling me about. That’s what he rowed me away from in the fog. I was going to get killed when that deal went down, but he rowed me away.”

“Yikes,” Stefan said.

“But what did he mean about the line being around you?” Roberto asked.

“Ah, well!” Now Mr. Hexter stopped walking, to catch his breath and answer this. He was all caught up in his tale. “In Moby-Dick there’s a chapter called ‘The Line,’ maybe the greatest chapter of all. That’s where Melville describes what it was like when the whalers were rowing after whales to catch them, with the harpoonist standing up in the bow, and something like a dozen or eighteen guys all rowing as hard as they could, like a crew team. There was a line coiled in a big tub in the middle of the boat, with its end tied to the end of the harpoon, and when the harpoonist throws the harpoon into the whale and it sticks, the whale dives for the bottom and the line runs out of the tub really fast. But to keep it from tangling or breaking at that sudden first pull, they have a whole bunch of the line hung around the boat on poles, so that the line can be yanked out real fast with the harpoon when the whale is hit and makes its dive. So as the guys are rowing as hard as they can, and bouncing around all over the waves and all, this line is draped all over in between them, waiting to get yanked down and away by the whale. So if you were to accidentally get an arm or your head caught in it as it ran out, bang! Over you would go and down to the bottom with the whale.”

“You’re kidding,” Stefan said. “That’s how they did it?”

“It is. But then, right when Melville finishes describing this insane setup, he says, ‘But why say more?’ and points out that it’s no different from the situation that anyone is in at any time! The reader reading Moby-Dick by his living room fire, Melville says, is in the exact same situation as those poor sailors rowing their boat after the whale! Because the line is always there!”

“Kind of depressing,” Roberto pointed out.

“It is!” And yet Mr. Hexter laughed. He tilted his head up and hooted, standing out there on the ice in the sun.

Finally he pulled up on the rope they were hauling their iceboat with, and said, “See, here’s the line again. But on that night, Melville helped me dodge it. And I alone escaped to tell the tale.”

c) Mutt and Jeff

Mutt and Jeff sit with Charlotte at their railing, sipping wine from the white coffee cups. “So is it weird being back in the world?” she asks.

“It was weird before.”

They regard the nighttime water-floored city. The antique filigree of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cablework articulates the new superscrapers on Brooklyn Heights, all lit like liqueur bottles. The harbor looks vast in the winter light, big plates of ice floating orangely in the black murk of twilight. Short days still.

“Arguably we’re saner now than we were before,” Mutt says.

Jeff shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be saying much, but even so it isn’t true. I’m off my nut now. I want things now.”

“You did before,” Mutt protests.

Charlotte says, “In dreams begin responsibilities.”

Jeff actually smiles at this, pleasing Mutt greatly.

“Delmore Schwartz!” Jeff says.

“It’s actually Yeats,” Charlotte explains. “Schwartz was quoting Yeats.”

“No way!”

“It’s true. I learned that the hard way. Someone said it was Yeats and I corrected them, I told them it was Delmore Schwartz, and then they corrected me, and they turned out to be right.”

“Ouch.”

“That’s what I said. It wasn’t someone I wanted to be corrected by.”

“Do you mean your ex, chair of the Federal Reserve?”

Charlotte raises her eyebrows. “Bull’s-eye.”

“I’m surprised he knew that.”

“I was too. But he’s full of surprises.”

They look down at the sheet of black water, studded with dim white icebergs, also buildings both lit and dark. The immensity of New York harbor at night, awesome, sublime. The black starry bay.

“Everyone’s full of surprises,” Mutt says. “Did you hear Amelia Black’s broadcast after her polar bears got nuked?”

“Of course,” says Jeff. “Everybody did, right?”

“It’s got like a hundred million views now,” Charlotte confirms.

“Everybody, like I said.”

“There’s nine billion people on this planet,” Mutt points out, “so actually that’s about one out of every ninety people, if I got my decimal point right.”

“That’s everybody,” Charlotte says. “Very big saturation, anyway.”

“So what did you think?” Mutt inquires of her.

Charlotte shrugs. “She’s a ditz. She can barely string two thoughts together.”

“Ah come on—”

“Meaning I love her. Obviously.”

“Not that obvious.”

“Well, I do. Especially after she said all those nice things about the Householders’ Union right in the middle of saving that crashing skyvillage. That broadcast has gotten a lot of views too. That was bizarre, actually, her saying that then. I do think she has a little trouble with, I don’t know what. Sequential thinking.”

Jeff says, “We’re all like her.”

Charlotte and Mutt don’t get this.

Jeff explains: “She wants things to go right. She’s mad that they’re not going right. She’d like to kill the people hurting her family. How are we any different?”

“We have a plan?” Charlotte suggests.

“But do we? You’ve got this building, and the intertidal community, the Lame Ass and all the other co-ops, but now that things are going well, it’ll all get bought up again. Wherever there’s a commons there’s enclosure. And enclosure always wins. So of course she wants to kill. I’m totally with her. Put ’em against a wall. Fucking liquidation of the rentier.”

“Euthanasia of the rentier,” Charlotte corrects. “Keynes.”

“Okay whatever.”

“You are sounding pretty mad.”

“But you should have seen him before,” Mutt insists. “I’m telling you, he’s a lot calmer now.”

“No I’m not.”

“Maybe a little vengeful,” Charlotte says.

Jeff throws his hands in the air, like, What. “I want justice!”

“It sounds like you want revenge.”

Jeff’s laugh is more like arrrrrgh. He is seizing his hair with both hands. “At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs. So yeah, I want both. Justice is the feather in the arrow, revenge is the tip of the arrowhead.”

“The rentier class is not going to go down easily,” says Charlotte.

“Of course not. But look, once you’re cutting them apart, you tell them that they each get to keep five million. Not more, but not less. Most of them will do a cost-benefit analysis and realize that dying for a bigger number is not worth it. They’ll take their five million and slink away.”

Charlotte considers this. “The golden parachuting of the rentier.”

“Sure, why not? Although I prefer to call it fiscal decapitation.”

“It’s pretty mellow, as far as revenge goes.”

“Velvet glove. Minimize the trauma drama.”

“I always like that.” She sips her wine. “It would be interesting to hear what Franklin might say about that. About how we could finance it.”

“Why him?” Jeff asks.

“Because I like him. A very nice young man.”

Jeff shakes his head at her like he’s regarding a true miracle of stupidity.

Mutt, thinking to divert Jeff’s no doubt withering critique of their young financier, says, “Have you ever noticed that our building is a kind of actor network that can do things? We got the cloud star, the lawyer, the building expert, the building itself, the police detective, the money man… add the getaway driver and it’s a fucking heist movie!”

“So who are we?” Jeff says.

“We are the wise old geezers, Jeffrey.”

“But that’s Gordon Hexter,” Jeff points out. “No, we’re the two old Muppets on the balcony, cracking lame jokes.”

“Lame-ass jokes,” says Mutt. “I like that.”

“Me too.”

“But isn’t it a little weird that we have all the right players here to change the world?”

Charlotte shakes her head. “Confirmation bias. That or else representation error. I’m forgetting the name, shit. It’s the one where you think what you see is all of what’s going on. A very elementary cognitive error.”

“Ease of representation,” Jeff says. “It’s an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality.”

“That’s right, that’s the one.”

Mutt acknowledges this, but says, “On the other hand, we do have quite a crew here.”

Charlotte says, “Everybody does. There are two thousand people living in this building, and you only know twenty of them, and I only know a couple hundred, and so we think they’re the important ones. But how likely is that? It’s just ease of representation. And every building in lower Manhattan is the same, and they’re part of the mutual aid society, and those are everywhere now, all over the drowned world. Probably every intertidal building in the world is just like us. For sure everyone I meet in my job is.”

“So it’s mistaking the particular for the general?” Mutt says.

“Something like that. And there’s something like two hundred major coastal cities, all just as drowned as New York. Like a billion people. And we’re all wet, we’re all in the precariat, we’re all pissed off at Denver and at the rich assholes still parading around. We all want justice and revenge.”

“Which is one thing,” Jeff reminds her.

“Okay whatever. We want justice-revenge.”

“Jusvenge,” Mutt tries. “Rejustenge. It doesn’t seem to combine.”

“Let’s leave it at justice,” Charlotte suggests. “We all want justice.”

“We demand justice,” Jeff says. “We don’t have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.”

“And conditions are ripe, is that what you’re saying?”

“Very ripe. People are pissed off. They’re scared for their kids. That’s the moment things can tip. If it works like Chenoweth’s law says it does, then you only need about fifteen percent of a population to engage in civil disobedience, and the rest see it and support it, and the oligarchy falls. You get a new legal regime. It doesn’t have to get all bloody and lead to a thugocracy of violent revolutionaries. It can work. And conditions are ripe.”

“So how does a thing like that start?” Charlotte wonders.

“Any kind of thing. Some kind of disaster, big or small.”

“Okay, good. I always like rooting for disaster to strike.”

“Everybody does!”

Jeff cackles along with Charlotte. She refills their cups. Mutt feels a smile stretching his face in an almost forgotten way. He clicks ceramic cups with Jeff. “It’s good to see you happy again, my friend.”

“I’m not happy. I’m furious. I’m fucking furious.”

“Exactly.”

d) Vlade

Vlade’s wristpad beeped and said, “So how’s it going with our gold?”

“Hi Idelba. Well, they’re figuring it out.”

“What do you mean?”

“We talked to Charlotte about it, and she convinced us to ask Inspector Gen what we should do.”

“You asked a policeman?”

“A policewoman. Yes.”

Long pause over the radio phone. Vlade waited her out. That always worked with Idelba; he had about fifty times more patience than she did.

“And what did she say?”

“She said melt it down and sell the gold and put it in the bank, and don’t tell anyone where we got it.”

“Well good for her! I was worried you would turn it over. I’ve dealt with salvage before, and it never goes well. So how long is that going to take? When do Thabo and I get our cut?”

“I’m not sure.” Vlade took a deep breath, then gave it a try: “Why don’t you come on over and we’ll talk about it with the gang here.”

“Like when?”

“Let me check on that. And listen, when you come, can you bring that vacuum you drug up the gold with? I want it to see if I can apply it to a problem I’m having with the building here.”

He explained his plan.

“I guess so,” she said.

“Thanks Idelba. I’ll get back to you on when the group can meet.”

Gathering the treasure consortium was hard, mainly because Charlotte was part of it now, in an advisory role, and she was mostly away, and busy even when she was home. But she carved out an hour at the end of one of her long days, and Idelba agreed to come in her tug and anchor between the tower and the North building.

Vlade was still finding leaks appearing below the low tide mark on the building, small but worrisome. Actually infuriating. Of course one could play drone versus drone, and he did that, but it wasn’t working. It seemed possible that going old school with Idelba might accomplish what he wanted. And it gave him an excuse to see her again.

So Idelba showed up in her tug, which was of a size that allowed it to just fit through most of the canals of lower Manhattan. Nervously Vlade welcomed her to the Met and showed her around. It was the first time she had visited, so he gave her the grand tour, starting below the waterline, including the rooms that had been broached. Boathouse, dining hall and commons, some representative apartments occupied by people he knew well, everything from the solo closets to the big group places, occupying half a floor and accommodating a hundred people dorm-style; then up to the farm, then above that to the cupola and the blimp mast. Then back down to the animal floor, pigs chickens goats, very smelly, and right under that the farm again, to get the views of the city through the loggia’s open arches.

Idelba seemed impressed, which pleased Vlade. Their history stood between them like a third person, but he still had his feelings; that would never change. What it was like for her, he had no idea. There was so much they had never talked about. Just the thought of trying to scared him.

“It’s a beauty,” she said. “I always like seeing it from the rivers. It stands out quite a bit, considering there are so many taller buildings.”

“It’s true. It’s in a bit of a gap. And the gold top marks it.”

“So what’s with these leaks you’re finding?”

“I think someone’s trying to scare us. That’s why I’m hoping to suck up some evidence.”

“Worth a try.”

“Thanks for helping.”

“Just another service from your new partner.”

“What do you mean?” Vlade was startled by this word.

“I mean let’s go talk to your chairperson.”

Vlade gave Charlotte a call, and as it turned out she was still in the building. After a while she joined them.

“This is Idelba,” Vlade said to Charlotte. “She and her crew helped us recover that gold from the Hussar.”

“We were married too,” Idelba said, not knowing that Vlade had told Charlotte about it. “Just to help you understand why I would help such a creature as Vlade.”

“Funny,” Charlotte said, “I was just talking to my ex the other day.”

“The city is like that.”

Charlotte nodded. “So what’s up?”

“I want to know what’s happening with the gold, when I’ll get my share.”

Charlotte said, “We’re still trying to figure out how best to maximize its value. That isn’t real obvious.”

“I can imagine, but I want in on that too. Without me and Thabo, no gold for you, and we were promised fifteen percent of the take, and it’s been two months. And in the winter we can’t work as much, so we’re not getting paid as much. Times are tight.”

“I thought you were on a city contract.”

“No, it’s just the association over there. We get paid or given goods by people there, but sometimes we’re just taking lemmas or IOUs.”

“I understand. It’s like that here too. I just thought it was a city project.”

“A city project, in the wet zone?”

“True. Anyway, we’re talking to people to figure out what to do about the gold.”

Idelba wasn’t happy at this. “Maybe you could start payments on what you owe me.”

“We don’t have that kind of money available. What about some kind of goods exchange? Goods or services?”

“Like how I’m helping Vlade work on your place’s security?”

Charlotte frowned. “Yeah, only flip it.”

Idelba shrugged. “I don’t know if you have anything I need.”

“Possibly we could put you up here over the winter. You see those hotellos across the farm, we could put up a couple more, right, Vlade?”

Vlade tried to imagine what it would be like living near Idelba again, failed, but managed to say “Sure” without much delay. Just enough for Idelba to give him the stink eye.

“I don’t think so,” she said darkly. “I don’t know if I want to use up any of our compensation that way. A room is a room, and we have space heaters and blankets out there.”

Charlotte shrugged, imitating Idelba, Vlade saw. “You can let us know.”

“Meanwhile you’ll work on turning that stuff? Or give us some to turn?”

“Yes. Of course. We’ll have something figured out within a week.”

Vlade escorted Idelba back down to the boathouse. “You should join us while it’s winter,” he ventured. “It’s nice.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Back in his boathouse office he offered her a shot of vodka, and she sat down and sipped it. She had never been a big drinker. They sat drinking by the light of the various screens and instruments, and the boathouse’s few night lights. Sharing the dimness and quiet. No huge need to keep a conversation going; they had already not said all the things they weren’t going to say. It was painful to Vlade.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you what I’m doing with the gold.”

“Have you shown the boys?”

“Sure, but that’s a good idea. It doesn’t get old.” He wristed the boys as he got out the equipment from boxes under his worktable, and in a few minutes they ran in, goldbug madness lighting them like gas lantern mantles.

“This is so cool,” Stefan promised Idelba.

“Even though we shouldn’t be doing it,” Roberto added.

Vlade had had to look it up, but it turned out to be fairly simple. The melting point of gold was just under two thousand degrees. He had borrowed a graphite crucible and an ingot mold, both standard salvager’s equipment, from Rosario, and he already had an oxyacetylene torch in his shop. After that it was just a matter of sprinkling some baking soda over ten of the darkened coins when they were stacked in the crucible, putting on a welder’s mask and heavy gloves, firing up the torch, and slowly cooking the gold under direct heat, until the coins turned red and slumped into a single bumpy red mass, sizzling or bubbling very slightly at the edges; then the mass melted further and became a fiery red puddle in the crucible. Always interesting to do and to see. Then while it was liquid, he seized the crucible in tongs and poured the gold redly out into the ingot mold.

Idelba and the boys watched with keen interest. Idelba even said “Aha” when the coins turned red. When they deformed and melted together, leaving a scum of the sodium carbonate and dirt on the top, the boys squealed “I’m meltingggg…” which Charlotte had taught them was appropriate.

Vlade turned off the torch and flipped up the mask. “Pretty neat.”

“Did you let the boys here do it?” Idelba asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“It was fantastic! You see how hot it is. You feel it.”

Then Idelba got pinged and she looked at her wrist. “Are your systems showing anything outside?”

He glanced at his screens, shook his head. “Yours are?”

“Yep. I think your radar must be baffled on this shit.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“Let’s see if we can suck something up for you.” She spoke to Thabo, who was still out on the tug. Vlade went out and untied the building’s runabout from the boathouse dock, and they got in and hummed out the door into the bacino. Idelba indicated the north side, between the Met and North, under her tug. When they came around from the bacino into the Twenty-fourth canal, Vlade saw that the tug was about half as wide as the canal. Thabo and a couple other men were standing in the bow wrangling one of their dredging hoses, and suddenly the big vacuum pump motor revved up to its highest banshee scream. With the pale slabs of the buildings walling them in, it was very loud.

All of a sudden the vacuum was shut off and things went quiet again. Vlade pulled up to the tug and Thabo caught the rope Idelba threw up to him and tied them off.

“Whatcha got?” Idelba called.

“Drone.”

“Oh my,” Vlade said. “Hey, have you got a strongbox on board there?”

“You think it might explode?”

“I don’t want it to with your guys exposed to it, right?”

Idelba called sharply to Thabo and the other man in Berber, and Vlade glimpsed the whites of their eyes before they scrambled belowdecks on the tug. A tense minute later they returned with a box and one held it while the other tossed an object from the screen end of the vacuum tube into it. They worked fast.

“Okay, locked up,” they called down.

“Strong one?” Vlade inquired hopefully.

“That’s why they call them strongboxes,” Idelba said.

“I know, but you know.”

“I don’t know! Who do you think you’re dealing with here, the military?”

“Or someone with military stuff.”

“Shit.” Even in the dark, Idelba could do a very good slow burn. Whites of her eyes. “Well our strongbox is military too. So quit paranoiding and tell me what to do with it.”

“Let’s put your strongbox in a bigger strongbox,” Vlade suggested. “I’ve got one in the office.”

“What will you do with it then?”

“Give it to the police. We got a police inspector lives here, she’ll be interested I think. We can do that tomorrow.”

“Doubt you’ll get much from the drone.”

“You never know. At least I can prove we’re being attacked.”

“Sort of. Any idea who’s doing it?”

“No. But there’s been an offer on the building, so it could be them. And even if we can’t prove it, the fact we’re getting attacked might make some residents mad and convince them to vote against the offer. There was a vote that went against it, but it was close, and the offer might get upped.”

“I guess I better figure out whether I want to winter here while you still own the place.”

Vlade tried to think of a snappy reply but failed. He sighed, and Idelba heard it, and quit her needling. Which surprised him. Truce in the Vlade-Idelba cold war? He would find out later. Right now he was just happy to have her around giving him shit. Mostly happy. Well, happy wasn’t the right word for it. He wanted her around in a tense, apprehensive, unhappy, even miserable way. But he wanted it.

e) Inspector Gen

After a sudden February thaw Inspector Gen had to take to the skybridges again, having been enjoying her walks on the frozen canals, and she was headed for the one that ran over to One Madison, intending to proceed east from there to the station, when Vlade stopped her at the doors to the skyway.

“Hey there Gen, I got something I want to give you.”

He explained that he and his friend Idelba had sucked a submarine drone out of the canal next to the Met, and that they had put it in a strongbox in case it exploded, because he suspected it was there to drill a hole in the building. “I know you can’t carry it to the station, but can you send some of your people over to pick it up? I’ve got it in my safe in the office, but I’m not happy taking it over to the station myself.”

“Sure,” Gen said. “I’ll call now and they’ll be over soon.”

She walked her usual route, gazing down on but not quite seeing perfect Canaletto wavelets on cobalt water. Physical evidence of an attack on the building. She called Lieutenant Claire and told her to send a boat over to pick up Vlade’s evidence.

If it was what Vlade thought it was, it might help. The various elements of the case weren’t matching up in her head, and as the leads petered out (they had not been able to get the courts to penalize Vinson for throwing them out of his office, warrant notwithstanding), she was getting more irritated. The longer it went on without coming clear, the more it had the potential for passing into that category that she hated so much, the Unsolved. Maybe even the Great Unsolved. If it did she would have to let it go and get past it. Not letting go of the frustration of the Unsolved, which could also be called the Unsolvable—that way lay madness, as she had learned long before, and more than once, by going mad. She was done with that. Hopefully.

By the time she reached her office in the station and got through the first rush of the day’s problems and paperwork, the boat had returned, and Lieutenant Claire walked in from the lab looking pleased.

“The device exploded three blocks away from Madison Square, so it was probably on some kind of proximity fuse. But the strongboxes held. It was messy inside, but it was the remains of a little drone sub for sure, with a needle drill included. And we found some taggants. It was made by Atlantic Submarine Technologies.”

“They make a drone that will puncture waterproofing? How do they advertise that?”

“It’s just a submarine drill with a very fine tip. You know, to thread little wires or something. They have to puncture diamond coating all the time.”

“It seems a little suspicious.”

“No, I think it’s just an ordinary tool. Almost any tool can wreck things as easily as build things, don’t you think? Maybe easier?”

“Maybe so,” Gen said, thinking of the police as a tool. “So do the taggants let us know who they sold it to?”

“They do. A construction company in Hoboken, started five years ago, out of business a year ago. Possibly a cover company to gather equipment and disappear, so Sean’s looking into that. Also into connections between that company and the names on our lists. Hopefully he can pick up the track on this thing.”

“Maybe. I can imagine otherwise. Let me know what you find out.”

Late that afternoon Gen went down the hall to the little office carrels inhabited by Claire and Olmstead. The two of them were sitting hunched in front of a screen, staring at a map of uptown all overlaid with colored dots, most of them green and red. Olmstead had a pad under the screen, and he was tapping away at it with his usual pianistic touch. “Don’t let that map fool you,” Gen advised Olmstead.

But they were on the hunt, so she sat in the corner and waited. Eventually they split off an inquiry and gave it to her to work on. She settled in and began to apply overlay maps to the snaps of the days when Rosen and Muttchopf had been kidnapped. Stacks within the great stack that was the city in four dimensions. An accidental megastructure, a maze they could reconstruct and then weave threads through. Outside the carrel the station emptied as people went home or out to dinner. They ate sandwiches brought in for them. More time passed, and the graveyard shift came in on a waft of cold air and bad coffee. On they worked.

Gen paused at one point to regard her assistants. So many hours they had spent together like this. Her youngsters were so much younger than she was. Twenty years at least, maybe more. She was fond of them; they were like nephews and nieces, but closer than that, because of the long hours they spent together. Her kids. Her surrogate children. So many hours. But after hours, off work, she never saw them.

Olmstead tapped a new screen out of the cloud, then glanced over at her. “Check this out. The company that bought the drone had pallets on the Riverside dock on October 17. Same day, a cruiser owned by—”

“Pinscher Pinkerton,” Gen said.

“No. Escher Protection Services. Remember them? They were working for Morningside when Morningside evicted the occupants of a property in Harlem they had bought. There were injuries, so they had to give enough information that I pierced the veil. They were brokering for a company called Angel Falls.”

“Good job,” Claire said.

“Morningside has certainly become the big dog uptown. The mayor’s group has used them, Adirondack used them. And now it’s fronting the bid on your building, right, Chief?”

“Right,” Gen said. “Wow, I wonder if it’s one of them. At this point I’m surprised anyone is using Morningside anymore, they’re looking kind of obvious.”

“Well, none of this is well-known,” Olmstead protested. “It took digging.”

“Let’s keep digging and see if we can find out who’s behind this offer. There must be other angles to get at that.” Then Gen saw the looks on their faces. “But not now! For now, let’s go get something to eat.”

The young officers nodded eagerly and went for their coats. Gen returned to her office to get hers. When they left the station she was wondering whether the kidnapping of Rosen and Muttchopf and the bid on the building and attendant sabotages were connected. They didn’t have to be. And now there were two security firms involved.

She didn’t know. It was cold out. She let her young cops lead the way to some all-nighter they liked up in Kips Bay. Skybridges were scarcer here, and the youngsters discussed taking a water taxi. Very cold night, but the canals were thawed out again, or covered by skim ice only. The chill woke them all up. Have to keep following the leads as best they could. Hungry now. Could sit and eat, listen to the youngsters shoulder the burden of talk. Of thinking.

f) Franklin

No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.

So, okay, it’s not quite that bad. I know how to trade. Get me in front of my screens and I can see spreads spreading or shrinking against the grain of the received wisdom as marked by the indexes. I can buy puts and calls and five seconds later get out with points in the black, and do it again and again all day and win on average more than I lose. I can dodge the tic-tac-toe situations, and the chess situations, and stick to checkers, stick to poker. I can play the game. When I’m feeling crisp I might dive into a dark pool and do a little spoofing, in and out before it becomes noticeable. I might even spoof that I’m spoofing and catch the backwash from that.

But so what? What is all that really? A game. Games. Gambling games. I’m a professional gambler. Like one of those mythical characters in the fictional Old West saloons, or the real Las Vegas casinos. Some people like those guys. Or they like stories about those guys. They like the idea of liking those guys, makes them feel outlawish and transgressy. That too might be a story. I don’t know. Because I don’t know anything.

So okay, back to square one. Quit the whining.

An investment is like buying a future. Not an option to buy, but a real future bought in advance of the event.

So what’s the future that the so-called real economy is offering here? What is this harbor, the great bay of New York, offering for investment?

An option on housing, let’s say. Decent housing in the submarine zone, in the intertidal.

Why is Joanna Bernal losing some liquidity there? It’s like she’s buying put options, making a bet that decent housing in the intertidal will be worth more later than now. Seems like a good bet.

What does Charlotte Armstrong want to avoid selling a call option on? She doesn’t want there to be an opportunity to buy the Met Life building. She didn’t offer that option and doesn’t like it that people are acting like she has.

What happens if there’s lots of decent housing in the intertidal? It increases a supply, which then decreases the demand on Charlotte’s place. Our place, if you want to put it that way. If I were to buy into the co-op that owns the place.

Okay.

So I went back up to the Cloister cluster to talk with Hector Ramirez again.

The trip up the Hudson was fun as always. Although the East River had refrozen and was now locked solid, the Hudson ice had broken up the week before, forming a giant ice jam at the Narrows that would slosh in and out on the tides until it either poured out to sea or melted. A fabulous slushy grumble from down there was sometimes audible all the way through lower Manhattan. The entire length of the Hudson had refrozen twice in the last week, then broken again on the tides. All that ice mostly had flowed south to join the jam, but upriver the breakup was still cracking off big chunks and floating them downstream. It was a time of year when it was obvious why it was called the mighty Hudson. The big ice plates floated around messing up traffic, shipping channels clogged with them, and all the barges and containerclippers had to dodge them like flocking birds, using the same algorithm and employing a lot of the cursing you hear among New Yorkers when they are cooperating with each other. Flocking birds curse each other in the same way, especially geese. Honk honk honk get outta my way what the fuck!

Coming in to the Cloister dock, I had to clunk my way through slush caught against the ice boom they had strung in a big circle around the dock, wincing at each hit to my unhappy hulls. Then through the downstream entry gate in the ice boom, taking my turn. While I was waiting, I looked over at the dirty snow covering the salt marsh where I had had my great epiphany. As I watched, a family of beavers came swimming right up to the ragged shore, big noses and heads on the parents, little ones on a line of four babies. They ducked into a beaver mound made of stacked branches and two-by-fours, just offshore from the bank. A low round house, not exactly neat, yet almost so. Constructed, for sure. Strong enough to handle the occasional bash from a passing ice floe. The beaver family disappeared inside, and I recalled from the museum displays that their doorway would be a tunnel underwater, leading up to an above-water level.

Housing in the intertidal.

Spring was springing.

I had scored a half hour with Hector, and once up on his flight deck I didn’t marvel at the view, awesome though it was; I didn’t want to waste time.

I tucked my pad into his tabletop and ran the prospectus for him. Vlade had put me in touch with his old city teammates’ diving co-op, the Bottom Feeders; they were good to go as divers. Vlade’s friend Idelba would serve as dredging subcontractor to them when needed, which, as Hector quickly pointed out, was likely to be often. An underwater drilling firm called Marine Moholes was willing to give us a few days when the bedrock was cleared of its overburden. It was an interesting question as to how many bollards would have to be placed to anchor a floating neighborhood, and how deep in the bedrock they would have to go, and I had gotten an engineering firm to give a preliminary answer: big anchors at the four corners, smaller ones between them: it came to about a dozen per block. How deep would a solid anchor have to go in the island’s schist and gneiss? Depended on how much pull on them there was going to be, also how many bollards you had. The engineers had weighed in, and now Hector and I dickered over that rather daunting depth for a while as if we were engineers. As often happened, I was surprised at how much he knew about the city. I had had to research all this, and here he was quoting depths of true bedrock off the top of his head, block by block.

The attachment cables were easier, as there were now any number of braids and bands made of new materials that were both stretchy and strong. I waxed eloquent on that front. “Hell you could hold the whole island in place with the latest fauxfascia. Its tensile strength was made for space elevators. You could tie the Earth to the moon with it.”

He just laughed. “Tides here max at about fifteen feet between low and high,” he said. “Usually more like ten. That’s what matters.” But that was well within the parameters of the cords I had researched, and he nodded as I pointed that out, and moved on to the platform rafts themselves.

Here again the basic templates were easy. Townships all over the world were floating around using the same tech already. Air pockets, basically; lots of them. Composite rafts, in which the plastics were as strong as steel, the glassy metals utterly saltproof, the diamond sheeting both waterproof and a little flexible. No problem to make a modular neighborhood, each unit the size of one New York city block, thus sticking to the notorious grid pattern already in place. Some of each raft would lie below water, but they were very buoyant, and the buildings on them could stack three or four stories tall before their weight got to be too much. Basements down in the rafts.

All the blocks would then float up and down on the tides and currents together. Underwater framing to keep the canals between them open and navigable, bumpers to keep the outer ones from bumping too hard into stationary neighbors in a storm. Saltproof and rustproof. Photovoltaic paint, farms on the roofs, water capture systems, water tanks on the roofs in the traditional NYC style, lifestraw purification filters, all standard operating procedure everywhere in lower Manhattan. Both water and power would be semiautonomous, maybe even autonomous.

It looked good.

Hector Ramirez thought so too. “You’ll need the city to approve the redevelopment, and reconfirm the old zoning, and maybe get some funding relief. The congressperson for that neighborhood should be on board too. Election this fall, right?”

“I guess so.”

He snorted at my cluelessness. “Talk to all the candidates, or at least the top dozen. It still matters.”

“Even in the wet zone?”

“Sure. It’s a federal issue, the intertidal. You’ll need the Army Corps of Engineers to weigh in. They like to make rulings, play with their toys.”

I suppressed a sigh but he heard it anyway.

“Fucking shut up and deal!” he said. “You get out of trading, you move into the real world, it’s a mess. It doesn’t get easier than trading, it gets harder! Finance is simple in comparison.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. But you’ll learn. Meanwhile, this is good. It’s so good you’ll take a huge amount of shit for it, and probably someone will steal it from you, do it first and take credit for it. So you’ll have to move fast.”

“I will. And you’ll go in on it?”

“Shit yes. We need this stuff, I know that. Go have some fun with it.”

“Thanks.”

He laughed at my expression. Maybe I was looking daunted. “This is going to eat up your life, youth. It’s going to fuck you over. You should consider quitting WaterPrice so you can afford the time to go fully nuts.”

So I floated back down the Hudson feeling good. Looking for more beavers, dodging ice floes that ranged in size from spilled ice cubes to monstrous icebergs. The tabular bergs, flat on top, served as aircraft carriers for big flocks of Canada geese.

I felt good when I got to Pier 57 and tied off in the marina, and walked up to the big sunset room and saw the gang there, Jojo included. Then I still felt good, but nervous.

Jojo was friendly but not excessively so. Not personal. Eventually she did allow me to talk to her on the side, away from the others, and I told her some of what I had just managed with Hector.

But she frowned. “You know that that’s my idea, don’t you?”

I felt the shock of that statement buckle my knees a little. I had to close my mouth, and as I did I realized my face was numb. “What do you mean?” I said. “I told you about it when I got it started. I’ve been working this up with Hector Ramirez and the people in the Met, Charlotte and Vlade and the others. You weren’t even there!”

“I told you I was doing this,” she said crisply, and turned her back on me and went back to the others. I rejoined them, but there was no way to talk about it there, and she was pleasant to the others, and drinking fast, but cool to me. Would not meet my eye directly.

Fuck! I was thinking as I groveled around trying to nudge her back out to the rail to talk freely again. What the fuck!

But she wouldn’t be nudged. She stuck fast to the end of the bar; I would have had to detach her elbow from it and hip her out the door to get her to move. That was not going to happen. She was tied to the mast. I’d have had to drag her out of there, shout in her face that she had never, never, never spoken of intertidal raft housing stock to me, not ever, and she knew it!

So why had she said it?

Convergent evolution?

I thought it over as I regarded the adamantine side of her face. Jojo and me as the fucking Darwin and Wallace of Manhattan redevelopment? Both coming up with the same idea when faced with the same problem and the same tool kit of solutions? The octopus eye staring at the human eye? And which one was I?

But I had told her about it. I had shared the idea with her in the hope of impressing her with my desire to do real-world good, which had begun as an act performed for her, and now had gotten into me somehow. And yet now she was claiming it was her idea?

Well, shit. It was possible she had forgotten that conversation, or turned it into an exchange of remarks in which she had figured things out for herself. Even in my very bad mood I could see that this could have occurred. She had definitely been the first to mention she wanted to build something, rather than just trade; then I had tried to do the same, to impress her with our soulmatedness, to get back into her pants. So I had come up with what seemed to me now a pretty obvious solution to the problem, which maybe she had taken and reinvented after hearing me hint vaguely about it. While meanwhile I had forged ahead at speed. So now she was upset by that, and instead of establishing our soulmatedness I had grossly alienated her. Although really, since it had been my idea, her claiming it was her idea was her problem. Indeed an indication she was possibly a liar and an idea thief, the kind of shark that one ran into all the time in finance.

A shark whom I wanted so badly. Because even while I was glaring at her stubbornly nonresponsive profile, she looked wonderful.

Well, fuck fuck fuck. Oh the humanity.

There was an implication here, which kept rearing its ugly head as I thought it through, that I was being an idiot in this mess, and only now coming late to the obvious: that she had been just having a night out with me, a fun night without meaning, followed by a breakup and then a mean claim on my idea as hers. Making her somewhat awful. If I had it right, or even close. But even if I did, I couldn’t really take it on. I had just put together a really good deal; she had just called me a thief, a purloiner of intellectual property; I still wanted her. Meaning I was a fool. A fool getting angrier by the second.

So after rolling my eyes at Inky and downing a last concoction he had thrown together to ease my pain, I went out to the bug and took the Thirty-fourth canal in to Broadway, and then down Broadway in the late-afternoon boat parade, the traffic jam as aquatic Mardi Gras. Then east on Thirtieth to Madison, stopping at the dockdeli at Twenty-eighth and Madison to get a float-by Reuben sandwich, because I really didn’t want to go down to the dining hall that evening and eat the co-op’s virtuous mush of the day. After that I was humming blindly along when I nearly ran into that Stefan kid, in his same rubber dinghy, looking anxiously over the side as he held an air tube in his hand.

“God damn you guys,” I exclaimed as I reversed my motor to come to a rapid halt. “You are just trying to get drowned.”

“No!” he said, looking over the side. “At least I’m not.”

“Well, your buddy down there is an idiot. What are you doing this time?”

“This was 104 East Twenty-sixth street,” he said, pointing down.

“So?”

“This is where Herman Melville lived.”

“Moby-Dick?”

He was sadly impressed at my immense knowledge of American literature. “That’s right! He was a customs inspector on the docks down at West Street, and he lived right here.”

We were surrounded by the big buildings between NoMad and Rose Hill, block-sized stone-and-glass monsters, rising sheer from the canal to the first setbacks high overhead. Nothing less like the nineteenth century could be imagined, there were no little remnant buildings tucked between the monsters to give a glimpse back into the Holocene.

“Jesus, boy. Pull your buddy up by the air hose, I want to talk to him. He’s not under that diving bell of yours again, is he?”

“Well yeah, he is. We went up and got it.”

“That’s not okay,” I said, weirdly angry. “You’re in a heavily trafficked canal here, and your bud is not going to find anything of Herman Melville’s down there! So yank him up before he croaks!”

The boy looked chastened, but also a little comforted to have some support for his own evident feeling that this was a lunatic quest on his bud’s part. Roberto the Reckless. He tugged three times, which I supposed was the signal for the maniac to resurface.

“You don’t have any radio contact with him?”

“No.”

“Good God. Why don’t you just dive off the Empire State Building and get it over with.”

“Don’t they have a jumper screen up there?”

“Okay, so what you’re doing is more dangerous than jumping off the Empire State. Come on, get him up out of there.”

Stefan hauled up hard on their diving bell’s rope, happily still attached to it this time, and after a while the smaller one appeared from the murky surface of the canal, looking like an otter with a human face.

“Come on,” I snapped, “get your ass out of there. I’m going to tell your mom on you.”

“Don’t got a mom.”

“I know that. I’m going to tell Vlade.”

“So what.”

“I’m going to tell Charlotte.”

That got their attention. Mulishly Roberto pulled himself back on board their rubber boat, and as he shivered bluely I helped them haul up their pathetic diving bellette, then towed them around the corner into the bacino, then into the Met boathouse.

“Vlade, tie these idiots up, I almost killed them again, they were diving on Twenty-sixth right in the middle of the canal.”

“Not the middle!”

“Close enough, so I want to give them over to Charlotte and watch her spank their asses.”

“Sounds a little kinky to me,” Vlade said. “And Charlotte is out.”

“Keep them tied up till she gets back.”

“Boys,” Vlade said.

The drowned rats bared their teeth at me and retreated into Vlade’s office. I went upstairs and changed clothes, still fuming about Jojo. I was about to go out again when Charlotte pinged me and I remembered the boys. I pinged back that I would join them and headed on down.

When I got there I saw that the boys had dried off and were now sitting in front of Vlade’s screens looking like they were in the principal’s office hoping to get expelled. Charlotte had clearly tired out her eyes by rolling them too much, and was now staring at the ceiling pondering other matters. Vlade was working.

“You fucking juvenile delinquents!” I said as I walked in, just to wake everyone up.

“It’s not against the law to dive the canals,” Roberto protested. “People do it all the time!”

“City workers,” Charlotte said heavily.

“You were obstructing boats taking a right from Madison onto Twenty-sixth,” I said. “I know because I almost nailed you. And you were back under that so-called diving bell, which is going to kill you if you don’t get rid of it. And who knew you were down there? And there is nothing left of Herman Melville’s house, I can tell you that for sure. That was three centuries ago and it’s a high-rise district now, so no way there’s anything left of the 1840s or whatever.”

“1863 to 1891,” Stefan said. “And we were going for the foundations. We were going to cut through the street just off the curb, and angle down to where the house was. The radar shows all kinds of house beams right under the street.”

“House beams?”

The boys put on their mulish look.

“Schliemann at Troy,” Charlotte suggested. “What’s-his-name at Knossos.”

“Archaeology?” I exclaimed. “Nostalgia?”

“Why not?” Roberto said.

“There was a lost manuscript,” Stefan added. “Isle of the Cross. A lost Melville novel.”

“Under the street?”

“They found Billy Budd in a shoe box. You never know.”

“Sometimes you know. There is not a lost Melville novel under the Twenty-sixth Street canal!”

Sullen silence in Vlade’s office. Vlade continued to work on his accounts. Feral madness fumed off Roberto like a whiff of skunk.

Charlotte heaved a big sigh.

“You guys are going to get killed,” I insisted. Then, to Charlotte and Vlade: “What the fuck, are these guys wards of the building or not?”

They both shook their heads.

“Wards of the city?”

At this Charlotte pursed her lips. “They don’t appear to have ever been processed by the city.”

“Meaning what?”

“There’s no record for them. They have no papers.”

“We are free citizens of the intertidal,” Stefan asserted.

“Where are your parents again?”

“Orphans,” Stefan explained.

“Where are your guardians?”

“No guardians.”

“What about foster parents?”

“No.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“I grew up with my parents in Russia,” Stefan said. “They died after we moved here, of the cholera. After that I moved out. The people I was with didn’t care.”

“What about you?” I said to Roberto.

He glared at Vlade’s screens.

Stefan said, “Roberto never had any parents or guardians. He brought himself up.”

“What do you mean? How does that work?”

Roberto stood up from his chair and said, “I take care of myself.”

“You mean you don’t remember your parents?”

“No, I mean I never had any. I can remember back to before I could walk. I always took care of myself. At first I crawled around. I guess I was around nine months old by then. I lived under the aquaculture dock at the Skyline Marina, and ate what fell through the dock to the underdock, where the clammers keep their stuff. There were old nets and stuff I could sleep in down there. Then after I learned to walk, I took stuff off the dock at night. People leave things there all the time.”

“Is that possible?” I said.

He shrugged. “Here I am.”

We all stared at him.

I looked over at Charlotte. She shrugged with her eyebrows. “We need to get you guys papers,” she said.

“Can you adopt them?” I asked her, but also including Vlade.

She gave me a look as if I were suggesting she tame water moccasins.

“For why?” Vlade said.

“To get some kind of leverage over them!”

Snorts from all four of them.

“All right,” I said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when Roberto here goes out there and drowns. In your last moment I want you thinking, Damn, I should have listened to that Franklin guy.”

“Not gonna happen,” Roberto affirmed.

“What will you be thinking?” Stefan asked.

“Not gonna happen,” Roberto grimly insisted.

“Lose the so-called diving bell,” I suggested, giving up on them. I went to the door. “Find a new hobby.”

“In lower Manhattan?” Roberto said. “What would that be exactly?”

“Build drones. Sail. Grow oysters. Climb skyscrapers. Look for marine mammals in the harbor, I just saw some beavers today. Whatever! Anything that keeps you on the surface. And we should probably lock some home detention ankle bracelets on you guys so we can tell where you’ve gone. Or find your bodies.”

“No way,” the boys said in chorus.

“Way,” Charlotte said, transfixing them with her look. It was like sticking pins in butterflies. Even Roberto quailed. “You live here now,” Charlotte reminded them. “In residence begins responsibilities.”

“We can still go out and do stuff,” Stefan explained to Roberto. “We’ll still have our boat.”

Roberto looked at the floor. “Yes to losing the diving bell,” he said. “No to no fucking ankle bracelets. I’ll light out for the territory if you try that shit.”

“Deal,” Charlotte said.

“Let’s go get that bell,” Vlade suggested heavily to the boys. “I don’t like you fooling with that thing. I had colleagues drown at work, and they were good at diving. And you’re not good at it. And—I knew people like you who drowned too. It’s bad when it happens, for the people left behind.”

Something in his voice caught the boys’ attention. Charlotte reached out and put a hand to his arm. He shook his head, a black expression taking him far away. After a while the boys followed Vlade out into the boathouse looking chastened, maybe even thoughtful.

I went upstairs with Charlotte. She looked tired and walked with a slight limp. On the common floor she glanced at me. “Dinner?”

“I already bought a sandwich,” I said, “but I’ll eat it with you.”

“That’s fine. Tell me how things are going.”

She filled a plate in the dining room line, and we sat down in the din and the crowds jamming the long parallel tables filling the room. Hundreds of voices, hundreds of lives; it was exactly like being alone together, but louder. While we ate I told her about the view from the top of the Cloister cluster, and how Hector Ramirez had agreed to join the funding for my plan for redeveloping part of the intertidal. Then I described the plan in brief.

“Very nice,” she said. “You’ll need city approvals, but given the state of those neighborhoods, you should be able to get them.”

“Maybe you can help us figure out who to talk to.”

“Sure. I can put you in touch with some old friends.”

“They work in your building?”

“Yes, either there or at the mayor’s office.”

“You worked at the mayor’s office?”

“Once upon a time.”

I must have been giving her a look, because suddenly she waved a hand. “Yes, I began in Tammany Hall.”

“I heard you interned for Machiavelli,” I said.

She laughed. She did have some white hairs salting the black. “That’s what you’ll need now. Do you think these raft apartments could be put in one at a time, as infill, rather than knocking down a whole neighborhood?”

“Yeah sure. They’re modular. It would be more expensive.”

“Even so. Ever since Robert Moses, knocking down whole neighborhoods has been frowned upon.”

“This could be piecemeal. But everything scales in this kind of project. Maybe we could tell them about Peter Cooper Village.”

“Good idea. Or Roosevelt Island.”

“Whatever seems nicest.”

“Of course. But precedents. That this kind of thing has been done before.” She poked around in the remains of her salad. “So how does this match up with what we were talking about before, of popping the intertidal housing bubble?”

“That’s where we short. This is where we go long.”

“And you still think a householders’ strike could cause a crash.”

“Yes. But look, if you were to do that, you would want to have a government in place that was ready for it. Because when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You would gather all the big banks and investment firms. They’ll be panicked but they’ll also be saying, give us all the money we’ve lost or the whole economy crashes. They’ll demand it. But this time the feds have to say, Yeah sure, we’ll save your ass, we’ll reboot finance with a giant infusion of public money, but now we own you. You’re now working for the people, meaning the government. Then you make them start making loans again. They become like arms of a federal octopus. Credit unions. At that point finance is back in action, but its profits go to the public. They work for us, we invest in what seems good. Whatever happens, the results are ours.”

“Including the disasters?”

“We already own those! So why not? Why not take the good as well as the bad?”

Charlotte leaned over and clinked her glass of water to mine. “Okay,” she said. “I like it. And since the current head of the Federal Reserve is my ex-husband, I see a little edge there. I can talk it over with him.”

“Don’t warn him,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I meant.

“No?” she said, seeing my uncertainty.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

She had a quick smile. “We can figure that out later. I mean, they do have to know about it. It should be a well-known plan, maybe. We can talk it over. I want to hire you. Better yet, I want you to volunteer your services. And run for the executive board of the co-op.”

Now it was my turn to smile. “No. Much too busy. And I’m not even a co-op member.”

“Buy in. We’ll cut you a deal.”

“I would deserve it, if I were to be so foolish as to be on the board. But I have to admit, I’ve been thinking of buying in. Maybe you’ve talked me into paying full price.”

“Even so you should be on the board.”

“It would be a busman’s holiday.”

“You don’t run anything in your job! You’re just a gambler! You play poker!”

I made an unhappy face. “I was thinking it was more. You said you liked my plan.”

“The building project, yes. The analysis, yes. I like those. The gambling, no.”

“It’s trading. It’s creating market value.”

“Please, you’re going to make me sick. You’re going to make me throw up.”

“Get over to the compost bin then, because that’s the way the world works.”

“But I hate it.”

“It doesn’t care that you hate it. As you have surely noticed by now.”

A quick wince of a laugh. “Yes, I’ve noticed. At my advanced age. Which is now clonking me on the head, actually. I’ve got to go get some sleep. But listen, I like these plans of yours.” She stood, picked up her plate, patted me on the head with her free hand as if I were a golden retriever. “You are a very nice young man.”

“And you are a very nice old woman,” I said before I could stop my mouth.

She smiled cheerfully. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to condescend. You are a fucking piece of work, how’s that.” She walked to the elevator door grinning. When she got in the elevator she was still smiling.

I stared at the closed elevator door, feeling puzzled. Pleased. At what, I didn’t know.

g) Charlotte

Charlotte found herself actually pleased to be giving her ex Larry a call to ask for another coffee date. Given everything that had happened lately, it was sure to be interesting. So she pinged him in the cloud, wondered to him if he had time for another et cetera.

He wrote back to say he’d tell his people to look for a time, and an hour later wrote again to say he could do it at the end of the following week, coffee at the sunset hour again, but could they do it in Brooklyn Heights because he had to be there for a thing. She wrote back and said fine, and then he wrote back again and suggested they tack an early dinner onto afternoon coffee, he knew a place on top of one of the Brooklyn Heights towers, unpretentious, open-air, he had a reservation, blah blah. She wrote back to say fine.

As it happened, on the day of their date the East River was still frozen over, but it was predicted to break up soon. Midharbor was a clutter of ice plates headed down to the jam at the Narrows, where they were grinding their way out on the ebb tides, then floating back in on the flood tides, and freezing from time to time in whatever configuration they happened to be in. This had gone on throughout the short days of beastly February, but now March was lambing in.

On the appointed day, Charlotte got in one of the cable cars running up thick steel lines from the East Village to the Brooklyn Bridge’s western tower. When that rising car had carried her over the water to the tower, she got out and walked across the old bridge with the rest of the well-bundled New Yorkers crossing the river. The river ice just below them was patterned like a jigsaw puzzle, and only broke open to black water past Governors Island. The wind whistled in the cat’s cradle of wires overhead in its aleatoric aeolia, surely the greatest music ever heard—if not the music of the spheres, then surely by definition the music of the cylinders.

It was cold waiting in the line for another cable car, this one running from the bridge’s east tower over to Brooklyn Heights. Definitely time to deploy icebreakers and get the vapos back in action, everyone in the line agreed, with their noses white, their lips blue, their teeth chattering. Brooklyn Transit Authority was going to get slapped with a class-action suit, someone remarked, assuming any of them survived to sue. If you or any of your loved ones has died from freezing on the Brooklyn Bridge, call this number.

The Bridge to Heights zipline was long, so by the time she was walking in the shadows of the superscrapers she was a little late. She hurried the last part of the way, and arrived out of breath at the building Larry had suggested. And there he was at the door too, so that was good, though it meant he got to see her huffing and puffing, red-cheeked, nose running, hair wild. Oh well. His grin was the same old grin, friendly as ever, with just that touch of sardonic mockery to worry her.

The elevator took forever, even ascending like a rocket. Once it decanted them onto the rooftop restaurant, glass-walled with heaters glowing over the tables, they settled at a corner overlooking the river, with a view down and across to the massed wall of old skyscrapers at the southern tip of Manhattan. It was one of the great views of the city, and Charlotte suspected Larry had chosen it with her in mind, thinking it would please her, which it did. They shoved the little table against the glass and sat next to each other so they could both enjoy the view. Wall Street’s wall of monsters looked like swimmers on polar dip day, clustered knee deep in the ice. Over near the kitchen a string quartet was quietly eerieing something out of Ligeti.

The oysters were from a bed right under their building, they were told, grown inside filter boxes. Icy-cold vodka was a drink Charlotte despised, but it helped wash down the even weirder oyster flavor. She could pretend sophistication, but why bother; Larry knew she would only be pretending. So after two oysters she shifted to retsina and fried calamari, more to her taste as well as her style. He stuck with the oysters and manfully finished them off.

Over their meal, which consisted of Cobb salads for both of them, way better than anything the Met’s kitchen could assemble, Charlotte tacked her way to the point of this meeting.

“So, Larry—if this intertidal real estate bubble pops on your watch, do you have a plan?”

He made his eyes go round, his way of saying he was not really surprised but could pretend to be if that would please her. “What makes you think it’s a bubble?”

“The prices going up while the buildings are falling apart. It’s the end of the line for a lot of wet buildings.”

He gestured across the dirty craquelure of the East River. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”

“Those are the skyscrapers, Larry. They’re footed in bedrock. The buildings to the north of them aren’t anywhere near as strong, but that’s where people live.”

“Even so, the indicators aren’t there.”

“The indicators are financial rather than physical. People cook those figures to make it look okay. They play the rubrics involved, but the reality in the water is completely different.”

“You think so.”

“I do. Don’t you?”

He squinted. “I see a little spread between the Case-Shiller and the IPPI. Might be a sign of what you’re saying.”

“And the rating agencies are still kissing ass, so you won’t get any warning there. They never saw a bubble they didn’t triple-A.”

“Now that’s true,” Larry admitted with a little frown. “Can’t seem to get them to behave.”

“It’s called conflict of interest. They’re still getting paid by the people they’re rating, so they give the results they’re paid to give. That will never change.”

“I suppose not.” He regarded her curiously. “You’ve been looking into this, I see.”

“Yes. So what will you do when it happens? Who will you be? Edson? Bernanke? Herbert Hoover?”

“Have to play it by ear, I guess.”

“But that’s a terrible idea. People freak out, you’re in the hot seat, then you start thinking about it?”

“It’s always worked before,” Larry quipped. But his eyes were watching her more closely.

She said, “After the First Pulse, Edson just tried to hunker down and wait it out, and we got the lost sixties, the famines, and the big crash after the Second Pulse. In the 2008 collapse, Bernanke had studied the Great Depression and knew he couldn’t just hunker down. He threw money into the breach and they crawled back from the brink. It was only a recession rather than a crash.”

Larry was nodding.

“And remember, one of the things they did then was nationalize GM. They let Lehman Brothers go down without saving it, and then watched the whole financial world follow it down, and they realized they couldn’t do that with the real economy, so they nationalized GM, took it over, got it back on its feet, sold it back to its shareholders later, and pretty much came out even. Right?”

Larry kept nodding. He was watching her closer than ever.

“So look,” Charlotte said, and leaned toward him. “When the bubble pops, nationalize the banks.”

“Yikes,” Larry said. He put the vertical line between his eyebrows that indicated how worried he would be, if he were worried. “What do you mean?”

“When this bubble pops, they’ll all be hung out there again, and the bigger they are, the more leveraged they’ll be. And they’re all interconnected. And after the Second Pulse, the reforms that got pushed through made the banks keep some skin in the game, so they can’t securitize their housing loans the way they used to. So when the bubble pops this time, no one will know what paper is still good, and they’ll all panic and stop lending, and we’ll all be in free fall. You know that. It’s a fragile system, based on mutual trust that it’s sane, and as soon as that fiction breaks down, everyone sees it’s crazy and no one can trust anyone. They’ll run screaming to you begging for help. You’ll be the only thing between them and the biggest depression since the last one.”

Now Larry was watching her so intently that he forgot to put on any fake expressions. Charlotte saw that and almost laughed, but instead she kept her focus and pounced:

“So then you go to the president and explain that once again the American taxpayer has to bail out these fucking idiots, to the tune of maybe twenty trillion dollars this time. She won’t like that news, right?”

“Right.”

“She might not just go catatonic, like Bush did with Bernanke, but she will freak out, and she’ll want you to have a plan. So that’s when you tell her to nationalize the biggest banks and investment firms. Bail them out by buying them out. At that point the American people are in control of global finance. In the cosmic battle between people and your oligarchy over there”—gesturing at Wall Street and the superscrapers uptown—“the people will have unexpectedly gained the upper hand. You can print money, restore confidence, crank the handle and get things going again, and after that, the ridiculous profits from finance will belong to the people. Also you can aim finance at solving people’s real problems. Congress can reform the financial system based on laws you write for them to pass, and you can quantitatively ease the American taxpayer instead of the banks. Print money and give it out to the bank of Mr. and Miz Taxpayer. It will be the biggest judo flip of power since the French Revolution!”

Larry shook his head, trying for one of his old expressions, this one meant to express faked admiration for Charlotte, an expression she remembered very well. “You are still such a dreamer!” he exclaimed.

“Not at all! It’s a plan, a practical plan.”

“It’s like you’re a communist or something.”

“Yeah yeah, Red Charlotte.”

“Charlotte Corday, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know, didn’t she kill one of the revolutionary leaders?”

“Marat, right? But for being a backslider, if I recall? For not being revolutionary enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s have it that way. You’ll stab me in the bath if I don’t hold the line.”

“If you don’t save the world when the chance comes. Don’t just put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall like all the other times. They’ll just fuck things up again, as soon as they can. Because they are greedy idiots. There’s not an idea in their heads except to line their pockets and head for Denver.”

He nodded. “Or take back the intertidal,” he suggested. “Buy your SuperVenice out from under you.”

Charlotte had to admit it: her ex was smart. “Well, that too.”

“I was wondering why you were all of a sudden interested in finance, having never been so before. Like not even a little.”

“It’s true. That offer on our building is looking more and more like a hostile takeover bid. They came back with a second offer last week, offering twice as much as last time! And I asked around lower Manhattan, and we’re not the only ones it’s happening to. We can’t tell who it is, because they’re using brokers, but for sure it’s happening. Gentrification, enclosure, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, I realized that it can’t be fought by any one building or any one aid association. It’s a global problem. So if there’s to be any chance of fighting it, it’s got to be at the macro level.”

“So to save your building from a hostile takeover, you suggest I overthrow the world economic order.”

“Yes. But let’s call it saving the world from another Great Depression. Or shifting the noose from our necks to the parasites’ necks.”

“Hard,” Larry noted.

“Hard, because it’s politics. And finance has bought a lot of the politicians and a lot of the laws. So it’s getting harder. But when the next crash comes, you could help to change that. It’s an inflection moment. You’ll go down in history as the first chair of the Fed with any balls.”

“Volcker was pretty good.”

“He had brains. I said balls. All Volcker’s best ideas came after he was out of office and couldn’t enact them. They were afterthoughts. He was like Greenspan, almost. Oh my God, I made such a mistake thinking Ayn Rand had all the answers! Except Volcker had some ideas.”

“Maybe so.”

“So try some forethought for once.”

“I usually try to.”

“So there you are. Do it this time. These are the times that try men’s souls.”

“Okay okay. No Tom Paine, please. Charlotte Corday is already bad enough. I see the knife there in your handbag. You can stop caressing it.”

She had to laugh. She reached up and gave his upper arm a quick squeeze. Time to lay off. She didn’t want to add that she also had a plan to pop the bubble on Larry’s watch. He was already freaked out enough, both at what she was saying and that it was her saying it. She was aware that he could have tripped her up at any point with technical questions, that he was allowing her to talk at the level of history and political economy rather than economics per se. He too was interested at that level, and interested that she was now paying enough attention to these issues that what he did was important to her. That had never been true before. They hadn’t had a conversation like this one in—well, never. This was a first.

Now it couldn’t go much further without her foundering on her own ignorance. What did it mean to nationalize the banks? He would know, she didn’t. But happily, at that very moment a huge cracking noise, like a first clean crack of thunder, announced that the ice in the East River below them was breaking up.

Everyone in the restaurant rushed to the west and north windows and cried out at the sight: white ice cracking apart and heaving up in immense jagged plates, then splashing back down into black water and rushing south toward Governors Island and the Narrows. Why all at once? Why now? A neap tide had hit its flood height and turned, someone said, a few hours earlier, and the current was now ebbing hard, the water dropping from under the ice. This was how it happened; this was how it had happened two years ago, and five, and eight. And back in the Ice Age. Spring was springing, right before their eyes; looking around at the flushed faces Charlotte saw that it was an erotic and even a sexual high, a March madness indeed. The string quartet had changed gears and was now ripping something ferocious from Shostakovich. Lips were red, eyes shining, voices thrilling with the energy of the breakup. Springtime equaled sex. Down on the river black water leaped out from under the white verge and tossed giant white plates end over end. Never had the East River looked so much like a torrent.

Larry had the same look as the others, his pale freckled Ivy League skin flushed as if he had been embarrassed or run a race. It wasn’t for her, or for the river; he was thinking about her plan. It was mixing in his mind with the awesome sight of the breakup, the rearing ice plates rolling in black water like the rush of history itself. He was feeling how it would feel to be part of that, to be riding that chaos. She reached up and briefly pinched his cheek. She had used to lick his ear when he was coming and he would go wild. That guy was still in there; he liked to feel good.

“That’s right buster,” she muttered, feeling her own cheeks burn, and sat back down. She glanced up at him, a bit abashed at herself, at the sight below, at her forwardness with him, at the strength of her sudden memories, breaking out like the black torrent.

“Think it over,” she said. “Be ready for it. Get all your ducks in a row.”

“Among those ducks would be members of Congress I could count on,” he remarked as he sat down. He was smiling his little smile. “Dessert?”

“Yes,” she said uneasily. “Dessert and cognac.”

“Indeed.”

h) the citizen redux

If the Earth’s atmosphere were compressed to the density of water, it would form a coating on the Earth about thirty feet thick. As it is, it extends some eleven miles into the sky and then gets very diffuse above that, shifting from the troposphere to the stratosphere. As far as human year-round habitation, that habitable zone reaches up some fifteen thousand feet, so say three miles; above that people tend to die. So think about a layer of cellophane wrapping a basketball, and then remember that you’re still thinking too thick, when it comes to the atmosphere and the Earth.

Meanwhile it’s air, quite tenuous compared to water, and easy to move around over the surface of the Earth, as the Earth spins like a top in its circling of the sun. One spin a day (which is what a day is, duh) gets you a surface speed at the equator of about a thousand miles an hour, so really the wonder is that the air remains as still as it does, but inertia, drag, et cetera, means that usually the jet streams top out at around a hundred miles an hour, pouring mostly eastward, in patterns not unlike water coming out of the end of a hose left on the ground, in other words chaotic patterns, but clustered around strange attractors so that there are in fact patterns. But it’s light stuff, air, and though it moves somewhat like ocean currents as it flows around the Earth, its motion is wilder.

This has always been true, but when you add heat to the system everything has more energy, and so it behaves like it did before, but even more so. So weather has always been wild and full of anomalies, but after the rise in global temperatures following the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by humanity’s industrial civilization, weather got even wilder. For a long time, there was 0.6 watt per square meter more energy coming in to Earth than was leaving, and this cooked things, and the pot began to boil. Note that this new extra energy doesn’t disallow cold events just because the average is hotter; the increase in energy increases also the violence of the whirlpools of air that form, and a big enough whirlpool whirls the air itself away from its center, making a low-pressure area, and the land under that absence of air can become stupendously cold. So: stormy weather of all kinds, including hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, lightning storms, blizzards, droughts, heat spells, downpours, cold fronts, high-pressure ridges, and so on. You get the picture.

So, in the twenty-second century, all over the world people were taking shots of extreme weather that wrecked whatever they had built, including the crops they were growing and the soil they grew it in. At sea level, raised to its current height just forty years before, the tenuous brittle fragile rebuilding efforts of humanity and all other living species were particularly vulnerable to superstorms in the new categories established, sometimes called class 7, or force 11, or motherfucker supreme. In the tropics a lot of construction had been dubious to begin with, and with the added storm intensities, and the ramshackle nature of the postpulse reconstruction, new weather events could simply smash coastal cities to smithereens. Confer Manila 2128, Jakarta 2134, Honolulu 2137. These were extremely sobering examples of the death and destruction now possible when an overwhelming storm hit an underwhelming infrastructure.

New York, it has to be said, compared to most coastal cities of the world, has an infrastructure like a brick shithouse. It is set in rock, and built of steel and various composites so strong that the rock is often the first thing to break. But rock does break, and not all the city is equally built to code. Lot of ad hockery in the various recovery and renovations made in the submerged zone and the intertidal. So it is not invulnerable. No human construct is.

Then recall also, if your retention still allows such a feat after so many dense pages, the peculiar geography of the Bight of New York relative to the Atlantic and the globe entire. Hurricanes, more violent than ever before, swirl up from the Caribbean, or really the horse latitudes, and as they move north at a medium speed, they spin counterclockwise when seen from space, such that the winds in the leading edge of the storm are pushing westward, and can be extraordinarily fast and powerful. Then recall the topography of the Bight, also the way that New York is an archipelago of islands in an estuary, with the Narrows connecting the estuary to the Atlantic at the bend point of the Bight, with a back door also on the east side of the estuary where Long Island Sound connects to the East River by way of Hell Gate.

What it adds up to is a recipe for a storm surge, yes indeed. A monster hurricane shoves a great deal of the Atlantic north and east into the Bight, New Jersey banks all that slug of water through the Narrows, and more gets shoved hard east along Long Island Sound until it floods through Hell Gate into the East River. Meanwhile the Hudson never stops draining a rather immense watershed, pouring its own flow down from the north, a flow that can max as high as two hundred thousand cubic feet per second. Thus a moment in a hurricane comes when water is coming into the bay from three directions, and there is nowhere for it to go but up. If by chance all this happens in a neap tide, it even gets a tug from the moon, such that upward becomes in effect the path of least resistance. So up the water goes. Storm surge of 2046’s Hurricane Alfred, eighteen feet, big disaster. Hurricane Sandy in 2012, storm surge of twelve feet, big disaster. Storm surge for the unnamed hurricane of 1893, thirty feet. Utter wreckation.

And now, recall, and this you should be capable of as it is the overriding omnipresent fact of life on Earth today, that sea level is already fifty feet higher than it was pre-pulse. Add a storm surge to this pre-existing condition, and what do you get?

You’ll only find out when it happens.

i) Stefan and Roberto

The late-spring days got longer and the rooftops burst all green. Every living thing budded and the turbid water smelled like shit, the intertidal oozing goo and reeking at low tide, its slimy mud stippled by oyster beds and old dock pilings. The great bay was so crowded with boats that the traffic lanes for big ships were well defined by the absence of little boats in them. Sun blazed off water from the half hour after dawn to the half hour before sunset, and close to shore the dark blue of the rivers turned black with silt or yellow with runoff, or prismatic with leaking gas and oil. The humidity was so great that the air grew visible, a fetid white mist weighing on the city, and the idea that just a couple months before the bay had been ice and the air like liquid nitrogen seemed incredible. Climate in the city, always notorious, a scandal, had in the twenty-second century gone nova; now the luminous miasmatic summers ranged from subtropical to supertropical, and the mosquitoes were bloodthirsty and disease-laden. The concrete chess tables grew as hot to the touch as ovens. People stayed indoors, or if they had to go out, stumbled or boated around stunned and appalled, feeling there must be a fire somewhere nearby. No one could quite believe that this city of dreams could veer so melodramatically, like a skyvillage flitting from pole to equator to pole in a matter of weeks. People begged for a blizzard.

Stefan and Roberto didn’t care. They were on a mission to locate Herman Melville’s grave, and maybe haul the gravestone back to the Madison Square bacino and mount it as a dock piling on the Met dock, at its northeast corner closest to where Melville had lived. That was their plan and they were sticking to it. Mr. Hexter had told them that the gravestone was big, possibly a four-foot-by-four-foot slab of granite, certain to weigh hundreds of pounds, but they weren’t going to let that stop them. They had borrowed a dock dolly when no one was looking, and their boat rode very high on the water. If worse came to worst, they could figure out the transport issues after they located it.

So this was in the nature of a reconnaissance, and they were happy motoring across the shallows of the Bronx, on the hunt again, dodging nasty roof reefs and blobs of black glop floating on the surface with the seaweed. The drowned Bronx was almost as extensive as the drowned parts of Brooklyn and Queens, which was saying a lot. Its current shoreline slurped many blocks north of where it had used to be, and old creek ravines and even a substantial river valley had refilled, splitting the borough with a couple north-south bays, the west one running right up to Yonkers, drowning the old Van Cortlandt Park and sloshing at high tide up and over Woodlawn Cemetery.

But not over Melville! Nautical writer though he had been, his grave still stood on dry land, many graves in from the high tide line. Mr. Hexter had determined this with his maps and assured them it had to be true. At first they were disappointed it wasn’t under water, but as they had given over their diving bell to Vlade, they became reconciled and decided it was a good thing. It would be their first terrestrial project.

Now they beached their boat on a wrack-lined slope of bushes, tied it off on a dead tree trunk, and walked east over the brush and litter of the abandoned cemetery to where one of Mr. Hexter’s folded maps had an X on it. After some hunting around they concluded that there were few things weirder than an abandoned graveyard, in this case half brushy meadow and half dank forest, filled with downed branches and trash and row upon row of gravestones, like a miniaturized model of uptown, with the occasional larger monument looming here and there. From time to time they stopped to read some of the longer inscriptions, but then they came on one memorializing one George Spencer Millet, 1894–1909, whose inscription read:

“Oh man,” Roberto said. “And in our building! That is terrible.”

“It’s like something you would do,” Stefan noted.

“No way! I’d just let them kiss me, shit. He was an idiot.”

After that they decided to quit reading inscriptions. They moved on, feeling the heavy stare of all those semilegible names and lives. There weren’t any cemeteries in lower Manhattan, and they found being in one less fun than they had expected.

But then they came on Melville. His was indeed a hefty gravestone, with a scroll carved on it. About four feet tall and almost that wide, and a foot or more thick. To each side of the carved scroll were carved leaves on vines, and Melville’s name was at the bottom, and therefore almost obscured by mud. It was a dismal place. His wife’s stone stood next to his, and on the other side were other family members, including his son Malcolm, who had died young.

“It’s big,” Stefan said.

“We should take it back to his neighborhood,” Roberto insisted. “No one comes here anymore, you can see that. He’s completely forgotten here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You think it’s illegal?”

“I think it’s not nice. His body is here, his wife’s body, all that. People might come here looking for him and think he got vandalized.”

“Well… shit.”

“Maybe we could find someone else whose grave is underwater now.”

“Someone else who lived near us? And whose ghost Mr. Hexter saw?”

“No. It would have to be some other someone else. Or maybe we could make memorial signs to put on the buildings around the marina, or on the dock pilings. Or a map, Mr. Hexter would love that. All that stuff he’s told us about, Melville, baseball, the Statue of Liberty’s hand, all that.”

“We live in a great neighborhood.”

“It’s true.”

“But I want to pull something out of the drink! Or the forest. Something we’ve saved.”

“Me too. But maybe Hexter is right. Maybe after the Hussar it’s all downhill.”

Roberto sighed. “I hope not. We’re only twelve.”

“I’m twelve. You only think you’re twelve.”

“Whatever, it’s too soon to be going downhill.”

“We’ve got to change careers, I guess. Change our focus. You were gonna get drowned at some point anyway, so maybe it’s a good thing.”

“I guess. I liked it, though. And there are jobs down there, like what Vlade did.”

“True. But for now. Maybe we could look up rather than down. There are those peregrine falcons nesting on the sides of the Flatiron, and lots of others.”

“Birds?”

“Or animals. The otters under the docks. Or sea lions, remember the time sea lions took over the Skyline Marina and all of them got on one boat and sank it?”

“Yeah, that was cool.” Roberto rubbed his hand over Melville’s gravestone, thinking it over.

Suddenly it was darker, and cooler. A black cloud had come up from the south and was covering the sun. The air was just as steamy, maybe more so, but because of the cloud they were in shade now, and it looked like it would only get cloudier. A big black-bottomed wall of cloud, in fact, rolling in from the south.

“Thunderhead?” Stefan said. It was too much of a wall to be a thunderhead. “We better get back.”

They hustled back to their boat, untied and hopped in, and headed down the middle of the channel that split the Bronx. The wind was in their face and they slapped over wave after wave, knocking sheets of water left and right as they crashed down onto the waves’ back sides. They ducked down to give the boat a lower profile. Wind and waves both came out of the south, so they could head straight into them. That was lucky, as the tops of the waves were now tumbling forward in the wind, creating major whitecaps. It would have been difficult or impossible to run sideways across waves as high and broken as these. Even heading straight into them was making the boat bounce up hard as it crashed into the white water, and they both moved to the back of the boat and sat on each side of the tiller, watching anxiously as the short white walls came rushing at them and the boat made its improbable tilt and lift. The slushy roar was so loud they had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. The uptilt in the bow that was built into every zodiac’s design proved their salvation time after time, but even so, waves only a few feet higher would certainly rush right over the bow onto them, or so it seemed.

Still, buoyancy was a marvelous thing, and for now they shot up over each wave in turn. And surely the waves couldn’t get much bigger, not here in the Harlem River anyway, where they had no fetch to speak of. The boys could hardly believe they were as big as they were, nor that the wind had gotten so strong so fast. Well, summer storms happened. And now they were seeing that the waves did have a bit of fetch, coming up the East River and curving into the Harlem. They were really bouncing hard.

“We should have waited it out!” Stefan shouted as one particularly big white wall tilted them almost vertically before it passed under them, and the bow then flopped down so hard they had to hold on to avoid being tossed forward.

“We can make it.”

“Maybe we should turn around.”

“I don’t know if the stern would rise as well as the bow.”

Stefan didn’t reply, but it was true.

“Maybe we should take our wristpad with us next time.”

“Maybe. We’d only ruin it though.”

“Look at that one coming!”

“I know.”

“Maybe we have to turn!”

“Maybe so. The boat will stay floating even if it’s filled with water, we know that.”

“Will the motor keep running if it gets wet?”

“I think so. Remember that time?”

“No.”

“It did one time.”

The next big wave shoved them up and back until they were vertical, and they both instinctively threw themselves forward against the bottom to help knock the boat forward. Even so they hung there upright for a long sweeping moment, hoping that the wave wouldn’t capsize them backward and dump them in the roil. Instead the boat flopped forward again and slid fast down the back side of the wave. But more were coming, big white walls, and the wind was howling.

“Okay, maybe we should come about. We don’t want to capsize.”

“No.”

“Okay, so…”

Roberto was staring ahead, round-eyed. Seeing his look, Stefan grew afraid. All the waves were about the same distance apart, just as always with waves. They had seven or eight seconds between each impact. It wasn’t a lot of time to turn around, but they couldn’t afford to get caught crossways.

“Next one,” Roberto said. “I’ll start the turn as soon as the crest is under us. Toward you.”

“Okay.”

The next wave was about the same size as all the others. Not a monster, but close enough. It lifted them, the boat tilted nearly upright, they threw themselves forward. As the bow dropped forward under the impact of their bodies, Roberto twisted the tiller toward Stefan, and as the boat slid down the back side of the wave he gunned the motor to its max. The boat turned sharply, it was impressively tight, but not super fast, and the next wave was coming. Nothing to do but watch the disaster unfold.

The broken wall of water hit when they were about three quarters turned to it, and Roberto pulled on the tiller so that as the boat skidded forward it straightened in orientation to the wave, the stern rising slower than the bow had, they were in the broken foam and it seemed they would be swamped, but aside from a splashing they were spared, as the boat was buoyant and the wave orderly. The boat rode this wave for a while, and then the wave passed under them and they were motoring back toward the Bronx at full speed, pushed by the wind and shoved time after time by the broken waves, which passed just barely under them, splashing them but not swamping them, the waves moving somewhat faster than the boat. But they weren’t getting swamped, and the Bronx shallows, with all their cluttered broken buildings and rooftops, were quickly approaching. It was a field of waves and bubbles and black roof reefs and white lines of foam, and looked horrible. But they could dart in some gap, then quickly get into the lee of something protruding from the water. And the waves would quickly dampen as they moved into the wreckage of the borough.

“We’re going to make it,” Roberto declared. It was the first thing he had said since they came about, many waves ago.

“Looks like it,” Stefan agreed. “But what then?”

“We wait it out.”