The two boys looked around to see if anyone was watching. Still no one. They ducked into the brownstone’s open door and made their way up a moldy battered staircase.
Fifth-floor walk-up. Floorboards creaking underfoot. Smell of mildew and mold and unemptied chamber pots. “Essence of New York,” Roberto noted as they shuffled down the dark hallway to the end door. They knocked on it using the old man’s code for his friends, and waited. Around them the building creaked and reeked.
The door opened and the wizened face of their friend peered up at them.
“Ah, gentlemen,” the man said. “Come in. Thanks for dropping by.”
They entered his apartment, which smelled less than the hallway but inevitably did smell. Quite a bit, actually. The old man had long since gotten used to it, they assumed. His room was very shabby, and crowded with books and boxes filled with clothing and crap, but it was orderly for all that. The piles of books were everywhere, often to head height or above it, but they all were foursquare piles, with the biggest books at the bottom, and all the spines facing out for easy reference. Several battery and oil lanterns perched on these stacks. Cabinets had drawers that they knew were full of rolled and folded maps, and the room was dominated by a big cubical map cabinet, chest high. A sink in the corner had a bulb of water draining down through a jumbo lifestraw into a bowl resting in the sink.
The old man knew where everything was and could go to anything he wanted without hesitation. He did sometimes ask them for help in moving books, to get to a large one at the bottom of a pile, but the boys were happy to oblige. The old man had more books than anyone they knew, more in fact than the total of all the other books they had ever seen. Stefan and Roberto didn’t like to talk about this, but neither of them could read. They therefore liked the maps most.
“Have a seat, gentlemen. Would you like some tea? What brings you here today?”
“We found it,” Roberto said.
The old man straightened up, looked at them. “Truly?”
“We think we did,” Stefan said. “There was a big hit on the metal detector, right at the GPS spot you gave us. Then we had to leave, but we marked the spot, and we’ll be able to find it again.”
“Wonderful,” the old man said. “The signal was strong?”
“It was pinging like crazy,” Roberto said. “And the detector was set for gold.”
“Right under the GPS spot?”
“Right under it.”
“Wonderful. Marvelous.”
“But the thing is, how deep could it be down?” Stefan asked. “How deep will we have to dig?”
The old man shrugged, frowned. His face made him look like a child with some kind of wasting disease. “How far down can the metal detector detect?”
“They say ten meters, but it depends on how much metal, and how wet the ground is, and things like that.”
He nodded. “Well, it could be that deep.” He limped over to his map cabinet and pulled out a folded map. “Here, look at this.”
They sat on each side of him. The map was a USGS topographical map from before the floods, of Manhattan and some of the surrounding harbor area. It had both elevation contour intervals and streets and buildings—a very crowded map, on which the old man had also drawn the original shorelines of the bay in green, and the current shorelines in red. And there in the south Bronx, inland from the shore as drawn by the USGS mapmakers, but underwater when considering both the red and the green lines, was a black X. Hexter tapped it with his forefinger, as always; the middle of the X was even a little worn.
“So, you know how I told you before,” he said, his usual preface. “I told you before, the HMS Hussar takes off from down near Battery Park where the British have their dock. November 23, 1780. One hundred fourteen feet long, thirty-four feet wide, sixth-rate twenty-eight-gun frigate, crew of about a hundred men. Maybe also seventy American prisoners of war. Captain Maurice Pole wants to go through Hell Gate and into Long Island Sound, even though his local pilot, a black slave named Mr. Swan, advises against it as being dangerous. They get most of the way through Hell Gate but run into Pot Rock, which is a rock shelf sticking out from Astoria. Captain Pole goes down to inspect and sees a giant hole at the bow of the ship, he comes up saying they have to ground the ship and get everyone to shore. The current is carrying them north, so they aim for either Port Morris on the Bronx shore, or North Brother Island, called Montressor’s Island at the time, but glug. Down they go. It all happens too fast and down goes the Hussar, in such shallow water that the masts are still sticking out into the air when it hits bottom. Most of the sailors get to shore alive in boats, although there was a rumor for a while that the seventy American prisoners all drowned, still chained belowdecks.”
“So that’s good, right?” Roberto asks.
“What, that seventy Americans drowned?”
“No, that it was shallow where it went down.”
“I knew you meant that. Yes, it’s good. But very soon afterward, the British got chains under the ship’s hull and dragged it around, trying to pull it back up. But it came apart and they never got the gold. Four million dollars of gold coins to pay British soldiers, in two wooden chests bound with iron hoops. Four million in 1780 terms. The coins would have been guineas or the like, so I don’t know why they always give the value in dollars, but anyway.”
“Lots of gold.”
“Oh yeah. By now that amount of gold would be worth a gazillion.”
“How much really?”
“I don’t know. I think a couple billion.”
“And in shallow water.”
“Right. But it’s murky, and the river moves fast in both directions. It’s only calm there at ebb and full tide, about an hour each, as you boys know. And they broke the ship trying to haul it up, so the ship was distributed up and down the riverbed, probably. Almost certainly. The gold chests probably didn’t move very far. There they are, down there still. But the river keeps changing its banks, ripping them down and building them up. And in the 1910s they filled in the Bronx shore in that area, made some new docks and a loading area behind them. It took me years in the libraries to find the surveying maps that the city workers made before and after that infill. Plus I found a map from the 1820s that showed where the British went when they came here and tried to pull the ship up. They knew where it was, and twice they tried to salvage it. For sure they were going for the gold. So I was able to put all that together and mark it, and later I figured out the GPS coordinates for the spot. And that’s what you went to. And there it was.”
The boys nodded.
“But how deep?” Roberto prompted, after Hexter seemed to be taking a little nap.
Hexter started upright and looked at the boys. “The ship was built in 1763 and had twenty-eight cannons. One of which they pulled up and put in Central Park, and only found out later it had a cannonball and gunpowder rusted inside it. They had to defuse it with a bomb squad! So anyway, sixth-raters like that had a single deck, not that high off the water. About ten feet. And the masts were still sticking out of the water, so that means it sank in something between fifteen and say forty feet, but the river isn’t that deep so close to shore, so say twenty feet. Then they filled in that part of the river, but only a few feet higher than high tide, no more than eight feet. And now sea level is said to be about fifty feet higher than back then, so, what, you’re hitting bottom at forty feet down?”
“More like twenty,” Stefan said.
“Okay, well, maybe the shore there was more built up than I thought. Anyway, the implication is that the chests will be thirty or forty feet below the current bottom.”
“But the metal detector detected it,” Stefan pointed out.
“That’s right. So that suggests it’s around thirty feet down.”
“So we can do it,” Roberto declared.
Stefan wasn’t so sure. “I mean, we can, if we go back enough times, but I don’t know if there’s room for that much dirt under our diving bell. In f
act I know there isn’t.”
“We’ll have to circle the hole, move the dirt off in different directions,” Roberto said. “Or put it in buckets.”
Stefan nodded uncertainly. “It would be better if we could get scuba gear and dive with that. Our diving bell is too small.”
The old man regarded them, nodding in thought. “I might be able to—”
The room lurched hard to the side, tumbling the stacks of books all around. The boys shrugged them off, but the old man was knocked to the ground by a stack of atlases. They threw these off him and helped him back to his feet, then went digging for his glasses, him moaning all the while.
“What happened, what happened?”
“Look at the walls!” Stefan said, shocked. The room itself now tilted like one of the remaining stacks of books, and through one bookshelf and its books they could see daylight, and the next building over.
“We gotta get out of here!” Roberto told Mr. Hexter, pulling him upright.
“I need my glasses,” the old man cried. “I can’t see without them.”
“Okay but let’s hurry!”
The two boys crouched and threw books around carefully but swiftly until Roberto came upon the glasses; they were still intact.
Hexter put them on and looked around. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s the building, isn’t it.”
“Yeah it is. Let’s hurry and get out of here. We’ll help you down.”
Buildings in the drink collapsed all the time, it was a regular thing. The boys had tended to scoff at the bad stories told about such collapses, but now they were remembering how Vlade always called the intertidal the death zone. Don’t spend too much time in the death zone, he would say, explaining that that was what climbers called mountains above twenty thousand feet. As the boys spent lots of time in the intertidal and were now diving the river too, they tended to just agree with him and let it be, maybe considering themselves to be like climbers at altitude. Tough guys. But now they were holding the old man by the elbows and hurrying him along the sideways-tilted hall as best they could, then down the stairs, one step at a time, had to make sure he didn’t fall or else it would take even more time, sometimes placing his feet by grabbing his ankles and placing them. The stairwell was all knocked around, railings down, open cracks in walls showing the building next door. Smell of seaweed and the anoxic stink of released mud, worse than any chamber pot. There was a booming from outside, and any number of shouts and bangs and other sounds. Shafts of light cut through the hazy air of the stairwell at odd and alarming angles, and quite a few of the stairs gave underfoot. Clearly this old building could fall over any moment. The oozy stench filled the air, like the building’s guts or something.
When they got down to the canal-level doorway, now a parallelogram very ugly to see, they emerged onto the stoopdock to find that the canal outside was filled with brick and concrete rubble, wood beams, broken glass, crushed furniture, whatever. Apparently one of the twenty-story towers on the next block had collapsed, and the shock wave of air, or the wave of canal water, or the direct impact of building parts, or some combination of all these, had knocked over a lot of smaller buildings. Up and down the canal, buildings were tilted or tumbled. People were still emerging from them, gathering dazedly on stoops or piles of rubble. Some pulled at these piles; most just stood there looking around, stunned and blinking. The turbid canal water bubbled, and was disturbed by any number of small wakes: rats were swimming away. Mr. Hexter adjusted his glasses when he saw this, and said, “Fuck if it isn’t rats leaving a sinking ship! I never thought I’d see that.”
“Really?” Roberto said. “We see it all the time.”
Stefan rolled his eyes and suggested they get going somewhere.
Then Hexter’s own building groaned immensely behind them, and Stefan and Roberto picked up the old man by the elbows and moved him as fast as they could over the wreckage in the canal. They lifted him over impediments, huffing at his unexpected weight, and helped him through the watery sections, sometimes going thigh deep but always finding a way. Behind them the building was shrieking and groaning, and that gave them strength. When they got to the canal’s intersection with Eighth and looked back, they saw that Mr. Hexter’s building was still standing, if that was the word for it; it was tilted more heavily than when they had escaped from it, and had stopped tilting only because it was propped by the building next to it, crushing the neighbor but not completely collapsing it.
Hexter stood staring at it for a while. “Now it’s like I’m looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Never expected to do that either.”
The boys stood holding the old man by the arms.
“You okay?” Stefan asked him again.
“I suppose getting wet like this can’t be good for us.”
“We got a bottle of bleach in our boat, we’ll spray you down. Let’s catch the vapo down to Twenty-third. We gotta get out of here.”
Stefan said to Roberto, “We’re taking him to the Met?”
“What else can we do?”
They explained the plan to Mr. Hexter. He looked confused and unhappy.
“Come on,” Roberto said, “we’ll be fine.”
“My maps!” Hexter cried. “Did you get my maps?”
“No,” Roberto said. “But we have that GPS position in our pad.”
“But my maps!”
“We can come back and get them later.”
This didn’t comfort the old man. But there was nothing for it but to wait for the vaporetto and try to stay out of the rain, which luckily had reduced to a drizzle. They were about as wet as they could get anyway. From one area of the vapo dock they could see the immense pile of wreckage that marked the fallen tower; it appeared to have pancaked onto its lower floors and then tipped to the south, distributing the higher floors across two or three canals. People in boats had stopped right in the middle of Eighth to stare at the collapse, causing a big traffic jam. It was going to take a while for the vapo to make its way down to them. There were sirens in the distance, but there were always sirens in the distance; it wasn’t clear that these sirens were in response to the collapse. Presumably any number of people had been crushed and were lying dead in the wreckage of the tower, but none of them were visible.
“I hope we don’t turn into pillars of salt,” said Mr. Hexter.
The skyscrapers of New York are too small.
suggested Le Corbusier
Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. We find an inverse relationship between the income share accruing to the rich (top 20 percent) and economic growth. The benefits do not trickle down.
noted the International Monetary Fund
years later
h) Franklin
Jojo and I set up a chatbox on our screens, and we didn’t talk that much about business in it, although we did both follow some of the same feeds, because those were the feeds anyone needed in order to trade in coastal futures. Mostly it was just a way to stay in touch, and it gave me a glow to see it there in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. And sometimes we did discuss some movement of interest in the biz. Like she wrote,
Why’s your IPPI dropping like this?
A Chelsea tower melted just now.
It’s that sensitive?
That’s my index for u.
Braggart. Are u shorting it now?
Got to hedge, right?
You think it will drop more?
A little. At least until Shanghai brings it back up. Catch a wave meanwhile.
Aren’t you long on intertidal?
Not so much.
I thought ownership issues were clarifying.
Intertidal isn’t just ownership uncertain.
Physical?
Right. If ownership solidifies on properties that have melted, so what?
Ah. That’s factored into the index?
Yes. A sensitive instrument.
Just like its inventor.
Thanks. Drinks af
ter work?
Sure.
I’ll come get you in Jesus.
Heavenly.
So I worked on through that afternoon heavily distracted by our evening’s date and my vivid memory of her Oh oh, enough to make me look tumescently at the clock, wondering how this night would go and checking the tide and moon charts, and thinking of the river after dark, the melvillemood of the Narrows at night, mysterious in moonlight.
My IPPI’s New York number had indeed dipped briefly at the news of this building collapse in Chelsea, but now it had stabilized and was even inching back up. A sensitive instrument indeed. The index, and the derivatives we had concocted at WaterPrice to play on it, were all booming in a most gratifying way. Helping our success was the fact that the continuous panicked quantitative easing since the Second Pulse had put more money out there than there was good paper to buy, which in effect meant that investors were, not to put too fine a point on it, too rich. That meant new opportunities to invest needed to be invented, and so they were. Demand gets supplied.
And it wasn’t that hard to invent new derivatives, as we had found out, because the floods had indeed been a case of creative destruction, which of course is capitalism’s middle name. Am I saying that the floods, the worst catastrophe in human history, equivalent or greater to the twentieth century’s wars in their devastation, were actually good for capitalism? Yes, I am.
That said, the intertidal zone was turning out to be harder to deal with than the completely submerged zone, counterintuitive though that might seem to people from Denver, who might presume that the deeper you are drowned the deader you are. Not so. The intertidal, being neither fish nor fowl, alternating twice a day from wet to dry, created health and safety problems that were very often disastrous, even lethal. Worse yet, there were legal issues.
Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It’s crazy to read, like Roman futurology: