Many smaller buildings had been crushed by the debris from the tower, and beyond those many others were knocked aslant. Absent outer walls revealed rooms that were empty or furnished, but either way, pathetic.
“This whole neighborhood is wrecked!” Jojo said.
I could only nod.
“Lots of people must have died.”
“That’s what they said. Although it looks like a lot of the brownstones were empty.” I turned and motored us on toward Eighth. “Let me think this over at Reef Forty. I need a drink.”
“And some oysters.”
“Sure.”
I piloted the bug up Eighth, and as we passed Thirty-first I heard a shout.
“Hey mister! Hey mister!”
“Help!”
It was the two kids I had almost run down south of the Battery.
“Oh no,” I said, and kept the throttle forward.
“Wait! Help, help, help!”
This was bad. I would have ignored them and hummed on anyway, but Jojo was watching me with a startled expression, surprised no doubt that I would just motor on, ignoring such a direct appeal. And the boys were holding up an old man between them, an old man who looked shattered and was not even as tall as they were. As if he had been cut off at the knees. They were all soaked, with mud streaking one boy’s face.
I cut the motor. “Hey. What are you guys doing up here?”
“We got wrecked!”
“Mr. Hexter’s house got knocked over back there!”
“Aha.”
The taller one said, “Our wristpad got wet and stopped working, so we were walking to the vapo. Hey can we use your pad to make a call?”
“Or can you give us a ride?” the smaller and lippier one said.
The old man between them just stared over his shoulder at his neighborhood, looking bereft.
“Is your friend okay?” Jojo asked.
“I’m not okay,” the old man exclaimed, without looking at her. “I lost everything. I lost my maps.”
“What maps?” I asked.
“He had a collection,” the smaller boy said. “All kinds of maps of the United States and all over. But mostly New York. But now he needs to get to somewhere.”
“Are you hurt?” Jojo asked.
The old man didn’t reply.
“He’s beat,” the bigger boy said. “We’ve come a long way.”
I saw the look on Jojo’s face and said, “All right, get on board.”
They made a mess of my cockpit as well as my plans. I offered to take them back to the old man’s building, thinking that with the evening already so muddied I might as well go completely philanthropic, but all three of them shook their heads at once.
“We’ll try and go back later,” the smaller boy said. “For now we need to get Mr. Hexter to where he can dry out and all.”
“Where’s that?”
They shrugged. “Back at the Met, maybe? Vlade will know what to do.”
“You live in the Met on Madison Square?” Jojo asked, looking surprised.
“Around there,” the littler kid said, looking at her. “Hey, you live in the Flatiron, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You do?” I said.
“That’s right,” she said again.
“So we’re neighbors!” I said. “Did I know that?”
“I thought you did.”
By now I was confused and thinking hard, and I’m sure it showed. Possibly I had not mentioned where I lived; we had mostly spoken about work, and I hadn’t known where she lived. After our night out on the Governors Island anchorage I had dropped her off at her office at her request, assuming, I realized, that she lived in that building. And then I had boated home.
“So can I borrow your pad?” the littler kid asked Jojo. She nodded and held out her arm, and he tapped on it and then said, “Vlade, our pad got soaked, but can you let us dry off in your office maybe? We have a friend whose building got knocked over.”
“I wondered if you guys were over that way,” the super’s voice said from Jojo’s pad. “Where are you now?”
“We’re at Thirty-first and Eighth, but we got picked up by the guy with the zoomer who lives in your building.”
“Who’s that?”
The boys looked at us.
“Franklin Garr,” I said.
“Oh yeah, hi. I know who you are. So, can you bring them back to the building?”
I glanced at Jojo and then said to the pad, “We can bring them back. They have a friend with them who needs a little help, I’d say. His house got knocked around when that Chelsea tower fell down this afternoon.”
“Sorry to hear. Someone I know?”
“Mr. Hexter,” the littler kid said. “We were there visiting him when it happened.”
“Okay, well, come on over and we’ll see what we can do.”
“Sure,” I said. “See you there.”
So I headed the bug to Broadway and down the big canal through the early-evening traffic to the Met, feeling balked but putting a good face on it. It was a sorry replacement for what I had had in mind for the evening, but what can you do. Our rescuees dripped blackly onto the floor of the cockpit, and the boat rode low in the water, tilting heavily as I guided it through the dense evening traffic on the canals. The rule for small boats was three hulls, three people, but not this evening.
Finally I idled across the Madison Square bacino to the Met’s boathouse door and waited for the super to wave us in. No desire to piss him off with this menagerie aboard.
He poked his head out and nodded.
“Come on in. You boys looked like drowned rats.”
“We saw a bunch of rats swimming away!”
“This big building next to Mr. Hexter’s place melted, and the wave knocked us sideways!”
The super shook his head lugubriously, as was his way. “Roberto and Stefan, spreaders of chaos.”
They liked this. “Can you put Mr. Hexter in one of the temporaries?” one of them asked. “He needs to get warmed up and cleaned up. Get some food and rest, right, Mr. H?”
The old man nodded. He was still in a fog. It made sense; people squatting in the intertidal were usually at the end of their options.
The super was shaking his head. “We’re full, you know that. Charlotte’s the one to talk to about that.”
“As always,” the smaller boy said.
Jojo looked like she was kind of enjoying all this, but I couldn’t see why.
“She’ll be back in an hour or so,” the super said. “Meanwhile there’s the bathrooms off the dining room, he could clean up there. And I’ll see if Heloise can rustle up a place for him, if Charlotte says it’s okay.”
I hummed into the boathouse and everyone got off on the interior landing. The kids led their ancient friend up the stairs toward the dining hall, and I looked at Jojo.
“We could take off?” I suggested.
“Since we’re already here,” she said, “I’d like to go over to the Flatiron and change. Then maybe eat here? I’m kind of tired.”
“All right,” I said, feeling uneasy. She was definitely not in the same mood she had been in when I picked her up, and I wasn’t sure why. Something about the kids, the old man? Me? It was spooky. I wanted her to be like she had been last time. But there was nothing to do but go along and hope.
I let the super hang up my boat to get it out of the way, asking him to put it where I could get to it fast this evening, thinking that Jojo might still change her mind. The super just pursed his lips and got the bug into his crane’s sling without replying. I didn’t know what the other residents saw in him. If it were up to me he’d be fired yesterday. But it wasn’t up to me, because I couldn’t be bothered to waste time dealing with the building’s many boards and committees. I got enough of trading at work and was happy to just rent an apartment in a nice building overlooking a bacino I liked that was not too near where I worked, so I could get a zoom in on a daily basis. I could more than affo
rd the non-co-op-members’ surcharge, even though this was shamelessly massive, a hit designed to gouge noncompliants like me. I sometimes hoped someone would challenge this dual price arrangement in court; it struck me as highly prejudicial and possibly illegal, but no one had done it so far, and it occurred to me as I waited for Jojo to come back from the Flatiron, fuming at the way the evening was going, that anyone who cared enough to waste their time challenging this rule would be too poor to rent in the building in the first place. They were price selecting for wealthy indifference from their nonmember rentals, a smart move, probably the plan of the board chairwoman, a notorious social justice warrior both at work and here at home, a control freak in the same class as the super, a woman who had been running the board and thus the building for I wasn’t sure how long, but far too long; she had been chair when I arrived. Naturally she and the super were buddy-buddy.
And lo and behold here she was herself, in conversation with the boys and the old man: Charlotte Armstrong, looking frazzled and intense, vivid and imposing. My day was complete. I followed them all into the dining room, keeping back so I didn’t have to join them any sooner than necessary. But then Jojo appeared at the common room entry, having walked over on the skybridges linking us to One Madison and then the Flatiron, or so I presumed. She headed for the boys before she even saw me, so there was no choice but to follow and join them.
I said hi, and the chairwoman was quite nice to me, in a way that Jojo noticed. I had to lift my eyebrows innocently and then admit that it was true, I had once again saved the wharf rats from a dismal fate.
“Shall we eat?” I asked, being ravenous, and some of us nodded, while others kept asking the now-homeless old man from Chelsea how he was feeling. Chairwoman Charlotte and Jojo followed me to the food windows in the dining hall, and I flashed my meat card to the clerk while listening to the two women talking. They were sounding fairly stiff and uncomfortable; city social worker and financier, not a great match. Around us in the line were many faces I knew and many I didn’t. Too many people lived in the building to actually get to know anybody, even if many faces became familiar.
The clerk zapped my meat card and I went to the tray of carnitas and filled a tortilla and rolled it. You had to work for any meat you ate in this dining hall; it was a way to create a lot of vegetarians and leave enough meat for the rest of us, because few could stomach, ha ha, raising a piglet to food age and then killing it, even with the super-humane zappers we have, essentially an instantaneous lights-out. Lots of people go anthropomorphic and decide it’s easier to eat fake meat or become vegetarian, or eat out when they want meat. I myself had found by direct experimentation that the unavoidable anthropomorphizing of the farm’s pigs had no restraining effect on my fatal hand, because if you think of a pig as a human it is a really ugly human and probably appreciates you putting it out of its misery. So I usually thought of them as the super, or my uncle, and enjoyed the taste of them later in the week, not a qualm as I chomped, as really I have done them nothing but favors, from farm to fork, from birth to mouth. They wouldn’t even have existed without me and the rest of the carnivores around me, and had had a great couple of years along the way, better than many humans in this city got.
“Eating meat again?” Jojo asked as we met at the salad bar.
“Yes I am.”
“Do you do the qualification thing on the meat floor of the farm here?”
“I do. It definitely makes it more real, more of a commitment. Kind of like being a trader, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Just joking.”
And of course it was quite stupid of me to joke about our biz given the way the evening was going, but all too often I can shoot before aiming, especially in the hours after a long day in front of the screen. I finish those sessions and my sense of discipline relaxes, and then odd things can come out of my mouth. On many evenings I’ve noticed that. So I reminded myself to be cool on this night, and followed Jojo back to our table, entranced again by the set of her shoulders, the fall of her hair. Damn those boys anyway.
We reconvened at a single table: the boys and their ancient friend; Jojo and Charlotte the chairperson; the super, whose name was Vlade, very apropos, Vlade the Impaler, face like a Ukrainian executioner; and me. It was just a couple too many people to be able to have a single conversation easily, not least because there were a few hundred more people in the big dining hall, and it was therefore noisy. Especially since a group in the corner was playing Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” by clacking a set of variously sized spoons and singing wordlessly. Still, everyone started by asking the old man how he was feeling, and Charlotte, hearing his story and squinting unhappily as she no doubt contemplated our building’s nonexistent or even negative vacancy rate, offered him a temporary place to stay, “until you can get back into your place or find something more suitable.”
“Can’t he just stay here?” the littler kid asked her.
Charlotte said, “We’re full right now, that’s the problem. And there’s a waiting list too. So all I can really do is offer one of the temporary spaces. Even those are full, and not that comfy over the long haul.”
“Better than nothing,” said the littler one. He was Roberto, I was learning. Either Roberto or Stefan.
“Is his own building a goner?” I asked, to show interest.
The old man winced. The taller of the two boys, this was probably Stefan, said, “It’s tilted like diagonal.”
The old man groaned at this. He was still shell-shocked.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked him. Jojo didn’t seem to notice this, but Charlotte gave me a grateful look as I rose. I was certainly going to refill my own glass too. The old man nodded as I picked up his glass. “Red wine, thanks,” he said. He would learn to avoid the red if he stayed here more than a couple of days, but only by experiencing its mouth-puckering tannins directly, so I nodded and walked over to fill his glass, and refill mine with the vinho verde. Both were from the Flatiron’s small roof vineyard, which spilled picturesquely down both of its long sides, but their verde was so much finer than their roter gut. I came back with both hands full and asked, “Anyone else, while I’m up?” but they were listening to the old man describe his building’s meltdown and only shook their heads.
“The main thing is to get my maps,” he concluded, looking at the boys flanking him. “They’re in cabinets in my living room. I’ve got a copy of the Headquarters map, and a whole bunch of others. They can’t get wet, so the sooner the better.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Roberto told him, with a little headshake to his ancient friend that said Don’t talk about this now. I wondered what that could be about; possibly they didn’t want Vlade thinking about them going back to the intertidal. Indeed the super was frowning, but the taller boy saw this and said, “Come on, Vlade, we’re there every day.”
“It will have a completely different bottom now that building has melted,” he said.
“We know, we’ll be careful.”
They kept reassuring him and the old man. Meanwhile Charlotte and Jojo were getting acquainted. “And what do you do?” Jojo asked.
Charlotte frowned. “I work for the Householders’ Union.”
“So, doing the same thing you’re doing for Mr. Hexter here.”
“Pretty much. How about you?”
“I work at Eldorado Equity.”
“Hedge fund?”
“That’s right.”
Charlotte did not look impressed. She made a quick reappraisal of Jojo, then looked back at her plate. “Is that interesting?”
“I think so. I’ve been financing the rebuilding in Soho, it seems to be going really well. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your people have been housed there, it has a low-income element. And up until a year ago it was just a shell, like most of that neighborhood. It takes investment to bring a drowned neighborhood back out of the drink.”
“Indeed,” Charlotte said, squinting
slightly. She seemed willing to entertain the notion, which made sense, considering her job. The city was always going to need more housing than it had, particularly in the submerged zone.
“Wait, I hear you sounding kind of positive about investment finance,” I said. “I need to get this on pad.”
Charlotte gave me a dirty look, but Jojo’s was even worse. I focused on the old man.
“You’re looking pretty tired,” I told him. “Would you like some help getting to your room?”
“We haven’t worked out where that is yet,” Charlotte said.
“So maybe we better?” I said.
She gave me a look that indicated she was not rolling her eyes only by dint of extreme muscular control.
I smiled. “The hotello in the farm?” I suggested.
“Isn’t that a crime scene?” Vlade asked.
Charlotte shook her head. “They’ve done what they need to there. Gen told us we could use it again. But does it stay warm in those?”
“My room was freezing,” the old man said. “I don’t care about that.”
“Okay then,” Charlotte said. “That would be easiest, for sure.”
The boys were looking at each other uneasily. Possibly they didn’t want to be tasked with being their friend’s roommates. Charlotte seemed unaware of their unease. Possibly they lived in or around this building without her knowing about it. Now was not the time to ask them. I was getting the feeling that nothing I could say at this table was going to go over well, and it seemed like my best option was to eat and run, with a good excuse, of course.
My plate was empty, and so was the old man’s. And he did look beat.
“I’ll help get you up there,” I said, standing up. “Come on, boys.” Their plates had been empty seconds after they sat down to them. “You can finish what you began.”
Vlade nodded at them and joined us as we headed toward the elevators, leaving the two women behind. I would have given a lot to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, but it was not to be; and if I had been present the conversation would not have been the same. So with a qualm I passed by Jojo and said, “See you later?”