They nodded.
“You ever been out here before?”
They shook their heads.
“And I thought I was local,” Vlade said. “Well, good. Here, see that barge and tug, about halfway down Coney Island? That’s where we’re going. That’s my friend Idelba doing her job.”
“Is she about halfway done with it?” Roberto asked.
“Good question. You’ll have to ask her.”
Vlade approached the barge. It was tall and long, accompanied by a tug that looked small in comparison, though the tug dwarfed Vlade’s boat as they drew alongside. There was a dock tied to the barge that Vlade could draw up to, and a crew of dockmen to grab their painter and tie them fast to dock cleats.
Vlade had called ahead, feeling more nervous than he had felt for many years, and sure enough, there was Idelba now, standing at the back of the group. She was a tall dark woman, Moroccan by birth, still rangy, still beautiful in a harsh frightening way. Vlade’s ex-wife, and the one person from his past he still thought about, the only one still alive anyway. The wildest, the smartest—the one he had loved and lost. His partner in disaster and death, his comrade in a nightmare for two. Nostalgia, the pain of the lost home. And the pain of what had happened.
Idelba led them up a metal staircase to a gap in the taffrail of the barge. From the top of the stairs they could look down into the hull of the barge and see that it was about a third full with a load of wet blond sand, a little mottled with seaweed and gray mud. Mostly it was pure wet sand. A giant tube, like a firefighter’s hose but ten times bigger around, and reinforced by internal hoops, was suspended from a crane at the far end of the barge over the open hull, and newly dredged sand, looking like wet cement, was pouring out of it into the barge. A big dull grinding roar mixed with a high whine came from the innards of the barge.
“We’re still dredging pure sand,” Idelba pointed out. “The barge is almost full. We’ll be taking this load up Ocean Parkway soon, drop the sand there at the new beach.”
“It seems like it could get a lot fuller,” Roberto said.
“True,” Idelba said. “If we were headed out to sea we could carry more, but as it is we go up canals to the high tide mark and dump it there as high as we can go, and then bulldozers will come and spread it at low tide. So we can’t ride too deep.”
“Where are you dumping it?” Vlade asked.
“Between Avenue J and Foster Avenue, these days. They tore out the ruins and bulldozed the ground. Half our sand will end up just below the low tide line, half just above. That’s the plan, anyway. Spread the sand out and hope to get some dunes at the high tide mark, and some sandbars just below the low tide mark. Those are important for catching the mulm and giving the ecosystem a chance to grow. It’s a big project, beach building. Moving sand is just part of it. In some ways it’s the easy part, although it isn’t that easy.”
“What if sea level rises again?” Stefan asked.
Idelba shrugged. “I guess they move the beach again. Or not. Meanwhile we have to act like we know what we’re doing, right?”
Vlade squinted at the sun. He had almost forgotten how Idelba said things.
“Can we go up with you and see the new beach?” Roberto asked.
“You can, but it might take too long for today. It will take a couple hours to get up Ocean Parkway, and then another couple to unload the sand. Maybe you could follow us there on your boat, then leave when you want.”
“I think we’ll have to do that some other time,” Vlade said, “or else we won’t get back to Manhattan by dinner. So, let’s tell you what we came out here for, and you can get on with your day and we can go back home.”
Idelba nodded. She had still not met Vlade’s eye, as far as he could tell. It was making him sad.
Roberto said, “You have to promise to keep this a secret.”
“Okay,” Idelba said. Now she glanced at Vlade. “I promise. And Vlade knows how well I keep my promises.”
Vlade laughed painfully at that, but when the boys looked alarmed, he said, “No, I’m just laughing because Idelba surprised me there. She’s good for it. She’ll keep our secret. That’s why I brought you to talk to her.”
“Okay then,” Roberto said. “Stefan and I are doing a little underwater archaeology in the Bronx, and we think we’ve found a, a find, that we want to dig up, but we’ve been working with just a diving bell, and we can’t do the excavation under it. We tried, but it won’t work.”
“They almost drowned,” Vlade added despite himself.
The boys nodded solemnly.
“A diving bell?” Idelba said. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, it’s really cool.”
“Really crazy, you mean. I’m amazed you’re still alive. Did you ever black out?”
“No.”
“Headaches?”
“Well, yeah. Some.”
“No lie. I used to do some of that shit too when I was your age, but I learned better when I blacked out. And I had headaches all the time. Probably lost a lot of brain cells. That’s probably why I hung out with Vlade here.”
The boys didn’t know what to make of this.
Idelba eyed them a while longer. “So it’s in the Bronx, you say?”
They nodded.
“It isn’t the Hussar, is it?”
“What!” Roberto protested. He glared at Vlade: “You told her!”
Vlade shook his head, and Idelba laughed her short harsh laugh.
“Come on, boys. No one digs up anything in the Bronx but the Hussar. You should know that. How did you decide where to dig?”
“We have this friend, an old man who studied it. He’s got a lot of maps and he’s done research in the archives.”
“He went to London.”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“Because they all go to London. I grew up in Queens, remember?”
“Well, he went there and read the records in London, and saw the big map there and all. And he figured it out, and we went there in our boat and dove with a metal detector, a Golfier Maximus.”
“That’s a good one,” Idelba allowed.
“I didn’t know you were into this stuff,” Vlade observed.
“It was before we met.”
“When you were ten?”
“Pretty much. I played in the Queens intertidal, we did all that water rat stuff. We were the Muskrats. I nearly drowned three times. Have you guys nearly drowned yet?”
They nodded solemnly again. Vlade could see they were developing a crush on Idelba. He could relate, and was feeling sadder than ever.
“Just last week!” Roberto was explaining. “I was stuck under the bell, but Stefan got Vlade to come out and save me.”
“Good for Vlade.” A shadow passed over her face and for a second she wasn’t there with them, and Vlade knew where she was. She took a sharp breath in and said, “So you think you’ve found the Hussar.”
“Yeah, we got a giant hit.”
“A gold hit?”
“That’s right.”
“Interesting.” She regarded them, glanced again at Vlade. He couldn’t read her expression as she regarded the boys; it had been too long. “Well, I think you’re chasing a dream here, boys. But what the hell. We all do. Better than sitting around doing nothing. Now the truth is I don’t have the right equipment to help you just hanging around out here. Mainly your job is too small for my gear. We would suck your site to smithereens. What you need is like tweezers compared to this rig here, see what I mean?”
“Wow,” Stefan said.
“We get it,” Roberto said. “But you must have something for, I don’t know, detail work? Don’t you do any detail work?”
“No.”
“But you know what I mean?”
“I do. And yes, I can pull together what you need. You got the site buoyed?”
“Yes.”
“Underwater buoy?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Okay, I’
ll put together a kit, and we’ll visit your site one of these days soon, and I’ll suck whatever you got out in a couple hours at the most. Suck it up and see what you got. It’ll be fun. Although you have to prepare yourself to be disappointed, understand? There’s been three hundred and whatever years of disappointment over this one, and it isn’t likely you’ll be the ones to end the streak. But we’ll suck it up and see what you got.”
“Wow,” Stefan said again. He and Roberto were both completely smitten. They were not going to remember not to be disappointed, Vlade could see. They would be crushed when they came up with nothing. But what could you do. Idelba gave him a look, a little reproving, but he could see she was thinking the same thing. You are setting these boys up for a fall, her look said, but what can you do. That’s what happens.
Yes, youth; and they were old. And when they were young they had suffered a blow, a blow so much more crushing than not finding your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that it was beyond what these boys could conceive. And beyond what they themselves had been able to handle. So … the boys were going to be okay. Everybody was going to be okay compared to Vlade and Idelba. The boys were even some kind of comfort, maybe, some kind of painful comfort. Something like that. Difficult for Vlade to know what Idelba was thinking; she was hard, and he was stunned just to see her again; he had no idea what he was feeling. It was like being slapped in the face. It was like that feeling of blasting out the Narrows into the Atlantic in a small boat, only bigger, stranger.
A Coney Island elephant named Topsy killed an abusive trainer who fed her a lit cigarette, and it was decided she was to be put down. In January 1903 Topsy was electrocuted. Fifteen hundred people gathered to witness the event at Luna Park, and Thomas Edison filmed it, releasing a movie later that year called Electrocuting an Elephant. Electrodes were attached to metal boots strapped to her right foreleg and left hind leg, and 6,600 volts of alternating current were passed through her. It worked.
d) Amelia
Amelia, having retaken control of the Assisted Migration, spent the next day or two eating and calming down, with just one camera on, and very little commentary, most of it more suited to a cooking show than animal affairs. Her viewers were going to be happy to see she was okay, and they would empathize with her being a bit post-traumatic. Below her the South Atlantic pulsed to the horizon with a blue that reminded her of the Adriatic; it was a sort of cobalt infused with turquoise, quite a bit bluer than most ocean blues, and its glitter of reflected sunlight was behind her now, to the north. They were deep in the Southern Hemisphere, and to the south the blue was a darker blue, flecked only by whitecaps. She was already through the Roaring Forties, and had come into the Flying Fifties, and if she wanted to fly into the Weddell Sea, which she did, she was going to have to angle to the west and run the turboprops as hard as she could all the time, to get any westness in the Screaming Sixties. Here, below the tip of South Africa, down where only Patagonia broke up the ceaseless pour of water and wind ever eastward around the globe, there was a natural tendency for the airship to head east for Australia. Pushing against that caused it to tremble all the time. It felt like being in a ship down on those waves. Because there were waves of air too, and now they were tacking into them, as any craft on this Earth must often do.
She was still waiting for her support team to give her a final destination for the bears. There was some dispute between their geographers and their marine biologists as to where the bears would have the best chance. The eastern curve of the Antarctic peninsula, one candidate, had warmed faster, and lost a greater percentage of its ice, than almost anywhere on the continent, and its winter sea ice grew far out into the Weddell Sea every four-month-long night; and the Weddell Sea was well stocked with Weddell seals.
All this sounded plausible and right to Amelia, so she kept telling Frans to head that way. But there were competing arguments from others in the ecology group that wanted her to head to Princess Astrid Land, on the main body of the continent. Here there would be a steep sea coast, and the world’s largest colony of Weddell seals, plus an upwelling from the depths that made for a rich life zone, including many penguins. And it had such a good name.
A third faction of ecologists apparently thought they should deposit these bears on South Georgia, so Amelia kept the airship on course to pass within sight of that island as she headed south, just in case. This was a much warmer part of the world, not even actually polar, and with much less sea ice, so she judged that the scientists advocating that destination were going to lose the argument. If they were going to defy the natural order so much as to put polar bears in the Southern Hemisphere, it seemed to behoove them to at least put them in a truly polar region.
As the airship passed to the east of South Georgia, which took most of a day, Amelia found herself glad that she had not been directed to drop the polar bears there; the island was huge, steep, and green where it was not covered by snow and ice, or mantled in cloud that whipped over it in a blown cap that reminded her of the jet stream flying madly over the Himalayas. It looked ferocious, and very dissimilar to the western shore of Hudson Bay. Surely the Antarctic peninsula would make a better new home for her bears.
Who seemed to be settled down again, back in their quarters. Their breakout and subsequent fast, not to mention the upending of the airship, and what had sounded like some pretty hard falls, had perhaps subdued them and made them happier to accept their lot. Several of them had been repeat offenders in Churchill and had spent multiple stints in the bear jail there, so their current confinement was probably not in itself what had disturbed them, so much as the airship’s palpable sense of movement, certainly unsettling to any bear that had never flown before. Whatever explained their earlier restlessness, they were now pretty calm in their quarters, and almost all of them had crossed in front of the x-ray machine, and enough images of their skeletons had been assembled to reassure their doctors that there were no broken bones among them. All was well.
Two days after passing South Georgia, they were flying in toward the east side of the Antarctic peninsula. The sea was covered with broken plates of sea ice, and much taller chunks of glacial ice, often a creamy blue or green in color, rearing toward the sky in odd melted shapes. On both the sea ice and the horizontal parts of the icebergs lay scores, even hundreds of Weddell seals. Amelia brought the airship down for a closer look and better images for her show, and from that level they could see streaks of blood on the ice, placental blood for the most part; many of the female Weddell seals, looking like slugs laid out on a sheet of white paper, had recently given birth, and smaller offspring (but not that much smaller) were attached to them, nursing away. It was a peaceful and one might say bucolic scene.
“Wow, check it out,” Amelia said to her audience. “I suppose it’s a bit of a bummer for these seals, us introducing a predator they’ve never encountered before, but, you know, the bears are going to love it. And these seals are getting eaten all the time by orcas, and I think tiger sharks or something like that. Oh, sorry, leopard seals. Hmm, I wonder if the bears will be able to eat leopard seals too. That might be quite a showdown. I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be leaving behind the usual array of cameras, and it will be really interesting to see what happens. A new thing in history! Polar bears and penguins in the same environment! Kind of amazing, when you think about it.”
As the airship approached the coast, Amelia wondered aloud if they were going to be able to tell where sea ice ended and snow on land began; everything ahead looked white, except for some black cliffs farther inland. But as they hummed south and west, she saw it was going to be easy; there were black sea cliffs along part of the shore, and above them the snow was a different shade of white, creamier somehow, and rising steeply to black peaks inland. Offshore the sea ice was much broken, leaving lots of the lanes of black water that polar seafarers called leads. As they floated over these, Amelia looked down and squealed: there underneath them was a pod of orcas, just a bit blacker than
the water itself, with white flashings on their sides, only visible when they arched slightly up and out of the water. A flotilla; possibly thirty of them. Oh, a pod.
“Dang!” Amelia said. “Hope we don’t fall in the water, ha ha! Not that I would want to anyway. Has anyone noticed how black that water is? I mean, look at it! The sky is blue, and I thought the color of the ocean was basically a reflection of the sky? But this water looks black. I mean, really black. I hope it’s coming across in the images, you’ll see what I mean. I wonder what explains that?”
Her studio people got on pretty quickly to say that it was hypothesized that the Antarctic ocean looked black because the bottom was very deep, even close inshore; also there were no minerals or organic material in it, so one was seeing very far into the water, down to where no sunlight penetrated. So one was seeing down to the blackness of the ocean depths!
“Oh my God that’s just soo trippy,” Amelia exclaimed. This was one of her signature exclamations, controversial back in the studio, as being either a cloying old-fashioned cliché or else an endearing Amelia-ism, but in any case Amelia couldn’t help it, it was just what she felt. Black ocean under blue skies! Sooo trippy! They weren’t in Kansas anymore. Which was another useful phrase. As they were very seldom in Kansas.
And indeed that was just the beginning of it. The closer they got to the peninsula itself, the bigger and wilder it appeared. The cliffs and exposed peaks were far blacker than the ocean, while the snow was painfully white, and lying on everything like a meringue. The foot of the cliff was coated with a white filigree that looked as if waves had broken there and then frozen instantly; apparently this was actually the result of many waves being dashed into the air, each adding a thin layer of water that then froze to what was already there. These arabesques were a grayer white than the smooth meringue coating the land above the cliffs. Inland, by some difficult-to-determine distance, maybe ten kilometers, black peaks thrust out of a white-and-blue surface, the snow there creamy white, the icefields blue and shattered in curving patterns of crevasses. These blue patches were the exposed parts of glaciers, ever more rare in this world, and yet here still vast in extent.