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 coul
d 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 in
tertidal,” 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.