This was agreed to be a good idea for some other storm. Wind as an aleatory art: it would be good. As it was, the invisible substance tore at the world with such force that it became somehow visible, or at least extremely present, as the abrupt defenestration of the institute made clear with a palpable punctuation. Such cracks, such roaring, such screams of dismay! It was good material.
But then again so much of the storm was good in that regard. Amelia and her hosts weren’t the only people in trouble, nor among those in the worst trouble. So she stayed in the cloud narrating the storm but did not score exceptionally high viewing numbers, as the competition out there was intense. It was somewhat of a lost opportunity, but then again she was going to survive, as was the Assisted Migration and Frans. Or so it seemed, until a shard of a newly shattered window flew into the airship and cut open several of its ballonets. After that the wind had its way with what remained. Pop goes the weasel!
So Frans was deflated and thrashed on the ground like a big carpet, and there were repairs to be made before Amelia could return to the air, but eventually it got done by the ground crew of a nearby airfield, happy to get the famous cloud star back in the air (and themselves briefly in the cloud with her). That done, she flew back down to the city at about the thousand-foot level, always excellent in terms of angle and prospect.
What she saw along the way astounded her. The lower stretch of the Hudson Valley was stripped of its leaves; it almost looked like midwinter, except so many trees had been knocked to the ground, or, if still standing, were extending their amputated limbs to the sky. It was much more noticeable than the damage to buildings, which was mostly a matter of missing windows or torn roofs. That was bad, the reconstruction was going to take months, she could see; but the flattened trees would take years to regrow. And of course the animals that lived in the forest would be similarly stricken.
“Wow,” Amelia said to her viewers. “This is bad.” Her voice-over on this day did not constitute her most eloquent performance. After a while, feeling overwhelmed, she mostly let Frans mention where they were and left it at that.
As she came closer to the city, the Cloister cluster reared up over the horizon long before anything else, a copse of spikes poking the sky. “Well, the towers survived.” She floated down the middle of the fjord, and when she was offshore from the uptown towers she slowed a bit, so that they and the Hoboken towers were both displayed to greatest effect, looming well over her cruising altitude to each side. At that point the Hudson looked somewhat like the flooded floor of a shattered roofless room. It was creepy.
Finally she veered in toward the city to have a look down into Central Park. She was shocked like everyone else by the devastation. It was a tent city now, punctuated by hundreds of downed trees, the holes left by their roots giving it the look of a cemetery where all the dead had burst out and run off, leaving their open graves behind. People like ants everywhere, the lost ones of the city huddling there, mostly out of an instinct to huddle, it seemed to Amelia. Then she saw that there were people gathered on the plazas of Morningside Heights, around the black marks of dead bonfires. There were lines of people too, regular enough to suggest they were military. Army in the streets. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The whole city was a mess.
“This is so sad,” she said. “It’s going to take years to fix all this.”
An automated radio message came in telling her to stay out of the city’s airspace. She had Frans circle Manhattan offshore, rising a bit as they did. There was a layer of puffy summer clouds drifting in from the west and over the city. The dramatic alternations of sunlight and cloud shadow made the long spine of Manhattan look like a piebald dragon, slain and lying dead in the bay. Amelia called home to tell Vlade she was going to make a circuit or two before coming in. He was with other people in the dining hall, she could hear. She said hi to them all.
“It looks like the superscrapers uptown didn’t sustain much damage,” she said. “Do you know how they did?”
“We hear they’re okay,” Charlotte said.
“People charged them last night,” Vlade said. “Tried to get in them to get some shelter, but they were kept out.”
“But couldn’t they be turned into temporary refugee shelters? It looks like they’d fit everybody in Central Park, more or less.”
Charlotte said, “That’s what I was thinking. But the mayor won’t do it.”
“Well shit!”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Hi Amelia!” came the voice of Roberto.
“Roberto! Stefan, are you there too?”
“I am here.”
“I’m so glad to hear your voices! What did you do in the storm?”
“We almost got eaten by muskrats,” Roberto said.
“No! I love muskrats!”
“We talked them out of it,” Stefan said. “Now we like them too.”
“Maybe we can do a study together. They’ll be rebuilding, just like us. I can see that the storm surge got pretty high.”
“Twenty-two feet!” the boys shouted.
“A lot of buildings are gone. How did our building do?” Amelia asked.
“Okay,” Vlade said. “The farm was wiped out, but the windows all held. This is one tough old building.”
“No farm? What will we eat?”
“Fish,” Vlade said. “Clams. Oysters. And so on. We might be a charity case for a while.”
“That’s not good.”
“Everybody will be.”
“Not the people in the superscrapers,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t like that,” Amelia said.
She told them she would let them know when she was coming in, then ended the call. She floated back north hanging over the East River, looking down at the wreckage in the shallows of Harlem and Queens and the Bronx, then at the immense towers of the Cloister cluster, metallic and colorful in the sun. Even though she had ascended to twenty-five hundred feet, the tallest towers still overtopped her.
The image of the boys’ muskrats came to her. So many animals would certainly have drowned in a surge that high. In fact at that very moment she spotted a pile of animal bodies, piled like bonfire wood on the big north meadow of the park.
Something turned in her as she realized what that little pile was, like a key turning in a lock, and she sat down hard on her pilot’s stool. After blindly staring down at the city for a long time, she couldn’t have said how long, she tapped the buttons that got her back in the cloud, and went live with her people around the world.
“Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing.”
As she was saying this, she turned the Assisted Migration around and headed south. “Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see.”