One sunny day late in October she tugged the barge back to Coney Island and anchored the barge to the loop of cable still tied to massive bollards off the sunken boardwalk. Vlade went with her, towing his boat behind the barge, so he could get back to the city the next day.
As before Hurricane Fyodor, they were well offshore. The shallows below them were maybe more turbid than usual, and the shoreline to the north looked perhaps lower, more battered. When they were anchored they took one of Idelba’s pilot boats and a couple of her crew up Ocean Parkway to where Brooklyn now rose out of the ocean, to have a look around. They took it slow, as the canal was obstructed.
The intertidal exposed by low tide was thrashed, and above the high tide mark, heavily junked with rubbish of all kinds. Buildings had collapsed for four or five blocks inland. It was hard to see any sign at all of the many bargeloads of sand that Idelba and her colleagues had moved from the drowned beach up to the new shoreline. “Damn,” Idelba exclaimed. “That’s like five hundred bargeloads of sand, just disappeared! How could it be? Where did it go?”
“Inland,” Vlade supposed. “Or offshore. Do you want to go down and have a look?”
“I kind of do. Are you up for it?”
“Always.”
This was almost true. Stripping down, getting the wetsuits on, gearing up and psyching up—all this was a spur to the blood, always, and never so much as when prepping with Idelba.
Over the side they were lowered, into the cold water. Down into the murk, the stupendously powerful Mercia headlamps cutting short fat cones of illuminated water ahead of them. Low tide, so the bottom was just ten or fifteen feet under the boat’s keel, meaning there was a bit of ambient light too, which actually made the water seem more opaque rather than less. Water getting colder as it pressed on them. From cold, to colder, to coldest. Coldissimo, Rosario called it.
The bottom had sand. He fanned it with his fins, and in the light from his headlamp saw it swirl up and join the general turbidity, then fall again. It was heavier than the glacial silt in till; it did not stay suspended in the water. He looked toward Idelba without pointing his headlamp at her. The bubbles releasing from Idelba’s gear shimmied up toward the surface, turning silver and disappearing overhead. He pointed down at the sand. They bumped helmets and he could see her grinning through her faceplate. Some of her new beach was still down there, and near enough to the tide line that wave action would move it there. Ultimately sand was where it was because waves pushed it there.
The storm had really thrashed the bottom. Vlade didn’t want to put his feet down flat, fins or no; seemed like a curl of broken glass could slice your foot in half, as had happened to Vlade’s brother once when they were kids. So Vlade swam horizontally above the bottom, floating around to inspect it. Here lay a half-buried wooden box, but not one that would hold any treasure; there a chunk of concrete stuck with lengths of rebar, ready to tear someone in half; there an armchair, resting on the bottom as if a living room had stood right there. The weirdness of the intertidal.
That evening he ate with Idelba and her crew, in the little commons room of their bridge.
“There’s still sand down there,” Idelba told her crew. “Not a lot, but some. We’ll just keep pouring it on.”
Abdul, who was from Algeria and was always giving the Moroccans a lot of lip, said, “I read when they were building Jones Beach, Robert Moses got mad because the wind kept blowing the sand away. His people explained it was dune grass that stabilized dunes, so he ordered a thousand gardeners to the beach, and they planted a million sedge starts.”
The others laughed.
“We’ll pull Jones Beach too,” Idelba said. “Coney Island, Rockaway, Long Beach, Jones Beach, Fire Island. All the way out to Montauk. Move it all up to the new tide line.”
The crew seemed to regard this endless task as a good thing. It was like working on the Met; it would never end. One of them raised a glass, and the others did likewise.
“One can easily imagine Sisyphus happy,” Abdul declared, and they drank to that.
The others then played cards, while Vlade and Idelba went out to look at the waterfront, leaning on the rail.
“What are you going to do?” Vlade asked her, not knowing how else to put it.
“You heard it in there,” she said. “I’ll stay here and work.”
“What about your share of the gold?”
“Oh yeah, I’ll be happy to have that.”
“You could probably retire on it.”
“Why would I want to do that? I like doing this.”
“I know.”
“Will you stop running your building?”
“No. I like it. I might hire a few more people. Especially since I’ve got some people I should fire.”
“Well, but you should have the co-op do that.”
“I will. Anyway I like to work.”
“Everyone does.”
He looked at her in the dim twilight. Her hawkish profile: that raptor power, that distant gaze. The low rise of Brooklyn was nearly pure black, just a scattered spangling of lights between the shore and the skyline. “What about us?” he ventured to ask.
“What about us.” She didn’t look at him.
“You’ll be here, I’ll be in the city.”
She nodded. “It’s not so far.” She slipped her hand under his arm. “You have your work and I have mine. So maybe we can just go on. I’ll come into the city some weekends, or you can come out here.”
“You could buy a little blimp.”
She laughed. “I’m not sure it’d be much faster.”
“True. But you know what I mean.”
“I think so. Yes. I will fly to you.”
He felt a deep breath fill him. Nitrogen narcosis. Breeze off the land. A calmness that he hadn’t felt in so long, he could not name the feeling. Couldn’t understand it. Could scarcely feel it, it was so strange a sensation.
“That sounds good,” he said. “I would like that.”
The next morning he went back up on deck. He had slept in Idelba’s bed with her, and slipped out just at dawn, leaving her asleep, mouth open, looking girlish. A middle-aged Maghrebi woman.
It was amazing to stand on the bridge of the tug and look up and down the coast. Far to the east, the boiling white reefs marked where Rockaway Beach had been; it seemed a huge distance and yet it was a tiny fraction of Long Island, which was invisible beyond Breezy Point. Then in the other direction, it was such a clear morning that it was possible to see not just Staten Island, but the glints of morning windowblink from Jersey. The Bight of New York, split by the Narrows. At the end of the Ice Age, Mr. Hexter had told them, a glacial lake had filled the Hudson Valley, from Albany down to the Battery. The melting ice of the great northern ice cap had filled it higher and higher and higher, until finally the waters had burst through the Narrows and poured down to the Atlantic, which at that time was many miles to the south. For a month or so the outflow was a hundred times greater than the flow of the Amazon, until the long lake was drained. After that the Narrows were carved deep, and when the Atlantic rose far enough, the glacial lake had refilled as the fjord and estuary they had now. Under the blue waves Vlade now looked at, that Hudson outbreak flood had left a submarine canyon that still cut the continental shelf. Vlade had dived its walls in his youth. A very impressive underwater canyon, scoring the continental shelf all the way out to the drop-off to the abyssal plain. All that wild depth, all that cataclysmic history, now hidden by a smooth blue sheet of water, slightly wrinkled by an onshore breeze, on an ordinary autumn morning.