“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?”
She frowned. “I’m tired, I’ll probably just go home in a while.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come back down when I’m done, see if you’re still here.”
“I’ll be up in a bit,” Charlotte said. “I want to see how things look up there.”
So the evening was screwed. And in fact it had been going badly most of the night, judging by Jojo’s face, and that was worrying me quite badly. Adjustments were going to have to be made, but which ones? And why?
PART THREE
LIQUIDITY TRAP
Drowned, hosed, visiting Davy Jones, six fathoms under, wet, all wet, moldy, mildewed, tidal, marshy, splashing, surfing, body-surfing, diving, drinking, in the drink, drunk, damp, scubaed, plunged, high diving, sloshed, drunk, dowsed, watered, waterfalled, snorkeled, running the rapids, backstroking, waterboarded, gagged, holding your breath, in the tube, bathyscaping, taking a bath, showered, swimming, swimming with the fishes, visiting the sharks, conversing with the clams, lounging with the lobsters, jawing with Jonah, in the belly of the whale, pilot fishing, leviathanating, getting finny, shnockered, dipped, clammed, clamming, salting, brined, belly-flopping, trawling, bottom-feeding, breathing water, eating water, down the toilet, washing-machined, submarining, going down, going down on Mother Ocean, sucking it, sucking water, breathing water, H2O-ing, liquidated, liquefied, aplastadoed, drenched, poured, squirted, pissed on, peed out, golden showered, plutosucking, estuaried, immersed, emulsified, shelled, oystered, squeegeed, melted, melting, infinityedged, depthcharged, torpedoed, inundated, laved, deluged, fluvialized, fluviated, flooded, Noahed, Noah’s-neighbored, U-boating, universally solventized,
a) the citizen
The First Pulse was not ignored by an entire generation of ounce brains, that is a myth. Although like most myths it has some truth to it which has since been exaggerated. The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the consequences of their carbon burn had unleashed the ice that caused the rise of sea level that wrecked the global distribution system and caused a depression that was even more damaging to the people of that generation than the accompanying refugee crisis, which, using the unit popular at the time, was rated as fifty katrinas. Pretty bad, but the profound interruption of world trade was even worse, as far as business was concerned. So yes, the First Pulse was a first-order catastrophe, and it got people’s attention and changes were made, sure. People stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact.