“Oh my God I’m tilting, the blimp is tilting up!”
“Hold on,” more than one of them urged her.
“Oh my God they’re out there.” This was followed by some loud thumps. Then radio silence.
“Amelia?” Charlotte asked. “Are you okay?”
A long, tense pause.
Then she replied. “I’m okay. Let me call you back. I’ve got to deal.”
The call went dead.
“Yikes,” Franklin said after a wondering silence. Charlotte saw Jojo elbow him in the ribs, saw him wince and then ignore it, eyes slightly crossed.
The others stood around, uncertain what to do. Charlotte gestured at the hotello door. “Have you had a look inside yet?”
“No, we were just going to do that,” Vlade said.
“Might as well. Our cloud star will get back to us when she can.”
The hotello was really just a walk-in tent, so Charlotte and Franklin and Jojo stayed outside it as Vlade led the old man in with the two boys. To Charlotte this viewing was a formality only; beggars can’t be choosers. She went to the south wall of the farm, sat on one of the chairs by the rail, and looked to the east toward Peter Cooper Village, now a kind of bay studded with remnants of the many fifteen-story towers that had once stood there. Anything built on landfill rather than bedrock was melting. To the south some towers of light illuminated the mostly dark downtown: the old towers of Wall Street, looking like spaceships ready for takeoff. Finance coming back home to roost. It gave her the creeps.
A southern wind came in over the rail, mild for autumn, and she pulled her sweater tighter around her. The two tall glassine spires just to the south of them spoiled the view, and she hoped, as she always did, that their slight tilt to the east meant they would soon fall over, like dominoes. She hated them as architectural fashion models, skinny, blank, featureless, owned by finance, nothing to do with real life. One giant apartment per floor. People living in glass houses and yet throwing stones. She had heard that most of the owners of these apartments only occupied them a week or two per year. Oligarchs, plutocrats, flitting around the world like vampire capital itself. And of course it was even worse uptown, in the new graphene superscrapers.
The men ducked out of the hotello and sat back down around her, all except for the old man, who stood at the railing, elbows on the rail, looking down. The boys sat at his feet, Vlade on the chair next to Charlotte, Franklin and Jojo on the chairs beyond them. A rare chance to rest.
“I hate those chopsticks,” Charlotte said to the old man, gesturing at the two glass splinters. They had refused to join LMMAS, and even the Madison Square Association. She took this as a personal affront, as she had helped to organize the buildings around the bacino into a working alliance within LMMAS, like a ring of city-states around a small rectangular lake.
The old man eyed them briefly. “Money,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t fallen yet.”
“Me too. They’re tilting though. They may go.”
“Will they hit us?”
“I don’t think so. They’re tilting to the east, see. They’re like the leaning towers of money.”
“Seems dangerous.” He peered down to the east. “It’s dark that way. But it looks like there’s still buildings they would land on.”
“Sure,” Charlotte said. “Hard to tell what’s there at night. I like that. It looks good, don’t you think?”
He nodded. “Beautiful.”
“As always.”
At this he frowned, then shook his head. “Not always.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not the day it went under, I mean. That was not beautiful.”
“You saw it?” Roberto asked incredulously, looking up at his face.
The old man glanced down at him, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah, I saw it,” he said. “Start of the Second Pulse. Breach of Bjarke’s Wall. I was about your age. You can’t imagine I was ever that young, can you.”
“Nope,” Roberto said.
“Well, I was. Hard though that is to believe. I can’t believe it myself. But I know it’s true, because I was there.”
He rubbed his face with his right hand, looked down blindly. The others glanced at each other.
He said, “Everyone thought it would happen gradually, and out in the boroughs it did. But they had built a surge wall about a hundred years before, Bjarke’s Wall, to keep downtown from flooding. It worked too. It was a berm. It was different in different places, because they had to fit it in where they could. Amazing they could do it at all, but they did. It went all the way around downtown, from Riverside West down behind Battery Park, up the east side to the UN building, where it cut up the rise to Central Park. Twelve miles. There were cuts in it for streets and all, where gates would close if a flood came. They closed it a bunch of times and it worked. But high tide kept getting higher, and they had to close the gates more and more. It was the same in London with the Thames River Barrier. When they closed the wall, my dad would take me down to the path running along its top at Thirty-third. Sometimes the Hudson would be raging, whitecaps all over it. And the water would get so high we could see that the river was higher than the city. You could lose your balance if you looked at both sides at once. It kind of made you sick to your stomach. Because the water was higher than the land. You couldn’t believe it. People would get the staggers and laugh, or cry. It was a thing.”
“I’d like to see that,” Roberto said.
“Maybe you would. We all went and looked. But you could see what could happen. And then it did.”
“You were there?” Roberto asked.
“I was there. It was a storm surge. I was like you, I wanted to go to the berm and see it, but my dad wouldn’t let me, he said this might be the time. My dad was smart. So he wouldn’t let me go, but then after school I went anyway. There were people all up and down the berm. The river was crazy. There was a south wind lashing it. It was raining too. You had to turn your back to it. You couldn’t take a step without you might fall. Mostly we sat down and got soaked, but we stayed, because I don’t know why. It was a thing. But then the streets on the inside of the berm were flooding. Everyone took off north on the berm path to get back up to Forty-second, because we could see that the wall must have broken somewhere downtown. Some people stood on the path shouting at us to walk and not run. They were loud. They were like—insistent. But we could see we were about to be on a berm with water on both sides of us, so we walked pretty fast. But we walked.”
For a while the old man stood there staring to the west.
“So you got off the berm?” Roberto said.
“Yes. I followed people off. We caught glimpses. The water coming in was brown and white. Filled with stuff. It fell down subway entries and then shot back up into the air. It was loud. After a while no one could hear what anyone was saying. Taxis were floating around. It was crazy. It didn’t look anything like what you see down there now. It was crazy time.”
“Weren’t there people?” Roberto asked.
“There were some. Mostly people ran uptown and got away, but some got caught somehow, sure. Floating in the water like logs, wearing their clothes. They were wearing their own clothes.”
“What else would they wear?” Franklin asked, and Jojo elbowed him so hard his chair squeaked, and he did too. Charlotte began to like Jojo a little better.
“It just struck fast, that’s all. They had been out there doing their ordinary day. But boom and that was it. Later people said it took less than two hours. The first breach was said to be a gate down near Pier Forty that gave way. After that the river tore the berm open a couple hundred yards wide. All the buildings near the breach went down. Water is strong.”