I think I might have gaped for a second. I did want to go look, but then again I didn’t, because although it was important that I stay on top of intertidal developments and get out before the bubble popped, that pop wasn’t going to happen just because this tower had done a Margaret Hamilton. And I was headed to the Forty oyster bar to watch the sunset with Jojo Bernal, and I didn’t want her thinking that I wasn’t giving her my top priority at this moment.
But in the midst of this cogitation she laughed at me. “Go ahead and go by,” she said. “It’s almost on the way.”
“True.”
“And if you think it might be a trigger event, you only have to push a button to get out, right? You’re prepped to move fast?”
“Nanoseconds,” I said, proudly if inaccurately, and turned the bug up West Broadway.
As we got up above Twenty-seventh it became a bit of a disadvantage to be in the bug, because its foils gave it a draft of almost five feet. Happily it was just a couple hours past high tide, which was all that allowed me to keep us headed uptown before I would have to cut west and out of the city.
As we got closer to the crash site, the ordinary ammoniac reek of a tidal flat was joined by another smell, maybe creosote, with notes of asbestos, cracked wood, smashed brick, crumbled concrete, twisted rusty steel, and the stale air of moldy rooms broken open to the day like rotten eggs. Yes, a fallen intertidal building. They have a characteristic smell.
I slowed down. The sunset poured its horizontal light over the scene, glazing the canals and buildings. A narrow bathtub ring marked all the buildings. Ah yes the intertidal, zone of uncertainty and doubt, space of risk and reward, the seashore that belonged to the unorganized public. Extension of the ocean, every building a grounded ship hoping not to break up.
But now one of them had. Not a monstrous skyscraper, just one of four twenty-story towers south of the old post office. Probably the use value and price of the other three had collapsed along with the one that had fallen, depending of course on if they could determine why it had happened. It was never easy to figure that out, making it a very good objective correlative for the market itself. Often crashes just happened, responding to invisible stresses. I said as much to Jojo and she grimaced and nodded.
We hummed slowly up Seventh, looking down the streets at the smash. No good would come from getting too close, as the canals around it were now dangerously reefed. This was obvious in the places where junk stuck up out of the water, and strongly suggested where swirls and ripples and little white potato patches roiled the black water as the tide ebbed south through the neighborhood. Other parts of the canals would look fine and nevertheless be hullrippers. So I looked by approaching the smash from several canals in turn, proceeding as far as I felt safe and then turning back.
The tower had obviously come down hard, pancaking maybe half its stories before spilling to the south and east. The shatter of its flat roof was tilted such that we could see all the water tanks and soil and greenery of the roof farm. Too much weight up there, probably, although that always was something that only became obvious in the aftermath. Emergency personnel were cautiously probing the wreckage from fireboats and police cruisers and the like, wearing the eye-popping yellows and oranges characteristic of disaster.
Many smaller buildings had been crushed by the debris from the tower, and beyond those many others were knocked aslant. Absent outer walls revealed rooms that were empty or furnished, but either way, pathetic.
“This whole neighborhood is wrecked!” Jojo said.
I could only nod.
“Lots of people must have died.”
“That’s what they said. Although it looks like a lot of the brownstones were empty.” I turned and motored us on toward Eighth. “Let me think this over at Reef Forty. I need a drink.”
“And some oysters.”
“Sure.”
I piloted the bug up Eighth, and as we passed Thirty-first I heard a shout.
“Hey mister! Hey mister!”
“Help!”
It was the two kids I had almost run down south of the Battery.
“Oh no,” I said, and kept the throttle forward.
“Wait! Help, help, help!”
This was bad. I would have ignored them and hummed on anyway, but Jojo was watching me with a startled expression, surprised no doubt that I would just motor on, ignoring such a direct appeal. And the boys were holding up an old man between them, an old man who looked shattered and was not even as tall as they were. As if he had been cut off at the knees. They were all soaked, with mud streaking one boy’s face.
I cut the motor. “Hey. What are you guys doing up here?”
“We got wrecked!”
“Mr. Hexter’s house got knocked over back there!”
“Aha.”
The taller one said, “Our wristpad got wet and stopped working, so we were walking to the vapo. Hey can we use your pad to make a call?”
“Or can you give us a ride?” the smaller and lippier one said.
The old man between them just stared over his shoulder at his neighborhood, looking bereft.
“Is your friend okay?” Jojo asked.
“I’m not okay,” the old man exclaimed, without looking at her. “I lost everything. I lost my maps.”
“What maps?” I asked.
“He had a collection,” the smaller boy said. “All kinds of maps of the United States and all over. But mostly New York. But now he needs to get to somewhere.”
“Are you hurt?” Jojo asked.
The old man didn’t reply.
“He’s beat,” the bigger boy said. “We’ve come a long way.”
I saw the look on Jojo’s face and said, “All right, get on board.”
They made a mess of my cockpit as well as my plans. I offered to take them back to the old man’s building, thinking that with the evening already so muddied I might as well go completely philanthropic, but all three of them shook their heads at once.
“We’ll try and go back later,” the smaller boy said. “For now we need to get Mr. Hexter to where he can dry out and all.”
“Where’s that?”
They shrugged. “Back at the Met, maybe? Vlade will know what to do.”
“You live in the Met on Madison Square?” Jojo asked, looking surprised.
“Around there,” the littler kid said, looking at her. “Hey, you live in the Flatiron, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You do?” I said.
“That’s right,” she said again.
“So we’re neighbors!” I said. “Did I know that?”
“I thought you did.”
By now I was confused and thinking hard, and I’m sure it showed. Possibly I had not mentioned where I lived; we had mostly spoken about work, and I hadn’t known where she lived. After our night out on the Governors Island anchorage I had dropped her off at her office at her request, assuming, I realized, that she lived in that building. And then I had boated home.
“So can I borrow your pad?” the littler kid asked Jojo. She nodded and held out her arm, and he tapped on it and then said, “Vlade, our pad got soaked, but can you let us dry off in your office maybe? We have a friend whose building got knocked over.”
“I wondered if you guys were over that way,” the super’s voice said from Jojo’s pad. “Where are you now?”
“We’re at Thirty-first and Eighth, but we got picked up by the guy with the zoomer who lives in your building.”
“Who’s that?”
The boys looked at us.
“Franklin Garr,” I said.