Kim Robinson - New York 2140

Now it was a matter of hoping they could run aground on Governors Island and wait out the tide. There was a salvage landfill there that they had enjoyed scavenging in from time to time, but staying there through a tide was a bit of a grim prospect, they would end up cold and starving. Actually it wasn’t even certain they could angle over to it. Again they paddled hard, trying to do that.

Then, even though they were out of all the traffic lanes, a little motor hydrofoil came flying downstream right at them. It didn’t veer, it didn’t slow down, it was going to run them over. Possibly it was high enough off the water that it would pass right over them, but then again its foils extended down like scythes, perfectly capable of slicing them in half, not just their boat but their persons.

“Hey!” they shouted, pulling harder than ever. It wasn’t going to work. They weren’t going to be able to get out of its way, it even seemed to be turning in just the curve that would intercept them and run them down. Stephan stood and stuck his paddle directly up in the air and screamed.

Just as it was about to hit them, the hydrofoil abruptly turned to the side and dropped off its foils into the water, with a huge splash that drenched them utterly, and swamped their boat too.

Even with their cockpit completely full the boat’s rubber tube sides were so big it would not sink, but now it lay very low in the water and would be nearly impossible to paddle. They would have to bail it out first to get anywhere.

“Hey!” Roberto shouted furiously at the zoomer. “You almost killed us!”

“You swamped us,” Stefan shouted in turn, pointing down. They were both standing knee deep in their cockpit, soaked and getting cold fast. “Help!”

“What the hell are you doing out here?” the pilot of the zoomer said sharply. Possibly he was angry that they had scared him.

“We ran out of battery power!” Roberto said. “We were paddling. We weren’t in any shipping lanes. What are you doing out here?”

The man shrugged, saw they would not founder, and sat down as if to push his throttle forward again.

“Hey, give us a tow!” Roberto shouted furiously.

The man acted as if he hadn’t heard them.

“Hey don’t you live at the Met on Madison Square?” Stefan called suddenly.

Now the man looked back at them. Clearly he had been about to leave them out here, and now he couldn’t, because they would report him. As if they couldn’t have just remembered his boat’s number, which was right there over them, A6492, but whatever, he was now heaving a deep sigh, then rooting around in his own cockpit. Eventually he threw a rope’s end down to them.

“Come on, tie off on your bow cleat. I’ll tow you home.”

“Thanks, mister,” Roberto said. “Since you almost killed us, we’ll call it even.”

“Give me a break, kid. You shouldn’t be out here, I bet your parents don’t know you’re out here.”

“That’s why we’ll call it even,” Roberto said. “You run us over, we’re freezing our asses off, you give us a tow, we don’t tell the cops you were speeding in the harbor, Mr. A6492.”

“Deal,” the man said. “Deal at par.”

So I nearly killed these two little squeakers who were out fucking around in a rubber motor dinghy on the East River, just south of the Battery. They were maybe eight or twelve years old, hard to tell because they had the runtish look of kids underfed in their toddler years, like those tribes they thought were pygmies until they fed them properly in toddlerhood and turned out they were taller than the Dutch. These kids had not been included in that experiment. They could barely reach the water with their paddles and the ebb was running full tilt; they were basically drifting out to sea. So they were lucky I almost ran them down, alarming though it was; there’s a narrow blind spot straight ahead when I’m zooming in the zoomer, but it only extends fifty meters or so, so I don’t know how I missed seeing them. Distracted, I guess, as I often am. Ultimately it was no harm no foul, or little harm little foul, as I had to haul them back into the city, because they knew where I lived. They were denizens of my neighborhood, unfortunately, a little cagey about where exactly they resided, but they appeared to know the super of my building. So I towed them back, and countered the smaller and browner one’s continuous criticism by informing them I had saved them from death at sea and would tell their responsible parties about it if they didn’t keep quiet. This gave them pause, and we got back to Madison Square in a little pact of mutual assured damage, with both sides to walk without complaint.

However, this was the very Friday I was due to pick up Jojo Bernal dockside at Pier 57, so I had to get up to my room and quick shower-shave-change, so I tied the zoomer off on the dock of the Met’s North building, paid the squeakers to look after it for me, ran to the elevators and then my apartment, made the change, trying for casual but sharp, and got back down and took off toward the west side, exchanging final ritual curses with the littler pipsqueak.

Jojo was standing on the edge of the dock looking up the Hudson, in a crowd of people all reading their wrists. Again, hair gleaming with sunset; regal posture; relaxed; athletic. I felt a little atrial fib and tried to glide up to the dock with an extra bit of grace, although truth to tell, water is so forgiving a medium that it takes something more challenging than a dock approach to show off any style in steering. Still I made a nice approach and touch, and she stepped onboard as neat as could be, her short skirt showing off her thighs and revealing quads like river-smoothed boulders, also a concavity between quad and ham that testified to a lot of leg work.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I managed. Then: “Welcome to the zoomer.”

She laughed. “That’s its name?”

“No. The name it had when I bought it was the Jesus Bug . So I call it the zoomer. Among other names.”

I got us out on the river and headed south. The late sun lit her face, and I saw that her eyes were indeed a mélange of different browns, mahogany and teak and a brown almost black, all flecked and rayed and blobbed around the pupils. I said, “When I was a kid we had a cat that our family just called the cat, and that seems to have become a habit. I like nicknames or what-have-yous.”

“What-have-yous indeed. So you call this the zoomer, and also?”

“Oh, well. The skimmer, the bug, the buggy, the buggette. Like that.”

“Diminutives.”

“Yes, I like those. Like the zoomer can be the zoominski. Or like Joanna can be Jojo.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That was my sister who did that. She’s like you, she does that.”