Kim Robinson - New York 2140

“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.

“Oh yeah, hi. I know who you are. So, can you bring them back to the building?”

I glanced at Jojo and then said to the pad, “We can bring them back. They have a friend with them who needs a little help, I’d say. His house got knocked around when that Chelsea tower fell down this afternoon.”

“Sorry to hear. Someone I know?”

“Mr. Hexter,” the littler kid said. “We were there visiting him when it happened.”

“Okay, well, come on over and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Sure,” I said. “See you there.”

So I headed the bug to Broadway and down the big canal through the early-evening traffic to the Met, feeling balked but putting a good face on it. It was a sorry replacement for what I had had in mind for the evening, but what can you do. Our rescuees dripped blackly onto the floor of the cockpit, and the boat rode low in the water, tilting heavily as I guided it through the dense evening traffic on the canals. The rule for small boats was three hulls, three people, but not this evening.

Finally I idled across the Madison Square bacino to the Met’s boathouse door and waited for the super to wave us in. No desire to piss him off with this menagerie aboard.

He poked his head out and nodded.

“Come on in. You boys looked like drowned rats.”

“We saw a bunch of rats swimming away!”

“This big building next to Mr. Hexter’s place melted, and the wave knocked us sideways!”

The super shook his head lugubriously, as was his way. “Roberto and Stefan, spreaders of chaos.”

They liked this. “Can you put Mr. Hexter in one of the temporaries?” one of them asked. “He needs to get warmed up and cleaned up. Get some food and rest, right, Mr. H?”

The old man nodded. He was still in a fog. It made sense; people squatting in the intertidal were usually at the end of their options.

The super was shaking his head. “We’re full, you know that. Charlotte’s the one to talk to about that.”

“As always,” the smaller boy said.

Jojo looked like she was kind of enjoying all this, but I couldn’t see why.

“She’ll be back in an hour or so,” the super said. “Meanwhile there’s the bathrooms off the dining room, he could clean up there. And I’ll see if Heloise can rustle up a place for him, if Charlotte says it’s okay.”

I hummed into the boathouse and everyone got off on the interior landing. The kids led their ancient friend up the stairs toward the dining hall, and I looked at Jojo.

“We could take off?” I suggested.

“Since we’re already here,” she said, “I’d like to go over to the Flatiron and change. Then maybe eat here? I’m kind of tired.”

“All right,” I said, feeling uneasy. She was definitely not in the same mood she had been in when I picked her up, and I wasn’t sure why. Something about the kids, the old man? Me? It was spooky. I wanted her to be like she had been last time. But there was nothing to do but go along and hope.

I let the super hang up my boat to get it out of the way, asking him to put it where I could get to it fast this evening, thinking that Jojo might still change her mind. The super just pursed his lips and got the bug into his crane’s sling without replying. I didn’t know what the other residents saw in him. If it were up to me he’d be fired yesterday. But it wasn’t up to me, because I couldn’t be bothered to waste time dealing with the building’s many boards and committees. I got enough of trading at work and was happy to just rent an apartment in a nice building overlooking a bacino I liked that was not too near where I worked, so I could get a zoom in on a daily basis. I could more than afford the non-co-op-members’ surcharge, even though this was shamelessly massive, a hit designed to gouge noncompliants like me. I sometimes hoped someone would challenge this dual price arrangement in court; it struck me as highly prejudicial and possibly illegal, but no one had done it so far, and it occurred to me as I waited for Jojo to come back from the Flatiron, fuming at the way the evening was going, that anyone who cared enough to waste their time challenging this rule would be too poor to rent in the building in the first place. They were price selecting for wealthy indifference from their nonmember rentals, a smart move, probably the plan of the board chairwoman, a notorious social justice warrior both at work and here at home, a control freak in the same class as the super, a woman who had been running the board and thus the building for I wasn’t sure how long, but far too long; she had been chair when I arrived. Naturally she and the super were buddy-buddy.

And lo and behold here she was herself, in conversation with the boys and the old man: Charlotte Armstrong, looking frazzled and intense, vivid and imposing. My day was complete. I followed them all into the dining room, keeping back so I didn’t have to join them any sooner than necessary. But then Jojo appeared at the common room entry, having walked over on the skybridges linking us to One Madison and then the Flatiron, or so I presumed. She headed for the boys before she even saw me, so there was no choice but to follow and join them.

I said hi, and the chairwoman was quite nice to me, in a way that Jojo noticed. I had to lift my eyebrows innocently and then admit that it was true, I had once again saved the wharf rats from a dismal fate.

“Shall we eat?” I asked, being ravenous, and some of us nodded, while others kept asking the now-homeless old man from Chelsea how he was feeling. Chairwoman Charlotte and Jojo followed me to the food windows in the dining hall, and I flashed my meat card to the clerk while listening to the two women talking. They were sounding fairly stiff and uncomfortable; city social worker and financier, not a great match. Around us in the line were many faces I knew and many I didn’t. Too many people lived in the building to actually get to know anybody, even if many faces became familiar.