Kim Robinson: New York 2140

Then Inspector Gen showed up. Very senior NYPD, and a famous defender of downtown when uptown. She usually walked the skybridges to the police station on Twentieth, and the day before she hadn’t seemed to know who he was. They had never talked, but over dinner she had grilled him about the building’s security systems. She had known the local co-op he had hired to install the system and in general seemed quick to understand the issues in surveilling a building. No surprise there.

Now they greeted each other and she said, “I wanted to ask you more questions about the two missing men.”

Vlade nodded unhappily. “Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen.”

“Right. Did you talk to them much?”

“A little. They sounded like New Yorkers. Always pounding their pads when I was up there. Hardworking.”

“Hardworking but living in a hotello?”

“I never heard what that was about.”

“So you were never told anything about them by anyone on the board?”

Vlade shrugged. “My job is to keep the building running. The people aren’t my worry. Or so I am led to understand by Charlotte.”

“Okay. But let me know if you hear anything about these guys.”

“I will.”

The inspector left. Vlade felt a little relief as he watched her walk away. Tall black woman, as tall as he was, rather massive, with a sharp look and a reserved manner; and now he had the oddity of his failed security cameras to account for. He definitely needed the security company that had installed the system to come over and check it out. Like with a lot of things, he needed tech support when he got far enough in. Being superintendent of a building definitely meant having to superintend. His crew numbered ninety-eight. Surely she would understand that. Must be the same for her.

He walked on the boardwalk that led out the tall boathouse door to the Met’s narrow dock on the bacino, still in the morning shade of the building. There the sight of a little hand reaching up over the edge of the dock to snag some of the stale bread he left out there did not surprise him. “Hey, water rats! Quit taking the ducks’ bread!”

Two boys he often saw hanging around the bacino peered over the edge of the dock. They were in their little zodiac, which just fit the gap between pontoons, allowing them to hide it under the dock’s decking.

“What kind of trouble you boys in today?” He had come to the conclusion that they lived in their boat. Many water rats did, young and old.

“Hi Mr. Vlade, we’re not in any trouble today,” the shorter one called up through the slats of the dock.

“Not yet,” the other one added. A comic duo.

“So come up here and tell me what you want,” Vlade said, still distracted by the policewoman. “I know you want something.”

They pulled their boat out from under the dock and climbed from it onto the planks, grinning nervously. The shorter one said, “We were wondering if you know when Amelia Black is going to get back here.”

“I think soon,” Vlade said. “She’s out filming one of her cloud shows.”

“We know. Can we look at her show on your screen, Mr. Vlade? We heard she saw grizzly bears.”

“You just want to see her naked butt,” Vlade pointed out.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

Vlade nodded. It did seem to be an important aspect of the popularity of her show. “Not now, boys. I’ve got work to do here. You can check her out later. Off with you.” He looked around his office, saw a box of pasta salad he had brought back from the kitchen and never gotten to. “Hey, take this and feed it to the water rats.”

“I thought we were the water rats!” the taller one said.

“That’s what he meant,” the shorter one said, snatching the box from Vlade before he might change his mind. “Thanks, mister.”

“All right, get out of here.”

New York, New York, it’s a hell of a bay. Henry Hudson sailed by and saw a break in the coast between two hills, right at the deepest part of the bight they were exploring. A bight is an indentation in a coastline too broad and open to be called a bay, such that you could sail out of it on a single tack. If you don’t care about such an antiquitarian sailor’s fact, bight me. Sail ahead a page or two to resume voyeuring the sordiditties of the puny primates crawling or paddling around this great bay. If you’re okay pondering the big picture, the ground truth, read on.

The Bight of New York forms an almost ninety-degree angle where the north-southish Jersey Shore meets the east-westish Long Island, and right there at the bend there’s a gap. It’s only a mile wide, and yet once through it, hopefully coming in on a rising tide, as it’s much easier that way, like Hudson you will come into a humongous harbor, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. People call it a river but it’s more than a river, it’s a fjord or a fyard if you want to be geologically prissy about it. It was one dripline coming off the world-topping ice cap of the Ice Age, which was such a monster that the entirety of Long Island is just one of its moraines. When the great ice monster melted ten thousand years ago, sea level rose about three hundred feet. The Atlantic came up and filled all the valleys of the eastern seaboard, as can be easily discerned on any map, and in that process the ocean sloshed into the Hudson, as well as into the valley between New England and the Long Island moraine, creating Long Island Sound, then the East River and all the rest of the vast complicated mess of marshes, creeks, and tidal races that is our bay in question.

In this great estuary there are some remnant ridges of hard old rock, skinny low long lines of hills, now peninsulas in the general flood. One runs south down the western side of the bay, dividing the Hudson from the Meadowlands: that’s the Palisades and Hoboken, pointing to the big lump that is Staten Island. One anchors the moraine of Long Island, angling in from the east: Brooklyn Heights. And the third runs south down the middle of the bay, and because of a swamp cutting across its northern end, it’s technically an island; rocky, hilly, forested, meadowed, ponded: that’s Manhattan.

Forest? Okay, now it’s a forest of skyscrapers. A city, and such a city that it used to take some looking to see it as an estuary. Since the floods that’s become easier, because although it was a drowned coastline before, it is now more drowneder than ever. Fifty-feet-higher sea level means a much bigger bay, more tidally confused, Hell Gate more hellish, the Harlem River a wild tidal race and not a shipping canal, the Meadowlands a shallow sea, Brooklyn and Queens and the south Bronx all shallow seas, their prismatically oily waters sloshing poisonously back and forth on the tides. Yes, a total mess of a bay, still junked up by bridges and pipelines and rusting sclerotic infrastructural junk of all kinds. And so the animals have come back, the fish, the fowl, the oysters, quite a few of them two-headed and fatal to ingest, but back. People too are back, of course, having never left, still everywhere, they’re like cockroaches you can’t get rid of them. And yet all the other animals don’t care; they swim around living their lives, they scavenge and predate and browse and get by and avoid people, just like any other New Yorker.