Flight (20 page)

The shock tries to paralyze him, but even as
he loses control, Joe starts his own rescue. Dozens of times over
the years at his summer camp, he has practiced kayak rollovers and
recoveries. When his head goes under, his lungs are full. He shifts
his fulcrum from left to right. He knows that the secret of a
recovery is not to panic and to continue the momentum of the
rollover. In camp, during the day, with warm, still lake water and
counselors all about, a capsize had been fun. A quick way to cool
down. You are right side up, a moment later upside down and a
moment after that, right side up again. All in friendly water.

Now, suddenly, the water is angry. Angry and
black to blind him. Angry and cold to slow him. Angry and fast to
exhaust him. And…Joe realizes as he struggles to right himself
while hurtling down the massive surge of water…the water has an
ally. His winter coat, which has kept him mostly warm and mostly
dry, has turned into a millstone. Its bulk and sodden weight works
to keep him upside down. As he twists to bring the kayak broadside
to the current so that the force which flipped him over will help
to right him, the coat, now like a spongy anchor, thwarts his
efforts.

Joe is so caught up in his fight against coat
and current that his lungs are already white hot and desperately
hungry for oxygen even before he decides to open the skirt so that
he can escape. His fingers fumble and fumble again until all of
Joe’s attention is drawn to some unfamiliar part of his brain which
is screaming at him to open his mouth.

First, yellow spots and then oozing patches
of red crowd in from the edges of his tightly closed lids. Joe’s
hands let go of the paddle so that they can tear at the coat. The
thought occurs to him that even though the Hudson is tormenting the
kayak, it really is benign. It is the coat that wants him dead. He
rips at its snaps and tears at the nelkro that is strangling
him.

In his ears, a sound louder than a descending
jet shrieks at Joe to breathe deep. When he fights off that
command, his tormentor changes to the softest whisper. Take a
breath. Just a sip. Just a sip. Just the smallest sip. In his mind,
filled with a thousand jumbled images, like debris from a flood,
Joe sees his coat sleeves writhing in the water like lamprey eels,
like leeches, come to take his arms. In horror, he flails his arms
first to evade their attack, then, pounds them in
counter-attack.

Just as the eels let go, red spreads full
across his eyelids like a stunning sunset. The shriek is back
again. It pierces his ears and this time Joe does as he is told. He
opens his mouth to take a sip…just the slightest sip.

Flight and Fight

Despite her persistent attempts to uncover
her parents’ past, both by direct questioning and more than two
hours of ogling before she fell asleep, Prissi woke up the next
morning feeling frustrated. She decided to get out of the apartment
to see if she could clear her mind. Although she felt too
distracted to fly, the winger cheated as she walked down 21st
Street toward the East River by slightly spreading her wings to let
the following wind give her a push. She crossed First Avenue and
climbed the stairs to the FDR levee. Once on top, she took a deep
breath of salty air and stared across the mile wide soup of gray
water to the misty ghosts of what had been Brooklyn.

When the world’s waters began to rise, a
decision was made that Manhattan was too important to the psyche of
the country to abandon all of it. When the same argument was made
to save the other New York boroughs, southern senators, who had
been forced to abandon New Orleans early in the century, voted
against providing funds for any other part of the city that was
below sea level. Walkers continued to live in Brooklyn in the
heights, as well as in Manhattan south of Houston Street, but that
lifestyle was a complicated one of illegal squats, small boats,
unpotable water, hydrocycles and dodging the house hawks.

Standing on top of the levee, Prissi watched
a pod of dolphins cavorting in the choppy waters near the base of
the Williamsburg Bridge. Ferries and a handful of pleasure boats,
as well as a couple of gypsy water taxis, were tatting frothy gray
lace with their wakes. The teener tried to think of a good reason
why her father would be so close-mouthed about her mother’s early
years as a scientist. After failing to breach that wall, she had
badgered him about his own early life. She had circled around and
back to those years for over an hour before giving up. It was
obvious that he was hiding something, but what that something was
remained a mystery. Prissi couldn’t decide whether it was fear or
shame or something more benign that was making her honest,
forthright father deflect her questions. What she did know was that
if she couldn’t get the truth from her father about his past, she
certainly had no chance of getting him to divulge anything about
her mother, especially about how and why she had died.

Prissi celled Nasty Nancy to tell her that
she had spent her first day home at the NYPD digging around in the
Joshua Fflowers papers trying to find out about a company Dr.
Smarkzy had talked about. Prissi ignored her friend’s sniff when
Nancy heard Smarkzy’s name. Knowing that Nancy would have no
intrinsic interest in helping her do research, Prissi dangled bait.
The records she was going through were supposedly off-limits to the
public. Some kind of mystery about Joe and Jack’s grandfather.
Prissi inveigled her roomie by playing up Nasty Nancy’s great
detective skills. Could, would Nancy fly over to NYPD and dig
around with her? Lunch would be Prissi’s treat?

Nancy didn’t say anything for awhile.

“What’s the name of the company?”

“Centsurety.”

“What business were they supposed to be
in?”

“Something with meta-mutation.”

“Sounds more like a life insurance company.
I’ll bet there were a million of those kinds of companies back
then. How long ago?”

“Maybe sixty.”

Prissi fought off the twinges of guilt that
were making her cheeks tighten.

“If they don’t show up much, they must have
been really unimportant. What’s that noise?”

“Outdoors. I’m over on the FDR.”

“Well, Cilly, that’s certainly banal. Are you
feeling your spirits lifting as you commune with nature?”

Although she hated Nancy’s nickname for her,
Prissi managed a laugh, “More my scraggly hair and dirty wing tips,
but, you know something, Nano, the longer I’m at Dutton, with all
of that space, the harder it is to stay in the apartment for days
on end.”

Hearing a nickname Prissi didn’t use much
anymore softened Nancy’s edge.

“Migod, Prissi, don’t go native. Actually
I’ve got cabin fever, too. Two days with my parents is about
thirty-six hours too long. Come to NJ and we’ll shop.”

“No. Shopping makes me crazy. I only want
what I can’t afford.”

The silence was so long Prissi looked to see
if she had dropped the call. Finally, Nancy whispered, “Look, I’ll
meet you in…two hours and help you track down your mysterious
company.”

“Do you really think you can help?”

“No, Prissi, it’s my snarky self coming out.
I can’t go another minute without seeing you. My heart pines. My
lips….”

“Yuck, Nancy. Don’t do that. It gives me the
creeps.”

And it did give Prissi the creeps even though
she was 99…well, maybe 91%, sure that Nasty Nancy did it just to
get the response that Prissi had just given her.

“By the lions.”

“By the lions, unless it starts raining.”

Although Prissi was eager to have Nancy’s
help, she didn’t mind having two hours to kill, or probably more,
since her roomie was always late. Since it was such a beautiful
day, the pent-up adolescent decided to go for a fly-about. Standing
at the edge of the levee, she took a moment to pre-flight herself.
She eye-hooked her vest and clipped her hair back from her face.
She checked to see that her wrist and ankle cuffs were tight. She
pushed and tugged her kanga-pak to be sure that everything in it
also was snugged tight. She pointed a hand into the air, oriented
it north and pushed the anemometer button on her mypod—west
southwest at 12 knots. Prissi figured that was enough wind to give
her a good workout without exhausting herself. She flapped, kicked
and was in the air. She was feeling so upbeat she considered
immediately flying out over the water, but all wingers were trained
to fly for at least three minutes before going anyplace where it
might be difficult to land. Usually, Prissi was intrepid, but, with
her shoulder having popped twice lately, she decided to be
cautious.

Winging was no different than swimming. A
muscle pull, a charley horse, low blood sugar or volatile weather,
and what should have been fun, could turn life-threatening in an
instant. Prissi dropped her right shoulder, half tucked that wing
and veered south. She climbed to just over twenty meters and
followed the levee.

When the waters around New York first had
begun to rise, Francis Phange, a senator from Massachusetts and
leader of the Ecoists’ caucus, had managed to stall federal
permitting by the Environmental Projection Agency to the Army Corps
of Engineering to construct a levee around the entire island of
Manhattan. His argument, and that of his party, had been that since
it was Big Business that had caused, or accelerated global warming
and it was Big Business that had used its political clout to delay
taking action against GW until it was too late, then it was Big
Business that should suffer the consequences. Big Business needed
to be taught a lesson. Since the lesson was to be taught to the
arrogant people of New York, the representatives of many of the Big
Ag and Big Service states joined forces with Phange. Even after the
permits finally were issued, Phange and his allies managed to stall
federal funding.

The young governor of New York, DeWitt
Clinton, the mayor, and a coterie of major New York City business
leaders tried to put together a regional coalition to fund the
rescue project, but both New Jersey and Connecticut saw the
situation as an opportunity, after two hundred fifty years, to get
out from under Gotham’s shadow. After a ten-year battle, the
federal government did provide funding, but the enabling
legislation specified that the levee was not to extend south of
Houston Street. Wall Street was to be sacrificed to expiate the
capitalist pride and greed that had cost the country years of
economic well-being during the Great Foreclosure Exposure of
2008-2016.

Since it was just after the morning rush
hour, Prissi was one of the few wingers in the air along the FDR.
Of those who were flying, almost all were going uptown. As she flew
further south toward Houston Street, the buildings along the levee
began to be more rundown. Piles of trash dotted the curbs. The
people below her who were walking on the levee or riding their
bikes seemed to be mostly from the southern hemisphere.

Once she flew past where the levee turned
west along Houston Street, Prissi entered a twilight area of the
city. All of the buildings south of the levee had been declared
uninhabitable more than forty years before; however from the number
of small boats in the streets and the number of vegetable gardens
and grills on the roofs, it was obvious the area in what once had
been called Little Italy and the Bowery, still had lots of people
living above the water line, although below the poverty line.

A few blocks further south, the number of
boats shrank and the shorter buildings canted in all directions as
a result of the water-soaked land beneath them. The taller ones,
since they had been more valuable at the time, had been interlaced
together with steel girders and guy wires as a temporary measure
while the political battles had been fought. Now, decades later,
the steel beams holding them together were a rusted web. Every
couple of months an adventurous, usually newly fledged, winger,
would be killed trying to nightfly through the maze of corroded
steel. Prissi herself had felt a tug to try her skills in that
deadly puzzle, but if something happened—she was hurt or stopped by
a housing hawk overflying the ruins—she would get her wings clipped
until she was twenty-one. Even though she had only been flying for
a year, the young winger could not imagine going back to being
earth-bound.

Prissi raised her chin, dropped her feet and
flew toward a sun clawing its way up a ladder of clouds in the
eastern sky. At seventy-five meters the air was appreciably
colder—her mypod displayed an effective air temperature of 42. When
EATs got below forty, wingers had to be extra careful of becoming
exhausted. The girl climbed until she was higher than most of the
decrepit ruins along the edge of the island. She spread her wings
as far as she could, then tilted them slightly forward to get more
lift. As she went into a sustained glide, she opened her mouth wide
and shouted, “Freeieekin fenomenal!” A second later she began
singing a horribly off-key rendition of the Dylantones anthem from
the 70s, “Blown in the Wind.”

“How many years must a girl look up, before
she can fly in the sky?”

Prissi began alternating wing beats so that
she slalomed back and forth, from over the river to almost brushing
against the sides of the buildings. As she sang and slalomed her
way south, the buildings got worse. Some structures remained intact
but a corner had sunk into the sludge beneath so that they seemed
to lean forward in anticipation. Others had huge cracks which ran
from ground level up to their crenellated tops. The sight of so
much destruction wrought by the world’s rising seas began to
depress Prissi and caused her to change her plan. Instead of
circling around the tip of the island, she banked toward the river
and felt the westerly wind shift behind her. Taking advantage of
those winds, she beat hard as she followed the skeletal remains of
the Williamsburg Bridge east into Brooklyn.