“I tried to save you a trip uptown,” Henry says. “This guy wants to see you. I emailed you his contact info and left you a voice message—”
“I listen to my voice messages like once a month,” I remind Henry. “You should’ve texted me.”
“Whatever. Just go talk to this guy.”
I check the address on the card: 26 Federal Plaza, down in the financial district. “What does the FBI want with me? And what’s this got to do with you yanking my story?”
Henry takes a deep breath and nods at the card. “I’ll let him explain. It’s complicated. But listen, Maya, the important thing to know is that we’re running the rest of your series. We’re just going to run them weekly rather than daily. You’ve got my word on that. You know I want to nail this guy just as much as you do—”
“As much as I do? I spent seven years writing for the science section before you canned it. All those shelling reports I wrote, the sea level stories, the practical disappearance of Louisiana that I covered, the graft with the construction of the Manhattan levees, the day Times Square flooded? How about my editorials about the beaches that are washing away every single day—?”
“Those are my beaches too,” Henry says, and I can see that his cheeks are red. He’s angry. And maybe not entirely at me. “We’re going to run the rest of the exposé. It’s great work, Maya. You know that. If it were up to me, your second piece would be running right now. But it isn’t up to me.”
“Sure it is,” I tell him. “Ever hear of this thing called freedom of the press?” I shake the business card and nearly call him a spineless ass, but the door behind me is open, and I haven’t heard a single tap on a single keyboard since I walked into Henry’s office. Even my insubordination has limits.
Henry grabs his coffee and takes a noisy sip. Whatever’s on his face right then is [REDACTED] by the mug. He and I have a long history of throwing barbs at one another, but this is something else. This is serious. By the time he sets the mug back down, the tension is as thick as sidewalk crowds during lunch hour.
“The FBI isn’t after you or me,” Henry calmly explains, like this should’ve been obvious from the beginning. Like I should know that we at the paper are small fries. And the rest dawns on me before Henry can spell it out. I understand why he pulled the story. And why he wants me to go speak to this Agent Cooper.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is after Ness Wilde,” I say.
Henry nods. “Bingo. And they want your help in bringing him down.”
3
I hail a taxi and give the driver the address for the Federal Plaza downtown. Broadway is jammed. It’s high tide, and of course a handful of pumps are on the fritz. A handful always are. Looking west down 39th, I can see a logjam of traffic backed up from the Lincoln Tunnel and a shimmer of standing water between the cars. People are sloshing through the traffic with galoshes on, despite it being summer and no rain in sight.
A friend of mine at the Times has lived in this city for over seventy years. He runs the obits, is semi-retired, says his job is to write farewell letters to old friends. He talks about the old days when New Yorkers didn’t need to check the tide tables before their commute to work. He talks about days when you made sure your train was running, checked if you might need an umbrella or a scarf, not whether your levee had breached or if your neighborhood pumps were down. The man is a walking memory of less-flooded times.
But even in my lifetime, there’s been a lot of change. I remember when I was young, thinking the sea was only capable of offering solace. She was only ever a calming force. I didn’t see her angry side until I was in my teens.
Hurricane Julia. There was a mandatory evacuation. My sister and I helped Dad put the storm shutters over the windows while Mom fretted over which irreplaceable things to pack in the car. We left not knowing what we would return to, if anything. The highway was a parking lot, so Dad took us down the coast before cutting in to the interstate. Driving along the beach, with the horizon a dark and foreboding gray, he pulled onto the shoulder so we could all marvel at the sky.
My sister and I begged to run up to the top of the beach access for a better view. A glance at Mother, our arbiter of risk, the slightest of worried nods. “Be quick,” our father had said.
As loud as the wind was, the sea was louder. Like thunder in my bones. I heard the angry waves before we got up the slick wooden stairs. At the top of the walkway, I stood and gripped the rail and leaned into the wind and watched an ocean I thought I knew whip and thrash around like an enraged beast.
Mountains of white foam crashed down in avalanche after avalanche. The waves bashed the rocks and chewed up the sand. Our parents used to say that the shoreline was forever changing, that a storm might move an entire beach or that the rising seas would push inland and cover what used to be shoreline, but I was too young to notice these things, and I’d never seen a storm like this.
Watching the sea that day, I thought of the people on the local news who got interviewed about a neighbor who had done something heinous. “He was always so quiet,” the neighbor would say. “He was the nicest person in the world.”
That’s how I felt then, seeing that something so familiar had become completely unrecognizable. A loved one had snapped, had become angry. The waves that normally drew us to her now caused our family to flee in terror.
I chose to blame the storm and the wind back then, rather than the sea. I made excuses for her.
As the traffic on Broadway inches south to a symphony of squeaky brake pads and prolonged horn blasts, I think back to the next time I saw the ocean angry. It was my freshman year in college. I went out on a boat with some friends and just assumed they knew what they were doing, that they’d checked the weather. We were five miles offshore when we saw the squalclass="underline" a great cliff of clouds that stretched from the heavens down to the sea—white on top but a dark gray beneath, like a pristine wedding veil someone had dragged through the mud.
There was no going around it, so we tried to race back to the inlet, but the storm was moving too fast. Winds over fifty miles an hour. It hit us all at once like a heavenly fist, a mighty slam of stinging rain and raucous seas. The outboard came out of the water as a steep wave lifted us up, and the engine stalled. We huddled in the floor of the boat, gripping each other and the rails, quiet, shivering, drenched, the boat filling with water, all of us absolutely terrified. The sea rose around us in crashing pyramids. I thought she would swallow us, this thing from which I had only known love. I learned to fear her then, and to simultaneously hate myself for feeling that fear. Afterward, I made more excuses: I blamed it on the sky, on the weather, on the poor planning.
Abusive relationships often go like this: falling in love, not seeing the ugly side, coming up with rationalizations when you do. It’s hard to get free, because you just want to recapture some lost feeling. You want to feel safe, respected, honored again. And you’ll play games with your mind to make that happen. It’s the alcohol’s fault; it’s the stress of their job; you may even make the great sin of blaming yourself.
By the time I was born, they’d already built the levees around Manhattan. Much was made of the project back when it was just an idea: how much it would cost, how unnecessary it was, debates about whether the sea would rise or not. Reading a historical account of the levee project today is strange, knowing what we now know. You marvel at the lack of impatience, at the bickering over details and budgets. Coastlines around the world were being redrawn while people argued whether anything was even occurring, much less whether it was our fault.