And so they worked their way from their put-in in Mid-City up to the heart of City Park, to where they could see the neoclassical columns of the Museum of Art sticking up out of the water. Donny half expected to see the banner of whatever the last exhibition was, but there was only vegetation hanging from the chipped cornice. He pushed them in closer, hoping to be able to see in through the shadows. A big night heron flew out from back in there, startling them with its primordial squawk before they even saw it.

“We don’t have time for your apocalypse tourism,” said Marianne.

“We also don’t have time to be in a hurry,” said Donny. They were both right.

That was when they saw the alligator, sunning itself on the roof of the old coffee shop. They saw it when Donny clumsily knocked the side of the boat with the pole, waking the beast with the noise.

“He looks a little cranky,” said Donny. “Or she.”

“What do they eat?” said Marianne.

“Anything that moves,” said Donny. “So don’t get any ideas about getting in the water.”

The gator slid into liquid. They tracked its eyes and notches for a while as it picked up speed, swimming parallel to them and then away, and then they lost it as it seemed to head toward the neighborhood to the south.

“Maybe it went under,” said Donny. “You got that map?”

She handed it to him. It was a map she had taken from the Library. New Orleans from before the floods, even before the fighting. A motorist’s map to a perfectly normal American city, one of those maps from the era when you could get away with never thinking about geography. When you could think of the city as a static thing, made by people, to their design. Instead of a product of nature, organic, dynamic, entropic.

A map that did not anticipate that the waterline could change, let alone so dramatically.

A map that did not tell you this entire neighborhood was built on what had been, when Europeans first arrived, a swamp. Land below sea level, a bowl designed to hold vast quantities of water when the river broke free of its banks.

So they paddled out into it, navigating by the street signs that remained, green and white markers from the past poking up from the water.

They paddled past flooded blocks of big twentieth-century houses under ten to twelve feet of water, now occupied mostly by wildlife, if at all. Supposedly a handful of members of the community were living out here now, establishing shelter in attics and rooftop shanties, showing a way to live when the coastal settlements of the world were underwater. But they didn’t see any of them.

They did see more alligators. And snakes.

They saw a rat the size of a small dog, swimming, looking not at all freaked out.

“Adaptation,” said Donny.