By 2 a.m., I was nosing slowly along West 18th. My lamp was funky, not fully charged, so I was more than usually paranoid about flooded cellar holes or drowned subway stairs. Dropping into one of those could rouse the old nightmare of being sucked into an underwater vortex, and then . . . well, panic on the streets was never a good idea.

Still hard for me to be out there with confidence. First, step quiet, like my street coach called it. Ears and eyes sharp. And trust your nose. That night, I was keeping downwind of the recent collapse of a six-story on 17th. Maybe some good pick in the rubble—two families had been squatting there—but also toxics and dust. Bodies, too, from the stink of it, and I’m no fan of stealing from the dead. Plenty of pickers will, but no way I’m grabbing for anything a corpse still has a grip on.

Corner of 18th and Seventh, my ears turned me uptown. With the tide coming in, the black river lapped greedily along the avenues to the west, the debris mats shifting in the current, groaning like drowning souls. Rubio says if God had known what we’d do to his lovely planet, he’d have made us keep our gills, but who swims anymore? Even with the ocean washing in and out each day, a dip in its oily sludge could burn you raw. Night pickers learned to listen up and hear the water’s messages.

And wear boots. We all had boots of some sort, though I still hadn’t cadged a pair that really fit me.

I asked Rubio, “Hey, did all the size eights make it into people’s luggage and off Island before the Wave?”

He rolled his eyes. “Which one?”

For once, I got a chuckle out of him, so I wasn’t about to argue that Superstorm Abel had been the biggest and baddest. Rubio didn’t see much cause for humor in this life, ’cept the darker sort. Or the sort where I was the butt, mocking my naïveté and ignorance.

But he never said: doncha remember? Not once he got that everything before Abel’s Wave was a blank for me—my name, my history, everything that tells you who you are. What I mean by brain fog. The den shrink called it ‘dissociative fugue’ and ‘loss of access to autobiography.’ In short, I was compensating. Plenty of memory-related trauma in the den: too little, too much, too vague, way too vivid. If you lived through Abel’s Wave—or any Wave—you likely didn’t want to remember. Just moving on took all your concentration.