“Course not!” I knew that was uncool. We had a few who didn’t. When all records are lost along with family and friends, you can become what you want. Or you can try. Takes style, Jenn would add, noting how little of that was found in a den. I figured her contempt for such fantasies was meant to prove her Minnesota relatives were humble but real. I hoped they were. “If we were rich, we’d have got out in time.”

“Probably.” When Rube sucked in his cheeks like that, his face got all cadaverous. “Maybe you were long-term squatters in an older luxury building. Plenty did after the first cycles of superstorms, with all those big apartments empty and the best available shelter.”

“You mean, like us now?”

“You call this luxury?” He gave his usual sour grin, but I knew he was thinking there’d been plenty of chance to get out if you had foresight and a place to go. If my family was rich, they must have left without me. And that was too sad to consider.

“So, we were poor. That’s okay, too.”

“I’m guessing more middle class. ’Cause of how you talk.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. But it’s different when you’re not trying to talk den.”

“I don’t try to talk any special way . . .”

“You want to hear this or not?”

“I guess.”

I always listened to Rubio, even when I didn’t like what he had to say. He could shake me out of my survivor’s tight self-focus, open up a broader perspective on things.

Wondering how many beers he was tossing back down in the Mess, I crossed the upper hallway to the bunk tiers. The wooden sleeping racks rose the full height of the room, a sturdy four-layered jungle-gym of salvaged beams and planking. The cheers and jeers from the media loft faded behind the snores of tired pickers who’d already hit the sack, and the constant creaking and shuddering of old wood under their weight. One of the old-timers called it like being aboard ship, the kind with sails instead of engines, like those I’d watch from the roof gardens, stirred with longing. Big-bellied white curves, gliding up the East River over Brooklyn. Silent with distance, just wind-driven grace and speed. As free as birds.