Sam’s laser gaze focused on Rubio. “Uptown?”

“Sure, Sam. Inwood. Washington Heights, Fort Tryon. West Harlem and the upper West Side. All that.”

“But who?” Sam would unspool a list of lost neighbors and friends if you even hinted you were willing to listen. I’d sat through it once, in case some name rang a bell. None did.

“Nobody ya’d know, Sammy.” Spunk got up. He never saw the point of the Sam ordeal, plus he had a girlfriend in C Tier. Maybe hoping for a quickie before heading out.

“You don’t know,” Rubio countered. “He might’ve.”

“He lived downtown.”

“Even so, he could’ve. I knew uptowners. Clients, mostly, but I knew them.”

“La-de-dah!” Spunk poked Rube in the shoulder, grinned and sauntered off.

Rubio scowled after him. “Uptowner staff, then! Who stayed on. Or casino workers, hotel staff, waiters in restaurants he worked in, maybe the owners!”

But Spunk was through the doors.

I said, “Gotta go check my draw.”

Rube threw me a look. Like, how could I leave when he hadn’t won a single argument?

“Which restaurants?” I heard Sam ask as the doors closed behind me.

And Rube would dutifully list the few left uptown, along with their much-reduced menus. He might even add the hardy handful of hotels, casinos, and clubs still open for business in the uptown towers, serving tourists from the Mainland who boated in between storms for a day or a week of urban rustic and nostalgia.

Life, it seems—and commerce—will always fill an empty niche.

After all, as Rubio would insist, this is still America.

EIGHT

So, it’s not quite right my claiming that everything before Abel was a blank. Or, not quite accurate, Jenn would say, correcting my grammar.

When I came to in the Ward so vague and silent, the medics were sure I had brain damage. But they’d put paper and pencil by my cot in case it was just my voice I’d lost. A few days later, I started writing down the days of the week. Numbers came next, then the fifty-two states. Weird, huh? I mean, how the brain works? The shrink said it could be my language center just firing at random. That’s until I put the numbers to work in basic math and finally croaked out the obvious: “Where am I?”

Or something like that. Anyhow, the physical world and the words to describe it came back to me in fits and starts. The door would open, spit out a bunch of words and concepts, then slam shut again. Memory quakes, I called them, ’cause they were seismic and left me wiped to the core. After a big one, I’d sleep the whole day. Like the kid two beds over with his seizures.