I sighed, went to the back, and got two bottles of beer from the fridge. He followed me to where a rope hung from the ceiling, attached to the attic’s pull-down ladder. I handed him the beer. “Here, hold my beer.”

“Famous last words,” he said.

I pulled the rope. The attic ladder dropped down. I took one of the beers from him and climbed up the steps. He followed me. We crossed the finished attic, where we kept our supplies, to a heavy steel door. I unlocked the two bars securing it and stepped out onto the side balcony. It was only three feet wide and five feet long, big enough to comfortably put two chairs. From this point we could see the city, the hustle and bustle of the street below, the traffic on Ponce de Leon, and beyond it, the burned-out husks of skyscrapers, falling apart a little more with each magic wave.

I took one chair; he took the other.

“Nice,” he said, and drank the beer.

“I like it. I like to watch the city.” I’d had the balcony and the attic ladder installed two months ago. When Jim found out, he had called me. He worried it was a security risk. Jim wouldn’t worry about anything related to me anymore. When a ten-year-old friendship shattered, the edges cut you.

My father drank his beer.

“What was Shinar like?”

He put his beer on the wooden railing and held out his hand. I touched it. A golden light rolled over the city below. I had expected crude, simple buildings the color of sand and clay. Instead beautiful white towers rose before me, drenched in greenery. Textured walkways led up terraces supporting a riot of flowers and trees. Sparkling ponds and creeks interrupted open spaces. In the distance a massive building, a pyramid or temple, rose, the first tier white, the second blue, the third green, topped with a shining gold sun symbol. People of every color and age strode through the streets. Women in colorful flowing dresses, in plain tunics, in military garb, carrying weapons and leading children by the hand. Older kids running, waving canvas bags at each other. Men in leather and metal armor, in robes like the one my father wore, in finery and a couple nude in bright swirls of red and blue body paint, some clean-shaven, some with a few days of scruff.

“No beards?” I said. Sumerian civilization was the oldest on record, and men on the few artifacts that survived always had full, curly beards.

“It came into fashion much later,” he said.

“It’s not what I expected.”