“Excuse me, did you forget Hurricane Sparky?”

“That was a natural disaster.”

Old Spots snorted. “It’s those extremist SERFs,” he said—the Sea Equality Revolutionary Front. “They’re planning to flood the subways and the sewers, forcing us to swim like rats.”

“Why would sea creatures even want that?”

“They hate our legs and our free society.”

“Hum?”

“It’s all connected, see? They want us all drowned. These buildings don’t have any floors because…” Old Spots paused for emphasis. “They’re huge aquariums full of fanatical sea creatures. When you and I are walking down the street, we’re being watched by sharks and stingrays and whales and those fucking dolphins. They’re right there plotting our demise while we go about our business, like suckers!”

Mitchell laughed and Old Spots frowned. The sad thing was that the reality of New York real estate was already so fantastical that anything felt plausible. More and more development had less and less to do with need. There was already a complex designed to look like a forty-story pair of pants. There was another everyone called the Swiss cheese block. Another building was designed like a tall, narrow zero, hollow in the middle. In this landscape of architects’ follies, an aquarium tower didn’t sound that outrageous.

Mitchell pictured this cartoon building. A super-tall high-rise where dolphins darted up toward the rooftop surface to servant creatures who sprinkled expensive fish food.

The pig barreled on. “Now imagine if one of these slick maniacs decides to pull the plug or break a hole in the wall of their watery tower. Boom. Downtown Tribeca, flooded. Central Park, a wetland. Thousands drowned. Pandemonium.”

“A little extreme, no?”

Old Spots snorted. “It’s our job to imagine worst-case scenarios. You have to think like those gutterpups. You may like to believe that you’re here to prop up some nanny-goat-state nonsense, but I want you on my side, because when we’re all dog-paddling for our lives it won’t be about rich versus poor, it will be about legs versus fins.”

“Umm…”

“Look, boss, no offense, but in my position, I may be privy to some intel you don’t get down here in Housing.” The pig smirked.

Mitchell hated him.

It wasn’t that Old Spots was stupid. It wasn’t even that there was nothing to worry over. Mitchell could see that the city was crumbling and the oceans were seething. It was that Old Spots transformed questions into a cudgel. He only wanted to see the most fragile punished. The pig was blaming the world’s problems on fish, when fish were getting poisoned and eaten, and eaten and poisoned, by all the creatures on land who’d built their industries on sea exploitation. The pig was right and wrong in Mitchell’s eyes, and yet they could only communicate across a chasm of difference. What was being shared? Mitchell didn’t know. Everything got twisted.