This excursion made Alfonzo buoyant. Subways could sometimes become something more than utilitarian tubes for transporting animals from home to work. Sometimes they felt like a magical escape pod. You enter your capsule in one neighborhood world and emerge in an altogether different zone. Chelsea could give way to the Cloisters. The cramp of Hell’s Kitchen could open into Prospect Park. The trains shot everyone through the ground. It was fantastical, really. There was so much of everything and it was all so strange. Alfonzo celebrated the muchness.

Leaving the center revived him. Manhattan and the Rockaways might as well be different countries. One realm was devoted to business, the other to all things aquatic. The shadows of City Hall and Hunter College were not long enough to fall over that far shore.

Salt wind flapped the blue cloth of the Atlantic. It mussed their wool. Sun-faded tarps rippled and snapped around half-destroyed buildings. Sand skittered along, obscuring the lines of the road. Animals were pushed and pulled along by the wind. Seagulls joked above them.

Alfonzo and Mitchell looked up and down Beach 90. Mitchell explained that in one direction was the Atlantic Beach Bridge, and in the other was Beach 227, tucked behind the Breezy Point gates.

The usual city structures were faded and cracked. They—those animals in charge of numbers and names—seemed to have given up out here. The labels were functional: Beach Channel Drive faced the channel, while Shore Front Parkway faced the open ocean. The beach felt loose.

Out here, water was the true religion, government, and culture. But even though, or perhaps because, this was a stronghold of seashore life, marks of hostility were visible. They sauntered by a cinder-block wall with a mural of whales and octopuses and dolphins painted in blue, green, and purple. Someone had graffitied over it BUBBLE BLOWERS OUT NOW! Over that, another painter had written a succinct FU. Gull boom-bap blared from a car stereo.

Alfonzo hadn’t been to the beach in ages, since before Hurricane Sparky. During that storm, he’d hidden out in Mitchell’s third-floor apartment, where they listened to records and ate macaroni. They worried and joked about the Gowanus flooding into their building. It would turn them into toxic avengers, said Mitchell. Alfonzo responded that it would probably just give them cancer. They blew cigarette smoke out the window as rain battered the leaves off the trees. The Gowanus did overflow into some basements but never got as far as their building. Alfonzo returned to his ground-floor den and dreamed of black mold.