Out here, of course, the storm had been devastating. He’d seen images in the news. They’d become iconic. Dogs paddling for their lives, clinging to bits of wood and using upturned buckets as boats. A pod of dead dolphins lying among a broken boat. On these streets there had been fireballs glowing from broken gas lines. Wooden houses turned mushy as waterlogged phone books. Though the city had long since cleared the most dramatic wreckage, signs of the disaster remained. The most visible evidence of the storm appeared in absences: concrete foundations in weedy lots and ghost lines on walls marking how high the water got. Those stains and vacancies told a story of dark, neck-high water churned with ragged wood, seaweed, oil-coated garbage, and downed electrical lines whipping like industrial-sized eels. The water had been everywhere. It could return if it wanted.

Mitchell led Alfonzo to a bedraggled apartment tower and buzzed the intercom. Alfonzo realized he was fuzzy on what site visits entailed. Were there forms? Would they have to go into a crawl space? Did he have to wear a hard hat? Must they meet a super? Would someone yell?

Mitchell snorted. “Don’t worry.”

Alfonzo let go. The elevators were broken, so they took the stairs. He liked springing up behind Mitchell. Mitchell joked about mountains to climb. Just like Machu Picchu. His friend had a way of making everything feel like a comical jaunt.

When they arrived at apartment 1975 the door was cracked. Mitchell called out in his business voice. A faint meow came from within.

The creature was speaking, but whether it was directed at them or someone else was unclear. Mitchell tried again.

“M’ello? Can we come in?” Mitchell gingerly poked his head inside.

A response came louder than before. “We’re back here.”

The apartment was shabby, but it also had that charm of the old: moldings, high ceilings designed with bigger animals in mind. The paint had been applied over and over and layered with fine intermediate coatings of cooking grease. The floors were a dinged-up dead-tree color, the walls a gray-blue fuzzed with dander.

There was a long hall with a few doorways. Alfonzo imagined a closet, then a bath, then a kitchen behind them. Alfonzo had been in many such apartments over the years. Friends’ places growing up. Layouts recycled and reused across the city. He peered into the first open door, expecting to see a small room, maybe a bed or layer of straw, but what he saw instead were cardboard boxes, floor-to-ceiling cardboard boxes in an impressively deranged display. A narrow pathway between the box stacks was the only clear space.