I
THE MONSTER IN THE WATER
The Monster in the Water: This is the hypercane, the biggest kind of hurricane there could be. It is maybe not something that has ever happened on earth. It is maybe something that never will. It is a theoretical idea, that's what Jess said. It is a possible outcome that Jess studied, where nonlinear weather changes could super- charge atmospheric conditions and produce superdense eye walls and fast-moving storms. Hypercanes could pull energy from the warmer water and spawn tornadoes and locally intense downdrafts. The rain could be sideways or include hail. It could have a very fast rate of precipitation per hour. It could have the most destructive winds possible, ranging up to 200 mph. I have never seen a hypercane, and maybe they are not real and will never be real, like a monster in the water that never comes.
—From the Water Logbook
1
WHAT WE SAVE
I can feel water and I can feel heavy weather on the way. Mother said, "You're like a dowser, Nonie, like those people who can feel water under the ground and help farmers find it, only you do it with water everywhere." What she said is so. I can understand water—floods and rivers over their banks, storms and clouds and placid days when the droplets sit in the air like they are thinking quietly of joining the earth.
But the storm that took Amen, that storm I didn't feel. It was too big. It was the one that broke the floodwalls. That was the last night of the Old City and the museum and Amen and everything that trapped us, when the wide Hudson opened its mouth wider and became the sea and the sea came to us and we took off north, no matter how scared Bix was, no matter how hard it was to leave Mother behind. It was the storm that started something new.
We still lived in the place we called Amen, what had been the American Museum of Natural History. Time made us shorten that name. We said "A-M-N-H," for the whole place—the ancient rooms we tended, the collections we protected—then "Amen," when it only meant the village we made on the roof of the museum library, the name a prayer to keep us safe. And we were safe up there a long time, Bix and me and Father and Keller, and Mother—before we lost her—and the rest of us working to save the collections and be there, just be there, saving each other too. I was young then, thirteen, Bix sixteen. I was a blur of closed heart and quiet voice, scared of the dark and of losing home, cozied in a place Mother made for us on the roof, where time and space were as fixed as they could be in The World As It Is.
Father said we would run north to Mother's land, Tyringham, our taiga, our last safe place, if we lost Amen. We made the go packs and canoe, learned to hunt, worried about the dogs and the Lost, about guns, about how people outside Amen fractured into groups by color, about everything between Amen and Tyringham. We worried about losing Amen. In the Museum Logbook we kept a list of all that might be lost, everything in the museum. The adults made notations on anthropology, archaeology, geology, paleontology, ichthyology, hydrology, geography, entomology, the museum records no one could read anymore on computers. They made notes from memory or books in the library, from listing the contents of cases and storage drawers and displays. And there was my list, my shadow list. In margins and on back pages, I added drawings and notes on water and how I understood it, the clouds, the shine on a puddle, the animals after they drank, the rainbow over the city, the way to feel the pressure drop for a squall, or the build of a hurricane. I added them to help me remember, and for other people to find one day, if all they found was the book.
The Museum Logbook was to keep understanding alive, the most important work there was for Amen, a race against rot and mold and time to save things, even the memory of things. My Water Logbook was only for the future. I was young then and didn't know why I was making it. Now I know it was to make the new way of knowing that might put it all right again, the new thing I'm standing at the edge of, here where there is drinkable water and where people are in the rooms of the house writing and cooking, and I'm about to leave again, but only for good reasons, remembering what was left behind in that storm.
My Water Logbook didn't help me see that storm. I didn't know what it would bring—the journey and the people who helped and the ones who harmed. That storm, that last storm of Amen, was a hypercane, like Jess predicted, the Monster in the Water. It moved faster than thought and faster than sense. It swept in to take everything, and I didn't see it. I was a girl on a roof, and I couldn't tell everyone, "The end is here."
