“Write that down,” Ena said, so my mother—rolling her eyes at me—did.

  There were exactly three reliable things at the Morningside. The first was Sanitation. No matter how bad things got, Sanitation was right on schedule. They did get stalled in disputes with the city, though, so if more than a week went by between pickups, it was necessary to start up the rusted little car Ena kept in the sub-basement garage and drive the trash over to the landfill, six bags at a time, until the sidewalk in front of the building was clear.

  The second was Bezi Duras. She was from Back Home, too, but had come to Island City years ago, well before the war, and so could scarcely line up five words of Ours, and then only in a disgraceful accent. She lived in the penthouse, with its private elevator. You could rely on her to be on time and polite, and to never, ever summon you for help. “In ten years I haven’t been up there,” Ena said. “If she needs something done, she gets her own people to do it.”

  The third were the gawkers. Only a few varieties of thistle persisted in the courtyard flower beds now, but the Morningside had once been renowned for its gardens. They had been impressive enough to attract the admiration of passersby, who would stick their heads through the main gate whenever it opened to admit a car. People still wanted this kind of access. Students from the old university down the street were always asking to be let in to photograph the gargoyles or to peruse the library collection, or to sketch the lobby. Ena no longer had patience for any of these characters. She kept blurry printouts of the most persistent ones taped above the blank screens in the security shed: a studious-looking wisp of a white girl with a nose ring; a broad-shouldered, soft-faced Black man with glasses and a receding hairline. We were to memorize their faces and refuse them entry, no questions asked. “This one,” she said, tapping the man’s picture. “This one is relentless. He tries at least once a month.”

  “Tries what?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know. To get in. To poke around.”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “This isn’t like Paraiso, Sil. You have to watch out for people here. Thieves and shifters.”

  “Is he a thief?”

  “Everybody is.”

  The people who weren’t thieves and shifters were janglers, a term Ena and my mother used to denote the kind of person who wore all their jewelry at once. Of these, the Morningside admittedly boasted a few. Their defects of character sprang, in Ena’s opinion, from a fatal combination of wealth and age. They weren’t about to let a few hurricanes and a submerged industrial district stand between them and the prosperity their grandparents had so doggedly eked out. “So they pretend things are just like they were forty years ago, and they throw their little tantrums. Leaving out trash, letting their dogs shit in the hallways, complaining about the water and the heat and the noise.”

  Most of these specimens spoke to you without eye contact, and often without bothering to form full sentences. Like Mrs. Gaspard, the Board’s cadaverous president, who, upon being introduced to us in the lobby, had only one question: “And how much did the Board have to shell out to get you here?”

  “Not a cent, Mrs. Gaspard!” Ena said cheerfully. “Repopulation Program! Credits!”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Gaspard. “God bless the credits.”

  “She’s the worst of the bunch,” Ena told us.

  By all rights, that should have been Bezi Duras, with that penthouse on the thirty-third floor all to herself. Ena was still forming an opinion about her, but if a person had made no strides toward proving they weren’t a jangler in ten years, then perhaps it was safe to default to the assumption that a jangler was exactly what they were. Many signs bore this out. Bezi Duras’s wealth was one. Her obstinate solitude was another. And then there were the dogs. Bezi Duras owned three behemoth hounds. She indulged them in better food than the rest of us had gotten in a long time, and they slept all day in the sun upstairs.

  “But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about the residents. There’s decent enough folks, too.” Mrs. Sayez in 16A, for instance, was a darling. She was the Repopulation Program coordinator for the upper city—a fact she kept repeating while she squeezed my mother’s hands in the hallway outside her apartment.

  “How’s the tour?” she asked.

  “Very wonderful,” my mother managed. “Thank you.”

  “It’s a bit overwhelming, I’m sure, but this really is one of the finest old buildings in the whole city, and I’m so glad you get a flavor of how it used to be.”

  “Beautiful,” my mother said. “Beautiful.”

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “We are so happy. Thank you.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.” Mrs. Sayez patted my mother’s hand. “Oh! Here.” Her momentary dive back into her apartment offered a glimpse of corridor wallpapered in brilliant marigold. “Can you read English?” she asked. I could, and said so. “And your mother, can she?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  “That’s just wonderful—isn’t it? You already know the language, and you have your aunt to make you feel at home. Here.” She put a stack of cards into my hand. “The Repopulation Program is always eager to hear your thoughts. How you’re feeling, what might make you feel more at home. Every few weeks, make sure to fill one of these out and drop it in the mail. Don’t worry about postage—they’re already stamped. And answer truthfully—but don’t forget to have fun!” She turned to my mother. “It’s meant to be fun.”

  Each card asked the same three questions, spaced neatly down the page and presented in unobtrusive capital letters: What is your level of satisfaction with your new home? What do you like most about your new home? What would make your new home even better?

  “What are those?” my mother asked as soon as we’d moved down the hall.

  “Fun cards,” I said stupidly. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the effect this barrage of intrusions would have on my mother.

  “But these are questions—look, these are question marks.”

  “Right.”

  “What are they asking?”

  “Just how we’re settling in. Things like that.” I tried smiling. “Light and easy.”

  Ena must have known that I was twisting the truth, but she didn’t betray me. Perhaps she, too, sensed that heading off my mother was the right thing to do. The last question on the fun cards had brought me to a quandary, however—one I had been contemplating since the beginning of the tour.

  “Are there any other kids in this building?” I asked Ena.

  “There used to be,” she said. “But all the families went upriver, you know?” Halfway down the service stairs, it occurred to her that this was not what I wanted to hear. A squeeze of the arm was waiting for me when I caught up with her. “But that just means you’ll have the place all to yourself. Want to see the playroom?”

  This was the final stop on our tour. Seeing it, I wondered whether Ena knew anything about kids at all. It was a room for the very young. It smelled faintly of early childhood pastimes—watercolors, chalk, glue—but was empty save for a mural of a painted woodland, a wraparound scene of forest animals at a party. A prim, worried doe was arriving late to the festivities. The sound of her footsteps had drawn the attention of a badger, who occupied the seat farthest to the left, with his back to the viewer. The act of turning his head to look at her had caused him to knock over a glass of what must have been wine onto the white tablecloth. All around sat a host of woodland friendlies engaged in various little confabs and misdeeds, though they were clearly meant to be paying attention to the wild boar, who stood at the head of the table and was in the middle of holding forth, tusks agape, a wineglass tilting perilously from his hairy trotter. A feast had been laid at the center of the table. Its particulars were familiar to me only because the books I’d grown up reading had a tendency to dwell on dazzling suppers. The bright yellow orbs spilling out of an upturned basket were almost certainly quinces. The huge, round, layered thing was surely some sort of cake. The cross-cut wheel off to the side was cheese, obviously, orange and full of holes, from one of which protruded the face of a mouse who, for some reason, had not been invited to the party—perhaps because, of all the creatures on display, he was the only one not wearing any clothes. In the very middle of it all sat a glistening red-and-white hunk, rimmed by a crown of bones.

  “What’s that?” I asked, already suspecting the answer.

  Ena looked. “That’s meat.”

  The basement laundry vented directly into the playroom, so it is impossible to recall that decadent yet horror-provoking mural without likewise remembering the floral burn of the ancient machines. Their rumble was the bass line of the adjoining superintendent’s office, that place of shadow and hum, where the pipe-laden ceiling pressed down and unseen water rushed back and forth overhead in the flickering gloom. There, under a deluge of mail and toolboxes, sat Ena’s desk, and on it, her little radio, tuned to the Drowned City Dispatch all day long, like every other radio in town.

  It was common in those days for people to call in to the Dispatch for just about anything. The Dispatcher mainly urged them to stick to stories about Island City, as it was now or as they remembered it—but once they were on the air, callers did whatever they liked. They’d share grievances about their neighbors. They’d get sentimental about past loves. They’d play a game we affectionately called Ration Roulette, where they’d list the most useless combinations of items they’d been assigned for the week: beets and baking powder; kerosene and parsnips; tinfoil and matches and half a packet of almonds. For the most part, the Dispatcher let them get on with it. He had a gravelly, coursing voice and a breezy manner. He didn’t talk about himself, and hardly ever participated in the kind of reminiscing he asked others to do. Sometimes people would call in because they thought they’d finally figured out his true identity—he was their neighbor, they said, or their mail carrier, or that guy who used to sell books on the east side of the park—to which he would always say, “Hey, you’re right!,” though they never were.

  The week we moved in with Ena, a starfall was observed above the outer bay. It was reported to the Dispatch by the crew of a patrol boat, who mistook it for a new phenomenon. Then somebody called in with a correction: it was, in fact, a recurring celestial event that happened every hundred and forty years. By the following evening, it was all anybody could talk about. It bled out of the radio into the corner stores and funding offices, into snippets of conversation you passed in the street. The cover of every newspaper was suddenly overtaken by the same hazy picture of night above the skyline. The Dispatcher encouraged experts to call in and debate whether such a subtle fizz of light could have been visible to the naked eye even as recently as ten years ago.

  Most agreed that no, it could not.

  “So perhaps,” the Dispatcher said, “just perhaps, this means that some measure of light pollution might finally be receding?”

  Yes, they told him. This starfall could, in fact, be the long-awaited sign—the Big One, the Real One, a clear indication that Posterity measures were working and that things were changing for the better at last.

  But then a few weeks passed with no governmental acknowledgment of the phenomenon. People stopped calling in about it. The starfall did not bear out, and we went back to waiting for the next omen.

  There was no dearth of them back then. In every corner of the city, some phenomenon akin to a miracle promised to portend the long-awaited return of better days. Some, like the starfall, were momentous. Others were just eerie: the discovery by a father and son, for instance, of football-sized goldfish in the sewer drain outside their building.

  Sooner or later, one of these near miracles would be the right one. And when it manifested, people said, they would buy the biggest loaf of bread or the biggest bottle of champagne they could find. They would rip up their old ration cards and stop watching the sky for signs. They would dance on piers and bridges, on boat decks and rooftops, surrounded by loved ones and the crash of music from competing parties. With fireworks overhead. Always fireworks.

  “I have a lot of reservations about whether this can or will ever happen,” the Dispatcher would say. “But if it does? My friends, if it does, we will be the luckiest people in the world.”

  We would have stuck it out on our flooded streets and disregarded the panic-mongering of naysayers to help reclaim Island City from the tide. We would find ourselves back in the Island City of before. The city as it had always been, and still was, under or above water: the city of fanfare and electric autumns, of lamplit streets and music and dazzling marquees, of lovers tangling furtively in windows, of lush parks, of townhomes glowing warmly on a moonless night. The ensuing party would be magnificent. And if you doubted it, all you had to do was look to the Dancing Girl billboard for reassurance. Every neighborhood had one. Battle Hill’s, at the crossroads of Moritz and Pine, just a few blocks south of the Morningside, was a shapely, dark-haired figure in a blazing yellow dress. The billboard had her in profile, waltzing with a lamp in the foreground of faceless, silhouetted revelers, all of them packed into the living room of one of those turn-of-the-century townhouses. Something about the billboard made you feel that it was the Dancing Girl’s own, perhaps newly acquired, perhaps one of those South Falls Island places that were promised to the likes of us. Tables around the room exploded with colorful fare. You had to stand right under the billboard to see the details: sprays of zigzag fish bones, fireworks of bonbons, coupes filled to the brim. Framing the dance floor was a huge window, beyond which lay the distant and unmistakable down-island skyline and a thin, cheerful stripe of the coming dawn. Disregarded in the only unoccupied corner of this blissful scene lay a folded-up umbrella. But not just any umbrella: the unmistakable emblem of the Posterity Initiative. The umbrella under which we had all been living: folded up, unnecessary now that we had come through the fire. No coincidence that it and the girl’s dress were the same shade of yellow. You toiled in faith under it, the billboard seemed to say. Now wear it in celebration.

  To the girl’s right were tastefully emblazoned the names of the billboard’s sponsors: the Island City Repopulation Program and the National Bureau of Posterity. To her left, underscoring all of this, was the ruling mantra of our time: We’re nearly there.

  Belief in the sign and the party was the city’s lifeblood. The sight of that Dancing Girl chipped away at your doubts. No one was immune to her thrall—not even my mother.

  Maybe you’ve never heard of my mother. Or maybe you followed the Belen case and formed an opinion of her years ago. Maybe you’ve seen her face, that unflattering picture from her Repopulation file that ended up all over the news. How sinister she must seem to you, the shock of hair clouding her forehead, the bloodshot eyes which, in that one picture, admittedly look a little crazy.

  My mother was a small, sinewy, dark-haired woman. In another life she might have been a jockey, but in this one she’d been a mechanic, a carpenter, and, for a little while one unfortunate summer, a hoof scraper.

  She was an agile, quick-thinking person. Unafraid of things that could befall her body. Exceedingly adept at languages, except for English, which she considered messy. She hated a mess. She hated ignorance, too—or, rather, hated finding it in herself about something she felt she should already know. She hated inconsistencies in people and stories alike. She hated rudeness, and strangers who acted too familiar, and friends who turned out to care less about you than you cared about them. But she liked animals. And keeping busy. And she loved me.

  Rules made up her world, and mine. Never ask a question in writing, for instance, if you could ask it in person—words committed to paper could haunt you forever. Don’t keep pictures or records for more than a year. If you have to think about whether the information you’re revealing might be compromising to someone, then shut your mouth. Speak Our language only at home, only with family—which, until we moved in with Ena, meant only with my mother herself. Don’t reveal where you’re from. If asked, name only the place you’d most recently called home—which, until we moved to Island City, had been Paraiso. If pressed, stick to this answer. Say you don’t remember anything before that.

  I had spent years unwinding a knot of theories about my mother’s commitment to obscuring our origins. At first, a sinister family history had seemed the most plausible explanation. A militant grandparent. A disgraced uncle. As I got older, I convinced myself we must be some sort of royalty, hunted from city to city, hiding from faceless usurpers. Setting aside my mother’s aptitude for manual labor, and the fact that she occasionally mentioned veterinary school, it seemed to make sense. It would certainly explain why we had no records, no pictures of my mother’s childhood, nor mine, nor of any relatives living or dead, including my unmentioned and unmentionable father.

  Ena, on the other hand, kept the past in full, abundant view. Pictures, cards, pamphlets. I’d never known a home so crowded with information. Most of it was about Beanie. Her radiation appointment schedule was still pinned to the wall. Her hairwash was still in the bathroom. Her watercolors were still spread out on the hall console. You got the sense, looking around, that she had just stepped out and was due back any second. Ena even spoke about her in the present tense. I didn’t know much about love, but this felt like it to me. A persistent keeping-around of the object of your affection. A surrounding of the self.

  In countless photos obscuring the fridge door, Beanie was a small, alert-looking woman who seemed vulnerable to sunburn. It was clear that she and Ena had traveled for leisure a great deal back in the before-time. Here they were in front of some ancient, sun-bleached temple. Here in a hot spring.