“Who’s the mail addressed to?” I asked May when he showed up that evening. “Just in case I decide to look for it, I mean.”

  He grinned. “You’ve already looked.”

  “I have not. And I won’t if you don’t start being more honest.”

  He settled himself on the wall and crossed his legs. “Most of the letters will be for Lamb Osmond.”

  “And what did you say your name is?”

  He hesitated. “Lewis Allen May.”

  “See why that’s a problem?”

  “L.A.M. Osmond. Lewis Allen May Osmond. Lamb, for short.”

  “That’s not how you spell ‘lamb.’ ”

  “It’s an endearment, Snoopy. My mother used to call me that. Osmond was my grandfather’s name.”

  “Sure.”

  “It was. Frank Gareth Osmond. My mother’s father.”

  “None of that explains why you’d be receiving mail under Lamb Osmond when you already have a name of your own, Lewis Allen May. If that even is your name.”

  “Plenty of people go by more than one name.”

  “Suspicious people.”

  “I’m not a suspicious person.”

  “You sure seem like one.”

  He could tell now, if he’d been unable to tell before, that there was a lot riding on this name business. All his glibness faded. He took his time. “Tell you what,” he said. “I can prove it.” He edged along the wall until he was a good deal closer to me. “There’s a fireplace in the living room in 16D. Right? Right?” This seemed like a detail Ena wouldn’t admit to knowing, so I didn’t either. “Well,” May said, “there is. If you sit down on the hearthstone and feel around with your feet, one of the tiles will give. And if you turn it over, you’ll find a little inscription. ‘Lamb Osmond wrote Nothing Fades here.’ ”

  I stared at him. “That doesn’t prove you’re Lamb Osmond. All that proves is that you know what’s written under Lamb Osmond’s hearthstone.”

  “Would anyone but Lamb Osmond know what’s written under his hearthstone?”

  “I don’t know.” My thoughts felt slow and stuck together. “Maybe he asked you to help him loosen it so he could turn it over. Or maybe you were fixing it after he moved out.”

  “But it isn’t fixed, Snoopy. It’s still loose.” He could see that I wasn’t convinced. “What are you worried about?”

  I shrugged. “That you’re asking me to steal someone else’s letters.”

  “Trust me, Snoopy. Everything in that mailbox belongs to me.”

  I still couldn’t convince myself that he was telling the truth. Or, perhaps, I was too convinced, and ashamed at being won over so easily. Ena—or perhaps any person grown-up enough to warrant involvement in this kind of decision—would have asked him better questions. She would have seen the holes in his story. Perhaps this was why he’d had no luck with my sensible panopticon of an aunt, and had resorted instead to bribing an eleven-year-old with promises of a secret key.

  Doubt grew around me and hardened. Imagine having to explain to my mother why I had participated in a series of misdeeds premised on lies. Why the pilfering of keys and the sneaking around? Why the thieving of mail that wasn’t mine to open and did not even bear the name of the person on whose behalf I was stealing it? Hadn’t she raised me to be better, smarter, more sensible, than this? It was in my mind to give up on the whole endeavor—and I might have done so.

  But then, later that week, I ran into Bezi Duras. I was coming back from Ricky’s when Bezi Duras turned the corner. I jumped aside. She didn’t see me. She was past me in a flash, but not before I noticed that her shirt and boots were splashed with paint. Royal blue and a strange electric green, so pale it was almost yellow. Right there, made brilliant in the sunlight on all her plain clothes.

  I stood staring up the slope after her.

  Paint. Wouldn’t paint announce itself this way on the body of a painter? Wouldn’t it hitch a ride away from the easel, ending up where it didn’t belong? Wouldn’t it stain her nail beds, speckle her eyelashes, brighten in rivulets the ends of her hair? And if May was telling the truth about this—this granular evidence, this vital thing I had missed about Bezi because I was too busy studying the dogs when I should have been studying her—couldn’t he be telling the truth about the letters?

  So I let myself into 16D. After all, why not? I’d never have to admit it to May if I didn’t want to. I stood in the great room, one two three, with the evening light melting in and tried to picture him living in here all those years ago. His slim glasses on the bathroom vanity. His suits hanging in the closet. His books piled on the mantel. I climbed up onto the hearth and stood there. The fireplace was empty, tiled in white, soot-covered. The little whirlwind that lives in every chimney pulled and pushed, as though it couldn’t quite decide what to do with me.

  I sat on the hearthstone and felt around with my sneaker until I felt one of the tiles give a little. It was a huge slab, three feet by one. I had very little faith in my ability to move it, but a crowbar did the trick in the end, when I eventually returned a few days later to give it another, more committed try. The lip of the tile came right up and sat suspended in the air before grating ruinously back down. I waited to see if the noise would bring anybody to the door, but no one came.

  When I finally managed to get enough leverage under it, I found the promised words. “Lamb Osmond wrote Nothing Fades here.” The inscription was followed by a ragged abstract of what I took to be a rook crane standing on one leg.

  The next time I saw May, I had pen and paper waiting in my pocket. “There’s something else under that hearthstone,” I said. “Can you remember what it is?”

  He frowned. For the first time since we’d met, he didn’t look smug.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “It’s a picture of something. Remember?” He went on looking at me. I held out the pen and paper. “It’s a—a bird.”

  His whole face lit up. “Ah! Snoopy—yes, of course.”

  His reproduction was close. Very close. I had the sense not to reveal whether he had passed my fiendishly clever test, though I could tell he was beginning to get a bit irritated with me. Was it reasonable to push him further? And, if so, how? I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him. Everything he’d said thus far had been some form of true. Would that have been enough for a grown-up? Or would a grown-up have denied him the letters on the simple, irrefutable grounds that they did not bear his name?

  We were both equally surprised, I think, when I showed up the following evening with a box of Lamb Osmond’s mail in my hands.

  “Snoopy! You did it.” He sounded moved, which took me by surprise. I had been imagining a more formal and dignified exchange, not unlike a briefcase trade in some old film—that’s why I’d gone to the trouble of putting all the messy envelopes into a single container. But May got down on his hands and knees right there, in Bezi Duras’s courtyard, and started in on the box, thumbing through fistfuls of paper before reaching in for more. “This is wonderful,” he said. Indignity upon indignity: at some point, he began to cry—or, rather, his glasses fogged up, mortifying me.

  My embarrassment turned to unease. He was taking forever. I could picture it all unraveling so clearly: Bezi Duras would pick tonight to return early from her walk, and she’d find us there in this absurd tableau, a stranger blubbering into a box of crusty old mail, and me standing there with my arms crossed, muttering, “One two three” under my breath.

  May finally remembered I was there. He grabbed my wrist. “Snoopy,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” What else was there to say to a grown man in such a state?

  He went on riffling through the box. As he came within sight of the bottom, his whole being started to slump.

  “Is there more?” he said over his shoulder.

  “No.”

  “This is everything out of the mailbox?”

  “And the basement.”

  He paused a moment to compose himself. “Anywhere you can think that a stray letter might be?”

  “It’s not there, is it? Whatever you were hoping to find?”

  “Doesn’t look like it, no.”

  “Sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Ah, Snoopy.” He forced his face into a smile. “You know, sometimes you’re so far away from what you once were, you need the slightest little reminder that your past was real?” He waved a slip of paper at me—an old ration card dated twelve years back, the year I was born.

  I squinted at it. “Think you still might be able to collect that soap and coffee?” I said.

  He laughed a little. “Maybe, Snoopy. Maybe.” He took forever to stand up. “Well, fuck. It was worth a try. Thanks for this. I won’t forget it.”

  A more technologically literate person would, by then, already have sought out what might be found on Lamb Osmond. And in so doing, they would already have known that once upon a time, the twenty-year-old Lewis Allen May had packed his bags and ditched the flat, green brilliance of the wind farm where he’d grown up, leaving behind a poetry-loving librarian mother and a stoic father of ordinary emotional capabilities, and returned to that same Island City his grandparents had abandoned to seek his fortune as a writer.

  The city had fallen several times by then, but it had always come back. It couldn’t help itself, revived by the fire it kept managing to stoke in its most recent newcomers. May felt like he knew it through and through. He’d heard his grandfather’s stories and read about it all his life, and he knew that he had the necessary fire in him. He hadn’t been prepared for how fast the city was emptying, though, or how tired it felt. He hadn’t been prepared for the size of the trash beaches mid-island. Or how indifferent the up-island girls would be: somber, about their own ways, wiping down tables in tea shops inherited from great-grandfolk, the tea itself long gone, its memory kept alive only in pictures on the wall. He sought out his grandfather’s little antiques store on a quiet block, boarded up like all the other houses around it. Cracks in the foundations. Fire escapes dangling uselessly.

  The Repopulation Program was just getting off the ground. Talking about it in company was the fastest way to pick a fight with almost anyone. The white tower people up- and down-island were all for it—it was a way for the administration to cover the climate debts it owed around the world without raising taxes. Plus, Repopulation awardees were exhausted and grateful. They took a rosy view of what they found when they arrived, unlike the people of the outer islands, who had nothing but centuries of complaints and questions. Why had the administration waited so long to offer new housing as an incentive to stay? Why hadn’t new houses been built in time to keep people like May’s grandparents from leaving in the first place, instead of letting their trains stall and their shops sit empty and their neighborhoods crumble into the bay?

  May knew. He’d known it all his life. What he didn’t know was why the city would invite more people in when it couldn’t even make someone who loved it so much, and knew so much about it, welcome.

  Of the three books he wrote in those hazy early years, two were published, both under the name Lamb Osmond, one to modest acclaim—which May had leveraged to a part-time position at the university up-island.

  He was determined to drudge alongside other lecturers in his department until his literary luck bloomed. In his youth, he had imagined himself the kind of person who would thrive in the limelight—but during the couple of instances where the opportunity presented itself to test this belief, he had found the public eye uncomfortably penetrating. He needed a beta blocker just to introduce the readers at a charity event down-island. He started to think he might be fine with staying unseen.

  And unseen he was—by the literati, and often by reviewers, but not, to his surprise, by the great poet Benjamin Bowen, whose university office shared a wall with May’s own. May’s mother was an ardent fan of Bowen’s, and May had grown up reading his poetry. He did not expect to see the legendary, bull-necked lothario refilling water bottles at the corridor fountain or sleeping off his fifth divorce on the same old office sofa where he had spent so many nights after the previous four. Nor would he have thought him capable of taking a genuine interest in an underling. But Bowen surprised him by seeking out and reading all of May’s books—even the one already out of print. “You’ve got some real sand,” he shouted after May one morning. “That scene with the turbines!” And there, under the blinding hallway lights of the fifth floor, within earshot of every open classroom, Benjamin Bowen whistled.

  Whether or not this remark had been facetiously intoned, May couldn’t decide. He let his misgivings fade as Bowen began inviting him out: to coffee at first, then chess games in the park, then a succession of literary parties, often held in the dimly lit penthouse apartment of some admirer of Bowen’s or another, usually an older man with a suspiciously amassed fortune and an effusive, inebriated wife. Every now and again, after such an event, Bowen would lead May farther up-island, to some crumbling turn-of-the-century fortress, where they would burst, unannounced, into the abode of a literary giant May hadn’t realized was still alive: Stuart Levshin (“still eats meat,” Bowen warned), Paul Brightwood (“pervert”), and eventually, even Fazal Khan (“you’ve never met someone so much up his own ass, but he does serve good wine”).

  May wasn’t really sure how he had ended up there. It felt most of the time like a life that had befallen somebody else. Perhaps if he laughed very quietly and sat off to the side, no one would remember that he had no stories of the city to share with these lions, who in their twilight seemed to have nothing but stories: of their youth, of their time on the stages of theaters and music halls, of the half-remembered parties at which they were honored, of freezing walks home arm in arm on those incredibly rare nights when all three or four of them struck out with the intended recipients of their romantic overtures. In their company, May finally understood the difference between people who were from the city and people who were of it—people whose presence in its history had left as much of an imprint on the city as it had on them. It lived in their work and their minds in its most formidable iteration. And in return, it had allowed them to see it as it really was—stark and unpredictable, eternal; uncorrupted by changes great and small, by the creeping tide and the doom it portended, or the steady exodus of what the great writers deemed “weak leavers,” who didn’t want to endure Posterity measures.

  Did his stomach dip a little at the thought of admitting to his mother, that adamant and lifelong fan of Bowen’s, that another Black writer did not feature in the great poet’s roster of friends? Certainly. He didn’t want to hurt her. He didn’t want her to feel differently about the hand-scrawled lines from “Fortune’s Favor” that had been taped to the freezer door since before he was born.

  Six months after May’s admission to this fellowship of reminiscence, Death met Benjamin Bowen in his kitchen by means of pulmonary embolism. May was surprised to find himself named to the pallbearing party. He couldn’t figure out how he’d become such a part of the great poet’s inner circle—but then, a man of Bowen’s age and stature, he reasoned, was likely to feel quite apart from ordinary people. It made sense that he would want the solace of knowing the roster of his send-off, lest it turn out to be sparsely attended.

  This theory disintegrated at the viewing, during which May was forced to stand for twenty-five minutes in a line that stretched around the block. Later, following the hearse that carried Benjamin Bowen’s coffin on the procession route across the bridge and down the city streets, he was astounded to see every sidewalk crammed with people holding signs of farewell. Poor May began to feel a tightening in his chest; the pain persisted throughout the services and the reception, and was only amplified by the presence of more than a thousand mourners—among them, the mayor—who fogged up the church with their sobbing. The pain in May’s chest grew quite acute. It was grief, he told himself that night, unable to sleep. “Just grief, right?” he asked the doctor when he went to make sure it wasn’t something else.

  It was a panic attack, the doctor told him, smiling up from her notes. Had he found himself under any acute stress these past few weeks?

  The acute stress was this: witnessing Bowen’s send-off had forced May to imagine his own. In the brief instant when his brain had fastened onto a vision of himself lying in a coffin, he had been unable to picture the occupant of the role he himself had played for Bowen. He couldn’t think of a single person he might nominate to bear his pall. And when he tried to populate the streets of his mind with mourners and well-wishers, he couldn’t actually picture any of the people from the university, or from the literary parties, standing there to see him off.

  No. No, they wouldn’t be there, he realized—and his chest seized up again. He didn’t really know any of them, and they didn’t know him. And he couldn’t rely on his readers, either. His work, though well received, was neither fashionable nor popular. He was not the figurehead of a movement, nor the spokesman of a cultural turn. He didn’t even understand his students, who only ever reached out to him when they needed references for residencies with which he was unfamiliar. He was a young Black man who had written a few books in a city he had always fantasized about but didn’t really know, alone in his profession, solitary even in crowded rooms. And he was not of this city—he wasn’t even from it. He was on track to go off entirely alone.

  This was the state of mind May was struggling under when the Exchequer Street train station collapsed. We needn’t dwell on the details. You probably remember most of it: the sinkhole and the rubble, and how the word “pancake” suddenly became a verb. As in: the train station “just pancaked.” The footage of weeping people swarming the highway, and the fires, and the rescue teams. The inquest, which took three years, and the endless lawsuits and the eventual reconfiguration of building codes that finally forced the administration to admit that much of the city’s down-island reach was landfill, and therefore essentially a sinkhole—a fact borne out by the subsequent flooding, not to mention the collapse of other buildings throughout the growing tidal zone.