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we passed them. By the time we reached Thirty-­Third Street we began to see other second-­generation ­people out and about, at work on one project or another—­shifting old cars off the weed-­cracked roads, cleaning up the debris where a sign or a window had fallen into the street in the night. My generation likes to keep busy, even if there’s no point to it.
    â€œCome look,” Brian kept shouting. “You won’t believe this.” One by one the others came racing over, hungry for any new excitement. The ­couple of first-­generation ­people there—­those few who would actually come this far downtown—­stared into my bucket with naked greed on their faces. They shook their heads and smiled with half their mouths and told us how lucky we were.
    â€œDo you think there will be more?” they asked, and I knew that starting the next day the subway stations would be crowded with fishers. We ate just fine in Manhattan, don’t get me wrong—­between what the government gave us and our rooftop gardens and the crabs and eels we pulled up, we made sure nobody went to bed hungry. But because we ate the same things week after week, year after year, the promise of some new dish was enough to get ­people salivating. “What kind of bait did you use?”
    â€œJust some old fish guts,” I told them, and they nodded sagely, like everybody knew that was how you attracted lobsters.
    On Thirty-­Eighth Street, a bunch of kids—­younger than Ike, some of them barely old enough to be set free in the streets—­came up and looked in the bucket and screamed, laughing, and danced away as the lobster waved its green claws at them. We knew all about crabs—­claws were nothing new—­but these were huge and fat and they looked like they could take your fingers off. By this point the lobster was getting sluggish and only waved one claw at the kids halfheartedly, but it was enough to make them jump back.
    We skirted around the edge of Times Square, staying well clear of the roped-­off areas. There used to be a million lightbulbs in those ­couple of blocks, my dad had told me. He said when they were all lit up, the night sky glowed with a kind of haze of light. Like most things he tells me about the time before the crisis, it was just words to me. Nights in Manhattan get really dark, since the skyscrapers block the moon and the stars. Those million lightbulbs hadn’t been turned on in twenty years, and most of them were down in the street now, torn down by wind and rain and lightning strikes. Broken glass made an ankle-­deep carpet in Times Square, a field of glittering gem-­bright snow nobody had ever bothered to clean up.
    The buildings we lived in were well to the west, closer to the river though still protected from the wind and the rain by the shoulders of high buildings on every side. There was no one at the guard posts when we arrived, which wasn’t too surprising—­it was springtime and everyone was working in the gardens, weeding and planting and scaring off birds. Only about a hundred ­people were down in the street. A gang of them were breaking up the concrete of the road with picks and claw hammers, pulling up the debris and carting it off in wheelbarrows. That ground would be better used for plants that didn’t need much light.
    Someone must have run ahead and told everybody we were coming. There was a throng of ­people waiting outside my building, just standing around talking quietly, their eyes darting in our direction as we approached. Sticking close by the door in case they had to run back inside. As we came up to the front door, the crowd parted and the mayor stepped out of the lobby, his two bodyguards keeping their traditional places right behind his shoulders.
    Jimmy Foster had been in charge of New York City as long as I could remember. Elections were held every so often, but nobody