The Boil Over

Cold Open

BOILWATCH ALERT HISTORY

DO NOT PROCESS FEELINGS OUTSIDE

LOCK UP WHAT YOU LOVE

LOWER EXPECTATIONS

TRUST THE NUMBERS

STAY FIRM

SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY

DO NOT FORM NEW EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS

DO NOT MAKE LIFE DECISIONS TODAY

GET HOME SAFE. YOU LOOK TIRED.

SAY SOMETHING NICE

ACCEPT YOUR SOFTNESS

STAY INSIDE. STAY PUT.

ENJOY THE PEACE WHILE IT LASTS

Every phone on the block had played the whole summer back in under a minute. Nobody had asked it to. At two minutes to ten on Tuesday morning the screens on Salt Street lit at once and scrolled through June, July and August in the same calm capitals, oldest first, and the street stood where it was and read its own season off the glass. The one line the block noticed was missing had never been an alert at all: the Announcer’s “We are all soup today.”, said on the platform under the street in the heat wave, which the block remembered better than anything BoilWatch had ever sent it.

Mena Orecchiette, seventy-one, read every line aloud from her window over the walk-up’s stoop, slowly and to the whole street, as if the street had asked her to. Outside Trattoria al Dente the owner had been hosing the same square of sidewalk since eight, and at SAY SOMETHING NICE he took his thumb off the hose long enough to say “No.” At the launderette door Rosa Cavatappi, coming off the night shift with her keys still in her hand, got as far as STAY FIRM, turned around and looked at her dryers for a while. On the sill of Nonna’s Pasta Shop stood the basil that had drooped at the first of these in June. It had been dead since the heat wave. It had nothing left to droop.

Read in a row, the summer sounded like a breakup.

Then the phones went dark, all together, as they had lit, and for a moment Salt Street was only Salt Street: one lane of cobbles, two shops facing each other across a painted white line, and the Feast’s arches still strung overhead with every bulb dead, because tonight would have been the last night of La Sagra della Farina and the rental company did not collect until Wednesday. Halfway down the block the grate on the painted line was breathing steam, which it had no business doing at ten in the morning. The white paint on its bars was wet.

The Trattoria’s owner looked at the grate for a long time. Then he went back to his square.

---

Behind the shutters of the Social Club in Hell’s Pantry, which had been down since Thursday, Don Lasagna, fifty-eight, sat in the back room under the green-shaded lamp with both hands flat on the desk. He had come back on Monday night. Nobody knew. The back room had been built so that nobody would: dark wood that swallowed the light and most of the sound, a desk wide enough to sleep on, and on the wall, framed, the yellowed poster that had thanked someone for their service for longer than Don had owned the desk. He sat with his back to it.

On the far side of the desk stood the old brass hygrometer, which had never once agreed with the reports. Its numbers ran out at ninety-nine. All morning its needle had climbed the last of the dial the way the price of a fan climbed on the first day of a heat wave, and at a minute to ten it touched ninety-nine and stopped, because the dial had nowhere else to send it.

Don turned his signet ring, once. In the front room the small espresso machine hissed, because he liked the sound. The big chrome one in the corner of the back room did not hiss. It never had.

His phone lit on the blotter. At the same moment every phone in Machattan lit with it, and they all made the same sound, a tone none of them had ever made before. Different tone. Slower.

Don read it once. He turned the phone face down on the blotter and lifted his hand off it one finger at a time.

“Fuck,” Don said.

Out front, the small machine hissed straight through it.

---

On Salt Street, Ricky Rigatoni, twenty-one, was standing at the scorch mark on the corner of Nonna’s building, where the kindness board had burned in August, with his courier bag across his chest and his phone in his hand. He had been on his way to the morning shift. He read the alert twice. The ridges down his back had started to bead.

“…What?” Ricky said.

Nobody on the street answered him. The Trattoria’s owner hosed. Mena’s window stayed open and, for once, quiet. Under the alert the app had already added a line of its own, in smaller capitals, before anyone could ask: NEAREST SHELTER: SALT STREET STATION.

Ricky looked up from it. Across the lane, on the south sidewalk in front of the launderette, the colander dome stood on its four iron legs over the station stairs, where it had always stood, breathing a little in the heat, its holes full of the green light from below.

It was the nearest shelter by about forty feet.

Chapter One — Plus Forty Cents Per Drop

At ten o’clock Ricky was still at the scorch mark with his phone lit in his hand, and steam was still coming up out of the middle of the street.

Salt Street was one lane of cobbles between Marinara Row and Broth Street, and the steam was rising from its exact middle, through a grate striped by the white line nobody on the block had ever admitted to painting. On the north corner stood Nonna’s Pasta Shop and on the south corner Lao Lao’s Noodle Shop, facing each other across the line as they had every morning of Ricky’s life. There was no sign in Nonna’s window. There was always a sign in Nonna’s window. Beside Ricky, on Nonna’s brick, the scorch mark still held the shape of his board’s frame, black at the middle and brown at the edges, and next to it, zip-tied to the empty bolt holes of the Honesty Board, a printed notice from the heat wave went on thanking everybody for their understanding. Overhead the dead arches waited for their truck.

Everybody on the street was very busy. A woman in SoHo linen walked a small dog in a coat down the far sidewalk without once looking up, and at the grate the dog stopped, considered the steam, and took them both the long way round, out into the road and back. The Trattoria’s owner was still hosing his square. Two ziti in work vests went past with their phones face down in their hands and their eyes on their shoes. On Marinara Row a shutter came down with a sound like a sentence ending.

It was the dog that bothered Ricky. It had gone round the grate the careful way you went round a man asleep on a bench, and the woman on the end of its lead had gone round with it and not noticed she was doing it. Then he noticed that everybody on the street was going round something, the grate, the dome, each other, and that quite a few of them were going round him.

Frankie Fettuccini, twenty-three, was beside him.

“Did you see the alert?” Ricky said.

“Everyone saw the alert,” Frankie said.

“‘The Kitchen thanks you for your consideration’? What does that MEAN?”

“It means…” Frankie looked at his own phone. “I don’t know what it means. It means we should probably not be outside.”

“We need to warn people—”

“People KNOW. Look at them.”

He tipped his phone at the street, as he tipped it at anything worth filming. A cannelloni with a rolling suitcase went past toward Broth Street, fast. The pharmacy’s shutter had come halfway up and stopped there. Nobody looked at anybody.

Frankie said it to the street, not to Ricky. “They’re not pretending it’s not happening. They’re pretending they can’t do anything about it. Different thing.”

Ricky had a reply for that. He had a reply for most things; it was the same part of him that had launched more neighborhood initiatives than anyone on the block and kept all but one of them in a drawer. This reply started with “Okay, but,” and he could not find the other end of it.

Frankie leaned in to Ricky’s screen and the four lines on it. “Look at the last line. It’s polite as a fucking eviction notice.”

His own phone lit before Ricky could answer.

SLURP: The city’s leaving. Leave together?

“Fourteen since nine fifty-eight,” Frankie said, and scrolled. “Listen. ‘Leaving town, but could do a quick one first.’ ‘Leaving town, but could do a quick one first.’ This one has a picture of a suitcase. ‘Leaving town, but—’”

“They all say the same thing?”

“There’s a button. Slurp wrote it for them.” Frankie put the phone away. “Apocalypse sex is just regular sex with surge pricing.”

“People are SCARED, Frankie.”

“Are they though?”

At twenty past ten Ricky’s phone made the small hard noise HotBag made.

HOTBAG: Evacuation surge active: plus forty cents per drop.

Ricky stood there with the forty cents for a while. “Cool. Love that for us.”

The order came right behind it, before he had decided how he felt about forty cents.

HOTBAG: New order. Pickup: Villa Generica, Times Squares. Drop-off: Machattan Bridge, outbound, middle span, silver car. Customer note: “stuck forever. bring napkins”. Accept in ten seconds.

He let the ten seconds run out, which was the only way to say no to HotBag. The next order arrived as the last one died: a black car, the same span, extra garlic, we’ll be here. He let that one run out too. Then HotBag spoke to him directly.

HOTBAG: Order declined. Acceptance rate: 68%. You may be paused for review.

Frankie, at his shoulder, had read it too. “They’re reviewing you for not bringing napkins to forever. Somebody got a fucking bonus for that.”

“It was two noes.”

“They count a no twice.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody knows that,” Frankie said.

“Crap,” Ricky said.

Paused was how a courier expired. Ricky put the phone in his pocket anyway, where it went on being sixty-eight percent of a person against his leg.

“I’m going to go film the Row panicking,” Frankie said. “Somebody should have it on file.” He was gone before Ricky could ask whose file.

---

At half past ten Ricky went into the shop to tell Nonna, because somebody had to tell somebody something, and she was the loudest somebody he knew.

Nonna, seventy-nine, stood at the window. She was not doing anything at it. Ricky had seen her at that window pinching back the basil, and counting Lao Lao’s customers under her breath and telling him it was pigeons, and once, in a thunderstorm, daring the lightning to try her. He had never seen her stand at it with her hands empty. Behind her the sauce murmured on the back burner. On the counter by the register Saturday’s sign lay face down. He knew what it said; he had carried it out for her on Saturday.

He waited for the plate.

There was always a plate. He had come through that door with a fever, a one-star review and a bicycle folded in half, and every time there had been a plate in front of him before there had been a question. Twenty-one years of plates. He stood by the counter with his bag across his chest and waited, and the plate did not come, and it was the most frightening thing anyone had done to him all summer.

“Nonna?” Ricky said. “What’s happening?”

She did not turn round. “When I was young, there was a night like this.”

“What do you mean?”

She turned then, and he saw she had been waiting to. “We don’t talk about it. Any of us. The elders. We all agreed to… not remember.”

“What happened?”

Nothing in Nonna’s voice leaned on anything. “Some people left. That’s all. They left. And the rest of us stayed. And we never asked where they went.”

Ricky heard the word left, and it went past him. He straightened the stack of menus on the counter, which was already straight, and then he straightened it again.

“Nonna—”

“Go find your friends, Riccardo. Stay together today. Whatever happens… don’t be alone.”

He went. He had his hand on the door when she said it, once, in Italian. She had never said it to him in English.

“Ti voglio bene.”