On the screen I saw naked bodies swimming down a street. The masks that covered their mouths, noses and eyes were the latest kind, invisible to the naked eye. I only knew they were there when they turned the right way, so that the optical difference between the air inside the mask and the water outside was detectable. They could have been in San Diego, Newport, Norfolk or a dozen other coastal cities, until I saw the antique cars parked at the curb, and the lights shining inside the ground floors of the buildings they were swimming past. Barnacles clung to the windows, coral was growing on the cars, but the illusion of a place which somehow still lived in spite of the risen sea was excellent.
A handsome middle-aged woman pointed at lettering painted on a window, COME TO MIAMI, as she swam past. Another, who could have been a teenager except that she had the silver hair of one who allows it to whiten even while she keeps all other parts of herself youthful, pointed at an illuminated, animated sign which read, BE WITH PEOPLE WHO’VE SUBMERGED.
Miami was the first city in North America to lose its main drag to the rising sea, and the only one which flaunted it, placing waterproof lights in its ground-floor windows and parking derelict cars at the curb, as though it were a new version of lost Atlantis, instead of demolishing the buildings to make it easier to use the water. It was also the only city that had gutted selected buildings and pressurized them, allowing people to continue to inhabit the ground floors.
They’d invested billions in making “life among the Submerged” into a special lifestyle, found only in Miami. I wondered if anyone actually bought into it.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use
The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Act, while action is still possible."
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