July 2010

When Raph arrived at the dive site, he was already in his dry suit. This was not his first time going into the Gowanus Canal. The previous trip was probably the most disgusting thing he had ever done. He couldn't wait to do it again.

The chief was waiting when Raph and his partner rolled up, and Raph climbed out of the passenger seat of the cruiser. (Mutants hadn't been granted the right to drive yet. It was infuriating and it sucked. But his partner was a good guy, and there was no rule saying that an officer couldn't turn on the lights and siren while his partner drove, which was really the best part anyway.)

Raph had never been one to waste time on chitchat. "What am I looking for?" he asked, as he approached the chief. He looked up and down the embankment - no tow truck, so probably not a vehicle recovery. No body bag, so probably not human remains either.

"A knife," the chief said. Raph had always appreciated the guy's laconic manner.

"Yeah, sure," Raph replied. "I'll find you ten knives in five minutes." He tilted his head towards the canal, more a holding pit for solid waste than a body of water. "You want me to pick you up a couple of guns and a bicycle while I'm at it?"

"Just the knife," the chief said. "Preferably the one related to this." He flashed a thick folder, then shook his head. "We got a tip on a cold case. Probably someone called in a bogus lead just to enjoy watching a cop jump in the Gowanus. But we have to follow up."

"Don't see why they're bringing us into this," Raph muttered. For the past year or so, the government had been trying to list the fetid cesspool generally called the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site. It should have been a no-brainer, but for some reason it had become a political issue in the city.

"Just don't hurt yourself in there," the chief said, and then Raph's partner showed up with the safety line to clip onto his suit, and Raph didn't waste any more time before getting to work. When he was swimming - or, at least, struggling through the soggy muck that constituted the contents of most of New York's waterways - he didn't have to think about how stupid his life had been for the past few years.

They'd still been living at the MIC, waiting for the government to pass even the most basic legislation recognizing that mutants existed, when Splinter had announced that every one of his sons was at least going to have a high school equivalency diploma. Volunteer tutors had started showing up at the temporary mutant housing facility, and Raph had studied with them, mostly because he didn't have anything better to do.

When he'd finally been allowed to sit the GED exam, he'd failed it. And failed again. And then passed. And then declared he was done with education.

His diploma had come in the mail, emblazoned with what was now legally his name - Raphael Hamato. Don's Uncle Stephen had tried again to pressure him to take a more mainstream name, but Raph had told him to stuff it. (He'd also demanded to be officially enrolled as Hamato Raphael, but every lawyer he'd said this to had told him that the family-name-first custom simply wasn't followed in America.)

With basic educational credentials in hand, he and Leo had worked in a big-box store for a while, restocking heavy items on the night shift. The other guys on the crew had given them a lot of shit for their weird-looking faces. But their managers had given them great performance reviews for their punctuality, their work ethic, and their care with the items.

Raph had learned a lot of self-control that year. But living that way - doing dull, repetitive work at night; sleeping during the day; showing up in court occasionally to testify about his own basic human-ness - he had lost his Turtle-ness. He had gone through the routine in a haze, losing all sense of who he was.

They hardly trained anymore. The sai he had fought so hard for, that had once been his constant companions, now spent most of their time in a box under his bed. Occasionally he would take them out, wipe the dust from the blades, go through the familiar katas. But the movements didn't come as easily as they should have. During what should have been his peak years as a ninja, he wasn't just stagnating - he was regressing. The failure and frustration sapped his motivation to practice more often, driving him instead to practice less often, a downward spiral he would probably never climb out of.

He'd gone back to the Lair, in search of himself. Reaching that mysterious cavern no longer required a long slog through the sewers: a gleaming elevator now led straight to the front door. The place was being run as a museum by the Mutant Aid Society, a not-for-profit organization that paid its overhead costs and then disbursed the rest of its proceeds to mutants who needed more help than what the government was providing.

In the entrance building at the top of the elevator, Raph had persuaded a ticket-taker to let him in without paying the admissions charge. But when he'd gotten downstairs, into a space of informational signs and velvet ropes that he could hardly recognize as his former home, he'd gotten into a fight with a docent over whether he could take some of the stuff that had once belonged to him, or whether everything had to be left exactly as it was when his family had departed.

He'd lost that fight. But nobody had stopped him from going upstairs, an area that was off-limits to tourists because the staircase had been preserved in its structurally deficient state and the ladder Raph had built had been deemed too unsafe for visitors. There was some evidence that a few researchers and journalists had made it to the upper level. But mostly, the rooms were untouched, and Raph could almost believe that he had once lived this way - that he had hallucinated a brother, but not an entire childhood.

He'd tried to find the old Lair, the abandoned subway platform where he had grown up. He wasn't the only one who had looked. The Hamatos had explained the disastrous condition of their previous home with the truth - they'd only been living there a short time, and hadn't finished restoring the rundown space to their usual standards. Some alert humans had quickly deduced from this that there must have been another former mutant residence somewhere in the city, and a handful of enterprising souls had actually tried to find it. But the Mousers had done their work thoroughly. Even knowing the exact location he was trying to reach, Raph could hardly get to it through the mounds of rubble. And when he did finally make it to the place, he could barely see the signs of past habitation by any sentient being. There was nothing there he could use to shore up his memories of what his family had been, before everything.

He'd returned to the surface. He'd walked along the crowded sidewalks. He'd paid a dollar - of his own money, that he'd earned from honest work - to buy a slice of pizza from a guy who always let him take a can of soda for free. He was, most of the time, treated more or less like a person. But in some ways, he'd never felt more isolated.

He hardly talked to April and Casey anymore. His former friends kept their distance these days. If they'd been seen to be close with the Turtles, it would have drawn questions about how they had all met each other. That would have made it challenging for April and Casey to avoid admitting that they had known about mutants before the rest of the world did, and that would have caused problems in other parts of their lives.

For the mutants, too, it was better to detach from these old relationships. Six and a half years after what had become known as the Mutant March, Stephen and Emma were still the only humans who knew that virtually all of the mutants were actually aliens. Even with all the practice they'd had concealing their own existence, the Turtles had found it difficult to lie about the true nature of the TCRI mutants. It had been easier just to not have too many friends.

Or, at least, to have too many friends who weren't Utroms.

"How many of you are there?" Raph had asked Mortu one day, when the sheer size of the Earthbound Utrom network had really hit home for him. "Are you making little Utrom babies all the time or what?"

"Nearly all of us were spawned on the homeworld," Mortu had replied, shaking his head. "There were many thousands of us on the ship."

"Really?" Raph had asked, skeptically. "How many Utroms does it take to fly a spaceship?"

"In a technical sense, very few," Mortu had told him. "But in a mission sense - Utrom living in isolation have a strong tendency to revert to their ancestral behavior patterns. To remain true to the social codes, we must have a society, a certain critical mass of other Utroms living around us. And so, when we undertake these journeys, we always send many more Utroms than are needed to pilot the ship."

"Aren't you pretty spread out on Earth, though?" Raph had probed. "Are you all going to go crazy or something?"

"It is unlikely," Mortu had assured him. "Humans have many shortcomings. But they are basically a social species, and so they serve well enough in reminding us Utrom of what we also aspire to be."

There were a few humans with whom the Turtles had not been able to sever contact: namely, Dr. Lynn Peggiora and Dr. Ron Engel. Over the past years, the two scientists had published a series of papers based on the notebooks and the data collected at Stockman's lab, beginning with the groundbreaking Complex Cognition in Mutated Terrapins: An Overview, and continuing through a collection of other articles that made Raph's eyes water. (Don had saved them all in a scrapbook, and apparently enjoyed revisiting them for a little light reading. But he was a nerd that way.)

It was through agreeing to help Lynn with her ongoing experiments that Raph had arrived in his present profession.

"I'm not a career counselor," she had told him, at the end of one session. "But have you considered becoming a professional diver?"

"Huh?" Raph had replied.

"Three-quarters of the Earth is covered by water," Lynn had said, because she always seemed to think that people were interested in facts like that, "and acre for acre it has been explored far less than our planet's land areas. Even here in New York, one of the most populated cities in the world, we hardly know what's in the rivers."

"What are you getting at?" Raph had asked suspiciously.

"I hope you won't take this as objectifying," Lynn said, "any more than when I point out that Donatello has an extraordinary intellect, or when I say that Michelangelo has a special talent for reading people's emotions. But - to be blunt, as a big turtle, you are an exceptionally good swimmer. You might want to consider whether that's a strength you'd like to leverage as you contemplate a long-term career path." And she'd handed him a booklet of information about swimming-related jobs.

He'd taken it home and studied it. Swim coach. Scuba diving tour guide. Marine animal trainer. Underwater photographer.

And, near the back of the book - police diver.

He'd learned that the NYPD's dive academy usually only accepted applications from people who were already officers on the force. But, given Raphael's unique qualifications, the review board had been willing to waive the usual prerequisites. Within a few months, he'd quit his job as a stock boy and enrolled for basic training and dive certification, one right after the other. On his first day in class, he'd stood up and announced loudly that he loved sewer diving. Funnily enough, no one had expressed any interest in fighting him for those assignments.

That was how he had been sworn in as Officer Hamato, and that was why he was now trawling through the yards-deep toxic sludge of the Gowanus Canal, searching blindly for a knife that someone had allegedly thrown here more than twenty years ago.

His training in working without sight served him well; the silt in the canal was so thick, he couldn't see his own hand in front of his face. The patience he had acquired over the last few years was also invaluable. He felt his way forward, inch by painstaking inch, putting anything that felt like a knife into the evidence bag clipped to his belt, leaving everything else.

The commanding officers liked his willingness to jump into anything. They liked the way he stretched the department's budget, making a tank of oxygen - normally rated for an hour - last much longer.

And, of course, no one on the squad could match his instinctive comfort in the water.

The pay was good. The respect was satisfying. And every time he surfaced with a murder weapon or a long-missing body or a wedding ring accidentally dropped down a sewer drain, he brought a little closure to somebody, restored a little rightness to a city that so often seemed to be going crazy.

As he lost the thread of his own life, at least he could help other people find the missing pieces of theirs.

He climbed out of the canal, unclipped the evidence bag, and handed it, dripping in slime, to the chief.

"Six switchblades, two dinner knives, nine utility knives, and a sword," he said. "The rest is up to you."