Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  Yet he wasn’t certain that was right either. There was no indication of panic in her language. In fact she seemed remarkably composed, equable, cheerful—even strangely reasonable. Nor was there anything remotely flirtatious about the tone. She had gone on about her boyfriend, after all. The whole thing was nonsensical, and though the letter seemed to demand a response, Mitchell didn’t know what to say. He removed from the bottom drawer of his desk the box of company letterhead he had inherited along with the office. Since all his correspondence was conducted electronically, he had never used it—nor, it seemed, had his predecessor, or the one before that, because the pages had acquired a faded, rust-colored border. Under the Fitzsimmons Sherman logo, instead of Mitchell’s name, it read DEPARTMENT OF EQUITY, ASSETS, AND DERIVATIVES. He shuddered. How had the acronym never occurred to him before?

  He stared blankly at the page. He wasn’t going to lecture her about all the ways in which she was risking her life, nor suggest that she move to New York City, where she could be examined by the best doctors in the world. That would hardly be tactful. Really he just wanted to ask her how she did it. That is, how did she live each day knowing that because of an electrical glitch, at any moment her heart, for no particular reason, could stop beating? How could she babble on about planting squash and sunflowers while all along hummed the constant threat of annihilation? For all he knew, in the time it took for the letter to reach his desk, she might have had another attack.

  Short of discussing any of these things, he’d be forced to write about himself. But there was little worth reporting on that subject. He couldn’t, for instance, explain to her the perverse truth about the day of the Puget Sound earthquake: how, as the chaos burst onto the screen in Cobb Hall, after an initial moment of panic he had been overwhelmed by a profound, almost ethereal sense of calm. That was why he’d been able to help her. For the first time in his life he hadn’t been alone with his fear. On that Tuesday morning everyone was Mitchell Zukor. Everyone obsessed over Richter magnitudes and fatality tolls and worst-case scenarios. He had read that Cassandra, during the sack of Troy—even as the temples incinerated and the women were dragged from their homes by their hair—had watched calmly from behind her loom. He now understood why.

  It would be just as distasteful to talk about his work for Sandy Sherman, the worst-case scenarios and death statistics. But that was his whole life: the Empire State Building, his anonymously furnished apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street, and the night terrors that brought on the cockroaches and their quick hairy legs.

  It then occurred to him that a single interesting thing had happened. Not extremely interesting—he hadn’t figured out how to deflect incoming asteroids or anything like that. But it was rather mysterious, a pattern of behavior that had no rational explanation but, once initiated, seemed fated to go on indefinitely.

  One afternoon during his lunch hour he had found himself, for no particular reason, turning west on Thirty-second Street at Fifth Avenue. It was only two blocks south of his office, but he had not been on that street before. Yong Su, a Korean restaurant a dozen yards from the corner, was serving a dish called bi bim bap. He’d never heard of bi bim bap—for that matter he’d never even eaten Korean food—but he ordered it. Soon a large bowl, the color of bone, was brought to his table. In it was arrayed a pinwheel of pickled vegetables—wedges of bean sprouts, spinach, cucumbers, carrots, mushrooms, and shredded radish—resting on a hassock of steamed white rice. A fried egg on top. It was one of the best things he’d ever tasted.

  He returned to Yong Su two days later, then three times the following week. Soon he was there every day. He developed a cordial, well, “friendship” wasn’t the word, but acquaintance with the waitress. Not that he knew her name or anything about her—he wasn’t even sure, now that he thought about it, whether she spoke more than ten words of English. Yet every time he ordered his bi bim bap, she gave him a brief, knowing smile, and he smiled back.

  Very quickly Yong Su became the highlight of his day and, to be honest, a not insignificant part of his life. By ten in the morning he was already thinking about his slow, deliberate walk to the restaurant; the satisfaction of placing his order, the three plosive detonations of bi! bim! bap!; the way the tacky surface of the black vinyl tablecloth clung to his fingertips; the bitter vinegary burst when he bit into the white radish; the waitress’s watery smile. This went on for a month.

  Then one day he did something he could not explain. At the entrance to Yong Su, instead of turning inside, he kept walking. It so happened that two doors down, there was another Korean restaurant, Soowon Galbi. Soowon Galbi also served bi bim bap. Mitchell told himself he was there for variation, but he wasn’t sure if that was quite right. As it turned out, the Soowon Galbi bi bim bap was just as delicious as the Yong Su bi bim bap. The waitress at Soowon Galbi was older than her counterpart at Yong Su, but there was something pleasantly maternal about her, and they soon developed their own rapport. After two weeks of committed patronage, she stopped bothering with the menu and, with a wink, delivered a steaming bowl of bi bim bap as soon as he sat down. He found their routine oddly reassuring—or was it reassuringly odd? And yet the next week something must have come over him because he crossed Thirty-second Street and discovered a new restaurant: Moo Dae Po II. The bi bim bap at Moo Dae Po II was excellent. The cycle repeated itself, but now, after three weeks at Moo Dae Po II, he found himself sitting in a booth at Chosan Galbi, pretending to scour the eight-page menu as if he didn’t know exactly what he would order. He figured he’d eat at Chosan Galbi for the next few weeks, get to know the waitress there—who seemed very kind, if not particularly loquacious—and see how he felt then.

  Satisfied with this account of his life in New York, Mitchell signed the letter, addressed the envelope to Elsa Bruner care of Camp Ticonderoga, and dropped it in his out-box.

  * * *

  A week later Mitchell received an old Camp Ticonderoga postcard. The image showed two ten-year-old boys in bathing suits and life vests paddling a canoe across a green lake. A dark wood loomed in the background. The boys were smiling giddily, as if sharing some private hilarity. He turned the postcard over.

  “Mitchell,” Elsa had written in her neat, girlish script. “Your note upset me. You seem deeply unhappy. I wonder if Fitzsimmons is the problem.”

  She signed it “The Fainting Girl.” Beneath she had drawn a small pencil sketch of a girl lying on the bottom of a canoe, X’s for her eyes and a large O for her mouth.

  Mitchell felt a sharp, almost overwhelming pulse of nausea. But why? He stared at the drawing for several seconds. Then he figured it out. He realized that he couldn’t tell whether the girl in the canoe was supposed to be asleep, or dead.

  5.

  The subject line read “YOUR PRESENCE.” Body of the e-mail: “REQUESTED.”

  The e-mail was not entirely unexpected. Still, as with any communication from his boss, it upset his nerves. Sandy Sherman’s e-mails, with their infantile reliance on the upper case, always seemed like threats.

  Mitchell had asked for a meeting with Sherman to discuss his valuation project. Twenty-four hours after Charnoble’s visit, Mitchell had finished calculating the total life worth, in dollars, of every employee on the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth floors of the Empire State Building. The project finally behind him, he felt he’d earned a chance at Risk. Out of the Basement and into the Penthouse.

  When Mitchell entered Sherman’s office he noticed that the caps lock key on the computer of Sherman’s secretary was held down permanently with a thin strip of duct tape. Sherman insisted on giving his two assistants the corner suite; he used the smaller adjacent room, intended for the secretaries, as his personal office on the few days every month that he came in to work. In that room there was space for only a single desk and a folding chair. Sherman invited Mitchell to sit in the chair. Sherman stood in front of the desk, so there was little separation between his crotch and Mitchell’s chin. Mitchell worked in one of
the largest buildings in New York City, but he was constantly finding himself sharing miniature spaces with other men.

  “Strong work,” said Sherman, pointing to Mitchell’s reports. They were the only papers on his desk. There was also a stopped clock and several paperweights. The desk was a prop. Mitchell sympathized with the desk. But he barely glanced at it, transfixed as he was by Sherman’s head. It was bald and white and as big as a drum, sprayed with red freckles that proliferated in density toward the crown. The effect was not unlike a giant nipple. Despite the fatness of his cranium, Sherman’s center of gravity was low, in his haunches, so that his hips buckled and it seemed as if, at any moment, he were about to spring. Men of Sherman’s stature are often compared to bulldogs, but he reminded Mitchell more of a jaguar—albeit one in captivity, fussed over and overfed. He had that animal’s dangerous, false languor in his eyes, a stare that lulled its object into quiescence before, all of a sudden, it attacked. Sherman saved his fangs for those further up the food chain, but Mitchell still viewed him with the quaking insecurity of a grazing imbecilic herbivore.

  “I’m grateful for your efforts regarding this delicate matter,” said Sherman. He absently caressed his belly. “We appreciate it.”

  A sudden lightness tickled Mitchell’s brain, and it occurred to him that this might be a good time to ask for his promotion. He told himself to speak. But he didn’t speak.

  “You’re quick with numbers. It’s a quality that seems to have gone extinct among today’s graduates. They think that as long as you can punch numbers into a calculator, you’re a mathematician. Not so. And you, Mitchell—you understand that. You show real cleverness in this department.”

  “Thank you.” Mitchell’s voice was quick with humiliating eagerness. “I think, given the opportunity, I might display talent in several different departments.”

  “I agree. In fact I had another department in mind. Equations and Vectors. We could use you there.”

  Mitchell smiled awkwardly, as if posing for a camera that wouldn’t click. The guys in E and V were glorified accountants. Their job was to devise algorithms and formulas to predict complex market activities and the rate of return on various investments. Even his DEAD colleagues seemed lively compared with the forsaken souls in E and V. They were the nerds of the quant world. Which was saying something.

  “Actually,” said Mitchell, the words coming too quickly now, “I was hoping that you might consider me for Risk.”

  Sherman smiled generously, as if indicating that he would be so good as to pretend Mitchell had never raised the subject.

  “Or—” Mitchell stammered, “there’s another idea I was considering. I’ve been approached by a risk consulting firm called FutureWorld. Given my experience with the evaluation project, I thought I could serve as a liaison. You see, they’ve worked out a new kind of business model. It’s quite ingenious—”

  Sherman, wincing with confusion at this sudden barrage, silenced Mitchell with a firm nod.

  “Risk requires a certain social, ah, aspect that I’m sure is beneath you,” said Sherman. “We tend to give those jobs to former college athletes—you know, big men on campus. Those jobs require salesmanship. Large personalities, camaraderie, wooing. Sure, they have to handle some quantitative analysis, basic stochastics and econometrics, but nothing more advanced than that. A brain like yours is better suited to pure statistical work. You know, the mathematics that are too tricky for computers. Delta-gamma approximations, Monte Carlo simulations, Hull-White, Cox-Ingersoll-Ross, Heath-Jarrow-Morton, whatever else those boys do behind the curtain. Frankly I don’t understand half that crap, but I’m told it’s a hell of an exciting field.”

  Sherman paused, his eyebrows flexing like caterpillars. Mitchell was reminded of the cockroaches, which happened to be furiously incubating in his gut that moment.

  What’s your secret, Elsa Bruner? Why aren’t you afraid? What do you know that I don’t?

  “This is between us,” said Sherman, “and I wouldn’t admit it to the frat boys. But I envy you. You quants—it’s like you have your own secret society. A secret language and a secret world. And it’s all up here.”

  Sherman pointed to his own head, which in that instant reflected the fluorescent ceiling light into Mitchell’s eyes.

  “Tomorrow you will be shown to your new office.” He seemed to notice the gloom in Mitchell’s face, because he added, “Don’t worry: you won’t even have to change floors.”

  Mitchell trudged back to his desk. His nameplate had already been removed from the door. They had placed on the filing cabinet his few personal belongings—a warm can of ginger ale, the postcard from Elsa, and a pair of framed photographs his mother had sent him the day he was hired. In the first photograph he was two years old, bouncing on her lap. Rikki looked concerned. At that age Mitchell was already behaving strangely. He had developed a habit of taking long pauses before speaking—a tic that Rikki blamed on having a nonnative English speaker for a father. It took a speech therapist to explain that Mitchell’s hesitation was not caused by any mental impairment, but by an unusual compulsion to speak in complete sentences. He did not respond to a question until he formulated his answer in his head and mouthed it to himself, making visible lip movements. There were other peculiarities. At three, observing an elder cousin struggle to read from a schoolbook, he glanced at the page and pronounced the first paragraph flawlessly. Seeing the astonished faces around him, he burst into tears.

  The second photo was taken less than two miles away, on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, during the Zukors’ first family trip to the city. Mitchell had been only twelve years old—too young for a hypersensitive child from Overland Park. He’d wanted to visit the aquarium, but his father, old Tibor, commanded the cab to drive straight to Wall Street and Broad. Police barricades, surging citadels of silver glass, pewter-faced men in loosened ties and sweat-damp shirts—Tibor had called the financial district a jungle, but to Mitchell it seemed more like a watch with intricate parts, constantly ticking, ticking. Or was it a time bomb? On a tour of the Stock Exchange, the traders’ urgent sign language and exasperated hectoring were too much. Mitchell covered his ears and the chaos became an insane pantomime, adults playacting like children. When he saw tears in Tibor’s eyes, Mitchell thought that his father must have been similarly affected. But Tibor was moved for a different reason.

  “This is where America happens,” said Tibor. “Where we happen.” His passion for old American movies surfaced whenever he found himself overpowered by emotion. “‘Greed is good,’” he said. “Wall Street, starring a certain Mr. Michael Douglas.” Mitchell had nodded solemnly in agreement.

  Tibor felt indebted to Wall Street because he owed his prosperity to a quintessentially American idea. He’d learned as a young man that it was possible to buy cheap residential property with very little money up front, just so long as you could secure, ahead of time, enough tenants who agreed to pay rent in cash. Even more incredible, one could win government funding for this scam, under the premise that each new building would create affordable housing in poor neighborhoods. Slumlords were the foundation of any strong community, Tibor would regularly declaim, though never, to his credit, with sincerity. But now his slums were fading, and so, it seemed, were Tibor and Rikki. Every time Mitchell looked at this photograph he wondered whether his parents were about to enter their own worst-case scenario.

  The Zukorminiums, as they were called by local activists, required extensive repairs. Extensive demolition would be better. They stood in Kansas City’s depleted Blue Valley industrial zone, adjacent to a condemned textile factory that still hiccuped orange puffs of overheated asbestos. Tenants had complained about the conditions before, but few lingered long enough to cause trouble. Since Seattle, however, there had been petitions, demonstrations, clench-fisted aldermen making speeches. Tibor was too old to be a slumlord anymore. His tenants and their community backers wanted to hurt him. They would gleefully dismember the poor ol
d Hungarian refugee.

  Mitchell felt for Tibor, he did, especially tonight as he prepared to leave his vacated Fitzsimmons Sherman office for an empty apartment and a nice long evening of panic. Sometimes Mitchell even saw himself as a kind of slumlord. Only his slums, his own private Zukorminiums, were inside of him. A vast array of necropolitan towers, rotting and structurally unsound. And how were they doing these days, his inner slums? They were not doing well. They, too, were in disrepair. The pipes were blocked, the air-conditioning cut out, and at night the cockroaches raced up the walls.

  6.

  Microwaves were all right—as long as you stood in the next room while they operated. Put the frozen burrito in the oven, set the timer, press start. Then run.

  Mitchell felt desperate sitting there on the couch, a paper plate and plastic fork on his lap, while the microwave whirred in the kitchen. It wasn’t the plastic, or the couch’s sour, pasty smell, so much as it was the waiting. He had waited patiently for college to end so that he could join Fitzsimmons Sherman, where he had waited patiently for a chance at Risk. Then came the valuation project—and failure. But why? Had he disappointed Sherman? He didn’t think so, but it was impossible to know. In any case, that opportunity had passed, and he would have to wait once more. When he woke the next morning, his career—and, by minimal extension, his entire life—would change. He would be an E and V man. He might have to wait there for a very long time.

  The microwave bleated. He nudged the burrito onto the paper plate, which sagged from the heat. Perhaps he was being too hard on himself. Hadn’t he felt the same kind of dread before starting at Fitzsimmons? When he learned that he would be working on the seventy-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, he had done some research on elevator accidents. To his horror, he immediately discovered that the most catastrophic accident in the history of building transportation technology was called the “Empire State Building incident.” On July 28, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old B-25 bomber pilot, was flying through increasing fog from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Newark Airport, where he was to retrieve his commanding officer. Twenty-five miles short of Newark, Smith radioed the air traffic controller for a weather report. “From where I’m sitting,” said the controller, “I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.”