Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “A bomb on the crosstown bus would harm me,” said Mitchell passionately. “It would harm me a lot.”

  He closed his eyes and saw bright sky, metallic dazzle. He was exhausted. An excess of fear did that to him. It exhausted his clients too. Nybuster lasted just over a month of meetings before losing his patience. By the end of August he had begun pacing around the room, nodding absently during Mitchell’s presentations.

  “Be honest with me, Zukor. Nanobot invasions? Really?”

  A look of concern flashed over Charnoble’s face, but by now he knew better than to interrupt.

  “All right,” said Mitchell. “I will get into the heavy shit.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” said Nybuster. “Extreme terrorism? The bosses want to know more about that.”

  Mitchell paused. He needed to try a new tactic with Nybuster. He remembered the street preacher on Lexington Avenue. There was something to that man’s act. The feverishness of it, the hot-blooded fantasy, the grand emotions. If a man attired in a brown canvas tunic cinched with string could make a living at it, then why couldn’t Mitchell? What did he have to lose? He counted silently to ten, then inhaled deeply.

  “The End of Days.”

  “And that would be?” said Nybuster, smirking.

  “One day your employees start complaining about insomnia. Many of them call in sick. Those who do show up wear gloves in the office and never remove them. Why? you ask. They don’t respond.”

  “Mm.”

  “Show me your hands, you say. They refuse to show you. You physically force your secretary to remove her gloves. The gloves are filled with blood.”

  “What?”

  Charnoble was getting a look that Mitchell hadn’t seen since their first meeting together—a white sheet of paper passing over his face.

  “You run her hands under the faucet,” Mitchell continued. “When the blood drains away, you can see the identical cuts on both her palms. The cuts are in the shape of a cross. You see what I mean.”

  “Actually? I don’t.”

  “She has received the stigmata.” He watched Nybuster closely for his reaction. It seemed to be taking. He thought of his father walking door-to-door in east Kansas City, selling the poor bastards on the merits of life in the Zukorminiums. So this is what it was to sell. Tibor hocked Zukorminiums; Mitchell hocked fear.

  Charnoble busily screwed his fingernails into the palm of his hand. It appeared that he was trying to give himself a stigmata.

  “The stigmata?”

  “The stigmata. You see, your secretary is one of the chosen ones.”

  “Chosen? For what?”

  “You wake up the next morning to the sound of a trumpet call. The sun is turning black, like a rotten lemon. At the northern end of Broadway, seven horses appear in the middle of the avenue. They are as white as ivory. Astride the beasts are horsemen cloaked up to their eyes in dark canvas garments. The horses begin to march downtown.

  “The East River has turned into blood. The Harlem into blood. The Hudson—also blood. Blood spurts out of the tap. There is a red ring around the shower drain. Blood comes out of there too.”

  Nybuster was baffled. Baffled, but transfixed. Mitchell could tell what Nybuster was thinking: Where is this maniac going? What’s next? And that was the crucial question. As long as Nybuster wanted to know what happened next, the consultations would continue, and so would the referrals, the money, the information. The whole exhilarating cycle of doom.

  “The blood is thick and dark, almost black,” said Mitchell. “It clots the pipes. Plants and crops start to wither. People raid supermarkets for bottled water. When that runs out, they start drinking the blood.”

  Nybuster stared in wonder. Charnoble was pressing one hand over his mouth.

  “The blood is nothing like normal human blood. It tastes awful.”

  “Zukor? Are you all right? Alec, is he all right?”

  “This taste,” said Mitchell, “this is the taste of the future.”

  10.

  The floor tiles in the bathroom were Florenza porcelain. The bathroom tiles were Verdana porcelain. The countertops in the kitchen were Caledonia quartz and Caesarstone quartz, and those beside the washer and dryer were Lacava polished marble. Mitchell didn’t know what any of this meant, but he figured that every proper noun could accurately be translated as “expensive.” The ceilings were nearly twice his height, and the floors were paneled with a white hardwood oak so pale that he periodically glanced behind him to see whether the soles of his shoes were leaving a trail, like a mud snail. But it was the living room—what just several months earlier, fresh from campus, he would have called a common room—that contained the apartment’s most astonishing feature: the windows. Only “windows” seemed too pedestrian. These were giant, luxurious, undulating sheets of glass, like fun house mirrors, only transparent. His broker, Pam Davenport, described them as “free-form,” which he could see was another way of saying “curved.” They spanned from the floor to the ceiling and were impossibly clean. You felt as if you were about to jump out of an airplane.

  “Splendid, no?” said Pam Davenport, grinning like she had annealed the glass herself. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Charnoble had recommended the broker (“top-class all the way,” he had said, blinking). When Mitchell called her, he explained that he wanted something nice. After all, he owed it to himself. His commissions at FutureWorld were increasing considerably, and he’d been there only two months. He wanted to make a broad gesture. He had tried to make one a week earlier, when he sent his parents a check for five thousand dollars.

  “What is this?” said Tibor. Mitchell could tell from the way his parents raised their voices that they were standing hunched over the phone.

  “This is dopey,” said Rikki.

  “I have more than I can use.”

  “It’s wonderful you’re making this money, but you should hold on to it. You’re too young to be parting with your salary.”

  “Here’s the thing,” said Tibor. “You never know when you might need this. You never know anything.”

  “I just thought you guys might need it.”

  “We don’t need your money!” shouted Tibor.

  “Maybe,” said Rikki in her most gentle tone, “you could figure out a better use for it. Like finding a new apartment.”

  She was right. When he first saw his current apartment, it had struck him as oddly familiar. He had found comfort in the lack of natural light, the stucco walls smudged with grease, and the pathetic meagerness of the kitchenette, its stained Formica and tin sink. When he e-mailed photographs to his mother, she was able to explain why this was.

  “You moved into a Zukorminium?” she wrote.

  This was not the only fact that had recently become clear to him. He had spent months, for instance, trying to distill from Elsa’s letters some kind of general philosophy of fear avoidance that he could appropriate. Her achievement was incredible to him. She had to know the numbers: a person who has suffered a Brugada episode has a ninety percent chance of having another one. The chance that she would die from a Brugada episode was eminently reasonable. It was eminently imminent.

  Early one morning, in an effort to exterminate a particularly virulent posse of cockroaches, Mitchell had done the dreadful calculation. It could be reduced to a single number: 1 in 53, or 1.89 percent. These were the odds that a Brugada patient who had already had multiple syncopes would have a fatal attack in the coming year. That was exponentially more likely than the odds of dying from drug or alcohol abuse (1 in 10,837) or an accidental injury (1 in 2,454). There was no mathematical analysis that could make that 1 in 53 less frightening. When you broadened the time frame, the numbers only became uglier. The odds of a fatal syncope in two years: 3.7 percent; in five: 8.7 percent; by the time she turned thirty: 13.2 percent. But Elsa, like curious Sarah Axon in Iowa, seemed oblivious to fear. To some extent, her trick seemed to lie in a delicate combination of denial and distractio
n. She did this mainly by focusing on pragmatic matters, on hard labor. But all her talk of sowing, plowing, and installing photovoltaic cells seemed to be the manifestation of a larger philosophical strategy. If he could only isolate this strategy, he might be able to use it himself. This was what he was trying to get at in his letters. It wasn’t easy; he couldn’t just ask her How do you overcome your fear of imminent death? Can you teach me? The difficulty wasn’t that these questions would be embarrassing or cross some line of decency. They would, of course, but he held back for a different reason: he was afraid that Elsa might reveal herself to be less carefree than she appeared. That she might say something truly horrifying like What do you mean? I’m terrified! I’m paralyzed with panic. I can barely get out of bed. I keep my hand on my heart at all times in the crazy hope that I’ll be able to feel it beating funny and act before it’s too late. So instead Mitchell had to get at the answer through swipes and squints and intuition. His mission was made more challenging by the fact that Elsa rarely took a serious tone and flitted around from subject to subject. It was like trying to steal the trick of camouflage from a butterfly.

  “Spalike,” said Pam Davenport, who had led him into the bathroom. “The bathtub is Kohler.”

  Mitchell nodded. “Colder than what?”

  He caught his image in the fog-proof mirror above the sink. He had the subtracted look of an automaton or mannequin. Very well—it was to be expected. Something had been subtracted. FutureWorld was working. Not merely as a business but as a treatment. It was better than any mood drug he’d ever taken—and he had tried them all, but none for very long, out of fear that they might mangle his synapses. FutureWorld was more focusing than Adderall, more calming than Ativan, more elating than Klonopin. It was a better soporific than Sonata. The only negative side effects were fatigue and nausea. And those he had already.

  His research alerted him to countless new worst-case scenarios, but the time and resources afforded him by the job allowed him to undermine each scenario with rigorous precision. He could exactly determine, for instance, the likelihood that New York’s water supply would evaporate in the next year (impossible), or that an earthquake would dissever Manhattan at 125th Street (exceedingly unlikely). An astronomer at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena explained patiently to him that the odds of an asteroid crashing into the earth and unleashing a new dark age was on the order of ten to the minus eighth power per year, and one in a million in the next century. This number was further mitigated by the odds that human civilization would figure out a way to block an asteroid by the time one arrived. The asteroid scenario was not going to happen. But if a giant rock did come close to hitting Earth, Mitchell knew exactly which aerospace and defense companies would profit.

  So it was a dream job—it quelled his nightmares. One by one the fears were dissipating. Even figuring out Elsa’s golden secret was beginning to seem less important to him. He was starting to suspect that she had no secret. She may have convinced herself that she started the farm for altruistic, utopian reasons, but the truth of the matter, he now believed, was that Ticonderoga had been designed as a fortress. She had locked herself away from cardiologists and hospital beds, from a life lived in perpetual uncertainty. At Ticonderoga she could control every aspect of her existence—the food, the energy, the people. At least that’s how she tried to play it off. In fact she had only created the illusion of control. The whole thing was so clear, so logical, he was amazed she hadn’t seen her own behavior for what it was. She was either in denial or terror stricken. Either way, she was trapped.

  Mitchell, on the other hand—Mitchell was free! Thanks to FutureWorld, thanks to Alec Charnoble, the old strictures were coming undone. Take, for instance, this situation with the drought. Elsa had written again to tell him how bad it was up on the farm. The tomatoes were exploding on the vine, the corn tasted burned. Her entire utopian fantasy was on the verge of shriveling up. There was a note of despair in her letters—which, by the way, had been coming less frequently. In fact, it had been something like three or four days since he’d heard from her. It made sense, this reluctance to write. It was becoming clear that it was simply unrealistic for a bunch of college kids without any agricultural expertise, or even experience, to start a farm. Unrealistic? “Insane” was a better word.

  Nor was Mitchell concerned about the drought. In the past he would have turned, frantically, to his research, calculating the odds that the water scarcity might bring about a disruption in the food supply, a hoarding of goods, rapid inflation. It’s true that the water table numbers weren’t promising, but that was hardly remarkable. Nearly three billion people on the planet lived in water-stressed regions, places of continual drought. He did the research as always, but now he used the numbers as a salesman would—to recruit new clients, to catalyze their fears. It had become a game to him. FutureWorld had transformed him from a neurotic paranoid into something much stronger, more powerful: a businessman. To prove this to himself, he had called Pam Davenport and asked to see her finest apartments.

  “The market in the financial district has shown some signs of loosening up,” she had said on the phone. “Especially the high-rises. The images from Seattle rattled some nerves, I’m afraid. But we can direct our energies further uptown, if you’d prefer—”

  “No,” said Mitchell, an edge in his voice. “The financial district is perfect.”

  This is where America happens. Where we happen.

  “Very good. If the high-rises don’t bother you, we can begin with Eight Spruce Street.”

  He let her describe the building, but he knew the details already. At seventy-six stories, Eight Spruce Street was the tallest residential tower in New York. In high winds it could lean fourteen feet in any direction. At Fitzsimmons Sherman he would stare at it from his window on the seventy-fifth floor and wonder why in the hell any human being would consent to living 867 feet off the ground in the middle of one of the world’s most dangerous airspaces.

  After Pam Davenport had finished showing him the concealed “self-closing” bedroom drawers, which slid tight with a plaintive whisper, she led Mitchell to the windows. He had been waiting for this. So, it seemed, had she. With a quick, joyful intake of breath, she walked up close to the glass and then, to Mitchell’s alarm, leaned her forehead on it.

  “A view like this,” she said, her mouth releasing an oval of fog onto the glass, “makes you feel like queen of the city.”

  Maybe. You certainly could see a lot of it. There was the Brooklyn Bridge, its ramps spooled like a pile of gray snakes. The water from this height was a thin navy border between the ashy flanks of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the downtown skyscrapers, the ziggurats and belfries and minarets built in tribute to American industry, seemed plain and quaintly chunky, like the building blocks preschoolers played with, or Legos. It all made his legs feel very stiff. He thought of the skycity of his dreams and wondered whether some part of his brain—his amygdala, perhaps—had modeled those slender, infinite towers after Eight Spruce Street.

  “Check this out,” said Pam Davenport, beckoning him forward. “You can see all—the way—down.”

  He blinked, and the city began to canter diagonally across his vision. He tried to back away but his legs were too stiff.

  “Mr. Zukor? Is everything all right?”

  The window plunged at him. It socked him in the nose. He bounced off the glass and slid clumsily to the floor. Pam Davenport shrieked. All he could think of was the boy at John Day who sat down Indian-style on the fifty-yard line and died. When he opened his eyes there was a streak of blood across the glass, parallel to the Brooklyn skyline.

  He heard his broker’s heels tapping on the hardwood, and then she was beside him with a wad of damp paper towels. She pressed it to Mitchell’s nose. The cold, pinkish water seeped down his lip and dropped onto his tie.

  “Oh dear,” she said, and ran back for more paper.

  He felt a sucking
sensation in his right nostril. He snorted and a clot of blood exploded in the tissue.

  “Oh my God,” said Pam, returning. “Is it broken?”

  Mitchell explored the bridge of his nose with his free hand. He couldn’t remember whether the bumps and crevices he felt were the same old bumps and crevices, or whether his collision with the window had broken new ground and altered his entire facial topography.

  “I guess it was the heat.”

  “The quality of the air-conditioning units is simply unacceptable for a new building.” She looked more closely at him. “Do you have any medical condition I should know about?”

  It really had been some time since Elsa had written. Five days? Six? This was unusual. Had he offended her? His last letter had been his most direct to date. He had explained that at FutureWorld he had learned that facing his fears head-on was the best way to defuse them. The window, at least, seemed to disagree.

  The water seeped beneath his collar and onto his chest. When he realized that Pam Davenport had been mopping his face for several minutes with disintegrating paper towels and speaking in a hushed but increasingly hysterical voice, he forced himself to stand, using the wall as support.

  “Listen, Pam,” he said, “maybe this isn’t such a hot idea after all.”

  On the street, stumbling back to the subway, his hand pressing a paper towel to his nostril, he passed an old firehouse mobbed with schoolchildren. A fireman was blasting them with a fire hose. The ecstatic children screamed as they galloped through the jet. The water pooled around the gutter, which had been dammed by a weir of plastic bags. Three dogs, their owners trailing, cantered over to the puddle and began to slurp. The owners did not interfere but watched their dogs with expressions of profound longing.

  11.

  In the FutureWorld foyer Charnoble was waiting for him, consulting the watches on either wrist.

  “We have our man from Edison Telecom in ten minutes.”