Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  Mitchell walked past him, into his office.

  “He wants to go over brain tumor epidemic scenarios again. Are you still fresh on the tumor scenarios?”

  “In a decade, four percent of his workforce will develop gliomas,” said Mitchell impatiently, crossing the vast carpeted expanse. “Three percent acoustic neuromas, two percent salivary gland tumors, one percent meningioma, another five percent benign tumors. Financial damages can be extrapolated accordingly. OK?”

  Mitchell removed from his desk drawer Elsa’s most recent letter. He read it over, looking for clues to her silence. There was her usual canoe sketch, the same neat schoolgirl’s handwriting. You’d think that if something were wrong you’d be able to see it in the handwriting, but penmanship that graceful indicated reason, orderliness, calm. Could it be some kind of subterfuge? He didn’t think Elsa was capable of subterfuge.

  It was not a particularly long letter. She spent most of it recounting problems she’d had keeping the artesian well clean—because of the drought it had drained and was beginning to develop mold. She joked about one of her more avid comrades on the farm who had argued in defense of the mold, which after all was a colony of living organisms. “According to him, fifty-pound sacks of powdered milk are better than cartons of organic milk but not as good as milk squeezed out of our neighbor’s goats. Shopping for overalls in Augusta is better than shopping for overalls online, but weaving our own overalls out of hemp is better still. Nudity is best. Toothpaste without fluoride or parabens or propylene glycol is essential, but baking soda and peppermint oil does the trick fine, and a mush made out of crushed pine needles and dirt is ideal.” Elsa seemed in good spirits. There was nothing to indicate that she wanted to cut off contact with Mitchell.

  “Any mail today, Alec?” he called out.

  “Just the normal things.”

  Mitchell ran back across the long ivory carpet to the small waiting room where the day’s envelopes and packages lay stacked on a coffee table. He hoped there wasn’t a letter from Elsa in the pile and he was afraid that there was not a letter in the pile and he was afraid that he was afraid.

  “I’m still going to need you in the meeting,” said Alec. “He’s paying to see you, after all. They all pay to see you.”

  “Start without me.”

  Mitchell flipped through the envelopes. There was the usual assortment of doomsday paraphernalia, the daily harbingers of things to come: the September issue of the Food Safety Magazine; a carton of ciprofloxacin; a report he had ordered from the Federation of American Scientists titled “Updated International Nuclear Warhead Database”; and the annual statement of the Reinsurance Industry Consortium, the association of gargantuan corporations that insured insurance companies. But no sign of Elsa’s canoe. The old familiar fears started growing inside him like a tropical forest.

  Charnoble glanced between Mitchell and one of the clocks on the wall. “Is there something wrong?” he said. “You don’t look good.”

  Mitchell went back into his office, running across the carpet this time, and typed some words into his computer. When the phone number came up, he called it.

  “ER. Augusta General.”

  “Do you have a patient in your hospital named Elsa Bruner?”

  There was a pause. In the background a man was screaming, the type of noise a dog would make while getting run over by a bus.

  “Hold on.”

  Charnoble paced into Mitchell’s office and pointed to one of his watches. Mitchell held up one finger.

  The woman came back on the line after a few seconds. Or minutes. Time was beginning to get strange.

  “Here’s the number.”

  “The number?” said Mitchell.

  “You got a pen?”

  The woman gave him a telephone number with a Maine area code.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s the number they left.”

  The screaming got worse. Mitchell had to raise his voice to make himself heard.

  “The number that who left?”

  “Hold on,” said the operator. The line was pulsing. “I have to take this.”

  Mitchell hung up and dialed the number. After four rings a man picked up.

  “Ticonderoga.”

  Mitchell didn’t understand.

  “Hello?” said the man. “Who’s that calling?”

  “I didn’t think—I thought Ticonderoga didn’t have a phone number.”

  “What? Why’d you call then?”

  Mitchell shook his head. Nothing made sense.

  “Hey,” said the man, in a sudden rage. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Listen,” said Mitchell. “Is Elsa there? Elsa Bruner?”

  There was a delay. When the man spoke again his voice was quieter, defensive.

  “Who is this?”

  “Mitchell. Zukor. I’m a friend of Elsa’s.”

  “Huh. Then I guess you haven’t heard.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

  Part Two

  Soon all sorts of strange things will come. No longer will things be as before.

  —WASCO TRIBE PROPHECY

  Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

  1.

  “Your coffin’s here.”

  “Wrong number!” Mitchell hung up—or tried to. His hand was trembling just enough that the receiver jarred against the plastic teeth on the telephone’s base. He used both hands to steady it into the groove.

  The phone rang again.

  “Sucker?”

  “… This is Mitchell Zukor.”

  “Two twenty-three East Thirty-seventh Street calling. You got a coffin here.”

  “I’m not expecting a coffin.”

  “Who is, right?” The doorman chuckled to himself. “There’s some guys got a large wood box and they want me to sign.”

  Now Mitchell understood.

  * * *

  The day of the purchase, when he awoke—from a dream of swaying, infinitely tall glass towers and a sky as bright as a nuclear flash—he felt that some gear in his brain had broken. The engine still revved, but the apparatus was beginning to grate and stutter, and despite the fact that there were not yet any outward signs of malfunction, he knew that after a few more revolutions the parts would grind themselves into dust.

  Like an android Mitchell had gone through that morning, sorting his disaster folders into alphabetical order (anthrax, botulism, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever…), scheduling meetings, dialing voice mail. It was only after he deleted his messages that he realized he hadn’t been listening at all, didn’t even know who had called or what they wanted. All he could think about was how Ticonderoga did, after all, have a phone line. Which meant that Elsa, the fainting girl, had lied to him. Of course Ticonderoga had a telephone. Probably a satellite connection too. Laptops and portables, no doubt. So why, then, this mad determination to write letters? Did Elsa think that if they had spoken by phone, Mitchell would have been more insistent? That he might persuade her of the absurdity of her decision to live on a half-assed farm in the middle of nowhere with a flock of third-generation hippies who washed their bodies in the lake and brushed their teeth with a paste of crushed pine needles? It would seem that his original hunch had been confirmed: Elsa wanted to read his thoughts, but she didn’t want to hear his voice.

  Still, it shouldn’t have mattered. The poor girl had been asking for help—begging—in the only way she knew how, but he had been too dumb, or weak, to do anything. Deep down, did some part of him want her to suffer? Would that have proved his point? Then again, what else could he have done? Rented a car one Saturday morning, driven to Maine, and kidnapped her, checking her in, against her will, to Mount Sinai or NewYork-Presbyterian? There were laws against that. A more puzzling question: How had he allowed himself to be lured into her fantasy? And why had the news of her attack, so predictable and logical, disturbed him? Terrible things did happen. Wishful thinking was negligent,
dangerous, and, in the case of Elsa Bruner, might even prove homicidal. But if Elsa were guilty of denial, Mitchell at least was an accomplice. And that was the old, familiar problem. Analysis without action.

  He had fled the FutureWorld office that day at noon, driven by an outrageous hunger. Cheeseburgers—he wanted cheeseburgers with a desperation that made his eyes water. At least he assumed it was his desire for cheeseburgers that was making his eyes water. But his hunger was extinguished almost immediately by the sight of a rat. It was not just any rat. As a New Yorker of nearly three months’ standing he was well acquainted with the local vermin. They were citizens too, after all: the pigeons queuing at the street corner, waiting for the light to change; the rats loitering on subway platforms; the bedbugs snuggling in the mattresses, preparing for dinner. But lately New York’s second-class citizens had been behaving strangely. This rat on Thirty-third Street, for instance, was attacking a garbage bag with an epileptic fervor. Having perforated the black plastic with its fangs, it tried to tear an opening by whiplashing its head with sudden jerks. It looked terrified, as if it weren’t trying to remove food from the bag, but seeking shelter inside it. New York rats had a reputation for haughtiness—they knew they were going to outlast you, it was just a matter of time, so could you please stop getting in their way?—but recently their confidence seemed shaken. Was it simply the heat? The unfair, merciless, dominant heat? Or did they know that something was coming? The animals were always the first to know. It was that way with the warming world—the polar bear experimenting with anorexia, the marmot cutting short its hibernation, the American grizzly emigrating to Canada. And now the native New Yorkers were behaving erratically as well. The rats were traumatized; the pigeons neurotic, their dirty beaks nodding incessantly, like meth addicts; the roaches were downright hysterical, running suicides across the sidewalk. And maybe Mitchell was imagining it, but he could swear that every single infant in every single stroller was shrieking. Could they sense it too, the newborns? Could they sense this tremendous thing, whatever it was, that was coming for them all?

  Where had his thoughts taken him? Ahead was the navy ribbon of the Hudson River, evaporating in vaporish wisps into New Jersey. Behind him a sky bridge that supported trees and dangling vines. Beside him a wide glass window inscribed with vinyl block letters, each letter a different shade of neon:

  PSYCHO!

  WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU SLEEP?

  The canoe rested on a podium in the middle of the gallery floor. The hull was painted in a kind of camouflage, only the colors, instead of being greens and browns, were a nightmarish swirl of orange and cerulean and bloodred.

  As soon as Mitchell stepped into the refrigerated art gallery he was approached by a delicate young man with pointed elbows, a too-clever smile, and glasses with translucent rims. The man closed the distance rapidly; he held a damp Dixie cup of ice water in his outstretched hand. Mitchell took the water gratefully, winced when the ice touched his gums. Before Mitchell could understand exactly where he was or what was happening, the attendent launched into a prepared speech. The current exhibition, he explained, featured the work of a group of young artists from the eastern Canadian provinces. These artists aimed to combine sixties psychedelic art with the folkloric art of First Nations tribes. The New Psychedelia School, they called themselves. “Rationality has made a mess of this world,” read the artist’s statement, posted on the wall. “We want to trust our impulses more.” Mitchell knew he had heard it somewhere before. The attendent indicated a series of portraits in which the subjects’ skin was peeled away to reveal bright patterns of stripes and polka dots. There was also a set of naked mannequins that were extraordinarily lifelike below their necks, with hair and pores, though they had the faces of animals—bears and giraffes and swans. But Mitchell didn’t care about any of this. He just wanted to look at the piece titled Psycho Canoe.

  The canoe, explained the attendant, was made by a young Nova Scotian woman named Sylvan who collected objects from her natural environment and painted them in unexpected ways, using organic laminates and gold leaf and nontoxic enamel in an effort to capture the eternal unity of—

  “Is it a real canoe?” Mitchell asked. “Functional, I mean.”

  “Sure. Even comes with two wood paddles. One of my favorite things is the fine detail she gave to the gunwales. If you’ll come closer.”

  “How much?”

  The kid nodded politely and made a show of going over to his desk and consulting a price guide. He returned with an ironic smile. A smile of ironic regret.

  “For this work we have set a price of twenty-nine thousand dollars.”

  Mitchell laughed, and the attendant, assuming that Mitchell was astonished by the price, joined in. Mitchell supposed that he was, in a way, laughing at the price—but not because it was high. He could buy the Psycho Canoe with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.

  The gallery attendant’s conspiratorial smirk was beginning to irritate him. Did the fact that Mitchell’s shirt was soaked through with sweat, or that his hair was uncombed and his eyes crazy—did the attendant find that amusing? Did he think that Mitchell couldn’t buy an expensive piece of art on a whim? This kid who, no doubt, was himself a struggling artist. See the tattoo, some kind of green flower, creeping above the margin of his shirt collar by barely an inch—but what calculation had gone into that inch! And those worn brown loafers, certainly his only good pair, purchased by his parents so that he could look respectable at his first job, at a Chelsea gallery with slate floors and theater lighting. Would he have given the same smirk to Alec Charnoble, or Ned Nybuster? Mitchell was finished being underestimated. Sandy Sherman had underestimated him, as did so many of his new FutureWorld clients—they paid their fees happily and sat through the consultation meetings in order to satisfy the requirements of the liability claims law, but they were slow to believe the horrors that Mitchell forecast. And Elsa, for that matter, hadn’t listened to him either. And now she lay in a coma at Augusta General. Mitchell reached for his wallet.

  “Do you deliver?” he said.

  The attendant flinched. It was barely perceptible—a slight recoil, the boy hunching an inch or two as if in response to a light blow to the stomach—but it gave Mitchell immense satisfaction. He felt that he had proved something. But what, exactly? And to whom?

  * * *

  The purchase of the Psycho Canoe was not the only evidence that the new Mitchell acted in ways that would have baffled the old Mitchell. In the weeks since Elsa’s attack, something had ruptured. It was as terrifying as it was liberating. His old life had peeled away like a label, and his old habits had lost their appeal. The catastrophe literature that arrived in his office every day began to pile up, unread. He shunned the library. He even lost his desire to calculate disaster odds. Elsa was right. By concentrating on the large-scale disasters he had missed the one unfolding right in front of him: Elsa herself.

  His brain didn’t shut down entirely, however. He was thinking, all right, it was just that the thinking part of him was increasingly removed from the doing part. During consultations with his clients he perceived Mitchell Zukor from a great distance, observing his actions unfold as if from miles away, peering out an oval airplane window or watching himself on a movie screen from the back row of the theater—a form of disengagement he had read about in firsthand descriptions of warfare. He watched himself take risks that weeks ago would have been inconceivable. He rarely looked before crossing the street, relying on sound and peripheral vision. He drank water directly from the tap. He held his cell phone next to his brain, neglecting to use his headset. He even let it rest in his front pocket, next to his testicles. What did he have to lose? Or, for that matter, to gain?

  He’d read
in a biography of Kurt Gödel that the great mathematician, after finishing work on his incompleteness theorems, suffered a breakdown and became incomplete himself. Sad old Kurt refused to leave the house, stopped washing, even abstained from eating. His weight dropped to sixty-five pounds and ultimately he died of starvation. But before he succumbed he developed one final application of his theory. He argued that the incompleteness theorems—which said that certain universal truths cannot be proved by rational thought—were themselves proof of the existence of God. Gödel’s suffering must have been tremendous, but in those final years his genius reached a new plateau. By withdrawing himself from Earth, he was able to perceive other planets, other universes, other realities. After his death they found in his rolltop desk a page of butcher paper on which he had scrawled his final thoughts. He had written, “There exist other worlds peopled by rational beings of a different and higher kind.”

  “What do you want me to do with this coffin?” yelled the doorman into Mitchell’s ear. “I tried using the passkey to your apartment, but it seemed there was some other lock on the door.”

  There were, in fact, four other locks on the door, including a biometric panel that clicked open only when Mitchell touched his right forefinger to a sensor he had screwed into the jamb.

  “I’ll be there soon,” said Mitchell, whispering so that Charnoble didn’t rush in. “Just sign for it, please.”

  “And leave it in the lobby? I can’t. It’s a fire hazard!”

  Very well, Mitchell thought as he hung up, but this fact in itself was hardly notable; the city was full of fire hazards. It was September now, and the drought had become increasingly dire. Back in July, Elsa had described particles of soil and dust floating through the Maine air, and the same thing was now happening in New York. The garbage was airborne. Plastic bags, newspapers, leaves that had cracked and fallen from the dehydrated trees—autumn had been prematurely induced. In the parks the parched soil solidified in crumbling beds of craquelure. The bodegas sold air-filtering masks imported from Japan. There were designer masks and low-end masks, louvered models and formfitting models, omega-pleated models for women with smaller faces, models with nose pads, nonstick models, and models that came equipped with damp filters containing SoothOn, a mentholated vapor laced with benzocaine that created the “sensation of throat-soothing steam” every time you exhaled. The local news anchors debated which models were the safest and most fashionable.