Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “Truth,” said Mitchell, shaking his head. “It ought to be ‘At the end of the tunnel—more tunnel.’”

  “In the darkness of the storm,” intoned Jane, “a ray … of darkness.”

  Mitchell spoke less frequently with his parents. On the phone with his mother he felt like a fraud.

  “Are you living well?” she asked him one night.

  “Living?” he asked, confused. For a second he actually couldn’t understand what she meant.

  “As in life? That thing we do when we’re not sleeping?”

  “Oh sure. That thing.”

  “Mitchell?”

  He composed himself so that he could respond with the proper degree of enthusiasm.

  “I’m living great, Mom. Don’t worry about me. How’s Dad?”

  The thing is, he was living well in New York, at least if you went by his dinner receipts and pay stubs. He was a big business success. He made thirty-two thousand dollars in August. All signs seemed to indicate September would be even better. But the personal cost was extravagant. His heart was bankrupt. He was in emotional foreclosure. He felt more isolated than ever before. Once he even took the company car downtown to Chosan Galbi, but the waitress didn’t recognize him.

  “FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “Bad things come to those who wait.”

  “FutureWorld,” said Jane. “Despair springs eternal.”

  At night he wrote letters to Elsa. He sat in the Psycho Canoe and read them over to himself before sending them—sometimes printing them out as many as a dozen times, marking them up with his pencil, trying to find the exact right words. But he never could. As he read them disembodied phrases jumped out like images in the magic eye books he obsessed over as a kid:

  … I should have realized …

  … in the future …

  … New York hospital …

  … false complacency …

  … I’m sorry … I apologize … I’m sorry …

  She didn’t respond, of course. She couldn’t. When he called the hospital—just about every afternoon—they reassured him that her condition was stable. As if that were a good thing.

  There was in his head a grim compatibility between this absence of communication with Elsa and the absence of rain in New York. He began to develop, with Jane’s help, a drought scenario for FutureWorld. They studied the Rainfall Anomaly Index, the Palmer Drought Index, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Jane drafted a Poisson chart to help determine the drought’s likely duration, which only confirmed the obvious—rain was long overdue. And Mitchell built narratives that drew from historical anecdote. He’d been researching the Dust Bowl. The dry soil rising like steam from the earth, the houses entombed by dirt, the black clouds filling the sky like coal smoke, the birds choking, disoriented, flying headfirst into the ground. The prevailing winds carried east Oklahoma’s red soil, so that in the winter of 1934 the snow that fell in New England was bright pink.

  “FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “It’s a matter of death and death.”

  “FutureWorld,” said Jane. “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

  They worked during lunch in the conference room of FutureWorld’s new office. A long window overlooked the corner of Central Park and its brown softball fields. Directly below was the Columbus Fountain, which had run dry and was now the home of nesting pigeons, and their shit. Mitchell caught Jane staring into the distance.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “When you were a kid did you ever look at a cloud and try to figure out whether it was an animal or an object?”

  “Kansas City has the highest number of clouds per capita of any medium-sized American city. That’s not a joke.”

  “So what’s that one?”

  Mitchell squinted, searching the sky. He reached for his glasses.

  “I didn’t know you wore glasses,” said Jane. “They make you look … professorial. I think I like you better without them.”

  “Me too.” Mitchell snapped the glasses back into their case and squinted again. On an otherwise clear day, a single cloud had appeared over the Central Park reservoir. It had an oblong shape, with tendrils flying off concentrically, like curls on an infant scalp.

  “I’m going to say a galaxy. The Milky Way.”

  “The Milky Way is kinda cloudy, I suppose.”

  “There’s that thick bar in the middle, see. And then the swirls coming out of it? Those are the arcs of the stars.”

  “I’d say a white laundry bag. The soiled clothing at the bottom—see how it’s heavier and darker there? The swirly lines are gym socks, flying out of the bag.”

  “Flying out? Why?”

  “Maybe because the person is running. Running the bag down the block to the Laundromat.”

  “Why is she running?”

  “She’s running because … it’s raining?”

  The cloud stung the earth with a bolt of lightning.

  Jane hiccuped.

  “Did you just hiccup?”

  “I hiccup when I’m surprised. Or scared.”

  A noise like God cracking His knuckles. Silence—and then cheers from the people on the sidewalk.

  “Jumping baby Jesus.”

  “A bomb,” said Mitchell.

  “No,” said Jane. “It’s much bigger than that.”

  They approached the window, pressing their foreheads against the pane. Mitchell was careful not to hit his nose on the glass. There was another boom. They both lurched back.

  “Thunder.”

  “No way.”

  “Unreal. Thunder. Unreal.”

  A crack of lightning tore across the sky. More cheering.

  “Wait a minute,” said Jane. “Is this going to be bad for business?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was just hoping we could milk this drought for a few more weeks.”

  Mitchell stared at her, uncomprehending. He was reminded that they saw the world in very different ways.

  “Is this actually happening?” Charnoble had rushed into the room. His fists were clenched, like a child having a tantrum. “We have at least a dozen special drought consultations scheduled this week. No, this is no good—”

  Beneath the cloud the sky was streaky and fish gray. On Columbus Avenue the crowds were gazing upward, their hands over their foreheads to block the sunlight. There was another crack in the sky, a gunshot to start a footrace, and they started running toward the park—a few people at first, then in bunches—whooping and laughing and pulling on their hair in disbelief.

  Tewilliger appeared beside Charnoble. Seeing the crowds in the park, she shook her head with disapproval.

  Jane grabbed Mitchell’s hand. Mitchell looked at their hands touching.

  “C’mon,” said Jane.

  “Where?”

  She tugged on his hand.

  “Might want to bring an umbrella,” said Charnoble, but they were already past him, racing down the hall.

  * * *

  A gray curtain of rain drew across the Great Lawn. Mitchell could hear it before it was upon them, a vociferous lashing of dried leaves and baked soil. Angry fist-size droplets detonated on the ground in front of them, and the sagging, wounded belly of the cloud passed over their heads. It was like walking under a waterfall or into a car wash. The rain pelted like hurled stones. The force was staggering. The people around him, raising their hands over their heads, laughed at its comical, bullying strength. They were like children being tossed around by a half-playful and half-malicious older brother.

  The two futurists ran to the Great Lawn. A crowd had assembled in an impromptu dance circle. It was one of those blue-moon New York exuberant moments when strangers made eye contact, slapped hands, even embraced flesh to flesh. A utilities worker held his construction helmet in his outstretched hand; when it filled with water, he dumped it over his head, roaring with glee as the water cascaded down his shirt. Then he held the helmet out again. A woman in a beige business suit was carrying her he
els in one hand, her bare feet clomping in the mud, her white blouse quickly becoming transparent. Children extended their arms like prophets, their heads back and mouths open. They caught the rainwater until their cheeks were full and then spouted it out like cherubic fountain statues. Jane grabbed Mitchell and pulled him into the circle. Without thinking he spun her around and dipped her, the rain splashing into her bright open face, and she burst into happy laughter. She had a distinctive laugh—a laughter arpeggio, accelerating from low quickly to high before descending again as she ran out of breath. She clenched her eyes shut and tilted back her head. The rain bounced off her exposed neck and gathered her hair into wild tendrils.

  Yet Mitchell couldn’t help but notice how, as the water pelted the dirt, it did not seep into the ground. It collected in pools, as it would on a tarp. He was suddenly desperate to do research. He knew that most droughts ended not in a single rainstorm, but over weeks and even months—just as droughts didn’t begin overnight, but over months as rains came with less frequency. Normally a drought ended only once a certain minimum amount of rainfall had been recorded over the course of a season. But what happened when a major rainstorm followed a major drought?

  He had stopped dancing. His pant legs were glutinous with leaf pulp.

  “What is it?” Jane yelled over the water’s loud patter.

  “We should probably go.”

  “C’mon, Mitchell! Live. Live just a little bit.”

  Jane started dancing with someone else, a cleanly shaved young man whose tie was winsomely dripping with mud. The crowds of people kept pushing past, running like mad to the Great Lawn.

  Mitchell turned and walked against the crowd, back to the office. He felt very damp, and very alone.

  3.

  What to make of the mayhem on the streets, the adults frolicking like children under a park sprinkler? Was this what everybody had been waiting for? A sign of divine intervention? On television it seemed so: the weathermen were in ecstasies. After so many empty predictions of advancing storms, their jobs—if not their entire scientific discipline—had been on the line. Now they appeared live on every station, enjoying the bliss of exoneration. They gesticulated manically in front of their painted maps, fist-bumping their amused anchormen. Their speech was infected with grand metaphors and meteorologically themed clichés.

  “There have come soft rains!”

  “Gray skies aren’t gonna clear up. Put on a happy face!”

  “Good day, no sunshine. Put on a happy face!”

  The tristate area Doppler radar maps were obscured by a heavy neon green swirl. It was a large, messy storm system. There were low winds and heavy rainfall, a combination that indicated the storm would linger in the metropolitan area. It was moving in a northeasterly course; from what Mitchell could determine, Camp Ticonderoga stood directly in its path. And it seemed as if there were more storms to come. In the Atlantic Ocean, just north of San Juan, Tropical Storm Tammy was rapidly coalescing, and now seemed poised to pursue its weaker predecessor up the coast. Over on Channel 4, Big Henry D.’s eyes were spinning, mini-cyclones. In his high-pitched ecstasy he swayed back and forth, his legs pressed tightly together, like Tweedledum. He appeared not to have urinated since the storm first glided onto his Doppler.

  Mitchell called Augusta General.

  “Patient Bruner, huh? You the guy who phoned this morning?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s been no change.”

  “A big storm is coming your way,” said Mitchell. “Thought you might want to know.”

  “Weatherman’s been predicting that for months,” said the receptionist. “He’s lying.”

  Mitchell paused, wanting to ask her something else, to find out more information about the body of the foolish girl in the hospital bed. How closely were they monitoring her? Had they contacted her mother? Had they considered sending her to a hospital in, say, New York City, so that she could be examined by world-class specialists using state-of-the-art machines with names that the humble country doctors of Maine would not even be able to pronounce? But the receptionist had hung up.

  A marine climatologist from the National Weather Service appeared on the office flatscreen. This man, pale faced and slightly cross-eyed, clearly lacked his colleagues’ exuberance. If anything, he appeared uneasy—an attitude that the anchorwoman seemed to find insulting. He spoke in a quiet, restrained voice and was distracted. He kept looking off camera to a live satellite feed of the tropical storm developing in the Atlantic Ocean just west of Bermuda.

  “Dr. Walsh,” said the anchorwoman, “why aren’t you more pleased about this storm? Isn’t this what we’ve been begging for all summer? What we’ve been praying for?”

  The camera cut to images of children playing on the beach at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. They were running around in the pouring rain with their arms held aloft like wings.

  “Well, Vivian, it’s not that simple. Given the duration of the drought, the intensity of this storm is troubling. As is the prospect of Tammy making landfall as soon as tomorrow evening, by which point it will likely achieve hurricane strength. The erosion of the beaches in the metropolitan East Coast region has accelerated dramatically in the last several months. The coastal wetlands have been decimated, not to mention—” He paused, glancing offscreen. “Is that—is that a live image? Those children should get off that beach. No one should be allowed on the beach!”

  The camera abruptly cut away from him and back to the image of the children playing.

  “Dr. Walsh, with all due respect to your expertise, do you actually mean to suggest that rain is a bad thing?”

  “Rain in and of itself is not a bad thing. But all the analytics indicate that this storm is going to bring excessive rain. The drought has inhibited the land’s ability to accommodate sudden large amounts of precipitation. The soil simply cannot absorb it. Especially at this stage in the tidal cycle, when we’re two days short of a full moon—”

  “Dr. Walsh? Thank you for your time. We’re going to have to cut away—”

  “Please, Vivian? You need to inform the public that they must retreat from the coasts—”

  “We’re going live now to Central Park, where an improbable display of jubilation has broken out on the Great Lawn. You just gotta see this—it’s the kind of thing that makes me proud to be a New Yorker. Actually—Harry? You want to take over? I might just run down there myself—”

  Mitchell flipped off the television and raced back to the conference room, where his drought files were arrayed across the table: historical weather tables, local news articles, reports from the USDA, the USGS, NOAA, books with titles such as The Worst Hard Time, The Drought, and The End of Nature. This Walsh was right, at least about the soil. During the drought the region’s topsoil had dried out and turned to dust. Just the previous week, farmers in New Jersey had seen large, glowing towers of cloud passing over their farms—what one man interviewed on the nightly newscast had described as a “black blizzard.” The dust sprayed houses and seeped through the thinnest cracks in the walls, around the windows and under doors. “The grit gets into every crevice, even into a man’s soul, if I may say so,” said a Newark contractor. One of the tabloids profiled a woman in Morris County who woke up to find that overnight, a fine layer of dust had invaded her house, settling on every surface, including her china, the rugs, and her sheets. When she rose from bed, the only clean part of her pillow was the outline of her head.

  In New York there was a run on window washers. The waiting list was three weeks, and that was only if you could afford the jacked-up rates—Charnoble had paid one guy four hundred dollars an hour. When you were on the street, you saw them every time you looked up; they dangled from their nets like tree caterpillars. Mitchell could have used one himself: brown plumes of sediment had appeared like mold on his own apartment window, blotting out the meager view he had. On the street level the problem was compounded by the automobiles’ trapped exhaust, which was too
heavy to rise, especially in the absence of breeze. The pillars of buildings were ribbed with soot; you couldn’t lean against a street corner without ruining your shirt. For months the earth had been drying out and flaking away. The land had been starved to death, abused, murdered.

  He realized that, having dedicated his research to extreme drought scenarios, he’d suffered a failure of the imagination. He hadn’t considered what might happen in the case of a deluge.

  There were precedents, he quickly discovered. Most recently the 2011 Queensland floods, which drowned nearly a quarter of Australia, had followed a decade of drought. He tried to run down what he knew about extreme rainfall in New York City. He recalled, for instance, that lower Manhattan began to flood when the sea level rose five feet above average levels. On December 11, 1992, a nor’easter caused a surge of eight and a half feet. The storm closed the PATH and subway systems. An L train reversed course under the East River when the Fourteenth Street tunnel began to fill with water. Three hundred passengers had to evacuate a G train and walk a thousand feet out of a flooded Greenpoint tunnel. The FDR Drive was submerged. The major bridges all closed down.

  In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy, though only a Category 1, brought a near fourteen-foot tide to Battery Park, flooded sections of lower Manhattan, and left 850,000 people without electricity. Staten Island and south Queens suffered the greatest damage; the Rockaway Beach boardwalk was stripped to its piers. The New York Stock Exchange closed for two consecutive days for the first time since 1888, schools shut down for a week, and it was more than two weeks before subway service was fully restored. The lessons of Sandy were soon forgotten, however, even though conditions continued to deteriorate in the years following the storm.