Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  Mitchell pulled the numbers. It didn’t take long to isolate the bad news. With depleted salt marshes, narrower beaches, eroded soil, and a higher water table—the East River and the Hudson had each risen eight inches in the past twenty years—the city had never been more susceptible to flooding. They were close to a full moon, which meant high tides: water two feet higher than the mean. A storm surge would raise the water level of the New York Bight, which would overflow into the rivers. The question was how large a surge there would be. Under extreme drought conditions, could a regular storm cause flooding?

  Mitchell was verifying erosion figures with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection office when Jane returned. She had pulled her hair back in a ponytail to keep the water from dripping down her face. She carried a single shoe, the other one having been lost somewhere in the park. Her makeup had washed away, and her eyes were dewy and soft.

  “You missed a lot of fun.” Her bra, pale blue and webbed, was visible beneath her wet cream blouse. “Have you seriously been working all this time?”

  “A little. I think we should review our flood scenarios.”

  “A flood?” She gave him a sideways look. “Are you kidding?”

  “Droughts often lead to floods. I’m trying to figure the odds.”

  Charnoble appeared at the doorway.

  “They’re calling,” he said, grinding his forefinger into his palm. “They’re calling. They want meetings. And meetings mean more money. Money, money, money—” An obscene grin, like a water stain, crept across his face.

  4.

  The newspapers led with photographs of ecstatic New Yorkers. Under the headline SINGING AND DANCING IN THE RAIN, the cover of one tabloid ran a picture of the casts of Broadway musicals dancing outside in Times Square, arm in arm in avenue-wide chorus lines. The markets had advanced nearly six percentage points, led by a massive surge in the agribusiness sector. Traders were photographed on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, spinning in the rain, pinwheeling their arms, their ties plastered to their shoulders.

  He’d slept terribly. Wasn’t rain supposed to lull you to sleep? Insomniacs paid for the privilege: there were machines, little speakers, that projected incessant pitter-patter all night. But what he heard outside his window was violent, erratic, a wild drunkard careening through the streets with sledgehammers in his hands. The rain continued all night. It wasn’t cleansing, at least no more than a blitzkrieg could be considered cleansing. It was obliterative. It wiped the sludge right off his window. He was only surprised that it didn’t wipe the windows right off his building.

  It had slowed to a drizzle by the time he headed for the subway the next morning, but the city had been noticeably altered. The sewer grates were clogged with crushed plastic bags, creating muddy ponds that gathered around each street corner. The sidewalk smelled of fresh soil. The exultant mood had already given way, overnight, to one of fatigued irascibility. It was typical New York City, this whiplash effect, one day’s exuberance followed the next day by a hangover and the shakes. The sudden rains had overwhelmed many of the city’s basic operations. Underground, Mitchell took his place behind a mob of exasperated commuters standing five-deep back from the tracks. A voice over the loudspeaker reported in a mechanical, stroboscopic bellow that several downtown stations had been closed due to flooding. A man next to him was so furious that he burst into tears.

  He blamed himself for not anticipating this sooner. Then he blamed Elsa. Her mystic optimism had brainwashed him into seeing his work as just, well, work. But it wasn’t just work. It was life and death. He had been completely disengaged, zombified. On the previous afternoon he had returned to the library and examined the city’s basic water blueprint. What he found haunted him.

  In the days when Times Square was a red maple swamp and St. Mark’s Place a hickory forest populated by hawks and ravens, more than forty brooks and streams covered the island of Manhattan. During high tide, the Lenape Indians could canoe from the East River straight through to the Hudson River across what is now Canal Street. His old office at Fitzsimmons Sherman stood over a little body of water called Sunfish Pond, which was beloved by early settlers for its profusion of sunfish, flounder, and eels. For all he knew, the pond was still there beneath the Empire State Building, percolating below the subbasement, the sunfish and flounder gone, but perhaps not the eels.

  All of these waterways were buried when the city was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the water didn’t disappear—it still pumped through the undersoil. Even during a drought Manhattan’s natural water table gushed thirteen million gallons of groundwater into the subway tunnels daily—water that once had been absorbed by roots, marshes, and streams. Every day, eight hundred electric-powered municipal pumps diverted the excess water into the sewer system. Whenever a sizable storm hit, the pumps were overtaxed and the subway tunnels flooded. After just twenty minutes of rain, Brooklyn’s sewage pipes began to overflow and human excrement spilled into the Upper New York Bay, Gowanus Canal, and Newton Creek. This was the price of having the entire island overlaid by concrete and a subway system buried deep in the earth—below the sewer pipes. The underground city was a water balloon filled to bursting. It just needed one sharp poke.

  When he called the office, Tewilliger picked up before the first ring finished chiming. Charnoble had trained her well.

  “Future.”

  “It’s Mitchell. I’m going to be a little late this morning—”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hold.”

  The hold music came on the line. It was a pop song from around the turn of the century, set against plaintive piano chords:

  As logic stands,

  you couldn’t meet a man

  who’s from the future.

  But logic broke,

  as he appeared he spoke

  about the future.

  We’re not going to make it …

  The song had been Jane’s idea. She screamed with laughter every time she was put on hold. It was starting to get under Mitchell’s skin.

  “Zukor!” Charnoble came on the line. He had never addressed Mitchell as Zukor before. He was out of breath.

  “Alec. What’s happening?”

  “We need you here now. The phone is ringing off the hook, in a manner of speaking. This may be our first live disaster.”

  The excitement in his voice was extreme, bordering on grotesque. Charnoble explained that Tammy had been upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, gusts as high as 105 miles per hour.

  “You should see the Doppler,” said Charnoble, and Mitchell could picture the spittle on his lips. “Overnight the beast spun into a tight spiral.”

  “Where is it going to make landfall? Is it coming here?”

  “Too early to tell. Weather Channel says Chesapeake Bay. CNN is reporting the Delaware coast. But Big Henry D. thinks farther east, near Ocean City.”

  “Ocean City would be very bad,” said Mitchell. “But Atlantic City—Atlantic City would be catastrophic.”

  “Let’s pray for Atlantic City!”

  Mitchell didn’t bother to explain that a storm passing through Atlantic City would likely head straight to Manhattan. He worried that this information would only multiply Charnoble’s giddiness. Instead he asked Charnoble to pull out his hurricane files so that Jane could review them before her meetings. The first file was a collection of material about the 1821 storm, one of the only hurricanes to have passed directly over Manhattan. During that storm the tide rose thirteen feet in a single hour, causing the East River to meet the Hudson in what is now SoHo.

  Charnoble had already booked both of them through the day. Mitchell volunteered to go straight to his first appointment. He was up-to-date on the literature now, he didn’t need his notes. The client was Jason Tanizaki, a vice-president of Lady Madeline, the perfume giant. Lady Madeline was concerned about what damage a hurricane might cause to their scent-production facto
ry in Middlesex County, less than a mile from the ocean.

  It seemed easier to work than to think of everything that might happen. Work, his old savior, would clear his brain, or at least distract him. It had been the same thing his whole life: when the hot panics came, he turned to math for relief. During high school he had seen an episode of Mega Disasters about the massive volcano, larger than the state of Rhode Island, that lay beneath Yellowstone National Park. The Yellowstone volcano had erupted three times. Each time it had covered the western half of North America with a foot of volcanic ash. Winds carried sulfur aerosols and ash particles around the entire planet, causing temperatures to plummet. Nearly all life on earth went extinct. The volcano erupted roughly every six or seven hundred thousand years; the last eruption had occurred 640,000 years ago. It seemed that we were due. With a shaky hand Mitchell had turned off the television. The host of Mega Disasters—a bearded man best known for hosting a dating show—had said that the volcano had erupted 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, and .64 million years ago. Mitchell wrote the figures on a pad and took out a calculator. If you added the intervals between eruptions and divided by three, that meant the Yellowstone volcano’s average dormancy period was 730,000 years. After plotting a probability graph, he determined that the chance another massive eruption would occur in the next one hundred years was 0.00055 percent, or 1 in 181,000. An exceedingly low number, one that did not justify the ominous tone used by Mr. Megadisasters. Those zeroes on the LCD face of his TI-89 calculator had made all the difference. They were like little white pills that faded out his anxiety. They put him to sleep.

  But the information he had found at the library, reading about Manhattan’s full bladder, had not yielded anything that suggested he was overreacting. And with the schedule of meetings today, there would be no time to call the top people at the local universities: the hydrologists, fluviologists, geomorphologists—anyone, really, who could tell him what the future would cost him.

  The Lady Madeline Tower was only five blocks away, so he abandoned the crowded subway station and set off on a sprint, his eyes turned upward, not caring where his feet landed. The gray clouds had sapped the coloration of the skyscrapers; every glass, stone, and steel surface had the same dull slate hue. It was as if Manhattan were assuming the qualities of his skycity—it lacked only the brilliant cobalt-blue sky of his dreams. When he reached the office building he was panting. A dismayed security guard stared pointedly at his shoes. They were leaking black dye onto the expensive carpet. He might as well have been walking on ink pads.

  “I’m here to see Jason Tanizaki,” said Mitchell. “I’m from FutureWorld.”

  The guard kept his eye on Mitchell while he dialed the intercom.

  “Mr. Tanizaki has a visitor.” The guard paused and stared balefully into Mitchell’s eyes. “He says he is the man from the future.”

  5.

  Seven people were seated around the oval marble conference table. Six of them stood when Mitchell entered the room.

  “The man of the hour,” said Jason Tanizaki, extending his soft fingers.

  Mitchell had liked Tanizaki as soon as they met, a month earlier. He was a thin, tall man with elongated features, and he dressed like a Ferragamo model; today he wore uncreased chocolate loafers, a trim navy suit, and a thickly knotted aqua-blue tie. His elegance extended even to his posture. During their consultations he sat with his ankles crossed, hands pressed together, and head cocked, as if in pleasant anticipation of whatever Mitchell had to say. Watching Tanizaki, Mitchell marveled at the natural effortlessness with which the powerful administered their affairs. No matter how hard Mitchell worked at it, his every action seemed to him freighted with the weight of Kansas City, his father, the Zukorminiums, thick Hungarian gravy on fatty sides of veal, saggy pelican-mouth briefcases with chipped bronze clasps.

  Mitchell walked right up to the edge of the table so that no one could see his leaking shoes.

  “Please,” he said, “sit.” He noticed there was nowhere for him to sit, so he remained standing.

  “You will be pleased to know,” said Tanizaki, “that Lady Madeline has purchased a headset for every one of our employees.”

  In their previous session they had discussed the problem of widespread cell phone use among Lady Madeline’s staff, particularly their traveling salesmen.

  “Glad to hear that,” said Mitchell. “You’ve spared yourself innumerable negligence lawsuits and a surge in oncology-related health-care expenses.”

  Tanizaki introduced his colleagues, who nodded as they were named. Finally he came to the slumped batrachian form at the head of the table. It was Lady Madeline D’Espy herself, the company’s founder, whose legendary beauty hadn’t faded so much as expired; she was decades past the sell-by date. Her face, blotted with heavy rouges and pinks, rested low in the hollow of her neck, but the eyes had retained a sharp brown lucidity. They peered out beneath eyebrows that had been sketched slightly too high up on her forehead, giving the impression of being raised, perpetually, in skepticism.

  Mitchell began his doomsday hurricane analysis by explaining that Lady Madeline needed to move quickly. The Middlesex factory had to be shut down immediately. All chemical substances and laboratory equipment should be moved belowground, preferably to a sealed storm cellar. The New York office must close tomorrow, the day the hurricane was expected to make landfall. Employees who lived in the city should leave for higher ground inland. Anyone with no choice but to remain in New York should consult the city’s online flood map to see whether his apartment lay in an official evacuation zone. If so, he should locate the nearest hurricane shelter. No apartment higher than the tenth floor or lower than the fourth floor was safe. All employees had to prepare a Go Bag, containing bottled water, nonperishable food items, a flashlight, batteries, latex gloves, medical history information, iodine tablets—

  D’Espy raised a stiff, maculated hand from the table. Though subtle, this gesture seemed to have activated some buzzer beneath each person’s seat cushion—all her employees abruptly turned to face her. She released a long, profound sigh that seemed to emanate from the pit of her soul. Finally, assured that she had their attention, she blinked her eyes deliberately several times and the edges of her mouth began to rise. It slowly dawned on Mitchell that this was meant to be interpreted as a smile. D’Espy spoke in a hoarse monotone.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  Surprised, Mitchell waited for a signal.

  “Oh, and Jason,” she said, turning to Tanizaki, “I don’t buy the business about cell phones causing cancer either.”

  Tanizaki’s expression—open mouth, wide eyes—was one that Mitchell would never have imagined possible on such a professional, elegant face. It was a look of pure, abject fear.

  “I’ve known two Tammys in my life,” said D’Espy. “One was a Puerto Rican maid who did the dishes for me back in the nineties. Tampíco Tammy. Mentally deficient, she was. You had to remind her, every single time, to wash both sides of a plate, or else you’d find it grimy with last night’s rice or some other horror. The other Tammy, Tammy Martin, used to run with my sister in high school. Big fat slutty girl, that one. Both Tammys, I should add, were extremely docile. Wouldn’t hurt a bug.”

  Her employees, other than Tanizaki, chuckled ostentatiously.

  “Ms. D’Espy,” said Mitchell, “with all due respect. The National Weather Service is now reporting that Tammy is a Category Two hurricane. It may strengthen to a Category Three, or even Four. We’ve already had some flooding today. You see, the drought has made the land incapable of absorbing such massive rainfall.”

  “I’ve been in this city, in this business, for forty-five years. I’ve never seen anything like what you’re predicting. On the Gulf Coast, maybe. Not here.”

  “In 1938 a Category Three hurricane hit seventy miles away, on Long Island. But still the East River flooded three avenues inland.”

  “Even I wasn’t born then.”

  “O
n December eleventh, 1992, a storm shut down Manhattan. That was only a nor’easter.”

  “I remember that day, and I remember the storm in 2012. Very windy. We all came to work anyway, and there were no serious problems at the factory. Do you have any idea how much it would cost us to close the factory?” As she glared at him Mitchell began to wonder whether her eyes, like her eyebrows, had been painted on. “Closing the factory,” she continued, “is a lot more expensive than purchasing these moronic earpieces for everybody’s little phones.”

  Mitchell felt unpleasantly warm all of a sudden.

  “Ms. D’Espy,” said Tanizaki. He paused, blinking, as if in an effort to catch his breath. “I believe that Mr. Zukor is suggesting that we might be encountering a once-in-a-lifetime storm. A natural disaster that might threaten our lives.”

  For whatever reason—D’Espy’s skepticism or the look of alarm on Tanizaki’s immaculate face—the hurricane began to feel more real. It was like stepping out of a movie theater and into the street when the light is too sharp. The air went out of Mitchell’s throat. He stared at the green vase in the middle of the conference table, and there, in the rippling glass, was the shifting surface of the horseshoe-shaped lake that lay beside Camp Ticonderoga. The water was swirling now, faster and faster, spinning like a black hole, and it was exerting a gravitational pull on the table, on the people in their cleanly pressed business suits, sucking them into its vortex, where they would drown.

  “Mitchell?”

  He looked up. They were waiting for his response. D’Espy rocked in her chair like a judge.

  “Ms. D’Espy,” he said. “I apologize. You are correct.”

  Tanizaki stiffened in his chair.

  “It is true that a Category Four hurricane—even a Category Three hurricane—would have a catastrophic effect on the city. Windows, walls, and exterior cladding would fall to the sidewalk, killing anyone unlucky enough to be standing below. Pedestrians seeking shelter underground would drown. Every rail-tunnel system, including most subway stations, would flood. At high tide, the rivers could surge as high as thirty-two feet above normal water levels. Much of Manhattan could be submerged. Days, if not weeks would pass before the authorities would be able to restore any semblance of order. A factory like yours in Middlesex, just a mile from the coast, would suffer tremendous damage. The windows would shatter and the building would flood. The chemicals stored in the laboratories would be released, causing explosions and releasing poisonous gas into the atmosphere. Overnight your business would lose most of its value.”