Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “I have an appointment,” said Mitchell. “Harold Harding.”

  “Nobody there,” said the janitor. “I’m telling you, I don’t get paid enough for this. I don’t know how to swim. Look at this shit.”

  He pointed upward. Mitchell understood the man’s apprehension. The sky had begun to darken. It looked enraged, a livid sky, full of eggplant colors, purple yielding to cast-iron black. There was something thrillingly exotic about the angry blackness of it, tense with intermittent electricity. The clouds were scowling. Mitchell walked away, but the janitor didn’t seem to notice. He was still staring upward, transfixed.

  On Cortlandt the wind started playing tricks, swirling one minute, swooping upward the next. Sometimes it pushed down from above like a giant sole crushing a bug—Mitchell the bug. The streets were a honking chaos: cars, overloaded with possessions, continued to drive toward the bridges while giant white NYPD buses, packed with people who had no other way of escaping, formed a procession up Broadway. In the windshield of each bus was a placard with the name of the evacuation center where it was headed; Mitchell saw Wassaic, Weehawken, Fort Lee, Randall’s Island. The subway was running on an enhanced schedule, express trains running north to the Bronx at brisk intervals, but dozens of skeptics were still emerging from the stations on Fulton Street. They stepped outside into the swirling winds, opened their umbrellas, threw down their umbrellas when they bent, and walked with brisk determination to their offices, purposefully oblivious to what was going on around them. The New York business day would brook no storm. It occurred to Mitchell that he was just like these people. On a day when an actual disaster might very well unfold, here he was, working! He supposed he could run away now, hop one of those white buses—but Charnoble, viper that he was, had attacked Mitchell’s weak point: his sense of logic. There was only one more client on his itinerary that morning, just four blocks away, an annuities executive named Howard Schmitz; all Mitchell had to do was check in and deliver his final warnings. Charnoble was right: If Mitchell couldn’t do his job when an actual disaster was approaching, how could he, or FutureWorld, have any credibility during calmer times? Then again, if he were honest with himself, he wasn’t staying in New York because of integrity. He was staying for Jane.

  When he reached the H. R. Hayes building he found the front door open, though no one was at the security desk. Mitchell hurdled the turnstile and took the elevator to Howard Schmitz’s office. It was empty, and Mitchell was punching the elevator button when he noticed a pair of black flats on the carpet, connected to stockinged feet behind the front desk. The feet were twisting from some type of exertion.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The feet froze. Slowly a mop of brown hair rose above the desk.

  “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

  “I’m Mitchell Zukor? From FutureWorld? Mr. Schmitz is expecting me.”

  “No, he is not.” The woman stood up. She was still wearing her wet raincoat. “The only thing he or anyone else is expecting is that hurricane. Tammy. What a name—who would’ve thought a storm with a fat girl’s name would do so much damage.”

  Mitchell stared at her, perplexed.

  “Haven’t you been watching the news?” she said. “You’ve been outside, I can see that.”

  “Mr. Schmitz isn’t in?”

  “Not him, not no one else neither. I left my car keys here somewhere and my car is parked downstairs. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get out of town without my car. That’s my excuse for being here. What’s yours?”

  “Well—I—I’m going around warning people to leave.”

  “They’re already warned! And they’re terrified. One thing I learned these last years is that the heavens don’t follow historical precedent. People are afraid. Bad things are happening. This is a new world we’ve made.”

  Mitchell slowly backed away. This woman was unstable. Maybe all the water had gotten into her brain.

  “I’d take the stairwell if I were you,” said the secretary. “They’re going to cut the electricity any second. The pipes are already out.”

  On the street again, he saw he had missed a call from Jane. He buzzed her back.

  “Have you met with anybody?” Her voice was less casual than before, almost pinched. If he hadn’t seen her name on his phone, he wouldn’t have believed it was Jane.

  “I think everyone’s gone,” said Mitchell.

  “Alec didn’t pick up when I called his phone. When I called the office, Tewilliger said he hadn’t been in all day.”

  “Huh.”

  “So I told her to go home.”

  “What’d Tewilliger say?”

  “She hung up on me.”

  Many of the workers he’d seen filing into the office towers were now running across the avenue, trying to reach the City Hall subway station before it closed. Hats and umbrellas flew through the air, colliding into the sides of buildings and falling back to the street. He’d be safer once he got back home, but he dreaded the three miles that lay between him and the apartment. Three miles of humanity shoving and racing. The same as any other day, really, only damper, even more desperate.

  “Mitchell,” said Jane. “It’s hard for me to say this.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I guess I was faking it before.”

  “Wait a minute—” He really didn’t like the tone in her voice. Where was the unflappable Jane, the demure Jane, the sarcastic, fearless—

  “I’m scared,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

  “No way. Don’t give me that.”

  “Everyone I know has already left the city. We’re the only ones left.”

  “What did we talk about before?” His mind raced. He realized how much he had been relying on her. If she was cool, he could be cool. He nearly shouted. “We could have left! We could be on the George Washington Bridge by now, or at least the Henry Hudson. There are probably ferries—”

  “Stop. Mitchell?”

  “What?”

  “Right now I don’t want to be alone.”

  8.

  She gasped audibly when the power went. There was a sound like a record player flipped off mid-song. The lights shuddered. Somewhere in the distance a man screamed.

  They had been watching television at the time, long enough to see the local news switch over to the national broadcast. The streets were finally empty, the ground white with the force of the rain exploding in steady bursts. The George Washington Bridge, thronged with cars and stragglers walking with their heads bent under the punishing rain, rocked gently from side to side, a cradle over the churning abyss of the Hudson River. The wind hammered like a crowbar at the Victorian houses on Rockaway Beach. Slate shingles boomeranged through the air in Bay Ridge. The East River breached the barricade of the FDR Drive, the impact of the waves creating vertical geysers of arctic-white spray that fixed in the air like holographic mist. In one particularly unsettling tableau, a cameraman had filmed the iridescent purple corpses of pigeons floating in the Central Park reservoir; in other parts of the park the rain had fallen with such ferocity that it filled the birds’ overhead nostrils and drowned them where they stood. There were reports of looting but also of supermarkets providing their stocks of fresh food to whoever passed by—the electricity was out, so the frozen meat was thawing, the ice cream melting. There were press conferences in Washington, Albany, Hartford, Brooklyn, City Hall. The politicians wore expensive rain slickers, but as if in solidarity with their constituents their hair had been carefully drenched and lay on their heads like wilted cabbage.

  “He’s terrified,” said Jane when the mayor spoke from his podium. “You can see it in his eyes. He looks like a little boy who lost his mother in the supermarket.”

  Though the window was shut, a sour mist sprayed into the room with each strong gust. Jane was the first person Mitchell had let into his apartment, and he couldn’t quite get comfortable. He kept looking around for things to tidy up, but after nudging the Psy
cho Canoe against the wall, he didn’t really know where to begin. The disorder was suddenly impossible and unbearable.

  “I have to make a phone call,” he said, handing her the remote.

  Jane pursed her lips as if she were going to say something, but one look at Mitchell and she turned back to the screen. He went into his bedroom, closed the door behind him, and made the call.

  As usual, the nurse at Augusta General explained that nothing had changed. Yes, they were doing everything they could. Yes, they had a backup generator in case a storm put the electricity out. Yes, she had his number and would alert him if Elsa’s condition changed. He hung up and returned to Jane.

  Outside the wind was calling to them. Oooh, it said. Oh oh oh ooooooh. Oh. Oh. Oh!

  Jane was watching a live press conference held by a Colorado Springs preacher. The man spoke like a high-ranking general: curt, supercilious gestures and a magnanimous tone, with significant, heightened pauses. He wore delicate spectacles that magnified his gentle blue eyes. The Colorado sky was bright and wide.

  “Never has the wickedness of mortal man been greater than now,” he said. “When the earth was filled with blood violence and all flesh had been corrupted, God did not tell Noah that the destruction of man would come by gun, bomb, or missile launcher. No, death would not come by any tool of man. God said, ‘I will destroy them with the earth.’ And today you can see that our modern Babylon is being overwhelmed by the earth in a great alluvion. Every man, beast, fowl, and thing that creepeth across the earth must repent.”

  “What a preposterous man,” said Jane, hugging herself. She changed the channel back to the local news. It was broadcasting an image of the Hudson, which was now melted caramel, muddied with sediment dredged from the riverbed. Splinters of wood whipped through the air. Newscasters were no longer reporting from the street—it was too dangerous—so the pictures were taken by cameras that had been left behind, beaming their images to satellites. There were no people visible anywhere, in fact. Tammy had already accomplished what financial collapses and terrorism and heat waves had failed to do: it had emptied New York’s streets of its people.

  “I guess I was wrong about FutureWorld,” said Jane. “You have to give Charnoble credit.”

  “For what? Exploiting fear to make money?”

  “Well, yeah. You do have to give him credit for that. I mean, just last week I bought a dress that costs more than my monthly rent, even though I have no place to wear it. I can see you’ve been indulging too.” She tilted her head toward the Psycho Canoe.

  “Impulse buy,” he said.

  “Yeah, exactly—we’re making enough money now to buy almost whatever we want, when we want it. But there’s another side to this thing. I mean, as crazy as it sounded at the time, the advice I gave my clients about hurricane evacuation is going to be useful. The numbers we ran were valid, after all. The time series was accurate and the stochastic process bore out. Our warnings might save lives.”

  Unnnh, said the wind. Ummmm. Unnnh.

  “I don’t think Charnoble cares about anyone’s life but his own.”

  “You’re right. But the business will help people despite that. Look at what’s going on.” She pointed to the television, where water was shown galloping up the steps of a subway station entrance on Eighth Avenue. “You can’t just pretend anymore that the unusual will never happen. It will.”

  “I know it, believe me.”

  “Every business needs a bank, a law firm, an insurance company, an advertising firm. I think they’re going to realize soon that they also need a future consultant. Not just to protect them from lawsuits, but to protect them from, well, this.”

  The power cut out with a tapering electronic sigh, as if it were relieved to exit the scene before the real destruction began. Mitchell tried his cell phone, but the signal was gone. After the surprise wore off, he realized he was grateful for the darkness, the silence. For a long time he and Jane sat listening to the squealing wind and the thunder that was like the roar of an ensnared beast.

  9.

  Everything got worse.

  If he weren’t on the third floor he would have sworn there was a man outside the window, a huge man pounding with his fists against the glass, demanding to be let in. They had to barricade it. Mitchell went over to the corner where the pile of wooden staves from the canoe crate still lay in a messy pile. As soon as Jane realized what Mitchell was doing, she pitched in, carrying the staves to the window and snapping the longer pieces over her knee. They laid the wood over the window in horizontal bands, using duct tape to hold them in place, following the example Tibor had set on that long-ago day in Overland Park. It was the only window in the apartment, but they weren’t losing much of a view. The city had been blanketed by an uncanny iron darkness. The only time they could see anything was when the lightning struck, filling the sky with baroque blue designs. What they saw in those brief flashes hurt Mitchell’s stomach.

  Third Avenue was now a canal, the water so high it had begun to spill over the curb. The ramp that led from the avenue to the Queens Midtown Tunnel was a cascading stream, the water leaping over itself as it rushed down the incline. The wind levitated the crushed skeletons of umbrellas, garbage cans, chunks of scaffolding. Bricks blurred through the air, hurtling like poorly thrown footballs until they pulverized against the sides of buildings. Or shot through windows.

  “These things do happen,” he said. “They really do.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s doubting you anymore,” said Jane, but she seemed very far away. There were blinking bursts of light at the edge of Mitchell’s vision and everything else was getting hazy. Was this the tragedy he’d been preparing himself for all these years, a world-cleansing flood of biblical proportions, straight out of the preacher’s sermon? Every man, beast, fowl, and thing that creepeth across the earth must repent. I’ve spent a lifetime worrying about this moment, doing the calculations, taking the measurements, trying to render catastrophe in calculable, precise dimensions, and still I’m not prepared? But real catastrophe was like that. It was a form of genius. It astounded expectations, was unlike anything that came before.

  Whee! shouted the wind. Whee! Wheeee!

  He squeezed his eyes and opened them. In order to ignore the frantic Morse code of his heartbeat, and the sweat edging his hairline, he forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. His mother’s old advice: Do something!

  He forced himself to focus on barricading the window. They worked together, Jane holding the slats in place while Mitchell taped them to the window frame. They worked slowly, deliberately, making sure not to leave any gaps, and slowly Mitchell began to breathe. Slat over window, tape, repeat. Slat, tape, repeat. They made progress. Jane glanced at him out of the side of her eye; it seemed she wanted to ask him something but didn’t quite know how to do so.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Mitchell finally.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything. But why is there a canoe in your living room?”

  “It’s actually a work of art. From the New Psychedelia School.”

  She nodded, as if giving this serious consideration.

  “It was made by a young Nova Scotian woman named Sylvan who collects objects from her natural environment and paints them in unexpected ways, using organic laminates and gold leaf and nontoxic enamel in an effort to capture the eternal unity of—”

  “That’s enough,” she said. “What’s going on, exactly? Are you worried that the window is going to blow in?”

  “We’re safe here,” he said. “At least for now. I have provisions. I have a Go Bag.”

  The wind sobbed. Whaaah! Whaaah! Aaaah! The wind screamed murder.

  “You’re in control of the situation, is what you’re telling me,” she said, doing her best impression of Charnoble’s wispy voice. She twisted her finger in her palm. “You’re a man of action.”

  “A man of action?” His voice came out bitter and clipped. He tore a strip of duct tape with a lou
d rip. “A man of action?”

  She put down the wood.

  “What was that phone call about?” she said.

  “It’s a long, boring story.”

  “It looks like we’re not going anywhere for a long time. It’ll get dull if we just have to sit here in silence, listening to the rain and wind.”

  “Here’s a question: Do you ever have the desire to do something irrational? Then you stop and think about it for a second and realize it’s a stupid idea. But you actually go ahead and do it anyway?”

  “Sure. I mean, I didn’t get any offers out of Wharton. I guess you didn’t know that. Bad timing with Seattle and all. But I came to New York anyway, no money, sleeping in a foldout chair in a Bushwick hallway. I was the only bartender at the All-Ways Lounge with an advanced degree.”

  “Yeah, but a Wharton degree—it was just a matter of time. I’m talking about real risk. Something that could ruin you.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I don’t know what that feels like. I don’t know if I’m capable of it.”

  She looked at him with a strange little smile. “There is one other thing. But I don’t want to scare you.”

  “I’m not easily scared.”

  “That’s a good one,” she said, and without hesitation she pulled down the collar of her V-neck sweater, revealing the latticed trim of a white bra. A word was tattooed in a neat blue cursive, arcing in a rainbow over her left breast.

  “I can’t read it,” he said in a whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again. “It’s too dark.”

  She laughed. “Look closer, buddy.”

  He moved in, close enough to see the goose bumps on her pale skin and read the word: SLUT.

  “My ex-boyfriend’s idea,” she said, snapping her shirt back. “I thought I was going to marry him. Typical Winnetka. We were eighteen. It didn’t bother me because I figured it’d be our private dirty joke. I don’t know why, but it turned him on. I guess I was a romantic back then.”