Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  He nodded gravely, testing with the back of his fingers the tension of the duct tape over the window.

  “Are you going to have it removed?” he said finally.

  “When my mother saw it she burst into tears, then fell down on the carpet and began to pray. I can’t blame her, really. But I guess that’s why I want to keep it.”

  “To piss off your mom?”

  “No. Because it’s a reminder of a time in my life when I didn’t care about the future, or silly things like pride or self-respect.”

  “Mm. I think I respect you more.”

  She punched him on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, now you owe me.”

  So he told her about the Zukorminiums. He told her about his mother’s long despair in Overland Park and the Hungarian Revolution that was waged every night in his father’s dreams, his fainting spells at Eight Spruce Street and Lady Madeline, the dazzling skycity of his nightmares, and, at last, Elsa Bruner, the human worst-case scenario. While Mitchell continued to barricade the window, adding vertical pieces for reinforcement—an activity that allowed him to avoid making eye contact—Jane listened. She watched him closely and asked questions. Why, for instance, had Elsa corresponded with him in the first place? In retrospect, he said, it seemed it was because he was the only person she knew who might see through her wild delusions. It was the first time his instincts for disaster avoidance had really been tested, but he had failed her, and the ridiculous girl was now lying comatose on a Maine hospital cot.

  By the time his story ended they had finished the window. At Jane’s request, they left a small area of the glass uncovered—a rectangular slot six by three inches—so that they could see what was going on outside. Jane was quiet for a moment, making herself busy by checking whether all the slats were properly aligned and the tape was secure.

  In the darkness it was impossible to read Jane’s expression. She turned toward him.

  “That girl wasn’t a test. What were you supposed to do, kidnap her?”

  “I could have tried.”

  “She was having an argument with herself.” Jane shook her head. “No, you haven’t been tested. When you’re really tested, you’ll know it.”

  “How?”

  There was a tremendous crackling noise. He was afraid to look outside. It sounded like a meteor shower on Third Avenue. The wall thumped. Jane laughed in surprise.

  “That’s how.”

  * * *

  He couldn’t fall asleep—the constant banging was even louder than the pulsing noise in his head—and after twenty minutes he got out of bed and quietly stepped over to the window. He knelt and looked through the slot. After some time an intricate mosaic of lightning filled the sky and he could see that the water had risen. The curb was gone; the few cars still parked on the street were almost completely submerged.

  “What do you see?”

  Mitchell jerked around. Elsa Bruner was standing behind him. She must have emerged from the canoe. Then he saw the swoop of brown hair and the half-shut eyes, and Elsa’s face became Jane’s face.

  “There are waves,” he said. “Coming up Third Avenue.”

  Jane knelt next to him, hip to hip. They looked together through the section of glass. Obscure objects bobbed in the water like fallen logs, before being dragged beneath the surface.

  The lightning sizzled again. Embedded in the foaming arc of a wave was, unmistakably, a black baby grand piano. There was a rending, creaking sound as some crucial structural brace peeled off a building and cartwheeled over the rooftops.

  Neither of them dared to move. Their heads touching, their bodies pressed together, they waited. Beneath the eruptions outside the window, Mitchell could hear Jane’s slow intake of breath. Her shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell.

  A jagged streak of lightning flashed very close by, and in that instant he could see a red blur flying through the air straight at them. They fell backward, shielding their faces as the brick crashed into the window. There was a small explosion of glass, then a burst of mist, and the rain started to spray into the apartment.

  “Jane?”

  She lay next to him, her arms covering her face. She started to tremble, and then she hiccuped.

  Mitchell touched her shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

  Jane flung back her arms, and all at once her peculiar melodious scale-climbing laughter filled the room. She started to brush the broken glass off her sweater, but that only made her laugh harder, and Mitchell laughed too—more out of shock than anything else. Still laughing, Jane flopped her leg over Mitchell’s waist and sat on top of him. She flung off her sweater, casting shards of glass across the parquet floor. She unbuckled her jeans; she found his hand and put it on her breast. When she lowered her face to meet Mitchell’s, her laughter stopped.

  Then the only noise was the storm throwing itself against the wall.

  Sternman

  1.

  He was standing on a cliff after a storm. Waves fell gently against the shore, a vaporish drizzle fell on the rocks, the air was shivery and moist. The seagulls were starting to return, searching, with forlorn chirps, for their lost friends. Then a mechanized stentorian voice, amplified by a loudspeaker, interrupted.

  “If you are safe and secure and have enough food and water for the next twenty-four hours, please remain where you are. If you are hurt or in danger, please call out. This is the United States Coast Guard. Is anyone in danger? Is anyone in danger?”

  Mitchell made his way gingerly across the living room to the window, circling a huge puddle flecked with needles of broken glass. Though the hole in the window he peered out at a new world.

  It wasn’t quite dawn. The sun touched lightly upon the balustrade of the tenement buildings across the street. Most of the windows were shattered or blown out entirely; one had been plugged with a waterlogged queen-size mattress. A white spotlight advanced north along the river that was once, very long ago, Third Avenue. The waters of the flood were upon the earth.

  He suddenly felt as if everything that happened before that moment had been a dream, but this world into which he’d awoken—this was real.

  He looked at Jane—she was asleep on the floor, partially covered by his shirt. Her head was pressed into the hollow of her shoulder; her mouth was slack; her hand was outstretched, grasping for something just out of reach. Most people look peaceful when they sleep. Jane looked as if she’d been knocked over the head.

  The Coast Guard patrol boat drifted into view. Its searchlight fanned across the width of the avenue, picking up a car, a half-submerged couch, the piano, and bloated, humped shapes the color of oyster meat. These last Mitchell feared were bodies. An officer leaned over the side of the boat, a grappling hook in hand.

  “Is anyone in danger?” asked the man through the loudspeaker.

  The grappling hook snagged something heavy in the water. With a grunt the man hauled his catch onto the boat. When the spotlight passed over the deck, Mitchell saw a pair of jeans, a clump of black hair, a puckered blue arm.

  He started frantically to remove the tape and the slats over the broken window. They couldn’t come off fast enough. Once the opening was large enough he put his mouth to it and yelled.

  “Up here! Up here! Hey! Help!”

  But the boat had passed.

  Jane was moving behind him. Before he could say anything, she was running into his bedroom, carrying her clothes, covering her body as best as she could. The door clicked shut behind her. Mitchell threw a towel over the puddle and found his Go Bag in the closet. He turned the transistor radio to the NOAA All Hazards station. Static kept interrupting the broadcast, but he could make out “massive flooding … known dead … preliminary … hundreds of thousands still unaccounted for, though many are hoped … no electricity for at least a week … damages that are already approaching … fog, calm, overcast…”

  Beyond his little apartment, beyond the shard of city visible from his window, something vast and nameless had happened—and was, to some e
xtent, still happening. Yet as scary as the news was, the measured tone of the reporter’s voice gave the tragedy an eerie semblance of normality. Switching on the radio, Mitchell had expected to hear inchoate wailing, the brass of crashing machinery, the rush of cascading water. But even a catastrophe of this proportion, it turned out, could be described in simple English—word after word, sentence after sentence. A barbaric nausea passed over him. The storm was being discussed in the same way that one might recount the highlights of a ball game, a summit meeting between prime ministers, a recipe for butternut squash. Chaos was seeping under the cracks of doors and through the seams in the carpentry, wrathful Kali was dancing at the door, the Valkyries were hurtling through the air with flashing spears, chanting their death hymns—yet somehow a story could still be told. Even on the precipice of hell, here was introduction, thesis, cliff-hanger, conflict, resolution. Somewhere in the world, possibly as close as Newark, there existed a radio studio in which a woman sat at a desk wearing a business suit; makeup, perhaps. Set before her, a printed script and a pen, a computer screen logging minute-by-minute updates. Staff members tested the microphones, wrote copy, balanced the sound frequencies, received reports from journalists flying over the wreckage in helicopters. Just another Thursday morning: microphone check one two three four.

  “There’s something wrong with your pipes.”

  Jane emerged from Mitchell’s bedroom in her jeans and T-shirt, her hair pulled back, her face still puffy from sleep. “I’m going home. I want to make sure my computer didn’t get totally drenched.” She began to move toward the door.

  “What?”

  She walked past him.

  “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “The city is flooded. Look outside.”

  She squinted at him. Mitchell, suddenly aware that he was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, slipped quickly into his room and pulled over his head a ratty old T-shirt he’d made in high school. When he emerged again, Jane was at the window. As if doing him a favor, she bent to look through the window.

  “Oh.” She hiccuped loudly. “My goodness.”

  Mitchell started picking through his Go Bag.

  “Ten snack bars, a gallon of bottled water, three cans of red beans, two boxes of animal crackers. There’s a can of tuna in my cupboard, and three bottles of lemon-lime Gatorade. Maybe a beer or two. Mustard, ketchup.” He walked into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator door. “And a small plastic container of coleslaw from a deli sandwich I ordered last week. That’s probably turned, though.” He opened the lid and sniffed. “Yeah. It turned.”

  Jane was still at the window, shaking her head.

  “And we’ll need some of this,” said Mitchell, opening the freezer. He began removing the rubber-banded stacks of bills from their ziplock bags. Each stack contained two hundred bills. A stack of twenties therefore was four thousand dollars. A stack of hundreds was twenty thousand. He took two of each. Then a third stack of twenties for good measure. “Cold, hard cash,” he said from the kitchen. Jane didn’t seem to hear him. “Frozen assets.”

  Jane’s voice, when she finally spoke, was altered; she sounded like a scared little girl.

  “How long are we going to be trapped here?”

  “They’re saying it might be a few days. But who knows?”

  “You. You know. You’re the genius futurist, aren’t you?”

  “No one can say how long it’ll take for the flooding to subside. Then they’ll have to restore electricity and test the water supply—that could take a while. A week? Months? I have enough food for five days, which is what the DHS advises. But I only planned for one.”

  “What are you saying?” Her eyes were wide. She did not faintly resemble the impish, chattering woman he had met at the FutureWorld offices only a couple of weeks earlier. A fog passed over her, as behind a smudged window on an old elevator door when it clangs shut, leaving visible only a sad, vague blur where there was once a human face.

  “I’m not saying you should leave,” he said. “That’s not my point. But buildings that have had structural damage can crumble any second. It’s as dangerous now as it was during the storm, if not more so. The roof above us might collapse. The floor could cave in.”

  He scanned the room. Had he missed anything? The apartment was actually in pretty good shape, considering: couch, puddle, canoe, broken glass, pile of wood, cushions and blanket, chair, desk, television, bookshelf … canoe.

  “No way,” said Jane, following his eyes. “You heard what the Coast Guard said: stay indoors.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes, found the depth, plunged the air down. A peculiar calmness radiated through him. When he opened his eyes his small, safe, ugly apartment had been transformed into a prison. The Psycho Canoe, its paddles stowed safely beneath the seats—the idea of a water escape, an exhilarating flight to safety—that was freedom. For the first time in his life he could laugh at risk. What was risk, anyway? Risk was a canceled check, a fever dream that flees from daylight, a stubbed toe.

  “If we wait here to run out of food, we might not have the strength to escape. We just missed a rescue boat. Who knows when the next one will come?”

  He picked up the two Day-Glo-orange PFDs and held one out for her.

  “Have you gone out of your mind?”

  Mitchell nudged the PFD into her shoulder.

  “No chance,” said Jane. “Let’s think about this rationally for a minute. First of all, that thing is an artwork. An attempt to capture the eternal unity of something or another.”

  Mitchell stood smiling back at her like a maniac.

  “You’re not acting like yourself.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He gave a low laugh. “I know.”

  2.

  He heard a sound that was like continuous thunder and it became louder, roaring in his ears, a powerful, overwhelming noise, and he realized it was the silence, the colossal silence of the emptied city, that was making the sound.

  The water was on fire. Low blue flames danced on the surface like floating bowls in a Thai river festival. He didn’t want to think about what was burning: sewer discharge, most likely, chemicals leached by ruptured pipes. But he was grateful for the fires. Without them it would be impossible to see the way. The morning fog had limited visibility to a fifteen-foot radius, the circumference marked by a heavy wall of white-blue mist, the color of skim milk. Out of this murkiness the larger shapes emerged first: the curved seat of a wicker chair; a strip of rubber insulation curled like an octopus’s tentacle; an inflated red yoga ball, like a candy apple; and the smooth black hull of a plasma television, bubbles coalescing and darting on its screen as it rocked in the current. Then the pigeon corpses. They were bobbing everywhere, lobster buoys in a Maine cove. And stationary objects—the studded plastic corner of a refrigerator door, a radiator’s white corrugated grill—protruded from the water like unnatural icebergs. On either side of the avenue, the steel beams of traffic lights were rotted trees bending into the river, their roots the bundles of severed copper cables. Where the floodwater reached its highest point it traced, along the sides of buildings, an uneven line of filth that continued the length of the avenue as far as they could see.

  “Gentle Jesus,” said Jane. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”

  The reek of sewage was overwhelming at first, then faint, and then—most unsettling of all—they stopped noticing it. The surface of the water was coated with a foamy scum that had collected into it cigarettes, gum wrappers, straws, plastic cups, bottle caps, and whatever other debris resisted sinking. Mitchell tried not to let the toxic water touch his skin, but it couldn’t be avoided the way Jane paddled. She had obviously never been in a canoe before, and every clumsy stroke produced a coppery spray that whipped into Mitchell’s face. It was no use telling her to go more gently. When he did, her exaggeratedly careful strokes were so feeble that she might as well not have paddled at all.

  Slowly they drifted uptown. Jane was in the bow, responsible for calling o
ut directions. Mitchell was the sternman. He executed hard rudders and wide sweeps to pivot around obstacles. A foreign sensation pulsed through him. He thought it might’ve been triumph, but he didn’t have much experience with that, and he didn’t trust it.

  “Right! Right!” shouted Jane. “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “Left. Hard left!”

  The birds had returned, at least some of them. Seagulls, kingfishers, even a few pigeons. In the absence of traffic and human voices, their calls filled the air. The melodies weren’t particularly joyous—it was mostly a furor of confused squawking, their imbecilic brains having lost all sense of orientation. Still they were a reminder of a life that existed beyond the fog and the alien gray river. Or rather, if life did exist somewhere beyond the fog, the birds would be the first to discover it. Noah’s big idea: release a dove. If it didn’t come back, that meant it had found a place where the floodwaters had abated.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” asked Jane after they had paddled about two blocks north. It was difficult to tell where the street ended and the sidewalk began. The best indications were the silver caps of fire hydrants, which peeked out of the water like soldier’s helmets.

  “We’re going to Bennett Park,” said Mitchell.

  “Never heard of it. Is that the one near the United Nations?”

  “No, it’s way uptown—on Fort Washington Avenue and One eighty-third. It’s the highest land in Manhattan. More important, it’s next to one of the narrowest sections of the Hudson. It’s also near the northern end of the island, so even if the current pulls us south as we cross the river, we should be able to make it to New Jersey before we’re carried off into the bight.”

  They were quickly entering midtown, the beige apartment towers and redbrick tenements giving way to black towers of glass and steel. He was reminded of the drawings made by the early explorers of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado gushing between black vertical walls, the lone canoe in the foreground, its paddlers two insignificant specks.