Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “We should get an office in SoHo,” Jane was saying. “Or Tribeca. Somewhere downtowny. The public relations team will be crucial. We need to hire professionals.”

  Returning to Manhattan was impossible to imagine, but then everything was impossible to imagine. His imagination, once whorled and baroque with theories of superfiasco, had become a casualty of Tammy. Now when he thought about the future, all he found was blankness. There would be no long term. Jane’s scenario, in which he founded a new futurist firm, would certainly make him money—lots of it, enough to force his parents into retirement in Mission Hills. But the worst-case scenarios would return. That would be part of the bargain. They would be waiting for him in the middle of the night.

  And for the first time since the flood, cockroach eggs began to hatch in the pit of his stomach.

  * * *

  The future had arrived. It assumed the shape of a long white rectangular box with two windows looking out over the narrowest part of the East River. A coffin with a view.

  “I guess this counts as prime real estate,” said Jane, taking in the sight.

  Their trailer, number 2199, looked no different from the thousands of other trailers arrayed in long rows across the baseball and soccer fields of Randall’s Island. The bedroom was just large enough for a double bed. In the bathroom the toilet nudged the shower stall. The main room contained a kitchenette with propane stove and mini fridge, a sofa upholstered in peach polyester, a matchbook-size dining table with two chairs. Two navy mesh FEMA baseball hats sat on the table, compliments of the federal government. The furniture was bolted to the floor. There was, significantly, no television. FEMA didn’t want the refugees to understand how bad it was in the city, how long they’d be stuck on Randall’s Island.

  “Beachfront property,” said Jane. She went straight for the bed and flopped onto it.

  The air in the trailer was tropical. Mold smeared the windowsills. The bedroom window gave a view of the northern tip of Astoria. A power plant stood there, its white smokestacks standing like the columns of an ancient ruin.

  “Sleeping now,” she announced, her eyes already closed.

  In the kitchen Mitchell set down his Go Bag and opened the fridge. The shelves were lined with aluminum cans. Across each can, in large black letters: FILTERED DRINKING WATER. Mitchell cracked one open and drank. The water had a mildly astringent aftertaste. Was that chlorine? Fluoride? Arsenic?

  This was unsustainable. But was it worse than Overland Park? That was the calculation. If he returned, he’d immediately be pressed into service by Tibor. Mitchell, after all, was slumlord-in-waiting.

  “New York is a wonderful place,” Tibor had said the last time they walked among the Zukorminiums. “Don’t get me wrong.” It was the week between graduation and Fitzsimmons, and Mitchell had reluctantly agreed one morning to accompany his father to his office. It was a decision he soon regretted.

  They were truly hideous structures, the Zukorminiums, even worse than he’d remembered—redbrick, cruciform, seven stories tall, with laundry racks and satellite dishes hanging as ornaments from the windows. The buildings had been built to maximize profit per square foot; Tibor hadn’t taken human dignity into account. On the way to the administrative offices you had to follow a winding gravel path lined by shrubs flecked with plastic bags, dodging bottles of hobo wine, syringes, and soiled diapers. The condition of the Zukorminiums was shameful, but the shame didn’t reflect on the inhabitants. It reflected on Tibor. And Mitchell claimed it too; he felt the shame. It posed uncomfortable questions. For instance: Deep down, how different was his father from, say, Sandy Sherman? Both men were obsessed by financial gain; they were, in this way, sociopathic, seeking profit at the expense of human dignity. The protesters who picketed the Zukorminiums weren’t wrong when they argued that Tibor cared more about their checks than their human rights. “We have insects, terrible mold, rodents, insecto-infestations,” one woman told a local news reporter. “I’m up all night long making sure things don’t crawl on my kids.”

  But none of this seemed to daunt Tibor. If anything, his pride had caused him to grow bolder. And now he was preparing Mitchell to take his place.

  “Isn’t it dangerous for you to stay here?” Mitchell had asked. “Don’t you fear for your safety?”

  Tibor laughed, stepping over a pile of what appeared to be human feces. “New York is also dangerous. You never know when something terrible will happen. I lived through Budapest in 1956. The revolution can burst out at any moment. That’s one of the great things about this place. There is no chance of revolution in Kansas City.”

  A bag of garbage fell from the sky and detonated on the path behind them. They froze and looked up. An old woman was leaning out of her window, shaking her fist.

  “Go back to commie Russia, Zukor!”

  They hurried into Tibor’s office and shut the door, but even then Tibor seemed unbowed.

  “Monty Python and the Holy Grail, starring a certain Mr. John Cleese,” said Tibor.

  Mitchell waited for the rest of it.

  “‘One day, lad, all this will be yours.’”

  No, he had thought. It most certainly would not. What was the Hungarian word? Nem. He would nem return to Kansas City, nem take over the Zukorminiums. Nem soha.

  The FEMA trailer rattled. Someone was smacking the front door.

  There were ten people standing outside. They wore ingratiating smiles. Mitchell’s first thought was that they were a delegation from the Zukorminiums, delivering complaints about asbestos and lead pipes.

  Their leader, or at least the person who had knocked, was a pretty young Hispanic woman in librarian glasses. She held a newborn child against her shoulder.

  “Are you the gentleman they call the Prophet?”

  Mitchell stared at her in confusion.

  She laughed apologetically. “I’m sorry to intrude. My name is Marcy Rosado. It’s just that, you see, we have some questions. And, well—” She gestured with her head to the baby. “We need the answers.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Mr. Zukor?” She wasn’t laughing anymore. “We need answers.”

  6.

  Who were all these people? Waiting on line outside the food tent, taking fluids intravenously in the medical trailers, lingering by the administrative desk in the hope of hearing news, any news, the children racing wildly around the island in unsupervised games of tag, the babies screaming. It was clear what they weren’t: Manhattanites. Many were first-generation immigrants. They didn’t have friends with guesthouses in other parts of the country; they couldn’t afford hotels or airfare. In many cases their entire family had lived on the same block. They were also stubborn: they didn’t want to start over. They planned to move back to their old neighborhoods and rebuild. A fog of high irritation had fallen over the camp. Hysteria, too—it buzzed in the air like a cloud of wasps. Occasionally the buzzing blistered into violence. Mitchell had already witnessed three fistfights. At breakfast a woman pulled another woman’s hair out over a bowl of cereal.

  But the refugees seemed to be going out of their way to be friendly to Mitchell and Jane. If anything, they were too friendly. By the end of the meal Mitchell had met the Lipinskis of Rego Park, the Diazes and Motas of Gravesend, the Wolaczes of Greenpoint, and a passel of McIntyres, nearly twenty in all, great-grandpa Miles through baby Lola. The McIntyres were from Broad Channel, a narrow island in Jamaica Bay between Howard Beach and the Rockaways that, during the storm, had been entirely submerged. Since the side streets in Broad Channel alternated with canals, many residents owned boats. The McIntyres had stayed afloat in their own family fleet, sheltered in the inundated but relatively protected bay. Mitchell didn’t meet anyone from the narrow Rockaway peninsula, the city’s first line of defense against the Atlantic Ocean. The Rockaways were missing.

  “What’s your story?” asked Joseph McIntyre, a man with a flat nose and large brown eyes who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. He sidled up w
ith his lunch tray. “How’d you end up here?”

  “We took a canoe through the flooded city,” said Jane. “We went to Maine, but the situation there was even worse. So we came back.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Jane nodded, smiling uneasily. “I do,” she said, but Joseph McIntyre just gaped back at her. Finally Jane asked for his story. The man smiled in gratitude.

  This became a pattern. Strangers asked questions, but they didn’t seem particularly interested in answers. Even when Jane recited the gruesome details—the floating bodies, the brush with Nybuster and his caroming golf balls—they gave her only blank stares and patient smiles.

  “Is that so?” said Ruben Mota. “That sounds scary.”

  “Really?” said Olga Lipinski.

  “My,” said Harold Wolacz. “You had it rough.”

  Their friendliness, Mitchell began to realize, was the first part of a ritual. In certain African societies, when you meet a person in the street, you can’t merely ask how he’s doing; you must also inquire about his health, family, and occupation before exchanging various blessings and hymns. The encounters at the camp worked in a similar way. The refugees would listen, patiently, to another person’s story, but only so long as they could share their stories next. They were desperate to unburden themselves of their personal horrors. The Lipinskis had waited for two days on their roof, dehydrating, until they were airlifted by a rescue basket into a Coast Guard helicopter. The Motas, a Dominican couple in their fifties, were trapped in their dining room; they stood on a coffee table for eighteen hours watching as the water slowly rose to their chins. A patrol boatman, hearing their screams, took an ax to their door and rescued them. Finally there was Maya Dupre, a robust college sophomore who told her story with wild gesticulations. She had swum out the window of her second-floor apartment in Homecrest. The night after the storm she slept on the elevated F train platform above McDonald Avenue, lying out in the open air. “For the first time in my life,” she said, “I could see the stars.” She was proud of that line. She repeated it and repeated it.

  “I could make her see some more stars,” said Jane between bites of a government-issued ham sandwich. Then her mouth puckered, and she removed a curled strip of plastic wrap from her mouth.

  And there were those who, like Mitchell, didn’t want to talk. These were the diminished people, unnaturally drawn and tortured, who haunted the Red Cross table. Aid workers gamely took down names and any information that might be used to identify a body. Some of the bereaved carried photographs of the missing; some wore the photographs on chains around their necks. They walked around the camp like zombies, from trailer to trailer, hoping in their desperation to discover a familiar face. Others gathered around the muted flatscreen television that had been hung from the side of the Red Cross trailer. The television was tuned to a local news network that periodically flashed images of the missing and scrolled the names of those who had registered at FEMA checkpoints. But nearly every time Mitchell walked by this television, his own picture appeared on the screen. It was the photograph Charnoble had taken on his first day of work at FutureWorld; he looked baffled and alarmed, and the flash had turned him several shades paler. It was like seeing a ghost—a ghost of a former self, a painfully naive young man who had no idea what kind of nightmare was about to swallow him. He told himself to stop going near the Red Cross trailer, but every hour or so he found himself back there, where he would linger until his face appeared under increasingly large font with increasingly hysteric captions:

  HE CAME FROM THE FUTURE

  WHY DIDN’T WE LISTEN?

  THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

  While Mitchell wandered the camp, Jane gave interviews. Once, when Mitchell’s photo appeared on the television, a tagline at the bottom of the screen appeared: “On the line: Jane Eppler, spokeswoman, Future Days.” He looked around and spotted Jane standing at the shore forty yards away, speaking into her headset, making exuberant motions with her hands.

  Nearly five days had passed since Tammy made landfall, and everyone who could leave Randall’s Island had already left. The refugees who remained were determined to stay put. They were ready to return to their homes. It was a reasonable position. There was only one problem: the water hadn’t gone down. Behind the administration desk, set up on what had been public tennis courts, a large whiteboard listed neighborhoods next to their flood-depth figures. Every hour the numbers were updated by a woman in one of the ubiquitous navy FEMA baseball caps. She read the latest depths from a clipboard. With her other hand she gripped a marker, using the side of her fist to dab away the old figures and scribbling the new ones in red ink. There was a mood of frantic expectation around the clipboard. Other than the Red Cross television, this was the refugees’ main portal to the rest of the world. All they knew of the devastation was what they had seen firsthand, and rumors. Some reported that the city was completely empty; there was no electricity, no drinking water, and the floodwater was tainted with toxic waste. Others claimed that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were already returning to their neighborhoods, that outside of lower Manhattan and the coastal areas, there was little damage other than fallen trees. So they scrutinized the only hard data they had: the water level figures on the whiteboard. They puzzled over them, as if the numbers alone could reveal the myriad unknown stories of the storm-wrecked city.

  The water in the neighborhoods along the East River—Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Sunset Park, and, to a lesser extent, Red Hook—had dropped from feet to inches. But those neighborhoods that fronted the sea, in lower Brooklyn and Queens—from Sea Gate (12.5 feet) to East New York (5 feet) and even parts of East Flatbush (10 inches)—had barely changed. By evening the numbers decreased, but in the morning they returned to their previous levels. Every time a higher figure appeared there were groans of outrage from the crowd. The FEMA woman, shrugging, blamed imprecise measurements, but Mitchell knew better. The fluctuations weren’t due to faulty equipment; the culprit was the tide. Washing in and washing out. And every time the water receded, it swept out traces of civilization—walls, furniture, bodies.

  Nor were the refugees pleased to see that while their neighborhoods in the outer boroughs were turning to swamp, the water in lower Manhattan was dropping rapidly. Manhattan, however, had help. The island had been surrounded by Mosquitoes—supertankers with suction pumps built to clean up oil spills. The Mosquitoes vacuumed millions of barrels of water every hour and pumped the effluent into the bight. Another day of the Mosquitoes slurping up Manhattan’s water and, according to the whiteboard, the borough would be dry.

  “How about that?” said Jane. “We could be having dinner at the Palm tomorrow night. I could use a steak. Rare. Salted and charred. Side of half-and-half. Side of creamed spinach.”

  “Jane.”

  “Side of thick-cut bacon.”

  “Dry doesn’t mean safe. They’ll have to send thousands of assessors, engineers, garbage crews. Imagine the amount of trash. Millions of tons, mountains, skyscrapers of trash.”

  Jane’s mouth went slack.

  “What,” said Mitchell. “What is it?”

  “It’s like you don’t even want to go back.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. But it was true. He could admit that much to himself.

  “I don’t get it. Would you rather stay here?”

  “No! Of course not.”

  Jane turned abruptly, advancing toward the woman with the clipboard. Her name tag read LANORE.

  “Lanore? Excuse me, but when do the buses start leaving for Manhattan?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lanore. “I don’t have that information.”

  “But you work for FEMA, don’t you? You must know something. We need to get back.”

  “I know. We all want to go home.”

  “Jane,” said Mitchell, touching her shoulder. “It’s OK.”

  “No, it’s not.” Jane shook him off with a violent twitch. Her eyes were blazing. He’d never
seen her like this. “She has a job to do.”

  “Yeah!” said a man standing behind Mitchell. “We want answers!”

  “Hey lady, what about Gowanus?”

  “Lady, why is the water getting higher in Dyker Heights?”

  “She making up shit.”

  Lanore looked around anxiously, as if for backup. But no other staff was near. Just a crowd of angry, scared people.

  “I don’t know anything,” said Lanore to Jane. “I just don’t.”

  “Do you even work for FEMA?”

  Lanore shook her head, her lips trembling.

  “I’m a receptionist for the Brooklyn Transit Police,” she said, unable to stifle a sob. “District Thirty-nine. I don’t know nothing. My family—I haven’t heard from them since this whole mess started. I don’t know where they are.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jane. “That’s horrible.”

  “She’s crying. Look at that.”

  “At least she got a fancy trailer.”

  “At least she got family.”

  Lanore, her cheeks damp, focused on Mitchell. The sight of him seemed to embolden her.

  “But you—you’re the so-called Prophet. And you’re telling me that you don’t know what’s happening?”

  The crowd turned to Mitchell. The crowd turned—and Jane turned too.

  Mitchell put up his hands.

  “I’m just a financial consultant,” he said.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” said Jane a bit too firmly, but it was too late. No one would listen to her. At the trailer the previous evening, when he had made his apologies, Marcy Rosado and her friends had appeared unconvinced, but they had left him alone. It helped that they had recognized his name from the news. At lunch, two of the McIntyre kids had even asked him to autograph their napkins. But now the mood was different. Nobody here wanted his ink. They wanted his blood.

  A circle closed around him. The shouting faces moved in, their breath hot on his neck, on his brow.

  “Jane!” said Mitchell. “Jane!”

  Jane was yelling somewhere, but very quietly. The other voices were louder and angrier.