Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “Wouldn’t she just qualify for some type of worker’s comp?”

  “That’s the best part. Apparently Charnoble neglected to sign FutureWorld’s own insurance forms. He’s not insured.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “He wasn’t a true believer.”

  “He was a salesman. He believed in that.”

  “Just wait till we start our own firm,” she said. “He’ll never know what hit him.”

  “Judging by his phone messages, I think he’s starting to get a pretty good idea.”

  “Future Days,” said Jane. “Where there’s life, there’s no hope.”

  “Future Days,” said Mitchell. “No prophet is accepted in his own country.”

  “No. That’s not a proper one. Was that scripture?”

  “Future Days,” said Mitchell. “Foresight is always twenty-twenty.”

  “We’re going to have to work on those.”

  Mitchell walked to the windows.

  “Don’t fall, please,” called Jane from the couch.

  “The structure at least seems solid, though.”

  “I have no idea. It’s stone. Isn’t it the stone house that the big bad wolf can’t blow down?”

  “Well it’s not the straw house, or the one made of sticks.”

  But from this height you could see that it was exactly straw and sticks that had saved the Canarsie Bank Trust. Across from the building, on the other side of Flatlands Avenue, lay a long marsh, a dense scrabble of destroyed trees and dried brush. It was two blocks wide and extended some six avenues long, until it touched the sea. The entire acreage was clogged with trash and plaster and splintered shingles, which meant that the marsh had done its job: it had buffered the winds and the rising water.

  And so the Canarsie Bank Trust was a real castle; it even had a moat.

  * * *

  They began in the outer rooms. The wood floor was still damp. Beneath the windows a pattern of mold—black and green polka dots—had begun to climb the wall. There was a sharp, rotten odor, and they soon found the source: a toad, its flat green head crowned with glass shards and fragments of sash. Using a hard manila folder as a shovel, Mitchell scooped the carcass off the floor and flopped it out the window.

  “If this were cleaned up,” said Jane as they began to pick the branches and muddy tufts of grass off the floor, “it wouldn’t make a bad temporary office for Future Days.”

  The sunlight, hitting the broken glass, cast prismatic shapes across the floor—rhombuses, triangles, diamonds. The breeze, washing through the room in a continuous flow from the sea, flushed out the scent of the dead frog. Through the windows you could see clear to the ocean. Even the Belt Parkway, which crossed the far end of the marsh, was still visible in the sunlight, though its platform was still a foot underwater. A furry animal with a bouncier gait than a dog was jogging along Flatlands Avenue. Was that a fox? Mitchell had never seen a fox. “It wouldn’t make a bad office,” said Jane, “if it weren’t in the middle of a postapocalyptic wasteland.”

  She chucked a clump of moss out the window.

  It was a warm day, and they were sweating, but the work was satisfying. It was brainless, mechanical labor and you could chart your progress by comparing the amount of dirt inside the offices with the amount on the street below. Jane was smiling at him.

  “What?” said Mitchell.

  “You look … different.”

  “Like strong? From the canoeing?”

  “No. Like confident,” she said, but there was something bittersweet in her smile. “Like happy.”

  “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t it a relief to be off that island?”

  “Manhattan? Or Randall’s?”

  “Well, both. But especially Randall’s.”

  “Yes.” But she wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her fingers palpated the surface of a long maple desk that was dappled with white water spots. She began rubbing away at one of these spots. This was not particularly useful—the water spots were the least of their problems. Nor was she making much progress, though she seemed to be putting significant effort into it. It would be more helpful to get started on, say, the birdshit stalagmites. But Mitchell sensed it was best not to interfere. He was doing more of that, he found. Sensing. Less logic, more intuition. He wasn’t confident that it was working.

  Once they were down to their last two cans of water they went to find Hank Cho at his church. It was about fifteen blocks away, but blocks no longer made sense as a unit of measurement—the distance was shorter because now you could walk diagonally through the grid. Hank was waiting for them on the stairs outside. There was a peculiar, stretched expression across his face. Mitchell realized it was the first time he had ever seen Hank grin.

  “I found it,” said Hank. He was rocking from one foot to the other like a kid who had to pee.

  “Found what?” said Jane.

  “Jackpot!”

  * * *

  Jackpot Eastern Market Supply was an enormous cement warehouse near the corner of Flatlands and Pennsylvania, about a mile east of the Canarsie Bank Trust. It had been run by a Chinese import agency that specialized, apparently, in everything. Square sections of ceiling had collapsed in the storm, and the warehouse had partially flooded. The merchandise on the shelves closest to the ground was mush, leaching a chromatic array of industrial dyes that pooled on the cement floor. But the pillars of sunlight lancing through the ceiling at least allowed them to see. As Hank led them down an aisle they passed parcels of fish food, copper pots, propane stoves, knife sets, beach towels. Mitchell stepped over a torn bag of fertilizer that had been colonized by a scraggly beard of orange moss.

  “Is there an organizing principle here?” said Mitchell.

  “It’s in alphabetical order,” said Hank. He handed beach towels to Jane and Mitchell. “In Chinese.”

  They smelled it before they could see it. And before they could smell it, they could feel it—on their faces, in their eyes. Their eyes filled.

  “Put them on,” said Hank. He demonstrated the technique with his own towel.

  They emerged into an open section of floor, where thousands of cans and sealed bags of food and plastic water jugs were stacked on pallets in magnificent towers that rose to the ceiling. It was a city of food. That was the good news. The bad news: the back wall was lined with freezers. They had been thawing for nearly a week. Sludge, the color of kidneys, oozed gently from the vents. White worms pullulated within the freezers. You could see them churning, pushing against the glass panels.

  Hank, pressing the towel firmly across his face, pointed to a set of shopping carts and then to the towers of cans. “Get going,” he said, his voice muffled by the terry cloth. “Before we run out of time.” They looked at the bank of freezers. One of the doors was beginning to bulge.

  * * *

  Outside Mitchell heard a violent heaving. He found Jane around the corner, several yards down the side of the warehouse, her forehead against the wall. A plastic water jug was on the ground next to her, half empty.

  “Just leave me,” she said.

  “Here. Take this.”

  She glanced quickly at him, but when she saw the towel she recoiled, as if he’d offered her a scorpion. Shuddering, she covered her mouth.

  “It’s the smell,” she gasped. “It’s an atrocity.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s on the towel. It’s on you.”

  He had already become used to it. After the reek of sewage in flooded Manhattan and the mold in their trailer on Randall’s Island, what was a little rotting meat?

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “No.” She turned to face him. Her hair hung in loose clumps; her eyes were strained. “I’m going back.”

  “Just stay outside—I’ll handle the rest of the shopping.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then,” he said. “Well—”

  “You want to stay here. In
this.” She waved at the littered expanse, the dirt fields.

  “You saw the bank building. It’s nice.”

  She laughed—a short, caustic burst of air—and shook her head. “You’ve already decided.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “I do. And I know how you feel about Future Days.”

  The smell hit him all at once then, and he felt he was about to be sick.

  “You’ve made up your mind,” said Jane. “You probably made up your mind as far back as Maine. Fort Lee, even.”

  In his mind he was floating with her again in Central Park, she was laughing and chewing animal crackers, the crow was shrieking, the sky was brightly scrubbed blue, and Mitchell and Jane were enclosed by the branches of the oak trees, laughing and floating together.

  “I’ve been trying to imagine what it’d be like,” he said. “Starting a new company.”

  “And?”

  “It’s not for me. The business of fear. All day stuck in a cell, creating worst-case scenarios. Doomsday every single day.”

  “So you lied to me,” said Jane.

  “That’s not it.”

  “You’ve changed. I don’t understand it.”

  “Look, the FEMA camp is going to hell. FEMA camps always do, you know. Let’s try this. For a little while, at least.”

  “I went to the roof this morning.”

  “The roof?”

  “At the bank building. While you were in the front room, I slipped upstairs. From the roof you can see the tip of Manhattan.”

  A silence stretched between them, stretched taut, and then it snapped.

  “What did you see?” Mitchell said.

  “The Mosquitoes are gone.”

  “Really.”

  She cocked her head, as if listening to something he was saying. But he had stopped speaking. So she was listening to some other voice, one he couldn’t hear. When this internal voice finished delivering its message, her eyes snapped back to his.

  “I want to be there when the city comes back,” she said. “I want to be part of that. Hank was right. This neighborhood will take months to come back. Years, even. They might forget about it altogether.”

  Mitchell nodded.

  “That’s why you want to stay, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t thought it through,” he said. “For the first time in my life I’m not thinking anything through.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve thought it through.”

  She was right. He had changed. But she hadn’t. She was the same: passionate, committed, loyal Jane Eppler. Her loyalty had shifted, however. It was not with him anymore. Her loyalty was with Future Days, with New York.

  “You can use my name,” he said. “If it helps you. My scenarios, too. Take them all.”

  “I might do that.”

  “I’d like you to.”

  With a sudden, almost deranged intensity, Jane lunged toward him with arms outspread. The embrace didn’t last long. Just as abruptly she pulled away from him, as in disgust. She picked up the water jug. Without looking back, she set off in the direction of the train tracks.

  Mitchell let her go.

  11.

  Order, logic, reason. Order, order, order, order. If you said “order” enough times in a row, you were guaranteed to drive yourself mad.

  Think of it as a geometry problem. The first step was demarcation: draw the x- and y-axes, name the variables. Most important of all, define the boundaries. Otherwise you were just beckoning chaos.

  The rectangular plot adjacent to the bank building on Flatlands Avenue was about half the size of a basketball court. The surface soil was orange. That was the only indication that a structure had stood there a week earlier, for the building itself had vanished. Mitchell scouted the surrounding land for any materials he could find. He loaded bent ribbons of wood and shattered masonry and sections of granite tile into a wheelbarrow that had been generously donated by Jackpot Eastern Market Supply. He dumped the debris along the border of his estate, where it began to accrete into a ramshackle perimeter wall. It would take days before the wall became functional—it was no more than a couple of feet at its highest point. But it seemed crucial to create a border to the property. A barrier would be necessary once the garden began to grow, if only to keep out the rats. They were everywhere, the rats. Without buildings or walls to shelter them, they had been forced out into the open. They raced, bewildered and terrorized, across the scarred landscape in search of any scrap that might shelter them. Many of them darted into the marsh, though few emerged from it. That’s because other, larger animals were moving in, no doubt attracted by the increasing availability of rodents. He’d now seen two foxes, an opossum, and a raccoon. On his second night he had been kept up by what he assumed must have been an owl, though it did not hoot. It gave a wounded cry: Ow! Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow—like a child rubbing his boo-boo. Or being stabbed. OW OW OW! Yes, it would be important to build the wall high. At least to the height of a tall human being. It was impossible to know what was lurking in this wilderness—or who.

  The ground floor was still a mess, but at least now it was an orderly and relatively hygienic one. Mitchell had stockpiled supplies from Jackpot—not just food but clothing (ersatz Benetton T-shirts and cotton-polyester blend slacks and triple packs of boxer briefs), an ax with a two-foot haft, rubber gloves, sanitizing wipes, bleach, barrels, shovels, padlocks. He kept the more valuable tools, along with his cash, in the old vault, which the previous tenants had cleaned out before the storm.

  One afternoon, his third, or fourth—he was already beginning to lose track of the days—he ran into Hank outside of Jackpot.

  “Your friend,” said Hank. “She gone?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “She didn’t want to be here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You could tell. The way she walked, even. Like she was being punished.” He looked at Mitchell closely. “You going to stay?”

  “For now,” said Mitchell.

  “Then you’re going to want these.” Hank pointed at three bags of compost in his shopping cart. “Third aisle. With the garden supplies.”

  Mitchell looked at him in confusion.

  “You dig a hole in the ground. As deep as you can. Then you dump in a full bag of compost.”

  “OK. Then what?”

  “Then you take a shit, man.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  He would deal with the latrine later—for now the marsh would have to serve. Besides, there were more immediate problems. With Jane gone and Hank ensconced in his cathedral, he was deeply, emphatically alone. It wasn’t only that he was without other people—that he could deal with. He had been without other people for so much of his life. But now he was without belief. He had forsaken the cult of fear, had abandoned the order of the futurists. For what was obsession anyway but a kind of intense faith? Yes, a new faith was required, something rigorous, ascetic, all-encompassing. Because if he couldn’t find one, then all he had was order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order.

  He couldn’t help but think of Ticonderoga. It was the only comparable scenario he knew. In Starling they had repurposed the land to create a self-sufficient habitat. Sure, it had ended badly, but only because of the twin blows of Brugada and Tammy. Maybe something could be learned from Elsa’s blueprint. Upon reaching Maine, what was the first thing she had done? He thought back to her first letter. In April, she had written, we tilled the baseball field.

  He wasn’t a true believer, but what else was available to him? He had to have time to think, and during that time he’d need to eat, give himself shelter, work. Most of all to work.

  He began by pounding the ground with a hoe, breaking up the dirt. The undersoil was still damp, so the surface crust punctured easily and the chalky layer beneath gave little resistance. But that didn’t matter—the pain began almost immediately. His knees grumbled, his back sobbed, his shoulder shrieked.
>
  He wondered what Jane was doing.

  He lugged a water jug outside and began again. It was October now, and the temperature was starting to drop into the sixties, maybe even the high fifties, but soon the sweat was so heavy that he took off his T-shirt and then his pants. Orange dirt descended in rivulets down his chest. Blisters appeared in the crooks of his fingers. By the time he’d finished smashing up the entire field the sun was nearly touching the horizon. He dropped the hoe and stumbled into the marsh.

  You had to go slow, hesitatingly, careful not to get hooked by a loose nail or a stubborn branch. Sections of warped plywood and broken trees were tangled with the brush. It was like walking through dirty, matted hair. He stepped carefully around a toppled tree trunk that had landed upside down in the earth. Its crown was lodged in the ground, and its root system spread in the air like branches. He heard a song in his head:

  Oh take me back to Elkhart Lake, where the cotton candy grows.

  Where the little marshmallows hang from the trees.

  And the lollipops grow on the ground!

  After a hundred yards he found a muddy finger of land that pointed into a calm pool. Here the earth was smoother, covered only by a light blush of moss. This was where the ocean began. Beyond this pool the creek snaked around a bend before expanding into a wide channel that fed Jamaica Bay. He removed his sneakers and waded in, the mud slimy beneath his feet, until the water rose to his armpits. The creek was rust colored, silty, and very cold. Without thinking, without caring, he dunked his head. The water flooded his ears, tickled his face, cradled his brain. The coldness was shocking, but when he resurfaced, everything had sharpened. The whiteness of the sky, the marsh’s clicking insect choruses, the breeze against his face like a fresh shave.

  On the way back to the bank building he congratulated himself for not worrying about the toxins that might have tainted his little bath—mercury, PCBs, dioxins, sewage. But perhaps they’d had an effect. A prickly wooziness settled over him, and as soon as he reached the upstairs couch he was dizzy. When he lay down the cushion under his head became a brick and knocked him into unconsciousness.