Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  * * *

  He was tamping down the soil one afternoon, speculating about the alimentary properties of the marsh breeze—would it nourish the spinach or desiccate it?—when he began to hear the voices.

  He had started by planting spinach because it was the only vegetable he recognized among the small pouches of vegetable seeds he’d found at Jackpot. His haul had included snow peas, kohlrabi, bitter gourd, soybean, burdock, and ten-pound bags containing soil the color of crushed brownies.

  How the mighty had fallen. Mitchell Zukor, the internationally renowned prophet, with $1,996.50 sitting in a backpack twenty yards away—he had given the balance, $50,000, to Jane for use as start-up capital—was now on his hands and knees, scrounging in the orange dirt, choking on it, getting it into his eyes and underwear.

  But whatever had started to happen to him in the cold waters of the marsh continued to happen. The long stretches of quiet labor narcotized him. Time was again becoming strange. It moved in erratic ways: in large bounds, when he worked in the fields. During other activities, as when he bathed in the marsh, it halted altogether. Light determined everything: his sleep schedule, his mealtimes, his bodily functions. The mineral smell of freshly turned earth also contributed, as did the sharp, wet breeze of the swamp, like the whip of a wet towel, that passed freely through the exploded windows of the third floor where he slept. The general sensation was of mindlessness. He didn’t know what he was going to do next, though that didn’t bother him. All that mattered was that he was now doing something.

  But then he heard the voices. And they were calling his name.

  So this is how it would happen. Hadn’t he, to a certain extent, been waiting for it? First the inexplicable impulse to follow Hank Cho on his kamikaze mission, then the rolling about nearly naked in the dirt, and finally the voices calling out to him, singing hymns, telling him to drown himself in the ocean.

  “Mitchell Zukor?”

  The voices weren’t quite inside his head, but they weren’t far away either. They were coming from the direction of the marsh.

  “Mr. Zukor?”

  He turned, expecting to see nothing, or worse—a seven-foot-tall cockroach, for instance, wearing a monocle—but instead there were two people, a man and a woman, roughly his own age. They stood directly beside each other on an archipelago of sidewalk that was all that remained of Flatlands Avenue. Each wore a bulky backpack; the girl had a blue bandanna wrapped around her head. They looked like hikers who had taken a wrong turn off the Appalachian Trail. A disastrously wrong turn.

  “Jane told us we’d find you here,” said the boy. “Jane Eppler.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Ronald. This here’s Cassie.”

  “Hey,” said Cassie. She took one step forward, stepping to the edge of the garden plot.

  Mitchell leaped up. “Listen,” he said, glancing nervously at Cassie’s feet, “I just spent two full days tilling this land.”

  Ronald reached for Cassie’s hand and pulled her back. “Oh,” said Cassie. “Of course. It looks good.”

  These social niceties, their tentative, smiling approach—there was something vestigial about it all. It was pathetically antediluvian. He had no time for it. State your purpose, then be on your way. And leave me alone.

  “Jane asked us to check on you,” said Ronald. “Make sure you’re OK.” He was looking at Mitchell very closely.

  “It’s only been, what, five days? What could’ve happened to me in that time?”

  The two of them glanced at each other.

  “It’s been almost two weeks. At least since Jane came back to the island.”

  “Hm. I don’t know about that.”

  “We just wanted to make sure everything was … OK.”

  “I’m fine,” said Mitchell. “You can go back to Randall’s Island and tell Jane I’m fine.”

  “We’re not going back,” said Ronald.

  “And she’s not on Randall’s Island anymore,” said Cassie. Her mouth opened wide when she spoke, disclosing a winking pearl within. A tongue stud: another quaint, even nostalgic touch, a relic from the early part of the century, like fax machines or vitamin supplements. “Jane is in Manhattan. They opened it up. On Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday,” said Mitchell. He chewed on it like a recalcitrant wad of taffy. “Wed-nes-day.”

  “Three days ago.”

  Three days. Knowing Jane, she’d probably already rented an office, hired a staff, designed a website, issued press releases, negotiated contracts with all of FutureWorld’s old clients. Joined Tewilliger’s suit against Alec Charnoble. Ate a steak at the Palm, side of creamed spinach, side of half-and-half.

  “You said you were staying here?”

  “We want to do what you’re doing,” said Ronald.

  “You walked away from ‘Mitchell Zukor,’” said Cassie. “You walked away from everything, all the old systems. We want that too. A lot of people want that.”

  “No,” said Mitchell. This wouldn’t do. “I can’t help you.”

  “We’re not asking to stay with you,” said Ronald. “We found a structure about a mile down. A school. And Jane told us about Jackpot.”

  What was Jane after? Was she sincerely worried about what might happen to him, left to his own devices, all alone in this storm-ravaged wasteland? Or was this a subtle poke, an effort to get him to return to Manhattan and help launch Future Days?

  “There’s really no reason for Jane to worry,” said Mitchell. “I’m self-sufficient.”

  The couple exchanged another look. “You know,” said Cassie, “this area is part of the Dead Zone. Canarsie, Flatlands, across to Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend—the whole swath along the water—it’s been classified as Zone Five.”

  “What’s a Zone Five?”

  “The unflooded areas are Zone One. Lower Manhattan is Zone Two. Downtown Brooklyn is Zone Three. They’ve had to prioritize the rebuilding effort.”

  “So this is last.”

  “Dead last. They’re saying they might let it go back to nature. Wetlands restoration. To serve as a natural buffer against future storms.”

  It was a farsighted policy. Perhaps they’d learned the lessons of recent meteorology. The refugees on Randall’s Island who had lived in Zone 5 wouldn’t be pleased, of course. But it wasn’t anything to get concerned about now. If Seattle were any model, those legal battles wouldn’t be resolved for years. Mitchell’s thinking was now decidedly short-term.

  “So, if you need us,” said Cassie, “for anything? We’ll be at the school.”

  Mitchell nodded warily.

  “Or we’ll see you around, I guess.”

  “Cassie,” said Ronald under his breath.

  “What?”

  He took her by the arm. “Let’s go. He’s working.”

  “There are others, you know,” said Cassie, shirking off Ronald. “There are others coming. Others like us. We want to start something here.”

  Mitchell turned his back on them and bent to the dirt. But he watched the couple out of the corner of his eye as they walked away. They watched him too, glancing back every few paces. When they finally disappeared behind a ruin—not a structure, exactly, but a mound of wooden planks and bent telephone poles, like a mammoth funeral pyre, festooned with tangled copper cables—Mitchell dropped the bag of spinach seeds. The garden would have to be postponed. He needed more debris. He had to build up his wall faster. If word had gotten out, if more people were coming, he needed to insure his privacy. He would also have to make another trip to Jackpot before others started competing for supplies. And before the maggots and rats colonized the entire warehouse.

  He was under no illusions. Out here in the neighborhood formerly known as Flatlands—or was it Canarsie?—he wouldn’t unearth Eden, or even some agrarian ideal. Most likely his work here wouldn’t amount to very much at all. He knew nothing, after all, about farming, fertilization, engineering, construction. Problems would arise that he could not anticipate, and h
e’d be comically unprepared to fix them. The weather would only become increasingly erratic. The fields might go fallow or flood. Winter would be excruciating. And a single serious injury or illness would force him to give up. There was also the danger that he might lose his nerve. Yet he doubted this. The only thing stronger than his desire to stay in the Flatlands was his aversion to the idea of returning to his old life.

  A time would come, perhaps even in the next month, when he would need to sneak back to the city for supplies: a generator, a water filtration system, perhaps even wind turbines or photovoltaic panels, the kind Elsa had installed at Ticonderoga. And books: on energy harvesting, basic engineering, agriculture. Best-case scenario, he would create a few hundred square yards of farmland next to the bank building and another plot, half that size, behind the building. He had enough bottled water to last a couple of months, and after that he supposed he could collect rainwater and boil it. He’d be away from the world, yet in it more intimately than he had ever known. Doing: finally. At night he would go to bed with the smell of the orange dirt in his nostrils, the sour taste of it in the back of his throat.

  The cynic in him laughed derisively. The logician in him, however, responded curtly, and not without condescension: it wasn’t a question of idealism; it was survival. In the Canarsie Bank Trust Company building he would create his own self-contained universe. This was a future. It might not be the best possible future or even a particularly comfortable future, but it was a future that he could see.

  He trundled the wheelbarrow across the dirt, and the heaviness didn’t bother him because he could feel within him the first flickers of obsession, the electricity sparking in his brain like a live wire. This obsession, after all, would not be very different from those he’d already mastered. It would be based in mathematics and logic, even scenario planning and risk analysis, only now the application would be practical instead of theoretical. The work would demand much more from him than his fanciful scenario planning at FutureWorld. The stakes would be higher, too: miscalculations could lead to injury or hunger. Precision was essential. There was no escaping math, after all. It was everywhere, especially in nature. You could go so far as to say that math was nature. Pi described the arc of a rainbow, the way ripples spread in a body of water, the dimensions of the moon and sun. Fractals could be observed in halved sections of red cabbage, the topography of deserts, the branching of lightning bolts. And take the old man glaring out from his shirt, Leonardo Fibonacci, who discovered that a basic number sequence predicted the arrangement of scales on a pinecone, the distribution of petals on flowers, the spiral of a snail shell, the furcation of veins in the human body, even the structure of DNA. When all the people were gone, the numbers would persist. Always the numbers, an infinite chain running to the edge of the universe.

  Once the property was running, he might even invite his parents to visit. Rikki would be glad that he had escaped Kansas City and its nightmares forever, and Tibor would be proud to see the landownership gene resurface in his son. Slumlord begetting fieldlord. From the haystacks of a farm outside of Györ to giant rotating turbine blades above his castle in the Flatlands.

  And yet—and yet—despite all this, he would be alone.

  Yes, there was Hank, there were Cassie and Ronald, who seemed like neo-hippies from Ticonderoga, and perhaps there would be others, settlers from Randall’s Island and elsewhere. But he would keep his distance, and the wall around him would grow tall with trash and plaster. The purest intellectual pursuits were always solitary, weren’t they? You had to be uncompromising and self-disciplined. No great mathematical problem was ever solved by a team of mathematicians (there was the Appel-Haken solution to the four-color theorem, but really their supercomputer deserved the credit); no brilliant machine was ever conceived in tandem (the Wright brothers were good engineers, but they honed technology developed by others); and no literary masterpiece was ever written by a group of collaborators (the Bible notwithstanding). Elsa had understood this. There were others working with her on the farm, working for her, but it was her plan, and she was uncompromising in its execution. And what Mitchell was after—an impregnable, self-contained, self-sustaining fortress—would require the same level of dedication. No place would be reserved for anyone else.

  The wheelbarrow hit against a single red brick wedged into the earth. He kicked at it, hard, and it budged enough so that he could pull it out of the soil, like a rotten tooth from a gum.

  His plan had other satisfactions. There would be no one for him to grow attached to, no one he would have to rely on but himself. He would avoid nostalgia; forget the past, forget FutureWorld, forget the whole tangled cycle of anxiety and fear and paranoia that got him here. Instead, his teeming energies—or, to be honest, his fanaticism—his fanaticism would be spent in the fields, building-shaping-making-growing-spreading. Then, at night, to bed alone. Alone with his numbers and their cold, metallic comforts.

  He would live, in other words, the life that Elsa Bruner had wanted. It was her ideal scenario: self-reliant, sovereign, irreproachable. Having created his own world, he’d be protected from the world. And he began to make out, like a distant cloud formation, the vast shape of her loneliness.

  It occurred to him then, as he pushed the wheelbarrow toward the funeral pyre of telephone poles and wiring, the wheels twisting restively on their axles, jarring on every divot and pebble. It occurred to him that he now understood another fact about Elsa Bruner, his paragon of solitary idealism, of single-minded devotion to higher purpose. He understood now that Elsa Bruner was dead.

  * * *

  It was three days after the encounter with Cassie and Ronald—or was it four?—when he discovered the tree.

  He had gotten into the habit of eating dinner at what must have been five o’clock. He couldn’t help it; by that time he was too starving to hold off any longer. But it gave him an hour of sunlight to kill before he could sleep. That was too long without working. These were the hours when, at Fitzsimmons Sherman and FutureWorld, he’d been at his most productive. Unhassled by the constant shocks of the business day—news reports, meetings, e-mails—he could concentrate on his scenarios. But now what was there to do? He had finished planting the seeds, after all, and he’d cleared the second and third floors of debris. Fortunately the wall could use more work. Though “wall” wasn’t the most accurate term for the uneven, steadily accumulating pile of rubble that rose in clumpy hillocks around the perimeter of the property. Every object that remained, every stray plank, roof tile, and cement block within about a hundred yards that he could stack in his wheelbarrow, he had added to his barricade. He hadn’t yet foraged in the marsh—the ground was too uneven for the wheelbarrow—but he had seen plenty of dead wood there. The smaller sections he could haul away by himself, as long as they weren’t too splintery. And for the most part they weren’t, the turbulence of the floodwaters having smoothed the wood, sanding down its burrs and jagged edges.

  In the vault he found what he was looking for: the ax. It was heavier than he’d expected, tugging aggressively at his shoulder as he lifted it. It was a powerful weapon. Walking around the property, swinging the ax, he felt for the first time as if he owned the land. The Canarsie Bank Trust, as well as the adjacent plot, whatever it had been, was his domain. His shoulder began to smart. He paused to rub it.

  He walked gingerly to avoid cutting himself. Navigating the matted swamp grass and the chaotic brambles, he entered the marsh. Here there were only the crushed branches of smaller trees, nothing substantial. But farther down, just past where his little bathing pool debouched into a wider creek, the trunk of a fallen oak lay on the shore. It was not native to that strip of land, but the storm had deposited it there and divested it of its crown. It was perfect. He wouldn’t be able to drag it home, you’d need a tractor for that, but he could chop it into thick stumps and use those to reinforce his wall’s foundation.

  As he approached he saw that the tree had split open near its midpoint. W
here the trunk had cracked there was a wide crevasse, chocolate near the outer levels and reddening farther down. He raised his ax, aiming the blade. But he couldn’t follow through. Something was moving in the tree. He bent over to examine it more closely, and then he was on the ground beside it, and then his head was nearly inside the tree.

  The first thing he noticed were the mushrooms, orange with caps the size of buttons, projecting from the walls of the crevasse. Their fleshy undersides were lined with gills that ruffled like lace. These gills secreted a toothpasty substance that branched into a plexus of lines that descended deep into the trunk’s core. But that was just the beginning. When Mitchell moved closer, he saw eruptions of brightly petaled clover; exotic spindly-legged spiders with bodies the same exact hue as the tree itself; a flesh-colored worm as long as his arm; a fiery procession of red mites snaking between piles of school-bus-yellow spores and thick, translucent bubbles of slime; a downy pink fungus like a speck of cotton candy; a bark beetle sheathed in an iridescent shell; and canals of thick syrup in which tiny flies had gotten stuck, flapping their broken wings and twitching in panic. What had appeared to be no more than a dead log was everywhere crawling, munching, slurping, rotting, liquefying, cannibalizing—a grotesque insectopolis. As his shadow moved across the log, the bark beetle, sensing a larger presence, folded completely into itself—head into shell, encased and protected, a gray oval disk without edges or openings. Protected against its predators. Protected even against the air.

  He tried not to think about Elsa, where her body now lay, in what state of decomposition. But then the awful flesh-colored worm, propelled by its wet, clenching suckers, glided sinuously along the surface of the log, and Mitchell felt that he was going to throw up.

  He rose, unsteady on his feet, and grabbed the handle of the ax. This time he would bring it down with all his force, explode the decayed wood, spattering worm pulp and tree rot and larva across the grass. But now the ax was much too heavy. The poll dug into the small of his back and he couldn’t begin to hoist it over his head.