Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  But Smith continued toward Manhattan. After passing the Chrysler Building, he became disoriented when a sudden burst of air pushed the airplane to one side, and he turned right instead of left. Within seconds he crashed into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. The hoist and safety cables of two of the elevators snapped. One of these elevators, which was being operated by a woman named Betty Lou Oliver, plunged from the seventy-fifth floor—the very floor Mitchell would be working on. Luckily for Betty Lou, who was cowering in a fetal position on the floor of the elevator, the falling car compressed the air in the shaft, creating a landing cushion that softened the blow at the bottom. She broke her back and both legs, but survived.

  Mitchell skipped the elevator. But after climbing seventy-five flights of stairs, his suit—a Hungarian tri-blend inherited from Tibor—was nearly translucent with sweat, and he had decided to run the numbers. In the United States there were 900,000 elevators, each serving an average of 20,000 people per year. That meant eighteen billion passenger trips per year. These trips resulted in twenty-seven deaths. The chance of dying in an elevator accident was therefore one in 10.44 (repeating) million—about equivalent to the odds of dying from a dog bite, according to the National Safety Council odds-of-death chart he kept in his wallet. This made him feel easier about entering the metal box every morning but he did find himself crossing the street whenever he saw a dog.

  It hadn’t been lost on him that FutureWorld’s office was on the second floor.

  After three bites he dumped burrito, plate, and plastic into the trash. Though it was barely dark outside he slipped off his loafers and lay on top of the balled-up sheets of his unmade bed, his laptop opened on his chest. He found New York State’s online legislative database. He searched for “Recommit to Civil Service and Pensions Act,” and a link was produced to State Finance Law § 307. Under section 52, subsection F, sub-subsection 3, he found what he was looking for:

  (3) Defense to liability claims.

  Legal indemnification against liability claims that should result from i) acts of God or ii) acts of war shall be assumed by any person or incorporated agency that holds legal title to a Group B building with a permitted occupancy of two hundred or more persons, provided that he/she has made a reasonable, good faith effort to protect his/her building from said circumstances through substantial investment in precautionary measures, or services thereof.

  Mitchell closed his laptop and then his eyes. He was asleep within minutes, a deep, rich sleep. He hadn’t slept so well in months—no cockroaches, no nightmares of flashing steel and glass, just milky oblivion.

  * * *

  The next morning Mitchell called in sick for the first time in his professional career. He removed from his wallet the business card with the line drawing of the open window, and he decided to jump out of it.

  Charnoble picked up in the middle of the first ring.

  “I wondered when you would call.”

  He offered Mitchell eleven thousand dollars to start the next morning. The check would arrive in less than an hour by messenger. (Mitchell considered asking that a copy be sent to Sandy Sherman, but then his survival instinct set in.) Charnoble didn’t try to hide his relief on the phone. “We’ve had a number of applications but there was no one with the right mix of technical knowledge and personal despair.”

  As soon as Mitchell hung up the room became very dark. What had he done? Had he gone insane? Was this, finally, the path that had been chosen for him: madness? He’d shown a talent for it in the past, he would admit that, a flair for madness, but he never believed it was his true calling. He tried Charnoble again. But this time, as in a nightmare, the phone rang and rang. No answering machine. He looked again at the business card, made sure he had the right number, and dialed again. Still no answer. He had a picture of Charnoble hunched over the phone, his eyes wide, watching it ring, cackling uncontrollably.

  But all things considered, wasn’t it a greater risk to remain at Fitzsimmons? An eternity in E and V—that was a risk he couldn’t take. Better to start at FutureWorld and quit if things went badly rather than return to Fitzsimmons and E and V. F—E—V: if you squinted, it almost spelled FOREVER.

  He called his parents.

  “FutureWorld? Isn’t that a village in Walt Disney?” said Rikki.

  “In Budapest,” said Tibor, “there was a social committee called the Future World. Their job was to assassinate nationalistic journalists. Sorry—torture first, then assassinate. I promised myself never to speak of the thing they did to my friend Laszlo. You think you can trust a business with that name?”

  “It is a dopey name, FutureWorld. But I’m glad you’ve found something that excites you.”

  “Poor Laszlo. He was never the same man once they were done with him. If, after such an experience, you could even call him a man.”

  Mitchell took a deep breath.

  “I’m being paid eleven thousand dollars today and sixteen thousand dollars a month. That’s before incentives and bonuses kick in. It may increase when we take on more clients.”

  “‘Yippie-kay-yay, motherfucker,’” said Tibor.

  “Tibor!” said Rikki.

  “Die Hard, starring a certain Mr. Bruce Willis.”

  Mitchell hung up the phone and looked around his apartment, as if for the first time. He had never given much thought to its appearance before—after work he tended to rumble directly to his bed and tip over like a felled tree. And he rarely saw the place by daylight. Not that it admitted daylight. He had only a single, grime-coated window in the living room, which faced the ramp leading from Third Avenue onto the Queens Midtown Tunnel. By day the window cast a narrow rectangle of light onto the floor; at night the tunnel’s marigold glow suffused the living room like a nuclear sunset. This was an unhappy apartment. It was not just depressing—it was itself depressed. The baleful wide-screen television glaring at the melancholy mouse-colored couch. The metal desk as heavy as a tombstone, supporting the computer’s glassy slab. The unvarnished teak coffee table supporting a pile of withered science magazines and heavily fingered books (on top lay Becker’s The Denial of Death: “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we shrink from being fully alive.”). And in the corner of the room, the pelican mouth of the forlorn brown briefcase that Tibor had bequeathed him as a graduation present. Every object was despondent, numb, heavy with exhaustion.

  Things outside weren’t any better. Seattle had inspired a new wave of street preachers to evangelize midtown Manhattan. They must have been having success with their donation boxes because they were fruitful and they did increase. They competed for the busiest intersections, standing across the street from one another, raising the volume on their loudspeakers until they drowned out the honking horns. They preached apocalypse and lifted signs written in magic marker: GOD IS ANGRY WITH THE WICKED EVERY DAY. THE STARS WILL FALL FROM THE SKY. IT REPENTED THE LORD THAT HE HAD MADE MAN ON THE EARTH, IT GRIEVED HIM AT HIS HEART. But it was the crowds that surprised Mitchell. They weren’t merely assembling—they were listening. This was a notable development in the world capital of cynicism.

  Charnoble’s check arrived within the hour. Mitchell took it straight to his bank and decided to celebrate with a lunch at Chosan Galbi. On Lexington Avenue he passed a particularly animated preacher who balanced himself precariously in the basket of a shopping cart. He was cloaked in nothing but a brown canvas tunic cinched around the waist with a dirty string. Not a bad idea—it was another hydrant-bursting, brownout-warning, macadam-melting summer day, the kind of day when people went to movies for the air-conditioning. But this urban apostle had attracted a crowd, roughly a dozen people. They removed the pods from their ears, the sunglasses from their eyes, and peered up at this man. Even Mitchell paused.

  “Meat?” said the preacher. The cart was unsteady beneath his feet, skipping on the pavement with each violent
swing of his arms.

  “Meat and bones and water?”

  “No!” shouted a young woman, sitting erect on her bicycle seat.

  “Is that all we are?” It was a loud voice, a rhetorician’s voice. He spoke like someone accustomed to standing at a pulpit in a mega-cathedral somewhere, lecturing a suburban congregation attired in their Sunday best. This shopping cart, his manner suggested, was only a temporary embarrassment. Sweat beaded under his eyes and dripped over his cheeks. The sides of him, visible through the tunic’s gaping armholes, were also wet.

  “Intricately wired meat? Meat sending signals to meat through electricity? Where is the mystery in that?”

  His audience nodded. It wasn’t just a performance. These people were paying witness. A feeling was building. An urban malaria, a future-affected anxiety disorder. Whatever kind of disease it was, it had become infectious.

  The bi bim bap at Chosan Galbi that day tasted rancid. Mitchell couldn’t finish it. Next to the register the restaurant offered a stack of free postcards. Mitchell chose one bearing an image of bi bim bap and, using the cashier’s pen, addressed it to Elsa Bruner.

  “By the time you get this,” he wrote, “I’ll be a futurist.”

  7.

  After a tense exchange with one of Sandy’s secretaries (“Mr. Sherman will not be pleased,” she said breathlessly when he presented his letter of resignation. “Mr. Sherman will not be pleased one bit.”) Mitchell took the elevator from the Fitzsimmons offices down to the lobby of the Empire State Building, then changed for an elevator that went to the second floor. He stepped into a long hallway. On the doors were stenciled the names of various law and accounting firms. Finally he reached a door without a name. Instead there was a brass panel embossed with the familiar image of an open window. Mitchell opened the door and entered a small foyer.

  Charnoble was seated there, facing him, not three feet away. His bent posture and mortified grin indicated that he’d been waiting there for hours. He wore the same navy pin-striped suit and yellow tie as at their first meeting. His hair was slick and tamped down, and his briefcase balanced gingerly on his pointed knees. As the door cracked open he leaped into the air.

  “Welcome!”

  “Thanks. I have a box upstairs—”

  “We have to leave. Now, I’m afraid. Potential client. A big one. Law firm downtown. You’ll get a chance to settle in later. But first, quickly—”

  Charnoble produced a camera, and before Mitchell could understand what he was doing, the flash went off.

  “Brumley Sansome insists,” said Charnoble. “For their file. Security purposes.”

  Over Charnoble’s shoulder Mitchell saw, side by side, beyond the foyer, an identical pair of large rooms. They did not resemble private offices so much as banquet halls. The only wall decorations were digital clocks. There appeared to be one on each wall. At first Mitchell assumed that each clock gave the time in a different international capital, but upon scrutiny he realized that they were all precisely synchronized with one another. Were they also synchronized to the watches on both of Charnoble’s wrists? It couldn’t be otherwise.

  The offices were minimally furnished. At the far end of each—some thirty or forty feet from the entrance—stood a small desk approximately the size of a chopping board. It was large enough to accommodate a micro laptop and a box of tissues. Tall rectangular windows looked onto Sixth Avenue.

  “Imposing, no?” said Charnoble. “Big spaces with small furniture create a mood of dread. Perfect for client meetings.”

  Downstairs, a long black car was idling at the curb. Charnoble didn’t give any directions. The driver knew where to go, and he drove aggressively. He assaulted the busy midday traffic, and the traffic yielded to the expensive car. The traffic supplicated. Mitchell wiped the sweat off his forehead with his suit sleeve and tried to ignore the roaches that nibbled away at his stomach lining.

  “It’s best that I do the talking,” said Charnoble. “It’s a trial meeting, in a manner of speaking. I’ve prepared a script.” He clutched a folder in his hand. The pages inside were thick with blue ink: diagrams, statistics, color-coded graphs. When Mitchell squinted to make out the text, Charnoble turned the folder over on his lap. Mitchell decided the best thing to do was close his eyes and banish any thought of Fitzsimmons Sherman.

  The car glided to a rest in front of a black tower, the headquarters of a major international law firm called Nybuster, Nybuster, and Greene. Charnoble explained that Nybuster represented several small sovereign nations, as well as corporations in more than forty countries. The firm’s representative was a very young man wearing a mohair three-piece, no doubt bespoke, and a checkered tie the color of a faded dollar bill. A fatuous smirk was slapped across his face like a price tag. He had trim golden-brown hair, a manicured five o’clock shadow (though it was ten in the morning—did he shave in the middle of the night, was that what you were supposed to do?), a robotic chin, and bright, malicious eyes. The eyes had the cocky look of inherited fortune and disinherited ambition. Mitchell was not surprised to learn that the fellow’s name was Nybuster: Ned Nybuster. The three of them sat at a conference table covered by white glass. A tray of cheese, cut fruit, soy wafers, and deli sandwiches had been laid out alongside miniature water bottles, each of which contained no more than a mouthful of liquid. The young Caesar grabbed an entire bunch of grapes, lifted it above his head, and pulled off the lowest-hanging orb with his lips.

  “So-o-o-o,” said Charnoble, with a thin smile. He was already in full ingratiation mode.

  “How does this work?” Nybuster had an effortlessly loud voice, a well-fed voice. “You guys are like economic soothsayers?”

  “In a certain sense—”

  “I once went to a fortune-teller. She said the path to success would be long and difficult.” He frowned playfully.

  “We are future-based consultants,” said Charnoble, trying again. He removed a digital recorder from his suitcase and pressed the record button. “We help you to build a risk-aware culture. We create scenarios to prepare your company for whatever the future might hold.”

  “I’m thinking the future holds money. Lots of it. Kind of like the past and the present.”

  Charnoble explained that he would record each session to comply with federal insurance briefing regulations. The recordings, along with reports that FutureWorld would issue after each meeting, would indemnify the firm should it ever be tried for castastrophe negligence in a court of law.

  “What kind of catastrophe? New York doesn’t have earthquakes.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Charnoble, and Mitchell had to bite his cheek to restrain himself from correcting his new boss. “Plenty of catastrophes are possible, however.”

  Nybuster flung a pin-striped leg on the seat of a swivel chair. “So what are we talking about here? Is it total bullshit or just credible bullshit? Entertaining bullshit, actually—that would be ideal.”

  “Right.” Charnoble took a deep breath. He had a pained expression that Mitchell had not seen on his face before. Was it anxiety? Could this be Charnoble’s first consulting session too? “Scenario one,” said Charnoble. “China declares war.”

  “The yellow claw,” said Nybuster, winking at Mitchell. He leaned back in his chair as if expecting to be fanned by palm fronds.

  Charnoble began by listing the number of ways in which the American markets were dependent on Chinese monetary policy. Then he reviewed Nybuster, Nybuster, and Greene’s specific Chinese accounts, explaining how each would be affected by an outbreak of war. Charnoble’s script wasn’t bad, but the delivery was tedious. He might have been reading his tax statements. Mitchell’s eyes watered. His hair was still damp and frizzled, his skin dry. He had shaved poorly and had barely seen the sun in weeks, except through tinted glare-resistant office windows. His eyes didn’t open all the way. And after a single restful night, the cockroaches had returned. But they weren’t alone. They had brought with them a new friend: a kindly bald Spanish
gentleman named Pedro Brugada.

  Pedro and his brother Josep, Spaniards who practiced in Belgium, were the first Westerners to identify a condition they first described as tristeza del corazón, “heart sadness.” In 1987 they observed a three-year-old Polish boy, Lech, who experienced fainting spells with a terrifying frequency. The boy’s sister had already died from the same mysterious disorder. The Brugadas found additional examples of this condition and, in 1992, the Brugada syndrome entered the diagnostic lexicon. But Easterners had known about it for centuries. In Japan it was called Pokkuri (“unexpected death at night”), and in the Phillipines it was known as bangungut (“scream followed by sudden death”). In the northeast of Thailand, where it struck young men disproportionately, it was known as lai tai, or “death during sleep.” Lai tai was believed to be caused by the ghosts of dead women who kidnapped young men to serve as their husbands in the underworld. The Thai men of this region, in a desperate effort to trick the succubi—or at least to turn them off—went to bed every night dressed in drag.

  In his second letter to Elsa, Mitchell had asked whether she was certain that she had this condition. The first indication, she wrote, came when her father dropped dead on a public bus when she was seven years old. His last checkup had revealed an unusual ditch in his electrocardiogram reading, but he was a healthy, fit man and no one suspected heart problems. Elsa had several fainting spells in high school, however, and her doctor noticed the same peculiarity in her EKG. After excluding everything else, a cardiologist tested for Brugada. It wasn’t an easy test. To test a patient for Brugada, you have to kill her.