Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “If we think like that,” he said, catching her eye, “we’re going to run into something and the boat is going to flip. And then we’ll really be in the shit.”

  “Right.” She seemed uncertain. She seemed to be trying to convince herself of something. “Right.”

  The floating hula hoop of fire was drifting very close now. But if Jane felt the heat behind her back, she didn’t show it.

  “It’s not just New York,” she said. “It’s like I’m being destroyed too. I know this sounds silly, but really, I never fantasized about being successful in Boston for crissakes, or Washington. What can you even buy in Boston?”

  “The city will come back. This is temporary. Everything is temporary.”

  “Whenever you say something hopeful, it sounds like a curse. Nobody believes you. Lady Madeline didn’t, Nybuster didn’t, and I don’t either.”

  “Just look out for flotsam, OK? Flotsam.”

  “Yeah.” She tried to wipe away her tears, but she managed only to spread the grease in a horizontal streak across the bridge of her nose. “Flotsam.”

  He pulled hard to avoid the oil fire, and the boat disappeared into a cloud of acrid smoke.

  5.

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

  “POOF! POOF!”

  “Where the little marshmallows hang from the trees—”

  “SAY WHAT?”

  “And the lollipops grow on the ground!”

  “NO! NO!”

  “YES! The LOLLI-pops grow on the GROUND GROUND GROUND.”

  The camp songs were Jane’s idea. It seemed incongruous, if not shameful, to be singing about lollipops while mattresses and house pets and who knows what else floated by, but it worked. With Tammy’s full horrors hidden from sight and their progress north unchecked, their immediate fear of disaster subsided and was replaced by a lightness that flirted with mania. Jane sang her choruses louder and louder in a desperate effort to dispel the sepulchral silence of Sutton Place.

  “POOF! POOF!”

  The day was becoming brighter too. The fog had diminished. The sleepy residential neighborhood had acquired a kind of diseased Venetian charm. The ornate battlements and bay windows of its town houses were reflected in jaundiced tints on the oil-streaked water. At the intersections, which had been most heavily exposed to the storm gusts coming off the East River, the trees that lined the avenue had been de-leaved, de-branched, even de-barked. All that remained were pitiful yellow stumps. On the west side of the street almost every window was gone; on the east side, leeward, they were mostly intact.

  By Fifty-fourth Street they were seeing signs of life. In one window a fire burned wildly on a shag rug; next door a young boy ran in circles with a model airplane in his hand, making vrooming noises. Standing at the railing of a third-story balcony was an impossibly well-dressed young man. Pin-striped gray suit, royal-blue silk tie, a pink oxford with starched white lapels. His right hand dangled a cigar; the fingertips of his left encircled the rim of a snifter filled to overflowing with an emerald liquid. A golf club leaned against the wall beside a plastic bucket of white balls. His pose reflected an attitude of lethargy and casual refinement almost psychopathic in this context. But what would be sane in this context? Singing camp songs?

  Just one thing about this man could not be reconciled. In place of shoes, he wore on his bare feet Kleenex boxes.

  The slap of oars in the water shook the man from his reverie. He spun toward them.

  “No,” he said. “Nuh-uh.” He stomped the length of the balcony, the Kleenex boxes trampling on broken glass. “What is this? Motherfucking FutureWorld? In a boat?”

  Then Mitchell recognized him. They were too close now, Mitchell couldn’t pretend not to see him. He pulled up alongside the building and the canoe came to a rest beneath the Kleenex-box-clad feet of young Ned Nybuster.

  “A full-service operation,” he was saying, giggling to himself. “FutureWorld to the rescue! But a motorboat might have been a better choice. I mean, if you’re going to consider all the angles, all the scenarios, you’re going to want a big, powerful engine”—his voice kept getting faster and quieter—“and maybe like a wedge to put on the front, and fishing rods and spears, or whatchucallem, harpoons like, rope of course, lots and lots of rope—”

  “Not a good idea,” said Jane under her voice.

  “He’s a client.”

  “Client of what? If you think we’re still on the clock, you’re even dumber than I thought. As of yesterday, the clock is broken. The clock drowned.”

  “Come to rescue me?” Nybuster peered down at them, a dark glint in his eye. “Guys?”

  “We’re just passing through,” said Mitchell. He tried to lighten his tone. “On our way north.”

  “Funny thing. My father and his wife left for Long Island as soon as they heard about the storm. Course they didn’t bother to inform me of their plans. All they did was leave a note.”

  Nybuster removed a balled-up paper from his pocket and spent a tedious minute unfolding it, flattening it, smoothing the creases. He cleared his throat and held the page at arm’s length.

  “Junior,

  Off to Montauk with Lori and kids.

  Call when I can.

  Feel free to avail yourself of the liquor in the library cabinet.

  Dad”

  Nybuster started to snigger. “Please … avail yourself. Avail yourself!” He exploded into a bout of cruel, obscene laughter.

  “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Jane. “He’s wrecked and probably violent.”

  “Oh, I felt free, Zukor. Never felt freer, in fact. Took on the wine cellar first—the old French bottles. Now I’m working through the liquor, starting with the Benedictine. But please—be my guest. Would you like to avail yourself?”

  “Thanks, Ned, but we have to be going. We’ll send help as soon as we find someone.”

  “Hey, let me ask you something. Did you know how many different kinds of herbs and spices there are in a bottle of Benedictine?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t even know what Benedictine—”

  “Twenty-seven! But the identities of these herbs and spices are a secret. The only people who know the secret are the French monks who make the stuff.” Nybuster stared, transfixed, into his snifter of green liquid, holding it up to the sun. It cast green flickers across his face. “It’s a conspiracy.”

  “Well,” said Mitchell. “Off we go.”

  “You know something about conspiracies, don’t you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “I think one of those spices must be salt, because I’m thirsty. Do you have any water? In the fridge there’s only green olives and Gruyère. I’ll trade you a case of Benedictine or even cognac for a bottle of water. There’s something here called Kelt Petra—is that OK? Or does the lady like champagne? I have regular and pink.”

  Jane glared at Mitchell.

  “It’s funny that in all our little catastrophe sessions, I never heard about a flood.” Nybuster’s eyes narrowed to coin slots, sharp and metallic. “Never a flood. Robot invasions, sure. An earthquake and a fleet of terrorists arriving from the sea armed with vials of bird flu. And the drought, Jesus—I have a lifetime supply of bottled water at the office, if it still exists. But if you’re such a good prophet, why didn’t you mention a flood?”

  “I did.”

  “No!” he shouted, with surprising force. “Never a flood. I see it now, what you were after all along. You weren’t trying to protect me. You were trying to disguise the disaster that you knew was coming.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Mitchell,” said Jane. “Mitchell, stop. He’s baiting you.”

  It didn’t matter. He would have his revenge. Nybuster was powerless over him now.

  “It was during the natural disaster sequence,” Mitchell said. “I talked about a hurricane-flood scenario. The worst case was a Category Four or Five headed straight into the New York Bigh
t. Tammy’s trajectory was dead-on, but it was only a high Category Three. It could have even been worse, especially given the rising sea levels—”

  Nybuster waved him off, his drink splashing into the canoe. “Yeah, yeah, but why didn’t you emphasize?”

  “What do you mean? I did emphasize it.” His face was hot.

  “Whatever. Listen—you got any water?”

  He was reminded of their very first meeting, Nybuster’s lips closing around one grape and then the next, popping them off the vine, the juice splashing all over the white glass of the conference table. And those tiny water bottles, which he downed in a single gulp, then tossed to the floor.

  “Mr. Nybuster,” said Jane. “We really have to go.”

  “Why didn’t you emphasize, Zukor?” Nybuster’s voice started rising, herky-jerky, up the scale. “You thought you could keep this from me? I guess you figured you’d be the only one to know. And look at you now. You had a boat all ready. You knew this was coming—”

  “And you said, if a flood came, you’d just get in your family helicopter and fly to your country house. Actually, the word you used was ‘hop.’ You’d hop over to Montauk.”

  “My father and his wife and their kids took the fucking helicopter!” It seemed that the glass would shatter in his fist. Then the cloud passed. Nybuster cracked his neck from side to side like a prizefighter right before the bell. “By the way, have you heard anything about Long Island? Is it flooding?”

  “I haven’t heard,” said Mitchell. But he had seen the flood charts. During the 1992 nor’easter the ocean breached Westhampton Beach, creating a new inlet a quarter of a mile wide; sixty houses were destroyed, including one that was carried several hundred yards into the bay. Barring some unusual quirk of the storm winds, it was likely that Tammy had overridden Long Island at all its narrow points, turning the island into an archipelago. Montauk, at the far eastern end, was at the highest risk. Sandy Sherman’s beachside house in Sagaponack might have washed away too, and for some reason this thought saddened Mitchell. He’d been given his start in that house, after all, speaking up at a meeting when he’d been too young and too stupid to know any better.

  “Before you go,” said Nybuster, “let me show you one thing.” He tilted the remainder of his Benedictine over the edge of the balcony and dropped the glass into the water after it. Mitchell noticed streaks of black mud on Nybuster’s suit jacket and on his bare ankles. Nybuster grabbed the golf club and pointed it at Mitchell. “You a golfing man?”

  Nybuster cued the golf ball on the balcony and launched it. It screamed through the air, a rising line drive, flying through an empty window frame on the fifth floor of the building across the street. It ricocheted loudly off the walls and bounced out of a different window, plopping into the water below.

  “Birdie!” Nybuster cried madly.

  Jane grabbed the gunwales so hard it looked like her knuckles would pop. “Mitchell! This is preposterous. Please.”

  But he didn’t want to go. Everything had become strange and he didn’t want to miss what happened next. He was a spaceman encountering an alien landscape for the first time. Several hundred yards up Sutton Place a large segment of plaster wall drifted across the wide Fifty-seventh Street intersection. On this crumbling raft squatted three Siberian huskies. They hissed at their reflections in the water.

  “You’ve always despised me,” said Nybuster. “I could tell. Bright midwestern Jew, star of your rinky-dink suburban high school, come east to be a big man. But you never learned how the game is played. Numbers alone would take you through, that’s what you hoped. But you’re weak.” He spat the word. “The ways of the world, of power—you don’t understand them. You thought you could scare me with your ridiculous ghost stories. But you’re the one who lives in constant fear, not me. I’ll be fine even if this entire fucking city falls into the sea.” His voice suddenly softened into a blandishment. But for Mitchell the spell was broken. He picked up the oar. “So why don’t you just come up here, give me some of that water? I won’t hurt you. Bring the girl. We’ll have some fun, the three of us. Come just a little bit closer. I can pull you the rest of the way.”

  “Go!” said Mitchell, but Jane was already at it, spraying away. They plunged hard, plowing into the canal, a wake beginning to ripple behind them. Nybuster disappeared into the house, only to reemerge a few seconds later with his arm full of brown bottles. He threw a half-filled whiskey bottle first; it landed several feet from the boat, splashing them with water that was like cold grease. A wine bottle came next, hurtling directly at Jane’s head, and Mitchell blocked it with the blade of his oar. Then a series of thumps, and golf balls were launched into the sky. He could hear them slicing through the air, but the angle was off and the balls crashed against the buildings across the street. When they were more than a block away, Nybuster finally put down his golf club. He stood with middle fingers extended as the canoe faded out of view.

  Jane started laughing then—her unruly arpeggioed laughter, a laughter that climbed through the broken windows, kicked off its shoes, and danced in the abandoned rooms. She turned around to look at Mitchell. It was probably an effect of the grease, but her face was shining.

  “Poof!” she said. “Poof!”

  Nybuster was right. Living in fear was no kind of life. Not long ago—that very morning!—Mitchell had been weak. Soft fibered. Defeated every morning, defeated every night.

  No more.

  6.

  “I haven’t had these since I was ten,” said Jane, her lovely, delicate teeth decapitating a tiger.

  Mitchell’s mouth was full of crackers so he could not immediately reply.

  “Noah took two of every animal,” he said at last. He reached into the box for another cracker. “So did I.”

  They had wedged themselves between the wide crowns of two oak trees near the northeastern corner of Central Park. Manhattan was narrower up here, the water deeper; Mitchell suspected that the Hudson River had flooded as well and the two rivers had converged in the middle, as in the era of the Lenape Indians. Branches poked from the water, their shredded leaves floating in the tide.

  “FutureWorld,” said Jane. “When it rains, it floods catastrophically.”

  “FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “Don’t go with the flow.”

  “FutureWorld: when the going gets tough, the tough jump into a tie-dyed canoe like a couple of half-wits.”

  They were sitting at the height of nesting birds. Baffled sparrows pecked at the water and then hurried back to the treetops, cautious and uncertain. The trees along Fifth Avenue had served as a kind of filter—their branches were cluttered with garbage—but in the interior of the park the water was calm and unusually clear. You could follow the brown trunks down for several feet below the surface. This underwater forest had seemed a good place for a noontime snack, hidden away from the rest of the floating city. They’d removed their PFDs, and Mitchell took out his last box of animal crackers. As soon as he cracked the box, he realized he was starving.

  “Another thing I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Jane. She took a rhinocerous and nibbled on its tusk.

  Mitchell braced himself.

  “Who’s that?” She pointed to his T-shirt.

  “Oh.” He looked down. “It’s an old shirt. I mean, high school old. His name is Leonardo Fibonacci. You know, the Fibonacci sequence?”

  Jane laughed, shaking her head. “Ah. Good old Leonardo Fibonacci. I didn’t know people silk-screened shirts with his face on it.”

  “People don’t. But I did.”

  “This flood is making me bughouse crazy.”

  Jane’s forehead was smudged black from the floodwater and her hair tangled in muddied clumps. But still her face retained its brightness. Even now, bedraggled and exhausted, the light was still on. Only twice, briefly—first when it seemed they were trapped in the apartment and later when they had passed the woman stranded with her infant—had the light gone out. He couldn’t help his mind�
�s eye from drifting back to the previous night. Her hair falling on his face like a caress, the action of her hips, her warm hands.

  She was looking at him as if she’d read his mind.

  “What happened last night,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It was an extreme situation.”

  “I know. This is an extreme situation too.” He gestured at the tree canopies that boxed them in like a garden maze.

  “Right,” she said. “Exactly.”

  Mitchell fed a zebra into his mouth.

  “I’m trying to say that I like you,” she said. “A lot. And not just because today, well, I don’t know any other way to say it: you probably saved my life. It’s just that—”

  “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  She laughed. “I do like you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He actually felt relieved. Earlier that afternoon he’d prepared a little speech, explaining that he had no expectations. He was planning to say something like It was a crazy night, but that’s all it was, one night. Neither of us is exactly in a position to look for anything more … involving.

  Jane relaxed. “I’m glad we agree. You won’t take it personally. Just as I won’t take it personally. We can be friends and forget it ever happened.”

  Mitchell nodded and tried to smile. “Bowwoman and Sternman. Paddling to salvation.”

  Jane tossed her cracker box over the side of the canoe.

  “I know—don’t litter.”

  “You get a pass.”

  The box drifted into a small current that trailed between two leafy islands several dozen yards distant. Then, with a plop, it sank into the water—pulled under by something swimming there. But it seemed to have been rejected, for a few seconds later it bobbed back to the surface.

  Jane shook her head. “The loss of life, the damage. It’s incalculable.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “That seems to be your approach—not thinking.”

  “I haven’t figured out anything better.”

  “Maybe you should try.”