Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “Maybe I will. Later.”

  “That’s the thing—the scale is too great. It’s impossible. We can only see what’s immediately in front of us. It’s difficult to imagine the next avenue, let alone the entire city. All the people.”

  “Most people were smart enough to evacuate,” said Mitchell.

  “Let’s be wildly optimistic. Say ninety-nine percent evacuated. There are one million five hundred and eighty-five thousand people on the island of Manhattan. What’s one percent of that? Fifteen thousand?”

  “Fifteen thousand eight hundred and fifty.”

  “So fifteen thousand eight hundred and fifty people didn’t get out.”

  Mitchell didn’t know what to say. Bubbles rose to the surface several feet from the canoe, gurgling loudly.

  “Not to mention the museums, the libraries, the theaters.”

  “The big ones will be safe. They were built on rock, Manhattan schist. The museum founders thought about floods. So did the rich, who built their mansions on Fifth Avenue—as far away as possible from both rivers. High ground. The central library stands on the side of a hill, eighty feet above sea level.”

  “Grand Central was flooded.”

  “It’s all rock: limestone, marble, granite. It’ll be fine.” He was not going to mention the bodies. Maybe not ever, to anyone.

  “What about the United Nations? That’s right on the river.”

  “The UN is in trouble. It was built on land twelve feet below sea level.”

  “So the Secretariat Building is a fish tank now.”

  “It’s a sunken ship in the East River.”

  “Maybe the very unreality of it all is what’s making me come back again and again to the same terrible thought. I just can’t shake it.”

  “That you’re just happy to be alive?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “That is nice, of course. But that’s not it.”

  “You can say it.”

  She paused, trying to find the right words. “I suppose it’s something like this: if the storm was so horrific, then why is everything now so beautiful?”

  As if on cue, a large black bird swooped over their heads, so low that the water rippled beneath its rush. The crow shrieked as it flew past and landed on a branch several yards away from them. It perched there unsteadily, maneuvering for balance, its talons scratching the bark, its vast wings beating several times in quick succession. Finally it settled. Slowly, with a regal, almost contemptuous motion, it rotated its head to examine the two figures sitting in the garishly stippled canoe. Mitchell and Jane watched in awe. No doubt perturbed by the sight of such large creatures so high in the sky, the crow sprang from the branch with a loud clap of its wings. They watched it soar in the direction of New Jersey.

  “Was that beautiful?” said Mitchell. “Or horrible?”

  They put on their PFDs, snatched up their oars, and resumed paddling. The fog had lifted and the air was clear, if not particularly fresh. The flooding wasn’t as severe once they got north of the park, since the elevation was higher. Harlem was empty and still. There were times when, the water depth having dropped enough that the hull began to scratch the pavement, they had to get out of the canoe and walk alongside it for a block or two, but they never ran aground. Their voyage had settled into a routine; there were no imminent threats to their safety and yet the spookiness never entirely dissipated. The cloudless sky seemed a kind of madness after the storm. But it wasn’t until they got to 135th Street that he realized what was unsettling him.

  Déjà vu. Of course he’d never seen before anything like a flooded city. But now the blueness of sky, the bright cobalt blueness … He stared at the place where the buildings touched the still floodwater. It was difficult to tell exactly at what point the buildings stopped and their reflections began. The buildings might have continued forever in either direction.

  It was his skycity. In his dreams what he had thought to be an infinite city, floating in space, was in fact a flooded New York. The sun was unusually bright because it bounced off the glassy surface of the water. If he fell from his tower, as in his dreams he often feared, he wouldn’t plunge forever, like Alice in the rabbit hole. He’d splash into the water. Maybe the reason the sky was so blue was because the rains had ended. All the filth of the world—its parasites and disease and wormlike anxieties—had been wiped away, just like the bacterial sludge on his living room window. His skycity had been rinsed by the flood. And what a glorious place it was.

  7.

  He was in no kind of physical shape, but as the day had progressed, he felt stronger. He looked forward to the challenge of crossing the Hudson—a true test of his sternman prowess. He began estimating the velocity of the Hudson’s current, the angle at which he should direct the Pyscho Canoe, the distance between the shores.

  But he never had the opportunity. As they turned onto Fort Washington Avenue, Jane gave a celebratory whoop, startling him from his calculations. Amid aid tents and portable toilets, a crowd of flood refugees stood around the edge of Bennett Park. They regarded Mitchell’s canoe perplexedly but quickly lost interest. After all they’d seen in the past twenty-four hours, what was a tie-dyed canoe?

  An aid worker ran to meet them, taking pulses and checking temperatures before they could even step out of the boat. As soon as they were on solid ground Jane pushed past the worker and jumped into Mitchell’s surprised arms.

  She kissed him greasily on the cheek, then withdrew so she could look him in the eye. “That was courageous. You’re the best sternman a bowwoman could ever hope for.”

  Mitchell hugged her back. From spending all day in the canoe, he was uneasy on his feet. He clung to her like an invalid. He shut his eyes tight, and when he opened them, everything was blurry. For a moment he felt as if the canoe had capsized and they were now sinking underwater.

  There was nothing to do with the Psycho but abandon it. He dragged it under a tree and turned it upside down, leaving the paddles and orange PFDs beneath it so that someone else in need could use it. Then he walked away. He wasn’t sad to leave the Psycho behind. In fact he hoped never to see it again for the rest of his life.

  A makeshift terminal had been established beneath the George Washington Bridge. Shell-shocked refugees were ferried across the river to New Jersey, where a shuttle ran them to Fort Lee High School. From there government-commandeered buses left every few hours, headed across the country in all directions: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Houston, and Portland, Maine. The country’s second cities were preparing to receive the humbled New Yorkers.

  In the mobbed gymnasium of Fort Lee High School Mitchell and Jane registered at an information desk and filled out Red Cross questionnaires. Mitchell wrote down the locations of Ned Nybuster, the wailing man, and the woman with the infant. They were given water bottles and cheese sandwiches and told to find a place on the floor. After seeing next to no one all day in the abandoned city, it was overwhelming to smell, hear, and see so many people packed into a single room. Laughter, bawling, manic ranting, furtive mumbles, and the now-familiar scent of dried sewage water, obscene body odor, urine, old sweat—too much too soon.

  “You going to Kansas City?” said Jane.

  He honestly hadn’t thought about it. “We’d be on the same bus, right? Are you going back to Chicago?”

  “Winnetka, you mean?” She shook her head. “Here’s the thing you have to understand about my parents. I’m the first person from my high school ever to attend Princeton. Then I was accepted at Wharton and finally hired for a high-paying job at a financial firm. I earn enough that I start saving to buy my own Manhattan apartment. But every time we talk, my parents ask me when I’m going to do something with my life. Why can’t I be like my sisters—all of them married, all of them pregnant. Perpetually. Perpetually pregnant, like feral dogs in heat. Two of them are younger than me. You know what else they ask me, my parents? They ask me when I’m going to make them proud.”

  “So which bus are you going to ta
ke?”

  “None of them, if I can help it. I’ll wait until the water subsides. It can’t be more than a week or two, right? New York is where I always wanted to be. I don’t think that will change. The city is invincible.”

  “You still believe that?”

  “You’ll see. It’ll come back. You said so yourself. It always has. I don’t want to go so far away that I can’t return.”

  It occurred to Mitchell that Jane might be right in the short term—New York would come back, certainly Manhattan and perhaps certain swaths of Brooklyn. But what about the long term? For the long term was now upon them. According to the scientists, these would become the presiding conditions. Over the next years and decades, things would not be as before. Things would be, for starters, a lot wetter. The floods would keep coming, more and more frequently. Soon the coastal cities would lose the will to rebuild the old seawalls and levees. No one would have to pay to hear about worst-case scenarios—they’d be living them, night and day. The future would vanish as a preoccupation; the present would consume man’s full energies. The nation’s money and power would gradually transfer to the largest inland cities. Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta—even Kansas City—ascendant. Miami, San Francisco, New Orleans, Houston: drowning. Or would the major cities retreat inland? Boston to Worcester? Los Angeles to Orange County? Invincible New York would persist, but it would be rebuilt as a canal city. Amsterdam on the Hudson. Amsterdam in the Hudson. Boats instead of cars. Canoes instead of bicycles. In a floating world, Sternman would be king.

  Cell service was still out, so they took turns waiting in line to use a public phone. After nearly two hours Mitchell was finally able to call his parents. His mother gasped when she heard his voice. She was too overcome to speak so she handed the phone to Tibor.

  “Mitchell! Very good. Very, very good to hear your voice. We’ve been calling your phone every second the last two days.”

  “I’m OK, Dad.”

  “We were worried. But then I thought to myself, you know what the Lion King says.”

  “‘I laugh in the face of danger.’”

  “That’s my son!”

  Mitchell could hear his mother sobbing hysterically in the background.

  “Your room is all ready for you,” said Tibor. “And the Zukorminiums—well, the business could always use a smart young executive with big-city know-how. I have an office space for such an executive. Should one day he happen to appear on my doorstep.”

  His mother grabbed the phone. “Honey, you do whatever you want to do. You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want, of course. But you make your own decisions.”

  “Rikki,” said Tibor, warning her.

  “Your son is grown. It’s not for us to say what he should do. Mitchell, just because of this disaster you don’t need to change who you are.”

  But the storm had already changed who he was. He hung up and, despite the groans of irritation from the people behind him, dialed his voice mail and punched in his passwords. He deleted the twelve messages from his parents and skipped five messages from Charnoble—he didn’t have the patience just now—before arriving at a recording from a man whose voice he didn’t recognize. The man sounded confused, and he kept trailing off; Mitchell could make out only the words “Billy,” “attack,” and “sealed,” and he would have assumed it was a wrong number if he hadn’t heard, at the very end, another word: “Bruner.” He pressed the phone hard into his ear and replayed the message:

  “Hey. I’m calling for a Mitchell Zukor? This is Billy. Elsa’s boyfriend. Well she’s still sleeping, but they let us move her back to the infirmary at Ticonderoga. When we were moving her belongings from her old room, I found a note. It said that if anything happened to her—like an attack, actually she specified another attack—that I should give you this other letter she wrote. It’s in a sealed envelope. So: I wondered where I should send it? My phone number is 207-685-4441. Again, this is about Elsa. Elsa Bruner.

  “Also, man? If you need a place to stay. You know, with the flood? We’ve got plenty of space now, unfortunately. So. This is Billy—”

  He found Jane. She was defending a few square feet of floor against a woman who kept trying to insert her child into the space where Mitchell had been sitting. The woman was using her elbows and her knees.

  Mitchell didn’t bother to sit down.

  “You can’t stay here.”

  Jane narrowed her eyes.

  “You should come with me,” said Mitchell. “We’ll tough it out together.”

  “In Kansas City? I don’t think so. That’s a bit too close for comfort. I can already see my folks driving down from Winnetka to pick me up. No way. I can’t go back to the Midwest.”

  “We’re not going to the Midwest,” said Mitchell. “We’re going north.”

  Part Three

  There’s no such thing as courage. There’s only fear. A fear of getting hurt and a fear of dying. That’s why the human race has lasted so long.

  —DAVID GOODIS

  Future Days

  1.

  “It’s just ridiculous.” Jane was getting worked up, her grimy hair dangling across her cheek. “You don’t owe her anything.”

  “Just want to visit her.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what she built. I want to see what she was so proud of. This farm, this life that made her feel safe. Despite everything.”

  He wasn’t being entirely honest, and Jane seemed to know it. Of course, he wanted a chance to talk to her, but even if she were still in her blind limbo, a million miles from Earth, maybe it would be enough just to see her. Maybe it would be enough just to take her hand in his own.

  Jane was giving him one of her death stares.

  “Besides,” he said, in a brusque tone that he did not himself recognize, “there’s a letter.”

  “What kind of letter?”

  “I don’t know. It’s waiting for me.”

  “That’s really wonderful. But I don’t see why I need to come along for the tearful reunion.”

  “I want to go, but not alone. I don’t know another way to say it.”

  “Mm.”

  “Look,” he said, “what happens if they close this center down tomorrow? Would you rather go back to Winnetka?”

  “That’s your most logical argument yet,” she said. “But it’s not going to happen.”

  They were jolted by a loud electronic trill. It was the first time in two days that they’d heard the sound of a machine. The woman beside them leaped to her feet. Like a soldier checking himself after an explosion to make sure all his body parts were intact, she patted herself down and located the ringing phone in her jacket pocket.

  The signal had been restored. It was the first service to come back, before running water and hospitals and even dry ground—the cellular towers and their omnipenetrative electromagnetic fields. Mitchell could feel the electric current zipping through his temporal lobes.

  “I have seven messages from Charnoble,” said Jane after listening to her voice mail. “They’re all for you.”

  A generator was activated, and a television screen that had been rolled into a corner of the gymnasium zapped on. The national news aired hallucinatory images of flooded New York. A traffic light bent like a cheap spoon. A frenzied school of orange carp fed on the torn garbage bags outside a half-submerged Chinese restaurant on First Avenue. A Gramercy Park brownstone had caught on fire; because the adjacent buildings had crumbled, the brownstone appeared to be standing alone in the water, a fiery monolith. And finally the watery outlines of bodies floating like lily pads on Second Avenue. Mitchell looked away.

  He turned on his portable and listened to the messages he had skipped earlier at the public phone. The first three were from Charnoble. A frightening urgency distorted his voice. Charnoble had checked the FEMA website and seen that Mitchell had registered at the Fort Lee relief center.

  “Mitchell!” said Charnoble. “I am so pleased you’ve survived.”


  He explained that FutureWorld was the only consulting firm to have predicted the flood. Word had gotten out—Jason Tanizaki at Lady Madeline had talked to a reporter from Forbes, and now it was everywhere. “I’ve been getting calls all day. Everyone wants to talk to you. Mr. Brumley and even old Mr. Sansome have called me personally. So have cable news, networks, websites. They want to talk to the man they’re calling the Prophet.”

  There were several more like this, interspersed with increasingly frantic messages from his parents and several from college friends he hadn’t seen since graduation. One, who reminded Mitchell that they had sat next to each other in Sputnik for Nudniks on the day of the Seattle earthquake, was now a journalist; he had been assigned to write a feature about Mitchell for The Wall Street Journal. There was a final message from Charnoble. “This is big,” he said. “This is mega. FutureWorld is going mega.” Mitchell thought of megaton nuclear bombs. When he was standing on Beekman Street—the wind crushing umbrellas and hurling them into buildings, the rain like falling ice picks, the security guard’s tired, terrified eyes—Charnoble must have been scurrying to a secure location. The coward was probably in the company car, escaping, at the very moment he’d called Mitchell.

  “What does that monster want?” said Jane.

  She had just spoken with her mother and stepfather. The conversation seemed to have exhausted her. At the beginning of the call she had tried to sound calm, reassuring, but after a few minutes she hung up in exasperation. Just the sound of Winnetka was enough to make her skin pucker.

  “They’re reporting that FutureWorld is the only firm to have predicted the flood,” said Mitchell.

  “That’s right. We were. You were.”

  “Charnoble wants me to do interviews. Though I don’t see why I should help him at this point.”

  “But the flood scenario—you came up with it yourself. Charnoble doesn’t deserve the credit.”

  “They’ll lose interest soon. They’ve got more important things to cover than some consulting firm’s predictions about things that have already happened.”