Jane wasn’t listening anymore.
“What,” said Mitchell. “What is it now?”
She was staring at the television, her mouth open. Mitchell turned.
A patrol boat was ferrying patients from New York Hospital up the East River to the Bronx. Semiconscious bodies doubled over the railing; others lay sprawled on the deck. They had wild eyes and gaping mouths, like astonished fish heaving on the bottom of a fishing boat.
“Exactly. They don’t have time for FutureWorld when this kind of thing—”
“No,” said Jane, impatient. “Read the crawl!”
Squinting, he focused on the text scrolling beneath the images: “… Zukor, a consultant at the firm, the only financial analyst to have foreseen the tragedy…”
“Jesus King,” said Jane. “No wonder Charnoble wants you to call.”
Mitchell’s phone started to ring. It was an unlisted number. When he picked up, the caller introduced himself as a producer from the Morning Show.
“Morning, like top of the morning?” said Mitchell. “Or mourning, like mourning an unspeakable tragedy.”
Jane gestured at him frantically. “Tell them you’ll call back.”
Mitchell hung up.
“Let’s think about this,” she said. “Strategize.”
“There’s nothing to think about. I’m not going to shill for FutureWorld.”
“No,” said Jane. “You should talk to them.”
Mitchell’s phone buzzed again, a different number. They stared at it. Mitchell pressed REJECT INCOMING CALL.
“Look, Charnoble sent you out in the hurricane too,” said Mitchell. “Just so you could make him a few extra consulting dollars. We might have died back there. We should have died. By all odds.”
“That’s just it. You do the interviews, but only on one condition: they don’t credit FutureWorld.”
“What would it say under my name—freelance consultant? What’s the point?”
“It doesn’t say freelance consultant. It says ‘Founder and Director, Future Days.’”
“Future Days?”
“Your new consulting firm.”
“Hold on.”
“You were the soul of FutureWorld. Charnoble was just an administrator, a scheduler. Brumley was the money behind the whole operation—and it was their idea anyway. But you’ve been devising worst-case scenarios since you were a kid. You’re the talent.”
“No way. I appreciate the thought. But I’m not interested.”
“Every scenario we presented to our clients, you created. You did the research. Most important, you were the one who scared the bejesus out of all those Nybusters we met with.”
“Thanks. You were pretty scary yourself.”
“Glad you think so. Because now that you’re the director of Future Days, I was hoping you might consider hiring a number two.”
“Have you been plotting this?”
“Plotting sounds devious. But yeah, I’ve been planning some future scenarios myself the last couple of days. Mitchell, the money is going to be flooding in.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Jane. “Look, you deserve this. Now’s the time to move. It’s a new market. We could make serious, consequential money. For you, frankly, the flood is a best-case scenario.”
“Listen to yourself. You sound like Alec.”
“Alec had his points. He was a good salesman, at least. He knew how to turn fear into capital.”
“Mm.”
“We might as well make the best of a bad situation, right?”
There was a heightened mania in her eyes. Passionate Jane had seized on another passion. She was like a puppy with a new toy clenched between her teeth. Mitchell remembered how she looked in Central Park, dancing when the storm broke, the rain bouncing off her exposed neck, her hair in wild tendrils, giddy and free.
“I can’t think about this now,” he said. “It’s too soon.”
“If we wait much longer, other people, other firms, will jump in. You know Brumley will.”
Mitchell thought of his father, gaping in awe of the high business machinery of New York City. The moral of the Hungarian Revolution: Greed is Good.
His phone rang. Jane tried to read the number that popped up on his display.
“Television calling?”
It was Anchor Liberty, a FutureWorld client. Mitchell plugged in his earphones and connected.
“Zukor, thank God.” It was Harold Harding, the investment firm’s boss. “You’re alive.”
“Mr. Harding? I showed up yesterday morning for our appointment, but the building was closed. The security guard didn’t let me in.”
Jane tapped Mitchell on the shoulder, indicating that she wanted to listen to the conversation. She nudged close to him, and he handed her one of his earbuds.
“Yesterday morning?” said Harding. “You mean the morning Tammy hit? You’re goddamned right it was closed.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“We assumed you left once the storm started bearing down. Why, we were following the directions you gave us yourself.”
“I suppose Alec wanted us to be sure—”
“Charnoble! He made you stay? I never trusted the guy. You, I’ve always respected. Always thought you had a real ability. You know that.”
“Yes sir.”
Jane, next to him, was smiling.
“But he forbade you from leaving the city,” said Harding, incredulous. “He made you go against your own recommendations? Frankly I’m stunned.”
“I’m stunned myself. I’m still in a state of stun.”
“We evacuated all our employees in time—not just the Manhattan office but also Fairfield. Followed your scenario to the letter. Everyone with an Anchor Liberty Go Bag. They avoided the traffic too, sticking to your escape routes.”
“They took Tenth Avenue, then?”
“Tenth to Amsterdam to the 181st Street bridge.”
“So it worked. I’m glad to hear it.”
“A bonus will be arriving with the first mail. Count on that. And now I see you’re some kind of national celebrity. Well, this has been a nightmare, a hell of a nightmare. But we’re grateful to have had your wisdom guiding us through.”
“See what I mean?” said Jane, after Mitchell disconnected. “They depend on you now.”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
“There’s a logic to it, right?” she asked. “A logic, no?”
“Yes,” he said, humoring her. “I see the logic. But how? We have nothing. We might not even have access to our apartments or the office for weeks.”
“That’s my job. All we need is our clients’ information, and I have that on my phone. They know you’re more valuable than Charnoble. We’ll call Anchor Liberty and Lady Madeline and a few other firms right away—those contracts will stake us while we develop our business plan. Especially since you’ll be able to bill more than FutureWorld. A lot more.”
“Future Days, huh?”
“It has a certain ring. If I don’t say so myself.”
“We’ll need a financial team, office space, a marketing strategy.”
“There are profits to be made,” said Jane, “in being prophets.”
“Yep. Got it. But first I’m going to Maine.”
Jane cocked her head, as if he had suddenly started speaking Farsi.
“All right, how’s this,” said Mitchell. “Come with me, and we’ll sort out the details of Future Days on the way.”
The phone rang, another unlisted number.
“Let me take it.”
Mitchell handed Jane his phone.
“I’m his representative,” she said. “Only on one condition,” she said. “Future Days,” she said. “Founder and director.”
Jane hung up.
“This,” she said, “is going to be mega.”
2.
In the ziplock bag the bills had thawed and were lightly perspiring. But he hadn’t needed them yet. Al
l bus and train transit had been government commandeered. The refugees received frequent handouts: sandwiches, bananas, Jell-O cartons, phone chargers, water bottles. There were no longer any shortcuts out of the city. They had to follow the masses; they had to ride the motorcoach. Traveling so slowly was exhausting. They might have made it more quickly on foot. The highways had been transformed into parking lots, shrouded in clouds of exhaust. But it wasn’t just the roads that were crowded; the cars were packed too, crammed full of possessions that had been accumulated over lifetimes. Save two of everything, so that they can replicate in the new world: two flatscreens, two laptops, two gaming consoles.
In the torn-up fields beside the interstate, sinuous white vapor rose like smoke in the wake of an explosion. Tammy had spent the greatest portion of her rage on New York and had weakened once she reached Connecticut, but not considerably. The earth had still been scoured, as by a vast cloud of steel wool. And the road itself was an obstacle course: car crush-ups, roadkill, fallen trees. It took half a day just to reach the Rhode Island state line. Every few hours Mitchell tried to call Billy, but there was not even a ring signal, just an empty, scratchy noise, the sound of a record that keeps spinning after the side is over. The Ticonderoga phone, or the wires, seemed to be dead. Anything that was frail before the storm was now dead.
When television or radio producers called, Jane answered his phone. She introduced herself as Mitchell Zukor’s publicist. She coached Mitchell to speak with humility and formality, and she limited interviews to five minutes. When newspaper and magazine journalists called, Jane introduced herself as Mitchell Zukor’s spokeswoman. She did those interviews herself.
“This is just the very beginning,” said Jane. “Keep them wanting more.”
At one point in almost every conversation he was asked, “What’s going to happen next? To New York, to America, to the world?”
“That information,” said Mitchell, “we reserve for our clients.”
Nobody on the bus paid them any attention.
After midnight the driver pulled over at a turnpike motel in Warwick, where power and electricity had been restored. Mitchell and Jane were given a room with a queen-size bed, dingy yellow carpeting, fluorescent lighting, and a dense cigarette aroma with a urine finish. The bus would leave again in less than six hours. When Mitchell entered the bathroom he was surprised by his reflection. The face in the mirror looked unhappy. In fact the face was giving a very strong suggestion of tears.
Mitchell dumped his sewage-stained clothes into the bathtub: slacks, Leonardo Fibonacci T-shirt, socks, even the boots. He emptied the contents of his Go Bag onto the sink counter—opening the ziplock bag to let the bills air—and then tossed his backpack into the tub as well. He twisted the hot faucet as far as it could go. When the water hit the clothes it released a metallic smell that thickened into something raunchy, animalistic. Mitchell squeezed the microbottle of courtesy shampoo into the tub. He tore open the microbar of courtesy soap and scrubbed at his shirt, trying not to let the blackening water splash on his naked body. But it couldn’t be helped. The stray drops left blue stains on his flesh. Mitchell let the tub drain, then refilled it. This time he emptied the microbottle of courtesy conditioner; it bubbled into an ashy foam. After thirty minutes the clothes, while not clean by any measure, had at least regained their original hues. He hung them on the towel rack and, with the last butter pat of soap, took a shower. When he came out of the bathroom Jane was asleep under the covers, in her clothes.
At rest stops, fast-food chains donated value meals. The bus passengers, blandly dipping their french fries into ketchup splats, didn’t speak very much. For Jane, revived by three cups of coffee, the long silences were maddening, a source of stress. She filled the vacuum with talk about her mother in Winnetka, a fastidious woman who forbade Jane from playing in the sandbox.
“Fear of germs,” she said. “When I came home from school I had to scrub my hands twice with soap and hot water. My little washerwoman hands, raw and red.”
“You didn’t get sick, though, did you?”
“That wasn’t the end of it—after the soap and hot water she sprayed me with disinfectant. Of course it didn’t really matter if my hands were dirty because everything was covered in vinyl. Slips over the furniture. But I did get sick. Often.”
“Because you cheated. You told her you’d washed your hands when you hadn’t.”
“No—because I didn’t cheat. That was the problem. I never built up a proper immune system. When I was given the chicken pox vaccine, I actually contracted full-blown chicken pox. The infectious disease specialist at Skokie Hospital said mine was the first case in Chicagoland in a decade.”
The shoulders on I-95 were plugged with cars. Many people had run out of gas; others had given up and, in some cases, pitched tents in the median, waiting for the traffic to subside. The exhaust was so dense on the road that it seeped into the bus’s air circulation system. It thickened into a large pillow, and the pillow pressed into Mitchell’s face, stopping his breath. He felt like he was being asphyxiated and he was only surprised that nobody else seemed affected by the recirculating exhaust—nobody was passing out or keeling over in the aisles. Nobody on the bus, in fact, was doing much of anything. The traffic, or traumatic shock, or just pure exhaustion had left the refugees in a narcotized stupor. They leaned against each other to sleep, or stared out the windows with expressions of horror and wonderment, preparing, perhaps, for the next crisis.
At the New Hampshire border, Jane began calling FutureWorld clients to introduce them to Future Days. The clients had heard Mitchell’s voice on television and radio, had seen the Wall Street Journal piece. Charnoble’s messages and e-mails, frantic coming on enraged, went unreturned.
But Jane’s constant phone chatter, her interviews and her repeated pitch to the FutureWorld clients she was busily poaching, finally became too much. Mitchell took the phone from her hand and turned it off.
“Why’d you do that?” She looked wounded.
“Let’s take a break.”
Jane sighed. “I suppose I was getting a little carried away. It’s just … incredible. How things can turn.”
“What do you mean?”
“A year ago today I was at Lippincott Library doing research for my thesis.”
“A day ago you were an analyst. Now you’re a mogul.”
“It’s been a long day.”
She needed to talk, needed chatter. It was almost a compulsion with her. The phone calls to clients were as much a manifestation of nervous energy as shrewd business planning. He couldn’t fault her. Set adrift, in a bus headed into unknown territory, it helped to grasp onto something familiar. Besides, he was responsible, after all, for the mess they were in.
That was the one thing unspoken between them. He should have told her to leave the city as soon as the storm came. But he had said no such thing. He did the opposite, in fact: when she asked him to wait for her, he had agreed. Very well, but—let’s be honest now—he wasn’t just being timid, or thoughtless, or kind. He was succumbing to a different voice, a whispering voice inside his own head. It was a reasonable, patient voice. It said, if he had to be trapped in this hurricane, wouldn’t it be nice to be trapped with Jane Eppler?
“And a year from now?” he said.
“Future Days signs its one hundredth client? Two hundredth?”
The bus passed over Memorial Bridge. A sign showing a church steeple in front of brown mountains announced LEAVING NEW HAMPSHIRE: LIVE FREE OR DIE. They passed beneath a sad, crooked pine tree, its crown bent like the head of a man whose neck has been snapped. Another sign said WELCOME TO MAINE: VACATIONLAND.
The traffic slowed to a stop. A hundred yards distant, the interstate passed over what had been, at normal water levels, a marina. The flood had receded, but the boats were stuck on the shore, in trees. A motorboat sat jackknifed across the shoulder, blocking two lanes.
And then he couldn’t think any longer—not a single secon
d longer—about Jane or her business plan for Future Days or the horrors they had left behind. For up ahead, on the horizon, loomed Elsa Bruner. And if she were hurtling ever farther into outer space—past constellations and galaxies, pulled by some dark energy, flying faster and faster to the outer reaches of the universe—then she was also becoming larger, vaster, boundless even, drawing into herself all his fears but reflecting nothing.
* * *
Portland, though structurally sound, was still damp; the streets shone like black ice. The government booked them into the Eastland Park, a towering 1930s-era redbrick hotel with a grand lobby lit by dim electric candlesticks. The bellhops wore pillbox caps and blazers with brass buttons. Nobody appeared to be staying there besides the bussed-in flood refugees, whose numbers had depleted with every stop after Lowell, Massachusetts. Even Portlanders had fled the storm, headed farther north, into the woods—to Aroostook County, Quebec, Prince Edward Island.
The double room granted to Jane and Mitchell was trying badly to be something it was not. There was a divan upholstered in apricot plush, a crimson-and-yellow-checkered marble table, an oval mirror squatting on curved cane legs. The sense of disorientation was extreme. It wasn’t only that they were in an unfamiliar place; it was another era, an alternate universe. There was a television, but it didn’t work. They had to lie in separate beds, as in a black-and-white movie. Perhaps it was better this way. No missed signals, no ambiguity. Safe.
After the lights went out, just as Mitchell was falling asleep, Jane rose. She stepped over to his bed and lifted his blanket.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said.
3.
This time, to his surprise, he actually got a ringtone. Then the machine answered. Billy’s voice had a distant, befuddled quality, as if he had been awakened in the middle of a dream.
“I’m afraid … I’m sorry. This is Billy, from Camp Ticonderoga. I’m afraid that we are not able to offer positions—bunks, or, I mean, shelter and food or … water to any more refugees from Tammy. I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re out of space. We ask you please. We have heard that other camps have been set up in Augusta and Bangor and the north country. But we’re overwhelmed. I—I’m sorry.”
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