Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  The tree above him was crackling and the smaller branches glowed golden. Mitchell felt dizzy and forgot what he was doing here, lying on the ground. It would be quite pleasant, he decided, to sleep at the foot of this tree. But as his eyes closed something pulled him, and he knew that it was Elsa, the Black Star, drawing him toward her, and then he was stumbling back to his feet and running the last twenty feet to the infirmary.

  He tried to hold the clean air in his lungs but when he ran around the side of the building he found that the air was clearer; a breeze was blowing from the lake, pushing the smoke up the hill. He prepared himself for what would come next. First he would have to remove whatever tubes were plugged into her. He’d make sure she was wearing her gown. Then he’d roll her out of the bed and over his shoulder. It wouldn’t be difficult to lift her; she was very small and no doubt had lost weight during her hospitalization. He would carry her away, not up the hill, at least not at first, but to the softball field. Then he could return, grab whatever medication or tubes or serums he could find in her room, and stuff them into his pockets; and finally, assuming none of the men from the bushes tried to interfere—just let them try!—he would carry Elsa up the slope to safety.

  Some distant part of his brain told him to stand out of the way when he opened the door, that the surge of oxygen might ignite a spark, but the other part of his brain, the part that was now dominant, made him pull the door back hard and rush in without hesitation. And then he was inside the infirmary.

  He was in a dark yellow room. There was no fire or smoke. But the walls were melting. Brown spots bloomed on the dark yellow wallpaper, and the paper was curling off in wide strips, exposing a glutinous, whitish plaster. It looked as if he were surrounded by bananas that were peeling themselves. He realized that this was not a bedroom at all, but a small doctor’s office. There was a shelf that held cardboard boxes of gauze and latex gloves and pill bottles. The glass pill bottles had burst, and there was brown and green glass sprinkled on the floor. There was a small examination table with dark yellow padding and a metal scale and a steel sink. There was a steel counter on which there were arrayed steel tongs, a plastic bowl filled with dark yellow lozenges, a reflex hammer, a blood pressure cuff, and the remains of a shattered jar of tongue depressors. The depressors had spilled onto the floor, which was a pattern of checkerboard squares done in brown and silver. An old thermometer lay at the edge of the counter, and Mitchell bent to read it. It must have been broken, because it read 208°F. Mitchell wiped a great sleeve of sweat from his face. There was no other person in the room.

  At the far end, there was a brown door. Mitchell’s thinking began again to slow down and this time he decided to feel the door before opening it. It was not any hotter than the air, so he opened the door and looked into a second room.

  This was not a bedroom, not exactly, more like an alcove, though there was a single bed in it. The bedsheets had been pulled back, revealing the mattress. There was an IV stand beside it, and on a table near the doorway there were about a dozen empty orange prescription bottles. Mitchell looked at one of the labels. It said, in a sloppy cursive: “Isoproterenol—dissolve 10mg in 1 gallon purified water/BRUNER, ELSA.”

  He scanned Elsa’s room for an envelope with his name on it, but he saw nothing. There was another doorway leading out of the not-exactly-bedroom, but flames were licking around the jambs. When he angled over to look into the hallway, all he saw was a curtain of bright blue fire. He realized that he was coughing again, only worse than before, and the pine needles in his lungs had become small scalpels that were excavating his chest from the inside. He backed away, out of Elsa’s room and into the office, where two small arms grabbed him around the waist.

  She dragged him outside, and he didn’t resist. They stumbled into the softball field, coughing, and collapsed into the dry dust.

  “Your face,” said Jane, coughing. “Oh dear God.”

  She gave him a bottle of water and he drank, pausing every few gulps to cough and spit and breathe. Jane bent over his face and gently wiped away the inky soot.

  “I don’t understand you,” she was saying. He didn’t tell her how much it hurt when she touched his face. Her fingers trembled as they brushed his skin.

  “Is it bad?” he asked, when he could speak.

  “It’s not good,” she said, pouring water on his scraped chin. “But it could’ve been worse. You could be dead.”

  “She wasn’t there.”

  Jane pulled back, squinting down at him quizzically. She nodded. “Now I know what it is that’s getting me.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have eyebrows anymore.”

  * * *

  At the gate they found the woman with the squid-ink spaghetti hair.

  “See? They’re fighting for control. It’s a zoo. A war. I just know my husband won’t come back. He’s off in the woods. Thinks he’s back in his regiment.” She looked at Mitchell more closely. “You should put some Neosporin on that. What did you do, run into the fire?”

  “The people who ran the farm,” said Mitchell. “What happened to them?”

  “The kids? They’re gone.”

  “Gone? Gone how?”

  “I don’t know. No one does.”

  “You haven’t heard anything.”

  “Oh, I have heard things. I have heard Canada. I have heard the Midwest. And I have heard that they never made it out of the infirmary.”

  “You tried,” said Jane, handing Mitchell the folded page from the Kennebec Journal. “But now it’s time to call Judy.”

  They sleepwalked through the billowing smoke, past a young girl defecating in the middle of the road and a woman curled on the shoulder bawling for her husband and a boy of twelve or so crawling through the brush, his arm bandaged and bloody—they walked away from Ticonderoga and Elsa Bruner’s exploded dream.

  Judy’s station wagon was waiting just past the fork in the road. She had never left.

  5.

  “As in the prophet Mitchell Zukor?”

  “Excuse me? No. Um. I don’t think so.”

  “The financial consultant Mitchell Zukor, the guy who predicted…” The FEMA representative, struggling to put it into words, overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all, finally just gestured around her to the white trailers and the snaking food lines and, in the distance, the smoke billowing from the Manhattan skyline. The skyline looked like photographs of Beijing, the smoke blurring the contours of the buildings into a swampy gray soup.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “This guy. Mitchell Zukor. Z-u-k-o-r. He is also the founder and director of Future Days, a new futurist consulting firm.”

  “My. What are you doing here? Of all people—”

  “We’d like a trailer,” said Jane. “Our own trailer. If possible.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” But then the FEMA employee turned back to Mitchell and a tremor passed through her body. Her bureaucratic seemliness cracked and split open. “Mr. Zukor, if you don’t mind. What is going to happen to us next?” She was becoming mucousy. “God help us, what will happen next?”

  * * *

  It had been a lively drive back from Vacationland—a shorter one too. The trip to Augusta had taken three days; they made the return in six hours. But first Judy had stopped at her house on Winthrop Street, where she found a bandage for Mitchell’s chin, a tube of first-aid cream, and a jar of aloe vera.

  “You look like a Martian,” said Judy as Jane gingerly applied a dressing of the green goo to Mitchell’s pink face. “Does it hurt?”

  Mitchell shrugged, as if to suggest that he couldn’t feel the burn. But he felt it, oh Lord did he feel it, the skin tender and already beginning to blister. When Jane accidentally applied pressure to his cheek the pain caused his eyes to water.

  Jane ordered Mitchell into the backseat and explained to him that she would be making the decisions from now on. She asked Judy to take them to the nearest police station so they could report what they’d seen at Tic
onderoga.

  “The cops?” said Judy in mock disbelief. “The cops are overwhelmed. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Most of these folks work on call, part-time, and they never had to govern a crowd or do much more than write folks speeding tickets. They’re stuck in the cities. At the state refugee centers in Augusta, even in Lewiston, there are breadlines for miles. A man in South Portland was stabbed to death because he cut the line. And Canada is squeezing the border.”

  “Fine, but something has to be done.”

  “It’ll improve once all the power comes back. People will resettle elsewhere. But for now there is nothing to do. Only panic.”

  Jane, having taken control of Mitchell’s Go Bag and the cash inside of it, offered Judy an extra hundred dollars to drive them to the Portland bus terminal. There Jane found a Greyhound driver named Herman Loaiza who had been contracted by FEMA. He was about to return to New York, on two hours of sleep, to collect a new batch of refugees.

  “You want to go back there?” said Herman, looking suspiciously at Mitchell, whose face still glistened with the green aloe. “What, you forgot something?”

  “We have nothing keeping us here,” said Jane.

  “New York is admitting nobody. Not even buses.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  “Randall’s Island. FEMA Trailer City. That’s where the folks are waiting to evacuate. Nope, sorry.”

  Jane opened Mitchell’s Go Bag and showed Herman the cash-stuffed ziplock.

  The northbound lanes were still jammed but the southbound road was empty. Herman kept it at eighty miles an hour. Mitchell lay across a pair of seats and tried to figure out why he had wanted to run inside the burning infirmary. Perhaps he had just wanted to see it for himself, the incineration of Elsa’s Ticonderoga dream. There was a grim satisfaction in that, as there was in the sight of the men stalking the woods. Elsa’s fantasy had been overrun by the actual world and its desperate hordes, and the tragedy—which was really almost a comedy—was how plainly predictable this outcome should have been. Even without the flood, a design so excruciatingly naive couldn’t have survived very long. What confused Mitchell was how he had failed to see it coming himself. If anyone should have been able to predict the chaos that Ticonderoga had become, it was Mitchell. This was his profession, after all. He didn’t have to do historical research on utopian communes or cooperative societies in order to know that most of them ended in disillusionment, pettiness, and, yes, violence. If he could insure behemoth corporations, shield them from risk, why hadn’t he tried harder to save the life of a single sick girl?

  “How is it?” Jane asked Herman. “In New York?”

  “You know it’s real bad,” said Herman, “because you can’t see anything. I mean, there’s news videos, things like that? I seen waves—I’m saying whitecaps—on Broadway. Right in front of Lincoln Center. Taxis—a dozen? Floating in a pack down First Avenue. Like a school of whales. Yellowback whales.”

  “Have you heard any numbers?” asked Jane.

  Herman shook his head. “The problem is that you can’t tell which of those pictures is fake.”

  “Fake? How?”

  “You seen the Swimming Boy?”

  They had. It aired on the television in the Fort Lee gymnasium, and they had caught it again at a service station near Lowell where the bus driver had taken a fifteen-minute smoke break. The clip was an instant smash; it had already been viewed online half a billion times. The video was shot from several stories up, presumably from a window across the street. The subject of the film was a blond-haired boy, no older than twelve, who finds himself standing alone on the roof of a car in the middle of a residential block. It might be the Lower East Side, Carroll Gardens, perhaps Bay Ridge. The car sits like a boulder in a fast-moving channel, the water galloping wildly on either side. At the beginning of the clip the boy waves across the street at someone, trying to communicate. The camera pans down to reveal a second, older boy—his brother, by the looks of it—halfway down the block, standing on a high stoop that is not yet submerged. He gestures for his younger brother to join him, to swim across the street.

  The little towheaded boy takes a deep breath, his shoulders rising and falling. He leaps—headfirst, arms outstretched—into the churning water. He wheels his arms and kicks wildly, but he is no match for the current. He flies past his brother, who is now screaming in despair, and careens to the next block. There, just before it seems he will collide with a parked van, he bobs beneath the water—apparently for good.

  Then, out of nowhere, a police patrol airboat sweeps into the intersection. The officer, leaning over the guardrail, reaches into the water and pulls the boy out by his wrist. The boy spits and heaves, but he is alive. Newscasters asked viewers to identify the savior and the courageous swimming boy.

  “Did they find him?”

  “Sure did,” said Herman. “It’s fake. It’s actors.”

  “Impossible.”

  “That’s the story today. Producer in Hollywood has politician friends. He had footage that never made it into some old disaster picture. Does a little touch-up to make it look like New York. Then the government sends it to the news programs.”

  “But why would they do that?” said Jane. “That’s sick.”

  “They need to tell a story. Distract from what’s actually going on. Hell, even if people find out the truth, that’s no worse—one more day of distraction. Point is, they don’t want us to know how bad it is.”

  It occurred to Mitchell that Herman was right. Tammy was worse than anyone could imagine. Like all major catastrophes, it surpassed the limits of imagination. And what was human imagination, after all, but the reconfiguration of past events? Tammy—like Seattle—was an innovative disaster. Its horrors were unprecedented. It created images that man had never seen before, but once seen, could never be unseen.

  Yet Jane, as they drove at eighty miles per hour back to the flooded city, seemed emboldened. Exhilarated even.

  “Do you think this is just the beginning?” she asked Mitchell.

  “Beginning of what?”

  “That there will be more hurricanes and more floods?”

  “That’s the trend. Natural disasters have been trending upward for the last three decades.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “It will get worse, but by how much I have no idea. Our expectations are constantly being surpassed. The scales need to be recalibrated.”

  “Then we’re in the right line of business. Wouldn’t you say? The more uncertainty, the higher the stakes—Future Days will only get bigger and bigger. Futurism is the way—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Of the future! Sorry. It wanted to come out.”

  They laughed, a bit too hard. It wasn’t funny. They just wanted to laugh. And as they laughed, Mitchell realized how badly they had been craving human things—laughter, certainly, also intimacy, cleanliness. But they’d wanted animal things too: food, water, sex. The animal things they had wanted even more desperately.

  “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” said Jane. “If I didn’t, I guess I’d cry.”

  He didn’t know whether it was the sight of Jane about to break down that did it, or the thousands of people gridlocking on the northbound side of the interstate, the fossils of their destroyed lives strapped to the roofs of their cars, or the highway signs twisted like paper clips, or the roadkill, which was everywhere, not just deer and skunks but birds and a black bear lying flat on its back, its teeth gleaming an unnatural white, and cats and dogs by the dozen with name tags around their broken necks. But it was only now that it occurred to him that Elsa, most certainly without medical care, had entered some new hell. For all he knew, she was dying this very second. Maybe she was already dead.

  As the bus passed Hartford (PLEASE ENJOY THE “INSURANCE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”!), the vast absurdity of the whole enterprise became a cattle prod and he was the dumb bovine, and the cattle prod was pushing one simple m
essage into his animal brain. The message was: disorder always won in the end. The idea that man could order the world to his own design was the most pitiful fairy tale ever told. An empty house, left alone for just a single year, begins to return to the earth. It starts with a storm, a ceiling leak. Pollen and rainwater seep in, and before long, a tree has taken root in the living room, its branches pushing out the windows, the birds and squirrels invading. This was true of man too. Even the most brilliant mathematician, late in life, was infantilized by old age. He lost his memory, motor skills, potty skills. It was a universal rule. Not even the universe itself was spared. It too was going senile. Space was cooling, and one by one all the stars would go out in the sky. Disaster: from Latin dis- “ill-” and astro “starred,” a calamity caused by an unfavorable configuration of the stars.

  Everything was disintegrating, yet here was man, the poor schlemiel, running around with his glue and his tape. Back in the city the federal government was now probably dredging Manhattan, repairing the bridges, planning task forces and emergency construction jobs. There was something insane about it. Pathetic too. The next flood would come, then another one. You could only delay the inevitable. Every arrow pointed down. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to unbreak the egg. What was the point?

  Jane, of course, was right—this was where the futurist came in. Essentially a futurist was asked to prevent the future from happening. He was paid to devise solutions that might halt change. The solutions were obvious: build higher seawalls, reinforce the concrete, use stronger alloys. Vaccinate and immunize; pack a Go Bag and a PFD. Preservation was the human instinct, or at least the American instinct. Those in power wanted to be told that everything will stay just as before—as long as you purchase a little insurance. And this was the service that Future Days would provide. In the short term, it would be a lucrative business. And the short term was all that mattered. He was beginning to think there would be no long term.