Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  “What are you keeping from us?” said an old man in a cloth cap and grimy overcoat, very close to Mitchell’s ear.

  “I’ve heard about you,” said a woman with a crumpled, washed-out face, on the other side of him. She smelled of detergent. He thought she might have been one of the McIntyres.

  “Tell us what you know.” This was a skinny white man with five-day stubble and a ghastly Oklahoma-shaped scab across his nose. He shook with rage, spittle forming on his lip. His fists clenched. “Tell us, kid!”

  The man reached out and nudged Mitchell’s shoulder. “Tell us!”

  Mitchell raised his arms in front of his face. He was trapped within a tiny chamber of noise and saliva.

  And then a very strong and very large hand came down on his head.

  7.

  They met after midnight at the northern tip of the island, beneath the railroad overpass.

  It was too dark to see faces. That was the point. If the expedition failed, they didn’t want to get arrested. Already there were rumors that the jails were swelling, that a person who stole bottled water would be tossed into the same cell as the murderers. In case they needed a further reminder, the yellow blinking lights of Rikers Island were visible across the river, the searchlights cutting scythes in the black water.

  It was too dark to see faces, but Mitchell could tell that there were eight people in all, only three of whom he could identify: himself, Jane, and Hank Cho. It wasn’t difficult to pick out Hank. He was six three, about 230 pounds, with a powerful torso and a broad, flat head like a tombstone. His arms, too, were brawny, but short, as if the bulk he had added to his arm muscles caused them to contract. The general resemblance was to one of those carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs. Mitchell had felt the power in Hank Cho’s fingers that afternoon, when Hank placed his palm over Mitchell’s head.

  “Leave the boy,” Hank had said. “He don’t know shit.”

  The fingers exerted a remarkable pressure on Mitchell’s skull.

  “And they call him prophet,” yelled one of the McIntyre men.

  Hank gave McIntyre a defiant glare. McIntyre shrugged, and turned his back. The crowd dissipated, the refugees wandering to their trailers. Once the danger had passed, Hank lifted his hand.

  “Thank you,” said Mitchell. “They wanted to kill me.”

  “I have a proposition for you,” said Hank. He gestured at Jane. “And your friend.”

  And so they ended up at the midnight meeting beneath the railroad overpass.

  The plan was simple. They were going to get off FEMA island. Where they ended up would be their own business, but for safety they would escape in a single group. They’d leave in the middle of the night. The plan was simple, but the execution posed problems.

  “They patrol the roads,” said one man. “You trying to swim?”

  “They patrol the three highway bridges. But not the Hell Gate. That’s only for freight trains. It spans the Bronx Kill.”

  “What?”

  “The water between here and Queens.” Hank pointed in the direction of the RFK Bridge. “That. The Hell Gate is the little bridge, without the lights. In front of the big one.”

  The RFK was lit brightly now, electricity having been restored, but the old railroad bridge stood in complete darkness. In the moonlight all you could see were the triangle cutouts of the steel trusses and the squat towers on either shore. Mitchell had never seen the bridge before, but he remembered it from disaster assessments of New York. The Army Corps of Engineers concluded that the Hell Gate would be the last bridge standing in New York after a nuclear explosion. Left to nature, it would outlast every other bridge in the city by a millennium.

  “Hell Gate over Bronx Kill?” someone said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Looks dangerous.”

  “We have to walk on train tracks?”

  “This is ludicrous.” That was Jane.

  Inwardly Mitchell cursed Alec Charnoble. In some way, he was convinced, this was all Charnoble’s fault.

  “The Hell Gate will take us into Astoria,” said Hank. “It’s a freight track, but there are no trains running now. We stay on the track past the bridge. It goes over Woodside, then bends south to Middle Village, Ridgewood, all the way to Broadway Junction.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I work for the MTA.”

  “Yeah, right. Doing what?”

  “Track maintenance foreman.”

  “I don’t live but ten blocks from Broadway Junction,” said someone.

  “I’m two stops east.”

  “From Broadway Junction,” said Hank, “you can go wherever you like. I’m planning on heading south.”

  “You from down there?”

  “Nope. Flushing. But I’ve been hearing that Flatlands and below got clean swept away.”

  “Why you going, then?”

  “I’m looking to start again.”

  No one had anything to say about that.

  “What are the Flatlands?” This was Mitchell.

  “It’s just about the end of the earth,” someone said. “Or as close as you can get without leaving New York City.”

  “It’s east of Flatbush Avenue, west of Ralph,” said Hank. “Near Mill Basin and the Belt Parkway, protected by the Rockaways from the sea. No subways go there. It was working class—mostly West Indians and Orthodox Jews. Now it’s a giant patch of dirt. You can bet the government won’t be rehabilitating it anytime soon.”

  “It’s cold,” Jane whispered in Mitchell’s ear. “Can we go?”

  “One second,” said Mitchell. “Let’s hear him out.”

  “When’s this supposed to happen?” someone said.

  “Tomorrow night,” said Hank. “We meet at the far end of the tennis courts. I’ll bring flashlights. But we don’t turn them on until we’re over Hell Gate.”

  The only sound was the river slapping playfully against the rocks.

  “Any other questions?”

  “Yeah,” said one woman. “Why are you in charge?”

  “You got a better idea, pop it.”

  They waited.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow midnight. Don’t let the word out. We don’t know who’s watching.”

  Mitchell and Jane separated from the others and walked quickly back to their trailer.

  “Who could be watching us?” said Jane after they were out of earshot. “He’s not just paranoid. He’s delusional.”

  “Paranoia has its advantages. Did you see his arms?”

  “Yeah. That dude is a piece of meat.”

  The smell engulfed them as soon as they entered the trailer, a sour, moldering, damp animal rot—the smell of despair.

  “It’s intolerable,” said Mitchell.

  “I know. I’d open the windows, but then we lose the AC. Lose-lose.” She cracked open a can of water and took a swig. “We have to get out of here. But we have to be smart about it.”

  “Mm.”

  “You’re thinking about going,” she said. “You’re actually thinking about leaving tomorrow. With Korean G.I. Joe.”

  “The man is Chinese.”

  “What about me?”

  “We go together.”

  “And Future Days?”

  “The FEMA people say it’ll be at least a week until the city opens. That’s optimistic. We have time.” He watched for her reaction. She didn’t react. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Look, I don’t feel safe here either. But it’s better than the Flatlands.”

  There was more to it, of course. It wasn’t only fear for their safety that made the Flatlands seem like a promising alternative. Unless he had some time to concentrate, in solitude, and consider everything that had happened, he wouldn’t be able to figure out the next thing, the big thing to which FutureWorld, Tammy, and even Ticonderoga were inexorably leading him. And there had to be something else, didn’t there? For if not, what had all this been for?

  “You saw the way they went after me yester
day,” said Mitchell. “They wanted to kill me. If it weren’t for Hank Cho, what do you think would have happened?”

  “I realize. But casting out into the unknown? It’s just so not like you.”

  “I’m not like me anymore.”

  There had to be a big, perfect thing right ahead, some pursuit more vast and profound than fear prediction. Now that his old way of life was gone, nothing remained. He was as bare as the floodgrounds. So there had to be something larger up ahead, because if not, then the only thing was destruction and chaos—

  “So you would just leave me here,” said Jane. She looked frantically around the trailer: the stained cabinets, the wilted, understuffed polyester couch, the linoleum floor that curled up at the edges like a piece of burning paper.

  “Of course not. I’m just saying the guy’s plan is worth some thought.”

  Jane went into the bedroom. Out flew a pillow, then the extra blanket.

  “You can think about the plan all you want,” she said, “over there.” She pointed to the couch.

  The door closed, then locked.

  He switched off the overhead fluorescent panel and spread the moth-bitten blanket over his body. That was Jane for you. Determined, devoted, never casual. She demanded full devotion in return. And she deserved it. But could he give it to her?

  He had a picture of Jane carefully wiping the soot off his face outside the infirmary at Ticonderoga, cradling his head in her trembling hands. He blocked it out. He turned on the couch and tried to hit the cushions into softness, but nothing worked, and then an uncomfortable sensation covered him like a heavy woolen blanket and he couldn’t escape from under it. For the first time he could remember, he was making a plainly irrational decision. Jane’s logic was sound. Futurism, as she’d put it on Herman Loaiza’s bus, was the way of the future. After Tammy, the risk market would be at peak demand. It was important to establish Future Days immediately. Futurism was now a job for specialists, but it wouldn’t be much longer. A few more years of these new meteorological patterns, a few more disasters, and every person on the street would be able to speak intelligently about drought, methane pollution, UV poisoning. The intricacies of planetary collapse would be general knowledge. Kid stuff. So Jane had every reason to act with urgency. And Mitchell had every reason to join her.

  What was the alternative? Elsa’s Ticonderoga dream of a self-sustaining farm, toxin-free food, the creation of so much natural energy that the surfeit could electrify the rest of the county? Sure, all that was noble, that was fine. Elsa had been a kind of futurist herself, her behavior driven by her fear about what was happening to the planet—and to herself. But Mitchell had been in finance too long to lose sight of the truth about Ticonderoga. What, after all, was its source of income? Billy’s father’s money. That wasn’t a business model. It was a charity, financed by good intentions. This put Ticonderoga squarely on the wrong side of history. It was a local, virtuous, and limited enterprise. The Nybusters of the universe would never invest in a Ticonderoga. They wanted to be insulated from transformational change. That’s why Future Days was the present, if not also the future. The question was whether it was Mitchell’s future.

  He realized that he was pacing around the room. He reached into the refrigerator for a water. As he popped the can, he heard a knocking behind him. So—Jane had reconsidered.

  “Jane?” he said. “Should I come in?”

  “That wasn’t me,” Jane called out from inside the bedroom.

  There was more knocking. The trailer rattled. He went to the front door. Marcy Rosado was back, with her child. This time she had brought twenty-five people.

  “Mr. Prophet,” said Marcy. She was rocking the baby on her shoulder to the erratic rhythm of her own agitation. Her teeth were bared. “Is now a good time?”

  8.

  What would Tibor do? A ludicrous question under normal circumstances, but here was one situation in which the experiences of father and son overlapped. A city destroyed, and nowhere to go. What would he do? Tibor would flee, as he had Budapest in the winter of 1956, hiding under a tarp in the bed of an apple truck until it reached Nickelsdorf, on the other side of the Austrian border. Rikki? She’d be halfway to Kansas City by now. She could take better care of herself than any government agency, thank you very much. And Elsa? Saint Elsa of the Fields? That was easiest of all. She’d be gone already—lost in the urban wilderness. It seemed to be Elsa’s preferred state, lost in the wilderness. The wilderness of idealism, the wilderness of Maine, the wilderness of unconsciousness. Wherever she might be, she was lost.

  But Jane Eppler was the only person who counted now. And her feelings on the subject were a tad more nuanced.

  “You’ve gone fucking in-sane.”

  She was foaming at the mouth. She had stepped out of the bathroom while brushing her teeth and the toothpaste foam was spilling down her chin. She caught it with her free hand and dodged back into the bathroom cubicle. Mitchell sat up on the couch and checked the clock. It was seven in the morning. It occurred to him that he had never heard Jane curse before.

  She rinsed and spat, forcefully. She appeared again in the little stretch of space between the bathroom and the living room, what might be called a hallway if it were longer than three feet.

  “After everything we’ve been through.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? I wasn’t going to abandon you.”

  “Hold on.” She went back into the bathroom. The water ran. She spat again.

  When she emerged, she scrutinized his face, squinting, as if to detect some hidden pattern there. Whatever she saw couldn’t have worked to his advantage. His skin still tender and pinkish from his little adventure in the Ticonderoga crematorium. A yellow scab on his chin that was just beginning to peel. His flat hair whorled in cowlicks like an electrocution victim; his eyes red, scummy with sleep; and his semi-beard, a growth of five days—what Rikki called his “Mexicano look,” which had something to do with the fact that only his mustache grew in fully, the hair on his cheeks growing out sparsely and in different directions, like spines on a saguaro. He knew this much about his appearance without consulting a mirror. He also realized that his mouth was hanging open, like a taxidermied bear.

  “Fine,” she said at last. “I believe you.”

  “Really?”

  “I have no choice, do I? What else can I do? Even if I wanted to go home, all the buses have left. I don’t know what is happening in the city; there’s no way to tell what horrors are raging there. And I’m not going to stay by myself in this camp. It wouldn’t be safe. So I’m completely vulnerable. Another way of saying that is, I’m screwed.” Her voice lowered. “Besides. We have to trust each other if we’re going to try to make Future Days work.”

  “Right. Good point.” And that was the moment of cowardice. Wrong, he should have said. I’m not going to work at Future Days. But that would have started a conversation he was not prepared to have. A conversation that would end with her leaving him. So he just sat there with a bland smile, like the selfish weasel he was.

  “So,” said Jane. “Breakfast?”

  They followed the crowds to the food tent.

  “It’s really not so bad here,” said Jane. “See?”

  He saw. It really was so bad. Five men stood in a line outside a trailer just twenty yards down. None of them talked with each other. Mitchell knew what they were waiting for. The previous night Marcy Rosado had, through tears, cataloged the depredations she had seen on FEMA Island: propane tanks were being filched right and left; small children found syringes in the field and used them in unsupervised games of doctor; and women who had lost everything in the storm were turning tricks. He hadn’t mentioned this to Jane, and he didn’t now, but one look at those men standing outside the trailer, hands in pockets, the red ribbon dangling from the door handle, and he knew that the trailer was open for business.

  Those men were patient, but no one else seemed to be. Breakfast wasn’t served until eight o’clock
, but even now the line was growing—Mitchell could see it from their trailer on the other side of the camp. The other refugees streamed by them, quick-walking or jogging toward the food. It was unsettling, this mania at every meal, the people rapacious in their hunger. It was like they were racing against one another. It was like they were running for their lives.

  They waited ninety minutes before being handed their microwaved breakfast burrito. It was cold. Biting into the tortilla, the flaky eggs coming loose all over the paper wrapping, the congealed salsa oozing like berry preserves, Mitchell thought of the frozen burritos he had stocked in his freezer before it had been crowded out by his money, and he had a strange pang of nostalgia for his old apartment. What condition was it in now? If an empty house, left alone for a single year, begins to harbor animals, what happens to a New York City apartment, its window blown in, its electricity out, in the week after a hurricane? Do rats make nests in the bathtub? Does the couch bloom moss? He didn’t want to think about the refrigerator. Undoubtedly by now the leftovers from Chosan Galbi had colonized the shelves, employing crude biological warfare, entrenching for a long occupation.

  “This is gruggy,” said Jane, washing down a bite with a gulp from her allotted pint of orange juice. “But I’m going to eat every morsel.” She appeared to gag slightly as she pushed the burrito into her mouth.

  They sat on a bench crushed between the Motas and the Watkins family of East New York. The Watkinses had been behind Jane and Mitchell in line. Between increasingly violent imprecations to their misbehaving children—there seemed to be about eleven of them in all—they had recited a tedious story about taking a public bus for eight hours through Queens with a band of manacled convicts.

  “We’re too rich for this,” Mitchell whispered. He was trying to eat quickly and avoid eye contact with the other refugees, wearing his FEMA baseball hat low on his head. He worried about a repeat of yesterday’s encounter. Perhaps Marcy Rosado would see him and arouse her mob. Only this time the mob would include the entire camp.

  “Exactly,” said Jane. “We should be eating baked Alaska or something. Though I’d settle for a hamburger.”