Odds Against Tomorrow

by Nathaniel Rich

  She did look starving. Like a refugee.

  “I can’t stop thinking of that building you ran into at Ticonderoga,” she said.

  “The infirmary. Where Elsa lived.”

  “How the walls were collapsing in on themselves. That’s how it’s been since Tammy, isn’t it? The walls collapsing in on themselves?”

  Mitchell put down his burrito. He leaned in so that the Motas and Watkinses couldn’t overhear.

  “You think I’m good at predicting disasters?”

  “Not really,” said Jane. “I’m just betting my career on it.”

  “Well, this?” He gestured around the meal tent, at the impatient refugees still standing in line, at the Watkinses screaming at their children, who were stealing one another’s burritos. “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “I know,” said Jane, and she put down her burrito. “I can’t eat this anymore. Let’s just go back to the trailer. Now.”

  They hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when a bomb detonated. A plume of smoke burst into the air three rows down. They approached cautiously, following the crowd across the field. A trailer’s propane tank had burst. Gas fumes blurred the air. The couple who lived there were lying on the grass, blackened by the smoke.

  “They’re dead,” said Jane.

  But the couple began to cough and wheeze, and slowly they crawled away from the wreckage. The crowd stood by and watched until the flames had burned themselves out. And then they began to line up for lunch.

  9.

  The corner of the chain-link fence was occluded by the blocky form of Hank Cho. “Blocky” wasn’t quite the right term: he really resembled a single block, as of granite or wood. A human two-by-four. Even from twenty-five yards away, in the darkness, there was no mistaking his girth. Jane squeezed Mitchell’s arm.

  “Where are all the others?”

  “Maybe they’re coming.”

  “Maybe this is a trap.”

  It was an argument that would have persuaded the old Mitchell. If he had worried that Alec Charnoble, at their first meeting, might slaughter him in the middle of the night on the seventy-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, where surveillance cameras and motion sensors and keystroke recorders detected their every move, then shouldn’t he be alarmed at the prospect of meeting an inordinately built Korean—or Chinese—man in the middle of the night on an island that had minimal security and was descending briskly into chaos? Soon the men would be stalking one another as at Ticonderoga and at the flooded deli on Madison Avenue. What would stop Hank Cho from dismembering them right there and then? He could boast to the rest of the refugees that he had killed the false prophet. Yet even as Mitchell’s brain went through the familiar convolutions of worst-case scenarioism, he felt oddly removed from himself. His brain’s logical infrastructure still functioned, but the fear, the hot animal fear, was absent. He yanked Jane the final fifteen yards toward Hank Cho.

  “Hey guys,” said Hank. He sounded sleepy. “Glad you came.”

  “Where is everybody?” said Jane.

  “Guess they’re scared.” Hank looked at his watch. “I think it’s just us three.”

  They stood in silence for several moments. Jane hiccuped.

  “Yeah,” said Hank. “Let’s probably go.” He started walking in the direction of the bridge.

  Jane took Mitchell’s hand, and squeezed it.

  “I’m putting all my trust in you,” she said.

  “And I’m putting all my trust in Hank Cho.”

  Jane stopped in her tracks. “You’ve completely lost it.”

  Laughing, they followed the giant into the darkness.

  * * *

  Queens was invisible. From the span of the Hell Gate they could see, ahead and to the left, the white glare of the klieg lights over LaGuardia Airport. The Mosquitoes were doing their work, sucking the polluted water from the runways and spraying the slurry into the bay in geysers that sparkled like formations of dark quartz. The rest of the borough was dark. It was a cloudy night, the moon as invisible as the Rockaways, so it was impossible to assess the damage in the neighborhoods beneath the train tracks. Still, Mitchell thought he could glimpse forms moving in the blackness—anxious, darting movements, like scurrying rats. Only much larger. He told himself it was a figment of his imagination.

  “Just follow the light,” said Hank, like a deathbed priest. Once they’d crossed the bridge, he aimed a yellow industrial flashlight in front of him. A second, dimmer model was tucked into his belt, mostly illuminating his buttocks but also spilling down to trace the narrow gravel strip between the northbound and southbound tracks. The gravel bounced and flickered as he walked, the light wobbling with each of his lumbering steps—for such a strong man he was rather clumsy of gait. They walked single file, Jane in the middle. And they didn’t talk. What was there to say? Any efforts at trivialities sounded absurd, even blasphemous against the night’s silence. There were no birdcalls, no crepitation of insects, not even frogs—only the crunch of the gravel and the light phthapping of the flashlight against Hank Cho’s bottom. After about half an hour, or an hour, or two—it was impossible to tell anymore—Hank halted their procession. He passed out cans of water and they drank greedily. When they were finished they tossed the empty cans over the railing and listened closely, as if the clink of the cans might describe the terrain of the streets below. But all they heard were three large plops. They kept walking, more quickly now.

  What were they doing? What were they thinking? Mitchell tried not to think at all by concentrating on the path. He had to be careful to walk in a straight line so as not to veer off the tracks.

  But of course he had already veered off the tracks. That’s exactly what he had done! He had run himself off the rails: the rails of his career and perhaps of his sanity. He had never adhered to them well—they’d always been slick, his sanity rails. And now the train was careening into the darkness, the engineer slumped unconscious over the wheel, his shoulder pressing on the accelerator. But this newest excursion was not entirely inconsistent with his past behavior. He had been running away from things for as long as he could remember: from Overland Park, the Zukorminiums, Fitzsimmons Sherman, FutureWorld, New York, Ticonderoga, Randall’s Island. The more he ran from things, the less he knew where he was. Where would it end?

  “Are you still there?” Jane asked without turning.

  “Yeah,” he said. But he wasn’t so sure.

  “I’m still here,” said another voice in the darkness. It was a female voice, but it wasn’t Jane. And it spoke without sound.

  “I don’t think you are,” said Mitchell, soundlessly. “I don’t think you’re anywhere.”

  “Then why can you hear me?” said Elsa.

  Mitchell didn’t have an answer to that one.

  “It’s like this for me,” she continued. “Walking down a long track through darkness, unable to see or hear anything.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “I am not going to answer that.”

  “We’re more similar than we’re different, aren’t we?”

  “We do have something in common,” said Elsa.

  “Obsession.”

  “There aren’t so many like us, you know. We are crippled by extreme beliefs.”

  “Extreme seems a bit extreme. I would say strongly held.”

  “We don’t listen when others try to tell us something.”

  “We don’t listen unless it suits us,” said Mitchell. “You didn’t listen to me.”

  “You still aren’t listening to me.”

  “I’m trying. I am.”

  “Obsession gives us purpose. I don’t think your friend understands that.”

  Mitchell looked at Jane ahead of him, walking lazily over the gravel.

  “Without obsession,” said Mitchell, “I have nothing. All I have is wandering through a shapeless black void.”

  “What are you going to do when you get to the Flatlands?”

  “I don’t
know. I’m afraid. What am I going to eat? Drink? Will there be anything resembling a bathroom? Will there be more violence? And say I do make it a few days, what happens next? Can you tell me?”

  “I cannot.”

  “But do you know? Do you know what’s waiting for me in the Flatlands?”

  “Oh yes,” said Elsa, and there was something dark and tinkling in her voice. “I know what is waiting for you.”

  Elsa was laughing and the track curved slightly to the right and the dancing light from Hank Cho’s flashlight bounced over the tracks, disrupting the darkness. And Elsa was gone.

  How good his fears had been to him! While they lingered, he had that thing so exalted by schoolteachers and guidance counselors: an All-Consuming Passion. He had a profession too. He missed them, his fears, just as he missed his skycity and even, in a perverse way, the cockroaches. Now there was only the void. With every step he took on the elevated tracks, the barrier weakened—the barrier that separated what was inside him and what was outside of him. The broken world beyond the tracks was seeping inside him. Or was it the other way around?

  He reached for Jane’s hand. She squeezed it. But since he was walking behind her this soon became awkward and she pulled her hand away.

  * * *

  “How long do you think it’s been?” said Jane. She was on the edge of tears.

  “Two and a half hours?”

  “I’d say six.” She sighed. “Please, God, let this end soon.”

  They were taking a bathroom break. During the last stretch the track had run for several minutes through an underground tunnel—a short but horrifying tunnel, which was like walking through an ink blot—and when they emerged they were at ground level, the tracks hemmed between two lines of trees. It looked like they had entered a forest. Had they left the city? Were they in Long Island? Were they back in Central Park? Jane had squatted ten yards behind him, several paces from the tracks. Mitchell was pissing on the southbound track. He wasn’t going to piss in the woods. He didn’t want to know what was in the woods.

  “Six hours, the sun would be out.”

  “Who knows. The same rules don’t seem to apply.”

  “It’s been four hours and twenty-five minutes,” said Hank. It was the first thing he’d said other than announcing the bathroom breaks. “And that over there? Way up ahead? That’s Flatlands Avenue.”

  “Where?” said Mitchell.

  “There,” said the giant, pointing at a vague, slightly paler patch of darkness in the distance, past where the trees ended.

  “So this is the Flatlands,” said Jane.

  “It’s Canarsie,” said Hank. “But close enough.”

  They walked several minutes longer, until the tracks began to angle to the right. Hank continued straight, stepping over the tracks. They were now on a dirt road littered with trash.

  “Keep walking,” said Hank. “Try not to get your feet stuck.”

  Mitchell obeyed. The ground was still muddy. Occasionally his shoe landed on something squishy, a bloated rat carcass perhaps or something larger, but he didn’t dare look down. They kept to the median, where the ground was slightly higher and there was less debris. Finally they came to a stretch of smooth cement. Before them appeared an area of low brush. At the horizon the sky was beginning to lighten.

  “Flatlands,” said Hank.

  “What do we do here?”

  “I’m going to rest,” said Hank, lowering himself to the concrete. “I’m tired.”

  “We’re just going to sleep on the ground?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we make sure that we’re alone.”

  10.

  It wasn’t so bad if you wrapped a towel around your face like a keffiyeh. There was an art to it. You had to cover as much of your face as possible, but the fabric couldn’t entirely cover your eyes. If you yanked the towel down too much, the stink got in—and then it invaded you, gumming up your pores and pricking your eyes. But if you tucked the edge of the towel just below your eyes and pressed the fabric close to your cheeks, you could endure five minutes, which was enough time to fill most of a shopping cart.

  Jane hadn’t mastered the technique. Almost instantly she had sprinted, gagging, for the exit. And she did not return. When Mitchell rumbled his shopping cart out of the warehouse, she was gone.

  There was only the loading dock and the stacks of cans in their carts and the empty expanse. Hank Cho had been right about the Flatlands. The lands had been flattened. There was little evidence that buildings had stood here just one week earlier, and just as little evidence of the flood: only a puddle here and there, as after a light rain. Few structures remained three-dimensional—a tepee of cracked plywood, brick foundation slabs, two concrete walls leaning on each other for support like a pair of old drunks. Most everything else had been pounded into the ground or wiped into the ocean, rinsed like a soiled plate after dinner. The only surviving buildings appeared to be the oldest ones.

  Before Mitchell and Jane had even awoken that morning, Hank had discovered a stone church standing on what he believed had been East 100th Street (he found the street sign several yards from the building, spiked halfway into the ground, though he’d also found signs for East 101st Street and East 99th Street farther down the block). There was no bathroom—no plumbing or electrical wire—but the interior was surprisingly clear. The floor was dry. Other than a smattering of bloated loofahs that, in the antediluvian era, had been prayer books, the only evidence of a flood was the peculiar arrangement of the wooden pews. They crowded in the entrance, stacked nearly to the ceiling. It was as if the pews had tried to climb over one another in a desperate attempt to save themselves from drowning. The pews had remained in this configuration when the floodwaters drained from the church, but the structure was flimsy; Hank gave a shove and like a scaffold it tumbled to the ground with a riotous clatter.

  One of the stained glass windows was intact. It depicted two serpents, two deer, and two eagles. The background was royal blue, and the animals stared with large eyes toward the heavens.

  Mitchell and Jane found roomier quarters on what had been Flatlands Avenue. The Canarsie Bank Trust Company was an old financial fortress, the kind built in the early twentieth century, modeled after an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with touches of brazen American showmanship. It was eerie to come across this beacon of high business authority in the middle of the desolate, flood-ravaged badlands—like encountering a monolith on the moon. The facade was white limestone brick, and the double-high top story was set behind a series of columns. The attitude of the three-story building was best expressed by the granite eagle that perched over the high entry arch; it seemed excessively prideful, the eagle, the way it surveyed the wreckage of the neighborhood. The newer, cheaply constructed buildings that had crowded around it in recent years were now less than rubble. The Canarsie Bank Trust had outlasted them all.

  Jane’s phone rang.

  “Who is it?” said Mitchell.

  “Tewilliger,” Jane whispered. She gestured for him to continue inside the building.

  The front door had shattered, but it still hung on by the hinges; it looked as if someone had burst through the center of it with a battering ram. Mitchell reached inside and turned the bolt lock. Then he pushed the door. It fell flat over.

  The interior was grander than the exterior. A dark floor of red travertine, stately brown teller counters, globe-shaped pendent lamps. Since the front entrance was raised, the flooding hadn’t been catastrophic; the waterline reached only to chest level. As in the church, the loose furniture had huddled together in fear. The clerical desks and chairs were piled in one corner like a bea-ver dam.

  Mitchell stepped across the atrium and creaked through an ancient turnstile. The air was thick with dust; it rose in puffs from the blood-colored floor with every step. A flight of stone stairs took him to the second level. Here was a lounge, lined with bookshelves and metal cabinets, the drawers all
open, files spilling out. It looked as if it had been ransacked by burglars unable to find what they were looking for.

  He forgot everything and decided he was exploring an abandoned world at the edge of the universe. There was no sleep or sadness here and beside him was a beautiful girl with long blue hair and soft violet eyes who would live with him happily ever after in a castle by the sea. They would speak to each other without sound and daydream their lives away.

  “Mitchell?” Jane’s voice was frantic and it made everything rush back to him, especially the fear.

  “Up here.”

  When she appeared in the stairwell she was holding the collar of her shirt over her mouth.

  “Phone died,” she said. “But we were about finished anyway.” She coughed. “This place is not to code.”

  “Yeah, but it’s beautiful.”

  “Compared to its neighbors.”

  “Everything OK with Tewilliger?”

  “She sat out the flood in the office. The tower was leaning in the winds, but she survived. She’s with a nephew in Virginia. And quite pissed.”

  They climbed to the third floor. The dust puffed around them. In the inner chambers they found couches that had been shielded from the rain. Jane sat on one; the leather gave generously.

  “I could sleep on this,” she said. “But last night I slept on asphalt.”

  In the outer offices—those facing the street—the storm had sucked out the windowpanes and the rooms were caked with bird droppings that rose in bent, conical stalagmites. The water stains on the white plaster wall looked like cat’s eyes, concentric circles in alternating shades of brown.

  “Another thing about Tewilliger,” said Jane. She bobbed on the leather cushion.

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s suing Charnoble.”

  “Why?”

  “Intentional infliction of emotional distress. For making her work on the day Tammy hit.”

  “Wow. Good for her.”

  “She has a case. She can prove that Charnoble understood exactly the danger of the hurricane. It’s all in your memos, after all. A suit could bring down the whole company. Just look at Seattle.”