Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

“Keeps me in the world,” said Jane, apologetically, when she caught Mitchell staring at them. “I know — dorky.”

“No, it’s not ,” said Mitchell, and they were both momentarily alarmed by the emotion in his voice.

But Jane avoided discussing Poisson distribution models in her consultation meetings and, for that matter, the jump-diffusion model, the constant elasticity of variance model, and the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model. She saved those for their work sessions. In her consultations she kept it easy, personal. The saleswoman’s flirtatiousness came naturally; the hucksterism appealed to her mischievous nature. She didn’t come across like Mitchell, an Old World avenger with a ten o’clock shadow. Jane was a sister figure or even a girlfriend — someone her predominantly male clients could confide in. They wanted, it seemed, to protect her.

Inevitably it turned out that Jane and the client shared some mutual acquaintance or personal interest. This was possible because she conducted extensive background searches before the first meeting, investigating her clients’ social lives just as assiduously as Mitchell researched the science behind his scenarios. She ran identity checks, posed as a potential employer to request information from college registrars, and scoured social networking sites.

She was a good student, but a better actress. In meetings she pulled her chair close to the client’s, moving to the same side of the table if possible, and made constant physical contact: she patted a knee, caressed a shoulder. From the first handshake she was in command. When she finally turned to Mitchell’s dark prophecies — for she loved his scenarios, called them “hilarious”—the effect was deadly. It gave Mitchell a special thrill to hear her interpretations of his scripts. In her delivery, his grave warnings were transformed into come-ons:

“Fear is the oldest, most effective security system we have. So don’t fear fear— embrace it.”

“I’m not here to talk to you about fear of the future. I want to tell you about the future of fear.”

“The world began without man, and it will end without him. Until then, there’s FutureWorld.”

Her clients were pinned like lepidoptera specimens. They were in love. They wanted more .

As FutureWorld grew, so did the firm’s advertising budget. Their logo — the pencil sketch of the open window, curtains blowing out — began to appear on subway platforms. Mitchell and Jane were on the way to lunch when the crosstown bus passed by, the FutureWorld logo pasted across its side. Next to the logo was a new slogan purchased by Charnoble from an advertising firm for twenty-five thousand dollars: “In a deceitful world, FutureWorld is a beacon of truth.”

“Truth,” said Mitchell, shaking his head. “It ought to be ‘At the end of the tunnel — more tunnel.’”

“In the darkness of the storm,” intoned Jane, “a ray … of darkness.”

Mitchell spoke less frequently with his parents. On the phone with his mother he felt like a fraud.

“Are you living well?” she asked him one night.

“Living?” he asked, confused. For a second he actually couldn’t understand what she meant.

“As in life? That thing we do when we’re not sleeping?”

“Oh sure. That thing.”

“Mitchell?”

He composed himself so that he could respond with the proper degree of enthusiasm.

“I’m living great, Mom. Don’t worry about me. How’s Dad?”

The thing is, he was living well in New York, at least if you went by his dinner receipts and pay stubs. He was a big business success. He made thirty-two thousand dollars in August. All signs seemed to indicate September would be even better. But the personal cost was extravagant. His heart was bankrupt. He was in emotional foreclosure. He felt more isolated than ever before. Once he even took the company car downtown to Chosan Galbi, but the waitress didn’t recognize him.

“FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “Bad things come to those who wait.”

“FutureWorld,” said Jane. “Despair springs eternal.”

At night he wrote letters to Elsa. He sat in the Psycho Canoe and read them over to himself before sending them — sometimes printing them out as many as a dozen times, marking them up with his pencil, trying to find the exact right words. But he never could. As he read them disembodied phrases jumped out like images in the magic eye books he obsessed over as a kid:

… I should have realized …

… in the future …

… New York hospital …

… false complacency …

… I’m sorry … I apologize … I’m sorry …

She didn’t respond, of course. She couldn’t. When he called the hospital — just about every afternoon — they reassured him that her condition was stable. As if that were a good thing.

There was in his head a grim compatibility between this absence of communication with Elsa and the absence of rain in New York. He began to develop, with Jane’s help, a drought scenario for FutureWorld. They studied the Rainfall Anomaly Index, the Palmer Drought Index, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Jane drafted a Poisson chart to help determine the drought’s likely duration, which only confirmed the obvious — rain was long overdue. And Mitchell built narratives that drew from historical anecdote. He’d been researching the Dust Bowl. The dry soil rising like steam from the earth, the houses entombed by dirt, the black clouds filling the sky like coal smoke, the birds choking, disoriented, flying headfirst into the ground. The prevailing winds carried east Oklahoma’s red soil, so that in the winter of 1934 the snow that fell in New England was bright pink.

“FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “It’s a matter of death and death.”

“FutureWorld,” said Jane. “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

They worked during lunch in the conference room of FutureWorld’s new office. A long window overlooked the corner of Central Park and its brown softball fields. Directly below was the Columbus Fountain, which had run dry and was now the home of nesting pigeons, and their shit. Mitchell caught Jane staring into the distance.

“What is it?” he said.

“When you were a kid did you ever look at a cloud and try to figure out whether it was an animal or an object?”

“Kansas City has the highest number of clouds per capita of any medium-sized American city. That’s not a joke.”

“So what’s that one?”

Mitchell squinted, searching the sky. He reached for his glasses.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” said Jane. “They make you look … professorial. I think I like you better without them.”

“Me too.” Mitchell snapped the glasses back into their case and squinted again. On an otherwise clear day, a single cloud had appeared over the Central Park reservoir. It had an oblong shape, with tendrils flying off concentrically, like curls on an infant scalp.

“I’m going to say a galaxy. The Milky Way.”

“The Milky Way is kinda cloudy, I suppose.”

“There’s that thick bar in the middle, see. And then the swirls coming out of it? Those are the arcs of the stars.”

“I’d say a white laundry bag. The soiled clothing at the bottom — see how it’s heavier and darker there? The swirly lines are gym socks, flying out of the bag.”

“Flying out? Why?”

“Maybe because the person is running. Running the bag down the block to the Laundromat.”

“Why is she running?”

“She’s running because … it’s raining?”

The cloud stung the earth with a bolt of lightning.

Jane hiccuped.