Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

When he’d awoken at five in the morning, a pale glow had just started to creep across the parquet floor of his living room in the shape of a lady’s fan. It looked like a beautiful day. Could the storm have veered off course? Once, in kindergarten, his school was closed because of a twister-spawning thunderstorm that was buzzsawing its way across Johnson County, headed straight for Kansas City. Old Tibor boarded up the windows with plywood and secured them with duct tape.

“We’re not on the ground, Toto!” yelled Tibor.

“Oh stop it,” said Rikki.

“ The Wizard of Oz ,” said Tibor, “starring a certain Miss Judy Garland.”

Mitchell hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, he was too afraid; he remembered stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night and sitting in the empty bathtub with his pajamas on, as if in a bomb shelter. But when the dreaded morning arrived, they awoke to the music of two woodpeckers cautiously tapping the plywood on their windows. The family gathered in the dimmed living room, and Tibor tentatively peeled off strip after strip of duct tape. Then, in a single dramatic gesture, he snapped back a sheet of plywood. A rectangular shaft of clear blue light shot through. It landed like a spotlight on the face of Mitchell’s mother. She laughed, startled, and they all joined in, snapping off the plywood, as if a normal sunny day were the craziest thing they’d ever seen.

Rikki, in fact, had called Mitchell several times since Tammy had strengthened to a Category 3. He hadn’t picked up, and he didn’t have the heart to call her back. No matter how calm he pretended to be, the moment she heard his voice, she would sense his terror. There was no need to worry her any more than she was already. In her last message she asked whether he had thought about where he could go in case the hurricane was as bad as some were predicting. Of course he had thought about where he could go. He had no place to go.

But am I still dreaming? Out the window the sky over the East River was a weird curdled pink — the color of fresh scars, inflamed gums. It sparkled like fish scales.

The phone rang. Was Rikki already up? Had she never gone to sleep? It was just after 5:00 a.m. in New York, which meant 4:00 in Overland Park. He picked up.

“Zukor! Glad I got through. You up?”

“It’s early, Alec.”

“I know, it’s just — I couldn’t go to sleep. Too excited.”

“Can we talk at the office?”

“Listen, at two a.m., after the latest numbers came in from the NHC, the mayor issued an executive order. Mitchell, he’s ordered an evacuation. All zones.”

The sun itself was a bloody disk. There were clouds — a linty blanket of them — white on top, fading to lavender below.

“Mitchell? You there?”

“They waited too long,” Mitchell said. “They should have made the announcement yesterday. By the end of the workday.”

“I know. Because of that, I don’t see our clients taking the warning seriously.”

“You’re saying you want me to go to consultations. You want me to work today? During an evacuation?”

“We don’t have a choice. Besides, the evacuation is a political thing. It’s stopped raining, for godsakes! I’ve even been hearing that the storm might miss us completely. And if our clients request meetings and we stand them up, well — how will that make us look? No, no, that won’t do.”

“Nobody’s canceling?”

“Listen, we won’t be foolish about it: we’ll monitor the weather minute by minute and act accordingly. Besides, you yourself spent all of yesterday telling people that we’d be safe.” Charnoble was speaking very quickly now. “We may never get another chance like this. This is the day by which FutureWorld will be judged from here forward. If we fail, our business is in jeopardy. If we succeed, we’ll be the leaders of the most important new sector in the financial industry. Mitchell, this is it! This is what we’ve been working for. I need this from you. We need this from you — all of us. Tewilliger, Jane, and me. We are in this nest together.”

Across the street from his apartment, at the entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, traffic accumulated. New Yorkers weren’t leaving so much as fleeing. There were no cars heading in the other direction except for the occasional police van. Pedestrians were running into the tunnel wearing backpacks, carrying suitcases, tripping in their galoshes.

“When I said that about the hurricane yesterday,” said Mitchell, “about how it wasn’t going to come? No one believed me.”

“I believed you.”

“They didn’t believe me because I didn’t believe it myself.”

The cars were loaded to their roofs with baggage, sleeping bags, moving boxes, and whatever else could fit: a basketball, a television, a stack of women’s dresses on hangers, a bubbling fish tank. Children’s faces pressed against the windows. Sleeping children; flushed faces. The adults were determined but feverish. They yelled at each other, pounded on the windshield, punched the roof of the car. They glanced frequently in the rearview. One man took a final look at the Chrysler Building before the tunnel swallowed him up. Or perhaps he was staring at the sky. The sky had gone cuckoo. On the horizon the streaks of cloud were curved like the grains of an oak board — brick-dust red speckled with curling yellows and oranges. God doing van Gogh. Mitchell had seen these colors only one other time, during a winter vacation he had taken with his mother on Vancouver Island. He must’ve been eight or nine. At a highway rest stop they happened upon a stream where salmon were spawning. The huge fish lay spent on the rocks, their roe already discharged, the water rushing over their bloated bodies. Their skin was the same unusually strong pink hue, almost bloody. The fish weren’t quite dead yet — they still flicked their tails and blinked idiotically — but sections of their flesh had already begun to decompose and flake away. The skeletons started to show; a fin detached; an eyeball hung loose from its socket. He asked his mother why the salmon, having already given birth, didn’t just drift back to the ocean. Why, even as they died, did they still face upstream, fighting against the current?

Three reasons, she said. First, they know, on a primitive level, that they won’t survive long enough to make it back to the ocean. Second, they want to keep the way clear for their offspring. And finally, like human beings, their instinct is to die looking up.

Charnoble cleared his throat.

“I appreciate this, Mitchell.” He paused. “Oh, and Mitchell? Enjoy yourself. This may be the most glorious day of our lives.”

“Wait — Alec. Have you looked at the sky? This sky—”

But Charnoble was gone.

7.

When he went to the bathroom to splash water on his face, the tap sputtered. In the refrigerator he found a jug of purified water. He bent over the sink and poured the cold water over his head. There was something absurd about drenching himself while a monsoon was speeding in his direction, but the cold slap of wetness on his neck and cheeks achieved the desired result. His thoughts clicked into place. His first resolution: no way was he going to work. He’d escape. If the trains weren’t running, he’d follow the traffic through the Midtown Tunnel, weaving between the stopped cars, escaping to Queens, then on to — no. Long Island, surrounded by water, would be even more dangerous. Better to head west to New Jersey, then Pennsylvania. The phone rang.

“You talk to Alec?” It was Jane. She sounded exhausted and bored.

“Yes, but…”

“You’re not thinking of bailing, are you?”

“You saw the scenarios. If we stay here too long, we’ll be trapped. Stuck. Cut off—”