Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

“Hold on a minute. It’s not even raining.”

“The mayor ordered an evacuation,” he said.

“Wait. Are you freaking out?”

“No. Yeah. Maybe a little.”

She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped an octave. The note of playfulness had vanished.

“Don’t abandon me,” she said.

The sound of her voice did something physical to him. It entered him, diving into his abdomen and extending prickly brambles into the soft parts of his stomach. He thought of his family, begging him to leave. And of Elsa, lying in a hospital bed in Augusta. Was her brain working? Did she know what had happened to her?

Psycho! Where Do You Go When You Sleep?

“I’d never abandon you,” he said. Despite the water dripping off his face, he suddenly felt flush. “You know that, right?”

She paused for a second, as if she were trying to figure out whether he was joking.

“FutureWorld,” she said at last. “Hope springs infernal.”

“FutureWorld,” said Mitchell. “You made your bed. Now die in it.”

“We’ll check in with each other, OK?” said Jane. “In a couple of hours?”

Mitchell nodded.

“Are you there?”

“Sorry.” He took a breath. “Yes. I’m here.”

* * *

The storm broke at six-thirty. As soon as he stepped out of his cab on Broad Street, large, pregnant drops sopped his hair and soaked his neck. They detonated in giant asterisks on the sidewalk, the backsplash drenching his pant cuffs. The sewers were stopped up and beginning to flood; estuaries bulged around each street corner. At the building where he was scheduled to meet with his first client, Affiliated Data Systems, the revolving door was jammed with a crowbar. He sprinted north to Anchor Liberty’s office on Beekman Street. An anxious janitor stood outside the shuttered lobby ordering workers to go home. As the janitor shook his head, a file of water dripped from the brim of his hat onto his chest.

“I have an appointment,” said Mitchell. “Harold Harding.”

“Nobody there,” said the janitor. “I’m telling you, I don’t get paid enough for this. I don’t know how to swim. Look at this shit.”

He pointed upward. Mitchell understood the man’s apprehension. The sky had begun to darken. It looked enraged, a livid sky, full of eggplant colors, purple yielding to cast-iron black. There was something thrillingly exotic about the angry blackness of it, tense with intermittent electricity. The clouds were scowling. Mitchell walked away, but the janitor didn’t seem to notice. He was still staring upward, transfixed.

On Cortlandt the wind started playing tricks, swirling one minute, swooping upward the next. Sometimes it pushed down from above like a giant sole crushing a bug — Mitchell the bug. The streets were a honking chaos: cars, overloaded with possessions, continued to drive toward the bridges while giant white NYPD buses, packed with people who had no other way of escaping, formed a procession up Broadway. In the windshield of each bus was a placard with the name of the evacuation center where it was headed; Mitchell saw Wassaic, Weehawken, Fort Lee, Randall’s Island. The subway was running on an enhanced schedule, express trains running north to the Bronx at brisk intervals, but dozens of skeptics were still emerging from the stations on Fulton Street. They stepped outside into the swirling winds, opened their umbrellas, threw down their umbrellas when they bent, and walked with brisk determination to their offices, purposefully oblivious to what was going on around them. The New York business day would brook no storm. It occurred to Mitchell that he was just like these people. On a day when an actual disaster might very well unfold, here he was, working! He supposed he could run away now, hop one of those white buses — but Charnoble, viper that he was, had attacked Mitchell’s weak point: his sense of logic. There was only one more client on his itinerary that morning, just four blocks away, an annuities executive named Howard Schmitz; all Mitchell had to do was check in and deliver his final warnings. Charnoble was right: If Mitchell couldn’t do his job when an actual disaster was approaching, how could he, or FutureWorld, have any credibility during calmer times? Then again, if he were honest with himself, he wasn’t staying in New York because of integrity. He was staying for Jane.

When he reached the H. R. Hayes building he found the front door open, though no one was at the security desk. Mitchell hurdled the turnstile and took the elevator to Howard Schmitz’s office. It was empty, and Mitchell was punching the elevator button when he noticed a pair of black flats on the carpet, connected to stockinged feet behind the front desk. The feet were twisting from some type of exertion.

“Hello?” he said.

The feet froze. Slowly a mop of brown hair rose above the desk.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“I’m Mitchell Zukor? From FutureWorld? Mr. Schmitz is expecting me.”

“No, he is not.” The woman stood up. She was still wearing her wet raincoat. “The only thing he or anyone else is expecting is that hurricane. Tammy. What a name — who would’ve thought a storm with a fat girl’s name would do so much damage.”

Mitchell stared at her, perplexed.

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” she said. “You’ve been outside, I can see that.”

“Mr. Schmitz isn’t in?”

“Not him, not no one else neither. I left my car keys here somewhere and my car is parked downstairs. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get out of town without my car. That’s my excuse for being here. What’s yours?”

“Well — I–I’m going around warning people to leave.”

“They’re already warned! And they’re terrified. One thing I learned these last years is that the heavens don’t follow historical precedent. People are afraid. Bad things are happening. This is a new world we’ve made.”

Mitchell slowly backed away. This woman was unstable. Maybe all the water had gotten into her brain.

“I’d take the stairwell if I were you,” said the secretary. “They’re going to cut the electricity any second. The pipes are already out.”

On the street again, he saw he had missed a call from Jane. He buzzed her back.

“Have you met with anybody?” Her voice was less casual than before, almost pinched. If he hadn’t seen her name on his phone, he wouldn’t have believed it was Jane.

“I think everyone’s gone,” said Mitchell.

“Alec didn’t pick up when I called his phone. When I called the office, Tewilliger said he hadn’t been in all day.”

“Huh.”

“So I told her to go home.”

“What’d Tewilliger say?”

“She hung up on me.”

Many of the workers he’d seen filing into the office towers were now running across the avenue, trying to reach the City Hall subway station before it closed. Hats and umbrellas flew through the air, colliding into the sides of buildings and falling back to the street. He’d be safer once he got back home, but he dreaded the three miles that lay between him and the apartment. Three miles of humanity shoving and racing. The same as any other day, really, only damper, even more desperate.

“Mitchell,” said Jane. “It’s hard for me to say this.”

“What? What is it?”

“I guess I was faking it before.”

“Wait a minute—” He really didn’t like the tone in her voice. Where was the unflappable Jane, the demure Jane, the sarcastic, fearless—

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

“No way. Don’t give me that.”

“Everyone I know has already left the city. We’re the only ones left.”

“What did we talk about before?” His mind raced. He realized how much he had been relying on her. If she was cool, he could be cool. He nearly shouted. “We could have left! We could be on the George Washington Bridge by now, or at least the Henry Hudson. There are probably ferries—”