Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

A woman cradling an infant sat in a second-floor window in the middle of the block. The baby shrieked painfully, as if being assaulted. The mother spotted Mitchell and Jane and asked whether they had water or food to spare.

“I’m sorry,” said Mitchell.

“God bless you anyway. Be careful out there.”

They pushed their paddles hard into the water and glided away, as from another obstacle.

“That was hard,” said Jane. Her face was polluted by black, greasy smudges — residue of the oil and sewage in the water. It was all over their hands, and she kept touching her face to pull back her hair. “But it was the right thing to do. Once we see a rescue worker, we can tell them about her.”

He couldn’t stop thinking about the scene they had witnessed on Madison. The men running through the street, smashing glass, bags of chips falling from their arms. In his futurist calculations he had always counted on bad things happening. But he hadn’t considered the brutality of it, the primitive, selfish desperation that took hold when one’s life was threatened. He pulled his oar out of the water. Then he started to paddle in reverse.

“What are you doing?” said Jane. The fear in her was strong, animal, instinctual. But she maintained her composure while Mitchell handed the woman a carton of animal crackers and lemon-lime Gatorade. When they set off again, her relentless spirit of denial cracked.

“I’m sorry. That was the right thing to do. I’m sick. What’s wrong with me? I’m sick.” She put the oar on her knees.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Mitchell. “Just look out for flotsam.”

But she had frozen.

“Jane?”

They were drifting toward a floating skerry of flame. It had the circumference of a hula hoop. When Jane finally turned, black, greasy tears were sliding down her face.

“I can’t do this,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too horrible.”

“Hey. Listen—”

“Why is this happening to us? A whole city…”

“Try not to think about it.”

“All the destruction. The death . Everything is dead. This city is dead. It’s a graveyard.”

“If we think like that,” he said, catching her eye, “we’re going to run into something and the boat is going to flip. And then we’ll really be in the shit.”

“Right.” She seemed uncertain. She seemed to be trying to convince herself of something. “Right.”

The floating hula hoop of fire was drifting very close now. But if Jane felt the heat behind her back, she didn’t show it.

“It’s not just New York,” she said. “It’s like I’m being destroyed too. I know this sounds silly, but really, I never fantasized about being successful in Boston for crissakes, or Washington. What can you even buy in Boston?”

“The city will come back. This is temporary. Everything is temporary.”

“Whenever you say something hopeful, it sounds like a curse. Nobody believes you. Lady Madeline didn’t, Nybuster didn’t, and I don’t either.”

“Just look out for flotsam, OK? Flotsam .”

“Yeah.” She tried to wipe away her tears, but she managed only to spread the grease in a horizontal streak across the bridge of her nose. “Flotsam.”

He pulled hard to avoid the oil fire, and the boat disappeared into a cloud of acrid smoke.

5.

“Oh take me back to Elkhart Lake, where the cotton candy grows.”

“POOF! POOF!”

“Where the little marshmallows hang from the trees—”

“SAY WHAT?”

“And the lollipops grow on the ground!”

“NO! NO!”

“YES! The LOLLI-pops grow on the GROUND GROUND GROUND.”

The camp songs were Jane’s idea. It seemed incongruous, if not shameful, to be singing about lollipops while mattresses and house pets and who knows what else floated by, but it worked. With Tammy’s full horrors hidden from sight and their progress north unchecked, their immediate fear of disaster subsided and was replaced by a lightness that flirted with mania. Jane sang her choruses louder and louder in a desperate effort to dispel the sepulchral silence of Sutton Place.

“POOF! POOF!”

The day was becoming brighter too. The fog had diminished. The sleepy residential neighborhood had acquired a kind of diseased Venetian charm. The ornate battlements and bay windows of its town houses were reflected in jaundiced tints on the oil-streaked water. At the intersections, which had been most heavily exposed to the storm gusts coming off the East River, the trees that lined the avenue had been de-leaved, de-branched, even de-barked. All that remained were pitiful yellow stumps. On the west side of the street almost every window was gone; on the east side, leeward, they were mostly intact.

By Fifty-fourth Street they were seeing signs of life. In one window a fire burned wildly on a shag rug; next door a young boy ran in circles with a model airplane in his hand, making vrooming noises. Standing at the railing of a third-story balcony was an impossibly well-dressed young man. Pin-striped gray suit, royal-blue silk tie, a pink oxford with starched white lapels. His right hand dangled a cigar; the fingertips of his left encircled the rim of a snifter filled to overflowing with an emerald liquid. A golf club leaned against the wall beside a plastic bucket of white balls. His pose reflected an attitude of lethargy and casual refinement almost psychopathic in this context. But what would be sane in this context? Singing camp songs?

Just one thing about this man could not be reconciled. In place of shoes, he wore on his bare feet Kleenex boxes.

The slap of oars in the water shook the man from his reverie. He spun toward them.

“No,” he said. “Nuh-uh.” He stomped the length of the balcony, the Kleenex boxes trampling on broken glass. “What is this? Motherfucking FutureWorld? In a boat? ”

Then Mitchell recognized him. They were too close now, Mitchell couldn’t pretend not to see him. He pulled up alongside the building and the canoe came to a rest beneath the Kleenex-box-clad feet of young Ned Nybuster.

“A full-service operation,” he was saying, giggling to himself. “FutureWorld to the rescue! But a motorboat might have been a better choice. I mean, if you’re going to consider all the angles, all the scenarios , you’re going to want a big, powerful engine”—his voice kept getting faster and quieter—“and maybe like a wedge to put on the front, and fishing rods and spears, or whatchucallem, harpoons like, rope of course, lots and lots of rope—”

“Not a good idea,” said Jane under her voice.

“He’s a client.”

“Client of what? If you think we’re still on the clock, you’re even dumber than I thought. As of yesterday, the clock is broken. The clock drowned.”

“Come to rescue me?” Nybuster peered down at them, a dark glint in his eye. “Guys?”

“We’re just passing through,” said Mitchell. He tried to lighten his tone. “On our way north.”

“Funny thing. My father and his wife left for Long Island as soon as they heard about the storm. Course they didn’t bother to inform me of their plans. All they did was leave a note.”

Nybuster removed a balled-up paper from his pocket and spent a tedious minute unfolding it, flattening it, smoothing the creases. He cleared his throat and held the page at arm’s length.

“Junior,

Off to Montauk with Lori and kids.

Call when I can.

Feel free to avail yourself of the liquor in the library cabinet.

Dad”

Nybuster started to snigger. “Please … avail yourself. Avail yourself!” He exploded into a bout of cruel, obscene laughter.