Nathaniel Rich - Odds Against Tomorrow

“You saw the bank building. It’s nice.”

She laughed — a short, caustic burst of air — and shook her head. “You’ve already decided.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I do. And I know how you feel about Future Days.”

The smell hit him all at once then, and he felt he was about to be sick.

“You’ve made up your mind,” said Jane. “You probably made up your mind as far back as Maine. Fort Lee, even.”

In his mind he was floating with her again in Central Park, she was laughing and chewing animal crackers, the crow was shrieking, the sky was brightly scrubbed blue, and Mitchell and Jane were enclosed by the branches of the oak trees, laughing and floating together.

“I’ve been trying to imagine what it’d be like,” he said. “Starting a new company.”

“And?”

“It’s not for me. The business of fear. All day stuck in a cell, creating worst-case scenarios. Doomsday every single day.”

“So you lied to me,” said Jane.

“That’s not it.”

“You’ve changed. I don’t understand it.”

“Look, the FEMA camp is going to hell. FEMA camps always do, you know. Let’s try this. For a little while, at least.”

“I went to the roof this morning.”

“The roof?”

“At the bank building. While you were in the front room, I slipped upstairs. From the roof you can see the tip of Manhattan.”

A silence stretched between them, stretched taut, and then it snapped.

“What did you see?” Mitchell said.

“The Mosquitoes are gone.”

“Really.”

She cocked her head, as if listening to something he was saying. But he had stopped speaking. So she was listening to some other voice, one he couldn’t hear. When this internal voice finished delivering its message, her eyes snapped back to his.

“I want to be there when the city comes back,” she said. “I want to be part of that. Hank was right. This neighborhood will take months to come back. Years, even. They might forget about it altogether.”

Mitchell nodded.

“That’s why you want to stay, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t thought it through,” he said. “For the first time in my life I’m not thinking anything through.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve thought it through.”

She was right. He had changed. But she hadn’t. She was the same: passionate, committed, loyal Jane Eppler. Her loyalty had shifted, however. It was not with him anymore. Her loyalty was with Future Days, with New York.

“You can use my name,” he said. “If it helps you. My scenarios, too. Take them all.”

“I might do that.”

“I’d like you to.”

With a sudden, almost deranged intensity, Jane lunged toward him with arms outspread. The embrace didn’t last long. Just as abruptly she pulled away from him, as in disgust. She picked up the water jug. Without looking back, she set off in the direction of the train tracks.

Mitchell let her go.

11.

Order, logic, reason. Order, order, order, order . If you said “order” enough times in a row, you were guaranteed to drive yourself mad.

Think of it as a geometry problem. The first step was demarcation: draw the x- and y-axes, name the variables. Most important of all, define the boundaries. Otherwise you were just beckoning chaos.

The rectangular plot adjacent to the bank building on Flatlands Avenue was about half the size of a basketball court. The surface soil was orange. That was the only indication that a structure had stood there a week earlier, for the building itself had vanished. Mitchell scouted the surrounding land for any materials he could find. He loaded bent ribbons of wood and shattered masonry and sections of granite tile into a wheelbarrow that had been generously donated by Jackpot Eastern Market Supply. He dumped the debris along the border of his estate, where it began to accrete into a ramshackle perimeter wall. It would take days before the wall became functional — it was no more than a couple of feet at its highest point. But it seemed crucial to create a border to the property. A barrier would be necessary once the garden began to grow, if only to keep out the rats. They were everywhere, the rats. Without buildings or walls to shelter them, they had been forced out into the open. They raced, bewildered and terrorized, across the scarred landscape in search of any scrap that might shelter them. Many of them darted into the marsh, though few emerged from it. That’s because other, larger animals were moving in, no doubt attracted by the increasing availability of rodents. He’d now seen two foxes, an opossum, and a raccoon. On his second night he had been kept up by what he assumed must have been an owl, though it did not hoot. It gave a wounded cry: Ow! Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow —like a child rubbing his boo-boo. Or being stabbed. OW OW OW! Yes, it would be important to build the wall high. At least to the height of a tall human being. It was impossible to know what was lurking in this wilderness — or who.

The ground floor was still a mess, but at least now it was an orderly and relatively hygienic one. Mitchell had stockpiled supplies from Jackpot — not just food but clothing (ersatz Benetton T-shirts and cotton-polyester blend slacks and triple packs of boxer briefs), an ax with a two-foot haft, rubber gloves, sanitizing wipes, bleach, barrels, shovels, padlocks. He kept the more valuable tools, along with his cash, in the old vault, which the previous tenants had cleaned out before the storm.

One afternoon, his third, or fourth — he was already beginning to lose track of the days — he ran into Hank outside of Jackpot.

“Your friend,” said Hank. “She gone?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She didn’t want to be here.”

“How do you know?”

“You could tell. The way she walked, even. Like she was being punished.” He looked at Mitchell closely. “You going to stay?”

“For now,” said Mitchell.

“Then you’re going to want these.” Hank pointed at three bags of compost in his shopping cart. “Third aisle. With the garden supplies.”

Mitchell looked at him in confusion.

“You dig a hole in the ground. As deep as you can. Then you dump in a full bag of compost.”

“OK. Then what?”

“Then you take a shit, man.”

“Oh. Right.”

He would deal with the latrine later — for now the marsh would have to serve. Besides, there were more immediate problems. With Jane gone and Hank ensconced in his cathedral, he was deeply, emphatically alone. It wasn’t only that he was without other people — that he could deal with. He had been without other people for so much of his life. But now he was without belief. He had forsaken the cult of fear, had abandoned the order of the futurists. For what was obsession anyway but a kind of intense faith? Yes, a new faith was required, something rigorous, ascetic, all-encompassing. Because if he couldn’t find one, then all he had was order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order order.

He couldn’t help but think of Ticonderoga. It was the only comparable scenario he knew. In Starling they had repurposed the land to create a self-sufficient habitat. Sure, it had ended badly, but only because of the twin blows of Brugada and Tammy. Maybe something could be learned from Elsa’s blueprint. Upon reaching Maine, what was the first thing she had done? He thought back to her first letter. In April, she had written, we tilled the baseball field.

He wasn’t a true believer, but what else was available to him? He had to have time to think, and during that time he’d need to eat, give himself shelter, work. Most of all to work.

He began by pounding the ground with a hoe, breaking up the dirt. The undersoil was still damp, so the surface crust punctured easily and the chalky layer beneath gave little resistance. But that didn’t matter — the pain began almost immediately. His knees grumbled, his back sobbed, his shoulder shrieked.