Odds Against Tomorrow (12 page)

He had fled the FutureWorld office that day at noon, driven by an outrageous hunger. Cheeseburgers—he wanted cheeseburgers with a desperation that made his eyes water. At least he assumed it was his desire for cheeseburgers that was making his eyes water. But his hunger was extinguished almost immediately by the sight of a rat. It was not just any rat. As a New Yorker of nearly three months’ standing he was well acquainted with the local vermin. They were citizens too, after all: the pigeons queuing at the street corner, waiting for the light to change; the rats loitering on subway platforms; the bedbugs snuggling in the mattresses, preparing for dinner. But lately New York’s second-class citizens had been behaving strangely. This rat on Thirty-third Street, for instance, was attacking a garbage bag with an epileptic fervor. Having perforated the black plastic with its fangs, it tried to tear an opening by whiplashing its head with sudden jerks. It looked terrified, as if it weren’t trying to remove food from the bag, but seeking shelter inside it. New York rats had a reputation for haughtiness—they knew they were going to outlast you, it was just a matter of time, so could you please stop getting in their way?—but recently their confidence seemed shaken. Was it simply the heat? The unfair, merciless, dominant heat? Or did they know that something was coming? The animals were always the first to know. It was that way with the warming world—the polar bear experimenting with anorexia, the marmot cutting short its hibernation, the American grizzly emigrating to Canada. And now the native New Yorkers were behaving erratically as well. The rats were traumatized; the pigeons neurotic, their dirty beaks nodding incessantly, like meth addicts; the roaches were downright hysterical, running suicides across the sidewalk. And maybe Mitchell was imagining it, but he could swear that every single infant in every single stroller was shrieking. Could they sense it too, the newborns? Could they sense this tremendous thing, whatever it was, that was coming for them all?

Where had his thoughts taken him? Ahead was the navy ribbon of the Hudson River, evaporating in vaporish wisps into New Jersey. Behind him a sky bridge that supported trees and dangling vines. Beside him a wide glass window inscribed with vinyl block letters, each letter a different shade of neon:

PSYCHO!

WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU SLEEP?

The canoe rested on a podium in the middle of the gallery floor. The hull was painted in a kind of camouflage, only the colors, instead of being greens and browns, were a nightmarish swirl of orange and cerulean and bloodred.

As soon as Mitchell stepped into the refrigerated art gallery he was approached by a delicate young man with pointed elbows, a too-clever smile, and glasses with translucent rims. The man closed the distance rapidly; he held a damp Dixie cup of ice water in his outstretched hand. Mitchell took the water gratefully, winced when the ice touched his gums. Before Mitchell could understand exactly where he was or what was happening, the attendent launched into a prepared speech. The current exhibition, he explained, featured the work of a group of young artists from the eastern Canadian provinces. These artists aimed to combine sixties psychedelic art with the folkloric art of First Nations tribes. The New Psychedelia School, they called themselves. “Rationality has made a mess of this world,” read the artist’s statement, posted on the wall. “We want to trust our impulses more.” Mitchell knew he had heard it somewhere before. The attendent indicated a series of portraits in which the subjects’ skin was peeled away to reveal bright patterns of stripes and polka dots. There was also a set of naked mannequins that were extraordinarily lifelike below their necks, with hair and pores, though they had the faces of animals—bears and giraffes and swans. But Mitchell didn’t care about any of this. He just wanted to look at the piece titled
Psycho Canoe
.

The canoe, explained the attendant, was made by a young Nova Scotian woman named Sylvan who collected objects from her natural environment and painted them in unexpected ways, using organic laminates and gold leaf and nontoxic enamel in an effort to capture the eternal unity of—

“Is it a real canoe?” Mitchell asked. “Functional, I mean.”

“Sure. Even comes with two wood paddles. One of my favorite things is the fine detail she gave to the gunwales. If you’ll come closer.”

“How much?”

The kid nodded politely and made a show of going over to his desk and consulting a price guide. He returned with an ironic smile. A smile of ironic regret.

“For this work we have set a price of twenty-nine thousand dollars.”

Mitchell laughed, and the attendant, assuming that Mitchell was astonished by the price, joined in. Mitchell supposed that he was, in a way, laughing at the price—but not because it was high. He could buy the
Psycho Canoe
with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.

The gallery attendant’s conspiratorial smirk was beginning to irritate him. Did the fact that Mitchell’s shirt was soaked through with sweat, or that his hair was uncombed and his eyes crazy—did the attendant find that amusing? Did he think that Mitchell couldn’t buy an expensive piece of art on a whim? This kid who, no doubt, was himself a struggling artist. See the tattoo, some kind of green flower, creeping above the margin of his shirt collar by barely an inch—but what calculation had gone into that inch! And those worn brown loafers, certainly his only good pair, purchased by his parents so that he could look respectable at his first job, at a Chelsea gallery with slate floors and theater lighting. Would he have given the same smirk to Alec Charnoble, or Ned Nybuster? Mitchell was finished being underestimated. Sandy Sherman had underestimated him, as did so many of his new FutureWorld clients—they paid their fees happily and sat through the consultation meetings in order to satisfy the requirements of the liability claims law, but they were slow to believe the horrors that Mitchell forecast. And Elsa, for that matter, hadn’t listened to him either. And now she lay in a coma at Augusta General. Mitchell reached for his wallet.

“Do you deliver?” he said.

The attendant flinched. It was barely perceptible—a slight recoil, the boy hunching an inch or two as if in response to a light blow to the stomach—but it gave Mitchell immense satisfaction. He felt that he had proved something. But what, exactly? And to whom?

*   *   *

The purchase of the Psycho Canoe was not the only evidence that the new Mitchell acted in ways that would have baffled the old Mitchell. In the weeks since Elsa’s attack, something had ruptured. It was as terrifying as it was liberating. His old life had peeled away like a label, and his old habits had lost their appeal. The catastrophe literature that arrived in his office every day began to pile up, unread. He shunned the library. He even lost his desire to calculate disaster odds. Elsa was right. By concentrating on the large-scale disasters he had missed the one unfolding right in front of him: Elsa herself.

His brain didn’t shut down entirely, however. He was thinking, all right, it was just that the
thinking
part of him was increasingly removed from the
doing
part. During consultations with his clients he perceived Mitchell Zukor from a great distance, observing his actions unfold as if from miles away, peering out an oval airplane window or watching himself on a movie screen from the back row of the theater—a form of disengagement he had read about in firsthand descriptions of warfare. He watched himself take risks that weeks ago would have been inconceivable. He rarely looked before crossing the street, relying on sound and peripheral vision. He drank water directly from the tap. He held his cell phone next to his brain, neglecting to use his headset. He even let it rest in his front pocket, next to his testicles. What did he have to lose? Or, for that matter, to gain?

He’d read in a biography of Kurt Gödel that the great mathematician, after finishing work on his incompleteness theorems, suffered a breakdown and became incomplete himself. Sad old Kurt refused to leave the house, stopped washing, even abstained from eating. His weight dropped to sixty-five pounds and ultimately he died of starvation. But before he succumbed he developed one final application of his theory. He argued that the incompleteness theorems—which said that certain universal truths cannot be proved by rational thought—were themselves proof of the existence of God. Gödel’s suffering must have been tremendous, but in those final years his genius reached a new plateau. By withdrawing himself from Earth, he was able to perceive other planets, other universes, other realities. After his death they found in his rolltop desk a page of butcher paper on which he had scrawled his final thoughts. He had written, “There exist other worlds peopled by rational beings of a different and higher kind.”

“What do you want me to do with this coffin?” yelled the doorman into Mitchell’s ear. “I tried using the passkey to your apartment, but it seemed there was some other lock on the door.”

There were, in fact, four other locks on the door, including a biometric panel that clicked open only when Mitchell touched his right forefinger to a sensor he had screwed into the jamb.

“I’ll be there soon,” said Mitchell, whispering so that Charnoble didn’t rush in. “Just sign for it, please.”

“And leave it in the lobby? I can’t. It’s a fire hazard!”

Very well, Mitchell thought as he hung up, but this fact in itself was hardly notable; the city was full of fire hazards. It was September now, and the drought had become increasingly dire. Back in July, Elsa had described particles of soil and dust floating through the Maine air, and the same thing was now happening in New York. The garbage was airborne. Plastic bags, newspapers, leaves that had cracked and fallen from the dehydrated trees—autumn had been prematurely induced. In the parks the parched soil solidified in crumbling beds of craquelure. The bodegas sold air-filtering masks imported from Japan. There were designer masks and low-end masks, louvered models and formfitting models, omega-pleated models for women with smaller faces, models with nose pads, nonstick models, and models that came equipped with damp filters containing SoothOn, a mentholated vapor laced with benzocaine that created the “sensation of throat-soothing steam” every time you exhaled. The local news anchors debated which models were the safest and most fashionable.

Most New Yorkers carried on with their usual activities, pantomiming quotidian normalcy, as if nothing were wrong. But a quiet lethargy had jammed the city’s clockwork. Pedestrians zombified at the curbs, cyclists walked their bikes through the traffic, cabs inched, trains stalled. Subway platform fainting spells became so common that EMS workers set up triage posts at the Grand Central, Borough Hall, and Times Square hubs. And the sky—everybody was talking about the sky. It was brassy, smoldering. But even though the days were sunny and bright, the haze, which rose from the pavement in velvety curtains, reduced visibility to less than a square block. Garbage burst into flame spontaneously, but the fire department had been ordered to let these small fires burn themselves out. There was no water to spare. They had to save the water for the expensive fires, the ones that threatened full city blocks and office towers and glassy high-rises. In neighborhoods in upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, the city had cut off the fire hydrants, complaining that too many kids were popping off the fireplugs, turning them into fountains. There was not enough water left in the reservoir for such frivolity, said the fire commissioner. Civil rights groups had filed suit.

Mitchell pushed through the revolving door in the lobby of the Empire State Building and broke into a sprint. The heat stopped him flat after half a block and he burst into a coughing fit, hacking out thick gobs marbled with black dust. He wondered what was in the dust. That morning the Air Quality Index had crested to 240, which put it safely in the Very Unhealthy zone (defined by the EPA as “everyone may experience more serious health effects due to airborne toxic particulate matter”). The whole Northeast was blanched, wilting. If only a big storm came along, said the meteorologists. Better yet, a
series
of big storms. If only.

By Third Avenue Mitchell was dripping on the sidewalk, big globular drops. The ovals of sweat that had spread concentrically outward from his armpits and neck had reconnoitered on the front of his shirt. Or was his stomach sweating too? Yessir. The stomach and the groin and the back had all jumped into the pool. The only part of his body that was not slick with moisture was the inside of his mouth. He had entered a new hell, and he was burning up. But it felt good, these flames, felt right. After the tepid limbo of the last three weeks, he welcomed the demotion to a lower circle. He welcomed the flames.

As promised the long wooden crate lay across the lobby, at a gratuitous angle—it could have been nudged in such a way that it didn’t block the entrance, but the doorman was proving a point. Mitchell held up one finger as he slipped past the doorman, who was muttering vile things in a Slavic language, and raced up the stairs. He removed ten twenties from the freezer—his face gasping in the cold air—and returned to the lobby. The first three twenties made the doorman stop cursing. The next five made him help Mitchell carry the Psycho Canoe up the stairwell. Two more twenties—and the reassurance that the box did not contain a coffin or a body—convinced him to help Mitchell break apart the crate. The doorman brought up a hammer and a bar. It took ten minutes. The planks of wood lay in a pile in the center of Mitchell’s living room like a pyre.

“Do you want me to take the wood away?” asked the doorman, eyeing the freezer.

Mitchell declined. He wanted to be alone with his canoe.

It occupied most of the living room. In order to clear enough space, Mitchell had to fold the plastic dining table, move it into the closet, and shove the couch into the corner. As the sky darkened, turning from pearl to mouse to soot, he ate dinner in the canoe, pensively dipping cold leftover spring rolls into cold, gelatinous duck sauce. He removed his shoes and pants. He fell asleep there with the television on, his head under the bow seat. It was a cosy berth, there in the hull of the Psycho Canoe. For the first time in two weeks—since he’d heard about Elsa—he slept like a corpse.