Odds Against Tomorrow (30 page)

What was the alternative? Elsa’s Ticonderoga dream of a self-sustaining farm, toxin-free food, the creation of so much natural energy that the surfeit could electrify the rest of the county? Sure, all that was noble, that was fine. Elsa had been a kind of futurist herself, her behavior driven by her fear about what was happening to the planet—and to herself. But Mitchell had been in finance too long to lose sight of the truth about Ticonderoga. What, after all, was its source of income? Billy’s father’s money. That wasn’t a business model. It was a charity, financed by good intentions. This put Ticonderoga squarely on the wrong side of history. It was a local, virtuous, and limited enterprise. The Nybusters of the universe would never invest in a Ticonderoga. They wanted to be insulated from transformational change. That’s why Future Days was the present, if not also the future. The question was whether it was
Mitchell’s
future.

He realized that he was pacing around the room. He reached into the refrigerator for a water. As he popped the can, he heard a knocking behind him. So—Jane had reconsidered.

“Jane?” he said. “Should I come in?”

“That wasn’t me,” Jane called out from inside the bedroom.

There was more knocking. The trailer rattled. He went to the front door. Marcy Rosado was back, with her child. This time she had brought twenty-five people.

“Mr. Prophet,” said Marcy. She was rocking the baby on her shoulder to the erratic rhythm of her own agitation. Her teeth were bared. “Is
now
a good time?”

8.

What would Tibor do? A ludicrous question under normal circumstances, but here was one situation in which the experiences of father and son overlapped. A city destroyed, and nowhere to go. What would he do? Tibor would flee, as he had Budapest in the winter of 1956, hiding under a tarp in the bed of an apple truck until it reached Nickelsdorf, on the other side of the Austrian border. Rikki? She’d be halfway to Kansas City by now. She could take better care of herself than any government agency, thank you very much. And Elsa? Saint Elsa of the Fields? That was easiest of all. She’d be gone already—lost in the urban wilderness. It seemed to be Elsa’s preferred state, lost in the wilderness. The wilderness of idealism, the wilderness of Maine, the wilderness of unconsciousness. Wherever she might be, she was lost.

But Jane Eppler was the only person who counted now. And her feelings on the subject were a tad more nuanced.

“You’ve gone fucking in-
sane
.”

She was foaming at the mouth. She had stepped out of the bathroom while brushing her teeth and the toothpaste foam was spilling down her chin. She caught it with her free hand and dodged back into the bathroom cubicle. Mitchell sat up on the couch and checked the clock. It was seven in the morning. It occurred to him that he had never heard Jane curse before.

She rinsed and spat, forcefully. She appeared again in the little stretch of space between the bathroom and the living room, what might be called a hallway if it were longer than three feet.

“After everything we’ve been through.”

“Why do you keep saying that? I wasn’t going to abandon you.”

“Hold on.” She went back into the bathroom. The water ran. She spat again.

When she emerged, she scrutinized his face, squinting, as if to detect some hidden pattern there. Whatever she saw couldn’t have worked to his advantage. His skin still tender and pinkish from his little adventure in the Ticonderoga crematorium. A yellow scab on his chin that was just beginning to peel. His flat hair whorled in cowlicks like an electrocution victim; his eyes red, scummy with sleep; and his semi-beard, a growth of five days—what Rikki called his “Mexicano look,” which had something to do with the fact that only his mustache grew in fully, the hair on his cheeks growing out sparsely and in different directions, like spines on a saguaro. He knew this much about his appearance without consulting a mirror. He also realized that his mouth was hanging open, like a taxidermied bear.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I believe you.”

“Really?”

“I have no choice, do I? What else can I do? Even if I wanted to go home, all the buses have left. I don’t know what is happening in the city; there’s no way to tell what horrors are raging there. And I’m not going to stay by myself in this camp. It wouldn’t be safe. So I’m completely vulnerable. Another way of saying that is, I’m screwed.” Her voice lowered. “Besides. We have to trust each other if we’re going to try to make Future Days work.”

“Right. Good point.” And that was the moment of cowardice.
Wrong,
he should have said.
I’m not going to work at Future Days.
But that would have started a conversation he was not prepared to have. A conversation that would end with her leaving him. So he just sat there with a bland smile, like the selfish weasel he was.

“So,” said Jane. “Breakfast?”

They followed the crowds to the food tent.

“It’s really not so bad here,” said Jane. “See?”

He saw. It really was so bad. Five men stood in a line outside a trailer just twenty yards down. None of them talked with each other. Mitchell knew what they were waiting for. The previous night Marcy Rosado had, through tears, cataloged the depredations she had seen on FEMA Island: propane tanks were being filched right and left; small children found syringes in the field and used them in unsupervised games of doctor; and women who had lost everything in the storm were turning tricks. He hadn’t mentioned this to Jane, and he didn’t now, but one look at those men standing outside the trailer, hands in pockets, the red ribbon dangling from the door handle, and he knew that the trailer was open for business.

Those men were patient, but no one else seemed to be. Breakfast wasn’t served until eight o’clock, but even now the line was growing—Mitchell could see it from their trailer on the other side of the camp. The other refugees streamed by them, quick-walking or jogging toward the food. It was unsettling, this mania at every meal, the people rapacious in their hunger. It was like they were racing against one another. It was like they were running for their lives.

They waited ninety minutes before being handed their microwaved breakfast burrito. It was cold. Biting into the tortilla, the flaky eggs coming loose all over the paper wrapping, the congealed salsa oozing like berry preserves, Mitchell thought of the frozen burritos he had stocked in his freezer before it had been crowded out by his money, and he had a strange pang of nostalgia for his old apartment. What condition was it in now? If an empty house, left alone for a single year, begins to harbor animals, what happens to a New York City apartment, its window blown in, its electricity out, in the week after a hurricane? Do rats make nests in the bathtub? Does the couch bloom moss? He didn’t want to think about the refrigerator. Undoubtedly by now the leftovers from Chosan Galbi had colonized the shelves, employing crude biological warfare, entrenching for a long occupation.

“This is gruggy,” said Jane, washing down a bite with a gulp from her allotted pint of orange juice. “But I’m going to eat every morsel.” She appeared to gag slightly as she pushed the burrito into her mouth.

They sat on a bench crushed between the Motas and the Watkins family of East New York. The Watkinses had been behind Jane and Mitchell in line. Between increasingly violent imprecations to their misbehaving children—there seemed to be about eleven of them in all—they had recited a tedious story about taking a public bus for eight hours through Queens with a band of manacled convicts.

“We’re too rich for this,” Mitchell whispered. He was trying to eat quickly and avoid eye contact with the other refugees, wearing his FEMA baseball hat low on his head. He worried about a repeat of yesterday’s encounter. Perhaps Marcy Rosado would see him and arouse her mob. Only this time the mob would include the entire camp.

“Exactly,” said Jane. “We should be eating baked Alaska or something. Though I’d settle for a hamburger.”

She did look starving. Like a refugee.

“I can’t stop thinking of that building you ran into at Ticonderoga,” she said.

“The infirmary. Where Elsa lived.”

“How the walls were collapsing in on themselves. That’s how it’s been since Tammy, isn’t it? The walls collapsing in on themselves?”

Mitchell put down his burrito. He leaned in so that the Motas and Watkinses couldn’t overhear.

“You think I’m good at predicting disasters?”

“Not really,” said Jane. “I’m just betting my career on it.”

“Well, this?” He gestured around the meal tent, at the impatient refugees still standing in line, at the Watkinses screaming at their children, who were stealing one another’s burritos. “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“I know,” said Jane, and she put down her burrito. “I can’t eat this anymore. Let’s just go back to the trailer.
Now
.”

They hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when a bomb detonated. A plume of smoke burst into the air three rows down. They approached cautiously, following the crowd across the field. A trailer’s propane tank had burst. Gas fumes blurred the air. The couple who lived there were lying on the grass, blackened by the smoke.

“They’re dead,” said Jane.

But the couple began to cough and wheeze, and slowly they crawled away from the wreckage. The crowd stood by and watched until the flames had burned themselves out. And then they began to line up for lunch.

9.

The corner of the chain-link fence was occluded by the blocky form of Hank Cho. “Blocky” wasn’t quite the right term: he really resembled a single block, as of granite or wood. A human two-by-four. Even from twenty-five yards away, in the darkness, there was no mistaking his girth. Jane squeezed Mitchell’s arm.

“Where are all the others?”

“Maybe they’re coming.”

“Maybe this is a
trap
.”

It was an argument that would have persuaded the old Mitchell. If he had worried that Alec Charnoble, at their first meeting, might slaughter him in the middle of the night on the seventy-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, where surveillance cameras and motion sensors and keystroke recorders detected their every move, then shouldn’t he be alarmed at the prospect of meeting an inordinately built Korean—or Chinese—man in the middle of the night on an island that had minimal security and was descending briskly into
chaos
? Soon the men would be stalking one another as at Ticonderoga and at the flooded deli on Madison Avenue. What would stop Hank Cho from dismembering them right there and then? He could boast to the rest of the refugees that he had killed the false prophet. Yet even as Mitchell’s brain went through the familiar convolutions of worst-case scenarioism, he felt oddly removed from himself. His brain’s logical infrastructure still functioned, but the fear, the hot animal fear, was absent. He yanked Jane the final fifteen yards toward Hank Cho.

“Hey guys,” said Hank. He sounded sleepy. “Glad you came.”

“Where is everybody?” said Jane.

“Guess they’re scared.” Hank looked at his watch. “I think it’s just us three.”

They stood in silence for several moments. Jane hiccuped.

“Yeah,” said Hank. “Let’s probably go.” He started walking in the direction of the bridge.

Jane took Mitchell’s hand, and squeezed it.

“I’m putting all my trust in you,” she said.

“And I’m putting all my trust in Hank Cho.”

Jane stopped in her tracks. “You’ve completely lost it.”

Laughing, they followed the giant into the darkness.

*   *   *

Queens was invisible. From the span of the Hell Gate they could see, ahead and to the left, the white glare of the klieg lights over LaGuardia Airport. The Mosquitoes were doing their work, sucking the polluted water from the runways and spraying the slurry into the bay in geysers that sparkled like formations of dark quartz. The rest of the borough was dark. It was a cloudy night, the moon as invisible as the Rockaways, so it was impossible to assess the damage in the neighborhoods beneath the train tracks. Still, Mitchell thought he could glimpse forms moving in the blackness—anxious, darting movements, like scurrying rats. Only much larger. He told himself it was a figment of his imagination.

“Just follow the light,” said Hank, like a deathbed priest. Once they’d crossed the bridge, he aimed a yellow industrial flashlight in front of him. A second, dimmer model was tucked into his belt, mostly illuminating his buttocks but also spilling down to trace the narrow gravel strip between the northbound and southbound tracks. The gravel bounced and flickered as he walked, the light wobbling with each of his lumbering steps—for such a strong man he was rather clumsy of gait. They walked single file, Jane in the middle. And they didn’t talk. What was there to say? Any efforts at trivialities sounded absurd, even blasphemous against the night’s silence. There were no birdcalls, no crepitation of insects, not even frogs—only the crunch of the gravel and the light
phthapping
of the flashlight against Hank Cho’s bottom. After about half an hour, or an hour, or two—it was impossible to tell anymore—Hank halted their procession. He passed out cans of water and they drank greedily. When they were finished they tossed the empty cans over the railing and listened closely, as if the clink of the cans might describe the terrain of the streets below. But all they heard were three large plops. They kept walking, more quickly now.

What were they doing? What were they thinking? Mitchell tried not to think at all by concentrating on the path. He had to be careful to walk in a straight line so as not to veer off the tracks.

But of course he had already veered off the tracks. That’s exactly what he had done! He had run himself off the rails: the rails of his career and perhaps of his sanity. He had never adhered to them well—they’d always been slick, his sanity rails. And now the train was careening into the darkness, the engineer slumped unconscious over the wheel, his shoulder pressing on the accelerator. But this newest excursion was not entirely inconsistent with his past behavior. He had been running away from things for as long as he could remember: from Overland Park, the Zukorminiums, Fitzsimmons Sherman, FutureWorld, New York, Ticonderoga, Randall’s Island. The more he ran from things, the less he knew where he was. Where would it end?