Odds Against Tomorrow (11 page)

Nor was Mitchell concerned about the drought. In the past he would have turned, frantically, to his research, calculating the odds that the water scarcity might bring about a disruption in the food supply, a hoarding of goods, rapid inflation. It’s true that the water table numbers weren’t promising, but that was hardly remarkable. Nearly three billion people on the planet lived in water-stressed regions, places of continual drought. He did the research as always, but now he used the numbers as a salesman would—to recruit new clients, to catalyze their fears. It had become a game to him. FutureWorld had transformed him from a neurotic paranoid into something much stronger, more powerful: a businessman. To prove this to himself, he had called Pam Davenport and asked to see her finest apartments.

“The market in the financial district has shown some signs of loosening up,” she had said on the phone. “Especially the high-rises. The images from Seattle rattled some nerves, I’m afraid. But we can direct our energies further uptown, if you’d prefer—”

“No,” said Mitchell, an edge in his voice. “The financial district is perfect.”

This is where America happens. Where
we
happen.

“Very good. If the high-rises don’t bother you, we can begin with Eight Spruce Street.”

He let her describe the building, but he knew the details already. At seventy-six stories, Eight Spruce Street was the tallest residential tower in New York. In high winds it could lean fourteen feet in any direction. At Fitzsimmons Sherman he would stare at it from his window on the seventy-fifth floor and wonder why in the hell any human being would consent to living 867 feet off the ground in the middle of one of the world’s most dangerous airspaces.

After Pam Davenport had finished showing him the concealed “self-closing” bedroom drawers, which slid tight with a plaintive whisper, she led Mitchell to the windows. He had been waiting for this. So, it seemed, had she. With a quick, joyful intake of breath, she walked up close to the glass and then, to Mitchell’s alarm, leaned her forehead on it.

“A view like this,” she said, her mouth releasing an oval of fog onto the glass, “makes you feel like queen of the city.”

Maybe. You certainly could see a lot of it. There was the Brooklyn Bridge, its ramps spooled like a pile of gray snakes. The water from this height was a thin navy border between the ashy flanks of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the downtown skyscrapers, the ziggurats and belfries and minarets built in tribute to American industry, seemed plain and quaintly chunky, like the building blocks preschoolers played with, or Legos. It all made his legs feel very stiff. He thought of the skycity of his dreams and wondered whether some part of his brain—his amygdala, perhaps—had modeled those slender, infinite towers after Eight Spruce Street.

“Check this out,” said Pam Davenport, beckoning him forward. “You can see all—the way—down.”

He blinked, and the city began to canter diagonally across his vision. He tried to back away but his legs were too stiff.

“Mr. Zukor? Is everything all right?”

The window plunged at him. It socked him in the nose. He bounced off the glass and slid clumsily to the floor. Pam Davenport shrieked. All he could think of was the boy at John Day who sat down Indian-style on the fifty-yard line and died. When he opened his eyes there was a streak of blood across the glass, parallel to the Brooklyn skyline.

He heard his broker’s heels tapping on the hardwood, and then she was beside him with a wad of damp paper towels. She pressed it to Mitchell’s nose. The cold, pinkish water seeped down his lip and dropped onto his tie.

“Oh dear,” she said, and ran back for more paper.

He felt a sucking sensation in his right nostril. He snorted and a clot of blood exploded in the tissue.

“Oh my God,” said Pam, returning. “Is it broken?”

Mitchell explored the bridge of his nose with his free hand. He couldn’t remember whether the bumps and crevices he felt were the same old bumps and crevices, or whether his collision with the window had broken new ground and altered his entire facial topography.

“I guess it was the heat.”

“The quality of the air-conditioning units is simply unacceptable for a new building.” She looked more closely at him. “Do you have any medical condition I should know about?”

It really had been some time since Elsa had written. Five days? Six? This was unusual. Had he offended her? His last letter had been his most direct to date. He had explained that at FutureWorld he had learned that facing his fears head-on was the best way to defuse them. The window, at least, seemed to disagree.

The water seeped beneath his collar and onto his chest. When he realized that Pam Davenport had been mopping his face for several minutes with disintegrating paper towels and speaking in a hushed but increasingly hysterical voice, he forced himself to stand, using the wall as support.

“Listen, Pam,” he said, “maybe this isn’t such a hot idea after all.”

On the street, stumbling back to the subway, his hand pressing a paper towel to his nostril, he passed an old firehouse mobbed with schoolchildren. A fireman was blasting them with a fire hose. The ecstatic children screamed as they galloped through the jet. The water pooled around the gutter, which had been dammed by a weir of plastic bags. Three dogs, their owners trailing, cantered over to the puddle and began to slurp. The owners did not interfere but watched their dogs with expressions of profound longing.

11.

In the FutureWorld foyer Charnoble was waiting for him, consulting the watches on either wrist.

“We have our man from Edison Telecom in ten minutes.”

Mitchell walked past him, into his office.

“He wants to go over brain tumor epidemic scenarios again. Are you still fresh on the tumor scenarios?”

“In a decade, four percent of his workforce will develop gliomas,” said Mitchell impatiently, crossing the vast carpeted expanse. “Three percent acoustic neuromas, two percent salivary gland tumors, one percent meningioma, another five percent benign tumors. Financial damages can be extrapolated accordingly. OK?”

Mitchell removed from his desk drawer Elsa’s most recent letter. He read it over, looking for clues to her silence. There was her usual canoe sketch, the same neat schoolgirl’s handwriting. You’d think that if something were wrong you’d be able to see it in the handwriting, but penmanship that graceful indicated reason, orderliness, calm. Could it be some kind of subterfuge? He didn’t think Elsa was capable of subterfuge.

It was not a particularly long letter. She spent most of it recounting problems she’d had keeping the artesian well clean—because of the drought it had drained and was beginning to develop mold. She joked about one of her more avid comrades on the farm who had argued in defense of the mold, which after all was a colony of living organisms. “According to him, fifty-pound sacks of powdered milk are better than cartons of organic milk but not as good as milk squeezed out of our neighbor’s goats. Shopping for overalls in Augusta is better than shopping for overalls online, but weaving our own overalls out of hemp is better still. Nudity is best. Toothpaste without fluoride or parabens or propylene glycol is essential, but baking soda and peppermint oil does the trick fine, and a mush made out of crushed pine needles and dirt is ideal.” Elsa seemed in good spirits. There was nothing to indicate that she wanted to cut off contact with Mitchell.

“Any mail today, Alec?” he called out.

“Just the normal things.”

Mitchell ran back across the long ivory carpet to the small waiting room where the day’s envelopes and packages lay stacked on a coffee table. He hoped there wasn’t a letter from Elsa in the pile and he was afraid that there was not a letter in the pile and he was afraid that he was afraid.

“I’m still going to need you in the meeting,” said Alec. “He’s paying to see you, after all. They all pay to see you.”

“Start without me.”

Mitchell flipped through the envelopes. There was the usual assortment of doomsday paraphernalia, the daily harbingers of things to come: the September issue of the
Food Safety Magazine
; a carton of ciprofloxacin; a report he had ordered from the Federation of American Scientists titled “Updated International Nuclear Warhead Database”; and the annual statement of the Reinsurance Industry Consortium, the association of gargantuan corporations that insured insurance companies. But no sign of Elsa’s canoe. The old familiar fears started growing inside him like a tropical forest.

Charnoble glanced between Mitchell and one of the clocks on the wall. “Is there something wrong?” he said. “You don’t look good.”

Mitchell went back into his office, running across the carpet this time, and typed some words into his computer. When the phone number came up, he called it.

“ER. Augusta General.”

“Do you have a patient in your hospital named Elsa Bruner?”

There was a pause. In the background a man was screaming, the type of noise a dog would make while getting run over by a bus.

“Hold on.”

Charnoble paced into Mitchell’s office and pointed to one of his watches. Mitchell held up one finger.

The woman came back on the line after a few seconds. Or minutes. Time was beginning to get strange.

“Here’s the number.”

“The number?” said Mitchell.

“You got a pen?”

The woman gave him a telephone number with a Maine area code.

“What is that?”

“That’s the number they left.”

The screaming got worse. Mitchell had to raise his voice to make himself heard.

“The number that
who
left?”

“Hold on,” said the operator. The line was pulsing. “I have to take this.”

Mitchell hung up and dialed the number. After four rings a man picked up.

“Ticonderoga.”

Mitchell didn’t understand.

“Hello?” said the man. “Who’s that calling?”

“I didn’t think—I thought Ticonderoga didn’t have a phone number.”

“What? Why’d you call then?”

Mitchell shook his head. Nothing made sense.

“Hey,” said the man, in a sudden rage. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Listen,” said Mitchell. “Is Elsa there? Elsa Bruner?”

There was a delay. When the man spoke again his voice was quieter, defensive.

“Who is this?”

“Mitchell. Zukor. I’m a friend of Elsa’s.”

“Huh. Then I guess you haven’t heard.”

Mitchell closed his eyes.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

Part Two

Soon all sorts of strange things will come. No longer will things be as before.

—WASCO TRIBE PROPHECY

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

1.

“Your coffin’s here.”

“Wrong number!” Mitchell hung up—or tried to. His hand was trembling just enough that the receiver jarred against the plastic teeth on the telephone’s base. He used both hands to steady it into the groove.

The phone rang again.

“Sucker?”

“… This is Mitchell Zukor.”

“Two twenty-three East Thirty-seventh Street calling. You got a coffin here.”

“I’m not expecting a coffin.”

“Who is, right?” The doorman chuckled to himself. “There’s some guys got a large wood box and they want me to sign.”

Now Mitchell understood.

*   *   *

The day of the purchase, when he awoke—from a dream of swaying, infinitely tall glass towers and a sky as bright as a nuclear flash—he felt that some gear in his brain had broken. The engine still revved, but the apparatus was beginning to grate and stutter, and despite the fact that there were not yet any outward signs of malfunction, he knew that after a few more revolutions the parts would grind themselves into dust.

Like an android Mitchell had gone through that morning, sorting his disaster folders into alphabetical order (anthrax, botulism, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever…), scheduling meetings, dialing voice mail. It was only after he deleted his messages that he realized he hadn’t been listening at all, didn’t even know who had called or what they wanted. All he could think about was how Ticonderoga
did
, after all, have a phone line. Which meant that Elsa, the fainting girl, had lied to him. Of
course
Ticonderoga had a telephone. Probably a satellite connection too. Laptops and portables, no doubt. So why, then, this mad determination to write letters? Did Elsa think that if they had spoken by phone, Mitchell would have been more insistent? That he might persuade her of the absurdity of her decision to live on a half-assed farm in the middle of nowhere with a flock of third-generation hippies who washed their bodies in the lake and brushed their teeth with a paste of crushed pine needles? It would seem that his original hunch had been confirmed: Elsa wanted to read his thoughts, but she didn’t want to hear his voice.

Still, it shouldn’t have mattered. The poor girl had been asking for help—begging—in the only way she knew how, but he had been too dumb, or weak, to do anything. Deep down, did some part of him
want
her to suffer? Would that have proved his point? Then again, what else could he have done? Rented a car one Saturday morning, driven to Maine, and kidnapped her, checking her in, against her will, to Mount Sinai or NewYork-Presbyterian? There were laws against that. A more puzzling question: How had he allowed himself to be lured into her fantasy? And why had the news of her attack, so predictable and logical, disturbed him? Terrible things did happen. Wishful thinking was negligent, dangerous, and, in the case of Elsa Bruner, might even prove homicidal. But if Elsa were guilty of denial, Mitchell at least was an accomplice. And that was the old, familiar problem. Analysis without action.