Odds Against Tomorrow (13 page)

2.

Charnoble stepped into Mitchell’s office, scissors in one hand and a long red ribbon, trailing to the ground, in the other. When Mitchell turned to face him, Charnoble sliced the ribbon in half.

“We’re moving on up!”

The ribbon slithered to the rug. Mitchell waited patiently.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I agree with you. We need a new office. Being in the Empire State Building undermines our authority.”

“Our safety, really. It undermines our physical safety. That’s the issue.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve found a place. We’re going to get out of this death trap.”

“That’s good news,” said Mitchell. He looked around his office, taking stock as if for the last time: the bare walls, the four clocks (one per wall), the low ceilings, and the expansive ivory carpet, its dense piles no doubt flourishing with bacteria (staph and E. coli assuredly, with even odds on salmonella). In the middle of the carpet lay a cardboard box, delivered that morning, that contained a pair of Day-Glo-orange PFDs, personal flotation devices. He figured they could serve as cushions for his canoe-couch.

“I’ve decided to let you go free,” Charnoble added, smiling with every tooth in his head.

“Free?”
Mitchell’s intestines clenched. Would he have to beg Sandy Sherman for his old job? Maybe he could sell the canoe back to the gallery—that would buy him a couple of months.

“You don’t need me on your consultations anymore. You’ll be flying solo.”

Mitchell exhaled. “Are you saying that you won’t accompany me to the terror meetings?”

“I trust you, Mitchell.”

“It won’t be a problem.”

Nor would it make much of a difference—Charnoble, after all, had been increasingly absent in the meetings. But Mitchell asked for a raise nonetheless. Charnoble granted it before the words left Mitchell’s mouth. He seemed surprised that Mitchell hadn’t asked for more.

It was difficult to tell exactly when it started, but there was no denying it now: FutureWorld had entered a boom period. Even before the raise, Mitchell’s commission-based salary had inflated spectacularly. And from the moment the Psycho Canoe had arrived at his apartment, the old Mitchell gradually began to return. His obsession with issues of cause and effect, interconnectedness, fate, and doom had never been stronger, so his mind was particularly well prepared for apocalyptic visions. Elsa’s blind optimism had deluded him, but her influence was beginning to wane. As the shock of her attack receded, he began again to see the world for the thermodynamic time bomb that it was. He resumed his old habits, stalking the library and monitoring daily disaster news from around the globe. It soon became clear to him that, during his brief vacation, conditions had only gotten worse. He could feel it intuitively: disaster was real, and it was coming fast, like an asteroid plummeting from the sky. Perhaps it
was
an asteroid plummeting from the sky. Something giant and obliterating was rapidly encroaching. What did it matter whether it were a bomb or an earthquake or a drought?

His Cassandra tales grew more persuasive, more specific. Perhaps too specific. During consultations he wrote calculations on a whiteboard, teaching them to his clients like a satanic high school algebra teacher. His favorite was the one developed by a Stanford statistician that predicted the odds of a nuclear war in the next year:

λ
CMTC
=
λ
IE
P
1
P
2
P
3

λ
IE
was the annualized probability of an event that could lead to a nuclear showdown (or Cuban-missile-type crisis).
P
1
was the probability that such an event actually results in a showdown.
P
2
was the probability that the crisis leads to the launch of a nuclear weapon. And
P
3
was the probability that the initial nuclear bomb results in a global nuclear war. Multiply the factors together, and the answer came out as one in ten. Every single year, in other words, there was a ten percent chance that the species would extinguish itself.

He had no great advice to offer his clients about this fact. He just wanted them to understand the likelihood that they would be incinerated shortly.

“You won’t be able to say no one warned you,” he said.

He could see the increasing discomfort, even alarm, on their faces. It was evident in the tight set of their jaws, their crimson eyes, their yellowish skin, the fingernail marks in their palms. He realized that the more strongly he believed his prophecies, the more strongly they did. It helped that anxiety was in the air. No longer was it free-floating. It had coalesced, settling into something heavier, tangible—a sludge of anxiety. You had to wade through it on the way to work; it sucked you down from underfoot, like quicksand.

In this light, the young, low-level financial associates who met with him suddenly seemed pitiful. They didn’t realize what they’d gotten themselves into. Like him, they had come from distant cities and towns to New York, hoping to make their fortune. Out of their element, without anyone to advise them, they bunked in dormitories dressed up as apartments in overpriced midtown high-rises and spent excessively on sushi, online dating, tailors, executive haircuts. But they were blind to their fate. They didn’t realize they were being fed like virginal sacrifices into the maw of history, of twenty-first-century global capitalism, of vast, complex systems that were wildly beyond their control. He wanted to help them. In his consultations he would explain to these young financial associates why, despite the suitsandties-Christmasbonuses-gymmembership-nightclubbottleservice-steakhousesplurges, they still woke up in the middle of the night with violent images in their brains and screams building in their chests. Mitchell’s scenarios reassured them that they had good reason to be afraid.

The drought helped. The weathermen, their credibility shot, were taking a beating. Out of desperation—or panic—they began to predict rain. They pointed to tropical storms in the Caribbean: imposing Irma, ominous Ophelia, promising Philippe—but all veered out to sea before making the Atlantic Seaboard. They pointed to a chain of hurricanes developing off the coast of Mauritania, another promising development. The Eurasian snow cover was higher than the previous year, broody cumulonimbus clouds were gathering just two hundred miles off Florida, and the sea surface temperatures in the tropics were at ten-year lows. Hopeful signs all, but still there was no rain. Faith in the meteorological industry fell to all-time lows—not that it had far to fall. Even the local anchors were getting into the act, using their meteorologists for easy punch lines. One of New York’s most beloved weathermen, Channel 4’s “Big” Henry D., normally a frothsome, jovial personality, was reduced to euphemistic expressions of melancholy and long, half-coherent lamentations. “When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because your people have sinned,” said Henry D. one night, the anchorwoman gaping gobsmacked across the news desk, “then what can we do? O Lord, what can we do?”

It made sense to Mitchell. Frightened people didn’t want bromides, expressions of hope, happy predictions. They craved dread, worst-case scenarios, end times. What would the future cost them? They wanted to hear that the price would be exorbitant.

This was excellent news for FutureWorld. FutureWorld would provide. FutureWorld would take their money. Oh God yes, we would.

*   *   *

The new office consisted of eight linked rooms on the fourth floor of a tower at Columbus Circle. This glass monolith seemed only marginally safer than the Empire State Building, though Mitchell had at least dissuaded Charnoble from choosing an office on the twenty-seventh floor. It had dawned on him that Charnoble’s priority wasn’t safety, but the appearance, at least to an untrained eye, of safety.

“Uptown,” Charnoble kept saying. “Always wanted to make it uptown.”

“What do you mean?”

“Downtown is for the wealthy,” he said, clarifying. “But uptown? Central Park South? That’s for the
rich
.”

Charnoble began to hum “Uptown Girl” through his fat, grotesque jackal grin. It occurred to Mitchell that Charnoble’s mouth had been put there by mistake—it was much too wide for his face.

With business growing, FutureWorld had to expand. Charnoble’s first hire was Mary Tewilliger, a woman in her late sixties and a secretary of the old mold. She had worked in Brumley Sansome’s Risk department since the twentieth century. She won Mitchell over with her wrinkled forehead, proud chin, sagging elbows, and the agitated, bushy gesticulations of hair on either side of her face. Because she insisted upon being addressed as Ms. Tewilliger, behind her back Charnoble referred to her simply as Tewilliger. Or Old Tewilliger.

A week later Charnoble introduced Mitchell to a second hire. Jane Eppler was just out of Wharton Business, with a philosophy degree from Princeton. She had won an award for her senior essay on Antisthenes, the original Cynic. Jane was attractive in the pert, suburban, midwestern tradition, and she spoke with a sensual underbite. She seemed self-conscious about her pedigree, so she tried to baffle expectations by using coarse language. Yet some vestigial attachment to her Catholic upbringing seemed to prevent her from using actual obscenities. The first time they met, she told Mitchell that the elderly male professors at Wharton were “predatory, palsied panty sniffers.” Winnetka, where she grew up with her three sisters, was a “geektown” where “gap-toothing” a star athlete or a teacher was the only way to get noticed (Mitchell didn’t ask whether Jane had been “noticed”). She added, over the course of conversation, that Antisthenes was a “stone-cold Matterhorn,” that the Stoics were “slophouse peenmunchers.” This talk was exhausting, but it was also clearly an act, and an essentially defensive one at that. She used conversation to win concessions and deflect her own insecurities. And Mitchell couldn’t help but be charmed by the unguarded, intimate way she glanced at him whenever he taught her things about the job. She wore tastefully small, expensive gems in her ears and cleanly pressed navy suits; her brown hair bobbed gently on her shoulders when she exited a room. Charnoble had hired her to be a second Cassandra.

“I’d like to learn from you,” said Jane as Mitchell helped carry a box of her textbooks into her office—
Statistics for Business and Economics
,
Elementary Probability Theory
,
Wall Street Words
. “Alec says you’re a genius.”

“Really,” said Mitchell. “He said that?”

“Well, not exactly. He said you were a ‘terrorist—in the new sense of the word.’ He called you a ‘natural born terrorist.’”

“Mm. That sounds more like him.”

Yes, she would be good at the job, just not for the same reasons that he was good at it. Unlike him, Jane had no apparent fear of catastrophe. She didn’t believe for a minute anything she was asked to prophesy.

At Charnoble’s request, Mitchell sat in on Jane’s first sessions, but it was already clear that she’d developed her own routine.

“Can we drop the technical mumbo jumbo?” That was the kind of thing she said to clients. “I’m going to level with you,” she said. “The numbers don’t lie.” This was boilerplate stuff, fed to her by Charnoble, and all an act—Jane was a quant at heart. As if to dispel any doubt, she tacked to her office wall on her first day of work a series of Poisson distribution charts she had drafted on loose-leaf graph paper. The charts predicted the number of nuclear accidents each year, the number of goals scored by the Chicago Blackhawks per game, the spread of bird flu from point of outbreak, Manhattan traffic accidents, congressional sex scandals. Every day at lunch she added new data points, the charts on her wall solidifying into a rolling mountain range of bell curves.

“Keeps me in the world,” said Jane, apologetically, when she caught Mitchell staring at them. “I know—dorky.”

“No, it’s
not
,” said Mitchell, and they were both momentarily alarmed by the emotion in his voice.

But Jane avoided discussing Poisson distribution models in her consultation meetings and, for that matter, the jump-diffusion model, the constant elasticity of variance model, and the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model. She saved those for their work sessions. In her consultations she kept it easy, personal. The saleswoman’s flirtatiousness came naturally; the hucksterism appealed to her mischievous nature. She didn’t come across like Mitchell, an Old World avenger with a ten o’clock shadow. Jane was a sister figure or even a girlfriend—someone her predominantly male clients could confide in. They wanted, it seemed, to protect her.

Inevitably it turned out that Jane and the client shared some mutual acquaintance or personal interest. This was possible because she conducted extensive background searches before the first meeting, investigating her clients’ social lives just as assiduously as Mitchell researched the science behind his scenarios. She ran identity checks, posed as a potential employer to request information from college registrars, and scoured social networking sites.

She was a good student, but a better actress. In meetings she pulled her chair close to the client’s, moving to the same side of the table if possible, and made constant physical contact: she patted a knee, caressed a shoulder. From the first handshake she was in command. When she finally turned to Mitchell’s dark prophecies—for she loved his scenarios, called them “hilarious”—the effect was deadly. It gave Mitchell a special thrill to hear her interpretations of his scripts. In her delivery, his grave warnings were transformed into come-ons:

“Fear is the oldest, most effective security system we have. So don’t
fear
fear—
embrace
it.”

“I’m not here to talk to you about fear of the future. I want to tell you about the future of fear.”

“The world began without man, and it will end without him. Until then, there’s FutureWorld.”