Odds Against Tomorrow (15 page)

“Dr. Walsh? Thank you for your time. We’re going to have to cut away—”

“Please, Vivian? You need to inform the public that they must retreat from the coasts—”

“We’re going live now to Central Park, where an improbable display of jubilation has broken out on the Great Lawn. You just gotta see this—it’s the kind of thing that makes me proud to be a New Yorker. Actually—Harry? You want to take over? I might just run down there myself—”

Mitchell flipped off the television and raced back to the conference room, where his drought files were arrayed across the table: historical weather tables, local news articles, reports from the USDA, the USGS, NOAA, books with titles such as
The Worst Hard Time
,
The Drought
, and
The End of Nature
. This Walsh was right, at least about the soil. During the drought the region’s topsoil had dried out and turned to dust. Just the previous week, farmers in New Jersey had seen large, glowing towers of cloud passing over their farms—what one man interviewed on the nightly newscast had described as a “black blizzard.” The dust sprayed houses and seeped through the thinnest cracks in the walls, around the windows and under doors. “The grit gets into every crevice, even into a man’s soul, if I may say so,” said a Newark contractor. One of the tabloids profiled a woman in Morris County who woke up to find that overnight, a fine layer of dust had invaded her house, settling on every surface, including her china, the rugs, and her sheets. When she rose from bed, the only clean part of her pillow was the outline of her head.

In New York there was a run on window washers. The waiting list was three weeks, and that was only if you could afford the jacked-up rates—Charnoble had paid one guy four hundred dollars an hour. When you were on the street, you saw them every time you looked up; they dangled from their nets like tree caterpillars. Mitchell could have used one himself: brown plumes of sediment had appeared like mold on his own apartment window, blotting out the meager view he had. On the street level the problem was compounded by the automobiles’ trapped exhaust, which was too heavy to rise, especially in the absence of breeze. The pillars of buildings were ribbed with soot; you couldn’t lean against a street corner without ruining your shirt. For months the earth had been drying out and flaking away. The land had been starved to death, abused, murdered.

He realized that, having dedicated his research to extreme drought scenarios, he’d suffered a failure of the imagination. He hadn’t considered what might happen in the case of a deluge.

There were precedents, he quickly discovered. Most recently the 2011 Queensland floods, which drowned nearly a quarter of Australia, had followed a decade of drought. He tried to run down what he knew about extreme rainfall in New York City. He recalled, for instance, that lower Manhattan began to flood when the sea level rose five feet above average levels. On December 11, 1992, a nor’easter caused a surge of eight and a half feet. The storm closed the PATH and subway systems. An L train reversed course under the East River when the Fourteenth Street tunnel began to fill with water. Three hundred passengers had to evacuate a G train and walk a thousand feet out of a flooded Greenpoint tunnel. The FDR Drive was submerged. The major bridges all closed down.

In late October 2012, Hurricane Sandy, though only a Category 1, brought a near fourteen-foot tide to Battery Park, flooded sections of lower Manhattan, and left 850,000 people without electricity. Staten Island and south Queens suffered the greatest damage; the Rockaway Beach boardwalk was stripped to its piers. The New York Stock Exchange closed for two consecutive days for the first time since 1888, schools shut down for a week, and it was more than two weeks before subway service was fully restored. The lessons of Sandy were soon forgotten, however, even though conditions continued to deteriorate in the years following the storm.

Mitchell pulled the numbers. It didn’t take long to isolate the bad news. With depleted salt marshes, narrower beaches, eroded soil, and a higher water table—the East River and the Hudson had each risen eight inches in the past twenty years—the city had never been more susceptible to flooding. They were close to a full moon, which meant high tides: water two feet higher than the mean. A storm surge would raise the water level of the New York Bight, which would overflow into the rivers. The question was how large a surge there would be. Under extreme drought conditions, could a regular storm cause flooding?

Mitchell was verifying erosion figures with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection office when Jane returned. She had pulled her hair back in a ponytail to keep the water from dripping down her face. She carried a single shoe, the other one having been lost somewhere in the park. Her makeup had washed away, and her eyes were dewy and soft.

“You missed a lot of fun.” Her bra, pale blue and webbed, was visible beneath her wet cream blouse. “Have you seriously been working all this time?”

“A little. I think we should review our flood scenarios.”

“A flood?” She gave him a sideways look. “Are you kidding?”

“Droughts often lead to floods. I’m trying to figure the odds.”

Charnoble appeared at the doorway.

“They’re calling,” he said, grinding his forefinger into his palm. “They’re
call
ing. They want meetings. And meetings mean more money. Money, money, money—” An obscene grin, like a water stain, crept across his face.

4.

The newspapers led with photographs of ecstatic New Yorkers. Under the headline
SINGING AND DANCING IN THE RAIN
, the cover of one tabloid ran a picture of the casts of Broadway musicals dancing outside in Times Square, arm in arm in avenue-wide chorus lines. The markets had advanced nearly six percentage points, led by a massive surge in the agribusiness sector. Traders were photographed on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange, spinning in the rain, pinwheeling their arms, their ties plastered to their shoulders.

He’d slept terribly. Wasn’t rain supposed to lull you to sleep? Insomniacs paid for the privilege: there were machines, little speakers, that projected incessant pitter-patter all night. But what he heard outside his window was violent, erratic, a wild drunkard careening through the streets with sledgehammers in his hands. The rain continued all night. It wasn’t cleansing, at least no more than a blitzkrieg could be considered cleansing. It was obliterative. It wiped the sludge right off his window. He was only surprised that it didn’t wipe the windows right off his building.

It had slowed to a drizzle by the time he headed for the subway the next morning, but the city had been noticeably altered. The sewer grates were clogged with crushed plastic bags, creating muddy ponds that gathered around each street corner. The sidewalk smelled of fresh soil. The exultant mood had already given way, overnight, to one of fatigued irascibility. It was typical New York City, this whiplash effect, one day’s exuberance followed the next day by a hangover and the shakes. The sudden rains had overwhelmed many of the city’s basic operations. Underground, Mitchell took his place behind a mob of exasperated commuters standing five-deep back from the tracks. A voice over the loudspeaker reported in a mechanical, stroboscopic bellow that several downtown stations had been closed due to flooding. A man next to him was so furious that he burst into tears.

He blamed himself for not anticipating this sooner. Then he blamed Elsa. Her mystic optimism had brainwashed him into seeing his work as just, well, work. But it wasn’t just work. It was life and death. He had been completely disengaged, zombified. On the previous afternoon he had returned to the library and examined the city’s basic water blueprint. What he found haunted him.

In the days when Times Square was a red maple swamp and St. Mark’s Place a hickory forest populated by hawks and ravens, more than forty brooks and streams covered the island of Manhattan. During high tide, the Lenape Indians could canoe from the East River straight through to the Hudson River across what is now Canal Street. His old office at Fitzsimmons Sherman stood over a little body of water called Sunfish Pond, which was beloved by early settlers for its profusion of sunfish, flounder, and eels. For all he knew, the pond was still there beneath the Empire State Building, percolating below the subbasement, the sunfish and flounder gone, but perhaps not the eels.

All of these waterways were buried when the city was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the water didn’t disappear—it still pumped through the undersoil. Even during a drought Manhattan’s natural water table gushed thirteen million gallons of groundwater into the subway tunnels daily—water that once had been absorbed by roots, marshes, and streams. Every day, eight hundred electric-powered municipal pumps diverted the excess water into the sewer system. Whenever a sizable storm hit, the pumps were overtaxed and the subway tunnels flooded. After just twenty minutes of rain, Brooklyn’s sewage pipes began to overflow and human excrement spilled into the Upper New York Bay, Gowanus Canal, and Newton Creek. This was the price of having the entire island overlaid by concrete and a subway system buried deep in the earth—below the sewer pipes. The underground city was a water balloon filled to bursting. It just needed one sharp poke.

When he called the office, Tewilliger picked up before the first ring finished chiming. Charnoble had trained her well.

“Future.”

“It’s Mitchell. I’m going to be a little late this morning—”

“No, you’re not.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hold.”

The hold music came on the line. It was a pop song from around the turn of the century, set against plaintive piano chords:

As logic stands,

you couldn’t meet a man

who’s from the future.

But logic broke,

as he appeared he spoke

about the future.

We’re not going to make it …

The song had been Jane’s idea. She screamed with laughter every time she was put on hold. It was starting to get under Mitchell’s skin.

“Zukor!” Charnoble came on the line. He had never addressed Mitchell as Zukor before. He was out of breath.

“Alec. What’s happening?”

“We need you here now. The phone is ringing off the hook, in a manner of speaking. This may be our first live disaster.”

The excitement in his voice was extreme, bordering on grotesque. Charnoble explained that Tammy had been upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, gusts as high as 105 miles per hour.

“You should see the Doppler,” said Charnoble, and Mitchell could picture the spittle on his lips. “Overnight the beast spun into a tight spiral.”

“Where is it going to make landfall? Is it coming here?”

“Too early to tell. Weather Channel says Chesapeake Bay. CNN is reporting the Delaware coast. But Big Henry D. thinks farther east, near Ocean City.”

“Ocean City would be very bad,” said Mitchell. “But Atlantic City—Atlantic City would be catastrophic.”

“Let’s pray for Atlantic City!”

Mitchell didn’t bother to explain that a storm passing through Atlantic City would likely head straight to Manhattan. He worried that this information would only multiply Charnoble’s giddiness. Instead he asked Charnoble to pull out his hurricane files so that Jane could review them before her meetings. The first file was a collection of material about the 1821 storm, one of the only hurricanes to have passed directly over Manhattan. During that storm the tide rose thirteen feet in a single hour, causing the East River to meet the Hudson in what is now SoHo.

Charnoble had already booked both of them through the day. Mitchell volunteered to go straight to his first appointment. He was up-to-date on the literature now, he didn’t need his notes. The client was Jason Tanizaki, a vice-president of Lady Madeline, the perfume giant. Lady Madeline was concerned about what damage a hurricane might cause to their scent-production factory in Middlesex County, less than a mile from the ocean.

It seemed easier to work than to think of everything that might happen. Work, his old savior, would clear his brain, or at least distract him. It had been the same thing his whole life: when the hot panics came, he turned to math for relief. During high school he had seen an episode of
Mega Disasters
about the massive volcano, larger than the state of Rhode Island, that lay beneath Yellowstone National Park. The Yellowstone volcano had erupted three times. Each time it had covered the western half of North America with a foot of volcanic ash. Winds carried sulfur aerosols and ash particles around the entire planet, causing temperatures to plummet. Nearly all life on earth went extinct. The volcano erupted roughly every six or seven hundred thousand years; the last eruption had occurred 640,000 years ago. It seemed that we were due. With a shaky hand Mitchell had turned off the television. The host of
Mega Disasters
—a bearded man best known for hosting a dating show—had said that the volcano had erupted 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, and .64 million years ago. Mitchell wrote the figures on a pad and took out a calculator. If you added the intervals between eruptions and divided by three, that meant the Yellowstone volcano’s average dormancy period was 730,000 years. After plotting a probability graph, he determined that the chance another massive eruption would occur in the next one hundred years was 0.00055 percent, or 1 in 181,000. An exceedingly low number, one that did not justify the ominous tone used by Mr. Megadisasters. Those zeroes on the LCD face of his TI-89 calculator had made all the difference. They were like little white pills that faded out his anxiety. They put him to sleep.

But the information he had found at the library, reading about Manhattan’s full bladder, had not yielded anything that suggested he was overreacting. And with the schedule of meetings today, there would be no time to call the top people at the local universities: the hydrologists, fluviologists, geomorphologists—anyone, really, who could tell him what the future would cost him.