Odds Against Tomorrow (21 page)

And the horror pounced on him, the roaches scrambling in his stomach, the panic sharp, cutting off his breath—he could see it all now, the waves rushing in from the East River, the water rising more quickly than anyone could imagine, surging through the Lexington Avenue entrances and down the long halls into the concourse. There must have been dozens, maybe hundreds of people in the terminal then, standing or sitting on the floor of the concourse, seeking shelter from the storm and waiting until the trains started running again. When the water began seeping into the station those people would have known better than to head down the ramps to the underground train tracks. Most likely they raced up the stairs, some of them abandoning their luggage, and ran out toward Vanderbuilt Avenue.

A second group of people would have been on the lower level, sitting in the open train cars, maybe lying across the seats, naively hoping to be on the first train out, once service was continued. As the water started rising in the tunnel, some of the people on the trains—the New Yorkers, the daily commuters—would have known to run out to the concourse and up the stairs, and they too would have escaped to higher ground.

But a third group, whether out of ignorance or pure panic, would have stayed put. That, after all, was the natural human response to disaster. Psychologists called it the incredulity response, or normalcy bias: most people, having never experienced a real catastrophe firsthand, don’t actually believe their eyes. This is why some pleasure cruisers don’t leave their cabins even as their ship is sinking, why some office workers continue sending e-mails even after they’ve learned that, on a lower floor, their building is on fire, why a stunningly high percentage of people who die in skydiving accidents are found to have never pulled the backup parachute line. The people waiting in the trains needn’t have waited very long. In the tunnels the pipes would have soon burst, and with the pumps overwhelmed, the water would have risen quickly from the ground. The whole thing might have been inundated within ninety seconds. Those people would still be there this minute, entombed in the submerged trains.

Yet there was also a final category of people: those who waited in the trains until it was
almost
too late, and then, rather than limply succumbing to their watery fate, came to their senses and ran out of the tunnel just in time. These people would’ve had to work hard, racing up the ramps against the cascading water—it would have been like running up a waterfall—only to reach the concourse. But by then the terminal would have been like the ocean, for in the first stage of flooding the water was undoubtedly deep and turbulent, gushing in from several directions, seeping up from the tunnels and in waves from Lexington Avenue. The floodwaters would have lifted the desperate people off their feet and swept them toward the western end of the concourse, as if the flood wanted to nudge them toward safety but didn’t know its own strength, until finally it crashed their bodies against the marble staircase. And so they would rest there, in a grotesque human dam, until the water subsided and the rescue crews arrived.

Mitchell didn’t wake Jane until they were back on Lexington Avenue.

“Why are you breathing like that?” she said.

“Like what?” he said, and they were under the real sky again, blinking in the sunlight.

4.

On Forty-fifth Street and Lexington a man was wailing. The noise seemed to be coming from an old tenement building that was barely standing; it leaned into the street at a cockeyed angle. They gave it a wide berth. On Forty-fifth and Third a woman was barking gibberish: “
Ungh. Ronned. Shmoft.
” And on a fire escape off Forty-fifth and Second a man was preaching to the sky, a waterlogged copy of the Bible bloating in his hands like a sea sponge. “Alas, that great city! God hath remembered her
iniquities
. In one hour so great riches is come to nought!”

They saw things they instantly tried to forget. The swollen corpse of a tabby cat, its head unnaturally inclined; doggy-paddling rats; a child’s coloring book, the bleeding ink turning the water different colors; a red sports bra. On Forty-sixth and Second, a brownstone had capsized, effectively damming the street with brick sections of wall and squat sandstone plinths. The rooms were completely bare inside; even the wallpaper in some places had been torn off by the wind. And once in a while they saw bodies. These tended to gather at street corners and beneath the parked cars. They were all half submerged, limbs sprawled and distended. Many were naked, their clothes having been torn off by the force of the flood.

“I can’t,” said Jane. “Oh, help us. Please help us.”

“Don’t look. I’ll do the looking. I’ll steer. Just paddle.”

It was not always possible to avoid looking. They passed very close to an old woman, a young man, another woman. But they rarely saw the faces. By some compassionate force of nature the drowned bodies floated facedown.

If they didn’t name what they saw, the things maintained an unreality. But just say the words “drowned cat” and, like a witch uttering abracadabra, the bloated belly, matted brown fur, twisted mouth, grasping paw, eyes watery with terror—the drowned cat appeared in their canoe, a third passenger, never to disappear. So they limited their conversation to canoeing directions, calling out debris and other obstacles. Almost immediately Jane had settled upon a simple code. Whenever they encountered a hunk of machinery, personal item, or a formerly living thing, she simply called out “flotsam” or “big flotsam”—or, in the case of the capsized brownstone, “really big flotsam”—and left it at that. Jane had become almost cartoonishly playful, as if determined to transform their journey into some kind of awful game. At first Mitchell was bothered by such blatant self-delusion. But as time elapsed and the fog held steady, he started to appreciate the tactic. It reflected one of the qualities that had made Jane so good at her job: she was a genius at beating back denial, at making improbable scenarios seem likely to occur. One of her favorite rhetorical tricks in consultation meetings had been to point out that an event that happens once every thousand days occurs on average, according to the math of probability, every two years. As it turned out, Jane was equally persuasive in making the case
for
denial. If Mitchell stared at the back of her head and avoided looking at the water, he could almost convince himself that he was back on Little Elkhart Lake, where the only obstacles he had to avoid were boulders and floating branches.

He wondered whether Elsa was dead.

About ten blocks ahead First Avenue passed through a short tunnel under the Queensboro Bridge. Since there was not much room between the surface of the water and the tunnel ceiling and Mitchell did not particularly relish the idea of canoeing through a dark cave, especially when the water level might suddenly rise at any moment, he hooked east, to Sutton Place. They’d have to veer even closer to the East River, but that seemed safer than heading west, back to Babylon.

A woman cradling an infant sat in a second-floor window in the middle of the block. The baby shrieked painfully, as if being assaulted. The mother spotted Mitchell and Jane and asked whether they had water or food to spare.

“I’m sorry,” said Mitchell.

“God bless you anyway. Be careful out there.”

They pushed their paddles hard into the water and glided away, as from another obstacle.

“That was hard,” said Jane. Her face was polluted by black, greasy smudges—residue of the oil and sewage in the water. It was all over their hands, and she kept touching her face to pull back her hair. “But it was the right thing to do. Once we see a rescue worker, we can tell them about her.”

He couldn’t stop thinking about the scene they had witnessed on Madison. The men running through the street, smashing glass, bags of chips falling from their arms. In his futurist calculations he had always counted on bad things happening. But he hadn’t considered the brutality of it, the primitive, selfish desperation that took hold when one’s life was threatened. He pulled his oar out of the water. Then he started to paddle in reverse.

“What are you doing?” said Jane. The fear in her was strong, animal, instinctual. But she maintained her composure while Mitchell handed the woman a carton of animal crackers and lemon-lime Gatorade. When they set off again, her relentless spirit of denial cracked.

“I’m sorry.
That
was the right thing to do. I’m sick. What’s wrong with me? I’m sick.” She put the oar on her knees.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Mitchell. “Just look out for flotsam.”

But she had frozen.

“Jane?”

They were drifting toward a floating skerry of flame. It had the circumference of a hula hoop. When Jane finally turned, black, greasy tears were sliding down her face.

“I can’t do this,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too horrible.”

“Hey. Listen—”

“Why is this happening to us? A whole city…”

“Try not to think about it.”

“All the destruction. The
death
. Everything is dead. This city is dead. It’s a graveyard.”

“If we think like that,” he said, catching her eye, “we’re going to run into something and the boat is going to flip. And then we’ll really be in the shit.”

“Right.” She seemed uncertain. She seemed to be trying to convince herself of something. “Right.”

The floating hula hoop of fire was drifting very close now. But if Jane felt the heat behind her back, she didn’t show it.

“It’s not just New York,” she said. “It’s like
I’m
being destroyed too. I know this sounds silly, but really, I never fantasized about being successful in Boston for crissakes, or Washington. What can you even
buy
in Boston?”

“The city will come back. This is temporary. Everything is temporary.”

“Whenever you say something hopeful, it sounds like a curse. Nobody believes you. Lady Madeline didn’t, Nybuster didn’t, and I don’t either.”

“Just look out for flotsam, OK?
Flotsam
.”

“Yeah.” She tried to wipe away her tears, but she managed only to spread the grease in a horizontal streak across the bridge of her nose. “Flotsam.”

He pulled hard to avoid the oil fire, and the boat disappeared into a cloud of acrid smoke.

5.

“Oh take me back to Elkhart Lake, where the cotton candy grows.”

“POOF! POOF!”

“Where the little marshmallows hang from the trees—”

“SAY WHAT?”

“And the lollipops grow on the ground!”

“NO! NO!”

“YES! The LOLLI-pops grow on the GROUND GROUND GROUND.”

The camp songs were Jane’s idea. It seemed incongruous, if not shameful, to be singing about lollipops while mattresses and house pets and who knows what else floated by, but it worked. With Tammy’s full horrors hidden from sight and their progress north unchecked, their immediate fear of disaster subsided and was replaced by a lightness that flirted with mania. Jane sang her choruses louder and louder in a desperate effort to dispel the sepulchral silence of Sutton Place.

“POOF! POOF!”

The day was becoming brighter too. The fog had diminished. The sleepy residential neighborhood had acquired a kind of diseased Venetian charm. The ornate battlements and bay windows of its town houses were reflected in jaundiced tints on the oil-streaked water. At the intersections, which had been most heavily exposed to the storm gusts coming off the East River, the trees that lined the avenue had been de-leaved, de-branched, even de-barked. All that remained were pitiful yellow stumps. On the west side of the street almost every window was gone; on the east side, leeward, they were mostly intact.

By Fifty-fourth Street they were seeing signs of life. In one window a fire burned wildly on a shag rug; next door a young boy ran in circles with a model airplane in his hand, making vrooming noises. Standing at the railing of a third-story balcony was an impossibly well-dressed young man. Pin-striped gray suit, royal-blue silk tie, a pink oxford with starched white lapels. His right hand dangled a cigar; the fingertips of his left encircled the rim of a snifter filled to overflowing with an emerald liquid. A golf club leaned against the wall beside a plastic bucket of white balls. His pose reflected an attitude of lethargy and casual refinement almost psychopathic in this context. But what would be sane in this context? Singing camp songs?

Just one thing about this man could not be reconciled. In place of shoes, he wore on his bare feet Kleenex boxes.

The slap of oars in the water shook the man from his reverie. He spun toward them.

“No,” he said. “Nuh-uh.” He stomped the length of the balcony, the Kleenex boxes trampling on broken glass. “What is this? Motherfucking
FutureWorld?
In a
boat?
”

Then Mitchell recognized him. They were too close now, Mitchell couldn’t pretend not to see him. He pulled up alongside the building and the canoe came to a rest beneath the Kleenex-box-clad feet of young Ned Nybuster.

“A full-service operation,” he was saying, giggling to himself. “FutureWorld to the rescue! But a motorboat might have been a better choice. I mean, if you’re going to consider all the angles, all the
scenarios
, you’re going to want a big, powerful engine”—his voice kept getting faster and quieter—“and maybe like a wedge to put on the front, and fishing rods and spears, or whatchucallem, harpoons like, rope of course, lots and lots of rope—”

“Not a good idea,” said Jane under her voice.

“He’s a client.”

“Client of what? If you think we’re still on the clock, you’re even dumber than I thought. As of yesterday, the clock is broken. The clock drowned.”

“Come to rescue me?” Nybuster peered down at them, a dark glint in his eye. “Guys?”

“We’re just passing through,” said Mitchell. He tried to lighten his tone. “On our way north.”

“Funny thing. My father and his wife left for Long Island as soon as they heard about the storm. Course they didn’t bother to inform me of their plans. All they did was leave a note.”