Odds Against Tomorrow (20 page)

Mitchell closed his eyes, found the depth, plunged the air down. A peculiar calmness radiated through him. When he opened his eyes his small, safe, ugly apartment had been transformed into a prison. The Psycho Canoe, its paddles stowed safely beneath the seats—the idea of a water escape, an exhilarating flight to safety—that was freedom. For the first time in his life he could laugh at risk. What was risk, anyway? Risk was a canceled check, a fever dream that flees from daylight, a stubbed toe.

“If we wait here to run out of food, we might not have the strength to escape. We just missed a rescue boat. Who knows when the next one will come?”

He picked up the two Day-Glo-orange PFDs and held one out for her.

“Have you gone out of your mind?”

Mitchell nudged the PFD into her shoulder.

“No chance,” said Jane. “Let’s think about this rationally for a minute. First of all, that thing is an artwork. An attempt to capture the eternal unity of something or another.”

Mitchell stood smiling back at her like a maniac.

“You’re not acting like yourself.”

“Yeah, I know.” He gave a low laugh. “I know.”

2.

He heard a sound that was like continuous thunder and it became louder, roaring in his ears, a powerful, overwhelming noise, and he realized it was the silence, the colossal silence of the emptied city, that was making the sound.

The water was on fire. Low blue flames danced on the surface like floating bowls in a Thai river festival. He didn’t want to think about what was burning: sewer discharge, most likely, chemicals leached by ruptured pipes. But he was grateful for the fires. Without them it would be impossible to see the way. The morning fog had limited visibility to a fifteen-foot radius, the circumference marked by a heavy wall of white-blue mist, the color of skim milk. Out of this murkiness the larger shapes emerged first: the curved seat of a wicker chair; a strip of rubber insulation curled like an octopus’s tentacle; an inflated red yoga ball, like a candy apple; and the smooth black hull of a plasma television, bubbles coalescing and darting on its screen as it rocked in the current. Then the pigeon corpses. They were bobbing everywhere, lobster buoys in a Maine cove. And stationary objects—the studded plastic corner of a refrigerator door, a radiator’s white corrugated grill—protruded from the water like unnatural icebergs. On either side of the avenue, the steel beams of traffic lights were rotted trees bending into the river, their roots the bundles of severed copper cables. Where the floodwater reached its highest point it traced, along the sides of buildings, an uneven line of filth that continued the length of the avenue as far as they could see.

“Gentle Jesus,” said Jane. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”

The reek of sewage was overwhelming at first, then faint, and then—most unsettling of all—they stopped noticing it. The surface of the water was coated with a foamy scum that had collected into it cigarettes, gum wrappers, straws, plastic cups, bottle caps, and whatever other debris resisted sinking. Mitchell tried not to let the toxic water touch his skin, but it couldn’t be avoided the way Jane paddled. She had obviously never been in a canoe before, and every clumsy stroke produced a coppery spray that whipped into Mitchell’s face. It was no use telling her to go more gently. When he did, her exaggeratedly careful strokes were so feeble that she might as well not have paddled at all.

Slowly they drifted uptown. Jane was in the bow, responsible for calling out directions. Mitchell was the sternman. He executed hard rudders and wide sweeps to pivot around obstacles. A foreign sensation pulsed through him. He thought it might’ve been triumph, but he didn’t have much experience with that, and he didn’t trust it.

“Right! Right!” shouted Jane. “Wait.”

“What is it?”

“Left. Hard left!”

The birds had returned, at least some of them. Seagulls, kingfishers, even a few pigeons. In the absence of traffic and human voices, their calls filled the air. The melodies weren’t particularly joyous—it was mostly a furor of confused squawking, their imbecilic brains having lost all sense of orientation. Still they were a reminder of a life that existed beyond the fog and the alien gray river. Or rather, if life did exist somewhere beyond the fog, the birds would be the first to discover it. Noah’s big idea: release a dove. If it didn’t come back, that meant it had found a place where the floodwaters had abated.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” asked Jane after they had paddled about two blocks north. It was difficult to tell where the street ended and the sidewalk began. The best indications were the silver caps of fire hydrants, which peeked out of the water like soldier’s helmets.

“We’re going to Bennett Park,” said Mitchell.

“Never heard of it. Is that the one near the United Nations?”

“No, it’s way uptown—on Fort Washington Avenue and One eighty-third. It’s the highest land in Manhattan. More important, it’s next to one of the narrowest sections of the Hudson. It’s also near the northern end of the island, so even if the current pulls us south as we cross the river, we should be able to make it to New Jersey before we’re carried off into the bight.”

They were quickly entering midtown, the beige apartment towers and redbrick tenements giving way to black towers of glass and steel. He was reminded of the drawings made by the early explorers of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado gushing between black vertical walls, the lone canoe in the foreground, its paddlers two insignificant specks.

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Jane. “I know you’re not saying that you want to canoe to New Jersey, because only a crazy person would say something so obviously crazy.”

He saw how it would be to surge through the wave breaks, the river licking up against their prow, Bergen County vastly looming ahead.

“So I’m stuck in a boat with a lunatic,” she said. “A raving, deranged—”

“Not at all. It doesn’t get more pragmatic than this.”

“You’re not doing this to be romantic, are you?”

“I’m doing it to survive. Our worst-case scenario is also the most likely one. We stay indoors, we starve. Or worse—we’re attacked by looters searching for food. It’s safer on the water.”

“I guess … Maybe we’ll come across a police boat. I thought I heard a helicopter, but I don’t think they can see down here until the fog clears.”

The canoe had veered, without Mitchell’s notice, toward the east side of the street, and now they were over the sidewalk, floating beneath the arcade of a fifty-floor office building. The canoe skidded over a round planter in which a ficus tree had somehow survived the storm. Its sodden leaves dragged in the water. The glass windows and doors that separated street from lobby had blown out, and Mitchell had the impression of entering an aquarium tank. There was a disturbance on the surface, and he noticed a pair of fish, each roughly three feet long, with large, puckering mouths and upper bodies streaked with olive and brown lines. They swam in lazy figure eights in front of the half-submerged security desk.

“Striped bass,” said Jane. “Why not.”

With a hard pull Mitchell pivoted the canoe around a black column and they were back into the middle of the avenue.

“I’m thinking we stay east,” said Mitchell, “then we can cut across once we’re farther north.”

“Why not go west? That way we can at least make it to dry land. The flooding must be worst closer to the East River. Doesn’t the elevation drop as you move east?”

“Yeah, the gradient is pretty sharp. The middle of the island is probably dry. But if we abandon the canoe, we might end up stranded, and surrounded by water. Out here at least we can move around.”

But Jane, on the verge of tears, insisted, and Mitchell conceded that there was probably a better chance of being rescued on the dry part of the island. At the corner of Fortieth Street they turned west. The water level dropped the farther inland they went. By the time they reached Lexington it was shallow enough that they could see the pavement beneath their oars.

“Almost there!” said Jane. Her brow was smudged from the black water. “I knew it.”

He felt good. Strong even. But then he started to hear the noises.

*   *   *

First there came a large splash directly ahead of them. This, in itself, was not particularly odd; they’d been hearing objects falling into the water ever since the moment they’d left Mitchell’s apartment building: burning debris, chunks of plaster. For that reason they’d kept to the middle of the street. But this first splash was followed directly by a second, and then a third, so it began to seem as if someone were tossing objects into the water on purpose. A window exploded, as if struck, and finally, unmistakably, they heard the sound of hollering men. It was difficult to make out words, but the voices were anxious and violent. After they glided past Park Avenue Mitchell told Jane to stop paddling and they drifted, listening. Once they were within about twenty yards of Madison, the canoe ran onto dry macadam, coming to rest behind a van parked in the middle of the street. There was a crash ahead and they began to make out through the mist the dark forms of men swinging metal bars into the windows of a deli on the corner. When the windows shattered, the men kicked the glass into the street. Then they attacked the store, overturning shelves and counters, grabbing as many liters of soda, beer cans, bags of potato chips, and boxes of candy they could carry. Already they had become animals. Snarling, brutish, hateful. Was it that easy, the transition into savagery? Was it also inside him?

In the middle of the avenue two men wrestled on the ground. Beside their entangled bodies stood a shopping cart loaded with bundles of logs and bags of charcoal. The cart tipped over when a gang of young boys ran by; they were chasing a bald man with a liver spot on his forehead. He wore a torn blazer. The boys laughed and shouted obscenities; the man was sweating profusely despite the cool, foggy air, and screaming for help. In his arms he cradled a gallon-size tank of water like it was a fat baby.

“We should never have left your house,” said Jane, her voice a frantic whisper.

Mitchell hooked one leg out of the canoe, pushing backward until the water was deep enough to float it.

“It’s OK,” he said, as much to himself as to her. He began backpaddling frantically. “We’re OK. We’ll go east.”

“How do you know that will be safe? The water will be higher.”

“You can trust me,” he said.

The crazy thing was that he actually believed it.

3.

Grand Central was darker than he expected—larger too. As they glided in, the two-tiered concourse opening around them, it was like passing from the mouth of a river into a lake—or a sea, since it was impossible to perceive its boundaries. The great arched windows on the terminal’s west wall had lost hundreds of panes during the storm, and the light that filtered through was viscous and gray. The expansive vaulted ceiling was as dark as the night sky, and the pinprick constellations were impossible to make out with their LED lights extinguished. The water was flat and still, some three feet deep. Only the marble counters glowed dimly, picked out by the faint shaft of light that fell diagonally from the lunette windows on the north wall.

“Thanks,” said Jane. “I needed this.” It was difficult to hear her. The cavernous room had a muting effect. It swallowed up her voice.

She removed her PFD and rested it over the thwart behind her. She lifted her legs onto the gunwales, and leaned back until her head came to rest on the orange pillow.

“Ten minutes,” said Mitchell. “Then we have to make another push.”

The clock over the information kiosk emerged from the darkness, a giant yellow cat’s-eye. It read 5:22: the time power had cut out.

“I can make out one of them,” said Jane, staring upward. “Andromeda.”

“I don’t even see any stars.”

Jane, without sitting up, lifted one of her arms and pointed overhead. Mitchell tried to follow her finger, but all he saw was blackness.

“The Chained Woman,” she said. “That’s what Andromeda means.”

Mitchell didn’t have his glasses—after Jane had expressed her distaste for them he put them in the drawer of his office desk and they were still there—but even when he squinted he couldn’t see the stars. He decided that Jane couldn’t either.

Slowly she lowered her arm and closed her eyes.

He would let her sleep. She needed it. He also needed it, but he wouldn’t be able to turn himself off while the adrenaline was so high in him. Too much was happening, too much, much too much: the future was on him, and he was trying to make sense of it all, but there was too much. He paddled past the kiosk, listening. No voices, no footsteps, no life. Only the sound of the water, parted by the canoe, lapping gently against the limestone walls. The stairwell to the lower level, on the eastern end of the concourse, was completely submerged, as were the tunnels off the main floor that led to the Metro-North tracks. And somewhere ahead, at the western end of the concourse, was the twinned staircase that led to Vanderbilt Avenue and high ground. And there were Mitchell and Jane in the Psycho Canoe, floating slowly across the giant floor of the concourse.

It was like being in the middle of a lake all right, or a grand swimming pool, peaceful and quiet, and Mitchell understood how Jane, exhausted and addled, could fall asleep. But he was only becoming more agitated. It wasn’t the thought of all the people who might have been trapped in stalled trains when the tracks flooded that did it, or the scattered pieces of luggage that bobbed in the water here and there, each no doubt containing a person’s most valued possessions, packed frantically at the last moment. It was the silence. The silence didn’t make any sense. Grand Central Terminal was the perfect place to wait out the storm: large, impregnable, stone, with restaurants stocked with food. It was one of the first places rescue teams would target. If nobody was here, there was probably a reason.

Then he saw the reason. The Psycho had drifted past the kiosk, and the western staircase had begun to emerge from the blackness. The tunnel between the twin marble staircases was like a large, greedy mouth drinking the water. But clogging that mouth, and against the bottom of the stairs, were bodies. Not just one or two, as he thought he might have glimpsed on Third Avenue, but at least fifteen, maybe twenty, and the number kept getting larger the closer he got. He began to make out bare arms and legs and gray, puffy faces. It was as if they had been stacked there on purpose. And then came the smell—a sour, mildewed ghastliness. Mitchell backpaddled, hard, and the boat rocked. Jane shifted but did not open her eyes.