Odds Against Tomorrow (34 page)

It was three days after the encounter with Cassie and Ronald—or was it four?—when he discovered the tree.

He had gotten into the habit of eating dinner at what must have been five o’clock. He couldn’t help it; by that time he was too starving to hold off any longer. But it gave him an hour of sunlight to kill before he could sleep. That was too long without working. These were the hours when, at Fitzsimmons Sherman and FutureWorld, he’d been at his most productive. Unhassled by the constant shocks of the business day—news reports, meetings, e-mails—he could concentrate on his scenarios. But now what was there to do? He had finished planting the seeds, after all, and he’d cleared the second and third floors of debris. Fortunately the wall could use more work. Though “wall” wasn’t the most accurate term for the uneven, steadily accumulating pile of rubble that rose in clumpy hillocks around the perimeter of the property. Every object that remained, every stray plank, roof tile, and cement block within about a hundred yards that he could stack in his wheelbarrow, he had added to his barricade. He hadn’t yet foraged in the marsh—the ground was too uneven for the wheelbarrow—but he had seen plenty of dead wood there. The smaller sections he could haul away by himself, as long as they weren’t too splintery. And for the most part they weren’t, the turbulence of the floodwaters having smoothed the wood, sanding down its burrs and jagged edges.

In the vault he found what he was looking for: the ax. It was heavier than he’d expected, tugging aggressively at his shoulder as he lifted it. It was a powerful weapon. Walking around the property, swinging the ax, he felt for the first time as if he owned the land. The Canarsie Bank Trust, as well as the adjacent plot, whatever it had been, was his domain. His shoulder began to smart. He paused to rub it.

He walked gingerly to avoid cutting himself. Navigating the matted swamp grass and the chaotic brambles, he entered the marsh. Here there were only the crushed branches of smaller trees, nothing substantial. But farther down, just past where his little bathing pool debouched into a wider creek, the trunk of a fallen oak lay on the shore. It was not native to that strip of land, but the storm had deposited it there and divested it of its crown. It was perfect. He wouldn’t be able to drag it home, you’d need a tractor for that, but he could chop it into thick stumps and use those to reinforce his wall’s foundation.

As he approached he saw that the tree had split open near its midpoint. Where the trunk had cracked there was a wide crevasse, chocolate near the outer levels and reddening farther down. He raised his ax, aiming the blade. But he couldn’t follow through. Something was moving in the tree. He bent over to examine it more closely, and then he was on the ground beside it, and then his head was nearly inside the tree.

The first thing he noticed were the mushrooms, orange with caps the size of buttons, projecting from the walls of the crevasse. Their fleshy undersides were lined with gills that ruffled like lace. These gills secreted a toothpasty substance that branched into a plexus of lines that descended deep into the trunk’s core. But that was just the beginning. When Mitchell moved closer, he saw eruptions of brightly petaled clover; exotic spindly-legged spiders with bodies the same exact hue as the tree itself; a flesh-colored worm as long as his arm; a fiery procession of red mites snaking between piles of school-bus-yellow spores and thick, translucent bubbles of slime; a downy pink fungus like a speck of cotton candy; a bark beetle sheathed in an iridescent shell; and canals of thick syrup in which tiny flies had gotten stuck, flapping their broken wings and twitching in panic. What had appeared to be no more than a dead log was everywhere crawling, munching, slurping, rotting, liquefying, cannibalizing—a grotesque insectopolis. As his shadow moved across the log, the bark beetle, sensing a larger presence, folded completely into itself—head into shell, encased and protected, a gray oval disk without edges or openings. Protected against its predators. Protected even against the air.

He tried not to think about Elsa, where her body now lay, in what state of decomposition. But then the awful flesh-colored worm, propelled by its wet, clenching suckers, glided sinuously along the surface of the log, and Mitchell felt that he was going to throw up.

He rose, unsteady on his feet, and grabbed the handle of the ax. This time he would bring it down with all his force, explode the decayed wood, spattering worm pulp and tree rot and larva across the grass. But now the ax was much too heavy. The poll dug into the small of his back and he couldn’t begin to hoist it over his head.

Did he really want to obliterate this festering micro-universe? Or might it be nicer simply to join it? To stretch out under the sky until night came and all the creeping things mistook him for a second log to explore and infest. If he were to lie there, simply lie there on the wet ground until he lost consciousness, how long would it take for anyone to notice? Who would discover his absence? Who would care? If Hank or the new settlers didn’t find him in the bank building, they’d assume he had given up and run back to New York. Days would pass, maybe weeks, before someone found him. By then his corpse would have already merged, like the rotting oak, into the marshy soil.

Gingerly he let himself down beside the log. His ears were full of the sound of the creek washing against the shore just several feet away, and above him spread the sky, more vast than any he’d ever seen in New York. That was another result of the flood and its destruction: it had not only wiped clean the ground, it had also expanded the sky. It used to steal through the narrow slivers between skyscrapers, a petty thief; now it had been restored its dominion. It was radiant with its pride.

There was only one stubborn cloud, a cumulonimbus, directly overhead. It was an odd cloud: it didn’t seem to be drifting at all. It just sat, motionless, looking down at him. Mitchell lay there for what seemed like ten, even fifteen minutes, but the cloud refused to move. How was this possible? It didn’t expand or contract, just stayed fixed in the highest part of the sky. And it really was watching him, wasn’t it? Just staring at him, waiting for him to move.

“You first,” said Mitchell without sound.

“Nope,” said the cloud.

“I got nowhere to be.”

“That’s two of us.”

“Fine,” said Mitchell. “Suit yourself.”

Even as the swamp flies, or whatever they were, started flapping around his eyes, as the bark beetles scaled his bare arms and the grass scratched at his neck, he would stay there. This was his land now. If he wanted to lie on it all night long, or even for weeks, until he wasted away and his flesh sloughed free from his bones—well, if he wanted to lie there for eternity, nobody could stop him, certainly not an intangible mass of vapor in the upper atmosphere.

But then something very peculiar happened. Almost imperceptibly, the cloud, cowed by his will, began to drift away.

Flatlanders

Mitchell Zukor was missing.

The condition of the atrium was the first indication that something was wrong. The atrium was immaculate. Last month it had still resembled a forgotten storage unit, with disorderly clusters of tools, chairs, and bank-teller desks, long sacks of fertilizer and compost, and pallets from Jackpot loaded with vegetable cans and packages of instant ramen. The red travertine floor tiles had been all but obscured by dirt and plastic wrappers and what appeared to be animal droppings. Mitchell’s appearance then had alarmed her; he had not looked good. He hadn’t shaved since, well, probably not since Randall’s Island. Gone was the Mexicano; this was the Elderly Wino. She could barely recognize him. The most disturbing thing was the beard. It was full and wild, getting into the corners of his mouth, and it was coming in white. Now he really looked the part of a mad old oracle, she told them back at the office. Like Tiresias himself, frail and muttering and blind.

It was a slight exaggeration. Mitchell wasn’t frail. Far from it, in fact, he was broader in his shoulders and neck—his body, in a state of shock, frantically adding muscle to cope with the intense physical exertions it had been forced to endure for the first time in its existence. And Mitchell wasn’t blind either, except in one respect: he had no idea what he looked like, not having glimpsed a reflective surface for six months other than the rippled, silty waters of the Fresh Creek Basin. When she mentioned the whiteness of his beard, he had no idea what she was talking about, and when she clarified it for him, he just shrugged. He didn’t seem to care. His clothes were filthy too. He cleaned them every few weeks in the marsh, he reported, as if this achievement were worthy of a trophy. Gold star for marsh boy.

So in addition to the other supplies he had requested and several that he had not, she had brought him a gift: a mirror. She’d had it wrapped in brown paper, tied with a red bow. She carried it to the door, leaving the rest of the things—the floor wax, the new pack of filtration cartridges, the fresh vegetables—in the truck. He didn’t answer the intercom at the front gate, which was typical, so she punched the security code, passed through the arbor, and unbolted the front door with her key. But now, upon entering the old bank building, she was so disturbed by what she saw that she lost her grip on the mirror. She clamped down as it fell, pinning it against the side of her knee just before it hit the floor.

“Mitchell?” she called out. “It’s me.”

The supplies were still there—they had barely been dented—but he had stacked them neatly in the bays along either side of the atrium, behind the U-shaped bank that in a distant age had separated the bank customers from the tellers. The floor had been mopped clean, the travertine tiles glowing dimly in the twin shafts of sunlight that passed through the two first-floor windows. Emptied of the clutter, the room somehow seemed taller, and she was astonished to see that the original lighting fixtures—twin domes hanging at the end of white stalks like the eyes of a hermit crab—had been polished to their original splendor. There were no lightbulbs in them, of course, but still the glass globes absorbed the light that bounced off the floor, projecting solar systems on the walls.

She first checked the vault—if Mitchell was inside, he might not have heard her enter. The door gave with a startled gasp, revealing its treasures: the portable generator, the canisters of gasoline, another half dozen pallets of canned vegetables, about a hundred gallons of water, and the black suitcase that she figured must by now contain nearly half a million dollars in rubber-banded stacks of hundreds. Everything seemed in order. There was no sign of a break-in. But there was also no sign of Mitchell.

On the second floor he had shelved the books she had brought him, and the couches had been arranged around the center of the room. A stack of books lay on the low coffee table in front of the couch. The thick volume resting on top was titled
Textbook of Domicilic Engineering: Systems and Processes
.

“Mitchell?”

Her voice came out strangled. Every time she visited she was reminded how ridiculous it was to leave him here like this, in isolation. But what else could she do? He’d refused every alternative. Even her offer of a cabin on the Maine coast, off the grid, outfitted with the latest in bioenergy technology, with a full garden already planted—even that he had refused with a scornful head shake.

“That’s not the point,” he’d said cryptically. He’d developed a disquieting habit of combing his fingers through his beard, where they inevitably found little pieces of fuzz or food that he held up to his eyes for examination before tossing aside. “I have to do it by myself, for myself.” He refused to say anything else on the subject.

On the third floor his sleeping bag was unrolled. His clothes were piled tidily on the conference table. The desk he kept by the windows was the only messy thing in the place: scattered papers, pencils, a calculator, and open books on electric engineering and building design, their pages heavily annotated. It could not look more different from his FutureWorld office. This room felt lived-in, thought-in, alive with knowledge. At FutureWorld the offices had felt choked by knowledge—choked to death.

On the tall windows he had done a near-professional job: the putty was almost invisible at the edges of the new panes, the glass unsmudged. The weather monitor sat on the sill, its silicon dish exposed to the sunlight. She walked over and looked out. Mitchell wasn’t visible in the garden below, though the large, flat leaves of the canna plants, flapping in the breeze like pterodactyl wings, obscured part of it. Nor was he in the outhouse; she could see that the door was ajar. And she doubted he was in the marsh; he never left the property by daylight, as far as she knew. In any case there wasn’t anyone now visible in the marsh, except for the Motas and their young daughter. A fat white opossum was sauntering lazily down Flatlands Avenue. She hiccuped.

“Mitchell!”

She ran down the stairs, her hiking boots
thwaping
on the burnished stone steps. She had bought them upon returning to Manhattan—a six-hundred-dollar pair of black Mountainsiders with injection-molded supports, antibacterial linings, open-cell foam sock liners, and thick, chunky treads. It was a silly purchase: she wore them only during visits to the Flatlands, and even then they were hardly necessary. Still, the boots had become part of the monthly ritual. Going to the wilderness? Throw the heels into a bag, slip on the hiking boots. Then call the armored limousine. That was the other indispensable part of the ritual: the armored limousine, which was really closer to a cargo truck, with its giant trunk compartment, off-road wheels, and Large Keith, the 280-pound retired defensive end who served as her driver.

Outside, as she passed from the entryway to the front gate, something flashed in the garden behind the canna plants. Squinting, she ran to it, past the tomato trellises and some kind of purple lettuce, her boots kicking soil onto her calves. Was he playing games with her, hiding in the garden?

But no one was there. The glimmer was a shard of glass wedged into the boundary wall at shoulder height. It was attached to a cracked window frame, one of the thousands of pieces of debris that formed the wall to Mitchell’s fortress, nearly every component with rough surfaces and jagged edges. You couldn’t climb a wall like that—you couldn’t even touch it. That seemed to be the point.