Odds Against Tomorrow (6 page)

“This is where America happens,” said Tibor. “Where
we
happen.” His passion for old American movies surfaced whenever he found himself overpowered by emotion. “‘Greed is good,’” he said. “
Wall Street
, starring a certain Mr. Michael Douglas.” Mitchell had nodded solemnly in agreement.

Tibor felt indebted to Wall Street because he owed his prosperity to a quintessentially American idea. He’d learned as a young man that it was possible to buy cheap residential property with very little money up front, just so long as you could secure, ahead of time, enough tenants who agreed to pay rent in cash. Even more incredible, one could win government funding for this scam, under the premise that each new building would create affordable housing in poor neighborhoods. Slumlords were the foundation of any strong community, Tibor would regularly declaim, though never, to his credit, with sincerity. But now his slums were fading, and so, it seemed, were Tibor and Rikki. Every time Mitchell looked at this photograph he wondered whether his parents were about to enter their own worst-case scenario.

The Zukorminiums, as they were called by local activists, required extensive repairs. Extensive demolition would be better. They stood in Kansas City’s depleted Blue Valley industrial zone, adjacent to a condemned textile factory that still hiccuped orange puffs of overheated asbestos. Tenants had complained about the conditions before, but few lingered long enough to cause trouble. Since Seattle, however, there had been petitions, demonstrations, clench-fisted aldermen making speeches. Tibor was too old to be a slumlord anymore. His tenants and their community backers wanted to hurt him. They would gleefully dismember the poor old Hungarian refugee.

Mitchell felt for Tibor, he did, especially tonight as he prepared to leave his vacated Fitzsimmons Sherman office for an empty apartment and a nice long evening of panic. Sometimes Mitchell even saw himself as a kind of slumlord. Only his slums, his own private Zukorminiums, were inside of him. A vast array of necropolitan towers, rotting and structurally unsound. And how were they doing these days, his inner slums? They were not doing well. They, too, were in disrepair. The pipes were blocked, the air-conditioning cut out, and at night the cockroaches raced up the walls.

6.

Microwaves were all right—as long as you stood in the next room while they operated. Put the frozen burrito in the oven, set the timer, press start. Then run.

Mitchell felt desperate sitting there on the couch, a paper plate and plastic fork on his lap, while the microwave whirred in the kitchen. It wasn’t the plastic, or the couch’s sour, pasty smell, so much as it was the waiting. He had waited patiently for college to end so that he could join Fitzsimmons Sherman, where he had waited patiently for a chance at Risk. Then came the valuation project—and failure. But why? Had he disappointed Sherman? He didn’t think so, but it was impossible to know. In any case, that opportunity had passed, and he would have to wait once more. When he woke the next morning, his career—and, by minimal extension, his entire life—would change. He would be an E and V man. He might have to wait there for a very long time.

The microwave bleated. He nudged the burrito onto the paper plate, which sagged from the heat. Perhaps he was being too hard on himself. Hadn’t he felt the same kind of dread before starting at Fitzsimmons? When he learned that he would be working on the seventy-fifth floor of the Empire State Building, he had done some research on elevator accidents. To his horror, he immediately discovered that the most catastrophic accident in the history of building transportation technology was called the “Empire State Building incident.” On July 28, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old B-25 bomber pilot, was flying through increasing fog from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Newark Airport, where he was to retrieve his commanding officer. Twenty-five miles short of Newark, Smith radioed the air traffic controller for a weather report. “From where I’m sitting,” said the controller, “I can’t see the top of the Empire State Building.”

But Smith continued toward Manhattan. After passing the Chrysler Building, he became disoriented when a sudden burst of air pushed the airplane to one side, and he turned right instead of left. Within seconds he crashed into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. The hoist and safety cables of two of the elevators snapped. One of these elevators, which was being operated by a woman named Betty Lou Oliver, plunged from the seventy-fifth floor—
the very floor Mitchell would be working on
. Luckily for Betty Lou, who was cowering in a fetal position on the floor of the elevator, the falling car compressed the air in the shaft, creating a landing cushion that softened the blow at the bottom. She broke her back and both legs, but survived.

Mitchell skipped the elevator. But after climbing seventy-five flights of stairs, his suit—a Hungarian tri-blend inherited from Tibor—was nearly translucent with sweat, and he had decided to run the numbers. In the United States there were 900,000 elevators, each serving an average of 20,000 people per year. That meant eighteen billion passenger trips per year. These trips resulted in twenty-seven deaths. The chance of dying in an elevator accident was therefore one in 10.44 (repeating) million—about equivalent to the odds of dying from a dog bite, according to the National Safety Council odds-of-death chart he kept in his wallet. This made him feel easier about entering the metal box every morning but he did find himself crossing the street whenever he saw a dog.

It hadn’t been lost on him that FutureWorld’s office was on the second floor.

After three bites he dumped burrito, plate, and plastic into the trash. Though it was barely dark outside he slipped off his loafers and lay on top of the balled-up sheets of his unmade bed, his laptop opened on his chest. He found New York State’s online legislative database. He searched for “Recommit to Civil Service and Pensions Act,” and a link was produced to State Finance Law § 307. Under section 52, subsection F, sub-subsection 3, he found what he was looking for:

(3) Defense to liability claims.

Legal indemnification against liability claims that should result from i) acts of God or ii) acts of war shall be assumed by any person or incorporated agency that holds legal title to a Group B building with a permitted occupancy of two hundred or more persons, provided that he/she has made a reasonable, good faith effort to protect his/her building from said circumstances through substantial investment in precautionary measures, or services thereof.

Mitchell closed his laptop and then his eyes. He was asleep within minutes, a deep, rich sleep. He hadn’t slept so well in months—no cockroaches, no nightmares of flashing steel and glass, just milky oblivion.

*   *   *

The next morning Mitchell called in sick for the first time in his professional career. He removed from his wallet the business card with the line drawing of the open window, and he decided to jump out of it.

Charnoble picked up in the middle of the first ring.

“I wondered when you would call.”

He offered Mitchell eleven thousand dollars to start the next morning. The check would arrive in less than an hour by messenger. (Mitchell considered asking that a copy be sent to Sandy Sherman, but then his survival instinct set in.) Charnoble didn’t try to hide his relief on the phone. “We’ve had a number of applications but there was no one with the right mix of technical knowledge and personal despair.”

As soon as Mitchell hung up the room became very dark. What had he done? Had he gone
insane
? Was this, finally, the path that had been chosen for him: madness? He’d shown a talent for it in the past, he would admit that, a flair for madness, but he never believed it was his true calling. He tried Charnoble again. But this time, as in a nightmare, the phone rang and rang. No answering machine. He looked again at the business card, made sure he had the right number, and dialed again. Still no answer. He had a picture of Charnoble hunched over the phone, his eyes wide, watching it ring, cackling uncontrollably.

But all things considered, wasn’t it a greater risk to remain at Fitzsimmons? An eternity in E and V—that was a risk he couldn’t take. Better to start at FutureWorld and quit if things went badly rather than return to Fitzsimmons and E and V.
F—E—V
: if you squinted, it almost spelled FOREVER.

He called his parents.

“FutureWorld? Isn’t that a village in Walt Disney?” said Rikki.

“In Budapest,” said Tibor, “there was a social committee called the Future World. Their job was to assassinate nationalistic journalists. Sorry—torture first, then assassinate. I promised myself never to speak of the thing they did to my friend Laszlo. You think you can trust a business with that name?”

“It is a dopey name, FutureWorld. But I’m glad you’ve found something that excites you.”

“Poor Laszlo. He was never the same man once they were done with him. If, after such an experience, you could even call him a man.”

Mitchell took a deep breath.

“I’m being paid eleven thousand dollars today and sixteen thousand dollars a month. That’s before incentives and bonuses kick in. It may increase when we take on more clients.”

“‘Yippie-kay-yay, motherfucker,’” said Tibor.

“Tibor!” said Rikki.

“
Die Hard
, starring a certain Mr. Bruce Willis.”

Mitchell hung up the phone and looked around his apartment, as if for the first time. He had never given much thought to its appearance before—after work he tended to rumble directly to his bed and tip over like a felled tree. And he rarely saw the place by daylight. Not that it admitted daylight. He had only a single, grime-coated window in the living room, which faced the ramp leading from Third Avenue onto the Queens Midtown Tunnel. By day the window cast a narrow rectangle of light onto the floor; at night the tunnel’s marigold glow suffused the living room like a nuclear sunset. This was an unhappy apartment. It was not just depressing—it was itself depressed. The baleful wide-screen television glaring at the melancholy mouse-colored couch. The metal desk as heavy as a tombstone, supporting the computer’s glassy slab. The unvarnished teak coffee table supporting a pile of withered science magazines and heavily fingered books (on top lay Becker’s
The Denial of Death
: “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we shrink from being fully alive.”). And in the corner of the room, the pelican mouth of the forlorn brown briefcase that Tibor had bequeathed him as a graduation present. Every object was despondent, numb, heavy with exhaustion.

Things outside weren’t any better. Seattle had inspired a new wave of street preachers to evangelize midtown Manhattan. They must have been having success with their donation boxes because they were fruitful and they did increase. They competed for the busiest intersections, standing across the street from one another, raising the volume on their loudspeakers until they drowned out the honking horns. They preached apocalypse and lifted signs written in magic marker: GOD
IS ANGRY WITH THE WICKED
EVERY DAY.
THE
STARS
WILL FALL FROM THE
SKY.
IT REPENTED THE
LORD
THAT HE HAD MADE MAN ON THE EARTH, IT
GRIEVED
HIM AT HIS
HEART. But it was the crowds that surprised Mitchell. They weren’t merely assembling—they were listening. This was a notable development in the world capital of cynicism.

Charnoble’s check arrived within the hour. Mitchell took it straight to his bank and decided to celebrate with a lunch at Chosan Galbi. On Lexington Avenue he passed a particularly animated preacher who balanced himself precariously in the basket of a shopping cart. He was cloaked in nothing but a brown canvas tunic cinched around the waist with a dirty string. Not a bad idea—it was another hydrant-bursting, brownout-warning, macadam-melting summer day, the kind of day when people went to movies for the air-conditioning. But this urban apostle had attracted a crowd, roughly a dozen people. They removed the pods from their ears, the sunglasses from their eyes, and peered up at this man. Even Mitchell paused.

“Meat?” said the preacher. The cart was unsteady beneath his feet, skipping on the pavement with each violent swing of his arms.

“Meat and bones and water?”

“No!” shouted a young woman, sitting erect on her bicycle seat.

“Is that all we are?” It was a loud voice, a rhetorician’s voice. He spoke like someone accustomed to standing at a pulpit in a mega-cathedral somewhere, lecturing a suburban congregation attired in their Sunday best. This shopping cart, his manner suggested, was only a temporary embarrassment. Sweat beaded under his eyes and dripped over his cheeks. The sides of him, visible through the tunic’s gaping armholes, were also wet.

“Intricately wired meat? Meat sending signals to meat through electricity? Where is the mystery in that?”

His audience nodded. It wasn’t just a performance. These people were paying witness. A feeling was building. An urban malaria, a future-affected anxiety disorder. Whatever kind of disease it was, it had become infectious.

The bi bim bap at Chosan Galbi that day tasted rancid. Mitchell couldn’t finish it. Next to the register the restaurant offered a stack of free postcards. Mitchell chose one bearing an image of bi bim bap and, using the cashier’s pen, addressed it to Elsa Bruner.

“By the time you get this,” he wrote, “I’ll be a futurist.”

7.

After a tense exchange with one of Sandy’s secretaries (“Mr. Sherman will not be pleased,” she said breathlessly when he presented his letter of resignation. “Mr. Sherman will not be pleased one bit.”) Mitchell took the elevator from the Fitzsimmons offices down to the lobby of the Empire State Building, then changed for an elevator that went to the second floor. He stepped into a long hallway. On the doors were stenciled the names of various law and accounting firms. Finally he reached a door without a name. Instead there was a brass panel embossed with the familiar image of an open window. Mitchell opened the door and entered a small foyer.