Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

Author:Nathaniel Rich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780374224240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Published: 2013-04-02T07:00:00+00:00

9.

Everything got worse.

If he weren’t on the third floor he would have sworn there was a man outside the window, a huge man pounding with his fists against the glass, demanding to be let in. They had to barricade it. Mitchell went over to the corner where the pile of wooden staves from the canoe crate still lay in a messy pile. As soon as Jane realized what Mitchell was doing, she pitched in, carrying the staves to the window and snapping the longer pieces over her knee. They laid the wood over the window in horizontal bands, using duct tape to hold them in place, following the example Tibor had set on that long-ago day in Overland Park. It was the only window in the apartment, but they weren’t losing much of a view. The city had been blanketed by an uncanny iron darkness. The only time they could see anything was when the lightning struck, filling the sky with baroque blue designs. What they saw in those brief flashes hurt Mitchell’s stomach.

Third Avenue was now a canal, the water so high it had begun to spill over the curb. The ramp that led from the avenue to the Queens Midtown Tunnel was a cascading stream, the water leaping over itself as it rushed down the incline. The wind levitated the crushed skeletons of umbrellas, garbage cans, chunks of scaffolding. Bricks blurred through the air, hurtling like poorly thrown footballs until they pulverized against the sides of buildings. Or shot through windows.

“These things do happen,” he said. “They really do.”

“I don’t think anyone’s doubting you anymore,” said Jane, but she seemed very far away. There were blinking bursts of light at the edge of Mitchell’s vision and everything else was getting hazy. Was this the tragedy he’d been preparing himself for all these years, a world-cleansing flood of biblical proportions, straight out of the preacher’s sermon? Every man, beast, fowl, and thing that creepeth across the earth must repent. I’ve spent a lifetime worrying about this moment, doing the calculations, taking the measurements, trying to render catastrophe in calculable, precise dimensions, and still I’m not prepared? But real catastrophe was like that. It was a form of genius. It astounded expectations, was unlike anything that came before.

Whee! shouted the wind. Whee! Wheeee!

He squeezed his eyes and opened them. In order to ignore the frantic Morse code of his heartbeat, and the sweat edging his hairline, he forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand. His mother’s old advice: Do something!

He forced himself to focus on barricading the window. They worked together, Jane holding the slats in place while Mitchell taped them to the window frame. They worked slowly, deliberately, making sure not to leave any gaps, and slowly Mitchell began to breathe. Slat over window, tape, repeat. Slat, tape, repeat. They made progress. Jane glanced at him out of the side of her eye; it seemed she wanted to ask him something but didn’t quite know how to do so.

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