Free Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich Page B

best to survive a chaotic universe. But why? Why should she care what Mitchell—a financial consultant who plotted disaster and figured out how to profit from it—thought about her little utopian agricultural experiment?
    He was thinking about this in his gigantic empty office on the second floor of the Empire State Building. The newest letter from Elsa Bruner lay on his desk beside a report from the World Health Organization titled “Dengue and Hemorrhagic Fever: An Emerging Public Health Threat in the United States,” a file containing new telemetric readings of unusual growth activity in the Yellowstone caldera, and an article from Nature titled “Recent Contributions of Glaciers and Ice Caps to Sea Level Rise.” It was astonishing how much bad news was generated every day. You had only to pay attention—subscribe to the right newsletters and academic journals—and you could see the information accrete, like matter spiraling around a black hole.
    The newest letter from Elsa had little to it—she complained about the unusually pungent and penetrating heat that had smothered the Northeast all summer. The depth of the Housatonic River in Connecticut was at a thirty-year low, and there had been a pageant of spontaneous fires through central New Jersey, spreading from house to house, jumping over distances as long as a basketball court. The same signs, she wrote, were evident at Ticonderoga. The well was drying up; the fields were turning to dust; the evergreens were brown. But what struck Mitchell about Elsa’s note was a throwaway line right at the end, set off from the rest. She had written:
    “Is it odd that we read each other’s thoughts but never hear each other’s voices?”
    This had stuck with him, stuck in the folds of his brain like gum to the sole of a shoe. There was something here. He didn’t think she was proposing that they speak on the phone. That would be difficult, since she had no phone line or Internet connection at Ticonderoga and she drove into Augusta no more than once a week. But the intimacy of that line ( we read each other’s thoughts ) forced him again to wonder why she was writing him so enthusiastically. Was she merely lonesome? Bored? That didn’t seem right. She had endless work to do in the fields. And she had plenty of company—not just her boyfriend but the friends who bunked at the farm for weeks at a time, usually after their rock bands broke up.
    But who, besides Mitchell, was willing to suggest to her, however timidly, that she was putting her life in danger? Not her comrades on the farm. The boyfriend, as far as Mitchell could tell, was doting and subservient, committed to her plans. Elsa’s father was dead, and her mother, a retired social worker on disability, was absent, a burnout in Boulder. Nobody would question her but Mitchell.
    So maybe Elsa, deep down, didn’t want to hear his voice. The distance sanitized the conversation, gave it an academic quality—a correspondence course in self-denial. The strangely antiquated act of exchanging letters allowed them a phony sense of detachment. It would be considerably more difficult to have to respond to a live person, ready with spontaneous retorts. When you looked at it this way, her letter-writing mania began to make more sense. She wasn’t trying to persuade Mitchell Zukor that she was doing the right thing with her life. She was trying to persuade herself . She had asked whether excessive fear could insulate you from the actual world. Perhaps Mitchell’s letters were as much of the actual world as she could tolerate.
    *   *   *
    Almost immediately after the encounter with Nybuster, Charnoble ceded control of client meetings to Mitchell. It was clear the kid had a special talent for conceiving cataclysmic scenarios.
    “You’re like an exorcist in reverse,” Charnoble told him over the office intercom. Since their desks were at the far ends of their respective offices, Charnoble had to walk thirty-five feet