Disaster Stories

[Olivie Inoue]

Mostpeople I know consider themselves sophisticated enough to pay no heed to end-times prophets, but catastrophe montage always evokes, for me, the evangelical camp counselors who haunted my childhood summers with apocalyptic Left Behind-esque visions. In the last several months, however, I have seen even the most worldly around me prickled with portents of apocalypse. The disasters have accumulated, from Houston to Mexico City to Puerto Rico to California to Iraq, into what feels like a meta-disaster. In the United States, 2017 was the most expensive year on record for disaster response.

It was a lot of work. Even with Mike's brain, it was a lot of work: he had no idea how the other associates could stand it. It was August and he felt like he hadn't slept more than four hours a night since he'd started at Pearson Hardman in July. It was not unreasonable to wonder sometimes whether he was losing his mind.

It was shortly after lunch and Mike was in Harvey's office taking notes. Harvey paced in his space ignoring the excellent view, hand-gestures expansive, as he listed all the angles Mike should be trying. Mike enjoyed seeing him this way: it was rare that Harvey forgot he should be cool and delved into the intricacies of legal maneuver. Mike liked him more the more he exposed his inner nerd. A half-smile was dawning on Harvey's face, totally unconscious, as he described the unintended consequences of contract clauses. And then the building got up and stretched.

He leapt to his feet unsteadily, notepad fluttering to the floor. Harvey took two steps and yanked him around and shoved him against the interior wall of the room next to the bookcases and then pushed himself into the same space. Mike stood there with his face mashed against the wallboard and an arm across his back and Harvey's heavy breathing in his ear, and wondered what the hell was wrong with him. With them both, at least, so it wasn't just Mike swan-diving off the deep end on some random Tuesday. Maybe someone had poisoned the water with PCP. It would be funny if Mike were not hallucinating himself.

He shuddered, sweaty and cold at the same time. He counted his heartbeats and waited for Harvey to let him go. The count got up to three hundred, although at the rate his heart was pounding that might only have been a minute or two. Harvey's cologne was thick in his throat.

The phone rang on Harvey's desk and Harvey backed off. Mike took his time removing his face from the wallboard, and put out his hands in case he was still dizzy. The bookcase supported him as he turned around. The phone was still ringing, and Harvey was not answering it. Phones were ringing up and down the hall, a rough discordant jangle.

On the other side of Harvey's glass door, Donna was in her cube on hands and knees, under the desk. Mike watched as she crawled out, tidying her hair as if she hid under a desk every day. Her shoes were on the floor in a pile and she stepped back into them.

"What --" Mike started to ask, but the fire systems started up their spinny lights and played a loud voice that told everyone to evacuate in an orderly fashion. Mike stood there trembling with no idea still what was going on. Harvey didn't even frown at him, just grabbed his wrist and towed him out into the hallway. Mike followed unresisting, still nauseated and trying to control it. The last thing he wanted to do was throw up on his boss's shoes.

And so they all went down the stairs. Donna had her purse with her (she was so good at thinking of things like that) and she stuck with Harvey. Harvey stuck with Mike, literally, because he didn't let go of Mike's wrist even after Mike got down about five stories and started feeling more stable. The concrete walls echoed with feet, low dull rubber soles and the high clatter of heels. Nobody said a word. People queued at the landings, taking turns joining the flow down the stairs, and they seemed patient, uncomplaining, apprehensive.

They were halfway between the 9th and 10th floors when someone above Mike called out, "It was an earthquake." Voices passed that word down, earthquake, earthquake. The backs and shoulders in front of him relaxed. Hands sneaked into pockets and pulled out Blackberries and began to text. Harvey did not look back. He kept a firm grip on Mike's wrist.

"Epicenter in Virginia," called the news-voice as if in answer, and again the echo downward: Virginia, Virginia. "Five point nine, they think." Five, nine, five-point-nine, Virginia five-point-nine, earthquake.

Mike turned his wrist to reclaim it, but Harvey didn't let go. Into the lobby, outside the building (it was a beautiful day, sunny and bright), Donna led the way down the block and Harvey dragged Mike along. They had their backs to him: he couldn't see their faces. They obviously had some kind of plan between them, and were following it to the letter.

The street filled with office workers, gabbing and garbling news updates from their cell phones. Traffic went ignored; the taxis blared their horns. When you evacuate a full office building, the people don't all fit on the sidewalk at once, even if they were inclined to stick around in the shadow of a skyscraper that might collapse. And almost every office building in Midtown was evacuating. A hundred people jaywalked at once, or stood together in huddles, or tripped on the curb and fell into the street. Tussles broke out, shoving matches, crowd behavior. Donna led them away from it all.

At first Mike thought they were headed for Central Park, but Donna turned right instead of left, and Mike saw the East River ahead of them. They were about ten blocks too far south to get onto the bridge, and two or three blocks south of the closest access to FDR Drive, but the buildings were smaller and the streets emptier. Mike began to relax, and then began to feel foolish, led around by the hand like a little kid.

Harvey looked over his shoulder. His expression was one of grave surprise. It was possible he'd forgotten he was still holding onto a wrist at all, or that the wrist belonged to Mike. Beads of sweat lined his scalp. He let go without a word.

They stopped under an awning less than a block from the river. Mike could see it glinting in the afternoon sun. Donna thumbed her phone and began reading out updates. Harvey was pale and wide-eyed, and paced in front of them.

Harvey paced and sweated and did not seem to be following the conversation. He'd done everything right so far: pulled Mike away from the windows in case they shattered, sheltered against an interior wall. Evacuated the building and followed a pre-existing plan to get to a rally-point: if it had been more serious, if it had turned into The Poseidon Adventure or something, he would have been the surprise hero. Surprise to Mike, anyway. Now they were safe and Harvey had run out of right things to do and maybe only just this second was assimilating what had just happened. Mike glanced at Donna and decided to offer him a softball. "Hold on, you made Donna come into work in the middle of a blizzard?"

A blink, and Harvey was back again. "I don't make Donna do anything. Haven't you learned by now?" He gave Mike a mean little smile, but under that was relief for anyone to see. "You, I can make come into the office in a blizzard."

That night, when he got home and got in the shower at some ridiculously late hour, Mike was surprised to discover finger-bruises all the way around his wrist, like a bracelet. He hadn't thought Harvey had gripped him that hard. He kept his sleeves rolled down for almost a week, till the bruises had faded enough that they weren't recognizable.

It was only a handful of days later that Hurricane Irene set her sights on New York. Mike read up on the physics of hurricanes like everybody else with an internet connection in the tristate area, although probably everybody else didn't annoy their boss by spouting random factoids in-between meetings.

"The Mets?" asked Harvey witheringly, his hand on the conference room door. "And it's not an implied contract. All the nonsense you can recite and you've never read the fine print on a baseball ticket?"

Mike had never held a major league baseball ticket in his life. But he wasn't going to tell Harvey that. They went into the conference room. Two hours later they emerged with most of a contract hammered out, and only a gazillion details for Mike to research before it could be finalized. He held the door for Harvey, who walked through it and then said,

"Screw threads tighten clockwise," said Harvey, as if they'd been discussing this topic for the past two hours, not how to structure stock options in a golden parachute. Mike struggled to keep a grin off his face: he'd successfully (if unintentionally) brain-wormed his boss. Harvey put on an expression of supremely reasonable satisfaction as if he'd solved a Rubik's cube blindfolded. "Counterclockwise is chaos, hurricanes are chaos. Clocks are anti-hurricane."

It only took a few minutes' googling to prove him wrong: the direction of screw threads was not standardized till the 19th Century. But no other explanation was forthcoming, and a gazillion details on that golden parachute weren't going to research themselves. They didn't finalize the contract till Friday, and the hurricane was coming on Sunday.

Mike's apartment was in the maybe possibly will have flooding area of the map, so he just packed an overnight bag and slept in his cubicle that Saturday night. At dawn, when the serious winds hit and the building started to sway, Mike brought down coffee for the overnight guard in the lobby, and they spent the morning playing checkers until it began to let up. He was back at work by noon.

After a week of licking his wounds, Mike ran into Rachel and invited her out for lunch. She knew a place, of course, and they walked down the avenue in the crisp wind of late fall together, scarves flapping behind them. Mike could feel his ears turning red, and wondered again why the corporate crowd disdained hats so firmly.

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