Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

most astonishing feature: the windows. Only “windows” seemed too pedestrian. These were giant, luxurious, undulating sheets of glass, like fun house mirrors, only transparent. His broker, Pam Davenport, described them as “free-form,” which he could see was another way of saying “curved.” They spanned from the floor to the ceiling and were impossibly clean. You felt as if you were about to jump out of an airplane.
    “Splendid, no?” said Pam Davenport, grinning like she had annealed the glass herself. “Didn’t I tell you?”
    Charnoble had recommended the broker (“top-class all the way,” he had said, blinking). When Mitchell called her, he explained that he wanted something nice. After all, he owed it to himself. His commissions at FutureWorld were increasing considerably, and he’d been there only two months. He wanted to make a broad gesture. He had tried to make one a week earlier, when he sent his parents a check for five thousand dollars.
    “What is this?” said Tibor. Mitchell could tell from the way his parents raised their voices that they were standing hunched over the phone.
    “This is dopey,” said Rikki.
    “I have more than I can use.”
    “It’s wonderful you’re making this money, but you should hold on to it. You’re too young to be parting with your salary.”
    “Here’s the thing,” said Tibor. “You never know when you might need this. You never know anything.”
    “I just thought you guys might need it.”
    “We don’t need your money!” shouted Tibor.
    “Maybe,” said Rikki in her most gentle tone, “you could figure out a better use for it. Like finding a new apartment.”
    She was right. When he first saw his current apartment, it had struck him as oddly familiar. He had found comfort in the lack of natural light, the stucco walls smudged with grease, and the pathetic meagerness of the kitchenette, its stained Formica and tin sink. When he e-mailed photographs to his mother, she was able to explain why this was.
    “You moved into a Zukorminium?” she wrote.
    This was not the only fact that had recently become clear to him. He had spent months, for instance, trying to distill from Elsa’s letters some kind of general philosophy of fear avoidance that he could appropriate. Her achievement was incredible to him. She had to know the numbers: a person who has suffered a Brugada episode has a ninety percent chance of having another one. The chance that she would die from a Brugada episode was eminently reasonable. It was eminently imminent.
    Early one morning, in an effort to exterminate a particularly virulent posse of cockroaches, Mitchell had done the dreadful calculation. It could be reduced to a single number: 1 in 53, or 1.89 percent. These were the odds that a Brugada patient who had already had multiple syncopes would have a fatal attack in the coming year. That was exponentially more likely than the odds of dying from drug or alcohol abuse (1 in 10,837) or an accidental injury (1 in 2,454). There was no mathematical analysis that could make that 1 in 53 less frightening. When you broadened the time frame, the numbers only became uglier. The odds of a fatal syncope in two years: 3.7 percent; in five: 8.7 percent; by the time she turned thirty: 13.2 percent. But Elsa, like curious Sarah Axon in Iowa, seemed oblivious to fear. To some extent, her trick seemed to lie in a delicate combination of denial and distraction. She did this mainly by focusing on pragmatic matters, on hard labor. But all her talk of sowing, plowing, and installing photovoltaic cells seemed to be the manifestation of a larger philosophical strategy. If he could only isolate this strategy, he might be able to use it himself. This was what he was trying to get at in his letters. It wasn’t easy; he couldn’t just ask her How do you overcome your fear of imminent death? Can you teach me? The difficulty wasn’t that these questions would be embarrassing or cross some line of decency. They