Michael didn’t go to work the next morning. The radio and TV said that most public transportation was moving normally. Traffic was congested, however. Three sidewalks in Manhattan had collapsed from water damage. Just walking down the street someone might get killed or paralyzed.
Europe’s economy had almost failed again, except that the Germans bailed out the Greeks with money that neither of them had. China was going to take over the American economy and make Michael and everyone he knew into Communist slaves living in dormitories and eating boiled rice.
But if no one could buy the goods, then China’s economy might fail, and it would engage its two-hundred-million-man army to reclaim all the money we borrowed to pay for the health insurance of undocumented, Spanish-speaking, job-stealing illegal immigrants.
There were microbes in the water after the storm. Militant Muslims had used the cover of the downpour to plant explosives under churches and big businesses. They weren’t afraid of the rain, like Michael and other poor Americans who just wanted to work until retirement... never came.
The phone rang on the morning of the third day that Michael had not gone in to work at Prospect, Farr, Grant, and Heldhammer.
Michael picked up the receiver but did not speak.
“Mike?” someone said. “Mike, is that you?”
“Michael is not here,” Michael heard himself say. Immediately he felt warm and safe behind the subterfuge of those words. He wasn’t at home and therefore couldn’t be reached, couldn’t be touched, burned, infected, blown up, or experimented upon by sales scientists working in subterranean desert laboratories for the superstores.
A lifetime of the nightly news and conspiracy theories woven into TV shows, movies, and even commercials; of the racist/sexist/classist schemes of Big Business and its political candidate shills; the private prisons, police, billionaires and millionaires, movie stars and pop stars and country stars and serial killers: all this came together in Michael’s mind in his apartment three days after the disaster that he finally understood would never end.
“Mike, it’s Finnmore, Ron Finnmore. Mr. Russell is wondering where you are.”
“I’ll leave Michael the message,” Mike said, and then he cradled the phone.
After hanging up, Michael had the urge to giggle but suppressed it. He knew that if he showed any emotion, soon they’d say he’d gone crazy and take him away.
“Yes,” he said, when the secretary answered the phone. “I’m calling for Mr. Trey. He’s not coming in today because of inclement weather.”
It was raining, and so Michael felt justified.
“It’s just a few showers,” Faye Lesser, Thomas Grant’s assistant’s secretary said.
“That’s how the last storm started. What if he got there and it came down like that again? Who would feed his cat?”
Michael didn’t have a cat. He didn’t have a fish or even a plant. If he had had a plant it would have died, because he hadn’t put up the shades since the storm.
The television spoke of conspiracies and of disasters both domestic and foreign that were increasing in severity, like the storm that had raged over New York. There were mad cows and rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. The Y chromosome in men had shrunk to the point that soon men might cease to be men and would have to learn how to be women-without-wombs.
There were prisons across the country that together released at least a hundred convicted killers every week and banks that created bad debt (Michael was never sure how they did this) and then sold the nonexistent interest to pension plans that subsequently failed.
Michael started taking notes. He had five folders that he had bought for his financial records but never used. He labeled these folders: diseases, natural disasters, man-made disasters, financial disasters, and human threats. Five folders were just right for the notes he needed to compile. He saw this as a sign that he was meant to stay in his fourteenth-floor apartment and study the truth that so many people missed because they went to work and therefore, somehow, inexplicably, betrayed themselves.
He spent whole days looking up fires, floods, serial killers, and food additives on his cell-phone IP. He ordered hundreds of cans of beans and tuna, concentrated orange juice, and powdered milk from grocery delivery services. He made the deliverymen leave the foods at the door and collected them only when he was sure that no one was lingering in the hall.
He used his phone to pay his bills until his accounts went low.
The super brought up his mail and left it at the threshold for him.
He had been fired, of course. His girlfriend, Melanie, told him that either he would meet her at the Starbucks on Forty-Second Street or she was breaking up with him. His mother called, but Michael fooled her by saying that Michael wasn’t home.
And he was getting somewhere with his research.
At first he thought that the problem was that there were too many people, but he gave up that theory when he realized that people working together would be benefited by great numbers. Finally he understood that it wasn’t the number of souls but the plethora of ideas that bogged down the world. It was like the old-time Polish parliament, in which nothing could be decided as long as anyone held a contrary point of view.
The problem with the world was a trick of consciousness: people believed in free will and independent thinking and were, therefore, dooming the world to the impossibility of choice. Yes. That was the problem. Together all the peoples of the world — Muslims, Hindus, and Jews; Christians, atheists, and Buddhists — would have to give up disagreements if they wanted the human race to survive the storm of incongruent consciousness that was even worse than the weather that had brought New York to its knees.
Michael felt that he was making great progress. He was beginning, he was sure, to articulate the prime issue at the base of all the bad news the New York Times had to print. He was trying to imagine what kind of blog or article he could author, when the eviction notice was shoved under his door. It had only been six weeks... no, no, nine... no, eleven. Just eleven weeks, but he was rent-stabilized, and the collusion of city government and greedy landlords made it possible for prompt evictions when there was potential for rent that could soar.
Working after midnight for days, Michael drilled forty-eight holes along the sides, top, and bottom of his door and similarly placed holes in the doorjamb and along the floor. He used a handheld cordless drill to do this work, and it took him seventy-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes. Through these connective cavities he looped twined wire hangers, two strands for each hole. This reinforcement, he figured, stood a chance of resisting a battering ram if it came to that.
He also used melted wax to seal the cracks at the sides of the door so that the police couldn’t force him out with tear gas.
His beard was filling in, and his hair had grown shaggy. He looked to himself like another man in the mirror: the man who answered the phone for the absent Michael.
He filled the bathtub to the overflow drain in case the super turned off the water.
On his iPhone he read the newspapers, studied the Middle East, Central America, and the Chinese, who, he believed, had gained control of capitalism without understanding its deteriorative quality.
Finally all those boring political-science courses that he took when he thought he might want to be a lawyer had some use.