Chapter One
At a quarter to four on a cold Wednesday morning, Jack Livermore awoke in the usual way, with a racing heart, sweat-soaked pajamas, and the unwavering certainty he was about to die.
He sat up in bed and worked on his breathing, muttering his morning mantra: “mortality risk low.” His heart, galloping wildly inside his chest, slowed to a canter, then to a brisk trot. When it finally settled back into a walk, he swung his legs out of bed, slid his feet into his slippers, and scuffed off to the bathroom.
This was no time to look in the mirror – experience had taught him as much – though that wasn’t a problem. He never shaved in the morning. He had no real desire to join the 40,000 men who accidentally carve themselves up every year. Nor did he shower (100,000 mishaps a year) until he was fully alert. For now, he just splashed his face with cold water, brushed his teeth, changed into his sweat pants and ‘Just Do It’ T-shirt, and shuffled on to the kitchen where, barring a power outage during the night, there ought to be coffee.
There was.
The ping and hiss of the radiators and the clanging of pipes had commenced, making him feel less alone. In the parlance of Manhattan real estate ads, the kitchen was “a gourmet’s delight,” which meant with a little maneuvering and a lot of brute force, a small table and three spindly chairs could be wedged up against the back wall for a dining experience rivaling coach class at thirty-five thousand feet. Jack groped in the dishwasher for his cup, a heavy white china mug with “World’s Greatest Dad” spelled out in red. The cup was a thirty-eighth birthday present from his daughter Emma who, having just turned ten, was still young enough to feel pleased whenever she saw him use it.
His morning coffee was one of the few things he looked forward to. Yet even that wasn’t without trepidation over the one thousand chemicals he knew coffee contained. Only a handful of them had been tested, and two-thirds of those had caused cancer in mice.Rather than dwell on the natural toxins he was about to ingest, he pressed on to the artificial: his pills. There were seven in all, stylish capsules in Crayola colors that held out the promise of sound mental health, a promise on which they had failed to make good. Jack swallowed them all in one throat-searing gulp. He’d been on them – or some variation of them – for six months now with nothing to show, although one never knew. His doctors were constantly making adjustments, reformulating the chemical stew.
In topping off his cup to replace what he’d already drunk, Jack had overfilled it and now faced a choice: dump some out, suck some down, or pick it up and just let it spill. Only a year ago, a predicament as minor as this would have escaped notice. Lately, however, the tiniest glitch had the power to paralyze him. In the end, after much indecision, he bent his head to the rim of the cup and siphoned a half-inch off the top. He carefully lifted the cup and carried it off to his book-lined womb of an office: Sanctuary – albeit temporary – at last.
He turned on his computer and watched as it bathed the small room in a heavenly light, a reminder that some things still worked as they should. He checked e-mail. Nothing but junk.
He felt better the minute he opened the file he’d been working on the previous night, an actuarial table that determined the life expectancy of a beneficiary receiving death proceeds from insurance.
The sight of the numbers aligned on the screen did what no pill ever could: slowed Jack’s heart and his breathing, dropped his blood pressure, eased his anxiety, and gave him hope. All the failures and fears that had dogged him as he drifted about the apartment hadn’t once tried to follow him in here, but waited respectfully outside the door. And if elsewhere he was a tongue-tied, inarticulate fool, he was fluent – even eloquent – here, in the language of Euclid, Pythagoras, and Descartes, in the kingdom of Galileo and Planck, where complexities could be rendered more manageable through the poetry of logical thought.
Numbers were Jack’s strength and his refuge, his one saving grace in a frightening world. The best evidence – the only evidence yet – of a God. With the exception of Emma, of course.
Outside, the city was coming to life, like a vast orchestra tuning up: the muffled horns of the cabbies, the sigh of air brakes, and the rim shots of tossed garbage cans. Twelve stories up, lulled by the hum of his computer and the rhythmical clacking of keys, Jack heard none of that. The equations that flashed on the computer screen fashioned a small symphony all their own, and he tapped his feet and rocked almost imperceptibly in his chair to the music that he alone heard.
He was advancing to split annuities when a slight movement caused him to look up. Emma watched from the doorway in her white flannel nightgown, her cobalt eyes clouded with sleep. Jack held out his arm and she climbed into his lap. She felt bigger than she had the last time she had done this not even three weeks before, and he felt a pang at the thought of her outgrowing their little ritual, as she no doubt soon would.
He brushed his lips over the top of her head with its soft, loopy curls once the color of corn silk, now darkening slowly to her mother’s mahogany. From the moment of birth, Emma favored her mother so much she could have been Liz’s clone. Although Jack was grateful to God (or whomever) for the drooling enchantress he had loved at first sight, he found himself endlessly searching for some evidence that his seed was involved. Though it took years to surface, when it finally did, it was better than hair color, blood type, physique, or anything else that he could have hoped for: his mathematical mind, that left-brained analytical marvel had been reborn in her.
He showed her his latest table, whispering so they wouldn’t wake Liz. He then closed the file and opened another, the mortality database Emma liked best. They had named the guy Barney, the hypothetical white married male who was the star of this actuarial chart, and there were few things Emma found more exciting than rubbing him out in creative new ways. She was, first and foremost, her father’s daughter.
“How’s Barney today?” she asked.
Jack grinned down at her. “Not too good, I’m afraid. Looks like he’s swirlin’ the drain.”
It was the traditional beginning to one of their favorite games, made all the more thrilling by the fact that it was strictly forbidden. They lowered their voices to conspiratorial whispers so Liz wouldn’t hear. “What is it this time?” Emma asked.
Jack furrowed his brow and feigned deep concentration. “I don’t know. Glaucoma? Gout?”
Emma’s face lit up. “Hey, I know! Let’s pickle his liver. Serious!” He shushed her, then whispered back: “Cirrhosis it is. Excellent choice.”
They gave Barney just three months to live, switching to calculus to compute the effect on his fictitious widow, Vera, a notorious bingo cheat who favored pink housecoats and Kent cigarettes. As usual, Jack was struck by his daughter’s facility with numbers, so much like his own. Not yet developed, of course, but it was there, and he was grateful.
These were the moments he lived for, when his daughter climbed into his lap and he shared this with her, this abstract higher realm where the concept of infinite space helped ease the cramped confines of his own shrunken life. There was safety in numbers, a reprieve from the fear and anxiety over what was out there that propelled him in here to seek evidence of a grand plan, in the form of numerical patterns embedded in seemingly random events.
Emma manned the PgUp and PgDn keys while Jack typed the numbers in their proper squares, a division of labor resolved long ago. And like any two people who work well together and know their assigned roles by heart, they did not have to talk about who did what, they simply did what they needed to do. So engrossed were they in their respective tasks, they didn’t hear Liz till it was too late. She was suddenly framed by the doorway, scowling darkly, as Jack and Emma looked up.
“Go get dressed. You’ll be late,” she told Emma, who twisted around in Jack’s lap and looked up. “Daddy?”
“You heard your mom,” he said. “Go get ready for
school.”
He braced for the inevitable, but instead of the usual speech – “Imaginary people? Dying of made-up diseases? You want her to end up like you?” – Liz simply turned on her heel and stalked off, which was worse, and what’s more, she knew it.
It hardly mattered that they’d covered this ground many times. Nor did it help him to know she was wrong. These were flesh-and-blood people dying actual deaths, represented by numbers: his work. And if he chose to admire how snugly human mortality fit mathematical curves, to marvel at its symmetry, to gaze in awe at its beauty, so cold and austere, then so what? Did that make him a heartless prick? No, it did not.
His wife’s unspoken scolding hung in the air nonetheless, shattering his earlier calm. In its place was a sense of unease, a disquieting tension, a flutter of fear. He felt a pulsating tic just above his right eye, tiny spasms he couldn’t control. And yet, even these seemed in sync with the universe, timed by some divine metronome.
What would he give to be able to take Emma places, to show her the world! He compensated with a readiness not only to play, but to invent elaborate games for them to play – complex “pretend” games carefully honed to the sensibilities of a ten-year-old. On his worst days, when his self-loathing reached critical mass, he saw all this through Liz’s eyes: a shameless campaign to make staying home with Daddy seem more fun than going places with Mom. Well, it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to include her. He’d made every effort, in fact. But in an ironic reversal of roles, Liz played the uptight, awkward parent, resistant to all his attempts to help her loosen up.
Lately, Emma had joined in the coaxing, in the wheedling tone she most often reserved for things she desperately wanted, like staying up until midnight, or Hostess cupcakes for dessert.
Jack got up and went into the kitchen, refilled his cup and sat at the table alone. Emma joined him two minutes later, bounding out of her room dressed for school in a navy blue jumper with a red turtleneck and matching red tights. She pulled out the chair next to Jack, as he poured the last of the Cheerios into her cereal bowl.
Liz emerged from the bathroom trailing clouds of her favorite perfume, a noxious medley of mosses and musk that Jack and Emma had dubbed “Eau de P.U.” More alarming than her perfume was her form-fitting Dolce & Gabbana suit and Jimmy Choo stilettos, the outfit that Jack had surmised to be her lover’s favorite.
Sure enough. “You two are on your own tonight. I have a dinner meeting that’s apt to run late,” she said briskly.
Jack glared at her – Look me in the eye, I dare you. Instead, she looked everywhere but as she poured herself a half-cup of coffee and drank it standing at the sink. She pretended not to see Emma’s hand as it patted the empty chair next to her own. Emma had been doing this sort of thing ever since her parents stopped getting along, positioning herself between them, looking from one to the other, assessing their moods, and generally breaking Jack’s heart.
“Will you be home before I go to bed?” she asked.
“I certainly hope so. I’ll do my best,” Liz replied.
Why are you lying? Jack thought, noting with pleasure the red blotches that sprang to her cheeks, her own built-in lie detector. She looked as if she had been slapped. As if he had slapped her. For a moment, he pretended he had.
He continued his silent interrogation. Is this going to be a repeat of last week, when you waltzed in at two in the morning? Or the time before that, at a quarter to four? You think I don’t know what’s going on?
Liz met his gaze finally and looked almost cornered – even a little contrite. Then she recovered and assumed the coolly challenging expression he’d been seeing more and more as of late. The night he stumbled out to the kitchen for a glass of water, switched on the light, and caught her smoking again. The Sunday morning he’d found their bedroom door inexplicably closed and barged in on a clandestine phone call.
Jack studied her now in her designer suit, standing there reeking of arrogance and musk, and tried to see her as he had the first time, appraising her not as her husband, but simply as a man. Regarding her this way, from a safe remove, lessened her power and buttressed his own.
She had slender ankles and shapely calves, wide hips, a not-quite-flat stomach, and small, stylish breasts. Her mouth turned down at the corners while her nose turned up, tugging at her top lip and exposing a crescent of teeth. Jack took in the shrewd green eyes, set far apart beneath brows she’d tweezed to a fine line. Her side-parted shoulder-length wavy brown hair had a Forties feel, as did the suit. She looked like a noir heroine: double-crossing and desperate, seductive, sweet-tough.
“We need to leave in two minutes,” Liz told Emma. “Do you have everything you need for school?”
Emma, who’d been regarding her parents with the same dopey slack-jawed expression she wore watching SpongeBob SquarePants, looked down at her thumbnail, which bore a trace of blue polish. She tried picking it off. “Mmmm-hmmm,” she said.
“Go brush your teeth then.”
Emma slid off her chair. A minute later came the flurry of coats, purses, gloves, boots and hats, a wet kiss that left Colgate residue on Jack’s cheek, and then silence. He waited until he heard the elevator doors close behind them, then went into the bathroom and opened a drawer. Liz’s diaphragm was gone. Well, he’d suspected as much. He sat down to assess how he felt. Oddly enough, not that bad. He was numb. What the hell, he thought. The pills were good for something.
Pills or no pills, he could not comprehend what Liz saw in her boss at the bank. Harold Nichols – “Hairy Knuckles” to Emma and Jack – was a senior VP who smoked stinking cigars, told embarrassing jokes and reduced life’s tragedies to golf metaphors, dismissing his own two failed marriages as a “double bogey.”
Jack had despised him on sight, a first impression that only saved him the trouble later on, when he was forced to endure Nichols’s company at various bank functions.
Back in the bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed glumly anticipating the long day ahead. It would be followed, he knew, by an even longer night lying awake listening for the scratching sound of Liz trying to insert her key after several martinis and a half-bottle of wine, followed by her clumsy attempts to slip into bed undetected. As if he could sleep through her blatant betrayal. As if the cigar smoke that clung to her hair didn’t make him too nauseous to sleep.
Jack thought longingly of a nap. It would be such relief to check out for an hour or two. But then he pictured his boss – or worse, Liz – waking him with a phone call when he should be working, and he went back to his office instead.
Nine-oh-five, checking e-mail again. Shit, a note from the boss, Druck the Schmuck. Larry Drucker had been on the job less than six months and already was widely reviled. He also was gunning for Jack, the only stay-at-home actuary on the corporate payroll.
The email was bad news. It always was. Jack clicked on the message and read: “There will be a mandatory meeting of all Metropolitan Mutual actuaries in the 18th floor boardroom tomorrow at 3. No teleconferencing on this one. I want you all in here. NO EXCEPTIONS. LD.”
He felt the words even before he’d deciphered them. They slammed into his solar plexus like a fist, hard enough to send aftershocks sparking up and down his limbs. Obviously, he was fucked. There was no way he could make it to lower Manhattan. He could barely handle the trip to the lobby to pick up the mail. (That he managed at all was a testament to the outstanding safety record of elevators which, although known to get stuck between floors, were designed to fall up and not down.)
Drucker knew all about Jack and his phobias. They were hardly a secret. Damn near everyone knew, including the growing number of colleagues who’d yet to catch a glimpse of the man they’d nicknamed The Phantom Actuary. There was some question as to whether he was, in fact, real. The quality of his work, his ongoing absence, and the various rumors floating around about him had all given rise to a kind of mythic stature, turning him into a hero of sorts. The Livermore Mystique annoyed Drucker no end. Demystifying Jack had become an obsession. He was that insecure.
With shaking hands, Jack opened his desk drawer and pawed through the bottles for his dwindling emergency stash, even as he formulated his imaginary reply. Druck: Can’t make the meeting, but will expect you at my place afterwards for some mandatory cock-sucking. Jack. He was down to a half-dozen Klonopins, a couple of Mellarils, and perhaps fifteen Valiums. He extracted two yellow Valium tabs and swallowed them dry. Ten milligrams, nowhere near adequate. This called for twenty at least.
“Mortality…risk…low,” he wheezed, though his heart vehemently disagreed. The giant fist in his chest squeezed the muscle so hard, he was tempted to call 911. An actuarial factoid popped into his head: Half of those men who die clutching their chests have had no prior symptoms at all. He was panting as hard as a black Lab in August, and the bag he kept in his desk wasn’t there. He scuttled out to the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinet where Liz stored such things. There he found a crumpled brown paper bag, covered his mouth and nose with it, and took a deep breath, trying his best not to focus on the molecules of arsenic, mercury, and dioxin that were coming along for the ride and making themselves at home in his lungs. The phone trilled. Startled, he dropped the bag and watched as it fluttered slow-mo to the floor. “He-he-he—hello?”
“Doing your Lamaze breathing?” Liz said.
“Heh – I – heh heh – have to – heh – go in for – heh heh – a meeting—’’
“Yeah, so?”
Indignation unleashed an adrenalin surge that made short work of his breathing disorder. “It’s tomorrow,” he said plaintively. “There’s no way in hell.”
“So you’ll miss one more meeting. How many does that make, a hundred? I’m afraid I don’t see the problem.”
“This one’s mandatory – show up or else.”
Liz snorted at this. “Or else what? Why would Drucker want to fire you? You do nothing but work. When’s the last time you took a day off?”
Jack could feel the fist start to constrict again. “I’m not analyzing his motive. I’m just telling you what he said.”
A pause. “All right, look,” she said, somewhat more kindly. “I’ll call a car service and arrange for them to take you and bring you home. Problem solved.”
“Well, not necessarily. I mean, I can’t promise that’s going to do it.”
“Well it had better, because I’ve about had it.” The sharp tone was back.
“Meaning what?”
“Use your head. Figure it out.” And with that, she hung up without saying goodbye, or even telling him why she’d called in the first place.
He hightailed it back to his office, only this time his phobias followed him in. They were dark, fearsome things, feral dogs milling, growling, eyeing his throat. For all his heart’s racing, his skin remained clammy. This was easily the worst attack yet. It was all happening, all the things he feared most. He was going to lose everything – not just his composure, but his wife and his daughter, his job, maybe even his life.
He glanced at the screen and watched in horror as the familiar discrete shapes of numbers broke down into pixels that ceased to make sense. The word “death” at the top of the screen pulsed and darkened and seemingly grew, obliterating everything else. It wasn’t some “Barney” death. It was his. He sensed it. Cancer. Heart attack. Cerebral hemorrhage. Stroke. One after another, his dark daydreams played out on the big screen TV in his head, till it all got to be way too much, and he knew of just one way out: more Valium.
He took two more and crawled into bed just before the drug kicked in and carried him off. When he opened his eyes hours later and his brain floated up from the murky depths, he saw Emma standing next to him in her school clothes looking impatient.
“How come you’re in bed? Are you sick?”
“I’m okay, just a headache. I’m better now.” He glanced at the clock. Holy shit, ten to five. “What time did you get home?”
“Three-thirty.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Emma shrugged.
“Well, what have you been doing? Did you get your homework done?”
Another shrug.
“Can’t you talk?”
A tiny one-shouldered shrug.
“Ah, but of course. You don’t speak any English. Parlez-vous Francais, Mademoiselle?”
“Si.”
“Si?” He chucked a pillow at her. “Don’t you mean oui?”
“Oui.”
“Aha! So you do speak English. I make ze joke. I have tricked you!” He laughed malevolently, and began tickling Emma under her arms.
“No! Daddy, stop!”
“I knew it. You faker! Tell you what. Let me grab a quick shower. Then we’ll order a pizza. Okay?”
“Yay! Can we get plain cheese? Please?”
“Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”
***
His marathon nap and the panic attack that preceded it left him wiped out. Once he’d cleaned up the kitchen and checked Emma’s homework, he sat on the sofa with her watching Animal Planet and explaining yet again why a puppy wasn’t an option right now.
He let her stay up an extra half-hour, then tucked her in and told her the next chapter in The Ongoing Adventures of Josette, a fictional girl who was a lot like Emma except she lived in France. He was about halfway through when he realized Emma had fallen asleep.
The odds of him following suit seemed remote – there were limits, after all, even for him – but his post-Valium hangover and the lead weight of dread for tomorrow made him suddenly weak. He got into bed at eleven with the dullest reading material he could find: the U.S. National Search and Rescue Manual. It turned out to be considerably more interesting than he thought, though it was definitely slow going. He’d barely made it through ten pages when he heard Liz wrestling with the deadbolt. It was just after midnight, a few hours too early for a stellar night out with Knuckles.
“How was the meeting?” he asked, his eyes glued to the page.
“Same old, same old.” Liz kicked off her shoes and sat on the edge of the bed rubbing her feet, something Jack used to do for her in a previous lifetime, before he got sick.
“We saved you some pizza,” he offered. “No yucky toppings. Just plain cheese.”
“No thanks. I already ate,” she said, and disappeared into the master bath. He heard her filling the tub, and surmised that the “same old, same old” had included a roll in the hay. He closed the book and his eyes and against all odds, fell into a deep sleep before she returned.
He awoke to an empty apartment and an ominous note taped to the bathroom mirror. “The car will be here at two, so be ready. I’m not going to tell you which service I called, so don’t even think about canceling. Just go. You can do this. I know you can. Liz.”
It was nine-thirty and sleeting. Jack could hear the ice pelting the windows. He padded out to the living room for a better view of the street. Everything looked unremittingly gray – not just the puddles and pavement, which were supposed to be gray, but the cars and people twelve stories below.
Using the Livermore Scale, Jack did a quick calculation to assess probable risk, based on the weather, the time of day he’d be traveling, and the average speed (estimated) the car was apt to achieve. He then factored in the use of restraints (lap and shoulder belts) and his position inside the car (back seat, middle), along with vehicle type (four-door sedan), and the sex of the driver (undoubtedly male.) Though the unknown variables – the driver’s age, driving record, and marital status, the measurement of the wheelbase, etc. – made it impossible to be as accurate as he’d have liked, he ended up with a risk factor of twelve-point-five, against an error rate of plus or minus two. He did not, as a rule, exceed ten.
Not that the Livermore Scale was infallible. The system had yet to be devised that could account for disasters that came at you from out of the blue – the Pakula Effect, as Jack had come to regard it, after the filmmaker killed on the Long Island Expressway by a seven-foot-long metal pipe that had fallen from a tractor-trailer truck, been struck by a car and propelled through the windshield of his Volvo wagon. There was a corollary to all this, of course: The perception of danger only tends to increase it. In other words, God looks out for fools. As if to prove it, a bare-headed bike messenger darted in and out of the snarled mess below, narrowly missing a pedestrian, a utility truck, and a late-model Buick. Jack stepped away from the window, shuddering.
He took a shower, got dressed, and began the countdown: less than four hours until the car came. He sat immobile for most of them, running the numbers and watching the clock.
