ON SHAKY GROUND

Years ago, I went on a date with a libertarian guy. After we discussed the usual get-to-know-you topics, like fiscal and monetary policy (disagreed on both), he then brought up a weird peeve of his that stopped me mid-bite. He was upset that Lucille Roberts, a women-only gym, didn’t allow men. To his libertarian mind, hostile to any social restrictions, it seemed like an injustice. This sudden derailment of a civilized conversation into batshit territory put me in a mild stupor, and, after I regained my composure, I asked him what was his injury in this case? Did he think that those women in that gym were some kind of tycoons or political rainmakers that decided the fate of the nation without his participation? That he was excluded from some consequential decision-making that would affect him? Was there some kind of financial detriment to him? He couldn’t articulate the concrete harm that was being imposed on him; “it’s the principle,” he said. It’s possible, in hindsight, that he was just trolling me.

That episode lingered in my mind, reinforcing my idea of libertarians as rudderless jesters who, if given the opportunity, would take the principal of personal freedom to an absurd place. The following decade, however, would prove that a tendency to elevate personal freedom above all other considerations wasn’t just limited to libertarians; the same dynamic was emerging on the American Left. As I mocked libertarians for their utopian views, the same thinking was overtaking my tribe, the progressive left. We put all our political chips on the concept of individual rights and ran with it.

It was a devastating mistake. After SCOTUS overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022, I was pretty sure that abortion will be one of the deciding factors in 2024 presidential election. As we were inundated with stories of women dying in southern states, reproductive rights looked like a winning issue. Then, on election day, came a rude awakening: more women voted for Trump than they did in 2020. The loss of reproductive rights animated women less than the opportunity to stick it to “they/them.”

That election forced a discomforting personal reckoning, a systemic reevaluation of my long-held beliefs. I saw the primal triumph over reason. The appeal to one’s rights, one of the principal arguments of American liberals, turned out to be politically impotent. The implications were sweeping and sobering: If that issue had left the women unmoved, then, perhaps, the whole model of appealing to individual freedoms could be faulty. Clearly, we were doing something very wrong.

***

Ontologically speaking, the Left (especially the identitarian left) and the libertarians stand on a much weaker philosophical ground than traditional conservatives. The idpol Left and the libertarians built their political cases on the ideas of the Enlightenment, on theoretical concepts and abstractions such as rights and utility. It is admirable, and those concepts gave us many modern comforts, but politically and philosophically they put us on an unstable footing. Abstractions like rights lack a definitive finish line, a solid bottom, a line beyond which an argument can’t go. Like that grinning libertarian guy, we’ve become so adept at abstractions and following the logic that we often find ourselves defending the absurd.

By contrast, the American Right, at least in its pre-MAGA form, based their political and cultural arguments on Christian foundations. Those foundations provided them with a hard backstop, a sort of closing final word, on which they can build their political case. Yes, their backstop is a superstition, a God, and we can mock it all we want, but it is a backstop that is operationally unassailable. On a very basic level, they have an answer to what had existed before the Big Bang, and the atheists don’t. Philosophically, the religious Right has an advantage in any moral or political debate.

MEANS AND ENDS

Max Horkheimer in his work Eclipse of Reason argued that when the philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason, what they had killed was not the church but metaphysics, and, as a result, the concept of objective reason itself. By objective reason Horkheimer meant the ability of a person or a society to formulate a cohesive collective purpose, an ends. What we’ve been doing for the last two centuries is channeling all our empirical knowledge and scientific breakthroughs towards a means––that is practical solutions to survival and accumulation of material comforts. We have succeeded in this task, and this success had led us to confuse means with ends. We had designated self-betterment, profit, and economic growth––the means––as the ends.

Horkheimer thinks that this epistemological confusion is at the root of modernity’s problems. He argues that because we have lost conceptual tools and ancient moral vocabulary, we’ve become vulnerable to illiberal forces. He warns that a liberal but atomized and hyper-individualistic society will fail to protect itself against fascism. A fascist operates with the same notions a liberal or a libertarian does––logic, reason, efficiency––to which a liberal is ill-equipped to offer a meaningful objection. Ask a modern self-interested individual why fascism is bad and he will struggle to give a definitive answer. To mount a strong argument, he’d have to deploy such concepts as “morally wrong” and those are just not in his vocabulary. Thus, according to Horkheimer, there is a permanent tension between self-interest and the idea of a liberal nation, and therefore a constant lurking danger.

“ABOUT ENDS IT MUST BE SILENT”

In a way, our philosophical handicap is by our own design. What we’re operating with here is an “incoherent conceptual scheme” in the words of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In his book After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that what makes the scheme incoherent is the fact that we operate with disjointed fragments of once universal moral concepts. Such concepts as “justice” and “good” are understood differently today than they were in Aristotelian times. Today they are merely instrumental, while in the olden days they were part of a larger societal context. A goodness of a man’s actions was measured by its effectiveness in advancing a defined collective purpose, a telos. Today, a “good” is merely what’s good for an individual in his personal quest.

Both MacIntyre and Horkheimer realize that reason is a poor tool to define collective purpose. Reason can advance us towards a certain goal, but it can’t articulate that goal. Reason is quantitative. It helped us to develop vaccines, antibiotics, electricity, air travel, and other modern comforts. It has lifted us from poverty and from the sewers and plagues of the Dark Ages, but it can’t answer the question “to what end?”

If reason can’t answer that question, and if there can be no rational basis for moral beliefs, then, MacIntyre concludes, “about ends (reason) must be silent.” Indeed, rationality only compels us to pursue our own individual goals. If we act morally (as opposed to rationally), we will most likely fail to achieve those individual goals. Moral people do not get promoted at a corporation; they don’t get appointed to run important government agencies; they can’t build and monetize a popular podcast.

And this is the crux of the human condition (and the recurring theme present in many major literary works and prestige TV dramas): our daily operational rationality is in constant tension with an inherent psychological need to consider ourselves moral agents. In the back of our minds, in our heart of hearts, we want to know what the ends are.

A TWO-LEGGED STOOL

In his book, MacIntyre describes a scheme that is necessary for a society to define and realize its collective goal. It consists of three elements: 1. A man in his original untutored state (that he also calls human nature); 2. A man if he realized his telos; and 3. A set of moral precepts that enable a man’s transition from the former to the latter. This scheme functioned in Aristotelian and in medieval times, because all three elements were then present.

The Enlightenment had eliminated the ‘man-if-he-realized-his-telos’ part from the equation, because it made it impossible to define that end goal with the new epistemological tools. Neither scientific inquiry nor the concept of individual rights have anything to say about the purpose of our collective existence. Neither physics nor math can tell us what we ought to do.

So, modernity has left us with just two elements: an untutored human nature and a residual set of disjointed moral precepts. When we ask a man to be a moral agent, he, in his untutored state, will ask in return “to what end?” and about that end we have nothing to say. To fill this teleological void, we have settled on the idea that the sum of discrete individual pursuits shall constitute a collective good.

We balanced on this two-legged stool for two centuries, but the conceptual incoherence is finally catching up with us. The lack of the third element, the telos, the collective purpose, the ends, is what underwrites our current civilizational upheaval.

CHARLES TAYLOR’S HORIZONS OF SIGNIFICANCE

The ideas of Horkheimer and MacIntyre are echoed and built upon by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his book Ethics of Authenticity. He, too, identifies subjective reason (that he calls instrumental reason) and the culture of individualism as the main culprits of the modern political and social turmoil.

Taylor attempts to chart a path, to articulate a way for an individual and a society to live a meaningful, authentic life. A person, according to Taylor, is always at risk of sliding into one of the two extremes: a pursuit of self-fulfillment in its most absurd, degraded and trivialized form; and the cynical posture of doubt that a morally fulfilling life is even possible. Between those two extremes exists a psychological and ethical space that someone who had resolved to realize his telos can tread.

Taylor offers a term, horizons of significance, to help us navigate this path. While not a recipe or a panacea, it is a way of thinking about your own motivations if you have decided that you don’t want to be either a hedonist or a nihilist. One must weigh the significance of their personal choices and actions by the impact they have on society. For example, the choice of a pronoun is a way of self-expression, and to have that choice is good, but in a grand scheme of things, it is an insignificant choice. If that person insisted on being taken seriously on account of her pronoun, she’d be elevating an abstraction to the same plane as reality, and we would instantly sense the ontological fraud. If that individual choice is used as the only means of self-expression, if that individual insists on its social significance, then it will meet resistance from those who question the significance of such designation. This is a linguistic construct clashing with reality, reason clashing with tradition, and, as Horkheimer and MacIntyre pointed above, and as we saw in practice in 2024, reason and abstraction will almost always lose against primal, subconscious sentiments.

A CHANGE IN THE AIR

Whenever the word “collective” is uttered by a Democrat, he’s immediately being labeled socialist or communist by those on the right. But a “collective” is not a leftist idea. It is a pre-Enlightenment term. The primacy of the “common” undergirds the functioning of American Evangelicals and Mormons and other religious communities, and no one accuses them of being communist. As such, whatever the Pope, or Bernie, or Mamdani are saying about justice and common good is not that ontologically different from the religious underpinnings of the American Right. When Bernie rails against billionaires, his message resonates well across the political spectrum, from DSA to MAGA. It resonates because he’s not talking about individual rights; at its core, his entreaty is grounded in a Biblical notion about rich people being denied entrance into the Kingdom of God on account of their greed. It strikes all of us on a subconscious level as something just, as something that transcends politics. It engages our mythological sensibilities, our apriori intuitions. A “right” carries no mythological quality, while a “collective good” does. There’s no concept of “rights” in fairy tales or fables or ancient epics.

When Democrats talk about religion and community, it makes Republicans nervous. It’s like they’re sensing that Democrats have figured something out, some skeleton key, and are hurrying to nip this trend in the bud. I’m noticing intensified chatter from the right-leaning bloggers and influencers about how “common good” is bad and how Dems are Commies. Watch, in the coming months, how the right will attack Talarico in Texas as he talks about his religious beliefs. They’d rather have him defend boys in girls’ sports. (I often think about whether the whole transgender debate, both pro and con, was a Russian psy-op).

The Left, animated by a collective purpose rather than by individual behavioral quirks can become a potent political force, while the Right, in its current MAGA form, is disintegrating, overrun by grifters and self-promoters. MAGA is now a clearinghouse for the two extremes that Charles Taylor warned about: hedonism and nihilism. Democrats should let MAGA be the libertines they want to be. We should welcome their descent into a conceptual dead end from which, if we’re lucky, it’ll take them decades to get out of.

The physique is that of a wrestler. A prodigious head abuts, without any aesthetic investment in a discernible neck, the bulky shoulders that, in turn, slope, also without any demarcation, into an opera-singer chest and stumpy front legs. The front paws are massive, the size of an adult human’s palm. The torso, barrel-sized at the girth, narrows gradually toward the rump and is bookended with a cinnamon bun of a tail. Hind legs are an afterthought. The might and the functions of an English Bulldog are front ended. The bow is where most of the weight rests, and the center of gravity is very low, right below the chest, which is why they’re such good skateboarders. The whole construct is compact and dense, like a tungsten cube, and if you attempt to lift a bulldog it will feel like lifting an anvil.

The smooshed-in face is overcompensated by a protruding mandible. The mouth, when in rest position, is hidden under the soft lugubrious jowls; when open, it is a monstrous cave with a 270-degree purview, studded with teeth of random size and chaotic positioning. (It kills me now to think how delicately he took food from my hand with that contraption. A fine English gentleman that boy was.)

The corporal solidity of a bulldog is the initial attraction. Upon seeing our bulldog on the street, a passerby would stop and coo and ask us if they could pet him and then would give him a kind of robust bro-pat that’s aimed at assessing his fitness. They were never disappointed. “Solid guy,” was the unanimous verdict. There are serious muscles there, under all the excess skin. Our guy could move a heavy armchair with his head, if it was blocking his way. He played with an 8-pound dumbbell thinking it was a rubber chew toy.

But it is the eyes that close the deal. A bulldog’s stare has an omniscient, lie-detector quality. He will see through all your bullshit, you can’t bargain with him. There’s the signature side-eye he’ll give you when you try to cajole him into doing something he doesn’t want to do; there’s outrage and disbelief when he thinks you’re going somewhere without him; there’s Old Testament judgment when you come back. His eyes alone can alter your daily routine, as you’ll find yourself unwittingly wanting to comply with his standards. With a bulldog in the house, you’ll be put under a constant moral test. Outside is a lol-nothing-matters world where nothing is sacred, but at home a bulldog draws the line. He is a snorting, farting stand-in for a moral anchor, a carrier of objective truth. And you’d hate to disappoint him. You’d hate to make him aware of our weakness and corruption and stupidity. Oddly, this is endearing. This is the part that seduces us.

Almost all the bulldog owners that we’ve met agree on one thing: these are not really dogs, but human-like creatures. In addition to his well-formed opinion on proper behavior, a bulldog possesses complex, multilayered personality, a combination of conflicting traits, just like us. First, bulldogs are not natural pleasers. Unlike other dogs, a bulldog does not take commands and will consider his options before doing anything (which is why they rank at the bottom of being fit for service). They exercise a will, an internal rationale, however fickle and impenetrable, and we, humans, can appreciate that. Second––and this is my favorite––there’s a comedic disconnect between what they want to do and what their clunky physique allows. A bulldog’s mind writes a check his oafish body can’t cash. He thinks he can take down a rottweiler, but he gets his ass handed to him; he thinks he can swim, but he sinks; he thinks he can jump on the back seat of a car in one swoop, but he misses and tumbles. We watch them giving an idea their best shot and failing, and we relate viscerally to that failure.

Finally, it is the gap between optics and essence. Under that ogre look and probing eyes, dwells the gentlest love and most loyal heart––an existential, gut-wrenching aspect that points at our own earthly tensions. It forces a reflection on our own public masks that we’re forced to wear in order to survive versus the divine gifts we hide deep in our psyche. Bulldogs, with their stern exterior and the tenderest of hearts, remind us of what spiritual cripples we are. We look at them, but we cry for ourselves.

All of that makes bulldogs a niche, a connoisseur’s breed. Owning a bulldog is an emotionally intense, clarifying relationship. We didn’t fully know what we were signing up for when we adopted our Lincoln. We didn’t expect he would change us in profound ways.

LINCOLN

The first two years of our Lincoln’s life were rough. Based on what they told us in the shelter, he came from an illegal breeder who left him on the street along with his brother Washington, until someone picked them up on President’s Day 2020 (that’s how they got their names). It breaks me just thinking about them, wandering the streets of some forsaken Southern California desert town, amidst tweakers and dusty concrete lots and tumbleweeds and all.

We drove from San Diego County, where we then lived, to a Moreno Valley shelter in late March 2020, when everything shut down. Lincoln was underweight and smelled bad and had a skin condition. But he knew right away we were his long-awaited mom and dad. He rolled on his back and gave us his belly to scratch and peed a little on my shoe from excitement and then jumped into our car. “He will be loved,” my husband told the shelter lady and she burst into tears.

If only we knew how much he will be loved. If only we knew what pathetic softies that bulldog would make of us. We built our lives around that boy for the next 6 years. He got the best medical care, first at UC Davis, then, when we moved back to the East Coast, at UPenn. We didn’t travel anywhere for years, because Lincoln’s multiple conditions required special attention and we felt like hiring a random dog sitter would prove inadequate. Plus, I developed an airplane phobia: I wanted to avoid even an infinitesimal chance of dying before him. Like a paranoid mother I was playing all kinds of bizarre scenarios in my head and the thought of Lincoln outliving us and ending up in a shelter again horrified me. He would think that we abandoned him, the worst possible scenario. No person shall die before their dog.

After we moved from California to Philadelphia, in our house backyard we built him a mulch box, because he was unimpressed with the street conditions, and, later, we installed a tent over it, because he couldn’t do his business in the rain. Although he was crate-trained, we eventually got rid of the crate, and he slept in our bed. His top walking speed was a wobbly 1.0 mph, and his max walking distance was a block and a half, so we got him a stroller and rolled him around the neighborhood. He knew all the restaurants with outside seating in the area (his favorite was Parc on Rittenhouse Square, nice steak frites). We got him a winter jacket. The whole set-up was utterly ridiculous; my old self-absorbed, image-conscious New Yorker self would cackle at the improbability of such ultimate ignominy, but I didn’t care. Our boy was happy and it was all that mattered.

He had a rather large vocabulary, to the point where, if we wanted to avoid provoking a premature excitement, we would spell certain trigger words like “park” and “car” and “beach”, and even then, he would detect our skullduggery as he had a good ear for our vocal inclinations. He could differentiate a normal conversation from some nefarious scheming that involved him. And once you made a promise to him explicitly, there was no backing out of it. If at night you said, “tomorrow we’re going to the beach,” you’d better be prepared to act on the promise the next morning, because he would hold you to it. If you reneged on it due to whatever human entanglements, he would wear a long face all day and would demonstratively ignore your calls. And you’d flog yourself for being a pact-breaking asshole.

In his heart Lincoln was a keeper of order. In the dog park he would stand in the middle of the field, reacting awkwardly to fast-speed play around him. He knew that he couldn’t outrun any dog on the playground, but he had his game––the intercept. He had excellent linebacker skills. He would calculate the trajectory and speed of a running dog and would T-bone the slinky offender––a labradoodle or a greyhound––sending them flying sideways. No idle running and frolicking was allowed on his watch. The flows of dogs, chasing frisbees and other dogs, would meet an immovable object. I liked that about him. Temperamentally, both Lincoln and I were wary of mischief-makers.

Lincoln made no dog friends on the playground, but other dogs are not a priority for bulldogs. Bulldogs are extremely people oriented. He formed instant friendships with every person he ever met, an example of yet another bulldog paradox: dispositional grumpiness but with a total, all-encompassing trust in people, even in strangers. My heart aches when I think about what bulldogs think of us, what qualities they ascribe to us and what we actually are. The burden of a bulldog parent then is to uphold his concept of a just, orderly world, to shield him from pain, betrayal and chaos. To create a sort of Edenic space where good guys win and get rewarded, and baddies lose and get their comeuppance. We know that such world doesn’t exist for us, so we have to create it for our dogs.

Lincoln’s death is still very raw. I miss his huffs and grunts and heavy footsteps and stinky breath. He made a lot of sounds and now the house is unbearably quiet. Right now, I’m at a point where I can’t even clean his dry drool marks from the floor near my desk. There’s furniture and blankies everywhere that are covered with all kinds of brown spots, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to clean them. Writing this tribute is my only way of coping with grief.

WHAT WE OWE THEM

Perhaps this will not land well with other bulldog aficionados, but I must say this as someone who went through the crucible of owning one: What makes bulldogs cute also kills them. In our pursuit of aesthetic amusement, we made them unfit for life. They’re all born with heart, skin, and breathing problems. They’re defenseless and helpless without a human. They can’t walk very far; they can’t be outside if the temperature is above 75 degrees or below 40. I used to tease Lincoln, tugging at his wrinkles, telling him that he was once a wolf and wondering what happened to him, but it’s a cruel, unfair tease. He didn’t ask to be what he was. His unfitness for life is our fault, our whimsy. A bulldog wouldn’t survive a day in the wild or on the street. The task of a bulldog owner is then to seek redemption for what we have made them.

Regardless, they have a perfect punishment for our folly. They steal our hearts and then they punish us with their short lives.

If you have a dog, any dog, hug them now and savor that moment. One day it’ll all be gone.

RIP my sweet boy.

Previous chapters.

CHAPTER 28: RUEFUL KNOWLEDGE

Most of the Whispering Reeds trailers got washed away into the marshes. The few remaining were tipped over and badly damaged. Recovery crews found several bodies inside. Among the dead were Candice, her husband, and their chihuahua.

The Dunes survived the hurricane intact, although its residents had to manage without power for three days afterward. None died.

Kenny stayed with Euclid at the Wawa store until the police and EMT arrived. He did not try to muddy what happened or to exonerate himself. With the austere precision of an infantry man reporting to a higher-up, he relayed to the officer on duty that he was a volunteer citizen’s patrol and thought that he was stopping a robbery under extreme circumstances, and offered to surrender to the authorities on the spot. He wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of spending time in jail. “Three hots and a cot, what’s not to like?” he said.

He got charged with involuntary manslaughter and pled guilty. At the sentencing, his public defender argued before the judge that the defendant had been driven by a sense of civic duty in a place that lacked adequate public resources and that it should be used as a mitigating factor. The judge gave Kenny two years, eligible for parole in six months.

“Was thinking it was gonna be longer,” Kenny said, sounding a bit disappointed.

Euclid’s body was transported inland, to a morgue in Philly, where it awaited cremation. His landlord contacted Sheryl and asked her to come in and help to go through Euclid’s stuff. The landlord claimed the Stratocaster. Sheryl took the two cats. The rest of the possessions––clothes, the electric Yamaha piano––ended up in a Goodwill store. In the briefcase that Sheryl retrieved from the closet, she found a partnership agreement between EADGBE LLC and Creative Solutions in Senior Care LLC that stated Euclid’s share in the enterprise: a hundred thousand dollars. She called Tilton to ask what could or should be done about it. Tilton said that he’d be happy to transfer Euclid’s share to a designated survivor, if Sheryl wanted to bother finding them. She did not. Euclid had left no will.

The state government took over all of Atlantic City’s finances soon after. The officials in Trenton hired an emergency manager––a consulting firm with turnaround experience in other bankrupt municipalities. The managers submitted a plan for massive cuts to public infrastructure and the privatization of most of the local government departments. For-profit entities were invited to submit bids for the municipal EMT services and public-transport utilities. The city’s entire bus fleet was sold to a New York private equity firm.

Hazard Capital, the lender that held a loan against the Atlantic City public pension fund, requested the bankruptcy court to appoint a trustee in preparation for litigation. Because the loan was current, and not in default, the bankruptcy judge declined the request, directing the parties to settle out of court. The emergency managers played hardball with the lender: they found irregularities in the original loan agreement that were sloppy enough to render the contract null and void. They also leaned on the fact that the loan had been signed by someone who was, at the time, already under indictment for misuse of public funds and thus lacked a mandate to sign off on any contract. It was a flex, and it worked. They dared the lender to enter into a long and costly litigation with an uncertain outcome, and the lender caved. The parties reached a settlement for a fraction of the loan amount: thirty million dollars.

Tilton applied for tax credits on his properties, the trailer park and the nursing home, and received them. He also lobbied the state to continue to finance his dam-building project. He made a splashy presentation for officials in Trenton: a forty-minute infomercial depicting all his previous successful business ventures, with clips of Euclid’s speech at the ground-breaking ceremony set to New Jersey’s unofficial anthem, “Don’t Stop Believing.” He closed off the infomercial with a self-humbling monologue:

“Ambition is hard on one’s psyche. On the way up, you’re constantly reminded of your own inadequacy. At some point one has to stop and ask: Why am I doing this? Here I had a chance to do something for the community, to look beyond self-interest. I’ll go to the grave knowing that I did something right. That I did somebody some good.”

Two weeks after Euclid’s death, the outstanding balance on the Atlantic City bonds was restructured at a heavy discount. Ann and the emergency managers led the negotiations on behalf of the municipality. Ann lectured the bondholders––several New York-based hedge funds and PE firms––explaining to them that those bonds were issued on a pro-forma basis, with light covenants, and that they took a risk, and that the word “loss” should enter their vocabulary every now and then, and that if they didn’t take the offered discount, they’d be kicking themselves in the balls wishing that they had.

Some bondholders threatened to sue, and one investor from an activist fund known for its hardball extrajudicial tactics hinted at a possible asset seizure. Ann cackled at the threat.

“Asset seizure?” she gloated. “What the fuck are you going to seize? City Hall? And do what? Convert it into apartments?”

After some more face-saving shots, all the parties had arrived at a grudging twenty-two cents-on-the-dollar truce.

The Chinese sovereign wealth fund bought the Skylark Hotel and Casino from Omni Capital for a hundred and five million dollars. They announced plans to remodel the casino to cater to a less fancy crowd. They would bring in chain restaurants and allow smoking areas on most of the casino floor, although they decided to retain the original Renaissance-themed decor. “Indulge yourself in classic beauty at a reasonable cost” was the promotional slogan that they settled on.

***

In late October, Bobbi received an invitation for a “Women in Finance for Ann” fundraising event. Right after the invitation email popped up in her inbox, her phone rang. On the line was Ann herself, now in the final stretch of her campaign for New Jersey governor.

“You saw the thing I sent you? I reserved a spot for you. You don’t have to come in early if you don’t want to listen to my stupid speech and mingle with the ‘Lean-in’ crowd.” Ann chuckled. “Come around nine, after everybody’s gone. We’ll chat one-on-one.”

“Uh, sure,” Bobbi mumbled.

“See you at nine.” Ann cut off and hung up.

When Bobbi showed up at the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue, the fundraiser had already ended, but some campaign aides and hangers-on still lingered in the reception room, drinks in hand. Ann, wearing a smart pantsuit and in a chipper mood, with a glass of scotch in her hand, saw Bobbi come in and excused herself from a group of supporters.

Ann led Bobbi toward a faraway dark corner of the dimly lit club dining room. She plunged into a cushy, soft leather couch, kicking off her high-heel pumps onto the floor. On the glass lounge table in front of the couch several copies of the Journal were spread out, with Ann’s smiling face in traditional black pixilated portrait font featured above the fold on the C1 page. The headline below stated: “Ann Messerer to AC Bondholders: Drop Dead.”

Bobbi signaled to an approaching waiter that she’d have what Ann was having. Ann held up two fingers.

“How’s the campaign?” Bobbi asked.

“Ugh, I’m numb from all the stump speeches.” Ann sighed. “My mind longs for an adult conversation.”

“You better get used to that,” Bobbi said. “This is how you’re going to have to talk for the next four years.”

“Hopefully eight. And yes, it is dreadful. But it must be done.” Ann scoffed. She accosted Bobbi with a wily squint. “Congrats on the sale,” she said with a head tilt.

“Thanks,” Bobbi replied, maintaining her indecipherable facade.

Ann shifted in her seat and lowered her voice: “Did you advise Euclid to default on the loan?” she asked. “It’s okay if you did. You had to protect your investment, so no hard feelings. I’m just curious about what went on.”

“No. He did it on his own.”

“What the hell was going through that fellow’s mind?” Ann shook her head. “I warned him not to do any stupid moves.”

Bobbi shrugged. “What does it matter now?”

“You’re right. You made money in the end. Isn’t that what matters?”

“Yeah.”

The waiter came back with their drinks.

“Well, here’s to Euclid, may he rest in peace.” Ann hoisted her glass.

“To Euclid,” Bobbi said grimly.

They drank in silence.

“There could be other opportunities to finance distressed properties in the future. We can talk more after the election,” Ann said.

“I want nothing to do with distressed anymore.”

“Really? Why?”

“There’s something about the dynamic.”

Ann was about to take a sip of her scotch, but her hand froze halfway to her lips. “Like what?”

“I don’t know how to explain this. It just feels . . . unkosher.”

“Feels? Unkosher?” Ann raised her eyebrows. Her face gleamed with amusement. “These are not words that should be in your vocabulary.”

Bobbi let out a nervous giggle. “Look. I appreciate the money, don’t get me wrong. Still, there’s something unseemly about this whole thing.”

Ann’s face regained its seriousness. “Then I worry about you, Bobbi,” she said. “Once you start assessing things like this, qualitatively, as good or bad, you can’t work in the industry anymore. I was in the same mental space once. It’s a weird place to be. It fucks up your emotional equilibrium. That’s when I left.”

Bobbi listened to Ann in silence, fidgeting, picking at her teeth with the plastic swizzle stick from her drink. “And went into politics?” she said bitterly.

Ann shrugged. “You’ve heard the expression: Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money?”

Bobbi nodded.

“Making money is quantitative. And I made a lot of money by the time I left.” Ann smiled. “Being right, on the other hand, is a qualitative thing. I’ve reached a point where I wanted to be right, where I could assign levels of moral importance to various events. It’s a forgotten skill. Our collective muscle responsible for that ability had atrophied. We quantify everything, and the quantification will eventually kill us. We have to relearn, to regain that skill––to separate the important from the unimportant. That’s how I ended up here.”

“So what is important?”

“Whatever keeps the order from collapsing,” Ann replied contemplatively. “But enough of this. Come, tell me some funny dealmaking story.”

Bobbi stirred ice cubes in her glass, browsing her mental catalogue of cocktail-hour crowd-pleasers. “This one is not really a deal story, but it’s pretty funny,” she said. “I was in college. Me and my roommates, we were all very liberal, you know, donated money to Planned Parenthood and stuff like that. We devised all these schemes about how best to advance our feminist causes after college. We played with different scenarios: becoming a teacher, a lawyer, or a banker. Finally, we arrived at the best possible avenue for us to do so.” Bobbi paused, bit her lip, and smiled into her glass. “We decided that the most optimal way, the biggest return on investment, was to dye our hair platinum blond, get breast implants, and marry some Texas oilmen, so that we could then siphon their ill-gotten money for our causes.” She scoffed, and Ann cackled. “It would be quicker and easier than spending years building a career. With fake boobs, you could start doing it sooner, with less hassle, and on a bigger scale.”

“And what happened?” Ann asked, visibly entertained.

“They did get fake boobs, and they did get married. But along the way, something happened. We had a reunion a few years ago. They avoided talking about politics. They were all very charming, don’t get me wrong, but I think they kinda felt sorry for me.” Bobbi sniffed. “I haven’t talked to them since.”

Ann cackled again. “There’s a reactionary lurking behind every boob job,” she said.

Bobbi planted her head in her palms. “Why, oh why, didn’t I get a boob job?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I’d have a happy life. Dumb, but happy.”

“What the fuck, Bobbi?” Ann put her drink on the table and wrapped her arm around Bobbi’s shoulder. “Let me tell you something.”

By this point Ann had reached that delicate, unguarded state of drunkenness where one is still lucid in speech but already bursting with the kind of ideas better suited to be aired in a college dorm room, not in adult company. She was breathing heavily. The muscles of her face were now unruly, released for a brief moment from a lifelong obeisance to a stiff, cheerful propriety. She spent the next minute in jittery contemplation, rubbing her forehead, as if trying to formulate and put into words a complex but crucial thesis.

“Listen,” Ann finally said with utmost urgency. “I see my younger self in you. Both you and I, we came to this understanding. I call it our rueful knowledge. We both went into a meat grinder where we’ve seen things and done things, and reemerged on the other side different from when we went in. Yes, that experience traumatizes you. But you come out of that crucible with a rare understanding. And that understanding makes you whole. Rueful knowledge makes you whole. Not happy. Whole.” She held up her index finger. “You should not seek happiness. Happiness is for the dumb, for the masses. It’s fool’s gold for the mushy-brained housewives of . . . what? Arkansas?”

“Alabama.”

“Right. And wholeness is for broads like us. We do not choose it. It chooses us. It’s a burden we carry. Embrace the wholeness, Bobbi.”

“And do what with it?”

“It is beyond my ability to answer.” Ann picked up her glass and leaned back into the sofa’s cushion.

They saw Gus separate from a group of donors and make a beeline toward them, waving and gesturing at his watch.

“Besides, Gus here is a politically ambitious New York Jew,” Ann said as he approached. “Your big boobs would be an impediment to his nascent public career. You, two, dating, no?”

“We, uh . . .”

“He’s a nice guy. With a bright future.”

“What are you ladies talking about?” Gus asked playfully when he came near.

“You wouldn’t understand,” they both replied simultaneously.

As they said goodbyes, Ann squeezed Bobbi’s forearm and looked her in the eyes. “Think about what I said. It will ease your sorrows.”

CHAPTER 29: LA GIOIA

After the Skylark sale, Nelson took two weeks off. He flew to Milan “to unwind and to refresh the wardrobe,” he told Bobbi. Upon arriving in Milan, however, he resisted the urge to go shopping and, congratulating himself for such monumental self-restraint, instead took aesthetic solace in observing the exquisitely dressed Italians. The idea that this time, in Milan of all places, he was neither a tourist nor a shopper was strangely exhilarating.

After two days in Milan, he took a train to Naples. In his mind he tried on, like one tries on a coat in a department store, a quiet life in the sylvan villages that raced by outside the train window. He imagined what it would be like to live in a bucolic little town, with a church and a cobblestone main square and a centuries-old tavern where he would go for a beer after a day’s work, to be surrounded by the same people for decades, to know all the neighbors and all the gossip about them, to be able to detect an out-of-towner by a slight difference in the patois, and he realized that if he really put his mind and resources to make this kind of life happen, it would prove to be a categorical impossibility. Here, unlike in New York, where one could buy an entry into any community or association, this quieter but more meaningful, richer life was closed off to an outsider by an impenetrable, non-negotiable, non-monetary barrier. That even if there were some upscale agency selling this simple life to high-end clients as a bespoke product for a hefty fee, the end result would be a staged production, not an authentic experience. He would be buying a simulation, not the real thing. He thought with bitterness that no matter what strings he’d try to pull, he was never going to become a contented native of a pastoral land, he’d never command the trust of the common folk, and that, if this new plan of his failed, he was condemned to be a restless citizen of the world.

In Naples, he rented a car and drove south along the coast, stopping for a late lunch in Salerno. He then drove inland, on a mountainous road weaving among vineyards, for two more hours. He arrived at a small village and checked into a bed and breakfast. Brushing up on his Italian, he asked the concierge for directions to the nearby monastery, and the concierge replied, in English propped by gesticulating, that the monastery was closed for tourists.

“Non sono un turista,” Nelson replied. “Ho un appuntamento.”

The monastery abbot, an elderly Benedictine monk in a long black habit, who interviewed Nelson the next morning, spoke good English and, to put Nelson at ease, asked him first about his civilian life and his job in New York.

Nelson, fidgeting, spoke about the pressures of the job and the emptiness of city life. “After twenty years in the trenches, I’ve come to the realization that my true mental disposition leans toward divine contemplation and mentorship,” he said.

“I know how it feels,” the abbot said. “I was a corporate lawyer myself in my previous life.”

The abbot recommended that Nelson spend a few days observing the community, examining the depth of his commitment, and then, if his determination was still resolute, fill out an application for postulancy.

Nelson spent the rest of the day walking around the abbey’s grounds. The monastery stood on the ancient ruins of a Roman-era mountainside fortress. Its picturesque courtyard overlooked a vast, lush valley covered in vineyards, cypress trees, and stone pines under the azure sky. With the eagerness and curiosity of a college freshman, he visited the dining hall, the kitchen, the workshop, all the while paying close attention to the resident monks. His inner cynic examined their faces and their demeanor for even a hint of doubt, of vanity, of performative piety. He told himself that if he detected even a smidge of insincerity or of overt idolatry, he would turn around and be on a plane back to New York the next day. But the monks with whom he managed to exchange a few words displayed a calmness of conduct that intrigued him; it was as if they were all in possession of a revelation. It was not that they believed; it was that they knew. And it was that abiding certainty that was at the root of their quietude, that distinguished them from the loud, militant zealotry of American evangelicals.

A young monk invited him to take a look at his quarters, a small cell at the end of a long hallway. Inside the cell, while appreciating the simplicity and the purpose of the interior, Nelson remembered how he once went on a trip to Vietnam that was advertised in an upscale lifestyle magazine as an authentic, immersive experience, tailored to bored wealthy Westerners seeking a gritty, edgy adventure but without serious risk of injury. On that trip he stayed in a jungle hut in a small fishing village on a bank of a river. As promised in the glossy brochure, the hut was at once rustic and posh. It had a dirt floor and bamboo walls, but that austerity was ameliorated by a bedside rug, expensive bedsheets, fresh orchids in vases, a complimentary bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, and a personal butler. There was no bathroom in the hut, so Nelson had to walk to a well-maintained but somewhat remote latrine. It was an inconvenience, but he welcomed it: it’d make for good stories later. The night in that hut cost him as much as a night at the Mandarin Oriental.

How well did they know their customers’ inner longings, Nelson thought now, standing in the young monk’s modest room. He leaned on the cold stone wall and began to shake with muted laughter, recalling how in that jungle he’d developed a bout of diarrhea, shuttling between the hut and the outhouse all night, and how that was the most memorable part of the trip. The young monk asked him what was he laughing about. “I just remembered something funny,” Nelson replied.

“La gioia e la strada,” the monk said, smiling.

“Yes. La gioia.”

The next day, back in the abbot’s office, Nelson reaffirmed his determination to apply for postulancy. He checked all the boxes: male, single, Roman Catholic, unimpeded by family obligations. The only thing that the abbot needed to see was a health report. Nelson was in his forties, the abbot said with friendly consideration, and joining the conclave would entail performing some physical tasks. And the daily schedule was quite rigorous: Wake up at 5 a.m. Meditation. Holy mass at 7 a.m. Work till lunch. Divine office several times a day. Plus the daily study of Scripture, philosophy, theology. Would he be able to do it?

Yes. Yes! He would. He would gladly surrender to monastic discipline. He was not driven by vanity but by some internal need that he couldn’t put into words, as if guided by a divine hand. He had spent years in deliberation. Entering the monkhood seemed to be the way out of the hedonistic wilderness, an escape from worldly folly, compromises, and indignities. He wanted to be close to the sacred.

The abbot listened to Nelson’s pitch, nodding quietly. “How do you say it,” he said. “Don’t let your mind write a check that your body can’t cash.”

Nelson laughed. “I’d hate to be a deadbeat.”

On a flight back to New York, across the aisle from him in the first-class cabin sat a dandy Frenchman. Nelson had noticed him an hour earlier, at the Alitalia business check-in. He marveled at his wardrobe––that impenetrable French effortless cool, where even the imperfections, like the wrinkles on his linen jacket and pants, looked exquisite.

With knowing ease and bonhomie, the Frenchman ordered a glass of Villa Antinori Chianti Classico and chirped jovially with the female flight attendant. She brought and uncorked the bottle and poured him a taste, and, with pressed lips and a frown that, on a European, could mean many things other than displeasure, he approved, and they chatted and giggled some more. When she approached Nelson, he ordered the same. The Frenchman noted, smiled at him, and said in accented English: “To be honest, one of the best red wines I have ever tried was a Pinot Noir from Napa Valley.”

“Quite a heresy, coming from a Frenchman,” Nelson replied.

The Frenchman laughed. “You flying home?” he asked Nelson.

“Yes. And you?”

“Some UN-related business.”

The Frenchman seemed like he was inviting Nelson to ask him to elaborate more, and normally Nelson would have engaged in a clever back-and-forth with a handsome, curious, and cultured stranger, but he thought that he would then be met with the same question himself, and, for the first time, he dreaded saying “banker.”

“I love New York, but I hate the traffic on the East Side,” the Frenchman said with a sigh.

“Same.”

After dinner, Nelson flattened his seat and slept for the remainder of the trip.

When the plane landed at JFK and Nelson saw the Frenchman walk away, a cold spasm shot through his body. It occurred to him that he was meant to apply himself and his talents in a completely different line of work. Yes, as a banker he served people, but those were the wrong kind of people. He should’ve been a public servant instead. He knew he had the right temperament and a perfect Aristotelian pedigree to dedicate himself to matters of the common good: no wife, no kids, no biases.

He swatted that thought away: He could never win an election. In the country of his birth, there was no place for people like him in a public space. He was too genteel and too smart. He loved to give long, thoughtful, humorous, and multilayered answers. His vocabulary was impenetrable to those he’d wish to help, and even though he loved humanity as a whole, in his attempts to manifest that love, in person or on TV, he would come across as a scold, or as an insufferable pedant. His homeland was hostile to the kind of weightless vivacity that the Frenchman, no doubt some kind of a diplomat, displayed; his homeland demanded one be a boor, a brawler, or a fool to be deemed qualified to serve the people. He thought of Euclid. If, at that moment, someone had asked him to describe one encompassing sentiment that he held toward the departed Atlantic City mayor, he would have to admit that it was benign envy.

In the taxi back to Manhattan, he prayed that his postulancy application would receive a quick approval.

CHAPTER 30: IT IS DIFFICULT TO DO

On the eve of the bonus announcement day in December, Bobbi huddled up with Gus at his West Side condo, cooking and watching movies. She was expecting a good number, and throughout the evening Gus pestered her, impishly, about what she should spend it on.

At around 9 p.m., when they were in bed, her phone rang. It was Nelson.

“You’ll get your number tomorrow,” he said quickly. “You won’t be disappointed. But I’m calling to congratulate you on your promotion. You’ll be getting an MD. I had to pull some strings. I didn’t want to delay the good news any further.”

Bobbi stumbled for words, and he continued: “I’m proud of you. It’s well-deserved. That’s all. Enjoy the rest of your evening and see you tomorrow.”

She hung up.

Gus stared at her, reclining on his elbow, awaiting an update. “So? Am I booking Per Se?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She jumped off the bed and began putting on her gym clothes.

“Where are you going?”

“For a jog. I just need to get some air.”

“Now? It’s ten degrees. With windchill!” Gus exclaimed then watched in silence as she put on her sneakers and went out the door.

Outside, the city had prepared for a snowstorm. Subzero temperatures had cleared the streets. Snowplows stood at the ready along the West Side Highway. The first flakes of snow were beginning to fall, and the wind was picking them up. She crossed the highway to the Hudson River Park’s pedestrian path. Not a soul in the vicinity. She got into a brisk pace, relishing the rare urban desolation and the feel of frosty wind and sharp icy particles on her face and bare shins. The physical strain gave her a pleasant, welcome numbness of mind.

She slipped and fell on a patch of icy pavement. Something cracked, and she felt a sharp pain in her right ankle. She limped to the nearest bench. The thin synthetic fabric of her yoga pants wasn’t much of a cushion, but at least the bench’s wooden planks would soon get warm under her body. She sat down and reached into her fleece jacket’s inner pocket for her phone. It wasn’t there. In a growing panic, she examined other pockets. They were empty. Fuck! I must’ve left it on the kitchen counter, she thought.

The icy wind from the Hudson at once felt more piercing. The park was deserted. Just a few hundred yards away, the windows of the high-rise luxury apartment towers along the West Side Highway were lit with cozy yellow lights, their inhabitants hunkered down for the stormy night. They might as well have been a million miles away.

Bobbi chortled bitterly at an emerging gruesome prospect. This is the most coddled, most densely populated island on the whole damn earth. What an idiotic way to go. There will be ridiculous headlines: “Banker Found Dead in Manhattan Snowstorm.”

She stood up and tried jumping on her left leg toward the highway. The slippery pavement made it hard to balance. The ramp toward the pedestrian crossing was covered in ice. To get better traction, she decided to hop toward the snow-covered lawn and the hedge of leafless but dense bushes that separated the lawn from the highway. She fell again, landing on her injured leg. A sharp pain pierced through the broken bone, and she squealed.

She crawled back to the bench. Her thin beanie and fleece were useless against the unyielding, intensifying gusts of arctic wind. Her fingers and toes went numb; her knees and palms were scratched and bloody. She struggled to breathe, as her lungs could no longer handle the freezing air. Is this how it ends?

Could’ve been worse, she thought. Fuck it, she was ready. Fifteen more minutes and it would all be over. There was nothing else left for her to do around here anyway. What are the next possible avenues? What can one do here besides greasing the wheels of commerce? There was only one regret: No one out there would ever know that she was only pretending, that it had all been an act.

In resignation, she stared at a snowflake on her sleeve. It was geometrically sublime. Its mates, millions of them, swirled around her in a tribal, directionless dance. How can something so perfect lend itself to such chaos, she thought as her mind drifted off.

She was cold no more. A heavenly comfort descended upon her. She saw everything with sparkling clarity. No more hustle. No more compromise. No more limbo. No more trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It was going to be either hell or heaven. She was prepared for both. Either would rid her of the need to make a choice. The numbness enveloped her, and some dark monkish figures began appearing around her. They were not sinister though; they stood motionless, looking at her with silent reproach. Their faces were shrouded in hoods, but she knew they were weeping and that she was the cause of their sadness, as if she had failed at some important task. She wanted to tell them they were wrong about her but couldn’t find the right words. That was the last thing she remembered before she lost consciousness.

***

To wake up in a hospital was a big disappointment. A group of extreme-weather enthusiasts out for a winter stroll had found Bobbi half frozen on the bench, the on-duty nurse told her. Her foot was in a cast. Balloons and flower baskets with pink bows and Hallmark cards filled the room. She wiggled her fingers. All in place. She stared at a gray, cloudy winter sky outside the window.

Ann’s words surfaced now, in an idle moment. Ann was right, Bobbi thought. The daily grind of big city life had altered her in irreparable ways. It had imbued her with a depraved insight, with a corrosive acumen that one doesn’t aspire to gain but gains along the way as an inevitable side effect that helps during the climb but kills one’s ease, one’s levity of being, one’s ability to lose oneself in joy. It had filled her emotional vessels with a heavy, noxious content that she hid behind busyness at work and behind affected conviviality at social events.

But can one really be whole here, in this town? Wholeness presupposes the possession of qualities that are antithetical to each other. To be whole is to try to reconcile two clashing extremes. Can one achieve the level of ruthlessness that helps them stay afloat and get ahead, and, at the same time, empty those emotional vessels of their noxiousness and refill them again with a lighter, more benign substance, with care and tenderness? Can one do that sincerely, nonperformatively, without shame and without risk?

“There you are!”

She turned her head and saw Gus, who held a heap of roses and a large envelope with the Omni Capital logo in his hand. He gave the roses to the nurse, pulled up a chair to the bedside, and straddled it.

“Your number is in here,” he said with a mischievous smile, tapping on the envelope.

The number! The ultimate measurement of one’s worth. A hard-dollar verdict that turns quality into quantity, that halts all speculations, that clears all doubts. That makes a name.

“I got it from Nelson this morning. He sends his good wishes. Shall we look?”

Bobbi blinked affirmatively. Gus tore up the seal and took a sheet of paper out of the packet. He looked at it silently and held it before Bobbi. She swallowed, licked her lips and closed her eyes. Gus carefully put the document back into the envelope and into his inner jacket pocket.

“Not bad for a little squirrel-eater,” he said. “Of course, part of it is in deferred stock, and, yeah, you have to pay almost half in taxes. But, dude, you have arrived! I’m so proud of you.”

Bobbi struggled to summon a limp smile. “It’s difficult,” she whispered.

“Of course it’s difficult. No one says it was easy,” Gus said. “But you deserved it a hundred percent. Which is why, when you’re out of here, we’re going to St. Bart’s to celebrate. Courtesy of Omni Capital. I already booked us a nice villa. Wanna see?” He pulled up his phone and scrolled through pictures.

“It’s difficult to do,” Bobbi’s lips repeated.

“What is?” Gus paused and touched her forehead as if to check whether she had a fever. “What is difficult?”

The nurse came back, carrying the roses in a plastic pitcher. She put the bouquet on Bobbi’s bedstand and checked the IV needle in her arm.

“I hope you’re wrapping up here, young man,” the nurse said. “Our patient needs to rest.”

“Of course,” Gus said.

The nurse hooked up a fluid bag on the drip stand and connected the plastic tube to Bobbi’s vein. As she was leaving the room, she looked at Gus, tapped on her wristwatch, and signaled “five” with her hand. Gus responded with a thumbs up.

He leaned over Bobbi. “Well, whatever it is, babe, I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said warmly, fluffing her pillow. “There’s no such thing as difficult. We’re in New York City, for fuck’s sake. I know a lot of people. They know people. There’s nothing we can’t do, right? We can do anything we want. We can be anything we want.”

Bobbi winced, struggling to keep her eyes open, but the medicine won and her lids drew shut. As she succumbed to the soft embrace of morphine, Gus’s words echoed, growing more distant.

“New York fucking City . . . Nothing we can’t do . . . Anything we want . . . The sky is the limit . . .”

***

The letter came by regular mail. It was handwritten on a custom letterhead adorned with the embossed insignia of the monastery.

Mr. Bosch,

It is not out of doubt in the sincerity of your conviction that we have decided to decline your application. It is out of concern for your health and well-being. Postulancy at our monastery is a rigorous undertaking, often requiring physical strain and deprivations more suitable for someone in their twenties or thirties. We are grateful, however, that you have considered us on your spiritual journey. God’s works are vast and mysterious, and He will guide you toward peace.

We shall keep you in our prayers.

{FIN}

Previous chapters.

The storm made landfall at 9 p.m. on September 5 with winds at a hundred and thirty miles per hour. The barometric pressure fell to 925 millibars, a historic low, cupping the coast with a giant vacuum dome, lifting everything and everyone not secured or sheltered properly. Thirty-foot waves assailed the shoreline. The sand dunes held the storm surge from the east, but the tide crept up from the west, through the tidal inlets. The fifteen-foot tide, exacerbated by the full moon, rolled into Absecon Bay and into the salt marshes farther inland. Large parts of the low-lying areas of Pleasantville and Galloway Township were submerged under floodwater.

Power went out. The generators kicked in at the convention center, where Euclid spent the night awake, huddling with hundreds of the city’s residents. The evacuees, assisted by the volunteers, were directed to rows of cots in the hallway and in the main ballroom and sat quietly on the designated cots while the winds howled and the rain pounded outside. There were free snacks and bottled water. The able and the benevolent kept the bathrooms clean and attended to the elderly and the young.

Euclid fought exhaustion and tried to stay awake by drinking hot, tasteless coffee from a Styrofoam cup but fell asleep around 6 a.m. Sheryl woke him up an hour later.

“We keep getting calls from the Dunes,” she said. “There are people still there. No electricity, no water.”

“What? No one should be there. They were all evacuated.”

“Just reporting what I heard.”

Euclid dialed Tilton, but the call went to voicemail. “Any help getting there?” he asked Sheryl.

“They say not for the next twenty-four hours.”

“Fuck!”

From the supply area of the shelter, with Sheryl’s help, he picked up two 28-packs of bottled water and two bags of ice and loaded them into the trunk of his car that was parked near the service entrance of the convention center and had somehow survived the night.

“Are you sure?” Sheryl said. “Maybe wait a few hours.”

Euclid got in the car.

The worst of the storm had passed. It was still raining, but the intensity of the wind had subsided. Atlantic Avenue had avoided the most severe floods but not the mayhem. It was peppered with large pieces of debris, sections of roofs, window frames, and downed traffic signals. Euclid maneuvered his car slowly around the wreckage. He passed a destroyed Dunkin’ Donuts. Its façade wall stood, almost intact. Behind the façade, the bare wooden beams of its skeleton loomed over a crumbled pile of torn drywall, twisted sheets of metal, and yellow shreds of insulation. On a side street, a battered staircase that once led to someone’s deck sat orphaned, sticking out of the water. The house and the deck were gone. A lonely man waded through ankle-deep water, carrying a disheveled, shivering dog in his arms. Over the post office a tattered flag flapped forlornly on its bent pole; the stripes were torn to shreds and only the stars remained.

Euclid turned left on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard then took Route 30 west. That route would take him via the bridge across the bay to Absecon. On top of the bridge he slowed down, observing a beach pavilion blown into the bay, its orange roof floating in lead-colored water. Farther, across the marshes, the Skylark’s once smooth, glassy surface was now speckled with the sporadic black holes of blown windows. As he crossed the bridge, his car waded into foot-deep water, but he trudged ahead until the water seeped into the passenger cabin and his feet and the gas pedal were submerged in cold water. The engine died.

The nursing home wasn’t too far, only half a mile away, on South Shore Road. Euclid stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, scooped out one plastic-wrapped 28-pack of bottled water, and balanced it first on his propped knee, then on his head, weighing whether he could carry it in this manner. He put it down.

“This is just stupid,” he said out loud. He rubbed his head.

There was a Wawa gas station and convenience store ahead, probably boarded up, but very close to the Dunes and, hopefully, still stocked with the basics. He could walk over there and take what was needed––leaving a note for the storeowner. Worth a try, he thought. He took out the rest of the packaged water from his trunk and put it all on top of the car, an open invitation to whoever came by to help themselves. He took a crowbar from the trunk and headed west on foot along the route.

The Wawa was boarded up, but someone had been there before him. A sheet of plywood on the entrance door had been detached, and the glass door was smashed. Euclid stepped inside. The store’s floor was littered with paper cups, empty sugar packets, and spilled coffee. The cash register was open, and the cigarette shelf behind the checkout counter was empty. He moved past the cash register to the beverage section. The glass walls of the refrigerated section were foggy, and the bottles inside were warm. Whoever had been here before him was most interested in sweet power drinks, evidenced by the fridge door that was flung open and the several bottles of blue, yellow and red liquid that lay on the floor, scuttled in the frenzy of the raid. The water section was untouched. Euclid looked around the store and found a roll of industrial-grade plastic trash bags behind the register. He took one bag and began to fill it up with water bottles from the fridge.

He filled the bag with what he thought he could carry and weighed it up and down in his hand like a scale. He hauled it over his shoulder like Santa Claus and tried to straighten up when he heard a loud cracking sound and felt a simultaneous tug on his right side at the edge of his ribs. Popped a joint? raced through his mind in a millisecond as he let go of the bag and grasped his side. His hand pressed against a rush of warm liquid. He felt weak and slumped to the floor.

Behind him stood Kenny, in camo fatigues and tactical gear, with a 9mm pistol in his hand. Kenny slunk toward Euclid on half-bent knees and circled around him.

“Jesus fuck!” he exhaled upon seeing his victim. “Euclid. What the fuck are you doing here?” He kneeled next to Euclid and propped him up against the wall.

Euclid saw Kenny’s gun. “What is this? You shot me?” he bleated.

“How could you be so stupid, Euclid? How the hell was I supposed to know it was you!” Kenny cried.

“I thought getting shot would feel different,” Euclid croaked, pressing the hand to his side.

Kenny unbuttoned Euclid’s shirt and examined his wound. It pumped dark blood, but there was some good news––an exit hole in the abdomen. He rummaged behind the check-out counter and found a roll of silver duct tape and a bottle of hand sanitizer. From the ice box by the entrance he fished out the least-melted bag of ice. He took a stack of paper napkins from the coffee stand and used them to put together a makeshift bandage over Euclid’s wound, securing it with the duct tape. Euclid grimaced and moaned in pain.

Kenny took off his jacket. He slowly lowered Euclid onto the floor, putting the folded jacket under his head. Kenny’s phone had no signal inside the store. He told Euclid he’d be right back and went outside. He came back ten minutes later. “Couldn’t get a signal,” he said. “Can I try yours?”

Euclid moved his eyes toward his jeans pocket, from which Kenny fished out the phone.

“I got through,” Kenny said when came back, with a concerned look, a few minutes later. “Somebody will be coming. Soon.” He put the phone back in Euclid’s pocket.

Euclid’s face was ashen, and small droplets of cold sweat had appeared on his forehead. Kenny wiped Euclid’s face with a paper towel and held a water bottle to his mouth. Euclid took a few sips and moaned.

Kenny checked the wound again. Blood seeped out from under the bandage and duct tape, and Euclid squirmed in pain. After some hesitation, Kenny opened the bulging side pocket of his army pants and produced a plastic dime bag with white pills in it. He poured the pills into his palm, picked one, put it on Euclid’s tongue, and helped him wash it down with water from the bottle.

“That’s Oxy,” he said. “You’re going to feel good in a moment.” He adjusted the folded jacket under Euclid’s head.

An hour passed. Euclid slipped in and out of consciousness, catching, when awake, random parts of Kenny’s meandering monologue.

“––collected rent and all that. Hey, at least I stayed for free in one of the trailers, so can’t really complain. Sometimes I just let it slide or took a partial payment, or payment in kind, if you know what I mean. Tilton didn’t like it. I told him he should hire me to do security at the nursing home. But you know what he had me do? He had me work the phones to collect payments from some old folks in Ohio. Frankly, I think he’s kind of a con man.”

Euclid stared at the ceiling vent above. A dusty piece of thread, like the limp leg of a dead spider, stuck out from the vent and hung motionless. He wondered how that thread had gotten there. Must be a remnant of a holiday decoration. He passed out.

“Yes, the terrain before us is treacherous and unfriendly, but who made it this way?”

Kenny’s ramblings continued as he awoke again.

“Nature? But nature only asks us to dress warmly and have shelter. It does not demand more. And this we have covered. But then there’s another terrain, and that one is man-made. It’s the one that demands more and more from us even when we’re sated and warm and have everything else taken care of. And we let it push us around. That’s where the problems start. When you’re merely clothed and sheltered, what’s to be proud of? Of conquering nature? It was conquered millennia ago. But today we are on a new quest. We need to prove our mettle, to leave our mark. What’s worse is that a man can’t refuse to participate. A man can’t say ‘I don’t wanna play,’ because everyone will think he’s a cuck who doesn’t have the balls to play. So he plays, and you play. And we all play.” Kenny sniffed. “And now we don’t know how to stop.”

A mind flash struck through Euclid’s opioid haze. It was instantaneous and illuminating, like a high-resolution camera shot, and imbued with a chilling clarity. He saw a serpentine clockwork structure, an assemblage of millions of separate parts that were spinning and oscillating and pulling on other cogs and gears in a self-perpetuating dynamic, reaching an unstoppable, uncontrollable velocity. There was no master switch. To stop this mechanism, to untangle all its ends, to cleanse off the toxicity and start anew, every participant, minor and major, would have to be asked––no, compelled––to stop moving, to abandon their dear pursuits, to cease pulling on their gratifying pedals and levers simultaneously. All the motions and initiatives would have to be put on hold and plugged out of their power source and made to lay idle, like a fallow field, for a period of time.

Such respite was but a pipe dream. Everyone was too entrenched in the algorithm. No one meant any harm to anybody, of course. They all just found themselves inhabiting a mechanism where every move, every slant of the hand, every faint word, would carry out what an algorithm had intended. And if any one participant had somehow found strength to unglue from that structure, he would find himself alone, like a gopher sticking his head out of the ground into a windy, hostile steppe, while the cozy, well-oiled machine would hum along without him.

“But maybe nature will take care of it for us,” Kenny said.

Kenny peeked at the wound again. The bleeding had stopped, but Euclid’s limbs were cold, his lips gray, and he was shivering. Kenny gave him another OxyContin, took the folded jacket from under Euclid’s head and covered him, tucking it underneath like a blanket. He cradled Euclid’s head on his lap.

Euclid lay motionless, his eyes locked into a languid stare by the piece of thread on the ceiling vent. The thread began to flutter in the airstream. The vent’s fan hummed faintly.

“I think the power is back on,” Kenny said.

He stood up and pulled the light switch on the wall. The lights came on. “Whoo-hoo! We’re in business!” he howled.

The vent above was pumping air, and Euclid felt its warm, soft breath on his face. His tension eased. He closed his eyes.

“Hold on tight there, buddy. Somebody will be coming now for sure.” Kenny’s words echoed from afar.

Euclid wondered why the air was warm. Hadn’t it been set on cold before the power went out? What difference did it make now? That soothing warmth was more than just air. It was a permission to succumb, a gentle call to loosen one’s grip on life. There was love there, and he wanted to be enveloped by it, to bathe in it.

“My cats,” Euclid muttered, barely audible.

“What?” Kenny tenderly touched Euclid’s forehead. It was sticky with cold sweat. “Hold on there, buddy.”

Euclid couldn’t hold on. He exhaled one last time and let go. The warmth took him.

(Dear readers. There are three more chapters left in the novel. I will post them all in one installment next week. This chapter was the culmination of the story, and those three final chapters will be the denouement. Nelson, Bobbi, and others have theirs lives upended in the aftermath of Euclid’s passing. Thank you for sticking around. KG)

Previous chapters

While the city’s default still dominated local news and conversations, and the journalists and the creditors still pestered Euclid for answers, his focus had already shifted elsewhere. Three tropical depressions were forming in the Caribbean, and most forecasts showed them strengthening into hurricanes along the East Coast, with possible landfalls in the mid-Atlantic area.

For the last several days, Euclid had been monitoring the hurricane data from Bloomberg that Bobbi was sending him daily. She told him that those updates were built on up-to-the-minute raw satellite meteorological reports, more accurate than anything he could get from a public source. The data that Bobbi filtered and customized just for him was so detailed and granular that Euclid could zoom into a particular mid-Atlantic region and see the hurricane path projections and the recommendations for local authorities. Euclid spent days playing with variables, feeding them into the forecasting model. Eventually, one likely scenario emerged: a Category 4 striking the coastline near Delaware. Euclid zoomed in on Atlantic City. The entire town was designated as Zone A––a mandatory evacuation zone. Under that scenario, the surge projection stood at twenty feet.

On the eve of the forecasted landfall, Euclid issued a citywide evacuation order and joined Sheryl and a group of volunteers to canvass the low-lying neighborhoods along Fairmont Avenue on the west side of town to get residents to leave. There was still plenty of room at the convention center, and there were buses arranged to take the evacuees to Philadelphia and Trenton. Some people said they had no money to go anywhere, and Euclid, trying and failing to control his frustration, pointed out that the buses were free and that the convention center was half a mile away. Still, many refused and stayed in their homes, and there was nothing Euclid could do.

The volunteers had neither the time nor the resources to check on the apartment towers along the Boardwalk. Those in the coastal high-rises who hadn’t yet left would have to ride out the storm inside and would have to be accounted for during the aftermath.

Euclid spoke on the phone with Tilton, who assured him that both the Whispering Reeds and the Dunes were in the process of being evacuated. Euclid sent Sheryl home to pack the necessities and decided to drive by the trailer park to check on their progress.

Euclid parked at the gate and went inside, walking along the alley of mobile homes and RVs. He hoped to see people loading their cars, boarding up their windows, and driving off, but he found a leisurely, holiday-like atmosphere. People spilled out of their doublewides and were relaxing on their lawns, blasting music, smoking, drinking. Portable generators hummed, hotdogs sizzled on grills.

Euclid imagined how tomorrow all these possessions would be lifted up into the sky and then be found floating somewhere along the Eastern seaboard, from Virginia to New York. The propane tanks would blow up. The generators would be lying mangled a few miles inland in piles of debris.

But these people were not only not panicking: They displayed a kind of exultant stasis, a defiant mix of excitement and bravado toward the upcoming catastrophe. It was as if they all shared an unspoken understanding, a deeply felt but unarticulated belief, that an exogenous event so impersonal, so inevitable, so severe, carried in it the potential to break the everyday monotony, to shake things up and to make true human bonding possible.

“What are you doing, people?” Euclid cried, holding his hands to his mouth. “You have to be packing your stuff and evacuating!”

“Hey, Mr. Dwyer! Want a hot dog?” someone shouted back.

“Come on, guys.” Euclid clapped impatiently. “Didn’t you get the message? You were supposed to be gone by now. You can’t stay here. It’s gonna be a big one.”

“We be a’right.”

Candice, the redhead, spatula in one hand, chihuahua in the other, and a cigarette in her mouth, flipped a burger on the grill. She took a sip from a perspiring beer bottle. “What about the dam?” she asked.

“Yeah, so, uh, here’s the deal. It is possible that the dam might not hold.”

“Like, what are you saying?”

“This place might get flooded.”

“Might get flooded? What the fuck? Then what was that whole thing about? They raised my rent for this stupid dam!” Candice cried, growing more agitated with each sentence.

“The dam might still protect you. But up to a point,” Euclid said, gesturing awkwardly. “What they’re forecasting is quite severe.”

“He says the dam might not hold!” Candice hurried to break the news to the other tenants, who, hearing her complaint, abandoned their grills and beach chairs and came over to see what was going on.

“It still might hold,” Euclid said, trying to sound conciliatory as he addressed the small crowd. “Although, under the surge that is projected, it might not. So to be on the safe side, it’s better if you leave.”

A brief silence was followed by a wave of irritated rumblings.

“It’s not just the flooding, you see,” Euclid pressed on. “There will be wind damage as well. It’s forecasted to hit a hundred and fifty miles per hour. That kind of wind, you just can’t ride it out in a trailer.”

“It’s fucking bullshit,” Candice cried. “So then we would have been better off not paying for this stupid dam. I think I want my money back.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” A white-haired woman asked, and Euclid, thankful, grabbed on to a question for which he had an answer.

“There is an evacuation facility at the convention center,” Euclid said. “It is a mile and a half from here. Transportation will be provided to those who can’t travel that far.” Now he was extemporizing. “I’ll come and collect you myself, in my own car, if I have to.”

“You know, I think you might be in on it with Tilton. That’s right. You got your cut, huh,” Candice ranted, slicing the air with her spatula.

“I want you to be safe, that’s all,” he said. “Could that be the reason? This storm, it’s a force majeure.”

“Yeah, yeah. Blah-blah-blah.” Candice returned her attention to the meat on the grill.

Euclid gave up and stumbled back to his car. Near the gate, he saw Kenny and Vern sitting on the stoops of Kenny’s trailer. Next to them was an old Rubbermaid cooler, and Kenny, when he saw Euclid approach, picked a can of Bud Light out of the ice and gestured for him to join them.

Euclid cracked the can open and sat down on an overturned plastic bucket. “What about you two?” he asked. He sounded listless.

“I’ll be at the convention center,” Vern replied.

“I have . . . plans,” Kenny mumbled.

“They say I’m in on it. That’s why they won’t leave.” Euclid scoffed and shook his head. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I’m in on it. Even so, both things could be true. I could be in on it and still not want them to drown.” He looked at Vern.

“Look,” Vern said. “You’ve done your part. You tried to help them. You warned them. They know the risks.”

“There’s nothing you can do about these degenerates,” Kenny said, waving his hand. “Tomorrow they’ll wish they’d left. Tomorrow they’ll see you were right.” He sent the cigarette butt into the grass with a snap of his fingers. “If God wanted them to leave, he’d have given them brains.” He turn to Vern. “Right, Reverend?”

“Perhaps it’s worse,” Vern said. “God gave them brains and they decided to stay.”

Kenny broke into a cackle and then stopped abruptly. “Is this why you lost your faith?”

Vern shrugged. “This is why I left the church.”

“Hey, I hear ya. The way I see it, a church is like a fake fire hydrant for dogs, the kind they use in airports. A dog doesn’t know that the fire hydrant is fake, but it serves its purpose. And everyone is happy.”

“I like that,” Euclid said.

“I came up with that myself. I call it the fake-fire-hydrant hypothesis,” Kenny said, pleased. “So Vern finally realized that the hydrant is fake, right?”

Vern didn’t reply. They were all quiet for a while, sipping beer, squinting at the sun. The heat and the beer calmed Euclid. He slid down from the plastic bucket and reclined on a patch of grass, leaning on his elbow.

“I think they all just gave up,” Vern said. “There’s comfort in giving up. They had rough lives. They tried to dig themselves out so many times, they failed so many times, that they don’t want to ever bother again. They collectively said ‘fuck it’ and decided that they’d rather be children. They kind of capitulated into this inert state. It’s a state that doesn’t demand much from them. Where they can be fools and clowns, and not suffer for it.”

“Hey . . . that’s . . .,” Kenny said and wobbled his head. “Maybe you’re on to something here, Rev.”

“So to them, you’re a stand-in for a stern parent,” Vern said to Euclid. “You are someone who calls on them at the end of the day, ‘Time to go home, kids. Wash your hands and eat your vegetables.’ So that they can then defy you. That is your function.”

“Huh,” Euclid said with a contemplative nod.

“They need somebody to show the middle finger to, and you’re it, Euclid.” Kenny chuckled.

“Yeah. You allow them to be rebels. And since they can’t be anybody else . . .” Vern trailed off with a shrug. “There’s a certain appeal there.”

Kenny cracked another can open. “Still, something must be done about human stupidity,” he said. “Some mandatory education. You should read this guy, forgot his name, some English dude. He writes about societal collapse. And the only way to get it under control is to have strong rules and enforce them with an iron hand. That’ll force everyone to be smart. Even the stupid ones.”

“Not sure it will work either,” Euclid said softly.

“It will. If it’s properly enforced. Deputize me and I’ll prove it to you.”

Euclid glanced at Vern. There was, in his eyes, a frantic inquiry, a searching for an argument that would counter Kenny’s conclusion. Vern must’ve felt that oozing despair.

“You did your duty. That’s all that matters. Results don’t matter,” Vern said.

A red tabby cat was relaxing on a nearby trailer’s porch, its belly up, paws stretched. A pitbull pup played with a rubber toy on the lawn, and the cat observed the dog with lazy condescension.

“None of you guys would make it in the military,” Kenny said with a scoff. “You’re thinking in abstractions too much. You have to think in applied physics.” He slammed a mosquito on his arm. “I can make them leave, Euclid. If you deputize me. You know what I mean?”

“I don’t think I have the authority,” Euclid said.

“Sometimes you gotta bend the rules. Eh. All you do is talk. Someone has to take care of shit.”

Kenny took a long gulp from his can, crinkled it in his fist, lit another cigarette, stood up, and, with dogged purpose in his stride, marched across the lawn toward one of the trailers. He scooped up the idling red tabby, who protested the abduction with an irritated screech and attempt at escape. As Kenny carried the cat back, the slinky animal dangled under his arm in deceiving surrender, its round eyes full of outrage and plans of revenge. Kenny sat down on the stoop, and gently placed the cat on his lap.

“This one ain’t drowning,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette and squinting into the far distance.

On the way back to the shore, Euclid made the usual stop by the gas station. He parked under the station’s chipped awning and saw that the gas pumps’ displays were turned off. There was no one in sight. He got out of the car.

Inside the glass door of the gas station convenience store hung a stenciled red-and-white “We’re Closed” sign. He held his hands to the sides of his face and peeked inside: the store was dark and empty.

Euclid went back to his car. The heat and the humidity crept into the cabin, and the faltering air-conditioning struggled to stave it off. His eyelids grew heavy. Drowsy, he slouched in his seat and succumbed to an indolent, sticky slumber.

He found himself in a smoky, sawdust-covered New Orleans piano bar. He was dressed in a white tuxedo jacket, impeccably pressed pants, and a blue ruffled silk shirt. Bobbi was there too, beautiful as always, in a floral dress, sipping champagne from a sparkling flute. A dandy straw boater hat encased with a yellow ribbon was slanted playfully on her head. He stood up from the table and raced toward the piano on the small stage. He broke into a twelve-bar blues improvisation, easy to learn but difficult to master, with trills and other acoustic embellishments. He played with soul and conviction, his hands were flexible and smooth, his fingers were gliding through the octaves with speed and marvelous dexterity, as the mesmerized patrons looked on and stomped to the rhythm.

A man with an electric guitar joined him for the jam. The man was messing up the rhythm and played in the wrong key. He wasn’t even playing the blues but unfolded some wailing, atmospheric, string-bending riff.

The piano keys disassembled under his fingers. The octaves lost their structure and morphed into buffoonish, senseless arrays. They bulged and curved, and changed the position and the number of keys at random. The keys seem to run away from Euclid’s fingertips as he continued playing, in a state of cold, gasping horror, trying to guess which note was which. But his blues was now a discordant noise.

Euclid stopped playing and looked at where Bobbi was sitting. She wasn’t there.

He awoke, sweating. It was getting dark. He started the car and drove slowly home.

Previous chapters

In his Chelsea lair, Nelson was restless. He was reclining on a sofa in the living room, switching between several open tabs on his laptop screen. One tab, which at the moment consumed his attention, was open on the website of a high-end apparel retailer, Brunello Cuccinelli. He zoomed in on a fine cashmere throw and a pair of velvet loafers, marveling at their austere luxury and gently scolding himself for this singular consumerist soft spot. He was trying to come up with a reason why he should abstain from buying any of these items.

He clicked on another tab and logged into a streaming website. With glassy-eyed apathy he scrolled down the list of shows. The few good ones he had already seen, several times. He switched to another streamer. Another scroll, another disappointment.

“Snark, snark, depravity, gore,” he mumbled at the catalogue of titles. “Hundreds of shows and nothing to watch.”

He gazed around his living room. It was now spartan. Long gone were the soft armchairs and the exotic plants and all other Belle Epoque accoutrements. Gone, too, was the throne. There was a simple chair and a desk by the window; the wooden floors were bare. In the bedroom, where once an indulgent king-size platform had summoned decadence, stood a single bed with a rusty metal frame that Nelson had scored at a garage sale in Brooklyn. Two eight-pound iron dumbbells lay on the floor by the bedside, underscoring the new ascetic character of the dwelling. The only memento of the sybaritic past was Nelson’s black satin kimono robe that he wore in a casual, almost disdainful manner, covering only his arms and shoulders, but untied, open upfront, with nothing underneath.

What smallness of ideas have we regressed into, he thought. We have stopped being serious people. And, perhaps, this is at the root of our artistic mediocrity––we operate on the assumption that death will somehow spare us. All these shows lack a sense of urgency. They avoid the existential. Worse, they engage in an insidious replacement of definitions. They elevate the self over the common and tell us that good art is about the nitty details of your petty peeves.

This devolution can be traced to centuries ago, when we, in our conceit, discarded religion as a mere scaffold that helped elevate us into modernity. In the process, we lost the wonderment gene, the ponderous muscle. We have acquired the souls of accountants. Our lives and our art now reflect that fatal civilizational detour. Instead of God, we study ourselves, and this knowledge paralyzes us. We became so intimately aware of our flaws and mediocrity, so mindful of how we’re perceived in the world, that we collectively decided to treat everything we create––including ourselves––ironically. The result is ugliness and conformity. Our life is a fearful life; our art is a cautious art. It is an art catering to the whims of the crowds. Scared people cannot create beauty. They create mediocrity. Snarking, jesting, gelatinous mediocrity.

But it should’ve been so easy. Beauty, the true kind that we access not with reason but with intuition, is available to us all. It comes from a noumenal space, a space that is uncontaminated by our lived experiences. It is a place that is free from embarrassment, cynicism, and resignation. It is that space that we should plumb in our search for an art able to transcend our paltry selves.

To exit that fearful existence, we must return to the seriousness and naivete of a child. One must shun the logic, discard the algorithm, and rely only on a swell of emotion. One has to embrace the raw and the ridiculous. There should be no blueprint, and thus nothing to arrest the propulsion of thought, of the genius impulse. Naivete creates the best, most enduring, most resonant art. If it borders on embarrassment, it borders on genius.

Nelson’s wandering mind had returned to the empty room. He exhaled. Someone has to make a show out of Milton’s Paradise Lost, he thought wistfully. I’d sign on as a producer. I’d put up a million or two. But who out there would even have the slightest idea of what it is that I’m talking about?

And this is the part where we all fail, Nelson mumbled under his breath, now sitting up on the edge of the sofa. He massaged his temples, his eyes closed. Several minutes passed.

Because we are all prisoners of the mind, he thought. Not of physical needs. It’s the damn mind. The mind keeps us captive with promises that will never be fulfilled. It tells us that someday all those people will recognize us for who we are and not for what we can do for them. But it does not show the path to that reality. This place, this town, erases all possibilities of absolution, erases our ability to pay the debt that we owe ourselves. It forces, it demands inauthenticity.

And who am I? I will forever be an effete urban homosexual with a good taste. A worldly banker with a thick Rolodex. A man with solutions.

But I am not that. I am more than that.

He sniffled, ground his teeth.

And yet, our vain mind is like a tick burrowed deep in the flesh. That tick demands more ambition, more persistence, more conceit, more ruthlessness. To remove it, one would first have to want to remove it, an already impossible proposition. Then, rid of that tick––and this is even harder––one would have to accept, to come to terms with, a life of shame, of social death. To be the subject of hushed, bewildered obituaries, and then be quickly forgotten. For an average person, that is an unsurmountable task. For a worldly New Yorker––an absolute impossibility.

It is difficult. It is damn difficult to do.

“I hate myself,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

His laptop’s screen was now open to yet another tab, the words “active monasteries in Italy” typed in the search bar, with a list of results displayed. Nelson spent the next half hour studying the monasteries’ websites. After narrowing his search to two picturesque Benedictine abbeys near Naples, he filled out an online questionnaire for postulancy on one website. He sent an email to a general address with the query, “What are the requirements for joining the order?” to another.

He relocated to his bedroom. He stretched out on the narrow, metal-framed bed. Its coils screeched under his weight. If Western Civilization is doomed, he thought, then, by becoming a monk, I could do two things at once: Escape the collapse and make a small contribution to its possible survival. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the slowly moving clouds above his window.

Once the word gets out, people will say that I lost my marbles. No! I’ve found them. But this fact will never get through the thick fog of their ossified misconceptions. Those people are incapable of thinking clearly and critically. They will call me a retrograde and a reactionary. But I’m not a reactionary. I am merely a disappointed person who decided to examine the source of my disappointment. I am someone who was forced to admit that none of our scientific and technological achievements have made us into better people. That our sentiments are no better than if we were writing them down with ink on paper under dim candlelight or sketching them onto a cave wall with a piece of charred wood. Would they even see the nature of my complaint?

He stood up and brought a portable speaker from the living room. He placed the speaker on the floor next to his bed, connected it to his iPhone, and plunged back into the saggy bedframe. He scrolled through iTunes. The sound of a-capella Palestrina chants soon filled the room. For the next half hour, Nelson lay quietly listening to the calming hypnotism of medieval choral arrangements.

He wondered what a postulancy interview would look like. He imagined a panel of dour friars in long brown robes. What kind of questions would they ask? How would they test his commitment? Oh, he would win them over with his deep, multilayered understanding of faith, with his command of catechisms, with the sincerity of his bid.

He would open his pitch by saying that while we’re drowning in rationality, while we worship efficiency and optimization, we have no courage to acknowledge the fact that our progress has met a fork in the road and gone up a false path. With all this progress, we’re still cruel, ignoble people. We have a big blind spot in our collective epistemology. We try to whistle past this blind spot, to pretend it’s not there. Somehow we know that to admit it would disturb our delicate mental equilibrium. It would bring us face-to-face with a dilemma both urgent and momentously unresolvable: that neither science, nor logic, nor reason, nor the most advanced technology can discern right from wrong, good from bad. Those questions are the province of theology and metaphysics––mental spaces we avoid like the plague.

He would then emphasize the primacy of Catholicism over all other Christian denominations. Max Weber was on to something when he critiqued the Protestant ethic––but not the Catholic one! The only entity that still concerns itself with these questions, the only force currently standing athwart history and yelling “Stop!,” is Catholicism, not Protestantism, and especially not its grifty American iteration. After all is said and done, it is this awareness of the fundamental mysticism of existence, and not the Protestant pluck and thrift, not scientific breakthroughs that give a man a solemn pause in the whirlwind of the daily grind, that he dwells on when on his deathbed. That should count for something.

And, hey––by the way––the Catholic Church invented the freaking science! It was the Church that facilitated and underwrote the Scientific Revolution. It was Catholic monasteries that planted the seeds for the development of science. It was the monks who worked, for centuries, to preserve and translate old manuscripts, who chronicled historic events, and who pondered on the nature of being. It was scholastics who labored to reconcile Aristotelian logic with Christian theology. It was alchemists who tinkered with earthly substances in search of the philosopher’s stone. It was astronomers who gazed upon the sky in search of God. Philosophy, chemistry, physics––that’s how the first European universities started. All thanks to nameless monks. Copernicus was a polymath but also a devout Catholic scholar who worked to reconcile his theories with the Scripture. Isaac Newton was a theologian who stated that it was divine power which gave the universe its original motion. Are we to dismiss, from our contemporary perch, these two great minds as not being sophisticated enough to embrace the intellectual superiority of materialism? If only those two had heard of quantum mechanics! That would show them how childish their beliefs were! Ha. But quantum mechanics is full of paradoxes that no scientific experiment, even with all the cutting-edge tools at our disposal, can explain. The uncertainty principle. What Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” The eerie link between a human mind and the behavior of particles under observation.

At this point, those robed friars would nod approvingly and exchange glances. Tell us, Mr. Bosch––they would then continue their inquiry––is it possible for modern society to reverse its moral decline? Or are we doomed?

Hmm––I would reply, rubbing my chin. If it’s not possible then it’s not for a lack of trying. Philosophers, Germans especially, detected that this is where we were heading centuries ago. Hegel found a way out––a cop-out I’d say: a dialectic. Kant spent his entire life attempting to formulate an ethics code that fused divine dictum with practical reason. He wanted to demonstrate that there exists a moral code that we should follow that is immutable, indisputable, and provable as a mathematical theorem. Although a deist himself, Kant thought that in order to convince a man, a learned and sophisticated man, to behave in a moral manner, he had to construct his appeal on reason, and not on any religious dogma, because he discerned, correctly, that appeals to the divine will fail to impress a modern man. It was a lofty task, perhaps in vain, but I commend him for undertaking it.

So here your choices are a Hegelian dialectic or a Kantian appeal to reason. Is there another option? Nelson conjured up another hypothetical question.

Yes, and I was getting to that. There’s an option that is only available to a select few, the most pious, because of its rejection of any compromise. It was defined by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard sympathized with Kant’s overall purpose but not with his method. In Kierkegaard’s mind, Kant let a man off the hook too easily. It would let him shuttle between two opposing realms, never committing to either one. But to Kierkegaard it had to be either/or; it could not be both/and. It had to be either reason or faith. One would have to commit, in Kierkegaard’s view, to either Athens––a symbol of reason—or Jerusalem––a symbol of faith. You must pick only one and live with the choice. To straddle both would mean to admit moral failure. To straddle both would mean to resign oneself to a life of self-deceit, of inauthenticity.

Here the friars would chuckle gently, and one of them would say: That is quite harsh, Mr. Bosch, don’t you think?

Yes, it is, I would nod. Yes, it is.

The eldest of the friars would finally break his silence. So what would be your prescription?

I guess I am agnostic about the method, but the return to sacrality, whether by fusion of reason and faith, or by faith alone, would arrest our civilizational fall. It would provide a backstop to all disputes; it would return us to a plane where all interpretations end and the final truth reigns. It would capture us like a safety net captures a careless ropewalker. Yes, we will hit a bottom, but we will be spared. That bottom, in its abiding finality, will signal to us that there exists a limit beyond which we mortals, with all our rationalistic thinking, can’t go, shouldn’t aspire to go. That there’s a realm we should take on faith and cease trying to invade or explain.

Okay, the elder would say, his arthritic fingers sorting through the beads of his rosary. But what of secular man? Postmodern man? What would you say to him? Can he get closer to the truth?

Huh. First, I would extend him sympathy. I’d say that I understand how difficult it is to cut the bonds of a toxic routine. I understand that if he were to do so, then in the eyes of all other strivers he would become a perplexing, pitiful nonentity, a non-player character, as the kids say.

And here, I’d say, is the glorious clemency of the divine grace that Catholicism offers him freely. The Church is a vehicle that allows a man to resign into anonymity and insignificance and to still maintain his dignity. It does not judge him based on his worldly works and titles. There are no moral ranks. Everyone is a sinner and everyone is forgiven.

If he’s not persuaded by this argument, because, after all, he’s a secular man, then I would encourage him to stop seeking solutions and instead seek rituals. A ritual could work as a substitute for faith because it requires a measure of piety and seriousness. In the midst of a ritual comes a dissolution of self, a healing and grounding contemplation. Rituals don’t need a man to be special. Just like Catholicism, they permit one to remain an ordinary man. The one who is prepared to come across as boring and silly. It is that ordinariness that would make him extraordinary. It would make him authentic in a sea of inauthenticity. This is how our collective pretenses will finally end. We will reach a point where we have no use for them.

Nelson’s mind eased away from the stone chamber of a mountainside monastery and returned to the present reality, to the room in Chelsea. He glanced, once again, at the open tab of the luxury retailer. The items that he fancied were already in the virtual cart, and all he had to do was press the “Proceed to Checkout” button.

No one will know it’s Cuccinelli, he told himself. It looks pleasantly austere. It’s just something comfortable to wear on the plane and in my monk cell, should they approve my application. Something appropriately monastic. If the world is ending, at least I’ll go out in style.

He typed in his credit card number and completed the order.

Previous chapters

CHAPTER 23: BEACH PARTY

The city went into default on June 25, 2015. It skipped payments on all the outstanding bonds and on the Skylark loan, making it the second biggest municipal default in the country after Van Buren County.

The default didn’t surprise the bondholders in New York, who had long anticipated this outcome and had already allocated resources and retained big law firms for a bankruptcy litigation.

Under the language of the lending agreement, the ownership of the Skylark Hotel and Casino had automatically transferred to Omni Capital.

Ann had been calling Euclid, shouting obscenities into his voicemail. After avoiding her for a few days, Euclid finally replied.

“Look . . . We didn’t have the money. After we paid the casinos what we owed them, there was nothing left,” he said with the cadence of an innocent fool.

“Listen, you idiot. You were supposed to stay current on all the loans. What did you have in your reserve fund?”

“Not enough. I had to prioritize. I figured keeping the jobs and paying interest on the pension-fund loan should trump everything else.”

“Where is Sheryl? I gotta talk to her.”

Sheryl gestured, waving her hands frantically, that she was not there.

“She’s not here.”

“Tell her to call me.”

“Okay. But look, Ann,” he said, switching to a soothing tone, “this is actually good for your campaign. You can turn it all to your advantage. You can say that, when faced with a tough choice, you decided to save the working folk and their pensions over some bankers and bond traders. It will resonate with a lot of people. They are all tired of all the schemes.”

“You ceded the fucking Skylark to the fucking bankers! There was at least sixty-seventy million of equity in that thing.”

“Yeah, well, eggs, omelet.”

“Fuck you, Euclid. Fucking Nelson,” Ann hissed. “I fucking knew it.” She hung up.

“I’ll be out of office for the rest of the week,” Nelson told Bobbi on a slow Wednesday afternoon in late July.

“Going to the Hamptons?”

“Must you pry?”

“Why so defensive?”

Nelson swiveled in his chair. “Mike invited me to some beer and music festival in AC.”

Bobbi chortled. “You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. That’s cool. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Oh?” Nelson’s voice was now full of mischievous delight. “And what are you going to do there?”

“Meeting with the buyers!” Bobbi scoffed. “What the fuck did you think I was gonna do there? I have to sell that building.”

“Aw, yeah.” Nelson sounded disappointed. “Whom are you meeting?”

“Yair and some Chinese sovereign guys.”

“Separately, I hope?”

She stared at him. “You sound like a retard lately. Maybe you should take a vacation.”

“I’m honestly thinking about it. I guess I’ll see you there. Text me.” He squinted at her. “Euclid will be happy to see you. He’s playing a gig at the beach.” He waited for her reaction and got none. He was about to walk away from the desk, but something, some nagging fixation stopped him.

“He did it out of love,” he said. This was yet another attempt, perhaps just as futile as all his previous ones, to evoke any human response from her.

“He did it because he ran out of money,” she replied after a long, fidgety pause.

“Keep fooling yourself.”

Bobbi drove to Atlantic City later that night and checked into the Mariner Club. She spent the next morning taking Yair Aronow and his team of building engineers and architects for a walkthrough of the Skylark premises. There was now a crew of private security guards inside the property, hired earlier by Omni Capital. The formerly neglected and battered shopping gallery and the reception area had been scrubbed clean by professional disaster clean-up workers. Bobbi had also hired an administrator and a property manager, who greeted the prospective buyers in the now sparkly foyer, by the escalator. The speedy escalator took all the visitors for a vertiginous ride to the casino floor.

Bobbi let the administrator and the manager answer all Yair’s questions. Yair clacked his tongue and shook his head as they toured the property, and with each clacking and each pressing of his lips, Bobbi mentally brought the potential bid price down by a million.

After wrapping up with Yair, Bobbi went back to her room and changed into jeans and an old T-shirt that she’d bought at a Tool concert. She took a taxi to the beach and walked through the festival crowd to the concert venue. The consortium of seaside casinos, the sponsors of the annual festival, had set up the tents and pavilions along the Boardwalk. In front of the Buccaneer Hotel and Casino, an area stretching out over the wide beach strip all the way to the water’s edge was designated as the party grounds. There were Hawaiian-themed bars, with bamboo chairs and reed pergolas, hot-dog stands, and a barbecue station. An ice-cream truck shuttled back and forth.

Bobbi spotted Euclid on the beach stage, shaded from the sun by a white canvas tent top. He was dressed flamboyantly in a Western-style fringe shirt with turquoise ornaments and faux smile pockets, and mustard-colored corduroy pants. Larry and Peter were on stage too, and the trio was currently played a cover of “Jesus Just Left Chicago.” The crowd before the stage was sparse and elderly but enthusiastic about the repertoire: many rhythmically shuffled sand with their sandals and lip-synched along.

Bobbi made her way to the stage, waited for the song to end, and waved at Euclid. He held his palm to his forehead and then waved back, his face lighting up. Bobbi pointed to the tiki bar, and made a drink gesture. Euclid replied with two thumbs up, mouthing “Wait for me.” He then turned to Larry and Peter and made some remarks. Larry giggled and shook his head.

A long-haired spectator in a Grateful Dead T-shirt shouted at Euclid from the crowd.

“Hey, I’m not a saloon pianist. I don’t do requests,” Euclid shouted back. “How about a little transgressive Skynyrd song,” he said into the microphone. “I remember blasting it when I was a young man. My mother heard it and asked what it was about. I told her it’s about a seamstress and a cook.” He touched the strings. “I think she bought it. Ha!” He plucked his guitar with the bouncy “The Needle and the Spoon” intro.

At the tiki bar, Bobbi found Nelson and Mike. “You guys look dapper,” she said to the men, who were both dressed in shorts and polo shirts, with boat shoes on their bare feet.

“How did it go?” Nelson asked.

Bobbi shrugged and cringed without a reply.

“Better chance with the Chinese tomorrow?” Nelson giggled.

“I hope so.”

Kenny Knapp was manning the bar. He had just emptied a fresh bag of ice into a zinc bucket filled with cans of Bud Light and Miller Light and was now obsessively wiping the bar counter with a wet cloth, glancing occasionally at Mike.

“Do you need a refill, gentlemen?” he finally asked. Mike and Nelson both demurred with lazy head wobbles.

“What about you, miss?” Kenny eyed Bobbi.

“Club soda, lots of ice.”

Kenny filled a glass with the hissing, bubbling contents of a soda gun and put it in front of Bobbi. “Two dollars.” She gave him a five-dollar bill and said to keep the change.

Out on the stage, Euclid had finished the Skynyrd song and was now exchanging some words with Peter and Larry, tuning his guitar. Peter put down his bass and sat behind a steel console.

“The next one is a blues song,” Euclid announced. “Well, I think it’s a blues song. My friend here”—he turned to Peter—“thinks it’s a country song. But maybe it’s both. It’s actually an old Knopfler song.”

He played the first lick, opening with a simple minor-key blues. The song was in a slow, longing tempo. The lyrics, like all blues lyrics, were about a difficult woman, and as Euclid began to sing, interchanging his words with melancholic chords, his voice trembled with anguish.

Nelson thought that this here was the fundamental genius of a blues song: a difficult woman served as an easy stand-in for some bigger, more universal grievance. A blues song like this one was a way for a working man, a blue-collar man, a man without an emotional vocabulary but with a lot to say, to convey that cosmic loneliness, to express the inexpressible. The longings of blues could not and did not need to be fulfilled. They simply needed to be told, lived.

Mike elbowed Nelson. “I think he’s playing it for her,” he whispered, shooting a glance at Bobbi.

Nelson turned around and looked at Bobbi, who sat alone at the bar and listened to the song with a stone, emotionless face.

On the stage, Euclid hunched over his red-and-white Fender and disappeared into the music. He dispensed with the wistful lyrics quickly, and now his guitar picked up the rest of the monologue. He played with a little lag in relation to the beat, for added dramatic effect. His hand slid up and down the guitar’s neck, bending the strings; his fingers plucked and weaved a sonic lace, an embroidery of yearning and heartache. There was a gasp of hope, a negotiation­­­­, then a rejection––and a chromatic descent into grief. In the background, Peter meditated on his steel console, and the two guitars cried on in a mournful conversation.

“He’s playing it for all of us,” Nelson replied. He ordered a tequila shot from Kenny and drank it in one gulp. He stared at Bobbi, who nursed her club soda.

“What?” Bobbi snapped, annoyed at his quiet but intense stare that had violated all polite norms.

“Is there anything at all behind that stoic front of yours?” Nelson pleaded.

“What do you mean?”

“Heartless cunt.” He waved his hand in frustration and turned back to Mike.

At the moment, Mike was co-opted by Kenny, who was talking to him, polishing the bar counter with a wet cloth.

“I don’t know if you know this, Mike, but I was a marksman in the military.”

Nelson overheard Kenny’s rapid-fire, monotone impromptu pitch.

“I know that you’re short-staffed right now, so if there’s an opening for someone like me, with a solid background, just give me a shout. I think I filled out an application once, but maybe it slipped through the cracks somehow.”

Mike listened to Kenny’s speech with belabored, glassy-eyed attention, bobbing his head as if in a show of support. When Kenny stopped talking, Mike continued to sit in listening mode, contemplative and wordless, nodding limply.

“You think I should try to apply again?” Kenny nudged him for a response.

Mike blinked, his eyes shedding the scale of enchantment. “Yeah. There’s all kinds of evaluations you have to go through. Besides, with budget cuts, all the hiring is frozen at the moment. But look, you can still fill out a form, and I’m going to be on the lookout if something comes up. I’ll put you up on top of the pile. How’s that?”

“That sounds great. Thank you, Mike. So I’m just gonna fill it out again then.”

“Yes. Do that.”

On the stage, Euclid wrapped up his gig and hurried to the bar. As he approached and saw Bobbi and Nelson, he stopped, spread his arms, slackened his knees and walked toward them in lunges. “How was it, huh?” He cocked his head.

Nelson, Bobbi, and Mike gave him a round of applause.

“The last one is my showpiece. I only play it on special occasions. It breaks my fingers.”

“Magnificent piece. Arresting delivery. We’re all shaken to the core,” Nelson said. He looked at Bobbi. “We’re going to get some hot dogs. You guys want anything?”

“No, we’re good,” Bobbi said and watched Nelson and Mike walk away.

Euclid climbed on a barstool next to her, exhaled, and ordered a Bud Light.

“Those two are together, huh?” He tilted his head. “Hey. Good for them.”

He got his beer, foaming and overflowing, from Kenny, sipped it, and stared at Bobbi.

“So. I’m not your client anymore,” he said with a probing grin, waiting for a reaction. Bobbi remained silent. He cleared his throat. “Did I make the right decision?”

Bobbi scoffed and smiled. “About what?”

“Stop pretending to be stupid.”

She chuckled. “I only told you about how to save the pension fund.”

“And I did, didn’t I?”

“We’ll see soon enough. It’s all in Ann’s hands now.”

“So you met with a buyer today?”

“I did.”

“What are you guys going to net on that sale? Seventy-eighty big ones?” He bugged out his eyes and whistled. “Ooh . . . you’re going to be a rich woman.”

Bobbi chewed on her plastic straw. “We could’ve taken a loss,” she said, trying to sound indifferent.

“You’re not a good liar, Bobbi.” He grinned. “That’s good.”

Bobbi bit her lip.

“But, hey, I don’t want you to think I was doing you a favor. We simply ran out of money. It was a tough choice, and I had to prioritize. As simple as that,” Euclid added.

“I see that you’ve become steeped in the workings of the system. I’m happy for you. I think you’re becoming a professional politician,” Bobbi said with deliberate lightness. “Maybe you should run for lieutenant governor after all.”

“You think?”

The evening coolness had crept from the sea, and a DJ in a track suit and a bucket hat took over the beach stage. He began to play remixes of Avicii’s “Levels.”

“I don’t want to be a professional though.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I think we’re in a situation right now that requires unorthodox thinking. Some situations, like this one, require amateurs, and that’s where I come in.” Euclid looked away, at the dancing crowd. Now, with a catchy pop tune setting the mood over the darkened beach, the party scene became denser, younger, more drunk and more rowdy. He sipped his beer and exhaled. “But what if I were doing you a favor?” He turned back to her. He was now giddy, his gaze playful.

“I’d rather you would not.”

“But what if I did?”

She sniffed. “Euclid, it’s all very touching, but I’m not sleeping with you. I’d rather you did it to save your ass. And the city. Whatever happened to our loan, I’d rather it be a fortuitous side effect.”

“I’m not asking you to sleep with me!” he cried theatrically. “Jesus, lady. That’s all you think about.”

Bobbi shook with a chortle and loudly sucked the rest of her soda through her straw. She asked Kenny for a refill.

“No. What I was thinking . . . How about you take me on a tour of the South?” Euclid said. “Show me around. We can fly to Nashville, hang out there a day or two, then drive to Muscle Shoals. Say hi to your folks. I could jam there with some local band. Then roll down to the coast. Biloxi. New Orleans. What do you say? A road trip.”

“It’s . . . doable,” Bobbi said. She was surprised to find herself entertained by the idea. “On one condition––”

“Nooo,” he cut her off, covering his crotch, his eyes bulging. “Don’t even count on it. This is verboten. Nuh-uh. We sleep in different rooms!”

“We’re not meeting my family.”

“Ahh,” he exhaled. “You don’t want to embarrass yourself. Fine, okay, we don’t have to meet your folks.”

“We can’t go in the summer though. Too hot. How about this fall?” Bobbi said. “October? You have anything scheduled for October?”

“Nothing important. October is great.”

Larry and Peter stumbled over to the bar, and Euclid introduced them to Bobbi.

“I heard all about you,” she said politely, shaking the bandmates’ hands.

Kenny poured some draft into to two plastic glasses. He put them in front of the two men. “On the house.”

Larry pointed at Bobbi’s T-shirt and said something to her, and the two of them then briefly submerged into whispery, wide-eyed, knowing chatter, like two strangers at a Comic Con event who had found an instant connection over some niche cultural ephemera.

Bobbi finished her drink and excused herself, saying that she had to catch some sleep to be ready to meet the Chinese investors tomorrow morning.

“Let me know how it goes,” Euclid shouted as she walked away. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Peter waited until Bobbi was at a safe distance and said, leaning closer to Euclid’s ear: “That handbag costs fifteen thousand dollars. I know that because my girlfriend wants one.”

“Yeah, well. She’s a hotshot banker.”

“You’re a lucky man.” Peter slammed Euclid’s back.

A chunky thirtyish woman climbed on the empty barstool. She wore cutoff jeans shorts and a tank top and held a gin and tonic in her hand. She was slightly drunk and in an upbeat mood. She leaned toward Euclid and cooed: “That song you played earlier was very romantic.”

“Thank you, miss . . . But I’m taken,” Euclid replied. He pointed his thumb at Larry. “But our drummer here, Larry, is available though.”

Larry downed a big gulp of beer and let out a guttural burp. “Hi,” he mumbled.

“Put your hands in the air!” the DJ bellowed over the darkened beach and turned up the volume. The young crowd complied, stomping the sand and pumping their fists to the beats. Fireworks exploded over the water.

CHAPTER 24: A GOOD EXIT

Euclid spent the next morning loitering in his car in front of the Skylark’s main entrance. He arrived there at 9 a.m. and saw several black SUVs parked sporadically on the curb and in the red zone. That meant Bobbi was already inside with the Chinese buyers, he thought.

An hour later, a large group of people exited through the casino’s glass entrance door. There was Bobbi, four or five security personnel—all of them uniformed, all with the intense but placid bearings of a military background— and a jolly, squad-sized set of designer-clad Chinese investors.

Bobbi and the Chinese delegation were engaged in parting pleasantries and formalities, when Euclid’s Pontiac came alive and, rattling and growling, rolled toward the guests. Everyone turned their heads, and the Chinese regarded the intrusion with limp curiosity.

“Let me take care of this,” Bobbi said quickly to the Asians. “So I’ll send you all the paperwork, like we talked about.”

The whole delegation split into smaller parts that then funneled into the fleet of black chauffeured SUVs. The caravan drove away.

“How did it go? You think they’ll buy it?” Euclid said as he got out of the car.

“I think so,” Bobbi said. “They’re gamblers.”

“Good.”

“Unless you spooked them. What are you doing here?”

“I was driving by and saw all these cars, and I figured I’d stop by and see how it went.”

Cut the crap, said Bobbi’s face.

“All right,” he said. “I just wanted to chat. Do you have five minutes?”

From the casino’s valet driveway they walked through the untended, patchy lawn toward the beach. They passed through the hole in the wire fence and went up the ramp to the Boardwalk. The ramp was weedy and partially covered in sand, and Bobbi took off her heels and walked barefoot. The Boardwalk was empty. They sat down on a bench.

“So what happens to us now?” he asked. His eyes tried to catch her gaze.

“Ann will tell the bondholders to take a hike,” she replied, looking at the ocean.

“What if they sue?”

“Ha. They will. She’ll tell them to wipe their asses with that lawsuit.”

Euclid scratched his nose. “It is amazing how things are done in your world. Here we are, little people, trying our best, but none of it matters. There’s like a battle of giants that happens up above us rubes that we know nothing about, can do nothing about. They let us delude ourselves that we self-govern, and yet everything’s been decided.” He sighed. “What do I have to do to become like that?”

“Nothing,” Bobbi said with a hurried concern in her voice. “You don’t have to become like that.”

“But one kinda has to.” He sniffled. “Maybe if my political career doesn’t pan out, I’ll go into business. Tilton has a lot of upcoming projects. The dam is one, but he also owns a lot of high-yielding properties. I’m an investor in one. It can shoot big.” Euclid glanced at Bobbi. She responded with a courteous nod.

“My equity piece could be worth millions one day,” he added. “On that one deal we’re leveraged three to one.”

Bobbi smiled. “You’ve learned all the terminology, I see.”

“Yeah, ha.” Euclid shifted in his seat. “So. What’s so embarrassing about your folks?”

“Must we talk about it?”

“Oh, come on. There’s gotta be some riveting hillbilly tale there.” He giggled. “I’m dying to hear it.”

Bobbi stared at the waves, gathering her thoughts. She closed her eyes and touched her eyelids with the tips of her fingers. “All right. I never knew my biological father. My mother was in and out of rehab. That’s where she met my stepfather. He was a Pentecostal minister.”

“Wow. He spoke in tongues?”

“Ha. Yeah.”

“That’s . . . hardcore. You did, too?”

Bobbi snorted.

“I remember trying to detect a system in the sounds that he made. You know, if it really was a language then there had to be some kind of syntax structure, a grammar logic. Soon I realized that it was not some ancient language but a collection of random sounds. As I expanded on that revelation, I saw that it was all garbage, a performance for the gullible. Still, this unintelligible garbage had an effect on his flock, a massive, profound effect. Well-dressed, respectable-looking people were barking and rolling on the floor in the throes of religious ecstasy. I remember that I wanted to believe it was an act. Whether or not it was, to think that his words, uttered in a certain way, with a certain cadence, could do this . . . It scared me. I thought, where is Jesus in all this?”

“Oof.” Euclid shook his head.

“His sermons became too intense. He was literally tearing a shirt off his chest on stage. Doing lunges and splits and, like, cartwheels, even though he wasn’t athletic. He was taking methamphetamines to maintain his energy. It took a toll on him. Lost sixty pounds, almost all teeth. He fell off a stage once and damaged his back badly and got addicted to painkillers. Became paranoid . . . By that point I was already in college. Got out the first chance I got.” She scoffed and smiled. “Both him and mom think I’ve gone to the dark side, got possessed by the devil. I send them money every once in a while, and that’s the extent of my communication. They don’t want to see me. But they do cash the checks. Which is fine.” She looked at Euclid. “I figured, we’ll all end up like this. Senile. Feeble. Stripped of agency. Why not be merciful?”

Euclid was quiet for a moment and then took a deep breath. The air exited his lungs with a loud whizz. “I haven’t told anybody this,” he said, twitching his foot. “Everyone thinks my mom died of a stroke on a trip to Europe.” There was a straining in his throat. Bobbi’s posture tensed, and her attention spiked.

“Well, she did die on a trip to Europe. But not from a stroke. She went to one of those assisted suicide clinics in Switzerland. She called me the day before she went in. There was no talking her out of it. She’d made up her mind.”

Bobbi listened to him, covering her mouth with her hand. “Was she sick?”

“No. She said she was tired of living and was happy to check out. I was stunned. I kept asking her ‘Why? Why?’ And she kept saying ‘I made a calculation, I made a calculation.’ As if that would somehow mitigate what she was about to do. She sounded content and almost relieved. She planned it for months in advance without telling anybody.”

“Wow. What an exit,” Bobbi said quietly, now with an admiration in her tone. “I’m in awe.”

“She was always eccentric. Starting with giving me this ridiculous name. But don’t you find it cruel?”

“I don’t think her decision had anything to do with you.”

“You sound like you knew her.”

“I feel like I do.”

“Why do you think she did it?”

“I don’t think she lied to you. I think she really was tired of life. It’s not even the tiredness. It’s the kind of”––she looked up––“pointless inertia.”

“Please don’t get any ideas, Bobbi.”

“I don’t have the balls.” She scoffed and took the phone out of her bag. She glanced at the bunch of text messages and put the phone back in the bag. “Anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. She went out the way she wanted. Painless. Dignified. On her own terms.”

“Too bad you two didn’t have a chance to meet. You’d have liked each other.”

“I’m sure we would.”

Bobbi fell silent and stared at the crashing waves.

“Maybe one day a tidal wave will come and ablute us all,” she mused with a soft exhale.

They heard two short, loud car honks from the valet area, where both of their cars were parked.

“It must be security,” Bobbi said.

They walked back to the parking lot.

“So I’ll pencil in October then,” he said. “For the trip.”

“Sure. Pick the dates and let me know so I can make plans.”

Previous chapters

CHAPTER 21: CUT HIS HAIR

In the Brooklyn tailor shop’s restroom, Euclid changed into the new suit, leaving his old clothes in a trash bin. He took a subway to Manhattan and wandered around Midtown for several hours. He stumbled upon an old-school barbershop near Lexington Avenue, and as he lingered outside, leering through the window at a customer getting a buzzcut, a barber gestured for him to come in.

The barber, of gregarious Middle Eastern disposition, welcomed Euclid into a chair, busily polishing the seat with a towel. He examined Euclid’s head, his tongue clicking, and then went through a list of possible options: comb-over, comb-over and fade, buzzcut. “There’s not enough of texture on top,” the barber said, burrowing through Euclid’s hair. “Shave it all off?”

“I’m not quite ready for that. I’d like to leave something.”

“A comb-over then.”

Euclid watched with some trepidation as his long strands fell on the floor from under the barber’s buzzer. Then, with a pair of scissors, the barber gave the remaining patch of hair some shape and uniformity and, with the help of a styling mousse and a spray, fashioned it into a wavy mop with a sharp side part.

The barber asked if Euclid would like to use an aftershave, and, getting a nod, offered two alternatives: Brut and Old Spice. Euclid sniffed both and picked Brut. It was the smell of one high-roller regular at the Buccaneer who sat at the blackjack table every time Euclid walked back to the garage after his late-night gigs. That guy always had a massive stack of chips in front of him.

Groomed and pomaded, Euclid loitered in front of Omni Capital’s office for half an hour, eventually drawing suspicious looks from the security guard inside the glass lobby. He retreated across the street to a small plaza and sat on the bench, at a strategic angle, watching the building’s entrance.

At around 7 p.m. he saw Bobbi come out through the revolving doors, holding a phone to her ear. He scuffled across the street traffic, drawing angry horns and curses from the cabbies, and Bobbi lifted her head, momentarily distracted from her conversation by the nearby commotion. Euclid weaved between the blaring cars and jumped onto the sidewalk right in front of her, with an “oof” and a triumphant grin on his face.

It took Bobbi a good ten seconds to assess the situation, to process the bizarreness of it, and to finally collect herself, saying, nonchalantly, into her phone “I gotta call you back” before regarding the apparition in front of her. “Holy shit, Euclid. What is this? You look like Dick Tracy.”

“Yeah, I, uh . . .”

“And you cut your hair. What are you doing here?”

“I came to pick up this suit at this fancy tailor. Still have some time before my bus. I thought I’d swing by.”

“Ah.”

“I thought maybe we’d catch up over a cup of coffee. Or something stronger.”

Bobbi led him to a nearby Starbucks. It was past the evening rush hour, and the place was empty, except for an elderly homeless lady who was quietly talking to herself in the corner.

Bobbi ordered iced tea.

“Second that,” Euclid said to the order clerk. He insisted on paying for both at the cash register.

“Cost me four grand, this thing,” Euclid said, stroking the jacket’s lapels after they got their drinks and sat down at the table by the window. “Fine Italian wool. Feel it, it’s so smooth.”

“It’s very nice,” she said, eyeing the fabric.

“So I was thinking,” he said, “and I wanted to get your opinion on this. I have this great idea. I think I should run for Ann’s seat in Trenton this year. What do you think?”

“Lieutenant governor? I don’t know.” Bobbi shook her head. “State politics is a whole new game.”

“Think about it. People in AC like me. I know the terrain. I lived in New Jersey my whole life. I know what’s what around here. And then . . . who knows? I can run for governor.” He paused, fidgeted in his seat, and looked at her with probing intensity. “You’d make a fine first lady of New Jersey. Your polish. My street smarts. We’d make a fine team,” he said wistfully.

Bobbi sniffed and took a big gulp of her iced tea. “I’m not as polished as you think.”

“Polished enough for New Jersey. And for me.” His initial bravado dissipated into gentle earnestness.

With her elbows on the table, Bobbi lodged her face into her palms and sat like this for a moment. “You have no idea.”

“About what? I know that we like each other. We’re two scrappy street kids who came from nothing trying to make it in this cruel world. Against all odds.”

“Euclid.” She looked up and paused, gathering her thoughts. “How’s your cash situation?”

“I have about fifty dollars on me. But if you mean in a global sense, I also have an equity share in––”

“Jesus! Not you. The city.”

“Oh. We’re, uh . . . Between the interest on the bonds and the tax abatement and everything, we’re . . .” He wobbled his hand.

“What happened to that loan against your pension fund? That was a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan.”

“We’re paying interest on it.”

“Good.”

“Why you ask?”

“There’s a possibility that there will be a restructuring.”

“Restructuring?”

“Yes. There will be a workout.”

“A workout? Like aerobics?”

Bobbi sighed. “Stop pretending to be stupid.”

“I really don’t know what you mean.”

“It means that Trenton will hire a management company that will take over all your finances. That’s what happened in Detroit. You should look it up.”

“Oh.” Euclid said. “I heard this crazy restructuring story. There was this guy—”

“Look. If that happens, all your pet projects will be cancelled. Defunded. The dam. The solar. Everything. Whatever public utilities you have could all be privatized.”

Euclid sniffed. “Why are you telling me this?”

She sighed. “I guess I want you to have some idea about what’s going on behind the scenes. About all the invisible dynamics that can have huge consequences for you. So that you can then prepare for it and make the right decisions.”

Euclid was silent. Then, as if in a stroke of epiphany, his facial muscles twitched, and his mouth stretched into a sly smile. “You like me, huh?” he brayed, shaking his finger at her. “You care about me. I’ll take that. We don’t have to be in love, you and me, we’re not teenagers. We could be companions.”

“Okay.” Bobbi rolled her eyes. “Your schtick is getting old.”

“It’s not a schtick.”

“Just remember. If a restructuring happens, all bet are off.” Bobbi grimaced. “It’s a lawless space. You should finish whatever projects you have while you have the time and the cash. Finish that dam. Do some repairs or whatever. Spend whatever cash you have so nothing is left for the vultures.”

“How much time do I have?”

“A month or two. At most.”

He swallowed and looked outside, where the big city now pulsated with evening lights and theater crowds. His gaze grew unfocused, distraught. His hand reached nervously for a strand of hair to tuck behind his ear, but that strand was now phantom, and his fingers touched a freshly shaved temple. He cleared his throat. “So you don’t like my idea? Me running for lieutenant governor?”

“I don’t think you’re ready for it.”

“Are we ever ready for anything?”

“You will need to raise money, schmooze, make compromises.”

“I’d hope that’s where you help me.”

“No. I’m not a PR person.”

“Not as PR.”

Bobbi sighed. “Euclid, you’re milking the same joke for too long. It’s not funny anymore.”

“I’m not joking. We could become a power couple. We could be doing something good for the people. Because we’ve been there ourselves. We both come from nothing. We have an understanding that others don’t.”

Bobbi was silent, fidgety.

“Fine,” Euclid said. “Maybe I’ll just move to New York then.”

“And do what?”

“Like I was gonna say, I made some real-estate investments.” Euclid’s eyes lit up as he said it. “I’m like an equity partner with this guy, Tilton. It’ll be a home run. I will get two-three times on the initial investment, three hundred grand, maybe more.”

“Great. Maybe you’ll be able to afford a small studio in New York.”

Euclid deflated and again ran his hand over nonexistent hair. “Look at it this way,” he said softly. “You’re a smart, ambitious woman. You’ve already mastered one particular field. And maybe you feel like you’re boxed in. Maybe it’s time you move on to the next quest. Like Ann. Go into politics. So, in a way, I’m offering you a way out.”

Bobbi sighed. “I’m not looking for a way out.”

“Okay. Think of it as a big adventure then.”

“Euclid. It’s a smooth tale, and I like you. But not in a romantic way.”

“That’s okay. Who is romantically involved these days anyway? No one.” He shrugged. “It’s not a requirement at all. Romance is stupid. People are together because they like each other’s company, because they have something in common. I think we have a lot in common. We like the same music. You laugh at my jokes. We can do something good together.” He glanced at Bobbi’s phone that was vibrating with texts and missed calls.

He gulped down his iced tea.

“But I gotta run. Don’t want to miss my bus.”

He stood up.

“But sleep on it, Bobbi. There’s no rush. Oh, and thanks for the skinny.”

CHAPTER 22: WE CAN JUST DO THINGS

“What do we have in our reserve fund?” Euclid asked Sheryl a few days later.

“Thirty million, about.”

“Get a conference call with the casinos.” Euclid was bursting with inexplicable excitement that Sheryl found suspicious. She arched her eyebrows in a silent question.

“We will pay them what we owe them for the two quarters,” Euclid replied. “And whatever is left, we’ll use it to pay interest on the pension fund loan. This is very important.”

Sheryl’s eyes narrowed in a puzzled squint, as if some quick calculation ran through her head, and she tapped her long nails on the desk’s polished surface. “That will empty the fund. We have bond payments coming up in June. Plus the interest on the Skylark loan,” she said. “What’s going on, Euclid?” Sheryl sounded both baffled and concerned.

He plunged into his chair and swiveled. “Aren’t you tired of playing this stupid whack-a-mole with no end in sight? How long are we going to sit here and shuffle our the bills like some paupers? Let’s face it, we are the fall guy. We’ve been designated to hold a colostomy bag.”

“Yeah. So?” She scoffed. “That’s not news.”

“What happened to that hundred and fifty million loan against our pension fund? Huh? Where’s that money? Spent, poof.” He held his fingers to his mouth. “Gone. No one knows where. And we are on the hook. Just think about how perverted this is: the money that we earned with our blood and toil”—he pounded on his chest—“is gonna end up in some private-equity guy’s hands. Due to some clause. Our money! Three hundred million dollars.”

“Yeah. It’s not three hundred anymore, though,” Sheryl said with a sigh. “At this point it’s half that.”

“Uh-uh!” he cried. “This is the thing. Not if Trenton comes in!”

“What are you talking about?”

Euclid stood up, walked to Sheryl’s desk, and sat on it. He leaned toward her ear: “I got some intel that Ann is planning to hire an emergency manager. Trenton will take over the city’s management and finances. And there will be a workout.”

“Who told you this?”

“Does it matter? So the state will wipe out all the private-asset holders. All our debts could be wiped out, see? I did some research, Sheryl. This is what happened in Detroit. After they defaulted, there was a bankruptcy case in court, and the judge sided with the municipality. Their debts were restructured at, like, fifteen cents on the dollar. The loan against their pension fund was made null and void. We, too, could have a chance to be whole again. Our people will keep their jobs. Keep their pensions. And we can be debt free again.”

Sheryl was quiet. Her head wobbled gently as she processed Euclid’s case, as if looking for flaws.

“There’s no guarantee that what happened in Detroit will happen here,” she said.

“No. But it’s a fighting chance.”

“Where are you going with this, Euclid?”

He covered his eyes with his hand and rubbed his lids, gathering his thoughts.

“Tilton once said to me that there are no laws when it comes to distressed debt. That the bondholders can do what they want. But then, if it’s all lawless, that means that the other side can be lawless too.”

He gave Sheryl a loaded, unblinking stare. “We can just do things, Sheryl.”

“So you want us to default on the bonds?” she asked.

“Bonds are pieces of paper. Owned by a faceless entity. No child will go hungry if we do.” He shrugged.

“Okay.” She bobbed her head slowly. “And Skylark?”

“Skylark is an empty building from which we won’t see a penny.”

“Uh-huh. And you want to keep the pension fund loan current because you want it go into restructuring.”

“Bingo.”

Sheryl listened to him, fiddling with a paper clip, straightening it and bending it back, as he continued:

“You’ve worked here what, thirty, thirty-five years? You’ve spent you entire life in public service. What I’m trying to do here is save your pension. And thousands of jobs.” He sniffled. “And these guys who own the casinos, they’re assholes, yeah. But they’re our assholes. They employ half the city. So we pay them.”

Euclid stood up and paced back and forth, hands on his hips. Then he stopped and took a deep breath.

“Sheryl. When I first got elected, I thought it was like fixing a leak. I thought I was gonna come in with, like, a wrench, find the leaking pipe, and just fix it. But it’s not like that at all. If it was that simple, all those other guys before me would’ve done it. There’s no one leaking pipe. What we have here is an entanglement of thousands of little threads that no one knows where they begin and end anymore. It’s a knot that can only be cut. And if it’s me who has to cut it, so be it. Blame me, if you have to.”

He plopped back into his chair.

“Default is not the end,” he said looking out the window. “It’s a new beginning. Those guys in New York, they default on their loans all the time. If they can do it so can we.”

A minute passed in silence.

“Ann will crucify you for Skylark, though,” Sheryl said softly. “You’re giving up a lot of equity.”

“It’s not our equity. So fuck her. Call the managers.”

Previous chapters

CHAPTER 19: BRUNCH WITH GUS

Gus Birnbaum invited Bobbi for a Saturday brunch at Serafina in Tribeca. “Just business,” he texted her. “We’ll chat about AC stuff.”

The restaurant buzzed with après-gym Tribeca moms in their Lululemon uniforms, who ignored food on their plates but indulged liberally in alcoholic beverages. Gus knew the greeter, who had a nice table by the window waiting for them.

“Where did you go to school?” Gus asked her after they placed their orders.

“Alabama.”

“U of A? Roll Tide!” He pumped his fist. “But really, I’m fascinated by your career trajectory. I think it’s admirable. Some of my former classmates would kill to trade places with you.”

“It’s Nelson. I guess he saw something in me.”

“I know what he saw. He saw American quintessence.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious. He saw pluck and grit and, more importantly, the absence of entitlement. A rarity these days. Being from the sticks, you’ve seen life. You’ve been beaten by life. That’s something.”

“If you say so.” Bobbi, deliberately expressionless, sipped her Bloody Mary.

“I’m not being facetious. To him, to Omni, you’re an asset.”

The waiter brought their plates.

“By the way, that Van Buren County deal that was in the news a few years ago. Was it yours?” Gus asked, biting on a strip of crispy bacon.

“Yeah.”

“That was a complete clusterfuck.” He shook his head. “Two hundred million dollars in the hole.”

“They signed off on the loan.” Bobbi shrugged. “They didn’t do a proper due diligence.”

“I hope you made decent money on that.”

“Omni did.”

“And you?”

“I got a nice bonus.”

“But no title?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe you’ll get it this time. On your AC deal.”

“Maybe.”

“How’s that loan performing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“It’s doing . . . It’s current,” she said and shrugged.

“That’s good,” Gus said. There was an unevenness in his voice, as if he were fishing for more information on this particular topic.

“Look,” Bobbi said, flicking her hair back with a nervous stroke of the hand. “It’s not like I’m rooting for them to default. But if they do, it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s not?”

“We’ll receive Skylark as collateral.”

“Ah.”

The way he said it. There was something, some restrained but palpable omniscience, in his tone. It was a tone of a parent acknowledging a five-year-old child’s career aspirations. Bobbi replayed that “ah” in her mind. Now she felt stupid. How silly of her was to explain the workings of the loan to Gus. Clearly, he knew how it worked, he was a clever guy, he’d gone to “a school in Boston.” A scion of a New York real-estate family. He was probing her for something. Or maybe he was trying to get her to understand something without saying it. He was subtly mocking her understanding of the situation, as if it were a naïve, incomplete understanding.

He noted her analyzing silence.

“All I can say is that if they’re going to default, they should do it sooner rather than later,” Gus said and looked at her. His gaze was sticky, unblinking. “Ann is shopping around for an emergency manager,” he added quietly, speaking into his coffee mug.

Bobbi felt instantly hot. She took a big gulp of icy water and looked out the window. She rubbed her forehead, that space between her eyebrows where a mournful wrinkle had already begun to form.

“How much time do we have?” she asked after a minute of contemplation.

“Until the election, at most,” Gus replied quickly, as if he had been eagerly anticipating this very question.

He glanced at her plate. “You’re not eating your eggs,” he said breezily and steered the conversation away from business. For the rest of the meal, he entertained Bobbi with behind-the-scenes tales of the campaign, the gossip, the infighting, the polling. “At the end of the day, she’s running twenty points ahead. She’s going to win this thing.”

“Are you getting a spot in the administration?”

“Chief of staff, I hope.”

Bobbi wanted to split the bill, but Gus insisted on paying.

“It was fun talking to you,” he said when they stepped out of the restaurant onto the busy weekend sidewalk that swarmed with superfit, polished downtown moms, strollers, and dogs. The day was sunny but windy, and Gus lifted his Brooks Brothers jacket’s collar, hunching. “Let’s have dinner sometime.”

“Like a date?”

“Yeah. Like a date. I like your type. You’re a tough, bullshit-free shiksa. I’m tired of neurotic New York Jewesses.”

Bobbi cackled.

“What. It’s a compliment,” Gus said with a smidge of defensiveness. “It’s interesting to talk to you. You understand what I’m saying. I don’t feel like I’m talking into the void. I’ll cook. I make a killer beef stew.”

Bobbi waited for Gus to disappear around the corner and dialed Nelson, her hands shaking.

“What do you think are the chances that AC will be put into a receivership?” she asked, hyperventilating, skipping the “hello.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I just had lunch with Gus. He threw some weird hints at me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that Ann is looking to hire an emergency manager.”

“Huh. That’s a big hint.”

“Precisely. But then all previous contracts could be made null and void. It is such a legal gray zone. Look at what happened in Detroit. They can tell us to go pound sand.” Bobbi was nearly in panic mode.

“It is a possibility.” Nelson giggled.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because it’s your deal. And because I picture you trying to impress on Euclid the imperative of defaulting on our loan, and it is quite an amusing visual.”

“Fuck you, Nelson.” She hung up.

“Fuck,” she spat out, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as pedestrians swerved around her.

CHAPTER 20: MASTERY OF A SPURIOUS THING

The next day, Nelson was chilling at his downtown pad, sipping wine and attending to the comments section under his recent blogpost, when he received a text from Bobbi.

“Are you in Chelsea? I’m nearby. Can we talk?” she wrote.

“Stop by,” he replied.

He returned to his blog. The majority of the comments came from anonymous accounts. Most were personal insults, but a good percentage offered snarky support. The comment that consumed his attention now came from someone who had the head of Aristotle for an avatar and whose handle started with “freethinker” and ended with a string of random numbers. The commenter was polite and wrote in complete, thoughtful sentences and generally came across as willing to engage in an earnest exchange.

“I like how you think,” freethinker wrote. “Your epistemology is solid, and yet I sense your discomfort with where it leads you. You shouldn’t be afraid of your deductions. Yes, there’s a superior culture, and yes, there’s a superior race. And you’re a part of it. We are indeed on thin ice, like you concluded. And the ice will break; it is already breaking. But it is a good thing.”

“I don’t want it to break though,” Nelson wrote in reply. “I want to preserve it and skate safely to the other shore.”

Freethinker wrote back a minute later: “But you should want it to break. It needs to be broken because it is contaminated. To purify it back to its original state, we must break it, or allow others to break it for us (if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, ha-ha).”

“Aristotle would disagree.”

“Aristotle? Ha. No. He disdained democracy. There’s an intellectual thread that goes from Aristotle all the way to Nietzsche.”

“Nietzsche is a pedestrian thinker whose only merit is his undue influence on impressionable seventeen-year-olds.”

“Oh, you have a rather surface understanding of him. You’re underestimating the power of a man’s will. It’s an unstoppable force. It can be constrained by norms and morals only for so long. It will dispense with them eventually, and it will force itself upon the weak and the wicked. You, yourself, made a case for the need for a final authority.”

“Authority of God, not of man.”

“God is dead, ha-ha. But seriously, all I’m trying to do here is rid you of your discomfort. The collapse is inevitable. All we can do now is prepare for what comes after the collapse.”

“And what is it?”

“A Caesar.”

It’s always a “freethinker,” Nelson thought.

Nelson was weighing several clever, well-argued responses that would dip into history, politics, and economics, when the doorbell rang. He shut his laptop and hurried to the bedroom and put on his flannel pajama pants.

He tied his robe and opened the door. Bobbi was outside, in her gym pants and a sweatshirt, soaked. She was breathing heavily, leaning on the door frame.

“I was jogging on the West Side,” she said. “You have ten minutes?”

She stepped inside his living room and gazed around. The room’s once over-curated grandeur was diminished: most of the Belle Epoque artifacts, armchairs, plants, a marble statue, had vanished and had not been replaced. There was, however, an imposing medieval throne with a despotically upright back in the corner of the room, and upon seeing it, she cackled.

“What is this?” she said. “What happened to decadence?”

“That’s the way I want it now. My sentiments changed.”

“You’re going back in time. May I?” she said.

Getting a nod from Nelson, she propped herself on the throne.

“How did people sit on this thing? It feels like punishment.” She slipped off the chair and sat on the floor, crossing her legs. “So what I think might happen is the same scenario as in Detroit’s bankruptcy,” she said, sounding as if she was picking up the thread of an existing conversation. “I looked it up. The emergency manager will have the power to write down all the debt.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said. He sounded tired.

“They can also annul contracts. In any dispute of a property that belongs to the city, the state can override the creditors. And the bankruptcy court usually sides with the municipality. That’s what happened in Detroit.”

“Yes. So you’re fucked.”

“But what if,” Bobbi continued, ignoring his remark, “we buy protection on some of the AC bonds. As a hedge.”

“Who is going to sell it to you?”

“I can call around and ask. Some European accounts looking for yield. Pension funds.”

“Even if you find a seller, it’s not going to be cheap,” he said grimly. “You’ll pay points upfront.”

“It doesn’t hurt to try. Also, I thought about it, as a last resort, what if we talk to Ann and have them, like, carve out some sort of clause for Skylark? Like, exclude it from the restructuring. Would she do that for you?”

“What if . . . what if . . . what if . . .” Nelson broke into a sudden rant, irritated. “Always scheming, always looking for an angle, for more and more contrivances. What if we buy protection, what if we tweak this one clause, what if we put this in the fine print, what if we this, what if we that . . .” His tone grew more mocking, caustic. He was pacing around the room, pressing fingers against his temples. “We’re all too clever. Clever, clever, clever. I’m tired of cleverness. It turns us into moral pretzels.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Bobbi said. Taken aback, she examined him with concern. “Are you high?”

“Sometimes all schemes must come to an end. Sometimes we just have to let go.”

“What? I can’t fucking let it go. It’s my fucking deal.”

“It’s all vanity.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hubris.”

She grinned in disbelief. “Yeah. Hubris. You know, it’s nice when you can afford to be so cavalier about it. You can elevate yourself above the mud fight and talk about morality and stuff. I don’t have that luxury. I have to wrestle there, down in the trenches, because if I don’t, it’s back to the holler for me.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. You’re ten years into this thing. Your name is out there, important people know you.” He scoffed. “You’re not going back to the holler. You’re going to become a girlboss.” Now he sounded resigned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he added with a flick of the hand. He walked to the kitchen and refilled his wine glass. He held out the wine bottle, offering the same to Bobbi, but she shook her head.

“Why do you work then?” she asked quietly. “If it’s all vanity and hubris, why work at all? You don’t need the money. You have a trust fund. You can”—she spanned her arms—“pretend-play all you want.”

“I’m not the only one pretending here.”

“No, you’re not.” She scoffed. “There are a lot of guys like you. Definitely a pattern that needs to be examined. Like that time, remember, when Paul, the head of special situations, went RVing cross-country? He came back and wouldn’t shut up about how he befriended all kinds of drifters and junkies. How he had to take a shit outside and almost got mauled by a bison. How his credit card didn’t work and he just drove away without paying. How he got shot at. And every time he told those tales he was shaking with excitement. Eyes sparkling, spit flying out of his mouth. I sensed in him a longing for a life where real shit happens. But, you know, he didn’t have to live that life. It was just a limited excursion, like a trip to Disneyland. It’s fun to glorify the hard life when you don’t have to live it.”

Nelson listened to her with a subdued air, fidgety, fingers at his temples.

“Guys like you are tired of luxury. You seek hardship, even if it’s a pretend, theme-park hardship.” Again, she gazed around the deliberately ascetic room––a case in point. Her tone had now acquired a firmness, even triumphalism, as if she had stumbled upon an important thesis. “You’re searching for what’s next. But you don’t know what it is.”

Nelson folded his hands, as if in prayer. They were both silent.

“Your observation is not without merit,” he finally said. “I think what you see is just men, under the yoke of responsibilities, dreaming of the delights of carefree boyhood. You have to extend them mercy, not judgment. It’s harmless role-playing. Their pretense doesn’t hurt anyone. You, on the other hand,” he continued after refilling his glass, “you have a claim to a love that every girl can only dream of. But you pretend not to see it.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know what I mean. But it’s okay to pretend you don’t. It’s your protective mechanism. I get it. You need it to survive in this city.” With a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, he plunged into the chair by his desk and swiveled in it. “You find him embarrassing. Because he’s not housebroken. For the kind of New York life you want to have. For the kind of people you must befriend. For the kind of scene you need to be a part of. Those are important things, I understand. Which is both funny and sad. Because of where you come from.”

“Look. I don’t need a shrink, okay?”

Nelson ignored her protest and spoke on. “The sheer will that you had to summon to get yourself out of that place. Your resume smelled of dirt, roadkill, and opioids. That’s why I hired you back in the day. I didn’t want any lab-grown hoop-jumpers. You have a good grasp of things, of the world around you. You’re not a shallow person. But you pretend to be one. Which makes it all even more tragic.”

Nelson’s words put Bobbi in a tense, pensive stillness. She listened to him looking down, her hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes, afraid to move.

“All that heightened awareness, all the exertion . . . and it’s all in a service of a spurious thing.” He shook his head. “And on some subliminal level, you know this. And it grates against the collective memory of your ancestors. Those swamp people, heh, they were more connected to the beauty than all of us here . . .”

“Are you on some kind of drugs?”

“And you, too, had that connection once. But were forced to discard it. Like I said, it’s tragic . . .”

“You seem to have an unhealthy obsession with my origins. I’m beginning to think you’re just jealous. Something money can’t buy, huh.” She sneered.

“But there’s another layer there. Underneath the depravity and indolence and ignorance, there’s a surrender to the lyricism of life. An acknowledgment of the futility of effort. This is the space where schemes end and good art begins.”

“You’re drunk, man. And you sound like Euclid.”

“Aw, he said the same thing?”

“He didn’t get into all this psychobabble, but yeah. He worships the forces that created Southern music.”

“Then it’s true. See? We both arrived at the same conclusion.”

“All right, this pop-up therapy session has gone too far,” Bobbi said, getting up from the floor. “So I’m just gonna ask for protection offers on AC bonds on Monday. See where they are. Clearly, I’m the only one around here who is trying to do anything about it.” Her last words were prickly, peeved.

“You know,” Nelson said, “I looked up your favorite band. I find their visual aesthetic atrocious. But . . . they have a certain artistic rawness. They veer between attempting to guide a cretinous man toward the sublime and despairing over the indelible debility of humankind.”

Bobbi let out a nervous chuckle and stared at him. “You’re in the wrong business, Nelson. What are you doing being a banker? But you’re digging too deep here,” she said, heading for the door. “I just like their music. And the fact that they keep you guessing.”

“Guessing about what?”

“About whether they’re serious or not.”

“Ha. What would you like them to be?”

She stopped and sniffed. “Serious, I guess.”

“Then they are.”

She was on a staircase, on the way out.

“Bobbi,” Nelson said, standing in the doorway. “It’s better if you don’t mention Tool to guys you go on dates with. You’ll scare them off.”

“I never do.” She shrugged.

“Good. I just don’t want you to end up a spinster with cats.”

There was no jest in his tone this time, and she didn’t like it.

“I’m gonna call you later and check on you,” she said. “I’m concerned.”

He closed the door and hurried to his desk. He opened a notebook and grabbed a pen and wrote in hurried cursive:

If Bobbi allowed his love, accepted his love, she would come to despise that version of herself. For it would make her weak and emotionally soft, like a tear-prone grandmother, a reader of paperback romance. She knows it and she resists it. If Euclid were a regular politician, savvy and shrewd and an asshole, perhaps, he would have a chance with her.

But Euclid . . . He has a feel for beauty. He sees it, like I do, but he is not weighed down by it. He just lives it. He’s like a cat basking in the sun, happy and content. Soaks in the sun’s warmth and leaves it at that. A precious, rare quality. But, alas, an evolutionary dead end. Maybe it’s good he went into public service. Otherwise he’d die alone.

He stopped writing and put the pen down. He sniffled.

His eyes swelled, and an urge to weep overcame him. He did not resist it.

Previous chapters.

Chapter 17: THE GHOST OF KEYNES

Nelson woke up at the Claridge Hotel as the emerging sunrise pink seeped into the east-facing suite. He got out of bed, trying not to disturb a snoring Mike, and walked to the window. His muscles ached pleasantly from last night’s bedside gymnastics. Mike had insisted on showing him his proprietary stretching technique that resembled an extreme form of Thai massage, with deep muscle kneading and pulling of joints and forbidding limb twists. His body had crackled under Mike’s stubby fingers, and several times he’d had to pound on the mattress for mercy, like a defeated wrestler.

Now he stretched his arms and stood in repose, naked, meditating over a serene, iridescent ocean, soaking in the light of a new day.

It was here, at the Claridge, he thought, that John Maynard Keynes had stayed for two weeks in 1944 on his way to the Bretton Woods Conference, a historic gathering of economists and politicians that would determine the fate of the international banking order for the next seven decades. It was here, in this building, that he, Keynes, had finalized his grand idea––the deployment of monetary levers to save societies from collapse. Perhaps he was looking at this sparkling ocean when he devised his plan to convince world leaders, FDR in particular, to adopt a sweeping policy––the creation of an international body tasked with balancing and regulating economic inefficiencies, the main cause of social upheaval.

Maybe it was from this very room that Keynes, already in poor health but driven by an urgent public-minded imperative, had written letters to his ideological rival, Friedrich Hayek, with whom, despite their bitter policy disagreements, he had a rather cordial correspondence.

It was here, within these walls—

The snoring behind him stopped.

“Your glutes look good.”

“Glutei.” Nelson turned around.

Mike had awoken and was reclining on his elbow, squinting. “But I see handles forming. Gotta cut down on those carbs.”

They got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. They walked through the hotel lobby, a dimly lit, wood-paneled labyrinthine network of carpeted stairs, corridors, plush hideaway nooks, and secret, brass-fixtured bars. The walls were covered in nostalgic black-and-white photos, under golden picture lights, that catalogued the happenings of Prohibition-era Atlantic City, the old Boardwalk, the famous patrons.

“This is a nice place,” Mike said. “I like the aesthetic. A bootlegger’s lair. Very roaring twenties.”

“It was actually built in the 1930s,” Nelson said ponderously.

At the cafeteria, Nelson ordered eggs and bacon, mindful of Mike’s carbs comment. Mike got an omelet, a side of pork sausage, and a Bloody Mary that, after tasting, he sent back, asking for more vodka.

Nelson’s mind was still engrossed in the intricate workings of the monetary system, but Mike was in a chatty, buoyant mood.

“It was the place to be back then,” he said, taking a bite of the sausage. “That’s where all the shit was happening. We used to be a destination.” He sighed. “Marilyn Monroe stayed here. Sinatra.”

“FDR, too. Keynes.”

“Gaines?”

“Keynes. John Maynard Keynes. The famous economist.”

“Never heard.”

“He was a pretty big name in the nineteen-forties. Incidentally, a queer. With a beard wife. A ballerina.”

“Huh. What is he famous for?”

“He came up with this idea that governments can and should use monetary levers to regulate money supply and thus prevent economic and social collapse.”

“Doesn’t seem to work here in AC,” Mike scoffed. “We tried all kinds of levers.”

“On a municipal level it works differently,” Nelson said and paused. “He also predicted that the problem of scarcity will be resolved in a hundred years. And that we will have ample amount of leisure.”

Mike spent a minute mulling Nelson’s thesis.

“Yeah, well, he did not think it fully through, your Keynes,” he finally said and pulled out his phone. “This is what happens when people have too much leisure.”

He poked into the screen and held it in front of Nelson. Nelson saw a shaky YouTube video of a riot: it was nighttime, there was smoke and firecrackers. Two young persons, clad all in black, faces hidden behind balaclavas, were spraying graffiti over a strip-mall storefront’s window. “Abolish the police” and “ACAB,” they inscribed. The camera pivoted to another group of similarly faceless rioters who were igniting a pile of tires. One of them turned to the camera and shouted something about revolution.

“What does ACAB mean?” Nelson asked.

“All cops are bastards.”

A middle-aged black woman was caught in the camera frame. She was a civilian but not a bystander. Distraught, she chased after one dark figure, then after another, trying to grab them by their sweatshirts and backpacks, but they slinked away from her.

“What are you doing? Stop it!” she cried in anguish and threw her arms in the air. Soon she gave up and stood helplessly, turning, watching the mayhem around her, her palms pressed against her head. She saw that she was being filmed and moved toward the camera, waving. “This is not right! This is not right!” Her voice quivered, her eyes were full of pained disbelief, of the realization of some horrible betrayal. The video ended.

“This was in Detroit,” Mike said. “But these kids are here, in AC, now. Doing the same shit. Places in distress always attract all kinds of delinquents.”

“This is the result of fiscal neglect,” Nelson said. His voice sounded flat, distant, as if it was coming from the far end of a tunnel. He felt a knot in his stomach. He couldn’t shake off the second part of the video. That black woman’s valiant but doomed citizenship in the midst of chaos, her lostness, her loneliness, her despair, lingered in his mind. He lost his appetite.

“They’re not doing it because they have nothing to eat,” Mike said. “They’re doing it for clicks. That one got a million views. These kids they think they’re doing something good and meaningful, but they’re too stupid to define what’s good. So what we get is ugliness.” He paused. “But ugliness gets clicks. And, because they’re so stupid, they mistake clicks for meaning.”

Nelson was quiet for a moment and then said: “That’s the key tragedy of our times.”

“Yeah. So, fiscal policy is moot when there’s a nationwide loss of, uh, rectitude.” Mike said, sounding pleased both with his grim conclusion and with the bon mot he used. He dug into his omelet.

A waitress stopped by. Mike asked her for a second Bloody Mary.

“I’m enjoying your company, Nelson,” he said between bites. “I don’t get to have these kinds of intellectual conversations often around here. It’s a pleasure to meet a kindred spirit.”

“Happy to be of service,” Nelson replied.

Mike smiled. He put down his fork, leaned back in his chair and sighed. “But I think that there are some things that cannot be stopped. Sometimes, a collapse has to happen. It’s a purifying event. Purge all the excesses and start anew. I think we’re nearing the absolute bottom,” he said and then attended to his plate with renewed interest, pinning a large chunk of sausage. He wolfed it down and wiped his lips with a starched white napkin. “Which would mean it’s almost perfect timing to run for the city’s mayor. I’d be coming in on the rebound. Capture all the upside. As they say in your business, buy when there’s blood on the streets.” He glanced at Nelson, and Nelson bobbed in agreement.

“What about Euclid?”

“What about him? Look, it’s not like I’m rooting for him to fail. He’s just in over his head. He’s a fall guy. Not his fault. Not anybody’s fault.”

The waitress brought another Bloody Mary and put it in front of Mike.

“God bless him, though,” he said, taking a generous gulp.

Nelson got a text from Bobbi, asking whether he wanted to get breakfast and then head back to New York. He texted back that he had already had a coffee and a bagel and suggested they meet in half an hour in the Mariner Club’s lobby.

At the Claridge’s taxi stand, Mike was giving him diet and exercise tips, and then, as Nelson was getting into his taxi, Mike leaned over and whispered: “Hey, let’s continue our philosophical salon. I can come to New York. If you, uh, want to get together again.”

“Done and done.”

Mike gave him a wink and two thumbs up.

When Nelson’s taxi pulled to the Mariner Club’s valet driveway, Bobbi was sitting in the waiting area with her suitcase. Their company Escalade was parked nearby, in the VIP spot.

She saw him get out of the cab. “Ah, I see,” she said, giving him a gleefully acidic grin.

“I just gotta, uh, get my stuff upstairs,” he said quickly, avoiding eye-contact, breezing by.

“Take your time.”

He was back with his suitcase within ten minutes. He insisted on driving.

In their car, in a charged silence, Bobbi waited for him to volunteer an account of his nighttime adventures, but he kept mum. Finally, she gave up.

“Had a good night? You look relaxed and happy,” she said.

“Unlike you,” he replied. “You’re your usual tightly wound self. Long overdue for a good shaking.”

“Not for the lack of opportunities.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“Believe it or not, it was the police chief.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe it? I told you he played for your team. He laid an eye on you first time he saw you. How was it?”

“Viscerally invigorating. My joints ache.”

“Good.” She nodded.

Nelson waited for her to say more. “Well?” He nudged her.

“Well,” she said. “I got one invitation for a nightcap upstairs and one marriage proposal.”

“Ha. Let me guess. Euclid is the latter? That is so sweet.”

Bobbi let out an awkward chortle.

“And Gus must be the other one.”

“Yeah.”

“How rude. But if I were you, I’d take Gus up on his offer. Just to release some steam.”

“I don’t have any steam to release. We’re having lunch later this week, though.”

How adorable it is, Nelson thought, that Bobbi finds Euclid’s crush on her embarrassing. And how charming it is that Euclid thinks she’s some kind of delicate maiden made for his serenades. Love like this, sincere, chivalrous, is rare; it certainly doesn’t exist in Manhattan. But it is beautiful. It is remarkable that such a lowlife like Euclid can see the beauty, feel it in his bones, sing about it, to it. He sees through her icy façade. And she––my cornpone cracker, my roadkill-eater Bobbi, is unnerved by it. She distrusts such love. She wouldn’t even look at the guy if he weren’t a client, if she passed him on the street. She’s so thoroughly assimilated into this thing we do. She’ll probably end up marrying some asshole hedgie, and I’ll cry at the wedding––for what could’ve been.

“Hello?” Bobbi cut into his long silence. “Where did you go?”

“The Claridge.”

“The Claridge?”

“I wanted to check something out there. That place has some historical and cultural significance.”

“Maybe Ann was right about you. You are a romantic.”

And what a couple they would make, he thought, returning to his musings. Him, a provincial fool; her, with her ancestral grievances, her trailer-park resentments, her rebel DNA memory, her coiled rage at the world. A movie could be made about those two.

These thoughts brought a smile to his face, a smile that he made sure to hide from her.

Chapter 18: ON THIN ICE

It was Saturday, eleven o’clock in the morning, and Nelson was still in bed, with a headache and in a cranky mood.

Last night he couldn’t sleep. At first he was kept awake by obsessing about fine-print covenants on a couple of old loans on Omni Capital’s balance sheet. Then, as hours went by and he failed to doze off, his narrow professional worries expanded into a broader concern about the growing American discontent and about the probability of resulting social unrest. As he was tossing and turning, his ruminations further progressed into weighing the pros and cons of monarchy, the concept of nobility, and whether such a social and political order could once again exist in modern society. He fell asleep at around six in the morning, only after unburdening the outlines of his heavy reflections into his Notes app. He resolved to expand on those outlines in a future essay.

Now he was scrolling through Instagram on his phone, with a sour expression on his face. He studied the profiles of several dozen female influencers, all of whom cultivated a certain look: the pouty lips, the smoky eyes, the thick eyebrows, some penciled, some tattooed, but all in the shape of an inverted Nike swoosh. Nelson did not seek to deride these striving-for-attention young women, however; his interest was coldly sociological. He was intrigued by the insipid universality of their looks and sought to define and distill the psychological origin of this need for such a uniform appearance and to incorporate his findings into a long essay “On Beauty,” his current work-in-progress that was opened on his laptop, cursor blinking.

He put his phone down and stared at the already-written paragraph on the screen. He skimmed the text:

And what is beauty? Beauty is a harmonious interaction between imagination and understanding, according to Kant. Understanding is a key concept here, because Kant knew that that interaction doesn’t come from knowledge; it comes from cognition a priori, a certain understanding that we’re born with. This is the understanding that descends upon us when we’re in the presence of the sublime––art or nature. This is also the reason why we admire excesses in art and in architecture: they trigger the part of our brain that is aware of the cosmic, of the infinite, the part that is suspicious of logic and reason. Reason would’ve told us that those ornaments and frivolous indulgencies are useless and should be gotten rid of for the sake of efficiency and savings. But that other part senses a fraud. It is appalled to arrive at that conclusion.

He reread the passage two times, thinking of how to weave his recent Instagram observations into this narrative.

He shifted into a new paragraph and began typing: It is appalled because . . .

A thought that was just there, within his grasp, dissolved into the ether.

He picked up the phone and went back to his Instagram feed. Underneath the polished and filtered homogeny that had already begun to offend his senses, another pattern appeared. Many of these influencers did not meet the standards of classical beauty, he noted, gliding through the women’s selfies. Their faces were too round, eyes––anime big. Their expressions were a peculiar crossover between innocence and sluttiness. They were cute and pretty, like Disney-drawn princesses, but not beautiful. No Greek statues’ golden-ratio proportions. No calm knowledge in the gaze. Nelson, mercifully, gave these women the benefit of the doubt: it is possible that they knew of all of their imperfections and resorted to the universality as a way to belong. It is these well-defined standards––for eyes, for brows, for mouth, all easily replicated at a nearby salon and spa––that draw an average woman into this game. These influencers agreed on something, even if that something was not real beauty, but vapidity. But the substance of the agreement didn’t matter. What mattered was that it existed. This was their canon! These girls had an agreed-upon canon, a stupid and banal one, but a canon nonetheless. Everything else flowed from there. All of their other truths. The lack of ambiguity offered an average or even ugly woman an acceptable and easy way to designate herself as beautiful, to operate freely in a cruel online world. Because she has met the standards, all the vicious internet trolls can go fuck themselves.

Nelson liked his thesis, and he mulled it for possible weak points. If I put it out there, he thought, it can go viral in a bad way. Still, he wrote down a memento to expand on later: an easy way for an ugly woman to conduct herself as beautiful.

Pleased with his little breakthrough, he rolled out of bed, took an Advil, and made himself a cup of coffee. His headache eased, and he got dressed and went for a walk. The High Line Park that abutted his building in the back swarmed with tourists and weekend gawkers. He dreaded the neighborhood’s imminent gentrification as more glass towers went up around his rugged three-story brick walk-up, but he had resigned himself to it. He took the stairs up to the wooden walkway, hoping to disappear into the flow of the crowds.

He finessed the human currents for a while and soon gave up. He sat on a bench and thought of the time, just a few years ago, when this place was a weed-covered abandoned railway, inhabited by junkies and drug dealers, and, before that, in the decades past, industrial vigor. There is beauty in the decay, he thought. It reminds us of transience and death; this awareness, in turn, serves as a powerful catalyst for artistic endeavors. Perhaps the developers had known it too and sought to turn melancholy into a product. He noted how the park’s architects had been careful to preserve that rustic feel, keeping patches of stray, untended grass and fragments of the rail tracks intact. These vestiges of desolation and abandonment were, themselves, a commodity. Clever marketing, he admitted.

The same sentiment must be at work here, Nelson thought, as in my affinity for antiques. These relics are all tokens that connect us to a time when life had meaning. These tokens point at a time when we were all in agreement on what’s important. So a hedgie, who buys an apartment in that high-rise over here, instead of in Midtown, acquires a piece of that authentic past, as if being in proximity to the remnants of that past offers him an absolution.

He snickered.

Now a rich theme, sprouting with multitude of subplots that could be incorporated into his ambitious but currently stalled essay, was beginning to coalesce in his head, and he would hate to let it slip away. He reached for his phone and started typing, but his fingers got numb in the cold and couldn’t keep up with the avalanche of ideas. He opened the phone’s recorder and began dictating:

But a man is no different than those pitiful Instagram women. Like them, he seeks beauty but is forced to settle for a crude imitation. He is an American who, after a trip to Europe, and still enchanted by European culture, decorates his suburban home with a sword he bought on eBay. I noticed this pattern among my private-equity guys. Europe is the place they return to again and again, as if they’re looking for something that they lack in their hyper-efficient lives. Rome, Florence, Paris, Edinburgh––there was once a significance not of a technocratic nature to those places. There are traces of the sacred, reminiscences of the sublime. They enter those thousand-year-old cathedrals, they touch those mossy stones, and they’re transported into a more evocative, more chivalrous space. There, among ancient walls, they imagine that they, too, are noble knights, with the same moral aptitude and sensibilities, who just happen to live in a different era, with different quests and technologies.

His thoughts now rolled. He stopped to clear his throat and quickly continued:

And here they commit a category error. They try to apply medieval European sacrality to their modern American industriousness. That transposition could never work. The feudal times that they admire and long for were the times of honor and duty. But theirs is the realm of markets, of winning and profit. They wish to be honorable and gallant, but honor and gallantry are notions that sprout from a different ontological foundation. So a random private-equity guy, who has more money than a random medieval lord, could build a stone castle in Connecticut, and he could acquire signets of sovereign power, but in his heart of hearts he would know that it’s childish make-believe, and that what he takes to be sacred in his daily life––clever trades, billion-dollar positions––are cardboard cutouts of a true noble, selfless quest.

He caught his breath and went on:

If the guy is not stupid––and none of them are––he can trace his discontent to the correct origin. He has the intellectual capacity to accurately diagnose the problem. He senses, rightly, that it is impossible to be both a nobleman and a businessman, because one vocation is rooted in selflessness, another in self-interest. What he can’t bring himself to accept is the obvious solution. That solution would strip him of his cherished, proud American identity.

Nelson pressed “stop” on the recording and stood silent, leaning against the walkway’s handrails. He didn’t remember how he’d gone from sitting on the bench to now standing and staring at a crew of construction workers that labored at the bottom of a concrete pit below the Highline. The foreman in an orange hard hat shouted orders, and the working men listened. Nelson watched mindlessly for a minute as the men took instruction and scuttered back to their tasks. He turned the recorder back on.

Still, even that confused man has to be commended for his high-minded impulse. Simply because it is there. He is correct to identify this deeper truth, even though he’s mistaken about ways to recapture it. His methods are shallow and mostly cosmetic. But we should want him to maintain that illusion. It serves an important purpose. He has an outlet, however imperfect, to channel his moral instincts. He can’t be a knight, but at least he gets to play one in his suburban castle.

Important disclaimer: I will not extend the same leniency to the most contemptible group, the libertarians. There’s not even a smidge of nobility there. They’re wretched jokers with the morality of pirates and raiders. They have no feel for the transcendent, only for the enterprise. Their understanding of freedom is grotesque, their methods most destabilizing. In the name of freedom, they will gleefully tear the fabric that underlies our delicate social contract. A libertarian is a guy, who will claim, shaking with rage, that it is societal constraints that prevent him from claiming and manifesting his inner goodness. He does not comprehend, with his pea-sized, inward-looking brain, that to be noble is to be constrained.

Nelson stopped dictating and took a deep breath.

“I love to watch a building go up. It’s a beautiful sight.”

A skinny young man, bespectacled and acned, wearing hiking boots and a backpack, stood a few feet from him, elbows propped on the rails.

“A testament of progress.”

“Yeah,” Nelson mumbled.

The young man smirked. “I agree in general with what you say. Some good points. Except the part about libertarians. That’s a miss. If it wasn’t for pirates and raiders, we’d all still be dirty peasants. You should read––”

“Fuck off.” Nelson cut him off and scurried away.

Back at his apartment, he hurried to transcribe his recordings onto the page.

He opened his desk’s drawer and took a pink Adderall tablet from a plastic dime bag. He washed the pill down with red wine that he drank out of a bronze, ruby-encrusted chalice. To further put himself in the right mood, he connected his phone to a Bluetooth speaker and clicked on an iTunes playlist called “For Writing.” The list contained a compilation of covers of just one song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by about a dozen various artists. The original 1967 song opened and closed the list.

Four hours and a bottle of Pinot Noir later, a new draft emerged.

And what of a man who doesn’t have that luxury? What of a man, a common man, who’s been stripped of the means to show his innate gallantry? What of a man who wants to relay to us that he’s a good man, a moral man, that he has principles, that he has an understanding of the sublime, but is unable to adequately express that understanding? In medieval times, he could pour these sentiments into the love of God or the service of a king. Today, the absence of those outlets puts an emotional burden on him that he can’t carry. When the intensity of his understanding is stunted by the lack of adequate channels to communicate that intensity, when he is unable to articulate the sensations of divine awe to his fellow human beings, it is then that this deficiency finds strange, violent ways out of his psyche. It is this arrested mode of expression, this communicative impairment, that festers into resentment and victimhood, and, eventually, into hostility.

We’ve deprived that man of a canon! We took away his anchor. He’s been left alone to drift among treacherous currents, with no guidance, no mercy. Where will he find solace? In culture? In TV shows that tell him how depraved we are and that, with a cynical shrug, celebrate that depravity because it is in the service of survival? The prevailing cultural takeaway is that there’s no takeaway. Oh, no, we’re not scolds! A takeaway would require a moral judgment––an ask too big for our pay grade. Who are we to tell that man what to do? No, dear average person, it is all for you to figure it all out for yourself. And, guess what––good news! Whatever you end up figuring out, it’s all good and right.

That man’s inherent righteousness, mocked and neglected, is ripe for the taking by hucksters and grifters who will fill this moral vacuum by telling him that there’s no such thing as truth, no such thing as the universal, that there’s only the personal and the tribal. That morality is malleable. That beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That if he wants to be heard he needs to envelop himself in a grievance.

This is the danger. We have to find a way to let that man be heard, to let him know he is understood. If we don’t, we might not survive as a republic.

There is an inescapable dichotomy. As humans, we long for that common understanding, for the existence of an authority that cannot be questioned. As humans, we want something, someone out there to tell us, definitively, what is good.

As Americans, however, we do not. Our national ethos is that of a rebel and a renegade. We hate to acknowledge the need for an authority. We now live in a world where to conform to norms requires one to be a libertine and a cynic. We are a nation of schizophrenics: deep down, we long for rituals and sacrality, we seek its substitutes, but, at the same time, on the surface, we’re conditioned to mock the authority that could provide us with that sacrality. This dichotomy puts us onto a dangerous terrain.

Thus, if we are to defend and preserve Western civilization, it is not enough to defend the industrial age and the Enlightenment. In fact, it will do us no good. To preserve it would require a massive transgression, a revolutionary, punk-rock act where we all become scolds and prudes. Only then can we defend that place of a common truth that existed before the modern age. Only then can we begin to dig ourselves out of this rut. But we, Americans, we are not cool with something that cannot be questioned. We, Americans, will fail at this. It’s antithetical to our nature. We’re self-interested to a fault. We shun the common, we mock the sacred. Our favorite pastime, our specialty, is fractal excursions into the multitude of abstractions. And at what point do we stop sliding into more and more of those abstractions, each more niche than the other? We will continue to behave like unruly children, unable to face, let alone resolve, our biggest dilemma: The need for the sacred, but the pursuit of the utilitarian.

I hereby arrive at an unsettling conclusion. Liberal democracy is on shaky ground. It is built on two notions that antagonize each other. If we reject self-interest, then we can no longer call ourselves liberal. If, on the other hand, we allow that self-interest to go unchecked, then we deny ourselves a common space, an agreed-upon set of values, and we will thus lose democracy. We will replace it with ersatz canon that will crumble under the weight of contradictions.

How long can we keep it together? We existed in this small, tense space for two hundred and forty years, and the entire time it was an aberration, a balancing act on the edge of a knife. We’re on thin ice. This whole liberal project of ours is on thin ice. And it’s all because we can’t agree on what’s beautiful.

He reread what he’d written twice. He made small edits, copied the entire text into a new blog post, inhaled, and hit the “publish” button. He sat motionless, taking small sips of wine, refreshing the blog page, waiting for any comments. The comment section remained empty. He copied the link to his Instagram account and went to take a bath, telling himself that he really didn’t care what the masses on the internet would say.

Still, after the bath, wrapping himself in a large, fluffy towel, he went to check his blog once again. There were now two comments.

“Wtf, sounds kinda fashy,” one anonymous commenter had written.

A second comment came from someone with the number 88 in their screen handle, which Nelson took to mean their birth year: “Despite the fact that you’re a soy-boy cuck, glad that you’ve finally seen the light.”

Fucking idiots.

He plopped on the sofa and rested with his eyes closed, hand on his forehead. His headache returned.

Previous chapters.

It was standing room only in the Mariner Club’s events center. The large ballroom was decorated with American flags, tricolor buntings, and Ann Messerer’s campaign posters. On the stage, a Stars and Stripes and a New Jersey state banner bedecked the space behind the lectern. Below the stage, in the crowded audience pit, the makeshift bar was busy, with two bartenders dispensing chardonnay in plastic cups and beer in cans into a formless queue. On the speakers, pop and soft-rock tunes kept the attendees, who awaited the feature act, entertained.

Nelson was in his usual party mode, discreet and observant, while Bobbi was scrolling through messages on her phone with one hand, holding a wine cup in another. She lifted her head and scanned the crowd with a slight scowl.

“Who are these people, and why are they at this fundraiser?” she asked rhetorically and went back to her phone.

“They are from New Jersey,” Nelson replied into the ether.

Ann’s campaign manager, Gus Birnbaum, a slender, bespectacled smooth operator, jumped to the podium and tapped on the microphone. He pointed to the curtained part on the left wing of the stage and introduced Ann with a heartwarming bootstraps success tale: Atlantic City native from a working-class family. A daughter of a casino dealer and a hotel maid. A Rutgers graduate who built a brilliant career on Wall Street, but who left it all in order to serve the people in her home state.

There was applause and whistles.

Ann, dressed in a smart blue suit and a ruffled pink blouse, walked out onto the stage, miming surprise and gratitude. She held her palms out and down, calming the cheers, and gave a short, practiced stump speech that leaned heavily on economic issues––“Black, white, gay, straight, we all have to put food on our table,” and on the upcoming revival of the city—“Good bone structure, five-star resorts, world-class restaurants.” After she finished, she came off the stage and glided through the ballroom, greeting, schmoozing, shaking hands. Gus followed her, making small talk with select donors. Ann stopped by Nelson and Bobbi.

“Nelson! What a pleasure to see you here,” she chimed, grabbing both of his hands. “You look sharp as always. I hear business is good.” She regarded Bobbi with a welcoming smile.

“Business is good,” Nelson replied. “But talented young blood is breathing down our necks.” He patted Bobbi. “This is Bobbi, my right-hand man. She’s gonna push me into retirement soon.”

“Nah. We’ll keep him as a consultant,” Bobbi deadpanned to Ann’s laughter.

Ann’s eyes lingered on Bobbi’s face a few seconds too long, coming alive, for a brief moment, with a pointed discernment of a player recognizing an equal, before switching back to a default expression of blank politesse.

“Be gentle with Nelson,” she said, chuckling, to Bobbi. “There’s an inner romantic underneath that cynical shell.”

“A romantic?” Bobbi cried with mock astonishment. “You’re in the wrong business, man.”

“I’m in it mostly for people-watching,” Nelson said with a giggle.

“I actually believe you,” Ann said. “Anyway, if you’re pushed into retirement, call me. We can use your skills in the public sector.”

“Thank you,” Nelson said. “But I’m . . . I’m . . . ” He fake-stuttered. “I don’t have sharp elbows like you. Not sharp enough for politics, anyway.”

“As a political consultant”—Ann winked at Bobbi—“we will use your deep insight into the human psyche.”

“Deal then,” Nelson said with sudden enthusiasm.

“Are you guys the bankers behind the Skylark deal?” Gus asked Bobbi after Ann moved on. “I think I might have spoken to you on the phone.”

“Yes, that’s us,” Bobbi replied.

“Are you Bobbi LaBrea?”

“Yes.”

“We should talk more. You’re staying for the afterparty?”

“I think so.”

“Good. And thank you for your contribution. It is much appreciated. You, too, Nelson. It is very nice to finally meet you in person,” Gus said and hurried to catch up with Ann.

“How long have you known her?” Bobbi asked Nelson.

“For more than twenty years. We both started as analysts at Marcus Roth.”

A select group of donors, the VIPs who had maxed out their donations to Ann’s campaign, had moved from the ballroom to a private party outside by the pool. It was getting dark, and the poolside bar and the potted palm trees lit up with garland lights. The hired band––Euclid and his team––began playing old rock tunes, while the guests, happy to finally discard their stiff official posture, coagulated into several gossiping, cackling clusters.

Bobbi went to greet Euclid, who, upon seeing her approach, started swinging his arm dramatically after each chord and shaking his head like the lead singer of an eighties hair band. She flashed him a thumbs-up and mouthed “awesome” then turned to the bar to get a drink. She asked for vodka cranberry, tipped the bartender, and strolled to an empty plastic poolside table.

Nelson positioned himself on a chaise lounge, holding a nonalcoholic beverage. He sipped his drink with a melancholy expression.

At the edge of the pool, a group of festive New York fund managers surrounded Ann. Ann was relating a story, the details of which Nelson could not hear, but he could tell, by the bursts of laughter––belly deep, tear inducing––and by Ann’s relaxed demeanor, that the men in the group were all trusted associates and that her riveting late-night anecdote was not meant for public consumption but served as an exclusive, in-kind repayment for these donors’ generous campaign contributions.

Over by the bar, Nelson spotted Tilton in the company of Yair Aronow, a Florida real-estate investor. Nelson didn’t know Yair personally but knew of him from news reports and industry papers. Yair specialized in distressed properties, scooping assets during hard times for pennies on the dollar and selling them later at a profit. Nelson thought that Yair’s presence here was a bullish sign for this place, and that there would most likely be other players like him, scouting for deals. He made a mental note to discuss Yair’s presence at this party with Bobbi later.

He took his phone and texted Bobbi: “You should try and talk to Yair, if you can. See what he’s up to.” He scanned the pool area, looking for her.

Bobbi was on the opposite end of the pool, now accompanied by Gus, Ann’s campaign manager. Gus talked animatedly, and Bobbi listened to him with a blank face but nodded politely. Nelson wondered about the topic of their conversation, floating various theories in his mind, finding himself subtly rooting for Gus, whatever his message was.

He turned his attention to the band, which had just finished playing a spirited rendition of Cream’s ‘White Room,” per Ann’s request. Euclid and Peter were deciding on the next song, gently strumming their guitars. Then Euclid opened slow in a minor key; the tune quickly accelerated into an energetic Southern jam before descending back to a melodic refrain where Euclid started singing. It was another cover song, and, as Nelson was trying to guess the name of the original band, he saw that Euclid peered, midsong, from the stage into the corner where Bobbi and Gus were talking. “I’m just a player,” Euclid wailed. “You are the shoooow, ooooh-ooooh.” Peter and Larry joined him as vocal backup, howling along in a trilateral choral harmony.

Nelson smiled, thinking of Bobbi, wondering whether she paid enough attention to this serenade, to this longing for her attention, whether she had the capacity to understand that she was the only intended recipient of this old love ballad. This thought overwhelmed him, and he stood up and went to the bar to get a stronger drink. He asked the bartender for Belvedere on the rocks. As the liquor’s warmth spread through his joints, he continued his study of the party scene, consumed by cozy euphoria.

“Don’t like the crowds?”

He glanced up and saw Mike, the police chief, standing over the next chaise lounge. Mike was dressed casually and held a plastic cup with a pink frozen margarita. Nelson invited him to sit down, and Mike lowered himself onto the edge of the chair, putting his drink on the ground. He placed his elbows on his knees and sighed.

“I don’t like it either,” he said. “But business is business, right?”

“That’s right.”

Mike looked down on his patterned shorts and boat shoes and chortled. “I’m in civilian capacity here. Not law enforcement.”

“That’s good to know. I can let my freak flag fly then,” Nelson said with a smile.

Mike laughed. “Ann and I, we go way back, you see. So she invited me. I couldn’t say no.”

“Really? Me too. I’ve known her for decades.”

“She’ll win this thing, no doubt. She has the chops.”

“For sure.”

Now Mike kicked back and stretched on the chaise. “So you’re in private equity, huh?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I hear that word thrown a lot these days. How is it different from banking?”

Nelson shrugged. “We’re less bound by the regulatory rules.”

“I see.”

“If we were a publicly traded company, we could never get the Skylark loan approved, for example,” Nelson decided to elaborate.

“Aww. Let’s hope you make money then.”

“We should. If that place is properly maintained,” Nelson said, putting a slight vocal emphasis on “properly maintained,” and flashed Mike a sly smile.

“Yeah, now that you mention it, I gotta say that Skylark’s security is one of the top priorities for my department. On Ann’s orders. We are a bit short on resources, I have to admit, so I have to do a lot of legwork myself. But I’ve been tracking these kids––some anarchists, antifa, who the hell knows what they are. Troublemakers. They think that AC is some kind of playground for their grievances, whatever those are.” He shook his head. “But I’m on to them. I’m on to them.”

“Good. I hope you’ll catch them.”

Mike shifted in his seat and took a sip of his margarita. “Politics is downstream of culture, they say. I tend to agree. Don’t you notice how it all started going downhill around the nineties? We’re about the same age, no? You’re, what, in your forties?”

Nelson nodded.

“I’m fifty. So we came of age at about the same time. Remember the eighties? The music. The movies. Back then they strove for something bigger than just entertainment. There was still some searching for beauty.”

“Yes. Although I’d argue the decay had already started then.”

“Maybe. Still, the songs used to be about love. About longing for love. Today it’s about bros and hoes.” Mike cringed. “Today nothing matters.”

“I don’t disagree,” Nelson said ruefully. “But what can one do against such an onslaught?”

“Preserve beauty in his own little world,” Mike said after a long pause. “Retreat into a certain aesthetic.” Mike said those words slowly, examining Nelson’s face.

“It’s risky these days. You’ll be accused of . . . things.”

Mike shrugged and scoffed. “I’m a cop. I’m used to it.” He glanced at Nelson. “Must be different for you up there in New York, huh? They put you through all kinds of training.”

“Not in private equity. We have no time for that. But I get your point.”

“Come to AC if you need a respite,” Mike said quietly. “We’re old school here.”

The band on the stage finished the song, and the sudden sonic lull reset the flow of the party.

“Euclid!” came a shout from Ann. “Peter, Larry, guys, take a break, come have a drink.”

“Listen,” Mike said, his breath uneven. “If you want to get out of here, the Chelsea Hotel has a nice bar. There’s a scene there, if you want to check it out. It’s only a mile away.”

Nelson and Mike sneaked out of the party. Nelson shot a parting glance at Bobbi and saw that she was now relaxed and laughing at Gus’s remarks.

At that point, Bobbi was on her third drink.

“That guy is kind of dumb,” Bobbi was saying to Gus giddily, subtly pointing at a well-dressed, middle-aged donor. “I see him on TV from time to time. He doesn’t usually know what he’s talking about.”

“Well. He’s a big donor.”

“He’s not smart.”

“He plays dumb in public. He’s not serious about it,” Gus said breezily and stared at Bobbi. “It helps him sell books,” he added with a self-evident inflection and a probing squint. “Oh, come on.”

Gus scanned Bobbi’s face for a reaction at this indisputable rationale, expecting either a glib giggle or a cynical acquiescence, but Bobbi fell silent, and her silence was full of searching anxiety. She ran her fingers over the condensation on her glass and played nervously with the straw.

“It always starts off as a joke,” Bobbi said.

“It’s politics. Everyone is a performer,” Gus said with a sigh.

“May I join you?” Euclid shuffled in, red faced, with a glass of beer in hand. “Hello, sir,” he said to Gus, and Gus acknowledged him silently. Euclid turned to Bobbi. “You liked my last song?”

“Yeah. You have a beautiful voice. What was it? The Outlaws?”

“Sweet Lord, yes!” He turned to Gus, his thumb pointing in Bobbi’s direction. “She’s from the South, this one. She knows her shit.”

“Oh?” Gus raised his eyebrows and looked at Bobbi. His surprise was genuine.

A few feet away, Ann was rambling and cackling, and so was her entourage. They all throbbed with gleeful, drunken energy.

“All of you fuckers gonna pay taxes on my watch,” Ann screamed from the top of her lungs and broke into hysterical laughter, hoisting her glass. She teetered on the edge of the pool, spinning her arms, but lost her balance and plunged into the water, her shoes flying.

“Fuck! Excuse me,” Gus said. He leaned toward Bobbi’s ear and whispered, “I’m in room 1206 if you wanna stop by later,” before rushing away to his boss’s rescue.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Ann chanted, spitting and coughing and rubbing her eyes as the men fished her out of the shallow end of the pool.

Gus went around and ordered everyone to delete pictures of Ann’s ignominy, if any were taken. “All right, everybody,” he then shouted. “Let’s wrap it up now.”

Euclid put his drink on the table. He looked at Bobbi and gestured in Gus’s direction. “Was he hitting on you?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to beat around the bush. You and I should go on a date,” he said quickly.

Caught off guard, Bobbi stared into space, searching her brain for a witty, non-obliging reply but failed to come up with a good one. “I’m flattered. But it would be completely inappropriate. You’re a client.”

“What if I wasn’t a client?”

“Well, you are.”

“One day I won’t be.”

“What if I have a boyfriend?”

He drilled her with a long stare. “I don’t think you have one.”

“Really? Why?”

“I think you scare men. Yeah, they’re afraid of you. That spikiness.” He squinted.

“But I don’t scare you?”

“You do,” he replied, shifting weight on his feet. “But we do business together. I don’t have a choice.”

“You’re not making any sense. And how come you don’t have a girlfriend? A lead singer in a rock band. Hard to believe. Chicks should be all over you.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend. I have callouses on my hands.” He held up his palms.

Bobbi couldn’t hold back a giggle and promptly cursed herself for reacting like a schoolgirl to his juvenile humor.

“From playing guitar!” he cried. “What did you think?”

“Even if you think that I thought that, there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You have a dirty mind, lady!”

“You tell me these sixth-grade jokes and then you mock me for the very reaction that you were fishing for.”

“Not mocking. I’m glad you thought it was funny.” He picked up his glass and took a big gulp. “You’d make a fine first lady of Atlantic City,” Euclid mumbled, hiding his mouth behind the glass, and then coughed and sniffed.

The audacity. The childlike levity. Should she pretend to not have heard it? Bobbi was silent for a few seconds and then issued another awkward giggle and sipped her drink.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Anyway, I’m practicing this method called ‘picking.’ That’s where the callouses are from.”

“Interesting.”

Bobbi saw that Yair and Tilton were heading for the exit. “Excuse me,” she said. “I gotta talk to that guy. But hold that thought.”

“Sure. And like I said, I’m serious!” he shouted as he watched her speed away toward the door.

The taxis and limos were lined up at the Chelsea Hotel entrance driveway. Groups of patrons, dressed for a night of clubbing, swarmed the valet stand, while others emerged from the arriving cars. Mike and Nelson’s taxi got trapped in an unmanaged, honking chaos, when their passenger door got blocked by a black stretch limo. In front of them two men, one in a sequined jacket and pink cowboy hat, the other in tight top and shorts, skipped the valet line and got into a taxi, one giving the other a slap on the buttocks.

Mike glanced at Nelson, weighing his reaction.

“I thought you hated the crowds,” Nelson remarked.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Mike said nervously. He put his hand on Nelson’s lap.

Nelson was a pleaser. He couldn’t say no.

“We can skip the drink,” Nelson said. He leaned forward to the taxi driver: “Take us to the Claridge,” he commanded.

After leaving Euclid by the pool, Bobbi chased after Yair but lost track of him on the casino floor. She wandered around the ringing slot machines for a while before finding a secluded spot with an entire empty row of video poker. She sat down at one terminal, put a hundred-dollar bill into the whirring slit, and tuned out. She spent an hour mindlessly hitting on a button and feeding the machine hundred- and then twenty-dollar bills until her wallet was empty.

It was long past midnight when Bobbi went back to her hotel room. As she waited for the elevator, she watched, in thrall, a janitor who was gliding his carpet-cleaning machine back and forth over the fenced-off area of a psychedelically colored carpet.

“Hope you won,” the janitor said as he completed one lap, coming near Bobbi.

“I wasn’t playing,” she replied.

Previous chapters

Kenny Knapp had been following a beat-up Honda Civic with New York plates around town for half a day. His pursuit had commenced spontaneously earlier that morning at a Dunkin Donuts parking lot, where he spotted its passengers: two androgynous figures clad all in black, with hoods covering their heads and faces. Inside the coffeeshop they stood in line before him, and he caught himself thinking that these two did not look like gamblers or vacationers. What would two New Yorkers, covered head-to-toe in black, be doing in Atlantic City on a chilly, windy spring day if not dunking their money at a casino or at the shopping mall? Kenny’s Spidey sense went on high alert.

One of the strange visitors went to use the shop’s bathroom while the other waited, and Kenny, after getting his coffee, went back to his truck. He loitered near the parked Honda and peeked inside. The back seat was messy: empty cans and plastic bottles, candy wrappers, a laundry basket with dirty clothing. There were also stacks of papers that looked like a newsletter. Kenny leaned closer to read the letterhead: Bakunin Bulletin. In his truck, as he waited for the New Yorkers to come out, he googled Bakunin Bulletin. The search took him to a YouTube channel. A video showed a riot in Detroit: a flock of kids, all dressed in black, spraying graffiti and breaking the window of a strip-mall storefront. In another clip, a similar group of faceless punks was setting a parked car on fire in Portland, Oregon. The one in Portland had more than a million views.

“Bingo,” he whispered. From his glove compartment, he took out a holstered handgun and latched it onto his belt.

He followed them to 7-Eleven, where they got cigarettes and a six-pack of beer. They bickered a little in the parking lot. Kenny only heard a muffled dispute. “That one, with a nose ring, must be a girl,” he mumbled to himself.

They sat in the car, smoked and drank beer for a while, after which they drove toward Skylark and parked on an empty street one block away from the shuttered casino. Kenny watched them from a gas station on a side street.

They got out of the car, retrieved two heavy backpacks from the trunk, and moved on foot toward the casino. Their faces were now concealed with black gaiters. They cut a hole in the wire fence with large wire cutters and ran up the ramp to the abandoned valet pickup area. A large piece of plywood covered the glass entrance; they pried one side open with a tire iron and sneaked inside.

Kenny squeezed through the hole in the fence and followed the kids inside the casino. Shards of broken glass crackled under his feet, and he stood still, listening to the intruders’ talk as they moved deeper into the building. When they were far enough that he could no longer hear their chatter, he treaded in their footsteps, keeping a safe distance.

He entered the casino’s cathedral-like reception area. Its giant stained-glass atrium wall soaked in midday sunlight, splintering the incoming beams into a rainbow mosaic on the surfaces of the abandoned interior: banquettes, armchairs, dead potted plants, and the covered Steinway grand piano. Kenny crouched and hid behind the empty bellboy stand and watched the kids unload their backpacks.

One of them took out a yellow lighter-fuel container from the bag. The other took their phone out and began filming. The first kid said something to the camera and sprayed the fluid all over the Steinway. Then, with a dramatic flair, the masked arsonist lit a lighter and paused, holding it near the grand piano, looking into the camera.

“Hold it!” Kenny barked and moved slowly toward them, holding his gun firmly with both hands. “I got you, fuckers. This is a citizen’s arrest. Let me see your hands.”

The kids froze. They slowly lifted their arms.

“Turn around.”

They complied.

“Well, hello, boys,” Kenny blared as the two kids stood silently, their faces still concealed by gaiters. “Or girls. It’s hard to tell these days.”

One of the arsonists jolted and sprinted for the exit. Kenny aimed his gun for the fugitive’s leg and fired. The arsonist screamed and fell, grasping at their thigh.

“You fucking shot him!” the other, a girl, shrieked and ran toward her comrade.

His gun still aimed at the two intruders, Kenny slowly approached the wounded and squatted. With his index finger, he hooked the black face gaiter and stripped it from the wounded arsonist’s face. “So. A boy. And a girl. How romantic.” He examined the boy’s leg. “I grazed you,” Kenny said with satisfaction. “It’s a flesh wound. You’ll live. Damn, I’m good.”

“He’s fucking bleeding!” the girl cried.

“The tree of liberty and all that,” Kenny replied with a lazy scoff.

“The fuck, man!” the young man groaned.

“We gotta get him to a hospital,” his girlfriend said, nearly sobbing.

“There’s urgent care nearby. They’ll give you a Band-Aid and Tylenol there. Maybe Oxy, if you’re lucky. Ha.”

Kenny searched and emptied the kids’ pockets. They were both from New York. The girl had a Starbucks employee card and twenty-two dollars in her wallet. The boy had an expired Columbia University student ID card and no money. “What is the purpose of your visit here?”

“None of your business,” the young man croaked.

“It fucking is.” Kenny played with the gun near the arsonist’s face.

“We’re accelerationists,” the girl said quickly.

“Ah. And what are you accelerating?”

“The collapse,” the young man said.

“Ha. Why do you wanna do that?”

“No other levers of change are working. How else does one get himself heard these days? Write an article? Go on a march?” The boy scoffed.

“Okay.” Kenny nodded. “And then what happens? After the collapse?”

“Justice,” the girl said, and added with some agitation: “Like, the rent will be three hundred dollars instead of fifteen hundred. And we won’t have to work anymore, not for, like, a corporation anyway. We will have a basic income, and we will be free to do what we want.”

“Uh-huh,” Kenny said. “I hear ya. You know, I was like you when I was younger. I wanted to smash it all up. Then I spent time in the military. There was strict order there. There could be no disobedience. No frivolities. And everything functioned perfectly. You knew what to expect. There were answers for everything. Everything worked like clockwork. It’s like there was an algorithm. And you know what? I felt free there. Now, here on the civilian side, there’s no algorithm. Here, there’s too many options. I can do what I want. I can become a girl if I want to. Heh. Is that freedom? I dunno. But in the military I felt free. Go figure. A paradox, huh? Order makes us free.”

“You should read Hobbes,” the young man said in a strained voice. “You’ll like him.”

“Who’s that?”

“Some English dude. He advocated for a strong state.”

“Ha. I’m not for a strong state at all.”

“You just said that you like order.”

There was some strained thinking behind Kenny’s tensed, wrinkled forehead. “I like Ron Paul,” he finally said. “He has some great ideas. Like, he wants to get rid of the Federal Reserve.”

“We do, too,” the boy said.

“Yeah, because that would save the dollar.” Kenny sounded encouraged.

“Except they don’t want to save the dollar. They want to devalue it. Then they won’t have to pay the debts.”

“Ding-ding-ding-ding.” Kenny imitated a jackpot jingle. “Exactly. It’s all manipulated.” He relaxed his grip on the gun and sat on the floor. “I mean, these are the folks who pulled off 9/11.” Kenny’s eyes narrowed as he gauged his captives’ reaction. “Steel beams don’t melt from airplane fuel.”

“No,” the young man said, subtly squeezing his girlfriend’s hand. “They don’t.”

“That’s right. It was all an inside job. You’re not as dumb as I thought you were, kiddo. What’s your name?”

“Zach.”

“And the young lady?”

“Emily.”

Kenny’s posture softened, and he sighed. “You’re a smart kid, Zach.” Kenny lowered his gun. “Yeah, to think that they were not in control, that they simply failed . . .” He trailed off and shook his head. “No. That is impossible. The best intelligence in the world. They had to know. So they either knew and let it happen or they did it themselves.” He shrugged as Zach listened to him with bated breath. “Right? There’s no other way. I’m inclined to believe the latter.”

Kenny took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one up and took a long drag. Zach and Emily were quiet but tracked his movements closely. He let the smoke out through his nostrils.

“So it goes to show that the reason they don’t make our lives better is because they don’t want to. If they wanted to, they would’ve done it by now. If they don’t do something, it’s because they mean not to do it. The United States is a machine that can’t fail. Because if it does . . .” Kenny waved his hand and looked longingly through the atrium glass wall at the sun that was beginning to set. “It would be unthinkable.” He put his gun back in the holster on his hip. “And this is where you two are mistaken,” Kenny went on. “That’s why you’re naïve to think that you can start a collapse. The collapse can only come from the inside. Like, when you’re inside the system. Only then you can make change. So you two better go get some jobs. Rise through the ranks and all that.” Kenny helped Zach from the floor. “Come on. Let’s get outta here.”

Zach wrapped his arms around Kenny’s and Emily’s shoulders, and the three of them moved slowly toward the exit.

“I’m glad you learned something today,” Kenny said as they stumbled onto the street. “But you gotta stop thinking so small scale. Atlantic City is not the right place for you to start your revolution. We’re too small. You gotta think big.”

They approached their Honda. Kenny adjusted the passenger seat and held the door for Zach, helping him down gently. He gave the girl instructions on how to get to the nearest hospital, in Toms River.

“Anyway, I do miss the order, though.” He sighed. “I miss the military. I felt free there. A paradox, huh?” He leaned toward the half-opened passenger window. “But don’t come here no more. Next time I see you here, you’re getting arrested.”

Previous chapters

The Whispering Reeds trailer park sat on the west side of the city, on a sloped hill that descended into the silty, reedy edge of the saltwater marshes. On top of the hill, right where the paved road ended and the thick brushes of kudzu and poison ivy marked the line between the dryland and the swamp, stood the sewage plant. The plant’s wire perimeter fence was disassembled. Several trucks were parked in a random manner on the weedy lawn. Behind the plant, a few yards farther down the slope, on a narrow strip of land, there were mounds of gravel and sand, cement mixers, and an excavator, all ready for the groundbreaking ceremony.

Euclid, Tilton, Peter, and Sheryl arrived at the park’s gate and walked down the paved path, crisscrossed by muddy tire tracks, toward the plant and then down to the water. Tilton observed all the construction equipment and the piled-on materials with a squint and a knowing satisfaction.

A local TV crew that Tilton had booked to document the historic event were unloading their equipment at the water’s edge. The crewmembers took shots of the area and then asked Euclid to pose for some camera tests.

The day was windy, and Euclid’s hair kept rising with the gusts and standing vertically in the wind like a weightless feather. After several attempts to control it, the chief TV producer, Troy, lent him his own tweed flatcap.

Euclid took the shovel that Peter had brought and burrowed it into the soft, silty ground. He leaned on the spade with his boot and let the cameraman take a shot.

“Take a few digs,” Troy instructed. Euclid took several enthusiastic stabs at the soil.

Against the backdrop of a large yellow John Deere excavator, with its bucket positioned high in the air, Troy filmed the cutting of the ribbon. Tilton and Peter held the ribbon’s ends, with Peter urging Euclid to not fuck it up because “it’s the only one I got.” Euclid sliced it perfectly, to sporadic applause and hoots from the few trailer-park residents attending the ceremony.

Troy told Euclid and the crew to move toward several large heaps of granite pebble and construction sand. He intended to film Euclid from below, with an extreme low-angle shot, and, to get a good enough angle, he commanded Euclid to climb on the pile of stones. He kneeled with his camera on the ground.

“Yeah, one foot up,” he said. “A look of determination.”

Euclid tried to comply with Troy’s artistic vision, assuming a dramatic contrapunto stand, but his feet kept sinking into the pebbles. After a few takes they scrapped the idea.

“Let’s just move on to the speech,” Troy said.

Flanked by Tilton and Peter, Euclid stood in front of a microphone, unfolded a piece of paper, and began reading from it.

“It is a great honor to welcome all of you here today. Today is a special day. This day shall mark the beginning of a new era, a time when we lay a new foundation––literally and figuratively––to our city’s renaissance and leave behind the troubles that befell us for decades,” Euclid recited, glancing at the bullet points written with a thick black marker.

“What will our comeback look like? It all starts with a partnership. We’re teaming up with seasoned professionals––Mr. Tilton here––who is someone with skin in the game, whose interests are aligned with ours. Mr. Tilton and his crew of experienced contractors have worked on multiple projects building and reinforcing flood infrastructure along the Delaware coastline. The tools and the methods that they use are state-of-the-art, and the technology has been copied from what they do in the Netherlands. And let me tell ya, the Dutch know a thing or two about how to build a dike.”

Euclid chuckled and looked at Tilton, who grinned and shook his head in agreement.

“So our revival begins with ensuring environmental resilience, first and foremost. This is the most crucial element. Only after we’ve conquered the forces of nature can we proceed to return our city to its past glory, to turn it back into an economic powerhouse, into America’s beloved playground.”

Euclid cleared his throat and looked at the camera crew. The cameras were rolling, and Troy motioned for him to keep talking.

“And what is a dam? A dam is more than just a dam. It is an idea, a symbol of rebirth. It is our collective purpose, a place of common understanding. The flood doesn’t care for our politics. It comes for all of us in equal measure. And we have to face it as one.”

“Euclid!” a redhead named Candice shouted from the top of the slope. She wore flip-flops and colorful leggings, and carried a chihuahua under her arm. As she tried to come down from the hill, she started sliding on the clay, dropped the dog, and nearly fell face down, but with rigorous twists of her body and arms regained her balance. “We just want to be able to flush a shit down,” she cried when she made it safely to the bottom.

“And you shall!” Euclid said, pointing at her. “A good bowel movement demands a functioning infrastructure. It is the foundation of a perfect day.”

Everyone giggled, and Euclid, encouraged, continued.

“We’re not the only resort town that has to deal with hostile natural elements. Look at Las Vegas. They deal with another extreme. They’re in the middle of the freaking desert. Their water sources are disappearing. And yet. And yet! They’ve built a paradise. I don’t see any reason why we can’t replicate their success here on the swamps. We could, of course, bicker and point fingers and look for the culprit, but the time has come to . . . has come for . . . for, uh, our better angels to bring out the best in us.”

Tilton coughed and leaned into the microphone, nudging Euclid away.

“Let me put it to you simply,” Tilton said. “In a language we can all understand. It all comes down to your pocketbook issues. Right now, all your homes, all your possessions, are not protected from the elements. Because no insurance company will sell you a policy. Right? And even if it did, it would cost you, what, four, five grand a year?”

There were nods and yelps, and, getting the attention he wanted, Tilton continued.

“So this seawall will essentially work as your insurance policy. The great thing about this insurance policy is that it comes with massive tax credits. So not only will we get protection, it will not cost us any extra expenses. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. So there you have it. I yield back to Mr. Dwyer.”

He stepped away from the mic.

“It’s hard to top that, huh,” Euclid said, smiling. “So this project here is a mere taste of what we can do. With the right vision and resources, we can finally secure all of our community from further environmental precarity. There had to be a political will to do it. And today it is here. I am the guarantor of it.”

Euclid put the paper notes back into his pocket. He glanced at Troy, who gave him two thumbs up and gestured to continue for two more minutes. Euclid turned his head and observed the vast, seagrass-covered wetlands that extended into the pale horizon. He sniffed, gathering his thoughts.

“The flood will come, and more trials will be upon us,” Euclid said, his voice now laden with sober cadence. “Our resolve will be tested again. But we will prevail. Why? Because the people of Atlantic City are the most resilient breed of people I’ve ever met. We’re used to adversity. We are hit hard, over and over, but we never give up. Because we have nowhere else to go. This sandy patch of land is our last stand. We’re squeezed between the ocean on one side and the marshes on the other. Atlantic City is a metaphor of life as it is. Our existence here is involuntary and chaotic. A man is thrown into this life . . . And he has to bring order to the chaos . . . And then he has to leave. It is the finality of it that . . . that . . .”

As Euclid rambled, a young TV crew assistant was surreptitiously recording the trailer-park residents listening to the speech. He stood at the water’s edge, facing inland, and set his tripod camera at a wide angle, and moved it slowly, zooming in on each face in the audience: skeptical, gum-chewing, toking on a cigarette, faces stamped with hardships and delusions. The camera lens lingered on Kenny. Sensing the lens’s gaze, Kenny scanned around for the source of the intrusion, found it, grinned and posed and puffed his chest. A few women, too, detected an observer, and began posturing, arching their backs, puckering their lips and making victory signs. Only Vern was indifferent to being filmed: he sat on a block of concrete, slumping, looking defeated, chewing on a blade of grass.

“Cut!” Troy shouted at his crew.

“You know, I can also play something,” Euclid said to Troy, who was examining the fresh reel. “I have my guitar and the amp here.” He extended his arm toward the gray melancholy vista. “This backdrop. We can put, like, a flag behind me.”

“Yeah,” Troy responded after taking a respectable pause to give Euclid’s offer a thorough consideration. “That wouldn’t quite work. The sound. Too much wind.” He turned back to the reel. “Ooh, this is gold,” he said as he looked at his assistant’s b-roll footage. “Who filmed this? You?” he asked the young man. “This is neorealism. Felliniesque. Very good.”

Peter opened a champagne bottle and filled an array of plastic glasses, and the festive offering got quickly consumed by the members of the TV crew and the residents.

All of the ceremony attendees, including the Whispering Reeds tenants who had showed up, received an invitation for a free concert and pizza at the Dunes. In the nursing home dining room, all the tables were pushed along the walls, and chairs were arranged in several rows before the stage. Hot pepperoni pies already awaited, stacked in cardboard boxes on one table, along with packs of soda cans and plastic plates and cutlery, all courtesy of Tilton. Vern and Kenny put on vinyl aprons and helped the guests, slicing the pizza and pouring the drinks into red plastic party cups.

Euclid, on stage with his bandmates, tuned his guitar, and the band tested the room’s mood by playing basic classic rock staples.

Maureen braved the dance floor alone at first, clumsy but spirited, kicking her boney legs, and daring others with her passages. Soon more ladies joined her.

Tilton watched them with the amusement of a cad watching a trained animal ride a bicycle. “She’s got the moves, that one,” he said.

Daphne leaned over to Tilton and whispered something in his ear. He reacted with an over-the-top expression, a crossover between surprise and entertainment. A few songs later, when the band, complying with the demands from the female audience members, who outnumbered men three to one, began playing John Fogerty’s “Rock and Roll Girls,” Daphne prompted Tilton to the dance floor, grabbing his hands and swaying. Tilton obliged her, moving and shaking with excessive, jesting clownishness.

Previous chapters

CHAPTER 12: THERE ARE NO LAWS IN THIS GAME

That fall the entire mid-Atlantic section of the East Coast dodged a major hurricane. Winter came early. In late October, the cold eastern winds glided over the ashen, swollen sea and crashed into the seaside condos with a force that made the window frames squeak and bend, and pounded the glass with a pointed staccato rain, before rolling farther westward over the coastal plains. The gusts ripped the hats off the Boardwalk pedestrians foolish enough to venture outside for a stroll and scuffled the roof tiles from the seaside bungalows. Still, most residents welcomed the drop in temperatures––a relief from a long, hot summer.

Euclid and Sheryl had spent weeks reshuffling city bills while waiting for Omni Capital’s to come through with a financing solution. There were interest payments due on bonds and old loans, plus the Skylark’s maintenance bill––all a priority, all coming before a penny could be disbursed toward public needs.

In November, when Euclid was on the verge of furloughing more public employees and cutting their salaries, some relief came from Trenton. Ann called and told them that she had managed to wrestle a postponement of the tax abatement from the casino owners. “I got you some breathing room for the next six months,” she said. “They agreed to wait until May. So you can focus on getting the Skylark loan. Still, put some money aside for those guys. They’re growing impatient.”

More good news came a week later when the term sheet for Skylark’s loan dropped from Bobbi: forty-five million dollars at a seven percent annual interest rate and a five-year maturity.

Euclid was buoyant, but Sheryl had concerns about the size of the loan.

“Forty-five million against a property that was valued at a billion dollars just two years ago!” she said, shaking her head.

“Hey, it’s cash in our pocket,” he countered.

“Debt is not cash, Euclid. And I think it should’ve been more than forty-five. Against that property.”

“Let’s call Bobbi,” he said. “You can ask her about the amount.”

On the speakerphone, as soon as he heard Bobbi’s voice, Euclid greeted her with a mellifluous acapella blues, wailing into the speakers: “Lady banker, lady please, how much does money mean…,”1 before Sheryl cut him off.

“Bobbi, Sheryl here,” she said, eyeing Euclid with a ‘let me do the talking’ glance. “I guess my question is about the size of the loan. Couldn’t we get more against this kind of property?”

“Of course, that’s a good question, Sheryl,” Bobbi replied warmly. “So, there are LTV considerations. That’s loan-to-value. A fifty-percent range is standard these days, especially for distressed properties.”

Sheryl gasped. “You value it at ninety million?”

“Personally, I think it’s worth more, but I had to be conservative in my estimate. I had to follow our internal guidelines.”

“Uh-huh.” Sheryl said.

“Look,” Euclid inserted. “It’s not like everyone else out there is lining up to give us money. Right?” He giggled.

Both women ignored his remark.

“What would constitute a default?” Sheryl asked after a brief, thoughtful pause.

“It’s all pretty standard. A missing payment, basically.”

Sheryl then asked Bobbi if Omni Capital had looked into issuing more Atlantic City bonds, and Bobbi replied that they did and that it would be prohibitively more expensive and that they would be giving the municipality bad advice if they pushed in that direction.

Euclid listened to Bobbi’s spiel, staring at Sheryl with intensely rounded eyes and a wrinkled forehead and a ‘how-about-that’ head wobble.

“Hey, we should celebrate,” Euclid said when Bobbi finished talking. “You and Nelson should come down. We’ll comp you.”

“Absolutely. Sounds like a plan,” Bobbi said, her peppy tone tinged with a smile.

In mid-January, Tilton closed on the loan to buy the Dunes nursing home. The purchase price, fourteen million dollars, was one million less than what Ann Messerer had hoped to get for it, but Euclid signed off on the sale quickly, in a jubilant mood: a huge liability was finally offloaded from the city’s balance sheet, and a large, immediate cash infusion was coming in, with no strings attached.

Euclid also received a stake, a one-percent share in the partnership, Creative Solutions in Senior Care LLC, that Tilton had formed for this enterprise. To keep his name anonymous in the partnership and to avoid complications, Euclid, per Tilton’s advice, also formed an LLC that he named EADGBE. The acronym stood for a blues guitar tuning.

In celebratory mood, Tilton insisted on taking Euclid to a fancy tailor in Brooklyn. “The guy is the best bespoke tailor in the country,” Tilton blared on the phone. “It’s past time you upgraded your wardrobe.”

Euclid wondered whether they could just stop by Men’s Warehouse.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tilton said. “Your current station demands a proper attire.”

In the waiting room of the tailor shop, Tilton plunged into a soft chair and picked up a fashion catalogue. Euclid wandered along the racks of ready-made suits, touching the sleeves, rubbing the fabric between his fingers.

“This one looks nice,” he said to Tilton, holding up a man’s blazer sleeve.

“This is just for show. Also, this one is too heavy,” Tilton replied, lifting his head from the magazine. “It will not sit right on you.”

“Nice color though. What about this one? Wow. Touch it.”

“This is silk,” Tilton said knowingly with a mere glance, without moving from his chair. “What are you, Prince Charles? You need a good, versatile wool suit.” Tilton put down the catalogue and picked up a thick binder with fabric samples. He shuffled through it. “Here. You need something like this,” he said, showing Euclid a dark gray garment cut.

“I like blue or navy,” Euclid said. “Pinstripes pattern.”

Tilton turned to another page.

“Oh, wait. Windowpane. That looks good too,” Euclid said hastily. He took a picture of it with his phone.

An assistant, a young woman, came out and invited them inside the shop. They walked past the busy, warehouse-size room with its chaotic assembly of rattling sewing machines, mannequins, and racks of half-finished, chalk-marked vestments.

Barry, the shop’s owner, an octogenarian Eastern European Jew, sat behind the desk in his office at the far end of the workshop. He regarded Tilton and Euclid with a tired, melancholic look, moving his lips in a barely audible greeting. Tilton eased the atmosphere by emphatically declaring that he was a regular customer and a great admirer of Barry’s craftsmanship.

“Mr. Dwyer here is an up-and-coming politician,” Tilton said. “So he will require something understated yet tasteful. Your shop’s specialty. I wouldn’t dare to bring him to any other place.”

Barry stood up and walked with small, shuffling steps toward Euclid with a measuring tape. Unprompted, Euclid lifted his arms in an accommodative deference, but Barry told him to press them down along his torso. He wrapped the tape over Euclid’s arms and chest, and told the assistant the number. He then took chest and waist measurements, and the distance from the crotch to the heels. His female assistant wrote all the numbers down in a notepad.

“I want cuffs on the pants,” Euclid said. “Put that down. Make some room.”

After some haggling and persuasion, where Tilton and Barry made subtle attempts to steer Euclid toward a more mainstream fashion, Euclid settled on his suit preferences: double-breasted light-blue wide-windowpane-patterned jacket. Bogart-style loose high-waisted trousers with cuffs.

“You’ll look like a gangster,” Tilton said.

“YOLO,” Euclid replied with a shrug.

Euclid added some accessories to the order: a handkerchief to use as a pocket square, pearl-encrusted cufflinks, a sterling-silver money pin. He bought a couple of shirts off the rack. The total bill came to thirty-five-hundred dollars. With a somewhat contrived carefree aplomb, Euclid pulled his credit card and gave it to the assistant.

“Thirty-five hundred!” Euclid cried when they walked out of the shop. “I don’t think I ever paid more than a hundred for any clothing item in my lifetime.”

“You’ve arrived. Let’s celebrate,” Tilton said.

They took a train to Manhattan. They got off at Grand Central and walked a few blocks up Fifth Avenue to 52nd Street, where they entered a dull-looking office building and took the elevator to the thirty-ninth floor.

“Is this where you work?” Euclid asked on the way up.

“I guess you can say that.”

The elevator opened to a large room that took up the entire floor. The room was dark; its windows, overlooking the Manhattan skyline, were draped in heavy burgundy-color curtains. Leather and wood dominated the interior: heavy leather armchairs lined up along oak-paneled walls on which dim sconces beamed upon autographed pictures of luminaries and celebrities. A strong smell of cigar smoke hit Euclid’s nostrils.

“It’s my after-hours hangout,” Tilton said as they approached a bar in the middle of the room. “You’ll meet all kinds of people here. That’s where most of the business is done.” He winked.

Tilton gladhanded some patrons at the bar, exchanged a few words with the bartender, and ordered two dry martinis. With drinks in their hands, they claimed two armchairs in a secluded corner.

An attendant came by and brought a small wooden box filled with cigars. Tilton picked one, held it under his nose, and offered it to Euclid. “It’s Cuban,” he whispered, his eyes wide with mischief. “Contraband.”

Euclid declined, tapping his fingers on his throat. “Don’t want to ruin my voice.”

“You don’t inhale, you just puff,” Tilton said as the attendant cut off the cigar’s tip, returned it to Tilton, and held up a lighter to it. Tilton let out a few plumes of smoke, and, with a satisfied nod, dismissed the attendant.

“You have to be a member here,” Tilton said. He took a few contemplative puffs and examined the cigar’s smoldering end. “What’s going on with the Omni people?” he asked and reached for the ashtray. “They gave you the loan yet?”

“They did. Forty-five million.”

“At what rate?”

“At seven percent.”

“A bit steep. But I guess, at this point . . .” He trailed off. “You made plans for it? How are you going to spend it?”

“Mostly Skylark maintenance. Electricity, security.”

“Good, good. Remember, you can outsource security to a contractor.”

“Yeah. When are you going to give me a quote?”

“If you’re ready to commit, I can talk to my guy tomorrow and get back to you.”

“Yes, do that.”

“And when are we breaking ground for the dam? My contractors are ready.”

“Let’s think of a date,” Euclid said. “I want to have a big ceremony. Cut the ribbon and all. Maybe film it, too. For political ads.”

“My man, now you’re becoming a true politician,” Tilton said, grinning. “We’ll do a lot of good business together.”

“For sure,” Euclid said.

“You think I can secure some downpayment in the meantime? I gotta buy some materials and pay the engineers. So that we can get the ball rolling.”

“How much do you need?”

“Five hundred to start.”

“Five hundred thousand?”

“Yeah. And I put down the other half. Like we agreed.”

“Sure. Let me look at the numbers first. So that we have enough left to pay interest on the loan. I don’t want to be a deadbeat.”

“Of course!”

Tilton stood up, went to the bar, and came back with two more martinis. He plunged into his armchair and picked up his cigar that smoldered on the glass ashtray.

“You see that other guy there?” he said, puffing. “The bald one in pink shirt? He’s a billionaire.”

“Wow. Never would have thought.”

“You know how he makes his money? He takes a loan to buy a commercial property to flip it. If it works, he quadruples his money. If it doesn’t––he says ‘Oops, sorry, guys’––and defaults on the loan. Pretty neat, huh?”

Euclid scratched his head. “Why do they keep giving him money then?” he wondered.

“They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box,” Tilton mumbled under his breath. “But, you know, in commercial real estate it’s a pretty standard thing. People default on loans left and right. There’s no moral quality to it. No one holds this against you. It’s just a business move.”

“But . . . they lose their money.”

“Who?”

“The guys who gave him the loan.”

“They get back the collateral.”

“Collateral?”

Tilton accosted Euclid with a long, testing stare. “The building.”

“Oh.”

Tilton put his cigar down and leaned forward. “What do you think will happen if you, God forbid, default on your Omni loan?”

“What?”

“Omni will get their money back. And more,” Tilton said, his tone cautious, probing. “Their loan is collateralized. Skylark is the collateral. If you default, they’ll get Skylark.”

“Ah,” Euclid nodded. “Yes.” He winced and took a nervous, greedy gulp as Tilton’s posture stiffened and he scanned Euclid with a new level of interest, with a ruthless gambler’s squint.

“Wait a minute. Hold on,” Tilton said, beginning to sound entertained, as if he had come upon some key clue that he had missed earlier. His eyes widened and shifted up and down, left and right. “Ah-ha-ha, Euclid! I see what’s going on here. Oh, this is so, so precious. You really think that they gave you this loan because they were impressed by your creditworthiness?” He slammed his lap. “This is it, isn’t it?” Tilton’s laughter echoed across the dining room, gaining in volume and pitch. Soon he howled. His eyes became watery, and he wiped them with a table napkin.

He calmed himself down.

“In distressed debt the biggest money is not made on interest. It’s made on a credit event,” Tilton said. “If you default on the loan, they will make a killing. They’ll own Skylark at cents on the dollar, and they’ll sell it at a huge markup. Your dear little Bobbi is going to get an insane bonus off of that deal. She may never have to work again.”

Euclid listened to Tilton in silence, nodding.

Tilton caught his breath and fanned himself with a menu. “I’m sorry, Euclid. You’re still learning. But know this: people go to great lengths to recover their collateral. There are stories you wouldn’t believe. Like…” Tilton scanned the room. “There was this other guy. He held some Argentinian bonds. They defaulted. So this guy sent some goons to seize an Argentinian cargo ship in international waters as a bargaining chip. And guess what, he got his money back. And more.”

Euclid listened to Tilton’s tales, his face drooping with confusion and disbelief.

“How is that even allowed?” he asked.

Tilton let out a bitter scoff and fell for a second into a somber silence.

“In that world there are no laws. You make laws as you go along. It’s one big sandbox without adult supervision.”

Euclid froze and held his breath, processing Tilton’s dark insight.

“Look,” Tilton said, snapping back into his usual showman mode. “You got a forty-million-dollar loan on a hundred-million-dollar property. You lose your claim to any upside. It’s not like Omni is going to sell it at a premium and send you a check for the difference. ‘Here, Mr. Dwyer, we sold your casino for a hundred million. We took back our forty, and here’s the check for the sixty.’ Ha-ha. It doesn’t work like this.”

Euclid slouched with his head down as he absorbed Tilton’s words. “But what about the money we already got?” he said. “They’re not going to claw that back? We get to keep it?”

“Yeah. You get to keep it. If you spend it fast enough. Before Trenton gets its hands on it.”

“Can they?”

Tilton shook his head and smiled. “Ah, Euclid,” he said dreamily. “To live in your world.”

He pulled out his phone. “Come on, let’s set a ground-breaking date. This cannot wait.”

CHAPTER 13: CONTINUING EDUCATION IN THE INTRICACIES OF BOND FINANCE AND COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

To help Euclid keep a close eye on the city’s financial standing, Bobbi had created a customized snapshot, from her sophisticated Bloomberg database, of several data points, along with graphs and charts, that came to Euclid’s inbox every morning at 7 a.m. via an automated message.

The first thing Euclid checked was the price––or, rather, the yield, a more proper gauge of creditworthiness, according to Bobbi––of the Atlantic City debt. Bobbi had explained to him that the lower the yield, the better the debt performs, and, for a reference point, she included the data on several other American municipalities in a similar condition, as well as on the sovereign debts of countries like Greece and Spain. Euclid was pleased to learn that the number in the “yield” column against Atlantic City was always lower than the numbers against other locations, all in Southern states. He found solace in the fact that his little seashore town had, by the consensus of the bond traders, more chances of survival than Greece and Spain, nations that have been around for hundreds, thousands of years.

Sheryl had been emailing back and forth with the casinos’ asset managers, trying to set up an introductory conference call between them and Euclid. It took her two weeks to have everyone agree on the date and the time.

“Do I have to talk to them?” Euclid asked Sheryl.

“Well, they own the casinos that employ almost half of the city. So, yes.”

“What should I say?”

“Just make them feel like they’re your priority and that you’re doing everything you can and that you appreciate their patience. And that your focus is to help people keep the jobs. Along those lines.”

Resolving to be well-prepared for the call, Euclid scanned the names on the contact list. He was expecting to find people one would see in the news and on TV, but what he found were mostly unknown VPs and senior analysts.

“Who are these people?” he asked Sheryl, a bit surprised. “Are they the actual casino owners?”

“They are all portfolio managers,” Sheryl said. “The actual owners are a bunch of LLCs. You won’t be talking to Carl Icahn or anything.”

The asset managers requested some paperwork for the meeting––nothing fancy, they said, just highlights for the discussion––and Euclid put together a summary, a one-page Word document with four bullet points, each a vague and aspirational description of further city development.

The investors on the phone sounded young, loudly assertive, and well-acquainted with one another. As Euclid and Sheryl waited for everyone to join the call, some of them chatted on the line about sports, golf, and Manhattan nightlife, cackling and posturing.

Euclid opened the conversation by cutting to the chase. “So here’s the deal,” he said, slack-jawed, speaking into the flat black box on the conference-room table and attempting to keep up with the cool and fast manner of the finance bros. “We’re in the process of selling some of our prime assets and will be looking to repay what’s owed.”

“That’s great news. Could we get more details on the size of the payment and the timeline?” one young asset manager asked.

“There will be more clarity in the next two to three weeks.”

Euclid heard a skeptical murmur coming from the speaker.

“I guess I’m interested in what happens down the road,” another investor weighed in. “Because this is obviously not enough to cover the entire outstanding balance. Like, what other sources of cash flow will you have?”

“Let’s take it one step at a time, gentlemen,” Euclid replied.

“Still, it’s a relevant piece of information. What’s your tax revenue? Like, is there any fiscal surplus? Can you cut some services?”

There were some chuckles from the bros, and one of them said: “Their whole tax revenue is going to pay interest on the bonds.”

A spontaneous, spirited discussion now sprung up among the asset managers, as if Euclid wasn’t even on the line. He listened, trying to make sense of their slang-heavy banter.

“Those are general obligation bonds. What about gasoline tax?”

“That one is a state tax, not AC tax.”

“The most recent debt just got downgraded by the S&P.”

“Hey, Euclid. You don’t plan to default on the bonds, by any chance?”

“Don’t give him any ideas.”

“Why not? I smell a good arbitrage trade here. Buy some protection, ha-ha.”

“But hold on. If AC defaults, there could be a potential restructuring.”

“And?”

“And all debts could be wiped out.”

“Not necessarily. It depends on what kind of resolve the bondholders have. And how deep is their wallet. And how bare their knuckles are. I mean, I know some litigious guys out there. They won’t just roll over.”

“Yeah, my boss will definitely sue.”

“Ha-ha, now we know who’s long AC bonds!”

“It all depends on the structure. There’s a waterfall priority. Some will default, others will be made whole. Gotta read the prospectus.”

“Ultimately it all comes down to a bankruptcy court.”

Euclid listened to the young asset managers’ dense chatter, doodling nervously on his notepad and searching his mind for what to say when they turned their attention back to him.

“Let’s hear from the mayor, guys. Euclid, what do you think?” one of them asked when they were finally done with their obtuse back-and-forth.

About what? was Euclid’s first thought, and it danced on the tip of his tongue.

“Uh,” he mumbled and cleared his throat. “Well. Our debt is still performing better than, say, Greece and Spain. So there’s that.” He looked at Sheryl, who gave him a slight approving nod.

“I once heard this funny restructuring story,” he continued, encouraged. “There was this one guy, and, uh, he defaulted on a building. The building didn’t have any heating except for the furnace. And the guy went to the bankruptcy judge, and the judge wanted to give him, like, fifty percent of the proceeds. And the guy is, like, no, it should be eighty. Because I have to do repairs, etcetera. But he really just pulled the number out of his ass! And the judge agreed with him. He gave him eighty percent of his money! Because the judge didn’t know what the fuck he was doing!” Euclid finished his anecdote with animated vocal inflection and then, perplexed by the lack of any reaction, issued a weak giggle. He looked at Sheryl, who sat with her eyes closed, biting her lip and clasping her hands. “It’s like the Wild West out there is all I’m saying,” he added awkwardly. “A sandbox without adult supervision.”

There was a long silence from all of the participants, until one finally said: “Hey, he’s not wrong. It is like the Wild West.”

“That’s great, Euclid” said another. “So, uh, what should we expect in the first tranche? Ten, twenty percent? I’m asking because I have to put something in the model.”

“Let’s say twenty,” Euclid threw it casually.

“Is it going to be pro rata?”

“Yes,” Sheryl said quickly, seeing Euclid’s confused expression.

“Okay. And what is the timeline here? Roughly?”

“I’d say, May?” Euclid replied with a wobbly intone. “June at the latest.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Euclid,” someone said. “We appreciate that you’re able to prioritize. You know, it’ll help us keep your people employed.”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Why don’t we touch base again in the spring?” Euclid said.

The call was over, and Sheryl stared at Euclid.

“What the hell was that story?”

“I heard it from some private equity guy in New York. Pretty wild, huh?”

“It was . . . incoherent.”

“So, what now?”

“Now we have to figure out what we can cut to pay those guys.”

Sheryl left for lunch, and Euclid went through the notes that he’d taken during the call––disjointed industry terms that he’d written down, hoping to put them all together, like a jigsaw-puzzle pieces, into a bigger, fuller picture.

The more he looked at his notes, the more confused he became. He called Bobbi and relayed, to the best of his abilities, what had been said on the call and asked for her take on what all of that meant.

“I mean, we don’t have any money, but those guys sounded like AC is some kind of treasure trove. They somehow plan to make money off of this place. I don’t understand how,” he said.

Bobbi sighed. “They were trying to gauge how solvent the city is. So they can make extraneous bets. The kind of bets that have nothing to do with you,” she said after some hesitation.

“Huh. Sort of like betting on a sports team?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.”

Bobbi proceeded to tell him that those guys were not in a make-or-break situation, that the AC casinos were a very small portion of their portfolios, and that they had already written them off to, like, twenty cents on the dollar, and that anything Euclid paid them would constitute a very small upside that probably wouldn’t even register on their overall radar.

“So, wait. Who cares then whether I pay or not?” he asked.

“An entity. An investment vehicle,” Bobbi blurted out after a brief pause.

Euclid mulled her answer for a few moments and then said: “A vehicle?” He heard Bobbi’s soft snort on the other end.

“On their side. On your side, it’s the people. The employees.”

“Huh.”

“To put it crudely, their worst-case scenario is already priced in, but yours isn’t,” Bobbi said. Faced with silence, she added: “Look. I don’t mean to ruin your day. I just want to give you an idea of the dynamic here, of the power balance. So you can decide on the best course of action.”

“What do you think it is?”

She sighed. “I’m not the best person to give you advice here, but, I dunno, keeping the people employed seems like a priority? For a mayor?”

“Yeah. Of course. And thank you for your insight. It’s very helpful. When are you coming to AC again? We’re breaking the ground for a new dam. There will be local TV and everything. A concert afterwards. Free pizza. You should come down.”

Bobbi suppressed a chortle. “It sounds like fun, but I doubt I can make it.” Not wanting to end the conversation on a minor note, she switched to a more comforting tone and said: “We will be coming down for Ann’s fundraiser though, sometime in March. Maybe see you then?”

“I’ll be there.”

Previous chapters

Nelson’s primary residence was a sprawling co-op apartment in a modern high-rise near Columbus Circle overlooking Central Park. He’d inherited it from his father, a corporate lawyer and a man of many interests. An avid art collector, the father amassed a respectable portfolio of abstract-expressionist work (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, a couple of De Koonings) and, later in his life, became a novelist, writing and publishing several corporate thrillers and a memoir. After his father’s death, Nelson hired an appraiser, who assessed the value of the art that covered the walls of the apartment at sixty million dollars. Nelson chose to keep the entire collection untouched.

He spent most weekdays there. The place was within walking distance of his Midtown office, and it offered a perfect setting to entertain important guests and to host fundraisers. But there was another dwelling, downtown, a place that gave him an emotional refuge, where he headed every Friday night. It was a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, right by the West Side Highway, in a three-story brick walk-up––one of several similar buildings, all built in the 1890s, huddled in a little cluster, that had for now survived the West Side’s aggressive redevelopment.

Nelson had bought this apartment a decade ago to use as an escape from his public-facing life. It had no doorman, no nosy neighbors, no awkward elevator rides­­––a true hideaway. He set it up as a decadent bachelor pad where he could bring his dates from the nearby gay bars and nightclubs. He splurged on its interior decoration, aiming to create an air of grandiose opulence, almost verging on gauche. The living room was appointed in a Belle Epoque style, with silk royal-lilies-patterned wallpaper, a Persian rug, and a miniature marble statue of Michelangelo’s David. Upholstered bergère armchairs of deep burgundy color, and potted plants––palm trees and poinsettias––completed the room’s salonlike atmosphere. A king-size bed with a carved red sandalwood headboard took up almost the entire bedroom. The bed was flanked by two nightstands, each propping a heavy brass and malachite multilayered candelabra; a large black-and-white photograph of a fragment of a male torso by Mapplethorpe hung over the bed.

From his queer visitors, Nelson got the reaction he wanted: they cooed at the over-the-top decor and praised his taste, but, over time, he found himself resentful of their admiration. He surmised that that praise came from a place of intellectual vacuity. The men he met were good lays, but they tended to focus on the superficial. The refinements and the cultural artifacts of his apartment were supposed to be the introduction, not the end point of an encounter. They were supposed to serve as a springboard toward intellectual pursuits, to fulfilling conversations, to the appreciation of beauty and the sublime. Instead, the conversations usually devolved into gossip and overtures for favors. Nelson concluded that flaunting his wealth was a handicap, that it was the cause of insincerity in the relationships. Gradually, he had grown weary of the downtown gay scene, and, along with the disenchantment, some of the luxury items went too. He had already gotten rid of a marble-top side table and a vintage four-panel Japanese screen, sending those to a consignment store.

It was late Saturday afternoon, and Nelson sat at the small secretary desk by the living-room window overlooking West Side Highway and, beyond it, the Hudson River. A laptop was open in front of him, with a Word file full of dense, single-spaced text on the screen, but his attention was elsewhere: He was marveling at the early evening light, thinking of the words best suited to describe the hues of the sunset sky. A blood orange with streaks of crimson, he thought. No––with splashes of crimson; that shape looked like a spilled liquid. This exercise in lyrical linguistics was a distraction from a more somber task at hand that had stalled at the moment.

He looked back at the screen. It displayed an open file titled “Banker: An Informal Primer” that Nelson was rereading for the third time, growing more dissatisfied with each attempt.

A banker’s job is first and foremost a people’s job. As a banker, you must maintain a permanent sell-side disposition; you must always be on call to cater to your clients’ whims. If I had to use a metaphor to describe the most optimal conduct for a banker to deploy and succeed in a relationship-heavy business––and, believe me, I’ve been in this business for twenty years––it would be that of a nurse at a mental institution. Yes, a nurse, however ridiculous it may sound. You have to be motherly and knowing and authoritative if need be, but always, always with an ever-ready list of options, softly nudging your decision-resistant client toward the correct one. If there’s bad news, you have to know how to break it––by offering an immediate and easy solution.

Aim at becoming your client’s best friend. In reality, he’s your patient (remember, you’re a nurse), but you have to make him feel as if he’s your friend. That means to always be ready to entertain him at dinners and sporting events with extemporaneous conversation on a variety of pet topics. You must be able to detect your client’s inclinations and to talk with ease and have a good grasp of any subject, whether baseball or poker or literature. You should be equally adept at getting your client a pass to the Masters in Augusta and to New York Fashion Week. You should keep a list of ongoing reservations at all the notable restaurants. You should donate to the right politicians––without necessarily sharing their views but for the sole purpose of ingratiating yourself with potential clients for having supported so-and-so.

To maintain your standing in the banking-industry pecking order, you must attend certain social events, annual charity galas and fundraisers. Every year you will fly to all the big industry conferences in Miami, in Vegas, and in Scottsdale, where you will make sure to book a posh private site intended for entertainment––either a yacht anchored in the marina, or the best table at a nightclub, or a tee time on a golf course. For special cases, in each of those locations, you have to keep good contacts with certain modeling agencies and madams.

He reread it again. What had seemed to him, in the process of writing, as deep insight into the intricacies of the banking profession now appeared flat, dogmatic, and obvious.

“Bo-o-o-ring.” He exhaled, frustrated.

He tapped on the table with his fingertips. The kitchen faucet dripped, messing with his concentration. He stood up and went to tighten it. The floorboards creaked under his bare feet. The faucet had been leaky for months, but Nelson was deliberate in his refusal to fix it. There was beautiful melancholy in the sound of dripping water; it gave the place an aura of marvelous decrepitude. As Nelson tinkered with its handle, the faucet’s trickle slowed to longer intervals. Nelson waited a few seconds and then put a sponge at the point of contact between water and porcelain.

He went back to his desk. For fifteen minutes he sat still and silent, taking shallow, wheezing breaths, as if trying to stave off any internal disturbances that would scare away a fleeting thought.

But his mind had run dry. He closed the laptop, got dressed, and went to a nearby tapas bar. He sat alone at the bar counter and ordered grilled octopus and a glass of white wine. The octopus was rubbery, but it looked good in the picture that he took with his phone. He posted it on his Instagram, captioning it “Early dinner.”

A young man sat down on a stool next to him. Latin complexion. Gelled black hair. With his side vision, Nelson noted a handsomely toned body bulging from under the man’s tight clothes.

The young man asked the bartender for a ginger ale. He drank it slowly, sizing up Nelson, smiling, licking his lips.

“Are you eighteen at least?” Nelson asked without looking at him. The young man went into his pocket and produced his ID, a passport. Ecuadorian. Nineteen.

“Mauricio,” Nelson read his name aloud. “I have drinks at my place. It’s nearby.”

Back at his apartment, Nelson sent Mauricio to the shower and then joined him there. He rubbed aromatic shower oil on the man’s back and buttocks to arouse himself, and then, when Mauricio said he was up for anything, told him, in impatient whisper, to “just suck it.”

“I know how to tell if someone has AIDS just by looking at them,” Mauricio said assuredly when they were done in the shower and had moved to the bedroom. “It’s the shape of the belly. If it juts out, like this”—he inhaled, protruding his stomach—“he’s HIV positive.”

“That’s some unscientific bullshit, sweetheart,” Nelson said. “I hope that’s not how you go around this town. You won’t last long.”

The young man pouted. “It’s true, though.” He stretched out. “You have a nice place. How much do you pay for it?”

“I own it.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a banker.”

“You’re rich.”

“Not really.”

“You are! Look at that vase. What is it, antique?”

“Yes.”

Mauricio got comfortable in bed, wrapping himself in the blanket as if aiming to linger overnight.

“Hey, uh, can I borrow three hundred dollars? Will pay you back next week.” Mauricio threw these words casually, as if he didn’t expect anything to come of it.

Nelson went into the living room and brought back his wallet. He shuffled through its contents full of hundred dollar bills. “Are you religious?”

“Of course!” Mauricio said, looking at the cash in Nelson’s hand.

“Catholic?”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean for you to be a Catholic?”

Mauricio paused in puzzlement, as if afraid of giving the wrong answer. He shrugged. “I dunno. Being a good person, I guess?”

“Are you?”

“I dunno. I guess.”

“That’s kinda weak.”

“Sorry.”

Nelson took out four banknotes from his wallet. “I’ll give you four if you get out of here right now.”

Mauricio got out of bed and began putting his clothes on.

“I’ll give you five hundred if you promise to buy yourself a one-way ticket back to Ecuador. This place is not good for you. You won’t last long here. It’s for your own good.”

Mauricio received the five banknotes and left, passionately assuring Nelson that he’d follow through on his advice.

Nelson lay in bed for half an hour, thinking, staring at the ceiling, then stumbled back to his desk. He opened another file, called “Memories and Observations,” and began typing:

Sometimes you have to assume a certain character to gain your client’s trust, to close the deal. I once had a client, a municipality in a Southern state (that I won’t name) that needed to raise two hundred million dollars. My associate and I went down there to pitch the deal. It was a private placement deal, which means we would issue the bonds and then place the bonds with our private investors. As usual, my associate did the presentation and I did the entertaining. I didn’t want to come across as some New York shyster, so I figured, I should try to blend in. I packed a linen seersucker suit, a bolo tie. A straw boat hat. I even brought a toupee, ha.

The deal that we pitched to them would saddle the county with too much debt, at a draconian interest rate that they would struggle to pay. Honestly, I didn’t think they’d go for it. And yet they totally bought it. They didn’t even pay close enough attention to the numbers, to the consequences. First I thought it was because they were unsophisticated. Which they were––but as I observed them further, that wasn’t really the reason they went ahead with our proposal.

Nelson stopped typing. He stood up, went to the kitchen, and poured himself a glass of red wine. He came back to the desk. His thoughts now flowed onto the page in a welcome breakthrough.

There exists a certain queerness in the South––overt, cultural, but also repressed, sexual. The legato voices, the slow moves, the dogged observance of an afternoon idleness. The fondness for rituals. Perfect hair. Pinky rings. Suits cut better than mine. They value manners and appearance and, sometimes, pomp. It struck me that these Southern men were all originalists, not consequentialists. They were starved for an understanding, not results. To close the deal, I had to become a vessel toward something else, not a municipal-funding deal, or not just a municipal-funding deal. I had to let them know that I understood them. I realized that culture, for these men, trumped any practical considerations. I responded to that need, and it was that one thing that mattered to them.

After the deal closed, I chartered a private jet to fly all of the county officials to Miami to celebrate, and they all came for a weekend of decadence. I already knew that the county treasurer was a closeted gay. We had a late dinner at the Shore Club. The treasurer got drunk and cried on my shoulder. We ended up spending the night in his room. He was despondent in the morning about having to go back home to his wife and his routine. For consolation, I took him antique-shopping the next day.

A year later, the whole deal unraveled. The county ran out of money; they defaulted on the debt. The treasurer resigned and his wife divorced him. He called me up one day, and I thought he was going to throw accusations at me or ask me to restructure the deal. Which I would gladly do. But he simply said he was a free man. He wanted to meet. I declined. I remember thinking that I wished he’d mentioned the bad deal. I wished he’d get mad at me and incriminate me. That way I’d know he was upset about the right things. His county was in the hole for two hundred million dollars, and it was never going to dig itself out of that hole, and he had a direct role in it, and yet here he was, lamenting about ephemeral things, symbolic things, after all of that. There’s no place for you in New York, I told him. I remember hating myself for saying it.

Nelson closed his eyes. He propped his forehead against the tips of his fingers.

I think it is a disturbing insight into a mind of a man. The implications go beyond . . .

He erased the last sentence by speed-tapping on the delete button.

What does that say about . . .

He deleted that too. He combined the two written pieces––the initial official primer and these more candid ruminations on the nature of business––made a few tweaks, and posted the whole thing on his personal blog under the Bored Banker pseudonym.

The sun had now set over the Hudson, and the West Side Highway shimmered with blurry passing car lights. A sadness came over him, and for some reason he thought of Euclid.

Previous chapters

Euclid was lounging on the eighteenth-floor open terrace of a high-rise beachfront condo. The sky was overcast, and the gray ocean mist blurred the demarcation between the sea and the sky. A soft breeze brushed against Euclid’s face. Down at the beach, the tide was low, and seagulls croaked and bickered over dead fish.

Euclid looked ahead, away from the shore. A white trimming had appeared where the horizon line would be, and that line was alive, moving, pushing against the sky. He thought it was an optical illusion.

The seagulls swooped in unison, as if lifted at once by a sudden airstream.

He stood up from his chair and leaned against the rails. The tide had receded even more, exposing the green, mollusk-covered stilts of the fishing pier. From the neighboring terraces came yells of surprise, then alarm.

“Get off the beach!” people shouted.

A low rumble came from the ocean. About half a mile away from the shoreline, the water swelled, and that swell grew as it approached the land. At the moment, the surge was about twenty to thirty feet high, and Euclid calibrated that the dunes might block it, and if they didn’t, then the ground-floor foyer of the building could flood. He watched intensely the few beachgoers run away from the water, hoping they’d make it to safety in time.

Thirty seconds later, the wave arrived. It rolled over the wide beach, swallowed the dunes, and brushed against the condominium. Euclid watched the muddy torrent swirl and drag beach furniture, cars, and parts of the Boardwalk. Could’ve been worse, he thought. Now we just have to wait for the water to recede.

More panicky cries came from the terraces. Euclid lifted his eyes. The horizon line had disappeared once again, but this time it was not hidden by mist. A monstrous wall of water, a several-hundred-feet inevitability, emerged out of the foggy air. The wave was both beautiful and macabre, the spectacle of a lifetime, a harbinger of oblivion. This one was nonnegotiable. This one discounted all possibilities of escape. This one would not crash and ebb but roll and roll dozens of miles inland until it exhausted itself somewhere near Philadelphia.

It was about a mile away from the shore, and it seemed to move slowly, almost leisurely, as if it wanted to give all the condemned ample time to behold its lethal magnificence. The wave’s slope steepened as it plowed toward the land, and Euclid, paralyzed, stared at the white veins of foam dancing on its dark teal surface.

With an effort, he shook off the spell, jumped inside the condo, and shut the sliding glass door behind him. There was no point in running up to the higher floors; the wave would swallow the twenty-five-story building with ease. It blocked the sky as far as he could see. Now it entered the land with its frothy hem, barging through the beach. It consumed the high-rise building to Euclid’s left, and he collected himself, clasping the edge of the kitchen counter. He hoped to die on impact, instantly, without suffering, without gasping for air. Millions of gallons of liquid darkness pushed against the condo’s windows, and the windows held for a few seconds, squeaking and bending.

“Take my body home,” Euclid whispered.

The pressure burst open the glass door.

He woke up. His phone was ringing. It was Tilton.

Tilton told Euclid that he had some ideas on matters of public importance and he wanted to run them by Euclid and hear his thoughts. He asked if Euclid were free that evening, to which Euclid replied “Yes,” and Tilton then said to meet him at the Mariner Club steakhouse for a friendly dinner.

Euclid found Tilton sitting at the bar, nursing a martini. They were quickly collected by a maître d’ and escorted to their table. Euclid stared at the menu, scanning the price side in silent shock, and finally asked the waiter what was the fish of the day.

“Fish?” Tilton cried. “No. No fish. Get a proper meal.” He looked at the waiter. “He’ll have the filet. Same way as mine.”

“Excellent choice, sir,” the waiter said and shuffled away.

A suave sommelier brought a bottle of red wine and poured a sample into Tilton’s glass. Tilton smelled and tasted the wine and gave an approving nod. The sommelier filled both of their glasses.

“I see a kindred spirit in you, Euclid. We both come from the working class. Both down-to-earth, no-nonsense blokes,” Tilton said.

“Well.” Euclid arched his eyebrows. “An argument can be made . . .”

“This?” Tilton looked down at his dapper suit. “This?” He hooked up his sleeve to show a giant Rolex on his wrist. “It’s all for show. I’m the son of a nurse and a postal worker from Pittsburgh. I know what it’s like to struggle. We were on food stamps for most of my childhood. Everything I have now came from years of dogged, uphill grind. No one handed me anything. That’s why I have such an affinity for this place. I have a soft spot for an underdog. Everyone thinks AC is a basket case. But not me. I see great potential here.”

“Good to know.” Euclid nodded.

“And what I like about you the most is that you’re a simple, honest guy. Exactly what this place needs at the moment.”

“I’m glad you think that,” Euclid said, pleased.

“So one thing I wanted to touch on today is to make sure that our priorities are aligned. We are civilized people. We both agree that the most vulnerable among us should be taken care of first. And only then can we focus on the job. You and I, we understand this.”

“For sure. Yes.”

“Maybe Sheryl told you already—there’s an outstanding fine for a public health violation at Whispering Reeds. There were problems with the septic tank before I even bought the place. Then it got flooded and I had to pay for cleanup. I had to install a new pump. These are all capital expenses that I anticipated, and I took care of it. Now, to avoid another flooding, I’m planning to build a concrete dam around it.”

“Oh?” Euclid stiffened with interest. “I was gonna ask you about that.”

“Yeah. I already have a contractor lined up. But there are still fines outstanding. From the previous administration. Now, you tell me: What’s more beneficial––me paying those fines, or me spending that money on building a protective dam instead?”

“The dam, of course,” Euclid said. “In fact, I was thinking about it myself. And I think it should be a bigger project. Not just for Whispering Reeds. The floods are getting worse every year. We can’t do anything else until we take care of that.”

Tilton leaned back. His eyes smiled. “See? I was right about you. You get it. Let’s talk more about it. This could be a public-private enterprise.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the fines,” Euclid said. “I’ll talk to Sheryl about it. I think it’s the Office of Health and Human Services, but they were all let go. Not sure who handles all the paperwork now. The bottom line is there’s no one out there to collect your fine.”

“Ah.” Tilton cackled. “There’s an upside to chaos.”

“And as long I’m in office, I’m not going to enforce it.”

The main course and the accoutrements arrived. Tilton took a spoonful of buttery mashed potatoes from a silver bowl and put it on his plate. Euclid helped himself to a side order of truffle fries. They both delved into their tender, bleeding filet medallions.

“This is actually a huge edge, Euclid,” Tilton said with animated cadence. “It’s like an organic tax holiday. If the word gets out that the collectors are gone, all the real-estate investors will be flocking here within weeks. They’ll be snatching up properties like hotcakes. Speaking of which: The Dunes. I know it’s a money pit for you right now. I can get it off your hands. At a good level.”

“I’m listening,” Euclid said with a mouthful.

“Retirement facilities are my specialty. I own several in Maryland and Ohio. All have an excellent track record. The residents are happy. The investors are happy. It’s better than selling it into some private-equity hands.”

“What would you pay for it?” Euclid asked.

“I’d have to run some numbers first. But I’m thinking somewhere north of ten million.”

“How far north?” Euclid probed.

Tilton laughed. “Like I said, I gotta look at the numbers. But it’s going to be a good level.”

“We think it should be closer to fifteen.”

“We can talk more about the concrete number later, but if we circle back to my earlier sentiment, then some sort of a tax holiday could potentially prop up the bid.”

“I see.”

“Like I said, we’ll work something out.”

The sommelier reappeared and refilled their glasses.

“Was always wondering, how does one make money on a nursing home?” Euclid asked.

“How? Well, first of all, there’s monthly cashflows that come directly from the government. So there’s an element of stability. Second, it’s asset appreciation. And third . . . there are various cash-flow-optimization methods that are too technical to describe. But all in all, it’s a double-digit annual return at the end of the day.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

“But it has to be managed properly. Nothing against Peter—I’m sure he’s a nice guy and means well. But he spends too much money on weird miscellaneous.”

Euclid chuckled as Tilton continued:

“He should’ve spent some money on installing solar to cut down the electric bill. Which is what I would do.”

“That’s . . . yeah. Great idea.”

“And, you know, if some private-equity guys buy it, it’d be a disaster. They’d extract what they can, kick everybody out, and sell the property. What I saw some people do, ugh, you wouldn’t believe what some people do. Not me. I treat patients with respect. Everybody who’s there is grandfathered in and gets the same care they always did.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I would love to invest in something like this. Do you think I can put a thousand dollars in?”

Tilton’s laughter thundered across the dining room. “You want to be partners, Euclid? I actually have room for an equity partner. But you will need much more than a thousand dollars.”

“Ah.”

“But listen, if you’re serious about it, I’m sure we can work something out. It could be like a combo deal: the dam, the nursing home. Some sort of fiscal credits. You’ll get an equity share. We’ll make it beneficial for all parties.”

“Uh-huh.”

Euclid relaxed and attended to his meal. He leaned into the truffle-oil mashed potatoes and the creamy spinach sides, plopping several large scoops on his plate. The filet mignon melted in his mouth. After two glasses of wine, and lifted by Tilton’s good spirits, he felt great.

“You have family?” Euclid asked with a mouthful.

“I was married. Once. That was enough.” Tilton chortled.

“That bad, huh?”

“It can get complicated.”

“Sorry to hear that. I just think it would be nice to come home to somebody.”

“For a couple of months, sure,” Tilton said. “But, hey, if that’s your axe, I know a few ladies I can introduce you to. Although––and don’t take it the wrong way––we gotta get you to a barber first and get you a nice wardrobe. You can’t go on a date looking like this.”

Euclid took a big gulp of water and strained to smile. “Not at the moment. Although I might take you up on the wardrobe offer. I need a new suit.”

“Of course. I’ll take you to a great tailor in Brooklyn. He does custom-made.”

A busboy appeared out of nowhere and refilled their water glasses.

“But enough about me. Let’s talk about you,” Tilton said. “How do you like this job?”

“I, uh . . . I actually like it. I like feeling busy. I feel like I can do something for the people.”

For the next five minutes, Euclid relayed the whole Skylark saga to Tilton: the billions spent, the high maintenance costs, the Trenton politics. Tilton listened with silent, attentive concern.

“Three hundred grand a month just for the electric bill! Then fifty grand for security. Mike is expecting those funds to put more people on patrol.”

“You don’t have to spend that much on the police department,” Tilton said. “There are cheaper ways to do it.”

“There are?”

“Who is doing the Skylark security now?”

“No one. I mean, Mike’s skeleton crew. Which is, I guess, no one.” He giggled sheepishly.

“Ah-ha. Well. I can give you a nice quote for a security contractor.”

Euclid bobbed contemplatively. “You own a security firm?”

Tilton smiled. “I know someone who does. A solid guy. It’ll cost you a fraction of what you’d otherwise spend on law enforcement. Officers need pensions, health insurance. My guy will just do the job for a fixed fee.” Tilton paused. He looked at Euclid, whose energetic chewing motions withered and then came to a stop, seemingly halted by the act of weighing the benefits of the proposition.

Tilton pressed on: “So instead of paying the police fifty grand a month, my guy will do it for, like, twenty. Think about what you can do with the savings. Maybe you can do some road repairs. Install solar on the Dunes. Set aside some funds for that dam.”

Euclid’s eyes widened when Tilton listed all the benefits, but his excitement dimmed just as quickly as it came on. He sighed and slouched. “Sheryl won’t sign off,” Euclid said.

“Sheryl’s just a clerk. You’re the boss. Tell her about the savings, and she will,” Tilton said. “Do you want me to talk to her? Me and her, we have a good working relationship.”

“Sure.”

Tilton pulled out his phone, scrolled through his contacts, pressed on a speed dial and, after getting Sheryl’s voicemail, left her a brief message to call him back.

“There.” He put the phone away. “After all, she saw how bad things are at Whispering Reeds. She knows that I gotta build the dam to prevent it from flooding again. She knows that no one else will do it.”

“Yeah.”

“And for people in Trenton, if you meet resistance, we’ll present this dam as the symbol of the city’s rebirth. It will be a proof of concept for how to secure the whole shoreline. At no cost to them. They can’t say no to that.”

“Yes. For sure,” Euclid said, helping himself to more mashed potatoes. Tilton’s phone pinged with a text message.

“A true professional, Sheryl,” he said after glancing at the phone. “Replied right away.”

“Sheryl is our local treasure,” Euclid said. “Did you know that her wages got cut in half, but she still keeps coming in full-time? She says she couldn’t sit at home doing nothing. I think that tells you something about what really drives people.”

“Ooh, you’re on to something there, Euclid,” Tilton hollered. He stopped chewing and lifted his finger. “There’s truth in that. I think a man is worn down by idleness, not work. People are not unemployed because they don’t want to work. Some will work just for the sake of working. People want to be a part of something. A cause, a platform. It’s an essential human need. Who are you if you’re on your own? Without means, without alliances? Without people who’d vouch for you? People are afraid to be on their own, that’s the thing, you see. What can you do on your own? If there’s no one out there to vouch for you and what you know and what you’ve done, then it’s as if you don’t exist. A man can’t handle that. He will gladly become a member of any group that will take him in.”

He cut a tender, bleeding piece of the meat, dipped it in the steak sauce, gobbled it, and continued. “Look at Bobbi, for example. Where would she be if Nelson hadn’t picked her up from the streets?”

“You know them?”

“They financed some of my properties way back when. Anyway, if the dice had landed differently for her, she’d be a stripper at some roadside joint. In the best case.” He wobbled his head. “And she knows that.”

“I don’t think she would be,” Euclid said, looking down at his plate.

“Aw, you like her,” Tilton brayed and smiled carnivorously. “She’s very smart, don’t get me wrong. But she is in too deep. That job, that world. It’s her home now. And she’s holding on to it with everything she’s got.”

Euclid stirred the ice cubes in his glass in contemplation. “But you work alone,” he said carefully and glanced at Tilton.

“Yeah,” Tilton said after a brief pause. “I guess I’m cut from a different cloth.” He shrugged.

The waiter came by and asked if they’d like another bottle of wine. Euclid shook his head and covered his wine glass with his palm.

“You sure?” Tilton asked. “It’s my treat.”

“I’m sure.”

Tilton ordered a martini for himself.

“I’ll tell you why I work alone,” Tilton said. His tone suddenly grew subdued; his face lost its gravity-defying salesman’s buoyance. “When I was just starting out, I worked for some big firm in New York. I was this scrappy, striving kid. The people I met there, they dazzled me with their prowess, their wealth. I fell under their spell, thinking I could grow up to be like them. I was seduced by a promise of what I could be. But it was an illusion that they sold me. Those people knew that no matter how hard I tried, I could never be like them; I could only be a pathetic wannabe version of them. And they encourage that. They want you to play their game, the game that we––riffraff like us––are not meant to win. And they want to watch you try and fail, again and again.”

He fell silent as the waiter came back with his martini.

“New York makes you wanna become a worse person than you really are,” Tilton said. “And one day I said fuck that.”

“I hear you, man.”

Tilton picked an olive from a skewer and downed his drink in one gulp. “But you know what? They need us. They need lowlifes like us.” He scoffed. “They mock us, and yet it is in towns like these that they make most of their money.”

Tilton signaled the passing waiter and asked for the check.

“You see, Euclid,” he said with a sigh, “at the end of the day I don’t want to be remembered for my business. I want to be remembered for my contribution to the community. Like, when a singer or an actor dies, we’re all grief-stricken, as if we’d known them personally. As if they’d known our pain somehow. But when a businessman dies, no one cares. Did we cry when, like, Jack Welch died? I mean, some people probably celebrated.”

The waiter brought back the bill. Tilton handed him his credit card.

“I want to be mourned,” Tilton said somberly. “Who will cry for me when I’m gone?”

“I don’t have that problem,” Euclid replied with a chortle. “Someone will cry for me. ’Cause I’m in the arts!”

Previous chapters

Nelson used his vast internal channels to inquire about the state of the Atlantic City three-hundred-million dollar public pension fund in order to see if it could be used as collateral in a transaction. Despite his attempts to keep his petitions as discreet as possible, they drew the attention of Ann, who called him and, without wasting any time on formalities, barked: “Pension fund? A: nice try. And B: you’re too late.”

To that, Nelson innocently and without missing a beat replied that he was only trying to find the best solution for the city.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Ann said, sounding entertained, and Nelson, with the calm courtesy of a diplomat, steered the conversation away from business toward asking Ann’s thoughts on the upcoming New Jersey’s elections. They chatted some more about Ann’s plans to announce her candidacy for governor, and Nelson pledged his financial support for her campaign and promised to reach out to other big donors.

They ended their conversation on a friendly note, with Ann, chiding admiration in her tone, calling Nelson a “smooth motherfucker.”

When Nelson hung up, he turned to Bobbi, ponderously tapping the tips of his fingers against each other, and said: “Well, scratch that one out.”

“You could’ve asked me,” Bobbi said. “There’s already a loan against the fund.”

“How big?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“Where did you see that?”

“I read the local press. It was a big scandal some years ago.”

“Not bad, Bobbi. Who is the lender?”

“Hazard Capital.”

“Ha. Fucking Ronnie. I saw him the other day, and he said nothing. So, what do you have on Skylark?”

“I ran some valuations.”

“Okay. And?”

“I’m thinking forty-five million at seven percent.”

“Uh-huh.”

Bobbi cleared her throat and tapped her pen on an open notebook. “It’s more of a credit play than it is an interest-rate play,” she said.

Nelson looked sideways and slowly nodded. “You expect him to default?”

“There’s a non-zero probability.” Bobbi massaged the keyboard, and an elaborate spreadsheet displayed on her monitor. “As it stands currently, the value of the property in the worst case is around seventy-five million. And that’s really a blood-on-the-street, end-of-the-world kind of scenario. So a forty-five-million loan, even if he defaults tomorrow, we can still collect thirty million. Give or take.”

“If we sell it quickly enough.”

“Yeah. I thought about that too. I made some phone calls. Skylark got a bid last year north of a hundred million. From some Florida guy, a distressed investor. But the deal fell through at the last moment for reasons unrelated to the price level. He just had some liquidity issues. Now, since then the rates have gone down another half point, so there should’ve been some upside to that number.”

“Okay. But how long can we carry it?”

“For up to two years,” Bobbi said. “But I don’t think it’ll ever come to that. There will be other bidders. It’s a prime asset.”

The hour was late, and the Omni Capital trading floor had emptied. Nelson and Bobbi ordered sushi and ate it at their desks, staring at the screens.

“If it’s a credit play, then make it forty at seven and a quarter. Or seven and a half,” Nelson said, picking a piece of eel roll.

“Yeah. Why nickel and dime them, though?” She replied with a mouthful.

Nelson chuckled and squinted at her. “You like him, huh?”

“Who?” She puffed. “Look. Like I said. I think this is a very high-upside low-downside trade.”

Nelson bounced in his chair, smiling at her, while she turned to her computer screen and started typing frantically.

“He’ll sign whatever deal you’ll offer him,” he said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Remember that Van Buren county deal?” he asked.

“Yeah, what about it?”

Nelson’s pupils darted up and down and across the room, and his lips bent slightly. His facial muscles twitched with cascading layers of reminiscences. “Those guys didn’t even look at the numbers we gave them, not seriously enough, anyway. It was the easiest deal I ever closed.”

“What?” Bobbi cried. “I spent two months working on that deal. I was working weekends!”

Nelson giggled. “There’s this thing about small-town politicians. They’re all bored to death and thus are susceptible to the wildest schemes.” Nelson began to ponder and then paused and looked at Bobbi. “Where were you that time when we all got invited to the country club? You had a date? Or went to one of your Tool concerts, ha-ha.”

“I think I caught some bug and stayed in my hotel room,” Bobbi said.

“So after your pitch meeting, the county treasurer invited me to their country club, where I met with the local officials for cocktails. The treasurer was a married man, and his wife was there too––a proper Southern lady. Warm but unhappy. I sensed that theirs was a sexless marriage and that she was his beard, resigned to her fate. Then, as we moved into the clubhouse for some cigars and whiskey, and I finally decided to talk business, I was met with a sort of polite, even contrived attention that masked an underlying indifference. I had to recalibrate my approach on the fly. It occurred to me that these Van Buren guys, these Southern gentlemen––they were moved by different things than we here in New York––intangible things.”

“What kind of things?”

Nelson shrugged. “We talked about the decline of Christian values. And about the literary merit of Walker Percy––by the way, add that to your list of mandatory reading. The treasurer asked me about life in New York, and I had to entertain him with tales of urban depravity. Then, after his wife left, and after we were on to a fourth drink, he made a subtle pass at me.”

“Maybe it’s a good thing I wasn’t there. I’d have ruined it for you with my presence. This way you both closed the deal and got laid. Did you?”

Nelson cackled. “Surely you would have had the good sense not to disrupt my delicate craft. Anyway, my point is, the treasurer signed off on that bond issue, in a bid, perhaps, to spice up his life, to have a momentary thrill, to feel important. And I was there for him.”

“You were. In body and spirit, ha.”

“Hey, it’s a people business.”

“Two gay conservatives, one Catholic, one evangelical,” Bobbi said, shaking her head. “How do you guys reconcile it for yourselves?”

“Reconcile what?”

“Your Christian values and your sexual deviance.”

She pronounced “deviance” with a wide-eye mean-girl glee in her tone, as if she were angling for a snappy, witty reply, but Nelson tanked, with his hand plastered over his mouth.

“First of all, as a Catholic, even a lapsed one, I can ask for forgiveness and receive it. Second, you’re puzzled because you’re not thinking systemically,” he said after a minute of fidgety contemplation. “Gayness and religion are not equal categories in tension with each other, you see. Catholicism is a way of understanding the world. A hardware of sorts. Homosexuality is a software, an app.”

“Okay,” Bobbi said slowly, sounding amenable. “But that hardware is hostile, no?”

“No. It’s indifferent.”

“Not in America,” she scoffed.

“Fine. I’ll give you that,” Nelson said. “There are extremes, of course. Still, it’s concerned with other things.”

“Like?”

“Like how one should live.”

Bobbi snickered. “Just don’t be an asshole.”

“For that, you’d have to define being an asshole. Opinions vary,” Nelson said tiredly.

As Bobbi stumbled to retort, he went on. “That’s where the trouble starts. That’s what kills us. We disagree on the definitions.”

“How hard is it to collectively agree on a universal definition of an asshole?” she said.

“Ah? If that’s your thinking, you just revealed that you, dear Bobbi, are an ontological conservative. Despite your feminism, despite your liberal inclinations.”

“I am?” She frowned.

“Don’t get upset. It’s good.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not voting GOP.”

Nelson laughed. “How shallow is your thinking. Your first instinct is to think of politics when you should be thinking of metaphysics. Eh. You can take a girl out of Alabama . . .” He trailed off with limp disappointment in his voice. “But now I see what your problem is.” His tone regained its vigor, and he wagged a finger at Bobbi. “You girls need a founding myth.”

“What?”

“You lack a formative idea, a coherent origin story.”

“We do?”

“Yes. Your whole world is built on vibes. You insist on a certain ethical framework that lacks a firm foundation. You keep talking about nurture, matriarchy, spirituality, you dabble in astrology and collect healing crystals and all that shit. It’s all hippie bullshit. It’s a construct that’s built on sand and it will crumble at the lightest unfriendly scrutiny.”

“I don’t collect crystals,” Bobbi objected, wincing. “I’m not a hippie.”

“It all goes back to the Enlightenment. It sold you a false god. It told you that the personal trumps the collective, and you bought it. You refuse to transcend your womanhood; you resolved to wallow in it instead. And it will be your undoing. You girls can lose your benevolent cause. And we will all suffer for it.”

“You’re a reactionary fag, Nelson.”

“Hey, I’m trying to help you. Think of it like this.” Nelson locked his hands and twiddled his thumbs. “And we don’t have to, God forbid, take it literally. We can approach it as a thought experiment.”

Bobbi rolled her eyes but turned in her seat and looked at him, crossing her arms. Make it quick, her whole posture said.

“Why did Eve eat the apple?” Nelson pondered and paused before answering himself: “She ate it because she was told that eating it would give her divine powers. She was told that she would be able to tell good from bad, right from wrong. So she got seduced by this promise and disobeyed God’s orders.”

“Yeah.”

“Now think about what would have happened if she hadn’t eaten the apple, if she had followed God’s instructions.”

“None of this”—she waved a hand as if to indicate the office, the city beyond, the entire world—“would have happened.”

“Q.E.D. That’s your myth.” He sounded jubilant. “A gift, from me to you. Eve set in motion this whole damn project.”

“Okay. But did we need this project?”

His eyes sparkled. “Now you’re thinking in systemic terms! Good job, Bobbi.”

“So, did we?”

“That’s our most enduring question. We are to spend our entire lives pondering the answer.”

“Meanwhile, we get blamed for it,” Bobbi said. “Not celebrated.”

“That’s because your PR is crap. You girls can spin it in many ways. You can argue that God actually wanted her to eat the apple because he made a wager with Satan to show him what magnificent things humanity could accomplish. You can say that Eve is the first person who exercised her free will. All men do is talk about it. She’s the one who fucking did it. You should lean into this narrative. Lean in, ha-ha. Like Ann. Ann, I bet you, understands what this is all about. Even if only subconsciously. And maybe you will too someday.”

Bobbi was silent. She fidgeted and played with her pen and glanced at her screen, hoping for a distraction.

Nelson continued: “Yes. She was a bad girl. But you should appreciate this.” He grinned and enunciated: “As. A. Jung. Scholar.”

Bobbi scoffed and spent a few moments weighing on Nelson’s thesis. “It’s all because that stupid Adam got fucking bored. If he weren’t bored, he would not have needed Eve, and he would have stayed in the Garden and played with his dick and balls and everything would have been fine.”

“Huh. Not bad, Bobbi. Your cogs are spinning. Bravo.”

“So Adam is the culprit. If God had created Eve first, I guarantee you she would not have gotten bored. She would have found cool things to occupy herself with. Thus there would be no Adam and none of this stupid macabre existence.”

“Excellent. What does that tell you then? It all had to happen. God wanted it to happen. He planned for her to disobey.”

“No. What it tells me is that boredom is what started it all. A man’s boredom.”

“That’s Kierkegaard,” Nelson said with whispery admiration.

“Whatever. Still, I’d rather she hadn’t eaten it.” Bobbi went back to her screen. “Then I wouldn’t have to do all this shit.” Her fingers pounded on the keyboard in a frantic display of busyness.

Nelson watched her silently, hand on his chin. “Do you want to be the principal lender on this deal?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s your call. You want to make a loan, make a loan. But you take the consequences.”

“Really? Sure.”

“Upside and downside.”

“Okay.”

Nelson stood up. “Look, Bobbi. I gave you a good manual, an existential blueprint. You can do all this shit and feel good about it. Or at least not feel bad. There’s purpose in all of this. It’s a good emotional and psychological crutch.”

He left.

Bobbi stayed at her desk for another half hour, replying to clients’ emails, and then went to the company’s gym, on the top floor of the building. In the late hour, the gym was empty and quiet––no group lessons, no solicitous personal trainers––just the way Bobbi preferred it. She disliked the hollow cheer of both.

She got on the treadmill and put on the headphones with techno beats. What Nelson had said about her being the principal on the deal occupied her thoughts. If Nelson were serious about it, that could mean that he would probably put her up for managing director at the end of the year. Maybe then I give it another year or two, collect a couple of good bonuses, and retire at thirty-five, she thought. Go work for a nonprofit. Or not work at all. Travel. Adopt a cat. Or a dog.

Bobbi stared at the nighttime cityscape outside the gym’s glass wall. Ahead of her––office towers, concrete terrariums with still life inside; below––a black canyon with blinking red taillights at the bottom.

And then what? Nelson can do all of that now, she thought. And yet he doesn’t.

She remembered a conversation she’d had with him years ago, when she was just a first-year analyst.

“If you have a trust fund, why do you have to work?” Bobbi had asked him then. (Now, on the treadmill, she had a bout of internal embarrassment at her crude amateurism. No one asks those kinds of questions around here. There are things that are simply understood.)

Nelson was magnanimous. If it were anybody else asking that question, Nelson would’ve replied with a sly, dismissive joke. But he found Bobbi’s naivete touching and decided to tell her the truth:

“People here are not impressed with how much money you have. They’re impressed with what you do. With what you can do. Especially for them. I like to help people, and I know how to do it. And they appreciate it. That’s why I work.”

Back then, Bobbi had found that answer unsatisfying. But now his rationale appeared to her in a different light.

There’s no solace in idleness, she thought. Eve, too, was bored.

Previous chapters

In the glossy pitchbook that Bobbi had given him, Euclid found a series of diagrams that consisted of squares, arrows, and three-letter acronyms. The schemes depicted the mechanics of several financial transactions that Omni Capital had tailored specifically for Atlantic City, with the stated goal of increasing the municipality’s revenues. One of the solutions included raising capital by issuing more municipal bonds. Another involved taking over the management of the city’s public pension-fund portfolio, currently earning a paltry four-percent return, by allocating parts of it toward more high-yielding securities. Yet another option would have Omni Capital extend a loan against a high-quality collateral, such as the Skylark Hotel and Casino. That much Euclid understood, although the diagrams and the acronyms confused him. He skimmed further pages of the pitchbook that described complex if-then scenarios that could trigger obscure mechanisms linked to interest rates and a basket of indexes that could, in turn, alter the “payment waterfall,” at which point he gave up.

His confusion was compounded by Sheryl, who insisted that he familiarize himself with the city’s balance sheet. She brought her laptop into his office one morning and opened an intimidating-looking spreadsheet. She glided her cursor over columns and rows filled with numbers and talked about taxable property base and tax revenue, funded and unfunded liabilities, reserve fund, payrolls, payables and receivables. At first, Euclid made an honest attempt to soak it all in, but he lost the thread pretty quickly. His head was spinning.

“Hold on, hold on,” he said impatiently. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s coming in and what’s going out?”

Sheryl sighed. “Our total tax revenues are eighty-two million dollars a year. Our basic outlays, fire, police, schools, pensions, are eighty-nine million a year.”

“Oh, that’s not too bad. I thought it was way worse.”

“That’s not all. We have debt. Bonds and loans. That we pay interest on. That interest in total is twenty-eight million a year. Plus the tax abatement. The first installment that the casinos are expecting next year is thirty million dollars. Unless we find some way to postpone it again.”

“Okay.” Euclid coughed, masking his unease. “So we’ll be in a hole.”

“We’ve been in a hole for a while. We’ve been borrowing to stay afloat for years. We have two bond issues outstanding, totaling two hundred and fifty million. Plus we have a loan against our public-pension fund.”

Euclid shook his head in silent dismay. “How did this happen?”

“Don’t ask. The guy who got the loan approved is in jail now.”

“No wonder.”

“For unrelated reasons.”

“Jesus. How the fuck—”

“What all of this means is that we have to borrow more money. Let’s hope those bankers will come up with some financing plan.”

Euclid’s phone rang. Nelson’s name displayed on the screen.

“Oh look! The bankers,” he cried with relief and answered the phone excitedly. “We were just talking about you!”

Nelson asked Euclid if he’d had a chance to look at the financing options and if he had any questions. Euclid mumbled that he had and he did.

“You want to come to New York and talk in person?” Nelson said. “We have an empty plane flying from AC to New York this afternoon. You can hop on board.”

“Seriously? That’d be great.”

After Nelson gave him the details, he hung up and looked at Sheryl. “What else do I have for today?”

There was a meeting with the casino unions scheduled that Euclid asked Sheryl to move to a different day. He told her he was going to New York for the rest of the afternoon.

“The wheels are spinning, Sheryl,” he said jubilantly, shaking his fists.

He left the office and sped home. On the way, he was overcome by a strange new feeling. It was a sensation of immediate, palpable agency, of things suddenly being within his grasp. He would fly on a private jet. To a meeting full of bankers. To discuss matters of great consequence.

Euclid put on his cleanest shirt and his most subdued tie. The day was going to be chilly, and he was happy to formally bring out his prized trench coat from the closet. He wondered whether he should bring his briefcase and decided in favor of it, in the event that he should come into possession of some important papers. He made a bologna sandwich, wrapped it in foil, and, supplementing it with an apple, put it inside the briefcase. He took a taxi to the airport.

The plane, a ten-passenger Gulfstream G280, was indeed waiting for him on the tarmac. Last night it had brought in a batch of Nelson’s East Asian clients for a night of gambling and was now preparing to fly back to New York empty, as those clients had decided to stay longer.

Once on board the plane, Euclid felt like a man on a mission. The James Bond theme song was playing on repeat in his head. Some critical gears were finally set in motion, and he was certain that he was going to oversee the greatest turnaround for his beleaguered city. He waited for after takeoff––he wasn’t sure that he could consume a selection of alcoholic beverages the moment he stepped on board––and ordered a glass of blue-label whiskey from a pretty flight attendant. She brought him a generously filled glass and several extra travel-size bottles that Euclid discreetly relocated into his briefcase.

After a thirty-minute flight, the plane landed at Teterboro Airport, where a black limo awaited Euclid on the tarmac. Euclid thought that the limo would take him to Omni Capital’s office in Midtown, but, after crawling across the George Washington Bridge, the car delivered Euclid to Yankee Stadium. His phone pinged with a message from Nelson: “I’m heading to Yankee Stadium. See you there.”

The limo circled the venue and finally parked outside the VIP entrance marked by metal dividers and a long blue canvas awning. Nelson texted Euclid that he was running a little late and encouraged him to go ahead and take full advantage of the amenities.

The VIP attendant, who, to Euclid’s astonishment, happened to have his name on the list, ushered him inside, and Euclid was then directed through a sequence of corridors and passageways by uniformed, friendly security personnel with earpieces and shoulder radios on which they relayed Euclid’s itinerary to each other toward the luxury suite rented by Omni Capital.

Even though the game was going on live and the sky lounge provided the best view of the field, the people present in the room watched it on flat-screen TVs on the wall. Some of them looked like they were there not for the game at all. Euclid noticed several young men in fleece jackets and vests, with their shirt sleeves rolled up, slouching, talking in the deep end of the suite. They exuded so much uniform blandness that one could reasonably conclude their goal in life was to become as free from idiosyncrasies as a mannequin––in facial expressions, attire, and attitude. Euclid waved and smiled at them as he walked in. They looked at Euclid, sized him up with limp interest, affording more bemusement to his getup than to him, and then returned to their hushed deliberations.

Euclid moved toward a white-clothed table with an array of catered snacks, silverware, and bottles of chilled wine resting in a silver ice bucket. He took a square-shaped porcelain plate from a stack on the table, grabbed some potato chips from a bowl with his hand, noticed the tongs lying nearby, felt bad about his manners, and turned around to see if anyone had noticed his transgression. No one had. He picked up the tongs, determined to display more civility in such a classy setting, and moved on to trays of gourmet canapes. As he struggled to pick up a tiny sandwich with the tongs, it disintegrated, and he hurried to pick up its components––the brie, the ham, and the slices of heirloom tomato––before his mess got discovered. A hand reached out from behind, grabbed a canape with its fingers, and Euclid heard a voice: “You don’t need those.”

Euclid turned and saw a casually but tastefully dressed silver-haired man in his seventies. The man put some canapes on his plate, gave Euclid a polite smile that masked a rather crude assessment of his status, found nothing worthy of further attention, and went back to rejoin a group of middle-aged men, all polished and relaxed, that congregated near the sky-box window overlooking the diamond field below.

A uniformed steward came to replace the stale cold snacks with a hot, fresh offering: roasted rosemary potatoes and bite-size braised lamb chops, each of their bone tips individually wrapped in white papyrus paper for aesthetics and convenience. Euclid waited for the steward to leave and then helped himself to several of those.

With a full plate, Euclid relocated toward that group of older men by the sky window. The gentlemen showed little interest in the game and were having a spirited discussion, punctured by intermittent bursts of laughter.

Euclid came closer and positioned himself near the businessmen, close enough to hear and be seen but also at a strategic-enough angle that allowed him a quick––should it become necessary––transition into a game spectator. The men acknowledged his gentle intrusion with nonchalant, even friendly glances.

“I had this case once,” a fiftyish man in a well-tailored suit said. He put his wine glass on the side table and loosened his tie. “We were working on a term sheet with some ranchers, you know, yokels in Idaho, who needed to raise some capital. So we’re talking, and I’m sensing it’s going nowhere; they keep bringing up these unrealistic scenarios that are never gonna happen, and when I tell them it’s not gonna work, my message doesn’t land. They just refuse to listen to me and think I’m hiding something from them. So to get them off my back I say: ‘What you guys should really try is’”––he paused, widened his eyes, and glided his palms over the air the way a magician does at a children’s party––“‘subordinated debentures.’” His slow, breathless enunciation of the term prompted a slew of hoots and cackles. “And I give them the number to call. Some regional banker in Minneapolis. I thought that was the end of it. But they call the guy and keep pestering him about subordinated debentures. They go back and forth—the poor guy doesn’t understand what the fuck is going on. He loses patience and asks them do they even fucking know what subordinated debentures are. And who gave them his fucking number. And they said this lawyer in New York said that’s what we need. That banker guy called me later. We had a good laugh about it. It’s our internal joke now.”

The men laughed, and so did Euclid, sensing that the story was funny but too niche for him to be able to retell it to anyone back home. Still, he made an effort, mumbling and moving his lips, to memorize this obscure term so that he could throw it around later with or without context.

“What are those?” another man asked, as if reading Euclid’s mind, to a round of howls.

“It’s a good name for a garage band,” a third man said.

“I actually play in a garage band,” Euclid sputtered, raising his hand with a half-bitten lamb chop in it. His intrusion was met with polite curiosity.

“What shop are you with?” one of the men asked Euclid.

Euclid felt suddenly exposed and searched his brain for another small-talk thing to say, but his mind short-circuited. At that moment, someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned around and saw Nelson, whom the men greeted like an old friend.

“The garage band is Euclid’s day job,” Nelson announced slyly, patting Euclid on the back. “But his side gig is Atlantic City mayor.”

Right away, this new piece of information inexplicably wiped the merriment off of the men’s faces. Some evinced pain, as if they had just been kicked in the crotch.

“That’s where they built that casino,” the lawyer remarked after a somber pause.

“Yeah, two billion buried in the sand,” said a man with a round face and a white goatee, the most senior of the group, shaking his head. “Plus they have that tax abatement. The Mariner Club alone is owed sixty-three million, I heard.” The man turned to Euclid. “Are you here looking for a good turnaround specialist? Cause if you are—”

“Euclid is spoken for, Ronnie,” Nelson hurried to reply to the old man. “I need a beverage, be right back. Keep an eye on the mayor for me, please,” he said and slinked away.

The men stared at Euclid in silence. He felt like a mongoose surrounded by swaying cobras.

“Nelson is your banker?” Ronnie asked.

“Yeah,” Euclid affirmed. “Smart guy, him.”

Euclid thought that Ronnie, with his moonlike face, white goatee, and with eyes and mouth resembling three slim crescents––the two down-bent in the apogee, and the one upward-bent in the perigee––that orbited close to the center of gravity, a short bulbous nose, could’ve passed for a department store Santa were it not for his slicing, carnivorous gaze.

“He sure is. Check out the Van Buren County deal. That was his,” Ronnie said.

Euclid took a mental note of “Van Buren County.” He thought he had heard that name before and now was determined to look it up.

“He said your name was Euclid?” Ronnie asked.

“Yeah. My mother was a mathematician, you see.”

“Uh-huh. Did you get any bids for Skylark?”

“We, uh . . . The previous mayor did, I believe. But nothing came of it.”

“There’s gotta be some kind of restructuring,” the lawyer said. “That place is in a death spiral. Are you working on anything specific right now?” he asked Euclid.

“Yeah . . . So . . . Uh, definitely some kind of restructuring,” Euclid said, shifting his eyes, and bit into another lamb chop.

Nelson came back with a drink. He saw that Euclid was withering under the inquiries of Ronnie and the others and needed a rescue.

“We’re putting together a bespoke deal,” Nelson said breezily. “Once we put the term sheet together, there could potentially be room for more equity and mezzanine investors.”

“I’d like to look at it when you have it,” Ronnie said.

“Me too,” the lawyer seconded.

“For sure.”

“Hoo boy, do I have a restructuring story for you,” Ronnie hollered, and Euclid sighed with relief that he was no longer the center of attention.

“We had this bankruptcy deal once,” Ronnie went on as everyone had now regained their joyful disposition in anticipation of a riveting tale. “We were a senior secured loan on a property in Queens, both the land and the building. The building was old, built in like the 1920s-30s. It was intended as a bakery, and that was its only function through all the years. All the other creditors besides us had claims on all of the equipment and the fixtures inside the building. And that included the furnace. Now, the furnace is a crucial part here, because the building didn’t have any other source of heat. Me and my lawyer knew this, but no one else did. So we go and meet with the bankruptcy trustee, who worked with the judge, and we make the argument that the sale of all the equipment had to be stopped on the basis that the pipes would freeze in the winter if the furnace is removed. It’ll destroy our collateral! If the equipment sale proceeds, then we have to benefit from the sale. The trustee thinks about it, asks a couple of inane questions, and goes”––Ronnie bent his lips––“‘You’re right, I think you have a point,’ and grants us seventy percent of the proceeds!”

Ronnie spoke with a rising cadence. He almost screamed the last sentence and then broke into a raspy cackle that morphed into a wheezing cough. His face turned red. He gazed around the room and, seeing other patrons giving him looks, dialed his decibels down a notch.

“You guys are bad.” Nelson chuckled and looked at Euclid, who was mesmerized by the story.

“But no, wait,” Ronnie continued after clearing his throat. “We’re like, ‘Let us think about that.’ So we go to the bathroom, and as we stand there relieving ourselves, we look at each other and just break into laughter. We had no claim whatsoever. We completely made it up, and the trustee fell for it. Can you believe it? So we’re thinking: should we take the seventy percent and run or should we ask for more? We come back from the bathroom and I go: Yeeaah, nooo, seventy is a little light. Putting in new heat is expensive, etcetera, etcetera. The trustee gave us eighty-five!”

Ronnie’s coarse laughter reached a crescendo and rolled through the room.

Below, the stadium, too, was getting noisy. The fans were trying to push the Yankees to rally in the bottom of the ninth to overcome a three-to-two deficit to maintain their one-game lead over Boston. The men in the sky lounge now turned their attention to the game.

“It’s the heart of the order here for the Yankees: Ellsbury, Beltran, then Teixeira,” a TV commentator announced.

Ronnie folded his hands around his mouth. “Boston sucks!” he shouted.

On the field, Derek Jeter stepped to the plate. Ellsbury was on third. Teixeira on second. Boston’s Ueharadelivered the pitch, and Jeter swung and drove the ball high.

“It is deep, looks like it may be a home run, but no, it’s off the top of the wall,” the announcer sang in one breath.

Ellsbury scored. Teixeira ran at the swing of the bat. Boston’s centerfielder fielded the ball. He threw it as hard as he could. Teixeira headed home.

“Here comes the ball!” the announcer blared as Teixeira slid in.

“Safe!” the umpire called out loud.

“Safe,” the home crowd exhaled.

“Theeeee Yaaaankeeees wiiiiin!”

Sinatra came on the speakers with “New York, New York.”

Nelson dipped into his jacket pocket, retrieved two tickets, and looked at Euclid. Last Allman Brothers Band concert. Tonight. Did Euclid want to go?

“W-what?” Euclid stopped chewing and whimpered with a mouthful of the second helping of the chops.

“The Allman Brothers. Final show. At the Beacon. You interested?”

Euclid choked. In a brief scuttle, Nelson and Ronnie rushed to do a Heimlich on him. He spit out a piece of lamb chop onto the carpet.

In the limo that whisked them to the Beacon Theater twenty minutes later, Nelson handed Euclid a plastic bag with soft folded fabric in it. “Here, wear this.”

Euclid took the contents of the bag out: it was a navy-blue fleece jacket with the Omni Capital Partners’ logo on the left chest. He took off his trench coat and put the fleece on.

“Now you’re one of the bros,” Nelson said approvingly.

“Is Bobbi coming too?”

Nelson glanced at his phone. “She is meeting us at the theater.”

“That’s great. You guys like the Allmans?”

Nelson’s tastes were more refined and esoteric. He liked The Smiths and Joy Division. But classic rock was the music of his clients, and he made sure to indulge them with regular concert outings at the Beacon and other venues, and did it in a top-notch, exclusive, white-gloves manner.

“Of course,” he replied.

Their car pulled to the back of the theater, on Amsterdam Avenue, and they entered the theater via the white tent of a VIP entrance.

If a bomb fell on the Beacon Theater tonight, the markets would not open the next morning. The Allman Brothers Band’s annual residence at the Beacon had long ceased to be a cultural event and had, over the years, mutated into a ritualistic Wall Street outing. Now Gregg Allman was retiring, and the finality of it was hitting the finance-industry veterans especially hard, and they had raced to cure these unsettling feelings of nostalgia the only way they knew how.

The first row of the orchestra was bought out in its entirety by parties that wished to remain anonymous. The second and third rows were claimed by the premier investment bank Marcus Roth. Omni Capital had reserved the left flank of the fourth and fifth rows. The right half, across the aisle, was mirror-snatched by its rival, Hazard Capital. Further rows, too, were cut like a Monopoly board into little fiefdoms by smaller firms in order of decreasing market clout.

Normally, there would be a number of proletarian seats left in the galleries, but on this special night even these low-grade assets had caught a bid and had been lifted blind by an assortment of portfolio managers and smaller broker-dealers.

Euclid saw Bobbi trudge through the narrow row of seats toward them, waving at and greeting other spectators. She stopped to exchange a few words with a group of men, and they all shared a quick laugh. Finally, she made it to their seats, in the middle of the front orchestra, feet away from the stage.

“Sorry I didn’t make it to the game. Had some stuff to take care at the office,” she said to Euclid. “How was the game?”

“Euclid made some friends,” Nelson replied.

“Yeah, there was this guy who looked like evil Santa.”

“A-ha-ha, Ronnie?” she cackled.

“Yeah.”

“Good. What’s in the briefcase?” She looked at the metallic attaché that Euclid held on his lap. He opened it and showed her the Atlantic City Funding Proposal folder. The apple, the wrapped sandwich, and the tiny vodka and gin bottles from the plane also didn’t escape her eye, and a snarky comment danced on the tip of her tongue, but she managed to kept her neutral composure.

“I’ve been studying it.” He tapped on the pitchbook. “Have some questions.” He noticed her interest in the briefcase’s other contents. “You hungry?” he asked.

“No. I ate at the office. So, what questions do you have?”

“Yeah. So. The thing about this is that I understand all the standalone words, like ‘credit’ and ‘default’ and ‘swap’, but put together and in context, I don’t quite get it.”

“Credit default swap is a vehicle used by someone who wants to place a bet on a possibility of default.”

“Ah,” Euclid said, feigning an understanding. “Smart.”

“What else?”

“What is leverage?”

“You have a hundred dollars. You borrow another fifty dollars against your hundred. Now you can invest that hundred and fifty dollars instead of a hundred and get a higher return. That’s called leverage.”

“Huh. What about subordinated debentures?” he asked. His eyes widened, and his voice was imbued with a clownish tone, as if it were a trick question, as if he expected her to laugh at his inquiry.

“What about them?” she replied with businesslike neutrality.

“What are those?”

“Those are junior bonds. Down in the capital structure.”

“Aha,” Euclid hollered, sounding like he’d finally found an explanation to a long-enduring mystery.

“Why, though? It’s not in the prospectus.”

“I heard some guys talk about those at the game. Talking and laughing. I thought it was like a joke or something.”

Bobbi chortled. “Simple things hide behind complex words, Euclid,” she said. “It’s the nature of my game.” She looked at Nelson, who was immersed in his phone. “Don’t worry, we’ll make it easy for you.”

Euclid scanned the theater. Here, away from their trading desks, the traders and the bankers were all normal folks, he thought. These men, despite their fancy titles, didn’t look like vultures; they looked like him––with dad bods, balding, nostalgic, humbled by life. They had wisdom and even pain in their eyes. As the warm acoustic chords of “Little Martha” flowed from the stage, he could sense all around him an almost physical grief for what could’ve been, a mourning for lost innocence, a yearning for what they could’ve become if only they’d stuck with their teenage garage bands back in the 1970s and had not been derailed by circumstances beyond their control into careers in finance.

Euclid wondered about two empty seats in the row in front of him. Who in their right mind, he thought, would pay some obscene amount of money for these seats and then wantonly, inexplicably, decide not to show up to witness the swan song of a classic, iconic American band?

He recalled a group of old-timers that congregated on the sidewalk in front of the theater, shut out from a sold-out event but sticking around anyway with the hope, perhaps, of catching a glimpse of Gregg Allman getting in the car after the show, and whose quiet, covetous gaze Euclid felt when he and Nelson skipped past them and dived into the VIP entrance. These were all white guys in their fifties and sixties, the same demographic as the one inside the theater, but they were dressed in unironically dirty jeans and timeworn work boots. Their leather jackets were battered, honestly and organically, by weather and manual labor and years of tough luck. Some of them were bald, others had ponytails and bandannas––roadies, truck drivers, bikers––true lifelong fans of the band for whom “dressing down” meant a different thing than for their more fortunate and more refined brothers on the other side of the velvet rope. They were smoking, talking about Duane and how the world had gone to hell and how things were not what they used to be.

If Euclid could somehow orchestrate a teleportation of two of those rough guys from the outside into these two empty seats, he would. Now, a few feet from the stage, he could see Gregg Allman’s sweat and spittle as the silver-haired minstrel poured his Southern soul into the microphone.

“Woke up this morning,” Gregg sang as the tight, thumping, fast-moving roll of “Statesboro Blues” was carried by Derek Trucks, once a child guitar prodigy and now a full-time member of the band. With his understated but deft surgery of the strings, he enthralled the crowd into a foot-stomping, head-bobbing rite.

Euclid sang along, his fingers running over the neck of an air guitar, and, when Nelson glanced at Euclid’s face, he saw joy––guileless, radiating joy. It was the joy of a child. It was an emotion that was too sincere, too rare, to be found in the streets and offices of Manhattan, too often confused with “fun” and “happiness” and “glee”––its weaker cousins. Nelson didn’t know of anyone in his close circle, professional or personal, who possessed the ability to display this kind of joy without contaminating it with cynical theatrics or schadenfreude. He watched Euclid, unable to take eyes off him, grateful that the theater darkness concealed his brooding fixation, and sad that he, himself, was denied such a gift.

Nelson left the concert early, before the encore, to avoid the post-show stampede. A good host, he offered to pay for Euclid’s night at a hotel, but Euclid declined, saying he had to be in AC the next morning. Nelson took out his wallet and gave Euclid three hundred-dollar bills. “For the cab fare,” he said and disappeared just as the opening bass line of “Whipping Post,” signaling the end, the very end, sent everyone in the auditorium into a communal heart-aching wail, and before Euclid could refuse such generosity.

It was 1:30 a.m. when the concert ended, and 2 a.m. when Euclid and Bobbi finally exited the theater. Euclid told Bobbi that he was headed to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to catch a Greyhound bus back to Atlantic City, and she offered to share a cab. They walked a few blocks south to get away from the theater crowd, and, after Bobbi rudely turned down several pedicabs that solicited them for a ride, managed to hail a taxi near Lincoln Center.

“Port Authority first, then Thirty-Eighth and Sixth,” Bobbi commanded the driver.

The taxi left the lights and the glitz of Columbus Circle behind and was now rolling down Ninth Avenue.

“So, to expand on my question,” Euclid said. “That hundred and fifty dollars example. Can I then borrow against the hundred and fifty again?” he asked cautiously.

Bobbi stared at him. “No,” she said. “I mean, technically you can, but that would be unwise. That’s where many people get killed. Don’t forget, you don’t own the fifty dollars. You borrowed it.”

“Yes, of course.”

“This is a classic story. This is what happened to many hedge funds in 2008. There was so much credit sloshing around. Everyone was leveraged. Some guys were leveraged thirty-to-one. They swam naked but didn’t get out before the tide receded, and they lost everything.”

“I love to swim naked,” Euclid said impishly.

Bobbi paused before replying with a preachy tone of a school principal: “I’d advise against it.”

The taxi dropped him off on 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, and Bobbi continued on to her place. At the bus terminal, Euclid learned that the first bus bound for Atlantic City was leaving at six in the morning. He decided to nap on the bench, sleeping peacefully, certain that he would not be mistaken for a bum and thus be left undisturbed, because of his new fleece jacket with the Omni Capital logo and his metal briefcase that had somehow survived the rollercoaster of the day and now rested safely clutched in his arms. As he dozed off, he realized he didn’t know where his trench coat was.

In the morning, before boarding the Greyhound bus, Euclid assessed the state of the bologna sandwich that had dwelled in the briefcase since yesterday and, erring on the side of caution, threw it away. He held on to the apple, which he ate on the bus for breakfast. He arrived in AC two hours later in high spirits.

Previous chapters

For any investment idea, whether a loan or an acquisition or a bespoke deal, Nelson had come to rely on Bobbi’s analysis. Bobbi liked to examine things on the ground firsthand, and she often flew across the country to compare the glossy prospectus description of the underlying property to the real thing. She’d often come back with an insight that was missing from the official term sheet. Sometimes she threw so much cold water on the rosy financials and projected cash flows of the prospectus that Nelson had to smooth things over with his clients. Her research style was eclectic: beyond the numbers, that she collected and attended to with a precision of a surgeon, she assessed the location, the foot traffic, the adjacent businesses or residentials, the make and the quality of cars parked on the street, even the menu of the nearby restaurants. Once Nelson had to reject a commercial loan for a large luxury apartment complex because Bobbi had discovered––merely by standing at the planned construction site and smelling the air––a meat-processing facility three hundred yards away. It was this unquantifiable angle, this ability to sense the unpredictable, this almost fatalistic caution––prevalent, in his opinion, among women and people born on the edges of society––that he valued the most about Bobbi.

That Roberta Cheyenne LaBrea had been born on the edges of society was clear to Nelson from the moment her resume landed in his hands ten years ago. It stated that she graduated from University of Alabama, and in her cover letter she mentioned that she was the first in her family to go to college. Nelson, driven by ideas of expediency rather than inclusion, passed her resume around the office, making wagers with other cackling bankers about her race. He won the bet when a white girl showed up for an interview. “A cracker,” some whispered with giddy delight as Bobbi walked, clutching her cheap purse, toward the conference room. During the interview she displayed the demeanor of a striver, but there was expectation in her eyes, already too weary for a twenty-two-year-old, of a feint, of some pernicious ploy coming at her from all sides. Hers was a distrust born out of poverty and powerlessness. It was the same distrust that held back her neighbors, her schoolmates, her relatives back in Dirthole, Alabama—the same relatives who burdened her with that ridiculous name—and it could’ve held her back, too, if the chips had fallen differently. This distrust was at the foundation of her kin’s intemperance, their short fuse, their default militancy, their superstitions and addictions. It’s what made them reflexively and gleefully buck anything unpleasant and inconvenient, and indulge in affected performance directed at society at large––in order to show that no one was the boss of them, that they were free.

At the interview, Nelson gave Bobbi a generic, ground-testing quiz that he himself had designed to quickly assess how a person’s mind works, a foolproof sifter that dispensed with about ninety-five percent of contestants right out of the gate. The quiz was about a bakery that hires additional bakers and the effect it has on the output.

“A second baker doubles the output.” Nelson gave a simple parameter. “What happens if the bakery hires four more bakers?”

Bobbi, whose grandmother was a part-time short-order cook at a roadside diner, could extrapolate from Nelson’s question back to that three-tables-and-a-counter greasy spoon decades ago, where four more short order cooks would bring the entire operation to a halt.

“It’s . . . nonlinear,” she probed.

Nelson hid his delight. He wrapped the interview quickly with a casual “You’ll be hearing from us.”

And here was a chance at a real-life experiment. Nelson believed the nature of investment banking expanded well beyond being a business. It was a social institution. And here was the opportunity to examine the transformative power of this institution. Any unwashed exposed to its influence could undergo an almost religious conversion. Despite being a highly paid field, investment banking was an ascetic order that nurtured and celebrated the abnegation of self, for it was through that abnegation, he believed, that one could rise above their primitive ways. The structures and the rituals of this world could arrest the rebellious tendencies of any aimless, callow youth and channel those tendencies to productive use. With this young hick, Nelson could test his theory about the disciplinary effect of the industry. He could watch Bobbi’s inbred class resentments be tamed by her nemesis of nemeses––a financial institution, a cabal of bloodsucking elites. He could watch her distrust of this big bad world dissipate on contact once she realized what it was all about. She would find no malice. She would encounter serious people who mastered their moods, whose seriousness could not be derailed by a distraction or a setback. She would see the people who had all their needs met so that they could only concern themselves with the one thing that mattered, and she would want to be part of that seriousness, she would want to be concerned with that one thing, with that business of adults. That business would become her compass, her safety capsule to cross the chaos of life.

She would also discover that rebels, subjects to raging, unexamined passions, wouldn’t survive a day at the world’s cockpit, a Midtown office tower, and that even if they could have scored one short, glorious moment in their sorry lives, they’d end up back working at Chuck E. Cheese once the revolution was over and the dust settled.

Did she understand this? With anthropological curiosity, Nelson searched for those rebellious strains in Bobbi, and he detected that all of those resentments indeed existed there, bubbling close to the surface, but were held in check with much effort and sometimes with labored displays of indifference. He loved to watch how Bobbi dealt with it. Her struggles affirmed his thesis.

There was a promise of authenticity, of a real-life brokenness in Bobbi, that was missing in most of the all-male Ivy League–trained personnel in Nelson’s office. She was a diversity hire without the self-righteous baggage, a real clay-eater who had already been humbled by life but who could become a power broker if she played her hand right.

She excelled at the business and the quantitative part of the trade. She built complex pricing models, and put together pitchbooks, and, when on the phone, handled irate clients with a Nurse Ratched calmness, giving reassuring answers, and gaining their trust.

In public gatherings, at cocktails and client dinners and other informal, festive settings, however, she came across as stiff and unsure. When, after a drink or two, the collective banter inevitably veered away from finance, away from the yield curve and price levels and loan covenants, Bobbi was slow to detect the shift in the mood and struggled to keep up with the niche humor and the references thrown around. Smooth social skills were an area still in need of further cultivation, Nelson admitted; it was, likely, a residue of her rough beginnings but certainly malleable with time and the exposure to the right culture.

Her public persona was that of an introvert who didn’t want to be known as one. Her clumsy attempts at vivacity and chumminess that she thought she had to display as part of the job were ill-timed and came in uneven bursts and were often loaded with odd mentions that no one understood. Some veteran portfolio manager would bring up California’s Orange County debt default, and, in response, Bobbi would say something about Bill Hicks, an obscure comedian, long dead, and about LA submerging into the Pacific Ocean, and then mumble something about “enema” before falling silent, blushing and contrite, and leaving Nelson to dig out of the resulting conversational dead end with some quick, juicy industry gossip.

Nelson had asked her later what the hell she was talking about, to which she replied, apologetically, that it was too long to explain and that she was just trying to be funny.

“If you’re not sure what to say, don’t say anything,” Nelson said sternly.

Another time, at a small invitation-only event, he caught her talking to some random guy whom no one knew and who turned out to be a party crasher. After the person was escorted out by security, Nelson asked her what was she doing talking to the guy. “He came over and started talking, and I was just trying to be polite,” she replied.

Nelson rolled his eyes. “You can’t just be polite with everybody. You have to learn to differentiate randos from real people.”

She needed to develop a sharp situational radar, a good discerning mechanism, to acquire a social polish, and Nelson resolved to help her achieve all of the above by bringing her along to more industry events. He instructed her to just stand and watch the people and let him do the talking. “Watch the flow, watch the dynamic, listen to the conversations. I’ll quiz you later on who said what and what was important and what was garbage.”

Nelson’s own knowledge of any social gathering, on the other hand, was so deep and vast that, if asked, he could lecture a course on the topic or write a beat-by-beat script. He knew that every party would always proceed in the same predictable fashion. He would stand with a tumbler glass filled with water and ice cubes––a trick he deployed to maintain his sobriety, while letting others think that it was vodka on the rocks––and watch the human currents pulsate and swirl around him. The currents were made of fluid junior professionals, resume peddlers, schmoozers, and service personnel, and as the party progressed, those currents dwindled into clusters. The formation of a cluster would begin with a generic, ground-testing “What are you focusing on these days?” probe to assess the rank, the risk appetite, and the size of the portfolio of the fellow partygoer. It was then followed by a cautious lament about the Fed and interest rates in order to assess each other’s standing on monetary policy, then––at this point over the second or third drink––by finding gleeful common ground in dissecting other industry players’ bad calls, and finally, after all the ballast––the vendors, the compliance analysts, the unattractive women––fell off, and the valence of all those remaining had been vetted, a “care to join us” call was issued to the core group to relocate to a ritzier, more secluded venue to solidify the newfound friendships with a more memorable, more exclusive and, ultimately, more profitable bonding experience.

Nelson observed all these motions with an expression of mournful parental benevolence. These hapless revelers sought to amuse themselves, to ingratiate themselves with their superiors, to sniff out an angle, they were getting drunk and making fools of themselves, acting on a strange mix of ennui and invincibility, and, as Nelson watched them, he felt a quiet empathy for them, as if they were lost children. They were laughing, but he knew that laughter came from a place of pain and dread, and his heart cried for them. He concluded that whatever afflicted these laborious in their merriment partygoers had no name and likely no cure, that boredom and vanity were eternal, ingrained drivers of human action, and that he had been placed in this unique position by a divine force to mitigate the journey for them, to make it bearable.

Bobbi’s verdict was less nuanced, and less merciful.

“These people mostly talk about some bullshit,” she told him crudely. “They make millions, but all they talk about is how they’re scrappy kids from Brooklyn.”

“You gotta learn to rein in your proletarian rage,” Nelson admonished her.

Nelson learned more about her lingering pedestrian sentiments during a business trip to Phoenix. Bobbi put out her best presentation that day, making a well-developed pitch with slides and printouts, and answering all the clients’ questions, after which she asked Nelson if she could skip the clients’ dinner. She explained that she was meeting an old college friend for drinks. Nelson thought it was a lame excuse and that it was probably a booty call, but he allowed it, winking at her as he said “Sure.” It’s good for her to unwind, he thought.

The next morning at the airport, when they were about to board a plane back to New York, Nelson noticed a purple ink stamp on the back of Bobbi’s hand, the kind people get at nightclubs. Discreetly, he peeked at the faded image, trying not to draw Bobbi’s attention. It was a logo of a wrench fashioned into a penis. Damn. Had she attended some kind of orgy? Just as he was about to interrogate Bobbi on her nighttime proclivities, a young man sat down in front of them, tossing his duffel bag on the next seat. The man’s bearing was jumpy, brimming with barely contained annoyance at the airport tedium, at the fellow passengers, and at the world at large. He twitched his foot and ground his teeth as if struggling to rein in some suppressed emotional coil that was on the brink of a violent eruption. His muscular trunk and biceps bulged from under a tight black T-shirt that sported the exact same logo of a phallic wrench as the one on Bobbi’s wrist, with the word “Tool” written in psychedelic colors across his chest.

Tool! She’d skipped a client dinner for some metal-band concert. She preferred a dark, loud gathering of sweaty, smelly degenerates, like this one before them here, over a nice cocktail in a company of fine––and some of them single––gentlemen.

Bobbi caught Nelson’s befuddled gaze shifting between the guy’s T-shirt and her wrist. “Yeah. I saw Tool last night,” she spilled. She rubbed on the stamp.

“Huh. With your friend, I hope.”

She grimaced and shook her head. Alone! She’d gone there alone.

Seeing Nelson’s near-apoplexy, Bobbi hurried to reassure him. “I’ve seen them many times. It’s pretty safe. I stay away from the mosh pit.”

With the intention of offering a caustic critique of Bobbi’s musical tastes, Nelson scrolled through iTunes on his phone.

Bobbi saw him do it and informed him that he would not find Tool on iTunes. “They’re commerce-averse,” she said. “Here.” She took out her own phone. She went through the pictures and videos in her media app. She clicked on one clip and passed the phone to Nelson. “From last night. Put the headphones on.”

On the phone screen, Nelson saw a mostly dark stage, except for psychedelic art projected on the back wall. The acid-colored, throbbing, shape-shifting visuals were bizarre, verging on disturbing. A loud, heavy sound tore at his eardrums, but it wasn’t the ghoulish trash-metal noise he’d thought he was going to hear. He heard a melody that was complex, intelligent, with changing pace and time signatures, and there was an unexpected harmony, even poetry in it. Intrigued, he watched on.

The singer stood at the deep end of the stage, almost hidden from view, and if not for a quick zoom-in, Nelson would’ve missed his arresting, freakish pageantry. Half-bent, wigged, his torso bare, the frontman convulsed as if in pain, as if overcome by a violent purging.

“That’s MJK,” Bobbi said with breathless reverence. “Maynard James Keenan.”

Maynard’s voice hypnotized. It had the convincing, forceful clarity of a cantor. It oscillated between mercy and wrath. It murmured like a pristine forest brook, then broke into the screeching, anguished rant of a street preacher. It could cleanse and heal the lepers one moment and smash merchants’ tables in a Jerusalem temple the next.

Nelson watched the clip to the end. “I mean . . . okay . . . some pimply twenty-year-old degenerate might find it cool,” he said, giving her back the phone. “But what do you see in this?”

Bobbi paused, weighing an answer that Nelson would find plausible. Her Tool fandom came from a place of morbid fascination, the paralyzing kind one falls under when looking at a crawling hand-size tarantula. The band, in her opinion, had the biggest epistemological disconnect between its art and its fans. In this disconnect she saw both beauty and terror. She saw intelligence and purpose on stage, and directioneless, adolescent rage in the audience pit. She saw an awesome art, whose awesomeness was lost on its most loyal audience. Maynard’s unsparing lyrics punctured pus-filled societal boils, but the fans––almost all men, young and middle-aged––mistook the oozing grotesqueness for an indictment of some vague, distant forces and not of the concrete, fallible, depraved self. Ecstatic and starry-eyed, the band’s disciples prayed and eagerly lost themselves in some ritual, just not the one Maynard demanded of them. Bobbi watched Maynard strain himself to harness these feverish exaltations, to rein in this chaotic male energy, to help channel it inward, instead of at the world at large, and she saw that he was mostly failing in his task. And she knew that Maynard saw it too; he routinely derided his fans for misunderstanding his artistic message. In return, they worshiped him even more. Bobbi was disturbed and fascinated by this dynamic, and she could not look away.

How could she articulate all these layered thoughts to Nelson right now? She knew she risked being mocked and she needed to proceed with caution.

“Well?” Nelson nudged her.

“The performance. The vocals. The artistry,” she said.

Nelson acknowledged each of the listed reasons with a skeptical nod.

“It’s really more of a sermon than a concert,” she added.

“Huh. I see. I think I know what it is. That’s your Pentecostal past speaking.”

“I’m not religious.”

“Yeah. That’s why you’re at a Tool concert and not at a tent revival. You replaced one rite with another.”

She puffed like a teenager and rolled her eyes.

“That’s it, yeah. Your dad, he spoke in tongues, didn’t he? Convulsed and shook and rolled on the stage, like this guy?”

“Stepdad.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Nelson giggled. “Still, same theatrics, same delusional flock. Your interest here is the interest of someone who can’t help but peek at the festering wound. It reminds you of the depravity you left behind.”

“Enough with the psychobabble.” Bobbi sniffed and again nervously rubbed the purple stamp on her wrist. “Those people, the fan base, they are consumed with anger that they can’t understand and don’t know where to direct. He tells them to channel it inward, at the self. To embrace their anima,” she said and glanced at Nelson. “That is, their softer side . . . It’s Jungian . . . Never mind.” She trailed off.

Their flight got called.

“Look. It is fascinating to observe people at niche events—I get it,” Nelson said on the plane after they took off. “And I think it’s great that you have this inclination. But can you find a less unsanitary venue?”

He ordered a glass of wine from a flight attendant.

“Like, industry events are, too, microcosms of depravity,” he said to Bobbi, who was sitting motionless, enthralled by the vast red desert that drifted slowly underneath the plane’s wing. “No less grotesque than a Tool concert.”

“I doubt it,” she replied. “One is a herd of office lemmings. The other . . . a chaotic force.” She turned back to her window.

The flight attendant brought him a glass of white wine. He sipped it and reclined in his seat. “A dark worldview you have, girlfriend. Don’t worry. You’re safe in Manhattan. Those degens, they can’t afford to pay the tunnel fee.” Nelson giggled at his own wit. He popped a Xanax, washed it down with the wine, put a silk eye mask on, and went to sleep.

Previous chapters

Bobbi LaBrea, Omni Capital junior banker, told Euclid on the phone that as part of due diligence she planned to visit the Buccaneer and, perhaps, two other Boardwalk casinos. She had arrived in Atlantic City the previous night, checking into the Mariner Club hotel. She parked her BMW at the VIP zone in front of the Mariner Club’s main entrance, and when she suggested that Euclid meet her there at the valet, he replied that he was going to pick her up. He pulled up the ramp in his Pontiac, the engine roaring. As the valet held the passenger door open for Bobbi, Euclid leaned over and hastily brushed dust and crumbs from the passenger seat with his sleeve. Bobbi tipped the valet five dollars.

“Nice car,” Bobbi said, getting in.

Euclid’s face reddened. “You like it? There was a bidding war for this baby.”

He revved up the engine some more. “I need to make a quick pit stop,” he told her as they took off. “It’s a two-minute detour. I forgot to turn on the AC this morning. I have two cats, don’t want them to bake all day.”

“God forbid,” Bobbi said.

He sped along Atlantic Avenue. Minutes later, they arrived at the front of a blue-and-white two-story apartment building. “The Breakers” was written in gold letters on a rectangular plaque mounted on a pole by the entrance. A hundred yards away, across the Boardwalk, the lazy ocean licked the edges of the wide sandy beach.

“The Breakers,” Bobbi said, looking at the sign. “An audacious name.”

“It’s a premium location, and we have a pool,” Euclid said. He pointed at the turquoise swimming pool behind a metal fence surrounded by cheap plastic chaise-lounges. “It’s a resort-grade facility.”

“I see.”

“I’d invite you in, but my place is a mess.”

“Bummer,” Bobbi replied. “I’ll wait in the car then.”

Euclid’s place wasn’t a mess, and he would have loved to invite Bobbi in to meet his cats and to showcase his musical instruments, but his bladder was about to burst, and he rushed inside, eschewing further niceties.

Bobbi rolled down the car window, inhaled the salty air, and listened to the ocean waves break ashore. A lonely seagull hovered over the deserted beach, resting on the airstreams with barely a move.

She examined Euclid’s glove compartment. Discount coupons. A couple of Dr. Sholl’s. A brochure for hair-replacement products. A Flomax prescription.

One of the building’s first-floor window screens went up, and Bobbi saw Euclid gesturing for her attention. He held up one of his cats, a fluffy orange tabby, and waved at her with the cat’s paw.

“Say hello to Miss Bobbi. Hi, Miss Bobbi. I’m Tangerine,” he intoned in a high-pitched cat-talking voice. He then put Tangerine down and said he would be right back.

“The other one is a calico named Percy,” he said when he got back in the car.

“That’s great,” Bobbi said. “Short for persimmon?”

“Ha, no. For Percy Shelley.”

“Very clever.”

“How’s business in the Buccaneer?” Bobbi asked when they left the apartment building parking lot and drove up north on Pacific Avenue.

“Their business is steady. They get Chinese ladies by the busload every day from New York,” Euclid replied. “That place is recession proof.”

The Buccaneer Hotel and Casino was located a mile and a half from Euclid’s apartment, on the northern part of the Boardwalk. As Euclid pulled up to the casino valet, a liveried old man hurried to open the passenger door for Bobbi. She slipped him a fiver. Euclid, oblivious to Bobbi’s stealth expediency, handed him a wrinkly dollar.

The casino was built in the 1970s, one of the first venues to rise up along the shore. In its heyday it hosted boxing matches and beauty pageants and rolled out the red carpet for the high rollers from all over the East Coast and from abroad. The hotel tower––then the highest building in New Jersey––had a presidential suite and a well-connected concierge service on call to procure tickets and late-night dinners and less mainstream delights for their patrons.

Now all that glamour was gone. “Gamblers wanted” declared a neon sign near the casino entrance, and Bobbi thought that instead of communicating a joyful summons for a freewheeling pastime, the sign betrayed a crippling shortage. She imagined how this cheerful but hollow enthusiasm was conjured up by pushy, unencumbered-by-doubt business consultants (she used to date that kind once) and made its way down the corporate structure, through staff memos and resolutions, to be carried out, with the expectation of full sincerity and diligence, by the front-line workers.

“Limited-time special,” a dutiful security guard greeted them with a monotonous, perfunctory chant. “Four hours of play, get a free room to stay, conditions apply.”

Upon recognizing Euclid, the security guard sprung out of his protocol-imposed verbal coma and gave him a lively high-five. He sized Bobbi up with interest, realized she was with Euclid, winked at him, and, seeing another customer roll in through the doors astride an electric wheelchair, fell back into his pre-recorded, focus-group-tested torpor.

“Four hours of play, get a free room to stay, conditions apply,” he droned on as Euclid and Bobbi proceeded to the casino floor.

It seemed that the management of the casino had lost the will to fight to keep the air of the casino fresh. Its HVAC systems pumped cold air with loud gusto but were helpless to stave off the stale, musty odor of food-court lard and the decades-long sourness of cigarette smoke. This failure of hospitality was remedied by keeping the inside temperature in the frigid 60s and layering it with the sweet, funereal scent of air fresheners. Bobbi sensed a discomfort in Euclid’s posture as they maneuvered between the slot machines.

They strolled by a roulette table hosted by a forlorn dealer, a black man in his seventies dressed in a pictorial version of a pirate getup: a white full-sleeved shirt with ruffled cuffs and front, and a faux-leather brown vest. Seeing the potential customers approach, the dealer’s dejected frown leapt, in a trained move, into a spasmic smile.

“Spin the wheel, win a meal,” the dealer bade them.

Bobbi approached the table and took out a hundred-dollar bill from her purse. The dealer gave her four green twenty-five-dollar chips. The chips were filthy and stuck to each other when Bobbi tried to separate them and place a bet. The dealer apologized and gave her new chips. They were just as sticky.

Bobbi put two green chips on red and two others on separate numbers. “Slow day?” she asked the dealer.

“It’s better on weekends,” he replied.

The dealer spun the wheel. The roulette ball rolled and bounced around the surface of the wheel as the three of them watched in silence.

“What’s fascinating about this moment,” Euclid said, “is that this ball, right now, is in a sort of a quantum state. And that makes us all in a quantum state. It’s a fluid, uncertain situation, where neither this ball nor us nor anybody really knows where it’s gonna land. So it’s going to bounce until it falls into a random niche, that up until a fraction of a moment ago, it didn’t even know about, and once it is in that niche, nothing can nudge that ball away from it. It’s done and done. Certainty has arrived and declared itself to the world: I’m here and I’m red. And nothing in this world can turn it into black. People are like that roulette ball: they fall into a niche randomly and not by some deliberation, and then learn to love it.”

Bobbi and the dealer eyed each other.

“That’s deep, Euclid,” she said.

The ball landed on black. Bobbi lost the two numbers as well. She and Euclid turned away from the roulette to continue their tour of the floor.

“Hold on, miss,” the dealer called her. “I got a buffet coupon for you.”

“Keep it.”

Bobbi found herself empathizing with the casino floor workers. There was honesty and simplicity to what they did. She wondered what they made in an hour. She observed the busyness of the room, the kind of slots being played, the nightly rates of the adjacent hotel––sixty-nine dollars a night––and did a quick calculation in her head. She arrived at some quite pitiful numbers. After the shareholders and bondholders get paid, these dealers and security guards are lucky to be making ten dollars an hour, she thought. No––she then downgraded her grim assessment––they’ll be lucky to hold on to their jobs for the next six months.

“I’m starving,” Euclid said. “Do you want to grab something to eat? There’s a decent Italian joint here. Or we can go to the food court.”

“Italian joint sounds good,” Bobbi said. “My treat.”

It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, and the restaurant was nearly empty. The greeter led them to a secluded table by a large panoramic window with a view of the ocean.

“So,” Bobbi said when they got drinks and placed their orders, “which one of your parents was a geometry fan?”

“My mother,” Euclid said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “She was a math teacher. She taught me calculus when I was nine.”

“I see. That’s how you ended up playing in a band.”

“That’s right.” Euclid lit up and giggled. Not only did Bobbi not need an explanation of his name’s origins, but she had also uncannily dissected the intricate dynamics behind his life’s trajectory.

“And you? How did you become a banker?” Euclid asked.

“It’s a long story. But technically I’m in private equity.”

“Private equity? Is it different from banking?”

“PE is just an umbrella term people use to avoid a narrow description of what they do.”

“Huh.” Euclid sipped his drink, feigning an understanding. “How do you like it?”

“It can be a grind.”

“You get bored?”

“Oh, no. I mean you can spend weeks putting numbers together and herding all the parties to come to the table, but then you have moments of sheer exhilaration. Or terror.”

“Terror?”

“Yeah. Like when you’re two beeps away from either making a killing or being fired.”

“Wow.” Euclid nodded, wondering what a beep was. “Brutal. And your coworkers? Are they nice?”

She grimaced slightly before answering. “Nice is not the kind of word I’d use to describe a PE person,” Bobbi said and took a sip of her wine, mulling whether to expand on her thought.

“Squares?” Euclid probed.

“Squares?” Her shoulders shook as she chuckled. “No. They’re assholes. But some of them are quite fascinating people. There’s no place for a square person in private equity. Well, maybe in back office.”

“Huh. Bad boys.”

“Yes, bad boys,” Bobbi said, and Euclid sensed some admiration in her voice. “You’re never bored.”

A waiter came, carrying the dinner plates: chicken parm for Euclid, pasta primavera for Bobbi. The waiter asked if they needed a refill on their drinks, and Euclid opted for another vodka cocktail. The waiter left.

“Are you from New York originally?” Euclid asked, biting on a piece of chicken.

“No. I’m from the South.”

“I sensed some traces of a drawl there. Where from exactly?”

“Alabama.”

“Alabama! You’re kidding,” he shouted with a mouthful.

“Nope.” Bobbi smacked her lips. “Nelson thinks I’m a squirrel skinner,” she added with a slight roll of her eyes.

“Whaaat?” Euclid hollered in high pitch.

“To him everyone west of the Hudson is a hick. He means that affectionately, though. I’m his grand experiment. His Eliza Dolittle.” She noted a slight confusion on Euclid’s face and offered another reference. “His Billy Ray Valentine.”

“Aha!” Euclid slammed the table, threw his head back, and cackled. “So we’re both from the sticks then. I like that.” He cut off another piece of chicken and put it in his mouth. “Where in Alabama?”

“This town called Florence. It’s across the river from Muscle Shoals. Ever heard?”

Euclid inhaled in awe. He took a big gulp of water. He coughed, covering his mouth with a white table napkin.

“Muscle Shoals! You gotta be kidding me! That’s like the very birthplace of Southern rock, and I would even go as far as to say the entire American music heritage. It’s a legendary place.”

“Yes,” Bobbi said. “You’ve been there?”

“No. Never been to the South. But it’s on my list of places to visit. Southern rock is actually my specialty. You grew up on rock music, I bet?”

“Yes.” Bobbi humored Euclid.

The waiter brought another cocktail. Euclid gulped half of it.

“To me, what makes Southern rock special is that it’s a blend. It’s a music that came down the Appalachian hills and went up the Mississippi Delta. It’s part white and part Black. Part rebel, part gospel.”

“Huh. Interesting.” Bobbi nodded politely. A good banker, she sensed Euclid’s pent-up fascination with the topic and encouraged him to expand. “Which part, you think, is more dominant?”

Euclid erupted. Here was a sympathetic ear, someone who could understand and appreciate his intricate thoughts on the American music tradition and who had actually expressed an interest in his elaborate theory.

“I think it’s gospel. Yeah, the roots of it, they go all the way to gospel. To me, Black revival is––and not that I’m religious or anything––the most important American contribution to world music.” Euclid spoke in one breath. “I think if we trace the roots of all the great musicians of the twentieth century, we will arrive at one Black woman with an electric guitar––Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She had a gospel show on the radio in the ’30s and ’40s. Anyway, Elvis, Bob Dylan, all the big names in rock ’n’ roll were heavily influenced by her. And all the British rock bands that we thought were so original, they’d be nowhere if it weren’t for her. Gospel captures the very essence of the human spirit. Not the American. The human spirit. There’s a difference.” He peered at her. “It’s just more encompassing. Ultimately, I think that a choir of Black women in purple robes that clap and wobble in unison and praise the Lord and . . . and . . . it’s the pinnacle of . . . of . . .”

Euclid grasped at air with both hands to signal an ineffable awesomeness.

“. . . the unity and the solidarity and brotherhood and welcoming everyone with open arms . . . People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’. That’s what we Yankees don’t have. There’s no place for us on that train.” He caught his breath and sighed. “We are dispersed, fending for ourselves one by one. Taking pride in our survival skills as if this is something to be proud of. We were sold a bag of goods, yeah. But Southern folk––no, those folk can’t be fooled.” He shook his head. “They stick together. They help each other. They have a good bullshit detector, pardon my French.”

Bobbi listened to him with quiet attention. Several times she wanted to interrupt him, to save him from a runaway thought that could lead him to an awkward place. But Euclid was on a roll.

“One day, when this is all over, I will go on a road trip through the South. First, to Muscle Shoals, maybe jam there with some local band. Then Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, visiting all the Black churches I can find. I want to stand and clap and sing together with those big Black mamas—if they’ll have me, of course. I hope they will. Then roll down to the gulf. New Orleans. Preservation Hall.”

He stopped again to catch his breath and gauge the effect of his ramblings on Bobbi. She replied with a warm, if a bit prim, smile.

“So, yeah, Southern rock is my specialty. My bandmates are more versatile. Larry, the drummer, is into prog rock. Peter can play more pop rock. You know, the kind people like to hear at weddings or birthdays. Journey, that kind of stuff, heh. I mean I can play it too, if I have to. It’s our other side hustle. But my primary artistic and emotional disposition is Southern rock. The Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Deep tracks, too. That’s the songs they don’t usually play on the radio.”

He stopped and again examined Bobbi’s face for a reaction. He was met, once again, with a polite corporate impenetrability.

“Here’s a funny story,” he said. “There’s this Skynyrd song called ‘The Needle and the Spoon’ in my repertoire. I used to practice it in my mother’s basement. That was back when I was seventeen. I listened to it on repeat for days. Finally, she came down, wondering what the song was about. I had to tell her it was about a seamstress and a cook. Ha. And she bought it!”

Now Bobbi laughed. He laughed too, pleased that his little anecdote had broken through her detached business facade.

“Were you using?” Bobbi asked very softly when she stopped laughing. She tilted her head, and her eyes narrowed, and there was some sticky, dogged alertness in her tone.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Were you?”

The pause was long, too long. “No,” she finally said, but her lengthy internal deliberations were not lost on Euclid.

“Someone was,” he said with a probing smirk.

“Someone, yeah,” she replied.

“Someone in your family?”

“We don’t have to talk about that. Tell me more about your mother.”

“She passed on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She went on a European cruise a few years back and had a stroke. Came back in an urn.”

“Hey, not a bad way to die, if you ask me.”

“No.”

The waiter came and took away their plates. Bobbi asked for a check.

“Next time it’s on me,” Euclid said.

Bobbi paid the bill, and they walked from the restaurant to the valet parking in silence.

“I appreciate your fascination with the South,” Bobbi finally said. “But don’t romanticize it too much. There’s a lot of misery there.”

“Of course. But that’s the reason they make the best music,” he replied. “It’s the cry of the soul.” He paused and looked at her. “I guess my point is that us, whites, we just can’t play Black music the way it’s supposed to be played. We approach it from the wrong angle. We make it all about a broken romance, about a woman who left. It’s a good take, but a superficial one. Southern music is about much more than that. It has simple words, but it’s about something existential.”

The valet brought his car.

Euclid revved up the engine, and they headed back to the Mariner Club.

“Although Skynyrd could pull it off,” he said, picking up on his unfinished thought. He glanced at Bobbi. “Can one like Skynyrd and be a Democrat?” he asked. There was an aching, a grasping for reassurance beneath his vocal nonchalance.

“Sure,” Bobbi replied soothingly. “A Southern Democrat. Like Huey Long.”

“Who?”

“Huey Long, Louisiana governor.”

“He likes Skynyrd?”

“He could have. He’s long dead now. Long before rock ’n’ roll.”

“I gotta look him up.”

“You should. He was very combative. Hard-core populist. People loved him. Pissed off a lot of people, too.”

“Sounds like an interesting guy.”

“He got shot.”

“Oh.”

Five silent minutes later, he dropped Bobbi off in front of the Mariner Club’s main entrance.

“Heading back to New York tonight?” he asked.

“Yes. I have some early meetings tomorrow.” She sighed.

“I like you, Bobbi,” he said. “You and me, we can rock ’n’ roll. I mean . . . do business together.”

“We sure can.”

On his dashboard sat the Atlantic City Funding Proposal folder that Bobbi had given to him earlier. He tapped on it.

“So, uh, I’m gonna take a look at this and get back to you with my questions.” He made sure to sound businesslike.

“Call me anytime,” Bobbi said and exited the car. Euclid bid her farewell with two air-ripping vrooms of the Pontiac’s motor.