“Well, it occurred to me that since the intertidal doesn’t have bedrock under it, you can never build anything there you can trust will hold.”
“So you let them go.”
“No, in fact I was talking with Hector about anchoring what you might call floating neighborhoods there. Connect little townshiplike blocks to the bedrock no matter how far down it is, and then you wouldn’t be fighting the tides so much.”
“Ah,” she said, looking surprised. “Good idea!”
“I think maybe so.”
“Good idea,” she said again, then frowned a little. “So you’re interested in venture capital now?”
“Well, I was just thinking. There does have to be something to go long on after the short. You were right about that.”
“It’s true. Well, that’s interesting. Good for you.”
So. A little bit of hope there, attached to a bedrock emotion, deep under the waves: the emotion being how much I wanted her. Attach a line to that bedrock, float a little buoy of hope. Come back later and see what else might be attachable. She seemed not unfriendly. Not amused at my sudden interest in real estate. Not anything obviously negative. Maybe even friendly; maybe even approving. Thinking things over. A little smile in her eyes. One time a photographer had said to me, Smile with your eyes only. I hadn’t gotten what he meant. Maybe now I was seeing it. Maybe. The way she was looking at me… well, I couldn’t tell. To be honest, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, not at all.
When Radio City was first opened they dosed its air with ozone with the idea that this would make people happier. The developer, Samuel Rothafel, had wanted it to be laughing gas, but he couldn’t get the city to approve it.
Robin Hood Asset Management began by analyzing twenty of the most successful hedge funds and creating an algorithm that combined all their most successful strategies, then offering its services to micro-investments from the precariat, and going from there to their now-famous success.
The old Waldorf Astoria, demolished to make way for the Empire State Building, was dumped in the Atlantic five miles off Sandy Hook.
We lingered in New York till the city felt so homelike that it seemed wrong to leave it. And further, the more one studied it, the more grotesquely bad it grew.
h) Mutt and Jeff
“Jeff, are you awake?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“It sounds like you are. That’s good.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re still in that room. You’ve been sick.”
“What room?”
“A shipping container somewhere. Where someone is keeping us. Maybe underwater, sometimes it sounds like we’re underwater.”
“If you’re underwater you can never get clear. The market will never come back to where it was, so you’re sunk for good. Might as well default and walk away.”
“I would if I could, but we’re locked in down here.”
“I remember now. How you doing?”
“What?”
“I said, how are you doing?”
“Me? I’m fine, fine. Actually I haven’t been feeling too good, but nowhere near as bad as you. You were pretty sick there.”
“I still feel like shit.”
“Yeah, sorry to hear, but at least you’re talking. For a while there you weren’t able to talk. That was scary.”
“What happened?”
“What happened? Oh—to you. I wrote some notes on our plates and sent them out when they got picked up out of the door slot. Then your food started to come with some pills that I got you to take. Then once I slept really hard, and I think that was because they knocked us out and came in here. Or took you out. I don’t know, but when I woke up again you were sleeping more easily. And now here we are.”
“I feel like shit.”
“But you’re talking.”
“But I don’t want to talk.”
Mutt doesn’t know what to say to this. He sits by his friend’s bed, reaches over and holds Jeff’s hand. “It’s better when you talk. It’s good for you.”
“Not really.” Jeff eyes his friend. “You talk. I’m tired of talking. I can’t talk anymore.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it. Tell me a story.”
“Who me? I don’t know any stories. You tell stories, not me.”
“Not anymore. Tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Not true. Tell me how we met. I’ve forgotten that, it’s been so long. First thing I remember it feels like we had been together forever. I don’t recall before.”
“Well, you were younger than me then. I do remember that, yeah. I had been at Adirondack for a year or two at that point, and I was thinking of quitting. The work was boring. Then I was in their cafeteria at lunch one day and there you were at the end of a table, by yourself, reading your pad while you ate. I went over and sat across from you, I don’t know why, and introduced myself. You looked interesting. You said you were in systems, but as we talked I could tell you were into coding too. I remember I asked where the rest of your team was, and you said they had already gotten sick of you and your ideas, so there you were. I said I liked ideas, which was true at that time. That was how it started. Then we were asked to try encrypting their dark pool divers. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. We had a good time.”
“I’ll remember later maybe.”
“I hope so. We had a good time at work, and then I don’t know how it happened, somehow I found out that you didn’t have a regular place to live, you were sleeping in your car.”
“Mobile home.”
“Yes, that’s what you called it. A very small mobile home. So I was looking for a new place myself, so we moved in to that place in Hoboken, remember?”
“Sure, how could I forget?”
“Well, you forgot our first job, so who knows. Anyway there we were—”
“That’s how we know this place is underwater! Because that place was.”
“Maybe so. I mean, it was. Subsurface real estate was just starting in the Meadowlands, so there were some rents we could afford. So, that was when we started working on front-running that would work for us as well as for Vinson. By then he was off on his own. That was illegal—”
“He was always an asshole.”
“Yes, that too. So we felt like we were just gigging for him doing questionable shit. Presumably if the SEC had ever twigged it, we would have been the ones to take the fall. People at Alban would have disavowed all knowledge of our existence.”
“Of a mission all too possible.”
“Yes, it was easy. But then we found out that everyone else was already doing it, so we were a late entry into an arms race no one could win. There was no difference between front-running and ordinary trading. So we quit Alban before we got hung out to dry. Started gigging around. It got a little ragged then. We needed something different if we wanted an advantage.”
“Did we want an advantage?”
“I don’t know. All our clients did.”
“Not the same.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to work for them anymore.”
“I know. But that’s led to problems for us, as you know.”
“As in?”
“Well, food. Food and lodging. We need those, and they take money, and you have to work to make money.”
“I’m not saying don’t work. I’m saying, not for them.”
“Agreed, we already tried that.”
“We have to work for ourselves.”