To her left, in a canvas of equal size, separated by an inch of white wall, is a farmhouse, set at an angle to the field across a wide expanse of lawn, so that the woman in the foreground appears to dwarf the house, so powerful is the trick of perspective. The house is red clapboard, two stories with a slanted barn roof, shutters closed. If you squint, you can see the wooden flap of an earth-bound storm door flipped up from the ground on the side of the house, revealing a dark hole. And from that hole emerges a man’s arm, clad in a long white sleeve, the tiny hand grasping a tethered rope handle, tense, frozen in motion. But is he opening the door or closing it?
You look back at the girl. She is not looking at the house. Her hair is across her face, but her eyes are visible, and though she faces forward her pupils have danced to her right, drawing the viewer’s eye across the intricate splay of leafy green, across another inch of white gallery wall, to the third and final canvas.
It is then you see what this girl has just now noticed.
The tornado.
That swirling devil’s clot, that black maelstrom of cylindrical majesty. It is a swirling gray spider egg unspooling, filled with rotten teeth. A biblical monster, God’s vengeance. Whirring and churning, it shows you its food, like a petulant child, houses and trees cracked and spinning, a gritty hail of dirt. Viewed from anyplace in the room, it appears to be coming right at you, and when you see that you take a step back. The canvas itself is bent and fraying, its top right corner bent inward, cracked and twisted, as if by the sheer power of the wind. As if the painting is destroying itself.
Now you look back to the girl, eyes widening, hand rising, not to pull the hair from her face, you realize, but to shield her eyes from the horror. And then, hair rising, you look past her, to the house, but more specifically to that tiny storm door, that black pit of salvation, and within it a single man’s arm, his hand grasping the frayed rope tether. And this time, as you take it in, you realize—
He is closing the storm door, shutting us out.
We are on our own.
Chapter 15
Layla
The things money can’t buy, goes the famous quote, you don’t want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can’t buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It’s all available for a price. The fact is, there’s enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows—share. But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.
At twenty-nine, Leslie Mueller is the sole heir to a technology empire. The daughter of a billionaire (male) and a runway model (female), she is a member of an ever-growing genetically engineered master race. They are everywhere these days, it seems, the moneyed children of brilliant capitalists, using a fraction of their inheritances to launch companies and fund the arts. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they buy impossible real estate in New York, Hollywood, London. They set themselves up as a new Medici class, drawn to the urgent throb of the future. They are something beyond hip, collectors of genius, winging from Davos to Coachella to Sundance, taking meetings, offering today’s artists, musicians, and filmmakers the seductive ego stroke of cash and the prestige of their company.
Beautiful and rich, they don’t take no for an answer.
Leslie—“Layla” to her friends—was one of the first, her mother a former Galliano model from Seville, Spain. Her father invented some ubiquitous high-tech trigger found in every computer and smartphone on the planet. He is the 9th richest person in the world, and even with only one-third of her inheritance vested, Layla Mueller is the 399th. She has so much money she makes the other rich people Scott has met—David Bateman, Ben Kipling—look like working stiffs. Wealth at Layla’s level is beyond the fluctuations of the market. A sum so big she could never go broke. So great that the money makes its own money—growing by a factor of 15 percent every year, minting millions every month.
She makes so much money just being rich that the annual dividends her savings account earns make it the seven hundredth richest person on the planet. Think about that. Picture it if you can, which of course you can’t. Not really. Because the only way to truly understand wealth at that level is to have it. Layla’s is a path without resistance, without friction of any kind. There is nothing on earth she can’t buy on a whim. Microsoft maybe, or Germany. But otherwise…
“Oh my God,” she says, when she enters the study of her Greenwich Village home and sees Scott, “I’m obsessed with you. I’ve been watching all day. I can’t take my eyes off.”