He nodded. “Can it be done?”
“All the tech is already available. And pretty soon all the stock down there is going to fall in the drink.”
He was nodding still. “Go long, my son. Go long.”
“I am. I will.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Leverage. I want an angel.”
He laughed. “All right. I’ve been wondering what would come next in this town. It sounds very exciting. Count me in.”
So that was good. Really good. And I was still thinking hard about it as I put the bug back out in the river and let it drift downstream back to midtown. The problem that remained, in the here and now, was that I worked on derivatives in a hedge fund, and not in an architectural firm designing the next iteration of intertidal design. I couldn’t do that work from my position.
But I could fund it.
That meant finding people to fund. Of course this resembled what I was already doing every day, because finding something to fund was very similar to finding a good bet. Even though WaterPrice didn’t have much of a VC element in its portfolio, arguably it should; and finding the long to follow the coming short was wise for anyone. It was kind of like what I was trying to do with Jojo.
That got me wondering if I could let her know what I was up to, or even ask her for help with it—whatever might impress her more. If that was what this was all for. Which it was. At least primarily. But then it might be a case of the sooner the better, and asking for help a sign of mature vulnerability. I had the feeling she would like it, and I was impatient to tell her about it too.
So when the bug had drifted down to midtown I put in at Pier 57 and went to the bar where we had first met. It was a Friday again, just before sunset; and again there she was, regular as clockwork. What was with that? There was the same group, John and Evgenia and Ray and Amanda, and they all greeted me in a friendly way, Jojo too, as if nothing had transpired between us. Then again, Amanda and I were that way with each other, so it couldn’t be said that it was all that unusual for Jojo to be acting like this, cool and friendly, uninvolved. Dang.
Well, I got a drink from Inky, who was asking me questions about this very problem with his eyes, but I just rolled mine, to indicate all was less than well and I would tell him about it later, then went back to the gang. On the railing at sunset in December, air chilly, the river sliding brassily over itself in its ebbing hurry down to the Narrows. House band inside playing space blues, trying to soundtrack the view. The gang’s talk was the same, and again I was mystified: these people, my crowd, had a tendency to be crass jerks, and yet Jojo had been all happy-happy with them the day I met her, and now too. We both fit right in; so what did that mean? I had a cold thought: maybe she had claimed I lacked the altruism she liked in a man, just to give her a decent cover story for something more fundamental than … well, more fundamental than fundamental philosophies of life. That didn’t quite compute, but then again, I didn’t know. Probably it would in fact be easier to accept that she didn’t like my values than my smell, or my style of lovemaking. Which in fact she had seemed to like. Well it was just very confusing.
I tried to ignore that whirlpool in my brain and my gut, and eventually stood by her side, and there we were.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said. “Interesting. I was talking with my old teacher from Munstrosity about trying to do something with all the fixes that people have been inventing to keep real estate from going under. You know, some kind of venture capital thing, sort of like what you were talking about before.”
She regarded me with some curiosity, and I tried to take hope from that, and not get distracted by the crystalline brown shatter of her eyes, the gorgeous eyes of the person I had fallen for so hard. Which was nearly impossible, and I couldn’t help gulping a little under her gaze.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.
“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.
—Rudyard Kipling, 1892
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?”