Adam finished his drink, held up two fingers at the bartender. His eyes were hard, shining, in pursuit of something. I’d never seen them like that. Or at least that’s what I thought, in the moment. I had seen that gleam before. I knew what it meant. But I’d suppressed that memory with remarkable success.
“I mean, look at this company he’s investing in. People want to snap up these foreclosures while they’re cheap, and Henry Fletcher is going to get rich by helping them do it faster. They’ll make money flipping these properties, and he’ll make money giving them access. These guys just drove the economy off a cliff, and now they’re trying to suck more money from the corpses. They’re actually profiting from all this. It’s more than unfair. They should go to jail, if you ask me.”
The alcohol made everything swirl together. Evan always at work. Tossing aside the manila envelope, like it was nothing. The arrogance, the indifference. Why did no one ever care about right or wrong? Why did no one ever care about me? Adam slid a new drink in front of me.
“It’s fucked up, right?” He held my hand tenderly. My mind was going fuzzy, the radio signal growing faint. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with these things. None of these guys should.”
The spark had been lit. I’d succeeded at one thing, at least: getting really, really drunk. I was aware, in a detached way, of the rising pitch of my voice, of my frustration releasing in a continuous vent. Everything came spilling out. Adam kept signaling to the bartender, never letting my glass sit empty. What was I saying? I lost my train of thought. He mentioned Evan’s name. I shook my head. I hated Evan; I hated everything that Evan made me feel. Evan, who reminded me of everything that had gone wrong, of every disappointment.
I felt myself curling in at the edges, growing blacker. Evan. It spun together into one theme: Fletcher, Spire, Madoff, all of it. I grasped at it through the vodka, the point I was trying to make to Adam. How had I never seen it before, the way the world worked? I described the strange identification I’d felt with Madoff’s sad, gray-haired victims on TV. We were casualties of the same greed-fueled catastrophe. Adam nodded vigorously. He understood. Don’t we have to do something about it? Don’t we have a responsibility to stop these things? He asked me about Evan again. What had I meant about Spire? What was going on there? You don’t have to protect him, Julia. You need to let these things out. You can’t carry this around by yourself.
The afternoon plunged into darkness.
At some point I got up to use the bathroom, wobbling in my heels. In the hotel lobby, people came and went. It was nighttime. My head spun as I sat down on the toilet. I propped myself up with one hand against the stall. Later, minutes later, hours later, in front of the bathroom mirror, I tried to fix my reflection in one place, but it danced and wavered no matter how hard I stared.
I spun around and stumbled back into the stall and threw up. The bile came in miserable waves. With one hand on the toilet, then one on the stall, I pushed myself up like a fever-weak patient. I rinsed my mouth in the sink and hunched over the basin, watching the water swirl around the white porcelain before vanishing down the drain, wishing I could follow it down there, away from all this.
*
In the time that has passed since that day, I’ve asked myself, over and over, whether I was aware of what I was doing. Aware of what I was setting in motion. Did I think it was the right thing to do? Did I know the impact it would have? I ask myself now: Is guilt determined by outcome or by intent?