Andrew wasn’t planning on telling anybody about what was happening, he hadn’t even really said goodbye to anyone besides Emma, but now, without warning, it all upended out of him.
“You don’t know what it’s like! You don’t know anything that’s going on!” No crying. There’s no crying in econ class. “I know that it’s a recession because my family’s pretty much totally bankrupt now. I have no house to go back to and I’m dropping out. Some guy out of, like, a Spike TV show repossessed my car!”
Kalchefsky’s eyebrows went up even more. The girl on his right reached out and touched his arm, her eyes wide. The class was a wall of sympathetic faces. Andrew’s heart slammed against his insides, and he looked down at his phone to make sure that he hadn’t accidentally dialed his father sometime in the middle of that speech. He had to go. That was all he could do. He had to leave class right now, and then he had to leave the state of Arizona altogether. Things started to move again. More hands reached out to him. Professor Kalchefsky started to put his face back in order.
That was it. Andrew couldn’t stay. He picked up his bag in one hand and his laptop in the other, and ran for the door.
十八
THREE BIG MISTAKES.
But, of course, it’s never that simple.
Before we even got to the third one, we were down and done.
As much as our willingness to believe in the constant rise felled us, as much as our eagerness to conquer risk opened us up to more risk, as much as Greenspan stood by as Wall Street turned itself into Las Vegas, there was also Greece, and Iceland, and Nick Leeson, who took down Barings, and Brian Hunter, who tanked Amaranth, and Jér?me Kerviel and every other rogue trader who thought he—and it was always a he—could reverse his gut-churning, self-induced free fall with one swift, lucky strike; it was rising oil prices, global inflation, easy credit, the cowardice of Moody’s, the growing chasm of income inequality, the dot com boom and bust, the Fed’s rejection of regulation, the acceptance of “too big to fail,” the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the feast of subprime debt; it was Clinton and Bush the second and senators vacationing with banking industry lobbyists, the Kobe earthquake, an infatuation with financial innovation, the forgettable Hank Paulson, the delicious hubris of ten, twenty, thirty times leverage, and, at the bottom of it, our own vicious, lingering self-doubt. Or was it our own willful, unbridled self-delusion? Doubt vs. delusion. The flip sides of our last lucky coin. We toss it in the fountain and pray.
十九
Helios, NY
SAINA SAT BEHIND the wheel of her parked car, a hand-me-down Saab that the house’s previous owner—a widowed theater director who couldn’t take the upstate winters anymore—had left behind along with an attic full of ancient furniture and a shed piled with buckets of unapplied weather sealant. Two cloth bags were balled up on her lap. She peered across the dirt lot, willing Leo not to materialize. Some weeks it was Gabriel, his assistant, who hauled the cartons of hydroponic lettuces to the market and explained to the aging dads with Mohawked toddlers riding on their shoulders that Fatboy Farm’s only crops were in the Asteraceae family, not the Cannabaceae.
What if Leo’s farm wasn’t there at all? Would that be because of her? She’d emailed, once, an apology that apologized for its own pointlessness, and texted, twice, with smaller, sadder apologies, but in the end, she’d allowed herself to be Graysoned into selfishness, reasoning that it was better, really, that Leo had seen things for himself. Better to rip off the bandage than let it grow into the wound.
But they were in the Catskills, and this was the only farmers market within twenty miles, and her father was coming. If she couldn’t gather up his lost world, then she had to at least welcome him with all the bounty this one could provide. Waxy Red Delicious apples trucked to the A&P from Mexico might have been okay for Grayson, but the Wangs deserved crisp, fragrant local Macouns, all rosy veins and bright white flesh.