The Futures(29)

“I’m okay.”

I wandered out toward the edge. The roof was covered with tar paper and gravel. Only a low wall and a flimsy metal bar stood between me and the sixty-story drop. On the other side of the roof was the area where David Kleinman’s helicopter had taken off that morning.

From this vantage point, life down below was proceeding normally. Taxis and trucks flowed up 8th Avenue in waves. Tiny pedestrians drifted down the sidewalk, their motion smooth and toylike. Sounds echoed up from the street: honking horns, a jackhammer, the rattle of a loose manhole cover, a siren in the distance. I could almost pretend the crisis was contained within the walls of our building, the babble of the TV irrelevant beyond its perimeter. The numbers were plummeting, the market was in a frenzy, but for the moment, it didn’t result in any visible change. No fires, no earthquakes, no violence or bloodshed. But it would take time for the real world to catch up to what was happening on our screens, and in a situation like this, the worst lay ahead. I understood that.

That woman downstairs, trying not to show her panic: her husband would lose his job, and she would probably keep hers, but it didn’t matter. The balance would be upset. I knew that feeling, of living exactly within your means. Their life was fancier than mine—children in private school, a second house in the Hamptons—but that feeling didn’t change. The precarious flow of incoming and outgoing gave you a toehold in this world, but it was one that would vanish if the paychecks stopped. Numbers had always felt realer to me than anything else. Days like this reminded you of that.

To the rest of America, to the rest of the world, I was indisputably one of them, even if I hadn’t been pushing shady CDOs. A bad guy. A practitioner of the dark arts who had suddenly lost control of his slippery magic. Why didn’t this bother me more? In the past, I think it would have. But my mind kept going back to the numbers. You could talk in generalities: Wall Street bad, Main Street good. It didn’t really mean anything. I liked the economy of action. A goal scored before the third-period buzzer, a clean and precise pass, an airtight model. You didn’t need words to complicate it. There were winners, and there were losers. The game bore it out. At first this job seemed more practical than anything else: a way to stay in New York with Julia, to make money and pay off student loans quickly. But it had transformed into something else. The thing I was meant to be doing.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned, taking in the panorama. The city was sparkling and alive, taking up every inch it could. I looked back at Roger, leaning against the wall. He was moving his lips as he read something on his BlackBerry.

“What is it?” I asked, walking over.

“Shit. This is crazy.” Roger thrust his phone toward me. “You see that picture? No, scroll down. There. That short guy in the blue tie? That’s my old roommate from Stanford. What are the odds, man?”

“What is this?”

“He works at Lehman, I guess. The little shit is famous.”

“Actually, it looks like he just got fired.” I scrolled to the top, where the headline read: LEHMAN GOES UNDER. It was from the Observer. The picture showed several bewildered-looking young men standing on the sidewalk, clutching cardboard boxes while pedestrians streamed around them.

“Whatever. He was a tool.”

“How did you find this?”

“I always read the Observer. Just for their finance guy. He’s good. You never read him?”

“What’s his name?”

Roger reached for his phone, checking the byline. “Adam McCard.”

“Adam McCard?”

“What, are you deaf?”

“No. No, it’s just that I know Adam McCard.”

Roger raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“He was a friend of Julia’s in college. Really? Adam McCard?”

“He’s a good reporter. Better than anyone else. He actually seems to get it.”

“Shit. If you say so.”

Roger took a final drag of his cigarette. Adam McCard. I hadn’t thought about him in months—in years. “Ready?” Roger kicked the brick away and held the door open.

“Right behind you,” I said.

*

Sophomore year, Julia dragged me along to a party off campus. I was hungover and stiff from the night before, from the hockey team’s end-of-season rager, but Julia insisted I come. She was in one of those moods. The party was on a dark, tree-lined street, in a crumbling old Victorian with a sagging porch. She had given a vague explanation of the occasion—for the magazine she worked on? Something like that—but when we walked through the front door, I saw the real reason.

Adam McCard was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, one foot hitched up. He waved at Julia, then shook my hand, gripping it too tightly. He told us to help ourselves to the beer in the kitchen, his kitchen. I realized belatedly, stupidly, that this was his house. Julia had been mentioning Adam’s name a lot in the preceding weeks. I’d decided, a while earlier, that I hated him.

We joined a group in the kitchen gathered around a keg. They gave me curious looks. “Are you an athlete?” one girl asked. She was scrawny, black-clad, with a cigarette smoldering between her pale fingers and an expression of surprised wonder.

“I’m on the hockey team.”

“Oh,” Julia said. “Oh, that reminds me of something. So last night…”