The Good Neighbor (22 page)

“I’m leaving. Okay? You happy now?” he said.

“I’m a long way from happy,” said Francie. “But I’m getting there.”

“What the hell does that mean?” “Michael,” said Francie, “good-bye.” Michael’s lower lip began to quiver.

“You remember when we were kids?” he said. “And you used to tell me that we would get a house in the country someday, where we could be alone and no one would bother us?”

“Michael—”

“First you leave me to fend for myself,” he said, “and now you throw me out? This was supposed to be our place, and now you’re sharing it with him? Great! Thanks a lot, Francie.”

“Mikey, that was
years
ago,” she said.

But, having planted his dagger, Michael was content to leave. He backed out of the driveway and onto the road, where he did a K-turn and began moving slowly along the river. She could see him looking back at her, waiting for some sign that she was just

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kidding, that she had taken pity on him again. But she gave no such sign, because she wasn’t kidding. And soon he was out of sight.

And here I am, alone with my house, she thought.

Francie climbed the steps and closed the door after her. She stopped in the foyer and listened. There was nothing to hear, ex cept her own breathing.

16
‌

Zero-G

C
olt, driving along the New Jersey Turnpike, was hearing his father ’s voice again.

Whatsa matter?
it said.
Afraid of a few dead bodies? Afraid they’re gonna come out and get you?

“Don’t you start,” Colt said.

Why not? Too grown up to listen to your father?

“You’re not my father,” said Colt. “You’re a voice in my head.

Which means . . . guess what? You’re not real.”

Yeah, but what is real? Isn’t everything just a voice in our head, when you come right down to it? Isn’t the whole world just an illusion we have to keep convincing ourselves of, over and over?

“Now you’re gonna start handing me that hippie bullshit? I don’t think so.”

Actually, it’s not”’hippie bullshit.” It’s Berkeley
.

“Fuck you and your philosophers,” Colt said. “Where were you when I had to deal with Mom’s body, anyway? Huh? And where was your philosophy when you were supposed to be raising me?” He turned on the radio and stabbed at the buttons, trying to

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find a song with screeching guitars. This was the only thing that worked—turning the volume up to such a level that no one else could have tolerated it.

It was only when he was alone that he started hearing Nova Hart’s voice. The bastard never bothered him when he was with other people. He was like the singing frog in the old cartoon, the one that sang “Hello, My Ragtime Gal” when there was no one around, but didn’t make so much as a peep when you put him in front of an audience.

The dead are troublesome, Colt thought.

His father wasn’t actually dead. He merely thought of him that way. It was Colt’s fervent wish, for reasons he chose not to revisit, that he should never see his father again; “dead” was the most convenient way to think of him. In reality, Colt’s father was liv ing some hours upstate, if you could call his current arrangements “living.”That was something not even Francie knew; she thought Nova was dead, too. And it was something that Colt never al lowed himself to think about, which was why he turned the car stereo up as loud as he could bear it.

But a person didn’t have to be dead to haunt you. That was a disconcerting fact Colt had discovered in recent years. This voice that took over his head sometimes—there was only one way to deal with that, and that was to make as much noise as possible until it went away. And New York was the one blessed place where you could count on never getting a single moment of peace and quiet.

Colt’s heart sang with relief as he neared Manhattan, its jagged lines jutting upward like the petrified jaw of some extinct beast. He sped faster toward it, a parched man on his way to an oasis. Hurry, he thought. Hurry, before it starts again. Forget about Francie, forget about the house, forget about everything else. Just hurry up and get there.

❚ ❚ ❚

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171

Anchor Capital, the investment firm for which Colt worked, was located in one of the glass-and-steel monoliths that dominate Sixth Avenue, a suitably loud thoroughfare constantly bustling with people, cabs, sidewalk vendors, construction crews, and tourists; every so often the surface rumbled queasily as a subway tore through its bowels. Colt’s boss, Forszak, who owned 51 per cent of Anchor, rented a portion of the thirtieth floor of one of these magnificent structures, and it was here that his minions toiled endlessly in the Snake Pit, manipulating the fortunes of the world in their own subtle way, through their tentacles of fiber-op tic cable. Forszak himself, the head of the financial octopus, occu pied a hidden corner office, where, via electronic means, he watched and listened to everything that was said and done through everyone’s computers and telephones, and cackled, and patted his belly—and occasionally ate homeless children for lunch, if rumors were to be believed. Mostly, though, he just counted his money. Colt knew—he had been in Forszak’s office and seen the figures zooming across the screens. There had been digits followed by more glorious zeroes than he’d ever seen before, even in his dreams. It was enough to make him drool. Someday, he, too, would lead these figures in a merry dance, like the Pied Piper and his legion of rats; someday, Colt would be a Forszak.

He nodded to the receptionist, who greeted him with a respect ful smile and buzzed him through the glass double doors. Colt went straight into the Snake Pit and hung up his coat. When An chor Capital had moved here six years earlier, Forszak had ordered all partitions removed, all desks pushed together, four by four, cre ating a large, open space in which no one could hide from anyone and everything was known; all the traders were thrown in to gether, writhing around in a heaving, chaotic mess. There were no less than thirty-seven men, and two harried and driven women, all shouting and cursing in the peculiar language of finance. It was blissfully loud in the Snake Pit, a veritable Babel. It had the same effect on Colt that the sound of waves had on sea turtles.

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He made his way to his desk, feeling the uproar smother him motheringly as it closed behind him. Nothing could bother him here, because there simply wasn’t time to think about anything. On Colt’s desk, just like on every other, were three computer monitors and a wireless keyboard. Behind him was a television, tuned at all times to MSNBC. On the wall in front of him was an other television, this one tuned to CNN. Between these five elec tronic oracles, Colt and his comrades were able to keep a handle on everything of note that happened in the world, for there was no telling how anything—an earthquake in Argentina or a war in Africa or a bushfire in California—could affect the entire market. You had to be adept at interpreting how these events would ripple throughout the financial world, and hedge your bets accordingly, if at all possible. It usually
wasn’t
possible, but that didn’t keep the traders from trying. They were the diviners at the temple gates, reading the day’s events in the spilled entrails of sacrificial ani mals. Nothing that happened was insignificant: a pencil dropped in Singapore, a woman forgetting to buy steamed rice in Delhi, a butterfly falling out of the sky over the Pacific Ocean—all these things were connected, and no matter how small they seemed, they all meant something. And eventually the effects of these things found their way into the stock market. Theoretically, the most adept trader in the world could lie on a hillside watching the clouds go by, and know every single thing that was happening everywhere, at any given moment. That person hadn’t been born yet, of course, but he was out there somewhere, the Reader, the One—He Who Didn’t Even Need to Set Foot in an Office to Make Fortunes with Every Breath He Drew. Or maybe it was a She. There was no way to know. All of the traders in Forszak’s office dreamed of becoming this One, and all of them knew it would never happen to them.

But they kept on showing up for work anyway, just in case.

❚ ❚ ❚

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Colt sat down and nodded to Herbert on his right, the balding, pudgy Asian man whom everyone called “Buddha.”

“Hiya, Coltie,” Buddha said. “How’s it hangin’?” “Bood. What’s news?”

Buddha shrugged. “Nothin’,” he said. “I’m long and wrong on Cisco.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s see here.”

Colt punched a random key and his screens flickered into wake fulness. One was connected to the Reuters line, another to various market indices, the third to his Web browser. He’d liquidated most of his holdings before they moved out to the new house; it wouldn’t do to be hanging onto stocks if he wasn’t there to con trol his position. They were in the moving business, after all, not the storage business. That was one of Forszak’s favorite lines—
moving, not storage
.
We don’t hang on to things here, we buy ’em and sell ’em
. Colt had kept a few penny stocks on the line like minnows, just to see what fortune they attracted, and he saw now with mild pleasure that one of them had advanced sufficiently for him to it sell off. He cast two hundred shares out into the electronic sea and watched as they were snapped up by some shark out of Philadelphia. Nice. He’d been at work for less than a minute and already he’d made a hundred dollars. That was how it went, day in, day out—sometimes the numbers were big and sometimes they were small, but all that really mattered was that they had a plus sign in front of them. He wrote “+ 100” on a piece of paper and leaned back, cracking his knuckles.

“I suck,” he announced, for it was office superstition that the more one debased oneself, the more likely the market gods were to shower one with favor.

“Coltie,” said Joe, the older man who sat across from him. “You move awright?”

“Yeah, we moved.”

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“How’d it go?”

“Fine, I guess. Pain in the ass. Brother-in-law shows up outa nowhere, wife throws a hissy last night. Things are crazy. I was gonna take a few days off, but I had to get outa there for a while.” Joe nodded. “Story of my life,” he said. “You know things are rough when you’d rather be at work than at home.” He reached out and touched the plastic head of the little dippy-bird that he kept on his desk; this was a kind of perpetual-motion toy in the shape of an ostrich and filled with red-colored water, which con tinually bobbed up and down. It drove the others crazy, but Joe claimed it was his good-luck charm, which removed it from the

realm of criticism altogether. Everyone was allowed their charm. “Joe moved once,” said Buddha. “After his wife found his gay

porn collection. Dincha, Joe?” “Zing,” said Colt.

“Don’t let the Bood get away with that shit, Joe,” said Raoul, on Colt’s left.

Joe himself, frowning at his screens, seemed unperturbed by this assault on his character. He had started out as an order boy on the exchange floor decades ago, when positions were still being recorded in chalk on a big blackboard. Now over sixty, thrice di vorced, Joe was a big earner, a
huge
earner; only Buddha was al lowed to zing him, because Buddha was hilarious, when he wanted to be.

“Fuck you, you Chink,” said Joe absently.

“Great comeback, Joe,” said Colt. “Real good one there.” Buddha snorted. “He’s a regular Don Rickles, is Joe,” he said.

“Mind as sharp as a noodle.” “Whoa,” said Raoul. “Lookit Dell.”

Colt peered at the Reuters line. The price of Dell shares had dropped five cents—somewhere in the universe something was happening, and this was the ripple of it, washing up on shore. Frantically he hopped on five hundred shares, and was rewarded a moment later by seeing it appear in his holdings column.

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“Hot diggety,” he said. “I got some.” “Me, too,” said Raoul.

“Sell me yours,” said Colt. “I like Dell. I’ll give you two and half over your purchase.”

“Done and done,” said Raoul, striking a few keys. “Now good day, sir.”

“Anybody know anything about the Bomber?” asked Buddha. “What the fuck is the Bomber?” asked Joe.

“I heard some guys talkin’ about it in the elevator. Bombardier.

They make subway cars, or something. Canadian company.” Raoul and Joe guffawed. “Canadian!” they said, simultane

ously.

“Whatsa matter, Buddha, those American stocks getting too much for you?” asked Colt. “Old red, white, and blue too expen sive for your yellow blood?”

“The official animal of Canada is the beaver,” said Joe.

“Well, there ya go,” said Buddha. “My official animal is the trouser snake. It’s a match made in heaven.”

“Don’t bet on fuckin’ elevator gossip, Bood,” said Raoul. “Next thing you know you’ll be goin’ to the cleaning ladies for tips.”